Looking back upon our Earthly Life.
Throwing ourselves forward in the pure imagination of faith into the world to come, let us seek to look back and down upon this world as though we already were beyond it. Surrendering ourselves in our faith, and with our powers of spiritual imagination lent to the aid of our faith, let us seek humbly to imitate our Master, and look upon our world as He looked upon this earth, when as from a position in eternity He saw Satan fall from heaven.
I. If we look upon our own lives as one looks back upon a way already trodden, and a work already accomplished, we shall gain a truer sense of the proportions of things. This true sense of proportion in life is hard for us to keep in the nearness of present things; yet it is essential to large, happy living that we should gain and keep it. Whenever we shall be far enough out in eternity to look back and see our lives as one whole, we shall understand better God's grouping of events in them; we shall know then how all the while He who sees the end from the beginning, and beholds all earthly things framed in the quiet charity of heaven, has looked in the good pleasure of His love upon the history of this world, which to us in the midst of it seems often so broken, over-shadowed, and wild. And certainly the more freedom of faith we can exercise in letting our hearts sail away from the present and the near, taking in as in one view our own past, present, and future, and contemplating our life as one Divinely ordered whole of existence; the happier will our thought of life be, and the more just our estimate of what things are small or great in our lives.
II. In so far as we can put ourselves in the exercise of our own faiths beyond this life, we shall gain in many respects a different, and in all a more just, estimate of our own real attainments. We shall see more clearly what we may expect to win for ourselves from life. Here I venture to say that the training and discipline of any power in the honest work of a lifetime may be so much real attainment for immortality so much gain carried in the man himself through death into the world of larger opportunity. A man, therefore, should perform all his labour on this earth not as though what he does now were all of it, but as an heir of immortality.
III. Only as we strive to throw ourselves forward into the life beyond, and to consider our whole existence here as it is in its relation to the man and his life then and there, can we form a safe estimate of the worths of things. Jesus Christ left no doubt as to what in the retrospect of eternity is of worth before God. It is the new heart. It is the soul born of the Spirit of God. The image of Christ in a human heart is the gain of eternal worth.
N. Smyth, The Reality of Faith,p. 30.
Reference: Luke 10:19-21. W. Wilson, Christ setting His Face to go to Jerusalem,p. 408.