CHRIST AND THE GOSPEL OF THE WORKSHOP

[nChrist]

CHRIST AND THE GOSPEL OF THE WORKSHOP
by J. C. Ryle - Written about 1877

"Is not this the carpenter's son? " --  Matthew 13:55.

"Is not this the carpenter?" Mark 6:3 -

"Nazareth, where He had been brought up." Luke 4:16.

From these and other passages we learn that our blessed Lord spent the greater part, probably the first thirty years, of His earthly life at Nazareth; for He there followed His reputed father's trade; and that He was commonly known as "the Carpenter," and "the Carpenter's Son." Nazareth is one of the few places in Palestine which possesses an undisputed identity. The northern side of the central plain of Esdraelon, the battle-field of Palestine, the scene of Gideon's defeat of the Midianites, of Barak's defeat of Sisera, of Necho's defeat of Josiah, and, in later days, of Napoleon's, or rather Kleber's defeat of the Turks, is bounded by a lofty limestone cliff, many hundred feet in height. From the summit of this cliff, and at right angles to it, runs a long shallow valley, such as is often seen in the chalk formations of our southern counties; and on the western slope of this valley, at a distance of from one to two miles from the cliff, lies the modern village, or small town, of en-Nazirah, the unquestioned representative of the ancient Nazareth. The little valley is fertile, filled with cornfields, gardens, and fruit-trees; the familiar hollyhock is there, and hedges of wild cactus. From the surrounding hills a magnificent view is obtained, almost unequalled in a country which, small in extent and varied in outline, is peculiarly rich in scenes of surpassing beauty. To the north are seen the spurs of the Lebanon ranges, with the snowy height of Mount Hermon standing out as a sentinel and keeping watch over the land; to the east may be traced the depression of the Lake of Galilee and the Jordan Valley; whilst near at hand is the conical Tabor, and beyond it the dark range of the trans-Jordan mountains; Mount Carmel rises to the westward, with glimpses here and there of the Mediterranean Sea; whilst to the south stretches the fertile plain of Esdraelon, and far away the hills of Samaria and Southern Palestine.

In this secluded village the Saviour spent the greater part of His earthly existence. The scenes which met His eye, and with which for thirty years He was familiar, were probably much the same as those which present themselves to the eye of the modern traveller; the view which I have just referred to must have been one upon which He often gazed, and in the unchanging East it is thus not difficult to reproduce in imagination some of the leading features of the private life of the Son of God.

My subject, however, limits me to one section of that life, the time passed and the work wrought in the workshop at Nazareth. What teachings come forth from that obscure abode; what lessons may be learned from our Lord's life as "the Carpenter"? Perhaps we may state the thesis thus: -- The Carpenter's shop at Nazareth, the Workshop of the Gospel: the Gospel which came forth from it, the Gospel of the Workshop.
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[nChrist]

CHRIST AND THE GOSPEL OF THE WORKSHOP
by J. C. Ryle - Written about 1877

I. -- THE WORKSHOP OF THE GOSPEL.

Of course, strictly speaking, the Gospel did not come forth from the workshop of Nazareth. It sprang from a far higher source. It formed part of "the everlasting purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations of the world were laid) He hath constantly decreed by His counsel, secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation' those whom He hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation, as vessels made to honour" (Art. xvii.). The Gospel was no afterthought, devised to meet an unexpected contingency; no plan of deliverance suddenly invented to counteract the unlooked-for consequences of the Fall. There are no unforeseen contingencies in the government of God. " Known unto Him are all His works from the beginning of the world." The counsels of the Most High ran from eternity; but when they came within the sphere of time, and the mighty drama began to unroll itself, then in a very true sense the workshop of Nazareth became the workshop of the Gospel. The august personality of Jesus Christ is the centre of the Gospel; nay, rather, it is the Gospel. Christ is Christianity; and the life of Christ, as lived by Him upon earth, is a prime factor in the great scheme of redemption. Thus the unfolding, the training, the perfecting of that life enters largely into the essence of the Gospel, and it is important to ascertain where and how that life received its development.

Certainly, if we had been told beforehand that the Son of God was to take man's nature, and in that nature to pass thirty-three years upon earth, we should not have selected the Galilean workshop as His home during the larger, or indeed any, portion of that period. We might have thought perhaps of the palace of kings, or, more likely still, of His Father's Temple at Jerusalem, the presumed abode of learning and of piety, as the least unseemly resting places for the incarnate Son; but the boldest imagination, the wildest fancy, would never have assigned to the Son of God the humble calling of a carpenter, or have ventured to suggest a village shop as the fitting abode of Deity. Such, however, were the circumstances under which the life of the Lord Jesus unfolded itself. The fact is referred to quite casually in the Gospels, it was indeed only owing to the perplexity of the rude villagers of Nazareth that it was mentioned at all; but the fact stands recorded, and is so recorded for our learning. It is a very simple but a very instructive fact, that by far the greater part of our Lord's earthly life was passed in the workshop of Nazareth.

Of the inferences to be drawn from this fact, I select one: one which meets, I think, a not uncommon difficulty in the spiritual life.
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[nChrist]

CHRIST AND THE GOSPEL OF THE WORKSHOP
by J. C. Ryle - Written about 1877

It is often felt by very earnest Christians that the exalted and heavenly life to which Christianity calls us is inconsistent with the plain prosaic life to which we commonly stand pledged. The true Christian is invested with the high privileges of Divine adoption; he lives in mystical union with the Son of God; he is a temple of the Holy Ghost; his citizenship is in heaven; his affection is to be set on things above; his life is hid with Christ in God. Such is the ideal, such is the true life of a real Christian. But where and how is this life. to be passed? In the sanctuary of God; in the chamber of prayer; in the solitude of the desert? No! Worship is good, prayer is good, solitude is good; but the greater portion of each Christian's life must be spent in the pursuit of a secular calling. In the mart, the office, the field, the workshop, hard, dry, secular facts, innumerable figures, bargains, sales, purchases, manual labour, exhausting toil, fill up the daily lives of many of God's children, and the heavenly life has to be lived amid the noise and dust of the most commonplace earthly existence. But can this be in accordance with the will of God? Can the spiritual life receive its highest development amid such unspiritual surroundings? Must not he who would live the higher, the very highest, life turn his back upon the workshop, and on some Mount of Transfiguration seek to live in habitual communion with God? So have thought some of the noblest of God's Saints, and. have betaken themselves accordingly to the cloister or the desert. So seem to think some ardent Christians in the present day, and, forthwith forsaking their secular calling, they seek as they suppose a purer atmosphere in which to live the consecrated life. But this is not the teaching which comes to us from the workshop of Nazareth. Of course any man may have mistaken his vocation, and after trial and full consideration may feel it right to change it; but not, I conceive, on the grounds too often urged -- that a secular calling is inconsistent with the highest development of the spiritual life. Our Lord's perfect life in the workshop of Nazareth is a standing protest against such an assumption. There He learned obedience; there He maintained uninterrupted communion with His Father in heaven; there He perfectly and ceaselessly did His Father's will; and if amid the humble and uneventful labours of a village shop the Son of God found a fitting sphere for the development of the only faultless life that has ever been lived upon earth, may not we be content that our poor lives should be subjected to the same conditions and nursed in the same homely school?

We find then, I think, in the workshop of Nazareth an answer to those who think lightly of a secular calling. The labour of the hands has there received its highest consecration; there is no inconsistency between the discharge of secular duties and the noblest service -- between a life of manual labour and a life hid with Christ in God.

The carpenter's shop at Nazareth was therefore in a very true sense the workshop of the Gospel; but the Gospel which came forth from it, embodied in the life and teaching, the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, was, emphatically.
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[nChrist]

CHRIST AND THE GOSPEL OF THE WORKSHOP
by J. C. Ryle - Written about 1877

II. -- THE GOSPEL OF THE WORKSHOP

It is here that the Gospel of Christ comes at once into collision with some phases of modern thought, or with what at least claims to represent such thought. We find ourselves in a world in which great inequalities of rank and fortune undoubtedly exist; there are the rich, and there are the poor; and in the extremes on either side there are contrasts painful to witness and impossible to defend. The cause of this state of things is traced by many to bad laws; such inequality, they say, must be swept away at all hazards; all men are equal, equal in their rights, they ought to be equal in their possessions; and laws ought so to be recast as to secure this result. This is the Gospel of many modern reformers; this is the Gospel which is held up as the Gospel for the poor; and a Gospel which appeals so strongly to some of the lower parts of our nature is hailed by many as the true Evangel.

Now this might be a Gospel, if it were not a lie, a cruel misleading lie; based upon a denial of the fundamental facts of human nature, and utterly incapable of raising that nature to a higher level. Social inequality always has existed, and always will and must exist; just because of the physical inequality of man. Place every man upon an equality to-day, and inequality would begin to-morrow; place a hundred men in an island with an absolute equality of possession, and in a week's time the principle of inequality would be in full operation. Skill, industry, thrift, on the one hand would have contended with ignorance, idleness, and waste; the result of the conflict would be at once apparent, and inequality would have become the rule not the exception. You cannot combat these facts; laws cannot reverse them; they lie deep down in the very nature of man, and that is no Gospel which professes to ignore them.

Nor is this teaching only false; it is cruel and misleading; it holds out expectations which can never be realized; for bread it gives a stone, and in place of an egg it offers a scorpion. In great social convulsions the weakest have always suffered the most; the paralysis of social disturbance, which checks the flow of capital, immediately affects the labour market and deprives the poor of employment; it is from the homes of the fatherless and the widow that the cry of destitution first comes forth, and the first effect of this so-called Gospel is to increase and accentuate the evil which it professes to cure.

We claim, then, for the Gospel of the Lord Jesus that it, and it alone, is the Gospel of the workshop, and that for two reasons.
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[nChrist]

CHRIST AND THE GOSPEL OF THE WORKSHOP
by J. C. Ryle - Written about 1877

(1) The Workshop needs the Gospel. -- The working man shares with every member of the human race the heritage of a fallen nature, and for that no healing is found save in the Gospel of Christ. But the cares of life press with special severity upon the working classes. With them there is often a continual struggle for existence; and if their earnings commonly suffice to supply them with daily bread, they live so near the border line which separates them from actual want, that any failure of work, an attack of illness, or any of those changes which in a highly complicated state of society are continually taking place, suffice to render them destitute. Surely then the workshop needs the Gospel; " each man must bear his own burden;" but the burden, the " load" of the working man is often a heavy one, and no one can so well help him to bear it as the great burden-bearer, the Lord Jesus Christ. Without the Gospel, the life of daily toil must always be an anxious one; with it there shall be such compensations as shall sweeten and ennoble it: without the Gospel, the workshop shall at best furnish a provision for the wants of time; with it, it shall prove a training-place for the occupations of eternity.

(2) The Gospel needs the Workshop. -- Truth through personality is the method by which God communicates His will to man; and personality "sanctified in the truth " (John 17:17) is the final product of the Gospel. But, if so, the Gospel needs a field in which to carry out its beneficent design; and that field is commonly found in the life of honest industry. It was so in the case of our blessed Lord. The only perfect life that has ever been lived upon earth was mainly passed, not in the abode of learned leisure, not in the solitude of the desert, not even in the Temple of God, but in a village shop. The Gospel made use of a workshop in which to mould and perfect the human character of its Founder; it was there that the Lord Jesus was trained for His great work; nor did He quit it until He entered upon the final stage of His earthly ministry. Christ has thus by His example consecrated the field of honest labour as a fitting training-place for heaven; there, in the fullest sense of the word, His servants may serve Him; there,- in the letter no less than in the spirit, they may follow the example and conform to the image of their risen Lord.

In the workshop of Nazareth, therefore, we may thus perhaps find an answer to some of the pressing social questions of the day. Christianity is a social religion, designed to work a social revolution, to raise and purify the social condition of mankind; but it does so, not by destroying society, but by regenerating it; not by reducing every member of the body politic to the dead level of uniformity, but by teaching each member to do aright the work that belongs to him; not by preaching revolution and seeking to roll back the world into chaos, but by establishing in men's hearts those principles of truth, righteousness, and love, which, just so far as they prevail, turn this fallen world of ours into a paradise. And Jesus Christ laid the foundation for this beneficent work when He lived the greater portion of His life as a labouring man; when, beginning at the bottom of the social scale, He accepted and ennobled a life of manual toil; when, renouncing the countless sources of supply that were open to Him, He earned His daily bread in the workshop of Nazareth.

Nor do we find in this homely example an answer only to some of our modern social difficulties; we also learn from it how close an alliance may exist between industry and piety, between even the rudest forms of daily labour and the purest aspirations, the highest attainments of the consecrated life. The workshop is a large word. With few, we may say with no, exceptions, every man has his workshop. The merchant, the tradesman, the soldier, the sailor, the statesman, the student, the professional man, each has his field of labour, his workshop in which to carry on his daily toil. And if it be said that some few are exempted from this common lot and may, if they will, spend their days in idleness, I answer that the workshop of the idle man is a scene of unending toil. Rest after labour is sweet, but the "idle man knows no rest; the change to work would be refreshing, but idleness refuses to work; the wheel goes round unceasingly, the door turns ever upon its hinges, the soul of the sluggard desireth and hath nothing.

Given, then, to each of us the workshop in which to carry on the work of life, there need be no collision between the two sides of that life, the human and the Divine. The presence of God may be as truly enjoyed, the love of Christ as truly felt, the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit as truly realized in the workshop as in the sanctuary; nay, it is there that God would have each one of us fight out the battle of life; not shirking duty, not restlessly pursuing change; but whatsoever the hand findeth to do, doing it with our might. And if at times discouraged and cast down, let the thought of that Galilean workshop come to our aid, the thought of Him who laboured on from year to year in patient, uneventful, unrequited toil; nay, rather of Him who has ascended from the workshop of Nazareth to the throne of the universe, and thence dispenses grace to His toilers, to every man according to his need.