May 1927 ■
T h e K i n g ’ s B u s i n e s s
283
Four Classes of the Unsaved B y D e . J. S tuart H olden
8 UKE 15 is probably the best known and the most generally loved of all New Testament chapters. Why ? Because it records Christ’s incomparable illustrations of the Divine Love and the lengths to which it goes in search of its objective; of its unconditioned forgiveness of injury to. itself; of variations of human experience consequent upon its own outrage and denial. In all ages men have seen themselves in the lost sheep, and the lost silver, and the lost sons, and have recognized in the shepherd, the housewife, and the father, the Love that sought and found and rescued them, First of all, we have the parable of,the straying sheep; that is the parable of^ the silly, the thoughtless, those who yield to the herd instinct, those who get their heads down into the lush grass and nibble themselves away into danger which they do not recognize. They are the victims of their own ignorance, for they are altogether unaware of their true worth as evidenced by the search of the Shepherd. Moreover, they are for the most part victims of some one’s carelessness. Somebody has left a broken hedge unmended, or a gate open; and out into the perilous high way have gone the sheep. These lost sheep round about us, remember, are not entirely to blame for their own con dition. The blame must be traced back to those who have left the gap in the hedge open; and the sheep nature has done the rest. These lost sheep are lost because they lack a sense of direction. They cannot find their way back. They are not in themselves vicious—a sheep is the least vicious of any animal; yet they wander in a vicious circle every circuit of which simply increases the hopelessness of their condition. They cannot get back. Of themselves they want nothing but sweet pasturage. They are blind to every other consideration, and are, moreoveT, extremely shy of approach. F ound E verywhere in S ociety Of such are those young people who have not, as yet, come into contact with Jesus Christ. They are to be found everywhere—in society, in our homes, in our schools and colleges, in the world’s idly busy crowds. They are, in the main, heedless, restless, thoughtlessly keeping up with the throng, and bleating in unison its silly catch-phrases. They are mistaken, of course, and self-opinionated and pathet ically self-satisfied. But they are of tremendous worth to the Shepherd! If we were only living in true fellowship with Him, sharing His aims, filled with His Spirit, we should recognize in these young people all about us their splendid possibilities, and should search for them prayer fully, patiently, lovingly and with the wisdom that is from above. All the time we actually have the secret of which they are in quest. What is it ? They are in eager quest of pas turage without danger, or protection without compulsion, and of security without monotony. And were we filled with the Spirit of Jesus, doing the works that He did—aye, and greater works, as He promised we should—we should be impelled rather to seek than to scold them. We should display the gifts of the Gospel rather than preach inces
santly to them. We should be impelled to go after them in love until we find themjjgruntil we find common ground between our convictions and their yearnings. And we should win them to the Good Shepherd. T he L ost C oin C lass There is the second group of lost ones. They are not a bit like sheep—not alert, restless, in almost perpetual motion; but rather are as insensible to their lost state as a coin that has fallen out of a woman’s hand and rolled under a bed or a bureau. The lost coin, like the sheep, however, is lost by somebody’s sheer carelessness. But whatever be the first cause, it is, in consequence, out of right relationship with life and with those economic forces which give to coins their value. And there are men who are exactly like coins out of circulation. They are making no contribution to life, for they are out of true relation ship with God and with His will for which they were created. They are good enough when they are found and put into circulation. The metal is good; the image is there; the superscription has not been defaced. They just represent the ordinary folk, as like to each other as any one coin is like to another, who have got wrong ideas of life, who are selfish, narrow, self-contained and self-con- tent. They are not doing harm to any one, at any rate not wittingly. But they are altogether unaware that they were created for a life of serviceable fellowship with all God’s other children, and that they are denying the very reason for their being. They have almost immeasurable potentialities for gbod or evil, as money, indeed, always has when it is in alliance with the great social forces of the world. It has been well said that “religion is not a'thing that is ever taught; it is always caught!” If anybody gets reli gion, he gets it by way of infection; he gets it from some one who has it. And these men, like lost coins, whose views of life are self-centered, and narrow, and unwor thy, and wasteful, and wrong; whose lives are, in truest meaning, lost, will only be won to Christ and His way of life when they see lives lived before them which are cen tered in H im ; whose orbit is not self-pleasing, but the will of God and the service of men; whose quality is convinc ing of the truth of His Evangel. T he P rodigal C lass Thirdly, Jesus said there are those who are like the younger son in the parable of the father and the two boys —the lost younger son, whom we generally call the prodigal. He was lost, mark you, not because he went into the far country, nor because he became a spendthrift rioter, but because he did not, while in the home, come “to himself.” He did not come to a realization of his own nature and the purpose of his being. Riotous living was not his essential sin, nor were extravagance and impurity. These were rather just the outcome of his wrong ideas about his father and about his own life. It was quite evident, from what Jesus tells Us of him, that he had dwelt on what was due to him rather than on what was due from him. At last he broke out into a
its largeness of heart; of its entire dependableness in all the
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