CONFESSIONS OF A FAILURE--THE BUSY MAN

1 Kings 20:40

In 1 Kings 20:40 you will find the text. "As thy servant was busy here
and there, he was gone." This is part of a parable that was spoken by
a certain prophet to King Ahab. This prophet was seeking to rebuke the
king for his leniency in dealing with Benhadad, whom he had overcome in
battle. It is not our purpose, however, to discuss this parable in
relation to its context. We are going to consider it altogether apart
from its surroundings. We will rather study it as it is related to
ourselves. Here then, is the story of this man's failure from his own
lips. "Thy servant went out into the midst of the battle; and, behold,
a man turned aside and brought a man unto me, and said, Keep this man:
if by any means he be missing, then shall thy life be for his life, or
else thou shalt pay a talent of silver. And as thy servant was busy
here and there, he was gone."

I imagine I meet this soldier immediately after he has been put in
charge of his important captive. He walks with the purposeful stride
of one who knows his task and who is setting seriously about doing it.
He seems to appreciate the honor that has been conferred upon him. He
seems also to have a sense of the serious responsibilities involved.
And when he takes his position before the cell of his prisoner he
watches with all diligence.

But when I pass his way again next day I am greatly shocked. My
soldier is no longer on guard. Another had taken his place. And when
I look about for the important prisoner that has been captured at the
price of blood and conflict he is no longer to be seen. Upon inquiry I
find that he has escaped. In his place, bowed down with shame and
dressed in chains, is the man who yesterday was a guardsman.

I cannot pass him by without a question. "How did this come about?" I
ask. "Were you surprised and overcome? Did your fellow soldiers allow
a strong company to break through their lines and to overpower you and
take your prisoner from you? Did a strong hand strike you down from
behind in the dark? How is it that your prisoner had escaped?"

And the man, without being able to look me in the eye, answers, "No, he
did not escape because I was overpowered. He did not escape because I
was surprised. He escaped because I was too busy to watch him." "Too
busy," I answer in amazement, "too busy doing what? What task did you
find more important than saving your country and saving your own home
and saving your own honor?" "Oh, no task in particular," he answers.
"I was just busy here and there." That is his confession. "As thy
servant was busy here and there, he was gone."

And the man is sentenced to death. And we must admit that the sentence
is just. Not that he has committed any aggressive crime. He has not
cut anybody's throat. He has not stabbed anybody in the back. He has
not stolen anything. He is not being punished for what he has done.
He is being punished for what he has failed to do.

And that kind of sin, let me warn you, is just as dangerous and just as
killing as positive and aggressive sin. How foolish are they who think
they are pious simply because they do no wrong. How absurd it is to
get it into your minds that a man is a Christian by virtue of what he
does not do instead of by virtue of what he does. Now, I know that
there are certain sins that are damaging and damning, but in order to
be lost now and ever more it is not necessary to be guilty of any of
them. All that is necessary is that you do what this man did, and that
is fail in your duty.

This is what our Lord taught us again and again. What was wrong with
the fig tree that He cursed it? It was not loaded with poison. It
simply had nothing but leaves. What charge is brought against Dives?
No charge at all. We are simply made to see him neglect the man at his
gate who needed his help. He does not drive the man away. He simply
lets him alone. And over his neglected duty he stumbles out into a
Christless eternity. What was wrong with the five foolish virgins? It
was not that they had water in their lamps. It was simply the fact
that they had no oil. What was the matter with those to whom the judge
said, "Depart from me"? Only this, they had failed in their duty. The
charge is, "Inasmuch as ye did it not."

So this man failed in his duty. That is what wrecked him. Why did he
fail? First, he did not fail through ignorance. He did not fail
because he did not know his duty. He understood perfectly what he was
to do. He understood also the great importance of his doing it. He
knew it was a life and death business with him. I know that he failed.
He failed miserably. He failed to his own ruin. But it was not
because of his ignorance. And that is not the secret of your failure.
We need to know more, all of us, but our greatest need in the moral
realm is not for more knowledge. Our greatest need is the will to live
up to what we already know. The reason you are selfish, the reason you
are unclean, the reason you are godless is not because you do not know
better. You have known better through all these years. It is because
you are unwilling to do better.

There is not a man here that does not know enough to do his duty. It
may be that you do not know the exact niche that the Lord wants you to
fill. It may be that you do not know the exact task to which He is
calling you. But you do know this, you know that there is an absolute
difference between right and wrong, and that you ought to be enlisted
on the side of the right. You know that it is your part to help and
not to hinder, to bless and not to curse, to lift up and not to drag
down.

And while you may not know your particular task, yet it is your
privilege to know even that. I am confident that God has a particular
task for every single soul of us. And I am equally confident that He
will let us know what that task is if we will only make it possible for
Him to do so. He tells us how we may know. "In all thy ways
acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy path."

There are many misfits in the world, and you know a misfit is the
cheapest and most useless thing known. If you want a cheap suit of
clothes go to the misfit establishment. I remember when I was a young
fellow just getting grown I decided to quit wearing the crude
hand-me-down suits such as I could purchase at the village store. I
decided that I must have a genuine tailored suit.

So with this idea in mind I wrote for the catalogue of Montgomery Ward
& Company. I might have used Sears Roebuck, but I liked Montgomery
Ward better. I found the suit I wanted, read his directions, took my
own measure and ordered the suit. In due time it came. And I pledge
you my word that you might have tried that suit on every form of man
and beast that the whole Roman Empire could furnish and it would not
have fit a single one of them. The legs of the pants were large enough
to keep house in. They would have made admirable wheat sacks, but as
trousers they were a failure. To me the suit was worthless because it
was a misfit.

And there are many men just as worthless to-day. But they need not
have been so. If they did not know their task they might have known
it. They did not fail, as this man did not fail, through ignorance.

Second, this man did not fail for lack of ability. If he could have
said that he was overpowered, if he could have told that superior
numbers came upon him and took his prisoner in spite of himself we
could have pardoned him. Or if he could have shown us a scarred breast
and a face that had been hacked by a sword, and said, "I won these
wounds trying to keep my prisoner," we would have respected him. We
would have sympathized with him. But he had no scars to show. He had
made no fight at all. Therefore he could not say, "I failed, 'tis
true, but I could not help it." Neither can you say that. No man here
is failing for lack of ability.

Now, I do not mean by that that you can do anything that you want to
do. When I was a boy people used to come to our school and tell us
such rubbish as that. But it is all false. Suppose I were to take a
notion to be a great painter, not one after the fashion of the ordinary
sixteen year old girl of to-day, but a painter like Turner. Why, I
might work at it a thousand years and never accomplish anything.

Suppose some of you were to take a notion to be great singers. Is
there any use for me to tell you that if you persist you will succeed?
Not a bit of it. You might succeed in ruining the nerves of your
teacher. You might easily make those who hear you practise "want to
gnaw a file and flee into the wilderness." But you would never learn
to sing. There is no hope for some of us till we get to Heaven.

No, we cannot do anything that we might want to do. But we can do
something infinitely better. We can do everything that God wants us to
do. I cannot do your task, and you cannot do mine. I am glad that
that is true. I am glad that we all do not have the same aptitudes. I
am glad that we all cannot do successfully the same things. I am glad
that we do not all have the same tastes. But while that is so, every
man has the ability, through grace, to perform the task to which he is
called.

In the third place, this man did not fail because of idleness. He did
not fail because he was lazy. Of course idleness will wreck anybody.
Laziness is a deadly sin unless it is overcome. I know something about
it because I have had to fight it all my life. But this man was not an
idler. This man was a worker. He failed, but he did not fail because
he refused to put his hand to any task or to bend his back under any
load.

Why then did this man fail? Not from ignorance, not from inability,
not from idleness. He was busy. That is his word about himself. And
nobody denies it. "As thy servant was busy here and there, he was
gone." What, I repeat, was the secret of his failure? Just this, that
though he was busy, he was not busy at his own task. He was simply
busy here and there. He was one of those unfortunate souls that has so
many things to do and so many engagements to keep and so many functions
to attend and so many burdens to carry that he cannot do his own duty.

Do you know of anybody like that? "Did you keep your prisoner?" I ask.
"No, I was too busy." "Busy at what, in Heaven's name! Do you know of
anything more important than obeying the orders of your king? Do you
know of anything more important than helping to save your nation? Do
you know of anything of more importance than saving your own life, your
own honor, your own soul."

You can see his trouble. He allowed the secondary to so absorb him
that he neglected the primary. Those things that he was working at
here and there, those unnamed tasks that he was performing, there is no
hint that they were vicious things. I am sure that they were
altogether harmless. They may have been altogether good and useful.
But the trouble with that good was that it robbed him of the privilege
of doing the best. The trouble with the Prodigal in the Far Country
was not simply the fact that he was in a hog pen. He might have been
in a palace and been quite as bad off. It was the fact that he was
missing the privilege of being in his Father's house.

The sin that I fear most for many of you is not the sin of vicious
wrong-doing. It is the sin of this man, the sin of choosing the second
best. I read recently of an insane man who spent all his time in an
endeavor to sew two pieces of cloth together. But the thread he used
had no knot in the end of it. So nothing was ever accomplished. Now,
there is no harm in such sewing. But the tragedy of it is that if we
spend all our time doing such trivial things we rob ourselves of the
privilege of doing something better. And that is just the trouble of
much of our life to-day. Many of us are engaged in a great, stressful,
straining life of trivialities. Some of these are not especially
harmful. But the calamity of it all is that they so absorb us that we
have no time left for the highest.

Down in Tennessee near where I used to live a house was burned one day.
The mother was out at the well doing the week's washing. The flames
were not discovered till they were well under way. Of course when they
were discovered the woman was seized with terror. She rushed into the
house and brought out a feather bed and a few quilts. But in her
madness she forgot her own baby and the child was burned to death.
Now, I submit to you that there was absolutely no harm in saving a
feather bed. There was no harm in saving a few old quilts. The
tragedy was that in the absorption of saving all these half worthless
things she lost the primary. In her interest in the good she became
utterly blind to the best.

I wonder if that is not your folly. You are busy here and there. You
go to work six days in the week. You are passionately in earnest about
amusing yourself. You do a thousand and one decent and respectable
things. But while you are busy here and there the peace of God slips
out of your life. While you are busy here and there you neglect the
Sunday School and the Church. While you are busy here and there you
lose your interest in the Word of God and you forget "the secret
stairway that leads into the Upper Room." "Busy here and there" you
lose the sense of God out of your life. "Busy here and there" you
allow the altar in your home to fall down. "Busy here and there" you
allow your sons and daughters to stumble over that broken down altar
into lives of Christless indifference.

Oh, men and women, there is but one remedy for us if we would avoid the
rock upon which this condemned guardsman wrecked himself. We must put
first things first. Let us listen once more to the voice of the sanest
man that ever lived. This is His message: "Seek ye first the kingdom
of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto
you." If you fail to do this, however noble may be the task at which
you toil, life for you will end in tragedy. If you do this, however
mean and obscure may be your task, life for you will end in eternal joy
and victory.

These are the works of Revered Clovis G. Chappell ( 1922).