115
T h e
K i n g ’ s
B u s i n e s s
March 1930
I Qrumbs
tjbromthe K ing’s !
By th e Editor
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tice safely, and be all the happier for our practice of them, but if to our brother they be fraught with peril, if they make it harder for him to do the right, then, for our brother’s sake, if we be Christians, we are called to the limitation o f our liberty.” There is no room in Christianity for the overscrupu- lous and worrying conscience. We are in Christ, and the Son hath made us free, and we are never to lose the glad ness of that freedom. All that the Scripture insists upon is this : That we are to use it in the bonds of love and never to'hesitate to limit it if by so doing we can help a brother. You say that is hard? I grant you it is some times hard ; the Gospel quite admits that it is hard. It may be irritating, when we want to live, to have to con sider also the weak brother. And then, flashing upon us in its glory, there comes the thought that Christ has died for him—and after that, we do not find it hard at all. Once we realize the sacrifice of Christ, all our little déniais are nothing. He gave up His life for that weaker brother, and shall we not give up our liberty ? It is thus that we come to have fellowship with Him, and to know Him better as we take our journey, for fellowship grows not alone by what.we get; it grows also by what we yield. T HE Gospel of a broken heart demands the ministry of bleeding hearts. If that succession be broken we lose our fellowship with the Lord. As soon as we cease to bleed we cease to bless. When our sympathy loses its pang we can no longer be the servants of the passion. We no longer “ fill up . . . the afflictions o f Christ.” The Apostle Paul was a man of the most vivid and real istic sympathy. “ Who is weak and I am not weak?” His sympathy was a perpetuation o f' the passion. What a broad, exquisite surface of perceptiveness he exposed to the needs and sorrows of the race. Wherever there was a pang, it tore the strings of his heart. Now it is the painful fears and alarms of a runaway slave; and now the dumb, dark agonies of people far away. The Apostle felt as vividly as he fought, and he lived to all he saw. He was being continually aroused by the sighs and cries of his fellow men. He heard a cry from Macedonia, and the pain on the distant shore was reflected in his own life. He was hearing cries every day. Wandering, pain-filled, fear- filled voices, calling out of the night ; voices from Corinth, from Athens, from Rome also, and from distant Spain. “ Who is weak and I am not weak?” He was exhausted with other folks’ exhaustion, and in the heavy burden someness he touched the mystery of Gethsemane and had fellowship with the sufferings of his Lord. Does the cry of the world’s need pierce the heart and ring through the fabric of our dreams? Do we “ fill up” our Lord’s sufferings with our own sufferings, or are we the unsympathetic ministers of a mighty passion? I am often amazed at the hardness and callousness of my own heart. I am amazed how small and insensitive is the sur- — o — x “ Fill Up the Sufferings’ ’
Liberty and hove jp^ggag^HE Holy Spirit, through the Apostle Paul, pic- jiS F / tures a Corinthian Christian invited to dinner by W i/Tb a friend. That friend is a heathen man and in comparatively humble life. Now, in the food yM-Vr that was set upon the table it was almost cer- r o l tain there would be temple meat—that is, meat of beasts that had been sacrificed, and then sold to the market by the priests. And the difficulty for the Christian was this: Was he at liberty to eat that meat? If it had been offered to idols in the temple, would not eating it mean fellowship with idols? It was about that difficulty they wrote to Paul, and his answer is supremely noble: “ Go to your dinner,” he says, “ and ask no questions. Eat what is set before you, and be thankful. I f you start worrying about things like that, you will d o . con science irreparable mischief. ‘ The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof.’ ” But now suppose that next to that Christian brother there is sitting another and a weaker Christian. He is struggling to be true to Christ, but the pull of the old heathen life is terrific; and he turns to his stronger brother by his side, and says to him, anxiously, “ That is temple meat. That meat has been offered to idols.” The question was: What was the stronger brother to do then? If he partook, his neighbor might partake, and that might be opening the gates to ruin for him. He would go home beset by the dark sense that he was again in fellowship with demons. But, on the other hand, if he did not par take, out of consideration for that weaker conscience, what became of his liberty in Christ ? So they wrote to Paul about that also. And I think you ■know how he replied. “ As a Christian man,” he said, “ it is your bounden duty to consider the weakness of your brother. Get into fellowship with Jesus Christ; you are called to the bearing of each other’s burdens. God forbid that you should use your liberty to offend one of these little ones.” There is no word here of personal safety. The stronger brother was perfectly secure. . For him, an idol was nothing in the world. He could eat and drink with good conscience. The only question was: How would this action tell on the tempted and weak Christian by his side? And Paul says that is to be determinative. It might be very annoying to be hampered so; one might regard his neighbor as a nuisance. It was hard that a man might not enjoy himself because he had a weakling looking on, and it is then that Paul, in that great way of his, lifts up the matter into such an atmosphere that the man who is tempted to fret at his restriction, bows his head in shame. “ Have you forgotten,” says the Apostle, “ that for that weak brother Jesus died? Have you for gotten that Christ for him endured the agony and the anguish of the Cross? Compared with that, how infinitely little is any sacrifice that you are called to make in the restriction of your Christian liberty. None of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself. There are many things in life that are quite lawful and on whose lawful ness we must insist; there are things that we could prac
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