Your ShelfYour Projects

A Pressing Need

25%

International Tract and Missionary Society · OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA · Jul 15, 1886

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 12, No. 27.

Read the full edition

A Pressing Need.

By Methodist Recorder

A PRESSING need of to-day, demanded by both the church and the world, is that Christians shall feel their personal responsibility. Among professors of Christianity there is quite too strong a tendency—may we not say desire—to conform to the world. From the one point of not making religion odious by a peculiarity of manner or dress, bearing the stamp of sanctity and "stiffness," people have gone to the other extreme, that of adopting the sinful habits of the populace, and aping their practices. "Being all things to all men for the sake of gaining some" is the plea, but God knows it is a lie, and the issue is different from what it was in the case of Paul, because his real motive was to win men not only from evil, but to Christ.
As things seem to be going, there is a "gaining," it is true, but it is on the wrong side. There is a vast difference between reaching out towards the world to win it to truth and purity, and a running after it with a hunger for conformity to the very things from which the Christian should seek to save it. Paul was all things to all men indeed, but to win them to Christ. But he was not sin to all men. To the Jew, he spake as to a Jew; to the Gentile, as to a Gentile, conforming himself to their standpoint of education and outlook, that he might show forth the excellency of Christ.
As heroes leap into the waves to rescue drowning ones, so Paul plunged in amid the sins and strifes of men to turn them from their evil ways, and save them to God and truth. If that was "conformity," it was to the divine model. He did not compromise truth, nor do evil that good might follow. His one purpose was to follow his Master in saving men, and if he was persecuted for Christ's sake, he endured all things for the world's sake, and kept himself pure and unspotted all the while. A non-aggressive religion, tested in a world teeming with sin and crime, must surely be graded to a low standard if it do not find persecutors. Christianity means a warfare with all that is impure and groveling.—Methodist Recorder.