James 4:13-17 Go to now, you that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain:… Business is the process of making what man needs for his physical wants, and also the process of buying and selling what is made or produced. The farmer is engaged in business, and that, too, of a most essential kind. Yet when we speak of business life we generally refer to what can be carried on in cities. By many people it is thought that Christianity has no relation with this manifold work which men carry on. At best business life, they think, must be governed by the common laws of morality, and by nothing more. What is distinctive in Christianity has nothing to do with man's ordinary occupations. But the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, forbids all such views of man's nature and of man's relation to God. In that great act God declared that He for a time would become dependent on outward and material means for the sustentation of His human life. His religion has much to do with material things; for His Son came in the flesh, lived in a material home, inhabited a physical body, worked in a common carpenter's shop, and died a .physical death. It is true that some of Christ's disciples were in His time, and are in ours, set apart for purely religious work. But these did not altogether escape secular toil. They had to live. Then, too, there were good men and true whom Christ left at their secular toil. These were none the less disciples, none the less saintly. There is, therefore, we believe, a Divine call to business. It is not a call to the same work as that undertaken by a minister of the gospel, but it comes from the same lips. What we really need is that all Christian men should feel the designation of God to all honest work. We shall never have a really Christian world and city until this recognition is general. 1. Men are adapted to different and special pursuits. One is evidently cut out to be a lawyer, another to be a doctor, another to be in a bank, another to sell in a shop, another to work in a factory. Who adapted them? We may say that they inherited certain aptitude, or that very much is due to training and early education. All very true. But unless we are going to dismiss God from human life, we must feel that His mind has been at work, and that these varying capacities are proofs of His presiding and providing will. 2. God provides not only the men but the raw material. "The earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof." His hand made all things; and when we handle the goods in our commerce, and put our prices on them, we are handling His work. 3. God made spiritual beings like ourselves to do our work through a physical medium. No direct religious work can possibly be done by us except we have been fortified by material means. With angels it may be different; but with us who have bodies it is certain that the souls within cannot act unless we are fed, clothed, nourished, and sheltered, and none of this can happen except through business life. And as God has ordered that we should work and live here through the body, He has ordered the means by which the body of man is to be kept in good working order. He who despises business despises the Lord and His ordinances. If this be so, if God designs that business life shall be the career of most men, then certain consequences follow. (1) We ought to make business life a matter of prayer. There is a plan in the Divine Mind. Do we not wish that plan to be revealed to us? How it calms and cools the fevered brow to pray! How it nerves a man for the battle of life to pray! How it opens the heaven of light in the midst of the world's darkness to ejaculate a prayer to God! (2) Then, too, it is very necessary that business men should be conscious that they are doing the will of God. Men should accustom themselves to feel God with and within them at all times and places. The pious housekeeper of Bengel, the German commentator, used to think that her master spent far too much time over his books and writings; she feared that his soul was in danger. But when one day she went to call him to dinner she saw him fall back in his chair and say, "Lord Jesus, accept my work to-day," and she felt no more fears about his spiritual life. The Christian business is the one that is carried on for the glory of God; it is the work in which Christ is always honoured and obeyed. In order to see the Christianity of business we must inquire a little as to what it is we mean by the glory of God. 1. Justice is the glory of God. It is impossible to read the nature of God without seeing that justice is at the very foundation, and that all other prerogatives would be rendered nugatory if this were absent. The man, then, who would show loyalty to Christ must pay great heed to this principle of justice. It is a harder one to apply in all its details than is love. It is a more uncommon quality in men than generosity and good-naturedness. Business life has been purposely arranged to be a training-school for this virtue. We are brought by business life into contact with unchanging laws. Punctuality is simply a means of paying a debt to our fellows, and it is obedience to the irrevocable law of time. In dealing with raw material it is the same. There is a just and honest way of working at it, and of making it of use in society. The paint washes off, the veneer falls away; the poverty of the material is revealed. There is no glory either of man or God then, but only shame. It was a shame that the workman scrimped his work, that the purchaser paid so low a price as to tempt him, that society loved shams and delusions, rather than "things honest in the sight of all men." 2. Brotherhood is a part of the glory of God. For as He is our Common Father He certainly desires to see us act toward one another as brothers. A man may strive, but he must strive lawfully. He may do his best, but he must not seek to inflict wrong and loss on another. He may seek his own gain, but he must not seek the damage of his neighbour. These are the principles of the gospel. They are like all lofty principles, difficult of application and hard to carry into practice, but it is a part of the discipline of business life that we should learn this difficult art, and thus seek in all we do the glory of God. 3. We seek the glory of God when we remember that the material in our life exists only for the sake of the spiritual. Every Christian man must have a soul above his business. He must make the Cross of Christ central. A responsible being, he must seek strength from God to discharge his duties to those who come under his influence. A consecrated being, he must find in the fellowship of fellow-Christians that which will fill his heart with joy because it fills his hands with usefulness. (S. Pearson, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: |
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