Relax is a modern word that is just about worked to death. It is heard on every hand and is offered as a sure cure for all our ills.
If you relax you will not have stomach ulcers. You will get along with your neighbors better. Your home life will be more congenial and happy.
A relaxed condition may be much better in building personal and social relationships, but when it comes into the realm of the moral and spiritual there must be no relaxing.
Christ said, “Strive to enter in at the strait gate: for many I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able.” When once the master of the house is risen up, and hath shut to the door….” (Luke 13:24)
We are to run with endurance said Paul. We are to keep our bodies under. We are to have our loins girded and our lamps burning.
In matters moral and spiritual there must be no relaxing, the soul must ever be on guard against the wiles of the devil, against the allurements of the flesh, and the enticements of the wicked one.
Let it be remembered that what makes an obstacle is the state of the heart of the man himself. External conditions which fruit in vicious acts are not half so deadly as an inner slackness that blurs all lines of distinction between right and wrong and builds up within the soul the desire for self-indulgence.
Christianity is a fight, and the Christian is in for it all that is in it. It is a warfare from which there is no discharge and in which there is no “cease fire.”
There will be much to endure-wars and rumors of wars, fighting’s within and without, fears and tumults and hatred and despair. But nothing will befall me that I cannot endure with Christ. And if I endure to the end I shall be saved.
Strive, to be sure, but the reward is worth the striving. And it does not all come at the end of life’s road, for here and now, in the present, there are rewards worthy of our best strivings and which will bring joy and gladness to the heart of the believer.
--George E. Failing
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