By J.R. Miller
We speak of certain religious exercises as means of grace. Prayer is one of these. When we pray we stand in the very presence of God. We do not see any form--but faith makes us conscious of the shining of his face, and we cannot but be affected. We read of Moses, that when he had been long in the mountain with God and then came back to the people, that his face shone. In one of the Psalms it is said that God's people looked unto him--and were radiant. Being with God makes us like God. The Bible also is a means of grace. As we read its words and think upon them their revealings, their counsels, and commands, their promises and comforts bring the life of God himself into contact with our lives, and we are helped, quickened, strengthened, and made better. Whatever in our experiences brings us under the influence of God and leads us into holier life--is a means of grace to us. This is the meaning of Christian worship. More than we realize, people also are means of grace to us. We get our best lessons from men; we are most deeply influenced by our contacts with them. "Evil companionships corrupt good morals." We know how being with good people in intimate relations makes us better.
Many of us know a few people at least who have a strange influence over us for good. To be with them for an hour or even for a few minutes lifts us up into a new atmosphere and makes us want to live a better life.
One of the finest tests of character--is the effect a life has on other lives. There are certain people who make you desire to be gentle, kindly, thoughtful; and there are others who stir up evil desires in you, who make you bitter, resentful, who provoke you to anger and all unholiness. The Christian should seek to be so full of spiritual influence, that all his words, his life, his conduct, shall be Christlike.
Paul wrote of certain friends whom he hoped to visit, "I long to see you--that I may impart unto you some spiritual gift." Could there be a more fitting wish than this in the heart of one friend for another? If this were always our desire when we were about to visit another, what blessings would we carry in our friendships wherever we go! We are not aware in how large a measure God sends spiritual gifts to men through other men. When he would help one of his children in some way he does not send an angel--but he sends a friend.
One reason for the incarnation, was that only thus could God get near to us, near enough to give us the blessing we need. If he had come in Sinai's splendors, the glory would have so dazzled our eyes that we could not have endured to look upon him. So he came instead in a sweet, gentle, beautiful human life. What was true of this largest of all divine manifestations is true in lesser ways of all heavenly revealing. God does not open a window in heaven that we may look in and see his face; he shows us a glimpse of heaven in some sweet home. Christ does not come down and walk again in person upon our streets that we may see him as the disciples saw him. He makes himself known to us in and through the lives of his friends. Even as in a dewdrop, quivering on leaf or grass blade, on a summer's morning, one can see the whole expanse of the blue sky mirrored, so in the lowliest life of a true believer there is a mirroring, though dim and imperfect, of the brightness of God's glory.
Thus God reveals his love to a child through the love of the mother. Thus the mother is the first means of grace to her child. She is the earliest interpreter to it of God's love and tenderness, of his thoughtfulness and care, of his holiness and purity. In wonderful ways also are children means of grace to their parents. A prayerful father and mother learn more of the love of God and of God's fatherhood as they bend over their first-born child, or hold it in their arms--than ever they learned before from teachers and from books--even from the Bible.
In other ways, too, is a child a means of grace to its parents. Jesus set a little child in the midst of his disciples and bade them learn from it lessons of humility and simplicity. Every child that grows up in a true home, is a constant teacher, and its opening life, like a rosebud in its unfolding, pours beauty and sweetness all about. Many a home has been transformed by the unconscious ministry of a little child.
Children are means of grace to parents, also, in the very care and anxiety which they cause. They bring trouble as well as comfort. We have to work the harder to make provision for them. We have to deny ourselves when they come, and begin to live for them. They cost us anxieties, too--sleepless nights, ofttimes, when they are sick, days of weariness when a thousand things have to be done for them. Then we have to plan for them, think of their education and training, and teach them to look after the formation of their habits. In many cases, too, they cause distress by their waywardness. In many homes the sorrow over living children is greater far--than was the grief from the death of those who have passed from our presence.
Yet it is in these very experiences, that our children become specially means of grace to us. We learn lessons of patience in our care for them. We are trained to unselfishness as, under the pressure of love, we are all the while denying ourselves and making personal sacrifices for them. We are trained to gentler, softer moods--as we witness their sufferings and as our hearts are pained by our concerns on their behalf. Our distress as we look upon them in their struggles and temptations and are grieved by their heedlessness and waywardness works its discipline in our lives, teaching us compassion and faith as we cry to God for them. There are really no such growing times in the lives of true Christian parents as when they are bringing up their children, if they learn their lessons.
Every life, old or young, that touches ours is meant to be a means of grace to us. The poet said, "I am a part of all that I have met." He meant that every other life which had touched him had left something of itself in him. Ever bit of conversation we have with another gives us something we shall always keep. We learn many of our best lessons from our casual associations with our fellows. Every line of moral beauty in a regenerated life--is a mirroring of a fragment, at least, of the image of God, on which our eyes may look, absorbing its loveliness. Every Christian life is in an imperfect measure, yet, truly, a new incarnation. Every believer may say, "Christ lives in me." We live every day in close and intimate relations with people who bear something of God's likeness. The good and the holy, therefore, are means of grace to us because they help to interpret to us the divine beauty. In sympathetic companionship with them, we are made conversant with holiness in practical life. God comes down out of the inaccessible light and reveals himself in the human experiences of those with whom we are walking or working.
If living in direct companionship with God seems too high an experience to be possible for us, it is possible for us to live with those who do have close fellowship with him. Converse with those who live near to Christ cannot but enrich our knowledge of divine things and elevate the tone of our lives.
Even the faults of those with whom we come in contact may be means of grace to us. It is harder to live with disagreeable people than with those who are congenial and sweet--the very hardness becomes a splendid discipline to us and helps to develop in us the grace of patience. Having to live or work with irritable, quick tempered people may train us to self-control in speech, teaching us either to be silent under provocation, or else to give the soft answer which turns away wrath. Socrates said he married Xantippe and endured her temper, for the self discipline he found in the experience. It would not be well to advise any man to marry such a woman for the purpose of the discipline he would get; yet if by accident a man finds himself unhappily yoked to a Xantippe, and wants to turn his misfortune to good, this is the way he may do it. In any case the disagreeable people, the unreasonable people, the unlikable people with whom we find ourselves associated in the contacts of business or society--may thus in indirect ways do a great deal toward making us better.
Enemies also may prove means of grace. For one thing, they give us a chance to practice one of the hardest lessons the Master gives us to learn--to love our enemies. When those who dislike us say unkind or bitter things about us--if we find that what they say is in any measure true, we should mend our ways. If what they say is false, we should be comforted by the beatitude for those whom men reproach and persecute and against whom they say all manner of evil falsely, for the Master's sake.
Thus on all sides we find that we may get good from those about us. From the holy and saintly--we may get inspirations toward better things and be lifted up perceptibly toward goodness and saintliness. From the gentle and the loving--we receive softening influence which melts our cold winter into the genial glow of summer. From the crude and the quarrelsome--we get self discipline in our continued effort to live peaceably with such people, despite their disagreeableness and their disposition to contention. Friction polishes not metals only--but characters also. Iron sharpens iron; life sharpens life. People are means of grace to us.
We may grow, therefore, as Christians, in our own place among people. Solitariness is not good. In the broader as well as in the narrower sense--it is not good for man to be alone. Every life needs solitude at times; we should get into each of our busy days, times of silence when human presences shall be shut away, and we shall be alone with God. We need such hours for quiet thought, for communion with Christ, for spiritual feeding, for the drawing of blessing and holy influences down from heaven to replenish the waste produced by life's toil, struggle, and sorrow. There is a time for being alone. But we should not seek to live always nor usually in this way. Life in solitude grows selfish. The weeds of evil desire and unhealthy emotion, flourish in solitariness.
We need to live among people, that by the contacts, the best things in us may be drawn out in thought and care and service for others. It is by no means a good thing for us to live in such conditions that we are not required to think of others, to make self-denials for others, to live for others, not for ourselves. The greater and more constant the pressure in life toward unselfishness, toward looking out and not in, and lending a hand, the better for the true growth and development of our lives. We never become unselfish, but under conditions which compel us to live unselfishly. If we live--as we may live--with heart and life open to every good influence, we get some blessing, some inspiration, some touch of beauty, some new drawing out of latent life, some fresh uplift, from every person we meet, even casually. There is no life with which we come in contact, which may not bring us some message from God--or by its very faults and infirmities help to disciple us into stronger, calmer, deeper, truer life, and thus become to us a means of grace.
