Christ is Essential to You 3/20/49
Scripture: (Read John 15: 1-11)
In most schools for advanced education, the student is required to take a certain number of major subjects each year, and pass a satisfactory examination in each in order to be a candidate for graduation. Many of these subjects are prescribed; they are regarded as essential; no one can be graduated from that school without a knowledge of them. Other subjects are called electives. From them may be chosen enough work to round out one’s field of interest and to satisfy the requirements for graduation.
A professor who taught what was known as “Religious Knowledge” in a Canadian University for some time admitted that it always irked him that his course was one of the electives -- something that could be chosen or not, taken or left, included or omitted at will. For he had a well-grounded conviction that the Christian gospel is not an elective for good living but is entirely essential, the most important thing on earth.
I do not suppose that many of us in this room would insist that courses on the Christian religion must become required courses at Lincoln High School or at the University of Wisconsin. We are too zealous guardians of the principle of the separation of church and state to be willing to give the appearance of public coercion on an individual to study religion. Nevertheless, many of you will agree with me that Christ and his gospel are entirely essential to good living - the most important thing in the world.
(1) Christ is essential because the world is now so small. With the appearance of steamship, locomotive, automobile, telegraph, telephone, radio, the airplane, the world has steadily shrunken in relative size until it is now a very small place. Time was when one who could survive the rigors and dangers of a move from Europe to the Americas could live fairly independent of the old world for the rest of his life. Not so now! Happenings on almost any part of the earth can be made known to all of the rest of the earth almost instantly once they are committed to modern means of communication. People can be transported to almost any point on the earth’s surface in a matter of hours if it seems urgent enough.
Any policy of isolation of people, or of nations, is pretty much outdated now. For it is clear that anything that happens to people anywhere on the earth directly affects all of the other people of the world. We are neighbors talking over the back yard, or front yard, fences and whether we like it or not we must find ways of getting along together. Our problem is that we do not really know each other well enough to get along as we need to do. Christ is essential to us because his gospel is basically a philosophy of living together and living at our best. It teaches us to build one neighborhood and our brotherhood.
(2) Christ is essential to us because the means of existence have outstripped our moral ability to control those means. A traveler in Africa had trouble one day when, after a very brisk pace of travel, his native porters sat down and refused to budge. Neither would they move nor even pick up their packs. Through his interpreter he demanded why this “sit-down strike.” One of the porters replied, with big, serious eyes, “Our bodies have gone too quickly for our souls. We are waiting for our souls to catch up.”
That seems to be about the predicament of the proud west. Our physical equipment has outstripped our souls. Scientific advancement has outpaced moral development. We have discovered and developed sources of power which place in our hands the most ruthless and destructive weapons ever devised and possessed -- or the greatest boon to civilization yet devised. Which of these goals shall be reached depends entirely upon the character and intention of us who hold that power in human hands. The great qualities of morality, integrity, good will and love must be developed within the lives of the people of this world. For the developing of this necessary and decisive issue, I do not know of anything superior or equal to the gospel of Christ.
(3) Christ is essential to us because he is author of the greatest blessings we now enjoy. Freedom, democracy, the rights and responsibilities of the individual, the culture we cherish most -- these and other great values have sprung from Christ’s gospel. If we let him, he will go on giving us the means of living abundantly. But have you ever meditated on the obvious truth that Christianity is always only one short generation from extinction? If it were possible for some force to destroy all Bibles and Testaments, and all books which comment on Christian teaching; to silence all Christian teachers and preachers; to close all churches; to proscribe any conversation whatever on religion --- then Christianity would die with us in our generation and the children next born would grow up in a world where they knew naught except measurable nature, or some prescribed philosophy.
Christ is essential to us and his gospel is the most important thing in the world. What must we do to keep his colors flying? How can we make his gospel as vital to us as the flag and the constitution are to the zealous patriot?
(4) It is urgent that all of us who call ourselves Christian have a vital experience of God in Christ. For years there were theological battles about the person of Christ -- was he human or divine? An historical fact or just a myth? And men battled about his birth; and about the truth of his teachings. But today, as also in some other days, men’s questions go deeper. They ask the basic question: “Is there a God at all, and if so how can he be real to me?”
A cowboy never saw the outline of mountains, the setting of the sun, the migration of the birds or the change of the seasons without feeling that there must be a God. But he said to the visiting minister, “How can I make God seem real to me?”
A church officer 45 years of age, who had served well, and lived faithfully in an exemplary manner confessed, during the spiritual misery of losing his son in the war overseas, “I’ve always believed in God, but I confess that he’s not very real to me. How can I make him real? I need to know that more than anything else.”
Servicemen returning from battle where they have seen man-made hell let loose, have seen comrades suffer and die, and who are vitally interested in rebuilding a better world sometimes say, “Of course we believe in God. But how can we find him real in our experience?”
How does God become real to us? Well, I venture a suggestion, with the warning that you can prove it only by your own experience, as I have by mine. And we Christians must beware lest we demand that everyone else must have an experience identical with ours. That is hardly possible, since no two of us are identical.
Some find God through their emotions. A fellow once remarked, “When I go to church I feel that I want to unscrew my head and put it under the seat until the service is over, for while I’m in church I never use anything from my neck up.” Of course this is utter foolishness. But of course religion is not all “of the head.” much of it is “of the heart,” and some do find God best that way.
I think that the head ought to search vigorously for truth, to be open to differing views, better understandings. Even the doubts that plague us are not to be denied the testings of reason. But there is a deep verity in the saying that we do not so much find God as he finds us. And our hearts ought to be receptive enough so that we may be found by him.
A young woman sang for years in the choir of her church and yet consistently refused to join the church for reasons of her own sincerity. She was a nurse by profession, and was at length engaged on the staff of a summer young people’s conference. One night as young people and staff members sat about a camp fire, a missionary from China gave a most moving address. After the address, a minister sat by the dying embers for a while turning the talk over in his mind, drinking in the lovely stillness of the lake, the moon’s reflection on the water. Presently this nurse came into the circle of the firelight and said to the minister, “I made a decision tonight. As soon as I get back home, I am going to join the church. I’m going to be Christian.” The minister congratulated her on the decision and said, “It was a great talk, wasn’t it?” The nurse replied, “It wasn’t the talk at all. I hardly know what was said, but God was real to me tonight. I felt as though I could reach out and touch him.” Her decision was not just a passing fancy. She did join the church heartily and has been active in it ever since.
While I was a young student I felt myself in considerable turmoil at being unable to direct my own life just as I wanted it. It was not easy to discover that I am not “the master of my fate, the captain of my soul,” but that much of life as it affects me is not under my own control. In this mood of acute dissatisfaction, I attended service one evening in a church not my own. The preacher was an exceptionally able speaker, but I remember not a word he uttered nor an idea he expressed. For that night, as I sat meditating in the pew, a peace came over my heart that I had not known for some time. I went out of the service knowing I could trust something other than myself. And my own frustrations faded to insignificance. God found me that night and my soul breathed freedom again!
Of course some people find how essential Christ is to them through reasoning --- the intellectual approach. A young fellow who says he was definitely irreligious wanted to do something worth while in life. The more he struggled with it, the more his church loomed up to him. He could not evade the fact that the church was responsible for the great things he saw in life. Great homes are Christian homes. Womanhood was emancipated through the work of the church. The abolition of child labor had been accomplished through insistence of the church, and so he had been in school where his family could hardly have kept him without that change in social behavior. He saw democracy as the product of the Christian church. All of these, and other, factors moved together to place the church and its Christ in first position in his mind.
He asked himself, “What makes up the church?” and immediately came upon the answer -- hypocrites, plenty of them. People who say one thing and do the other. But his reasoning showed him that the church would soon fall flat and cease to exist if it were only of those people. Who then makes up the church? Well, there is the teacher who wore out his Bibles, and prayed on his knees so solidly that when he had burned out his life in vigorous service in middle age the undertaker said to a relative, “I never cared for a body with such callused knees.”
There was the woman who did everything she could do honorably to earn money to help young people --- not with just one gift. She had a consuming passion to amass and establish a foundation that would help pay the tuition of several worthy young people in school each year -- and that, after she had raised a family of her own!
Why shouldn’t some find Christ the way that young man did? Weren’t we given the power of reason that we might observe what there is to see all about us, and from it draw reasonable conclusions?
Some find God through service. At the age of 30 Albert Schweitzer was “on top of the heap.” A distinguished philosopher, he could have had a permanent place on the faculty on either of two leading European universities. He was an outstanding authority on the music of Bach. He was a well trained physician and could have had an exclusive practice. But he decided on a course of extraordinary service. Taking his own savings, backed by no denominational boards, he went to east Africa to bring medical care to some of the most needy, neglected, and poverty stricken people of that continent. For him, God was to be found in active service.
Probably most of us find God somewhat in each of these channels - emotion, reason and service. And having found him let us share the discovery continuously with all others by the way we live. Let us serve him so well that others may remark: “These Christians really have something! We had better find out about it.”
---------- Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, March 20, 1949.