I remember a friend in Philadelphia, a young man who resigned an influential position to go out as a missionary in India. And another friend not at all in sympathy remarked sneeringly in my hearing, "He's gone to bury himself in India." He spoke more aptly than he knew. The years since have told what a blessed burial that was. For scores of lives in Southern India have known the resurrection power of the Lord Jesus through his service.
Do you remember when the Greeks came to Philip with their great plea, "Sir, we would see Jesus"?[82] Whether really from Greece, or Greek-speaking people from elsewhere, or simply non-Jewish people, they represented the outer, non-Jewish world coming to Jesus. The Jew door was slammed violently in His face, but here was the great outer-world door opening. And He had come to a world! But instantly, across the vision so attractive to His eyes, there came another vision, never absent from His spirit those last weeks, the vision black and forbidding, of a cross. And He knew that only through this vision of a cross could the vision of a world coming be realized. And out of the sore stress of spirit, that for a few brief moments shook Him, came the quietly spoken, tense words, "Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone."
The road to Greece is not over the sea here to the west, not the overland caravan route up north through Asia Minor; it is the road down through Joseph's tomb. That was true for Him. It was by that road that He so marvellously reached the Greeks and all the world. And this is true for us. It is only by this road that we can reach out to the crowds with the reach-in that touches heart and life.
These are the four experiences of suffering and sacrifice. This is the dip-down in the "Follow Me" road where it runs through a darkly shadowed valley. These are the dark and red shuttle-threads being woven into the web, by repeated sharp blows of the batten-beam. These are the minor chords that, coming up through the strains of music, give a peculiar sweetness to it.
What Is Sacrifice?
Now you will note that the chief thing in all this is sacrifice. The chief thing in all of our Lord's life, clear from Bethlehem to Calvary and the tomb, was sacrifice. It runs ever throughout; it finds its tremendous climax in the cross. And the word to put in here in quietest tone—the quietest is tensest, and goes in deepest—the word is this: Following means sacrifice. It means sacrifice as really for the follower as for the Lone Man ahead.
That word "sacrifice" has practically been dropped out of the dictionary of the Christian Church of the western world. It has not been wholly lost. There is much real sacrifice, no doubt, under the surface. But, in the main, it is one of the lost words in our generation of the Church. We are rich, and increased in goods, and have need of nothing that we cannot provide by the lavish use of money; so we think. And the loss of that word explains the loss from our working dictionaries of another word, power. For the two words always go together.
But please note what sacrifice means. For we may get confused in the use of words, and like the Hebrews in Isaiah's day call things by the wrong names.[83] Sacrifice does not merely mean suffering, though there may be much suffering included in it. But there may be suffering where there is no sacrifice. It does not mean privation, though there may be real painful privation in it. But again there may be much privation and pain without any element of sacrifice entering in.
The heart of sacrifice is that it is voluntary, and that it really costs you something. It is something that would not come to you unless you decide to let it come. It is wholly within your power to keep it away, and it brings with it real pain or cost of some kind. Sacrifice means doing something, or doing without something, that so help may come to another, even though it costs you some real personal suffering of spirit, or of body, or both, or lack of what you should have and would enjoy.
And please note that sacrifice is not the key-note of the "Follow Me" life. We are not to seek for sacrifice. Perhaps that is quite a needless remark. We are not likely to seek for it. No one loves a cross any more than did Peter, when he had the hardiness to rebuke his Master.[84] And yet we remember those earnest souls in earlier times, who shut themselves up behind monastic walls, and inflicted pain upon themselves by privation and by bodily self-infliction. And we cannot help admiring their earnestness and saintliness, even while we see how morbid was their conception of life, and how completely they got the true order reversed. And there can be found some here and there, among us to-day, with the same idea.