The Stuff of Manhood: Some Needed Notes in American CharacterSpeer, Robert E. (Robert Elliott)
Philosophy
The Stuff of Manhood: Some Needed Notes in American Character
Speer, Robert E. (Robert Elliott)
Character; Christian life; Conduct of life; Moral education
It would be easy to recall the lives of great missionaries and point
out how they received their divine guidance through other men――not
even through a dream, far less through some miraculous vision, but
through a brother man who came to talk with them, reasoned with them,
and showed them the best way in which a man could use his life. Men
are indispensable to God in order to guide other men into the work
which God has for them to do. And one reason why there is such an
awful waste of life to-day, why so many men, going out of the colleges,
miss the highest work of their lives, is simply because there are not
enough other men who recognize that they are indispensable to God in
order that, through them, God may guide men to their highest and most
efficient places.
Men are indispensable to God in bringing men to Jesus Christ. As
men were brought to Christ by other men in the beginning, so has it
been during all the succeeding years. The angels are willing to do
what they can, but none of us have had any visible object lessons of
what they do. Men have been brought to Christ always by other men.
Imperfect lives are to be brought up to the Perfect Life, and to do
this service Christ uses common men, just such as we are. That is what
Paul conceived as the glory of his life, that he had the privilege of
being the bond――no other beings in the universe being able to take that
place――between men who had not found Christ and Christ hunting for His
own.
Then God requires men now as He never required them in all the days
gone by to bear testimony to the Deity of Jesus Christ. We know how
little value our Lord attached to any accrediting evidences that did
not come right out of pure, human personality. He discredited the
advantages of bringing back Abraham from the dead, for example, to
bear testimony to the truth. If men were not willing to accept adequate
moral evidence, valid human testimony, they would not believe by
miracle, He said. That is why He was so pleased with the confession of
Simon Peter. “Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona; for flesh and blood
hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.”
It rejoiced Him to get such testimony from a man who, in turn, had
drawn it out of his own experience of God. There is no greater need
in the world to-day than for a great body of men who know Christ to
be God more surely than they know themselves to be men, and are able
to go out and testify to what Christ can do with a definiteness and
certainty greater than that of any other testimony they can bear, who
can say what John said, “That which we have seen and heard declare we
unto you.” If there ever was a day when God was calling men to a great
undertaking, He is calling them now to be His witnesses, unimpeachable,
unflinching, to the unique personality, to the supreme divine character
and power of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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