Isaiah 61:4 And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities… Our work is a work of restoration. This message is infinitely varied in its tone. If we are indeed to build the "old wastes," we must see what has made them wastes; and we shall find that there have been three great enemies that have done this — disease and ignorance and sin. I. We must bring a message of good news to THE BODY. We must recognize its needs — its need of pure air, and wholesome food, and healthy homes; and, also, its craving, especially in the days of youth, for leisure and amusement, and even excitement. We must meet these cravings, not with the forbidding frown of the Puritan, as though they were in themselves sinful, nor yet with the easy-going smile of the good-natured Epicurean, as though they were the all in all of human happiness, but with sympathy and good sense and forethought, in the belief that they represent one part of the Father's will for His human children. II. We must to the full recognize the rights of THE MIND. A Gospel that has no message of good news to the intellect of man is but a mutilated Gospel. Literature, art, science, music, have not, indeed, the last word to say on man's relation to God, but they have a mighty and a lovely word to say; and it ought to be the joy of all Christ's truest ministers, lay and clerical, to help in conveying such words to the ear and to the heart even of the poorest and dullest. Public libraries and museums, cheap concerts and cheap magazines, arc among the truest weapons of those who would in our day destroy the works of the devil. III. Chiefly must we come face to face with sin, not only with a message against sin; we must have a message of good tidings also to HUMAN SOULS. And when I say "good tidings," I do not necessarily mean agreeable and attractive tidings. When Jesus said, "Repent ye and believe the Gospel," the call to repent, though hardly attractive, was in itself a Gospel. We cannot build the waste places in England, in morals and social customs, in ways of thinking and talking and feeling, unless we very plainly denounce what is unchristian in contemporary life. The message of the Gospel is not only a soothing message of forgiveness to the sinner who is troubled in mind, nor a tender message of companionship to the lonely and the bereaved, nor a consoling message of eventual justice to the wronged and the overborne. But there is also the voice which convinces the world of sin, the voice which says to society, irrespective of class, to rich as well as to poor, to .poor as well as to rich: "In this and that you are wholly wrong; you are wrong in your expenditure of time, wrong in your expenditure of money, wrong in your estimate of the true prizes of life, wrong in your worship of comfort, wrong in your class isolation; wrong, many of you, in your very conception of religion." We have, if we are indeed witnesses of our Master, a message of good tidings to all alike, to all classes, to the rich and to the poor, to the highly cultivated and-to the ignorant. (H. M. Butler, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations. |
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