'If any man serve Me, let him follow Me.' Everything is smelted down
into that; and there you have a sufficient directory for every man's
every action.
Now although it has nothing to do with my present purpose, I can
scarcely avoid pausing, just for a moment, to ask you to consider the
perfect uniqueness of such an utterance as that. Think of one Man
standing up before all mankind, and coolly and deliberately saying to
them, 'I am the realised Ideal of human conduct; I am Incarnate
Perfection; and all of you, in all the infinite variety of condition,
culture, and character, are to take Me for your pattern and your
guide.' The world has listened, and the world has not laughed nor been
angry. Neither indignation nor mockery, which one might have expected
would have extinguished such absurdity, has waited upon Christ's
utterance. I have no time to dwell on this; it is apart from my
purpose, but I would ask you fairly to consider how strange it is, and
to ask how it is to be accounted for, that a Man said that, and that
the wisest part of the world has consented to take Him at His own
valuation; and after such an utterance as that, yet calls Him 'meek and
lowly of heart.'
But I pass away from that. What does He mean by this commandment,
'Follow Me'? Of course I need not remind you that it brings all duty
down to the imitation of Jesus Christ. That is a commonplace that I do
not need to dwell upon, nor to follow out into the many regions into
which it would lead us, and where we might find fruitful subjects of
contemplation; because I desire, in a sentence or two, to insist upon
the special form of following which is here enjoined. It is a very
grand thing to talk about the imitation of Christ, and even in its most
superficial acceptation it is a good guide for all men. But no man has
penetrated to the depths of that stringent and all-comprehensive
commandment who has not recognised that there is one special thing in
which Christ is to be our Pattern, and that is in regard to the very
thing in which we think that He is most unique and inimitable. It is
His Cross, and not His life; it is His death, and not His virtues,
which He is here thinking about, and laying it upon all of us as the
encyclopaedia and sum of all morality that we should be conformed to
it. I have already pointed out to you in my introductory remarks the
force of the present context. And so I need not further enlarge upon
that, nor vindicate my declaration that Christ's death is the pattern
which is here set before us. Of course we cannot imitate that in its
effects, except in a very secondary and figurative fashion. But the
spirit that underlay it, as the supreme Example of self-sacrifice, is
commended to us all as the royal law for our lives, and unless we are
conformed thereto we have no right to call ourselves Christ's
disciples. To die for the sake of higher life, to give up our own will
utterly in obedience to God, and in the unselfish desire to help and
bless others, that is the _Alpha_ and the _Omega_ of discipleship. It
always has been so and always will be so. And so, dear brethren, let us
lay it to our own hearts, and make very stringent inquiry into our own
conduct, whether we have ever come within sight of what makes a true
disciple—viz., that we should be 'conformable unto His death.'
Now our modern theology has far too much obscured this plain teaching
of the New Testament, because it has been concerned—I do not say too
much, but too exclusively, concerned—in setting forth the other aspect
of Christ's death, by which it is what none of ours can ever even begin
to be, the sacrifice for a world's sin. But, mind, there are two ways
of looking at Christ's Cross. You must begin with recognising it as the
basis of all your hope, the power by which you are delivered from sin
as guilt, habit, and condemnation. And then you must take it, if it is
to be the sacrifice and atonement for your sins, for the example of
your lives, and mould yourselves after it. 'If any man serve Me, let
him follow Me,' and here is the special region in which the following
is to be realised: 'He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that
hateth his life shall keep it unto life eternal.'
Now, further, let me remind you that this brief, crystallised
commandment, the essence of all practical godliness and Christianity,
makes the blessed peculiarity of Christian morality. People ask what it
is that distinguishes the teaching of the New Testament in regard to
duty, from the teaching of lofty moralists and sages of old. Not the
specific precepts, though these are, in many cases, deeper. Not the
individual commandments, though the perspective of human excellences
and virtues has been changed in Christianity, and the gentler and
sweeter graces have been enthroned in the place where the world's
morality has generally set the more ostentatious ones; the hero is,
roughly speaking, the world's type, the saint is the New Testament's.
But the true characteristic of Christian teaching as to conduct lies in
this, that the law is in a Person, and that the power to obey the law
comes from the love of the Person. All things are different; unwelcome
duties are made less repulsive, and hard tasks are lightened, and
sorrows are made tolerable, if only we are following Him. You remember
the old story in Scottish history of the knight to whom was entrusted
the king's heart; how, beset by the bands of the infidels, he tossed
the golden casket into the thickest of their ranks and said, 'Go on, I
follow thee'; and death itself was light when that thought spurred his
steed forward.
And so, brethren, it is far too hard a task to tread the road of duty
which our consciences command us, unless we are drawn by Him Who is
before us there on the road, and see the shining of His garments as He
sets His face forward, and draws us after Him. It is easy to climb a
glacier when the guide has cut with his ice-axe the steps in which he
sets his feet, and we may set ours. The sternness of duty, and the
rigidity of law, and the coldness of 'I ought,' are all changed when
duty consists in following Christ, and He is before us on the rocky and
narrow road.
This precept is all-sufficient. Of course it will be a task of wisdom,
of common sense, of daily culture in prudence and other graces; to
apply the generalised precept to the specific cases that emerge in our
lives. But whilst the application may require a great many subordinate
by-laws, the royal statute is one, and simple, and enough. 'Follow Me.'
Is it not a strange thing—it seems to me to be a perfectly unique
thing, inexplicable except upon one hypothesis—that a life so brief, of
which the records are so fragmentary, in which some of the
relationships in which we stand had no place, and which was lived out
in a world so utterly different from our own, should yet avail to be a
guide to men, not in regard to specific points, so much as in regard to
the imperial supremacy in it of these motives—Even Christ pleased not
Himself; 'My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me.'
And so, brethren, take this sharp test and apply it honestly to your
own lives, day by day, in all their _minutiae_ as well as in their
great things. 'If any man _serve_ Me,' how miserably that Christian
'service' has been evacuated of its deepest meaning, and
superficialised and narrowed! 'Service'—that means people getting into
a building and singing and praying. Service—that means acts of
beneficence, teaching and preaching and giving material or spiritual
helps of various kinds. These things have almost monopolised the word.
But Christ enlarges its shrivelled contents once more, and teaches us
that, far above all specifically so-called acts of religious worship,
and more indispensable than so-called acts of Christian activity and
service, lies the self-sacrificing conformity of character to Him. 'If
any man serve Me,' let him sing and praise and pray? Yes; 'If any man
serve Me,' let him try to help other people, and in the service of man
do service to Me? Yes; but deeper than all, and fundamental to the
others, 'If any man serve Me, let him _follow_ Me'—Is that _my_
discipleship? Let each one of us professing Christians ask himself.