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Text: —Acts 20: 35. “It is more blessed to give
than to receive.’’
E have just passed through what many
of us would consider to have been the
very best and most helpful Bible Con
ference that we have ever had in all the
past ten years of our conference gather
ings. It has reminded many of us of
the earlier days of our Conference when
the teachings that we have been having
were fresh and in many respects new
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to us, and when they came to us with such freshness
and such power. I personally received great bless
ing from the messages that we have heard and from
the general spirit that we have had manifested by
those who have attended from a distance and from
our own section.
During the whole of the ten days of blessed privi
lege I have been impressed with the fact that there
has been one striking Personality that seemed to
dominate and control everything else; this was not
a human personality, but a divine; there has been
a well-defined consciousness of the presence of Jesus.
It seems to me that I have never known our Lord
as consciously present at all the services as we have
known Him to be, by experience in our own hearts,
and in the hearts and experiences of others, actually
stamping His presence upon the countenances of
people. Sometimes as I sat on the platform, while
one after another was endeavoring to present his or
her phase of the truth, I have felt the presence of
Jesus so distinct, so marked, that it seemed that I
could almost touch Him.
In continuing the line of conference teaching, I
wish to bring you face to face with this same great
overmastering Personality.
JESUS’ BIOGRAPHY.
We shall be confined for our material to the four
gospels, all of them relating to this one subject. It
is marvelous that so great a personality of Jesus has
His life told in four small, thin volumes. When
Mosley (?) finished the life of Gladstone, though he
had done his dead level best to condense it, he could
not for the life of him help putting it into three
huge volumes. And when Carlyle wrote the life of
Frederick the Great, he found that it was impossible
for him to tell of that life without using up twenty
one huge volumes, and so when we come to think
of the lives as we have them today in biographies
of great men, how much it has taken to tell it; and
then bring them alongside of what is said of the life
of Jesus, and it is perfectly marvelous that we can
get so perfect a picture of this wonderful Person
ality, the most wonderful, from a human standpoint
even, that ever put His foot upon the earth, and
that we have that in four such small volumes. And
it is still more wonderful when you think of the
thirty-three years of the life of this man that only
three of these years are told about. The rest of His
life is merely hinted at; just a touch here and there
of the thirty years preceding. The biographers of
the life of Jesus confined what they had to say to
those three years of his public ministry, and it is
still more wonderful when you consider the fact
that out of the three years of His life about which
they wrote they told only of forty days. The four
gospels are made up of forty busy days in the life of
our Lord. They simply extracted from thirty-three
years of life on the earth forty days to write about,
and in those forty days Jesus did enough to set
forth His real character. When we come to look
through the gospels at the character of Jesus, we
will find that there is one thread that runs clear
through from beginning to end and around this
thread everything else hinges. It is like the thread
that runs through the stick so rock candy, holding
together all of its crystals. So is this thread that
runs through the life of Jesus. It is the thread of
generosity. You may keep that in mind, and you
will find that everything Jesus did clusters about
this thread of generosity. He was of all men the
most generous, and it was the generosity of Jesus
that characterized His entire life. Not a single thing
77ZE CHARACTER OT JESUS
Tabernacle Sermon by Reb. Len G. Hr ought on, *D. D.
Stenographic»lly reported for The Golden Age. —Copyright applied for
Tire Golden Age for April 8, 1909.
that we find that is recorded that Jesus ever did that
is not to be traced back to His generosity. That
is the one dominant note of the life of Jesus —the
note of generosity, and the text that we have se
lected this morning is merely the condensed state
ment of the philosophy of Jesus; and in addition to
it of His experience. He is not stating merely a
cold philosophy that “It is more blessed to give
than to receive”; He is stating also, though in a
very condensed form, His experience, for it was al
ways along the line of Jesus’ experience that He
taught and that He worked. And this experience
of Jesus with reference to the giving and the re
ceiving is given to us as an incentive, as a motive for
our lives, that our lives may be governed by it and
the fruit of our living may be as blessed as His.
Looking at it in this light one is impressed at the
outset with the fact that Jesus had so little to give;
think of the things that the average man of the
world of today has as compared with what Jesus
had.
To begin with, Jesus had no reputation to give.
All the reputation that He has now has been made
practically since He left the earth. He laid down
His reputation before He left His Father’s pres
ence in the glory; He took upon himself no reputa
tion. Jesus had no money to give. In reading the
life of Jesus one is impressed with the fact that he
never was found with money on His person. He
was absolutely dependent, from a human standpoint,
upon the gifts of others; everywhere He went He
was entertained at the home of His friends. He
never seemed to carry with Him anything with which
to purchase the ordinary necessities or comforts of
life. He had no money, and so He is not expected
to give money, for He did not have it.
JESUS GAVE HIS FRIENDS.
But Jesus did have something that he gave, and
for the giving or these things He gets the reward.
What are some of the things that Jesus had to give?
To start -with, Jesus had friends; not a great many,
but He had some friends, and these friends He
freely gave. He sent them out from His presence,
two by two, to bless others. And there is a lesson
in that for us. Do you know that some of us are so
selfish with our friends that we are not willing to
give our friends to the blessing of others? We want
them for ourselves. We want to enjoy their friend
ship, and presence, their companionship, their fel
lowship. And Ido not think that the number of us
who are selfish in this way is small either. I think it
is a phase of selfishness that we have rarely given
attention to. The world is wanting friends, your
friends, my friends; and your business and my
business, if we have the spirit of the Master, is to be
so self-forgetful that we are willing to give our
friends that 'have blessed us to somebody else that
He may bless them. Jesus gave His friends.
Jesus had time, and He gave that. Every day of
Jesus’ life was packed full of some kind of service
and it was a service in the end for the blessing of
other people. If Jesus rested, His resting was that
He might be of more service, when He was rested, to
a needy world. If Jesus enjoyed pleasure for a
season it was that through this pleasure He might be
the better equipped, that He might the better serve
the great world in need. Never mind what Jesus
had, He used it for the purpose of intensifying His
time, making His time count for the most.
Jesus had thought, He had brain, and He gave
them. Oh, how often do we find Jesus stopping in
His busy life to teach people, to tell them of the
better way, using the mind and the brain that He
had that He might thereby uplift and bless a needy
world; and remember that there is ever before Him
one great problem, and that is, the world’s uplift.
Jesus said far more in His ministry about bettering
this world, making men and women better here, than
He did about the other world. The one great burn
ing passion of the life of Jesus and His ministry was
to make the world better, for in the making of the
world better Jesus knew that He was making men
and women fit for citizenship in the world to come.
Jesus had strength. We make a great mistake
if we think that Jesus was a sickly, dyspeptic kind
of character. I saw a picture of Jesus drawn by a
famous artist, but drawn from a false conception of
Jesus; representing Him as a pale, sickly, dyspeptic
looking man. I can not conceive of Jesus as any
thing but a strong, vigorous, healthy man, with as
near as possible a perfect physical body. We never
hear of Jesus complaining of pain, and yet we see
in Jesus every other expression of humanity. He
was just as much a man as He was God, and when
we come to look at Jesus in His life we must look at
Him as a man as well as God. Jesus had a perfect
physical body as far as it was possible for a man to
have a perfect body, and Jesus gave this perfect
physical body, with all of its strength and vigor, to a
world in need.
HIS SYMPATHY.
Jesus had sympathy. Very few men that we have
ever heard of have the touches of sympathy that
Jesus had. You find it showing itself here and
there all through His ministry—His great loving
heart of sympathy, and He was always ready to be
stow it. Look at Him coming from the Mount of
Transfiguration, a kind of Bible Conference occa
sion, where He had been privileged to toil upon the
very mountain tops of Glory. Look at Him. Imme
diately after that experience on the Mountain of
Transfiguration Jesus goes to the valley where there
is suffering and sorrow and begins to manifest His
great heart of sympathy. Jesus had love, and He
freely gave it. It was through the exercise of love,
this wonderful grace, this one grace that the world
wants today more than anything else perhaps, that
Jesus came to this earth.
But more than that —Jesus had Himself and He
could do with Himself as He pleased and yet Jesus
out of His consideration for the great world in sin
and in suffering and sorrow, gave Himself —’His life.
•Somebody says, “What is the practical applica
tion of all this? Jesus w-as God and knew that when
He gave like this, that He could get it back because
He could make and unmake worlds, and if He could
make and unmake worlds He could make and un
make anything else, and therefore it was nothing for
Jesus to give His friends, His time, His thought, His
sympathy, His love, Himself, for He could make
more friends, time was nothing to Him as God, He
could generate thought as fast as He desired to, and
so with His sympathy, His love and His life.” I
want that we shall for the rest of this time think
of Jesus as distinctly a man, for I am viewing Him
now as such. Igo with you just as far as you can
possibly go in my acceptance of Jesus as God, God
of very God, but this morning I am asking you to
consider Jesus simply as a man, for it is as a man
we are to look at Him, and it is as a man that
Jesus lived in the exercise of the fullness of this
text. It was as a man, I believe, that Jesus was
transfigured on the Mount of Glory. I believe that
that transfiguration on that mountain scene of glory
was God withdrawing the curtain from man to show
to the world what man might have been had it not
been for sin. As a man Jesus gave His friends, His
time, His thought power, His strength, His sym
pathy, His love, Himself, and if you are to be
actuated by the Spirit of Jesus, if you are ever to
experience in its fullness the fruit of this text, if
the philosophy of giving is ever to be realized by us,
we ourselves have got to do exactly what Jesus did.
We have got to give our friends, our time —oh, how
the world today needs our time; my brethren, you
do not begin to understand, you can not understand,
none of us can, but you who are burdened with the
world’s affairs, you can begin to understand how the
world, this poor, sin-cursed and suffering world,
needs your time. You are so occupied that you can
not give it. You are so occupied, perhaps, with
business that you can not give it; then if you are,
let me say to you one thing: see to it, beyond every
thing else, that in that business preoccupation of
yours there is the one consuming purpose that
