Thought that those over 55 will really relate to this. Kind of goes along with what Paul Holm put up yesterday, I think it was. A Spurgeon Moment ‘There is but a step between me and death.’ 1 Samuel 20:3 First, then, there is a sense in which this text is no doubt literally true of every man; ‘There is but a step between me and death’ for life is so short that it is no exaggeration to compare it to a step. I confess to my own experience that a week is now a hardly appreciable space of time to me. There seems to be very little breathing room between one Sunday and another. As we grow older, time very sensibly quickens its pace. You young people look to a month as being quite a period of time, but when you are getting 40, or 50, or 60, you will look upon a whole year as no more than a brief interval. But when a man grows old, his days seem fewer than they were—and the older he gets, the shorter his life seems to have been! There are many ways of calculating time and its length or brevity lies more in idea than in fact. I have sometimes noticed it—I dare say you have—that an hour has seemed to me very long, indeed. In certain states of mind I have looked to the clock again and again and I have thought that I never lived such a long hour. But often and often does it occur to me that I sit down to write and that I go on writing—and when I lift up my head an hour has passed and I think to myself—It cannot be. There is a mistake. Somehow that clock has made a mistake! I have even referred to my watch and I have found that it was even so, but where that hour went, I do not know. When one is very busy, the hours glide away, so that you say, Time is, after all, only a dream. Time may appear to be long, while it is short, and it may be really short when, according to human calculation, it is long. But all men, when they come to die, confess that their life has been brief—that it was but a step. Yesterday I was born; today I live; tomorrow I must die! Ephemera are born and die in the space between the rising and the setting sun—their life is a fair picture of our own. We are shadows and we come and go with the rising and the setting sun. Truly, ‘there is but a step between me and death. O my God, if my life is so short, prepare me for its end! Help me to stand ready for its close, so that I may give in my final account with joy.’ See ‘spurgeongems.org’ volume 31 – sermon 1870.
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 22:40:18 +0000
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