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TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks About Calvary (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 17. Living Martyrs
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Living Martyrs
St. Paul knew this. In Gal_2:20 he said, “I have been crucified with Christ.” That is the roadway of life, by death, by being taken down into the ground of Joseph’s tomb. “I have been crucified with Christ.” That’s the old “I.” “Nevertheless I live.” There is a new “I.” The old “I” has died. There is a new “I” living. You see a crucifixion here means a resurrection. The resurrection comes in the second sentence. “Nevertheless I live, yet not I,” —not the old “I,” but—“Christ liveth in me.” This new life which I now live in the flesh, I live “by the faith of the Son of God, Who loved me, and gave Himself freely for me.”
Out of his deep experience Paul wrote to the Romans, “I beseech you therefore that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice.” Please mark that word “living.” The Church has honoured the martyrs because they gave a dying sacrifice; they were martyrs to the death; and I honour those martyrs. We all do, and rightly we do. But there is a class of martyrs even more needed, living martyrs; those who will simply not bring a dying sacrifice and the thing finished; but a living sacrifice, with the spear-thrust and the drive of the nail and the cut of the knife-edge going on, not for a few hours and done; but year after year, a living sacrifice. That is what this secondary Calvary meant to Paul: stones, beatings, stripes, rods, imprisonment, hunger, nakedness, cold, and the rest of the category, you remember,—a living sacrifice.
You know it is not such a hard thing to die and be done with it. Oh! it is hard. But for us there is something harder, that is a living sacrifice.
“So he died for his faith. That is fine.
But stay. Can you add to that line
More than the most of us do,
That he lived for it, too?
"It is easy to die. Men have died
For a wish or a whim—
From bravado, or passion, or pride.
Was it hard for him?
“But to live: every day to live out
All the truth that he dreamt,
While his friends met his conduct with doubt,
And the world with contempt.
“Was it thus that he plodded ahead,
Never turning aside?
Then we’ll talk of the life that he lived,
Never mind how he died”
Our Master, from Calvary’s top today, says to us today, “Follow Me,” and only as we do here can there be life for us of this highest sort, and through us life for a whole world.