1 Corinthians 13:5

1 Corinthians 13:5

Individual Faithfulness.

I. No sincere worker for God is long left with nothing to do; for God's ways and works are very manifold. Martha is working one way while she is providing for her Lord, Mary at another while she listens humbly at His feet. Savonarola serves his Lord in one way with his mighty thunderings; Fra Angelico in another with his soft pictures. The man with one talent may more laudably and more faithfully serve God than he with five.

II. This faithfulness is incumbent on every one of us. Think not that to do our duty in life, to give back to God something better than the crumbling dust of corrupting bodies and the leprosy of dwarfed and dwindling souls, needs, on our part, any magnificent theatre, any superhuman endeavour, any unobtainable eminences. That is not it: it needs only to travel round the quiet walk with God, to which every one of us is pledged by baptism. Externals will not save us; neither fast nor feast, nor service, nor general respectability, nor religious scrupulosity, nor to bow the head like a bulrush, nor to say "Lord, Lord"; nor will anything avail us but that life of obedience which is the true test of the forgiven penitent.

III. Beyond all doubt it is carelessness as to individual duties which makes the world what it is. It is the neglect which comes of the personal sinfulness and the personal insincerity of millions. To hearts once purified from self and touched by the grace of God nothing is dearer than to help earth's immense and trampled multitudes by saving souls for whom Christ died. We have but one life given us, but one second, that is, in God's eternity, but it becomes majestic as part of one great living whole, and every true life is only a true life at all in as far as it is the continuation of the one great life of love, of which the one object was to seek and to save the lost.

F. W. Farrar, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxxi., p. 113.

References: 1 Corinthians 13:5. Preacher's Monthly,vol. ii., p. 250. 1 Corinthians 13:5; 1 Corinthians 13:6. H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xvi., p. 11; Ibid.,vol. xxiii., p. 394.