We could do with more Simons in the Church today, with more con-secreted enthusiasm. We have lots of enthusiasm for other things; it carries us through difficulties and discouragements, it helps us to brave criticism and endure hardship We have enthusiasm for games, for golf and tennis and football and racing, for a hundred other things,—but why is there not more enthusiasm for God? Why are the great majority absolutely cold when it comes to work for Christ? Oh fór the enthusiasm of the martyrs and the saints, and holy men of God of days long gone by, who braved rack and fire and imprisonment rather than be false to Christ Oh for the fiery energy of a Wesley, a Whitfield, a Booth, a Spurgeon, a Moodey, and many another in our own day and days gone by, so possessed by a zeal for Christ that they faced life and Now let us ask ourselves why from out of the crowds that followed Him, every emergency with flaming and infectious enthusiasm.
Christ chose Simon the Zealot. We There are Zealots all about us.— can imagine that some of the more cautious members of the band, Philip for instance, himself of Cana,—ad-can we not win them to the service of Christ? Or at least can we not catch some of their fire and use it vising against it. These Zealots were fiery people, difficult to restrain, And then too, Simon was not a safe man to make a disciple, if Jesus wanted to keep right with Rome. Why then did He choose him?
And first of all I think that we can say that the choice of Simon to be a disciple was a forecast of the Gospel Christ had come to preach.—a gospel of reconciliation. Consider these men— for God? The service of Christ calls for and is worthy of the loftiest enthusiasm. Few things are to be more lamented today than that so little—a mere trickle—of the daring, and the enterprise of the modern commercial world has found its way into the Christian Church. It is reported that an enthusiast rose in a Church Council and cried.—"Mr. Chairman, I move that we move the world."
And why not, for we remember that There was another man beside Simon whom our Lord had seemed ill-advised to call into the circle of his friends, to make one of his little band of disciples, Matthew, the Publican. Think of it, Matthew the tax collector, the servant of Rome, and Simon, the Zealot. Both likely, one might assume, to prove sources of friction in their relations with the ethers, and themselves diametrically opposed. But as we think it over in our minds, we begin to see why Christ selected these two—so opposite —to be His disciples. May He not, have done so with a very definite of the early Christians it was said, not only that they moved the world, but that, they turned it upside down.
We could do with a company of Christ directed Zealots in Shanghai today. God grant we may. catch some of that spirit of zeal and self-sacrifice which marked the Zealots of old; and with it follow Christ in the way of service for our fellow men. That it may set our hearts on fire to work for the spread of His Kingdom. Enthusiasm that shall be lasting. For when the darkest days come remember that we have a great promise of sustaining power.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.