Concluding Applications on Sober-Mindedness (3)

By pursuing sober-mindedness you will prepare for a useful life, if it please God that you live long, and for a comfortable one. Those who are sober-minded when they are young, as they are thereby fortified against every evil word and work, so they are furnished for every good word and work, and are likely to be in their day vessels of honor fit for our Master’s use, while the ludicrous and unthinking live to be at the best unprofitable burdens of the earth, and good for nothing.

Young people that are sober are likely to do good in every relation and condition of life. When they are children, and do the duties, and improve the advantages of their learning, and behave themselves prudently, then they are made ready to have the charge of families themselves, to which they are likely to be great blessings, and to the places in which they live.

They will not only be the joy of their parents’ hearts while they live, but an honor to their memories when they are gone; and thus the children will rise up and call the discreet and virtuous mother blessed, by treading in her steps, and producing the good fruits of their prudent religious education.

Young men who are sober-minded are likely to be in time serviceable to the communities they are members of, civil or sacred, in a higher or lower sphere. They may be called to the magistracy or ministry, to serve the state, to serve the church. Few ever come to do real service or credit to either, or to be of account in either of those posts of honor, unless they be sober-minded when they are young. Lose the morning, and you lose the day. But though they may not arrive to such a public station, yet they may in a private capacity be eminently useful to their neighbors in the things of the world, and to their fellow-Christians in divine things, and so be instruments of glory to Cod. They that are sober-minded when they are young, if they go on as they begin, what will the wisdom be which the multitude of their years will teach? Obadiah who feared the Lord from his youth, came to fear Him greatly. Young saints, we hope, will be eminent ones.

Lose the morning, and you lose the day.

By living soberly you will prepare for a happy death, if it please Cod you should die quickly, and may then die cheerfully. Oh that young people were so wise as to consider their latter end not only as sure, but as near! For it is folly for the youngest, strongest, and most healthful, to put far from them the day of death, when death is every day working in us. Now, the best preparation you can make for it, if you should die in youth, is to live soberly. Then the sting of it will be taken out, through Christ, and consequently the terror of it taken off. Therefore though you may pray with the psalmist, “Oh my God, take me not away in the midst of my days,” yet if the cup may not pass away, you need not dread it. You then know the worst that death can do to you, if it shorten your life on earth, all will be abundantly made up in a better life. Abijah, that sober youth, in whom was found some good thing towards the Lord God of Israel in the house of Jeroboam, dies in the flower of his age. There is no harm done him. He comes to his grave in peace, and goes to heaven triumphantly (1 Kings 14:13). Whereas, those that are loose and extravagant, if they die in youth, (as Elihu speaks, Job 36:14), “Their soul dieth”—so it is in the original—they are spiritually dead, twice dead; while they lived in pleasure, they were dead though they lived. Therefore when they die in sin, they are twice dead, and their life on the other side of death, is among the unclean, among the Sodomites—so the margin reads it—who suffer the vengeance of eternal fire Qude 7).

Young saints, we hope, will be eminent ones.

Rev. Matthew Henry (1662-1714) pastored a Presbyterian congregation at Chester, England, for twenty-five years. He is best known and loved for his Bible commentary (1708-10). This series of articles is taken from his The Young Christian.

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