107. PERSISTENCE

PERSISTENCE

Brethren Of The Graduating Class :—You have come with the help of God to the end of a long course of study and of sacrifice. Some of you have given up secular avocations which furnished an assured support. It has required great economy and occasional hardship to push your way through. You have been walking by faith, for it was not a matter of demonstration that you were called to the ministry or that you would succeed in it. I congratulate you that the preparatory training and trial are now over. You have shown something of that sustained effort toward a distant end, without which there is no strong character. You have a new sense of power, and a new faith in God. You may well thank God and take courage. Will it seem unsympathetic if I remind you that the reward of a duty done is the power to do another; that the obstacles thus far overcome are not only not the last, but are really only the beginning of a long series; that past victories are only intended to strengthen and encourage for new conflict; that, instead of being a time to settle down and rest, this is the time to gird up your loins for the real work of your lives? Yet this is my message to you to-night. I bid you remember that Alp upon Alp rises before you: the ascent is arduous and will tax your strength. From these quiet halls you go into the thick of the fight: you will need all your courage. And the one word that I would have ring in your ears continually is the word Persistence.

You have begun to learn the art of preaching. But preaching is the study of a lifetime. You have made a few good sermons. But if you regard these as a stock in trade, they may be your undoing. Nothing is more pitiable than the preacher whose trial sermon is his best, and who never preaches another so good. Cultivate a noble discontent with past achievements. Make every success a stepping-stone to one still greater. You cannot do this without incessant labor. The modern pulpit requires abounding resources. After a little experience in preaching twice each Sunday to the same congregation, you will be conscious of an aching void ; your ideas will be exhausted; you will be tempted to pull up your stakes and seek a new pastorate. I charge you then to recall this closing address. Set yourselves to new study of the Scripture and to new pondering of your own experience. Give up all dependence upon the past and begin to make your own sermons. Another year of original thinking will make men of you. You will discover that you have peculiar gifts. You will get a new hold of your people. You will enter upon a career as preachers that may last as long as Doctor Maclaren’s and may possibly be as useful.

Pastoral work requires persistence. The first few years are but an apprenticeship. Many of your church will regard you as a boy, however determined you may be that no man shall despise your youth. There is a confidence which only prolonged acquaintance can beget. There are measures which you can easily carry in the fourth and fifth years of your pastorate which you cannot possibly carry in the first or the second year. Remember that these impressions of your people are to some degree correct. Your opinions are not so worthy of respect at the beginning as they will be after you have learned to know your church. And you cannot have at first that confidence in yourself which is needed to win the confidence of others. For this reason an exceedingly short first pastorate is often the ruin of a man. He never gets over the sense of failure which that first experience has given him.

Remember that there are difficulties everywhere, and leaving one church for another is only jumping from the frying-pan into the fire. There will be some opposers everywhere. Resolve that you will subdue them by love. Kindness to them and to their children will commonly make them friends. But even if you cannot make them friends, you have no right to leave the church on account of a small number who cherish discontent. If you bury yourself in your work and give every energy to your people, you may trust your cause to God and believe that he will vindicate you. He can make even your enemies to be at peace with you. He can make your endurance an object-lesson to ungodly men, so that at last you win them to Christ. The good Shepherd sought the lost sheep "until he found it." Go thou and do likewise. For these reasons I give you my counsel to be content with nothing less than four or five years in your first pastorate. That first pastorate will set the standard for those that come after. Do not leave your first church until you can see that you have accomplished something permanent there, something that will abide after you have departed. Be sure that the church is better in numbers, in organization, in liberality, in discipline, than it was when you took charge of it. Be sure that you have done all you can for the ungodly men of the community before you leave them. Only a sublime persistence will enable you at the end of your ministry to say what George Fox, the Quaker, said when he was dying: "I am clear! I am clear!" Be persistent in the care of your own souls. Remember that nothing here is done, so long as anything yet remains to be done. The Christian pastor who neglects his own spiritual life in order to minister to others will soon find that he has nothing to give. In an old Bible belonging to Oliver Cromwell was found this inscription: "O. C, 1644—Qui ccssat esse melior cessat esse bonus "—" He who ceases to be better ceases to be good." Luther’s maxim was: "He who is a Christian is no Christian." And Paul’s was after the same pattern: "I count not myself yet to have apprehended : but one thing I do ... I press on toward the goal." Have you been striving to be good men, in order that you might be fit ministers of Jesus Christ? I urge you to strive yet more earnestly as you enter upon your work. Satan has desired to sift you as wheat. He will tempt you through pride and through lust. Continue steadfastly in prayer, and buffet the body, bringing it into bondage, lest by any means, after you have preached to others, you yourselves should be cast away. The church comes to reflect the character of its pastor. An aggressive, determined, persistent pastor makes an aggressive, determined, and persistent church. Let the pastor then reflect the persistence of his Lord,—not the persistence of self-will, but the persistence of love, the persistence that beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Where can you learn this persistence of love but from the Lord of love, Jesus Christ himself? Human nature is weak and fickle. Our resolutions are brittle as spun glass. Trust in our own strength will give us only a broken reed to lean upon. But we have something better than that,—even the truth of God, that shall endure when all that seems shall suffer shock.

It fortifies my soul to know That, though I perish, Truth is so; That howsoe’er I stray and range, Whate’ er I do, thou canst not change.

I steadier step when I recall, Howe’er I slip, thou canst not falL

Those are noble lines of Arthur Hugh Clough. But they are too abstract. We want not only the truth of God, but also the Spirit of God, to steady us and give us persistence. It is my great satisfaction to assure you that you may be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inward man, and so may be filled with all the fullness of God. There is no way by which mortal men may be made immutable but by becoming partakers of the divine nature and sharers of the immutability of God. Dear brethren, you go to widely separated parts of the earth. Each one of you has his own nature and his own work. But the omnipresent and omnipotent Spirit of God goes with you. We commend you to his care, believing that he will give you the grace of persistence to the end, the patient continuance in welldoing, which both endures and perseveres.