Quiet Talks on Following the Christ

by S. D. Gordon

The distressing thing is that there is so much of going to extremes. Go through the Christian homes of the western world to-day, and you find home appointments, wardrobes, safety-deposit boxes, bank books, title deeds, all spelling out one word, spelled in capital letters, EXTREMES. But that key-note, named several times already, gives the only safe way—obedience. We need to be on our guard, not so much lest we go to extremes at either extreme, but that we obey our Lord Jesus. That, and that only, leads to the wise, well-balanced judgment and action. Obedience to Him means true sanity.

Where do you draw the deciding line between necessity and luxury? How do you define those two words? What is necessity? And what is luxury? Simple definitions help much in getting clear ideas. The dictionary says, a necessity is something you must have. And a luxury, in its root meaning, is an extravagance, something "wandering beyond the proper boundary." The trouble is to know how to draw the line when it comes to one's own affairs. There is such a big difference between what you want and what you need. And often we don't want to go into such distinctions. They might bother our consciences a bit. It seems difficult to keep one's poise in such things. Some godly people go to extremes in not providing sufficiently for real needs. Most of us go to the other extreme. Where does the true dividing line come in?

Well, I think you can say truly that whatever keeps up and adds to your strength can properly be called a necessity. All beyond that line is luxury. It is the part of wisdom to provide carefully and well for necessities. Luxury is bad, for it really saps our strength. It makes a man less vigorous in every way. And yet more can be said. The question of need comes in. Luxury is wrong because of the crying need of men for what the money spent in luxury would bring to them. I think chiefly now of the need of their lives for what can come only through a knowledge of Christ. The bitter cry of the common people against Louis XVI, at the time of the French Revolution, was that the royal family lived on the costliest delicacies while many of the common people were actually starving. They thought that was the chief crime to be expiated at the guillotine.

What is necessary for one's strength moves on a sliding scale. As years come, and the sort of work one does and his strength change, his needs increase. What might at one time have been reckoned luxury is now a real necessity for his best strength and work. Whatever ministers to one's strength is a necessity. All above this becomes luxury, and so is both hurtful to strength, and wrong in itself.

A missionary returning to his home-land, on furlough, noted on his first return home that what had been considered luxuries before he left, were now reckoned necessities; on his second furlough he noted again that what had been reckoned luxury on his first return was now counted necessity. And each return home found this condition repeating itself.

It reminded me of the experience of Sir John Franklin in one of his Arctic explorations. His ship was hemmed in by an ice-field so that progress was impossible. All he could do was to calculate his longitude and latitude, and wait. The next day he was still hemmed in, and so far as he could see, was exactly where he had been on the previous day. But on calculating longitude and latitude again, he was surprised to find that the ship had drifted several miles backward from the position of the previous day.

It would be a sensible thing for us to make frequent calculations, and find out where we are, and prayerfully steer a changed course if we've been drifting. But we can't decide such questions for each other, and they can't be decided by what another does. They can only be decided alone on one's knees with the Master, with the Book, and perhaps a map of the world at hand. We need both the Word of God, and a view of the world of God to shape our judgment. No, it's not a question of money primarily, nor of missions, only of personal loyalty to our Lord Jesus, and to the passion of His heart.

Grafted.

Have you noticed the significance of that word "abide" which our Lord used on the night of His betrayal?^[85] "Abide" means a grafting process; we were branches in the vine, but we were broken off by sin. The only way to abide in that vine is by being grafted in. "Abide" means grafted. But the grafting process has two wounds. It means a knife used twice. It means a wound in the vine-stock, and our Master flinched not there. It means likewise a wound in the branch to be grafted in. Just as surely as the knife must make the incision into the stock, it must also cut the end of the branch before it can be grafted in. Our Master flinched not. How about you and me when it comes to the knife, with its sharp cutting edge, and slash and sting?

Perhaps this explains why there's so little life, so little sap-flow, so little fruit. If you follow along the narrow road your progress is sure to be barred by a knife thrust out across the path. And the whole instinct of our nature is to shrink from the knife. The sacrificial knife becomes the pruning, the grafting knife. There can be no life without that knife. Failure to obey cuts off the supply of life.