The new ten commandments, and other sermons

Front matter

The New Ten Commandments

By

Louis Albert Banks, D.D.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The New Ten Commandments . . 9 Rev. 21:5; Matt. 5 : 1

II.. Expect Great Things .... 24 Heb. 10 : 13

II

" Henceforth expecting till his enemies be made the footstool of his ieet."—Heb. 10: 13.

THAT virile and frankly Christian writer, Bruce Barton, not long ago had a most remarkable interview with the then head of the Roman Catholic Church in America, the late Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore, after he had passed his eighty-sixth milestone in the journey of life.

In beginning his conversation with Cardinal Gibbons, Mr. Barton remarked : " I notice that your secretary and your associates are all young men."

" That's part of the secret of warding of! old age," the Cardinal answered, with a smile the freshness of which belied his years. " When a man begins to look back, then he is old. I never look back. Lot's wife looked back, you remember, and was destroyed. Looking back is destruction always — the beginning of the end. After a person passes middle life he ought to surround himself with those who have a long time yet to look forward." He turned so that he faced a little into the sun. " Until you are forty, seek the companionship of men who are older," he continued. " After that, keep a vital contact with those who are younger. That is a pretty good rule. Until my recent sickness I used to walk every afternoon from five to six, and whom did I choose for companions? Students from the Seminary. They come from every part of the United States: one day a man from Massachusetts, another day one from Oklahoma, and so on. They tell me their hopes and their ambitions and their plans.

" And do you want to know what I say to them ? I say, ' Young man, expect great things ! Expect great things of God ; great things of your fellow men and of yourself. Expect great things of America. For great opportunities are ahead; greater than any that have come before. But only those who have the courage and the vision to expect them will profit when they come.' "

And at the close of that long and extraordinarily interesting conversation he closed the interview on the same key:

" I said at the beginning, ' Young man, expect great things.' And I say it again at the end. I have lived almost three times as long as the average age of your readers. I have watched men climb up to success, hundreds of them ; and of all the elements that are important for success, the most important is Faith. Those who throw up their hands in discouragement when the first snow falls, fail to profit when the sunshine of spring returns. And no great thing comes to any man unless he has courage, even in dark days, to expect great things ; to expect them of himself, of his fellow men, of America, and of God."

When I read this remarkable and exceeding profitable piece of advice from this venerable man out of his long experience, there came to me these similar

26 EXPEGT GREAT THINGS words written nearly two thousand years ago by a greater than Cardinal Gibbons, — the words of St. Paul, in describing the attitude of Jesus since he gave himself on the cross as the infinite sacrifice for the sins of the world. Paul says, writing of Jesus in the tenth chapter of his Epistle to the Hebrews : " But he, when he had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down on the right hand of God; henceforth expecting till his enemies be made the footstool of his feet."

This wonderful declaration appeals to our imagination very strongly. It gives us the picture of Jesus watching through all the ages the strife and turmoil and evolution of mankind, never for a moment losing the attitude of confident expectation that the love of God, which had its supreme revelation in the sufferings of the cross on Calvary, will finally come to everlasting triumph.

Others may lose hope for humanity, but Jesus never. Others may become discouraged, but Jesus is the eternal optimist. " Henceforth expecting." That is the Christian attitude for us all if we are to imitate our Lord himself. I wish to apply this so as to be an immediate blessing to each of us.

I

Expect great things of your own physical life. I speak of the physical first because it is the first essential and has so much to do with our success in every other phase of our career. A man's or a woman's body is as important as the nest is to the young bird. "As useless as a last-year's bird's nest " has gone into

EXPECT GEE AT THINGS 27 proverb, but nothing is more important to the young bird than this year's bird's nest, and your body is " this year's " life nest for you. No young man or young woman can afford to be careless or indifferent concerning the health and strength of the body. It is either one of your greatest assets or one of your heaviest liabilities. Without health and strength of body you will be increasingly handicapped and limited in your powers of achievement throughout your life. Every other gift or blessing of life will be discounted and detracted from if you surrender to go through life with a weak or sickly body. But what miracles can be wrought by improving your body and bringing it into a state of health and power if you will expect great things of it, and give yourself with earnest determination to realize your expectations.

Theodore Roosevelt, who was the beau ideal of the athletic world for so many years in America, was a very weak and sickly child. In her reminiscences of her brother, Mrs. Robinson tells how the first Theodore Roosevelt, father of the future President of the United States, turned one of the upstairs rooms in their New York City residence into a kind of outdoor gymnasium, with every imaginable swing and bar and seesaw, and when the second Theodore was eleven years old his father took him up into this gymnasium and said : " Theodore, you have the mind, but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one's body, but I know you will do it." The little boy looked up, and threw back his head in a characteristic fashion. Then, with a flash of those white teeth — which later in life became so well known that when he was police commissioner in New York City it was said that any recreant policeman would faint if he came suddenly face to face with a set of false teeth in a shop window — he said : " I'll make my body." And how splendidly he lived up to the expectations of his father, and his own, the story of his romantic and useful life tells.

II

We should expect much of our minds and the success of the work to which we give our energies for our share in the work of the world.

Your success in the development of your mental power will be largely dictated by your expectations. " According to thy faith be it unto thee," is just as scientific in our every-day life as any demonstrated truth of science. You will not do more than you expect. Orville Harrold, who is generally conceded to be the greatest American tenor, is a splendid illustration of the power of expecting great things in high endeavor. He was a farm boy on a poor farm where there was no money for education. He was twenty years old before he graduated from the High School, so hardly did he have to work his way through. But he had faith in himself and in the powers God had given him to produce musical sounds, and struggled on. When finally, very late in life for the triumph of a great singer, he had brought the musical world to his feet, when asked the secret of his success, he said very simply : " I won because I thought I could

EXPECT GKEAT THINGS 29 win." He expected great things and so achieved them.

There is a picture called " The Devil's Auction " in which, among many other articles, the devil, who is the auctioneer, holds in his hand a small wedge with a very sharp edge. This he is said to prize above all his other tools, because he has caused more failures with it than through any other device. The name of that efficient tool in the devil's shop is Discouragement. Discouragement is the most insidious enemy known to man. So long as a man keeps his courage and expects great things, he is never defeated; but the discouraged man is whipped before the battle begins.

Ill

We should expect great things of our friends and those we love. We should deem this of the greatest importance, because the very sweetest and most satisfying comfort that will come to us in all our human experiences will be the love and friendship we win from others, and the tenderness and affection we feel for them.

Have you heard the story of the " Ruby of Great Price?" We are told that Abdul Hamid had long been troubled in his mind as he wove baskets in the doorway of his humble hut. So he asked of the bamboo tree beside the path : " Why should I toil and slave to make my living? Perhaps I shall be the one to discover the Ruby of Great Price, and so I shall become the Great Mogul, as the gods ordained when they hid the great and beautiful stone. To-morrow I will start and search until I find it."

And so Abdul Hamid sold his little hut and searched all the rest of his life throughout all the lands of the East for the Ruby of Great Price. But his search was in vain, and at the last, an old and broken and defeated man, he came back to die among the scenes of his youth, his only hope to be buried beneath the great bamboo tree that grew beside the path near the little hut where he used to weave baskets. But imagine his astonishment on his return to find that where once his little hut stood there was now the marble palace of the Great Mogul, and to find that the poor peasant no richer than himself, to whom he had sold his hut, had, underneath the doorstep where for so many years he had sat to weave baskets, found the Ruby of Great Price.

Oh, my friends, it is not in searching the halls of political fame, or the palaces of great wealth, or the temples of science, but in your own home, at your own doorstep, the richest and sweetest and most wonderful prize of life is to be found. It is in the bosom of your mother or your father. It is in the heart of your wife or your husband. It is in the love of your child or the affection of your friend.

Did David in all the years of his life in the palace as the great king of his time ever find any Ruby of Great Price as dear and rich with blessing as the love of Jonathan, who risked his life for him?

Expect great things of those you love and those who love you, and they will rarely disappoint you.