Pledges of sunrise

It is still night to the church: a night of danger, a night of weariness, a night of weeping. Her firmament is dark and troubled. The promise of morning is sure, and she is looking out for it with fixed and pleading eye, sore tried with the long gloom, yet it has not arisen. It is deferred - deferred in mercy to an unready world, to whom the ending of this night shall be the closing of hope, and the sealing of ruin, and the settling down of the infinite darkness. "For the Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness, but it is long-suffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9).

But though it is night, there are times both in the saint's own history and the church's annals, which may be spoken of as mornings even now…They are indeed little more than brief brightenings of the darkness - lulls in the long tempest that is to rage unspent till the Lord come. Still we may call them "mornings" just as we give the name of midday to the dim kindlings of the sky at daily noon, in the six months' arctic night, when the sun keeps below the horizon. Or better and true, we may call them earnests of the morning - that morning which is to outshine all mornings, and to swallow up alike the darkness and the light of a present evil world. Dim and transient as are these earnests, they are unutterably gladdening. They cheer the heavy darkness and are pledges of sunrise.

The Earnests of the Morning from Morning of Joy, Horatius Bonar (1808-1899), Reformation Heritage Books, 2008, pp. 149-150.

Photo credit: By Dori (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons