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Acceptable
Service
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.
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