LOYALTY TO JESUS
But supremely, of course, the Christian religion is personal and passionate loyalty to Jesus Christ. It does not mean just believing something about Him or singing hymns to His praise. There is something prior to loyalty and that is consecration. You make Him the captain of your salvation and then give Him a complete trust, a cheerful obedience, and an unswerving loyalty. It means following Him at all costs and ordering your life according to His mind and will. It means that, just that, but it does mean that Galsworthy has given us a play called “Loyalties” and made us see situations where there is a clash of loyalties. Most of us know such situations. But for a Christian the supreme loyalty is never in question. Our first loyalty is pledged to Jesus Christ and neither pleasure, nor care, nor enemies must reduce us from it. If He is the captain of our salvation it is His to call and command, ours to follow and obey.
LOYALTY TO CHURCH
The Christian religion means loyalty to the Christian church. For the church is the body of Christ, the agent through which His kingdom comes, the one instrument that exists alone to establish His reign on the earth. There are folk who entice the church and cheerfully argue that it is nearly dead. It is worthwhile remembering that the bitterest critics of the churches never enter one. These folk will draw their own conclusions. Don’t you worry: The church can’t die for the life of it. It lives because Christ is its Head. No other institution knows so well the mind of Christ or exists alone for the pastures of the kingdom. Boldly I say it, through the church alone can the world be cured of its poisonous hates, devastating materialism, and bitter despair.
What the church needs is the loyalty of its members. If you ask me why you should make sacrifices for it, since it ever were the service comes before your own wishes, why you should care for its well-being and concerned that its congregations are small, there is only one reply—you are a member of it. Who asked you to join? Not me. I never asked one of you to join and never put a man’s name on the roll without his consent. It is not for me to dictate, it is for you to ask what loyalty to your membership involves.
Be loyal to the church of your choice though it is far from perfect. My home may not be as elaborate in its appointments as some of the homes I stay in, but because it is mine, it commands my loyalty and service. Bring your best to it. Put your youth and vitality, your courage and your resources, your laughter and your high spirits, into it. Seek to make your church worthy of your Lord.
LOYALTY’S GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY
Days of defection and defect give loyalty its golden opportunity. Just because the days are difficult and things do not seem to be going well with the church is surely no reason for desertion and disloyalty. This is one great chance to show the sincerity of our loyalty. Let one illustration serve instead of argument. Whenever I want to renew a proper pride in a church of my fathers’ and my choice, I take down Silvester Horne’s history of the churches. In it, among many stirring stories of splendid loyalty I read the story of Vavasor Powell (182), the intrepid Welsh evangelist. He died in 1670 having spent eleven of his fifty-three years in prison for no greater crime than that of preaching the gospel. If you search in Bunhill Fields you will find his tombstone and on it these words—“In the defection of many he found grace to be faithful.”
That is the grace we greatly need in these days. It is comparatively easy to be loyal when your cause is popular and your church is successful. But real loyalty is displayed when things are going wrong and the half-hearted scatter from what seems to be a sinking ship. “Then to side with truth is noble, when we share her wretched crust, ere her cause bring fame and profit, and tis prosperous to be just, then it is the brave man chooses while the coward stands aside, till the multitude make virtue of the faith they have denied.”24
WHAT THIS VIEW OF RELIGION INVOLVES
Religion, I am insisting, is loyalty, loyalty to Christ, His church, and the wonderful life and service for which they stand. Such a view does not make religion easy, but it does make it simple and intelligible. It does not ask you to sign complex creeds or believe things that offend your intellect and tax your credibility. It asks you to consecrate your life to a leader, a captain, and then to be loyal at all costs to Him. That is all I have a right to ask, but I have the right to ask that. It is not for me to say you shall not go here or there or do this or that. But if Christ says, “Don’t go there or do that,” will you obey?
That is religion—loyalty to the captain. Such loyalty transforms and transfigures. Perhaps the most moving writing of the war years was Donald Hawkins’s “The Beloved Captain.” He tells how literally loyalty to the beloved captain made a bunch of odds and ends into a company of perfect soldiers. Still more will loyalty to the captain of our salvation mean the transforming of ordinary folk into soldiers who, in the good fight, play the part of heroes.
“Live loyally under God’s eye with all your mind and strength.” Such loyalty will bring its own radiant reward. One of the outstandingly happy memories of my early days is the memory of Rallies of Christian Endeavors. I recall the crowds of clear-eyed, happy-hearted, full-throated, eager youths and maidens. They were keener and happier than the crowds I have seen at football matches or in entertainment halls. I recall their radiantly happy rendering of the hymn that was their Marseillaise, and I would to God we could sing it in the same spirit. “Peal out the watchword! Silence it never! Song of our spirits, rejoicing and free, peal out the watchword! Loyal forever! King of our lives, by Thy grace we will be.”25
24. This is a quote from James Russell Lowell and his famous poem “The Present Crisis.”
25. This is from the famous hymn writer Frances Havergal, “True Hearted, Whole Hearted, Faithful and Loyal” (1878).
“UNACCOMPLISHED AIMS”—1 Kings 8.17–19
(Preached at Spring Head Mission 10/17/1943 and at Bishop Street 8/11/46)
1 Kings 8.17–19 “It was in the heart of David . . . to build a house for the name of the LORD . . . and the LORD said . . . whereas it was in thine heart to build a house unto my name . . . nevertheless, thou shalt not build the house, but thy son . . . he shall build the house to my name.”
David’s purpose to build a house for the worship of God seems to have been altogether pure and generous. He could not bear the thought that, while he himself dwelt in a house of cedar, the ark of God rested under curtains. His proposition to build commended itself to the judgment of Nathan the prophet, who said, “Go, do all that is in thine heart.” Yet for all that, David was forbidden to carry his scheme into effect: the purpose never became a performance. God made it clear to him that he was not to realize his heart’s desire. The house would be built, but not by David’s hands.
Though there are many fine things in David’s life, I know nothing finer than the spirit in which he accepted the denial of his desire and the refusal of his proffered gift. There was nothing little or peevish about him when he learned that the desire he sought had been granted to another. I will come back to that presently, for the moment let us think of how this incident illuminates life’s unaccomplished aims.
There are many whose generous purposes are broken off and whose grand designs never become deeds. The broken column in the churchyard is a symbol of unrealized dreams and broken hopes. But this thing is true to life as well as to death. There are reasons, physical, psychological, emotional, why many never fulfill all that it is in their hearts to do. They plan in marble, but have to build in brick. Their paths find extension in Anne Bronte’s words: “I hoped, . . . with the brave and strong.” We recognize that the lot of all is such.
Whatever it cost Solomon to build the temple,