“LET US MELT DOWN THE SAINTS

AND PUT THEM INTO CIRCULATION”

In a book titled How to Witness Successfully by George Sweeting there is quoted a true story that happened in England during the time of Oliver Cromwell.  There was a shortage of silver to make the coins for the country.  Officers were sent throughout the country in search of silver.  They returned and reported that there is no silver anywhere in the land except the icons of Saints found in the churches.  Oliver Cromwell ordered to bring them with this command, “Let us melt down the saints and put them into circulation.” 

Though Cromwell meant differently, this is the secret of productivity of the Saints. We remember the passion of Christ on the cross these days and this is precisely what has happened in Him on the cross. As St. Paul puts it beautifully in the epistle to Philippians: “… Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on the cross.” (2:5-8).

It is better to be melted down to become useful to the people around than to sit idle in the thrones as saints.  Whoever we call great were people who were willing to be melted down for the sake of the community.  They were people who could not sit idle when they saw the needs around them. In Luke 12:50 we read Jesus saying, “I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how I am constrained until it is accomplished.”  The inward pressure on him was such that he could not but do it. This is what Paul also says in 2 Cor. 5:14: “the love of Christ constrains us.”