Living and Acting in the Third Domain

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. You might begin by reading it every day, especially the verses which describe the perfect character. “Love suffers long, and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself.” Get these ingredients into your life. Then everything that you do is eternal. It is worth doing. It is worth giving time to. No man can become a saint in his sleep. 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. Address yourselves to that one thing; at any cost have this transcendent character exchanged for yours.

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 around 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 the life that has gone, four or five short experience when the love of God reflected itself in some poor imitation, some small act of love of mine. Somehow 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 which no man knows about, or can ever know about - they never fail.

In the Book of Matthew, where the Judgment Day is depicted for us in the imagery of One seated upon a throne and dividing the sheep from the goats, the test of a man then is not, “How have I believed?” but “How have I loved?” The test of religion, the final test of religion is not religiousness, but love, I say the final test of religion at that great Day is not religiousness, but love; not what I have done, not what I have believed, not what I have achieved, but how I have discharged the common charities of life. Sins of commission in that awful indictments are not even referred to. By what we have not done, by sins of omission, we are judged. It could not be otherwise. For the withholding of love is the negation of the Spirit of Christ, the proof that we never knew Him, that for us He lived in vain. It means that He suggested nothing in all our thoughts that He inspired nothing in all our lives that we were not once near enough to Him to be seized with the fervency of His compassion for the world. It means that:

I lived for myself, I thought for myself,

For myself, and none beside -

Just as if Jesus had never lived,

As if He had never died.

It is the Son of Man before whom the nations of the world shall be gathered. It is in the presence of Humanity that we shall be charged. And the spectacle itself, the mere sight of it, will silently judge each one. Those will be there whom we have met and helped: or there, the unpitied multitude whom we neglected or despised. No other witness need be summoned. No other charge than lovelessness shall be preferred.

Be not deceived. The words which all of us shall one day hear, sound not of theology but of life, not of churches and saints but of the hungry and the poor, not of creeds and doctrines but of shelter and clothing, not of Bibles and prayer books but of cups of cold water in the name of Christ. 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 hairs’ 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 receives me.” And who are Christ’s? “Every one that love is born of God.”



The Lord works from the inside out. The
World works from the outside in. The world
would take people out of the slums. Christ
takes the slums out of people, and then they
take themselves out of the slums. The world
would mold men by changing their
environment. Christ changes men, who then
change their environment. The world would
shape human behavior, but Christ can change
human nature. -EZRA TAFT BENSON













BIBLIOGRAPHY


Covey, Stephen R., “Principle-Centered Leadership”,
(1991) Simon and Schuster

Covey, Stephen R., “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”,
(1989) Simon and Schuster

Lee, Blaine, “The Power Principle: Influence with Honor”,
(1997) Simon and Schuster

Drummond, Henry, “The Greatest Thing in the World”,
(1981) Whitaker House

The Holy Bible, New King James Version,
(1982) Thomas Nelson, Inc.