“I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course,

I have kept the faith: Henceforth there is laid up for me

a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge,

shall give me at that day: and not to me only,

but unto all them also that love his appearing”

(2 Timothy 4:7-8)

The whole world is startled and sickened by the horrible killings taking place in China. How difficult for us to understand this wholesale slaughter of the Chinese students, the nation’s brightest, bravest, and best.

In his play Dirty Hands, Jean-Paul Sartre casts some light for us on this dreadful enigma. The leading character in the Sartre drama is an ardent young Communist in the country of Illyria who is given an assignment to liquidate a party member in a high position. The young man is sent as secretary to this commissar with orders to shoot him at the first opportunity. Party powers have decided to remove this particular commissar because he is following a policy of appeasement and peaceful coexistence with the capitalist forces of the country.

But the young Communist secretary with the assassination orders cannot — at first — bring himself to carry out his assignment. He is not by nature a killer. He cannot overcome his early bourgeois ideas about taking human life. Then, too, when he gets to know the commissar, his boss, he grows to like him. He cannot hate the man. But, more damaging still, he begins to approve of the commissar’s policies. So he delays the assassination.

Nevertheless, at last, in loyalty to the party’s commands and against his better judgment, his innate sensibilities, and his personal feelings, he shoots the commissar and pays the inevitable penalty of a prison term. Finally, in Sartre’s play, the young secretary is released from prison only to discover that in the meantime the party has switched its policy, made a hero of the dead commissar, officially adopted his ideas of peaceful coexistence and now the top party officials are laying down as the condition for the young Communist’s rehabilitation into the party that he flatly deny his role in the assassination.

The Sartre play ends with the idealistic young Communist frankly admitting his inability to reevaluate his life so sharply, to switch his personal commitments so completely. The final curtain comes down on the young Communist secretary opening the door for the goon squad waiting on the outside to come in and liquidate him.

All around the world today Communist nations are reevaluating their structures of government, their methods of doing business, and their relations with the outside world. China and Russia, the largest and most powerful nations committed to Marxist communism, have been going through the most rapid and radical changes because, as Zbigniew Brzezinski points out in his book The Grand Failure, their social system is going to rack and ruin.

The Chinese students who staged their peaceful demonstration in Beij­ing were demanding democratic changes in their system of government to match the changes already made in China’s commercial coexistence with the capitalist nations. But China’s top echelon of totalitarian control in its lust for power overruled the students’ dreams of freedom and justice and mercy and launched the Beijing massacre.

But it is not only in Communist countries that the vagaries of politics and rapidly changing social conditions force on people painful reevaluation of the priorities to which they have given their lives. Changing conditions in church and family and in the heavy toll of the years through the aging process sometimes force catastrophic reevaluations on all of us.

Look at this business of growing old, for example. The French impres­sionist painter Claude Monet at eighty-six wrote to a friend, “Age and chagrin have worn me out. My life has been nothing but a failure, and all that’s left for me to do is to destroy my paintings before I disappear.”

Time was to reveal, however, that Monet’s reevaluation of himself and his work at the middle of his ninth decade, though sincere and thoroughly honest at that point of infirmity and discouragement, was not the ultimate evaluation of his life and work that history would accord Monet, for his paintings are worth millions. But, more importantly, Monet raised such monumental questions through his life’s work as to remain the most influential of all the French impressionists.

Then turn to marriage and the family. Every marriage counselor — professional or nonprofessional, doctor, lawyer, merchant, friend or relation — knows about that painful process of reevaluation that always takes place when some act of unfaithfulness or the long, slow process of thoughtlessness and neglect has wrecked a marriage. What reordering of values, what new priorities, what repentance, what forgiveness can be brought into that relationship to save it? These are the painful necessities of such a moment, regardless of how new or how old-fashioned have been the moral principles of a husband and a wife. A reevaluation must be made.

Changing conditions in the Church are also forcing painful reevaluations on us all. Now and then you hear someone say, “Where’s so and so? I haven’t seen him at church for some time,” or, “Whatever happened to that family that used to sit in the pew next to us?” What’s going on? Why, people are reevaluating their situations, their lives, in relationship to the changed world and their changed values regarding what is important now and what priorities should control their lives.

A friend of mine was in Chicago and chanced to remark to a taxi driver about the unprecedented, long, beautiful stretch of weather the country was having. The driver replied, “But we’ll pay for it yet. I don’t believe in God, but I’ve seen enough of life to know that there is an equalizer in control.”

Subsequent conversation revealed that the young taxi driver had been raised a Roman Catholic but had become disenchanted with the changes he had seen in the established church and was now in complete rebellion, having renounced all faith. My friend responded on the spur of the moment, yet out of a lifetime of devout, disciplined, and dedicated Christian living, with a remark that stands in my estimate as one of the finest Christian contemporary witnesses I’ve heard. He said, “Don’t let the troubles of the Church destroy your personal faith in God.”

What a great thought for every one of us to clutch close in this time of reevaluation of all things! The Church, the body of Christ in the world, has always been and always will be an institution both human and divine. To it God has committed the incomparable riches of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which carries the power of God unto salvation for all sinners who will believe. But the Church is always composed of human beings, weak, sinful, ignorant, and prone to enormous error. The Church has always had her troubles, but she has never been deprived of her power to point people to God in Christ. “Don’t let the troubles of the Church destroy your personal faith in God.”

Toward the end of his life, Saint Paul came to a season of ultimate reevaluation, and in his last letter to Timothy, he sets before us guidelines and goals that have proved to be unshakable before all forces, whether they be the ebb and flow of political fortunes, or the rise and fall of ecclesiastical structures, or even the steady drain of the years, or the success or failure of our personal ventures.

Listen to Paul’s words: “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing.”

Are these the top priorities, the essential guidelines that you and I are keeping in mind and heart and will for every reevaluation, whether in disappointment and defeat or in success and victory?

First, have we kept the faith? What faith? Keeping the faith for the Apostle Paul meant pressing on “toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” Have we lived for Christ? Have we so kept the faith that we have not let down those to whom we owe love and loyalty and service following the example of Jesus?

Second, have we fought a good fight? This life is a long warfare. It is often an obstacle course. The choice is ours — ever ours — to take our place on one or the other side of two titanic forces contending throughout all human history. Where do we choose to enlist our energies, to direct the weight of our influence? On the side of service to others and kindness and purity and honor, or on the side of selfishness and cruelty and callous disregard of human rights and human need and human hope? Where will we fight and for what? And will we really contend courageously, or do we intend merely to talk and make a show, a shadowboxing, at fighting a good fight?

Third, are we finishing our course, achieving our goals? Any realistic reevaluation by a Christian at any juncture must always include a fresh compass reading to determine whether we are on course or have strayed. From whom are we now taking our orders? Are we really receiving and carrying out Christ’s orders?

The idealistic young Communist secretary in the Sartre play gave his all in loyalty, obedience, and devotion to the Communist party, taking all his orders in life and death, only to discover that he had entrusted his destiny to cynical, power-mad men. Only Jesus Christ, the Savior of all people, who gives himself completely for all, even the dirtiest and most lost sinner among us, only he is worthy to be trusted as the supreme Lord of the conscience of every person. Are we moving on to finish our course, which in reality is his course, the course of the Kingdom of God?

In Catherine of Aragon, Garrett Mattingly writes that the dying Cardinal Wolsey, on his journey to the Tower of London where King Henry VIII was sending him to be tried for high treason, was reported to have said, “If I had served God as diligently as I have done the King, He would not have given me over in my grey hairs.”

These are our unchanging checkpoints for every season of reevaluation: Have I fought a good fight? Have I finished my course? Have I kept the faith?

And the unimpeachable assurance that comes from a reevaluation that sincerely includes these checkpoints is, “Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing.”

“Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, To the only wise God, our Savior, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.”