LIVING AND DYING FOR CHRIST.
By Joseph Parker
We are not called upon to lay down our lives tragically, but we are called upon to spend our lives moment by moment. Whether ye eat, therefore, or whether ye drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God. I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice unto God, holy, acceptable, which is your reasonable service. Open thy mouth for the dumb, be eyes for the blind and feet to the lame, and the cause thou knowest not, search it out. Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world. What doth the Lord thy God require of thee but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God? Oh, ye modest ones, then, who whenever anything else is talked about, lift up your heads and glow with the radiance of sympathy, but when godliness is talked about, drop away and are not seen! know ye that there is a time for retirement and a time for publicity, a time for silence and a time for speech; and those of us who are always in the blaze of public light, let us remember that there is a closet to be entered and a door to be shut, and a fast that is to be made as if it were a feast, and that the string of communications is sometimes to be cut between the right hand and the left as if they were strangers, never introduced, living at the opposite points of a diameter. You find the truth in the two aspects, not in either one of them. And, as for dying for Christ, if we live for him, we shall certainly die for him. I want to live in the love of Christ, and I feel many a time that I spoil six days out of seven of every week. I know I would like to be called upon to do some great thing for him,—that would suit me. If He would build a platform, and, with his own hand, conduct me to it and lift a finger to indicate the time of commencement, I feel as if I could die for him. Instead of that he, says: "If thine enemy smite thee on one cheek turn to him the other also. If thine enemy hunger, feed him, if he thirst, give him drink. Avenge not yourself, but rather give place unto wrath. Judge not, that ye be not judged." He wants me to do these things, and I cannot. If he will help me, I will try.—Joseph Parker.