Do you ask how that can be?  It is time that I tried to tell you, tried to tell how one may be full of life and yet be free from the pride of life.  That question must somehow be answered, or else the world will be condemned to choose forever between an arrogant prosperity and a salvation by misery, distress and disaster, by death.  What do we need for the salvation of a prosperous life?  The answer in one word is consecration.  Consecration, that is what we need.  There have been men in whom life seemed complete who have yet walked very humbly.  They had no pride of life.  And why?  Because always before them and above them there stood some great principle, some idea, some duty to which their life belonged, not to themselves.  All work is modest, all idle self-contemplation is vain.  And what the young man needs with his vague aspirations and conceits is to make himself the servant of some worthy purpose.  And what the merchant needs with his growing business is to count himself the steward of some worthy Master.  And what the student needs with his active mind is to trace the footsteps of the God of wisdom in the path he walks and to count the reaching nearer to Him, the true prize and object of all thinking.  Consecration!  We are proud of life because we do so little with it.  It is as if the bearer of dispatches sat down calmly and boasted of the well-made box in which they had been given to him, and never bore them to their destination.  Life is force, to be transmitted and delivered to a purpose and an end.  It loses its true nature and sweetness, it corrupts into pride, when it is robbed of its true purpose and cherished only for itself.

We can find our example of the consecrated man wherever we see true lives lived in history or about us now, in the Bible or in common life.  Moses, David, Paul!  But why look at the poor, imperfect copies when in our Lord Himself we have the consummate human life clothed in the wondrous humility of His appointed work.  The life of lives! and yet was ever any life so utterly free from the tawdry pride that makes our poor achievements so wretched and unsatisfying.  You say He cut Himself off from all that men are proud of.  Not so.  He gave up house and home, but he carried about with Him always the devotion of the people, the mystery of unknown power and the consciousness of great work and influence, the very things that have always seduced the best men most and in their highest labors made them proud.  You say He was divine and so could not be humble.  Yes, but He was profoundly human also, and humility is not subserviency or meanness.  It is a grace not unworthy of, nay, necessary to, even the perfect humanity.  But one thing stands out always:  His was the consecrated life.  It was all given to its purpose.  “He was called Jesus because he should save his people from their sins.”  “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” “Behold we go up to Jerusalem and the Son of Man shall be betrayed.”  “To this end was I born and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.”  Everywhere the consecration, a life appointed to an end, the face set to Jerusalem, the hands and feet waiting for the cross!  Meanwhile it was the fullest life, but lived so high that the “pride of life” lay all below under His feet and out of sight.