February 4

Excelling the world in zeal

“Who gave himself for us, that he might . . . purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works” (Titus 2:14).
“Your zeal hath provoked very many” (2 Cor. 9:2).

Have you ever listened to the enthusiastic roar of football spectators over a ball kicked to a goal? Have you seen men crowd and push in their zeal to get a standing-place in the stadium? Such zeal and enthusiasm is considered legitimate! But where is the zeal for Christ? Bushnell has said: “If your pulse ordinarily beats sixty times a minute when you think of other themes and talk about other themes, and if your pulse does not go up to seventy-five or eighty when you come to talk about Christ and Heaven, it is because you do not know the one, and have a poor chance of getting to the other.”

A clergyman once asked David Garrick why it was that the acted word of the theatre was more powerful than the spoken word from the pulpit. In reply, the actor said: “Ah, my dear sir, you of the pulpit speak truth as if it were fiction; we in the theatre speak fiction as if it were truth.”
On this subject Spurgeon said: “I feel right glad to meet with a zealous man nowadays, for zeal for God has become a rare quality in the land. Fashion and art and society and literature, each one evokes zeal of a certain kind; but we are not overdone with those who are zealous in the matter of religion.”
Any man that wishes to act on the mind of another must believe something, and believe it in his very soul. Sincerity and earnestness, in fact a certain degree of enthusiasm, are essential to give effect to spoken thought. A man must brood over his own thoughts till his mind takes fire, and then he may hope to fire other minds.
—T. T. Lynch.

His earnest love, His infinite desires,
His living, endless, and devouring fires,
Do rage in thirst, and fervently require
A love ’tis strange it should desire.

We cold and careless are, and scarcely think
Upon the glorious spring whereat we drink,
Did He not love us we could be content:
We wretches are indifferent.

’Tis death, my soul, to be indifferent;
Set forth thyself unto thy whole extent,
And all the glory of His passion prize,
Who for thee lives, Who for thee dies.
—Thomas Traherne.

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