Crowns Won and Crowns Lost # 4

Crowns Won and Crowns Lost # 4

1. An undivided heart.

I trust this is a word to everybody, but you will realize that my heart is going out to younger brothers and sisters particularly just now. This is a day of very great trial for the younger folk; our hearts are very much with you. This is a new phase of things. We are going to be scattered, called upon to do what no previous generation has had to do. I do want them to take a word for these coming days that may help them in the time of trial when the crown is at stake.

May I say this to you? If only you will eliminate, or ask the Lord to enable you to eliminate, every element of mixture in you life, so that your flame is one clear pure flame, it will save you an enormous amount. I think it will save you 99% of the trouble. If you have got a double motive, if your heart is divided, if you have got two things working at the back of you, if there is internal conflict, if there is civil war, you are going to lose, and therefore, in the light of the glorious issue, it is always the wisest thing right from the outset to take a clear and unmistakable position so that everybody knows exactly where you are, they have not got to find out, they know that is where you stand right at the beginning. No mixture - get rid of any double element at work in your life - that you want to stand well with both sides, you do not want to let the lord down secretly on His side, at the same time you want to stand well with others, you do not want to have them against you. Well, there is a wisdom that God can give which will save us from doing that sort of thing in a way that leads to unnecessary trouble. I think we can be foolish even in that matter.

It says about the Lord Jesus that He grew in favor with God and man, and you say, Well, can a Christian do that? I think probably the explanation is that there was a wisdom which did not unnecessarily and foolishly put peoples' backs up. A lot have done that sort of thing in an unnecessary way, and they have done mischief quite unnecessarily. You understand what I mean. There is a wisdom which may save from a lot of that sort of thing. Ask for that wisdom. Read the eighth chapter of the book of Proverbs, read and reread it, and go to the Lord and say, Give me that wisdom! Ask for wisdom, but at the same time, while asking for and seeking to be governed by real wisdom in your position and relationships and attitudes, do at the same time have no double interest, no doubt motive. Let it be clear as to the line you are taking, as to where you stand, and that from the outset.

2.  Endurance to the End

Well now, we must draw this homily to a close. Here is this word which helps us. "Hold fast that which thou hast that no one take thy crown." Hold fast! That is only another way of saying what is said to very many times in the New Testament, Be steadfast, hold fast or endure. Crowns are so often lost just for want of a bit of real "stickability", holding on, letting go too soon. Oh, how much this matter of the divine crown, the reward at the end, is bound up in the New Testament with that word - endure. "He that endureth to the end..." (Matt. 10:22) "If we endure...". Endurance is a great test. There are many who can make a great spurt at the outset, make a show on the first lap, and you would think by their beginnings they are going to carry it on. We know quite well it is not always those who get ahead at the beginning. It is usually those who can hold on to the end, who hold fast. This word, you notice, is to the church at Philadelphia, and the Lord is saying - "...the hour of tribulation which is coming on all the earth...hold fast". Yes, it is just that holding fast in tribulation that is the great factor of the crown.

You know, I have been having a good deal of time in recent weeks for thinking and reading, and I have been reading a number of very interesting things. I read Admiral Byrd's story of that wonderful advance camp in his Antarctic expedition; the story of the salving of the American submarine, Squallus, thirty men out of fifty trapped over two hundred feet deep, and several things like that I have been reading, and I have been moved to my depths, as probably you have, with stories like that, moved to the very depths. What men will do, what they will endure, just to add a little bit more to the knowledge, the information and the usefulness of such information, in the great store of scientific research in the history of this world. What they will do - the unspeakable suffering! No one could read that story of Admiral Byrd's without feeling that we do not know anything about suffering. A man will go through all that just to give a little more information to the world as to currents and wind force and so on. You cannot think of their sufferings. But the thing that has impressed me is this. I expected before I got to the end of those stories, I expected Byrd to say, "Let me get out of this, you will never catch me on this again! All those men trapped down there two hundred and forty feet in the ocean in a helpless submarine, shivering in the intense cold with hope slowly dying and never being recovered. Let us get out of this, you won't catch us in a submarine again!" The thing that impressed me was that Byrd must have another expedition. Practically dying, collapsing, such cold as to touch something meant to strip the very flesh off your hand, yet he is no sooner back than he is working a new expedition. The men down there in the Squallus, no sooner having been rescued  just when they were losing consciousness and beginning to view the last hours, no sooner rescued and their submarine salved after three months' hard work than they say, "We want no other life than a life on a submarine, we choose to go back!"

That is something that you and I have got to stand up to, and I have to think, "Hello, where are we Christians?" Don't we often feel, "If only I could get out of this, oh Lord, deliver me from this, and I will never put myself in the way of it again!" Are we like that over our Christian life or, as Paul evidently did and as these men  looked at their work, "We are on the business, the great business, we are on a line that matters in the long run, it is something which, added to the whole, is going to be of tremendous value and we are in it to the end, to the last drop; we get out of one scrape, well, we will get into another, but we are going on, we are not going to quit!" That is the point. We are not going to quit and seek a softer job. So Paul says, "Thou, therefore, endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ" (2 Tim. 2:3). It is only another metaphor for the same thing. Hold fast, do not quit, do not let go, hold fast that which thou hast that no one take thy crown.

Will you just sort this out a bit at a time? Thy crown; no one take thy crown; hold fast and watch all those ways, those subtle ways, by which crowns are lost. I hope that every one of us here at any rate, in the great day, whether we are known here as being of any account or of no account, may receive at the Lord's hand that crown for which He apprehended us, and while we do not want to take other peoples' crowns, let us be faithful that where the Lord is not being satisfied in others, He may be doubly satisfied in us.

The Lord help us to hold fast that which we have. Amen

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(The End)