Sound Familiar?
How often do you hear, as soon as any attempt is made to bring people to seriousness; "Pray do not intermeddle with us. Go to heaven your own way, and leave us to go ours. Be as religious as you please, but keep your religion to yourselves." But this is enjoining on Christians an impossibility. "If these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out." And as they cannot, so the ought not to refuse such office of love. Only a Cain will ask, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Certainly you are. Are you not bound, "as you have opportunity, to do good unto all men"? If we are required to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to heal the sick, are we not much more bound to save the soul in the day of the Lord Jesus? Is not zeal important in proportion to the value of its object? Is time to be compared with eternity? Is not charity to the soul, the soul of charity?
(Lectures on Female Scripture Characters, p. 229, by William Jay)
So true. But just think how often we are made to feel that we are doing a bad thing to somebody by disagreeing with them or trying to save them from a belief that is harmful to them. Love seems to many as hatred. But our aim is to please God and make the truth of His Son known on the face of the earth, for the short amount of time that we live here.
ReplyDelete