Plain Christianity ingly good and generous and brave and unselfish, and all the rest of it, without much effort and without any faith, has really nothing to say to the man who knows he is by nature, and possibly through his own upbringing and circumstances, selfish and suspicious and afraid of things and people, and at the same time ashamed of himself for being afraid.
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ly focused Himself at a particular point in time, in the man Jesus Christ . . . It may well sound to you like an amazing thing to be lieve, but it isn’t, surely, out of all reason. For if God wants to make Himself known to us human beings, then it is no good overwhelming us with His greatness or His power. He must express His character in terms that we can understand. He must reveal Himself within the limits of a human life. Now this Man Jesus Christ once said that if a man sincerely wanted to cooperate with the plans of God, then he would know by a kind of inner endorsement whether His own teaching was a purely human invention or was in sober fact a revelation of God Himself. The ac tual words, which I expect you know, are: “ If any man will do his will [that is, the Father’s will], he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.” Now this is exactly what hap pens in practice. For when a man takes this leap of faith—and that is what it is to start with—and ac cepts Christ as the revealed Char acter of God, and His teaching as the revealed Will of God, then he does find within himself this in-
Good News, for it brings the hope of being the-person-he-knew-he- was-always-meant-to-be to the man who is bogged down by his own failures and fears and sins. I spoke a moment ago about Jesus Christ being God, so to speak, focused in a human be ing. I think unless we can ac cept this (the central part of the Christian faith) we are left with thoughts of God so huge and over whelming that He becomes quite unknowable. During the last few years science has been discovering for us not only the immense size of the universe, but a thousand different complexities in its work ing that our forefathers never dreamed of. If we even begin to imagine the kind of mind that must be behind all the bewildering phe nomena that science observes (and several million others it has not yet observed), the idea of a personal God becomes impossible for the mind to take in. And that is of course one reason for the kind of noncommittal agnosticism which afflicts so many modem people. But just suppose the Christian claim is true—that a God so im measurably vast and infinitely be yond our understanding deliberate
I hope you will see what I am driving at. The world is full of a kind of infection, of selfishness and fear and greed, and it isn’t in the least useful simply to say, “Why can’t you be like so-and-so; he’s always kind and generous and hon est?” But of course plain Christian ity can say a great deal more than that. It does not go around de nouncing men as sinners but it does point to a way out. Let us for a moment go back to the Source of the Christian religion. If you will assume for the moment what I firmly believe, that Jesus Christ was God focused in a human being, it becomes immediately im mensely important to see how He dealt with the situation. He onee said, with a certain irony no doubt, that He hadn’t come “ to call the righteous, but sinners to change their ways.” And indeed, it is plain from the four Gospels that sinners of all kinds, that is, people who knew their lives were on the wrong track, flocked to hear Him, and many followed Him. Yet we very rarely find Him calling people sin ners; what He called them to do was to “ follow” Him. Whether it was people like James and John who had a good steady fishing business, or Matthew who had built for himself a nice comfortable racket in the tax-col lector’s line, or whoever it was, it seems that Jesus always appealed to the real man living underneath the facade presented to the world. “ Follow Me,” He said, and that real person inside each one of them fol lowed, sometimes, I think, to his own surprise. All through the New Testament records there is an alto gether astonishing testimony to the power of Christ to change people from within. The call of Christ is
ARE YOU SAVED ? A high school lad who was a new Christian was given a button by his Sunday school teacher and on the button were the words “ Jesus Saves.” A classmate jokingly asked what it meant. The lad stammered around and then changed the subject. He just didn’t know how to answer. The problem seems to be merely one of words. “ Are you saved?” is an overworked cliche that has lost much of its meaning for the average person. But actually the question is just as valid as if he asked if a drowning person had been saved by the lifeguard. Recall that the Bible says, “ and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins.” It would do us little good if Christ were but a teacher or a good example. He is Saviour. And because He is He can do something about everything that is wrong in our life. He alone can forgive all our sin, wipe away our tears and meet the deep need of our heart. This is something we all want and only Christ our Saviour is adequate to meet this want.
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THE K IN G 'S BU SINESS
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