A difficult but very beneficial journey!
Dear Friends,

If there’s anything most of us don’t want and try with all our might to avoid, it’s going down! Yet being humbled is what all of us need. Today’s devotional will explain and encourage you. God bless you.

Because of Calvary,

John Janney

• A difficult but very beneficial journey!

  Ecclesiastes 12:1-8English Standard Version (ESV)
  Remember Your Creator in Your Youth
  12 Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, “I have no pleasure in them”; 2 before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return after the rain, 3 in the day when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those who look through the windows are dimmed, 4 and the doors on the street are shut—when the sound of the grinding is low, and one rises up at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought low— 5 they are afraid also of what is high, and terrors are in the way; the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along,[a] and desire fails, because man is going to his eternal home, and the mourners go about the streets— 6 before the silver cord is snapped, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher is shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern, 7 and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. 8 Vanity[b] of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity.

Ecclesiastes 12:1-8

“There are times in a man’s life when he has to come down. It is not a very easy matter to go down the hill safely. Some persons have proved that it is difficult to grow old gracefully; but to the Christian it ought not to be impossible or unusual to grow old graciously. Still, there are difficulties about that coming down the hill of life, ― coming down in a very material sense, perhaps, from competence to real poverty; coming down as to your mental powers, being conscious of losing your former influence over your fellows; coming down in general repute, through no fault of your own, but through circumstances of which you are not the master. All this is very trying to human nature. You know that, on the way to heaven, there are many Hill Difficulties; and brave spirits rather enjoy climbing to the top of them. We like a craggy path, hard and rough, where we can keep on looking upward all the way even if we have to scramble on our hands and knees. There is something pleasant in going up in that fashion; but it is when going down into the Valley of Humiliation that we are apt to slip. We do not like going down; and, as many horses fall at the bottom of the hill, so I believe that many people trip at the end of a trial when they think it is nearly over, and they have no need to look so carefully to their feet…. You get poorer and poorer; but ‘underneath are the everlasting arms. You get older and feebler; your ears are failing, your eyes are growing dim; but ‘underneath are the everlasting arms.’ By-and-by, unless the Lord speedily returns, you will have to die, and you will come down very low then; but still it will be true ‘underneath are the everlasting arms.’” [Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit XLI, (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1895), p. 495]