Social Life of a Christian Citizen

Social Life of a Christian Citizen THE SOCIAL LIFE OF A CHRISTIAN CITIZEN’
By Jack Meyer

You will understand that the thoughts that move through the heart of a person who has been gone after graduation from this school, for 16 or 17 years are almost entirely overwhelming. That sentiment is in no wise affected, but is entirely sincere, and, I might, say, just a little unexpected to me, because while I knew that through these years I have cherished a real, genuine affection for A.C.C., for so many of the people, for the school itself, for my former associates, I thought that I was “man enough” to take charge of myself emotionally a little better than apparently is the case right now. As one comes on the stage and into this talk, some-thing gets hold of a fellow that, as the people who have a brand of religion that we don’t endorse would say, is “better felt than told.” But anyway, for about a minute or two before I “settle down” I want you to understand as I tell it simply and briefly, and yet sincerely and earnestly, that it is just a pleasure that cannot possibly be explained. Through these years I have cherished and nourished, nurtured and looked after very closely with an abiding interest everything that pertains to this school. Though I have been more or less planted in the deep south for a number of years, I have kept in as close touch as possible with the affairs of the school. There has never been a day, there has never been a moment, when I have not been supremely connected with the school, and I certainly do profoundly appreciate more than I can say the factors involved in making: it possible for me to be here now, to be associated with you, with Brother Don Morris, with all the entire personnel of the school.

It is my purpose to “get down to business'’ in this talk right now. A man .shouldn’t come 800 or 1000 miles to appear on anybody’s program and spend much time in preliminaries—and I greatly appreciate the brevity of Brother Morris’s introduction. I am rather hard to catch a hint, though. Brother Morris said that he was trying to make these programs start on time and close on time. I heard the first part of that but I just “suspected,” I “think” he said also, close on time. To say the least of it, I’m not taking this platform with the attitude that I know anything especially to tell you people, but on the other hand I am not taking this platform to make a Sunday school talk of ten minutes. That doesn’t mean I am here for two hours now, but we are here for the business in hand—“The Social Life of a Christian Citizen.”

I want you to understand this and I want you to take this in the right spirit, in the right attitude—it is given in that way—the only book that I have read in the preparation for this talk is this one right here— the New Testament. I do not believe it is necessary for a gospel preacher, when he gets on somebody’s program, to go running the first thing to someone else’s book. I am not saying that in a critical spirit or in a wrong attitude, and I am not saying that we shouldn’t read any book except this one. We shouldn’t even go to school in that case, but I just mean to say that the quotations and the all of this talk are produced and can be found right here in the pages of this word.

Suppose we talk now for a time about the social life of the Christian citizen. We want to keep in mind what these terms mean. Christian citizen can be best ex-plained with these passages. In Php_3:20, we find Paul saying that “our citizenship is in heaven,” and then that remark can best be explained by three or four passages; for example, in Acts 2:36, either at the time of the conclusion or at the time the audience interrupted his speech, the apostle Peter declared that he “hath made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom ye crucified.” What did Peter mean by that? Going on further in 1 Timothy 6:15 Paul declared that he was the “King of kings and the Lord of lords.” And in Colossians 1:13 : “He delivered us out of the power of darkness and translated us into the kingdom of the Son of his love.” Now read Ephesians 1:22-23—and you want to keep your pronouns straight in this passage: “And he (that is, God) put all things in subjection under his.” (that is Christ). Now, let’s go back. “And he put all things in subjection under his feet and gave him to be head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.” Paul declares in these passages that the kingdom, the body and the church are one and the same. So far as I have been able to read with profit in my Bible, I find no phase, or aspect, or anything else of the kingdom, or any future age or anything of that sort except that peculiar “phase,” if you please, of the kingdom or the body or the church over which Jesus now is exalted as King of Icings, and Lord of lords, and rules, reigns and presides as the head thereof. And since Jesus is enthroned at God’s right hand in heaven, as practically all of us, in line with the New Testament, agree —reigning there upon his own throne, God’s throne and David’s throne of Old Testament prophecy, the headquarters of the kingdom are to be found there, and I understand then why Paul said that our citizenship is in heaven. And then you want to keep this idea in mind. Since Jesus Christ reigns now in heaven over the kingdom which is the church on earth, there must be some stand-ard of authority for this kingdom, for this church, for this body, and I find that staled in John 14:26 where Jesus told the apostles that he would send the Com-forter, or the Holy Spirit, who would “teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I said unto you,” meaning that Jesus didn’t teach them all of the truth, but he taught them all that in his own wisdom it was best to teach them at that time, and that he would send the Holy Spirit to finish and complete the job. So he said in John 16:13, that the Spirit would come and guide them into all truth. Then you will find in 1 Corinthians 2:12-13, the apostle Paul affirming that they spoke in words, not merely ideas, which the Spirit taught or supplied. Consequently, Hebrews 8:5 says, “For see, saith he, that thou make all things according to the pattern.” Now that passage was quoted from Exodus 25:40, where God gave the pattern for the tabernacle to Moses and said in effect: “Go by the pattern in building it.” Now, of course, Hebrews 8:5 is not telling us to build a tabernacle. It is telling us that, as Moses went by the pattern in building the tabernacle, so are we to go by the pattern, and this (the New Testament) is it in all things affecting our relationship to God and man, so that this is a standard or this is a voice to go by. We have the liberty to investigate what others have said, to read the books of other men, but this New Testament, stands paramount; this stands as the complete, final and all-sufficient revelation of God to man, representing the faith once for all delivered unto the saints. Consequently, if I am talking today about the social life of the Christian citizen, I can only use this book as my authority.

Then when you look at that term, “social life,” of course that word “social” restricts the lesson a little more, narrows it down to that part of our life that comes in contact with other people; social—having to do with associations, with contacts, with companionship, with fellowship with other people. So, then, we are considering at this time how the Christian citizen —the person who is a citizen of the kingdom over which Jesus the Christ reigns, we are considering how the Christian citizen who is to go by this pattern which the apostles and their colleagues have given us, we are considering how the Christian citizen is to act in his contact with people of the world. I was very glad to see that program which came to me put that word “citizen” in there. That gave us a foundation to work on.

Now, this question: Somebody says, “But what difference does it make how we live? Is it necessarily a question of great importance that we ought to preach about it? Does it deserve a place on a lectureship pro-gram?” In the preaching of the preachers, the teaching of the teachers, the instruction of the fathers and mothers, and the emphasis of all of that, does it make a great deal of difference about how we ought to live? I give you two scriptural answers to that. The first one, of course, is in Php_1:27, where the Spirit had the apostle to say: “Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Clirist,” establishing there that the gospel gives a standard for living, whereby the gos-pel is a measuring rod. And then another passage, 1 Corinthians 15:33. “Be not deceived”—now let us stop a moment. When the Holy Spirit says, “Don't you be deceived,” that’s serving notice on us that he is getting ready to tell us something that people frequently get confused about. I, therefore, am especially interested in it and it attracts my attention, and I read the whole verse now: “Be not deceived, evil companionships corrupt good morals.”
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I want you to see something else right there. Or rather, I want us to be impressed with it, as I am sure that you already see it. Paul gave us the positive side of it in that first passage, “Let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel.” In this second passage he turns and specifices something that we should be warned against. Jesus Christ preached the truth and told people positively and definitely how to live and what to believe and do, and then he turned right around and in the next breath he said, “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees,” Now, I’m not advocating that anybody should go to war to the extent of carrying a chip on his shoulder, acting ugly or insulting. I am not advocating that, but I just mention that to let us be profoundly impressed with the idea that the belief that you sometimes hear people express that you can preach the gospel and let everybody else alone is flatly contradicted by these passages of scripture. These two examples I gave you, as well as others of course, with which we are familiar, show that the New Tes-tament preachers, beginning with Jesus Christ, told us what to believe and do, and then turned right around and specified and warned against the things we were not to believe and the things that were not to be done. So it is, we have a twofold task set out for us, all of us, and especially those of us that consider ourselves young people here today. We have a job cut out now. The apostle says that you had better conform your so-cial life, your life in contact with other people, to the principles of the gospel. Then the apostle says, fur-thermore, that you had better see to it that you be hot deceived by the idea that you can be strong enough to overcome some things that put you in a compromising position, and that drag others down, but that you'll be too strong to be unfavorably affected. And so it is that we have the positive and the negative of the social life of the Christian.

Now I want to lay down four principles, four basic laws, in the regulating of our social life Of course, this New Testament which we have been talking about regulates it, because here is a standard and in heaven is a king where we get our orders, but now, here are four very effective and helpful rules to go by. I am not proposing and I don’t accept the responsibility of mak-ing out a 24-hour schedule for any of us, telling us every place to go and every place not to go, everything to do and everything- not to do, to say and not to say, though as we move along in this talk, as it suits us we will be glad to specify some things, but we are seeking in this lesson to lay down some basic laws which, if a man will accept and use, will guarantee to keep him out of trouble, to keep him out of questionable affairs and places and indulgences. The first one is in itself very basic. This is it: that the nature of the kingdom, of the body, of the church —the nature of the kingdom of Christ in which we hold citizenship—is different from that of the world. And we read in John 18:36 the proof of that, where Jesus says, “My kingdom is not of this world.” Paul begins to elaborate on that when he says in Romans 12:2 : “Be not conformed to the world but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind that ye may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” Paul says, “Don't be conformed.” Jesus says, “The kingdom over which I am to reign is different from the world.” Then if you will go with me to that familiar passage in 2 Corinthians 6 and drop into the middle of that paragraph beginning with the 16th verse you will find this, “And what agreement hath a temple of God with idols? for we are a temple of the living God; even as God said, I will dwell in them and walk in them, and I will be their God and they shall be my people,” Then he goes on to quote from the Old Testament and say: “Wherefore, come ye out from among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch no unclean thin#; and I will receive you and will be to you a Father, and ye shall be to me sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty.” If you will consult that passage, he is quoting from a number of places, the gist of the whole thing being simply this: as back in the Old Testament the nation of Israel constituted a distinct people, a dis-tinctive nation, so the kingdom today which is the Israel of God, and the only Israel that God knows, or the only Israel that God will ever know, that kingdom which is the church, which is the body today, is a distinctive nation, and constitutes a distinctive people. That doesn't mean, I take it, that we are to withdraw into caves and live the life of a hermit, but, as they were to live distinctively so far as their every day per-sonal life was concerned, so are we to live distinctively as regards the character of the life of the church. It matters not how many good and honest and moral peo-ple may grace this old world today, out yonder in de- nominationalism and sectarianism, or in any other situation in which they may not be identified with anything religiously, it ought to be said truly that the average life of the church of Jesus Christ is consid-erably higher than that of the world. I would that there was some way to impress that upon all of us, beginning with myself, because I need that as much as anybody else, of course. I would that could be burned indelibly into the hearts of people as a basic, fundamental law, regulating the social life of the Christian citizen as a recognition of the fact that we are not to be as other people, that we are to be different. And I do not advocate by any means that we are to be cranky or anything of that sort, but simply that we are to be as suggested—different, higher, better, holier, and purer people with regard to character.

That, of course, involves our relationship and our contact with other people, because they will see us and we will demonstrate before them the lives we live. Now, if you can go out here in Abilene where you live or in Birmingham where I live and find a gathering of people of the town, and find members of the body of Christ in every one of those gatherings, going where the world goes, doing what the world does, saying what the world says when they get there, then you can only say that the church is no different from the world. But if we recognize that fundamental law that the nature of the church is to be different, then we ought to be in a fair way to regulating our whole life so as to keep us out of anything that is questionable whatsoever.