Quiet Talks on Following the Christ | Page 7

They are used unthinkingly for something
less--much less--than they mean. Perhaps if we use the phrase He used
we may be able to get back to the thing He meant, and did.
There are three possible lives open to every man's choice: a bad life, in
which selfishness or passion or both, either refined or coarse, rule; a
good, true, natural life; and a Father-pleasing life. By a good, true,
natural life I mean, just now, a really Christian life in all that that
means, but lived as if there were no emergency in the world to change
one's habit of life.
You know an emergency coming into a man's life makes radical
changes. You go to bed tonight and ordinarily will sleep out your eight
hours in comfort and quiet. If a fire break out in the house, you are up
in the middle of the night, hurrying around, only partly clad, carrying
out valuables, or helping turn on water, or something of this sort. Your
natural arrangements for the night are all broken up by the fire. An
emergency may make radical changes in one's life for a little time,
sometimes for the whole life. Financial reverses may change the whole
habit of one's life.

Here's a man who has a well-assured, good-sized income from his
business, or his inheritance, or both. He lives in a luxuriously appointed
home, with many fine pictures and works of art and curios which it is
enjoyable to have. He has a choice library including some fine costly
old prints and editions, and enjoys adding rare books on subjects in
which he is specially interested. He belongs to some literary and social
and athletic clubs. He has an interesting family growing up around him
whose education is being carefully looked after. He is an earnest
Bible-loving Christian, faithful in church attendance and church duties,
pure in life, and saintly in character. He gives liberally to church and
benevolent objects, including foreign missions, which have become a
part of the church system into which he fits. And he goes an even,
contented round of life, home, church, club, recreation and so on, year
in and out, holding and using the great bulk of his money for himself. I
think of that as one illustration of the good, true, natural life.
Now, the Father-pleasing life is radically different in certain things.
Ordinarily the two would be identical. The true natural life as originally
planned for us would be the life pleasing to the Father. But something,
not a part of God's plan, has broken into life, a terrible something,
worse than a fire in the night, or a financial panic that sweeps away
your all. Sin has wrought fearful havoc; it has made an awful
emergency, and this emergency has affected the life and character of all
the race, in a bad way, terribly, awfully, beyond words to tell, or
imagination to depict. The whole earth is in the grip of a desperate
moral emergency.
And naturally enough this emergency affects the life of any one
concerned with this earth. It has affected God's life, and God's plans,
tremendously. It has broken His heart with grief, and radically changed
His plans for His own life. He has made a plan for winning His world
away from its rebellion, its sin, back again to purity and close touch
with Himself. That plan centred around His Son, and He spared not His
own Son, but gave Him up.
And that emergency, and that plan of the Father's because of the
emergency, have affected our Lord Jesus' life on the earth. The whole

plan of His human life was radically revolutionized by it. The
emergency, the Father's plan, gripped Him. He turned away from the
true, good, natural life which it would have been proper for Him as a
man to have lived, and He lived another sort of life. It was an
emergency life, a life fitted to His Father's plan, and so the
Father-pleasing life.
He became a homeless man, with all that that means. Would any man
have enjoyed home-life with all the rare home-joys, the sweetest of all
natural joys, so much as He? And then the larger circle of congenial
friends, the enjoyment of music, of exquisite art, the reverent study of
the great questions of life, of the wonders of nature whose powers it
was given man to study and cultivate and develop,[11]--it is surely no
irreverence to think of Him both enjoying and gracing such a life, for
such was the original plan of human life as thought out by a gracious
Creator.
Instead, He had not where to lay His head, though so wearied with
ceaseless toil. He fairly burned His life out those few years, early and
late, ministering to