The Base impulse - Chambers, Oswald
Lord, Lord, when we are dead, remember not
All our lost sorrows and our soul’s endeavour,
Better to bear the burden of our lot,
Firmer to stand how strong the storm so-ever,
Only remember all the agony
Thou bearest in the Garden silently.
And when the soul by death is freed again,
Thou wilt not let the rapture of her wings
Be marred by memory of this life’s pain,
But lift our hearts above our sufferings.
Lord, let our soul’s life after all these years
Rise stronger, wiser, cleaner for its tears.
1. The low man with a little thing to do
The base impulse is the way sin works into our minds and gives us a totally wrong view of god. If the base impulse does not show itself in flesh and blood sins, it will show itself in mean-mindedness. Try and imag- ine what jesus meant when he said, preach the gos- pel to every creature; he keeps an open house for the whole universe. It is a conception impossible of human comprehension.
(a) Moral distinctions
We are interested in other mens lives because of a career, a profession, or an ideal we have for them,
But god does not seem to care an atom for careers or professions, he comes down with ruthless disregard of all gifts and geniuses and sweeps them on one side; he is interested only in one thing, and that thing was exhibited in the life of our lord, viz. , a balanced holiness before god. Our lords character is the fullorbed expression of gods ideal of a man. We can never take any one virtue and say Jesus christ was the representative of that virtue; we cannot speak of Jesus christ being a holy man or a great man or a good man; Jesus christ cannot be summed up in terms of natural virtues, but only in terms of the supernatural. If we can describe a man by any one virtue, he ceases to be gods idea of a man, and the characteristic of the spirit of god in us is that he brings us unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of christ.
(b) Money matters and the masters mind
Money is the sign and symbol of all earthly possessions; it is earthly pleasure in a solid condition, only requiring to be melted to assume any of its more volatile and usable forms; and the pursuit of it easily becomes an absorbing passion even with those who have forgotten how to turn it into these equivalents. On this subject the language of jesus is astonishingly severe.
Stalker
Jesus saw in money a much more formidable enemy of the kingdom of god than we are apt to recognise it to be. Money is one of the touchstones of reality. People say, we must lay up for a rainy day. We must, if we do not know god. How many of us are willing to go the length of Jesus christs teaching? Ask yourself, how does the advocacy of insurance agree with the sermon on the mount, and you will soon see how un-christian we are in spite of all our christian jargon. The more we try to reconcile mod- ern principles of economy with the teachings of Jesus, the more we shall have to disregard jesus. When- ever we read anything that is very plain in our lords words, we either say that we cannot understand it or that it has another meaning. Common sense is the best gift we have, but it must be under the dominant rule of god. We enthrone common sense, we do not enthrone god. Men must reason according to their god, and the god of to-day is common sense; that is why Jesus christs teaching is ruled out of court. If we try and apply the principles of the sermon on the mount to ordinary business life to-day, we shall see where we are. Civilisation was founded by a murderer, and the very soul and genius of civilisation is competition. What we are trying to do to-day is to christianise civilisation, and our social problems exist because Jesus christs teaching is being ruled out.
2. The high man with a great thing to do
Profound as is his sense of the wickedness of the world and the lostness of the individual, the ground-tone of his preaching is not despair, but hope; and the final and enduring impression left on the mind by the pro- longed and sympathetic study of all his words is, that there is an essence of divine dignity and immeasurable value, which it is the task of the saviour and of all who are inspired with his aims to rescue from the dangers to which it is exposed and to redeem to a destiny of blessedness and immortality.
Stalker
Solidarity means oneness of interest. We are familiar with the phrase the solidarity of the human race, but there is also a solidarity of sin (a oneness of inter- est in sin), and a solidarity of salvation (a oneness of interest in salvation). I mean by sin, not sin in a particular sense, but in the great big general sense which means a violation or neglect of the laws of morality or religion, and gods book shows that there is a one- ness of interest in all sin. The psalms show a wonder- ful discrimination about sin (e. G. Psalms 32, 51); they refer to the same thing the apostle paul refers to in ephesians 6:12, the supernatural inspiration of sin.
We have considered the three great sins of our lords daythe sin of the publican, of the pharisee, and of the sadducee, and now we must look to the fact that our lord considered men as evil. If ye then, being evil . . . (luke 11:13). Jesus christ is made to teach the opposite of this by modern teachers; they make out that he taught the goodness of human nature. Jesus Christ revealed that men were evil, and that he came that he might plant in them the very nature that was in himself. He cannot, how- ever, begin to do this until a man recognises himself as jesus sees him,
we start with the idea that some people are good and some bad; but we are all bad, everyone of us needs saving by Jesus christ. Imagine that being believed to-day! We can hear christendom saying, nonsense, human nature is not evil. The feature of to-day is the love of man that hates god. We are alienated from the standpoint of Jesus, we have become incarnated by a leaven that never came from his point of view, and if we are going to stand for him we shall find that what he said is true: they will turn you out of the synagogues not because we denounce sin, a socialist denounces sin as much as a preacher of the gospel. The difference between a christian worker and one who does not know jesus christ is just this that a christian worker can never meet anyone of whom he
Can despair. If we do despair of anyone, it is because we have never met Jesus christ ourselves. The social worker who does not know what jesus christ came to do will end in absolute despair before long, because the social worker more than anyone else begins to see the enormous havoc that sin has made of human nature, and if he does not know the saviour from sin, all his efforts will meet with as much success as attempting to empty the atlantic ocean with a thimble.
(b) saviour from sin
The great challenge in personal work is what relationship have i to Jesus christ? It is not simply that we realise the power of Jesus to save, but that we recognise the possibilities for evil in our own heart, discerned in us by the holy spirit, and know that jesus can save unto the uttermost. Let a man be a murderer, or an evildoer, or any of the things jesus said men could be, it can never shake our confidence if we have once been face to face with jesus christ for ourselves.
It is impossible to discourage us because we start from a knowledge of who jesus christ is in our own life. When we see evil and wrong exhibited in other lives, instead of awakening a sickening despair, it awakens a joyful confidencei know a saviour who can save even that one. One worker like that is of priceless worth, because through that one life the son of god is being manifested. It is not only necessary to have an experience of gods grace, we must have a body of beliefs alive with the spirit of jesus, then when we have learned to see men as he sees them, there is no form of disease or anguish or devilishness that can belch up in human life that can disturb our confidence in him; if it does disturb us, it is because we dont know him.
The sense of sin is in inverse ratio to its presence, that is, the higher up and the deeper down we are saved, the more pangingly terrible is our conviction of sin. The holiest person is not the one who is not conscious of sin, but the one who is most conscious of what sin is. The one who talked most about sin was our lord jesus christ. We are apt to run off with the idea that a man in order to be saved from sin must have lived a vile life himself; but the one who has an understanding of the awful horror of sin is the spotlessly holy christ, who knew no sin. The lower down we get into the experience of sin, the less conviction of sin we have. When we are regenerated and lifted into the light, we begin to know what sin means. There is no mention of sin in the apostle pauls apprehension by christ, yet no one wrote more about sin than the apostle paul years after in his epistles, because by the marvellous working of gods grace and his own repentance, he was lifted into the heavenly places where he saw what sin really was.
The danger with those of us who have experienced gods perfect salvation is that we talk blatant jargon about an experience instead of banking on the tremendous revelation of god the holy ghost. The purer we are through gods sovereign grace, the more terribly poi- gnant is our sense of sin. It is perilous to say, i have nothing to do with sin now; you are the only kind of person who can know what sin is. Men living in sin dont know anything about it. Sin destroys the capacity of knowing what sin is. It is when we have been delivered from sin that we begin to realise by the pure light of the holy ghost what sin is. We shall find over and over again that god will send us shuddering to our knees every time we realise what sin is, and instead of it increasing hardness in us towards the men and women who are living in sin, the spirit of god will use it as a means of bringing us to the dust before him in vicarious intercession that god will save them as he has saved us. Beware of the metal- lic, hard, un-christlike stamp of some testimonies to sanctification, they are not stamped by the holy ghost.
The testimony to sanctification that is of god is dipped and saturated in the blood of the son of god, and that blood sprang from the broken heart of god on account of sin. When once the soul realises what sanctification is, it is a joy unspeakable, but it is a joy in which there is the tremendous undercurrent of a chastening humiliation. Beware of any experience that is not built absolutely on the atoning merit of Jesus christ; and remember, the measure of your freedom from sin is the measure of your sense of what sin is.