In Christ — The Limitless Ideal

1909

By Rev. Frank T. Benson in the Church Calendar

It has been said of some men that they think in continents; they live and act in hemispheres. In Jesus Christ we see this character in its perfect flower. Indeed the large ideal and the world-vision is the legitimate fruit of a Christian civilization.

Christ's was the life which alone had no limits in time. He was a world-man. No age could claim Him, and no race could lay its hand upon Him and say, "He is of us." The truth He taught was of the same character. Each era as it comes and goes has some central thought or ideal which controls it. Around that thought clusters the air, and the science, and the philosophy, and even the action of that age. But the truth that Jesus taught had no such limit. It was neither the product of the time in which He lived, nor had it the imperfection of a limited horizon. He saw all truth at its fountain. He beheld it not in its segments but in its perfect circles. For these reasons the truth Jesus uttered was full of the deepest significance. The simplest word He uttered sometimes was capable of elaboration until it reached the uttermost man, and the ultimate time.

In His labors this limitless ideal was ever present. His ideal had within its purview not the Jew alone, but all men, everywhere. When He saved the soul of one man it was to add him to the sum total, but that man was not the end. He was saved that his influence and labors might be added to those saved like him until they might reach forth to save the world. The Gospel might begin at Jerusalem, but it must not stop until it has belted the globe. Jesus in every expression of His purpose and every energy of His divine nature was a world-conqueror.

Those who follow in the footsteps of Jesus have no business to be satisfied with small things. He gave His disciples no other commission but a world-wide commission. The man or the church that glories in his or its insignificance never learned that spirit from Jesus. No man, who has any true conception of the real character of Jesus, can fail to see that it was never His intention that any man should die without first having the opportunity of hearing, from consecrated and burning lips, the evangel of hope as it issued forth from the cross.

The church has suffered sometimes more from narrowness than from devils. We contract and minimize Christ and the glory of His gospel by the insignificance of our ideals and service. We labor to bring forth a mouse. In a world which is doing great things, a world with its world-wide enterprises, the church cannot expect to hold her own unless she leads in still wider vision and still mightier enterprise. There is some reason for the taunt of the world which we sometimes hear, "The church is too slow." But the taunt is getting more and more unjust. The modern missionary propaganda with its slogan of carrying the gospel to all nations in this generation, is as grand in its conception as it is mighty in its performance. In her evangelism, in her charities, in her fellowship, the church is pushing forth the contracted horizons of her ideals to world-wide scope.

The church is capable of doing greater things than the world inasmuch as she assured that all power is hers as she moves forward in accordance with the will of her divine Master. Behind a militant church is the Almighty God. The apostle lost all fear and claimed all things when he said, "I can do all things through Him that strengtheneth me." This is the true spirit of the church, and it is irresistible.

What we need as a church is to get into touch with the limitless ideal of Christ, and to order our labors in the light of that revelation. To do this we must face the taunt of those who are too indolent or too worldly to move, and would hold back the church that they may continue in their self-complacency. Added to this will be the taunt of the world, which, under Satan's control, always views with alarm an awakened church. We ought not to allow these to control us. The Lord is our example. Our marching orders are from the King, and at the end of our days we must give in our account to Him. Heaven's highest reward will be to have Him say, "Well done" to us.

The value of a great ideal and an exalted service upon the individual is blessed beyond computation. A man's own faith and energy are great in the degree in which he sees and appreciates the greatness of the cause in which he is enlisted. If he thinks meanly of his cause, if it seems to him of no great consequence, he will find no heart to do noble deeds in its furtherance.

If a man beholds in Jesus the sum of all perfections, the fountain of all goodness, the ultimate power for all righteousness; if he sees in the gospel the power of God unto salvation for all men; if he sees in the church the organized agency to carry that salvation to the world; if he realizes that the operations of grace here will find their fruition in eternal glory hereafter; if he believes that the dream of Christ was more than a dream, and that the world will yet lie at His feet sobbing out its griefs, and finding its heart's ease there; if he believes that he is a part of the host who can draw from the sources of omnipotence for its work; if he believes that a recreant church will be the cause of unutterable anguish to a lost world, which she might have saved if she had been true to the Lord and His commission — then he will shake off his lethargy, and, with his new conception of duty, and his new ideal of service, he will go forward, attempting great things for God, and God will honor his faith and his labors by showing him that even yet "the arm of the Lord is not shortened that it cannot save, nor his ear deaf that cannot hear."

—Denton Journal, Denton, Maryland, March 6, 1909, p. 2.