By J.R. Miller
In one of the psalms is a sentence of committal, the full force of which is not usually noted. The words read: "Into your hand I commend my spirit. You have redeemed me, O Lord, O God of truth." This is commonly quoted as if it referred to dying. Indeed, Jesus, when he was dying--used almost these exact words, and thousands of believers since have done the same. But as originally written, the committal was for life--not for death. The writer of the psalm was facing the experiences of human struggle and danger, and put his life into the hands of his Redeemer.
We may commit our life into the hands of God--in the fullest and most far-reaching sense. This is what we really do in the act of believing on Christ. Perhaps the conception of Christ as a living person, to whose hands we entrust our soul's keeping, is not always as vivid as it might be. There is a sense in which we are saved by the death of Christ; but we need to add to this, the truth of the living Christ--who is our personal friend, teacher, guide, keeper, the restorer of our soul, and our helper in all ways. He takes our life, with all its sin, frailty, fault, and peril, and by his power--cleanses, renews, transforms, trains, and guides--until at last he presents us faultless before the presence of the divine glory.
Then, not our soul only--but our affairs also, may we commit into the hands of Christ.
Every life is full of experiences, which no human wisdom can make clear. Our affairs are forever getting tangled like threads in a child's hands--and the tangles we have no skill to straighten out. We cannot see how anything beautiful or good, can come out of our poor living or our feeble striving. Ofttimes our circumstances seem to be unfriendly. Our days are full of disappointments, and our nights' rest is broken by fear and anxieties.
The Christian's privilege in the midst of such experiences, is to commit all into the hands of Christ. Jesus can take our broken things, over which we weep bitterly--and build them up into spiritual beauty. One of the finest windows in a great cathedral is said to have been made out of the fragments of broken glass which the workmen had thrown away as worthless. A skillful hand gathered them up, and wrought them into lovely form.
Just so, Christ can take our failures, our mistakes, our follies, even our falls and sins--and make them into beautiful life and holy character. He can take our tangled threads, and, disentangling them, weave them into a garment of beauty for us. He can take our sore disappointments, and change them into divine appointments, so that they shall be radiant paths to blessing and good. It matters not what the burden or the care is--if only we will lay it in the hands of Christ, and leave it there, he will transform it into good.
Jesus, when about to leave this world, committed his disciples into the hands of his Father, asking him to keep them in the midst of the world's danger and trial. So may the dying parent commit his children, whom he must leave alone, into the hands of God. We may commit our unfinished work into the same hands--when we have to drop it from our feeble clasp. We may commit into Christ's hands also, the loved ones for whom we pray, for whose salvation our hearts cry out with such agony of love. Long may the answer to our supplications seem to be delayed.
We may trust all our cares, into the hands which the nails pierced on the cruel cross, for our redemption. We may lay every anxious thought and wish, everything that to us seems hopeless, everything that seems to have failed, everything that causes us pain or care or sorrow--we may lay everything in the hands of Christ, and leave it there, with the faith of a little child. These broken things, these mere fragments of efforts and attainments and achievements and shattered hopes--all we may entrust to the great Master of life, knowing that nothing shall be lost.
We may also entrust our life itself to the same keeping. Circumstances are but incidents; the real thing about us always is our life itself. The house is not the family. Fire may destroy the building--but the household life is not affected thereby.
The body is not the life. Sickness may waste the beauty and the strength, or accident may wound or scar the flesh; but the life within, that which thinks, feels, loves, suffers, wills, and aspires--remains unharmed. It matters little what becomes of our money, our clothes, our house, our property, or even of our personal happiness; but it is of infinite importance what happens to our life itself. The problem of living in this world, is to pass through life's vicissitudes without being harmed by them, growing ever into more and more radiant and beautiful Christly life, whatever our circumstances and experiences may be.
It is in this phase of our living, that we need Christ most of all. We cannot escape meeting temptation; but we are so to meet it as not to be hurt by it, coming from it rather with new strength and new radiancy of soul. We cannot find a path in which no sorrow shall come into our life--but we are to pass through sorrow without having our life marred by it. None but Christ can keep us thus unhurt--amid the manifold perils through which we must move continually. The gentlest, purest, strongest mother, cannot fold her child in her bosom so securely--that it will be absolutely safe from the world's power of evil.
Few thoughts are more serious than that of the responsibility, under which we come when we take another life into our hands. A baby is born, and laid in the mother's arms. In its feebleness it says to her in its first cry, "Into your hands I commit my life. Guard and keep me. Teach me my lessons. Train my powers. Hide me from the world's harm. Prepare me for life and for eternity." Yet any mother who thinks at all, knows that she herself cannot do all this for her child.
Perhaps we do not often think of the responsibility of being a friend. We like to have people come to us, and trust us, and love us, and look to us for whatever friendship can give or do. But we do not think what it means to take a soul in this way into our influence--to become friend, for example, to a young life that turns to us with confidence and yearning. It is a sacred trust. We are responsible for all we do that may influence, impress, color, or sway our new friend's life. Are we worthy to be friend to this young life? Are our hands clean? Are they gentle? Are they strong? Will the life be helped, inspired, beautified, enriched, lifted near to God by our friendship?
Must we not confess that Christ is the only one to whom any life may be committed, with absolute confidence that no hurt shall ever come to it? No most humane surgeon has such skill in binding up wounds or in treating sickness--as has the Lord Jesus Christ in dealing with our lives. All the best things in friendship are in him. "The chief need in life," a great thinker has said, "is somebody who shall make us do the best we can." Such a friend is Christ. He never makes life easy for us--as sometimes we mistakenly do for those we love, hurting them, weakening their character, by our over-help. Christ inspires us always to do our best.
Whatever sweet human friendships we may form, and whatever these may mean to us, it is only by committing our life into the hands of Christ, that there ever can be absolute safety in this world so full of evil, or that our life ever can reach its best possibilities.
We may, then, also make this same committal of our life when we come to what we call dying. That was what Jesus did: "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit." It is hard for us to see our godly friends die. It seems to us that they will miss our love, and that death will somehow harm them. But we are mistaken. They will be kept as no mother ever kept a child, and some day we shall get them back again in radiant beauty.
We need never fear to commit our godly loved ones into the hands of Christ when they leave us; nor need we be afraid, when to us the hour of departing comes, to breathe out our spirit into the same strong, gentle hands of eternal love.
