Quiet Talks on ServiceGordon, S. D. (Samuel Dickey)
Religion
Quiet Talks on Service
Gordon, S. D. (Samuel Dickey)
Christian life
There can be a personal going to some in words tactfully spoken. There is
the life of sweet purity and gentle patience always so winsome, that
speaks all the time in musical tones to one's circle. There is an
enormous, unconscious aggressiveness about such a life. Then there can be
the going through gold. And the entire planet can be brought under one's
thumb of influence through the strangely simple power of prayer.
I have been running across some new versions of this last word of Jesus. A
sort of re-revisions they are. I have not found them in the common print,
but printed in lives, the lives of men. The print is large, chiefly
capitals, easily read. These lives are so noisy as to quite shut out what
the lips may be saying. There are variations in these translations.
Sometime the message is made to read like this: "All power hath been given
unto Me, therefore go ye, and make--coins of gold--oh, belong to church of
course--that is proper and has many advantages--and give too. There are
advantages about that--give freely, or make it seem freely--give to
missions at home and abroad. That is regarded as a sure sign of a liberal
spirit. But be careful about the _proportion_ of your giving. For the real
thing that counts at the year's end is how much you have added to the
stock of dollars in your grasp. These other things are good, but--merely
incidental. This thing of getting gold is the main drive."
Please understand me, I never heard any of these folks talk in this blunt
way with their _tongues_. So far as I can hear, they are saying something
quite different. But what their tongues are saying is made indistinct and
blurred by some noise near by.
Other translations I have run across have this variation: "Make a place
for yourself, in your profession, in society. Make a comfortable
living;--with a wide margin of meaning to that word 'comfortable'--belong
to the church, become a pillar, or at least move in the pillar's circle,
give of course, even freely in appearance, but remember these are the dust
in the scale, the other is the thing that weighs. All of one's energies
must be centered on the main thing."
May I ask you to listen very quietly, while I repeat the Master's own
words over very softly and clearly, so that they may get into the inner
cockles of our hearts anew? "All power hath been given unto Me; therefore
go ye, and _make disciples of all nations_." These other translations are
wrong. They are misleading. _The one main thing is influencing men for
Jesus_.
The Perspective of True Service.
It is not the only thing by any means. There is a multitude of things
perfectly proper and that must be done and well done. But through all
their doing is to run this one strong purpose. These other things are
details, important details, indispensably important, yet details. The
other is the one main thing toward which the doing of all the others is to
bend and blend.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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