Quiet Talks with World Winners Part 1

Quiet Talks with World Winners.

by S. D. Gordon.

The Master Pa.s.sion

The Earliest Calvary Picture.

There's a great pa.s.sion burning in the heart of G.o.d. It is tenderly warm and tenaciously strong. Its fires never burn low, nor lose their fine glow. That pa.s.sion is to win man back home again. The whole world of man is included in its warm, eager reach.

The old home hearth-fire of G.o.d is lonely since man went away. The family circle is broken. G.o.d will not rest until that old home circle is complete again, and every voice joining in the home songs.

It is an overmastering pa.s.sion, the overmastering pa.s.sion of G.o.d's heart. It has guided and controlled all His thoughts and plans for man from the first. The purpose of winning man, and the whole race, back again is the dominant gripping pa.s.sion of G.o.d's heart to-day. Everything is made to bend to this one end.

When Eden's tragedy came so early, to darken the pages of this old Book, and, far worse, to darken the pages of human life, there is a great glimpse of this pa.s.sion of G.o.d's heart in the guarding of those Eden gates. The presence of the angels with their sword of flame told plainly of a day when man would be coming back again to the old Eden home of G.o.d.

The place must be carefully guarded for him.

This is a love pa.s.sion, a pa.s.sion of love. And love itself is the master pa.s.sion both of the human heart and of G.o.d's heart. Nothing can grip and fill and sway the heart either of man or G.o.d like that.

We would all easily agree that the greatest picture of G.o.d's marvellous, overmastering pa.s.sion of love is seen in the cross. All men as they have come to know that story have stood with heads bowed and bared before the love revealed there. They have not understood it. They have quarrelled about its meaning. But they have acknowledged its love and power as beyond that of any other story or picture.

However men may differ as to why Jesus died, and how His dying affects us, they all agree that the scene of the cross is the greatest revelation of love ever known or ever shown. All theories of the atonement seem to be lost sight of in one thought of grateful acknowledgment of a stupendous love, as men are drawn together by the magnetism of the hill-top of Calvary.

But there is a wondrously clear foreshadowing of that tremendous cross scene in the earliest page of this old Book. Nowhere is love, G.o.d's pa.s.sion of love, made to stand out more distinctly and vividly than in the first chapter of Genesis. The after-scene of the cross uses intenser coloring; the blacks are inkier in their blackness; the reds deeper and redder; the contrasts sharper to the startling-point; yet there is nothing in the cross chapters of the Gospels not included fully in this first leaf of revelation. But it has taken the light of the cross to open our eyes to see how much is plainly there. Let us look at it a bit.

The Love Pa.s.sion.

What is this greatest of pa.s.sions called love? There is no word harder to get a satisfactory definition of. Because, whatever you say about it, there comes quickly to your mind some one who loves you, or you think of the pa.s.sion that burns in your own heart for some one. And, as you think of that, no words that anybody may use seem at all strong enough, or tender enough, to tell what love is, as you know it in your own inner heart.

Yet I think this much can be said--love is the tender, strong outgoing of your whole being to another. It is a pa.s.sion burning like a fire within you, a soft-burning but intense fire within you, for some other one. Every mention of that name stirs the flame into new burning. Every pa.s.sing or lingering thought of him or her is like fresh air making the flames leap up more eagerly. And each personal contact is a clearing out of all the ashes, and a turning on of all the draughts, to feed new oxygen for stronger, fresher burning.

There are many other things that seem like love. Kindliness and friendliness, and even intenser emotions, use love's name for themselves.

But though these have likenesses to love, they are not love. They have caught something of its warm glow. A bit of the high coloring of its flames plays on them. But they are not the real thing, only distant kinsfolk. The severe tests of life quickly reveal their lack.

Love itself is really an aristocrat. It allows very, very few into its inner circle, often only one. The real thing of love is never selfish. Now we know very well that in the thick of life the fine gold of love gets mixed up with the baser metals. It is very often overlaid, and shot through with much that is mean and low. Rank selfishness, both the coa.r.s.e kind and the refined, cultured sort, seeks a hiding-place under its cloak.

But the stuff mixed in it is not love, but a defiling of it. That is a bit of the slander it suffers for a time, from the presence in life of sin.

Weeds with their poison, and snakes and spiders with their deadly venom, draw life from the sun. That is a bit of the bad trans.m.u.ting the good, pure sun into its own sort. The sun itself never produces poison or any hurtful thing.

Love itself is never mean, nor bad, nor selfish. The man who truly loves the woman whom he would have for his own lifelong, closest companion is not selfish. He does not want her chiefly for his own sake, but for her sake, that so he may guard and care for her, and her life be fully grown in the sunlight of the love it must have. And, if you think that is idealizing it out of all practical reach, please remember that true love will steadily refuse the union that would not be best for the loved one.

What is the finest and highest love that we know? There are many different sorts and degrees of love revealed in man's relation with his fellow: conjugal, the love between husband and wife; paternal, the love of a father for his child; maternal, the mother's love for her child; filial, the love of children for father and mother; fraternal, or brotherly, meaning really the love of children of the same parents for each other, both brothers and sisters--the same word is used for love between friends where there is no tie of blood; and patriotic, or love for one's country.

And under that last word may be loosely grouped the love that one may have for any special object, to which he may devote his life, outside of personal relationships, such as music or any profession or occupation.

This is putting them in their logical order. Though in our experience we know the father-and mother-love for ourselves first; and then in turn the others, so far as they come to us, until we complete the circle and reach the climax of father-and mother-love in ourselves going out to another.

Mother-love.

Now of these sorts and degrees which is the highest and finest? Well, your answer to that question will depend entirely on your own experience; as every answer and every thought we have of everything does. All children have mothers, or have had, but thousands of children don't know a mother's love.

I was speaking one time in New York City about the conception, of which the Bible is so full, that G.o.d is a mother. And the English evangelist Gypsy Smith, who lost his mother when very young, but who had an unusually devoted father, said with charming simplicity that he could not just see how G.o.d could be called a mother, but he knew He was a father. And then he went on to speak very winsomely of G.o.d as a father.

Many times love is not born in the heart at all, until there comes into the life some one clear outside of one's own kin. Many a woman never knows love until it is awakened in her heart by him who henceforth is to be a part of herself.

But the common answer, that most people everywhere give to that question, is that a mother's love is the greatest human love we know. And if you press them to tell why they think so, this stands out oftenest and strongest--that it is because she gives so much of herself. She gives her very life. If need be, she sacrifices everything in life, and then sacrifices life itself, going out into the darkness of death that her child may come into fulness and sweetness of life. This is the mother spirit, giving one's very self to bring life to another.

The mother gives her very life-blood that the new life may come. And, if need be, will gladly give her life out to the death that the new life may come into life. And yet more, she gives her life out daily and yearly, throughout its length, that so the full strength and fragrance of life may come in her child's life.

Yet, when all this has been said, I am strongly inclined to think that the mother's love, though the greatest that can be found in any one heart, is not the perfect, fully grown love. The human unit is not a man nor a woman, but a man and a woman. Perfect love requires more than one or two for its matured growth into full life. It cannot exist in its full strength and fragrant sweets except where three are joined together to draw out its full depth and meaning.

There must be two whose hearts are fully joined in love, each finding answering and ever-satisfying love in the other; and so each love growing to full ripeness in the warm sunshine of the other love. And then there needs to be a third one, who comes as a result of that mutual love, and who constantly draws out the love of the other two.

For love in itself is creative. It yearns to bring into being another upon whom it may freely lavish itself. That other one must be of its own sort, upon its own level. Nothing less ever satisfies. And so the love poured out draws out to itself an answering love fully as full as its own. And then, having yearned, it does more. It creates. It must create. It must bring forth life; and life like its own in all its powers and privileges.

This is the very life of love in its full expression.

Yet to say all this is simply to spell out fully, in all its letters and syllables, the great, the greatest of pa.s.sions, mother-love, which we agreed a moment ago was the highest. For mother-love is not restricted to woman, though among us humans it often finds its brightest expressions in her. It knows no restriction of s.e.x. It is simply love at its fullest and highest and freest and tenderest; free to do as it will, and to do it as fully as it will. Love left to itself, free to do as its heart dictates, will give its very self, its life, that life may come to another. This is the great pa.s.sion called love, the greatest of all pa.s.sions.

The Genesis Picture.

Now, maybe you think we have swung pretty far away from that first chapter of the Genesis revelation. No; you are mistaken there. We have been walking, with rapid stride, by the shortest road, straight into its inner heart. Let us look a bit at the picture of G.o.d sketched for us in this earliest page of revelation.

There are two creations here, first of the earth, man's home; and then of man himself who was to live in the home. Here at once in the beginning is mother-love. Before the new life comes the mother is absorbed in getting the home ready; the best and softest and homiest home that her mother-love can think of, and her fingers fix. The same mother instinct in the birds spends itself in getting the nest ready, and then patiently broods until the new occupants come to take possession.

The Bible never calls G.o.d a mother, though the mother language, as here, is used of Him many times. It takes more of the human to tell the divine.

You must take many words, and several of our human relationships, and put them together, in the finest meaning of each, to get near the full meaning of what G.o.d is. Up on the higher level, with G.o.d, the word "father" really includes all that both father and mother mean to us.

The word "father" is even used once of G.o.d in what we think of as the strict mother sense. In speaking of G.o.d's early care of the Hebrews Paul says, "as a nursing-father bore he them in the wilderness."[1] That word "nursing-father" is peculiar in coupling the distinctive function of the mother in caring for the babe with the word father.

The word "father" applied to G.o.d includes not only our meaning of father in all its strength as we know it at its best; but all of the meaning of the word "mother," in all its sweet fragrance, as we have had it breathed into our own very life.

We have come commonly to think of the word mother as a tenderer word than father. Though I have met many, both men and women, who unconsciously revealed that their experience has made father the tenderer, and the tenderest word to them. Father stands commonly for the stronger, more rugged qualities; and mother for the finer, gentler, sweeter, maybe softer qualities, in the strong meaning of that word soft.

G.o.d Giving Himself.

Here in this Genesis story the creation of the whole sun-system to give life to the earth, and of the earth itself, was the outward beginning of this greatest pa.s.sion of love in the heart of G.o.d. And if you would know more of that love in this early stage of it, just look a bit at the home itself. It has been pretty badly mussed, soiled and hurt by sin's foul touch. Yet even so it is a wonder of a world in its beauty and fruitfulness. What must it have been before the slime and tangle of sin got in! But that's a whole story by itself. We must not stop there just now.