The World's Great Sermons, Volume 07: Hale to Farrar
Religion
The World's Great Sermons, Volume 07: Hale to Farrar
Sermons
town of England, within a stone's throw of Christian houses, and
near enough to hear the sound of public worship, will yield to
nothing but that sadly forgotten law which enjoins personal contact
with the sinful and the suffering, as one chief condition of raising
them from the black mire in which they welter.
The effect of much well-meant Christian effort is simply to
irritate. People are very quick to catch delicate intonations which
reveal a secret sense, "how much better, wiser, more devout I am
than these people!" and wherever a trace of that appears in our
work, the good of it is apt to be marred. We all know how hackneyed
the charge of spiritual pride and Pharisaic self-complacency is,
and, thank God, how unjust it often is. But averse as men may be to
the truths which humble, and willing as they may be to assume that
the very effort to present these to others on our parts implies a
claim which mortifies, we may at least learn from the threadbare
calumny, what strikes men about our position, and what rouses their
antaganism to us. It is allowable to be taught by our enemies,
especially when it is such a lesson as this, that we must carefully
divest our evangelistic work of apparent pretensions to superiority,
and take our stand by the side of those to whom we speak. We cannot
lecture men into the love of Christ. We can but win them to it by
showing Christ's love to them; and not the least important element
in that process is the exhibition of our own love. We have a gospel
to speak of which the very heart is, that the Son of God stooped
to become one with the lowliest and most sinful; and how can that
gospel be spoken with power unless we, too, stoop like Him?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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