It is a very easy thing for a man to say, 'I take the discharge of my
duty, given to me by Jesus Christ, as my great purpose in life,' when
there is nothing in the way to prevent him from carrying out that
purpose. But it is a very different thing when, as was the case with
Paul, there lie before him the certainties of affliction and bonds, and
the possibilities which very soon consolidated themselves into
certainties, of a bloody death and that swiftly. To say _then_, without
a quickened pulse or a tremor in the eyelid, or a quiver in the voice,
or a falter in the resolution, to say then, 'none of these things move
me, if only I may do what I was set to do'--that is to be in Christ
indeed; and that is the only thing worth living for.
Look how beautifully we see in operation in these heartfelt and few
words of the Apostle the power that there is in an absolute devotion to
God-enjoined duty, to give a man 'a solemn scorn of ills,' and to lift
him high above everything that would bar or hinder his path. Is it not
bracing to see any one actuated by such motives as these? And why
should they not be motives for us all? The one thing worth our making
our aim in life is to accomplish our course.
Now notice that the word in the original here, 'finish,' does not
merely mean 'end,' which would be a very poor thing. Time will do that
for us all. It will end our course. But an ended course may yet be an
unfinished course. And the meaning that the Apostle attaches to the
word in both of our texts is not merely to scramble through anyhow, so
as to get to the last of it; but to complete, accomplish the course,
or, to put away the metaphor, to do all that it was meant by God that
he should do.
Now some very early transcriber of the Acts of the Apostles mistook the
Apostle's meaning, and thought that he only said that he desired to end
his career; and so, with the best intentions in the world, he inserted,
probably on the margin, what he thought was a necessary addition--that
unfortunate 'with joy,' which appears in our Authorised Version, but
has no place in the true text. If we put it in we necessarily limit the
meaning of the word 'finish' to that low, superficial sense which I
have already dismissed. If we leave it out we get a far nobler thought.
Paul was not thinking about the joy at the end. What he wanted was to
do his work, all of it, right through to the very last. He knew there
would be joy, but he does not speak about it. What he wanted, as all
faithful men do, was to do the work, and let the joy take care of
itself.
And so for all of us, the true anaesthetic or 'painkiller' is that
all-dominant sense of obligation and duty which lays hold upon us, and
grips us, and makes us, not exactly indifferent to, but very partially
conscious of, the sorrows or the hindrances or the pains that may come
in our way. You cannot stop an express train by stretching a rope
across the line, nor stay the flow of a river with a barrier of straw.
And if a man has once yielded himself fully to that great conception of
God's will driving him on through life, and prescribing his path for
him, it is neither in sorrow nor in joy to arrest his course. They may
roll all the golden apples out of the garden of the Hesperides in his
path, and he will not stop to pick one of them up; or Satan may block
it with his fiercest flames, and the man will go into them, saying,
'When I pass through the fires He will be with me.'