1 Corinthians 10

1 Corinthians 10:24

SELF- VS. SELF-SEEKING 1 Corinthians 10:24ONE of the important features in Christ’s teaching is its positiveness along original lines. We are told that one day Jesus went into Capernaum; “and straightway on the Sabbath Day He entered into the synagogue, and taught. And they were astonished at His doctrine: for He taught them as one that had authority”. Not by referring to what the fathers and former rabbis had said; not with the timidity suggesting fear of mistake, either in the manner of declaring the truth or uncertainty of the truth itself, but with positive speech, and original thought He spoke. He dared even to set up His opinions in matters of morals and religion and life, as of sufficient weight to overthrow the old fossilated formulas of tradition. “I say unto you”, was the sentence with which He introduced many a declaration meant to shatter and destroy the commonest proverbs of the people, and make manifest the mistakes into which religious teachers had fallen. Good things are claimed for the sacred writers of false religions, and we are constantly being told that even the golden rule is negatively stated in them, but it is the sufficiently distinguishing peculiarity of Christ’s utterances that they express the loftiest good, and put that expression into most affirmative, positive words.Our text did not escape the Master’s lips, but dripped rather from the point of the Apostle’s pen, as Paul wrote to the Corinthians.

It is a text, however, clearly born of the Christ-spirit and based absolutely upon His teaching; a text, which, as I have thought upon its essential point, seems to be as directly in conflict with some of the proverbs of the present time, and as antagonistic to the spirit of our age, as were the most radical of Christ’s reformatory utterances to the notions of His nation, and the character of His earth-life times.Who is there among us today, both practicing and teaching this text, “Let no man seek his own, but every man another’s wealth”? We are not without our good Samaritans, who when they find a man beaten and robbed, are ready to carry him to an inn, have his wounds dressed, and even pay the bill. But this text goes farther, and reaches deeper into life’s motives. It demands that we seek our most healthy and prosperous neighbor’s good, even before our own advantage. That is out of keeping with our most cherished proverbs. The world says, “Look out for number one, first of all!” Philosophy argues that “God cares for him who takes care of himself”; and even our modern science is based largely upon the notion that “self-preservation is the first law of nature.” But if this text is right, then our social proverb, our much-cherished philosophy, and our boasted science is wrong, and I believe the text is right, is the truth of reason and observation, as well as the revelation of God.But you may not be prepared to accept my opinion, and so I must back it up with some arguments drawn from observation and the revealed.SELF-SEEKING SETS ASIDE THE ETHICAL IN LIFE By the “ethical,” I mean those fundamentals of morality which are written indelibly into the human heart and conscience, and which lift man into an infinitely higher realm than that through which moves the beast.Self-seeking discovers only the lower animal nature. What pig cares whether his fellow-swine gets a single grain of food so long as he can capture the whole feed? What cur is disturbed if his best friend among all the canines of the neighborhood is starving for a morsel of meat, so long as he is filled with the crumbs from his master’s table? Darwin’s survival of the fittest may apply in plant life and lowest animal life, and even find many illustrations in the life of human-heathenism; but civilization seeks to set that law aside, social ethics opposes the notion, and the religion of Jesus Christ is constantly trampling such barbarism beneath its feet, saying, “Ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good”. Honor the aged, carry food and drink to the sick and imprisoned, and offer your own life, even, to save the life of the helpless and the weak. Adam Smith in his “Wealth of Nations,” argues that competition is the life of trade, and that the best commercial regulations are those resulting from the effort of every man to do his best and get the most out of his effort.

I accept both his premises and conclusion; but I do so, only because he concludes by showing such a system to be one of service, of mutual good, as between man and man, of blessing to one’s neighbor as certainly as profit to one’s self.I believe that in this very law of commerce we find both illustrations of the law of self-seeking and self-offering. The clerk, who has no interest in the firm by which he is employed, save that of retaining his position and drawing his salary, is self-seeking. That other man, however, who forgets constantly what his wages are and when they will come to his pocket, in the more engrossing thought of serving faithfully the business firm, illustrates self-offering, and proves that he doesn’t live to eat and wear, but eats and wears to serve— to serve his employer, to serve his wife and children and friends, and furnishes an illustration of the morality and reasonableness of our text, “Let no man seek his own, but every man another’s wealth”. Self-seeking also destroys faith as between man and man. Who can trust another, if we are to follow the common proverb, “Look out for number one”—a proverb which seems fair enough on its face, and yet hides away the hideous features of knavery, cheat, deception and fraud, if only by so doing it can gain an advantage? What business relations are possible without fidelity of man to man? In the south the tillers of the soil are constantly annoyed by the self-seeking of the colored employees. Only turn your back and many of the colored hands will drop the hoe, or lay aside the ax, or sit down upon the beam of the plow, and do nothing until you have turned eyes on them again. The result is a depreciation of the nominal value of their service, and a constant apprehension to the served, lest their duties go at loose ends and heavy losses result.

Every large merchandise involves many trusts. Men are left alone at work, because the owners of establishments believe their men to be in sufficient good faith not to seek self-interest solely, but the interests of others as well.

Destroy fidelity as it exists between pupil and teacher, and bring the one to believe that the only interest the other has, is that of self-ease, or personal profit, and immediately the possibilities of education are mightily circumscribed. What interest would you attach to this sermon, what faith would you put in my words as being true, if a one of you believed that my only concern in this matter was that of gaining a reputation as an orator, or that of performing a certain service for a stipulated price? Don’t you see that self-seeking whenever it is clearly evident destroys faith as between man and man, and at once falls under the ban of criticism? That is the principal trouble today between capital and labor. Faith is gone! The one believes that the other is organized for getting the largest profit off its labor without interest in, or sympathy for the laborer himself.

The other sees before him a great American institution, growing daily in numbers and power, the very motto of which is, “The largest money for the shortest hours.” Self-seeking seems to be the esprit-de-corps of these two great armies of laborers and capitalists. When the day comes that, under the gracious advances of loftier thought and purpose, the two can, in some measure at least, subscribe to the text of this morning, then capitalists will be better served and laborers better paid. “Let no man seek his own, but every man another’s wealth”, and a fortnight will revive that mutual faith so necessary to the good of all men.The spirit of self-seeking fosters a continuous destruction of wealth and life.

Every man who has seen far into business, has witnessed many illustrations of wealth’s destruction through the infamy of self-seeking. Every rich miser stands as the living monument to a vast deal of dead wealth. His selfishness has laid many a living dollar low, and placed it in the tombs, from which it will never come forth, till after the tolling of the bell, telling of the cringing man’s death at last. Then again, wealth is destroyed, when as Dr. Talmage in a sermon once said, a young merchant is caught in some unexpected ruin, and stronger ones instead of helping him over some adverse tide, are self-seeking enough to shove him into deeper water and force upon him bankruptcy, that they may make gain of his spoils and laugh at his wreck, “Sheriff’s sale, a red flag in the window.” Goods have changed hands. “The young merchant goes home that night and says to his wife, ‘Well Mary, we’ll have to move out of this house, and sell our piano, and for the gain of that grasping soul, we may end in the poorhouse.’” Do you know, my friends, that every failure in business clogs the commercial wheels and destroys, rather than adds to, the country’s wealth?But if loss of wealth were all, we might easily withhold our tears! But how often it means loss of life.

As was said of that case of bankruptcy on the part of a young merchantman, the chances are, that broken-spirited, he will go to drink. “The young wife and child go to her father’s house, and not only a store is wiped out and a market disturbed, but his home is wiped out, his morals are unbalanced, and his prospects for two worlds, this and the next, are blighted forever.” Truly will “the devils make a banquet of fire, and fill their cups of gall and drink deep to the health of the man” who seeks only his own gain, and tramples beneath his iron heel his neighbor’s good. Edward Bellamy’s book, “Looking Backward,” is thought of by many to be a mere vagary, a wild phantasmagoria.

But I read it twice through, and although finding many weaknesses, I am sure I discovered many excellencies as well. So well has he shown the degrading and hurtful consequences of that commercial spirit, which seeks to build up self by tearing down others, of enriching one’s own life off the spoils of neighbors, that I can but believe the book is already a factor in that reformation of commerce which is sure to come. The sermon which the racy author put into the Rev. Mr. Barton’s mouth, as a sermon of the twentieth century, I object to, because it is too little tinctured, if touched at all, with the Gospel of Christ. But sure it is, he knew how to use an illustration, and right vividly did he employ one to portray “the desperation with which men and women” of the nineteenth century “fought and tore each other in the scramble for golf.” You may recall that illustration.

It was painted in these words: “Some two or three centuries ago, an act of barbarity was committed in India, which, though the lives destroyed were but a few score, was attended by such peculiar horrors that its memory is likely to be perpetual. A number of English prisoners were shut up in a room containing not enough air to supply one-tenth their number.

The unfortunates were gallant men, devoted comrades in service, but as the agonies of suffocation began to take hold of them, they forgot all else, and became involved in a hideous struggle, each one for himself, and against all others, to force a way to one of the small aperatures of the prison at which alone it was possible to get a breath of air. It was a struggle in which men became beasts.” Then he applies that horrible struggle, by analogy to the ways of trade, in which so many men seem to have turned beastly, and forgetting all else save the good of a dollar and selfish gain, trample their fellows beneath their maddened feet. There, analogy is better grounded than we sometimes think! The half of this city today would not be wrestling with the hardships which have beset their lives, if the other half should overthrow their proverb and philosophy and science (falsely so called) of selfishness, and bring into trade and benevolence the teaching of this text. David’s life was examplary in many respects, but so long as the Bible is read, there will stand against it the indictment of Nathan, the Prophet, “Thou art the man”, who to satisfy a selfish greed sacrificed a life and enriched your own house with his spoils only to see the curse of God upon the act. So long as the Pentateuch lives the blood of righteous Abel will cry in judgment against self-seeking and brother murder. Let us live for others, my friends, if we intend to live for the right and God.Again I argue thatSELF-SEEKING IS TO I confess to a great dislike of the employment of technical terms, but I could get no other words to express the same thoughts at all concisely. By utilitarianism I intend the greatest good of the greatest number. Self-seeking is so far removed from that result that it is not difficult to see that it accomplishes exactly the opposite end.For even the individual who employs it, it has in store only bloat and blight. Every drunkard lives a life running purely counter to the principles of this text. He despises not only the good of his neighbor, but treats with contempt the good of those in his own bosom. Father and mother, brother and sister, wife and child, are all forgotten in the selfishness of drink.

He is warmed by it at first and thinks himself profited. He is stimulated by a second draught and imagines himself profited.

He is stimulated by a third draught and imagines his gain increased. He is intoxicated by a fourth and in his delight forgets all others. He is bloated with a fifth and vainly imagines an increase in health. He is blighted at last and imbruted into utter indifference to all else save a futile effort to slake his own distempered and hellish thirst. The gambler and the man of unclean heart and life are in the same row, and must accomplish a like end. That is also the process by which misers are made. Their cringing is only legitimate economy at the start. With an accumulation of dollars the money greed grows and larger profits are on.

Excited still more, penuriousness breaks into a passion, and the wealthy man of today will be starving tomorrow in the midst of plenty, because he is now blighted in the bloat of his former greed. A student may possibly make the same mistake. He who acquires a love of study which more and more consumes him, until at last he prefers to shut the door of his cloister, as the ancient monks used to do, and take in from all literature and thought, giving nothing out, has made just such a mistake. His own mind will stagnate under it and his accumulated wisdom become a muddy worthless pool indeed. That religion which seeks to get all and give nothing knows no spirit of the Christ. The individual who reads the Bible without teaching it to others; who rejoices in the Gospel invitation, but never repeats it; who is thankful for a personal experience of grace, but never openly confesses it; who sings, “Were the whole realm of nature mine, that were a gift far too small,” and yet lets no nickel escape his fingers for the Gospel’s sake, is shriveling and being dwarfed into spiritual imbecility.

That spring is purest and best that overflows continually, that gives out itself with every passing hour, and so is that human life.Self-seeking only departs from the individual, bloated and blighted, to touch the community with wrong and robbery. He who gets more from this world than he gives back to it, is a social, a political or religious, thief!

He who gets just as much from the world as he contributes to it, is a nonentity, and had as well remained unborn. We sometimes hear people praising individuals as self-made men. That can only be in a comparative sense. There are ten thousand contributions to every man’s life, if that life amounts to much, and for every one of these he becomes a debtor to somebody or something. His debt may be partly due to the condition of society at the time of his entrance into it. That society was waiting for just such a man.

Mordecai said to Esther, “Who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this”? That condition of things which opened the way to position of queen to the young Jewess laid her under tribute, and she would have wronged herself, her people, and her God, if she had failed to pay the debt by taking her life into her own hands to become intercessor with the king.The contribution may be the sympathy and assistance given by friends, and if so we owe an equal amount of sympathy and assistance to somebody, and we who don’t give it will go out of the world at last leaving behind us unpaid debts.

As I look back over my own past life today, I do not recall many times in which society has laid me under financial obligations, for I have had to earn with the sweat of my brow almost every dollar, and if I went out of the world today many would say of me, “He owed no man anything,” but that would be a falsehood. There are ten years immediately behind me, no single day of which has passed but my life has been laid under tribute by some bright sympathy, some deed of kindness enjoyed, some tender expression of favor received, some earnest prayer prayed in my behalf. I confess to you this morning that I find myself made up for the most part by contributions from without. I am indebted to every friend who has devoutly wished me good; I owe every Christian who has bidden a hearty God-speed; I am under obligations to every author from whose volumes I have brought anything of wisdom or instruction; every teacher from whose presence I have turned away with fuller head or heart; every church through which I have passed, to know its respect and love. If I was unkind to men as I met them, I should display the basest ingratitude to that society whose members have been kind to me. If I sought not to instruct others, my own teachers might bitterly complain; if I gave no sympathy to the sorrowing or assistance to the afflicted, my former days of sickness ought to return, and all the sorrow which others have helped me to bear, be brought and laid upon my shoulders afresh; if I sought my own good and not my neighbors, I should seem to despise the only real life, and if I spent not my soul in telling the plan of redemption, I would crucify afresh the Christ who gave His life to redeem me!

Oh, how much we owe. We are taught to “owe no man any thing, but to love one another”, but can we ever discharge the debt of love?

Surely not, if our lives are spent in self-seeking!I am brought to say finally, then, SELF- IS THE TRUEST LAW OF LIVING Just as a man by intense selfishness can rob and wrong the society in which he moves, so conversely a man by unselfishness may enrich every greater life-circle. I sometimes think that human nature has gone so far awry that it might be profited by following out lessons to be learned from the nature that is normal, that has never gone wrong. There is much in nature to illustrate the text, “It is more blessed to give than to receive”. Every spring rising out of earth’s bosom into the crystal stream that hastens away through ravine and valley; every rivulet winding its way through meadow and forest to the distant lake where it loses itself forever; every majestic river sweeping on to the ocean depths, is an illustration of the beauty and utility of this best law of existence, the law of giving. Every candle disseminating the darkness with its rays; every star glistening through the shadows of night; every central sun pouring out its essence of warmth and light to a myriad of worlds, is an illustration of this blessedness of giving. God’s precept is God’s practice, my friend, for He owed no man anything, and yet He gave Himself to the world that so needed Him.

An obligation in life has both length and breadth. Its breadth is our ability, its length is our opportunity.

I am able to give something to the social circles through which I move. Those circles offer me time and place for my contribution. If I don’t pay it, I will have wronged at once my own soul, and have excited that society’s contempt. The same thing is true in matters of civil and religious concern. Let us not say then that “society is a sham and I propose to let it alone”; that “politics is a muddy pool, and I will keep far away from its banks”; that religion is a question of opinions and “I will live my life out without passing judgment.” That is cowardly; that is a mistake; that is almost insane! If society is a sham then it is yours to help make it grandly solid; if politics are corrupt you are under obligations to cast in your contribution of salt to help purify the pool; if religion is a question of faiths, you must seek out the true belief or die like the careless beast and leave religion in deeper doubt by your irreligious course!

You are in debt to them all, my friend, and you must pay, or prove yourself unworthy the name of man!I am firmly convinced that the law of giving is the law of growing. Christ was not merely exhorting a set of covetous men and trying to stir them up to some missionary effort when in a sermon He said, “Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom.

For with the same measure that ye mete withal, it shall be measured to you again”. When Christ said that, He simply expressed a principle that may be observed upon in every relation of life. Giving is growing! The fountain grows because it gives. The stream grows because it gives. The river grows because it gives. The old ocean, for which they appear to be robbing themselves, will pay them back and more, sending up a mist that shall gather into a cloud and halting over hill and valley, give itself into fountain, and rivulet, and river again. The exalted stations in life all lie at the end of humility’s path.

That is why Christ said, “He that humbleth himself shall be exalted”. The thrones of earth lie at the end of paths of service. That is why Christ said, “Whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant”. The way to be filled is to empty self. That is why God put into the Prophet’s lips the sentence, ‘The liberal soul shall be made fat.’ Covetousness is the crying sin of the age, and covetousness is the most appalling poverty. Many a man has gone hungry and ragged because the habit of withholding has grown until he is too penurious to expend his wealth of his own body even, and many a soul will go down in leanness to the grave, because of its utter want of liberality. There are many men salving their conscience by praying. Better prove your love to God by giving at the same time.

Dr. Sewall of Maine is said to have entered a meeting one day, just after the collection for foreign missions was taken. The pastor called on Sewall to pray. He thrust his hand into his pocket. The pastor repeated the request. Still Sewall was fishing in his pocket. Finally the pastor said, “Doctor, I didn’t ask you to give, I asked you to pray.” “Oh, yes,” said Sewall, “I heard you, but I can’t pray until I have given something.” If this text is the truth of God, while men are perishing without the truth, no man can pray until he has given something.To give proves our kinship to God. He is the Great Giver.

I sometimes wonder if we appreciate our own words when we call Him “The Giver of All Good.” I love to think of the great throbbing heart of the Infinite that lies back of and prompts such beneficence! And it is only the Christ spirit in man that discovers to him the blessedness of serving his fellow, giving to relieve their needs, and suffering to lighten their sorrows. In reading Henry Drummond’s “Tropical Africa,” I was pleased with his method of rebuking the heartless covetousness of his native guides. One of their number had been run down by a wounded buffalo, and gored almost to death. Chicken soup was the only food he could take and be profited by it. The natives doggedly refused to share their fowls with the poor sufferer.

For three whole days Drummond gave up his meals to the wounded man and went without himself. At the end of that time, the guides grew heartily ashamed and begged his pardon and afterward willingly divided with the wounded man.

I sometimes wonder how man can be indifferent to suffering souls that are starving without the bread of life, and withhold their paltry dollars before the very face of the Man who died on Calvary to save such souls. Oh, when will we grow ashamed of our covetousness? “Hereby perceive we the love of God, because He laid down His life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren,. But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him? My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth”.