485. Unoccupied Fields

Unoccupied Fields

Rom_15:20 : ’93Lest I should build upon another man’92s foundation.’94

In laying out the plan of his missionary tour, Paul sought out towns and cities which had not yet been preached to. He goes to Corinth, a city mentioned for splendor and vice, and Jerusalem, where the priesthood and the Sanhedrin were ready to leap with both feet upon the Christian religion. He feels he has especial work to do, and he means to do it. What was the result? The grandest life of usefulness that a man ever lived. We modern Christian workers are not apt to imitate Paul. We build on other people’92s foundations. If we erect a church we prefer to have it filled with families all of whom have been pious. Do we gather a Sabbath-school class, we want good boys and girls, hair combed, faces washed, manners attractive. So a church in this day is apt to be built out of other churches. Some ministers spend all their time in fishing in other people’92s ponds, and they throw the line into that church-pond and jerk out a Methodist, and throw the line into another church-pond and bring out a Presbyterian, or there is a religious row in some neighboring church, and a whole school of fish swim off from that pond, and we take them all in with one sweep of the net. What is gained? Absolutely nothing for the cause of Christ. What strengthens an army is new recruits. What I have always desired is, that while we are courteous to those coming from other flocks, we build our church not out of other churches, but out of the world, lest we build on another man’92s foundation. The fact is, this is a big world. When, in our schoolboy days, we learned the diameter and circumference of this planet, we did not learn half. It is the latitude and longitude and diameter and circumference of want and woe and sin that no figures can calculate. This one spiritual continent of wretchedness reaches across all zones, and if I were called to give its geographical boundary, I would say it was bounded on the north and south and east and west by the great heart of God’92s sympathy and love. Oh, it is a great world! Since six o’92clock this morning sixty thousand eight hundred persons have been born, and all these multiplied populations are to be reached of the Gospel. In England, or in our Eastern American cities, we are being much crowded, and an acre of ground is of great value, but out west five hundred acres is a small farm, and twenty thousand acres is no unusual possession. There is a vast field here and everywhere unoccupied, plenty of room more, not building on another man’92s foundation.

We need as churches to stop bombarding the old ironclad sinners that have been proof against thirty years of Christian assault. Alas for that church which lacks the spirit of evangelism, spending on one chandelier enough to light five hundred souls to glory, and in one carved pillar enough to have made a thousand men ’93pillars in the house of our God forever,’94 and doing less good than many a log cabin meetinghouse with tallow candles stuck in wooden sockets, and a minister who has never seen a college, or knows the difference between Greek and Choctaw. We need as churches to get into sympathy with the great outside world, and let them know that none are so brokenhearted or hardly bestead that will not be welcomed. ’93No!’94 says some fastidious Christian, ’93I don’92t like to be crowded in church. Don’92t put any one in my pew.’94 My brother, what will you do in heaven? When a great multitude that no man can number assembles they will put fifty in your pew. What are the select few today assembled in the Christian churches compared with the mightier millions outside of them, eight hundred thousand in Brooklyn, but less than one hundred thousand in the churches? Many of the churches are like a hospital that should advertise that its patients must have nothing worse than toothache or ’93run-rounds,’94 but no broken heads, no crushed ankles, no fractured thighs. Give us for treatment moderate sinners, velvet-coated sinners and sinners with a gloss on. It is as though a man had a farm of three thousand acres and put all his work on one acre. He may raise never so large ears of corn, never so big heads of wheat, he would remain poor. The church of God has bestowed its chief care on one acre and has raised splendid men and women in that small enclosure, but the field is the world. That means North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, and all the islands of the sea. It is as though after a great battle there were left fifty thousand wounded and dying on the field, and three surgeons gave all their time to three patients under their charge. The major-general comes in and says to the doctors: ’93Come out here and look at the nearly fifty thousand dying for lack of surgical attendance!’94 ’93No,’94 say the three doctors, standing there fanning their patients, ’93we have three important cases here, and we are attending to them, and when we are not positively busy with their wounds, it takes all our time to keep the flies off.’94 In this awful battle of sin and sorrow, where millions have fallen on millions, do not let us spend all our time in taking care of a few people, and when the command comes, ’93Go into the world,’94 say practically: ’93No, I cannot go; I have here a few choice cases, and I am busy keeping off the flies.’94 There are multitudes today who have never had any Christian worker look them in the eye, and with earnestness in the accentuation, say: ’93Come!’94 or they would long ago have been in the kingdom. My friends, religion is either a sham or a great reality. If it be a sham, let us disband our churches and Christian associations. If it be a reality, then great populations are on the way to the bar of God unfitted for the ordeal, and what are we doing?

In order to reach the multitude of outsiders we must drop all technicalities out of our religion. When we talk to people about the hypostatic union and French Encyclopedianism and Erastinianism and Complutensianism, we are as impolitic and little understood as if a physician should talk to an ordinary patient about the pericardium and intercostal muscle and scorbutic symptoms. Many of us come out of the theological seminaries so loaded up that we take the first ten years to show our people how much we know, and the next ten years to get our people to know as much as we know, and at the end find that neither of us know anything as we ought to know. Here are hundreds of thousands of sinning, struggling and dying people who need to realize just one thing’97that Jesus Christ came to save them, and will save them now. But we got into a profound and elaborate definition of what justification is, and after all the work there are not, outside of the learned professions, five thousand people in the United States who can tell what justification is. I will read you the definitions: ’93Justification is purely a forensic act, the act of a judge sitting in the forum, in which the Supreme Ruler and Judge, who is accountable to none, and who alone knows the manner in which the ends of his universal government can best be obtained, reckons that which was done by the substitute in the same manner as if it had been done by those who believe in the substitute, and purely on account of this gracious method of reckoning, grants them the full remission of their sins.’94

Now, what is justification? I will tell you what justification is’97when a sinner believes, God lets him off. One summer in Connecticut I went to a large factory, and I saw over the door written the words: ’93No Admittance.’94 I entered and saw over the next door: ’93No Admittance.’94 Of course I entered. I got inside and found it a pin factory, and they were making pins, very serviceable, fine and useful pins. So the spirit of exclusiveness has practically written over the outside door of many a church: ’93No Admittance.’94 And if the stranger enters he finds practically written over the second door: ’93No Admittance,’94 and if he goes in, over all the pew doors seems written: ’93No Admittance,’94 while the minister stands in the pulpit, hammering out his little niceties of belief, pounding out the technicalities of religion, making pins. In the most practical, common-sense way, and laying aside the nonessentials and the hard definitions of religion, go out on the God-given mission, telling the people what they need and when and how they can get it.

Comparatively little effort as yet has been made to save that large class of persons in our midst called skeptics, and he who goes to work here will not be building upon another man’92s foundation. There is a large number of them. They are afraid of us and our churches, for the reason we don’92t know how to treat them. One of this class met Christ; and hear with what tenderness and pathos and beauty and success Christ dealt with him: ’93Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. This is the first commandment, and the second is like to this, namely: thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is no other commandment greater than this.’94 And the scribe said to him, ’93Well, Master, thou hast said the truth, for there is one God, and to love him with all the heart and all the understanding and all the soul and all the strength is more than whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.’94 And when Jesus saw that he answered discreetly, he said unto him, ’93Thou art not far from the kingdom of God.’94 So a skeptic was saved in one interview. But few Christian people treat the skeptic in that way. Instead of taking hold of him with the gentle hand of love, we are apt to take him with the pincers of ecclesiasticism.

You would not be so rough on that man if you knew how he lost his faith in Christianity. I have known men skeptical from the fact that they grew up in houses where religion was overdone. Sunday was the most awful day in the week. They had religion driven into them with a trip-hammer. They were surfeited with prayer-meetings. They were stuffed and choked with catechisms. They were often told that they were the worst boys the parents ever knew, because they liked to ride down hill better than to read Bunyan’92s Pilgrim’92s Progress. Whenever father and mother talked of religion they drew down the corners of their mouth and rolled up their eyes. If any one thing will send a boy or girl to perdition sooner than another, that is it. If I had such a father and mother I fear I should have been an infidel.

Others were tripped up to skepticism from being grievously wronged by some man who professed to be a Christian. They had a partner in business who turned out to be a first-class scoundrel, though a professed Christian. Twenty years ago they lost all faith by what happened in an oil company which was formed amid the petroleum excitement. The company owned no land, or if they did there was no sign of oil produced; but the president of the company was a Presbyterian elder, and the treasurer was an Episcopal vestryman, and one director was a Methodist class-leader, and the other directors prominent members of Baptist and Congregational churches. Circulars were gotten out, telling what fabulous prospects opened before this company. Innocent men and women, who had a little money to invest, and that little their all, said: ’93I do not know anything about this company, but so many good men are at the head of it that it must be excellent, and taking stock in it must be almost as good as joining the church.’94 So they bought the stock, and, perhaps, received one dividend so as to keep them still, but after a while they found that the company had reorganized, and had a different president and different treasurer and different directors. Other engagements or ill-health had caused the former officers of the company, with many regrets, to resign. And all that the subscribers of that stock had to show for their investment was a beautifully ornamented certificate. Sometimes that man, looking over his old papers, comes across that certificate, and it is so suggestive that he vows he wants none of the religion that the president and trustees and directors of that oil company professed.

Of course, their rejection of religion on such grounds was unphilosophical and unwise. I am told that many of the United States army desert every year, and there are many court martials every year. Is that anything against the United States government that swore them in? And if a soldier of Jesus Christ deserts, is that anything against the Christianity which he swore to support and defend? How do you judge of the currency of a country? By a counterfeit bill? Now, you must have patience with those who have been swindled by religious pretenders. Live in the presence of others, a frank, honest, earnest Christian life, that they may be attracted to the same Saviour upon whom your hopes depend.

Remember, skepticism always has some reason, good or bad, for existing. Goethe’92s irreligion started when the news came to Germany of the earthquake at Lisbon, November 1, 1775. That sixty thousand people should have perished in that earthquake, and in the after rising of the Tagus river, so stirred his sympathies that he threw up his belief in the goodness of God.

Others have gone into skepticism from a natural persistence in asking the reason why. They have been fearfully stabbed of the fatal interrogation point. There are so many things they cannot get explained. They cannot understand the Trinity or how God can be sovereign and yet man a free agent. Neither can I. They say, ’93I don’92t understand why a good God should have let sin come into the world.’94 Neither do I. You say, ’93Why was that child started in life with such disadvantages, while others have all physical and mental equipment?’94 I cannot tell. They go out of church on Easter morning and say, ’93That doctrine of the resurrection confounded me.’94 So it is to me a mystery beyond unravelment. I understand all the processes by which men get into the dark. I know them all. I have traveled with burning feet that blistered way. The first word that children learn to utter is generally papa or mamma. I think the first word I ever uttered was ’93Why?’94 I know what it is to have a hundred midnights pour their darkness into one hour.

Such men are not to be scoffed at but helped. Turn your back upon a drowning man when you have the rope with which to pull him ashore, and let that woman in the third story of a house perish in the flames when you have a ladder with which to help her out and help her down, rather than turn your back scoffingly on a skeptic whose soul is in more peril than the bodies of those other endangered ones can be. Oh! skepticism is a dark land. There are men in this house who would give a thousand worlds, if they possessed them, to get back to the placid faith of their fathers and mothers, and it is our place to help them, and we may help them, never through their heads, but always through their hearts. These skeptics, when brought to Jesus, will be mightily effective, far more so than those who never examined the evidences of Christianity. Thomas Chalmers was once a skeptic, Robert Hall a skeptic, Robert Newton a skeptic, Christmas Evans a skeptic. But when once with strong hand they took hold of the chariot of the Gospel, they rolled it on with what momentum!

If I address such men and women today, I throw out no scoff. I implead them by the memory of the good old days when at their mother’92s knee they said: ’93Now I lay me down to sleep,’94 and by those days and nights of scarlet fever in which she watched you, giving you the medicine in just the right time, and turning your pillow when it was hot, and with hands that many years ago turned to dust, soothed away your pain, and with voice that you will never hear again, unless you join her in the better country, told you to never mind, for you would feel better by and by, and by that dying couch where she looked so pale and talked so slowly, catching her breath between the words, and you felt an awful loneliness coming over your soul; by all that, I beg you to come back and take the same religion. It was good enough for her. It is good enough for you. Nay, I have a better plea than that. I plead by all the wounds and tears and blood and groans and agonies and death-throes of the Son of God, who approaches you this moment with torn brow and lacerated hands and whipped back, and saying: ’93Come unto me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’94

Again, there is a field of usefulness but little touched, occupied by those who are astray in their habits. All northern nations, like those of North America, and England and Scotland, that is, in the colder climates, are devastated by alcoholism. They take the fire to keep up the warmth. In southern countries, like Arabia and Spain, the blood is so warm they are not tempted to fiery liquids. The great Roman armies never drank anything stronger than water tinged with vinegar, but under our northern climate the temptation to heating stimulants is most mighty, and millions succumb. When a man’92s habits go wrong the church drops him, the social circle drops him, good influences drop him, we all drop him. Of all the men who get off the track, but few ever get on again. Near my summer residence there is a life-saving station on the beach. There are all the ropes and rockets, the boats, the machinery for getting people off shipwrecks. Summer before last I saw there fifteen or twenty men who were breakfasting, after having just escaped with their lives and nothing more. Up and down our coasts are built these useful structures, and the mariners know it, and they feel that if they are driven into the breakers there will be apt from shore to come a rescue. The churches of God ought to be so many life-saving stations, not so much to help those who are in smooth waters, but those who have been shipwrecked. Come, let us run out the lifeboats! And who will man them? We do not preach enough to such men; we have not enough faith in their release. Alas, if when they come to hear us, we are laboriously trying to show the difference between Sublapsarianism and Supralapsarianism, while they have a hundred vipers of remorse and despair coiling around and biting their immortal spirits. The church is not chiefly for goodish sort of men, whose proclivities are all right, and who could get to heaven praying and singing in their own homes. It is on the beach to help the drowning. Those bad cases are the cases that God likes to take hold of. He can save a big sinner as well as a small sinner, and when a man calls earnestly to God for help he will go out to deliver such an one. If it were necessary God would come down from the sky, followed by all the artillery of heaven, and a million angels with drawn swords. Get one hundred such redeemed men in your churches, and nothing could stand before them, for such men are generally warm-hearted and enthusiastic. No formal prayers then. No heartless singing then. No cold conventionalisms then. Destitute children of the street offer a field of work comparatively unoccupied. The uncared-for children are in the majority in most of our cities. When they grow up, if unreformed, they will outvote your children, and they will govern your children. The whisky ring will hatch out other whisky rings, and grog-shops will kill with their horrid stench public sobriety, unless the church of God rises up with outstretched arms and enfolds this dying population in her bosom. Public schools cannot do it. Art galleries cannot do it. Blackwell’92s Island cannot do it. Almhouses cannot do it. New York Tombs and Washington Jail cannot do it. Sing Sing cannot do it. Church of God, wake up to your magnificent mission! You can do it! Get somewhere, somehow to work!

The Prussian cavalry mount by putting their right foot into the stirrup, while the American cavalry mount by putting their left foot into the stirrup. I do not care how you mount your war charger, if you only get into this battle for God and get there soon, right stirrup or left stirrup or no stirrup at all. The unoccupied fields are all around us, and why should we build on another man’92s foundation? I have heard of what was called the ’93thundering legion.’94 It was in 179, a part of the Roman army to which some Christians belonged, and their prayers, it was said, were answered by thunder and lightning, and hail and tempest, which overthrew an invading army and saved the empire. And I would to God that our churches might be so mighty in prayer and work that they would become a thundering legion, before which the forces of sin might be routed, and the gates of hell might tremble. Launch the Gospel ship for another voyage. Heave away now, lads! Shake out the reefs in the foretopsail! Come, oh heavenly wind, and fill the canvas! Jesus aboard will assure our safety. Jesus on the sea will beckon us forward. Jesus on the shore will welcome us into harbor.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage