James 4:14

THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE

‘For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.’

James 4:14

To this question we must expect many different answers. But however different may be the various answers, in one sense the same answer must come from all. From the man of wealth in his grand house, and from the beggar asking at his door for bread; from the successful merchant in his counting-house, and from the ruined bankrupt in his prison; from the lady of rank rejoicing over the cradle of her firstborn, and from the nameless outcast carrying the child of her shame to perish in the black river, from all alike comes this answer, ‘What is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.’ Yes, ‘for a little time’—‘so soon passeth it away, and we are gone.’ As says our great philosopher and poet:—

We are such stuff as dreams are made on,

And our little life is rounded with a sleep.

I. Let us look at our life from this point of view, not gloomily, or remorsefully, but as sensible men and women who can look truth in the face. We shall see that our life is like the mist which rises in the morning, and quickly passes away. We shall see that our life is brief, uncertain, full of change, often full of sorrow and disappointment; something, therefore, to be used to good purpose, not to be spent in idle dreams, or doubtful speculations, but to be made the most of. How short our time is! There is no truism more commonly quoted, and yet it is just one of the things which we think least about. The looking-glass shows us the tell-tale wrinkles, and the grey hairs here and there; we know that we are growing old, and that the vapour called life is passing fast away, yet many of us shut our eyes to the fact.

II. The question applied.—The question of the text is applied and brought home to us in many ways—

(a) The tombs in the churchyard;

(b) The pages of a church register;

(c) The old letters still cherished from those who have passed away. All these things come to us with the voice of warning, and you are forced to say, ‘Oh! that I were as in months past, as in the days when God preserved me, when His candle shined upon my head, and when by His light I walked through darkness; as I was in the days of my youth, when the secret of God was upon my tabernacle.’ Many a one has been forced to cry with the poet:—

No wonder that I sometimes sigh,

And dash the tear-drop from my eye,

To cast a look behind.

III. But we waste our time in looking back mournfully into the past: we may not alter it, though we can by God’s grace repent of it. The present is ours, let us strive to live to-day as Christ’s redeemed ones. Seldom indeed does an opportunity which we have missed once return to us again. Let us try then by the help of God’s Holy Spirit to make our daily life pure, and patient, and gentle, and self-denying, a life framed humbly after the pattern of Him Who came not only to teach us how to die but how to live. Then though on all sides of us, from the sick-room where the sufferer tosses upon his uneasy pillow, from the pinched home of poverty and hard work, from desolate firesides and ruined households, we hear the cry going up, ‘If this life be all, then are we of all men most miserable’—still we can take comfort and look forward. Learn to look up, though it be through your tears, and see the better country. Then you will learn to say with truth, ‘What is my life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.’ But yet ‘my life is hid with Christ in God, to me to live is Christ, to die is gain.’

Rev. H. J. Wilmot-Buxton.

Illustration

‘I saw an old man the other day looking at a game of cricket. There were boys and young men there full of life, and strength, and merriment; and I looked at the old man and thought how he had been like them once. Perhaps the old man thought the same; how his eyes had once been as keen as theirs; how his foot had been as swift, and his arm as strong as theirs, whilst now he was forced to say, like the old man Barzillai, “Can thy servant taste any more what I eat or what I drink? Can I any more hear the voice of singing men or singing women?” “What is my life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.” ’

(SECOND OUTLINE)

LOW VIEWS OF LIFE

There is a mistake in making too much of life, as if it were everything; there is also a mistake in making too little of life, as if it were nothing. The one of these is the mistake of those who have their portion here and disparage the greatness of eternity; the other is the mistake of those who, from a mistaken religious impulse, disparage life to enhance the value of eternity. Let us look shortly at some considerations which make men think that life is small and mean.

I. It often strikes us that life must be a very common and valueless thing because it seems to exist in such quantities.—Valuable things are rare. But life, human life, seems to be poured abroad with an unsparing lavishness. It is wasted and spilt and thrown away, and yet there seems always abundance—even superfluity. Look where men breed and swarm in the rank air and packed closes of our great cities. Consider the millions talking, working, eating, sleeping, worshipping, dying in China. Recall the myriads that toiled and groaned when the Pharaohs raised the pyramids; the tide of human life that a great conqueror such as Xerxes poured with imperial extravagance over the plains of Europe; the extinguished human energy which a strong gale casts like seaweed on our shores. Every tick of the clock tells that one has dropped somewhere on earth’s surface out of the vast account. The infant mortality too seems to imply that life is a very cheap thing—so many specimens spoilt, as it were, thrown away as useless before two or three can come to anything like maturity. I do not mean that they are thrown away, but at first sight it almost looks as if they were. Why, ninety per cent., one might almost say, are lost, or at least do not come to full growth and power. And the material seems so valueless that the few perfect specimens still continue to be made at this tremendous cost. ‘My life,’ we may well think and say, when we reflect on the great seething tide of being, ‘why, it is neither here nor there; a drop in the ocean—it would never be missed.’

II. Another reason why life seems very small is its shortness.—Things that do not last long are not regarded as worth much. Though many think that others’ lives are long, no one thinks so of his own. When a man sees what can be done and exerts himself, he is baffled and tantalised by the small amount of time he has to draw upon. He has strength, taste, objects, plans, but he can’t get them finished; they interfere with one another. The day is done before he can get many things even looked at. Life is done before he has got almost anything completed. I never knew one who wished to do much in life who ever found time to do all he wished.

III. Another thing which gives us a low view of life is the way it deceives men.—Hardly any one but will admit that its appearances and promises have been fallacious. In almost no particular has it given what it promised. It is not that it has given nothing. Christians who have made what they might of their religion; worldly men even, who have been shrewd and vigorous and fortunate, will not tell you that life has given them nothing. But it has not given them what it promised. It has been an il lusion at least, if not a de lusion. Nothing has seemed the same when they came near it as it did at a distance. Their senses deceived them in childhood. The sun seemed a metal plate in the heaven; the rainbow appeared to touch the earth; the brook at the bottom of the garden seemed an enormous, almost impassable, flood of waters. These phantasms have, of course, been dispelled long ago. But this has been a mere image of the way in which the imagination, the affections, the reason even, have made them their dupes. They have got things, as a rule, only when they had lost the taste for them. Nay, the whole of life seems to be constructed on the principle of luring men on by the hope of one thing, and then giving them either nothing or something else.

IV. Another consideration tells in the same direction.—It may be safely affirmed that for a great mass of people life escapes being an illusion only because it is so complete a drudgery. It is an illusion only to those who have the leisure or the taste to cherish hopes. But many have almost given up hoping. They never, as it were, get so far away from life as to be able to take a philosophic view of it, and say whether it has cheated them or not.

(THIRD OUTLINE)

THE GREATNESS OF LIFE

If life were really so poor and small as it seems, should we not be in danger of losing our faith in the power and meaning of life, and therefore—for they are bound together—any effective faith in God? What can be said on the other side?

I. Life is great in its moral significance, in spite of all the seeming meanness and evil of it. It is only to triflers that it seems to consist of trifles. All great men, all true men even, have found life great and intense with interest. There is nothing in the whole world that can even be called interesting in comparison with human life. I do not speak of it with reference to God and eternity, but simply in itself, as a stage of moral conflict, where dramas of passion and purpose and hope are enacted. You say man is so mean that he is only a fit object of contempt. I say he is so great that he is a fit object of wonder and terror and admiration; and the latter statement is far truer than the former. Even the confusion of his nature, his self-contradiction, his waywardness, his resolute set towards evil—they do not take from the greatness of the nature and the significance of the life. They add to them. It is something grand and terrible, though deplorable, his persistent sinning, his defiance of God. Study the description of fallen man, of the ruins of human nature, in the Epistle to the Romans. It reads, as one has said, like some battle among the gods. Animals cannot breathe defiance, and destroy themselves, and sin their life away. Those who see life aright call it not commonplace and petty; but terrific. It contains the elements of all real tragedy. What we call tragedy results merely from the accidental addition of certain circumstances. The impulses, the fire, the wild hope, the fierce desire, which cause what we call tragedies, slumber in almost every human breast. You only want the spark. For one man who commits murder or suicide, there are a hundred who might have committed them. Human nature, human life, is not a collection of flat commonplaces. It is instinct with tremendous meaning. It is a magnificent and awful ruin.

II. Human life is great.—And it is the sense of this coming to the mind which most quickly and surely chases our scepticism, and restores our faith, when we are haunted and oppressed with a feeling of the insignificance of existence. Can human life be small when God once passed through it? Has Christ not for ever, beyond touch of suspicion, lifted it up to a Divine plane? Dwell on that thought, or rather let us allow that thought to dwell on us. A thing is sacred by its associations. A scene is fraught with interest where a great deed has been wrought. A garment is consecrated which royalty has worn. No man who really believes that God took flesh and dwelt among men dares to feel in his inmost soul that life is paltry. It is a garment, this human life, which once the Almighty wore. This poor flesh, these limitations of feeling, this powerlessness of the exhausted system, those cross-currents of emotion—God once clothed Himself in these. We never feel so mortified, never feel so deeply as if vanity were written on our strength and greatness, as when, after successful exertion and exalted purpose, sleep forces itself upon us. But have you never heard how the Prince of Life lay slumbering once in an open boat, worn out—utterly unconscious? Say of nothing human that it is feeble, degrading, when God Himself felt it, touched it, put it on. But do not say that this contact of Christ has only served to bring out a tremendous contrast, that it was simply a piece of inconceivable Divine condescension. We exaggerate that side of the truth unduly at times. There must have been some affinity before there could have been contact. Man’s nature must have been redeemable before the Holy One redeemed it. Or, as has been said, the mystery of ungodliness must have corresponded to the mystery of godliness. It proves a Divine possibility in the poor, despised thing. Remember, when you despair of life, or sneer at it, that God was once Incarnate in it. He lived; gazed on earthly sunsets; drank of earthly waters; wrought at a common craft. And that has not merely clothed with a hallowed memory a certain spot, cast a shimmer of glory over the lake of Galilee, given a weird significance to Jerusalem. He lifted all human life, for He was made in the likeness of man.

III. But men who talk slightingly of human life have forgotten not merely the doctrine of the Incarnation: they have forgotten the doctrine of the Holy Ghost.—A really Divine personal force in the plane of human life transfigures; it gives infinite meaning. That we are agreed on. But is the presence of such a Divine personal force only a memory? Is it not also a fact? Has Christ quite departed? Is there only the fragrance of His name left? Is there no breath of God still moving among men? It is a question of tremendous moment, but it is a question believers can answer only in one way. The Divine life is not passed away; it is working still. There are growths among us of a purely heavenly origin. Where God’s spirit has moved, there men’s hearts are filled with a life which is not of time at all. Eternal life—a life similar to Christ’s own—is present, slumbering perhaps, but present among us. There is a kingdom of God, a community of the saints, in which God’s own mind and power are working, and that within human life. You may see here before your eyes this human life transformed into a spiritual, an immortal thing. Call it then poor and small if you dare.

Illustration

‘ “The master-power in shaping and sustaining our thoughts, our purposes, our deeds”: this, and nothing less, is what we are bidden to find in the fact that in our Lord Jesus Christ, God became man, and man was made one with God. The Bishop was never weary of calling upon those whom he taught, to strive to enter more fully into the meaning of St. Paul’s favourite phrase “in Christ.” In these two words he held that we have both the mystery and the power of the Incarnation summed up. The thought is so tremendous, and the phrase so familiar, that we are sometimes apt to miss the fulness of its meaning.’

(FOURTH OUTLINE)

THE RELIGIOUS VIEW OF LIFE

The life for this world only, the life of self and sin, is

I. Unsubstantial and insignificant.—It is a ‘vapour,’ a little cloudlet. Could anything be slighter than this?

II. Pretentious.—It seems more, and sometimes other, than it is. It has ‘the maximum of appearance and the minimum of substance.’ It is constantly seen through distorting media. We have no accurate gauge for it outside of revelation. How important are even the most discerning of us in our own eyes!

III. Evanescent.—Its business, so to speak, is summed up in appearing and disappearing.

Have we taken to heart the great moral? It is not by wailing, ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,’ that we shall be delivered from this nightmare of the souls who are ‘without God and without hope in the world.’ The better life, even the eternal, is still within our reach. Let us lay hold on it, that we go not out into that darkness that may be felt!

Illustration

‘Have you ever watched for any length of time the clouds in a summer sky? I did this the other day, and was astounded at the rapidity with which even the most clearly defined and strongly marked dissipated in the heated atmosphere, vanished before me as I looked. And is not this the character of the entire material universe in which we find ourselves?

There rolls the deep where grew the tree,

O Earth, what changes hast thou seen!

There where the long street roars, hath been

The stillness of the central sea.

The hills are shadows, and they flow

From form to form, and nothing stands;

They melt like mist, the solid lands,

Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

Yes, and like these the life that rests in, and confines its affections to such things, must partake of their nature. It seals its own mortality—it cherishes its own graveyard.’