CHAPTER XXIV JESUS' IDEALS OF GOOD WILL IN ACTION MANY of the ideals of living that this book discusses seem so much higher than the common standards practised among men that the question is often raised as to whether they are practical. How his ideals may become ours -Any abstract ideal makes a weak appeal to our imagination. It is only when ideals are made concrete by becoming real in somebody's life that they appeal to us strongly and win our support. The power of the ideals of Jesus rests in the fact that he not only explained them but lived them, thus proving them to be not visionary but practical. In fact, these same ideals become real to us not simply when we say "Yes" to them, but when we put our heart and will into them and live them ourselves. In a wonderful way Jesus personified all of these Christian ideals, and through sharing his spirit with us, if we are loyal friends of his, he arouses in us the power to realize these ideals in our lives and characters. It will help us to interpret and understand them if we try to discover more closely Jesus' own method of applying them. So we study in this chapter Jesus' ideals of good will in action. His life of good will and kind deeds. Some years after Jesus' death the apostle Peter, who knew him so intimately, summed up with beautiful simplicity his earthly career in these five words: He went about doing good.-Acts 10: 38. We have already seen that Jesus went about doing good because of the hunger within him to express his kindly soul in human service. He simply couldn't help doing good. He would have suffered real heart pain, in sympathy for the human suffering he constantly met, if he had been unable to relieve it. The life of service seemed to him the highest possible privilege. Probably those years of his most successful service, when the multitude flocked to him and the common people heard him gladly, were the happiest years of any life in history. He met daily the priceless rewards of gratitude, which mere money never can buy. He found daily the even deeper satisfactions which came from the sense of working with God in his great cause of redeeming men and making a better world. How Jesus invested his days.-As he went about doing good, he was just filling in the outlines of his great vision of the New Age which he confessed to his unresponsive neighbors that day in the Nazareth synagogue. It was his apology for leaving the carpenter's bench, and the expression of all the pent-up hopes of his youth for a life of great usefulness: God's Spirit has come upon me, To give liberty to men crushed by tyrants; All through the gospel story we can see him putting this program of good will into joyous action. Much of the narrative reads like a triumphal journey. Like a con quering hero he passes from town to town, greeted by grateful crowds and overcoming all sorts of human ills and troubles. He heralded the good tidings of the brotherly world, the world of his faith and vision; he taught them his beautifully simple religion, in their synagogues; he cured the sick who were suffering from "all manner of disease," including difficult cases of palsy, epilepsy and insanity. (See Matthew 4: 23-.) Imagine a country with no trained doctors and you can better understand the sensation caused by this Good Physician on his campaigns of kindness. How does a crowd affect you? Jesus seems to have been naturally of a quiet, retiring disposition. We can imagine him shrinking at first from the lime-light of public life. Until you get used to a crowd, it seems like a great living leviathan, in which the human souls composing it are lost in the mass. Jesus overcame his timidity in the presence of the multitude by singling out the individuals who were suffering and needed his help. Nothing reveals his tender heart more truly than this description: And when he saw the vast crowds, his heart was touched with pity for them, because they were distressed and fainting on the ground like sheep without a shepherd's care.-Matthew 9:36. It was this silent call of human need that pulled on Jesus' heart and forced him day after day to serve needy souls and bodies, sometimes quite beyond his strength, so that he was tired and exhausted at the end of the day. When you stand on a city street corner and see the crowd moving by, weaving in and out, some in feverish haste, others aimlessly, stolidly-some happy, peaceful faces, others anxious, pained, discouraged, worried,—how does this human moving-picture affect you? If you have a Christly heart, you will feel the tug of these faces, pulling you out of your selfish complacency into a kindlier and more useful life. It will make you discontented with a narrow life of personal pleasure. Gradually it will dawn upon you that a life of useful service is the only kind worth living. Gradually you will discover that the happiest folks in the world are the ones who are living that sort of a life. On the other hand, if you can pass through the crowd with a hard heart, feeling no compassion to offset your selfish motives, you are likely to come to the conclusion that a life of service is "all moonshine" and that Jesus was mistaken in following such an impractical ideal. The expression of good will in service. Many times we are modest about offering our help because we feel there is so little we can really do that our little would not amount to much. We are mistaken in this, for, as Jesus shows so plainly, the motive always counts more than the deed; and however slight the act of kindness, the good will back of it hallows it and makes it priceless to the one receiving it. And whoever shall give one of these little ones merely a drink of cold water, as the act of a Christian, I tell you truly he shall not miss his reward.-Matthew 10:42. The cup of cold water in an Oriental land, where good drinking water must be bought, was more precious, of course, than with us to-day, but it was a comparatively insignificant service, made great by a holy motive. A grouchy person might give a hundred dollars to a good cause so unwillingly and ungraciously as to spoil all the meaning of his gift; whereas many a boy can pick up a lady's parcel with such grace and politeness as to win her gratitude and her long memory of his kindness. The Boy Scouts have gained well-deserved fame for the fine way in which they have honored the lesser services of life. In a familiar story of Jesus we find his estimate of a deed of pure gratitude (Luke 7: 36-). A woman whom Jesus had evidently rescued from a sinful life took a strange Oriental way of showing her grateful love for her Saviour. She bought some precious ointment in an alabaster flask, enough to last for months of ordinary use, and used it all to anoint Jesus' head and feet, while he was reclining at a banquet in a rich man's house. The gift had no real value to him, but it symbolized the woman's gratitude for his kindness and so her act touched his heart deeply. He was wise enough to understand that her deed of devotion would help to keep her loyal to his ideals of living, so he said, "Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much." The kindly act of service makes the kindly life.— And so we see the final result of such deeds of good will. Repeated often enough, they produce the life of good will, through the habit of kindliness. This is possible only when the sincere motive of kindness is back of the deed of service. The one who serves others becomes worth more to himself as well as to the world. He finds his satisfactions in the worth-while things of life, and they are permanent. The noble ideals of good will get into life and character only through action. It is the act which writes them on the brain-paths, not merely the thinking about them. Then, when written on the brain, they easily occur again and again, until finally they become a part of permanent character through habit, a character of happy good will most naturally expressed in service. |