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Daily Devotionals
Music For the Soul
Devotional: January 13th

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SECRET DISCIPLESHIP

And after this Joseph of Arimathea, being a disciple of Jesus, but secretly, for fear of the Jews, asked of Pilate that he might take away the body of Jesus; . . . and there came also Nicodemus, he who at the first came to Jesus by night. - John 19:38-39

While Christ lived, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus had been unfaithful to their convictions; but His death, which terrified and paralyzed and scattered His avowed disciples, seems to have shamed and stung them into courage. They came now, when they must have known that it was too late to lavish honour and tears on the corpse of the Master whom they had been too cowardly to acknowledge whilst acknowledgment might yet have availed. How keen an arrow of self-condemnation must have pierced their hearts as they moved in their offices of love, which they thought He could never know, round His dead corpse!

They were both members of the Sanhedrin: the same motives, no doubt, had withheld each of them from confessing Christ; the same impulses united them in this too late confession of discipleship. Nicodemus had had the conviction, at the beginning of Christ’s ministry, that he was at least a miraculously attested and God-sent teacher. But the fear which made him steal to Jesus by night - the unenviable distinction which the Evangelist pitilessly reiterates at each mention of him - arrested his growth, and kept him dumb when silence was treason.

Joseph of Arimathea is described by two of the Evangelists as " a disciple "; by the other two as a devout Israelite, like Simeon and Anna, " waiting for the Kingdom of God." Luke informs us that he had not concurred in the condemnation of Jesus, but leads us to believe that his dissent had been merely silent. Perhaps he was more fully convinced than Nicodemus, and at the same time even more timid in avowing his convictions. These two contrite cowards, as they try to atone for their unfaithfulness to their living Master by their ministrations to Him dead, are true examples of secret disciples. They were restrained from the avowal of the Messiah-ship of Jesus by fear. There is nothing in the organization of society at this day to make any man afraid of avowing the ordinary kind of Christianity which satisfies the most of us; rather it is the proper thing with most of us middle-class people to say that in some sense or other we are Christians. But when it comes to a real avowal, a real carrying out of a true discipleship, there are as many and as formidable, though very different, impediments in the way to-day from those which blocked the path of these two cowards. In all regions of life it is hard to work out into practice any moral conviction whatever. How many of us are there who have beliefs about social and moral questions which we are ashamed to avow in certain companies for fear of the finger of ridicule being pointed at us? It is not only in the Church, and in reference to purely religious belief, that we have the curse of secret discipleship, but it is everywhere. Wherever there are moral questions which are yet the subject of controversy, and have not been enthroned with the hallelujahs of all men, you get people that carry their convictions shut up in their own breasts, and lock their lips in silence, when there is most need of frank avowal. The political, social, and moral conflicts of this day have their " secret disciples," who will come only out of their holes when the battle is over, and will then shout with the loudest.

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