| Devotional Hours with the Bible |
Chapter 20 |
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It is easy enough to think of this law of life as a theory. Now and then there comes an opportunity also to illustrate it in some grand way, as some nurse does it, as some true doctor does it, as an other does it. But how are we going to live this way in the common experience of everyday life? “If any man serve me, let him follow me.” “He that hateth His life… shall keep it unto life eternal.” We may interpret this law of the cross so as to make it apply to the experiences of the home, the neighborhood, the school, the business office. Victor Hugo attempts it in speaking of the philosophy of life. He says:
Men hate, are brutes, fight, lie, leave their dream unto the shadow. But share you your bread with little children; see that no one goes about you with naked feet; look kindly unto mothers nursing their children on the doorsteps of humble cottages; do not knowingly crush the humblest flower; respect the needs of birds… Be like him who has a watering pot in His hand, only let your watering pot be filled with good deeds and good words… If you have enemies, bless them — and live with that sweet, unobtrusive authority that comes to the soul in patient expectation of the eternal dawn.
The keynote of the lesson we are trying to learn is self-denial, which is not merely doing without meat during Lent, giving up some customary indulgences for a few weeks, sacrificing a few things you do not care much for. There are few farces enacted in the world equal in emptiness to the farce of pious self-denial, as it is played by a good many people, for example, in the Lenten days, meanwhile living selfishly in all the relations of the common days. Self-denial as Christ practice it and teaches it is denying yourself — hating your own life, laying it on the altar that some other one may be helped.
Hating your life means stooping down and considering the needs of little children, the loneliness and wariness of old people; it means thinking of persons no one else is likely to think of or care for; being patient with disagreeable people, cranky people, and kind to them; going far out of your way to be obliging to one who would not go out of His way an inch to do a good turn to you; not noticing slights and inattentions, or even slurs and offensive things, save to be all the more Christlike to those who so ungraciously treat you; saying especially kind things of anyone who had been saying unusually unkind things of your. That is what Christ did.
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