| Week-Day Religion |
Chapter 12 |
Page 2 |
We shall be prepared to seek the good of others in the largest, truest way only when we have learned to look upon human lives as our Lord did. There was not a poor ruined creature that came into his presence in whom he did not see, under all the wasting of sin, something that he esteemed worthy of his love. There was not one whom he thought it a degradation to serve. When the disciples where quarreling as to which one should take the servant’s place and wash the feet of the others, he quietly arose and performed the humble service. He was never more conscious of his exalted glory than he was that hour, and yet there was no reluctance in his heart. The question of their immeasurable inferiority to him never rose in his mind. He never though for a moment that these men were not worthy to have such menial service performed for them by such hands as his. He saw in them something which made it no degradation even for his divinity to serve them. When we have learned to look upon human lives as he did it will be no painful task to minister, at whatever cost, to the lowliest and most unworthy about us.
We are willing to serve those whom we honor. But we are apt to hold our lives as too sacred to be spent or sacrificed for the sake of those whom we regard as beneath ourselves. A tender and delicate woman leaves her lovely, sheltered home, and finds her way into the fever wards of the city hospital or into the gloomy cells of a prison to try to help the suffering or the criminals she finds there. A cultured girl turns away from comfort and luxury, from circles of loving friends, and from social honors and triumphs, and plunges into the heart of a heathen land to live out her beautiful and golden life in toiling for savages. A godly young man turns away from applause and ease, and gives himself to the rescue of the squalid classes in a great city. On all hands people say, “These lives are too precious for such work. They are too refined, too beautiful, too delicate, too valuable, to be sacrificed in such service.” But if there was nothing in that most precious, that divine life of the Lord Jesus that was too good to be poured out in serving such as those for whom he gave his life, shall we say that any human life is so sacred, so valuable, that it may not find fitting employment in serving the poorest, the most ignorant, the most squalid men and women to be found in prison, in jungle, in hospital, in dreary tenement or wretched garret?
When we learn to measure others, not by their rank and station, but by the worth of their spiritual nature, by their immortality, by the possibilities that lie in the most ruined life, it will be no longer humiliating for us to do even the humblest service for the least of God’s creatures. Then there will be nothing in us that will seem too rich or too sacred to be poured out for the sake even of the most despised. We may honor ourselves and may be conscious of all the power and dignity of our lives as God’s children, and yet not think ourselves too good to minister to the smallest and the least.
Page 2
<< Prior Page 1 2 3 Next Page >>