Ethics Quotes Worth Saving
Ethics Quotes Worth Saving
From W. W. Adams, in an often-preached sermon on "Jesus, Minister and Redeemer.
Let me tell you about Leonard C. Broughton. It was my privilege to be with him a week at Frederick, Maryland, within less than a year of his death. I do not know how many of you knew Leonard G. Broughton, the founder of the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Atlanta. I did love to hear him preach in evangelistic services. I was the Bible expositor in the morning sessions. We slept in the same room. About the end of the week he said, "Adams, I have been listening to you; you are right."
I had been talking about Jesus among men. He said, "I have a story to tell you out of my own life that gathers up all you have taught.
Some years ago in Atlanta, in August, in a little suburban area, just taken into the city where all the city services had not yet reached, typhoid fever broke out. Somebody found typhoid germs in the water. Four people had died. It was talked about; it got in the headlines; but nothing was done.
Saturday, the city authorities met and discussed it; but nothing was done. It was their responsibility because the area had been taken into the city. But at the same meeting, $15,000 was voted to pave the street in front of the home of one of the big city politicians who knew how to pull wires.
It was too much for Dr. Broughton. He called up city hail and said, "I want two of your men in my church tomorrow morning."
It came time to read the scripture. He said, "You have come (big audience) to hear me preach on a certain subject (it had been announced in the papers). I am asking you to let me keep that till next Sunday." Then he prepared to address this situation and said, "I want to show you the Word of God." For fifty minutes he opened up the Old and New Testaments, showing how God, who made all the world, all the things and all the laws, our bodies as well as our spirits, wants us to live fully, wholly, completely. He is just as anxious for people to have good water to drink as he is to have them go to prayer meeting. He said before he was half through, those two people from Atlanta`s City Hall whom he had seen come in, were trying to hide behind the people in front of them.
When the benediction was over he stepped down in front, and then he said, "For one hour they gripped my hand, people with tears running down their faces, saying, `Thank you for speaking for God and for us."` That is not the point.
The next morning, before ten o`clock, money was voted, and in thirty-six hours the plague was stopped. But that is not the point. He said, `Adams, in the next three months, I baptized 75 people, and nearly every one of them said, `Pastor, what got us interested first in you and your church and your Christ is the fact that you helped some people get some good water to drink. That kind of God and Christ, who can really meet all our needs, is the Christ we want.
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Acceptance of responsibility for involvement in the world of citizenship is in the tradition of daily cross-bearing to which Christ has always called his followers. With George Fielden MacLeod, "I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles but on a cross between two thieves; on the town garbage-heap; at a crossroad so cosmopolitan that they had to write his title in Hebrew and in Latin and in Greek (or shall we say in English, in Bantu and in Afrikaans?); at the kind of place where cynics talk smut, and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. Because that is where He died. And that is what He died about. And that is where churchmen should be and what churchman-ship should be about." (Only One Way Left, Glasgow: The Iona Community, 1956, p. 38.)
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Emil Brunner introduced his book, The Divine Imperative, which he called a "Protestant Ethic," with this declaration: "The question, `What ought we to do?` the great question of humanity, is the entrance to the Christian Faith; none can evade it who wish [es] to enter the sanctuary. But it is also the gate through which one passes out of the sanctuary again, back into life." [Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1947), p. 9.
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Facing the institutionalized unrighteousness of Adolf Hitler`s Nazi evil, Karl Barth in 1938 voiced this prophetic challenge: …..Let the Church… look and see whether she is not now.., compromising herself with the Devil, to whom no ally is dearer than a Church, so absorbed in caring for her good reputation and clean garments, that she keeps eternal silence, is eternally meditating, eternally discussing, eternally neutral, a Church so troubled about the transcendence of the Kingdom of God – a thing which isn`t really so easy to menace! – that she has become a dumb dog. This is just the thing which must not take place today." (The Church and the Political Problem of Our Day, New York: Charles Scribner`s Sons, 1939), p. 21.)
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The early church was beautifully baptized in the righteousness of God so that one unknown historian could write, probably between A.D. 130 and 200:
Christians are not distinguished from the rest of mankind either in locality or in speech or in customs. For they dwell not somewhere in cities of their own, neither do they use some different language… . But while they dwell in cities of Greeks and barbarians as the lot of each is cast, and follow the native customs in dress and food and the other arrangements of life, yet the Constitution of their own citizenship, which they set forth, is marvelous, and confessedly contradicts expectation. They dwell in their own countries, but only as sojourners; they bear their share in all things as citizens, and they endure all hardships as strangers. Every foreign country is a fatherland to them, and every fatherland is foreign. They marry like all other men and they beget children; but they do not cast away their offspring. They have their meals in common, but not their wives. They find themselves in the flesh, and yet they live not after the flesh. Their existence is on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven. They obey the established laws, and they surpass the laws in their own lives."
Henry Melville Gwatkin, Selections from Early Christian Writers (Westwood, NJ: Fleming H.
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