The first thing was to bring people on to the very centre and to get there at once—­to get men away from the accumulation of occasional and self-directed virtues, from the self-sustained life, from self-acquired righteousness, and to bring them to face the fact of God, to realize the seriousness of God and of life, and to see God.  When he preached self-denial, he did not mean the modern virtue of self-denial with all its pettinesses, but a genuine negation of self, a total forgetfulness of self by having the mind set entirely on God and God’s purposes, a readjustment of everything with God as the real centre of all.  This is always difficult; it is not less difficult where the conception of God is, as it was with Jesus, entirely spiritual.  The whole experience of mankind was against the idea that there could be a religion at all without priest, sacrifice, altar, temple, and the like.  There is a very minimum of symbol and cult in the teaching of Jesus—­so little that the ancient world thought the Christians were atheists, because they had no image, no temple, no sacrifice, no ritual, nothing that suggested religion in the ordinary sense of the word.  We shall realize the difficulty of what Jesus was doing when we grasp that he meant people to see God independently of all their conventional aids.  To lead them to commit themselves in act to God on such terms was a still more difficult thing.  To believe in God in a general sort of way, to believe in Providence at large, is a very different thing from getting yourself crucified in the faith that God cares for you, and yet somehow wishes you to endure crucifixion.  How far will men commit themselves to God?  Jesus means them to commit themselves to God right up to the hilt—­as Bunyan put it, “to hazard all for God at a clap.”  Decision for God, obedience to God, that is the prime thing—­action on the basis of God and of God’s care for the individual.

His purpose that this shall not be merely the religion of choice spirits or of those immediately around him, but shall be the one religion of all the world, makes the task still vaster.  He means not merely to touch the Jews.  Whether he says so in explicit terms or not, it is implied in all that he says and does, that the new movement should be far wider than anything the world had ever seen; it was to cover the whole of mankind.  He meant that every individual in all the world should have the centre of gravity of his thinking shifted.

Again, he had to think of a re-creation of the language of men, till God should be a new word.  Our constant problem is to give his word his value, his meaning.  He meant that men should learn their religious vocabulary again, till the words they used should suggest his meanings to their minds.  Something of this was achieved, when some of his disciples came to him and said:  “Teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples” (Luke 11:1).  Further, he had to secure that men should begin the rethinking