The Cedar Christian
From Words of Cheer for Christian Pilgrims
By Theodore Cuyler, 1896
Strolling one bright summer morning over the velvet carpet of Chatsworth Park, we came suddenly upon a cedar of Lebanon. It was the first and only one we ever saw - this lone representative of the most regal family of trees upon the globe. Every bough was laden with glorious association to us. Broad, gnarled, rough old tree as it was - yet it blossomed with poetry and hung golden with heavenly teachings. As we gazed through our tears at the exiled sovereign, the voice of the psalmist was in our ears, "The righteous shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon."
With that hardy veteran of Chatsworth in our mind's eye, let us say a word about the kind of cedar Christians that we need in our day. Of pliant, willow church-members; of brash and brittle basswood professors; of pretentious, fashion-following, bay-tree Christians - we have quite too many. Give us more cedars for the pulpit and for the pews!
1. The first quality of the cedar, is that it GROWS. It is a live tree. Where there is hearty life - there must be growth. And it is the lamentable lack of inward godliness, which makes the stunted professor. There is not vitalizing sap enough in his heart-roots to reach up into the boughs of his outward conduct. There is not vigor enough in the trunk of his character, to stand erect. No answering showers brought down by fervent prayer, cleanse the dust of worldliness from his yellow, sicklied leaves.
There he is - just as he set out in the church a score of years ago; no larger, no broader, no brighter in graces than he was then! The caterpillars of lust have spun their unsightly webs all over his branches. He has not grown an inch - in any one Bible trait. He has not yielded one single fruit of the Spirit. He is a cumberer of the ground - fit only to be cut down. He is all the while drinking up God's pure air and water - and yet fulfilling Satan's purpose! Not of such a prayer-neglecting professor, not of such a time-serving, money-loving, fashion-worshiping professor, could we honestly say, "He grows like a cedar in Lebanon."
2. But the cedar not only grows; it has a peculiar style of growth which God's people may well imitate. It grows through all weathers. It is a hardy tree, or else it could not live a month in the arctic climate of Lebanon's sky-piercing summits. Delicate plants might thrive on the warm lap of southern exposures - but not up among the rifts of whirling snows, or where the steel-like air gleams under the silent moon. Sudden hurricanes may twist off the gorgeous magnolias of the valley, or crack the brittle bay-tree - but let the gale rage ever so fiercely on Lebanon's blustering heights, let the snow-squadrons join battle - the cedar tosses the tempest from its elastic boughs, and stands firm like the everlasting mountain under it.
In God's Church there are to be found just such hearty characters, storm-proof, money-proof, temptation-proof. What a plantation of such cedars were the early apostles! What a coronet of stalwart storm -defiers graced the summit of God's Zion in Reformation days! John Knox, who never feared the face of man; burly Latimer, who marched singing to Smithfield's kindled stake; John Huss, gazing up into the open heavens from the suffocating smoke and flame which are wrapping his tortured limbs - all these were cedars through whose branches the very gales of persecution made glorious music.
Here and there - is such a cedar Christian discoverable in our century. They never bend. They never break. They never compromise. To such Christians, worldliness comes, and smooth-tongued expediency comes, and sensual pleasure comes - but "finds nothing in them." Hurricanes come down amain upon them - but the cedar of principle proves an overmatch for the blast of selfishness, worldliness, or power. Persecution only makes the roots of resolution strike the deeper, and the trunk of testimony stand the firmer.
3. The greatest peril to such Christians as read these lines, will not come in the form of persecution - but rather from those secret influences which are the most fatal in the every-day life of the professor. There is a whole colony of busy insects which will test the quality of a believer's timber.
Insidious worms gnaw out the very heart of the pretended piety of the false professor. When the community is shocked by the scandalous sin of some prominent man in the church - it is only the crack of a beam which was worm-eaten by secret sin long before!
He alone is a cedar of Christ's training and polishing - who is sound to the very core! For the cedar was famous for its solidity of wood. It knew no decay. It afforded no asylum to any stealthy insect - which turned its aromatic wood into dust and ashes. Therefore did Israel's royal temple-builder select it for the most conspicuous and important portions of the edifice on Mount Moriah. With its fine grain, its high polish, and delightful fragrance, every lintel and every door-post was at once a strength and an ornament to the temple of the living God. So stand the faithful, fearless minister of Christ, the incorruptible Christian layman, the unflinching testimony-bearer for the truth as it is in Jesus. They bid defiance to the worm of sin while they live, and to the worm of calumny when they are dead. Centuries hence their memory will be as sound and as fragrant as the chests of sandal-wood in which the Oriental kings were accustomed to conceal their treasures.
4. The last noticeable thing with the cedar is its breadth of limb. The verdant veteran of Chatsworth had a diameter of branches, greater than his height. Elliot informs us that he saw cedars on the top of Lebanon that were thirty feet in circumference of trunk! Their limbs were so wide-spreading that the diameter of the branches from the extreme of one side of the tree to the opposite extreme was one hundred feet! Under that majestic canopy a whole regiment might find shelter. Now, we need not go far to find just such a broad-armed Christian. Broad in his sympathy with all the "faithful in Christ Jesus" of every sect; broad in his love of man, irrespective of climate, color, or condition; broad in his financial benevolence, is our cedar brother. Hundreds of happy beneficiaries lie down under the shadow of his liberality. The poor scholar whom he helps with books, the poor orphan whom he helps to a home, the poor harlot and the drunkard for whom he builds the asylum, the poor sin-struck heathen man of far-away India to whom he sends the "good tidings," are, each and all, the richer for his broad-limbed beneficence.
There is room for regiments of sufferers to encamp under such a man. It will make a sore and sorrowful void - when that imperial cedar is transplanted to the banks of the crystal river in the Paradise of God!
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