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‘All that in every place call upon
the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours.’—1 Corinthians
1:2.
There are some difficulties, with
which I need not trouble you, about both the translation and the
connection of these words. One thing is quite clear, that in them the
Apostle associates the church at Corinth with the whole mass of Christian
believers in the world. The question may arise whether he does so in the
sense that he addresses his letter both to the church at Corinth and to
the whole of the churches, and so makes it a catholic epistle. That is
extremely unlikely, considering how all but entirely this letter is taken
up with dealing with the especial conditions of the Corinthian church.
Rather I should suppose that he is simply intending to remind ‘the Church
of God at Corinth ... sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints,’
that they are in real, living union with the whole body of believers. Just
as the water in a little land-locked bay, connected with the sea by some
narrow strait like that at Corinth, is yet part of the whole ocean that
rolls round the world, so that little community of Christians had its
living bond of union with all the brethren in every place that called upon
the name of Jesus Christ.
Whichever view on that detail of
interpretation be taken, this phrase, as a designation of Christians, is
worth considering. It is one of many expressions found in the New
Testament as names for them, some of which have now dropped out of general
use, while some are still retained. It is singular that the name of
‘Christian,’ which has all but superseded all others, was originally
invented as a jeer by sarcastic wits at Antioch, and never appears in the
New Testament, as a name by which believers called themselves. Important
lessons are taught by these names, such as disciples, believers, brethren,
saints, those of the way, and so on, each of which embodies some
characteristic of a follower of Jesus. So this appellation in the text,
‘those who call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,’ may yield not
unimportant lessons if it be carefully weighed, and to some of these I
would ask your attention now.
I. First, it gives us a glimpse into
the worship of the primitive Church.
To ‘call on the name of the Lord’ is
an expression that comes straight out of the Old Testament. It means there
distinctly adoration and invocation, and it means precisely these things
when it is referred to Jesus Christ.
We find in the Acts of the Apostles
that the very first sermon that was preached at Pentecost by Peter all
turns upon this phrase. He quotes the Old Testament saying, ‘Whosoever
shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved,’ and then goes on to
prove that ‘the Lord,’ the ‘calling on whose Name’ is salvation, is Jesus
Christ; and winds up with ‘Therefore let all the house of Israel know
assuredly that God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both
Lord and Christ.’
Again we find that Ananias of
Damascus, when Jesus Christ appeared to him and told him to go to Paul and
lay his hands upon him, shrank from the perilous task because Paul had
been sent to ‘bind them that call upon the name of the Lord,’ and to
persecute them. We find the same phrase recurring in other connections, so
that, on the whole, we may take the expression as a recognised designation
of Christians.
This was their characteristic, that
they prayed to Jesus Christ. The very first word, so far as we know, that
Paul ever heard from a Christian was, ‘Lord Jesus! receive my spirit.’ He
heard that cry of calm faith which, when he heard it, would sound to him
as horrible blasphemy from Stephen's dying lips. How little he dreamed
that he himself was soon to cry to the same Jesus, ‘Lord, what wilt thou
have me to do?’ and was in after-days to beseech Him thrice for
deliverance, and to be answered by sufficient grace. How little he dreamed
that, when his own martyrdom was near, he too would look to Jesus as Lord
and righteous Judge, from whose hands all who loved His appearing should
receive their crown! Nor only Paul directs desires and adoration to Jesus
as Lord; the last words of Scripture are a cry to Him as Lord to come
quickly, and an invocation of His ‘grace’ on all believing souls.
Prayer to Christ from the very
beginning of the Christian Church was, then, the characteristic of
believers, and He to whom they prayed, thus, from the beginning, was
recognised by them as being a Divine Person, God manifest in the flesh.
The object of their worship, then,
was known by the people among whom they lived. Singing hymns to Christus
as a god is nearly all that the Roman proconsul in his well-known letter
could find to tell his master of their worship. They were the
worshippers—not merely the disciples—of one Christ. That was their
peculiar distinction. Among the worshippers of the false gods they stood
erect; before Him, and Him only, they bowed. In Corinth there was the
polluted worship of Aphrodite and of Zeus. These men called not on the
name of these lustful and stained deities, but on the name of the Lord
Jesus Christ. And everybody knew whom they worshipped, and understood
whose men they were. Is that true about us? Do we Christian men so
habitually cultivate the remembrance of Jesus Christ, and are we so
continually in the habit of invoking His aid, and of contemplating His
blessed perfections and sufficiency, that every one who knew us would
recognise us as meant by those who call on the name of the Lord Jesus
Christ?
If this be the proper designation of
Christian people, alas! alas! for so many of the professing Christians of
this day, whom neither bystanders nor themselves would think of as
included in such a name!
Further, the connection here shows
that the divine worship of Christ was universal among the churches. There
was no ‘place’ where it was not practised, no community calling itself a
church to whom He was not the Lord to be invoked and adored. This witness
to the early and universal recognition in the Christian communities of the
divinity of our Lord is borne by an undisputedly genuine epistle of
Paul's. It is one of the four which the most thorough-going destructive
criticism accepts as genuine. It was written before the Gospels, and is a
voice from the earlier period of Paul's apostleship. Hence the importance
of its attestation to this fact that all Christians everywhere, both
Jewish, who had been trained in strict monotheism, and Gentile, who had
burned incense at many a foul shrine, were perfectly joined together in
this, that in all their need they called on the name of Jesus Christ as
Lord and brought to Him, as divine, adoration not to be rendered to any
creatures. From the day of Pentecost onwards, a Christian was not merely a
disciple, a follower, or an admirer, but a worshipper of Christ, the Lord.
II. We may see here an unfolding of
the all-sufficiency of Jesus Christ.
Note that solemn accumulation, in
the language of my text, of all the designations by which He is called,
sometimes separately and sometimes unitedly, the name of ‘our Lord Jesus
Christ.’ We never find that full title given to Him in Scripture except
when the writer's mind is labouring to express the manifoldness and
completeness of our Lord's relations to men, and the largeness and
sufficiency of the blessings which He brings. In this context I find in
the first nine or ten verses of this chapter, so full is the Apostle of
the thoughts of the greatness and wonderfulness of his dear Lord on whose
name he calls, that six or seven times he employs this solemn, full
designation.
Now, if we look at the various
elements of this great name we shall get various aspects of the way in
which calling on Christ is the strength of our souls.
‘Call on the name of—the Lord.’ That
is the Old Testament Jehovah. There is no mistaking nor denying, if we
candidly consider the evidence of the New Testament writings, that, when
we read of Jesus Christ as ‘Lord,’ in the vast majority of cases, the
title is not a mere designation of human authority, but is an attribution
to Him of divine nature and dignity. We have, then, to ascribe to Him, and
to call on Him as possessing, all which that great and incommunicable Name
certified and sealed to the Jewish Church as their possession in their
God. The Jehovah of the Old Testament is our Lord of the New. He whose
being is eternal, underived, self-sufficing, self-determining, knowing no
variation, no diminution, no age, He who is because He is and that He is,
dwells in His fulness in our Saviour. To worship Him is not to divert
worship from the one God, nor is it to have other gods besides Him.
Christianity is as much monotheistic as Judaism was, and the law of its
worship is the old law—Him only shalt thou serve. It is the divine will
that all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father.
But what is it to call on the name
of Jesus? That name implies all the sweetness of His manhood. He is our
Brother. The name ‘Jesus’ is one that many a Jewish boy bore in our Lord's
own time and before it; though, afterwards, of course, abhorrence on the
part of the Jew and reverence on the part of the Christian caused it
almost entirely to disappear. But at the time when He bore it it was as
undistinguished a name as Simeon, or Judas, or any other of His followers’
names. To call upon the name of Jesus means to realise and bring near to
ourselves, for our consolation and encouragement, for our strength and
peace, the blessed thought of His manhood, so really and closely knit to
ours; to grasp the blessedness of the thought that He knows our frame
because He Himself has worn it, and understands and pities our weakness,
being Himself a man. To Him whom we adore as Lord we draw near in tenderer,
but not less humble and prostrate, adoration as our brother when we call
on the name of the Lord Jesus, and thus embrace as harmonious, and not
contradictory, both the divinity of the Lord and the humanity of Jesus.
To call on the name of Christ is to
embrace in our faith and to beseech the exercise on our behalf of all
which Jesus is as the Messiah, anointed by God with the fulness of the
Spirit. As such He is the climax, and therefore the close of all
revelation, who is the long-expected fruition of the desire of weary
hearts, the fulfilment, and therefore the abolition, of sacrifice and
temple and priesthood and prophecy and all that witnessed for Him ere He
came. We further call on the name of Christ the Anointed, on whom the
whole fulness of the Divine Spirit dwelt in order that, calling upon Him,
that fulness may in its measure be granted to us.
So the name of the Lord Jesus Christ
brings to view the divine, the human, the Messiah, the anointed Lord of
the Spirit, and Giver of the divine life. To call on His name is to be
blessed, to be made pure and strong, joyous and immortal. ‘The name of the
Lord is a strong tower, the righteous runneth into it and is safe.’ Call
on His name in the day of trouble and ye shall be heard and helped.
III. Lastly, this text suggests what
a Christian life should be.
We have already remarked that to
call on the name of Jesus was the distinctive peculiarity of the early
believers, which marked them off as a people by themselves. Would it be a
true designation of the bulk of so-called Christians now? You do not
object to profess yourself a Christian, or, perhaps, even to say that you
are a disciple of Christ, or even to go the length of calling yourself a
follower and imitator. But are you a worshipper of Him? In your life have
you the habit of meditating on Him as Lord, as Jesus, as Christ, and of
refreshing and gladdening dusty days and fainting strength by the living
water, drawn from the one unfailing stream from these triple fountains? Is
the invocation of His aid habitual with you?
There needs no long elaborate
supplication to secure His aid. How much has been done in the Church's
history by short bursts of prayer, as ‘Lord, help me!’ spoken or unspoken
in the moment of extremity! ‘They cried unto God in the battle.’ They
would not have time for very lengthy petitions then, would they? They
would not give much heed to elegant arrangement of them or suiting them to
the canons of human eloquence. ‘They cried unto God in the battle’; whilst
the enemy's swords were flashing and the arrows whistling about their
ears. These were circumstances to make a prayer a ‘cry’; no composed and
stately utterance of an elegantly modulated voice, nor a languid utterance
without earnestness, but a short, sharp, loud call, such as danger presses
from panting lungs and parched throats. Therefore the cry was answered,
‘and He was entreated of them.’ ‘Lord, save us, we perish!’ was a very
brief prayer, but it brought its answer. And so we, in like manner, may go
through our warfare and work, and day by day as we encounter sudden bursts
of temptation may meet them with sudden jets of petition, and thus put out
their fires. And the same help avails for long-continuing as for sudden
needs. Some of us may have to carry lifelong burdens and to fight in a
battle ever renewed. It may seem as if our cry was not heard, since the
enemy's assault is not weakened, nor our power to beat it back perceptibly
increased. But the appeal is not in vain, and when the fight is over, if
not before, we shall know what reinforcements of strength to our weakness
were due to our poor cry entering into the ears of our Lord and Brother.
No other ‘name’ is permissible as our plea or as recipient of our prayer.
In and on the name of the Lord we must call, and if we do, anything is
possible rather than that the promise which was claimed for the Church and
referred to Jesus, in the very first Christian preaching on Pentecost,
should not be fulfilled—‘Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord
shall be saved.’
‘In every place.’ We may venture to
subject the words of my text to a little gentle pressure here. The Apostle
only meant to express the universal characteristics of Christians
everywhere. But we may venture to give a different turn to the words, and
learn from them the duty of devout communion with Christ as a duty for
each of us wherever we are. If a place is not fit to pray in it is not fit
to be in. We may carry praying hearts, remembrances of the Lord, sweet,
though they may be swift and short, contemplations of His grace, His love,
His power, His sufficiency, His nearness, His punctual help, like a hidden
light in our hearts, into all the dusty ways of life, and in every place
call on His name. There is no place so dismal but that thoughts of Him
will make sunshine in it; no work so hard, so commonplace, so prosaic, so
uninteresting, but that it will become the opposite of all these if
whatever we do is done in remembrance of our Lord. Nothing will be too
hard for us to do, and nothing too bitter for us to swallow, and nothing
too sad for us to bear, if only over all that befalls us and all that we
undertake and endeavour we make the sign of the Cross and call upon the
name of the Lord. If ‘in every place’ we have Him as the object of our
faith and desire, and as the Hearer of our petition, in ‘every place’ we
shall have Him for our help, and all will be full of His bright presence;
and though we have to journey through the wilderness we shall ever drink
of that spiritual rock that will follow us, and that Rock is Christ. In
every place call upon His name, and every place will be a house of God,
and a gate of heaven to our waiting souls.
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‘For the preaching of the Cross is
to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the
power of God.’—1 Corinthians 1:18.
The starting-point of my
remarks is the observation that a slight variation of rendering, which
will be found in the Revised Version, brings out the true meaning of these
words. Instead of reading ‘them that perish’ and ‘us which are saved,’ we
ought to read ‘them that
are
perishing,’ and ‘us which
are being
saved.’ That is to say, the Apostle represents the two contrasted
conditions, not so much as fixed states, either present or future, but
rather as processes which are going on, and are manifestly, in the
present, incomplete. That opens some very solemn and intensely practical
considerations.
Then I may further note that this
antithesis includes the whole of the persons to whom the Gospel is
preached. In one or other of these two classes they all stand. Further, we
have to observe that the consideration which determines the class to which
men belong, is the attitude which they respectively take to the preaching
of the Cross. If it be, and because it is, ‘foolishness’ to some, they
belong to the catalogue of the perishing. If it be, and because it is,
‘the power of God’ to others, they belong to the class of those who are in
process of being saved.
So, then, we have the ground cleared
for two or three very simple, but, as it seems to me, very important
thoughts.
I. I desire, first, to look at the
two contrasted conditions, ‘perishing’ and ‘being saved.’
Now we shall best, I think,
understand the force of the darker of these two terms if we first ask what
is the force of the brighter and more radiant. If we understand what the
Apostle means by ‘saving’ and ‘salvation’ we shall understand also what he
means by ‘perishing.’
If, then, we turn for a moment to
Scripture analogy and teaching, we find that that threadbare word
‘salvation,’ which we all take it for granted that we understand, and
which, like a well-worn coin, has been so passed from hand to hand that it
scarcely remains legible—that well-worn word ‘salvation’ starts from a
double metaphorical meaning. It means either—and is used for both—being
healed or being made safe. In the one sense it is often employed in the
Gospel narratives of our Lord's miracles, and it involves the metaphor of
a sick man and his cure; in the other it involves the metaphor of a man in
peril and his deliverance and security. The negative side, then, of the
Gospel idea of salvation is the making whole from a disease, and the
making safe from a danger. Negatively, it is the removal from each of us
of the one sickness, which is sin; and the one danger, which is the
reaping of the fruits and consequences of sin, in their variety as guilt,
remorse, habit, and slavery under it, perverted relation to God, a fearful
apprehension of penal consequences here, and, if there be a hereafter,
there, too. The sickness of soul and the perils that threaten life, flow
from the central fact of sin, and salvation consists, negatively, in the
sweeping away of all of these, whether the sin itself, or the fatal
facility with which we yield to it, or the desolation and perversion which
it brings into all the faculties and susceptibilities, or the perversion
of relation to God, and the consequent evils, here and hereafter, which
throng around the evil-doer. The sick man is healed, and the man in peril
is set in safety.
But, besides that, there is a great
deal more. The cure is incomplete till the full tide of health follows
convalescence. When God saves, He does not only bar up the iron gate
through which the hosts of evil rush out upon the defenceless soul, but He
flings wide the golden gate through which the glad troops of blessings and
of graces flock around the delivered spirit, and enrich it with all joys
and with all beauties. So the positive side of salvation is the
investiture of the saved man with throbbing health through all his veins,
and the strength that comes from a divine life. It is the bestowal upon
the delivered man of everything that he needs for blessedness and for
duty. All good conferred, and every evil banned back into its dark den,
such is the Christian conception of salvation. It is much that the
negative should be accomplished, but it is little in comparison with the
rich fulness of positive endowments, of happiness, and of holiness which
make an integral part of the salvation of God.
This, then, being the one side, what
about the other? If this be salvation, its precise opposite is the
Scriptural idea of ‘perishing.’ Utter ruin lies in the word, the entire
failure to be what God meant a man to be. That is in it, and no
contortions of arbitrary interpretation can knock that solemn significance
out of the dreadful expression. If salvation be the cure of the sickness,
perishing is the fatal end of the unchecked disease. If salvation be the
deliverance from the outstretched claws of the harpy evils that crowd
about the trembling soul, then perishing is the fixing of their poisoned
talons into their prey, and their rending of it into fragments.
Of course that is metaphor, but no
metaphor can be half so dreadful as the plain, prosaic fact that the exact
opposite of the salvation, which consists in the healing from sin and the
deliverance from danger, and in the endowment with all gifts good and
beautiful, is the Christian idea of the alternative ‘perishing.’ Then it
means the disease running its course. It means the dangers laying hold of
the man in peril. It means the withdrawal, or the non-bestowal, of all
which is good, whether it be good of holiness or good of happiness. It
does not mean, as it seems to me, the cessation of conscious existence,
any more than salvation means the bestowal of conscious existence. But he
who perishes knows that he has perished, even as he knows the process
while he is in the process of perishing. Therefore, we have to think of
the gradual fading away from consciousness, and dying out of a life, of
many things beautiful and sweet and gracious, of the gradual increase of
distance from Him, union with whom is the condition of true life, of the
gradual sinking into the pit of utter ruin, of the gradual increase of
that awful death in life and life in death in which living consciousness
makes the conscious subject aware that he is lost; lost to God, lost to
himself.
Brethren, it is no part of my
business to enlarge upon such awful thoughts, but the brighter the light
of salvation, the darker the eclipse of ruin which rings it round. This,
then, is the first contrast.
II. Now note, secondly, the
progressiveness of both members of the alternative.
All states of heart or mind tend to
increase, by the very fact of continuance. Life is a process, and every
part of a spiritual being is in living motion and continuous action in a
given direction. So the law for the world, and for every man in it, in all
regions of his life, quite as much as in the religious, is ‘To him that
hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance.’
Look, then, at this thought of the
process by which these two conditions become more and more confirmed,
consolidated, and complete. Salvation is a progressive fact. In the New
Testament we have that great idea looked at from three points of view.
Sometimes it is spoken of as having been accomplished in the past in the
case of every believing soul—‘Ye have been saved’ is said more than once.
Sometimes it is spoken of as being accomplished in the present—‘Ye are
saved’ is said more than once. And sometimes it is relegated to the
future—‘Now is our salvation nearer than when we believed,’ and the like.
But there are a number of New Testament passages which coincide with this
text in regarding salvation as, not the work of any one moment, but as a
continuous operation running through life, not a point either in the past,
present, or future, but a continued life. As, for instance, ‘The Lord
added to the Church daily those that were being saved.’ By one offering He
hath perfected for ever them that are being sanctified. And in a passage
in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, which, in some respects, is an
exact parallel to that of my text, we read of the preaching of the Gospel
as being a ‘savour of Christ in them that are being saved, and in them
that are perishing.’
So the process of being saved is
going on as long as a Christian man lives in this world; and every one who
professes to be Christ's follower ought, day by day, to be growing more
and more saved, more fully filled with that Divine Spirit, more entirely
the conqueror of his own lusts and passions and evil, more and more
invested with all the gifts of holiness and of blessedness which Jesus
Christ is ready to bestow upon him.
Ah, brethren! that notion of a
progressive salvation at work in all true Christians has all but faded
away out of the beliefs, as it has all but disappeared from the
experience, of hosts of you that call yourselves Christ's followers, and
are not a bit further on than you were ten years ago; are no more healed
of your corruptions (perhaps less so, for relapses are dangerous) than you
were then—have not advanced any further into the depths of God than when
you first got a glimpse of Him as loving, and your Father, in Jesus
Christ—are contented to linger, like some weak band of invaders in a
strange land, on the borders and coasts, instead of pressing inwards and
making it all your own. Growing Christians—may I venture to say?—are not
the majority of professing Christians.
And, on the other side, as
certainly, there are progressive deterioration and approximation to
disintegration and ruin. How many men there are listening to me now who
were far nearer being delivered from their sins when they were lads than
they have ever been since! How many in whom the sensibility to the message
of salvation has disappeared, in whom the world has ossified their
consciences and their hearts, in whom there is a more entire and
unstruggling submission to low things and selfish things and worldly
things and wicked things, than there used to be! I am sure that there are
not a few among us now who were far better, and far happier, when they
were poor and young, and could still thrill with generous emotion and
tremble at the Word of God, than they are to-day. Why! there are some of
you that could no more bring back your former loftier impulses, and
compunction of spirit and throbs of desire towards Christ and His
salvation, than you could bring back the birds’ nests or the snows of your
youthful years. You are perishing, in the very process of going down and
down into the dark.
Now, notice, that the Apostle treats
these two classes as covering the whole ground of the hearers of the Word,
and as alternatives. If not in the one class we are in the other. Ah,
brethren! life is no level plane, but a steep incline, on which there is
no standing still, and if you try to stand still, down you go. Either up
or down must be the motion. If you are not more of a Christian than you
were a year ago, you are less. If you are not more saved—for there is a
degree of comparison—if you are not more saved, you are less saved.
Now, do not let that go over
your head as pulpit thunder, meaning nothing. It means
you,
and, whether you feel or think it or not, one or other of these two solemn
developments is at this moment going on in you. And that is not a thought
to be put lightly on one side.
Further, note what a light such
considerations as these, that salvation and perishing are vital
processes—‘going on all the time,’ as the Americans say—throw upon the
future. Clearly the two processes are incomplete here. You get the
direction of the line, but not its natural termination. And thus a heaven
and a hell are demanded by the phenomena of growing goodness and of
growing badness which we see round about us. The arc of the circle is
partially swept. Are the compasses going to stop at the point where the
grave comes in? By no means. Round they will go, and will complete the
circle. But that is not all. The necessity for progress will persist after
death; and all through the duration of immortal being, goodness,
blessedness, holiness, Godlikeness, will, on the one hand, grow in
brighter lustre; and on the other, alienation from God, loss of the noble
elements of the nature, and all the other doleful darknesses which attend
that conception of a lost man, will increase likewise. And so, two people,
sitting side by side here now, may start from the same level, and by the
operation of the one principle the one may rise, and rise, and rise, till
he is lost in God, and so finds himself, and the other sink, and sink, and
sink, into the obscurity of woe and evil that lies beneath every human
life as a possibility.
III. And now, lastly, notice the
determining attitude to the Cross which settles the class to which we
belong.
Paul, in my text, is explaining his
reason for not preaching the Gospel with what he calls ‘the words of man's
wisdom,’ and he says, in effect, ‘It would be of no use if I did, because
what settles whether the Cross shall look “foolishness” to a man or not is
the man's whole moral condition, and what settles whether a man shall find
it to be “the power of God” or not is whether he has passed into the
region of those that are being saved.’
So there are two thoughts suggested
which sound as if they were illogically combined, but which yet are both
true. It is true that men perish, or are saved, because the Cross is to
them respectively ‘foolishness’ or ‘the power of God’; and the other thing
is also true, that the Cross is to them ‘foolishness,’ or ‘the power of
God’ because, respectively, they are perishing or being saved. That is not
putting the cart before the horse, but both aspects of the truth are true.
If you see nothing in Jesus
Christ, and His death for us all, except ‘foolishness,’ something unfit to
do you any good, and unnecessary to be taken into account in your
lives—oh, my friends!
that
is the condemnation of your eyes, and not of the thing you look at. If a
man, gazing on the sun at twelve o'clock on a June day, says to me, ‘It is
not bright,’ the only thing I have to say to him is, ‘Friend, you had
better go to an oculist.’ And if to us the Cross is ‘foolishness,’ it is
because already a process of ‘perishing’ has gone so far that it has
attacked our capacity of recognising the wisdom and love of God when we
see them.
But, on the other hand, if we clasp
that Cross in simple trust, we find that it is the power which saves us
out of all sins, sorrows, and dangers, and ‘shall save us’ at last ‘into
His heavenly kingdom.’
Dear friends, that message
leaves no man exactly as it found him. My words, I feel, in this sermon,
have been very poor, set by the side of the greatness of the theme; but,
poor as they have been, you will not be exactly the same man after them,
if you have listened to them, as you were before. The difference may be
very imperceptible, but it will be real. One more, almost invisible, film,
over the eyeball; one more thin layer of wax in the ear; one more fold of
insensibility round heart and conscience—or else some yielding to the
love; some finger put out to take the salvation; some lightening of the
pressure of the sickness; some removal of the peril and the danger. The
same sun hurts diseased eyes, and gladdens sound ones. The same fire melts
wax and hardens clay. ‘This Child is set for the rise and fall of many in
Israel.’ ‘To the one He is the savour of life unto life; to the other He
is the savour of death unto death.’
Which
is He, for He
is
one of them, to you?
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‘I determined not to know anything
among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.’—1 Corinthians 2:2.
Many of you are aware that to-day I
close forty years of ministry in this city—I cannot say to this
congregation, for there are very, very few that can go back with me in
memory to the beginning of these years. You will bear me witness that I
seldom intrude personal references into the pulpit, but perhaps it would
be affectation not to do so now. Looking back over these long years, many
thoughts arise which cannot be spoken in public. But one thing I may say,
and that is, that I am grateful to God and to you, dear friends, for the
unbroken harmony, confidence, affection, and forbearance which have
brightened and lightened my work. Of its worth I cannot judge; its
imperfections I know better than the most unfavourable critic; but I can
humbly take the words of this text as expressive, not, indeed, of my
attainments, but of my aims. One of my texts, on my first Sunday in
Manchester, was ‘We preach Christ and Him crucified,’ and I look back, and
venture to say that the noble words of this text have been, however
imperfectly followed, my guiding star.
Now, I wish to say a word or two,
less personal perhaps, and yet, as you can well suppose, not without a
personal reference in my own consciousness.
I. Note here first, then, the
Apostolic theme—Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
Now, the Apostle, in this context,
gives us a little autobiographical glimpse which is singularly and
interestingly confirmed by some slight incidental notices in the Book of
the Acts. He says, in the context, that he was with the Corinthians ‘in
weakness and in fear and in much trembling,’ and, if we turn to the
narrative, we find that a singular period of silence, apparent abandonment
of his work and dejection, seems to have synchronised with his coming to
the great city of Corinth. The reasons were very plain. He had recently
come into Europe for the first time and had had to front a new condition
of things, very different from what he had found in Palestine or in Asia
Minor. His experience had not been encouraging. He had been imprisoned in
Philippi; he had been smuggled away by night from Thessalonica; he had
been hounded from Berea; he had all but wholly failed to make any
impression in Athens, and in his solitude he came to Corinth, and lay
quiet, and took stock of his adversaries. He came to the conclusion which
he records in my text; he felt that it was not for him to argue with
philosophers, or to attempt to vie with Sophists and professional orators,
but that his only way to meet Greek civilisation, Greek philosophy, Greek
eloquence, Greek self-conceit, was to preach ‘Christ and Him crucified.’
The determination was not come to in ignorance of the conditions that were
fronting him. He knew Corinth, its wealth, its wickedness, its culture,
and knowing these he said, ‘I have made up my mind that I will know
nothing amongst you save Jesus Christ and Him crucified.’
So, then, this Apostle's conception
of his theme was—the biography of a Man, with especial emphasis laid on
one act in His history—His death. Christianity is Christ, and Christ is
Christianity. His relation to the truth that He proclaimed, and to the
truths that may be deducible from the story of His life and death, is
altogether different from the relation of any other founder of a religion
to the truths that he has proclaimed. For in these you can accept the
teaching, and ignore the teacher. But you cannot do that with
Christianity; ‘I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life’; and in that
revealing biography, which is the preacher's theme, the palpitating heart
and centre is the death upon the Cross. So, whatever else Christianity
comes to be—and it comes to be a great deal else—the principle of its
growth, and the germ which must vitalise the whole, lie in the personality
and the death of Jesus Christ.
That is not all. The history of the
life and the death want something more to make them a gospel. The fact, I
was going to say, is the least part of the fact; as in some vegetable
growths, there is far more underground than above. For, unless along with,
involved in, and deducible from, but capable of being stated separately
from, the external facts, there is a certain commentary or explanation of
them: the history is a history, the biography is a biography, the story of
the Cross is a touching narrative, but it is no gospel.
And what was Paul's commentary which
lifted the bare facts up into the loftier region? This—as for the person,
Jesus Christ ‘declared to be the son of God with power’—as for the fact of
the death, ‘died for our sins according to the Scriptures.’ Let in these
two conceptions into the facts—and they are the necessary explanation and
presupposition of the facts—the Incarnation and the Sacrifice, and then
you get what Paul calls ‘my gospel,’ not because it was his invention, but
because it was the trust committed to him. That is the Gospel which alone
answers to the facts which he deals with; and that is the Gospel which,
God helping me, I have for forty years tried to preach.
We hear a great deal at present, or
we did a few years ago, about this generation having recovered Jesus
Christ, and about the necessity of going ‘back to the Christ of the
Gospels.’ By all means, I say, if in the process you do not lose the
Christ of the Epistles, who is the Christ of the Gospels, too. I am free
to admit that a past generation has wrapped theological cobwebs round the
gracious figure of Christ with disastrous results. For it is perfectly
possible to know the things that are said about Him, and not to know Him
about whom these things are said. But the mistake into which the present
generation is far more likely to fall than that of substituting theology
for Christ, is the converse one—that of substituting an undefined Christ
for the Christ of the Gospels and the Epistles, the Incarnate Son of God,
who died for our salvation. And that is a more disastrous mistake than the
other, for you can know nothing about Him and He can be nothing to you,
except as you grasp the Apostolic explanation of the bare facts—seeing in
Him the Word who became flesh, the Son who died that we might receive the
adoption of sons.
I would further point out that
a clear conception of what the theme is, goes a long way to determine the
method in which it shall be proclaimed. The Apostle says, in the passage
which is parallel to the present one, in the previous chapter, ‘We preach
Christ crucified’; with strong emphasis on the word ‘preach.’ ‘The Jew
required a sign’; he wanted a man who would do something. The Greek sought
after wisdom; he wanted a man who would perorate and argue and dissertate.
Paul says, ‘No!’ ‘We have nothing to
do.
We do not come to philosophise and to argue. We come with a message of
fact that has occurred, of a Person that has lived.’ And, as most of you
know, the word which he uses means in its full signification, ‘to proclaim
as a herald does.’
Of course, if my business were to
establish a set of principles, theological or otherwise, then
argumentation would be my weapon, proofs would be my means, and my success
would be that I should win your credence, your intellectual consent, and
conviction. If I were here to proclaim simply a morality, then the thing
that I would aim to secure would be obedience, and the method of securing
it would be to enforce the authority and reasonableness of the command.
But, seeing that my task is to proclaim a living Person and a historical
fact, then the way to do that is to do as the herald does when in the
market-place he stands, trumpet in one hand and the King's message in the
other—proclaim it loudly, confidently, not ‘with bated breath and
whispering humbleness,’ as if apologising, nor too much concerned to
buttress it up with argumentation out of his own head, but to say, ‘Thus
saith the Lord,’ and to what the Lord saith conscience says, ‘Amen.’
Brethren, we need far more, in all our pulpits, of that unhesitating
confidence in the plain, simple proclamation, stripped, as far as
possible, of human additions and accretions, of the great fact and the
great Person on whom all our salvation depends.
II. So let me ask you to notice the
exclusiveness which this theme demands.
‘Nothing but,’ says Paul. I might
venture to say—though perhaps the tone of the personal allusions in this
sermon may seem to contradict it—that this exclusiveness is to be
manifested in one very difficult direction, and that that is, the herald
shall efface himself. We have to hold up the picture; and if I might take
such a metaphor, like a man in a gallery who is displaying some
masterpiece to the eyes of the beholders, we have to keep ourselves well
behind it; and it will be wise if not even a finger-tip is allowed to
steal in front and come into sight. One condition, I believe, of real
power in the ministration of the Gospel, is that people shall be convinced
that the preacher is thinking not at all about himself, but altogether
about his message. You remember that wonderfully pathetic utterance from
John the Baptist's stern lips, which derives much additional pathos and
tenderness from the character of the man from whom it came, when they
asked him, ‘Who art thou?’ and his answer was, ‘I am a Voice.’ I am a
Voice; that is all! Ah, that is the example! We preach not ourselves, but
Christ Jesus as Lord. We must efface ourselves if we would proclaim
Christ.
But I turn to another direction in
which this theme demands exclusiveness, and I revert to the previous
chapter where in the parallel portion to the words of my text, we find the
Apostle very clearly conscious of the two great streams of expectation and
wish which he deliberately thwarted and set at nought. ‘The Jews require a
sign—but we preach Christ crucified. The Greeks seek after wisdom,’ but
again, ‘we preach Christ crucified.’ Now, take these two. They are
representations, in a very emphatic way, of two sets of desires and mental
characteristics, which divide the world between them.
On the one hand, there is the
sensuous tendency that wants something done for it, something to see,
something that sense can grasp at; and so, as it fancies, work itself
upwards into a higher region. ‘The Jew requires a sign’—that is, not
merely a miracle, but something to look at. He wants a visible sacrifice;
he wants a priest. He wants religion to consist largely in the doing of
certain acts which may be supposed to bring, in some magical fashion,
spiritual blessings. And Paul opposes to that, ‘We preach Christ
crucified.’ Brethren, the tendency is strong to-day, not only in those
parts of the Anglican communion where sacramentarian theories are in
favour, but amongst all sections of the Christian Church, in which there
is obvious a drift towards more ornate ritual, and aesthetic services, as
means of attracting to church or chapel, and as more important than
proclaiming Christ. I am free to confess that possibly some of us, with
our Puritan upbringing and tendency, too much disregard that side of human
nature. Possibly it is so. But for all that I profoundly believe that if
religion is to be strong it must have a very, very small infusion of these
external aids to spiritual worship, and that few things more weaken the
power of the Gospel that Paul preached than the lowering of the flag in
conformity with desires of men of sense, and substituting for the simple
glory of the preached Word the meretricious, and in time impotent, and
always corrupting, attractions of a sensuous worship.
Further, ‘The Greeks seek after
wisdom.’ They wanted demonstration, abstract principles, systematised
philosophies, and the like. Paul comes again with his ‘We preach Christ
and Him crucified.’ The wisdom is there, as I shall have to say in a
moment, but the form that it takes is directly antagonistic to the wishes
of these wisdom-seeking Greeks. The same thing in modern guise besets us
to-day. We are called upon, on all sides, to bring into the pulpit what
they call an ethical gospel; putting it into plain English, to preach
morality, and to leave out Christ. We are called upon, on all sides, to
preach an applied Christianity, a social gospel—that is to say, largely to
turn the pulpit into a Sunday supplement to the daily newspaper. We are
asked to deal with the intellectual difficulties which spring from the
collision of science, true or false, with religion, and the like. All that
is right enough. But I believe from my heart that the thing to do is to
copy Paul's example, and to preach Christ and Him crucified. You may think
me right or you may think me wrong, but here and now, at the end of forty
years, I should like to say that I have for the most part ignored that
class of subjects deliberately, and of set purpose, and with a profound
conviction, be it erroneous or not, that a ministry which listens much to
the cry for ‘wisdom’ in its modern forms, has departed from the true
perspective of Christian teaching, and will weaken the churches which
depend upon it. Let who will turn the pulpit into a professor's chair, or
a lecturer's platform, or a concert-room stage or a politician's rostrum,
I for one determine to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ and Him
crucified.
III. Lastly, observe the
all-sufficient comprehensiveness which this theme secures.
Paul says ‘nothing but’; he might
have said ‘everything in.’ For ‘Jesus Christ and Him crucified’ covers all
the ground of men's needs. No doubt many of you will have been saying to
yourselves whilst you have been listening, if you have been listening, to
what I have been saying, ‘Ah! old-fashioned narrowness; quite out of date
in this generation.’ Brethren, there are two ways of adapting one's
ministry to the times. One is falling in with the requirements of the
times, and the other is going dead against them, and both of these methods
have to be pursued by us.
But the exclusiveness of which I
have been speaking, is no narrow exclusiveness. Paul felt that, if he was
to give the Corinthians what they needed, he must refuse to give them what
they wanted, and that whilst he crossed their wishes he was consulting
their necessities. That is true yet, for the preaching that bases itself
upon the life and death of Jesus Christ, conceived as Paul had learned
from Jesus Christ to conceive them, that Gospel, whilst it brushes aside
men's superficial wishes, goes straight to the heart of their deep-lying
universal necessities, for what the Jew needs most is not a sign, and what
the Greek needs most is not wisdom, but what they both need most is
deliverance from the guilt and power of sin. And we all, scholars and
fools, poets and common-place people, artists and ploughmen, all of us, in
all conditions of life, in all varieties of culture, in all stages of
intellectual development, in all diversities of occupation and of mental
bias, what we all have in common is that human heart in which sin abides,
and what we all need most to have is that evil drop squeezed out of it,
and our souls delivered from the burden and the bondage. Therefore, any
man that comes with a sign, and does not deal with the sin of the human
heart, and any man that comes with a philosophical system of wisdom, and
does not deal with sin, does not bring a Gospel that will meet the
necessities even of the people to whose cravings he has been aiming to
adapt his message.
But, beyond that, in this message of
Christ and Him crucified, there lies in germ the satisfaction of all that
is legitimate in these desires that at first sight it seems to thwart. ‘A
sign?’ Yes, and where is there power like the power that dwells in Him who
is the Incarnate might of omnipotence? ‘Wisdom?’ Yes, and where is there
wisdom, except ‘in Him in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and
knowledge’? Let the Jew come to the Cross, and in the weak Man hanging
there, he will find a mightier revelation of the power of God than
anywhere else. Let the Greek come to the Cross, and there he will find
wisdom and righteousness, sanctification and redemption. The bases of all
social, economical, political reform and well-being, lie in the
understanding and the application to social and national life, of the
principles that are wrapped in, and are deduced from, the Incarnation and
the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ. We have not learned them all yet. They have
not all been applied to national and individual life yet. I plead for no
narrow exclusiveness, but for one consistent with the widest application
of Christian principles to all life. Paul determined to know nothing but
Jesus, and to know everything in Jesus, and Jesus in everything. Do not
begin your building at the second-floor windows. Put in your foundations
first, and be sure that they are well laid. Let the Sacrifice of Christ,
in its application to the individual and his sins, be ever the basis of
all that you say. And then, when that foundation is laid, exhibit, to your
heart's content, the applications of Christianity and its social aspects.
But be sure that the beginning of them all is the work of Christ for the
individual sinful soul, and the acceptance of that work by personal faith.
Dear friends, ours has been a long
and happy union but it is a very solemn one. My responsibilities are
great; yours are not small. Let me beseech you to ask yourselves if, with
all your kindness to the messenger, you have given heed to the message.
Have you passed beyond the voice that speaks, to Him of whom it speaks?
Have you taken the truth—veiled and weakened as I know it has been by my
words, but yet in them—for what it is, the word of the living God? My
occupancy of this pulpit must in the nature of things, before long, come
to a close, but the message which I have brought to you will survive all
changes in the voice that speaks here. ‘All flesh is grass ... the Word of
the Lord endureth for ever.’ And, closing these forty years, during a long
part of which some of you have listened most lovingly and most
forbearingly, I leave with you this, which I venture to quote, though it
is my Master's word about Himself, ‘I judge you not; the word which I have
spoken unto you, the same shall judge you in the last day.’
********************************
‘Labourers together with God.’—1
Corinthians 3:9.
The characteristic Greek tendency to
factions was threatening to rend the Corinthian Church, and each faction
was swearing by a favourite teacher. Paul and his companion, Apollos, had
been taken as the figureheads of two of these parties, and so he sets
himself in the context, first of all to show that neither of the two was
of any real importance in regard to the Church's life. They were like a
couple of gardeners, one of whom did the planting, and the other the
watering; but neither the man that put the little plant into the ground,
nor the man that came after him with a watering-pot, had anything to do
with originating the mystery of the life by which the plant grew. That was
God's work, and the pair that had planted and watered were nothing. So
what was the use of fighting which of two nothings was the greater?
But then he bethinks himself that
that is not quite all. The man that plants and the man that waters are
something after all. They do not communicate life, but they do provide for
its nourishment. And more than that, the two operations—that of the man
with the dibble and that of the man with the watering-pot—are one in
issue; and so they are partners, and in some respects may be regarded as
one. Then what is the sense of pitting them against each other?
But even that is not quite all;
though united in operation, they are separate in responsibility and
activity, and will be separate in reward. And even that is not all; for,
being nothing and yet something, being united and yet separate, they are
taken into participation and co-operation with God; and as my text puts
it, in what is almost a presumptuous phrase, they are ‘labourers together
with Him.’ That partnership of co-operation is not merely a partnership of
the two, but it is a partnership of the three—God and the two who, in some
senses, are one.
Now whilst this text is primarily
spoken in regard to the apostolic and evangelistic work of these early
teachers, the principle which it embodies is a very wide one, and it
applies in all regions of life and activity, intellectual, scholastic,
philanthropic, social. Where-ever men are thinking God's thoughts and
trying to carry into effect any phase or side of God's manifold purposes
of good and blessing to the world, there it is true. We claim no special
or exclusive prerogative for the Christian teacher. Every man that is
trying to make men understand God's thought, whether it is expressed in
creation, or whether it is written in history, or whether it is carven in
half-obliterated letters on the constitution of human nature, every man
who, in any region of society or life, is seeking to effect the great
designs of the universal loving Father—can take to himself, in the measure
and according to the manner of his special activity, the great
encouragement of my text, and feel that he, too, in his little way, is a
fellow-helper to the truth and a fellow-worker with God. But then, of
course, according to New Testament teaching, and according to the
realities of the case, the highest form in which men thus can co-operate
with God, and carry into effect His purposes is that in which men devote
themselves, either directly or indirectly, to spreading throughout the
whole world the name and the power of the Saviour Jesus Christ, in whom
all God's will is gathered, and through whom all God's blessings are
communicated to mankind. So the thought of my text comes appropriately
when I have to bring before you the claims of our missionary operations.
Now, the first way in which I desire
to look at this great idea expressed in these words, is that we find in it
I. A solemn thought.
‘Labourers together with God.’
Cannot He do it all Himself? No. God needs men to carry out His purposes.
True, on the Cross, Jesus spoke the triumphant word, ‘It is finished!’ He
did not thereby simply mean that He had completed all His suffering; but
He meant that He had then done all which the world needed to have done in
order that it should be a redeemed world. But for the distribution and
application of that finished work God depends on men. You all know, in
your own daily businesses, how there must be a middleman between the mill
and the consumer. The question of organising a distributing agency is
quite as important as any other part of the manufacturer's business. The
great reservoir is full, but there has to be a system of
irrigating-channels by which the water is carried into every corner of the
field that is to be watered. Christian men individually, and the Church
collectively, supply—may I call it the missing link?—between a redeeming
Saviour and the world which He has redeemed in act, but which is not
actually redeemed, until it has received the message of the great
Redemption that is wrought. The supernatural is implanted in the very
heart of the mass of leaven by the Incarnation and Sacrifice of Jesus
Christ; but the spreading of that supernatural revelation is left in the
hands of men who work through natural processes, and who thus become
labourers together with God, and enable Christ to be to single souls, in
blessed reality, what He is potentially to the world, and has been ever
since. He died upon the Cross. ‘It is finished.’ Yes—because it is
finished, our work begins.
Let me remind you of the profound
symbolism in that incident where our Lord for once appeared conspicuously,
and almost ostentatiously, before Israel as its true King. He had need—as
He Himself said—of the meek beast on which He rode. He cannot pass, in His
coronation procession, through the world unless He has us, by whom He may
be carried into every corner of the earth. So ‘the Lord has need’ of us,
and we are ‘fellow-labourers with Him.’
But this same thought suggests
another point. We have here a solemn call addressed to every Christian man
and woman.
Do not let us run away with the idea
that, because here the Apostle is speaking in regard to himself and
Apollos, he is enunciating a truth which applies only to Apostles and
evangelists. It is true of all Christians. My knowledge of and faith in
Jesus Christ as my own personal Saviour impose upon me the obligation, in
so far as my opportunities and capacities extend, thus to co-operate with
Him in spreading His great Name. Every Christian man, just because he is a
Christian, is invested with the power—and power to its last particle is
duty—and is, therefore, burdened with the honourable obligation to work
for God. There is such a thing as ‘coming to the help of the Lord,’ though
that phrase seems to reverse altogether the true relation. It is the duty
of every Christian, partly because of loyalty to Jesus, and partly because
of the responsibility which the very constitution of society lays upon
every one of us, to diffuse what he possesses, and to be a distributing
agent for the life that he himself enjoys. Brethren! there is no
possibility of Christian men or women being fully faithful to the Saviour,
unless they recognise that the duty of being a fellow-labourer with God
inevitably follows on being a possessor of Christ's salvation; and that no
Apostle, no official, no minister, no missionary, has any more necessity
laid upon him to preach the Gospel, nor pulls down any heavier woe on
himself if he is unfaithful, than has and does each one of Christ's
servants.
So ‘we are fellow-labourers with
God.’ Alas! alas! how poorly the average Christian realises—I do not say
discharges, but realises—that obligation! Brethren, I do not wish to find
fault, but I do beseech you to ask yourselves whether, if you are
Christians, you are doing anything the least like what my text
contemplates as the duty of all Christians.
May I say a word or two with regard
to another aspect of this solemn call? Does not the thought of working
along with God prescribe for us the sort of work that we ought to do? We
ought to work in God's fashion, and if we wish to know what God's fashion
is, we have but to look at Jesus Christ. We ought to work in Jesus
Christ's fashion. We all know what that involved of self-sacrifice, of
pain, of weariness, of utter self-oblivious devotion, of gentleness, of
tenderness, of infinite pity, of love running over. ‘The master's eye
makes a good servant.’ The Master's hand working along with the servant
ought to make the servant work after the Master's fashion. ‘As My Father
hath sent Me, so send I you.’ If we felt that side by side with us, like
two sailors hauling on one rope, ‘the Servant of the Lord’ was toiling, do
you not think it would burn up all our selfishness, and light up all our
indifference, and make us spend ourselves in His service? A fellow-labourer
with God will surely never be lazy and selfish. Thus my text has in it, to
begin with, a solemn call.
It suggests
II. A signal honour.
Suppose a great painter, a Raphael
or a Turner, taking a little boy that cleaned his brushes, and saying to
him, ‘Come into my studio, and I will let you do a bit of work upon my
picture.’ Suppose an aspirant, an apprentice in any walk of life, honoured
by being permitted to work along with some one who was recognised all over
the world as being at the very top of that special profession. Would it
not be a feather in the boy's cap all his life? And would he not think it
the greatest honour that ever had been done him that he was allowed to
co-operate, in however inferior a fashion, with such an one? Jesus Christ
says to us, ‘Come and work here side by side with Me,’ But Christian men,
plenty of them, answer, ‘It is a perpetual nuisance, this continual
application for money! money! money! work! work! work! It is never-ending,
and it is a burden!’ Yes, it is a burden, just because it is an honour. Do
you know that the Hebrew word which means ‘glory’ literally means
‘weight’? There is a great truth in that. You cannot get true honours
unless you are prepared to carry them as burdens. And the highest honour
that Jesus Christ gives to men when He says to them, not only ‘Go work
to-day in My vineyard,’ but ‘Come, work here side by side with Me,’ is a
heavy weight which can only be lightened by a cheerful heart.
Is it not the right way to look at
all the various forms of Christian activity which are made imperative upon
Christian people, by their possession of Christianity as being tokens of
Christ's love to us? Do you remember that this same Apostle said, ‘Unto me
who am less than the least of all saints is this grace given, that I
should preach the unsearchable riches of Christ?’ He could speak about
burdens and heavy tasks, and being ‘persecuted but not forsaken,’ almost
crushed down and yet not in despair, and about the weights that came upon
him daily, ‘the care of all the churches,’ but far beneath all the sense
of his heavy load lay the thrill of thankful wonder that to him, of all
men in the world, knowing as he did better than anybody else could do his
own imperfection and insufficiency, this distinguishing honour had been
bestowed, that he was made the Apostle to the Gentiles. That is the way in
which the true man will always look at what the selfish man, and the
half-and-half Christian, look at as being a weight and a weariness, or a
disagreeable duty, which is to be done as perfunctorily as possible. One
question that a great many who call themselves Christians ask is, ‘With
how little service can I pass muster?’ Ah, it is because we have so little
of the Spirit of Christ in us that we feel burdened by His command, ‘Go ye
into all the world,’ as being so heavy; and that so many of us—I leave you
to judge if you are in the class—so many of us make it criminally light if
we do not ignore it altogether. I believe that, if it were possible to
conceive of the duty and privilege of spreading Christ's name in the world
being withdrawn from the Church, all His real servants would soon be
yearning to have it back again. It is a token of His love; it is a source
of infinite blessings to ourselves; ‘if the house be not worthy, your
peace shall return to you again.’
And now, lastly, we have suggested
by this text
III. A strong encouragement.
‘Fellow-labourers with God’—then,
God is a Fellow-labourer with us. The co-operation works both ways, and no
man who is seeking to spread that great salvation, to distribute that
great wealth, to irrigate some little corner of the field by some little
channel that he has dug, needs to feel that he is labouring alone. If I am
working with God, God is working with me. Do you remember that most
striking picture which is drawn in the verses appended to Mark's Gospel,
which tells how the universe seemed parted into two halves, and up above
in the serene the Lord ‘sat on the right hand of God,’ while below, in the
murky and obscure, ‘they went everywhere preaching the Word.’ The
separation seems complete, but the two halves are brought together by the
next word—‘The Lord also,’ sitting up yonder, ‘working with them’ the
wandering preachers down here, ‘confirming the words with signs
following.’ Ascended on high, entered into His rest, having finished His
work, He yet is working with us, if we are labourers together with God. If
we turn to the last book of Scripture, which draws back the curtain from
the invisible world which is all filled with the glorified Christ, and
shows its relations to the earthly militant church, we read no longer of a
Christ enthroned in apparent ease, but of a Christ walking amidst the
candlesticks, and of a Lamb standing in the midst of the Throne, and
opening the seals, launching forth into the world the sequences of the
world's history, and of the Word of God charging His enemies on His white
horse, and behind Him the armies of God following. The workers who labour
with God have the ascended Christ labouring with them.
But if God works with us, success is
sure. Then comes the old question that Gideon asked with bitterness of
heart, when he was threshing out his handful of wheat in a corner to avoid
the oppressors, ‘If the Lord be with us, wherefore is all this come upon
us? Will any one say that the progress of the Gospel in the world has been
at the rate which its early believers expected, or at the rate which its
own powers warranted them to expect? Certainly not. And so it comes to
this, that whilst every true labourer has God working with him, and
therefore success is certain, the planter and the waterer can delay the
growth of the plant by their unfaithfulness, by not expecting success, by
not so working as to make it likely, or by neutralising their evangelistic
efforts by their worldly lives. When Jesus Christ was on earth, it is
recorded, ‘He could there do no mighty works because of their unbelief,
save that He laid His hands on a few sick folk and healed them.’ A
faithless Church, a worldly Church, a lazy Church, an unspiritual Church,
an un-Christlike Church—which, to a large extent, is the designation of
the so-called Church of to day—can clog His chariot-wheels, can thwart the
work, can hamper the Divine Worker. If the Christians of Manchester were
revived, they could win Manchester for Jesus. If the Christians of England
lived their Christianity, they could make England what it never has been
but in name—a Christian country. If the Church universal were revived, it
could win the world. If the single labourer, or the community of such, is
labouring ‘in the Lord,’ their labour will not be in vain; and if they
thus plant and water, God will give the increase.
********************************
‘Now if any man build upon this
foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble: 13. Every
man's work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because
it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man's work of
what sort it is.’—1 Corinthians 3:12, 13.
Before I enter upon the ideas which
the words suggest, my exegetical conscience binds me to point out that the
original application of the text is not exactly that which I purpose to
make of it now. The context shows that the Apostle is thinking about the
special subject of Christian teachers and their work, and that the
builders of whom he speaks are the men in the Corinthian Church, some of
them his allies and some of them his rivals, who were superimposing upon
the foundation of the preaching of Jesus Christ other doctrines and
principles. The ‘wood, hay, stubble’ are the vapid and trivial doctrines
which the false teachers were introducing into the Church. The ‘gold,
silver, and precious stones’ are the solid and substantial verities which
Paul and his friends were proclaiming. And it is about these, and not
about the Christian life in the general, that the tremendous metaphors of
my text are uttered.
But whilst that is true, the
principles involved have a much wider range than the one case to which the
Apostle applies them. And, though I may be slightly deflecting the text
from its original direction, I am not doing violence to it, if I take it
as declaring some very plain and solemn truths applicable to all Christian
people, in their task of building up a life and character on the
foundation of Jesus Christ; truths which are a great deal too much
forgotten in our modern popular Christianity, and which it concerns us all
very clearly to keep in view. There are three things here that I wish to
say a word about—the patchwork building, the testing fire, the fate of the
builders.
I. First, the patchwork structure.
‘If any man build upon this
foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble.’ In the
original application of the metaphor, Paul is thinking of all these
teachers in that church at Corinth as being engaged in building the one
structure—I venture to deflect here, and to regard each of us as rearing
our own structure of life and character on the foundation of the preached
and accepted Christ.
Now, what the Apostle says is that
these builders were, some of them, laying valuable things like gold and
silver and costly stones—by which he does not mean jewels, but marbles,
alabasters, polished porphyry or granite, and the like; sumptuous building
materials, which were employed in great palaces or temples—and that some
of them were bringing timber, hay, stubble, reeds gathered from the
marshes or the like, and filling in with such trash as that. That is a
picture of what a great many Christian people are doing in their own
lives—the same man building one course of squared and solid and precious
stones, and topping them with rubbish. You will see in the walls of
Jerusalem, at the base, five or six courses of those massive blocks which
are the wonders of the world yet; well jointed, well laid, well cemented,
and then on the top of them a mass of poor stuff, heaped together anyhow;
scamped work—may I use a modern vulgarism?—‘jerry-building.’ You may go to
some modern village, on an ancient historic site, and you will find built
into the mud walls of the hovels in which the people are living, a marble
slab with fair carving on it, or the drum of a great column of veined
marble, and on the top of that, timber and clay mixed together.
That is the type of the sort of life
that hosts of Christian people are living. For, mark, all the builders are
on the foundation. Paul is not speaking about mere professed Christians
who had no faith at all in them, and no real union with Jesus Christ.
These builders were ‘on the foundation’; they were building on the
foundation, there was a principle deep down in their lives—which really
lay at the bottom of their lives—and yet had not come to such dominating
power as to mould and purify and make harmonious with itself the life that
was reared upon it. We all know that that is the condition of many men,
that they have what really are the fundamental bases of their lives, in
belief and aim and direction; and which yet are not strong enough to
master the whole of the life, and to manifest themselves through it.
Especially it is the condition of some Christian people. They have a real
faith, but it is of the feeblest and most rudimentary kind. They are on
the foundation, but their lives are interlaced with the most heterogeneous
mixty-maxty of good and evil, of lofty, high, self-sacrificing thoughts
and heavenward aspirations, of resolutions never carried out into
practice; and side by side with these there shall be meannesses,
selfishnesses, tempers, dispositions all contradictory of the former
impulses. One moment they are all fire and love, the next moment ice and
selfishness. One day they are all for God, the next day all for the world,
the flesh, and the devil. Jacob sees the open heavens and the face of God
and vows; to-morrow he meets Laban and drops to shifty ways. Peter leaves
all and follows his Master, and in a little while the fervour has gone,
and the fire has died down into grey ashes, and a flippant servant-girl's
tongue leads him to say ‘I know not the man.’ ‘Gold, silver, precious
stones,’ and topping them, ‘wood, hay, stubble!’
The inconsistencies of the Christian
life are what my text, in the application that I am venturing to make of
it, suggests to us. Ah, dear friends! we do not need to go to Jacob and
Peter; let us look at our own hearts, and if we will honestly examine one
day of our lives, I think we shall understand how it is possible for a
man, on the foundation, yet to build upon it these worthless and
combustible things, ‘wood, hay, stubble.’
We are not to suppose that one
man builds
only
‘gold, silver, precious stones.’ There is none of us that does that. And
we are not to suppose that any man who
is
on the foundations has so little grasp of it, as that he builds
only
‘wood, hay, stubble.’
There is none of us who has
not intermingled his building, and there is none of us, if we are
Christians at all, who has not sometimes laid a course of ‘precious
stones.’ If your faith is doing
nothing
for you except bringing to you a belief that you are not going to hell
when you die, then it is no faith at all. ‘Faith without works is dead.’
So there is a mingling in the best, and—thank God!—there is a mingling of
good with evil, in the worst of real Christian people.
II. Note here, the testing fire.
Paul points to two things, the day
and the fire.
‘The day shall declare it,’ that is
the day on which Jesus Christ comes to be the Judge; and it, that is ‘the
day,’ ‘shall be revealed in fire; and the fire shall test every man's
work.’ Now, it is to be noticed that here we are moving altogether in the
region of lofty symbolism, and that the metaphor of the testing fire is
suggested by the previous enumeration of building materials, gold and
silver being capable of being assayed by flame; and ‘wood, hay, stubble’
being combustible, and sure to be destroyed thereby. The fire here is not
an emblem of punishment; it is not an emblem of cleansing. There is no
reference to anything in the nature of what Roman Catholics call
purgatorial fires. The allusion is simply to some stringent and searching
means of testing the quality of a man's work, and of revealing that
quality.
So then, we come just to this, that
for people ‘on the foundation,’ there is a Day of revelation and testing
of their life's work. It is a great misfortune that so-called Evangelical
Christianity does not say as much as the New Testament says about the
judgment that is to be passed on ‘the house of God.’ People seem to think
that the great doctrine of salvation, ‘not by works of righteousness which
we have done, but by His mercy,’ is, somehow or other, interfered with
when we proclaim, as Paul proclaims, speaking to Christian people, ‘We
must be manifested before the judgment seat of Christ,’ and declares that
‘Every man will receive the things done in his body, according to that he
has done, whether it be good or bad.’ Paul saw no contradiction, and there
is no contradiction. But a great many professing Christians seem to think
that the great blessing of their salvation by faith is, that they are
exempt from that future revelation and testing and judgment of their acts.
That is not the New Testament teaching. But, on the contrary, ‘Whatsoever
a man soweth that shall he also reap,’ was originally said to a church of
Christian people. And here we come full front against that solemn truth,
that the Lord will ‘gather together His saints, those that have made a
covenant with Him by sacrifice, that He may judge His people.’ Never mind
about the drapery, the symbolism, the expression in material forms with
which that future judgment is arranged, in order that we may the more
easily grasp it. Remember that these pictures in the New Testament of a
future judgment are highly symbolical, and not to be interpreted as if
they were plain prose; but also remember that the heart of them is this,
that there comes for Christian people as for all others, a time when the
light will shine down upon their past, and will flash its rays into the
dark chambers of memory, and when men will—to themselves if not to
others—be revealed ‘in the day when the Lord shall judge the secrets of
men according to my Gospel.’
We have all experience enough of how
but a few years, a change of circumstances, or a growth into another stage
of development, give us fresh eyes with which to estimate the moral
quality of our past. Many a thing, which we thought to be all right at the
time when we did it, looks to us now very questionable and a plain
mistake. And when we shift our stations to up yonder, and get rid of all
this blinding medium of flesh and sense, and have the issues of our acts
in our possession, and before our sight—ah! we shall think very
differently of a great many things from what we think of them now.
Judgment will begin at the house of God.
And there is the other thought, that
the fire which reveals and tests has also in it a power of destruction.
Gold and silver will lose no atom of their weight, and will be brightened
into greater lustre as they flash back the beams. The timber and the
stubble will go up in a flare, and die down into black ashes. That is
highly metaphorical, of course. What does it mean? It means that some
men's work will be crumpled up and perish, and be as of none effect,
leaving a great, black sorrowful gap in the continuity of the structure,
and that other men's work will stand. Everything that we do is, in one
sense, immortal, because it is represented in our final character and
condition, just as a thin stratum of rock will represent forests of ferns
that grew for one summer millenniums ago, or clouds of insects that danced
for an hour in the sun. But whilst that is so, and nothing human ever
dies, on the other hand, deeds which have been in accordance, as it were,
with the great stream that sweeps the universe on its bosom will float on
that surface and never sink. Acts which have gone against the rush of
God's will through creation will be like a child's go-cart that comes
against the engine of an express train—be reduced, first, to stillness,
all the motion knocked out of them, and then will be crushed to atoms.
Deeds which stand the test will abide in blessed issue for the doer, and
deeds which do not will pass away in smoke, and leave only ashes. Some of
us, building on the foundation, have built more rubbish than solid work,
and that will be
