What the Church Means to Me | Page 6

quoted as saying, "Decide," "Choose." We must remember that what he said was, "Choose whom you will serve," not what your final belief is going to be. Christ never sought for admirers, but for followers. The most voluble protestants of their faith in Jesus as God's Son were devils. They knew it, but benefited little by it. Thank God, Jesus never made the opposite of confessing our belief in him before men to be the non-apprehension of his divinity, but always the denying and being ashamed of his service and becoming a stumbling block. Though I know what a wonderful thing it is, as a source of power, to be able to confess our faith in Jesus as the Son of God, and what infinite peace it affords to have that confirmed by experience.
The shrewd judgment of Wall Street would not lend a man ten cents because he had been accepted as a member of a church on confession of faith. Often enough members of the same church wouldn't either, although they probably both would to a doer, like Livingstone. So let us abandon the creed-judging of others. Jesus accepted the following of the adulterers, publicans, and the harlots, and the man who has honest doubts may be a Christ follower or a Christian, who ever says the contrary.
BANDED TOGETHER FOR MANLY SERVICE
I have always loved to think of Jesus Christ and to commend him as Master because he accepted all who came--whether for comfort, for help, or for service. When a man sets to work on the road that leads to heaven here, he will be tasting the sweetness of the believing that involves everlasting life. In our Labrador work we form no church. Our fellow-workers pray and worship in every denomination as the bias of their mind and temperament leads them to find peace and comfort and strength best. Yet we are a definite body associated together for certain purposes. These we believe are translations into action of our interpretation of our debt to God and to our neighbor. In that sense are we not a true ecclesia?
Will it horrify my readers if I confess I have accepted doctors for our hospitals, nurses for our districts, and workers of every type, and yet have never known which way they prefer to worship? Nor have I ever played the censor on their right to help us by defining what they ought to believe before I allowed them to set to work. Before a member joins the permanent staff we must know he is in absolute sympathy with our aim to glorify God and serve our brother, and that he or she is willing to give their best for that object. But that is all. I am fearless to confess that I would enroll for a colleague in the clinics, which hold in their hands the lives of my friends, a man who is facile princeps in the art of surgery rather than a second-rate surgeon who can subscribe to the very same intellectual tenets as I do myself.
Our claim to be capable servants of our Master and reincarnations of his life is judged in our little world by the good work we do; if as surgeons or nurses, by our skill; if as storekeepers and labor employers, by the clean deals we give. If we are second-rate in our work all our talking won't persuade men of our fitness for our position. Securus judicat orbis terrarum--and to my mind God seeks first men diligent in business, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord.
All the sects have only the same work for the same Master to accomplish; it is through being fellow-workers and not identical thinkers that love for all who love Christ must come. This is unity. The camaraderie of a fighting force is not disturbed by the feeling that one is of the cavalry, another of the infantry, a third of the artillery; or even, as has often been shown in warfare, whether they are of different races, climes, or temperaments. There is nothing like common work to beget intelligent love for your fellow.
How did Christ admit his members? By their profession of faith? I think not. By their readiness to work? Yes. Those were workers he chose, every one of them. Did he wait until they could say they believed, even that he was God's Son, before he sent them out to work? Not at all. He said if you are willing to go out and work you will get faith by working and seeing others work.
In this way most men get faith now. The empirical method is the very best way to get it firmly rooted. Experientia docet. "Now we believe, not because of what you say, but because we have seen for ourselves." Did not Judas