potency of right thought is to be found at its best when we come to a
man's thought of God. How shall we think about ultimate reality? What
is behind all these changing, passing phenomena? Who is back of it
all? Is anybody? If so, is he wise or blind? Is he good or evil or
morally indifferent? Does he mean anything by it all, or is he only an
unreasoning, purposeless force? You cannot ask yourself or your
fellows a more important question than this--"How shall we think about
God?"
Men had been filling their minds with all sorts of wild and foolish
guesses about God. This young man placed upon the lips of the race and
within its heart that great word "Father." "When ye pray say, 'Our
Father.'" Begin with those words on your lips, with that thought in
your mind and with the filial spirit in your heart. When you worship
"Worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father seeketh such
to worship Him." When you would turn away from the evil of your life
say, "I will arise and go to my Father." When you want assurance say,
"No man can pluck me out of my Father's hand." When you come to die
say, "Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit." Death is the act of
a tired child falling back into the arms of his Father. He showed us
the Father and it sufficed us.
This great truth was the heart of this young man's message to the
race--God is our Father. God combines the strength and the tenderness,
the authority and the devotion, the responsible control and the
capacity for self-sacrifice which belong to fatherhood at its best.
Take the highest you have ever seen in fatherhood and raise it to the
_nth_ power, and then trust that, for that is God.
How many of you believe that? It is the easiest thing in the world to
say, "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and earth,"
but do you really believe it? Are you striving to live it? If God is
your Father, then you are His children, heirs of God, joint heirs with
Jesus Christ! Your interests are His interests. Your life and His
life, your destiny and His destiny, are not things apart--they are all
one.
In the light of that great overarching, underlying, interpenetrating
truth, there is no duty more commanding, no privilege more resplendent
than that of living daily and hourly in the filial spirit before Him.
When a man really believes that, he goes about saying by word and by
deed, "I am not alone, the Father is with me. I come not to do my own
will, but the will of Him who sent me. I must be about my Father's
business." When that great sublime truth is set within the heart of
the race, as it was set within the heart of this young man, it changes
the history of the world.
He also changed men's thoughts about goodness. What does it mean to be
good? When may we call any man good? There were men who felt that
being good meant obeying the law, keeping the rules, ordering one's
life in accordance with the endless specifications outlined in the
Sacred Books. If a man could get through the day without having gotten
off the path for an inch, then he might be esteemed good. And the race
groaned under the burdens which this system had bound upon the
consciences of men. It was all outward, formal, mechanical, impossible.
Jesus set Himself against that whole conception and method of goodness.
"Except your righteousness exceeds that," He said to the men of His
day, "you will not in any wise enter the Kingdom of Heaven." Goodness
must be inward, vital, spontaneous. A good tree brings forth good
fruit. It cannot otherwise. It does it as naturally as a bird sings.
Therefore, make the tree good and let the fruit come as it will--it
will be all right. A good man out of the good treasure of his heart
brings forth good deeds. He does it spontaneously. Therefore, make
the heart right and let the man do as he pleases. Love God with an
honest heart and love your neighbours as well as yourself, and then do
as you like. Love works no ill, either Godward or manward; therefore,
love is the fulfilling of all law. Here is the great underlying
principle of all righteousness to which all our ethical considerations
must be adjusted. As men rise from the practice of keeping outward
rules into the more exacting but more joyous liberty of the spirit,
they become genuinely good.
In the third place Jesus put within our reach a power which would
change our hearts. If you are made as I am, and as I have found
hundreds of other men, you feel oftentimes that your life is weak and
thin and mean. You do not love God with an honest heart and strive to
be what He would have you. You do not love your neighbours as you
ought, and give expression to that love in unselfish action. You lag
back when you ought to be forging ahead. You lie down where you ought
to climb. You muddle along in a dull, commonplace way when your
aspirations and your high resolves should be mounting up with wings
like eagles.
When you are frankly honest with yourself you say, as I have said to
myself, and as Paul said before us, "The good that I would I do not,
and the evil that I would not, that I do. O wretched man that I am,
who shall deliver me!"
Here was One who knew that men are weak and thin and mean, yet He
believed that every one of them through faith in Him could have a life
strong and rich and fine, He actually believed that men who have bumped
their way clear down to the bottom of the moral stairs could climb up
again. He believed that the woman of the street, whom the bigots of
that day were ready to stone, could "go and sin no more," her sins
forgiven because she loved much.
The publicans and harlots would go into the Kingdom--they would go in,
Jesus said, ahead of some of those respectable, cold-hearted Pharisees
who were scandalized at such talk. He knew the capacity for moral
renewal which lies in waiting in every heart, and He knew His own power
to call that capacity into effective action. "I am the door," He said,
"to newness of life. By Me if any man enter in, he shall be saved. He
shall go in and out and find pasture." Security, liberty, sustenance,
they would all be his!
My mind goes back to a man in one of my former parishes. He kept a
little store, but he neglected his business in order to get drunk. The
wolf was often at his door. He had a good wife and two lovely
daughters, but he had broken their hearts by his evil ways. He would
become so intoxicated that he would not know his own name nor the
street he lived on. When he was coming out of such debauches he would
go about dirty, blear-eyed, trembling, asking every man he met to give
him money to get another drink.
Then there came a day when that man's heredity was not changed, his
environment was not changed, but his heart was changed. He put his
faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and was turned into another man. He
became at once sober, reliable, industrious, affectionate, aspiring.
He put a smile on his wife's face which is there yet. He began to take
care of his store and of his family. He became an honoured and useful
citizen, chosen to positions of trust by his fellow men. He has now
gone to his reward, but if he hears what I am saying he would tell you
that it is all true. He would tell you also that he owed this change
to the transforming power of the Son of God, the Saviour of men.
How the world changes and for the better! When Jesus Christ was here
they said of Him, "He receiveth sinners and eateth with them." They
said it with a sneer. When William Booth, the head of the Salvation
Army, did the same thing they said of him, "He receiveth sinners," but
they regarded it as the glory of his life. The first century saw the
Son of Man scorned and spat upon for receiving sinners and eating with
them. The twentieth century saw William Booth received at court by
King Edward VII and honoured with a degree from Oxford University for
receiving sinners. The world moves; there is sunrise everywhere and
the promise of a brighter day! And this great change has been wrought
by the One who brought upon the earth a finer form of spiritual energy
to renew the hearts of men.
And finally this young man set in the sky of human aspiration a fixed
star of hope. You cannot change the world by scolding it. You cannot
change the world by petting it. You must set before its eyes a vision
of God and in its heart a passion for goodness, and in its will a form
of strength that will not accept defeat, and in its sky a star of hope.
"Strong Son of God, Immortal Love
Whom we that have not seen Thy face
By faith and faith alone embrace
Believing where we cannot prove."
Jesus Christ has done that for us all--"Believing where we cannot
prove!" He has taught us how to hope and to trust and in that sign to
conquer.
He tasted the whole human situation for every man. He was tempted in
all points like as we are, and tried by those ordeals which culminated
on Calvary. "In this world," He said, "ye shall have tribulation." The
word He used means literally "pressure." Life is not all music and
refreshments. Every honest life must be lived under pressure. It is
compelled to do its work under the steady weight of duty, obligation,
responsibility. It is compelled to fight a good fight in order to keep
its faith and finish its course.
In the end that is the making of any life. Steam does all its work
under pressure. Turn it loose in the air to go where it will and it
becomes useless. In this world we must live under pressure. But Jesus
bade men face it all undaunted and radiant. He planted in their lives
an eternal hope, "Be of good cheer. I have overcome--you can."
He knew that His own purposes were entirely right--"I do always those
things that please the Father." He knew that He was strongly
entrenched in the love and confidence of those who knew Him best. He
knew that the great moral order was on His side and that He could
afford to wait for results. In that high confidence He moved ahead as
serene as the sun shining in its strength. "Be of good cheer," He
cried, when He stood within a hundred yards of Calvary.
His victory was not meant to be exceptional, it was meant to be
representative. It was to be shared and repeated by all those who walk
in fellowship with Him. How much it means when a man is making his way
through some dark forest or climbing some stiff mountainside to find
the faintest sort of a trail. "Other men have passed this way," he
cries, "and what men have done, men can do again."
Here is a trail of spiritual victory, reaching on and up through all
manner of untoward situations! His own patient, bleeding feet marked
it out and thousands of His faithful followers have traversed it in
their turn. "Who can separate us from the love of Christ? Can
tribulation or distress or persecution or famine, or peril or sword?
Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who
loved us. For I am persuaded that neither life nor death nor angels,
nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come,
nor height nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate
us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
When the long, hard, dark days come it means everything to a man to
know that there is that within him which cannot go down in final
defeat. His real life, his best life, his enduring life, is hid with
Christ in God, and that life will yet have its way.
The earth is another place when it is seen to have a sky above it.
This earthly life is another thing when it is seen to have a heaven
above it and beyond it. We are saved by hope, by the hope of life
abundant, life enduring, life eternal, which shines on and on, no
matter how earth's clouds may come and go.
When all else seems to fail we look up and hear this young man say,
"Let not your heart be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in Me.
In My Father's house are many mansions. If it were not so I would have
told you. I go to prepare a place for you that where I am there ye may
be. Be of good cheer, I have overcome and by My grace you will."
Here then is my case! Here is my own tribute of loyalty and affection
for that young man who changed the history of the world. He did it by
changing men's thoughts about God--"To us there is but one God, the
Father." He did it by changing men's conception of goodness--to be
good is to be like Him, simple, genuine, spontaneous, in our love and
practice of the right life. He did it by changing the hearts of men
from within--"If any man is in Christ he is a new creature." He did it
by setting in our human sky a fixed star of hope to shine on until the
day dawns and the shadows flee away.
In the face of it all how can any man of sense and conscience do less
than follow Him and act with Him until His will is done on earth as it
is done in Heaven!
"If Jesus Christ is a man
And only a man, I say
That of all mankind I cleave to Him
And to Him will I cleave alway.
"If Jesus Christ be God
And the only God, I swear
I will follow Him through Heaven and Hell,
The earth, the sea, the air."
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End of Project Gutenberg's Five Young Men, by Charles Reynolds Brown