Sunday, April 22, 2007
Sermons and Lessons
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Camden M. Cobern, professor of English Bible, and philosophy of religion, Allegheny College, Meadville, Pa., 1906 -1915; born in Uniontown, Pa., April 19, 1855; received A.B., A.M. and D.D. from Allegheny College; S.T.B. and Ph.D. from Boston University; and Litt.D. from Lawrence University; was the pastor of important churches such as Ann Arbor, Mich., Trinity church, Denver, and St. James, Chicago; gave courses of Bible lectures in different cities; known on both continents as the man who discovered the “bricks without straw” which the Israelites made in Egyptian bondage; was with the world‘s most famous excavator, Dr. W. M. Flinders Petrie, visiting him while he was digging up the archeological remains of several cities in Egypt and Palestine; author of a large work on Egypt, a critical commentary on Daniel, etc.
“The place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” - Exod. 3:5.
A poor man, an old man, a lonely man is tending his sheep on Mount Horeb. He is a failure. He had a chance once. Once he lived in the city and was thought well of at court; but because of certain ideals of his he threw up all this - and has missed a career. He was a big man in a big place once; but that was long ago. He is a nobody now. He has been a nobody for forty years. He has grown slow of tongue. He has lost his courtly bearing, and in appearance as in speech has become a rustic. If he had only been a little less impulsive, a little less patriotic or conscientious, he might have made quite a success in life. Poor old man - a little man in a little place! But God still remembers him. Others forget him, but what a blest thing it is that God even remembers the little man in the little place.
But are we absolutely sure, after all, that Moses is a smaller man than he was forty years ago? No. He has been hidden and forgotten, but he is still the big man - so big that he can take the biggest task ever given by the Almighty to a mortal man for two thousand years. He is a greater man than he was forty years ago. He was not great enough then for this great task of nation-building. The desert has been his teacher. The God of the sky and of the heart has been teaching him self-poise and self-mastery. He has had time and chance to get away from the little things of the city and the court and think of the big things of life; to think and grow. Do not pity Moses because he lost half a lifetime in the country. That made him. That was part of God’s plan for him and the world. God’s man need not be in a hurry to get into a big place. If he is God’s man, God will lead him and give him a task big enough for his fullest powers.
What did Moses learn in the desert? He learned its resources, its hidden springs, its oases. He learned the ways of the desert folk and made blood-brotherhood with them. It was God’s plan to thus prepare allies for the mightiest deliverance of a slave people known to history.
One day the new call came to the new stupendous task for which the old little task had prepared him. A bush began to burn as he passed by, and continued to burn, and was not consumed. “And Moses said, I will turn aside now and see this great sight why the bush is not burnt. And when Jehovah saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him.” That was the test. It is so today. We talk of the deadline. That is the test as to whether a man has reached it. When a man has lost inquisitiveness for new truth, when he has lost interest in the new things of the new present, when he has become too old to “turn aside to see,” then he has reached the deadline. Then even God Almighty cap not use him as a leader. But when he finds God in the novelties of daily life, then the place where he stands may become holy ground.
What makes a particular spot “holy ground”? Is it holy because God is there? No. God is everywhere. Why is this particular spot holy? Because God and man are here together, and the man recognizes God‘s presence and finds his world task.
It is a holy moment and a holy place when God and I are linked together eternally and I make the soul-thrilling discovery that He needs me to help Him save the world. That is a place better than heaven, where a man hears the voice of the Eternal saying, “I need you,” and joins partnership with the omnipotent God - omnipotent and yet not able, as the human heart is now constructed, to “make a best man without man‘s best to help Him.” To be called to such work is better than to be called to go to Paradise in a chariot of fire. There is a good deal of sham in much of our talk about wanting to go to heaven. I believe in heaven; but I don’t want to go yet. Earth is better for me now. If there were twenty airships anchored in front of this church at this very minute, each bound for the New Jerusalem, all of them manned by angels in white robes and carrying a written guarantee from the King of Heaven that they would make the journey safely, I would not apply for passage. I can not conceive of anything in heaven equal to the task given me here and now of helping the Christ to conquer this earth. Why did God, when Cornelius prayed, send to Joppa for Peter, calling upon him to make that long trip to Caesarea and tell that heathen how to be saved? Why did not God send His angel? Because no angel could tell that story. Only the man who has fought the beast in himself and got the victory through Christ’s help can tell the power of Jesus’ blood. No archangel could do that. Why did not God Himself whisper to Cornelius the way of life? Was it that He was unwilling to take away that possible star out of Peter’s crown, or is the human agency in salvation a necessity which even the great God acknowledges? In any case, how glad Peter must have been that he did not get to heaven too soon! He wanted to go once on the Mount of Transfiguration - or at least to turn that mountain into Paradise and stay there - but how glad he ought to have been that he was still on the earth and able to help this One, greater than Moses, in the one and only task greater than the deliverance of an enslaved nation - the deliverance of an enslaved world.
It is better than heaven to feel that God is using me as He could not use an angel and as He could not use me in heaven.
That there is a mystery about the Omnipotent using and needing human help to save and uplift the world we must admit. But we must also admit the fact. The battle-hymn of the old church army was “The sword of the Lord and of Gideon.” That was big honor for Gideon. It is doubtful if that battle would have been won without Gideon. So in the New Testament: would Jesus have worked the miracle of feeding the five thousand if there had been no boy there willing to do his part? Did not the boy help Jesus work the miracle? So we help Him work His miracles of healing now. Does He not say distinctly that we have a part which if we fail to do will affect His power to save? He could do no mighty works in one place because of their unbelief in the olden time. He is crippled in His saving work now in the same way. Yes, and by our inactivity. “We are members of his body,” wrote the apostle and some eighteen hundred years ago or more an ancient reader added, and wisely, “Of his flesh and of his bones” (Eph. 5:30). That is, we are as necessary to Him in this one particular work as hands and feet are necessary to us in doing our work. “Ye are the body of Christ and severally members thereof.” The body is not one member, but many; and each member is needed. “God hath set the members each one of them in the body even as it pleased him” (1 Cor. 12). Too often when the Christ would do some mighty works to¬day the body is paralyzed through which He seeks to act. Ye are His very flesh and bones! This is His second incarnation in human flesh. What honor is this that I may be His hand to help Him lift up the fallen. Can any better task come to us in any other world? Perhaps a greater task may come, but not this task— and to neglect this is to fail to do a work which is more important now than any joy which heaven could give us.
But not only the spots devoted to what we call religious work are sacred. The whole man is sacred, and the whole work of God’s man is sacred work. It is not one day in seven and one place in Palestine and one man in a nation, but all God‘s men are priests, and the temple is in the man‘s own heart and the sacred work is all the work of the daily human Christian toil. As in the making of the tabernacle, God inspired men to spin and work in wood and brass; so now the work on the farm or in the store or in the home may be as sacred toil, and as truly religious as the words spoken in the pulpit or the testimony given in the prayer-meeting. The steps of a good man are ordered of the Lord; not simply his steps when he travels to the house of God, but when he goes to his business office and about his every-day duties. Man’s religious life extends through seven days of the week and twenty-four hours of each day. He does not lose his religion, eyen when he is asleep. To sleep when it is time to sleep, and to laugh when it is time to laugh, and to work when it is time to work, is just as religious as to say one ‘s prayers. It is just as Christian a duty to saw wood or deliver mail or build a house, or put in the plumbing so it will stay, or keep the accounts so that no recording angel can find fault with them, as it is to go to the communion table. God wants religious men as world-workers. Not to provide for the things of one’s own household is to be worse than an infidel. To fail to provide the necessary things for the wife and children of one’s household in order to get to the prayer-meeting is a sin. To be diligent in business is as much a duty as to trust in God. To take care of the house and the children is a higher duty than to go to the missionary rally. If one or the other must be given up, it should be the latter. The religious value of good cooking has never yet been sufficiently discussed. Our distinctions between secular and religious activities are artificial and unbiblical. It is religious to do one’s daily task as “unto the Lord.” As Hiram Golf said, there is such a thing as being a shoemaker “by the grace of God.” Good shoes are just as necessary as good sermons. The cobbler who fails to mend the shoe religiously, and so allows William Bunkles’ youngest to catch cold and die, will find at the judgment day what it means to be false to one’s daily religious task. A defective cap used in a drill-hole yesterday exploded prematurely and blew twenty-eight men into eternity. What shall be said of the man who made that defective cap? Carelessness in stitching a saddle-girth, it has been said, caused a general to fall from his horse at a critical moment and a great battle to be lost. The man who made that saddle-girth, stopping to take a glass of beer and thus carelessly losing a stitch, or the army contractor who furnished poor thread instead of the best, did not do their daily tasks religiously - and in the judgment day, if the universe is gov¬erned justly, they must suffer penalty. It is a great thing when a man realizes that “the place where thou standest is holy ground.” God is here! The task I do is under His eye and according to His will, and this seemingly small task is to take its place in the large scheme for bringing in the heavenly kingdom upon the earth.
There are no “little” unimportant things in an immortal life, which is a part of a divine plan for the coming future. All human life is sacred when the man who lives the life is God’s man. It is better than heaven to help God make the “new heaven and the new earth” which is to come.
It is better to be on the wicked earth helping to make it better with God looking on approvingly, than to be singing hallelujahs with holy angels. If God wanted us in heaven He could easily provide transportation. Where He wants us to be is better for us than paradise. If we are where God wants us to be, then the place where we stand is holy ground.
Related Tags: sermon, lesson, Camden M. Cobern
Camden M. Cobern, professor of English Bible, and philosophy of religion, Allegheny College, Meadville, Pa., 1906 -1915; born in Uniontown, Pa., April 19, 1855; received A.B., A.M. and D.D. from Allegheny College; S.T.B. and Ph.D. from Boston University; and Litt.D. from Lawrence University; was the pastor of important churches such as Ann Arbor, Mich., Trinity church, Denver, and St. James, Chicago; gave courses of Bible lectures in different cities; known on both continents as the man who discovered the “bricks without straw” which the Israelites made in Egyptian bondage; was with the world‘s most famous excavator, Dr. W. M. Flinders Petrie, visiting him while he was digging up the archeological remains of several cities in Egypt and Palestine; author of a large work on Egypt, a critical commentary on Daniel, etc.
A PLACE BETTER THAN PARADISE
“The place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” - Exod. 3:5.
A poor man, an old man, a lonely man is tending his sheep on Mount Horeb. He is a failure. He had a chance once. Once he lived in the city and was thought well of at court; but because of certain ideals of his he threw up all this - and has missed a career. He was a big man in a big place once; but that was long ago. He is a nobody now. He has been a nobody for forty years. He has grown slow of tongue. He has lost his courtly bearing, and in appearance as in speech has become a rustic. If he had only been a little less impulsive, a little less patriotic or conscientious, he might have made quite a success in life. Poor old man - a little man in a little place! But God still remembers him. Others forget him, but what a blest thing it is that God even remembers the little man in the little place.
But are we absolutely sure, after all, that Moses is a smaller man than he was forty years ago? No. He has been hidden and forgotten, but he is still the big man - so big that he can take the biggest task ever given by the Almighty to a mortal man for two thousand years. He is a greater man than he was forty years ago. He was not great enough then for this great task of nation-building. The desert has been his teacher. The God of the sky and of the heart has been teaching him self-poise and self-mastery. He has had time and chance to get away from the little things of the city and the court and think of the big things of life; to think and grow. Do not pity Moses because he lost half a lifetime in the country. That made him. That was part of God’s plan for him and the world. God’s man need not be in a hurry to get into a big place. If he is God’s man, God will lead him and give him a task big enough for his fullest powers.
What did Moses learn in the desert? He learned its resources, its hidden springs, its oases. He learned the ways of the desert folk and made blood-brotherhood with them. It was God’s plan to thus prepare allies for the mightiest deliverance of a slave people known to history.
One day the new call came to the new stupendous task for which the old little task had prepared him. A bush began to burn as he passed by, and continued to burn, and was not consumed. “And Moses said, I will turn aside now and see this great sight why the bush is not burnt. And when Jehovah saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him.” That was the test. It is so today. We talk of the deadline. That is the test as to whether a man has reached it. When a man has lost inquisitiveness for new truth, when he has lost interest in the new things of the new present, when he has become too old to “turn aside to see,” then he has reached the deadline. Then even God Almighty cap not use him as a leader. But when he finds God in the novelties of daily life, then the place where he stands may become holy ground.
What makes a particular spot “holy ground”? Is it holy because God is there? No. God is everywhere. Why is this particular spot holy? Because God and man are here together, and the man recognizes God‘s presence and finds his world task.
It is a holy moment and a holy place when God and I are linked together eternally and I make the soul-thrilling discovery that He needs me to help Him save the world. That is a place better than heaven, where a man hears the voice of the Eternal saying, “I need you,” and joins partnership with the omnipotent God - omnipotent and yet not able, as the human heart is now constructed, to “make a best man without man‘s best to help Him.” To be called to such work is better than to be called to go to Paradise in a chariot of fire. There is a good deal of sham in much of our talk about wanting to go to heaven. I believe in heaven; but I don’t want to go yet. Earth is better for me now. If there were twenty airships anchored in front of this church at this very minute, each bound for the New Jerusalem, all of them manned by angels in white robes and carrying a written guarantee from the King of Heaven that they would make the journey safely, I would not apply for passage. I can not conceive of anything in heaven equal to the task given me here and now of helping the Christ to conquer this earth. Why did God, when Cornelius prayed, send to Joppa for Peter, calling upon him to make that long trip to Caesarea and tell that heathen how to be saved? Why did not God send His angel? Because no angel could tell that story. Only the man who has fought the beast in himself and got the victory through Christ’s help can tell the power of Jesus’ blood. No archangel could do that. Why did not God Himself whisper to Cornelius the way of life? Was it that He was unwilling to take away that possible star out of Peter’s crown, or is the human agency in salvation a necessity which even the great God acknowledges? In any case, how glad Peter must have been that he did not get to heaven too soon! He wanted to go once on the Mount of Transfiguration - or at least to turn that mountain into Paradise and stay there - but how glad he ought to have been that he was still on the earth and able to help this One, greater than Moses, in the one and only task greater than the deliverance of an enslaved nation - the deliverance of an enslaved world.
It is better than heaven to feel that God is using me as He could not use an angel and as He could not use me in heaven.
That there is a mystery about the Omnipotent using and needing human help to save and uplift the world we must admit. But we must also admit the fact. The battle-hymn of the old church army was “The sword of the Lord and of Gideon.” That was big honor for Gideon. It is doubtful if that battle would have been won without Gideon. So in the New Testament: would Jesus have worked the miracle of feeding the five thousand if there had been no boy there willing to do his part? Did not the boy help Jesus work the miracle? So we help Him work His miracles of healing now. Does He not say distinctly that we have a part which if we fail to do will affect His power to save? He could do no mighty works in one place because of their unbelief in the olden time. He is crippled in His saving work now in the same way. Yes, and by our inactivity. “We are members of his body,” wrote the apostle and some eighteen hundred years ago or more an ancient reader added, and wisely, “Of his flesh and of his bones” (Eph. 5:30). That is, we are as necessary to Him in this one particular work as hands and feet are necessary to us in doing our work. “Ye are the body of Christ and severally members thereof.” The body is not one member, but many; and each member is needed. “God hath set the members each one of them in the body even as it pleased him” (1 Cor. 12). Too often when the Christ would do some mighty works to¬day the body is paralyzed through which He seeks to act. Ye are His very flesh and bones! This is His second incarnation in human flesh. What honor is this that I may be His hand to help Him lift up the fallen. Can any better task come to us in any other world? Perhaps a greater task may come, but not this task— and to neglect this is to fail to do a work which is more important now than any joy which heaven could give us.
But not only the spots devoted to what we call religious work are sacred. The whole man is sacred, and the whole work of God’s man is sacred work. It is not one day in seven and one place in Palestine and one man in a nation, but all God‘s men are priests, and the temple is in the man‘s own heart and the sacred work is all the work of the daily human Christian toil. As in the making of the tabernacle, God inspired men to spin and work in wood and brass; so now the work on the farm or in the store or in the home may be as sacred toil, and as truly religious as the words spoken in the pulpit or the testimony given in the prayer-meeting. The steps of a good man are ordered of the Lord; not simply his steps when he travels to the house of God, but when he goes to his business office and about his every-day duties. Man’s religious life extends through seven days of the week and twenty-four hours of each day. He does not lose his religion, eyen when he is asleep. To sleep when it is time to sleep, and to laugh when it is time to laugh, and to work when it is time to work, is just as religious as to say one ‘s prayers. It is just as Christian a duty to saw wood or deliver mail or build a house, or put in the plumbing so it will stay, or keep the accounts so that no recording angel can find fault with them, as it is to go to the communion table. God wants religious men as world-workers. Not to provide for the things of one’s own household is to be worse than an infidel. To fail to provide the necessary things for the wife and children of one’s household in order to get to the prayer-meeting is a sin. To be diligent in business is as much a duty as to trust in God. To take care of the house and the children is a higher duty than to go to the missionary rally. If one or the other must be given up, it should be the latter. The religious value of good cooking has never yet been sufficiently discussed. Our distinctions between secular and religious activities are artificial and unbiblical. It is religious to do one’s daily task as “unto the Lord.” As Hiram Golf said, there is such a thing as being a shoemaker “by the grace of God.” Good shoes are just as necessary as good sermons. The cobbler who fails to mend the shoe religiously, and so allows William Bunkles’ youngest to catch cold and die, will find at the judgment day what it means to be false to one’s daily religious task. A defective cap used in a drill-hole yesterday exploded prematurely and blew twenty-eight men into eternity. What shall be said of the man who made that defective cap? Carelessness in stitching a saddle-girth, it has been said, caused a general to fall from his horse at a critical moment and a great battle to be lost. The man who made that saddle-girth, stopping to take a glass of beer and thus carelessly losing a stitch, or the army contractor who furnished poor thread instead of the best, did not do their daily tasks religiously - and in the judgment day, if the universe is gov¬erned justly, they must suffer penalty. It is a great thing when a man realizes that “the place where thou standest is holy ground.” God is here! The task I do is under His eye and according to His will, and this seemingly small task is to take its place in the large scheme for bringing in the heavenly kingdom upon the earth.
There are no “little” unimportant things in an immortal life, which is a part of a divine plan for the coming future. All human life is sacred when the man who lives the life is God’s man. It is better than heaven to help God make the “new heaven and the new earth” which is to come.
It is better to be on the wicked earth helping to make it better with God looking on approvingly, than to be singing hallelujahs with holy angels. If God wanted us in heaven He could easily provide transportation. Where He wants us to be is better for us than paradise. If we are where God wants us to be, then the place where we stand is holy ground.
Related Tags: sermon, lesson, Camden M. Cobern
