We do not relinquish the vain
pursuit. By Charles Simeon. Jeremiah 2
verses 11 to 13. Has a nation ever changed its
gods? Yet they are not gods at all.
But my people have exchanged me, their glorious God, for worthless
idols. Be appalled at this, O heavens,
and shudder with great horror, declares the Lord. My people
have committed two sins, they have forsaken Me, the spring
of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns
that cannot hold water. Grievous, indeed, had been the
departure of God's ancient people from Him and their obstinate
attachment to idols. But if God utters this complaint
against them, then how much more justly may He urge it against
professing Christians today? What has been the uniform tenor
of our lives but one constant state of departure from God and
a preferring of every worldly vanity before Him? True, we have
not bowed down to idols of wood and stone, but we have cared
for nothing and thought of nothing but the pleasures or riches or
honors of this vain world. Look at most of the people who
are filling our churches. What are they seeking after?
It is this poor world, in some shape or other. Though they have
found worldly pleasures to be, in fact, nothing but vanity and
vexation of spirit, yet they go on in the same infatuated
course from year to year, setting their affections upon worthless
vanities which never did, nor ever can, give them lasting satisfaction
and felicity. We do not mean to condemn all
pleasure, honor, wealth, or learning as evil in themselves. These
all have their legitimate and appropriate use, and all may
be pursued and enjoyed in perfect consistency with a good conscience
before God. But the evil which usually accompanies
these things consists in making them the great end of our life.
in allowing them to draw away our hearts from God or to occupy
that place in our affections which is due to God alone. The
creature which is allowed to rival God in our affections,
whatever it may be, is only a broken cistern. Who will dare to say
that he has ever found solid and permanent satisfaction in
the creature? has lived any considerable time
in the world without learning, by his own experience, the truth
of Solomon's observation, that all earthly vanities are meaningless,
a chasing after the wind. Yet, whatever our experience
has been, we still follow our own delusions and run after a
phantom, which, while we attempt to apprehend it, eludes our grasp. We suppose that the pleasures
of the world will make us happy. We follow them and for a moment
imagine that we are happy. But we awake and find that it
was but a dream. We next try wealth or honor.
We run the race and we attain the prize. But we find at last
that we have been following a shadow and are as far off from solid
happiness as ever. Notwithstanding our daily experience
of the insufficiency of all earthly good to make us truly happy,
we do not relinquish the vain pursuit. We have hewn out one
cistern and found it incapable of retaining any water. We have
then renewed our labor and hewed out another cistern which we
have found as unproductive of solid benefit as the former.
We have worn ourselves out with the pursuit of various and successive
vanities. We have persisted in our error,
untaught by experience and unwearied by continual disappointments.
What amazing folly, then, have we been guilty of? Why do you
spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor
for that which does not satisfy? Isaiah chapter 55 verse 2. How long will you go on withholding
your affections from God, who alone can make you happy, in
a determined pursuit after earthly vanities? I do hope that you
will see how foolish such pursuits are, and will from this time
turn unto God with your whole hearts.