| The Glory of the Common Life |
Chapter 4 |
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But is Christ the friend of his followers in these days? Is it possible for the Christian to establish a personal friendship with Jesus Christ like that which John and Peter had with him? Yes; he died, then rose again and ever lives, walking with us on the earth, our companion, our friend. There is no other one who can be to us the one thousandth part in closeness, in intimacy, that Christ can be. He is the realest friend any of us can have.
Think what Jesus was as a friend to the poor people to whose doors he came in the days of his flesh. Perhaps he did not seem to do much for them. He did not build them any larger or better houses, no give them richer food, nor make softer beds for them to sleep on, nor weave for them finer, warmer garments to wear. He was not what men call a philanthropist. He endowed no institutions of charity. A recent writer says, “The Son of Man was dowered at birth above the rest with the impulse and the power to love and to minister … His compassion for the multitude because they were distressed and scattered as sheep no having a shepherd, his charity for the outcast, the oppressed and the weary, his affection for the innocence of childhood, are among the tenderest and sweetest chapters in the history of our race, and seem to have mad the profoundest impression both upon those whose exceeding fortune it was to see his human countenance, and upon the ages that came after.”
The friendship of Jesus to the common people was not shown in what he did in material ways, nor in what he took away of the common burdens, the hardness, the wrongs they suffered, but in his sympathy for them, in the cheer and courage he put into their hearts, in the peace within which he imparted, which made them better able to go on in their lives of toil and struggle. So it is that today the friendship of Christ is at work among people, making them brave to bear their burdens. Nothing does so much to help those who suffer as to know that somebody cares. The most that even Christian teaching can do ofttimes is to assure the struggling world that Christ feels and sympathizes.
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