---

Let us look first at that member of the pair which is least popular — DOCTRINE. What does the word mean? It means simply "teaching," or "what is taught." St. Paul, writing to Timothy, who was by office a teacher, says "take heed unto the doctrine, to what you teach"; and of course writing to the people he would have said "take heed unto the doctrine, unto what you are taught." We are all being taught constantly; persons and things and events are constantly giving us lessons; the process of doctrine-making is for ever going on within us, and we cannot help it, as long as we are receptive and reasoning beings. And very often me hear some man give expression to a doctrine under the influence of a sudden event, which only puts in shape and brings to light what has been forming in his life for years. Since then the warning is about teaching, it must mean that we are to be careful of our subject and our teacher; for those are the important things in all teaching, and it is just those that give the characteristics to Christian doctrine. The subject is God and the teacher is Christ. It exalts God to His place as the very centre of all our life; it says that under Christ alone can we really learn about God worthily, although there will be many subordinate teachers, to whose word He will give the right place and due importance. This is the essence of Christian doctrine. Look at it thus as regulating, systematizing, correcting all the teaching that is for ever poured into our minds, and there is nothing so terrible in its aspect. It is not dry or unimportant; it is a matter of vital interest; it does not consist of things that cannot be understood, but has its beginnings in the simplest facts that all can comprehend.

II. And so doctrine is put before us as a necessity of all life. And now we can turn to the other side which men appreciate so much more readily — to CONDUCT, which is contained in those words, "take heed to thyself." Care of our conduct, which we all willingly grant to be three-fourths of man's evident life, everybody feels the need of in this world.

1. In the first place we can see how conduct serves doctrine. This process of learning is not an easy one; the best side of a lesson is easily passed over, because some other side appeals to us more. We have been accustomed to think only of ourselves; sin has turned us away from God and He is a hard, dry subject to us; we are not what God made us to be, and so we are not able to appreciate what our God's word is to us. But diligent care of oneself tones up the mind. The man is, used to being rigid with himself, to looking away from his own immediate comfort to higher and better. Doctrine is the learning in God's school: and just as it makes a great difference from what kind of a home a child goes to the school, as to how much he learns when he arrives there, so to learn in God's school we need to go there with lives that have appreciated the vileness of all sin and the value of all struggle against it.

2. This is the value of conduct, then, as a preparative for doctrine: look at it next as the interpreter of doctrine. God's teaching must be very great, and often beyond us; and we never shall know it, until we have tried it at point after point and found how powerful it is. Human conduct creates strange emergencies; and we, in our cowardice, are often afraid that we shall not be able to meet them, and so we are almost afraid to take heed unto ourselves. We think that we had better close our eyes to many things in our lives for fear that we shall not know how to deal with them. We do not know what we shall find in ourselves if we look too closely. But put conduct and the study of God's teaching together, and we find that all the emergencies of one answer to the possibilities of the other. The care of our conduct becomes like an experimental lecture on God's teaching; it supplies the illustrations for God's book of doctrine, which can help all poor ignorant scholars who say that their cannot understand God's teaching here. God's doctrine of mechanics is to be found in no text-book; it is written in the formation of our bodies, in the movements of the heavenly bodies, in the connection of all substances of this earth here. Men, like children, are led by these illustrations; they read page after page, they learn the doctrine, they go on and spread it in inventions of their own embodying those same principles, and so the world is furnished with what it needs. God's laws of morals and doctrine of salvation ask the same illustration; they are not all plain; they have obscure points as all God's thoughts must have to us. How shall the world get at them and use them? Only by their being embodied, so that men can study them in human lives and then use the principles in forming those new lives which the world so sadly wants. Take heed unto thyself and unto the doctrine. Find out your own wants and infirmities and go to the doctrine for their supply; take the doctrine and write it in your own life. And there is something more that conduct gives to doctrine besides illustration: it is life and warmth. No wonder that doctrine is often declared to be dry and hard. It is teaching about God coming to many men who know nothing about God Himself; He is a mere name to them; they do not appreciate His existence or His being at all. What shall give this same strange living power to doctrine? The man hears of God, but He is far away. But his own life he does appreciate; let him value that it is a precious thing; it can live on nothing that the world furnishes; it calls out for the living God: take heed unto thyself, says the apostle. In thee is a voice which does tell of the nearness of another world, which demands the knowledge of a higher being. Living men make living doctrines. By those the world is saved. The doctrine received into men's lives is the power of God. And so when God would save the world He sent Christ to it. There was the complete union of doctrine and life. All the teaching of God was there; He was the Son of God direct from the Father. And in the last place, look how great the work is that such care of the doctrine and of conduct accomplishes. "Thou shalt both save thyself and those that hear thee." We do not save ourselves by our conduct and our neighbour by our doctrine. The two together save both of us. The two paths are one, the two goals are one.

(A. Brooks.)

---

---

KJV: Take heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine; continue in them: for in doing this thou shalt both save thyself, and them that hear thee.

WEB: Pay attention to yourself, and to your teaching. Continue in these things, for in doing this you will save both yourself and those who hear you.