By J.R. Miller
The title of the chapter is important. It is not, "What Christ Is," but "What Christ is to me." He may be, in our thought, a most glorious person, with all the honor claimed for him in the New Testament--and yet be nothing at all to me personally. He may be a great Savior--and not be my Savior. He may be a wonderful Friend--and yet his friendship means nothing whatever to me. The twenty third psalm is an exquisite little poem. It is dear to the hearts of millions of believers. But it would not be the same if it began, "The Lord is a Shepherd." It is the word "my" which gives it its dearness. So it would not be the same if the title of this chapter were, "What Christ Is." It might depict his character in glorious words. He is the Son of God, deity shining in every line. He is the King of kings, worthy of the worship and adoration of the highest beings in the world. He has all divine excellences. It was no robbery of God, for Jesus Christ to claim to be equal with God. But we may believe all that the creeds of Christendom assert regarding him--and yet receive no blessing from him.
The question, what Christ is to us, starts in our hearts infinite thoughts of love, of mercy, of comfort. How can we ever tell what he has been to us? We may think of what he has done for us as our Savior. This opens a vista back to the heart of God--and into eternity. We cannot understand what the Bible tells us of the kingdom prepared for us from the foundation of the world, of our names having been written in the Lamb's book of life from the foundation of the world. Whatever these and other such words mean, they certainly suggest that we have been in the heart of God from the eternal past. There is something bewildering in this revealing--that Christ thought about us before we were made.
We may think also of what Christ is to us in personal ways. For one thing, he is our Friend, and he calls us his friends. Then need of friendship is the deepest need of life. Every heart cries out for it. Christ spoke no other word to his disciples which meant more to them than when he said, "I will be your friend." A young man, a teacher in a mission school in the South, said these words to a boy who had been brought up in the darkest ignorance, who had never heard a kind word before, and who had never had a friend. The words fell upon the boy's ear, like something spoken from heaven. Some days afterward the boy lingered about until the teacher was alone, and said to him, "Did you mean what you said the other day--that you would be my friend?" The teacher assured him that he did. "If you will be my friend," the boy said, "I can become a man." It was the beginning of a new life to the boy.
Hundreds of people in barren conditions never hear such a word from any lips and are starved to death for love. Human friends have brought life, joy, hope, and marvelous uplifting to countless lives just by saying, "I will be your friend." Nothing you can do for the world could mean half so much to men--as just going among them and in reality becoming their friend. There are great men, with noble gifts and splendid qualities, who have learned the secret of loving others, who are doing marvelous good among their fellows, not by giving them anything, nor by doing anything for them--but just by being a friend to them.
There never was any other man who wrought such a ministry of friendship as Christ has wrought through the centuries. He is always coming to men and saying, "I am your friend." That was the way he saved Simon, making of him the great apostle whose name is known through the world. That was the way he took the youth John, becoming his friend, putting a glorious ideal into his heart, and making him ultimately the apostle of love. It is this blessed friendship that, all the Christian centuries, has been touching lives everywhere with its own spirit of unselfishness and service. There are many pictures of Jesus in the Gospels--but perhaps there is no one more suggestive of his real character, than the one which shows him girt with a towel, holding the basin and washing the disciples' feet. There is nothing Jesus would not do--no sacrifice he would not make--no humbling of himself to which he would not stoop--in doing the part of a friend.
Dr. Watson tells of once hearing a plain sermon in a little country church. It was a layman, a farmer, who preached--but Dr. Watson says he never heard so impressive an ending to any sermon as he heard that day. After a fervent presentation of the Gospel, the preacher said with great earnestness: "My friends, why is it that I go on, preaching to you, week by week? It is just this--because I can't eat my bread alone." That is the Master's own burden--his heart is breaking to have men share with him the blessings of life. He cannot bear to be alone in his joy. There is no surer test of love for Christ--than the longing to have others love him.
When we receive Christ's friendship and love into our hearts, infinite possibilities of blessing are ours. Christ becomes our teacher, our guide, our burden-bearer, our very life. We are transformed through his influence. Loving him makes our dull lives radiant. A missionary teacher of Tokyo tells of a Japanese woman who came to speak about having her daughter received into the school for girls which the teacher was conducting. She asked if only beautiful girls were admitted. "No," was the reply; "we take any girl who desires to come." "But," continued the woman, "All your girls that I have seen are very beautiful." The teacher replied, "We tell them of Christ, and seek to have them take him into their hearts, and this makes their faces lovely." The woman answered, "Well, I do not want my daughter to become a Christian--but I am going to send her to your school to get that look in her face."
Christ is the sweetener and beautifier of the lives and the very faces of those who become his friends. He gives them peace, and peace brightens and transforms their features. He teaches them love, and love makes them beautiful. A girl who was very homely, so homely that even her mother told her she never would have any friends, determined to make her life so winning by its graciousness and its ministry of kindness, that her homeliness would be forgotten. She gave herself to Christ in a simple and complete devotion and sought to be wholly under his influence. She then devoted herself to the helping and serving of others, until she was known everywhere as the angel of the town where she lived. Her ugliness of features, was forgotten, in the beauty of her disposition and life. That is what having Christ for a friend does for those who yield themselves to his transforming influence.
In no other experience in life is the blessing of the friendship of Christ more wonderful than in the times of affliction and trouble. "It is worth our thought," says Huntington, "how small the audience would be that would assemble weekly, to listen to a gospel that had nothing to say to sufferers. Poor, weak, broken hearts, staggering under their loads, would refuse a comforter who had never wept himself, nor remembered that his followers must weep. A religion that addressed itself only to those who are in a state of comfort would be like a system of navigation calculated only for clear weather, and giving no aid when night and cloud have wiped out all way marks from earth and sky, and the tempest shrieks in the darkness over an unknown sea."
The Bible is a great book of comfort. The heart of Christ was wonderfully sensitive to suffering. He was called a man of sorrows, and it is said that he was acquainted with grief, that is, with all phases of grief. We may know a little of pain, one phase of suffering--but Christ knew the whole field of grief. Yet the griefs of the world did not make him bitter. One of the dangers with us--is that we shall receive hurt from life's trials, shall be hardened by them. Christ received no harm from anything which he suffered. He came through all painful experience with the gentleness of his heart still gentler. He never complained of God, charging him with unkindness or saying he did not care when his children suffered.
We never can know in the present world, what we owe to the hard things in our lives, what pain and suffering do for us. Christ makes these experiences a school of blessing and good for us. He changes our crown of thorns--into a garland of roses. We have to meet hard things in our experiences--but it is never God's will that we shall be hurt by them; he wants us always to be helped by them, made better, our lives enriched.
In Barrie's book, is a chapter with the suggestive title, "How My Mother Got Her Soft Face." She got it through suffering. Her boy was hurt. News had come that he was near death, far away from home, and the mother set out to go to him, hoping to reach him in time to minister to him and comfort him. Her ticket was bought; she had bidden the other children goodbye at the station. Then the father came out of the little telegraph office and said sadly, "He's gone," and they all went home again. She was another woman ever after, however, a better woman, gentler. Barrie says, "That is how my mother got her soft face and her pathetic ways and her large charity, and why other mothers run to her when they have lost a child." There are many other mothers who have got soft faces in the same way. They have had very hard troubles to bear--but their lives have been made more beautiful by the hardness. That is part of what Christ is to us--he leads us through pain and loss--but our faces grow softer.
What is Christ to us in the development of our lives? A woman spent the summer in the mountains and brought home with her in the autumn some pieces of lovely moss. She put it in her conservatory, and in the warmth of the place, a multitude of beautiful little flowers came up among the moss. There are in us possibilities which, in common experiences are not brought out--but when the warmth and light of the love of God pour about them they are wooed forth. The poet, when asked what Christ was to him; pointed to a rose bush near by, full of glorious roses. "What the sun is to this rose bush," he said, "Christ is to me." Whatever is lovely in our lives has been brought out by the warmth of Christ's love touching us and calling out the loveliness. We do not realize all that Christ may be to us, what undeveloped beauty there is in our natures that he will bring out, if we yield ourselves to him.
What is Christ to us in our hope for the future? The veil that hides the eternal world is not lifted here--but we have visions of something very wonderful waiting for us. "It is not yet made manifest what we shall be. We know that, if he shall be manifested, we shall be like him; for we shall see him even as he is." That is enough for us to want to know. A Christian woman was speaking of a saintly man who was for many years the superintendent of a large city Sunday school. He was a man of most gentle spirit. He loved the children with a love that made them most dear to him. When he lay in his coffin, the members of his Sunday school passed by to look at his face in their last farewell, and every child laid a flower on his breast, until he was literally buried beneath the sweet blossoms. Speaking of his death, the woman said, "He must have passed right into the bosom of Jesus, he was so true, so holy, so Christlike." That is what death means to one who has followed Christ faithfully.
When the news went out that Phillips Brooks was dead, the mother in one home where he was most dear, told her little daughter that her good friend was gone. She had dreaded to break the news to her lest her grief might be overpowering--but the child only exclaimed, "Oh, mother, how glad the angels must be to have him in heaven!"
It is sweet to think, that when we go away from the dear love of earth, we shall be with Christ, lying on his bosom, welcomed by angels and by waiting saints. Christ is everything beautiful to us here: there he will be infinitely more to us.
