Christian Character 2

THE PROBLEM OF CHARACTER FLAWS

      Sometimes it is said that a person has a character flaw. In such a case, the individual usually has most of the components of a good character. But one of the necessary constituents is poorly developed, warped, or missing, and sooner or later it will show up in his life in bad behavior. Such a case happened in an outdoor tent meeting, when an evangelist was preaching the Gospel very effectively.  Each night people were persuaded to repent, confess faith in Jesus, and be baptized. Interest and enthusiasm was growing each day, and each night more people crowded into the tent to listen to the preacher.  Then the worst happened in response to a very small irritation. A stray cat had wandered into the tent and up onto the platform where the preacher was speaking. Lonely, hungry, and forsaken, the little creature began to rub against the ankles of the evangelist.  This became a distraction to him and a mounting irritation. When he almost stumbled over the cat, the man's temper flared. He viciously kicked the kittie to the wall of the tent. The people were shocked at the preacher's outrage and cruelty to the poor feline. One after the other, they arose and left the tent, until half were gone. The next evening, the attendance was very small; everyone in the community was describing the man's loss of temper and hateful treatment of the little cat. The next evening, no one appeared at the tent except the preacher. His opportunity to win more souls to Christ was lost. One of the greater features of good character is self-control, and the man demonstrated before everyone he lacked it. He had a character flaw, and it cost him the opportunity to finish the meeting with great success.

      We all have character flaws to some extent, and when the stress of life presses upon us, we cave in at the point of weakness. And it costs us dearly in our relationships with other people, especially the people closest to us. Another element of Christian character is sincerity. A play on words can be made with this term to demonstrate the main idea in it. It can be separated into two parts, sin- and -cerity. "Sin-" suggests the Latin word sinê (without), and "-cerity" suggests the Latin word cera (wax). This is not the actual derivation of the word "sincerity." It's rather a good analogy that reveals a vivid meaning.

      It is a fact that ancient Roman sculptors would inscribe on the base of a statue the two words sinê cera, meaning "without wax." A wealthy person would commission an artist to produce, e.g., a beautiful statue of a water nymph to place beside the pool in his ornamental garden. The artist would indeed make an exquisite statue that looked almost lifelike. But somewhere the thing would get chipped and blemished. He was not about to spend months producing another statue, which might also get cracked or chipped. So, he would simply reattach the chipped part with a bit of hard wax. The client would not notice it and so would display it proudly beside the pool. Then, on an oppressively hot summer day, the wax would melt and the chip would fall off. Reputable artists, however, when delivering a statue to a customer, would inscribe upon the bottom of it a guarantee ... sinê cera.

      A person without sincerity is one whose character is held together, so to speak, with wax. And when pressure is applied to him, the wax melts, and he falls apart. Surely, every reader of this has seen it happen to someone who was considered a solid person, and it quickly provoked great disappoinment. Do we not then use the vivid expression, "He came unglued!"?

Christian Character 1

      There are words in our language that we use so much they become trite and lose their significance. Character is one of those words. In fact, it has come to have contradictory meanings in various appli-cations. With admiration, when we wish to praise someone who uniformly exerts a good influence, we say he/she is "a person with character." On the other hand, we call someone a "character" who acts silly, or engages in unexpected, unusual behavior, or causes trouble and fouls things up. It goes without say-ing that when we state that "character is important," we are referring to its positive, beneficial nature rather than the negative connotation the word can have.

      As I contemplated the basic meaning involved in this term, I looked up its derivation and found its origin in the Greek word carakthr, which designated "a tool for engraving." The basic idea involved is something that is set or established. The ancient Greek had two main ways of writing, with a stylus on a wax tablet, or with an iron tool upon stone. When something was written on wax, it was easily erased by smoothing the wax with the other end of the stylus, with a finger, or by heating. But when a message was engraved on stone with hammer and iron point, it was put there to stay. To remove it, one had to exert great effort to chisel or sand away the inscription. I have never read or heard of a single inscription on wax that survived from ancient Greece, but thousands of lines of script chiseled in stone still exist.

      As philosophers and theologians pondered human nature, it occured to them that the constitution of some people is like a wax inscription, and for others it is like a configuration engraved in stone by iron. Hence the application of the word "character" from the iron engraving tool. A person without character is unstable and therefore undependable; neither he nor his works will endure. Like an inscription in wax, his life will vanish and leave nothing behind for anyone to read or use. But a person of charater has fixed qualities that do not move with the storms of life and changes in the enviornment.

                                                                    (There will be much more to come on this subject in future articles. BFW)