Quiet Talks with World Winners

by S. D. Gordon

We do well to remind ourselves that its influence for good is always distinctly less than that of a life. To live a life pure and strong and wholesome in its ideals out among men is more than to be able to give money in any amount. To keep one's life up to such ideals in the heartless drive and competition of modern life means more than to extract large quantities of gold out of the mine of barter and trade, and to give some of it away.

And money is less than personal service. Great deference is paid to checks and subscriptions. The man who can draw a large check for some good object, and who may by dint of much dexterous handling be induced to write his name under some large figure, is treated with awe. But there's another man who stands higher up in the scale, and to whom hats should go farther off and more quickly. That is the strong man who gives personal service. There may be a blessed partnership between the man of money and the man of service. There often is. But he is an unfortunate man, to be pitied, who lets anything else crowd out of his life the privilege of giving some of his self out in personal service for others. These are some of gold's limitations.

The Best Partnership.

Give money good partners, and there is no end to what it can do. Let prayer and sacrifice and money form a life-partnership, and that first sentence can be revised, and greatly strengthened by the revision: Money is almost almighty. It gets all the good qualities of its partners as long as it stays in the partnership, on good working terms.

It isn't the head of the firm, however. Prayer belongs in that place. It must direct. It is the prayer's touch with God that hallows the gold and gives to it some of God's omnipotence. Money is the working partner, best when hard at work, and famous for the amount of work it can do in obeying orders from the head of the house.

It gives a strange sense of awe to realize that the bit of money you hold in your hand can be used to change a life, aye, more, to change many lives. That money is yours to control. It came to you in exchange for your labor or your skill. It is yours, for the sweat of your brow or your brain is upon it. And now it can be sent out, and the result will be a life utterly changed, purified, and redeemed.

Through your partnership the money produces something greater than itself. And that changed life becomes the centre of a new power, changing other lives out to the far rim of an ever-widening circle. It may have cost you much. Some of your very life has gone out in the work that brought into your hands that bit of gold. It is red with your blood. And now, if you choose, it can be sent out and made to bring new life in to some one else. Life has gone from you in getting it, and life will come to another in your giving it out, under the blessed Master's transmuting touch.

Jesus' Teaching.

Jesus' teaching about money is startling. I mean that it stands in such utter contrast to the commonly accepted standards out in the world, and inside in the Church, that the contrast startles one sharply.

There are four passages in which His money teachings group, largely. There's the "Lay-not-up-for-yourselves-treasure-upon-the-earth" bit in the sermon on the Mount;[30] with the still stronger phrase in the Luke parallel, "Sell that ye have, and give."[31] There is the incident of the earnest young man who was rich;[32] the parable of the wealthy farmer in Luke, twelfth chapter;[33] and the whole sixteenth chapter of Luke, with that great ninth verse, whose full meaning has been so little grasped. The truth taught in each of these is practically the same thing.