It is now twenty-seven years since I began my college life, which stretched out through eight years of good, hard work. I was raised by a devout Christian mother, but at college I often met those who scoffed at the Bible.
I have always been profoundly interested, as a student of human nature and of medicine, to try to find out what ailed the world about me. As I grow older, I have come to find out that there is so much misery and unhappiness in the world. Why is it that each successive generation of young people begins to run the life-race that is set before them, full of vigor, enthusiasm and determination? Then, one by one, they drop back into the same indifference and routine as those who preceded them.
I would say in my own life that I have both lost something and found something. I have lost that which I at first esteemed great, for I discovered as I went on, that it was, after all, but a bubble, a glittering semblance of a jewel, evanescent and temporal. But, wondrous to relate, I have found in its place something infinitely more precious, eternal, a possession which increases in value day by day.
I well remember setting success in life before me as the one great desideratum. But I found as I went on that this was but a selfish scheme of living. I saw, too, some who were just about to take their fill of the cup of ambition being suddenly snatched away by untimely death.
My first aim as a graduate, therefore, was manifestly a false one. I thank God that when I found the emptiness of the things of the world, I also found that God was not so sparing of His best gift as I had begun to imagine. When I found that life and self were failures, then I found through Jesus Christ more than heart could desire.
There is just one thing in this world that is worth making the object of our ambition, and that is to know, to love, and to serve God. We can only know Him through His Son, Jesus Christ, who died for our sins and rose again. Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as personal Saviour (John 3:3,16) is the key that enters one into true, meaningful life (2 Corinthians 5:17).
The Christian life is not a theory, or a philosophy, but a wholly new life, transformed by the power of God. The great, effective instrument of the Holy Spirit, by which these truths are authoritatively taught, is the inspired Word of God (1 Peter 1:23-25).
I have found that Jesus Christ is a wonderful foundation rock upon which stands a marvelous superstructure, and I can go without question wherever He may lead me. Once my interest was in the things which will soon pass away; now it is in Him who made all these things. What are they compared to Him? Reader, won't you turn your life over to Him? "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved" (Acts 16:31).
--Dr. Howard A. Kelly
(Dr. Kelly, 1858-1943, had academic, professional, and honorary degrees from the Universities of Pennsylvania, Washington and Lee, Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and was welcomed into at least a dozen learned societies from around the world. As a professor at Johns Hopkins University, his work and teaching were beyond question the highest in America and Europe. His published works have caused him to be reckoned the most eminent of all authorities in his own field.)
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