Me Thinks

I just read a book that was published in 1906 and I loved it.  It is called, "The Marks of a Man."  Robert E. Speer was a Presbyterian and he had a lot of good things to say about Christian character.  Oh, I could share pages but I will choose a couple of paragraphs:

In that day we shall ask Him, “When saw we Thee?”  “Saw Me?”  He will answer:   

“When you lied to that man in your class in college, you lied to Me.  When you struck that man on the athletic field, and the umpire was not looking, you struck Me.  When you cheated that widow and her children as you were practicing your profession, you were cheating Me.  In all the dishonesty and the dishonor and the meanness of your life you were affronting Me.  When saw you Me?  In absolutely every trial and testing of your life you faced Me.”  This life of ours, what is it except just the story of our attitude to Jesus Christ?  My bearing to every man is my bearing toward Christ.  Every hope and thought and act and practice of mine is a judgment for or against Jesus Christ.  In the secrecies of our life we are living against Him or for Him, and at the last we shall be judged in proportion as everything we did was a service of or an affront to the Christ whom we served or spurned in the silences of our lives.

We say that a thing is notable, but what do we mean by that?  We mean that a few millions of people now think it is notable.  What about that great crowd of witnesses around us who look down upon all that goes on here in this world of ours?  How vastly they out-number this little company here whose knowledge of the thing, we say, makes it great and notable!  Our Lord has told us that the day will come when the things whispered in the ear will be proclaimed from the housetop, and when the things spoken in the darkness will be blazed abroad in the light.  In that hour, the hidden heart that served Jesus Christ, whom it saw in the unadvertised opportunities that came to it, in the inconspicuousness and the oblivion that are essential to the highest moral power, will be shown to be the great and potent life.  Well will it be for us if in that day when we face Christ we can say:  “O Lord, I recognized Thee there; I saw Thee in those opportunities.  When saw I Thee?  All through my life I saw Thee.”