instruments Of Service
By A.B. Simpson
This passage gives us an inventory of God's favorite instruments--of the things that God likes best to use, and the people that God especially chooses; and some of you may be surprised to find yourselves not included in this inventory; some of you may feel that it would be a considerable humiliation to come within it. You have got your choice of five places: you can either be among the foolish things, or among the weak things, or among the base things, or among the despised things, or among the things that are not at all, and in one or the other of these classes you will have to muster if you are going to be one of God's favorite instruments and one of the things which God hath chosen to amount to anything and to bring to naught the things that are strong and wrong.
I. The foolish things. The Corinthians were terribly chagrined at the humiliation of having to give up their culture. It was a sort of modern Boston or Edinburgh and was very proud of its culture. And so when Apollos came among them and began to preach the philosophy of the Alexandrian school of which he was master, they were delighted with him, and turned away from the crude and barren style of old Paul and thought they had found something worthy to be compared with their wisdom. But Paul told them that God holds all this culture in great derision; that he thinks very little of it, indeed, that it is foolishness with Him, and that if any man will be wise, he must become a fool that he may be wise; that is, he must abandon his own natural and self-confident wisdom; he must be willing to esteem as of very little value the product of his own intellect and his education, and like a little child begin at the alphabet at the feet of Jesus, for God hath made foolish the wisdom of the wise and taketh the wise in their own craftiness.
There is a great deal of danger in our modern American life of this same thing. There is an affectation of culture, and perhaps a real culture, which is beginning to become a kind of God to the higher classes of American society. You noticed probably with alarm the other day the sums that were spent on a few special works of art in this city--hundreds of thousands of dollars at a single sale, enough to sustain the Gospel for half a century in the great mission fields. People ought to pause a little and remember, that natural culture has often been associated with the world's darkest ages. The man that built the first city, made the first musical instrument, and the first works of human industry and art was Cain, and since that day the world, when it goes away from God, tries to make the earth a paradise. The next great land of culture was Egypt, but God took His people right out of Egypt and He didn't preserve among them one single trace of Egyptian science, Egyptian art, Egyptian culture. Nay, He would not let them touch a work of art, lest it should be made subservient to idolatry. The next great period of culture was perhaps in Babylon, the cradle, I dare say, of Grecian culture; but what did that come to? "Is not this great Babylon that I built by the might of my hand for the honor of my majesty?" In that same hour there came a voice from Heaven: "The kingdom is departed from thee and thou shalt have thy dwelling with the beasts of the earth;" and Nebuchadnezzar went out under the strongest form of madness until he learned that every man's pride must be laid low at the feet of God. The next stage of culture we find in Greece, and perhaps the highest stage that has ever been attained in the history of man. And what was Grecian culture and art when Paul looked upon its most splendid monuments in Athens? You don't find a bit of enthusiasm such as modern travelers display, but his spirit was stirred within him when he saw the city given to idolatry; every particle of it was a minister of idolatry; every particle of it was the handmaid of sin, and it did not save Greece from the deepest moral degradation. The next and the most brilliant period of art and culture the world has ever seen was the modern Italian age when Raphael and Michael Angelo gave the world their triumphs of genius and you will remember that was the time when Caesar Borgia sat in the Papal chair, a monster of infamous iniquity, and when the Church was sunk in utter corruption; yet its temples were adorned with the most splendid paintings.
