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No matter how
accurate and reliable a set of scales may be, if
they are meddled with they may be made
inaccurate and undependable. If we were weighing
coal and the scales were out of balance a few
pounds, it would not matter so much; but if we
were weighing diamonds or gold, a very little
variation would amount to a great deal. The more
valuable that which we weigh, the more necessary
it is that the scales be properly adjusted and
accurate to a high degree. When it comes to a
standard of weighing the human soul, that should
be the most accurate of all standards. When it
comes to judging ourselves, it is important that
we have a right standard of judgment. The right
standard God furnishes is his Word. It will
weigh us accurately if we take it as it is; but
if we misinterpret it or turn it out of its
natural course and meaning, we may judge
ourselves very wrongly by it. What we need to do
is to be absolutely fair with ourselves. We must
not allow ourselves to be prejudiced either in
favor or against ourselves. If our standard of
judgment is so low that it permits us to be
impure in heart and purposes and to do things
that are wrong in the sight of God, that
standard is evil for us, and we are not just to
ourselves. If we have too high a standard and
require more of ourselves than is just and
right, again we do ourselves an
injury.
We must learn to
be fair to ourselves. We must require of
ourselves all that we ought to require, but
nothing more than that. In many lives the ideal
is far too low, and consequently the life is too
low. In other cases the ideal is too high and is
entirely out of reach and can never be attained.
We should have high ideals, but these ideals
should be practicable and should not overlook
the facts of human life. They should always be
balanced by common sense. We should not live in
a spiritual dreamland; for in practice we shall
ever have to face the cold hard facts of life.
These facts, not our dreams and imaginations,
are what we must adjust ourselves to. If we have
too high a standard, we shall always be coming
short of it and condemning ourselves. A high
ideal, if not too high, is a strong incentive to
progress; but when it is made the standard by
which we judge our present attainment, it tends
to discourage us and becomes a real barrier to
our progress. We can never attain to our ideals
because they will ever grow as we grow, and they
will continue to be in advance of us no matter
how fast we grow. We must have a practicable,
not an ideal, standard of judgment.
Making someone
else our standard has its dangers. We cannot see
another's inner life. We know nothing of his
conflicts or his secret faults. We can see only
the external manifestations. We do know our own
inner life, but we can know theirs only as we
judge it from outward appearance. God wants each
of us to judge himself by His Word, not by any
other standard, and he does not want us to judge
ourselves by an ideal beyond our reach.
People often make
a serious mistake in comparing themselves with
someone of a different temperament. It is very
common to suppose that if a person make many
demonstrations in religion, he has a great deal
of religion, and that if he is very quiet, he
has no religion to speak of. I traveled for a
number of years in the gospel work with a
minister whose temperament was decidedly
emotional and who would sometimes become very
demonstrative, leaping and shouting, and
manifesting his feelings very plainly. I was of
a rather unemotional temperament. I had powerful
emotions sometimes, but it was not my
disposition to give vent to them. People
therefore judged that he had a much better
experience than I had, and oftentimes I heard
people remark that they wished that they had an
experience like his. No one ever seemed to wish
that about me. No one seemed to covet in the
least an experience like mine. They all wanted
one like his, because they thought he was so
happy. We both had the same salvation and served
the same God. The difference was a difference of
temperament.
Salvation is not a
thing of temperament, though manifestation is.
To make our feelings and emotions a standard, is
to make our temperament the standard. Those of
other temperaments will differ from us. They
cannot and will not have the same experience so
far as feelings and emotions are concerned.
Great havoc has been caused by unwise preaching
on these points. Preachers often relate their
experience, telling how happy they were and what
wonderful emotions they had when they were
converted. Others, hearing them, are led to
suppose that if they too obtain salvation they
will have these same emotions; so when they seek
salvation, they seek these emotions. If they are
of a different temperament, they do not
experience them, and as a result they find it
very difficult to suppose that they are saved at
all. The preaching that emotion is ever a sign
of salvation, in the sense that we can base our
hope of God's favor and heaven upon it, is a
serious error. Faith is fundamental. Believing
in God is what counts. Emotion is a superficial
thing. It is not a reliable evidence, and when
people are taught to look upon their feelings as
evidences, they do not get a settled experience,
an experience that will take them through hard
places when their feelings subside. A man's
religion does not consist in the joy that he has
nor in the amount of noise he makes, but in the
attitude of his heart toward God.
Preaching should
never go beyond the bounds of common sense. We
should never let our enthusiasm run away with
our judgment. When feelings are preached, the
strong-nerved preacher will preach a
strong-nerved gospel, and the weak-nerved one
will preach a weak-nerved gospel. The first will
make no allowance for those who have weak nerves
and who suffer the trials incident to their
nervous condition; so he is likely to be the
cause of bringing them into severe trials and
conflicts. He has no idea of how things look and
are to them. The other makes allowance for the
infirmities of the weak and preaches his own
experience. The strong-nerved persons who hear
him know that his experience is not like theirs
and think he is lowering the standard. The thing
to do is to preach the Word. We may use our
experiences to illustrate the things that we
preach, but we ought to make it clear that
experiences differ widely in many respects and
that we should never judge one another by our
experiences, nor should we expect our
experiences to correspond fully with that of
someone else.
The effect of too
high a standard is always to discourage. We
should have a proper standard, but not an ideal
standard. We ought to require nothing of
ourselves or others beyond a practical and
common-sense Christian life. Sometimes the
standard of the sanctified life is placed
altogether too high, being out of reach. I once
heard a sermon that left the impression on me
that the preacher felt thus: "I am up here and a
few others are up here, but the most of you are
down there, and you know that you are down
there, and you are going to have a very hard
time to get up here if you ever do succeed." The
effect of that sermon was very discouraging, but
it is far from the only one of the sort that has
been preached. Many souls have been crushed by
such preaching.
Many times I have
heard the experience of sanctification described
as such an ideal state that I knew the preacher
himself nor anyone else had ever attained such a
state and never would in this life.
Sanctification means the purification of our
natures, but it does not mean the perfecting of
our human faculties. It does not mean that we
are automatically perfect in patience or
kindness nor that we are in a state where our
emotions will always be sweet and ideal. It does
not mean that we shall never have a feeling of
impatience or anger. Anger comes from the
violation of our sense of justice. There are two
forms of anger. One is vindictive anger, which
causes us to have feelings of resentment and
vengeance, and which would feel pleased at the
suffering of the offender. This is sinful anger.
The other is that indignation which arises from
a sense of the evil nature of the act or thing,
and which does not excite vindictive feelings
toward the object. Christ was angry when he
reproved the Pharisees (Mark 3:5), and justly
so, for their wicked conduct was such as could
not but excite his indignation. The Bible speaks
of God's indignation, his anger, his wrath, his
fury, etc., but we know that nevertheless he is
holy. In fact, it was this very quality of
holiness that caused him to be angry with
wickedness. The stronger our sense of justice
and our love of holiness, the stronger will be
the sense of disapprobation that evil-doing will
excite in us.
The Bible nowhere
teaches us that a sanctified man will never be
angry. Instead it teaches what he should do when
angry. "Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the
sun go down upon your wrath" (Ephesians 4:26).
One of the requirements of a bishop is that he
should be holy, and another is that he should
not be "soon angry" (Titus 1:7), that is, he was
to be man who possessed proper self-control. I
am not arguing in favor of getting angry, but
simply to show that if a person does become
angry, it does not necessarily prove that his
heart is impure. We need to guard very carefully
all our natural faculties and control them so
that they do not lead us into sin.
Sanctification makes us much more equable in
temper than we were before, so that many things
that angered us before do not have that effect
upon us now.
That anger which
comes from an ugly temper or from wounded pride
is not a mark of the Christian. This sort of
thing and the love of God will not abide in the
same heart. When the grace of God comes in, that
kind of anger goes out to stay. The love of God
softens our hearts and our natures, and the more
of his love and power there is in us, the more
kind and tender and affectionate we are. When we
are filled with the fullness of God in entire
sanctification, it brings to us a calmness and
quietness and self-control that helps us to
preserve moderation in all our ways. The mere
feeling of displeasure and anger that now arises
in the modified form that it does manifest
itself in the Christian, is not sinful in its
nature. Sometimes people say they are tempted to
be angry. They might as well say they are
tempted to be joyful or sad or thankful. Anger
is an involuntary emotion. We cannot be tempted
to be angry, but the temptation is to do or say
something wrong when we are angry.
Do not condemn
yourself as not being sanctified just because
you sometimes feel these emotions that some
idealists say that you will not feel. Judge
yourself by the Bible and common sense. Some say
that anger comes from depravity. If so, from
whence does it come in the animal? Depravity in
man affects it to make it vindictive. Then, and
not until then, does it become sinful. The more
of God we have in us, the more like God we shall
be in these feelings and the more perfect will
be both our temper and our conduct.
We ought to have
the same standard of judgment for ourselves that
we have for others. There are those who have a
lower standard for themselves and excuse in
themselves that which they could not and would
not excuse in someone else. They are ready to
condemn others for doing the very same things
that they themselves do or things that involve
the same principle. They find no excuse for
others, but only condemnation, but they have a
ready excuse for themselves whenever they are
guilty of a like thing. Others go to the
opposite extreme. They have a higher standard
for themselves than they have for anyone else.
They can excuse others for doing what they
themselves would not feel clear in doing. They
condemn themselves for things that they would
not condemn others for. They can find excuses
for others, but none for themselves. By adopting
either of these courses, we do wrong to
ourselves. God has the same standard of judging
all people, and he desires that we have the same
standard for judging ourselves. The standard we
set for others is more likely to be correct than
the one we set for ourselves. If the standard we
set for ourselves is not a proper standard by
which to judge others, it is not the proper one
by which to judge ourselves. There is a true and
just standard. Let us seek that and apply it to
our own lives and to the lives of others. The
true standard is neither too high nor too low.
The standard by
which God judges us is flexible, that is, he
holds us responsible only for what we know;
hence the greater the light, the greater the
responsibility of the person. Others will never
be judged by our light nor we by theirs. It is
only when persons have the same degree of light
and when the circumstances are alike that the
same standard is applicable to two or more
individuals. But where light and circumstances
are the same on any point, all must be judged by
the same rule; and what is right for one is
right for all, and what is wrong for one is
wrong for all.
Sometimes people
act as prosecutors, witnesses, judge, and jury
to secure their own condemnation. Their
consciences are so sensitive that they are ready
to condemn themselves for various slight and
trivial things - things that God pays no
attention to at all and that they should not
trouble themselves about. It is unwise to be
always questioning our lives down to the
minutest details. If our purpose is to serve God
and we act upon that purpose, we need not watch
ourselves so closely. It will be natural for us
to do right. We shall feel disposed to do right,
shall want to do right, and will do right. We
need not spy upon ourselves and play the
detective upon ourselves all the time. The
Christian life is a natural life. Just live
naturally. Do not feel all the time as though
you were going to do something wrong. Do not
treat yourself like a suspected criminal. God
wants you free from all this care. He wants you
free from all such fear. He wants you to have
confidence that you are going to please him, and
to act with the assurance that confidence
brings. Get away from the idea that you must
watch yourself so closely to prevent yourself
from doing wrong. We must, of course, watch our
conduct and not be careless and indifferent, but
living the Christian life is not like trying to
walk on a wire. It does not require any strain
or struggle to keep balanced. No, the Christian
path is broad enough for us to set our feet down
squarely and to walk with ease and comfort. If
Christ lives in us, will not he live out his
life in us as naturally as he lived it out in
his own fleshly body here in this world? Trust
yourself to him and have confidence that he will
work out in you the things that are well
pleasing in his sight. Someone has said, "Do
your best and trust the rest." There is much
wisdom in that saying. Think it over until you
get what it means and then put it in practice in
your life. Do not all the time be trying to do
what you cannot do and what you have never
succeeded in doing and never will succeed in
doing. "It is God which worketh in you both to
will and to do of his good pleasure"; therefore
just let him will and do in your life and trust
him to do it.
Overvaluing or
depreciating ourselves and our work is another
unwise thing. Whichever we do will turn out bad.
It is not true humility to be always criticizing
and undervaluing ourselves. If we do a thing, it
is neither better nor worse than if someone else
had done it, and we should not so regard it. Let
us not have a double standard, one for ourselves
and one for others, but let us have the same
standard for all, and let that be a just and
right standard, one that God's approval will
rest upon. Then we may live satisfactory lives
and have the blessing and approval of God upon
us. The Bible and good common sense - that is
the true and only standard by which we must be
judged. |
