if, after all the
process, the polished shaft is to be broken in two, and tossed away as
rubbish? If death ends faculty, it is a pity that the faculty was so
patiently developed. If God is educating us all in His school, and then
means that, like some wastrel boys, we should lose all our education as
soon as we leave its benches, there is little use in the rod, and little
meaning in the training. Brethren! life is an insoluble riddle unless the
purpose of it lie yonder, and unless all this patient training of our
sorrows and our gladnesses, the warmth that expands and the cold that
contracts the heart, the light that gladdens and the darkness that saddens
the eye and the spirit, are equally meant for training us for the perfect
life of a perfect soul moving a perfect body in a perfect universe. Here
is a pillar in some ancient hall that has fallen into poor hands, and has
had a low roof thrown across the centre of the chamber at half its height.
In the lower half there is part of a pillar that means nothing; ugly,
bare, evidently climbing, and passing through the aperture, and away above
yonder is the carved capital and the great entablature that it carries.
Who could understand the shaft unless he could look up through the
aperture, and see the summit? And who can think of life as anything but a
wretched fragment unless he knows that all which begins here runs upwards
into the room above, and there finds its explanation and its completion?
But there is the third sphere of the
divine operation. As in creation and in providence, so in all the work and
mystery of our redemption, this is the goal that God has in view. It was
not worth Christ's while to come and die, if nothing more was to come of
it than the imperfect reception of His blessings and gifts which the
noblest Christian life in this world presents. The meaning and purpose of
the Cross, the meaning and purpose of all the patient dealings of His
whispering Spirit, are that we shall be like our Divine Lord in spirit
first, and in body afterwards.
And everything about the
experiences of a true Christian spirit is charged with a prophecy of
immortality. I have not time to dwell upon one point gathered from the
context, that I intended to have insisted upon, viz. that the very desires
which God's good Spirit works in a believing soul are themselves
confirmations of their own fulfilment. But if you notice at your leisure
the verses that precede my text, you will find that the Apostle adduces
the groanings of ‘earnest desire to be clothed with our house which is
from Heaven,’ as a proof that we
have
‘a building of God, a house not made with hands.’ That is to say, every
longing in a Christian heart when it is most filled with that Spirit, and
most in contact with God, and which is the answer of that heart to a
promise of Christ—every such longing carries with it the assurance of its
own fulfilment. He that hath wrought it has wrought it in order that the
desire may fit us for its answer, and that the open mouth may be ready for
the abundant filling which His grace designs. He works upon us, therefore,
by making us desire a gift, and then He gives that which He desires. So
let us cherish these longings, not for the accident of escaping death, nor
as choosing the path by which we shall reach the blessed issue, but
longing for that great issue itself; and try to keep more distinct and
clear before all our minds this thought, ‘God means for me the
participation in Christ's glorified Manhood, and my attaining of that
Manhood is the end that He has in view in all that He does with me.’
III. So I must say one word about
the last thought that is here, and that is the certainty and the
confidence. ‘Therefore we are always confident,’ says the Apostle.
‘He that hath wrought us for
the self-same thing is God.’ Then we may be sure that as far as He is
concerned, the work will not be suspended nor vain.
This
man does not begin to build and is unable to finish. This workman has
infinite resources, an unchanging purpose, and infinite long-suffering. He
will complete His task.
In the quarries of Egypt you will
find gigantic stones, half-dressed, and intended to have been transported
to some great temple. But there they lie, the work incomplete, and they
never carried to their place. There are no half-polished stones in God's
quarries. They are all finished where they lie, and then borne across the
sea, like Hiram's from Lebanon, to the Temple on the hill. It is a
certainty that God will finish His work; and since ‘He that hath wrought
us is God,’ we may be sure that He will not stop till He has done.
But it is a certainty that you can
thwart. It is an operation that you can counterwork. The potter in
Jeremiah's parable was making a vessel upon his wheel, and the vessel was
marred in his hand, and did not turn out what he wanted it. The meaning of
the metaphor, which has often been twisted to express the very opposite,
is that the potter's work may fail, that the artificer may be balked, that
you can counterwork the divine dealing, and that all His purpose in your
creation, in His providence and in His gift of His Son for your
redemption, may come to nought as far as you are concerned. ‘I beseech you
that ye receive not the grace of God in vain.’ ‘In vain have I smitten
your children,’ wailed the Divine Love; ‘they have received no
correction.’ In vain God lavishes upon some of us His mercies, in vain for
some of us has Christ toiled and suffered and died. Oh, brother! do not
let all God's work on you come to nought, but yield yourselves to it.
Rejoice in the confidence that He is moulding your character, cheerfully
welcome and accept the providences, painful as they may be, by which He
prepares you for heaven. The chisel is sharp that strikes off the
superfluous pieces of marble, and when the chisel cuts, not into marble,
but into a heart, there is a pang. Bear it, bear it! and understand the
meaning of the blow of the sculptor's mallet, and see in all life the
divine hand working towards the accomplishment of His own loving purpose.
Then if we turn to Him, amid the pains of His discipline and the joys of
His gifts of grace, with recognition and acceptance of His meaning in them
all, and cry to Him, ‘Thy mercy, O Lord, endureth for ever, forsake not
the work of Thine own hands,’ we may be always confident, as knowing that
‘the Lord will perfect that which concerneth us.’
‘We are confident,
I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present
with the Lord.’—2 COR. v. 8.
There lie in the
words of my text simply these two things; the Christian view of what death
is, and the Christian temper in which to anticipate it.
I. First, the
Christian view of what death is.
Now it is to
be observed that, properly speaking, the Apostle is not here referring to
the state of the dead, but to the act of dying. The language would more
literally and accurately be rendered ‘willing to
go from
home, from the body, and to
go
home, to the Lord.’ The moment of transition of course leads to a
permanent state, but it is the moment of transition which is in view in
the words. I need not remind you, I suppose, that the metaphor of the home
is one which has already been dwelt upon in the early part of the chapter,
where the contrast is drawn between the transitory house of ‘this tent,’
and the ‘building of God,’ the body of incorruption and glory which the
saints at the Resurrection day shall receive. So, then, the Christian view
of the act of death is that it is simply a change of abode.
Very clearly and
firmly does Paul draw the line between the man and his dwelling-place.
Life is more than a result of organisation. Consciousness, thought,
feeling, are more than functions of matter. No materialist philosopher has
ever been, or ever will be, able to explain within the limits of his
system the strange difference between the cause and the effect; how it
comes to pass that at the one end of the chain there is an impression upon
a nerve, and at the other there is pain; how at the one end there is the
throb of an inch of matter in a man's skull, and at the other end there
are thoughts that breathe and words that burn, and that live for ever.
That brings us up to the edge of a gulf over which no materialist
philosopher has ever been able to cast a bridge. The scalpel cannot cut
deep enough to solve this mystery. Conscience as well as instinct cry out
against the theory that the worker and the tools are inseparable. For such
a theory reduces human actions to mechanical results, and shatters all
responsibility. Man is more than his dwelling-place. You crush a shell on
the beach with your heel, and you slay its tiny inhabitant. But you can
pull down the tent, and pluck up its pegs, and roll up its canvas, and put
it away in a dark corner, and the tenant is untouched. The foolish senses
crown Death as last, and lord of all. But wisdom says, ‘Life and thought
have gone away side by side, leaving doors and windows wide,’ and that is
all that has happened.
Still further, my
text suggests that to the Christian soul the departure from the one house
is the entrance into the other. The home has been the body; the home is
now to be Jesus Christ. And very beautiful and significant with meanings,
which only experience will fully unfold, is the representation that the
Lord Christ Himself assumes the place which the bodily environment has
hitherto held.
That teaches us, at
all events, that there is a new depth and closeness of union with Jesus
waiting the Christian soul, when it lays aside the separating film of
flesh. Here the bodily organisation, with its limitations, necessarily
shuts us off from the closeness of intercourse which is possible for a
naked soul. We know not how much separation may depend upon the immersing
of the spirit in the fleshly tabernacle, but this we know, that, though
here and now, by faith which dominates sense, souls can live in Christ
even whilst they live in the body; yet there shall come a form of union so
much more close, intimate, all-pervading, and all-encircling, as that the
present union with Him by faith, precious as it is, shall be, as the
Apostle calls it in our context, ‘absence from the Lord.’ ‘We have to be
discharged,’ says an old thinker, ‘of a great deal of what we call body,
and then we shall be more truly ourselves,’ and more truly united to Him
who, if we are Christian people at all, is the self of ourselves and the
life of our lives. No man knows how close he can nestle to the bosom of
Christ when the film of flesh is rent away. Just as when in some crowded
street of a great city some grimy building is pulled down, a sudden
daylight fills the vacant space, and all the site that had been shut out
from the sky for many years is drenched in sunshine, so when ‘the earthly
house of this tabernacle’ is ruinated and falls, the light will flood the
place where it stood, and to be ‘absent from the body’ shall be to be
‘present with the Lord.’
May we go a step
further and suggest that, perhaps, in the bold metaphor of my text, there
is an answer to the questions which so often rack loving and parted
hearts? ‘Do the dead know aught of what affects us here? and can they do
aught but gaze on Him, and love, and rest?’ If it be that there is any
such analogy as seems to be dimly shadowed in my text, between the
relation of the body on earth to the spirit that inhabits it, and that of
Jesus Christ to him who dwells in Him, and is clothed by Him, then it may
be that, as the flesh, so the Christ transmits to the spirit that has Him
for its home impressions from the outside world, and affords a means of
action upon that world. Christ may be, if I might so say, the sensorium of
the disembodied spirit; and Christ may be the hand of the man who hath no
other instrument by which to express himself. But all that is fancy
perhaps, speculation certainly; and yet there seems to be a shadow of a
foundation for at least entertaining the possibility of such a thought as
that Jesus is the means of knowing and the means of acting to those who
rest from their labours in Him, and dwell in peace in His arms. But be
that as it may, the reality of a close communion and encircling by the
felt presence of Jesus Christ, which, in its blessed closeness, will make
the closest communion here seem to be obscure, is certainly declared in
the words before us.
Then this
transition is regarded in my text as being the work of a moment. It is not
a long journey of which the beginning is ‘to go
from
home, from the body,’ and the end is ‘to
go
home, to the Lord.’ But it is one and the same motion which, looked at
from the one side, is departure, and looked at from the other is arrival.
The old saying has it, ‘there is but a step between me and death.’ The
truth is, there is but a step between me and
life.
The mighty angel in the Apocalypse, that stood with one foot on the firm
land and the other on the boundless ocean, is but the type of the spirit
in the brief moment of transition, when the consciousness of two worlds
blends, and it is clothed upon with the house which is from heaven, in the
very act of stripping off the earthly house of this tabernacle.
Nor need I remind
you, I suppose, in more than a sentence, that this transition obviously
leads into a state of conscious communion with Jesus Christ. The dreary
figment of an unconscious interval for the disembodied spirit has no
foundation, either in what we know of spirit, or in what is revealed to us
in Scripture. For the one thing that seems to make it probable—the use of
that metaphor of ‘sleeping in Jesus’—is quite sufficiently accounted for
by the notions of repose, and cessation of outward activity, and
withdrawal of capacity of being influenced by the so-called realities of
this lower world, without dragging in the unfounded notion of
unconsciousness. My text is incompatible with it, for it is absurd to say
of an unconscious spirit, clear of a bodily environment, that it is
anywhere; and there is no intelligible sense in which the condition of
such a spirit can be called being ‘with the Lord.’
So, then, I think a
momentary transition, with uninterrupted consciousness, which leads to a
far deeper and more wonderful and blessed sense of unity with Jesus Christ
than is possible here on earth, is the true shape in which the act of
death presents itself to the Christian thinker.
And remember, dear
brethren, that is all we know. Nothing else is certain—nothing but this,
‘with the Lord,’ and the resulting certainty that therefore it is well
with them. It is enough for our faith, for our comfort, for our patient
waiting. They live in Christ, ‘and there we find them worthier to be
loved,’ and certainly lapped in a deeper rest. ‘Blessed are the dead that
die in the Lord.’
II. In the next
place, note the Christian temper in which to anticipate the transition.
‘We are always
courageous, and willing rather to leave our home in the body, and to go
home to the Lord.’ Now I must briefly remind you of how the Apostle comes
to this state of feeling. He has been speaking about the natural
shrinking, which belongs to all humanity, from the act of dissolution,
considered as being the stripping off of the garment of the flesh. And he
has declared, on behalf of himself and the early Christian Church, his own
and their personal desire that they might escape from that trial by the
path which seemed possible to the early Christians—viz. that of surviving
until the return of Jesus Christ from Heaven, when they would be ‘clothed
upon with the house which is from Heaven,’ without the necessity of
stripping off that with which at present they are invested. Then he
says—and this is a very remarkable thought—that just because this
instinctive shrinking from death and yearning for the glorified body is so
strong in the Christian heart, that is a sign that there is such a
glorified body waiting for us. He says, ‘we know that if our house ...
were dissolved, we have a building of God.’ And his reason for knowing it
is this, ‘for
in this we groan.’ That is a bold position to say that a yearning in the
Christian consciousness prophesies its own fulfilment. Our desires are the
prophecies of His gifts. Then, on this certainty—which he deduces from the
fact of the longing for it—on this certainty of the glorious, ultimate
body of the Resurrection he bases his willingness expressed in the text,
to go through the unwelcome process of leaving the old house, although he
shrinks from it.
So, then, Christian
faith does not destroy the natural reluctance to put aside the old
companion of our lives. The old house, though it be smoky, dimly lighted,
and, by our own careless keeping, sluttish and grimy in many a corner, yet
is the only house we have ever known, and to be absent from it is untried
and strange. There is nothing wrong in saying ‘we would not be unclothed
but clothed upon.’ Nature speaks there. We may reverently entertain the
same feelings which our Pattern acknowledged, when He said, ‘I have a
baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened until it be
accomplished.’ And there would be nothing sinful in repeating His prayer
with His conditions, ‘If it be possible, let this cup pass from Me.’
But then the text
suggests to us the large Christian possessions and hope which counterwork
this reluctance, in the measure in which we live lives of faith. There is
the assurance of that ultimate home in which all the transiency of the
present material organisation is exchanged for the enduring permanence
which knows no corruption. The ‘tent’ is swept away to make room for the
‘building.’ The earthly house is dissolved in order that there may be
reared round the homeless tenant the house eternal, ‘not made with hands,’
God's own work, which is waiting in the heavens; because the power that
shall frame it is there. Not only that great hope of the ‘body of His
glory,’ with which at the last all true souls shall be invested, but
furthermore, ‘the earnest of the spirit,’ and the blessed experiences
therefrom, resulting even here, ought to make the unwelcome necessity less
unwelcome. If the firstfruits be righteousness and peace and joy of the
Holy Ghost, what shall the harvest be? If the ‘earnest,’ the shilling
given in advance, be so precious, what will the whole wealth of the
inheritance which it heralds be when it is received?
For such reasons the
transitory passage becomes less painful and unwelcome. Who is there that
would hesitate to dip his foot into the ice-cold brook if he knew that it
would not reach above his ankles, and that a step would land him in
blessedness unimagined till experienced?
Therefore the
Christian temper is that of quiet willingness and constant courage. There
is nothing hysterical here, nothing morbid, nothing overstrained, nothing
artificial. The Apostle says: ‘I would rather not. I should like if I
could escape it. It is an unwelcome necessity; but when I see what I do
see beyond,’ I am ready. Since so it must be, I will go, not reluctantly,
nor dragged away from life, nor clinging desperately to it as it slips
from my hands, nor dreading anything that may happen beyond; but always
courageous, and prepared to go whithersoever the path may take me, since I
am sure that it ends in His bosom. He is willing to go from the home of
the body, because to do that is to go home to Christ.
There are
other references of our Apostle's, substantially of the same tone as that
of my text, but with very beautiful and encouraging differences. When he
was nearer his end, when it seemed to him as if the headsman's block was
not very far off, his
willingness
had intensified into ‘having a
desire
to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better.’ And when the end
was all but reached, and he knew that death was waiting just round the
next turn in the road, he said, with the confidence that in the midst of
the struggle would have been vainglory, but at the end of it was a
foretaste of the calm of Heaven, ‘I have finished my course, I have kept
the faith; henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness.’
That is our model, dear brethren,—‘always courageous,’ afraid of nothing
in life, in death, or beyond, and therefore willing to go from home from
the body and to go home to the Lord.
Think of this man
thus fronting the inevitable, with no excitement and with no delusions.
Remember what Paul believed about death, about sin, about his own sin,
about judgment, about hell. And then think of how to him death had made
its darkness beautiful with the light of Christ's face, and all the terror
was gone out of it. Do you think so about death? Do you shrink from it?
Why? Why do you not take Paul's cure for the shrinking? If you can say,
‘To me to live is Christ,’ you will have no difficulty in saying, ‘and to
die is gain.’ That is the only way by which you can come to such a temper,
and then you will be willing to move from the cottage to the palace, and
to wait in peace till you are shifted again into ‘the building of God, the
house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.’
‘We labour that
whether present or absent we may be accepted of Him.’—2 COR. v. 2.
We do not usually
care very much for, or very much trust, a man's own statement of the
motives of his life, especially if in the statement he takes credit for
lofty and noble ones. And it would be rather a dangerous experiment for
the ordinary run of so-called Christian people to stand up and say what
Paul says here, that the supreme design and aim towards which all their
lives are directed is to please Jesus Christ. In his case the tree was
known by its fruits. Certainly there never was a life of more noble
self-abnegation, of more continuous heroism, of loftier aspiration and
lowlier service than the life of which we see the very pulse in these
words.
But Paul is not only
professing his own faith, he is speaking in the name of all his brethren.
‘We,’ ought to include every man and woman who calls himself or herself a
Christian. It is this setting of the will of Jesus Christ high up above
all other commandments, and proposing to one's self as the aim that
swallows up all other aims, that I may please Him—it is this, and not
creeds, forms, opinions, professions, or even a faith that simply trusts
in Him for salvation, that makes a true Christian. You are a Christian in
the precise measure in which Christ's will is uppermost and exclusive in
your life, and for all your professions and your orthodoxy and your
worship and your faith, not one hair's-breadth further. Here is the
signature and the common characteristic of all real Christians, ‘We labour
that whether present or absent we may be well-pleasing to Him.’
So then in looking
together at these words now, I take three points, the supreme aim of the
Christian life; the concentration of effort which that aim demands; and
the insignificance to which it reduces all external things.
I. First, then, let
me deal with that supreme aim of the Christian life.
The word which is,
correctly enough, rendered ‘accepted,’ may more literally, and perhaps
with a closer correspondence to the Apostle's meaning, be translated
‘well-pleasing,’ and the aim is this, not merely that we may be accepted,
but that we may bring a smile into His face, and some joy and complacent
delight in us into His heart, when He looks upon our doings. That pleasure
of Jesus Christ in them that ‘fear Him, and in them that hope in His
mercy’ and do His will is a present emotion that fills His heart in
looking upon His followers, and it will be especially declared in the
solemn, final judgment. We must keep in view both of these periods, if we
would rightly understand the sweep of the aim which ought to be uppermost
in all Christian people. Here and now in our present acts, we should so
live as to occasion a present sentiment of complacent delight in us, in
the heart of the Christ who sees us here and now and always. We should so
live as that at that far-off future day when we shall ‘all be manifested
before the Judgment-seat of Christ,’ the Judge may bend from His tribunal,
and welcome us into His presence with a word of congratulation and an
outstretched hand of loving reception. Set that two-fold aim before you,
Christian men and women, else you will fail to experience the full
stimulus of this thought.
Now such an aim as
this implies a very wonderful conception of Jesus Christ's present
relations to us. It is a truth that we may minister to His joy. It is a
truth that just as really as you mothers are glad when you hear from a
far-off land that your boy is doing well, and getting on, so Jesus
Christ's heart fills with gladness when He sees you and me walking in the
paths in which He would have us go. We often think about our dear dead
that they cannot know of us and our doings here, because the sorrow that
would sometimes come from the contemplation of our evil, or of our
misfortunes, would trouble them in their serene rest. We know not how that
may be, but this at least we do know, that the Man Jesus Christ, who, like
those dear ones, ‘was dead, and is alive for evermore,’ in His human
nature has knowledge of all His children's failures, as well as successes,
and is affected with some shadow of regret, or with some reality of
delight, according as they follow or stray from the paths in which He
would have them walk. If it be so with Him it may be so with them; and
though it be not so with them it must be so with Him. So this strange,
sweet, tender, and powerful thought is a piece of plain prose, that Christ
is glad when you and I are good.
Does it need any
word to emphasise the force of that motive to a Christian heart that loves
the Master? Surely this is the great and blessed peculiarity of all the
morality of Christianity that it has all a personal bearing and aspect,
and that just as the sum of all our duty is gathered up in the one
command, ‘Imitate Christ,’ so the motive for all our duty lies in ‘If you
love Me, keep My commandments,’ and the reward which ought to stimulate
more than anything besides is the one thought, not, of what I shall get
because I am good, but of what I shall give Him by my obedience, a joy in
the heart that was stabbed through and through by sorrow for my sake. That
we may please Him ‘who pleased not Himself,’ is surely the grandest motive
on which the pursuit of holiness, and the imitation of Jesus Christ can
ever be made to rest. Oh! how different, and how much more blessed such a
motive and aim is than all the lower reasons for which men are sometimes
exhorted and encouraged to be good! What a difference it is when we say,
‘Do that thing because it is right,’ and when we say, ‘Do that thing
because you will be happier if you do,’ or when we say, ‘Do it because He
would like you to do it.’ The one is all cold and abstract. To stand
before a man and simply say: ‘Now go and do your duty,’ is a poor way of
setting his feet upon a rock and establishing his goings. Duty is not a
word that stirs men's hearts, however it may awe their consciences. It
rises up before us like some goddess statuesque and serene, with purity,
indeed, in her deep and solemn eyes, but with nothing appealing to our
affections in her stern lineaments. But when the thought of ‘You ought’
melts into ‘For my sake,’ and through the dissolving face of the cold
marble goddess there shine the beloved lineaments of Him who ‘wears the
Godhead's most benignant grace,’ the smile upon His face becomes a motive
that touches all hearts. Transmute obligation into gratitude, and in front
of duty and appeals to self put Christ, and all the harshness and
difficulty and burden and self-sacrifice of obedience becomes easy and a
joy.
Then let me remind
you that this one supreme aim of pleasing Jesus Christ can be carried on
through all life in every varying form, great or small. A blessed unity is
given to our whole being when the little things and the big things, the
easy things and the hard things, deeds which are conspicuous and deeds
which no eye sees, are all brought under the influence of the one motive
and made co-operant to the one end. Drive that one steadfast aim through
your lives like a bar of iron, and it will give the lives strength and
consistency—not rigidity, because they may still be flexible. Nothing will
be too small to be consecrated by that motive; nothing too great to own
its power. You can please Him everywhere and always. The only thing that
is inconsistent with pleasing Him is the thing which, alas! we do at all
times and should do at no time, and that is to sin against Him. If we bear
with us this as a conscious motive in every part of our day's work it will
give us a quick discernment as to what is evil, which I believe nothing
else will so surely give. If you desire life to be noble, uniform,
dignified, great in its minutest acts and solemn in its very trifles, and
if you would have some continual test and standard by which you can detect
all spurious, apparent virtues, and discover lurking and masked
temptations, carry this one aim clear and high above all else, and make it
the purpose of the whole life, to be well-pleasing unto Him.
II. Now, in the next
place, notice the concentrated effort which this aim requires.
The word
rendered in my text ‘labour’ is a peculiar one, very seldom employed in
Scripture. It means, in its most literal signification, to be fond of
honour, or to be actuated by a love of honour; and hence it comes, by a
very natural transition, to mean to strive to gain something for the sake
of the honour connected with it. That is to say, it not only expresses the
notion of diligent, strenuous effort, but it reveals the reason for that
diligence and strenuousness in what I may call (for the word might almost
be so rendered) the
ambition
of being honoured by pleasing Christ. So that the ‘labour’ of my text
covers the whole ground, not only of the act but of its motive. The
concentration of effort which such an aim requires may be enforced by one
or two simple exhortations.
First, let me say
that we ought, as Christian people, to cultivate this noble ambition of
pleasing Jesus Christ. Men have all got the love of approbation deep in
them. God put it there for a good purpose, not that we might shape our
lives so as to get others to pat us on the back, and say, ‘Well done!’ but
that, in addition to the other solemn and sovereign motives for following
the paths of righteousness, we might have this highest ambition to impel
us on the road. And it is the duty of all Christians to see to it that
they discipline themselves so as, in their own feelings, to put high above
all the approbation or censure of their fellows the approbation or censure
of Jesus Christ. That will take some cultivation. It is a great deal
easier to shape our courses so as to get one another's praise. I remember
a quaint saying in a German book. ‘An old schoolmaster tried to please
this one and that one, and it failed. “Well, then,” said he, “I will try
to please Christ.” And that succeeded.’
And let me remind
you that a second part of the concentration of effort which this aim
requires is to strive with the utmost energy in the accomplishment of it.
Paul did not believe that anybody could please Jesus Christ without a
fight for it. His notion of acceptable service was service which a man
suppressed much to render, and overcame much to bring. And I urge upon you
this, dear brethren, that with all the mob of faces round about us which
shut out Christ's face, and with all the temptations to follow other aims,
and with the weaknesses of our own characters, it never was, is not, nor
ever will be, an easy thing, or a thing to be done without a struggle and
a dead lift, to live so as to be well-pleasing to Him.
Look at Paul's
metaphors with which he sets forth the Christian life—a warfare, a race, a
struggle, a building up of some great temple structure, and the like—all
suggesting at the least the idea of patient, persistent, continuous toil,
and most of them suggesting also the idea of struggle with antagonistic
forces and difficulties, either within or without. So we must set our
shoulders to the wheel, put our backs into our work. Do not think that you
are going to be carried into the condition of conformity with Jesus Christ
in a dream, or that the road to heaven is a primrose path, to be trodden
in silver slippers. ‘I will not offer unto the Lord that which doth cost
me nothing,’ and if you do, it will be worth exactly what it costs. There
must be concentration of effort if we are to be well-pleasing to Him.
But then do
not forget, on the other hand, that deeper than all effort, and the very
spring and life of it, there must be the opening of our hearts for the
entrance of His life and spirit, by the presence of which only are we
well-pleasing to Christ. That which pleases Him in you and me is our
likeness to Him. According to the old Puritan illustration, the refiner
sat by the furnace until he could see in the molten metal his own face
mirrored, and then he knew it was pure. So what pleases Christ in us is
the reflection of Himself. And how can we get that likeness to Himself
except by receiving into our hearts the Spirit that was in Christ Jesus,
and will dwell in us, and will produce in us in our measure the same image
that it formed in Him? ‘Work
out
your own salvation,’ because ‘it is God that worketh
in
you.’ Labour, concentrate effort, and above all open the heart to the
entrance of that transforming power.
III. Lastly, let me
suggest the utter insignificance to which this aim reduces all externals.
‘We labour,’ says
Paul, ‘that whether present or absent, we may be accepted.’ What
differences of condition are covered by that parenthetical phrase—‘present
or absent!’ He talks about it as if it was a very small matter, does he
not? And what is included in it? Whether a man shall be in the body or out
of it; that is to say, whether he be alive or dead. Here is an aim then,
so great, so lofty, so all-comprehensive that it reduces the difference
between living in the world and being out of it, to a trifle. And if we
stand so high up that these two varieties of condition dwindle into
insignificance and seem to have melted into one, do you think that there
is anything else that will be very big? If the difference between life and
death is dwindled and dwarfed, what else do you suppose will remain?
Nothing, I should think.
So if we only, by
God's help, which will be given to us if we want it, keep this clear
before us as the motive of all our life, then all the possible
alternatives of human condition and circumstance will sink into
insignificance, and from that lofty summit will ‘show scarce so gross as
beetles’ in the air beneath our lofty station.
Whether we be rich
or poor, solitary or beset by friends, happy or sad, hopeful or
despairing, young or old, wearied or buoyant, learned or foolish, it
matters not. The one aim lifts itself before us, and they in whose eyes
shine the light of that great issue are careless of the road along which
they pass. Do you enlist yourselves in the company that fires at the long
range, and all those that take aim at the shorter ones will seem to be
very pitifully limiting their powers.
Then remember that
this same aim, and this same result may be equally pursued and attained
whether here or yonder. It is something to have a course of life which
runs straight along, unbent aside, and not cut short off, by the change
from earth to Heaven. And this felicity he only has who, amidst things
temporal and insignificant, sees and seeks the eternal smile on the face
of his unchanging Saviour. On earth, in death, through eternity, such a
life will be homogeneous and of a piece; and when all other aims are hull
down below the horizon, forgotten and out of sight, then still this will
be the purpose, and yonder it will be the accomplished purpose, of each,
to please the Lord Jesus Christ.
My dear friend,
remember that in its full meaning this aim regards the future, and points
onward to that great judgment-seat where you and I will certainly each of
us give account of himself. Do you think that you will please Christ then?
Do you think that when that day dawns, a smile of welcome will come into
His eyes, and a glow of gladness at the meeting into yours? Or have you
cause to fear that you will ‘call on the rocks and the hills to cover you
from the face of Him that sitteth on the Throne?’
We are all close by
one another; our voices are very audible to each other. Do you learn,
Christian people, that the first,—or at least a prime—condition of all
Christian and Christ-pleasing life, is a wholesome disregard of what
anybody says but Himself. The old Lacedæmonians used to stir themselves to
heroism by the thought: ‘What will they say of us in Sparta?’ The governor
of some outlying English colony minds very little what the people that he
is set to rule think about him. He reports to Downing Street, and it is
the opinion of the Home Government that influences him. You report to
headquarters. Never mind what anybody else thinks of you. Your business is
to please Christ, and the less you trouble yourselves about pleasing men
the more you will succeed in doing it. Be deaf to the tittle tattle of
your fellow soldiers in the ranks. It is your Commander's smile that will
be your highest reward.
'Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes,
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove;
As he pronounces lastly on each deed,
Of so much fame in heaven expect thy meed.'
‘The love of
Christ constraineth us.’—2 COR. v. 14.
It is a dangerous
thing to be unlike other people. It is still more dangerous to be better
than other people. The world has a little heap of depreciatory terms which
it flings, age after age, at all men who have a higher standard and nobler
aims than their fellows. A favourite term is ‘mad.’ So, long ago they
said, ‘The prophet is a fool; the spiritual man is mad,’ and, in His turn,
Jesus was said to be ‘beside Himself,’ and Festus shouted from the
judgment-seat to Paul that he was mad. A great many people had said the
same thing about him before, as the context shows. For the verse before my
text is: ‘Whether we be beside ourselves, it is to God: or whether we be
sober, it is for your cause.’ Now the former clause can only refer to
other people's estimate of the Apostle. No doubt there were many things
about him that gave colour to it. He said that a dead Man had appeared to
him and spoken with him. He said that he had been carried up into the
third heaven. He had a very strange creed in the judgment of the times. He
had abandoned a brilliant career for a very poor one. He was obviously
utterly indifferent to the ordinary aims of men. He had a consuming
enthusiasm. And so the world explained him satisfactorily to itself by the
short and easy method of saying, ‘Insane.’ And Paul explained himself by
the great word of my text, ‘The love of Christ constraineth us.’ Wherever
there is a life adequately under the influence of Christ's love the
results will be such as an unsympathising world may call madness, but
which are the perfection of sober-mindedness. Would there were more such
madmen! I wish to try to make one or two of them now, by getting some of
you to take for your motto, ‘The love of Christ constraineth us.’
I. Now the first
thing to notice is this constraining love.
I need not spend
time in showing that when Paul says here ‘The love of Christ,’ he means
Christ's love to him, not his to Christ. That is in accordance with his
continual usage of the expression; and it is in accordance with facts. For
it is not my love to Jesus, but His love to me, that brings the real
moulding power into my life, and my love to Him is only the condition on
which the true power acts upon me. To get the fulcrum and the lever which
will heave a life up to the heights you have to get out of yourselves.
Now Paul never saw
Jesus Christ in this earthly life. Timothy, who is associated with him in
this letter, and perhaps is one of the ‘us,’ never saw Him either. The
Corinthian believers whom he is addressing had, of course, never seen Him.
And yet the Apostle has not the slightest hesitation in taking that great
benediction of Christ's love and spreading it over them all. That love is
independent of time and of space; it includes humanity, and is
co-extensive with it. Unturned away by unworthiness, unrepelled by
non-responsiveness, undisgusted by any sin, unwearied by any, however
numerous, foiling of its attempts, the love of Christ, like the great
heavens that bend above us, wraps us all in its sweetness, and showers
upon us all its light and its dew.
And yet, brethren, I
would have you remember that whilst we thus try to paint, in poor, poor
words, the universality of that love, we have to remember that it does not
partake of the weakness that infects all human affections, which are only
strong when they are narrow, and as the river expands it becomes shallow,
and loses the force in its flow which it had when it was gathered between
straiter banks, so as that a universal charity is almost akin to a
universal indifference. But this love that grasps us all, this river that
‘proceedeth from the Throne of God and of the Lamb,’ flows in its widest
reaches as deep and as impetuous in its career as if it were held within
the narrowest of gorges. For Christ's universal love is universal only
because it is individualising and particular. We love our nation by
generalising and losing sight of the individuals. Christ loves the world
because He loves every man and woman in it, and His grace enwraps all
because His grace hovers over each.
'The sun whose beams most glorious are
Despiseth no beholder,'
but
the rays come straight to each eyeball. Be sure of this: that He who, when
the multitude thronged Him and pressed Him, felt the tremulous, timid,
scarcely perceptible touch of one woman's wasted finger on the hem of His
garment, holds each of us in the grasp of His love, which is universal,
because it applies to each. You and I have each the whole radiance of it
pouring down on our heads, and none intercepts the beams from any other.
So, brethren, let us each feel not only the love that grasps the world,
but the love that empties itself on me.
But there is one
more remark that I wish to make in reference to this constraining love of
Jesus Christ, and that is, that in order to see and feel it we must take
the point of view that this Apostle takes in my text. For hearken how he
goes on. ‘The love of Christ constraineth us, because we thus judge, that
if one died for all, then all died, and that He died for all,’ etc. That
is to say, the death of Christ for all, which is equivalent to the death
of Christ for each, is the great solvent by which the love of God melts
men's hearts, and is the great proof that Jesus Christ loves me, and thee,
and all of us. If you strike out that conception you have struck out from
your Christianity the vindication of the belief that Christ loves the
world. What possible meaning is there in the expression, ‘He died for
all?’ How can the fact of His death on a ‘green hill’ outside the gates of
a little city in Syria have world-wide issues, unless in that death He
bore, and bore away, the sins of the whole world? I know that there have
been many—and there are many to-day—who not accepting what seems to me to
be the very vital heart of Christianity—viz. the death of Christ for the
world's sin, do yet cherish—as I think illogically—yet do cherish a regard
for Him, which puts some of us who call ourselves ‘orthodox,’ and are
tepid, to the blush. Thank God! men are often better than their creeds, as
well as worse than them. But that fact does not affect what I am saying
now, and what I beg you to take for what you find it to be worth, that
unless we believe that Jesus Christ died for all, I do not know what claim
He has on the love of the world. We shall admire Him, we shall bow before
Him, as the very realised ideal of humanity, though how this one Man has
managed to escape the taint of the all-pervading evil remains, upon that
hypothesis, very obscure. But love Him? No! Why should I? But if I feel
that His death had world-wide issues, and that He went down into the
darkness in order that He might bring the world into the light, then—and I
am sure, on the wide scale and in the long-run only then—will men turn to
Him and say, ‘Thou hast died for me, help me to live for Thee.’ Brethren,
I beseech you, take care of emptying the death of Christ of its deepest
meaning, lest you should thereby rob His character of its chiefest charm,
and His name of its mightiest soul-melting power. The love that
constraineth is the love that died, and died for all, because it died for
each.
II. Now let me ask
you to consider the echo of this constraining love.
I said a moment or
two ago that Christ's love to us is the constraining power, and that ours
to Him is but the condition on which that power works. But between the two
there comes something which brings that constraining love to bear upon our
hearts. And so notice what my text goes on to adduce as needful for
Christ's love to have its effect—namely, ‘because we thus judge,’ etc.
Then my estimate, my apprehension of the love of Christ must come in
between its manifestation and its power to grip, to restrain, to impel me.
If I may use such a figure, He stands, as it were, bugle in hand, and
blows the sweet strains that are meant to set the echoes flying. But the
rock must receive the impact of the vibrations ere it can throw back the
thinned echo of the music. Love must be believed and known ere it can be
responded to.
Now the only answer
and echo that hearts desire is the love of the beloved heart. We all know
that in our earthly life. Love is as much a hunger to be loved as the
outgoing of my own affection. The two things are inseparable, and there is
nothing that repays love but love. Jesus Christ wishes each of us to love
Him. If it is true that He loves me, then, intertwisted with the outgoing
of His heart towards me is the yearning that my heart may go out towards
Him. Dear brethren, this is no pulpit rhetoric, it is a plain, simple
fact, inseparable from the belief in Christ's love—that He wishes you and
every soul of man to love Him, and that, whatever else you bring, lip
reverence, orthodox belief, apparent surrender, in the assay shop of His
great mint all these are rejected, and the only metal that passes the fire
is the pure gold of an answering love. Brethren! is that what you bring to
Jesus Christ?
Love seeks for love,
and our love can only be an echo of His. He takes the beginning in
everything. If I am to love Him back again, I must have faith in His love
to me. And if that be so, then the true way by which you, imperfect
Christian people, can deepen and strengthen your love to Jesus Christ is
not so much by efforts to work up a certain warmth of sentiment and glow
of affection, as by gazing, with believing eyes of the heart, upon that
which kindles your love to Him. If you want ice to melt, put it out into
the sunshine, If you want the mirror to gleam, do not spend all your time
in polishing it. Carry it where it can catch the ray, and it will flash it
back in glory. ‘We love Him because He first loved us.’ Our love is an
echo; be sure that you listen for the parent note, and link yourselves by
faith with that great love which has come down from Heaven for us all.
But how can I speak
about echoes and responses when I know that there are scores of men and
women whom a preacher's words reach who would be ashamed of themselves,
and rightly, if they exhibited the same callousness of heart and
selfishness of ingratitude to some human, partial benefactor as they are
not ashamed to have exhibited all their lives to Jesus Christ. Echo? Yes!
your heartstrings are set vibrating fast enough whenever, in the adjoining
apartment, an instrument is touched which is tuned to the same key as your
heart. Pleasures, earthly aims, worldly gifts, the sweetnesses of human
life, all these things set them thrilling, and you can hear the music, but
your hearts are not tuned to answer to the note that is struck in ‘He
loved me and gave Himself for me.’ The bugle is blown, and there is
silence, and no echo, faint and far, comes whispering back. Brethren, we
use no one else, in whose love we have any belief, a thousandth part so
ill as we use Jesus Christ.
III. Now, lastly,
let me say a word about the constraining influence of this echoed love.
Its first effect, if
it has any real power in our hearts and lives, will be to change their
centre, to decentralise. Look what the Apostle goes on to say: ‘We thus
judge that He ... died for all, that they which live should not live
henceforth unto themselves.’ That is the great transformation. Secure
that, and all nobleness will follow, and ‘whatsoever things are lovely and
of good report’ will come, like doves to their windows, flocking into the
soul that has ceased to find its centre in its poor rebellious self. All
love derives its power to elevate, refine, beautify, ennoble, conquer,
from the fact that, in lower degree, all love makes the beloved the
centre, and not the self. Hence the mother's self-sacrifice, hence the
sweet reciprocity of wedded life, hence everything in humanity that is
noble and good. Love is the antagonist of selfishness, and the highest
type of love should be, and in the measure in which we are under the
influence of Christ's love will be, the self-surrendering life of a
Christian man. I know that in saying so I am condemning myself and my
brethren. All the same, it is true. The one power that rescues a man from
the tyranny of living for self, which is the mother of all sin and
ignobleness, is when a man can say ‘Christ is my aim,’ ‘Christ is my
object.’ ‘The life that I live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son
of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.’ There is no secret of
self-annihilation, which is self-transfiguration, and, I was going to say,
deification, like that of loving Christ with all my heart because He has
loved me so.
Again, let me remind
you that, on its lower reaches and levels, we find that all true affection
has in it a strange power of assimilating its objects to one another. Just
as a man and woman who have lived together for half a century in wedded
life come to have the same notions, the same prejudices, the same tastes,
and sometimes you can see their very faces being moulded into likeness,
so, if I love Jesus Christ, I shall by degrees grow liker and liker to
Him, and be ‘changed into the same image, from glory to glory.’
Again, the love
constrains, and not only constrains but impels, because it becomes a joy
to divine and to do the will of the beloved Christ. ‘My yoke is easy.’ Is
it? It is very hard to be a Christian. His requirements are a great deal
sterner than others. His yoke is easy, not because it is a lighter yoke,
but because it is padded with love. And that makes all service a
sacrament, and the surrender of my own will, which is the essence of
obedience, a joy.
So, dear friends, we
come here in sight of the unique and blessed characteristic of all
Christian morality, and of all its practical exhortations, and the Gospel
stands alone as the mightiest moulding power in the world, just because
its word is ‘love, and do as thou wilt.’ For in the measure of thy love
will thy will coincide with the will of Christ. There is nothing else that
has anything like that power. We do not want to be told what is right. We
know it a great deal better than we practise it. A revelation from heaven
that simply told me my duty would be surplusage. ‘If there had been a law
that could have given life, righteousness had been by the law.’ We want a
life, not a law, and the love of Christ brings the life to us.
And so, dear
friends, that life, restrained and impelled by the love to which it is
being assimilated, is a life of liberty and a life of blessedness. In the
measure in which the love of Christ constrains any man, it makes for him
difficulties easy, the impossible possible, the crooked things straight,
and the rough places plain. The duty becomes a delight, and self ceases to
disturb. If the love of God is shed abroad in a heart, and in the measure
in which it is, that heart will be at rest, and a great peace will brood
over it. Then the will bows in glad submission, and all the powers arise
to joyous service. We are lords of the world and ourselves when we are
Christ's servants for love's sake; and earth and its good are never so
good as when the power of His echoed love rules our lives. Do you know and
believe that Christ loves you? Do you know and believe that you had a
place in His heart when He hung on the Cross for the salvation of the
world? Have you answered that love with yours, kindled by your faith in,
and experience of, His? Is His love the overmastering impulse which urges
you to all good, the mighty constraint that keeps you back from all evil,
the magnet that draws, the anchor that steadies, the fortress that
defends, the light that illumines, the treasure that enriches? Is it the
law that commands, and the power that enables? Then you are blessed,
though people will perhaps say that you are mad, whilst here; and you will
be blessed for ever and ever.
‘Now then we are
ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech ... by us: we pray ...
in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God.’—2 COR. v. 20.
These are wonderful
and bold words, not so much because of what they claim for the servants as
because of what they reveal of the Lord. That thought, ‘as though God did
beseech,’ seems to me to be the one deserving of our attention now, far
rather than any inferences which may be drawn from the words as to the
relation of preachers of the Gospel to man and to God. I wish, therefore,
to try to set forth the wonderfulness of this mystery of a beseeching God,
and to put by the side of it the other wonder and mystery of men refusing
the divine beseechings.
Before doing
so, however, I remark that the supplement which stands in our Authorised
Version in this text is a misleading and unfortunate one. ‘As though God
did beseech
you’
and ‘we pray
you’
unduly narrow the scope of the Apostolic message, and confuse the whole
course of the Apostolic reasoning here. For he has been speaking of a
world which is reconciled to God, and he finds a consequence of that
reconciliation of the world in the fact that he and his fellow-preachers
are entrusted with the word of reconciliation. The scope of their message,
then, can be no narrower than the scope of the reconciliation; and
inasmuch as that is world-wide the beseeching must be co-extensive
therewith, and must cover the whole ground of humanity. It is a universal
message that is set forth here. The Corinthians, to whom Paul was
speaking, are, by his hypothesis, already reconciled to God, and the
message which he has in trust for them is given in the subsequent words:
‘We then, as workers together with God, beseech you also that ye receive
not the grace of God in vain.’ But the message, the pleading of the divine
heart, ‘be ye reconciled to God,’ is a pleading that reaches over the
whole range of a reconciled world. I take then, just these two thoughts,
God beseeching man, and man refusing God.
I. God beseeching
man.
Now notice
how, in my text, there alternates, as if substantially the same idea, the
thoughts that Christ and that God pray men to be reconciled. ‘We are
ambassadors on
Christ's
behalf, as though
God
did beseech you by us, we pray on
Christ's
behalf.’ So you see, first, Christ the Pleader, then God beseeching, then
Christ again entreating and praying. Could any man have so spoken, passing
instinctively from the one thought to the other, unless he had believed
that whatsoever things the Father doeth, these also doeth the Son
likewise; and that Jesus Christ is the Representative of the whole Deity
for mankind, so as that when He pleads God pleads, and God pleads through
Him. I do not dwell upon this, but I simply wish to mark it in passing as
one of the innumerable strong and irrefragable testimonies to the
familiarity and firmness with which that thought of the divinity of Jesus
Christ, and the full revelation of the Father by Him, was grasped by the
Apostle, and was believed by the people to whom he spoke. God pleads,
therefore Christ pleads, Christ pleads, therefore God pleads; and these
Two are One in their beseechings, and the voice of the Father echoes to us
in the tenderness of the Son.
So, then, let us
think of that pleading. To sue for love, to beg that an enemy will put
away his enmity is the part of the inferior rather than of the superior;
is the part of the offender rather than of the offended; is the part of
the vanquished rather than of the victor; is the part surely not of the
king but of the rebel. And yet here, in the sublime transcending of all
human precedent and pattern which characterises the divine dealing, we
have the place of the suppliant and of the supplicated inverted, and Love
upon the Throne bends down to ask of the rebel that lies powerless and
sullen at His feet, and yet is not conquered until his heart be won,
though his limbs be manacled, that he would put away all the bitterness
out of his heart, and come back to the love and the grace which are ready
to pour over him. ‘He that might the vengeance best have taken, finds out
the remedy.’ He against whom we have transgressed prays us to be
reconciled; and the Infinite Love lowers Himself in that lowering which
is, in another aspect, the climax of His exaltation, to pray the rebels to
accept His amnesty.
Oh, dear brethren!
this is no mere piece of rhetoric. What facts in the divine heart does it
represent? What facts in the divine conduct does it represent? It
represents these facts in the divine heart, that there is in it an
infinite longing for the creature's love, an infinite desire for unity
between Him and us.
There are
wonderful significance and beauty in the language of my text which are
lost in the Authorised Version; but are preserved in the Revised. ‘We are
ambassadors’ not only ‘for
Christ,’ but ‘on
Christ's behalf.’ And the same proposition is
repeated in the subsequent clause. ‘We pray you,’ not merely ‘in Christ's
stead,’ though that is much, but ‘on
His account,’ which is more—as if it lay very near
His heart that we should put away our enmity; and as if in some
transcendent and wonderful manner the all-perfect, self-sufficing God was
made glad, and the Master, who is His image for us, ‘saw of the travail of
His soul, and,’ in regard to one man, ‘was satisfied,’ when the man lets
the warmth of God's love in Christ thaw away the coldness out of his
heart, and kindle there an answering flame. An old divine says, ‘We cannot
do God a greater pleasure or more oblige His very heart, than to trust in
Him as a God of love.’ He is ready to stoop to any humiliation to effect
that purpose. So intense is the divine desire to win the world to His
love, that He will stoop to sue for it rather than lose it. Such is at
least part of the fact in the divine heart, which is shadowed forth for us
by that wonderful thought of the beseeching God.
And what facts in
the divine conduct does this great word represent? A God that beseeches.
Well, think of the tears of imploring love which fell from Christ's eyes
as He looked across the valley from Olivet, and saw the Temple glittering
in the early sunshine. Think of ‘O Jerusalem! Jerusalem! ... how often
would I have gathered thy children together ... and ye would not.’ And are
we not to see in the Christ who wept in the earnestness of His desire, and
in the pain of its disappointment, the very revelation of the Father's
heart and the very action of the Father's arm? ‘Come unto me, all ye that
labour, and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’ That is Christ
beseeching and God beseeching in Him. Need I quote other words, gentle,
winning, loving? Do we not feel, when looking upon Christ, as if the
secret of His whole life was the stretching out imploring and welcoming
hands to men, and praying them to grasp His hands, and be saved? But, oh,
brethren! the fact that towers above all others, which explains the whole
procedure of divinity, and is the keystone of the whole arch of
revelation; the fact which reveals in one triple beam of light, God, man,
and sin in the clearest illumination, is the Cross of Jesus Christ. And if
that be not the very sublime of entreaty; and if any voice can be
conceived, human or divine, that shall reach men's hearts with a more
piercing note of pathetic invitation than sounds from that Cross, I know
not where it is. Christ that dies, in His dying breath calls to us, and
‘the blood of sprinkling speaketh better things than that of Abel’;
inasmuch as its voice is, ‘Come unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of
the earth.’
Not only in the
divine facts of the life and death of Jesus Christ, but in all the appeals
of that great revelation which lies before us in Scripture; and may I say,
in the poor, broken utterances of men whose harsh, thin voices try to set
themselves, in some measure, to the sweetness and the fulness of His
beseeching tones—does God call upon you to draw close to Him, and put away
your enmity. And not only by His Word written or ministered from human
lips, but also by the patient providences of His love He calls and prays
you to come. A mother will sometimes, in foolish fondness, coax her sullen
child by injudicious kindness, or, in wise patience, will seek to draw the
little heart away from the faults that she desires not to notice, by
redoubled ingenuity of tenderness and of care. And so God does with us.
When you and I, who deserve—oh! so different treatment—get, as we do get,
daily care and providential blessings from Him, is not that His saying to
us, ‘I beseech you to cherish no alienation, enmity, indifference, but to
come back and live in the love’? When He draws near to us in these outward
gifts of His mercy, is He not doing Himself what He has bid us to do; and
what He never could have bid us to do, nor our hearts have recognised to
be the highest strain of human virtue to do, unless He Himself were doing
it first? ‘If thine enemy hunger, feed him. If he thirst, give him drink;
for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head.’
Not only by the
great demonstration of His stooping and infinite desire for our love which
lies in the life and death of Jesus Christ, nor only by His outward work,
nor by His providence, but by many an inward touch on our spirits, by many
a prick of conscience, by many a strange longing that has swept across our
souls, sudden as some perfumed air in the scentless atmosphere; by many an
inward voice, coming we know not whence, that has spoken to us of Him, of
His love, of our duty; by many a drawing which has brought us nearer to
the Cross of Jesus Christ, only, alas! in some cases that we might recoil
further from it,—has He been beseeching, beseeching us all.
Brethren! God pleads
with you. He pleads with you because there is nothing in His heart to any
of you but love, and a desire to bless you; He pleads with you because,
unless you will let Him, He cannot lavish upon you His richest gifts and
His highest blessings. He pleads with you, bowing to the level, and
beneath the level, of your alienation and reluctance. And the sum and
substance of all His dealings with every soul is, ‘My son! give Me thy
heart.’ ‘Be ye reconciled to God.’
II. And now turn,
very briefly, to the next suggestion arising from this text, the terrible
obverse, so to speak, of the coin: Man refusing a beseeching God.
That is the great
paradox and mystery. Nobody has ever fathomed that yet, and nobody will.
How it comes, how it is possible, there is no need for us to inquire. It
is an awful and a solemn power that every poor little speck of humanity
has, to lift itself up in God's face, and say, in answer to all His
pleadings, ‘I will not!’ as if the dwellers in some little island, a mere
pin-point of black, barren rock, jutting up at sea, were to declare war
against a kingdom that stretched through twenty degrees of longitude on
the mainland. So we, on our little bit of island, our pin-point of rock in
the great waste ocean, we can separate ourselves from the great Continent;
or, rather, God has, in a fashion, made us separate in order that we may
either unite ourselves with Him, by our willing yielding, or wrench
ourselves away from Him by our antagonism and rebellion. God beseeches
because God has so settled the relations between Him and us, that that is
what He has to do in order to get men to love Him. He cannot force them.
He cannot prise open a man's heart with a crowbar, as it were, and force
Himself inside. The door opens from within. ‘Behold! I stand at the door
and knock.’ There is an ‘if.’ ‘If any man open I will come in.’ Hence the
beseeching, hence the wail of wisdom that cries aloud and no man regards
it; of love that stands at the entering in of the city, and pleads in
vain, and says, ‘I have called, and ye have refused.... How often would I
have gathered ... and ye would not.’ Oh, brethren! it is an awful
responsibility, a mysterious prerogative, which each one of us, whether
consciously or no, has to exercise, to accept or to refuse the pleadings
of an entreating Christ.
And let me remind
you that the act of refusal is a very simple one. Not to accept is to
reject; not to yield is to rebel. You have only to do nothing, to do it
all. There are dozens of people in our churches and chapels listening with
self-satisfied unconcern, who have all their lives been refusing a
beseeching God. And they do not know that they ever did it! They say, ‘Oh!
I will be a Christian some time or other.’ They cherish vague ideas that,
somehow or other, they are so already. They have done nothing at all, they
have simply been absolutely indifferent and passive. Some of you have
heard sermons like this so often that they produce no effect. ‘It is the
right kind of thing to say. It is the thing we have heard a hundred
times.’ Perhaps you wonder why I should be so much in earnest about the
matter, and then you go outside, and discuss me or the weather, and forget
all about the sermon.
And thus, once more,
you reject Christ. It is done without knowing it; done simply by doing
nothing. My brother! do not stop your ears any more against that tender,
imploring love.
