Reckon it as a sign and test of true union with Jesus Christ. And so,
if ever, by reason of our passing at the call of duty or benevolence
outside the circle of those who sympathise with our faith and
fundamental ideas, we encounter it more manifestly than when we 'dwell
among our own people,' let us count the 'reproach of Christ' as a
treasure to be proud of, and to be guarded.
Be sure that it is your goodness and not your evils or your weakness,
that men dislike. The world has a very keen eye for the inconsistencies
and the faults of professing Christians, and it is a good thing that it
has. The loftier your profession the sharper the judgment that is
applied to you. Many well-meaning Christian people, by an injudicious
use of Christian phraseology in the wrong place, and by the glaring
contradiction between their prayers and their talks and their daily
life, bring down a great deal of deserved hostility upon themselves and
of discredit upon Christianity; and then they comfort themselves and
say they are bearing the 'reproach of the Cross.' Not a bit of it! They
are bearing the natural results of their own failings and faults. And
it is for us to see to it that what provokes, if it does provoke,
hostile judgments and uncharitable criticisms, insulting speeches and
sarcasms, and the sense of our belonging to another regiment and having
other objects, is our cleaving to Jesus Christ, and not the
imperfections and the sins with which we so often spoil that cleaving.
Be you careful for this, that it is Christ in you that men turn from,
and not you yourself and your weakness and sin.
Meet this antagonism by not dropping your standard one inch. Keep the
flag right at the masthead. If you begin to haul it down, where are you
going to stop? Nowhere, until you have got it draggling in the mud at
the foot. It is of no use to try to conciliate by compromise. All that
we shall gain by that will be, as I have said, indifference and
contempt; all that we shall gain will be a loss to the cause. A great
deal is said in this day, and many efforts are being made--I cannot but
think mistaken efforts--by Christian people to bridge over this gulf in
the wrong way--that is, by trying to make out that Christianity in its
fundamental principles does approximate a great deal more closely to
the things that the world goes by than it really does. It is all vain,
and the only issue of it will be that we shall have a decaying
Christianity and a dying spiritual life. Keep the flag up; emphasise
and accentuate the things that the world disbelieves and denies, not
pushing them to the 'falsehood of extremes,' but not by one jot
diminishing the clearness of our testimony by reason of the world's
unwillingness to receive it. Our victory is to be won only through
absolute faithfulness to Christ's ideal.
And, lastly, meet hostility with unmoved, patient, Christlike, and
Christ-derived love and sympathy. The patient sunshine pours upon the
glaciers and melts the thick-ribbed ice at last into sweet water. The
patient sunshine beats upon the mist-cloud and breaks up its edges and
scatters it at the last. And our Lord here tells us that our
experience, if we are faithful to Him, will be like His experience, in
that some will hearken to our word though others will persecute, and to
some our testimony will come as a message from God that draws them to
the Lord Himself. These are our only weapons, brethren! The only
conqueror of the world is the love that was in Christ breathed through
us; the only victory over suspicion, contempt, alienation, is pleading,
persistent, long-suffering, self-denying love. The only way to overcome
the world's hostility is by turning the world into a church, and that
can only be done when Christ's servants oppose pity to wrath, love to
hate, and in the strength of His life who has won us all by the same
process, seek to win the world for Him by the manifestation of His
victorious love in our patient love.
Dear brethren, to which army do you belong? Which community is yours?
Are you in Christ's ranks, or are you in the world's? Do you love Him
back again, or do you meet His open heart with a closed one, and His
hand, laden with blessings, with hands clenched in refusal? To which
class do I belong?--it is the question of questions for us all; and I
pray that you and I, won from our hatred by His love, and wooed out of
our death by His life, and made partakers of His life by His death, may
yield our hearts to Him, and so pass from out of the hostility and
mistrust of a godless world into the friendships and peace of the
sheltering Vine. And then we 'shall esteem the reproach of Christ' if
it fall upon our heads, in however modified and mild a form, 'greater
riches than the treasures of Egypt,' and 'have respect unto the
recompense of the reward.'
May it be so with us all!