Joy in Service; Forgetting, and Pressing Onward; Until the Day Dawn

by George Tybout Purves

And yet our Lord Jesus was a very genuine man. He did not impress observers with the common insignia of holiness. It was the Pharisees, not Christ, who stood at the corners of the streets to make long prayers, who enlarged the borders of their phylacteries and chose the chief seats in the synagogues. It was the Baptist, not Jesus, who clothed himself in a garment of camel's hair and ate locusts and wild honey. Jesus, on the contrary, lived the outward life of other men, consorted with them in their usual places of resort, dressed and spake as they did; so that, in outward manner, it was impossible to distinguish him from the common mass in which he moved. All the more precious, therefore, is this revelation of his inner life. What a soul was his! The thought uppermost in his mind was devotion to the Father's will. The joy which most gladdened his lonely life was the joy of unknown, but sublime and perfect, obedience. He had been pointing a Samaritan woman, sitting by the wellside, to the salvation of God; and though she was but one, and that to human eyes an unworthy subject,—though she was a Samaritan and an open sinner,—his soul found such intense pleasure in bringing her—as the Father had sent him to bring men anywhere—to the knowledge of the truth, that fatigue and hunger were forgotten, and all his energies were absorbed in the delight of the task. In this I think Christ appears simply Divine. No later fame or success, no gaudy robes of human praise, no gilded crown of human admiration, are needed to adorn him. He discloses the very ideal of a godly life. All our poor efforts at obedience, all our faint aspirations after the knowledge and love of God, all our unfulfilled prayers, and falling flights, and unredeemed promises and sin-stained attempts to serve, confess the ideal perfectness of him who could truthfully say, "My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work."

I. Let us first, then, draw a little closer to this peerless soul, in which there was such perfect sense of the worth of infinite things, and let us note more particularly, and appreciate as far as we are able, this phase of the character of the Son of Man.

I have said that Christ was a very natural man. But he was more than that. I am sure that none can study his character without admitting and admiring the perfect proportion in which truth evidently lay in his mind. This is one of the rarest beauties of character. Most of us are very one-sided. We can grasp but a part of truth; and in order to grasp that part firmly, we have to absolutely let other truth go. In order to be devoted to duty as we see it, we commonly have to leave other duties untouched. Our spiritual growth ought to take just this direction of including broader views of truth and duty, of obtaining a conception of life in which the various elements shall be held in their proper relations and proportions; no one allowed to eclipse the others, but each modified to a proper extent by the presence and influence of the rest. I say this is a rare achievement. No one but Christ has ever achieved it perfectly. It is easy to see that even the apostles, inspired as they were, did not equally appreciate all sides of revelation. They have their distinguishing doctrines and points of view.

It is still easier to see that Christian churches and theologians differ for this same reason, and to a much greater extent. No creed, no church, no theology, that builds on the Word of God, can be wholly wrong. Its difference from others must lie in its partial appreciation of the truth, in its inability to take in all truths in their relative proportion. And so in literature and science and philosophy some men are impressed with material evidences, others with moral. Some men are poets, others are logicians; some critical, others dogmatic. The hope of the future for the Church and for humanity is in the slow approximation and combination of these partial views, until at last, "in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, we shall come unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." Meanwhile, at the beginning of our Christian history, Christ stands perfect. To see this is to appreciate his authority. As Paul said, He is the corner stone of the spiritual temple which the Divine Spirit is building.

I do not mean that he taught explicitly all the truth which later times have discovered, or which after him apostles taught. But he laid the living germs of all later religious truth, and he held them in such perfect proportion that when the long course of history shall be finished, when that which is in part shall have been done away, and that which is perfect shall have come, the result will be but the reproduction on a large scale of the already perfect stature of Christ.

And this is particularly manifested in Christ's views of life. His peerless spirituality did not make him an ascetic. His clear vision of the future did not lead him to despise the present. His love of God did not destroy his love of nature or of man. His hatred of sin did not cause him to shun the sinner. Hence, though our Lord was the model of a religious man, he was no enthusiast, still less a fanatic. The enthusiast is a man who sees but part of truth and magnifies it out of its proportion; and the fanatic is one who, in addition to this, hates what he cannot understand. According to Isaac Taylor, "Fanaticism is enthusiasm inflamed by hatred." But Christ exaggerated nothing and hated no man. He hated sin, but no sinner. His boundless, tender love itself prevented such moral distortion. And, therefore, he is the ideal or model of human life. We do not feel that in striving to imitate even his most spiritual qualities we shall become impractical or unnatural. We do not feel this in the case of most other holy men. They become examples of one virtue by exaggerating it. But Christ never did this. Lofty as the view of life was which he discloses in our text, sublime as was its spiritual consecration, it existed in him in harmony with the life which by its thoroughly human and practical features proves that we too, in at least some measure, can make even his highest traits our exemplars. Look, therefore, at this text which discloses his mind, and mark its principal elements.

1. There is first disclosed the strong and constant consciousness that he had a distinct errand in the world. He knew that he had been born for a purpose, that a divine aim was in his coming, and that a positive result would follow his life. This sense of a definite errand was expressed by him on numerous occasions; in some of them quite incidentally, and in others more directly. You remember how, as a boy in the temple, he said to his mother, "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" You remember how, at the marriage in Cana, he said to her again, "My hour is not yet come." So with that precious phrase which on several occasions fell from his lips, "The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which is lost." He regarded himself as one sent from God; and when his life was about over he lifted up his eyes to heaven and said, "Father, the hour is come; I have glorified thee on the earth; I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do."

So in our text, "My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work." He was here on a special errand, and that errand was always before his mind. Earth was but a place of appointed work. Life was to him an office, a stewardship. He had this consciousness, even when he seemed to be accomplishing nothing. It gave unity to all his acts and words. To Galilean peasants and to Jewish scribes he could speak with equal assurance, because his errand was to both. Yet he knew its limitations. He said to the Syro-Phœnician woman, "I am not sent save to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." He had come do a special work among the Jews, and in that a work for all mankind. He had not come to be glorified. He had not come to be ministered unto, but to minister. But he had come on a distinct errand; and whatever be your doctrine of Christ's person, you must confess that he considered himself no accident of history; that he did not regard his life work as originating in his own choice; that his sense of a mission did not come as an afterthought to him, or grow clear as he advanced in life. He felt his special errand from the start. It was always before his mind, so that life was to him the performance of a given task and the fulfillment of an assigned duty.

2. But furthermore, our text discloses that, to Christ's mind, this errand of his in the world derived its sanctity from the fact that it was the will or wish of his Father. Every man is governed by some controlling motive or class of motives. The lowest of all is the motive of personal gain and pleasure, and the sorrows and sins of men chiefly spring from the tyranny of this degraded passion. Higher than it is the motive of pity and compassion, which may lead us to do good for the sake of benefiting others. This is the spring of much charity and philanthropy, and, so far as it goes, it is of course to be commended. But there is a higher motive than even it, and Christ reveals it to us here. It is the wish to do God's will. Such was his motive. To him the will of the Father was the perfect good. He knew of nothing nobler than it, so that the whole energy of his character consisted in the force of obedience.

This phrase may carry us back to that time in the counsels of the Godhead when, as we conceive such matters, the Father determined to save the world that had rebelled against him. The question was, where to find a Saviour; and the spirit of the Divine Son was manifested in his self-dedication to the work. He, too, loved man, but that was not his main motive. He loved the Father. He appreciated the Father's wish to save. He gave himself to carry out that wish. "Lo, I come," said he, "to do thy will, O God." Thus we may perceive, I think, the deep reality in the Divine Sonship of Christ; and certainly on earth this was his controlling motive. He was obedient even unto death. To obey to the very least particular the Father's will was the principle of his being. To him the Father's will was not hard, stern law, as we with our rebellious instincts so often regard it; it was the Father's wish. When love exists between two persons, the will of one it is the other's joy to do, if possible. Love impels to its accomplishment. Love rejoices in being of service, in giving the loved one pleasure, in carrying out the other's desire. So the will of God was, to Christ, his Father's wish. Obedience was the mainspring of his soul's life, and his errand in the world derived its sanctity and its glory—in spite of man's antagonism and in spite of apparent fruitlessness—from the fact that it was the will of God. In this Christ discloses the very highest spiritual life which it is possible to conceive. How marvelous was this! He who has won the greatest influence over the race, he before whom the head bows in adoration, he who has changed already the course of history, and will change it until every knee has bowed to him, was one whose supreme wish was to be an obedient Son. Instead of conquering by selfishness he conquered by self-abnegation. Instead of doing his own work, he gave himself up to doing his Father's. Here is at once a miracle of history and a model of life of which man would never have dreamed.