442. What Were You Made For?

What Were You Made For?

Joh_18:37 : ’93To this end was I born.’94

After Pilate had suicided, tradition says that his body was thrown into the Tiber, and such storms ensued on and about that river that his body was taken out and thrown into the Rhone, and similar disturbances swept that river and its banks. Then the body was taken out and removed to Lausanne, and put in a deeper pool, which immediately became the center of similar atmospheric and aqueous disturbances. Though these are fanciful and false traditions they show the execration with which the world looked upon Pilate. It was before this man when he was in full life and power that Christ was arraigned as in a Court of Oyer and Terminer. Pilate said to his prisoner: ’93Art thou a King, then?’94 and Jesus answered: ’93To this end was I born.’94 Sure enough, although all earth and hell arose to keep him down, he is today empalaced, enthroned and coroneted King of earth and King of heaven. ’93To this end was I born.’94 That is what he came for, and that was what he accomplished.

By the time a child reaches ten years of age the parents begin to discover that child’92s destiny; but by the time he or she reaches fifteen years of age, the question is on the child’92s lips: ’93What am I to be? What am I going to do? What was I made for?’94 It is a sensible and righteous question, and the youth ought to keep on asking it until it is so fully answered that the young man, or the young woman can say with as much truth as its author, though on a less expansive scale: ’93To this end was I born.’94

There is too much divine skill shown in the physical, mental and moral constitution of the ordinary human being to suppose that he was constructed without any divine purpose. If you take me out on some vast plain and show me a pillared temple, surmounted by a dome like St. Peter’92s, and having a floor of precious stones, and arches that must have taxed the brain of the greatest draughtsman to design, and walls scrolled and niched and paneled and wainscoted and painted, and I should ask you what this building was put up for, and you answered: ’93For nothing at all,’94 how could I believe you? And it is impossible for me to believe that any ordinary human being who has in his muscular, nervous and cerebral organization more wonders than Christopher Wren lifted in St. Paul’92s, or Phidias ever chiseled on the Acropolis, and is built in such a way that he shall last long after St. Paul’92s Cathedral is as much a ruin as the Parthenon’97that such a being was constructed for no purpose, and to execute no mission, and without any divine intention toward some end. The object of this sermon is to help you to find out what you are made for, and help you find your sphere, and assist you into that condition where you can say with certainty and emphasis and enthusiasm and triumph: ’93To this end was I born.’94

First, I discharge you from all responsibility for most of your environments. You are not responsible for your parentage or grand-parentage. You are not responsible for any of the cranks that may have lived in your ancestral line, and who a hundred years before you were born may have lived a style of life that more or less affects you today. You are not responsible for the fact that your temperament is sanguine or melancholic or bilious or lymphatic or nervous. Neither are you responsible for the place of your nativity, whether among the granite hills of New England or the cotton plantations of Louisiana or on the banks of the Clyde or the Dnieper or the Shannon or the Seine. Neither are you responsible for the religion taught in your father’92s house, or the irreligion. Do not bother yourself about what you cannot help, or about circumstances that you did not decree. Take things as they are, and decide the question so that you shall be able safely to say: ’93To this end was I born.’94

How will you decide it? By direct application to the only Being in the universe who is competent to tell you’97the Lord Almighty. Do you know the reason why he is the only one who can tell? Because he can see everything between your cradle and your grave, though the grave be eighty years off. And besides that, he is the only being who can see what has been happening for the last five hundred years in your ancestral line, and for thousands of years clear back to Adam, and there is not one person in all that ancestral line of six thousand years but has somehow affected your character, and even old Adam himself will sometimes turn up in your disposition. The only being who can take all things that pertain to you into consideration is God, and he is the one you can ask. Life is so short we have no time to experiment with occupations and professions. The reason we have so many dead failures is that parents decide for children what they shall do, or children themselves, wrought on by some whim or fancy, decide for themselves without any imploration of divine guidance. So we have now in pulpits men making sermons who ought to be in blacksmith shops making plowshares, and we have in the law those who instead of ruining the cases of their clients ought to be pounding shoe lasts, and doctors who are the worst hindrances to their patients’92 convalescence, and artists trying to paint landscapes who ought to be whitewashing board fences; while there are others making bricks who ought to be remodeling constitutions, or shoving planes who ought to be transforming literatures. Ask God about what worldly business you shall undertake until you are so positive you can in earnestness smite your hand on your plow handle, or your carpenter’92s bench, or your Blackstone’92s ’93Commentaries,’94 or your medical dictionary, or your Doctor Dick’92s ’93Didactic Theology,’94 saying: ’93For this end was I born.’94

There are children who early develop natural affinities for certain styles of work. When the father of the astronomer, Forbes, was going to London, he asked his children what present he should bring each one of them. The boy who was to be an astronomer cried out, ’93Bring me a telescope!’94 And there are children whom you find all by themselves drawing on their slates, or on paper, ships or houses or birds, and you know they are to be draughtsmen or artists of some kind. And you find others ciphering out difficult problems with rare interest and success, and you know they are to be mathematicians. And others making wheels and strange contrivances, and you know they are going to be machinists. And others are found experimenting with hoe and plow and sickle, and you know they will be farmers. And others are always swapping jack-knives or balls or bats and making something by the bargain, and they are going to be merchants. When Abbe de Rance had so advanced in studying Greek that he could translate Anacreon at twelve years of age, there was no doubt left that he was intended for a scholar. But in almost every lad there comes a time when he does not know what he was made for, and his parents do not know, and it is a crisis that God only can decide.

Then there are those born for some especial work, and their fitness does not develop until quite late. When Philip Doddridge, whose sermons and books have harvested uncounted souls for glory, began to study for the ministry, Dr. Calamy, one of the wisest and best men, advised him to turn his thoughts to some other work. Isaac Barrow, the eminent clergyman and Christian scientist’97his books standard now, though he has been dead over two hundred years’97was the disheartenment of his father, who used to say that if it pleased God to take any of his children away he hoped it might be his son Isaac. So some of those who have been characterized for their stupidity in boyhood or girlhood, have turned out the mightiest benefactors or benefactresses of the human race. These things being so, am I not right in saying that in many cases God only knows what is the most appropriate thing for you to do, and he is the one to ask. And let all parents and all schools and all universities and all colleges recognize this, and a large number of those who spend their best years in stumbling about among businesses and occupations, now trying this and now trying that, and failing in all, would be able to go ahead with a definite, decided and tremendous purpose, saying, ’93To this end was I born.’94

But my subject now mounts into the momentous. Let me say that you are made for usefulness and heaven. I judge this from the way you are built. You go into a shop where there is only one wheel turning and that by a workman’92s foot on a treadle, and you say to yourself: ’93Here is something good being done, yet on a small scale;’94 but if you go into a factory covering many acres, and you find thousands of bands pulling on thousands of wheels, and shuttles flying, and the whole scene bewildering with activities, driven by water or steam or electric power, you conclude that the factory was put up to do great work and on a vast scale. Now, I look at you, and if I should find that you had only one faculty of body, only one muscle, only one nerve, if you could see but could not hear, or could hear and not see, if you had the use of only one foot or one hand, and, as to your higher nature, if you had only one mental faculty, and you had memory but no judgment, or judgment but no will, and if you had a soul with only one capacity, I would say not much is expected of you. But stand up, O man! and let me look you squarely in the face. Eyes capable of seeing everything. Ears capable of hearing everything. Hands capable of grasping everything. Mind with more wheels than any factory ever turned, more power than Corliss engine ever moved. A soul that will outlive all the universe except heaven, and would outlive all heaven if the life of other immortals were a moment short of the eternal. Now, what has the world a right to expect of you? What has God a right to demand of you? God is the greatest of economists in the universe, and he makes nothing uselessly, and for what purpose did he build your body, mind and soul as they are built? There are only two Beings in the universe who can answer that question. The angels do not know. The schools do not know. Your kindred cannot certainly know. God knows, and you ought to know. A factory running at an expense of five hundred thousand dollars a year, and turning out goods worth only seventy cents a year, would not be such an incongruity as you, O man! with such semi-indefinite equipment doing nothing, or next to nothing, in the way of usefulness. ’93What shall I do?’94 you ask. My brethren, my sisters, do not ask me. Ask God. There’92s some path of Christian usefulness open. It may be a rough path, or it may be a smooth path, a long path or a short path. It may be on a mount of conspicuity, or in a valley unobserved, but it is a path on which you can start with such faith and such satisfaction and such certainty that you can cry out in the face of earth and hell and heaven: ’93To this end was I born.’94

Do not wait for extraordinary qualifications. Philip the Conqueror gained his greatest victories seated on a mule, and if you wait for some caparisoned Bucephalus to ride into the conflict you will never get into the world-wide fight at all. Samson slew the Lord’92s enemies with the jawbone of the stupidest beast created. Shamgar slew six hundred of the Lord’92s enemies with an oxgoad. Under God, spittle cured the blind man’92s eyes in the New Testament story. Take all the faculty you have and say: ’93O Lord! Here is what I have, show me the field and back me up by omnipotent power. Anywhere, anyhow, any time for God.’94 Two men riding on horseback came to a trough to water the horses. While the horses were drinking, one of the men said to the other a few words about the value of the soul, and then they rode away, and in opposite directions. But the words uttered were the salvation of the one to whom they were uttered, and he became the Rev. Mr. Champion, one of the most distinguished missionaries in heathen lands; for years wondering who did for him the Christian kindness, and not finding out until in a bundle of books sent him to Africa he found the biography of Brainerd Taylor and a picture of him, and the missionary recognized the face in that book as the man who, at the watering trough for horses, had said the thing that saved his soul.

What opportunities you have had in the past! What opportunities you have now! What opportunities you will have in the days to come! Put on your hat, O woman! this afternoon, and go in and comfort that young mother who lost her babe last summer. Put on your hat, O man! and go over and see that merchant who was compelled yesterday to make an assignment, and tell him of the everlasting riches remaining for all those who serve the Lord. Can you sing? Go and sing for that man who cannot get well, and you will help him into heaven. Let it be your brain, your tongue, your eyes, your ears, your heart, your lungs, your hands, your feet, your body, your mind, your soul, your life, your death, your time, your eternity for God, feeling in your soul: ’93To this end was I born.’94

It may be helpful to some if I recite my own experience in this regard. I started for the law without asking any divine direction. I consulted my own tastes. I liked lawyers and courtrooms and judges and juries, and I reveled in hearing the Frelinghuysens and the Bradleys of the New Jersey bar, and as assistant of the county clerk, at sixteen years of age, I searched titles, naturalized foreigners, recorded deeds, received the confession of judgments, swore witnesses and juries and grand juries. But after a while I felt a call to the Gospel ministry and entered it, and I felt some satisfaction in the work. But one summer, when I was resting at Sharon Springs, and while seated in the park of that village, I said to myself, ’93If I have an especial work to do in the world I ought to find it out now,’94 and with that determination I prayed as I had never before prayed, and got the divine direction, and wrote it down in my memorandum book, I saw my life-work then as plainly as I see it now. Oh, do not be satisfied with general directions. Get specific directions. Do not shoot at random. Take aim and fire. Concentrate. Napoleon’92s success in battle came from his theory of breaking through the enemy’92s ranks at one point, not trying to meet the whole line of the enemy’92s force by a similar force. One reason why he lost Waterloo was because he did not work his usual theory, but spread his force out over a wide range. O Christian man! O Christian woman! break through somewhere. Not a general engagement for God, but a particular engagement, and made in answer to prayer. If there are sixteen hundred million people in the world, then there are sixteen hundred million different missions to fulfil, different styles of work to do, different orbits in which to revolve, and if you do not get the divine direction there are at least fifteen hundred and ninety-nine million possibilities that you will make a mistake. On your knees before God get the matter settled so that you can firmly say: ’93To this end was I born.’94

And now I come to the climacteric consideration. As near as I can tell, you were built for a happy eternity, all the disasters which have happened to your nature to be overcome by the blood of the Lamb if you will heartily accept that Christly arrangement. We are all rejoiced at the increase in human longevity. People live, as near as I can observe, about ten years longer than they used to. The modern doctors do not bleed their patients on all occasions as did the former doctors. In those times if a man had fever they bled him, if he had consumption they bled him, if he had rheumatism they bled him, and if they could not make out exactly what was the matter they bled him. Olden time phlebotomy was death’92s coadjutor. All this has changed. From the way I see people skipping about at eighty years of age, I conclude that life insurance companies will have to change their table of risks and charge a man no more premium at seventy than they used to do when he was sixty, and no more premium at fifty than when he was forty. By the advancement of medical science and the wider acquaintance with the laws of health, and the fact that people know better how to take care of themselves, human life is prolonged. But do you realize what, after all, is the brevity of our earthly state? In the times when people lived seven and eight hundred years, the patriarch Jacob, at the age of one hundred and thirty, said that his years were few. Looking at the life of the youngest person in this assembly and supposing he lived to be a nonagenarian, how short the time and soon gone, while banked up in front of us is an eternity so vast that arithmetic has not figures enough to express its length or breadth or depth or height. For a happy eternity you were born unless you run yourself against the divine intentions. If standing in your presence, my eye should fall upon the feeblest soul here as that soul will appear when the world lets it up, and heaven entrances it, I suppose I would be so overpowered that I should drop down as one dead.

You have examined the family Bible and explored the family records, and you may have daguerrotypes of some of the kindred of previous generations, you have had photographs taken of what you were in boyhood or girlhood, and what you were ten years later, and it is very interesting to any one to be able to look back upon pictures of what he was ten or twenty or thirty years ago; but have you ever had a picture taken of what you may be and what you will be if you seek after God and feel the Spirit’92s regenerating power? Where shall I plant the camera to take the picture? I plant it on this platform. I direct it toward you. Sit still or stand still while I take the picture. It shall be an instantaneous picture. There! I have it. It is done. You can see the picture in its imperfect state, and get some idea of what it will be when thoroughly developed. There is your resurrected body, so brilliant that the noonday sun is a patch of midnight compared with it. There is your soul, so pure that all the forces of diabolism could not spot it with an imperfection. There is your being, so mighty and so swift that flight from heaven to Mercury or Mars or Jupiter and back again to heaven would not weary you, and a world on each shoulder would not crush you. An eye that shall never shed a tear. An energy that shall never feel a fatigue. A brow that shall never throb with pain. You are young again, though you died of decrepitude. You are well again, though you coughed or shivered yourself into the tomb. Your everyday associates are the apostles and prophets and martyrs, and most exalted souls, masculine and feminine, of all the centuries. The archangel to you no embarrassment. God himself your present and everlasting joy. That is an instantaneous picture of what you may be, and what I am sure some of you will be. If you realize that it is an imperfect picture, my apology is what the apostle John said: ’93’91It doth not yet appear what we, shall be.’94 ’93To this end was I born.’94 If I did not think so I would be overwhelmed with melancholy.

The world does very well for a little while, eighty or a hundred or a hundred and fifty years, and I think that human longevity may yet be improved up to that prolongation, for now there is so little room between our cradle and our grave we cannot accomplish much, but who would want to dwell in this world for all eternity? Some think this earth will finally be turned into a heaven. Perhaps it may, but it would have to undergo radical repairs, and pass through eliminations and evolutions and revolutions and transformations infinite, to make it desirable for eternal residence. All the east winds would have to become west winds, and all the winters changed to springtides, and the volcanoes extinguished, and the oceans chained to their beds, and the epidemics forbidden entrance, and the world so fixed up that I think it would take more to repair this old world than to make an entirely new one. But I must say I do not care where heaven is if we can only get there, whether a gardenized America or an emparadised Europe or a world central to the whole universe. ’93To this end was I born.’94 If each one of us could say that, we would go with faces shining and hopes exhilarant amid earth’92s worst misfortunes and trials. Only a little while and then the rapture. Only a little while and then the reunion. Only a little while and then the transfiguration.

In the seventeenth century, all Europe was threatened with a wave of Asiatic barbarism and Vienna was especially besieged. The king and his court had fled and nothing could save the city from being overwhelmed unless the king of Poland, John Sobieski, to whom they had sent for help, should with his army come down for the relief, and from every roof and tower the inhabitants of Vienna watched and waited and hoped until on the morning of September eleventh, the rising sun threw an unusual and unparalleled brilliancy. It was the reflection on the swords and shields and helmets of John Sobieski and his army coming down over the hills to the rescue, and that day, not only Vienna, but Europe, was saved. And see you not, O ye souls besieged with sin and sorrow, that light breaks on the swords and the shields and the helmets of divine rescue bathed in the rising sun of heavenly deliverance? Let everything else go rather than let heaven go. What a strange thing it must be to feel one’92s self born to an earthly crown, but you have been born for a throne on which you may reign after the last monarch of all the earth shall have gone to dust. I invite you to start now for your own coronation, to come in and take the title deeds to your everlasting inheritance. Through an impassioned prayer take heaven and all of its raptures. What a poor farthing is all that this world can offer you compared with pardon here and life immortal beyond the stars, unless this side of them, there be a place large enough and beautiful enough and grand enough for all the ransomed. Wherever it be, in what world, whether near by or far away, in this or some other constellation, hail home of light and love and blessedness! Through the atoning mercy of Christ, may we all get there!

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage