Equally sad is the case of Elijah, that grandest of men, as I may truly call him. You see him in his grandeur as he cries “Take the prophets of Baal; let not one of them escape;” and as he brings them down to the brook Kishon and slays them there, and then as he goes to the top of Carmel and prays till the rain descends upon the parched land. Yet after the excitement is over he is afraid of a woman, Jezebel, and the great Elias shrinks down into a frightened man who runs away and cries, “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am not better than my fathers.” So you see that “the fear of man bringeth a snare” even to the best of men; it drags them down from their high places and hurls them into the dust. Therefore may God preserve us from it!
The fear of man keeps some believers in very dubious positions. I have known some believers remain where they knew they were not doing right, and where every day they were dragging a heavy chain behind them because they had not the moral courage to come straight out for God. If any of you young people who love the Lord want to go the easiest way to heaven—you know that all ways there are rough, but if you want to go the easiest way, take that which looks the hardest; namely, be an out-and-out thorough-going Christian. “But that will cost me much,” says one. It will at first, but it will be the more easy for you afterwards; whereas if you begin by giving way to the world a little—trimming a little— you will have to give way and trim more and more. A Christian should be like a steamer that goes straight away to the port it is intended to reach; but many professors are like sailing vessels; the motive power that controls them is outside of them, so they have to tack a good deal; and though they may ultimately get to their destination, there is a good deal of queer sailing to the right and to the left and their voyage takes a very long while. I hope you, dear friends, will go straight to your mark. “Trust in God and do the right;” and this will after all be the very smoothest path that you can follow.
Further, the fear of man hampers the usefulness of a great many. There are brethren who ought to be preaching, but who are not because they are afraid of men; and some who ought to go and visit the poor, but they say that they cannot; the reason is that they are afraid of men. Why, I have known some who were afraid even to give away a tract; they were as much alarmed as though they had to put their hand into a tiger’s mouth. I have known some who were afraid to speak to their own children about their souls. Is it not strange that they can speak to other people’s children about their souls better than they can to their own? It should not be so; in fact, there is nobody living that any one of us, if he is a Christian, has any right to be afraid of. We shall never do good to people if we are afraid of them. What would have become of the Church of God if the apostles had been such timid, gentle Christians as some whom I know? They would not have gone out to preach in the streets, and as there were no chapels and churches then, they would not have preached at all. As soon as Caesar promulgated an edict that they were not to meet on the first day of the week, they would have said, “Perhaps we had better not meet.” When they heard that the crowds shouted in the amphitheatre, “Christians to the lions!” they would have said, “We must not expose ourselves to such a risk, and we must think of our wives and families;” and so they would have been cowards, and soon there would have been no Christianity left in the world. Just imagine what would have happened if the Reformers had acted thus. Suppose Martin Luther had said, “I shall do as that old monk advised me when I consulted him. He said, ‘Martin, go back to thy cell and live thou there near to thy God, and leave the Church and the world alone.’” If Luther had followed that advice, where would the blessed Reformation have been, and what preaching of the gospel would there have been at this present moment?
I must not continue much longer upon this part of my subject, but I must say that to a minister of Christ the fear of man is one of the worst of snares. Jonah tried to escape from going to Nineveh because he was afraid of man. The Galatians could not bear the full light of the gospel, and therefore certain teachers among them tried to shut off some of its beams; and if a minister of Christ once begins to be afraid of his hearers, his tendency will be to withhold some doctrine through fear of a wealthy subscriber, or to keep back some rebuke for fear that it should bear too hardly upon an influential person in his congregation. There is one sin which I believe I have never committed; I think that I have never been afraid of any of you, and I hope by the grace of God that I never shall be. If I dare not speak the truth upon all points and dare not rebuke sin, what is the good of me to you? Yet I have heard sermons which seemed to me to have been made to the order of the congregation. But honest hearers want honest preaching; and if they find that the preachers message comes home to them, they thank God that it is so. They say “Is it not right that it should be so? If we err, should not the Word of God which is quick and powerful, search us, and try us, and find out our errors?” And the preacher, if he really preaches the truth as it is in Jesus, must often deal out rebuke as well as encouragement. May God deliver all his ministers from the fear of man everywhere, and the whole Church of Christ too! At one time the fear of man took this form —the geologists had discovered that Moses was mistaken, and that God did not know how he had made the world! Many seemed to think that something dreadful had happened, and they wondered how those objectors were to be answered. Soon after that, somebody discovered that God was mistaken about having made Adam and Eve, for they gradually developed from oysters or some smaller creatures still! Then again there was a great outcry, “Who is to answer these eminent philosophers?” O, Church of God, is every drivelling fool to have any answer at all? Stand fast by the inspired Word, and be not ensnared by the fear of man. We have seen scores of systems of philosophy come and go, and we shall probably see as many more before we die. Our business is just to stand fast to the truth of revelation, and let philosophies die as the frogs of Egypt died in the days of Moses; for die they will, and when fresh hordes come they also will die, but the eternal truth of the ever-blessed God will never die—it will live on in its own glorious immortality.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
