Penetrating Questions from George Eddy - Part I

September 12, 2008 – 5:15 pm

In a message delivered at the Sixth International Convention of the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM) for Foreign Missions in Rochester, NY, 1910, George Sherwood Eddy challenged college students and professors about their personal fellowship with Christ.

The message was entitled “Is Our Christianity Worth Propagating?” He clarified the title by stating “not, is Christianity [italics his] worth propagating? We have no doubt as to that; but, is our Christianity worth propagating? Have I a salvation that is worth passing on?” He proposed five questions that each conference attendee ought to ask themselves, and we would be the better for contemplating as well.

Each question and clarification will be submitted as separate posts in the future, with the intention that these admonitions from a saint of old will edify the reader.

Question One: What am I before God?

What am I before God? What am I in personality? My life is my message. We are epistles, known and read of all men. Whether at home or abroad, men will not come in large numbers to our churches, they will not read our Bibles; but they read our lives. What is my life? When God wished to save the world it was not through a miracle, through a book, through a mass of work, through a teaching; it was through the revelation of a personality. Born in an obscure Roman province, less than three years in public life, He left not a written word, and no elaborate organization. All He left were twelve personalities, in whom He could reveal and repeat His life. But the world was changed.

If there were not a Christian beside the delegates to the Rochester Convention, we could go out and win the world if we would let Him pour His life through us, if we would allow Christ to live in us the rest of our days. What am I, naked and laid open before the eyes of Him with whom we have to do? “Not on the vulgar mass called work is judgment passed.” Not, what do men think I am? Not, what is my office or profession, but what am I before God? Am I a growing man? Would I be willing to retain the personal habits that I have today? I am what I am becoming day by day; in my thoughts, in what I love, in what I choose. The old psychology said, “A man does what he is.” The new psychology says, “A man is what he does.” Do, overcome now, and all life is changed. Unless we choose to go back to lower levels, we can forever be what we become today.

These short four years of college, what are they for but to mould [sic] personality? Am I realizing this purpose? “Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my thoughts, and see if there be any wicked way in me.”

The above excerpt is derived from the volume Students and the Present Missionary Crisis, which is the complete record of all messages delivered at the 1910 SVM Rochester Convention. The volume is public domain. The book is also available online.

Unfortunately, Eddy waned in his zeal for foreign missions following World War I, during which he was present in Europe as a secretary for the YMCA. He emerged from the war a pacifist and socialist, and spent the rest of his life in contradiction to the burning message he proclaimed at the 1910 convention. This ought to be a reminder to us to keep the gospel primary in our ministries and guard ourselves from the philosophies of this world’s culture bent on our destruction. (Read more on Eddy’s excellent beginning and tragic ending.)