B 06 - A Great Work
A GREAT WORK
6. The ministry is a great work. It is great in its subject-matter or ideas which deal with God and man and sweep the whole field of being, so that as a system of thought, theology is a universal science and nothing in the universe is foreign or uninteresting to it. It is great in its motives as all the interests of time and eternity are behind it to give it responsibility and urgency. It is great in its plan and program, for it proposes a radical regeneration of the individual in heart and character and life and an equally radical re construction of society in its spirit and order, and then it sweeps its circle around the world that it may rebuild it into the Kingdom of God on earth.
Vocations differ greatly in this point of magnitude, and it should have large place and weight in choosing a calling in life. A great work tends to make us great, and a small work tends to make us small. The mind in sensibly expands or contracts to the size of the field it works in. This is the mischief of a minute division of labor that tethers a man to a small and insignificant mechanical task that repeats its endless round of drudgery and allows no play of mind in initiative and variety. Even to devote one’s life to mere money making, while it sharpens the acquisitive wits, may narrow the mind and wither the heart. The man that would give his whole time and thought to carving heads on cherry seeds would presently have a cherry-seed head. But a work of great importance and responsibility inspires us with a sense of its magnitude and calls out our ambition and power. When we are shut in, down in a narrow valley or in the confines of a walled inclosure, not only is our vision contracted, but our whole nature is cramped and tends to shrink; but when we climb a mountain it puts its giant shoulder under us and lifts us into the blue, where we have a vaster dome over us and a far-flung horizon around us and a splendid and inspiring vision. While we climb the mountain the mountain lifts us and imparts to us some of its majesty and mystery; and it is impossible to stand on the summit of a lofty mountain and not swell with a new sense of the mystic greatness and grandeur of the world and of life.
Many a person is leading a narrow, shriveled, morbid life, eating his own heart out, because he has no wide outlook and worthy objective to take him out of himself and cause him to lose his sour self-consciousness and be absorbed in a greater and nobler life. Let us get out of the low ideas and ideals of a self -centered and selfish life and climb some great mountain of vision and service. Such an elevation of thought and aim will lift us out of the ruts and holes of our life and especially out of our morbid grievances and our mental and physical aches and complaints, which are so largely subjective and will sim ply vanish if we forget them, and will catch us up into the inspiration of a great life. The ministry is the greatest calling in the world from the point of view of great ideas and ideals. It is true that a few exceptional men, by reason of their genius and great station, the supreme thinker and poet and artist, or the great statesman or general, wield a power exceeding that of any other class of men and cast the shadow of their fame far down the centuries. But so also may the preacher of great genius command wide power and acquire enduring fame. Yet among ordinary men the minister has a work that handles the greatest ideas of the human mind, that allies him with the best men and the greatest souls and with God himself in the greatest dream and enterprise of all the ages, the rebuilding of the whole world into the Kingdom of God. This work will lift a minister out of low interests and aims into a lofty life that will expand his vision and stir his energies and tend to make him great.