I. Our Lord in order to press upon us the great law of our self-determination, to help us to be honest with ourselves, carries us into the heart of things as they are in a startling fashion. He holds up to us three typical instances of sudden, sharp, and decisive separations which the crisis of His coming will produce. People that look the same now will be seen to be different. The day will declare them. Great occasions evolve character and create divergencies, but these divergencies had their roots long before, in the dark places of many and many a secret determination. In the closest friendship, in the most familiar intercourse, in the meeting of the same kind of circumstances divergencies grow and grow, separations are being evolved more and more decisively and infinitely. So powerless, so less than nothing are circumstances, so impotent to produce a result. So imperious is character, so free from the control of the very circumstances which are its daily occasions.
II. When Christ comes, when He meets me, then shall I know myself. Underneath us now yawns the pit of failure, close to us is the weakness born of past indulgence, but above us and with us is God, our Refuge, our Strength, our Hope. God, who will not be trifled with, who will not let us make excuses because He loves our real selves too well, and sees that they will not help us. Let us turn to Him who is our only Hope amid the treasons of our wills and the disloyalties of our hearts; let us turn to Him as those who have trodden the same road before us turned in their desolation. "Nevertheless, I am always by Thee; Thou hast holden me by Thy right hand.' Thus kept and consecrated the busiest life may be the truest to God, and the most monotonous occupation may be the most fruitful, and the very distractions and infirmities that beset us, and the memories of old sins that haunt us, may drive us closer to God; and we, with all our consciousness of weakness and sin, may be found to be His own in wish and heart and aspiration in that day of separation, when the eagles shall be gathered together, when every life shall openly declare its only true and real desire.
R. Eyton, Cambridge Review,Feb. 24th, 1886.
References: Luke 17:37. H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Sunday Sermonettes for a Year,p. 12; D. Fraser, Metaphors of the Gospels,p. 233.Luke 17 Homilist,new series, vol. iii., p. 359; F. D. Maurice, The Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven,p. 263.Luke 18:1. J. Kennedy, Christian World Pulpit,vol. iii., p. 33; E. W. Shalders, Ibid.,vol. xxiv., p. 124; T. B. Stevenson, Ibid.,vol. xxxi., p. 394; T. Child, Ibid.,vol. xi., p. 51; F. O. Morris, Ibid.,vol. xvii., p. 88; Spurgeon, Evening by Evening,p. 320; J. M. Neale, Sermons in a Religious House,2nd series, vol. i., p. 293.