A Good Beginning, Continuing and Ending

Extract
A Good Beginning, Continuing and Ending
A. W. Pink

A Good Beginning

What a mercy it is to enter this world with a healthy body and sound constitution; how severely handicapped for this life where the opposite be the case! What a blessing to be born into a Christian home, to receive our earliest impressions from pious parents, to be trained from infancy to walk in “the way of the LORD” (Gen. 18:19)! What a difference it makes in the marital life whether or not it opens with a consecration of the same to the Lord, and where the “family altar” is erected from the outset! It is sadly true that a good beginning will not of itself ensure a good ending; yet if the former obtains not, it is unlikely that the latter will be attained. If the foundation be faulty, the superstructure erected thereon is insecure. Though it be not everything, a good beginning is much to be desired. The indolent youth rarely amounts to much subsequently. Certain it is that as we sow in our earlier days, we are made to reap later on. The same law holds good in the Christian life: the formation of good spiritual habits at an early stage does much to mould future character and conduct.

It is customary in the early days of January for our friends to wish us a happy New Year, but what ground have we to expect that such a hope will be realized unless we begin the year aright? Certainly we are not justified in looking for the smile of God upon us if its dawn be celebrated with carnal gluttony and worldly jollification. That is to act as the heathen do. Nor may we count upon the providential blessing of the Lord if He be not duly honoured by us. This is not to inculcate the doctrine of human merits, as though by any good deeds of ours, the Lord can be brought into debt to us. No indeed: rather is it a pointing out of our duty and an enforcing of God’s rightful claims upon us. All of the Lord’s dealings with His people are in grace, yet grace ever works “through righteousness” (Rom. 5:21) and never at the expense of it. God has plainly declared, “them that honour me I will honour;” but on the other hand, “they that despise me shall be lightly esteemed” (1 Sam. 2:30). Ponder well those words, my reader, at the opening of 1949,…