When I look at the
life of Jesus I see that the purpose of consecration, of emancipation,
is service of His fellow-men. I cannot think for a moment of Jesus as
doing that which so many religious people think they are doing when they
serve Christ, when they give their lives to Him. I cannot think of Him
as simply saving His own soul, living His own life, and completing His
own nature in the sight of God. It is a life of service from beginning
to end. He gives himself to man because He is absolutely the Child of
God, and He sets up service, and nothing but service, to be the ultimate
purpose, the one great desire, on which the souls of His followers
should be set, as His own soul is set, upon it continually.
What is it that Christ has left to be His symbol in the world, that we
put upon our churches, what we wear upon our hearts, that stands forth
so perpetually us the symbol of Christ's life? Is it a throne from which
a ruler utters his decrees? Is it a mountain top upon which some rapt
seer sits, communing with himself and with the voices around him, and
gathering great truth into his soul and delighting in it? No, not the
throne and not the mountain top. It is the cross. Oh, my brethren, that
the cross should be the great symbol of our highest measure, that that
which stands for consecration, that that which stands for the divine
statement that a man does not live for himself and that a man loses
himself when he does live for himself--that that should be the symbol of
our religion and the great sign and token of our faith? What sort of
Christians are we that go about asking for the things of this life
first, thinking that it shall make us prosperous to be Christians, and
then a little higher asking for the things that pertain to the eternal
prosperity, when the Great Master, who leaves us the great law, in whom
our Christian life is spiritually set forth, has as His great symbol the
cross, the cross, the sign of consecration and obedience? It is not
simply suffering too.
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