December 1 Daily Devotional

Stand thou on that side—for on this am I!

[The Christian life] is something that is always intensely personal.... We are all of us so much slaves of ‘the done thing’. We come into a world full of traditions and habits and customs to which we tend to conform. It is the easy and obvious thing to do; and it is true to say of most of us that there is nothing we hate so much as being unusual or different... one of the most difficult things that many people have to face when they become Christian is that it is going to involve them in being unusual and exceptional. But it has to happen ... one of the first things that happens to a person who becomes alive to the message of the gospel of Christ is that he says to himself: ‘Well; whatever may be happening to the majority, I myself am a living soul and I am responsible for my own life.’ ... So when a man becomes a Christian he first begins to see himself as a separate unit in this great world. Formerly he had lost his individuality and identity in the great crowd of people to whom he belonged; but now he stands alone. He had been rushing madly with the crowd, but he suddenly halts.... He leaves the crowd. You cannot get a crowd through that turnstile all together, it only takes one person at a time. It makes a man realize that he is a responsible being before God, his Judge Eternal. The gate is strait and narrow, it brings me face to face with judgement, face to face with God, face to face with the question of life and my personal being, my soul and its eternal destiny.

But I not only have to leave the crowd, the world and the ‘jollity’ outside.... I have to leave the way of the world outside ... we must leave outside the gate the things that please the world ... the things that belong to and that please our unregenerate nature must be left outside that strait gate.

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, ii, pp. 221–3

(continued on p. 337)