Hebrews 13:3 Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body. We feel our own burdens distinctly enough and our own limitations and sorrows. Now if we felt those of other people a tenth part as distinctly, we could do almost anything with them and for them. To Christ other people were real: just as real as He. God was interested in men because to Him they were lovable. "God so loved the world"; that was where redemption began. And it was not a general, diffusive kind of thing, His love was not. It was not like some great sea of translucent fog which sometimes inundates our city of a warm morning, which only has a kind of general reference to everything and no particular reference to anything. His love was rather like a sunbeam, which drops down ninety million miles upon one specific grass-blade, into one particular bird's eye. People, indeed, are interesting as soon as we get near enough to them to feel that they are people, not things, and as soon as we get far enough into the secret of their life to discover its workings, its difficulties, its disappointments, its ambitions, its defeats, its penitences, its remorses. I believe we would love everybody we came near to if we realised what a hard time they are having. No two people would ever quarrel if they could be each other for a little while. "If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." Then, besides that, if we could feel the sorrow and suffering that is in a man's life, no matter how wicked or degraded he might be, his degradation would be no barrier to kindly regard for him. If we came near enough to a bad man's history to understand it, to see how unfortunate influences tell upon him, what susceptibilities to evil were in him, entirely independent of any choice of his own in the matter, we should find that circumstances were what made a large:part of the mischief, and that the poor fellow has had just as hard and sad a time in keeping from being worse than he is, as we have had in keeping from being worse than we are. We are sometimes surprised that Christ, who as we are told " knew what was in man," nevertheless was able to love man, to love all men. But that was exactly the reason why He was able. Tragedy is all about us — a good deal more tragedy than comedy; and any life becomes inter-resting as soon as, with a key wrought out of love, you unlock it and begin so to be yourself closeted on the inside of it as to feel yourself somehow involved in it, and all its difficulties to be your difficulties, and all its weaknesses and sins even to be so taken upon yourself that you commence to feel the burden of them as your burden. That is what Christ did. That is the meaning of His life; that is the distinctive quality in His redemptive work. He carried people. By becoming like them He helped them to become like Him. And as Christ can do this for each of us, because in His loving way He so perfectly understands all the ins and outs of each of us, so we, in order to make our own lives redemptive in another's behalf, have to make a distinct and affectionate problem of his life, get on to the interior side of it, discover the impulses that play in it, the history that lies back of it, the circumstances that encompass and dominate it. These things quicken in interest as we go on. If you have commenced to read a book, and some one says to you, "Do you like it?" you will very probably answer, "I can hardly say, for I have not yet got fairly into it." So the characters and lives of people only then begin to be interesting, when we have fairly got into them. They are then sure to be of interest, even when we treat them merely as problems to be mentally solved; how much more when we bring to them a heart fraught with personal regard and Christian sympathy. It is in this way, then, that people must be saved and lifted. I do not believe we are going to solve the problem of city and country evangelisation till we get over lumping people. When, at this season of the year, you look up into the sky of an evening, you discern a nebulous belt of light, an indiscriminate mass of stars, lying up and down the sky like a vast white cosmic rainbow. Now, telescopes, as they are directed to that great nebulae, are showing themselves competent to crumble up that mass of stellar uncertainty into myriads of little diamond-like stellar individualities, and as, year by year, the penetrating powers of telescopes are increased, this crumbling, individualising process goes steadily on, so that now we do not any longer think of the Milky Way as a mass of star stuff, but as a host of brilliant worlds, each as distinct from the rest, and as complete in itself as our own great sun, which is indeed thought to be one single flaming member of that superb host. Now, what lenses of enhanced power do for the human eye in the way of splitting up a world of filmy splendour into keen-edged points of individual light and lustre, the same thing love does for human discernment when exercised upon the mass of humanity by which, in a great city, we are environed. It crumbles the mass up into glittering individualities, each a little distinct personal world all in himself. When the sun melts the snow in the spring it tackles each little snow crystal by itself. Each sunbeam picks out its own crystal and turns it into a tear, and so is able to do a great deal in its little way and saves itself the embarrassment and weariness of thinking how many flakes there are that it can never reach; and the snow goes off. How much better that is than it would be for the sunbeams to spend all their time holding conventions in order to devise means for melting the masses of snow. The next thing, therefore, for you and me to do, is to go into the Snow-bank, if we have not already done so, and pick out our particular snow crystal, and commence melting it. (C. H. Parkhurst, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body. |
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