Receive our blog posts in your email by filling out the form at the bottom of this page.
“So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." — Ps. 90:12
At the close of 2021, we at Log College Press wish to thank you, our dear readers, for your support and encouragement.
In years past, we have highlighted New Year’s sermons and meditations by Samuel Davies, Francis James Grimké, Benjamin Morgan Palmer, Henry Augustus Boardman, George Barrell Cheever, Elias Harrison, Erskine Mason, Gardiner Spring and others. This year we turn the spotlight on a message from Thomas DeWitt Talmage: Standards For the Measurement of Life: A New Year’s Sermon (1899).
How do evaluate or measure our mortal existence? That is a question for all of us, and an appropriate one at the close of one year and the beginning of another. Based on the text from Genesis 47:8 (“How old art thou?”), Talmage asks us to consider whether we are using a good standard to measure our time spent on this earth. As he notes, there are wrong ways to measure our time, and a right way. There are some, he says, who measure their years by the money they make, or the joys or sorrows they experience. “They say, ‘The year 1866, or 1870, or 1898 was wasted.’ Why? ‘Made no money.’” But hear how Talmage concludes the matter.
I remark again: there are many — and I wish there were more — who are estimating life by the good they can do.
John Bradford said he counted that day nothing at all in which he had not, by pen or tongue, done some good. There have been men who have given their whole life in the right direction, concentrating all their wit and ingenuity and mental acumen and physical force and enthusiasm for Christ. They felt in the thrill of every nerve, in the motion of every muscle, in every throb of their heart, in every respiration of their lungs, the magnificent truth: “No man liveth unto himself.” They went, through cold and through heat, foot-blistered, cheek-smitten, back-scourged, tempest-lasht, to do their whole duty. That is the way they measured life — by the amount of good they could do.
Do you want to know how old Luther was; how old Richard Baxter was; how old Philip Doddridge was? Why, can not calculate the length of their lives by any human arithmetic. Add to their lives ten thousand times ten thousand years, and you have not exprest it — what they have lived or will live. Oh, what a standard that is to measure a man’s life by? There are those in this house who think they have only lived thirty years. They will have lived a thousand — they have lived a thousand. There are those who think they are eighty years of age. They have not even entered upon their infancy, for one must become a babe in Christ to begin at all.
This is a good day in which to begin a new style of measurement. “How old art thou?” You see the Christian way of measuring life and the worldly way of measuring it. I leave it to you to say which is the wisest and best way.
As 2021 comes to an end, and we look ahead to 2022, we encourage our readers to consider Talmage’s message about how we measure our days, and to meditate upon the words of the Psalmist above. We are excited about the growing number of resources available at Log College Press to aid in the study of spiritual devotion, the Christian life, church history, Christian biography and much more. And we are grateful for the input of all those who continue to support and encourage us in our endeavors. May the Lord bless richly bless you and yours in the coming New Year!
