(Revelation 21:16)

What are your measurements? I’m not talking about those measurements your tailor or dressmaker has recently been taking to outfit you with your fall and winter clothes. I’m not thinking of those measurements that are calculated by means of tape measure around your chest or waist or hips. I would call you to give your attention to your personal measurements, your dimensions of personality. What are your real measurements? Just what size person are you? When measured by the circumstances of life, how big or how little are you? When folks “size you up” with a closely gauging eye, is it put down in their minds that you are narrow or short, too light or too heavy? What are your measurements?

In the Book of Revelation, St. John tells us something of the measurements of the Perfect City, the Heavenly Jerusalem. He writes: “The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal.” And Phillips Brooks has said that here in this scripture text we find also the record of the measurements of a perfect personality: “The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal. There are three directions of human life which we may fitly give these three names: length, breadth, and height.” (Phillips Brooks)

First, there is this measurement for a life — length. But the length of a life, in this meaning of it, is not its duration — not its longevity — but rather the projection and the extension of its self-hood. “The length of a life is the reaching on and out of a man, in the line of activity and thought and self-development which is indicated and prophesied by the character which is natural within him. It is the push of a life towards its own personal ends.” (Phillips Brooks) Sometimes we call this dimension of personality, self-expression, or self-development, or fulfillment.

You know the story of the life of Vincent Van Gogh, of how he burned with a passion to paint pictures, and of how he gave such free reign to this inner genius that he produced marvelous paintings, but he so stretched himself in attaining this dimension of length in life that physical strength and mental health were destroyed.

The length of a man’s life is the outreach of it in developing and expressing his own personality, his genius, his self-hood. The good life must have such a dimension — it should measure long in this direction. The Lord of Talents is merciless with his unprofitable servants who bury the treasure of God-given personality endowments and powers — never using or developing them.

The second dimension of life is breadth — not width of waistline — nor even tolerance of mind and heart, but something more inclusive than tolerance … rather the breadth of life is its outgoing, in sympathy and love and fellowship, to other lives. It is the lateral outreach of life. “When a man comes to value his own personal career because of the way in which it relates him to his brethren and the help it permits him to offer them — then his life has distinctly begun to open itself in this new direction of breadth — to its length it has added breadth.” (Phillips Brooks)

The life which has only length, only intensity of ambition, is narrow … “Crass selfishness,” says the historian Charles Beard, “never attained an enduring value.”

Many a life achieves its first real widening, its initial stage of development, in this dimension of breadth when a man falls in love with a maid or a maid with a man. But how sad it is when the breadth of a life stops there. I heard a lady sorrowfully say the other day: “My husband and I have lived too much to ourselves. I see it now.” You know that pitiful prayer of the man whose breadth of life is measured by the diameter of his family circle: “God bless me and my wife and our son, John; his wife; us four and no more.” Rather, the love of the lover for his beloved and the blessed family bonds should lead us on and out into the larger love life of the whole human family and the brotherhood of all mankind.

But there is a third dimension to life — height — not just the tallness of a man measured in his stocking feet, six feet, plus or minus … “The height of a life is its reach upwards toward God; its sense of childhood; its consciousness of the divine life over it, with which it tries to live in love, communion and obedience.” The true life has, as Rufus Jones puts it, “a window open on heaven.” On the coat of arms of the Prince of Wales there is a famous inscription, borrowed from a saintly and heroic life. After acknowledging that he holds his title by the grace of God there follows this line: “Whose I am, and whom I serve.” The life which is lived under that faith and conviction has that divine dimension called height.

“The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal,” said St. John of the Perfect City, the Heavenly Jerusalem. So also the perfection of character must be charted in a close correlation of these three measurements. The perfect life must be extended in all three directions with an equality or balance of measurements.

“The height of life, its reach towards God, must be co-extensive with the length of life, or its reach towards its personal ambition, and breadth of life or its reach towards the sympathy of other lives. It is when a man begins to know the ambition of his life not simply as the choice of his own will, but as the wise assignment of God’s love; and to know his relation to his brethren not simply as the result of his own impulsive affections, but as the seeking of his soul for these souls because they all belong to the great Father-soul: it is then that life for man begins to lift itself all over, and to grow towards completion upwards through all its length and breadth.

“The life which has only length, only intensity of ambition, is narrow. The life that has length and breadth, intense ambition and broad humanity, is thin. It is like a great, flat plain of which one wearies, and which sooner or later wearies of itself. The life which to its length and breadth adds height, which, to its personal ambition and its sympathy with man, adds the love and obedience of God, completes itself into the cube of the Eternal City, and is the life complete.

“Think for a moment of the life of the great Apostle, the manly, many-sided Paul. ‘I press toward the mark for the prize of my high calling,’ he writes to the Philippians. That is length of life for him. ‘I will gladly spend and be spent for you,’ he writes to the Corinthians. There is the breadth of life for him. ‘God hath raised us up and made us sit together in heavenly places,’ he writes to the Ephesians. There is the height of life for him. You can add nothing to these three dimensions when you try to account to yourself for the impression of completeness which comes to you out of his simple, lofty story.” (Phillips Brooks)

And why is the perfect life, the complete, ideal life, the one in which the length and the breadth and the height are equal? In a very simple word — because this is the saved life. John Watson tells us that the question Henry Drummond was always trying to answer in all his writing and speaking was not: “How can a man save his soul?” but rather, “How can a man save his life?” Drummond’s idea of salvation — and I think it is the New Testament idea of salvation — was that of rising to the stature of Christ and sharing his simple, lowly life. St. Paul put it this way: “Till we all come, in the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, into a perfect man unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.”

The simple fact of human existence is that the life without breadth, bereft of human sympathy and unselfishness, is not a saved life, it is lost.

Neither is the life which lacks height, the upsurge of the whole soul to God, a saved life. I remember going into a home to help work out some solution to that home’s many problems. Husband and wife were estranged. Long conferences had failed to bring about reconciliation. Little children were suffering then and were destined to suffer still more in the future because of the selfishness, the sins, and the godlessness of both parents. And yet both parents were professing Christians. On the walls of that home were decorative mottos. “Jesus Never Fails”, “God Bless our Home”. And I thought to myself: “If there was ever a home which was not blessed with the peace and love and righteousness of God, it was that home. And if ever it would seem that Jesus had failed to save the lives of his own, he had failed with these.” Were the promises of God false? Oh, no. It was not Jesus who had failed, but rather these people whose lives had not grown into the stature of Christ’s life. Their home was not blessed of God because they would not truly let God have anything to do with their lives. Their windows had not been open towards heaven. That important dimension of life — height — was lacking.

What are the measurements of your life? Are the length and the breadth and the height of it equal? “I hope that we are all striving and praying now that we may come to some such symmetrical completeness. Do not dare to live without some clear intention toward which your living shall be bent. Mean to be something with all your might. Do not add act to act and day to day in perfect thoughtlessness, never asking yourself whither the growing line is leading.

“But at the same time do not dare to be so absorbed in your own life, so wrapped up in listening to the sound of your own hurrying wheels, that all this vast, pathetic music, made up of the mingled joy and sorrow of your fellow-men, shall not find out your heart and claim it, and make you rejoice to give yourself for them.

“And yet, all the while, keep the upward windows open. Do not think that a child of God can worthily work out his career, or worthily serve God’s other children, unless he does both in love and fear of God their Father. Be sure that ambition and charity will both grow mean unless they are both inspired and exalted by religion.

“Energy, love, and faith, those make the perfect man. And Christ, who is the perfectness of all of them, gives them all three to any man who gives himself up to Him.” (Phillips Brooks)

 

BACCALAUREATE SERVICE

PASTORAL PRAYER

Our hearts, Lord, are filled to running over with joy and sadness in this sweet, sad season. It is so momentous a time for us we must come into Thy church and talk with Thee about it. In the confusion of our many mixed emotions there is one thing we are sure about — we are terribly grateful and thankful, Lord.

As our parents and relatives gather about us there come rushing in memories of their sacrifices and patient love which have brought us to this day. Longer hours of work patiently endured, last season’s clothes worn cheerfully another year, vacations foregone, and savings expended — for our sakes, Lord. We would be clods not to be grateful, and we are, Lord.

And our teachers, how much we owe to them, whose investment of love and learning in us we shall carry with us as long as life lasts.

And for friends, too, we are grateful, Lord, for all we’ve learned of life and of Thee through our shared experiences with friends.

We thank Thee, too, O God, for Thy great storehouse of truth opened up before us in our student days, a storehouse carefully packed with the treasures that brave pioneers who have gone before us risked life and health and reputation to seek out, hunt down, and preserve for our enjoyment and enlargement.

But most of all, O Lord, we are grateful at this commencement time that we do not live in a neatly finished and complete universe — that Thou has saved something great for us to do — that a wonderful world of exciting possibilities in scientific research and social improvement lies ahead of us — that Thou hast brought us in Thy mercy to this hour, prepared us for our thrilling adventure and fired our hearts with the conviction that we are come to the kingdom for such an hour as this.

Hear our prayer, O Lord. Accept our thanksgiving and send into our hearts the spirit of the living Christ, for Jesus sake. Amen.

• Scripture Reference: Revelation 21:10-17 • Secondary Scripture References: n/a • Subject : Measures of the value of one’s life, The; 619 • Special Topic: n/a • Series: n/a • Occasion: n/a • First Preached: 9/21/1947 • Last Preached: 5/24/1959 • Rating: 3 • Book/Author References: , Charles Beard; , Phillips Brooks; , Rufus Jones; , Henry Drummond