relation to God. For the world of fallen men does not honor God.
Millions call themselves by His Name, it is true, and pay some token
respect to Him, but a simple test will show how little He is really
honored among them. Let the average man be put to the proof on the
question of who is _above_, and his true position will be exposed. Let
him be forced into making a choice between God and money, between God
and men, between God and personal ambition, God and self, God and human
love, and God will take second place every time. Those other things will
be exalted above. However the man may protest, the proof is in the
choices he makes day after day throughout his life.
"Be thou exalted" is the language of victorious spiritual experience. It
is a little key to unlock the door to great treasures of grace. It is
central in the life of God in the soul. Let the seeking man reach a
place where life and lips join to say continually "Be thou exalted," and
a thousand minor problems will be solved at once. His Christian life
ceases to be the complicated thing it had been before and becomes the
very essence of simplicity. By the exercise of his will he has set his
course, and on that course he will stay as if guided by an automatic
pilot. If blown off course for a moment by some adverse wind he will
surely return again as by a secret bent of the soul. The hidden motions
of the Spirit are working in his favor, and "the stars in their courses"
fight for him. He has met his life problem at its center, and
everything else must follow along.
Let no one imagine that he will lose anything of human dignity by this
voluntary sell-out of his all to his God. He does not by this degrade
himself as a man; rather he finds his right place of high honor as one
made in the image of his Creator. His deep disgrace lay in his moral
derangement, his unnatural usurpation of the place of God. His honor
will be proved by restoring again that stolen throne. In exalting God
over all he finds his own highest honor upheld.
Anyone who might feel reluctant to surrender his will to the will of
another should remember Jesus' words, "Whosoever committeth sin is the
servant of sin." We must of necessity be servant to someone, either to
God or to sin. The sinner prides himself on his independence, completely
overlooking the fact that he is the weak slave of the sins that rule his
members. The man who surrenders to Christ exchanges a cruel slave driver
for a kind and gentle Master whose yoke is easy and whose burden is
light.
Made as we were in the image of God we scarcely find it strange to take
again our God as our All. God was our original habitat and our hearts
cannot but feel at home when they enter again that ancient and beautiful
abode.
I hope it is clear that there is a logic behind God's claim to
pre-eminence. That place is His by every right in earth or heaven. While
we take to ourselves the place that is His the whole course of our
lives is out of joint. Nothing will or can restore order till our hearts
make the great decision: God shall be exalted above.
"Them that honour me I will honour," said God once to a priest of
Israel, and that ancient law of the Kingdom stands today unchanged by
the passing of time or the changes of dispensation. The whole Bible and
every page of history proclaim the perpetuation of that law. "If any man
serve me, him will my Father honour," said our Lord Jesus, tying in the
old with the new and revealing the essential unity of His ways with men.
Sometimes the best way to see a thing is to look at its opposite. Eli
and his sons are placed in the priesthood with the stipulation that they
honor God in their lives and ministrations. This they fail to do, and
God sends Samuel to announce the consequences. Unknown to Eli this law
of reciprocal honor has been all the while secretly working, and now the
time has come for judgment to fall. Hophni and Phineas, the degenerate
priests, fall in battle, the wife of Hophni dies in childbirth, Israel
flees before her enemies, the ark of God is captured by the Philistines
and the old man Eli falls backward and dies of a broken neck. Thus stark
utter tragedy followed upon Eli's failure to honor God.
Now set over against this almost any Bible character who honestly tried
to glorify God in his earthly walk. See how God winked at weaknesses
and overlooked failures as He poured upon His servants grace and
blessing untold. Let it be Abraham, Jacob, David, Daniel, Elijah or whom
you will; honor followed honor as harvest the seed. The man of God set
his heart to exalt God above all; God accepted his intention as fact and
acted accordingly. Not perfection, but holy intention made the
difference.
In our Lord Jesus Christ this law was seen in simple perfection. In His
lowly manhood He humbled Himself and gladly gave all glory to His Father
in heaven. He sought not His own honor, but the honor of God who sent
Him. "If I honour myself," He said on one occasion, "my honour is
nothing; it is my Father that honoureth me." So far had the proud
Pharisees departed from this law that they could not understand one who
honored God at his own expense. "I honour my Father," said Jesus to
them, "and ye do dishonour me."
Another saying of Jesus, and a most disturbing one, was put in the form
of a question, "How can ye believe, which receive honour one of another,
and seek not the honour that cometh from God alone?" If I understand
this correctly Christ taught here the alarming doctrine that the desire
for honor among men made belief impossible. Is this sin at the root of
religious unbelief? Could it be that those "intellectual difficulties"
which men blame for their inability to believe are but smoke screens to
conceal the real cause that lies behind them? Was it this greedy desire
for honor from man that made men into Pharisees and Pharisees into
Deicides? Is this the secret back of religious self-righteousness and
empty worship? I believe it may be. The whole course of the life is
upset by failure to put God where He belongs. We exalt ourselves instead
of God and the curse follows.
In our desire after God let us keep always in mind that God also hath
desire, and His desire is toward the sons of men, and more particularly
toward those sons of men who will make the once-for-all decision to
exalt Him over all. Such as these are precious to God above all
treasures of earth or sea. In them God finds a theater where He can
display His exceeding kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. With them God
can walk unhindered, toward them He can act like the God He is.
In speaking thus I have one fear; it is that I may convince the mind
before God can win the heart. For this God-above-all position is one not
easy to take. The mind may approve it while not having the consent of
the will to put it into effect. While the imagination races ahead to
honor God, the will may lag behind and the man never guess how divided
his heart is. The whole man must make the decision before the heart can
know any real satisfaction. God wants us all, and He will not rest till
He gets us all. No part of the man will do.
Let us pray over this in detail, throwing ourselves at God's feet and
meaning everything we say. No one who prays thus in sincerity need wait
long for tokens of divine acceptance. God will unveil His glory before
His servant's eyes, and He will place all His treasures at the disposal
of such a one, for He knows that His honor is safe in such consecrated
hands.
_O God, be Thou exalted over my possessions. Nothing of earth's
treasures shall seem dear unto me if only Thou art glorified in my life.
Be Thou exalted over my friendships. I am determined that Thou shalt be
above all, though I must stand deserted and alone in the midst of the
earth. Be Thou exalted above my comforts. Though it mean the loss of
bodily comforts and the carrying of heavy crosses I shall keep my vow
made this day before Thee. Be Thou exalted over my reputation. Make me
ambitious to please Thee even if as a result I must sink into obscurity
and my name be forgotten as a dream. Rise, O Lord, into Thy proper place
of honor, above my ambitions, above my likes and dislikes, above my
family, my health and even my life itself. Let me decrease that Thou
mayest increase, let me sink that Thou mayest rise above. Ride forth
upon me as Thou didst ride into Jerusalem mounted upon the humble little
beast, a colt, the foal of an ass, and let me hear the children cry to
Thee, "Hosanna in the highest."_
IX
_Meekness and Rest_
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.--Matt. 5:5
A fairly accurate description of the human race might be furnished one
unacquainted with it by taking the Beatitudes, turning them wrong side
out and saying, "Here is your human race." For the exact opposite of the
virtues in the Beatitudes are the very qualities which distinguish human
life and conduct.
In the world of men we find nothing approaching the virtues of which
Jesus spoke in the opening words of the famous Sermon on the Mount.
Instead of poverty of spirit we find the rankest kind of pride; instead
of mourners we find pleasure seekers; instead of meekness, arrogance;
instead of hunger after righteousness we hear men saying, "I am rich and
increased with goods and have need of nothing"; instead of mercy we find
cruelty; instead of purity of heart, corrupt imaginings; instead of
peacemakers we find men quarrelsome and resentful; instead of rejoicing
in mistreatment we find them fighting back with every weapon at their
command.
Of this kind of moral stuff civilized society is composed. The
atmosphere is charged with it; we breathe it with every breath and drink
it with our mother's milk. Culture and education refine these things
slightly but leave them basically untouched. A whole world of literature
has been created to justify this kind of life as the only normal one.
And this is the more to be wondered at seeing that these are the evils
which make life the bitter struggle it is for all of us. All our
heartaches and a great many of our physical ills spring directly out of
our sins. Pride, arrogance, resentfulness, evil imaginings, malice,
greed: these are the sources of more human pain than all the diseases
that ever afflicted mortal flesh.
Into a world like this the sound of Jesus' words comes wonderful and
strange, a visitation from above. It is well that He spoke, for no one
else could have done it as well; and it is good that we listen. His
words are the essence of truth. He is not offering an opinion; Jesus
never uttered opinions. He never guessed; He knew, and He knows. His
words are not as Solomon's were, the sum of sound wisdom or the results
of keen observation. He spoke out of the fulness of His Godhead, and His
words are very Truth itself. He is the only one who could say "blessed"
with complete authority, for He is the Blessed One come from the world
above to confer blessedness upon mankind. And His words were supported
by deeds mightier than any performed on this earth by any other man. It
is wisdom for us to listen.
As was often so with Jesus, He used this word "meek" in a brief crisp
sentence, and not till some time later did He go on to explain it. In
the same book of Matthew He tells us more about it and applies it to our
lives. "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will
give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and
lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is
easy, and my burden is light." Here we have two things standing in
contrast to each other, a burden and a rest. The burden is not a local
one, peculiar to those first hearers, but one which is borne by the
whole human race. It consists not of political oppression or poverty or
hard work. It is far deeper than that. It is felt by the rich as well as
the poor for it is something from which wealth and idleness can never
deliver us.
The burden borne by mankind is a heavy and a crushing thing. The word
Jesus used means a load carried or toil borne to the point of
exhaustion. Rest is simply release from that burden. It is not
something we do, it is what comes to us when we cease to do. His own
meekness, that is the rest.
Let us examine our burden. It is altogether an interior one. It attacks
the heart and the mind and reaches the body only from within. First,
there is the burden of _pride_. The labor of self-love is a heavy one
indeed. Think for yourself whether much of your sorrow has not arisen
from someone speaking slightingly of you. As long as you set yourself up
as a little god to which you must be loyal there will be those who will
delight to offer affront to your idol. How then can you hope to have
inward peace? The heart's fierce effort to protect itself from every
slight, to shield its touchy honor from the bad opinion of friend and
enemy, will never let the mind have rest. Continue this fight through
the years and the burden will become intolerable. Yet the sons of earth
are carrying this burden continually, challenging every word spoken
against them, cringing under every criticism, smarting under each
fancied slight, tossing sleepless if another is preferred before them.
Such a burden as this is not necessary to bear. Jesus calls us to His
rest, and meekness is His method. The meek man cares not at all who is
greater than he, for he has long ago decided that the esteem of the
world is not worth the effort. He develops toward himself a kindly sense
of humor and learns to say, "Oh, so you have been overlooked? They have
placed someone else before you? They have whispered that you are pretty
small stuff after all? And now you feel hurt because the world is saying
about you the very things you have been saying about yourself? Only
yesterday you were telling God that you were nothing, a mere worm of the
dust. Where is your consistency? Come on, humble yourself, and cease to
care what men think."
The meek man is not a human mouse afflicted with a sense of his own
inferiority. Rather he may be in his moral life as bold as a lion and as
strong as Samson; but he has stopped being fooled about himself. He has
accepted God's estimate of his own life. He knows he is as weak and
helpless as God has declared him to be, but paradoxically, he knows at
the same time that he is in the sight of God of more importance than
angels. In himself, nothing; in God, everything. That is his motto. He
knows well that the world will never see him as God sees him and he has
stopped caring. He rests perfectly content to allow God to place His own
values. He will be patient to wait for the day when everything will get
its own price tag and real worth will come into its own. Then the
righteous shall shine forth in the Kingdom of their Father. He is
willing to wait for that day.
In the meantime he will have attained a place of soul rest. As he walks
on in meekness he will be happy to let God defend him. The old struggle
to defend himself is over. He has found the peace which meekness
brings.
Then also he will get deliverance from the burden of _pretense_. By this
I mean not hypocrisy, but the common human desire to put the best foot
forward and hide from the world our real inward poverty. For sin has
played many evil tricks upon us, and one has been the infusing into us a
false sense of shame. There is hardly a man or woman who dares to be
just what he or she is without doctoring up the impression. The fear of
being found out gnaws like rodents within their hearts. The man of
culture is haunted by the fear that he will some day come upon a man
more cultured than himself. The learned man fears to meet a man more
learned than he. The rich man sweats under the fear that his clothes or
his car or his house will sometime be made to look cheap by comparison
with those of another rich man. So-called "society" runs by a motivation
not higher than this, and the poorer classes on their level are little
better.
Let no one smile this off. These burdens are real, and little by little
they kill the victims of this evil and unnatural way of life. And the
psychology created by years of this kind of thing makes true meekness
seem as unreal as a dream, as aloof as a star. To all the victims of the
gnawing disease Jesus says, "Ye must become as little children." For
little children do not compare; they receive direct enjoyment from what
they have without relating it to something else or someone else. Only
as they get older and sin begins to stir within their hearts do jealousy
and envy appear. Then they are unable to enjoy what they have if someone
else has something larger or better. At that early age does the galling
burden come down upon their tender souls, and it never leaves them till
Jesus sets them free.
Another source of burden is _artificiality_. I am sure that most people
live in secret fear that some day they will be careless and by chance an
enemy or friend will be allowed to peep into their poor empty souls. So
they are never relaxed. Bright people are tense and alert in fear that
they may be trapped into saying something common or stupid. Traveled
people are afraid that they may meet some Marco Polo who is able to
describe some remote place where they have never been.
This unnatural condition is part of our sad heritage of sin, but in our
day it is aggravated by our whole way of life. Advertising is largely
based upon this habit of pretense. "Courses" are offered in this or that
field of human learning frankly appealing to the victim's desire to
shine at a party. Books are sold, clothes and cosmetics are peddled, by
playing continually upon this desire to appear what we are not.
Artificiality is one curse that will drop away the moment we kneel at
Jesus' feet and surrender ourselves to His meekness. Then we will not
care what people think of us so long as God is pleased. Then _what we
are_ will be everything; what we appear will take its place far down
the scale of interest for us. Apart from sin we have nothing of which to
be ashamed. Only an evil desire to shine makes us want to appear other
than we are.
The heart of the world is breaking under this load of pride and
pretense. There is no release from our burden apart from the meekness of
Christ. Good keen reasoning may help slightly, but so strong is this
vice that if we push it down one place it will come up somewhere else.
To men and women everywhere Jesus says, "Come unto me, and I will give
you rest." The rest He offers is the rest of meekness, the blessed
relief which comes when we accept ourselves for what we are and cease to
pretend. It will take some courage at first, but the needed grace will
come as we learn that we are sharing this new and easy yoke with the
strong Son of God Himself. He calls it "my yoke," and He walks at one
end while we walk at the other.
_Lord, make me childlike. Deliver me from the urge to compete with
another for place or prestige or position. I would be simple and artless
as a little child. Deliver me from pose and pretense. Forgive me for
thinking of myself. Help me to forget myself and find my true peace in
beholding Thee. That Thou mayest answer this prayer I humble myself
before Thee. Lay upon me Thy easy yoke of self-forgetfulness that
through it I may find rest. Amen._
X
_The Sacrament of Living_
Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to
the glory of God.--I Cor. 10:31
One of the greatest hindrances to internal peace which the Christian
encounters is the common habit of dividing our lives into two areas, the
sacred and the secular. As these areas are conceived to exist apart from
each other and to be morally and spiritually incompatible, and as we are
compelled by the necessities of living to be always crossing back and
forth from the one to the other, our inner lives tend to break up so
that we live a divided instead of a unified life.
Our trouble springs from the fact that we who follow Christ inhabit at
once two worlds, the spiritual and the natural. As children of Adam we
live our lives on earth subject to the limitations of the flesh and the
weaknesses and ills to which human nature is heir. Merely to live among
men requires of us years of hard toil and much care and attention to the
things of this world. In sharp contrast to this is our life in the
Spirit. There we enjoy another and higher kind of life; we are children
of God; we possess heavenly status and enjoy intimate fellowship with
Christ.
This tends to divide our total life into two departments. We come
unconsciously to recognize two sets of actions. The first are performed
with a feeling of satisfaction and a firm assurance that they are
pleasing to God. These are the sacred acts and they are usually thought
to be prayer, Bible reading, hymn singing, church attendance and such
other acts as spring directly from faith. They may be known by the fact
that they have no direct relation to this world, and would have no
meaning whatever except as faith shows us another world, "an house not
made with hands, eternal in the heavens."
Over against these sacred acts are the secular ones. They include all of
the ordinary activities of life which we share with the sons and
daughters of Adam: eating, sleeping, working, looking after the needs of
the body and performing our dull and prosaic duties here on earth. These
we often do reluctantly and with many misgivings, often apologizing to
God for what we consider a waste of time and strength. The upshot of
this is that we are uneasy most of the time. We go about our common
tasks with a feeling of deep frustration, telling ourselves pensively
that there's a better day coming when we shall slough off this earthly
shell and be bothered no more with the affairs of this world.
This is the old sacred-secular antithesis. Most Christians are caught in
its trap. They cannot get a satisfactory adjustment between the claims
of the two worlds. They try to walk the tight rope between two kingdoms
and they find no peace in either. Their strength is reduced, their
outlook confused and their joy taken from them.
I believe this state of affairs to be wholly unnecessary. We have gotten
ourselves on the horns of a dilemma, true enough, but the dilemma is not
real. It is a creature of misunderstanding. The sacred-secular
antithesis has no foundation in the New Testament. Without doubt a more
perfect understanding of Christian truth will deliver us from it.
The Lord Jesus Christ Himself is our perfect example, and He knew no
divided life. In the Presence of His Father He lived on earth without
strain from babyhood to His death on the cross. God accepted the
offering of His total life, and made no distinction between act and act.
"I do always the things that please him," was His brief summary of His
own life as it related to the Father. As He moved among men He was
poised and restful. What pressure and suffering He endured grew out of
His position as the world's sin bearer; they were never the result of
moral uncertainty or spiritual maladjustment.
Paul's exhortation to "do all to the glory of God" is more than pious
idealism. It is an integral part of the sacred revelation and is to be
accepted as the very Word of Truth. It opens before us the possibility
of making every act of our lives contribute to the glory of God. Lest we
should be too timid to include everything, Paul mentions specifically
eating and drinking. This humble privilege we share with the beasts that
perish. If these lowly animal acts can be so performed as to honor God,
then it becomes difficult to conceive of one that cannot.
That monkish hatred of the body which figures so prominently in the
works of certain early devotional writers is wholly without support in
the Word of God. Common modesty is found in the Sacred Scriptures, it is
true, but never prudery or a false sense of shame. The New Testament
accepts as a matter of course that in His incarnation our Lord took upon
Him a real human body, and no effort is made to steer around the
downright implications of such a fact. He lived in that body here among
men and never once performed a non-sacred act. His presence in human
flesh sweeps away forever the evil notion that there is about the human
body something innately offensive to the Deity. God created our bodies,
and we do not offend Him by placing the responsibility where it
belongs. He is not ashamed of the work of His own hands.