The True Estimate of Life and How to Live

In the history of the Christian church perhaps no man, upon whom the eyes of the world have been fixed, has so wondrously fulfilled in character and conduct the ideal of Christianity as did the Apostle Paul. Most of us will agree that he realized more fully than any man of his own time the purposes of God as revealed in Jesus Christ. His life and teaching have revealed the meaning and Christianity in a way accomplished by no other life or teaching. It is very interesting in his letter to the Philippians, one of his later epistles, to find him writing of himself, and yet of himself principally in the new life, which he had then been living for about three and thirty years. He writes with human tenderness, of human sensibilities, and human thoughts, while yet upon all there rests the light of the divine, and through all there is manifested the power that has taken possession of him.

In this epistle, written to his children in

II the faith at Philippi, it is very evident that he writes under the stress of circumstances. Not that circumstances are causing him one moment’s anxiety, but they are such as to compel him to face the alternative possibilities which lie just ahead of him. It is while in this condition that he writes this letter and condenses into one swift burning sentence an epitome of Christianity as he has realized it: ‘*To me to live is Christ.’’

To this man, all the marvelous unfoldings of the doctrine and scheme of redemption can be condensed and expressed in the simplest of words. He tells the whole story of his own experience of Christianity when he writes, ‘‘To me to live is Christ’’ (Phil. i. 21). To him Christianity is Christ.

“Christ! Iam Christ! and let the name suffice you, Ay, for me, too, He greatly hath sufficed;

Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning, Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ.’

This statement of the apostle’s view of Christianity gathers force when we remember the circumstances under which he wrote it. He was a prisoner in charge of the Pretorian guard. He was waiting, most probably, for the final word of the emperor, which should

12 decide in which of two ways his pathway should lie. If the emperor’s command be given, the apostle will tread the road through the door of his prison, through the city to the place of execution, and then, by one swift, sudden stroke, his life will end. He looks along that road and thinks of the possibility of traversing it. Then he looks in the other direction. Suppose that the emperor command that he be set at liberty. Then back to Philippi he will speed to see his children, and on to some new region to tell the same story and live the same life and win more trophies for Christ. He looks at these two roads stretching before him, and he says:

**To live — is Christ, and to die — is gain. I am in a strait betwixt two. I desire to depart, and yet for your sakes I would tarry a little longer.’

Life and death have lost their old significance to him, because there is one vision that fills the horizon whether he look this way or that. Here it is Christ, and there it is gain, and gain is Christ, and Christ is gain. There is no darkness but only light, for everywhere he sees the Master. That is Christianity.

The True Estimate of Life.

Now, beloved, I want to take that estimate of Christian life and meditate upon it for a little while. Do not expect me to exhaust it, for in this text lie all the possibilities and potentialities of the Christian life.

‘*To me to live is Christ.’ What did the apostle mean? There are seven things which he might have meant. By these words he intended to say that:

I. Christ was the author of his life. It was as though he had written, ‘‘To me to live at all is Christ.’’

2. Christ was the sustainer of his life. ‘*To me to continue to live is Christ.’’

3. Christ was the law of his life. ‘‘The conditions in which I live my life are summed up in Christ.’’

4. Christ was the product of his life. ‘*To me to live is to reproduce Christ.’’

5. Christ was the aim and influence of his life. ‘‘To me to live is to lead men to Christ.’’

6. Christ was the impulse of his life. “To me to live is to be swept along under the compassion of the Christ.’’

7. Christ was the finisher, the crown of his life. ‘‘To me to live is at last to be what

14 he is, and to find the crowning of all my manhood in him.’’

Christ the end, as Christ was the beginning. Christ the beginning, and therefore Christ the end. Whether this man looked back upon the past, at the present, or into the future, within or without, behind, above, or beyond to the consummation — wherever he turned his eyes, he saw Jesus only.

The first thought is that when Paul wrote these words, ‘‘To me to live is Christ,’’ he meant to say, ‘‘Christ is the author of my Mte.”?

This man did not count that he had any life except the life which was named ‘‘Christ.’’ He began to reckon his life only from the day when Christ was born within him through the power of the Holy Spirit. In the life of this man, there is one clean line, dividing it about at its center. Behind that line is the old life, the ‘‘old man,’’ to which he so often referred, while on the other side of the line is the new life, the ‘‘new man.’’ To Paul, the crossing of that line was something that went to the very depths of his being. It transformed him so that in looking back to the days when he became a new man in Christ, he said of the The True Estimate of Life.

old days, ‘‘Old things are passed away.’’ They had all vanished out of his sight. He took no account of anything that was behind him, and he said, ‘‘All things are become new,’’ and in the new things he lived. The years that he spent on the earth, prior to the moment when Jesus found him, he did not reckon as worth speaking of for a single moment.

Was Paul not mistaken? Had not very much of value been crowded into the years before his conversion? Stop him for a moment and ask him:

**Paul, what do you mean by this? You lived a very remarkable life before you met Jesus of Nazareth. You had been brought up at the feet of Gamaliel. You had all the advantages of learning and religion. You had never been a profligate. Your life had been straight and pure, clean through. You were a Pharisee of the Pharisees, a Hebrew of the Hebrews. In all outward seeming, and what is infinitely more, in all inward sincerity, you had been a remarkable man.’’

Keep reading