Life a Walk

Colossians 1:9-12For this cause we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you… Having entered the world, at once we leave the moment of our nativity, as a starting-place, and incessantly advance towards death, as a common habitation, where, sooner or later, all men meet. Other travellers may, if they please, delay their journey, or retrace their steps; but we cannot do either. Time, enfolding us from the first moment of our life, perpetually carries us forward, whether we wake or sleep, whether we consent to it or resist, without permitting us to turn back, or indulge in the shortest repose. We are like him on board a vessel propelled by sea and wind, whose personal motion does not arrest or abate his course. But as the roads and projects of travellers are very different, so there is a great diversity of habit and manners in men's lives. Wicked men follow one way, and good men another. The pagan steers one course, the Jew another, the Mohammedan another, and the Christian another, each wholly different from the others. This is what the Scripture calls "the way of man"; that is, the fashion and method of life which each man follows. And suitably to this expressive figure, it often makes use of the word walking, to signify a regulating and framing of the life after some certain manner, whether good or evil; meaning the tenor of our lives, and our customary deportment. There is nothing more common in the Psalms, and in the Proverbs, than these forms of speech; "to walk in integrity"; or, on the contrary, "to walk in fraud and iniquity": and in the writings of the New Testament, "to walk in light," or, "in darkness"; "after the Spirit," or, "after the flesh"; with other similar phrases, all signifying a certain manner and condition of life, good or evil, as it is qualified. Agreeably to this scriptural style, the apostle says here, "that ye might walk"; meaning, that you may live, that you may regulate and form your lives. (J. Daille.)