August 27 - The Highest Life Ever Lived!

Henry Drummond (1851-1897)

This remember was the highest life ever lived. So simple a thing it was, so natural, that those who saw it did not even know it was religion, and Christ did not pass among them as a very religious man. Nay, it is certain, and it is an infinitely significant thought that the religious people of His time not only refused to accept this type of religion as any kind of religion at all, but repudiated and denounced Him as its enemy. Inability to discern what true religion is, is not confined to the Pharisees. Multitudes still who profess to belong to the religion of Christ, scarcely know it when they see it. The truth is, men will hold to almost anything in the name of Christianity, believe anything, do anything - except its common and obvious tasks. Great is the mystery of what has passed in this world for religion. The Greatest Thing in the World  audio book follows below.

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August 21 - Exercise Your Soul Muscles

If a man does not exercise his arm, he develops no biceps muscle; and if a man does not exercise his soul, he acquires no muscle in his soul, no strength of character, no vigor of moral fiber, no beauty of spiritual growth. Love is not a thing of enthusiastic emotion. It is a rich, strong, vigorous expression of the whole Christian character—the Christlike nature in its fullest development. And the constituents of this great character are only to be built up by ceaseless practice. ....

By synthesis of all the colors, men can make whiteness, they cannot make light. By synthesis of all the virtues, men can make virtue, they cannot make love.--Love Practised, Henry Drummond

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The Greatest Thing in the World - part 4

 Love Defended

By Henry Drummond

Now I have a sentence or two to add about Paul’s reason for singling out love as the supreme possession. It is a very remarkable reason. In a single word it is this: it lasts. “Love,” urges Paul, “never faileth.” Then he begins again one of his marvelous lists of the great things of the day, and exposes them one by one. He runs over the things that men thought were going to last, and shows that they are all fleeting, temporary, passing away.

“Whether there be prophecies, they shall be done away.” It was a mother’s ambition for her boy in those days that he should become a prophet. For hundreds of years God had never spoken by means of any prophet, and at that time the prophet was greater than the king. Men waited wistfully for another messenger to come, and hung upon his lips when he appeared, as upon the very voice of God. Paul says, “Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail.” The Bible is full of prophecies. One by one they have “failed”; that is, having been fulfilled, their work is finished; they have nothing more to do now in the world except to feed a devout man’s faith.

Then Paul talks about tongues. That was another thing that was greatly coveted. “Whether there be tongues, they shall cease.” Take it in any sense you like. Take it, for illustration merely, as languages in general. Consider the words in which these chapters were written—Greek. It is gone. Take the Latin—the other great tongue of those days. It ceased long ago. The language of Wales, of Ireland, of the Scottish Highlands is dying before our eyes. The most popular book in the English tongue at the present time, except the Bible, is one of Dickens’ works, his Pickwick Papers. It is largely written in the language of London street-life; and experts assure us that in fifty years it will be unintelligible to the average English reader.

Then Paul goes farther, and with even greater boldness adds, “Whether there be knowledge, it shall be done away.” The wisdom of the ancients, where is it? It is gone. A schoolboy to-day knows more than Sir Isaac Newton knew; his knowledge has vanished. You put yesterday’s newspaper in the fire: its knowledge has vanished. You buy the old editions of the great encyclopedias for a few cents: their knowledge has vanished. Look how the coach has been superseded by the use of steam. Look how electricity has superseded that, and swept a hundred almost new inventions into oblivion. “Whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.” At every workshop you will see, in the back yard, a heap of old iron, a few wheels, a few levers, a few cranks, broken and eaten with rust. Twenty years ago that was the pride of the city. Men flocked in from the country to see the great invention; now it is superseded, its day is done. And all the boasted science and philosophy of this day will soon be old.

Knowledge does not last. Can you tell me anything that is going to last? Many things Paul did not condescend to name. He did not mention money, fortune, fame; but he picked out the great things of his time, the things the best men thought had something in them, and brushed them peremptorily aside. Paul had no charge against these things in themselves. All he said about them was that they would not last. They were great things, but not supreme things. There were things beyond them. What we are stretches past what we do, beyond what we possess. John says of the world, not that it is wrong, but simply that it “passeth away.” There is a great deal in the world that is delightful and beautiful, great and engrossing; but it will not last.

All that is in the world, the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life, are but for a little while. Love not the world therefore. Nothing that it contains is worth the life and consecration of an immortal soul. The immortal soul must give itself to something that is immortal. And the only immortal things are these: “Now abideth faith, hope, love, but the greatest of these is love.”

Some think the time may come when two of these three things will also pass away—faith into sight, hope into fruition. Paul does not say so. We know but little now about the conditions of the life that is to come. But what is certain is that love must last. God, the eternal God, is love. Covet, therefore, that everlasting gift, that one thing which it is certain is going to stand, that one coinage which will be current in the Universe when all the other coinages of all the nations of the world shall be useless. You will give yourselves to many things, give yourself first to love. Hold things in their proportion. Let at least the first great object of our lives be to achieve the character defended in these words, the character—and it is the character of Christ—which is built round love.

I have said this thing is eternal. Did you ever notice how continually John associates love and faith with eternal life? To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and to love forever is to live forever. Hence, eternal life is inextricably bound with love. We want to live forever for the same reason that we want to live tomorrow. Why do we want to live tomorrow? Is it because there is someone who loves you, and whom you want to see tomorrow, and be with, and love back? There is no other reason why we should live on other than that we love and are beloved.

Eternal life also is to know God, and God is love. This is Christ’s own definition. Ponder it. “This is life eternal, that they might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.” Love must be eternal. It is God. That is the philosophy of what Paul is showing us; the reason why in the nature of things love should be the supreme thing—because it is going to last; because in the nature of things it is eternal life.

Now I have all but finished. How many of you will join me in reading this chapter once a week for the next three months? A man did that once and it changed his whole life. Will you do it? It is for the greatest thing in the world—love. You might begin by reading it every day, especially the verses which describe the perfect character. “Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself.” Get these ingredients into your life. It is worth giving time to. No man can become a saint in his sleep; and to fulfill the condition required demands a certain amount of prayer and meditation and time, just as improvement in any direction, bodily or mentally, requires preparation and care.

You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments that stand out, the moments when you have really lived, are the moments when you have done things in a spirit of love. As memory scans the past, above and beyond all the transitory pleasures of life, there leap forward those supreme hours when you have been enabled to do unnoticed kindnesses to those round about you, things too trifling to speak about, but which you feel have entered into your eternal life.

I have seen almost all the beautiful things God has made; I have enjoyed almost every pleasure that He has planned for man; and yet as I look back, I see standing out above all four or five short experiences, when the love of God reflected itself in some poor imitation, some small act of love of mine, and these seem to be the things which alone of all one’s life abide. Everything else in all our lives is transitory. Every other good is visionary. But the acts of love, they never fail.

Thank God the Christianity of today is coming nearer the world’s need. Live to help that on. Thank God men know better, by a hair’s breadth, what religion is, what God is, who Christ is, where Christ is. Who is Christ? He who fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the sick. And where is Christ? Where?—“Whoso shall receive a little child in My name receiveth Me.” And who are Christ’s? “Every one that loveth is born of God.”

Public domain. Condensed and slightly adapted from the original, published in 1891:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16739/16739-h/16739-h.htm.

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The City Without a Church - by Henry Drummond

by Henry Drummond (assistant to D.L.Moody in the UK, 1893)

“Perhaps the most dismal fact of history is the failure of the great organized bodies of ecclesiasticism to understand the simple genius of Christ's religion. Whatever the best in the churches of all time may have thought of the life & religion of Christ, taken as a whole they have succeeded in leaving upon the mind of a large portion of the world an impression of Christianity which is the direct opposite of the reality. Down to the present hour almost whole nations in Europe live, worship, & die under the belief that Christ is an ecclesiastical Christ, religion the sum of all the churches' observances, & faith an adhesion to the churches' creeds. I do not apportion blame; I simply record the fact. In many places the churches have literally stolen Christ from the people; they have made the Son of Man the Priest of an Order; they have taken Christianity from the city & imprisoned it behind altar rails; they have withdrawn it from the national life & doled it out to the few who pay to keep the deception up. The ideal of the New Jerusalem was: no temple [Rev.21:22a], but a God-inhabited society. Are we not reversing this ideal in an age when ‘the church’ still means in so many mouths ‘the clergy,’ instead of meaning the Christian society, & when 9 men are striving to get men to go to church for one who is striving to make men realize that they themselves are the Church? Yet even with words so strong as these, the superstition reigns in all but unbroken power. And everywhere, still men are found confounding the spectacular services of a church, the vicarious religion of a priest, & the traditional belief in a creed, with the living religion of the Son of Man. I should tell the people that the great use of the church is to help men to do without it. Church services are ‘diets’ of worship--they are meals. All who are hungry can take them, & that regularly. But no workman is paid for his meals. He is paid for the work he does in the strength of them. As a channel of nourishment, as a stimulus to holy deeds, as a link with all holy lives, let all men use it, & to the utmost of their opportunity. But by all that they know of Christ or care for man, let them beware of mistaking its services for Christianity.” 

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Lessons from the Angelus

By Henry Drummond (1851–1897), abridged

God often speaks to men’s souls through music; He also speaks to us through art. Millet’s famous painting entitled “The Angelus” is an illuminated text, upon which I am going to say a few words to you tonight.


There are three things in this picture—a potato field, a country lad and a country girl standing in the middle of it, and on the far horizon the spire of a village church. That is all there is to it—no great scenery and no picturesque people. In Roman Catholic countries at the evening hour the church bell rings out to remind the people to pray. Some go into the church, while those that are in the fields bow their heads for a few moments in silent prayer.

That picture contains the three great elements which go to make up a perfectly rounded Christian life. ... The Angelus may bring to us suggestions as to what constitutes a complete life.
The first element in a symmetrical life is WORK.

Three-fourths of our time is probably spent in work. Of course, the meaning of it is that our work should be just as religious as our worship, and unless we can work for the glory of God, three-fourths of life remains unsanctified.

The proof that work is religious is that most of Christ’s life was spent in work. During a large part of the first thirty years of His life He worked with the hammer and the plane, making ploughs and yokes and household furniture. Christ’s public ministry occupied only about two and a half years of His earthly life; the great bulk of His time was simply spent in doing common everyday tasks, and ever since then, work has had a new meaning.

When Christ came into the world He was revealed to three deputations who went to meet and worship Him. First came the shepherds, or working class; second, the wise men, or student class; and third, the two old people in the temple, Simeon and Anna; that is to say, Christ is revealed to men at their work, He is revealed to men at their books, and He is revealed to men at their worship. It was the old people who found Christ at their worship, and as we grow older we will spend more time exclusively in worship than we are able to do now. In the meantime we must combine our worship with our work, and we may expect to find Christ at our books and in our common task.
Another element in life, which of course is first in importance, is GOD.

The Angelus is perhaps the most religious picture painted this century. You cannot look at it and see that young man standing in the field with his hat off and the girl opposite him with her hands clasped and her head bowed on her breast, without feeling a sense of God.

Do we carry about with us the thought of God wherever we go? If not, we have missed the greatest part of life. Do we have a conviction of God’s abiding presence wherever we are? There is nothing more needed in this generation than a larger and more scriptural idea of God. A great American writer has told us that when he was a boy the conception of God which he got from books and sermons was that of a wise and very strict lawyer. I remember well the awful conception of God which I had when a boy. I was given an illustrated edition of Watts’ hymns, in which God was represented as a great piercing eye in the midst of a great black thundercloud. The idea which that picture gave to my young imagination was that of God as a great detective, playing the spy upon my actions, as the hymn says: “Writing now the story of what little children do.”

That was a very mistaken and harmful idea which it has taken me years to obliterate. We think of God as “up there,” or as one who made the world 6,000 years ago and then retired. We must learn that He is not confined either to time or space. God is not to be thought of as merely back there in time, or up there in space. If not, where is He? “The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth.” The Kingdom of God is within you, and God Himself is among men. When are we to exchange the terrible, faraway, absentee God of our childhood for the everywhere present God of the Bible?

Too many of the old Christian writers seem to have conceived of God as not much more than the greatest man—a kind of divine emperor. He is infinitely more; He is a spirit, as Jesus said to the woman at the well, and in Him we live and move and have our being. Let us think of God as Immanuel—God with us—an ever-present, omnipresent, eternal One. Long, long ago, God made matter, then He made the flowers and trees and animals, then He made man. Did He stop? Is God dead? If He lives and acts, what is He doing? He is making men better.

He it is that “worketh in you.” The buds of our nature are not all out yet; the sap to make them comes from the God who made us, from the indwelling Christ. Our bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost, and we must bear this in mind, because the sense of God is kept up, not by logic, but by experience.

Until she was seven years of age the life of Helen Keller, the Boston girl who was deaf and dumb and blind, was an absolute blank; nothing could go into that mind because the ears and eyes were closed to the outer world. Then by that great process which has been discovered, by which the blind see, and the deaf hear, and the mute speak, that girl’s soul became opened, and they began to put in little bits of knowledge, and bit by bit they began to educate her. They reserved her religious instruction for Phillips Brooks. After some years, when she was twelve years old, they took her to him and he began to talk to her through the young lady who could communicate with her by the exceedingly delicate process of touch. He began to tell her about God and what He had done, and how He loved men, and what He is to us. The child listened very intelligently, and finally said:

“Mr. Brooks, I knew all that before, but I didn’t know His name.”

How often we have felt something within us impelling us to do something which we would not have conceived of by ourselves, or enabling us to do something which we could not have done alone. “It is God which worketh in you.” This great simple fact explains many of the mysteries of life, and takes away the fear which we would otherwise have in meeting the difficulties which lie before us.
The third element in life about which I wish to speak is LOVE.

In this picture we notice the delicate sense of companionship, brought out by the young man and the young woman. It matters not whether they are brother and sister or lover and loved; there you have the idea of friendship, the final ingredient in our life, after the two I have named. If the man or the woman had been standing in that field alone, it would have been incomplete.

Love is the divine element in life, because “God is love.” “He that loveth is born of God,” therefore, as someone has said, let us “keep our friendships in repair.” Let us cultivate the spirit of friendship, and let the love of Christ develop it into a great love, not only for our friends, but for all humanity. Wherever you go and whatever you do, your work will be a failure unless you have this element in your life.



These three things go far toward forming a well-rounded life. Some of us may not have these ingredients in their right proportion, but if you are lacking in one or the other of them, then pray for it and work for it that your life may be rounded and complete as God intended it should be.

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