WORLDLINESS continued
Our Lord doesn't want us to stay in the sheepfold . . . but out on the frontier . . . under danger
after year after year. And they don’t live 10,000 miles away. They live two blocks down the street, two houses down the street, right next door to us, behind us, all around us, and we don’t see the need for sacri fice! We’ve become deaf to the cries that surround us. We’ve become hardened to them — to all the hands that reach out from every side. We take the place of -the Pharisee and the Levite in that parable of the Good Samaritan, who passed by on the other side of the road when they saw the wounded traveler lest they become defiled themselves by helping him. We’re there really. That’s not the modernist and the liberal. That’s the fundamentalist Christian who is so concerned about being defiled with worldliness that he’s lost his touch with the world. He’s no longer interested in helping worldly people, in meeting their problems, in learning to become friends with them and meeting their needs. That’s where we stand. Now there are many people who sense the hypoc risy of this kind of Christian living and they try to remedy it, and the result is that they go to the other extreme. They rush out and they begin to mix with the world in every way. They begin to drink cocktails and take up card playing and small gambling, and they learn how to dance, and they move in with the world. Now please, I’m not making lists of things; please don’t misunderstand me. I’m simply trying to char acterize some of the thinking of a life like this. They adopt the world’s standards and the world’s values in the hope of being of some influence to the world in some small way for Christ. Now the result of that is always tragic. When we become like the world we lose all our power to influ ence the world. I remember reading of a boy who had a cageful of sparrows and he thought it would be nice to teach the sparrows how to sing like a canary. So he bought a canary and put the canary in the cage with the spar rows. After a couple of weeks he came running in to his mother and said, “Mother! The sparrows are not singing like the canary. The canary is now chirping like the sparrows!” That’s always what happens. The canary begins to chirp like the sparrows. If you want to see the folly of a life like that, go out and stand by the shores of the Dead Sea and look at that cheerless, dreary, lifeless waste. The most desolate spot on the face of the earth. And then go read the story of Lot who moved into Sodom in order to try to win it and influence it by being like it and see what he lost as a result. That dreary, desolate place stands as a mark of the folly of moving in to be like the world.
T T T T e l l now, what’s the answer? How do we V J reach the world and still not be like it? Well, we must learn to walk and to live ” ^ on a frontier between these two ex tremes. We must be in the world, we must seek worldly friends, deliberately become friends with them. Invite them into our homes, go into their homes. We’re going to have to ignore some things that are irritating to us, some of their habits, some of their ways of thinking and talking. We have to ignore it for awhile. T J . here xs no man that is altogether secure from tempta tions while he liveth. When one temptation goeth away, another cometh; and we shall ever have something to suffer. Many seek to fly temptations, and fall more grievously into them, for by flight alone we cannot overcome. He that only avoideth them outwardly, and doth not pluck them up by the roots, shall profit little: yea, temptations will soon return unto him, and he shall feel them worse than before. By patience (through God’s help) thou shalt more easily overcome, than by harsh and disquieting efforts in thy own strength. — Thomas a Kempis But we must make friends with them. We dare not shut ourselves away from the perils and the dangers and the dilemmas of the world around us. Our Lord doesn’t want us to! We must he in the world, seek worldly friends, but we must not be like the world. You see, the word that we need to emphasize is not separateness; that’s not the word if you think of that as withdrawing, but the real word and best transla tion here is distinctiveness. We’re to be distinct, dif ferent. Dare to be different. Be in the world like our Lord was — in it up to the hilt. But never to live trader false colors. We’re not to be thinking like the world, you see; our attitude is different. Our thoughts are different. And yet we’re to he with them. We’re to be out-and-out Christians. Distinct but not distasteful. We’re to be sheep among wolves, as our Lord says. That is, we’re not to stay in the sheep- fold. We’re disobedient if we stay in the sheepfold. We’re to he out, He wants us out among the wolves, boldly out there. Well, you say, isn’t that dangerous for sheep to go out in the midst of wolves? Yes, it is. Of course it is.
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THE KING'S BUSINESS
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