MORAL

LEADERSHIP

AND THE MINISTRY

CHAPTER I

RELIGION AND LEADERSHIP

R

ELIGION is the making connection with higher powers, a participation

in the life of God. Its fruit is a vastly superior life. Even paganism is an effort to bring to men the help of the gods. There are other and higher powers; there are the framework and the disposition and the energy and the ongoing and the law of the universe. The great fact is God. Fellowship with Him is life: i.e., peace, power, service, effectiveness, authority. The prophets of Israel illustrate it; Christ incarnates it. All religion is a quest for fuller life. It is a making connection with the soul of the

universe, a yielding to a great celestial gravitation, an entering into the life of God. It is the best way that has ever been made known, and the greatest support ever found, for the living of a life. Religion involves the fully personal, the extraordinary, the superhuman. There is a mightier Will, there are higher thoughts and ways, and to go forth in the power of them is to share the life. Our fellowship is with the Father; our heritage is to partake of the divine nature. Religion is the most practical and the realest thing in the world. All good things and blessed boons are included in the abundant life it fosters. The religious man has equipment for leadership; he shares the superhuman, he lays hold of the divine, he incarnates God.1

1 "Leadership, mastery of one's self and of the world, mark the character derived from the influence of Jesus Christ." -PEABODY, Jesus Christ and the Christian Character, p. 150.

"How to take command of circumstances instead of being their slave; how to own one's wealth and not be owned by it; how to rule one's spirit as well as to take a city; how to be among the leaders and not among the led; how to

The first and great fact of the universe is God. The Gospel is the Gospel of, i.e., concerning, God. The Bible is eminently the story about God. It begins with His creation of a world-it ends with a vision of His triumph. It is the story of what God did, of what God said, of how God loved: how He rewarded and chastened and strove and led and over-ruled and triumphed. Its subject is God's will, God's providence, God's faithfulness. It tells of His dealings with Israel: how He made them a people; how He raised up for them leaders; how He gave them victory over their enemies; how He overthrew them for their idolatry; how He scattered them among the nations. Its great psalm sings that the Lord is a labor together with God instead of being a cog in some great machine; how to maintain peace of mind amid the disasters, illusions, and tragedies of experience - this is the cry for power which goes up from many a life, ensnared

is not?

as whose

- in the mechanism and materialism of the world." "To this cry for moral power . . . there comes the answer of Jesus Christ.”—Idem, p. 152.

shepherd. Christ's Gospel is the fact of fatherhood. According to the insight of an ancient seer God is so much the one factor to be accounted of, that compared with man He shapes him as a potter shapes clay. In this sense, concerning the price of man's redemption, a hymn of the Gospel sings, "Jesus paid it all."

This fact of God, consistently insisted upon in it, gives the Bible its surpassing and wonderful charm, and makes it an unrivaled book. It makes the grand dignity and the cheerful hopefulness of the Gospel. It gives life its awful solemnity, grounds its needed consolation and its glorious liberty; creates man's responsibility. The Gospel's saving grace is faith in God. Eternal life is the gift of God. Take God out of the Bible and it becomes as any other book; lose the fact of God and there is no gospel. The subject of the Bible is not man; the heart of the Gospel is not man.

The significant and hopeful fact of life is God. His imperial will and His perfect love undergird as law all the relations and needs of man.

The Gospel is this God is for us: man is partaker of the glory of God. Religion is an assessment of those things in the universe that enrich and ennoble personality. Its essential principle is moral power.

This Over-will is the greatest fact of the universe and the ground of every religion. Our God is our glory. The sun shines, the wind blows, the rain falls, the seasons come round, this and that come to pass-man does not have everything resting upon his shoulders. Indeed, what man does is very little compared with what is done for him. There is a power not his own. The wind carries the ship onward; the voyager but directs the course. Man is blocked and hindered; he is overturned and overturned. He cannot escape death, he cannot explain