THE MOUNT AND THE PLAIN
‘But Peter and they that were with him were heavy with sleep: and when they were awake, they saw His glory, and the two men that stood with Him.’
A glorious scene lost because they were ‘heavy with sleep.’ The same men lost, not long after, in the Garden, an opportunity of comforting their Master which could never return, because they were ‘heavy with sleep.’ And here the sights and sounds of glory were missed because they were ‘heavy with sleep.’ And many a similar loss has been yours and mine because we have been ‘heavy with sleep.’ Your morning watch, that quiet hour when you might have had your Lord all to yourself undisturbed by domestic or outside sound—but you were ‘heavy with sleep.’ Add up the amount of time in which you have missed seeing your Master on the mountain of prayer because you were ‘heavy with sleep,’ and see what a total it makes. And then, of course, if you were ‘heavy with sleep’ when you ought to have been at prayer you will just have made all the mistakes that Peter made. If you do not know the happy power of rising early in the morning for prayer, what befell him will befall you.
I. On the mount.—Listen to him: ‘Master, it is good for us to be here.’ Of course it is. This is vastly better and easier than the life of struggle and calumny and hardship we have hitherto had. ‘Let us make three tabernacles,’ etc. Yes, Christian, if you have lost your time for prayer because you ‘were heavy with sleep,’ you will, like Peter, not feel the needs of the plain below. The other nine are down there, and they are Christians without power; and there, too, are the broken-hearted parents, and the devil-maddened child uncured, and the crowd who scoff at the impotence of your Master’s disciples. It is in prayer that you and I, as Peter did, see our visions. We live, thank God, in a time when the Mount of Transfiguration is found in many a hallowed gathering of God’s intimate ones. We know now that a deeper life and a higher life are possible to the believer than he used to think possible. We are learning that victory, not failure, is the thing which God gives us through Jesus Christ our Lord.
II. In the plain.—This transfiguration mount is the place where the Lord wants you to hear the voice, and learn the lesson, and see the glory which will brace and equip you for the life of the plain. You want to do something heroic. He wants you to take down this transfiguration power and use it below. It is for the home, the workshop, the office, the drawing-room, the unsympathetic sisters, the jesting brothers, the worldly associates who knew you before you learned the way up the mount—it is here the Lord wants you to be. No, you must not make three tabernacles up there. You must come down from the mountain. Every one wants to be doing something heroic nowadays. We are beginning to think life quite a commonplace thing if we do not look for the North Pole or explore a new glacier. But what is really needed is that you and I should come down with our transfigured faces into the trivial round and the common task of every-day life. Be often on the mount, but do not let it make you discontented with the life of the plain.
—Rev. R. C. Joynt.
Illustration
‘It is clear, from the narrative of Luke, that the three Apostles did not witness the beginning of this marvellous transfiguration. An Oriental, when his prayers are over, wraps himself in his abba, and, lying down on the grass in the open air, sinks in a moment into profound sleep. And the Apostles, as afterwards they slept at Gethsemane, so now they slept on Hermon. They were “weighed down” with sleep, when suddenly starting into full wakefulness of spirit, they saw and heard. In the darkness of the night, shedding an intense gleam over the mountain herbage, shone the glorified form of their Lord.’