Evening, June 25
Charles Spurgeon · Morning and Evening: Daily Readings
Genesis 8:9
"The dove found no rest for the sole of her foot."
Genesis 8:9
Reader, can you find rest apart from the ark, Christ Jesus? Then be
assured that your religion is vain. Are you satisfied with anything
short of a conscious knowledge of your union and interest in Christ?
Then woe unto you. If you profess to be a Christian, yet find full
satisfaction in worldly pleasures and pursuits, your profession is
false. If your soul can stretch herself at rest, and find the bed long
enough, and the coverlet broad enough to cover her in the chambers of
sin, then you are a hypocrite, and far enough from any right thoughts
of Christ or perception of his preciousness. But if, on the other hand,
you feel that if you could indulge in sin without punishment, yet it
would be a punishment of itself; and that if you could have the whole
world, and abide in it forever, it would be quite enough misery not to
be parted from it; for your God--your God--is what your soul craves
after; then be of good courage, thou art a child of God. With all thy
sins and imperfections, take this to thy comfort: if thy soul has no
rest in sin, thou are not as the sinner is! If thou art still crying
after and craving after something better, Christ has not forgotten
thee, for thou hast not quite forgotten him. The believer cannot do
without his Lord; words are inadequate to express his thoughts of him.
We cannot live on the sands of the wilderness, we want the manna which
drops from on high; our skin bottles of creature confidence cannot
yield us a drop of moisture, but we drink of the rock which follows us,
and that rock is Christ. When you feed on him your soul can sing, "He
hath satisfied my mouth with good things, so that my youth is renewed
like the eagle's," but if you have him not, your bursting wine vat and
well-filled barn can give you no sort of satisfaction: rather lament
over them in the words of wisdom, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!"