Mark 5:18-20 And when he was come into the ship, he that had been possessed with the devil prayed him that he might be with him.… This issue comes home to all souls alike. It is the solvent of the difficulties which we feel in diversities of talent. One Christian man says, "How can I be expected to do much good? I am not eloquent, I am not an apostle, I am not Apollos, I am not a Paul." Another man says, "I should be very glad if I were a man of affairs; I should like to live a Christian life in the conduct of affairs; but I have no ability." Now, the gospel force belongs to every man alike. If you are low in life, you are susceptible of living like Christ. If you are very high in life, you are susceptible of living a Christ-like life. If you are wise and educated, that is the life for you. If you are ignorant, that is just as much the life for you. It does not lie in those gifts that the world prizes, and justly prizes, too. It is something deeper than that, far more interior than that; and it is clothed by the creative idea of God with an influence over men's souls greater than any other. Wherever you are; whether you are poor, obscure, mean, even sick and bedridden, or in places of conspicuity, the highest, the lowest, and the middle, all come to a gracious unity. Not only that, but they all feel resting upon them the sweet obligations of the duty of loving Christ, of being like Christ, of loving our fellow men. When we shall become communal, whenever the coronal faculties of the human soul are in ascendency and in sympathetic unity, the world will not linger another eighteen hundred years before it will be illumined. The new heavens will come, and the new earth. (H. W. Beecher.) Parallel Verses KJV: And when he was come into the ship, he that had been possessed with the devil prayed him that he might be with him. |
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