Are You Getting The Best Out Of Life?

Get the best out of life! Let Christ live in you and you in Him, so that the glory of salvation revealed in you, may be shed abundantly upon those who have missed life's real goal and are battering the eternal for the temporal.

1922 Walter A. Maier Walther League Messenger

The following article by Walther A. Maier is take from the February 1922 issue of the Walther League Messenger, volume 30, number 7, on page 247.

Do you walk on mountains wrapped in golden sunlight and bathed in the crystal of the air, or do you grovel in darkened caverns where light and warmth seldom penetrate? Are your eyes opened to behold the far-reaching breadth of life, or does your short-sighted vision stop at the boundaries of self and of the moment present? Can you say that this will be a better world, that the total of human happiness will be increased because you have lived, or will your whole career be so self-centered, cal-loused, and cold, that being ended, its record will be written on the restless waters of the sea of failure? Ask yourself: Am I getting the best out of life? Or, put the question this way: Is life, the life that is really worth living, getting the best out of me?

When the first Christian missionary came to the British Isles, the King of Northumbria summoned his nobles to a gathering at which the new. religion would be examined. At this meeting an old chief arose and put this test to christianity. He said: "You know, O king, how, on a winter evening, when you are sitting at supper in your hall with your company around you, when the night is dark and dreary, when the rain and the snow rage outside, when the hall inside is lighted and warm with a blazing fire, sometimes it happens that a sparrow flies into the bright hall out of the dark night, flies through the hall, and then flies out into the dark night again. We see him for a few moments, but we know not whence he came, nor whither he goes in the blackness of the storm outside. So is the life of man. It appears for a short space in the warmth and brightness of this life, but what came before this life and what is to follow this life, we know not. If, therefore, these new teachers can enlighten us as to the darkness that went before and the darkness that is to come after, let us hear what they can teach us."

But Christ's blessed Gospel gives us not only the answer to these problems that have perplexed thinking men of all lands and ages, but also enlightenment as to that span of years between birth and death which is commonly called life. As fleeting and as swift as the flow of years may be, life may be lived and bring blessing, or it may be wasted and bring judgment. Lost wealth may be recovered by energy and thrift, lost knowledge by reading and study, lost health by medicine and rest, but time lost is lost forever.

Christian young men and young women cannot and dare not lose time and waste their life. Living in God, in whom they also move and have their being, theirs is a definite purpose in life, a fixed objective, to reach which they count no service too hard, no sacrifice too demanding. Because they know that whether they eat or drink or whatsoever they do, they must do all to the glory of God, they realize that they have been born into this passing life to serve the Maker and Redeemer, whom they will glorify in the endless life. And because the love toward their fellow-men is second only to the love which they must give to their God, they will find their other great purpose in life in the uplifting and sustaining of their fellow-men and fellow-sinners and in bringing them to the Savior whose death gave our life something real and imperishable.

The plain and plodding life which the Christian young man and young woman live in God and for mankind is not spectacular and showy. Someone has said: “To human vision, nothing was ever smaller than the grain of seed which fell into Calvary’s soil and died. To any vision, nothing will ever be vaster than the tree of life which, having come up from Calvary's dying seed, is overshadowing human space and human kind and sending out its boughs through all the immensities." And in much the same way the world will not pause or slacken its pace before any redeemed disciple of Christ except to smile and wonder. Yet the humblest peasant in the obscurity of the lowliest hovel who has taken the best out of life-and that is Jesus the Christ as the only but all-sufficient cure for all the sin and wrong in this sick world of ours—has lived for more blessing than the most exalted man of millions in the magnificence of the costliest mansion, who may have gained the whole world, but in so doing lost his own soul.

W. A. M.