Usually the first Sunday of the month is
the time for the observation, or observance rather,
of our communion service, but this time we
have changed it to conform to our missionary
society around the entire world.
Every place, as the sun moves from the
east to the west, the sun never sets
on a life mission.
And as it moves, time zones move west
with it around the whole world, when morning
service time comes, the Alliance people will observe
the Lord's supper.
And for that reason we have changed, so
that when we later celebrate together his death,
looking forward to his coming, it will be
with the knowledge that thousands of people, like
-minded people, of every color around the whole
world are today observing this same holy service.
Although this is the Sunday which is by
the churches called Palm Sunday.
I see no reason for changing the steady
progress of our, to me very enjoyable, trip
through 1 Peter.
So in 3 Peter, verses 8 and 9,
these words, Finally, be of all one mind,
having compassion one of another.
Love as brethren, be pitiful, be courteous, not
rendering evil for evil, or railing for railing,
but contrarywise blessing, knowing that ye are there
unto call, that ye should inherit a blessing.
Now, he says here, Finally, I never could
discover why the Apostles put a finally in
every once in a while, or the preachers
have a smiling joke about St. Paul bringing
one of his epistles to a close three
different times.
Finally, brethren, he said three different times and
then went on.
And Peter says, Finally, brethren, and says that
we are to be of one mind.
I want to talk a little bit about
what it is to be like-minded.
Ellicott, who is the latest find, the great
commentator, Zondervan Publishers, has given back to the
world again of English people.
He says the word means unanimous.
So I want to ask you, or ask
and answer, what did Peter mean when he
said, Finally, be ye all of one mind?
Finally, be ye unanimous.
Well, I'll tell you what it isn't to
begin with, in order that we might discover
what it is.
Unanimity, spiritual unanimity, is not regulated uniformity.
I could never discover, nor do I know
to this day, how the churches have fallen
into this error of believing that unanimity meant
uniformity.
That to be like-minded meant the imposition
of a similarity from the outside.
Now, this has been a great error.
People have tried to secure harmony in religious
bodies by imposing uniformity.
The very word uniformity, if you take the
last syllable or two up, you have uniform.
And uniform, while it is a descriptive word
describing a certain situation, it's also a very
blunt noun referring to a garment or a
series of garments worn by members of certain
bodies or groups, to show that they are
members of those bodies or groups.
We have the uniform of the United States
Army, the uniform of the Navy, the Air
Corps, the Marines.
We have various uniforms, that is, garments that
are reformed in one uniform, and it's uniformity
imposed from the outside.
But everybody that's ever been in United States
service knows that under the uniformity there is
a world of disagreement and grousing and definitely
lack of uniformity.
So the putting on of a uniform does
not in any sense make a body of
person one.
And yet people have tried to achieve it,
that uniformity, by putting on a uniform.
They have tried to achieve it by all
adopting the same tone of voice.
For they have tried to adopt it, or
have adopted it, by all wearing the same
boots or doing the same things.
That is imposed uniformity, and it is a
great error.
Because it assumes that uniformity is an external
thing and can be achieved by imposition, and
forgets that the only valid unity is unity
of the heart.
If you could conceive a regiment of soldiers,
each one dressed differently.
They might look odd, but if you could
conceive of a regiment of soldiers that by
some miracle had been tuned like several instruments
all to one pitch pipe, and were all
alike inwardly, you'd have then perfect uniformity, and
you wouldn't need the uniform on the outside.
But I suppose there is no particular harm
in all dressing alike if in the first
place everybody's thinking alike and feeling alike on
certain things.
But the error, I say, lies in believing
that we can achieve inward unity by imposing
external uniformity.
Now, actually, variety and not uniformity is the
hallmark of God.
Wherever you see God's hand, you see not
uniformity or always even similarity, but you see
variety.
Paul says that the star differs from another
star in glory.
And if it would clear up sometime, as
I hope it may, and the ceiling lit,
ceiling is a word we use for all
the tobacco smoke and grime and smog that
lies over the great city, but if it
would all lit some night and we could
all see the starry city of God, you
would note that there wasn't one star exactly
like another.
They differ from each other in glory, and
God made them.
If God had made all the stars in
heaven to be the same size and the
same distance from the earth so they presented
a uniform appearance, it would look when you
gazed up like the marquee of a theater
and not like that mysterious, wonderful heaven of
God that you see when the skies are
clear.
Everybody knows, or can find out in five
minutes, that no two leaves on any tree
are alike.
They're all different.
There's some water-like.
They may even be basically alike, but God
allows them a certain, so to speak, freedom
of choice.
Anybody that gazes at a seascape, or better
still, gazes at the ocean, will notice that
even when the winds are high and the
waves are running, there are no two waves
alike.
If you look carelessly, you'll say they look
alike and there's a monotony and uniformity about
them as they beat in nervously over the
sand.
But if you look a little more sharply,
you'll find that no two of them are
alike, and no one is quite like any
other one.
And the artist who makes them all alike
has imposed something out of his own mind
upon God Almighty's ocean, for the ocean is
never guilty of spewing up ten thousand little
billows, all the same size and shape and
all at the same angle.
Each one differs from the other.
And it's so with the birds.
We say we hear a bird, we say
that bird is a cardinal, and that one
I hear singing is a warbler, and this
one that I hear singing is a robin.
But if you listen again and a little
more closely, you will find that no two
robins sing alike.
Everybody that raises canaries knows that there is
a basic likeness in certain, say, of the
roller type of canary, but they do have
different songs.
And it's so with people, that's too well
known to need any explanation.
Here are, and Bible Saints, the same.
We make a great deal of the similarities
between Bible Saints, when actually the variety was
still more marked than the similarities.
Who can conceive of two men further apart
than Isaiah and Elijah?
Why, if they had been sitting in the
same church pool, or had been somewhere together,
they would not even have been recognized as
belonging to the same race, let alone the
same faith.
Their similarities were internal.
They belonged together inside, but they certainly were
different outside.
Or take a man like Peter and Moses
and stand them up together, or even stay
within the little circle of Peter's own little
group, the disciples there.
Look at Philip, look at the lovely, feminine
John, almost feminine in his refinement, and then
look at that noble, strong, Elijah-like Peter.
All together unlike each other, and yet their
likeness was real because it was an internal
likeness.
They were alike inside, but they certainly weren't
alike outside.
When God gave his church to the world,
he gave a church that was basically to
be one.
But he also gave a church that was
to provide as much of a variety as
a flower garden, so that they might present
an attractiveness.
I used to hear a black man, that
is, they don't allow you to use that
word anymore, though I don't know how better
you could describe their boy's face, a dear
man of God by the name of Brother
Collet.
We had a Collet and a Collet, one
was white and the other wasn't, and I
forget which is which, but I think this
was Brother Collet.
Brother Collet was absolutely as black as if
he had been polished at the nearest shoe
stand.
He used to preach and say, God makes
his bouquets and he has all colored flowers
in them.
He said, if they had been all your
color, they wouldn't have had any variety.
So God put me in there in order
to give a little variety to it.
He was perfectly right, God has his variety
throughout all the Church of Christ, not only
in looks, but in personality and tastes and
gifts and all the rest.
And yet Peter says, Be like-minded, be
unanimous.
What did he mean?
He meant that we must all be alike
in certain things.
Did you notice what we are to be
alike in?
Be alike compassionate, be alike loving, be alike
pitiful, be alike courteous, and be alike forgiving.
He names it, I didn't put that in
there, he said it.
Finally, be ye all one mind.
This is the way to have one mind,
and in these things have one mind, having
compassion one of another, love as brethren, be
pitiful, be courteous, and be forgiving, not rendering
evil for evil.
So there you have the uniformity the man
of God, the unanimity the man of God
was looking for.
It was a unanimity of compassion, all of
God's people must be alike in that.
Unanimity of love, they must all be loving.
Uniformity of pity, they must be unanimously be
filled with a pittiness, that is a pitifulness,
that is a tender heart, and courtesy and
forgiveness.
Now let's look at them, then, compassionate.
And as you know, compassionate means a feeling
with one another, that is, a sympathetic understanding
wherever one life touches another.
Because this is what unity means, it means
a likeness at points of contact.
We must agree wherever we touch, wherever parts
touch, wherever minds touch, there must be there
agreement, a loving agreement.
And that was true of all the Bible
characters.
They were alike in that they touched God,
and where they touched they were alike.
But in all other things they were unlike.
And it's to be in the Church of
the Lord Jesus Christ that wherever we touch
each other there is to be unity.
But in all other things there can be
diversity and difference and variety.
And the variety itself is an artistic scheme
that God has introduced to bring beauty into
the body of Christ.
But dissimilarity that goes through to the heart,
and differences that go through to the mind,
and variations that touch the throbbing heart, is
like throwing a piano out of tune.
Not all the strings are alike, but all
the strings are alike in this, that they
bow to a certain pitch.
And so the people of God are alike
in that they bow to and recognize the
one holy divine pitch to which they are
to be set.
Indeed, then after that they can be just
as unlike and as free to be themselves
and to be individualistic and have complete freedom.
I suppose there never was a body of
Christians that succeeded in being freer than the
Quakers.
And yet they did the best they could
to kill it.
They imposed a uniform and they also imposed
a certain address, a certain use of language.
But in spite of that, they had so
much of that inner flame that they succeeded
in presenting to the world a wonderful flower
garden of variety.
So we must be alike from passion.
And that is sympathetic understanding wherever we touch,
and agreement that we can disagree where we
don't touch and where it's nobody's business.
And we're to have a feeling for one
another, that's compassion.
And then it says loving, that we are
to love the brethren, and love is oneness
where hearts touch.
And there must be, there is, a unity,
a feeling the two have become one, where
there is love.
Now, one man, I think, if I recall,
it was an old bishop whose name for
the moment slips me, pointed out on this
verse that unanimity was to be achieved not
by freezing people together, but by loving them
together.
He said that you can get oneness out
of variety by freezing it.
You can do that, you know.
You all know how if a thing freezes
hard enough and solid enough, it's a unity.
But it's a frozen unity.
And there are churches where nobody ever disagrees
with anybody else, because they've started out by
agreeing that nothing really matters anyhow.
There's a church down on the South Side,
they've put out some literature, I suppose they
all do, but I have gotten a hold
of this, and they say that the basic
tenet of their church is that there is
no basic tenet.
That you can believe anything that's decent and
still be a member of their church.
Well, it would be pretty hard to agree
when you had started out by agreeing that
you couldn't disagree because nobody believed anything anyhow.
That's what you call freezing together.
You can freeze four fellows together, or you
can bring them together by love.
One is divine and the other is the
devil's way of making people one.
I don't want to be on the side
of any disruptive element, certainly, and all this
emphasis on unity, it's a strange and ironic
joke that must have had its origin in
the seventh hell down.
That the generation that makes the most of
unity is also the generation that has the
greatest numbers of hates and suspicions and the
biggest bombs in the largest armies.
They can't kid me.
I can smell them from a distance, however
mellifluous they sound on the radio, brother.
They still don't fool me, because I know
that there is no unity in the earth.
There is division and hatred and hostility and
borderline war.
And yet they come and say, Oh, men
are brethren, there's a brotherhood of man and
a fatherhood of God, and we must all
forget our differences only feel to see if
the lump is still on their hip there,
that lump that means they're gone.
Well, we Christians don't pay any attention to
the latest fad, which happens to be uniformity
and everybody being like everybody else.
We Christians know that there is only one
way ever to achieve uniformity, and that is
by loving, by compassion, by the work of
God in the breast and the soul of
man.
And then there can be unity even where
there is a blessed and free diversity.
Now, we love each other.
I say love is unanimity where hearts touch.
Then we are to be pitiful, and that
word means tender-hearted according to the Greek.
I might say that religion will either make
us very tender or very hard.
There isn't anything that will tender us like
religion.
I don't like to talk about individual men,
but it happens that one of my favorite
people is Tom Hare.
Tom is a very tender man.
I think he's so tender he's imposed on
a lot by neurotic people.
But nevertheless, he's a tender man.
But being Irish, he wouldn't have been a
tender man, maybe, if God hadn't tendered him.
He has enough spirituality to make him tender.
But the Pharisees had enough religion to make
them hard.
And religion will do one thing or the
other.
It will either make you very tender or
very hard.
It's entirely possible to be very severe, to
be, indeed, cruel, and do it all in
the name of religion.
My rule is, whose side am I on,
principle or people?
Is it principle or people?
Principle has been a hard, rough cross upon
which human beings have been nailed through the
centuries.
Principle, we say, and nail a man up.
And his blood and his tears and his
sweat never affects us at all, because we
pride ourselves he's dying for a principle.
Any man who'll die for a principle ought
to have his long ear shaved.
It's not principles that hold the moral world
together.
It's the presence of a holy God and
love for God and mankind.
Moral laws exist in the world, nobody preaches
that any more with greater emphasis than I
do.
But to extract a principle from the holy,
loving heart of God and then nail a
man on it, and say, I'll die for
that, I won't.
I trust I would die for love, I
trust I would die for those I love,
I trust I would die for the church
of Christ.
If I didn't, I'd be ashamed.
But I trust that I would give my
everything to the love of God and the
love of mankind.
That's one thing, but it's quite another thing
to extract a stiff iron principle and then
nail a man on it.
The Bible says, Be pitiful, be tenderhearted.
You know, Christ never talked about principles, he
always talked about people.
When he made his great little stories to
illustrate the called parables, he never talked about
principle, he always talked about people.
There was always some person there, somebody that
was in trouble, or somebody that was astray,
or somebody that was lost, or somebody that
was sent out to bring in folks, or
somebody.
Always there were people there.
Jesus Christ didn't come down from his heaven
above, riding on this steel beam of the
divine principle, hard and stiff and cold, walk
from the room of the Virgin to the
cross, don't go with it, upright as a
ramrod, stiff as a beam, and die for
the moral government of God.
He did die for the moral government of
God, but, O brethren, he achieved his ends
not by hardness and harshness, but by love
and by caring for people, for it was
the people he cared for.
Back of it all was the divine principle
of certainty, back of it all was the
moral righteousness of God, the holiness of the
Deity must be sustained if the world falls.
But our Lord walked in and out of
that with all the sweet smoothness, the lubricated
tenderness that never irritated nor scratched.
Love lubricated his spirit, and he walked among
men, loving men, and loving people, and loving
children, and loving women, and loving the low
as well as the high.
We had a great President once.
We've had numbers of great Presidents, certainly.
We never know for a generation or two
whether they've been great or not, we'll all
must admit that.
But we had a great President once who
was a man-person of President's segment.
They called him Honest Abe.
He had a big sense of humor and
a heart that could cry easily over other
people's sorrows.
But he had some generals who stood on
ceremony and lived by principle, and saw these
poor boys taken out of the hills and
away from the farms and out of the
factories, conscripted and jammed without much training up
to the front to fight, being young fellows
and still boys, some of them deserted.
When the terror and the screaming and the
dying and the blood and the sound of
the gunfire got too strong, some of the
boys couldn't take it, so they turned and
fled.
They caught those boys and sentenced them to
die one after the other.
And all the time the war was going
on between the North and the South, Abraham
Lincoln was busy doing everything he could do
to get those boys off.
On one occasion they came in and found
him sitting sad-faced, turning over papers off
a file, writing at the bottom of them
one after the other.
Somebody said, What's you doing, Mr. President?
Oh, he said, Tomorrow's butcher day in the
army, and they're going to shoot my boys.
He said, I'm going over these papers once
more to see if I can't get some
of them off.
We love Abraham Lincoln for that.
He was a man who loved people.
On one occasion he had the sly, humorous
effrontery to advance an argument to save a
boy's hide that I suppose nobody ever advanced
before in their sense.
And some of those stiff, hard-hearted old
boys that had a principal rammed up their
back tied to it so they couldn't bend,
they thought he was a fool, a clown,
for even advancing it.
But he advanced this one time.
He said, I don't want this boy shot.
They said, But he ran away under fire.
Well, he said he couldn't help it.
He said he didn't want to do it,
but his legs ran away with him.
And he actually tried to push that through
as an argument.
The fellow's legs took him away.
Well, that was Lincoln, the nation of tender
-heartedness and humor, and above all things, a
great love for people.
Now, I bring him in not because he
was a great Christian.
I doubt whether he was a great Christian.
But he was a great man, and he
had much that we Christians could borrow.
And one of them was he was a
tender-hearted, pitiful man who put people ahead
of principle.
Then he says, Be courteous.
Now, that doesn't mean etiquette.
I know that Peter had never read a
book on etiquette.
I got a book on etiquette one time
and started to read it.
And I got so discouraged about halfway through
that I put the book away.
I don't even know where it is now.
I don't know about etiquette.
It's just too much for me.
At Emily Post walking at the head of
the etiquette parade, I can't even keep in
step.
But there is what the world has called
nature's gentlemen.
They are not bred to the palace, but
they have in them a humble-mindedness and
a desire to put the other person first.
And they are courteous in the right sense
of the term.
I have been to the hills of West
Virginia and of Georgia and of other states
in the Union.
I have gone up among the plain people,
the old lady who had one dress and
the half-grown daughter who had maybe one.
And it went barefooted much of the time,
so she wouldn't wear out her precious shoes.
And she went barefooted, her feet got big,
and when she put on her precious shoes
they didn't fit, so she gave them to
her smaller sister, and she ran through the
same process.
That's the way they had to live.
I've slept in their homes.
Slept in their homes where several people had
to sleep in the same room.
And where one little room was living room,
kitchen, everything.
And I am prepared to say to you,
ladies and gentlemen, that I have never elsewhere
found such perfect courtesy.
They were courteous almost without a single exception,
those hill people, those mountain people.
For they were actuated, motivated by one thing.
This man's our guest.
And we've got to please him no matter
what he does to us.
That's courtesy.
That's the kind Peter had.
If Peter had been put down at a
Washington function, he'd have disgraced the whole place,
because he wouldn't have known what knife to
use or what fork or what spoon.
Peter Cartwright, the great Methodist preacher, was a
man of great courtesy with no etiquette.
He was eating with the governor one time,
and the governor's wife said, Reverend, would you
like a cup of coffee?
He said, that stuff scalds my stomach, I
can't eat it, or can't drink it, no.
And the friends around him were horrified, but
the governor's wife, Grinch, she knew it was
Peter Cartwright.
And they were having chicken.
And hungry as the dog sat with his
head off on one side and his ears
cocked by the governor's chair, Peter cleaned each
bone carefully and flipped the bone to the
dog.
In the governor's palace dining room, and everyone
was blushing with chagrin except the governor and
the other folks that were big enough to
know they had a man on their hands
who was, in all essential things, a courteous
man, for he put everybody else ahead of
himself.
But what was a little thing like throwing
a bone to a dog?
Dogs and bones go together.
Peter had never read the book.
Emily hadn't written yet when Peter lived.
Be courteous.
So courtesy is an unselfish regard for other
people, even if it costs you something.
Brethren, if we'll ask God for that kind
of courtesy, humble-mindedness really is what the
word is.
If we'll ask God for that kind of
humble-mindedness, you never need to worry too
much about Emily.
Then forgiving, he says here.
Not rendering evil for evil, but blessing, in
order that you might obtain a blessing.
There's the forgiving spirit.
So now you see where uniformity comes in,
our oneness.
It comes in in being all alike companion,
all alike loving, all alike pitiful, all alike
courteous, and all alike forgiving.
And after that, you can be just as
different as the leaves on the tree or
the stars in the sky.
And it's all right with God.
He made you to be unlike other people.
Now, we come to the communion service and
we don't shift mood, for it's all one
here.
Forgiving each other, not rendering evil for evil,
but blessing, that you might bring a blessing.
A like-minded people, unlike in a hundred
ways, taste the very wide as the cold
scale of human thought.
But all alike in being compassionate, and all
alike in loving, and all alike in pity,
and all alike in courtesy, and all alike
in forgiveness.
That's being unanimous, brethren.
Now, we come to this communion table, I
trust, unanimous.
Not unanimous in prophetic interpretations, we vary on
that, and I wouldn't respect you if you
agreed with me on everything.
Not on modes of baptism, for there are
differences of opinion among us.
Not on interpretations always of all verses of
scripture, but unanimous in forgiving, pity, and loving,
and compassion.
But if there is one negative vote, if
there is in your fellowship one negative vote,
one person who, when you say, who's in
favor, compassion, love, pity, courtesy, forgiveness, and there
is one now, unuttered but felt in the
heart, one negative soul, remember that the body
is harm, and the spirit is grief, and
the individual himself is injured beyond all description.
So, let us come, as the brethren pass
around and make available to you the elements,
as we call them.
Let us join in this external evidence of
internal unity.
And if we have the internal unity, then
are we blessed indeed.
But if we do not, then the uniformity
of observance of the Lord's Supper does not
heal the breach or make us one, for
oneness is internal.
I trust we may give to God the
unanimous consent to be all alike in all
these things.
And then though we are unworthy, we will
be able in a worthy manner to partake
of the Lord's Supper.