TRUE CHRISTIAN STEWARDSHIP.
It is still a practical question in the Christian church, whether, after all, our Lord meant just what he said in declaring, “No man can serve two masters;” and again, “One is your Master, even Christ.” There are a great many Christians who, somehow, believe that they have no real Master; that they do not absolutely belong—body, mind, soul, property—to him whom they look to for salvation; or who somehow think that they belong partly to the Lord and partly to themselves. They are not ready to accept, in its literalness, the inspired assertion to the disciples of Jesus: “Ye are not your own;238for ye are bought with a price.” Even when they are ready to admit that their souls belong to the Saviour, that in purely spiritual things they are subject to his authority, they are inclined to the idea that their time, or their talents, or their business interests, or, at all events, the money they have made, or which has been given to them, is their own—at least nine-tenths of it, in case they count a tithe of it as fairly belonging to the Lord. Unqualified Christian stewardship is by no means recognized generally in the church of Christ as absolutely indispensable to true Christian discipleship. Yet if there is one duty above another which the Lord Jesus insisted on as an essential requisite to the becoming his disciple, it is the duty of unconditional surrender of one’s self and one’s possessions to his service. When the young ruler came to Jesus, seeking the way of salvation, and saying that he had kept the whole moral law from his youth up, Jesus asked him if he was now ready to give up all his accumulation of “great possessions,” and trust himself for this life and for the next to the one Saviour of sinners. That was more than the young man was ready to do. Yet without a readiness to do just that, at the call of Jesus, no young man, nor older one, could ever be saved. It is not that the selling one’s goods, or the giving to the poor, has any essential merit in it, or aids in securing salvation. It is that one must be ready to sell, or to give, or to hold, whatever he has, or whatever he may hereafter acquire, just as the Saviour may direct. It is not the Christian giving, but it is the Christian readiness to give or not to give at the Saviour’s call, which evidences Christian discipleship. When one proposed to follow Jesus after he should have buried his father, “Jesus said unto him, Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead.” Jesus did not thereby intimate that leaving the dead unburied was meritorious; but he did teach that he must have the first place in the service of his disciples. “So, likewise,” he said again, “whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple;” that is, unless you are ready to forsake or to yield all your possessions when he demands it, you cannot be in his service; you are obviously unwilling to recognize him as your Master. “He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me, is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not his cross and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.” He who does not propose to be Christ’s in all things, cannot be Christ’s in anything. One may be an imperfect Christian, but he cannot be partly a Christian. He cannot be Christ’s in spiritual things, if he is not Christ’s in all things. He cannot have any treasure laid up in Heaven if he does not, while on earth, count himself Christ’s steward in the use of all the treasures committed to him here. “This is an hard saying; who can hear it?” The great thing in the use of one’s possessions is to do with them just as the Lord directs in the particular case, and for the time being; it is to hold them or to part with them at his call. And he who stands ready to do this shall not lack wisdom as to the Master’s will. But in a Christian’s exercise of his stewardship, he must be careful lest his refusal to give at a call of charity is prompted by a personal desire for accumulation, or by a wish to use his money for his selfish gratification, rather than by the conviction that his Master desires him to make that refusal.—S. S. Times.