The Character of Jesus

by Charles Edward Jefferson

Truthfulness, honesty, plainness, frankness, simplicity, these and many

others are only children of the Queen — Sincerity.

It is the virtue which the human heart instinctively cra...

a sincere heart. This is what we demand in all the higher relationships of life.

Sincerity is the very blood and breath

of friendship. “Pure gold he is,” we say with exultation, meaning that in our friend there is no alloy.

Beautiful, indeed, is the virtue of sincerity. It is not a gaudy virtue. It does not glitter. It has no sparkle in it. But it is substantial. It is life giving. It sustains and nourishes the heart.

There are some things we cannot be, and many things which we cannot do. But this one thing is within the reach of us all, — we may pray God

unceasingly to keep our hea...

Would you see sincerity in its loveliest form, then come to Jesus. Here is a man incapable of a lie. Nothing was ...

It was his constant exhortation that men should speak the truth.

It was the belief of Jesus that a man’s word ought to be as good as his oath, or as we say as good as his bond.

he had come into the world to bear witness to the truth.

This unquestioned loyalty to truth gives his words a value which no other words possess.

There is a discrepancy between the soul and what the mouth declares. Not so with Jesus. He holds back

nothing. What he thinks he says, what he feels he declares. He tones down nothing, he exaggerates nothing.

A Chinese proverb says that words are the sounds of the heart. This is certainly true of the words of Jesus. His words are simply the pulsations of his heart.

his voice has in it something which inspires assurance and quenches uncertainty and doubt.

Jesus: he soothes and heals us by being genuine. The heart is always at peace when it

rests upon a heart which is sincere.

Jesus was a man of unparalleled common sense.

“I came that they may have life, and may have it more abundantly,” thus did he express the object of his coming. “I am the resurrection and the life,” “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” It was in such phrases that he endeavored to give men an idea of his mission and his

person. Men everywhere want to live, but the tragedy of the world is that they do not succeed. There is a path which leads to life, but there are only a few who find it. Tennyson expressed what

every heart feels in his lines: — “‘Tis life of which my nerves are scant, More life...

In order to expose the folly of men, Jesus had the habit of asking questions.

It is one of the devil’s last resources to speak through the mouth of a friend. Such a trick cannot deceive Jesus.

“To this purpose was I born, and for this end came I into the world, to bear witness to the truth.”

we like preceding generations fall down before him acknowledging that his

character is without a flaw and that his life is without a blemish.

The fact is that God has never left himself without a witness. The Son of God has always been in the world. He is the light that lights every man who is

born. From the beginning he has been giving men right ideas and right feelings and helping them to reach right conclusions and decisions. We ought, therefore, to expect nothing in Jesus’ teaching absolutely unthought of before his incarnation. We ought to expect to find just what we do find, that everything he taught had been anticipated, and that all his cardinal ideas had existed in germ in the writings of holy men who at

divers times had been moved by the...

By emphasizing mercy instead of sacrifice he made religion new.

Jesus was man completed. What a fulness of life there was in him! What a power he had.

He claimed to be the light of the world, the bread of life, the water of life, the only good shepherd, the way, the truth, the life, the only mediator between God and man, the only one

who knows deity completely and who can save the world from its sins.

John, who knew him best, heard him saying, “Behold I make all things new.”

he is the Master and the Saviour of the heart. “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away: behold all things are become new.”

One of the notes of Jesus’ life was joy. He was a man acquainted with grief, and yet his joy was without measure. It was one of the things he had so much of that he could bequeath it to his disciples.

we draw a circle around our beneficence that we become what God likes to see — a cheerful giver.

unwisely when we mourn disconsolately over lives that seem to be cut off at noon. Let a man strive not to live long but to do his work, and if he does it why should we

lament because he dies at noon?

“Verily I say unto you, unless you abide in me, you have no life at all in

you!” This, then, is the narrowness of Jesus. He is narrow for a purpose. He limited himself, emptied himself of his divine glory, was found in the fashion of a man, walked the narrow path which led from the

carpenter’s shop to Golgotha, all because of his great love for us, and in order that we might each one of us have ...

He walked the narrow path because he carried in his heart the dream of an empire which was vast. By standing in one place and striking repeatedly the strings of the same set of hearts, he

started vibrations which have filled the world with music. By carefully tending the fire which he had kindled, he made it hot enough to change the spiritual climate of many lands. By saturating a little circle of

chosen followers with his spirit, he made them capable of carrying on their shoul...

How wonderful it is that Jesus’ ideas are broad enough to cover all the nations and all the centuries. Many ideas shrivel and dry up with

the lapse of time. Political ideas have a strange fashion of passing away, and so do scientific ideas. One century has no interest in the political teachings of the century which preceded it, and no generation is willing