Fantasy Football Challenge - Football Fanatics Library

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Men of the Bible

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to be scrupulously honest, and to speak the simple truth. We shall forfeit a little of our present popularity, if we take the course which conscience dictates. We shall have to forego and neglect certain things, and suffer loss, if we undertake Christian work. We shall have to give up many an easy hour, many a light and frivolous hour, many an open and secret sin, sweeter to us than honey, if we confess the Lord Christ, and take up the burden of discipleship. The hundred talents block the way, and rather than let them go, we let God go, and sacrifice all the sanctities, and all the precious and immortal things. And this answer comes to all of us--the answer which the prophet gave to the hesitating king as he stood balancing the hundred talents against the duty of the hour: "_The Lord is able to give thee much more than this_." Better to win thy great battle and lose the talents, than keep the money and lose thyself and everything in the impending struggle. God is not so poor that He cannot pay His servants as ample wages as they ever get from other masters. It is not the same kind of pay, but it is always, in the long-run, larger and better. No man ever does the right thing at God's command, without receiving eventually sufficient wages for it--joy even in this life. Whatever immediate losses he may incur, there will be more than compensating gains. The man who lives an upright, conscientious, pure and kindly life, wronging no one, showing justice and mercy to all, is always the happier man; richer in all his thoughts and emotions, richer in friendships and affections, richer in peace of mind, in abiding satisfactions, richer in hopes. He has within him a well-spring of joy which never ceases to flow. Righteousness is not a losing business: it has the best part in this life, and in that which is to come. Whatever you resign at Christ's call: whatever His service costs you in the way of sacrifice: however much you must give up in the shape of pleasure, ease, and agreeable habits--there will be more given to you in return. When Christ asked the disciples to leave all things and follow Him, He said nothing about the rewards--not just then. He told them to take up their cross and come after Him; that was all. He spoke often to them about the pains they would have to endure, the scorn they would meet with, the tribulation they would have to pass through. When he called the last of the apostles, Paul, He even said, and it was the only promise He gave, "_I will show him how great things he must suffer for My name's sake_" (Acts ix. 16). No talk of rewards and gains at first. He knew the men. He knew their eagerness to do what was right and to obey the voice of God. Men who have the right spirit, men with some fire of enthusiasm, do not need crowns held before them to draw them into the true and noble way. They are almost glad to think that crosses and self-sacrifices await them in that way. Christ spoke no words at the beginning about gains and rewards. Come, because I want you, and God asks you, and it is your duty: but afterwards, when they had obeyed His call, He talked to them often about the gains. They had begun to understand them then. There is no man who hath left anything for My sake, who shall not receive a hundredfold in this present time, and in the world to come, life everlasting. And we all learn in a measure what that means, when we have faithfully served Christ for a little time. You talk about the sacrifices and losses of the Christian life. Yes, but no man is fit to be called a Christian who has not found in Christ ten or twenty times as much joy as he has lost. If there were no hereafter, no future crowns at all, it would be a terrible disappointment, but even, apart from that, the present life of every one who believes in Christ and does Christ's work, and loves as Christ loved, is richer, fuller, wider, and happier in almost every way than the life which knows Him not. What about the hundred talents? you say, and I answer with the prophet, "_The Lord is able to give thee much more than this_." JABEZ BY REV. J. G. GREENHOUGH, M.A. "And Jabez was more honourable than his brethren."--1 CHRON. iv, 9. This is a curious fragment of biography, half-hidden in a dreary mass of wholly uninteresting names. We cannot conjecture how it got there. It seems to have no connection either with what comes before or what follows. It is like a sweet little poem in the midst of a dry, genealogical chart; or like a real, living face with the flush of warm colour in it, speaking amid endless rows of mummies or waxwork effigies. It is indeed the short, incomplete story of a life with neither beginning nor end. We are not told who his father was, or who his mother was, or what tribe or family he belonged to. Not a word about origin, descent, pedigree. And there seems to be a purpose in this. For the sacred writer at this point is doing nothing else but tracing pedigrees. These four chapters are to us the most useless in the Bible: names, nothing but long-forgotten names. Names of everybody's father, grandfather, great-grandfather, back to a remote antiquity. I question whether there are many Bible readers who have ever laboured through the list. Yet these family trees, as we may call them, were very precious to the Jews. They thought as much of long descent as my lord Noodle does now. It swelled them immeasurably in self-importance if they could trace their lineage back in unbroken line to one of the twelve patriarchs, or to one of those who came out of Egypt. And the historian ministers to this prejudice or vanity by diligently recording the whole dry catalogue, and then, as if weary of the business, or, perhaps, with just a touch of scorn, he introduces this one name as something worth talking about. Here was a god-made nobleman, whose heraldry need not be written on earth, because it is more surely written in heaven. All the rest were their fathers' sons, and that was about all. This man did not need a pedigree: he won a name and reputation for himself without the help of a distinguished ancestry. By prayerfulness, and energy, and courage, he fought his way from obscurity to honour. And when that happens, when a man has fought the fight with adverse circumstances and overcome

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