Read Ebook: Cosmic Tragedy by Gardiner Thomas S Taurasi James V Illustrator

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JOY IN SERVICE, 7

"Jesus saith unto them, My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work."

FORGETTING, AND PRESSING ONWARD, 45

"Forgetting these things which are behind, and reaching forth to those things which are before, I press towards the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus."

"UNTIL THE DAY DAWN," 83

"The things which are not seen are eternal."

THE TEACHER AND PASTOR, 87

Address of Dr. F. L. Patton, at the funeral of Dr. Purves.

JOY IN SERVICE.

JOY IN SERVICE.

This is one of the sentences that dropped from the lips of Christ, which let us into his personal spiritual life and in some measure lay bare his mind. To be permitted thus to share his confidence is one of our greatest privileges. Viewing him from a distance, we may admire his character; viewing him in history, we may confess his incomparable power; viewing him when convincing us of our own sin, we may adore him as our Saviour; but we desire, and may have, a still more intimate acquaintance. He tells us about himself. He describes here and there his personal inner life. He permits us to share his secrets, and all that we otherwise feel of reverence, admiration, and gratitude gives new value to these disclosures of the spiritual life of the God in man.

Now, in the words before us, Christ describes his joy in the service of the Father. They reveal a devotion so complete as to entirely control his mind. They reveal a soul so absorbed in doing the Divine will as to be insensible for the time to ordinary physical needs. They reveal a self-consecration which is absolute, and yet which is so spontaneous and glad as to be self-sustaining; so that Christ needed no other support in serving the Father than simply the opportunity of such service. We, on the contrary, require support to enable us to serve. We must be rewarded for our work, must be encouraged by sympathy, must be fed with promises and spiritual gifts, in order to be strong enough to do our duty. Christ found duty its own reward, service itself joy, obedience a source of renewed strength. His will was one with the Father's; and thus he discloses the, to us, marvelous spectacle of one who could truly say, Not my desire or my duty, or my purpose is, but my meat--my food--my source itself of life and strength--is to do the will of God, and to finish his work.

And yet our Lord Jesus was a very genuine man. He did not impress observers with the common insignia of holiness. It was the Pharisees, not Christ, who stood at the corners of the streets to make long prayers, who enlarged the borders of their phylacteries and chose the chief seats in the synagogues. It was the Baptist, not Jesus, who clothed himself in a garment of camel's hair and ate locusts and wild honey. Jesus, on the contrary, lived the outward life of other men, consorted with them in their usual places of resort, dressed and spake as they did; so that, in outward manner, it was impossible to distinguish him from the common mass in which he moved. All the more precious, therefore, is this revelation of his inner life. What a soul was his! The thought uppermost in his mind was devotion to the Father's will. The joy which most gladdened his lonely life was the joy of unknown, but sublime and perfect, obedience. He had been pointing a Samaritan woman, sitting by the wellside, to the salvation of God; and though she was but one, and that to human eyes an unworthy subject,--though she was a Samaritan and an open sinner,--his soul found such intense pleasure in bringing her--as the Father had sent him to bring men anywhere--to the knowledge of the truth, that fatigue and hunger were forgotten, and all his energies were absorbed in the delight of the task. In this I think Christ appears simply Divine. No later fame or success, no gaudy robes of human praise, no gilded crown of human admiration, are needed to adorn him. He discloses the very ideal of a godly life. All our poor efforts at obedience, all our faint aspirations after the knowledge and love of God, all our unfulfilled prayers, and falling flights, and unredeemed promises and sin-stained attempts to serve, confess the ideal perfectness of him who could truthfully say, "My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work."

I have said that Christ was a very natural man. But he was more than that. I am sure that none can study his character without admitting and admiring the perfect proportion in which truth evidently lay in his mind. This is one of the rarest beauties of character. Most of us are very one-sided. We can grasp but a part of truth; and in order to grasp that part firmly, we have to absolutely let other truth go. In order to be devoted to duty as we see it, we commonly have to leave other duties untouched. Our spiritual growth ought to take just this direction of including broader views of truth and duty, of obtaining a conception of life in which the various elements shall be held in their proper relations and proportions; no one allowed to eclipse the others, but each modified to a proper extent by the presence and influence of the rest. I say this is a rare achievement. No one but Christ has ever achieved it perfectly. It is easy to see that even the apostles, inspired as they were, did not equally appreciate all sides of revelation. They have their distinguishing doctrines and points of view.

It is still easier to see that Christian churches and theologians differ for this same reason, and to a much greater extent. No creed, no church, no theology, that builds on the Word of God, can be wholly wrong. Its difference from others must lie in its partial appreciation of the truth, in its inability to take in all truths in their relative proportion. And so in literature and science and philosophy some men are impressed with material evidences, others with moral. Some men are poets, others are logicians; some critical, others dogmatic. The hope of the future for the Church and for humanity is in the slow approximation and combination of these partial views, until at last, "in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, we shall come unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." Meanwhile, at the beginning of our Christian history, Christ stands perfect. To see this is to appreciate his authority. As Paul said, He is the corner stone of the spiritual temple which the Divine Spirit is building.

I do not mean that he taught explicitly all the truth which later times have discovered, or which after him apostles taught. But he laid the living germs of all later religious truth, and he held them in such perfect proportion that when the long course of history shall be finished, when that which is in part shall have been done away, and that which is perfect shall have come, the result will be but the reproduction on a large scale of the already perfect stature of Christ.

And this is particularly manifested in Christ's views of life. His peerless spirituality did not make him an ascetic. His clear vision of the future did not lead him to despise the present. His love of God did not destroy his love of nature or of man. His hatred of sin did not cause him to shun the sinner. Hence, though our Lord was the model of a religious man, he was no enthusiast, still less a fanatic. The enthusiast is a man who sees but part of truth and magnifies it out of its proportion; and the fanatic is one who, in addition to this, hates what he cannot understand. According to Isaac Taylor, "Fanaticism is enthusiasm inflamed by hatred." But Christ exaggerated nothing and hated no man. He hated sin, but no sinner. His boundless, tender love itself prevented such moral distortion. And, therefore, he is the ideal or model of human life. We do not feel that in striving to imitate even his most spiritual qualities we shall become impractical or unnatural. We do not feel this in the case of most other holy men. They become examples of one virtue by exaggerating it. But Christ never did this. Lofty as the view of life was which he discloses in our text, sublime as was its spiritual consecration, it existed in him in harmony with the life which by its thoroughly human and practical features proves that we too, in at least some measure, can make even his highest traits our exemplars. Look, therefore, at this text which discloses his mind, and mark its principal elements.

So in our text, "My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work." He was here on a special errand, and that errand was always before his mind. Earth was but a place of appointed work. Life was to him an office, a stewardship. He had this consciousness, even when he seemed to be accomplishing nothing. It gave unity to all his acts and words. To Galilean peasants and to Jewish scribes he could speak with equal assurance, because his errand was to both. Yet he knew its limitations. He said to the Syro-Phoenician woman, "I am not sent save to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." He had come do a special work among the Jews, and in that a work for all mankind. He had not come to be glorified. He had not come to be ministered unto, but to minister. But he had come on a distinct errand; and whatever be your doctrine of Christ's person, you must confess that he considered himself no accident of history; that he did not regard his life work as originating in his own choice; that his sense of a mission did not come as an afterthought to him, or grow clear as he advanced in life. He felt his special errand from the start. It was always before his mind, so that life was to him the performance of a given task and the fulfillment of an assigned duty.

This phrase may carry us back to that time in the counsels of the Godhead when, as we conceive such matters, the Father determined to save the world that had rebelled against him. The question was, where to find a Saviour; and the spirit of the Divine Son was manifested in his self-dedication to the work. He, too, loved man, but that was not his main motive. He loved the Father. He appreciated the Father's wish to save. He gave himself to carry out that wish. "Lo, I come," said he, "to do thy will, O God." Thus we may perceive, I think, the deep reality in the Divine Sonship of Christ; and certainly on earth this was his controlling motive. He was obedient even unto death. To obey to the very least particular the Father's will was the principle of his being. To him the Father's will was not hard, stern law, as we with our rebellious instincts so often regard it; it was the Father's wish. When love exists between two persons, the will of one it is the other's joy to do, if possible. Love impels to its accomplishment. Love rejoices in being of service, in giving the loved one pleasure, in carrying out the other's desire. So the will of God was, to Christ, his Father's wish. Obedience was the mainspring of his soul's life, and his errand in the world derived its sanctity and its glory--in spite of man's antagonism and in spite of apparent fruitlessness--from the fact that it was the will of God. In this Christ discloses the very highest spiritual life which it is possible to conceive. How marvelous was this! He who has won the greatest influence over the race, he before whom the head bows in adoration, he who has changed already the course of history, and will change it until every knee has bowed to him, was one whose supreme wish was to be an obedient Son. Instead of conquering by selfishness he conquered by self-abnegation. Instead of doing his own work, he gave himself up to doing his Father's. Here is at once a miracle of history and a model of life of which man would never have dreamed.

I say again, therefore, what a spiritual life was this! Praise itself seems almost to defile it. It was perfect. It was sublime. Thus can we understand his sinlessness. We can imagine no higher ideal; and marvelous to say, here was the ideal realized. We cannot wonder any longer that over this Jesus of Nazareth God should say, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased."

We are met at the outset by man's natural reluctance to even think of regarding the will of God as aught but repulsive. Very often objection is openly made to the spiritual view expressed by Christ. God, it is said, must surely want to educate us into the love of virtue and truth for their own sakes. He does not want merely to conquer us, to break our wills by superior power. He wants to lead us to share his own spirit and life; and, therefore, would not ask us to submit merely to his will. To train men, therefore, to merely obey is not so noble as to train men to reason, or to love truth and righteousness for their own sakes. But we reply that we should attain to the most exalted love of truth and righteousness and every other noble thing in no way so well as through loyalty to God. Certainly God does not want to merely conquer us by force, but of all things in the world that is the one not exhibited in Jesus Christ. His was the obedience of love. It sprang from his admiration of the Father's nature. And so must ours. God has laid us under immeasurable obligations of gratitude. He has condescended to reveal himself to us. He has given proof of his wisdom, his love, his holiness, his righteousness. And, therefore, the will of God is no arbitrary commandment. It is the wish of our dearest Friend. It is the direction given from the world's Pilot. It is the direction of infinite wisdom and righteousness and love; and to be devoted to his will is but to be confident that all his glorious attributes are being expressed for our guidance.

And then, what should we say of one who seeks after truth and righteousness, and yet does not yield obedience to him who is the source of all things--the truth, the righteousness? We should probably conclude that his search was a fancy, his aspiration an illusion. No! What we need is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, to feel that he is the wisest, the most lovely--the embodiment and the source of all other wisdom and goodness; the Sun by which the other planets shine, by whose rays the world of nature receives its life and beauty. We need to love God supremely; and if we do, then the will of God will seem to us always good, even as it did to Christ.

"Man's weakness, waiting upon God, Its end can never miss; For men on earth no work can do More angel-like than this.

"He always wins who sides with God. To him no chance is lost; God's will is sweetest to him when It triumphs at his cost.

"Ill that he blesses is our good, And unblessed good our ill; And all is right that seems most wrong, If it be his sweet will."

Let man behold, through Christ, the infinite Father, the source of all life and blessedness and good, and man will put God first, and find his highest glory in acting out the prayer, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

But even so, we are met by the further difficulty that, unlike Christ, we are not always sensible of being sent on any special errand into the world. We lose what aim we have, amid the diversities of toil to which we are compelled. We lose what breadth of view we have, amid the multitude of trifles of which our lives are composed. We can imagine Christ's sense of his mission, and how it could absorb him; but what in our lots can correspond? It may indeed be true that, unlike Christ, you have no clear idea of why God sent you into the world. Few have, but it would seem to quite remove God from actual government of the world to say that, therefore, he had no purpose. That glowing picture which the apostle paints of the rising temple should forbid the doubt. Every stone has its place and is needed. It may need to be broken and hewn, to be polished; it may be hid in an unseen place within the wall; no man may notice it. But the Builder meant it to be there, and it contributes its share to the work before which the ages of eternity shall fall in wonder; that work which is to manifest to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places the manifold wisdom of God. We may dismiss the doubt therefore, since God is God. We have been made and sent here for a purpose. God's will is meaning to use us, and it is our duty and privilege now to carry out, as far as possible, that will of him that sent us, so far as he has made it known. And certainly, brother man, enough of the Father's will is made known to teach us our work.

FORGETTING, AND PRESSING FORWARD.

FORGETTING, AND PRESSING ONWARD.

What, then, did Paul mean when he here describes himself as "forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are before"? He meant his language to be understood comparatively and relat

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