You
are all sons of the light and sons of the day. We do not belong to the night or
to the darkness. So then, let us not be like others, who are asleep, but
let us be alert and self-controlled. 1 Thessalonians 5:5-6
We of the Christian faith
need not go on the defensive, for it is the modern man of the world who is the
dreamer, not the Christian believer!
The sinner can never be
quite himself. All his life he must pretend. He must act as if he were never
going to die, and yet he knows too well that he is. He must act as if he had
not sinned, when in his deep heart he knows very well that he has. He must act
unconcerned about God and judgment and the future life, and all the time his
heart is deeply disturbed about his precarious condition. He must keep up a
front of nonchalance while shrinking from facts and wincing under the lash of
conscience. All his adult life he must dodge and hide and conceal. When he
finally drops the act he either loses his mind or tries suicide.
If realism is the
recognition of things as they actually are, the Christian is of all persons the
most realistic. He of all intelligent thinkers is the one most concerned with
reality. He pares things down to their stark essentials and squeezes out of his
mind everything that inflates his thinking. He demands to know the whole truth
about God, sin, life, death, moral accountability and the world to come. He
wants to know the worst about himself in order that he may do something about
it. He takes into account the undeniable fact that he has sinned. He recognizes
the shortness of time and the certainty of death. These he does not try to
avoid or alter to his own liking. They are facts and he faces them full on.
The believer is a
realist—his expectations are valid and his faith well grounded!
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