George H. Morrison - Devotional Sermons

Devotional For

July 30

      Some Features of Christ's Working
      
      My Father worketh hitherto, and I work--Joh. 5:17
      
      Christ Taught That Work Is Honorable
      
      It is characteristic of the Christian Gospel that its Savior should be a worker. In the old world, it was hardly an honorable thing to work. It was a thing for slaves and serfs and strangers, not for freeborn men. Hence work and greatness rarely went together; and nothing could be more alien to the genius of paganism than a toiling God. Jesus has changed all that. He has made it impossible for us to think of God as indolent. It was a revolution when Jesus taught "God loves." But it was hardly less revolutionary when He taught "God works."
      
      And He not only taught it, He lived it too. Men saw in Christ a life of endless toil, and "he that hath seen me hath seen the Father." Had Jesus lived and taught in the quiet groves of some academy, it would have made all the difference in the Christian view of work, and all the difference in the Christian view of God. But Jesus was a carpenter. And Jesus stooped to the very humblest tasks till He became the pattern and prince of workers. I want to look, then, at some features of His work, for He has left us an example that we should follow in His steps.
      
      The Magnitude of His Aim
      
      Looking back, then, upon the work of Jesus, what strikes me first is the magnitude of His aim compared with the meanness of His methods that arrests me first.
      
      It should be so with every Christian toiler. It is a simple lesson for every man and woman who seeks to serve in the true Christian spirit. Meanly surrounded, he should be facing heavenwards. Meanly equipped in all things else, he should be mightily equipped in noble hope. If I am Christ's, I cannot measure possibilities by methods. My heaven is always greater than my grasp. If I am Christ's, I cherish the loftiest hope and am content to work for it in lowliest ways.
      
      Difference between a Visionary and a Christian
      
      And it is there the difference comes in between a visionary and a Christian. A visionary dreams his dreams and builds his castles in the air, and they are radiant and wonderful and golden, and the light of heaven glitters on every minaret. And then, because he cannot realize them now and cannot draw them in all their beauty down to earth, the visionary folds his hands, does nothing, and the vision goes. But the true Christian, with hopes as glorious as any visionary's because they are the hopes of Jesus Christ, carries the glory of them into his common duty and into the cross-bearing of the dreary day. And though the generations die, and the purposes of God take a thousand years to ripen, he serves and is content--
      
      Jesus shall reign where'er the sun
          Doth his successive journeys run.
      
      Untiring Labor with Unruffled Calm
      
      Once more, as I look back upon the work of Jesus, I find there untiring labor joined with unruffled calm.
      
      There never was a ministry, whether of man or angel, so varied, so intense, or so sustained as was the public ministry of Jesus. He preaches in the synagogue at Nazareth. He preaches on the hill and on the sea. With infinite patience and unexhausted tenderness He trains the twelve. And all that we know of Him is not a thousandth part of what He said and did. Charged with that mighty task and with only three short years to work it out, shall we not find Christ anxious, and will we not light on hours of feverish unrest? There is no trace of that. With all its stir, no life is so restful as the life of Jesus. With all its incident and crowding of event, we are amazed at the supreme tranquillity of Christ. There is time for teaching and there is time for healing. There is time for answering and time for prayer. Each hour is full of work and full of peace. No day hands on its debts to tomorrow. Jesus can cry, "It is finished," at the close. Here for each worker is the supreme example of untiring labor and unruffled calm.
      
      Let us remember that. It is the very lesson that we need today. There are two dangers that, in these bustling times, beset the busy man. One is that he be so immersed in multifarious business that all the lights of heaven are blotted out. The calm and quietness that are our heritage as Christians are put to flight in the unceasing round. Life lacks its unity, loses its central plan, becomes a race and not a stately progress, slackens its grasp upon eternal things, till we grow fretful in the constant pressure; and men who looked to us, as followers of Jesus, for a lesson, find us as worried and anxious as themselves. That is the one extreme; it is the danger of the practical mind. But then there is the other; it is the mystic's danger. It is that, realizing the utter need of fellowship with God, a man should neglect the tasks that his time brings him and should do nothing because there is so much to do. All mysticism tends to that. It is a recoil from an exaggerated service. It is the shutting of the ear to the more clamorous calls that we may hear more certainly the still small voice.
      
      But all that is noblest in the mystic's temper and all that is worthiest in the man of deeds, mingled and met in the service of our Lord. Here is the multitude of tasks. Here is the perfect calm. And that is the very spirit that we need to rebaptize our service of today. God in the life means an eternal purpose. And work achieved on the line of an eternal purpose is work without friction and duty without fret. God in the life means everlasting love. And to realize an everlasting love is to experience unutterable peace.
      
      He Had a Mission with a Message
      
      Again, as I look back upon Christ's work, there is another feature of it that strikes me. I find in it a mission for all, joined with a message for each.
      
      Times without number we find Jesus surrounded by a multitude. Christ is the center of many crowds. Wherever He is, the crowd is sure to gather. And how He was stirred and moved and filled with compassion for the multitude, ail readers of the Gospel story know. Every chord of His human heart was set vibrating by a vast assembly. The common life of congregated thousands touched Him, true man, to all His heights and depths. He fed them, taught them. This was His parting charge, "Go ye into all the world and preach!" Yet for all this--the wide sweep of His mission--no teacher ever worked on so minute a scale as Jesus Christ. Did any crowd ever get deeper teaching than Nicodemus when he came alone? And was the woman of Samaria despised because she was companionless? How many sheep did the shepherd go to seek when the ninety-and-nine were in the fold? How many pieces of silver had been lost? How many sons came home from the far country before the father brought out his robes and killed the calf? Christ did not work on the scale of a thousand or on the scale of ten, but on the scale of one. Companionless men were born, and companionless they must be born again.
      
      Jesus Insists on Quality, Not Quantity
      
      We cannot afford, in these days, when all the tendency is toward the statistics of the crowd--we cannot afford to despise that great example. It is true, there is a stimulus in numbers. There is an indescribable sympathy that runs like an electric thrill through a great gathering; and heights of eloquence and song and prayer are sometimes reached where the crowd is that never could have been reached in solitude. But for all that, all Christlike work is on the scale of one. Jesus insists on quality, not quantity. And when the books are opened and the strange story of the past is read, some voices that the world never heard, as of a mother or a sister or a friend, shall be found more like Christ's than others that have thrilled thousands by their eloquence. Pray over that sweet prayer of the Moravian liturgy: "From the desire of being great, good Lord, deliver us." A word may change a life. It did for the Philippian jailer. A look may soften a hard heart. It did for Peter. To sanctify life's trifles, to redeem the opportunities for good which the dullest day affords, never to go to rest without some secret effort to bring but a little happiness to some single heart--men who do this, unnoticed through the unnoticed years, grow Christlike; men who do this shall be amazed to waken yonder and find that they are standing nearer God than preacher or than martyr, if preaching and if martyrdom were all.
      
      Seeming Failure and Singular Triumph
      
      Lastly, as I look back upon that life of Christ, I see another feature. I see in it seeming failure joined with signal triumph. If ever there was a life that seemed to have failed, it was the life of Jesus. For a time it had looked as if triumph had been coming. The people had been awakened. The national hope had begun to center round Him. A little encouragement, and they would have risen in enthusiasm for Messiah. But when Jesus went to His death, all that was changed. The people had deserted Him. His very disciples had forsaken Him and fled. His hopes were shattered and His cause was lost. His kingdom had been a splendid dream, and Jesus had been the king of visionaries. Now it was over. The cross and the grave were the last act in the great tragedy. Jesus had bravely tried, and He had failed. Yes! so it seemed. Perhaps even to the nearest and the dearest so it seemed. God's hand had written failure over the work of Jesus, when lo! on the third day, the gates of the grave are burst, and Jesus rises. And then the Holy Ghost descends on the apostles, and they begin to preach. And the tidings are carried to the isles and pierce the continents. And a dying world begins to breathe again: and hope comes back, and purity and honor, and pardon and a new power to live, and a new sense of God; and it all sprang from the very moment when they wagged their heads and said, "He saved others, himself he cannot save." Failure? Not failure--triumph! It was a seeming failure in the eyes of man; it was a signal triumph in the plans of God.
      
      Seeming Failure Is Often True Success
      
      O heart so haunted by the sense of failure, remember that. O worker on whose best efforts, both to do and be, failure seems stamped, remember that. If I have learned anything from the sacred story, it is this, that seeming failure is often success. When John the Baptist lay in his gloomy prison, it must have seemed to him that he had failed. Yet even then, a voice that never erred was calling him the greatest born of women. When Paul lay bound in Rome, did no sense of failure visit him? Yet there, chained to the soldier, he penned these letters that run like the chariots of Christ. God is the judge of failure, and not you. Leave it to Him, and go forward. Successes here are often failures yonder, and failures here are sometimes triumphs there.