BUILDING FOR PEACE

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 881, 27 January 1930, Page 14

BUILDING FOR PEACE

PURPOSE OF NAVAL CONFERENCE SERMON AT AVONDALE The Rev. C. B. Jordan, M.A., 8.D., who preached in the Avondale Methodist Church last evening, took for hi 3 text Ezra vi„ 14. The preacher described how the Jews came to rebuild the temple at Jerusalem after their long exile in Babylon. The date was about 520 B.C. About 18 years before this the foundation of the temple had been laid, but, owing to the interference of their Samaritan neighbours, the work had soon ceased, and the poor Jews had been too much occupied with the mere struggle for existence to make much effort or sacrifice over the building of God’s house. Their enemies had supposed that the; recent activity of the Jews was only a step toward a war of rebellion against Persia. Instead of that, however, they had been really building a peace edifice. The preacher then made reference to his Majesty’s speech at the opening of the Five-Powers Naval Conference. The world had hitherto been spending its resources in trying to keep the nations froir. destroying one another. As with the Jews, so had it been with the nations, a mere struggle for existence. Self-preserva-tion had been the last law of nature as well as the first. The cultivation of science and art, industry and agriculture, and above all of education and religion had hitherto taken a comparatively subordinate place. The great unemployment trouble had been a particularly palpable instance of neglect. “Something very much analgous to this has been going on in church life up to the present owing to our sectarian divisions,” said the preacher. “The energies and resources of Christians have largely been spent on the mere maintenance of their particular branch of the church, which with most has been a hard struggle. The inroads which the church had made on the world of selfishness and evil had been consequently far less than they otherwise would have been. “The majority of people iu our time did not take our beautiful, wonderful, healing, life-saving Gospel seriously. They only half believed it, and that because we had not lived it sufficiently and had not proclaimed it with sufficient force. The colltctionplate aspect of church life had been almost the only aspect the outside world had noticed. As for human characters being transformed—bought over from a life of sin and selfishness to one of purity and love—the world regarded it as either a mere sham or pretence, or else as a beautiful dream having nothing to correspond to it in the world of reality. The world is sighing and aching this moment for inward peace and a durable satisfaction. Christ through the church can give this. The edifice the church must build in the future will represent life, power, love, holiness and virtue. The church must rise and build.