How Christ Is Lost
The first answer suggested by the circumstances in the passage before us is that it is done through carelessness. What but heedlessness could have allowed Joseph and Mary to be separated from the Savior? And the same thing today is the explanation when such a trouble befalls the soul. The Scripture expressly urges to watchfulness. It is while the virgins slumbered that the midnight cry was raised; it was while the man slept that his enemy sowed tares in his field. “And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.” (Mark 13:37)
But how does the thing itself happen? What are the steps of this departure?
Christ is lost gradually. God loves us too much to leave us at once. Just as the light of day dies out of the west, so the divine light leaves the soul. There have been tender, gentle warnings enough, but the man absorbed in other things has not regarded them. There were looks and calls with each retiring step of heaven, but they were not noticed or obeyed. The angle of divergence was made in some neglected duty or some persisted-in questionable thing. It was so small a matter, that as a moral angle it would have been called very acute, very minor indeed; but for all that it was a divergence from the straight Christ-like life, and meant that in time the man and his Savior were certain to be parted.
It would be a long period before ships thus sailing would disappear from each other, but that day would come at last, and sweeping the wide sea with a glass the companion vessel could not be found; she had dipped finally beneath the horizon. Thus gradually the soul loses Christ. The instant we cease moving on the parallel of a perfectly consecrated life, the fact of spiritual distance, yea, an ever-widening distance between us and Him—then the final disappearance of Christ out of the heart and life becomes as veritable a reality and as patent to other eyes as the spectacle of the parted ships on this ocean.
It seems that not by one great evil act are men parted from the Lord, but it is by a number of little acts, none of which are very grave and alarming. Just as most people do not get off of a high tower by jumping down from the top, but descending by hundreds of steps to the ground; so the Christian rarely ever brings himself down and away from the presence of Christ by one gross sin. It is by a long line of little things said and done which were unspiritual, objectionable, and reprehensible in an increasing degree that the calamity of a lost Christ takes place. One of the alarm signals hung out in the soul is a protracted spiritual coldness. Instead of going at once into a faithful self-examination and prayerful waiting upon God for help, this signal is made to mean nothing by the statement that “the Christian life is a faith life and not one of feeling.” It is true the life is one of faith, but it is also one of feeling. The Bible says, “The joy of the Lord is your strength,” (Nehemiah 8:10) and Christ said, “These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.” (John 15:11) In the Book of Revelation the fault that the Savior found with a certain church was that it had lost its first love, and in another verse He said He would spew a lukewarm church out of His mouth (Revelation 2:4, 3:16). A protracted spiritual coldness means that Christ is leaving, and we should at once fly to Him and wait on Him until the clear assurance of His presence is restored.
Another way that Christ is lost by the Christian is by getting the eye off Christ and resting it on church work. This is what happened to the Jews. With all their boasted love of the Lord they let the Temple and Temple work come in between them and the Holy One. Devoted to the Temple, they killed the Lord of the Temple. How busy they were when Jesus stood in their midst silently contemplating them! There was no end to religious ceremonies, the victims were being slain by thousands, the smoke of incense was rising, the priests and Levites were regular in their duties, the Scribes and Pharisees were fasting twice a week and saying long prayers; and yet in the midst of it all, Jesus saw spiritual death, and said that the outside was as fair as a glistening marble sepulchre, but inside was corruption and dead men’s bones (Matthew 23:27).
The thought is fearful that we can get the eye off of Christ while abounding in His work. That we can lose Him at the altars of Jerusalem and in the Temple. That loaded down with church work, writing business letters, attending Board and committee meetings, keeping the church books and passing around the collection basket, we can become so absorbed in these things as to utterly lose Christ.
The most motionless people spiritually I have ever known have been men and women who belonged to a dozen different church Boards and Societies. They had got their eyes off the Savior and on their work and become spiritually petrified. This was what had happened to the steward and his wife of whom I spoke. He was the president of the Board of Stewards, and his wife was the President of the Ladies Aid Society and prominent in other church work, and yet both had lost Christ. While running around in the name of Jesus they lost Him, and they lost Him in the Temple.
This was what had occurred to the preacher I told you about. He said to me with a countenance full of pain, “I cannot tell you how it happened; but I was preaching, visiting, and attending to all my work when suddenly I woke up to the fact that I had lost the Savior.” The explanation was that the eyes insensibly were taken from Jesus and placed on His work.
In a certain large religious denomination there was a preacher greatly gifted in intellect and administrative power. He was chosen at once to preside over church assemblies, and he was speedily thrust to the front as a leader in all church business of great moment. He soon became absorbed in the multifarious duties of his position. He began to think he could not be spared from the world and church, when in the midst of it all he was laid upon his deathbed. A preacher, in speaking to him about his spiritual condition, was first surprised and then alarmed at his evasive replies. Becoming still more concerned as he saw the state of the dying man, he took a second preacher into his confidence, and together they visited and prayed with him. To their amazement they found that the man before them, while busied in the Temple, had lost Christ. “As thy servant was busy here and there, he was gone.” Day after day these two servants of God conversed, prayed and labored with this man, who had become so great in church affairs and so little in grace divine. After a week’s faithful work with him, the man said a little while before death that he was reconciled to go. He was saved, but saved as by fire (1 Corinthians 3:15).
I believe if we knew how many men and women prominent in the church, how many ushers who are smilingly seating the congregation every Sunday, how many Sunday-school teachers and members of the choir and preachers in the pulpit have lost Christ out of their hearts, the world would be horrified. We do not mean that they are living immoral lives, but they have been more loyal to church work than to Jesus, and the jealous God is grieved and gone. The dark and sad countenances we often see in the pew, choir and pulpit confirm what I say.
It is never to be forgotten that it is easier to attend windy Board and Society meetings in the name of the Lord than to spend the same hour alone on the knees with Christ. There is much pastoral visiting called the work of the Lord that amounts to nothing. It is easier to pay a social visit than to wait with groanings on the Lord. The jealous God sees how much work undertaken in His name deserves not the name and is simply a sop thrown out to ease conscience.
It is happening today as much as in the times of the Scribes and Pharisees that the Temple is put in the place of the Lord; the House and its services are exalted and the Lord of the House is set aside. Today some of the most active church workers have the most superficial experience; and some have none, having lost it all by placing the work above Christ, and the Temple above the Lord of the Temple.