| Week-Day Religion |
Chapter 11 |
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Over all the Church the prevalent tendency upon the part of lay members is to shrink from the exercise of their gifts in the Master’s work. And the plea is unfitness, want of ability. Classes go untaught in many a Sabbath school, and there are thousands of children that ought to be gathered in and trained. Meanwhile, there are large numbers of Christian men and women in the churches, with abundant ability for such service, but who shrink from it and try to satisfy their own uneasy consciences by humbly pleading unfitness for the delicate duties. There are urgent necessities for work in every line of Christian enterprise. There are fields that need only reasonable culture to render them fruitful. There are voices calling to duty that break upon our ears every moment amid the noises of the street. There are cries of human distress and want that are for ever coming to our hearts with their urgent appeals. But amid all these opportunities for usefulness, these waiting, clamorous duties and these pathetic pleadings for help, gifted men and women sit with folded hands.
It is not because they have no interest in the Master’s work or are insensible to the calls of duty and the cries of distress. It is because they are unconscious of their own power. They do not believe that they have ability to do the things that need to be done. They think it would be presumption for them, with their weak and unskilled hands, to undertake the duties that solicit them. So they fold their talent away and bury it, and think that they have acted in the line of a beautiful and commendable humility, in modestly declining such important responsibilities. It does not occur to them that they have grievously sinned.
Our humility serves us falsely when it leads us to shrink from any duty. The plea of unfitness or inability is utterly insufficient to excuse us. It is too startlingly like that offered by the one talented man in the parable, whose gift was so small that there seemed no use in trying to employ it. The lurid light that the sequel to his story flashes upon us should arouse us to read the meaning of personal responsibility, and to hasten to employ every shred of a gift that God has bestowed upon us.
The talent may be very small – so small that is scarcely seems to matter whether it is used or not so far as its impression on the world or on other lives is concerned; and yet we can never know what is small or what is great in this life, in which every cause starts consequences that sweep into eternity.
“Only a thought; but the work it wrought
Could never by tongue or pen be taught,
For it ran through a life like a thread of gold,
And the life bore fruit a hundred fold.
“Only a word; but ‘twas spoken in love,
With a whispered prayer to the Lord above;
And the angels in heaven rejoiced once more,
For a new born soul entered in by the door.”
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