Adopted with permission from The Place of Help by Oswald Chambers (Copyright 1935 Oswald Chambers Publications Association).
The biographies (or autobiographies) of great Christians-Augustine, Wesley, Hudson Taylor-are often held up as encouragements to live a more enduring, committed Christian life. But do these stories of, say, Praying Hyde developing leathery knees or Adoniram Hudson losing children, wife, and health in missionary endeavor bolster us with determination? Or browbeat us into despair? Do great Christians spur us on by their example, or sack our resolve with their untouchable spirituality?
Oswald Chambers, a preacher in England during the first two decades of this century, wrestled with this question. Chambers is best known for his book My Utmost for His Highest, ranked by LEADERSHIP readers a few years ago as their number one devotional resource. This excerpt from Chambers’s The Place of Help offers encouragement for those who want to be more like the legendary saints but seem to lack the energy and endurance.
“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord” (Ps. 121:1-2).
The marginal rendering puts it in the form of a question. “Shall I lift up mine eyes to the hills? From whence should my help come?” and recalls Jeremiah’s statement: “In vain is help looked to from the mountains.” I want to apply that statement spiritually.
Great aspirations
Mountains stir intense hope and awaken vigor but ultimately leave the climber exhausted and spent. Great men and great saints stir in us great aspirations and a great hopefulness but leave us ultimately exhausted with a feeling of hopelessness. The inference we draw is that these people were built like that, and all that is left for us to do is to admire. Longfellow says: “Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime,” but I question whether this is profoundly true. The lives of great men leave us with a sense of our own littleness, which paralyzes us in our effort to be anything else.
Going back to the setting of this psalm, one realizes that the exquisite beauty of the mountain scenery awakens lofty aspirations: the limitless spaces above the highest mountain peak, the snow-clad summit, and the scarred side ending in foliage and beauty as it sweeps to the valley below, stand as a symbol for all that is high and lofty and aspiring. When one is young this is the type of scenery most reveled in; the blood runs quicker, the air is purer and more vigorous, and things seem possible to the outlook that were not possible when we lived in the valleys.
But as one gets older, and realizes that limitation not only of physical life but in the inner life, the remembrance of the mountains and of mountain-top experiences leaves us a little wistful with an element of sadness, an element perhaps best expressed by the phrase, “What might have been, had we always been true to the truth, had we never sinned, had we never made mistakes!”
Even such simple considerations as these bring us to the heart of the psalmist’s song in this Pilgrim Song Book-“Shall I lift up mine eyes to the hills?” Is that from whence my help is to come? And the psalmist answers, “No, my help cometh from the Lord who made the hills”-and there we have the essence of the spiritual truth. Not to the great things God has done, not to the noble saints and noble lives he has made, but to God himself does the psalmist point.
The study of biography is always inspiring, but it has this one drawback: it is apt to leave the life more given to sentiment and thinking and perhaps less to endeavor than is usually supposed. But when we realize what the psalmist is pointing out and what the New Testament so strongly insists on, namely, “the Lord is our help,” we are able to understand such a mountain-peak character as the apostle Paul saying, “Follow my ways which be in Christ.” We have not been told to follow in all the footsteps of the mountainlike characters, but in the footsteps of their faith, because their faith is in a Person.
Great attainments
This is such an important theme that it will profit us to look at it from another aspect. This is the age when education is placed on the very highest pinnacle. In every civilized country we are told that if we will educate the people and give them better surroundings, we shall produce better characters. Such talk and such theories stir aspirations, but they do not work out well in reality. The kingdom within must be adjusted first before education can have its true use. To educate an unregenerate man is but to increase the possibility of cultured degradation. No one would wish to belittle the lofty attainments of education and culture, but we must realize we have to put them in their high, mighty, second place. Their relationship in human life is second, not first. The man whom God made is first, and the God who made him is the only help. God seems to point this out all through his Book. Moses, learned in all the learning of the Egyptian schools, the highest and ablest prophet-statesman conceivable, realizes with a keenness and poignancy the bondage and degradation of his brethren, and sees that he is the one to deliver them, but God sends him for forty years into a wilderness to feed sheep. He removes first of all the big “I am” and then the little “I am” out of him. Read the account carefully; you will find that at the end of those forty years, when God spoke to Moses again, saying, “Come now therefore, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh, that thou mayest bring forth my people,” Moses said, “Who am I?” All this points out one thing, that the ability of a man to help his brother lies lastingly with God and not with his aspirations or his education or his attainments.
If the dominant identity of the disciple is not built up by God himself, in vain are the mountains looked to for help. There may be some who are trying by aspiration and prayer and consecration and obedience, built up from looking at the lives that stand like mountain peaks, to attain a like similarity of character, and they are woefully lagging behind. Their lips, as it were, have grown pale in the intense struggle, and they falter by the way, and the characters that used to stir intense hopefulness leave the soul sighing over “what might have been” but now can never be. To such a reader let the message of this psalm come with new hope, “My help cometh from the Lord who made the hills.” A strong saintly character is not the production of human breeding or culture; it is the manufacture of God.
Great admirations
Take it from another aspect. There are people today who are exalting our Lord as a teacher, saying, in effect, that they believe in the Sermon on the Mount and its high ideals but not in the Cross, that all that is necessary is to place the pure noble ideals of the Sermon on the Mount before mankind and let men strive to attain, that there is no need for a sacrificial death. When minds and men and countries are very young in thinking, this sort of statement and teaching has a wonderful fascination, but we sooner or later learn that if Jesus Christ was merely a teacher, he adds to the burdens of human nature, for he erects an ideal that human nature can never attain. He tantalizes us by statements that poor human nature can never fit itself for. By no prayer, by no self-sacrifice, by no devotion, and by no climbing can any man attain to the “Blessed are the pure in heart,” which Jesus Christ says is essential to seeing God.
When we come to the New Testament interpretation of our Lord, we find he is not a teacher; we find he is a savior. We find that his teaching is but a statement of the kind of life we will live when we have let him remake us by means of his Cross and by the incoming of his Spirit. The life of Jesus is to be made ours, not by our imitation, not by our climbing, but by means of his Death. It is not admiration for holiness, nor aspirations after holiness, but attainment of holiness, and this is ours from God, not from any ritual of imitation.
I would like to commend this thought for the instruction and courage of those whose hearts are fainting in the way, from whom the ideals of youth have fled, to whom life holds out no more promises. For thirty years or more it may be that life has been a boundless romance of possibilities. Beckoning signs from lofty mountain peaks have lured the spirit on. But now the burden and the heat of the day have come, and the mountain tops are obscured in a dazing, dazzling heat, and the road is dusty and the mileage long, and the feet are weak, and the endeavor is exhausted. Let me bring the message contained in this psalm, even as a cup of water from the clear sparkling spring of life. “My help cometh from the Lord who made heaven and earth.” He will take you up, he will remake you, he will make your soul young and will restore to you the years that the cankerworm hath eaten and place you higher than the loftiest mountain peak, safe in the arms of the Lord himself, secure from all alarms, and with an imperturbable peace that the world cannot take away.
This psalm is one of the fifteen that the people sang and chanted on their ways of weary pilgrimage to the mighty concourse and festivity of God’s hosts, and it is well called one of the “pilgrim psalms.” The psalmist goes on to say, “The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil,” so that there be no fainting by the way. “The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.”
To whom are you looking? To some great mountainlike character? Are you even looking at the Lord Jesus Christ as a great mountainlike character? It is the wrong way; help does not come that way. Look to the Lord alone, and come with the old pauper cry-
Just as I am, without one plea
But that Thy blood was shed for me,
And that Thou bid’st me come to Thee-
O Lamb of God, I come.
Any soul, no matter what his experience, who gets beyond this attitude is in danger of falling from grace. Oh, the security, the ineffable rest of knowing that the God who made the mountains can come to our help! Let us hasten at once under the “shadow of the Almighty” to the “secret place of the Most High,” for there shall no evil befall us. Jesus said, “Him that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out.”
Copyright © 1986 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
