22. Strengthened With Might

NO ONE questions any longer that the atmosphere in which we breathe and live exerts an uncommon influence upon our health. Fresh air builds up and invigorates. You see this with mountaineers, how the fresh mountain air puts iron into their blood; and, in the same way, with those who dwell in marshy regions, how the air, charged with poison from the swamps, keeps them below par and makes them pine away.

How can it be otherwise? Is not breathing a restless inhaling, always with full draughts, of what swarms about us in air and atmosphere; and not alone our breathing, but, if in lesser measure, the absorption also of the thousand and ten thousand pores in the skin is a drinking in of the atmospheric elements, and this opens the way to influences that affect our entire system?

Hence the pale and the anaemic are always urged to seek fresh air and to breathe more healthy atmospheres. Hence, equally, in hot, sultry summer days the panting for relief which evening brings, and, if within easy reach of the shore, the longing for a breath of the cooler, more invigorating air of the sea.

Now, we consist of body and soul, our being is twofold; and so this mighty influence upon our constitution of the atmosphere in which we live naturally finds a counterpart in the strong influence which the moral character of our environment exerts upon our own moral development.

This, too, is above question. Sad and joyous events continually show both how injuriously low moral standards affect character, and how life amid moral and healthy surroundings quickens one's moral sense.

Education is, perhaps not altogether, but very largely influenced by the surrounding atmosphere - the light and shadow of environment; and the secret of our mother's influence upon the formation of our character is largely due to the fact that as children we were longest in her presence.

The moral life, too, has laws and ordinances. It expresses itself in facts and deeds. It reflects itself in writings and conversations. But apart from all this, moral life is still something else, a sort of spiritual air, a moral atmosphere which is either healthy and bracing, poisonous and. injurious, or neutral and weakening. And though your character may be strong you, too, undergo these several influences to your spiritual profit or loss.

This is not all.

There is not only in the air you breathe a power that affects your bodily health and, in your moral environment, a power that operates upon your moral life, but there is also an atmosphere of person which counts.

Constant association with a sensually disposed person of little elevation of character has a depressing effect upon your own. On the other hand, daily intercourse with a person of higher principles, of more seriousness of thought, of holier aim in life, stimulates you. Such a one is like a good genius to you. Such environment holds you back from what would otherwise pull you down.

This is especially evident when this person is indeed a man of sterling character or a woman of a dominant spirit. Persons exercise an attraction upon one another which has a levelling effect. The one is stronger than the other, and the stronger molds the weaker into uniformity to his own nature. Imitation lies at the bottom of human nature, and unobservedly and unintentionally the weaker inclines to be and to act like the stronger, even to the extent sometimes, of the inflection of voice and kind of conversation.

And this personal influence of itself leads to the influence of the religious atmosphere, which is distinctly different from the moral.

All religion is personal at the core.

Moses has put the print of his personality upon all Israel. Christendom has been carried into the world by the Apostles. S. Augustine has inspired the Middle Ages. The Reformation on the Continent of Europe and in the British Isles bears the stamp of its spiritual fathers. And in every community, to this day, in which a strongly animated religious life is dominant, you can point out the persons from whom this bracing atmosphere has emanated.

It is, then. fire from the heart of one that kindles fire in the heart of the other.

The child of God that is robed with the beauty of holiness, as with a garment, also wins souls for God in his environment.

Now we come to the highest rung of the ladder which, as a rule, is too little reckoned with.

There is a breathing-in of mountain air and sea air. There is a drinking-in of the moral atmosphere that surrounds us. There is an appropriation in ourselves of the animation that comes to us from a finely-strung heart with which we are in touch. But there is also, and this is the highest, a hidden walk with God Himself; and it is the influence that goes out from this hidden walk which for the strengthening of our heart far excels all others.

S. Paul prays for the Ephesians (3:16), that they might be "strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man."

This, then, is the highest, richest, holiest atmosphere that can and must work upon you inwardly.

Suppose that Jesus were still on earth and that you, say for the space of a month, could see Him every day; you would feel yourself transferred thereby into an atmosphere of noble and holy living which in an unequalled way would strengthen you with might in the inner man.

To live for three long years in this holy atmosphere was the all-surpassing privilege of the Apostles, so that afterwards, strengthened in the inner man, they were enabled, even without the visible presence of Jesus, to witness against the world.

This is not possible now. We know Jesus no more after the Flesh. But through Him we have access to the Father Himself, and the daily, personal, hidden converse with God is open to us.

If, now, you take this to mean that it all ends with the short moments that you pray, then you remain in this holy atmosphere only a short time. All your prayers together, as a rule, do not occupy more than one half hour in every twenty-four.

But this is not the way the Scripture takes it. Already David sang (Psalm 23:6). "I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever." And all the saints who before and after the royal harpist have sought, found, known and enjoyed this hidden converse with God, understood by it, a frequent thinking of God, a continual lifting up of the soul to Him, a pondering on all things with an eye to Him Who loves us, an ever being near unto Him, and a continual experience of blessedness in His holy, courage-inspiring and animating nearness; a personal appreciation of His omnipresence; our whole life and our whole existence being immersed, as it were, in the holy nimbus that shines out from His Divine Being - a feeling in our own heart of the throbbing of the Father-heart of God.

Churches with such a motive-power are alive; others that lack this, though dogmatically they may be sound, are dead. A preacher who brings this atmosphere to his congregation is an ambassador of God. Preachers who have no eye for this, because their heart does not go out after it, are as tinkling cymbals. When to be near unto God is your joy and your song; when you dwell in His tent, and the hidden converse with Him is daily your delight, then your whole person undergoes day by day the mighty, strengthening influence of the holy atmosphere above; of that atmosphere in which angels breathe and from which departed saints drink in the never-fading freshness of their soul. Thus the powers of the kingdom communicate themselves unto you in the inner man. This is heavenly ozone that fans your soul; power that restrains in you what is impure and unholy; draughts from the Fountain of life which make your breast swell with vitality and vigor; even the Holy Ghost in whom God Himself touches you and inspires you to nobler exhibits of power.

O! what a change would overtake all of social life if every soul could breathe this holy atmosphere.

But this is the sin in point. When you say to one who is anaemic. "seek mountain air," or "seek sea air!" he at once considers the means to do it. Everyone is willing to do this!

But when you say to one who is spiritually weak: "Withdraw yourself from your surroundings and seek an atmosphere of a higher moral character," then you may move a single individual, but by far the greater number continue to delight themselves in their own evil ways.

And when you go further and say: "Practice the hidden walk with God, and drink in the atmosphere of the life above!" - then no one moves except as God Himself draws him.

This is a proof of the very high grace that has been ministered to you, if you indeed do know this secret walk.

O, bend the knees, even as S. Paul, unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, that this glorious privilege may not be taken from you, but that rather from this hidden walk you may continually obtain might to strengthen you in the inner man.