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The
Lightstand Magazine
1986
• July • Reflections on the way
by Bro. Robin Lamplough
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Every
room in the house is in disorder. Boxes and cases obstruct
every passage. There are piles of articles on every flat surface.
For people who call themselves strangers and pilgrims we certainly
accumulate a great deal in the way of worldly goods. And moving
back into one's home after a sojourn elsewhere of two months
is almost as bad as a real and permanent change of residence.
It certainly involves at least as much dislocation of the
everyday routine. The words "Set thine house in order"
acquire suddenly an immediate and a concrete significance.
BASIS OF DISCIPLESHIP And, at the end of the day, is this
not really what discipleship is all about? When we come to
the Truth and embrace its promises, are we not acknowledging
that our spiritual house is disordered and that we desire
to set it right? As we progress through the different stages
of discipleship, are we not slowly learning, area by area
and painful piece by piece, to make order out of the confusion
of our lives by getting our priorities right and learning
to glorify God than to glorify self?
It was King Hezekiah, on what would have been his deathbed,
who received that simple message from God through the prophet
Isaiah: "Set thine house in order!" (Isaiah 38.1)
And the circumstances reflected the urgency of the injunction:
"for thou shalt die and not live." But for the miracle
which was to give him an unlooked-for extension of life, Hezekiah
had reached the end of his day. And all his power and responsibility,
once exercised nation-wide, had been reduced to a narrow and
immediate compass: "Set thine house in order!" These
words have a particular relevance for us, living as we do
at the end of an age.
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A
LIMITED TIME For us, as for Hezekiah, there are important things
to be done in a limited time. For us too there is an impending termination
of activity which will be final. We do not know what the immediate
future holds but we do know that the end of all things is at hand;
that the night cometh when no man may work; that we have a particular
responsibility because of our knowledge of what the Word of God
teaches. The wisdom of the old hymn is plain to see. "Live
each day as if it were thy last."
But there is another aspect also. In the final analysis, I am responsible
for my house and my house alone. It is there that I exercise divinely
ordained authority. It is there that I have particular responsibilities.
It is there that I should have sufficient work to engage all my
energies. And the same applies to you in your house. So much of
our time is presumptuously spent trying to set other peoples' houses
in order; in seeking with plank-obstructed vision to clear the motes
from our neighbours' eyes. "Set thine house in order!"
should give us pause; should help to restore our perspective. Each
one of us has been given, in the American phrase, his own row to
hoe, and it is on the manner in which we have discharged that responsibility
that we will be judged. Let us therefore resist the temptation to
mind other people's business and seek to set our own houses in order,
knowing that there is little time left in which to do it.
R.L.
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