Very few people have the opportunity to seek the Kingdom of God
at the end. Christ, knowing all that, knowing that religion was
a thing for our life, not merely for our death-bed, has laid this
command upon us now: "Seek FIRST the Kingdom of God."
I am going to leave you with this text itself. Every boy in the
world should obey it.
Boys, before you go to work to-morrow, before you go to sleep
to-night, resolve that, God helping you, you are going to seek
FIRST the Kingdom of God. Perhaps some boys here are deserters;
they began once before to serve Christ, and they deserted. Come
back again, come back again today! Others have never enlisted at
all. Will you not do it now? You are old enough to decide. The
grandest moment of a boy's life is that moment when he decides to
"SEEK FIRST THE KINGDOM OF GOD."
The Changed Life: The Greatest Need of the World.
God is all for quality; man is for quantity. The immediate need
of the world at this moment is not more of us, but, if I may use
the expression, a better brand of us. To secure ten men of an
improved type would be better than if we had ten thousand more of
the average Christians distributed all over the world. There is
such a thing in the evangelistic sense as winning the whole world
and losing our own soul. And the first consideration of our
own life--our own spiritual relations to God--our own likeness to
Christ. And I am anxious, briefly, to look at the right and the
wrong way of becoming like Christ--of becoming better men: the
right and the wrong way of sanctification.
Let me begin by naming, and in part discarding some processes in
vogue already for producing better lives. These processes are far
from wrong; in their place they may even be essential. One ventures
to disparage them only because they do not turn out the most perfect
possible work.
1. The first imperfect method is to rely on
Resolution.
In will power, in mere spasms of earnestness, there is no salvation.
Struggle, effort, even agony, have their place in Christianity, as
we shall see; but this is not where they come in.
In mid-Atlantic the Etruria, in which I was sailing, suddenly
stopped. Something had gone wrong with the engines. There were
five hundred able-bodied men on board the ship. Do you think that
if we had gathered together and pushed against the mast we could
have pushed it on?
When one attempts to sanctify himself by effort, he is trying to
make his boat go by pushing against the mast. He is like a drowning
man trying to lift himself out of the water by pulling at the hair
of his own head.
Christ held up this method almost to ridicule when He said, "Which
of you by taking thought can add a cubit to his stature?" Put down
that method forever as being futile.
The one redeeming feature of the self-sufficient method is this--that
those who try it find out almost at once that it will not gain the
goal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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