Will the World Be Won?
The great pa.s.sion of G.o.d"s heart is a love-pa.s.sion. Love never fails. It waits and, if need be, waits long; but it never fails to get what it is waiting for. Love sacrifices; though it never uses that word. It doesn"t know it is sacrificing, it is so absorbed in its gripping purpose. There may be keen-cutting pain, but it is clean forgotten in the pa.s.sion that burns within. G.o.d means to win His world of men back home to Himself.
But some earnest friend is thinking of an objection to all this talk about a world being won. You are taken all anew with the great picture of G.o.d"s pa.s.sion of love in the opening page of this old Book. But all the time we have been talking together you have been having a cross-cutting train of thought underneath. It has been saying, "Isn"t this going a bit too far?
will the whole world be won?"
Let us talk over that a bit. We have been used all our lives to hearing about soul-winning. We have been urged, more or less, to do it. A favorite motto in some Christian workers" convention has been, "Win one."
But this idea of winning the world has not been preached. At first it doesn"t seem exactly orthodox.
The old-time preaching, of which not so much is heard now, except in restricted quarters, is that the whole world is lost; and that we are to save people out of it. We used to be told that the world is bad, and only bad; bad beyond redemption, and doomed. In his earlier years Mr. Moody used to say often with his great earnestness that this was a doomed world, and that the great business of life was to save men out of it.
But of late years there has been a distinct swing away from this sort of preaching and talking. Everything we humans do seems to go by the clock movement, the pendulum swing: first one side, then the other. Now we hear a very different sort of preaching. This is really a good world. There is some wickedness in it, to be sure. Indeed, there is quite a great deal of it. But in the main it is not a bad world, we"re told.
The old-time preaching was chiefly concerned with getting ready for heaven. Now it is concerned, for most part, with living pure, true lives right here on the earth. And that change is surely a good one. But it is also the common thing to be told that the world is not nearly so bad as we have been led to believe.
Some Bad Drifts.
It is striking that with that has come a change of talk about sin, the thing that was supposed to be responsible for making the world so bad. Sin is not such a d.a.m.nable thing now, apparently. It is largely const.i.tutional weakness, or prenatal predilection, or the idiosyncrasy of individuality. (Big words are in favor here. They always make such talk seem wise and plausible.) Heaven has slipped largely out of view; and--h.e.l.l, too, even more. Churchmen in the flush of phenomenal material prosperity, with full stomachs and luxurious homes and pews, are well content with things as they are in this present world, and don"t propose to move.
And with that it is easy to believe what we are freely told, that there is really no need of giving our Christian religion to the heathen world.
Those peoples have religions of their own that are remarkably good. At least they are satisfactory to them. Why disturb them? They are doing very well. This talk about their being lost, and needing a Savior, is reckoned out of date. The old common statements about so many thousands dying daily, and going out into a lost eternity, are not liked. They are called lurid. And, indeed, they are not used nearly so much now as once.
This swing away has had a great influence upon the ma.s.s of church-members, and upon their whole thought of the foreign-mission enterprise. There is a vaguely expressed, but distinctly felt idea both in the Church and outside of it, for the two seem to overlap as never before--that the sending of missionaries is really not to save peoples from being lost. That sort of talk is almost vulgar now.
Mission work is really a sort of good-natured neighborliness. It is benevolent humanitarianism in which we may all help, more or less (usually less), regardless of our beliefs or lack of beliefs, our church-membership or attendance. We should show these heathen our improved methods of living. We have worked out better plans of housekeeping and schooling, of teaching and doctoring, and farming and all the rest of it. And now we want to help these poor deficient peoples across the seas.
We think we are a superior people in ourselves, as well as in our type of civilization, decidedly so. And having taken good care of ourselves, and laid up a good snug sum, we can easily afford to help these backward far-away neighbors a bit. It is really the thing to do.
Such seems to be the general drift of much of the present-day talk about foreign missions. The Church, and its members individually, have grown so rich that we have forgotten that we were ever poor. The table is so loaded with dainties that we are quite willing to be generous with the crumbs, even cake crumbs.
Great Incidental Blessings.
Now, without doubt the sending of the missionaries has vastly improved conditions of human life in the foreign-mission lands. The missionaries have been the forerunners of great improvements. They have been the pioneers blazing out the paths along which both trade and diplomacy have gone with the newer and better civilization of the West. Civilization has developed marvellously in the western half of the world. And the missionaries have been its advance agents into the stagnant East, and the savage wilds of the southern hemisphere.
Full, accurate knowledge of nature"s resources and laws, and adaptation of that knowledge to practical uses, have been among the most marked conditions of the western world during the past century. And, as a result, education, medical and hygienic and sanitary science, development of the earth"s soil, and resources above and below the soil, have gone forward by immense strides. So far as is known, our progress in such matters exceeds all previous achievements in the history of the race.
And some of all this has been seeping into the heathen world. It hasn"t gotten in far yet; only into the top soil, and about the edges, so far.
The progress in this regard has seemed both rapid and slow. When the great ma.s.s of these peoples have not yet gotten even a whiff of the purer, better civilization air of the western nations the progress seems slow.
But when we remember the incalculably tremendous inertia, and the strangely stagnant spirit of heathen lands, it seems rapid.
The effort to get the heathen world simply to clean up; to open the windows and let in some fresh air, and use plain soap and water to scrub off the actual dirt makes one think of the typical small boy"s dislike of being washed up. It has been a hard job. Yet a great beginning has been made. The boy seems to be beginning to find out that his face is dirty, and feels dirty. And that is an enormous gain.
The World Really Lost.
Yet while this is good, and only good, it isn"t the thing we are driving at in missions. While it would fully warrant all the expenditures of money, and vastly more than has yet been given, it should be said in clearest, most ringing tones that all this is merely incidental. It is blessed. It is sure to come. It is remarkable that it always has come where the Gospel of Jesus is preached.
Yet this is not the thing aimed at in missions. The one driving purpose is to carry to men a Saviour from sin. And to take Him so earnestly and winsomely that men yonder shall be wooed and won to the real G.o.d, whom they have lost knowledge of.
It cannot be said too plainly that the world is lost. It has strayed so far away from the Father"s house that it has lost all its bearings, and can"t find its way back without help. The old preaching that this is a lost world, is true.
But we need to remember the different uses of that word "world." In the old-time conception it was used in a loose way as meaning the spirit that actuates men in the world. The scheme of selfishness and wickedness and sinfulness which has overcast all life is commonly spoken of in the Bible as the world spirit. In that sense the world is bad, and only bad. Men are to be saved out of it, as Moody said.
But, in the other commoner use of it, that word "world" simply means the whole race of men. And we must remind ourselves vigorously of the plain truth that this is a lost world. That is to say, men have gotten away from G.o.d. They completely misunderstand Him. Then they do more, and worse, they misrepresent and slander Him. The result is complete lack of trust in Him.
They have lost their moorings, and have drifted out to deep sea with no compa.s.s on board. Thick fogs have risen and shut out sun and stars and every guiding thing. They are hopelessly and helplessly lost, and need some one to bring the compa.s.s so as to get back to sh.o.r.e, back home to G.o.d.
But this world of men is to be won. Jesus said He came to save a world.
And He will not fail nor rest content until He has done it, and this has become a saved world. He said that He gave His life for the life of the world. And the world will yet know the fulness of that life of His throbbing in its own heart.
This does not mean that all men will be saved. There seems to be clear evidence in the Book that some will insist on preferring their own way to G.o.d"s. And I am sure I do not know anything except what the Book teaches.
It is the only reliable source of information I have been able to find so far. It must be the standard, because it is the standard.
There will be a group of stubborn irreconcilables holding out against all of G.o.d"s tender pleading. John"s Patmos vision of glory, with its marvellous beauty and sweep, has yet a lake of fire and a group of men insisting upon going their own way. If a man choose that way, he may. He is still in the likeness of G.o.d in choosing to leave out G.o.d. He remains a sovereign in his own will even in the h.e.l.l of his own choosing.
G.o.d"s Method of Saving.
The method of saving is by winning. The Father would not be content with anything else. Such a thing as might be represented by throwing a blanket over the head of a horse in a burning stable, and so getting it out by coaxing, and forcing, and hiding the danger, is not to be thought of here. Sin is never smoothed over by G.o.d, nor its results, their badness and their certainty.
He would have us see the sin as ugly and d.a.m.ning as it actually is, and see Him as pure and holy and winsome as He is; and then to reject the sin and choose Himself. The method of much modern charity, the long-range charity that helps by organization, without the personal relation and warm touch, is unknown to G.o.d. He touches every man directly with His own warm heart, and appeals to Him at closest quarters.
Man"s highest power is his power of choosing. It is in that He is most like G.o.d. G.o.d"s plan is to clear away the clouds, sweep down the cobwebs that bother our eyes so, and let us get such a look at Himself that we will be caught with the sight of His great face, and choose to come, and to come a-running back to Himself. The world will be saved by its own choosing to be. It will be saved by being won. Men will choose to leave sin and accept G.o.d"s Saviour Jesus Christ.
It is a great method. It is the only method G.o.d could use. The creative love-pa.s.sion of His heart was that we should choose Himself in preference to all else, and choose life with Him up on His level as the only life.
And the method of winning is by getting each man"s consent. The old cry of soul-winning is the true cry. It tells the method of work for us to follow. Each man is to be won by his own free glad consent. There is to be no wholesaling except by retailing. In business the wholesale comes after the retail. It is the child and servant of the retail.
Here the method is to be one by one; and the results, a great mult.i.tude beyond the power of any arithmetic to count. Soul-winning is the method, and world-winning is the object and the final result.
The Programme of World-winning.
There is a programme of world-winning repeatedly outlined in this old Book of G.o.d. That programme has not always been clearly understood.
Indeed, it may be said that for the most part it has been misunderstood, and still is by many. And, as a result, many churchmen have lost their bearings, and strayed far from the Master"s plan for their own lives and service. It helps greatly to get the programme clear in mind, so we can steer a straight course, and not get confused nor lost.
The first item of that programme is world-wide evangelization. That is the great service and privilege committed to the Church, and to every Christian, for this present time. Every other service is second to this.