God’s Appreciation of Humble Service
By J. B. Hawthorne, 1898“Whosoever shall give you a cup of water to drink in my name, because ye belong to Christ, verily I say unto you, he shall not lose his reward” (Mark 9:41).
To me everything that belongs to Christianity is precious, but there is no feature of it which I admire and love more than its sympathy with the weak and lowly. When Jesus Christ entered upon His mission He sought neither favor nor recognition from men of authority and influence. Herod sat in his golden palace at Tiberias in dissolute splendor, but of him He took no notice except to say to His disciples: “Go ye and tell that fox.” He wanted Herod to understand that He neither courted his favor nor dreaded his frown. He despised him, not for the office he held, but for the corrupt life which he lived.
The Pharisees were the dominant religious party of Judea and were recognized as the religious aristocracy of their time. They swept through the temple courts in their fringed robes with supreme haughtiness and with sovereign contempt for everybody who did not belong to their sect. For them Christ has no words but rebuke and reprobation. Their smiles and patronage He did not covet.
The dreaded emperor was all-powerful at Rome. To him Jesus sent no appeal; of him, He sought no favor. He had no more regard for his influence than for that of the humblest subject of his empire. For worldly pride and display, for despotic power and cruelty, for extravagance and lust, He had nothing but frowns. But for suffering, weakness, and humble fidelity, He had infinite compassion and love.
To the haughty and self-sufficient He was wrathful as the storm, but to the feeble and lowly He was gentle as the summer’s breeze.
He pitied and loved the sick and the poor. He loved children, He loved sinners, and of all sinners He loved most those who had suffered most and those who were divorced from human respect and sympathy.
True Christianity stretches out its hands, not to the mighty, but to the weak, and its victories have been won, not only without the help of the world’s power, but in utter disregard of it.
Christianity and not philosophy has taught us the inherent dignity of man. Christianity and not philosophy has taught us to appreciate man for those faculties which connect him with God and a boundless future.
He who did not blush to sit at the banquet of the publican, Who shrank not from the white touch of the leper, and Who felt no pollution from the harlot’s tears, has done more to secure for man the respect, sympathy, and affection of his fellows than all other people combined.
From the life and teachings of Christ we learn the lesson that each man is as great as he is in God’s sight and no greater. This thought is full of consolation to those who are obscure and who feel that their individuality is lost in the multitude.
God is no respecter of persons. Before Him the world of mankind is but as the small dust of the balance. Is it anything to the ocean whether one foam speck upon its great bosom be larger or smaller than another? Gradations and eminences among creatures infinitesimal are not regarded by Him whose vision sweeps the infinite.
The chief of a nation dies and cities drape themselves in mourning; the great bells toll, requiems are sung, solemn processions march through the streets, and a thousand other things are done to signalize the fact that a great man has fallen; but to the great God, before Whom his soul passes in all of its nakedness, he is of no more importance than the little waif who dies on the street unpitied and unnoticed. Let us thank God that in His sight all are equally great and equally small.
The chief of a nation dies and cities drape themselves in mourning; the great bells toll, requiems are sung, solemn processions march through the streets, and a thousand other things are done to signalize the fact that a great man has fallen; but to the great God, before Whom his soul passes in all of its nakedness, he is of no more importance than the little with supreme haughtiness and with sovereign contempt for everybody who did not belong to their sect. For them Christ has no words but rebuke and reprobation. Their smiles and patronage He did not covet.
When we die the few who love us may build us a humble monument and write upon it a brief epitaph. But in a few years the monument will decay, the inscription will be illegible, and we shall be forgotten. But let us not be unmindful of the counterpart to this sad truth. Within each one of us there dwells an immortal spirit which is akin to God and infinitely precious in His sight. To Him this is neither common nor obscure. God appreciates everything for the purposes for which He gave it existence. Every drop of rain has its mission. The shadow made by the tiniest insect’s wing has its mission. For every human being upon this planet there is a divinely appointed mission, and in proportion to his fidelity to it he is worthy of approbation and honor. The only real and permanent greatness possible to us is in the line of duty and usefulness, and this is as open to every one of us as sunlight and air. When Jesus Christ says, “Whosoever shall give you a cup of water to drink in my name. . .shall not lose his reward,” He teaches that God’s eye is upon His humblest servant, that He accepts the most inconspicuous service, if inspired by benevolent motives, and that He will as truly reward the little gift of the pauper as the great gift of the millionaire.
The same lesson is embodied in the parable of the talents. That parable teaches us that God values us, not for the magnitude and splendor of the gifts which He has bestowed upon us, but for the fidelity with which we use them. It teaches us that, however small our talents and however meager our opportunities, if we faithfully use them our reward shall be infinite.
To the man who had wisely employed the two talents he gave the same plaudit which he bestowed upon him who had rightly used the five talents: “Well done, good and faithful servant.” He received the same honor and was bidden to enter the same joy. The same reward would have been bestowed upon the man who had received one talent if he had been as true and loyal as those to whom greater gifts were given.
My friends, every man among you has a divinely bestowed talent, and by the wise and faithful use of it he can honor God, bless his fellow-men, and win for himself a joyous welcome to the skies.
In the light of this truth every one should aspire to usefulness here and blessedness hereafter. O ye humble, feeble, hidden, unrecognized ones, look up and bless God that there are eyes above you that do see the light that is in you, and that your gift, though it be but the widow’s mite or a cup of water, is registered in Heaven.
Tonight, if you will lift your eyes to the sky, you will see some stars pre-eminent for their magnitude, while others in the far-off milky way are almost lost to vision. But though “one star differeth from another star in glory,” all are of the same pure essence, all are the offspring of the same eternal sire.
So it is in the kingdom of grace. There we behold towering men, kingly men, men upon whom God has lavished His richest gifts, men who shine with dazzling effulgence; and there we behold obscure men, men endowed with but one talent, and whose light is as dim as that of the scarcely discernable star. But they are children of the same father and servants of the same master. Their lights were kindled at the same fountain of glory. Each is fulfilling the mission to which he was called, and in the end they shall receive the same rapturous plaudit and be crowned with the same imperishable honor.
I thank God when a rich man is truly converted and brought into the church. Houses of worship cannot be built without money. Colleges for the education of our children cannot be established without money. The preaching of the gospel cannot be sustained without money. Missionaries cannot be sent to China, Africa, Italy, and Mexico without money. Homes for the aged, retreats for the sick, and asylums for the poor cannot be erected without money.
I praise God when He puts His grace into the heart of a rich man and makes him a true disciple of Christ, because that man, inspired by the love of God and humanity, may enlarge and multiply the agencies for the extension of Christ’s kingdom and the redemption of lost souls.
But let me assure you that poverty is as truly a talent as wealth. Some are called to be rich and others are called to be poor. In respect to the acquisition of worldly possessions, “there is a divinity which shapes our ends.”
There are two kinds of poverty. One is envious and idle. It sits down in dirt and wretchedness, bemoans its hard fate, and curses the man of enterprise and thrift. Such a poverty deserves neither sympathy nor respect. The other kind is manly, noble, and helpful. Having little besides daily bread, it possesses also the virtue of contentment, which makes happy the humblest lot.
If any have come up to this house from homes of poverty, if any who have recently put on Christ in baptism and been admitted to fellowship in this body of Christians are struggling with the inconveniences of penury, I would say to them that there is no disgrace in honest poverty and that they can make it a beautiful and happy lot.
There are some men and women in this world whose estimates of other people are not only unjust, but disgustingly vulgar. They look with contempt upon self-denial, whatever be the motive behind it. They sneer at the scant table and the threadbare garb of the honest laborer, forgetting that such a man may be rich in every element of a noble life; forgetting that our divine Lord placed on the pinnacle of human greatness one whose raiment was coarse camel’s hair and whose meat was locusts and wild honey; forgetting that some of the greatest of the apostles were poor fishermen of the Galilean lake, and that their divine Lord and master was so poor that He had not where to lay His head. I would rather have the virtues of such men than the wealth of “Twenty seas, whose shores were pearl, whose waters were crystal, and whose rocks were gold.”
Poverty is no barrier to usefulness. The lips of contemptuous Pharisees might curl when the poor widow dropped her two mites into the temple treasury, but in the eyes of Him who sees the hearts of men that poor widow gave more than all the Pharisees.
Those whose intellectual gifts are meager and feeble, and who realize their incompetence for great and conspicuous undertakings, I would exhort to work on without discouragement and without one thought of the inconspicuous character of their service. Fidelity is better than greatness and fame.
Do your best, assured that God would not love you more if you had the genius of a Milton or a Newton. Work with the same manly self-respect that you would have if you knew that senates were listening to your words and empires were being molded by your counsels. Work hopefully and confidently, knowing that God approves and angels applaud, and that when your task is done the gates of glory will open to receive you. The secret of success and happiness in this life is to be just where God would have you and to do just the work which God has committed to your hands. Before Him,
Honor and fame from no condition rise;
Act well your part; there all the honor lies.There is a Christian ceremony which signifies that those who submit to it have merged their wills into the will of God, their thoughts into the thought of God, and their lives into the life of God. This is what is meant by being “buried with Christ in baptism.” The man who has thus identified himself with the limitless resources of the Infinite cannot fail to be good and great. The possibilities of such a man’s life cannot be measured by any human mind, and neither the highest art nor the highest eloquence can depict the glory of the immortality to which he is destined.
[From An Unshaken Trust & Other Sermons, 1898; via The Berea Baptist Banner, December 5, 2010. Scanned and formatted by Jim Duvall.]
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