Busy about the Wrong Thing
I Kings 20:40 And as thy servant was busy here and there, he was gone.
The text is part of a little parable, spoken by an unnamed prophet to King Ahab.
I Kings 20:39 (KJV) And as the king passed by, he cried unto the king: and he said, Thy servant went out into the midst of the battle; and, behold, a man turned aside, and brought a man unto me, and said, Keep this man: if by any means he be missing, then shall thy life be for his life, or else thou shalt pay a talent of silver.
I Kings 20:39 (Amp) And as the King passed by, the [prophet] cried out to him, Your servant went out into the midst of the battle; and behold, a man turned aside and brought a man to me, and said, Keep this man. If for any reason he is missing, then your life will be required for his life, or else you shall pay a talent of silver.
1 Kings 20:40 (KJV) And as thy servant was busy here and there, he was gone. And the king of Israel said unto him, So shall thy judgment be; thyself hast decided it.
I Kings 20:40 (Amp) But as your servant was busy here and there, he was gone. And the King of Israel said to him. such is your own verdict; you yourself have decided it.
Given a man to keep, he had lost the man. And he had lost him because he was too busy to keep him. Evidently the servant considered that an excuse. Had he been idle, then indeed the loss of the man would have been an unpardonable offence. Justly enough, the King found that but an aggravation of the fault. If one to whom we had entrusted millions should lose them, would we not find it a poor excuse that he had been busy picking up the pennies which he had dropped?
Now let us leave King Ahab and the nameless prophet, and come down the centuries to ourselves for an application. It is an easy application to make, for we too have been given a man to keep and our most pressing danger is the we shall lose that man, just because we are too busy to keep him. The battle is the battle of life, the man is our self, and the peril of loss lurks in the engrossing, absorbing character of modern life. Never in all the history of the world was the battle of life so bitter, so merciless, so ruthless as now. It is not without an instinctive sense of fitness that the common speech of the day calls the chief business men "captains of industry." Business is organized on a vast scale; the unit counts for nothing -- the mass for everything. The hours of the day are not enough for toil, business burns up the nights as well. God’s rest day is ruthlessly
Busy about the Wrong Thing
appropriated; men wore out, burnt out rather, and left behind without thought or mercy.
And instinctively we feel that we must keep up with the rush or be trampled under foot. Lately a famous cartoonist drew a caricature (picture) of himself, in which unwillingly he characterized us all. He represented himself grimly walking on a treadmill. Behind him were sharp spikes which effectually forbade a pause. Before him -- as a wisp of straw is dangled before a horse to lure him to a ceaseless task -- hung a dollar mark, the goal of his weary tramp; a tramp that never ceased, a goal never reached. What an amiable satire on business life! With a slight change, it might be made to apply with equal point to modern social life. What is it but the ceaseless round of the treadmill? Before the man the elusive dollar, -- before his wife an equally elusive phantom, pleasure. And in this two-fold pursuit more men and women are lost than in crime or debauchery. Crime appeals to the social pervert, debauchery to the social degenerate; but on the treadmill called "society," more manhood and womanhood is lost than all the churches are saving.
The man given us to keep is the man whom each of us calls "myself." When the battle is over, when at last for each of us the tramp of the treadmill ceases, when we are lifted from the wheel and another takes our place -- to be in turn worn out and cast aside -- the one demand made upon each of us will be for the man who was given us to keep. Not -- "What money did you gather?" Not -- "what fame did you achieve?" not - "What space did you occupy in the social papers?" But, "What man are you?" And it never will do to reply: "Lord,
’And as thy servant was busy here and there’ 1 Kings 20:40
the man, the woman Thou gavest me to keep was gone."
if, anticipating the day, yet the future, thank God, when the Lord of life will demand of us the man He gave us to keep, we were to stop today and make that demand of ourselves, what answer could we give?
Where is the boy He gave us to keep? As each of us remembers himself in boyhood, I am sure some accusing sense must come over us all of foul wrong done to the boy. Might I have done better by that little fellow who was then that strange being whom I now call "myself’?
In the confederate war time there is this one soldier, thirty years elapsed between the surrender at Appomattox and the soldiers next visit to Richmond. He arrived early in the morning of a summer day and walked over to the Capitol square. The larger facts were unchanged. There was the old Capitol, under whose roof he had heard Yancey and Hunter and Stephens and a host of the giants of that day. The great trees were still there and across the square the executive mansion of Virginia, in whose doorway he had for the
Busy about the Wrong Thing
first time seen Robert E. Lee. All that came easily back. But where was the boy in Confederate butternut, who had seen it all? His answer was the foolish one of the prophet’s parable:
’And as thy servant was busy here and there, he was gone.’ 1 Kings 20:40
And I felt with a sudden sternness, that were another to deal now by my boy as he had dealt by that war time boy "myself," I should hold him to a strict accounting.
What have we -- pursuing still that self judgement of which I have spoken
-- done with the young man who was given us to keep? Have we lost him too, in being busy? Is this careworn, bowed man of today – worn, worn and bowed in the petty, contemptible strife for dollars and place and position -- what we have made of him? Happy indeed, if we have not made him into a cruel and selfish monster.
You remember Andrew Lang’s verses on three portraits of Prince Charlie, the last of the Stuarts:
1731
Beautiful face of a child
Lighted with laughter and glee,
Mirthful, and tender, and wild,
My heart is heavy for thee!
13 years later
1744
Beautiful face of a youth,
As an eagle poised to fly forth
To the old land loyal of truth,
To the hills and the sounds of the North:
Fair face, daring and proud,
Lo! The shadow of doom, even now,
The fate of thy line, like a cloud,
Rests on the grace of thy brow!
Twenty nine years later
1773
Cruel and angry face,
Hateful and heavy with wine,
Where are the gladness, the grace,
The beauty, the mirth that were thine?
Busy about the Wrong Thing
Ah, my prince, it were well
Hadst thou to the gods been dear,
To have fallen where Keppoch fell,
With the war-pipe loud in thine ear!
To have died with never a stain
On the fair White Rose of Renown,
To have fallen, fighting in vain,
For, thy father, thy faith, and thy crown!
No, we cannot accuse ourselves of idleness, but we may have been busy about the wrong thing. We have been given a man to keep and if we have lost him, all our achievements, however splendid, are worse than useless.
Mark 8:36 (KJV)
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
Mark 8:36: For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his life [in the eternal kingdom of God]?
There are three important senses in which, in the rush and preoccupation of our modern life, we are in danger of losing the man given to us to keep. And first I place the eternal sense. For this man given us to keep, whom each of us calls "Myself" is an immortal being. He is a special creation of God. An animal to his body, he is "Theopneustos" -- God breathed -- as to his essential being. He is the "offspring" of the Eternal Father. He lives in a universe the final basis of which is moral and spiritual, not material. He cannot escape from that universe if he would. He must meet God, and must meet Him on the one single issue -- his personal treatment of the Son of God.
Furthermore, this man who was given us to keep is the raw material out of which the renewing spirit makes sons of God by the marvel of the new birth. That is the true destiny of the man given us to keep. Made a little lower than the angels, his destiny, in the divine plan, and the divine desire, is far above the angels in an eternal oneness with God Himself. For that reason he has been made capable of infinite perfection, infinite bliss.
At God’s right hand -- where the man given us to keep belongs -- are pleasures forevermore. Pleasures of the senses purified of sin; pleasures of the intellect, emancipated from fleshly limitations; pleasures of the soul beyond description or conception. But along with this infinite capacity of enjoyment, the man given us to keep has an infinite capacity of suffering. If he turns from the felicities of manhood made holy, he must endure the woes of manhood made devilish. It is for you and me to say which of these eternal destinies, the man given us to keep shall have. What have we chosen?
Busy about the Wrong Thing
We may lose the man given us to keep in an important personal sense. He is susceptible of all but illimitable development. He has an intellectual capacity to receive knowledge, to reason upon that knowledge, to light the flame of imagination, to commune with the sages and the seers, to enter -- humbly it may be, at their feet -- the society of thinkers, poets, of statesmen and philanthropists who have enlarged the empire of the mind and filled it with the most intellectual delights.
The man given us to keep has an emotional nature capable of love, of friendship, of the holy family relationships. He may live in spheres of love or hate. He may love nobly or ignobly. He may fill this capacity of his with heaven or hell. What have we done with him? Have we taught him to live greatly, even though obscurely; or to live basely, even though conspicuously? Have we made of him a wise man or a fool? Have you noticed that the man that Jesus Christ called a fool was a most successful man, as the world counts success? He was a man who had much goods, enough money for years, laid up; but he was a fool because he invited his soul to live on these things.
Finally there is another sense in which we may lose the man given us to keep. We may teach him to center his life energies and capacities upon himself, and so, whatever we may have taught him to call himself, make of him a pagan. For just as truly as Jesus Christ brought a new life into the world and opened the door of it to all who will trust him, just as surely did He bring a new philosophy of life. Before Christ, religion consisted in certain sacrifices and in personal affection for God. Life then was hoarded. But the religion which Jesus Christ declares to be "pure" is ---
James 1:27 (KJV)
"To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world."
James 1:27: External religious worship (religion as it is expressed in outward acts) that is pure and unblemished in the sight of God the Father is this: to visit and help and care for the orphans and widow in their affliction and need, and to keep oneself unspotted and uncontaminated from the world.
Have we made the man, given to us to keep, clean, brave and knightly in all unselfish service? Have we developed him along the lines of his varied capacity? Above all, have we brought him into right relations with Jesus Christ?
