Joy in Service; Forgetting, and Pressing Onward; Until the Day Dawn | Page 3

its proportion; and the fanatic is one who, in addition to this, hates what he cannot understand. According to Isaac Taylor, "Fanaticism is enthusiasm inflamed by hatred." But Christ exaggerated nothing and hated no man. He hated sin, but no sinner. His boundless, tender love itself prevented such moral distortion. And, therefore, he is the ideal or model of human life. We do not feel that in striving to imitate even his most spiritual qualities we shall become impractical or unnatural. We do not feel this in the case of most other holy men. They become examples of one virtue by exaggerating it. But Christ never did this. Lofty as the view of life was which he discloses in our text, sublime as was its spiritual consecration, it existed in him in harmony with the life which by its thoroughly human and practical features proves that we too, in at least some measure, can make even his highest traits our exemplars. Look, therefore, at this text which discloses his mind, and mark its principal elements.
1. There is first disclosed the strong and constant consciousness that he had a distinct errand in the world. He knew that he had been born for a purpose, that a divine aim was in his coming, and that a positive result would follow his life. This sense of a definite errand was expressed by him on numerous occasions; in some of them quite incidentally, and in others more directly. You remember how, as a boy in the temple, he said to his mother, "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" You remember how, at the marriage in Cana, he said to her again, "My hour is not yet come." So with that precious phrase which on several occasions fell from his lips, "The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which is lost." He regarded himself as one sent from God; and when his life was about over he lifted up his eyes to heaven and said, "Father, the hour is come; I have glorified thee on the earth; I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do."
So in our text, "My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work." He was here on a special errand, and that errand was always before his mind. Earth was but a place of appointed work. Life was to him an office, a stewardship. He had this consciousness, even when he seemed to be accomplishing nothing. It gave unity to all his acts and words. To Galilean peasants and to Jewish scribes he could speak with equal assurance, because his errand was to both. Yet he knew its limitations. He said to the Syro-Phoenician woman, "I am not sent save to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." He had come do a special work among the Jews, and in that a work for all mankind. He had not come to be glorified. He had not come to be ministered unto, but to minister. But he had come on a distinct errand; and whatever be your doctrine of Christ's person, you must confess that he considered himself no accident of history; that he did not regard his life work as originating in his own choice; that his sense of a mission did not come as an afterthought to him, or grow clear as he advanced in life. He felt his special errand from the start. It was always before his mind, so that life was to him the performance of a given task and the fulfillment of an assigned duty.
2. But furthermore, our text discloses that, to Christ's mind, this errand of his in the world derived its sanctity from the fact that it was the will or wish of his Father. Every man is governed by some controlling motive or class of motives. The lowest of all is the motive of personal gain and pleasure, and the sorrows and sins of men chiefly spring from the tyranny of this degraded passion. Higher than it is the motive of pity and compassion, which may lead us to do good for the sake of benefiting others. This is the spring of much charity and philanthropy, and, so far as it goes, it is of course to be commended. But there is a higher motive than even it, and Christ reveals it to us here. It is the wish to do God's will. Such was his motive. To him the will of the Father was the perfect good. He knew of nothing nobler than it, so that the whole energy of his character consisted in the force of obedience.
This phrase may carry us back to that time in the counsels of