Philippians 2:20,21

For I have no man like minded

The care of a good pastor for his people

I. Every good minister feels a tender concern for the good of his people. Every good minister is--

1. A good man; and therefore has a spirit of benevolence.

2. Has experienced a saving change, and is therefore anxious for the salvation of others.

3. Has grown in grace himself, and is consequently desirous to promote the spiritual good of others.

II. Why this is true of every good minister. Because--

1. He realizes that God has committed the flock into his hands, and, for a time, suspended their present and future good upon his care and fidelity.

2. Because his people have committed themselves to his pastoral watch and care.

3. Because he freely and solemnly engages to be their spiritual guide and watchman.

4. Because he knows that his interest is inseparably connected with theirs.

5. Because he views their eternal interests as inseparably connected with the eternal interests of Christ. (N. Emmons, D. D.)

Missionary agency

I. The men wanted. Those like minded with the apostle, men of earnest, spontaneous, self-denying zeal.

II. The scarcity of them.

1. Manifest.

2. Humiliating.

3. Admonitory.

III. The reason of it.

1. Selfish aims.

2. Want of love to Christ. (J. Lyth, D. D.)

Concern for the spiritual wants of men

I. The situation of mankind. From a spiritual point of view this is such as to awaken the unaffected concern of good men.

II. The rarity of those who care for the spiritual state of others.

1. They were rare in Paul’s time.

2. They are rare now in proportion to the number who require their efforts, although in a less degree than formerly.

III. The principal causes of this unconcern.

1. An inordinate and criminal self-love.

2. The prevalence of unbelief.

3. Despondency. (E. Payson, D. D.)

Failures

In this and like passages we may trace signs of one of the apostle’s trials, which we hardly estimate at its real measure. His forced inactivity opened to him a new experience. He had to sit still and see what became of his work, with the sense that the world thought him a defeated man. Judged by our rule such a result would appear to be failure in life; and we should expect the attendant feelings to be those of depression and disappointment. We know that it was not so with St. Paul; but moods of feeling come and go even in the strongest, and we may see signs that he was not unmoved. There is an under tone of deep sadness in this Epistle, full as it is of firm confidence and rejoicing. He was at Rome. What had become of his great Epistle? Do we not read between the lines here that the reality was not all he had hoped for? There was energy, zeal, progress; Christ and His servant were spoken of in the household of Nero: Rome was hearing more than ever of the name of Christ. But there was another side to this. How was the solemn adjuration of Romans 12:1 realized. What fruit had come from his lessons of forbearance and cooperation? What a tale does it tell when there in the midst of that great active Church, there was no man like minded, etc. To a faith like St. Paul’s these adverse appearances, though they might bring for him as they passed a cry of distress, wore a very different aspect to what they did to the world. They were but parts of his Master’s use of him, and if the moment’s disloyalty or littleness stung him, the next moment brought back the unfailing joy.

I. The failure of life. The contrast between its opening and its close is what mankind has been accustomed to see from the beginning. Examples of it are familiar to us now.

1. In their coarser forms we have evidence of them in the old cries about the cheats and broken promises of life, in the discontent of the successful, and in the falls from goodness to evil.

2. All our lives have failure in them. Every action is an instance how we have come short.

3. We see the failures of life in the ordinary incidents of our experience; when the good die young; when the bright promise is cut short; when men miss their true calling or ignobly shrink from it; where a life of noble labour is wrecked as a ship sinks within sight of port.

4. But the failures which specially touch us are when a man has aimed high, and has shot wide of his mark or short of it; when care, love, and toil have been lavished on an idea or a cause, and the idea will not stand the test, or the cause dwindles into rivalry or strife; when the successful statesman sees his policy bringing forth fruit which he did not plant or look for; when the reformer sees his work taken out of his hand by disciples of meaner and narrower thoughts; still worse when he becomes their dupe and leaves the evils of the world greater than when he assailed them.

5. So it has been with those heroic institutions which have one after another tried some great effort for God’s glory. The flock of Francis, the royal-hearted bridegroom of the forgotten poverty of Christ sank down too often into idle mendicants; the flock of Dominic became the ministers of the inquisition; the little company who devoted themselves to the service of Jesus swelled into that mighty order which has furnished the bravest of missionaries, but also the most daring and ambitious of political intriguers.

6. What right have we to wonder when the greatest of God’s instruments, His Church, presents in its reality such a contrast to its ideal, when, in spite of all the wonders it has done, it has failed to do all that was expected of it. But what is it but the inevitable incident in the mingled greatness and littleness of human life.

II. Failure means humiliation to ourselves, but we know not what it means in the counsels of God. There is something wiser even than the world, and that is the counsel of Him who taketh the wise in their own craftiness. Paul in prison could not refute the world’s accusation of failure nor convince it of the meaning of what he had done, and of what was to follow it. His justification belonged to God his Master, and God kept it in His own hands for this world and the next.

III. How shall we think then about what we call failure.

1. We cannot take it in at all adequately without being led to think, not hopelessly, scornfully, or indifferently, but humbly of this human life in which it is so severe a part of our discipline. And these lowly thoughts are enforced by the contrast between what we do as moral agents, and what we achieve within the range where simple intelligence works, in mathematics, physics, mechanics, etc. Within that range men can predict without mistake, secure perfection in their skill, and move from one stupendous discovery to another; but all is changed when we pass into that other world whose ruling powers are love, duty, pain, and death. Compare what we achieve in mathematical and physical science with our success in the problems of government. Does not this read the Bible lesson of lowly thinking in the rebuke which it gives to ambition and pride.

2. Shall we then sit with folded hands, idle and hopeless because the chances of failure are so formidable, and like the servant in the parable bury our talent. There can be no failure worse than that. God our Master sends us forth not to make our mark but to work. God accomplishes His purposes in many ways; one of them we know, by the highest of all examples, the way that seems irretrievable disaster. The followers of the Cross have no right to look, in their own day, for the recognition of success; and, besides, we are bad judges of success and failure. Only in after years does the work draw itself up to its true grandeur; only then do we lose sight of partial failures and see it at last for what it is.

3. Don’t let us be afraid, in a good cause, of the chances of failure. “Heaven is for those who have failed on earth,” says the mocking proverb: and since Calvary no Christian need be ashamed to accept it. But even here, men have that within them which recognizes the heroic aspect of a noble failure. Even here it is better to have failed than not to have tried; to make the mistakes of the good than never to have struck one blow for Christ because so many have struck to little purpose. If the great and saintly life be incomplete, at least there is the great and saintly life. If the great effort has waxed feeble, at least there has been a new beacon of warning. The world would have missed its highest examples, if men had always waited tilt they could make a covenant with success. (Dean Church.)

The experience of isolation

I. It is a common complaint amongst us that we want sympathy.

1. We are lonely, we say; and if not actually solitary, are solitary in heart. The young are too impatient, too imperious in their demand for sympathy; the old are sometimes too tolerant, at least too fond, of isolation.

2. There is much that is fanciful and morbid in the complaint of the young that they have no one like minded. Why cannot that sister make one of her own household the sharer of her troubles and joys? No, that is too tame and commonplace a friendship: nothing but that which is self-made and self-sought has any charms for one who is as yet trying new sources of happiness instead of drinking thankfully of those which God has opened.

II. St. Paul gives no encouragement to this ungrateful pursuit.

1. True, he was a man to whom life without love would have been a daily torture and death. Nor was his a promiscuous love only. Within the universal brotherhood he had his special preferences and close attachments.

2. But his thirst for human love was not the sentimental, purposeless thing it is with many. His best affections were engaged and fixed unalterably. “To me to live is Christ.” What he sought in human friendship was not a supreme, nor even subordinate object of affection. He sought sympathy in his work for Christ: the loneliness he bewailed was a loneliness in his care for Christ’s people. How this says to us, Away with your little, selfish, earth-born murmurings! So long as your troubles are all selfish they cannot be borne too lonelily.

3. And if sympathy like this be denied you, learn like Paul to be content (Philippians 4:11; Romans 8:31, etc.). (Dean Vaughan.)

Care for souls

Some preachers think only of their sermon; others think only of themselves: the man who wins the soul is the man who aims at it. (Dean Hook.)

Natural care for others

The following account of a piece of heroism on the part of a young Englishwoman, by which she lost her life, has just reached us from the Cape. On September 23 last, Miss Burton, a governess in the family of Mr. Saul Solomon, resident at Capetown, was out with her little pupils, when the youngest, a girl of five, fell into a reservoir of water. Miss Burton endeavoured vainly to rescue her little charge by means of her parasol, and then jumped in after her. The elder children ran home to raise the alarm, but when help was obtained both the governess and child had disappeared, and it was necessary to use drags for the bodies. Great sympathy was expressed throughout the town for the bereaved parents, and also much admiration for the brave girl who lost her life in attempting to save that of the child entrusted to her.