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TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks About the Tempter (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 096. Good, or God's Will
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Good, or God's Will
A second perversion of this sort is in connection with Christian service. There is much Christian service that is done merely because it is a good thing to do. The purpose to "do good" is the controlling thought. The true controlling purpose in service should not be to do good simply, but to do God's will. Doing God's will is always good. But doing something that is good may not be doing the thing that God has planned for us to do. There is a Lord to the harvest. We are not to start in doing the thing that strikes us as being a good thing to do. We are to find out the plan of the Lord, and fit into that. A vast amount of hit-or-miss work, and a vast amount of strength, would be turned to much better account if this "do good" fallacy were exploded.
Speaking broadly it would undoubtedly have been doing good for our Lord to have met those Greeks, and gone with them to their people to teach about the true God, and to heal their sick, and so on. But we know so well that that was not God's will for Him.
Mr. Spurgeon at one time was urged to accept an invitation to preach at a certain place. And in pressing the invitation it was stated that he would have the opportunity of speaking to a very large audience of many thousands, including very influential people. His quiet reply, as he declined going, was that he was not ambitious to preach to thousands, but only to do the will of God.
God guides the prayerful man to discern what His will of service for him is. But this thing of merely doing good rather than discerning the good that is also God's plan for us, has ever been one of the tempter's favourite temptations with religious folk. We should frequently recall the lines that run:—
"More anxious not to serve Thee much;
But please Thee perfectly."
A third "Angel-of-light" disguise is regarding that very sensitive stuff called money. The Jews were required to pay a tenth of all into God's treasury. And the giving of a tenth has been widely advocated as the standard of giving for Christians. It is a standard of giving that has been followed by many, and has brought great blessing to the givers, and loosened out much money for God's work. If the whole Church membership could be brought up to this standard the Lord's work would be revolutionized in the funds that would be loosened out for use, and immense blessing would follow to the Church itself.
That is all true. But there is more yet to be said that is true also, and that more gives an utter change of view. The giving of a tenth has been taken to mean that we are fully discharging the love obligation laid upon us by giving only a tenth. The Jew practically was taxed a tenth; the giving was not voluntary; it was compulsory. The Christian is not under any such law of compulsion. He is left free to do as his heart moves him, with very strong motives brought to play upon his heart action. The Jew had much less of light, and privilege, and fulness of blessing than the Christian.