Wanted, a Verdict!

And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choos&^you this day whom ye will serve: whether the gods which your fathers served that were on this side of the flood or the gods of the Ammonites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” — Jos. xxiv. 15.

I am not just now concerned with the details of the particular incidents in which this challenge was born. The words are independent of local environment; they have a permanent value. In this respect they are like many of the Psalms; they belong to no clime or time, and they exercise an unchanging ministry through all the changing years. But the historical setting is briefly this: An old crusader has come to the end of his days, and in the assembly of his people he gives them his last counsel, the matured warning and experience of his years. He reviews their wonderful history, the long succession of providential mercies, shining like an unbroken line of light far back to the days of their Egyptian bondage. He rehearses the Lord’s dealings with His people, and he also rehearses the people’s dealings with the Lord. He recalls their murmurings, their reluctant service, their dubious homage, their uncertain attachment, their frequent revolts. He declares that they have spent their days in light and flippant flirtations, and that they have never settled down into steady affection, and into serious wedlock with the Lord. And so this is the urgent counsel of the dying warrior to his people: Let these flirtations be ended! In one way or another make up your minds! Don’t go any further with this dubious limping gait! Settle down to something positive and decisive! Choose you this day whom ye will serve.” It is the critical position to which the prophet Elijah also brought the people. “How long halt ye between two opinions? ‘’ How long will ye spend your life in inconclusive flirtations? Settle the matter. Make up your minds. “If the Lord be God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word,” and the timid flirtations went on. And so it is to-day. In spiritual relationships men flirt, but they do not wed; they pay courteous attention, but they do not choose. They give a respectful hearing, but they do not risk an issue. Everything is open, nothing concludes. And so I am bringing this old-world counsel into our modern conditions, as counsel which I think is pertinent to much of our inconsequent and inconclusive life. Put an end to mental hesitancy and moral timidity! Stop the flirtations and wed! “Choose you this day whom ye will serve.”

Now let us look a little more in detail at the counsel, and see what it implies. First of all, it surely means that our thinking should lead to moral conclusions. There is such a lot of thinking on moral and spiritual themes which is never tied together in a final knot. It is loose, unfinished, and ineffective. There are so many of our mental webs which never become garments. The looms of the brain are in almost perpetual motion; we spin, and spin, and spin, but nothing comes of it. And therefore it is that John Euskin has said that ‘’ one of the worst diseases to which the human mind is liable is its disease of thinking.” ow it is quite unnecessary to say that Euskin is no advocate of mental passivity or mental indolence. He spent his days in the endeavour to awake our people to mental vigilance, and to quicken their perceptions in body, mind, and soul. It is not, therefore, a remonstrance against mental activity, but against a mental activity which makes no practical advance. It is a remonstrance against the motion of the hobby-horse, motion without progress, and not against the motion of a mental gteed whose movements are directed by bit and bridal to definite and serviceable ends. Diseased thinking is goal-less thinking, thinking which never arrives, thinking which never concludes; and, according to Euskin, it is one of the worst diseases” which affect the human mind.

Now, all thinking about these high, imperial matters should culminate in moral crises, and toward those crises they should inevitably tend. At certain intervals in our life our minds should be constituted a court of law, as in the closing hours of some momentous and entrancing case. The witnesses have been heard. The evidence is finished. Counsel has spoken. The judge has sifted the entanglements, and presented the issue in a clear and continuous story. And now for the verdict, and for the judgment, and for execution, and the case is ended. And that, I say, is what we want in the realm of the mind. Now and again the bustling quests of the mind must be hushed and concentrated on a solemn court of judgment. The evidence must be regarded as closed. Mental exploration must change to moral verdict, and the judgment must be executed. Yes, that is what we want, and that is what we lack in much of our mental movements — we lack moral verdicts. Our thinking trails on, and on, and on, for the mere delight of the intellectual process, and the verdict is indefinitely delayed. And so life is spent in a sort of royal commission which never reports, and in the flippant delay the moral slumber of the soul is deepened and intensified.

Now there are some matters on which we are no longer entitled to keep an open mind. We ought to wipe out the note of interrogation and insert a period. The verdict ought to be given, and the case closed. The beauty of holiness, the obligation of truthfulness, the duty of charity, the dignity of chivalry, the mighty ministry of sacrifice — these are typical of matters which ought no longer to lie upon the table as open questions, but upon which we ought to issue final judgment, and close the doors of our minds.

But above and beyond all these questions of virtue there is the supreme issue of the moral and spiritual supremacy of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. We may keep an open mind on the nature of the miracles, on the true interpretation of the atonement, on the function and limitations of the ministry of prayer, and on a thousand and one theological questions which for centuries have provided diversions for the schools; but on the question of the moral sovereignty and spiritual pre-eminence of the Christ; on the question as to who has the right to the homage and service of our wills, the case ought to be closed, and our minds ought to register a definite and final decision.

I venture to say there is not a man or woman who reads these words who requires further evidence about the rightful leadership of Jesus Christ; and yet the case drifts on and on, and no weighty and revolutionising verdict is pronounced. And we cannot afford to surrender our lives to purposes of mere enquiry. We are in this world, not merely as enquirers, but as crusaders; not only to think, but to do. Take my own life. At the most, there is probably only a stretch of thirty years awaiting me. What shall I do with the years? Shall I go on and on, making timid and doubtful enquiries? Shall I go on, lightly toying with evidence that I have been touching for years; or shall I pull myself together, and risk a strong conclusion? In my life, at any rate, it were high time the court were constituted for judgment, high time that I pronounce verdict upon the Lord, solemnly, definitely, and decisively; and on this most supreme of all supremacies finally close the case.

But would not that be narrowness of mind? But why should it be regarded as narrowness of mind to have a closed mind about settled issues? There is a mental disposition rampant to-day which describes itself as “breadth of mind,’’ and which is a very spurious thing. We seem to be approaching a time when the only people who will be entitled to be called broad will be people who have settled convictions about nothing! The only people who will be regarded as mentally free will be mental vagrants, who have no fixed and settled abodes! I say the breadth is spurious, and the freedom is counterfeit. Believe me, there is a very real and profound distinction between mental licentiousness and mental liberty. Mental licentiousness is laxative; mental liberty is tonic. All true liberty has a certain fixity, and from that fixity it draws its sap and virtue. Men who have no mental holdfasts may boast about their freedom, but their freedom is unreal and is neither fruitful nor efiicient. It is the truth which makes us free. It is the man with a settled home who can walk abroad with serene and receptive freedom. And therefore I come back to the old counsel. Think up to an issue. Think up to a conclusion. Think up to moral settledness and fixity. “What think ye of Christ?” Register a verdict,

WANTED, A VERDICT! Ul

choose your leader, ‘^ Choose you this day whom ye will serve. ‘^

Let me take you a step further. We are counselled not only to think to an issue, but to register our mental verdicts in definite moral and spiritual decisions. If in your mind the Lord Jesus Christ is judged to be the supreme Leader and Saviour of men, then pronounce the judgment from the throne of your life, and solemnly resolve to give the Christ the practical homage and fealty of your will. For it is not only ‘’ thinking ‘’ that is prone to meander in tedious and wasteful futility, but “willing ‘^ also is apt to loiter in wasteful indecision. A man may determine upon a verdict, and may solemnly pronounce the verdict, and yet he may postpone the execution of it. A man may honestly say “Lord! Lord! ‘’ and do not the thing which the Lord says. And that is why the Bible calls upon men to put their solemn verdicts into immediate execution. ‘’ Choose you this day whom ye will serve.’’” To-day, if ye will hear His voice, harden not your hearts I “‘’ Behold, now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation!” And yet we postpone, we dilly-dally, we devise excuses, and, as in the procrastination of Hamlet, ‘’ the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” The court has given judgment, but execution is stayed. That is surely the condition of multitudes in this land. They have closed the case. They have given their verdict. And yet their life is still frittered away in puerilities, or in uncertain or undignified enterprise. And all for want of deliberate choice, and swift and summary action! They let I dare not “wait upon ‘^ I would,” and life speeds on to the night! The more I live, the more I study life, the more I see its aimless, goal-less driftings, the more I counsel a definite deliberateness in the determination of a Christian life. Yes, I would even go so far as to say that I would have men break up their indecision by a deliberate action which is striking and dramatic. I do not mean a stagey spectacle, with an applauding audience looking on, but a dramatic moment in secret, when a man smashes up his moral hesitancies and indecision, and, laying a firm hand upon the neglected helm of his boat, shall say, ‘’ Now! henceforth for me to live is Christ! ‘*” Choose you this day whom ye will serve ... As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.’’

But let me give a note of warning. Let every man be careful to distinguish between resolutions and resolution. We may make our resolutions, but want of resolution will make them ineffective. There is an old saying that the way to hell is paved with good resolutions. I suppose it is true, but they are good resolutions in which there has been no resolution. We may make our resolutions, but we need a mystic force of resolution if they are to be efficient. And men are so prone to confound the one with the other, and their moral enterprises collapse in pathetic disaster. For let us ever remember, that

WANTED, A VERDICT! MS

even when the verdict has been given, and our resolutions have been made, the bias of our beings may be against our moral choice. Yes, that is the controversy which characterises thousands of lives when they first pull themselves together for moral decision. The combatants are resolutions versus inclinations, and in such warfare mere resolutions are apt to prove very frail. And so again I say, when we have made our resolutions we need spiritual resolution to make them powerful. “It is not by might, not by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord.’’ You may put your firm hand upon the rudder of your sailing boat; but you are not going far without the wind. ‘’ Breathe on me, breath of God! ‘’” Ye shall receive power when the Holy Ghost is come upon you.’’ ‘’ And He breathed upon them,” and the flapping sails tightened to receive it, and the boat moved out of harbour in its God-appointed way! ‘’ And He breathed upon them,” and the frail resolution pulsed and tingled with resolution, and the timid recruit became a valorous knight, fit to take his place on the sternest part of the field!

“Breathe on me, Breath of God:
Fin me with life anew,
That I may love what Thou dost lore.
And do what Thou would’st do.

Breathe on me, Breath of God,
Till I am wholly Thine,
Until this earthly part of me
Glows with Thy fire divine.”