The Expositor's Bible: The General Epistles of St. James and St. JudePlummer, Alfred
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The General Epistles of St. James and St. Jude
Plummer, Alfred
Bible. James -- Commentaries; Bible. Jude -- Commentaries
But there is another advantage in making religious worship, whether
public or private, the outlet for our emotions. It secures a real
connexion between worship and life. Missionaries tell us that this is
a frequent difficulty in their work. It is a hard enough thing to win
converts from heathenism; but it is perhaps still harder to teach the
newly converted that the worship of God has any bearing whatever upon
their conduct. This idea is quite strange to them, and utterly alien
to their whole mode of thought. They have never been taught anything
of the kind before. They have been accustomed to regard the worship of
the gods as a series of acts which must be religiously performed in
order to win the favour of the deities, or at least to avert their
wrath. But it has never occurred to them, nor have their priests
impressed upon them, that their lives must be in accordance with their
worship, or that the one has any connexion with the other, any more
than the colour of their clothes with the amount that they eat and
drink. From this it follows that when the idolater has been induced to
substitute the worship of God for the worship of idols, there still
remains an immense amount to be done. The convert has still to be
taught that there can no longer be this divorce of religion from
conduct, but that prayer and praise must go hand in hand with work and
life.
Converts from heathenism are by no means the only persons who are in
need of this lesson. We all of us require to be reminded of it. All of
us are apt to draw far too strong a line of distinction between Church
and home, between Sunday and week-day, between the time that we spend
on our knees and that which we spend in work and recreation. Not,
alas! that we are too scrupulous about allowing worldly thoughts to
invade sacred times and places, but that we are very jealous about
allowing thoughts of God and of His service to mingle with our
business and our pleasures, or at least take no pains to bring about
and keep up any such mingling. Our worship is often profaned by being
shared with the world; our work is rarely consecrated by being shared
with God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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