a crude people -- a task requiring the generation of fear. But his weapon was only a rod. Just a dry stick which one might use as a walking cane. But God made use of such as Moses had, and He required Moses to make full use of it also. It was all he had, so he made the most of it.
This that you have, young man, young woman, is your life. It has its privileges and its limitations; it has its assets and its liabilities. It will no doubt be shorter than you wish -- perhaps shorter than the lives of some you have known. Its scope will be more limited than you like. You will long for travel and for study that shall not be yours. But this is your life. It is all the life you will have. Initially it is God's gift to you. But it is capital to be employed, and not a fortune to be buried. By inheritance it is a boon from your parents immediate and distant. In the shadow of the great pyramid, Napoleon stirred his army by pointing to the great monument, and crying, "Soldiers, forty centuries are looking. down upon you!" But all the centuries of the past are looking down upon you; for you are the last issue of all who have preceded you from Adam until now. In you all the centuries lodge their hopes -- and fears. And you are the link between the past and the future. The future looks to young for its heritage. But God's gift, parents' boon, and future's source, it is yet your life -- make the most of it.
MAKE THE MOST OF THE PERSONAL CHRISTIAN LIFE
More than a century ago a writer, whose identity I have been unable to establish, said, "There have been from the beginning two orders of Christians. The majority of the one order live an honest life, doing many good works, abstaining from gross evils, and attending the ordinances of God, but waging no downright warfare against the world nor making any strenuous efforts for the promotion of Christ's kingdom. These aim at no special spiritual excellence, but are content with the average attainments of their neighbors. The other class of Christians not only abstain from every form of vice, but they are zealous, of every kind of good works. They attend the ordinances of God. They use all diligence to attain to the whole mind that was in Christ, and to walk in the very footsteps of their beloved Master. They unhesitatingly trample on every pleasure which disqualifies for highest usefulness. They deny themselves not only indulgences which are expressly forbidden, but also all those which by experience they have found to diminish their enjoyment of God. They take up their cross daily. At the morning's dawn they pray, 'Glorify Thyself in me this day, 0 blessed Jesus.' It is more than their meat and d rink to do their heavenly Father's will. They are not Quietists, ever lingering in secret places, delighting in the ecstasies of enraptured devotion. They go forth from the closet as Moses came down from the mount of God, with faces radiant with divine glory, and visiting the degraded and the outcast, they prove by their lives the divineness of the Gospel."
John Bunyan, in his immortal allegory, brought his pilgrims into Beulah Land before they crossed the river of death. Here they were entirely out of sight of Doubting Castle, and in view of the Celestial City. Here the sun shone day and night.
Paul speaks of the heavenlies or heavenly places in Christ Jesus in which Christians sit together in blessed and unbroken fellowship. Such a place is a land of solid peace, unfailing victory, pure joy and blessed assurance.
All these are in contact with those who talk of the Christian life as something unsatisfying and impractical, and we can but conclude that men are accustomed, as in the days of the apostles, to tell the things they have seen and heard and experienced, and this leads us to conclude that there is an inner circle in Christian experience and life to which some have attained, and which others imagine does not exist simply because they have not attained it themselves.
"How shall we reach the masses?" "How shall we hold our young people?" These are the questions that distracted church leaders are wont to ask, and the usual answer is, "Make the program entertaining. Use motion pictures. Adopt operatic music. Stage spectacular preaching." And to the second question the answer given is, "Remove the ban from the dance, the theater and from card games. Major on the social life. Compete with the world in offering plans for pleasure. Out-world the world, and thus hold those for whom the world bids."
But it all reminds me of the maxim I used to hear in my boyhood days: "Never bet on the other man's game." The world can beat the church being worldly -- it always has done so, and when the church becomes worldly it introduces cravings that it is unprepared to satisfy and its purpose is defeated. If people want the world they can find it better outside the church than in it. The church must have a better and a different bid.
Then there are those, well meaning people too, who think to induce people to become Christians by lowering the standards of the Christian life and experience and making it easy in the fleshly sense. My father was not a Christian in my childhood days. But once he came home late at night to tell about going to church at the insistence of a business associate, and to tell how his friend and others had gathered about him at the close of the meeting to urge him to join the church. He had excused himself on the ground that he was not a Christian. But they had answered this by arguing that this should not deter him -- he should join the church anyway, then perhaps he would become a Christian. It was all new to my father and the rest of us, and served only to make us question as to whether or not there really was anything in it at all. The editor of the official organ of the Northern Baptist Convention, commenting on the large proportion of losses over against the gains in the membership of the churches of that body, remarked that church joining has been made too easy. Men join the church with such little effort and so little preparation that they can go away and forget that they have joined at all. With all men's faults, they do not like to be coddled. The heroic has more appeal than the promise of indulgence. That branch of the army which is listed as most dangerous always has the longest list of applicants for service. And He who knew men as no one else ever has, challenged them thus: Unless a man will forsake all that he hath and take up his cross and follow me, he cannot be my disciple. The Christian life exacts much, but it promises more. The question is, How much do you want to invest in it?
Observing that the community was made up largely of church members, but that there were few signs of spiritual life, a thoughtful man said, "The people have had religious varioloid which has served principally to make them immune to genuine salvation." It was like this with many in the days of our Lord, for then, too, wicked sinners entered into the kingdom of God in greater numbers than did formal professors.
The same principle applies to Christian life that applies to knowledge in that the proper choice lies between drinking deep or else not touching the magic cup. But it were folly to suggest even this dilemma. There is no good life except the Christian life, and in the Christian life there is only one place of genuine satisfaction and that is the place of full devotion to God and of full reception of grace from God. Socrates, in his day, prayed that his inner power and outer demands might be at balance, and that is what we are promised in Christ. There is no demand in the law of Christ that is not fully answered in the supply of the grace of Christ. We have no right to use the words "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" as a separate text, for the passage thus read is mutilated. "For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure" is an inseparable part of the exhortation.
Is there a place of complete deliverance from outward and inner sin in Jesus Christ? Is there a place of full assurance and unbounded peace in Him? May a Christian have unbroken fellowship with God? Is there a fullness of the Holy Spirit for every heart? Is perfect love a heritage of saints here on earth? Does the perfect love of Christ cast out the love of the world and bring one to the place where all desires are gladly subjected to His blessed will with no residue of irritation or worry? The answer is yes in every case, and those who will not be content with less than the best press on to full devotion and faith for the possession of such a place and state of grace.
In the Christian life grace responds to need and need encourages the conditions for further grace. Love for God generates love for the Bible, the Word of God; and care in the reading and study of the Bible makes love for God more intelligent and more real. It is indispensable that a Christian should pray, and prayer is a means for stronger faith and for fuller realization of God. The Christian will want to pay the tithe of his income into the work of God, and he will want to make additional offerings as the Lord enables. And the proper exercise of the office of steward is a help to all inner virtue. Church attendance is both an expression of true religion and a minister to it. Righteous living is both a fruit of grace and a means for further bestowals of grace. In simple words, the Christian life is a unit of which experience is the subjective and right living is the objective phase.
If you want to break an egg, sharp point foremost on your forehead, the only counsel you need is, "Be sure to hit hard enough." For if you do not hit hard enough your head will take the blow and you will suffer pain. But if you hit hard enough the egg will take the blow and you will escape injury. The best way, we found as boys, to enter the swimming hole for the first dash in the spring is to go in with a splash -- gradual approach only prolongs the agony. Likewise, life in the twilight zone between God and the world is a miserable existence. There religion has such a pull that one cannot enjoy the world, and the world has such a pull that one's religious satisfaction is imperfect. All exhortations to carefulness in dealing with God are out of place. We need no protection against Him. All caution to the winds! Leave all and find all! This Christian life is by right your life -- make the most of it. May "the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it."
MAKE THE MOST OF THE SOCIAL LIFE
No statement in the teachings of Jesus is more revolutionary in character than this: "It is more blessed to give than to receive." We very nearly missed these words altogether. None of the four evangelists record them, and Paul mentions them (Act_20:35