“He saved others; himself he cannot save” (Matt. 27:42).
“And that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves” (2 Cor. 5:15).
To save others, He must sacrifice Himself; to deliver others, He must surrender Himself. It must be the one or the other. He could not do both—save others and save Himself also.
God has not called us to a life of ease and enjoyment, but to a life of self-renunciation, self-crucifixion, and entire devotion to His will and redemptive purposes. Let us beware of the false enthusiasm which professes to burn for God, but is indifferent to the claims of our brother-man. Let us seek to be filled with the Christ-in-us enthusiasm which burned in the heart of the great apostle of the Gentiles—the enthusiasm which compelled him to look upon himself as a debtor to all men, and which made him the mighty spiritual force that he was in his own day, that he is in our day, and that he will be to the end of time.
The great need of the age is men, not rich men, not wise men, not learned men—we have them in abundance—but men of deep convictions, men who are conscious of the all-consuming power of the love of God, men with whom it is a passion to save men, men who are prepared to dare all things and endure all things in order to finish the work which they feel in their inmost soul that God has given them to do.
May God make us men and women of this stamp, and may we live so that those who know us best may be able to say of each one of us when we have passed away, “He saved others; himself he could not save. She saved others; herself she could not save.”—Griffith John.
Earth’s truest heroes hold their lives but lightly,
Ready to peril all for others’ gain,
Thinking but little of the joy hereafter,
Only absorbed in soothing this world’s pain.
Labor as Christ, with nought of self behind you,
He had no ’vantage from His death to win.
Ruler of Heaven and earth through countless ages,
Why came He, poor, unto a world of sin?
Deep in each nature lies a note heroic;
Though in the soul its music ne’er may wake,
Longing to burst self’s trammels wide asunder,
Hardship enduring for its own stern sake.
—G. F. Browning.