Morning Dew – Cure of Secret Discipleship

Then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing; for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert.  – Isaiah 35:6

JOSEPH of Arimathea and Nicodemus learned to be ashamed  of their cowardice, and their dumb lips learned to speak, and their shy, hidden love forced for itself a channel by which it could flow out into the light; because of Christ’s death. And in another fashion that same death and Cross is for us, too, the cure of all cowardice and selfish silence. The sight of Christ’s Cross makes the coward brave. It was no small piece of courage for Joseph to go to Pilate and avow his sympathy with a condemned criminal. The love must have been very true which was forced to speak by disaster and death. And to us the strongest motive for stiffening our vacillating timidity into an iron fortitude, and fortifying us far above the fear of what man can do to us, is to be found in gazing upon His dying love who met and conquered all evils and terrors for our sakes.

That Cross will kindle a love which will not rest concealed, but will be:  “like the ointment of the right hand which bewrayeth itself.”  I can fancy men to whom Christ is only what He was to Nicodemus at first, “a teacher sent from God,” occupying Nicodemus’ position of hidden belief in His teaching, without feeling any need to avow themselves His followers; but if once into our souls there has come the constraining and the melting influence of that great and wondrous love which died for us, then, dear brethren, it is unnatural that we should be silent. If those for whom Christ has died should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out. That death, wondrous, mysterious, terrible, but radiant and glorious with hope, with pardon, with holiness for us and for all the world, – that death smites on the chords of our hearts, if I may so speak, and brings out music from them all.

The sight of the Cross not only leads to courage, and kindles a love which demands expression, but it impels to joyful surrender. Joseph gave a place in his own new tomb, where he hoped that one day his bones should be laid by the side of the Master against whom he had sinned – for he had no thought of a resurrection. Nicodemus brought a lavish, almost an extravagant, amount of costly spices, as if by honor to the dead he could atone for treason to the living. And both the one and the other teach us that if once we gain the true vision of that great and wondrous love that died on the Cross for us, then the natural language of the loving heart is –

” Here, Lord! I give myself away;
‘Tis all that I can do.”

If following Him openly involves sacrifices, the sacrifices will be sweet, so long as our hearts look to His dying love. All love delights in expression, and most of all in expression by surrender of precious things, which are most precious because they give love materials which it may lay at the beloved’s feet.  What are position, possessions, reputation, capacities, perils, losses, self, but the sweet spices which we are blessed enough to be able to lay upon the alter which glorifies the giver and the gift?  The contemplation of Christ’s sacrifice – and that alone- will so overcome our natural selfishness as to make sacrifice for His dear sake most blessed.

Morning Dew – Miseries of Secret Discipleship

And the children of Israel did secretly things that were not right against the Lord their God.  – 2Ki_17:9

How much Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus lost! – all those three years of communion with the Master; all His teaching, all the stimulus of His example, all the joy of fellowship with Him!  They might have had a treasure in their memories that would have enriched them for all their days, and they had flung it all away because they were afraid of the curled lip of a long-bearded Pharisee or two.

And so it always is, the secret disciple diminishes his communion with his Master. It is the valleys which lay their bosoms open to the sun that rejoice in the light and warmth; the narrow clefts in the rocks that shut themselves grudgingly up against the light, are all dank and dark and dismal. And it is the men that come and avow their discipleship that will have the truest communion with their Lord. Any neglected duty puts a film between a man and his Saviour; any conscious neglect of duty piles up a wall between you and Christ. Be sure of this, that if from cowardly or from selfish regard to position and advantages, or any other motive, we stand apart from Him, and have our lips locked when we ought to speak, there will steal over our hearts a coldness: His face will be averted from us, and our eyes will not dare to seek, with the same confidence and joy, the light of  His countenance.

What you lose by unfaithful wrapping of your convictions in a napkin, and burying them in the ground, is the joyful use of the convictions, the deeper hold of the truth by which you live and before which you bow, and the true fellowship with the Master whom you acknowledge and confess. And when these men came to Christ’s corpse, and bore it away, what a sharp pang went through their hearts! They woke at last to know what cowardly traitors they had been. If you are a disciple at all, and a secret one, you will awake to know what you have been doing, and the pang will be a sharp one. If you do not awake in this life, then the distance between you and your Lord will become greater and greater; if you do, then it will be a sad reflection that there are years of treason lying behind you. Nicodemus and Joseph had the veil torn away by the contemplation of their dead Master. You may have the veil torn away from your eyes by the sight of the throned Lord; and when you pass into the heavens, may even there have some sharp pang of condemnation when you reflect how unfaithful you have been.

Blessed be His name!  The assurance is firm that if a man be a disciple, he shall be saved; but the warning is sure that if he be an unfaithful and a secret disciple, there will be a lifelong unfaithfulness to a beloved Master to be ” purged away so as by fire.”

Morning Dew – Causes of Secret Discipleship

Can any hide himself in secret places, that I shall not see him? saith the Lord. Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the Lord.  – Jer_23:24

In a society like ours, in which the influence of Christian affects a great many people who have no personal connection with Christ, it is not always enough that the life should preach, because over a very large field of ordinary daily life the underground influence, so to speak, of Christian ethics has infiltrated and penetrated, so that many a tree bears a greener leaf because of the water that has found its way to it from the river, though it be planted far from its banks. Even those who are not Christians live outward lives largely regulated by Christian principle. The whole level of morality has been heaved up, as the coast line has sometimes been by hidden fires slowly working, by the imperceptible gradual influence of the Gospel.

So it needs sometimes that you should say, ” I am a Christian,” as well as that you should live like one. Ask yourselves, dear friends, whether you have buttoned your great coats over your uniforms, that nobody may know whose soldier you are. Ask yourselves whether you have sometimes held your tongues because you knew that if you spoke, people would find out where you came from and what country you belonged to. Ask yourselves have you ever accompanied the witness of your lives with the commentary of your confession? Did you ever, anywhere but in a church, stand up and say, ” I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, my Lord?”

And then ask yourselves another question: Have you ever dared to be singular?  We are all of us in this world often thrust into circumstances in which it is needful that we should say, “So do not I because of the fear of the Lord.” Boys go to school. They used always to kneel down at their bedsides and say their prayers when they were at home; they do not like to do it with all those critical and cruel eyes- and there are no eyes more critical and more cruel than young eyes- fixed upon them; and so they give up prayer. A young man comes to Lanchester, goes into a warehouse, pure of life, and with a tongue that has not blossomed into rank fruit of obscenity and blasphemy.  And he hears at the next desk there, words that first of all bring a blush to his cheek, and he is tempted into conduct that he knows to be a denial of his Master. And he covers up his principles, and goes with the tempters into evil. I might sketch a dozen other cases, but I need not. In one form or other we have all to go through the same ordeal. We have sometimes to dare to be in a minority of one, if we will not be untrue to our Master and to ourselves.

A minority of one……….do we dare?

Morning Dew – Secret Discipleship

And after this Joseph of Arimathea, being a disciple of Jesus, but secretly, for fear of the Jews, asked of Pilate that he might take away the body of Jesus; . . . and there came also Nicodemus, he who at the first came to Jesus by night.  – Joh_19:38-39

While Christ lived, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus had  been unfaithful to their convictions; but His death, which terrified and paralyzed and scattered His avowed disciples, seems to have shamed and stung them into courage. They came now, when they must have known that it was too late to lavish honour and tears on the corpse of the Master whom they had been too cowardly to acknowledge whilst acknowledgment might yet have availed.  How keen an arrow of self-condemnation must have pierced their hearts as they moved in their offices of love, which they thought He could never know, round His dead corpse!

They were both members of the Sanhedrin: the same motives, no doubt, had withheld each of them from confessing Christ; the same impulses united them in this too late confession of discipleship. Nicodemus had had the conviction, at the beginning of Christ’s ministry, that he was at least a miraculously attested and God-sent teacher. But the fear which made him steal to Jesus by night – the unenviable distinction which the Evangelist pitilessly reiterates at each mention of him – arrested his growth, and kept him dumb when silence was treason.

Joseph of Arimathea is described by two of the Evangelists as ” a disciple “;  by the other two as a devout Israelite, like Simeon and Anna, ” waiting for the Kingdom of God.”  Luke informs us that he had not concurred in the condemnation of Jesus, but leads us to believe that his dissent had been merely silent. Perhaps he was more fully convinced than Nicodemus, and at the same time even more timid in avowing his convictions. These two contrite cowards, as they try to atone for their unfaithfulness to their living Master by their ministrations to Him dead, are true examples of secret disciples.  They were restrained from the avowal of the Messiah-ship of Jesus by fear. There is nothing in the organization of society at this day to make any man afraid of avowing the ordinary kind of Christianity which satisfies the most of us; rather it  is the proper thing with most of us middle-class people to say that in some sense or other we are Christians.  But when it comes to a real avowal, a real carrying out of a true discipleship, there are as many and as formidable, though very different, impediments in the way to-day from those which blocked the path of these two cowards. In all regions of life it is hard to work out into practice any moral conviction whatever. How many of us are there who have beliefs about social and moral questions which we are ashamed to avow in certain companies for fear of the finger of ridicule being pointed at us? It is not only in the Church, and in reference to purely religious belief, that we have the curse of secret discipleship, but it is everywhere.  Wherever there are moral questions which are yet the subject of controversy, and have not been enthroned with the hallelujahs of all men, you get people that carry their convictions shut up in their own breasts, and lock their lips in silence, when there is most need of frank avowal. The political, social, and moral conflicts of this day have their ” secret disciples,” who will come only out of their holes when the battle is over, and will then shout with the loudest.

My thoughts on this:

To say you are a disciple of Christ, sadly today, has a very different meaning than that of those original disciples who had the joy and delight of walking with Jesus in His life.   With that said, I believe that many in the world today claim they are “followers” of Christ, or disciples.  But they do not “Proclaim” they are followers of Christ.  It is hidden in the heart, much as we hide our shame.