Luke 9:24 For whoever will save his life shall lose it: but whoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it. The highest life, by thinking of something else than your life at all, of something else than yourself, than either of your own body or your own soul. Quit thinking about yourself and your own life; that is how man shall attain the true life, by losing himself in something else I Now, this is apt to seem a contradiction and a paradox. Is not the first principle in doing anything this — to keep the thing steadily before you and aim right at it? It seems a sort of getting at the true life round a corner; going in one direction in order to get into another. And yet it is not so. See! It is true that with respect to the work man has to do outside himself, "the way to do it is to keep it directly in view, aim consciously at it. But what I want you to notice is, that the moment you come to the operations of mind or life in man himself, not merely in this higher life Christ speaks of, but in almost any part of his nature, in man himself, the opposite principle comes in — this very principle which seems so paradoxical, the principle that losing the life, letting it go, not thinking of it, is the surest way of saving it. This is not only true with regard to coming to the best for one's soul, it is true of coming to the best even in the commonest faculties and qualities of life. Why, you see the truth of it every day even in such a common thing as the operations of mind and memory. You want the name of a person or of a place. It is something you know perfectly well — you know it, you say, as well as your own name. Yet you cannot recall it; no l and the serious thing is that the harder you try to recall it, the more it won't come. Dr. W. B. Carpenter tells how some years ago an English bank cashier lost the key of the vault. In the morning it was not on hand. The whole business was at a stand. What must be done? He certainly had it the night before and put it some-where — but where he could not remember. A sharp detective was sent for, and when he had inquired into every circumstance connected with the affair, he said, "The only way is for you to go home and think of something else." And the man did go home; probably found it very hard work to get interested in anything else but at last something attracted his attention, set him thinking in quite a different direction, and then, almost directly, it flashed into his mind where he had put it — and all was right. Take a higher operation of mind than mere memory. Did you ever try to cross a stream by some rather awkward stepping-stones, or by a rather narrow plank? Or have you tried to walk at some dangerous height? or, in fact, anything requiring a particularly clear, steady head? If you have, you know that it is to be done exactly by not thinking about it. If you begin looking down at the stepping-stones, or at the water, or at the depth beneath you, and thinking about it, and about how you shall go through with it, you are lost. Whereas, if you are so occupied, thinking about something else, that you hardly notice the stepping-stones; if you are on some errand in which you are so eager that you are not thinking of yourself — that losing yourself is your safety — you may go perfectly safely over places and heights that afterwards, when you do come to think about them, will make you dizzy to look at. There, too, life is safest by not thinking about saving it. Take another matter — the preservation of health. One condition of keeping in good health is not to think about your health, but to be wholesomely occupied with quite other thoughts. Think about your health, begin feeling your pulse, watching your symptoms, considering all the things which might possibly be the matter with you, and you may think yourself into an illness. Why do physicians so often order "change of scene" and " something to distract the mind," but that the patient may be led to lose himself, and so find the health which he could not gain while anxiously thinking of himself? And so, when there is some epidemic about, how true you constantly see it that "he that will save his life shall lose it." The most dangerous thing of all is to be constantly thinking and scheming how to escape infection. And so it is even in life's most tremendous crisis and trials and perils. In those terrible days of persecution, when the Christian might any hour be taken before some magistrate, and have it put to him to say a word or two cursing and denying Christ, or else to be thrown to the wild beasts in the amphitheatre, or put to any cruel torture that happened to have come in fashion-they believed their Master's words. They didn't worry themselves about saving life, and they did "find it." They found it even here — here, as Christ had said, a hundred-fold, even with their persecutions. The life they had was a nobler, happier life, because it was not occupied in thinking of its own safety, and when they lost it, why, they found it elsewhere. Yes; for these are the things which make us feel man's immortality. It is not when I see men in a mad rush for safety; it is not when I see men setting such store on the mere life that they will sacrifice everything for it, that I am most impressed with life's deathless quality, but just the opposite. When I road — and every week there is some instance of the kind — of those who in the wrecked ship or the burning building are content to let life go in order to help others; when I read of such brave men as that lifeboat crew who, a while ago, pushed off into the raging sea out to the stranded ship, and the storm was so awful that their own boat swamped, and eight of them were drowned; or when I hear such a story as that of the colliers in a mine only five miles from my old Lancashire home, where there was one of those awful explosions, and the men from some lower levels came rushing up right into the danger of the deathly afterblast, when the only chance of escape was by another shaft; and one man knew this, and stood his ground there in that dangerous passage warning the men, as they came rushing along, that their only safety was the other way, and when they urged him to go that other way, saying, "No; some one must stay there to guide the others" — ah! these are the things which make you feel that immortality is real. For the moment you touch this — not self-preservation, but self-renunciation — you feel that there is something in such life of quite other sort than that gross matter by which it can be crushed or burned or drowned; something against which those brute substances and forces are as powerless as a sledge-hammer against steam. I know it seems a hard doctrine. The whole spirit of the common world rises up against it. "We must look to ourselves," men say. Yes, I know how natural this is, and I know that it has its place. I do not want to speak intolerantly or condemnatorily about self-interest. Self-interest, if it is not the highest thing, is one of the useful forces of the world. Self-interest has set man grappling with nature, has taught him the arts of self-protection, has trained him to dig and plant, and spin and weave, has sent him sailing and discovering over the world, has raised the human race from savagism to civilization. Yes, and it has all this, and this kind of thing, to do perpetually. Self-interest is one of the great, strong, permanent forces at the base of life! It is part of nature; but it is not the whole of nature, and it is not the highest nature. Through these self-motives, more and more disciplined and restrained, man should be ever rising higher. The world's best life and work are always leading on to this higher quality in life and work, of losing self, forgetting self. The very things which begin with self do not come to their best till self is lost, forgotten. If you only want to be a public speaker, well, you may begin your practising for it — perhaps you have to do — by thinking about yourself; but you will never come to any real eloquence till you have got away past that, till in some hour of passionate feeling you have forgotten yourself in your subject. The physician may study medicine in order to earn his own living; "but he will be a poor doctor who does not by and by become so interested in his work, and in trying to do good to his sick patients, that he constantly forgets himself. So with all the real excelling power in life. The real power to do any worthy thing in the world depends upon our loving that thing more than ourselves. The moment you rise to that — forget yourself, think of something else, some one else — that moment your work takes on a higher quality. The merest hand-worker goes to work for his own need, but he will find his work happier, and do it better, whenever he forgets his own interest in thinking of his employer's interest. And just so the employer carries on his business primarily for his own self-interest. (B. Herferd, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it. |
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