[photo taken by Chuk Pierpont at Duck Point on Wolf Lake near Watersmeet, Michigan]
Does the “call of the eternal” ring clearly in your soul?
J. H. Jowett’s book The Preacher, His Life and Work is the text of his 1912 Yale Lectures on Preaching. They are over 100 years old but I have read the re-read them dozens of times. The lectures often have a lyrical quality, a poetic beauty about them. In the first lecture he describes the sense of calling a pastor must have–but I think this same sense of eternity should ring in the heart of every follower of Christ.
“The call of the Eternal must ring through the rooms of his soul as clearly as the sound of the morning bell rings through the valleys of Switzerland, calling the peasant to early prayer and praise.”
Since I was a young teen I have had at least a faint sense of the eternal embedded in my soul. I pray that God will help me live out all my days before me with a continual and sweet sense of holy duty tugging at me from the deepest place in my soul. Though I live in a noisy world, may the call of the Eternal ring though my soul as clearly and beautifully as the sound of the bell in an alpine valley calling men and women to prayer.