Making Sunshine in Shady Places
R. H. Lovell. Romans 15:2-3 Let every one of us please his neighbor for his good to edification.… 1. Life is a big bundle of littles, intended to be tied together by love. Life's joy depends on what cords bind you and what hand ties them. Bound together we must be, either by cords of silk or by iron fetters. How much our happiness is placed in the power of others! The thoughts, looks, words, and actions of others can in a moment fill us with joy or sorrow. The sensorium of our life seems sometimes like a great and beautiful spider's web, in which every thread is sensitive, we at the centre giving out and receiving back again a thousand pulsations of joy and sorrow. To change the figure, our hearts are a telephonic centre, from which we send out varied messages, and get them back, too. Messages of tenderness and of scorn, of healing and mischief. Who of us can live to ourselves? 2. How much we each have it in our power to make others happy! Surely here is a realm of Christian duty little regarded by us, and I fear less practised. How many persons in this age of keen competition, when life is a race, have pondered Christ's words about loving their neighbour as themselves? Even in family and social life how many need to ponder the sin of being constant misery-makers! If one person kills another in passion, we call that murder. But if a hard, selfish nature frets another and a loving nature to death, what do we call that? We find in our text — I. A CENTRE. No man can please his neighbour who does not please himself. We cannot give what we have not got. Without a fixed centre there can be no circle. Now, if a Christian man is to please himself, he needs that three features shall be prominent in his experience. 1. Let him make up his mind as to what is life's true idea, and lovingly pursue it. Much of our joy in life depends on what we expect. If I expect a large gift and get a little one, or nothing, I am vexed and disappointed; but if I expect little and get much, then I am easily pleased. If I have made up my mind that the world is a workshop to make men; that God and men are the workers, circumstances the tools; each day an opportunity for new effort and new knowledge; failure only a revelation of the ideal and another chance for progress; if I have settled that love is life's one great end and prize, then, with a noble discontent, which rests ever and yet never, I may be happy in myself. 2. But this happiness will only be secure as my motive is right and my helper is ever near. To live to push myself to the front, or even to please men, will never give full pleasure to the heart. He who commands and inspires me must himself be perfect, or his imperfection will in turn become mine. Christ must be the keynote of life's song and the singer's inspiration. To please Him is to lead self to its highest ideal and aspiration and joy. Would we please self, our motto must be, "For me to live is Christ." Self lost in Christ is life's full gain. 3. Yet one thing more is needed. Every day and hour brings me a heap of failures. What am I to do with these? Carry them hourly to Christ for His loving forgiveness, which deepens penitence, heartens trust, and inspires to new and nobler service. II. THE CIRCUMFERENCE of our text is — that no man can truly please himself unless he seeks to please his neighbour. 1. Selfish joy is a paradox. A great thinker has said, "No man has a right to all his rights"; the measure in which he determines to have them is the measure of his meanness — the measure of his willinghood to forego them is the measure of his manhood and nobleness. Where to-day men are too selfish to labour for the common weal, politics become degraded, the national conscience debased, and the poor trampled upon. 2. But what language can fully describe the holy gladness of being permitted to help and bless one's fellow-men? What a royal gift it is to carry sunshine about with you; to be like the flowers, making people happy without knowing it; to light your neighbour's candle by your own, thus losing nothing and giving much. If we could doom each man to live and labour merely for himself, then, whatever has lent any virtue to work, whatever has prompted courage and self-sacrifice, the very beauty of home life itself, must perish. I am told if you play a flute beneath a great church bell, too large for you to stir, and listen close till the right note flows forth a silver rivulet of melody, that mass of metal will respond with a myriad waves of sound in low, soft unison. So, if a man will live like Christ lived — not to please himself — then not only will he most truly please himself, but a thousand hearts will vibrate to the melody of that man's self-sacrificing love. III. THE CONCLUSION of our text is — that no man can either truly please his neighbour or himself who does not seek to please both for a worthy reason. We must seek to please for the permanent building up of character. 1. All can please if they only try. True, some have dispositions naturally winsome and agreeable, and others as naturally acid and disagreeable; but, not the less, every man has this command laid upon him. 2. Merely to give pleasure may, unless guarded, be a snare. We may seek to please only to find opportunity for display, or to secure men's applause. We may want the partnership of others in gaiety or dissipation, and we may please them only for the sake of keeping us company. These methods, and many others, pull men down and never build them up. Our work is to build men up for good and for God. 3. All our life would be lifted to a level of nobility if our pleasure were to seek to do men good in a glad spirit. It was a noble resolve of the blacksmith who said, whatever others do, "I have resolved not to undersell but excel my neighbours." Yet all secondary efforts to either please or bless men, however laudable they may be — and they are — yet concerts, entertainments, lectures, all of them will bring us much disappointment; but the one work which will give us largest pleasure and noblest fruit is to sing to men the old, old story of Jesus and His love. 4. Nothing is more important than that men who do seek to build up others for good should do it in a pleasing way. I have no patience with good people representing God or His service in any unlovely light. Scolding seldom builds men much higher; silence is best when we cannot praise. To tell men what God has done for them, and wants to do for and in them, and to show them how glad and restful His service makes us — this is the best service we can render the truth and our fellow-men. Conclusion: Love is the great river that flows through and sweetens human life. Let us each one take care what we put into that river of love. Some carelessly throw in the broken potsherds of strife and ill-will. Some poison the stream with the miserable ambition of getting rich at any cost. Others foul the stream with grossnesses and impurity. Every man should feel that he is responsible for the fulness, and purity, and beauty of life's river of love. (R. H. Lovell.) Parallel Verses KJV: Let every one of us please his neighbour for his good to edification. WEB: Let each one of us please his neighbor for that which is good, to be building him up.