This is true as regards all our prevailing habits of mind, but the 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.