insensitive and unsympathetic and smug and compla cent in their thoughts and in their lives. We can get all worked up over missionaries 10 or 12 thousand miles away, but people can live right next door to us and be perishing in their spiritual agony and we do nothing. That’s worldliness. It results from this business of thinking we can live our own lives; that we can with draw from the world and create our own little tight circles and live within them. We have changed the Lord’s words “ Go ye,” into “ Send ye,” and we think if we’re sending out people into the mission field, that’s the adequate answer to our own responsibility. But the Lord didn’t say that. He said, “Go ye into all the world.” And I don’t think He meant that only geographically. I think He meant that from the standpoint of into all the ways of the world, into all the thinking of the world, into all the attitudes of the world, in order that you might under stand and have some sympathy with the poor dying wretches who live next door to you that are in the world and lost in the world. I think this is one of the most tragic things about our Christian lives. We become disobedient Christians, you see. We forget our own personal responsibility in witnessing. We talk about witnessing but we sel dom ever do it. We’re embarrassed about it. We con fess in moments of honesty that we’re embarrassed and ill at ease in this process of trying to witness to someone else and talk to them. We confess we don’t know how to do it. We’re supposed to be imitating our Master who gave up all things, who pleased not Himself, who laid down His life in order that He might win these lost worldlings to Himself. But when it comes to us, we don’t want to give up an afternoon of golf or a night of bowling or an after noon of tea or open our homes or give up some time on Sunday to do something to win these lost ones. I sn’t that the truth? Doesn’t that describe us? When I think sometimes of our comfortable, ease ful, luxurious lives that many of us lead and then read in the Scriptures about those early Christians who loved not their lives unto death, I tell 3 >ou I sometimes grow sick with the very shame of it. Why don’t we have the spirit of sacrifice? Well, I think it’s because our view of separation has built a shell about us so that we don’t see the need of sacri fice. And that’s the terrible tragedy of it. We’re living in the midst of people who are dying for what we have, really who are hungry, who are putting bullets through their heads, and jumping off bridges, and turning on the gas, and living in utter misery year CO N T IN U E D 27
Building walls does not shut it out, any more than building a wall or a fence around your backyard will keep the weeds out of your garden. In order to have the weeds out of your garden, you’ve got to cultivate it and plant it with good seed or it’ll produce weeds forever. I’ve had a fence around my backyard for five years and my garden is loaded with weeds. In fact, because of the fence they’ve all intermarried with one another and I have a special variety of my own! But they’re still weeds! You see, the fence doesn’t keep them out. T o w the third great result of this type of I I thinking is a total or partial loss of the ^ spirit of sacrifice in our lives. When we ““ “ ^ avoid worldly people because we’re trying to avoid worldliness, we also lose most of our oppor tunity to sacrifice for Christ’s sake. The result is, and I’ve seen it and you have too, that this process of withdrawing into our own little watertight Chris tian circle of affairs results in people who become
God washed the world last night With sweet, refreshing rain; And thirsty earth reached up to drink O f that life-giving gain. God washed my heart last night With tears, both bitter, sweet; He probed in hidden corners, dark, . And washed it clear, complete. "My child,” His voice spoke sweet and low, "This storm came as a grace; Lean hard upon my breast, dear one, And look into my face.” Completely spent, I looked and prayed, "Dear Father, be it Thine, To mold and make me as Thou wilt, Thy will forever mine.”
— Althea S. Miller
NOVEMBER 1956
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