The life of Christ in the world, sermons

Contents

SERMON PAGE

I. The Unity of God's Work in Heaven and

ON Earth . , i

II. The Message Of Christ To The Conscience

"For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things. Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we co7zfidence toward God.'''' — i John iii. 20, 21.

THIS feeling of our heart, which St. John mentions here, is evidently what we call the voice of conscience. There is something very significant in the easy and natural way in which it is referred to here. It is taken for granted as a power which exists in man, and to which attention must therefore be given ; to cultivate it rightly, to be able to understand and to use it, is evidently considered to be an object at which all religion aims. We all grant the existence of a conscience : we have felt it too often within us, not to know what is meant by its name. It breaks forth in characters where it seems as if it would have long ago been too much discouraged ever to enter its protest again. We reserve, as the last most condemnatory description of a man, the statement that he seems to have no conscience. Conscience involves not only a power of recognizing what is good or evil, but it also comprises that strange, uneasy feeling, which we cannot shake off, which comes over us when we are more or less conscious that we have violated the laws relating to good and evil. It is the witness which man carries within him that he is a moral being, bound to do not only what is pleasant, what is convenient, what is useful or profitable, but what is right. No matter where that idea of what is right came from, when in the heart of man it is recognized as right, it is because of the power of the conscience. It is a mysterious but valuable possession. We cannot locate it any more than we can locate the possession of life.

It is a mode of thought that makes man's mind differ from the mind of all other creatures ; and we dread the loss of it, because by that the man's moral power seems hopelessly maimed, and his moral position lost. We cannot appeal to him or deal with him as a man. And yet this important and elevated power receives strangely little culture and encouragement fKom our action and thought. The other parts of life are disciplined and trained, the objects that they desire are put before them, the reasons and modes of their working are studied and comprehended, their culture and growth are watched with anxiety, the dangers to which they are exposed are carefully avoided. Conscience asks for duty and the elevation of duty, and we hardly know what to give it. ]\Iost significant, then, is the way in which St. John, when he is dwelling on the love and service of God, turns and lays that before the conscience. He does it as naturally as we give food to the body, and wisdom to the mind. That power which the common course of life has to let drift uncared for and neglected, he turns to at once as the very one for which he has a word. He shows that there is hope for our most important faculty if we will only let religion have its true power in our lives. He does not argue that there ought to be such a thing as conscience : he supposes all men to admit that. He does not wait to prove that religion speaks to the conscience; but he goes right on to show what it says to it, and how it helps it. The religion which is full of the love of God needs a conscience to which it can speak.

That is its field of action. Without it, it can no nothing. It says to men, " Give me just what you find it hardest to dispose of otherwise, and I will be satisfied." Try to make religion play its part merely on our bodies or our minds, and it becomes a thing of ceremonies or of doctrines. Try to make it play its part on our feelings merely, and it becomes a thing of sentiment. The religious man must be one whose conscience is ever active with the strong sense of duty that has been given it, and is ever clear as to the source of duty with the sight of God that has been revealed to it. There is a field in religion for every faculty of man to exercise itself fully ; but it starts with the man just where every other source of power has nothing to give, — with the conscience. It makes the moral sense a reality as it dwells with vigor on those two great ideas of man's sin and his power of belonging to God. Those are the two things which the conscience whispers blindly : " You are not good, and you ought to be better." Those are the two things which religion says in still clearer, more definite, and more practical tones : "You are a sinner, and you ought to be God's child." The poor, stifled voice of conscience hears this hopeful response to words which it has been trying to make heard amid sounds which drowned them. It feels that it is no longer alone; it looks up, and is saved. How much better our lives would be if this close relation between the conscience and religion were ever clear ! Religious men would day after day get better and deeper knowledge of their duty. Conscientious men would find that this guide that they were blindly reverencing and yet despairingly following was not a poor, lonely stranger from a better land, but was the very voice of God leading them naturally and easily on to their heavenly Father.

But so great a power as conscience is not to be dealt with lightly or easily. St. John not only recognizes and encourages conscience, but he tells us how we are to deal with it. Sometimes our conscience accuses us, and tells us that we have done wrong. We all know that feeling, and it is one in which we can never delight. The wrong-doing of which we are conscious separates us from our best ideas of life ; we are ashamed of ourselves. It separates us from others who may know, or who, we think, may know, our secret. The accusation of others is not nearly as hard to bear as the accusation from within, for the latter we cannot deny : we ourselves are the witnesses to its truth. We cannot palliate it : it is brought home to us in all its force. It is within us, where thought is most active, where feeling is most sensitive. Such moments of a guilty conscience must, then, be among the deepest and most important of our lives. We dread them so much that we try to forget them in the past and to avoid them in the future. How do we deal with them when they are present.'* How often this stirring of conscience leads only to an attempt to quiet it ! The feeling is so unbearable that we strive at once to apply the remedy at just the point where the pain is felt. We flee to some act^ of reparation, some word of apology, some deed of j^enance, which shall quiet the conscience, and ease our pain. The very intenseness of our feelings leads to a superficial cure; our own feelings are uppermost in the intensity of our self-accusation, and we think of our own immediate position alone as we strive to free ourselves from the weight of a condemning conscience.

There seems to be no time for largeness of thought or breadth of action. The one thought is, Get rid of this burden. Perhaps we rush from one fault to another. Some neglect of a suffering brother makes us thoughtlessly lavish in acts of benevolence ; some undue assertion cf power makes us lax in standing up for what we know to be right ; some carelessness in belief makes us blindly superstitious. I have heard a man of prominence, whose character, training, and position made him inclined to underrate the importance of all purely moral considerations, declare that he had found conscientious men the most unsatisfactory to deal with, and the least to be relied upon. To his mind, looking without sympathy, as a critical spectator, they were always one-sided. They were so careful about some one point, with regard to which they felt a special fear, that they neglected many others where evil could easily be done. Surely we can all appreciate in ourselves the power of such a criticism, as we remember how often some sad failure, of which conscience has accused us, has led to the putting of a patch on our moral garment in that one particular place, until at length the process, oft repeated, has led to our appearance among men, clothed, indeed, — covered over with marks of moral carefulness, — but unattractive, and ashamed of the very results of God's training of us as men with consciences. Now turn to St. John's mode of dealing with an accusing conscience, and see how true a remedy it contains for these dangers.

" If our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts, and knoweth all things." That is to be the thought of a man filled with the love of God. Instead of pointing out one little fault, the accusation of conscience is to open a sight into all the possibility of sin ; instead of shutting us up to the thought of ourselves, it is to lead us up to the thought of God. There is surely no tampering with conscience there, no silencing of its voice. We are made to see more than ever the heinousness of sin ; but it is seen in the light of God's searching judgments, not of our excited feelings. We see the one thing that has touched our conscience as a part of the great sin of all life, departure from God ; and to Him we betake ourselves more closely than ever before. We learn to be watchful at every point ; we put all our character and all our action into God's keeping. Our new resolutions and efforts take in not only the correction of that one failure, but the remedy of all those failings, known only to God, of which our conscientious self-reproaches are but indications. We rise broader and better men from our discomfiture, for it has told us of God. Our conscientious troubles have not been the opening of a door which lets in an uncomfortable draft upon us, and which we close again as soon as possible ; but it has been the opening of a door into the larger, freer air of God's love and discipline. The first breath has struck us uncomfortably, accustomed as we were to our more confined and corrupt atmosphere ; but we arise and go out through this door, and are made better and stronsrer men in all our action. When we come in contact with moral questions, when our conscience, which is our possession as moral beings, is stirred, we are dealing with things in which wc demand the thought and help of God. The world did not cause the questions, and cannot solve them ; we of ourselves cannot do the work, for the .questions speak of us in our relation to Him. But we must knov/ God in order to deal rightly with our stirred consciences, — know Him in His love, in His true position as our Father, as He has showed Himself to us in Christ, calling us, forgiving us, providing the way for our salvation. Then we can rise, and be bold to put down the disturbing visitor in our heart. With a wisdom large and comprehensive, because it is the wisdom of God, we can remedy our failing, make reparation for our sin, cleanse our conscience, rise to a better life. Our knowledge of our sin will be lost in God's deeper knowledge of it, as He, "greater than our heart," knoweth all things ; and we shall find comfort and strength in adding, as Peter did after his sin of denial, " Lord, Thou knowest all things ; Thou knowest that I love thee."

So St. John shows the love of God as dealing w^ith a troubled conscience. Now turn to the conscience in the other state, when it is not troubled, the quiet, easy conscience. There are such times in life, times when no sins seem . to come within the limits of our consciousness to harass our minds. We do not doubt that we are sinners, but the course of life does not at such moments bring our sins vividly home to us. We are apt to distrust such times, and either to try to stir our conscience by dwelling on our sins, or to reproach ourselves that we are not doing better with our lives, and using them to more purpose. The first develops a disagreeable and morbid self-consciousness ; the latter distrusts all God's dealing with us, and makes us inclined to think that He is only fitfully with us. Surely there must be moments of quiet and rest needed for our moral life, just as the growing and strengthening child needs the hours of sleep for his development. And so we rejoice to hear St. John's supposed case : " Beloved, if our heart condemn us not." It tells us to be confident in God at all times. It tells us to have deeper signs of moral health than morbidness of feeling or fussiness of character. It tells us that there is no more need of always stirring up our consciences in order to convince ourselves that we are Christians, than there is for a mother to wake up her peacefully sleeping child in order to assure herself that he is well. And yet we know the dangers of a quiet conscience too well not to look deeply, and see St.

John's provision against them. It is so easy to be satisfied, to feel that moments of quiet are certificates of exemption from all moral exertion, to enjoy our ease, and be careless, that we rightly dread the after-effect of such times in our life. They seem to result in a retrograding in all our moral culture, as conceit and sloth take possession of our contented souls. We come out of them with all our watchfulness relaxed, and with all our strength gone. We are often wakened from them by finding ourselves in some terrible sin. And the reason surely is, that to us such moments seem the end, and not the beginning, of moral paths. To us they recommend themselves because of their own pleasure; they are to be enjoyed for their own sake. But to St. John they are attractive as opening another and a delightful mode of approach to God, who Himself is the only end of moral attainment. "Beloved, if our hearts condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God." It is a time when we can approach God in that spirit of loving confidence in which we can learn most of Him. We are untroubled at such moments, and our minds are free to dwell on Him, on His power and His love. We approach our great Father in the way in which the child who has been faithful and good draws near to his parent, — ready to take his hand and enter his confidence ; not arrogating equality, but simply entering into that relation which the father loves to have him assume. God, in the view of St. John's Gospel, is not a God to be sought only in time of sin or of trouble. He is one who is able to give more than forgiveness in sin, or succor in trouble. He is one able to give something better than either of those, — sympathy and ready love ; able to make us grow up, by the sweetest natural processes of life, into men after the likeness of our heavenly Father. He works in sunshine as well as in storm, in development as well as in creation, in peace as well as in war, in the still, small voice more than in the whirlwind. If we have a faith in such a God, if we see Him as John did in Jesus Christ, then most gladly we shall welcome every moment of quiet as a time that tells us, not of ourselves, but of Him ;

not of our goodness, but of His kindness ; not of our rest, but of His activity. This quiet, if it is a worthy one, came not from ourselves. The circumstances of Hfe that have shielded us from storms of sin, the knowledge of a Gospel which has been the forming power of our life, the presence of a Spirit that has breathed peace to our souls, — all these have been His gift. With greater confidence we approach Him. Now through that open door of conscience comes the warm sunshine, not making us drowsy, careless, and slothful, but inviting us to go out into the presence of our God, from whom it comes, and to enjoy it and use it, to make us stronger men. We store up strength in such moments. We ask and receive with deeper faith, because through all our petitions runs that tone of confidence and of nearness to our God. The resting conscience is to be alive, not dead ; gaining strength like a resting man, sure that the time of action, hard and strenuous, is yet to come, when all will be needed in the emergencies of action. It will wake soon enough ; we need not stir it artificially, or begrudge it its quiet, if we only see that quiet as the gift which makes us confident in God. There is no intermission to its action ; but always, if used in the faith of Christ, it is pointing to its true object, God.

Conscience is a great blessing. It is not a distress, to be disposed of as soon as possible. It is not the pain of a diseased moral nature. It is our noblest faculty ; it belongs to us most naturally. Is there any thing worse in this world than mistaking a friend for an enemy .'' We lose what is our greatest strength, we gain what is our greatest curse. We have the battle with the supposed enemy ; and we are without the very means of conducting it, for he who should be our friend and helper is not by our side. It is because of this that suspicion poisons many a life, and makes it a failure from beginning to end. Every thing in that life is weak by a continual mistake. And when the same mistake takes possession of us, as we look at ourselves and our moral equipment for life's work, will it not be still more fatal .-* How we fight against our conscience, dread its frowns and distrust its smiles, and act as if it were a faculty meant to harass us, and often determined to deceive us ! It cannot be. If such had been the case, it would have killed man long ago with its persecutions and delusions, or man would have deservedly killed it, and put it out of his nature, for its constant and unnatural harassings. But conscience is as strong as it ever was, still conducts itself as imperiously, and sometimes contradictorily; and each 'man still fisfhts with his conscience the battle that has been humanity's from the beginning. Are we not making a mistake, and taking that for our enemy which is our friend ?

And is not that mistake part of the still greater one which makes us think that God is the enemy, the hard taskmaster, of us all ? Never will conscience be what it should be to us until He who gave it stands out before us in His true light. So Jesus is the only leader and guide to the conscience ; He alone makes it what it should be to us, and harmonizes all its words and actions. Other things provoke it : all life stirs its words of right and wrong ; you hear them every day. But that never can make us really conscientious men. Only He who tells us of the nearness and love of God, holds Him up to us as a loving, forgiving, disciplining, and perfecting Father, — only He can tell us how to use rightly this greatest of gifts, the conscience. In Him all its words shall be harmonized ; it shall be our sweetest companion by night and day, in winter and summer, in work and in play. We shall never want to lose it, as we listen eagerly for its slightest word ; and men shall learn not only to respect it, but to love it as they see it in our action. Poor, maltreated friend ! it shall begin to be appreciated by us, as it does its true work of leading us at all times nearer to the God whom Christ has taught us to love. His Spirit shall inspire its wisdom ; His redemption shall take the sting from its rebukes; His love shall make profitable and pleasant its soothing words. The growth of the conscientious and the Christian life must ever keep pace, for they are one and the same. To be a Christian is to be a truly conscientious man. The conscience within us, which none of us ought ever to desire to silence, calls out for the Saviour Christ ; and we must not deny it, for it can live only by the love of God,

III. The Power Of Christ's Words

" The officers aits7vered, Never man s^paJce like tnis man.'''' — ^JOHN vii. 46.

WE are not allowed in the Bible to think that the reception of Christ by those to whom He presented Himself was always quick or decisive. Processes of thought and of conviction are displayed, and objections are answered according to their nature. Disciples are seen gradually maturing in their degree of certainty, and every variety of motive and reasoning contributes toward the result. St. John, who of the apostles seems to have been most conversant with the current thought of the time, shows us on more than one occasion the general fermentation of thought which Christ's appearance and position caused in that Jewish community, and specifies different considerations which influenced the "decision of the various groups of men which came in contact with Him. As our minds are alive to these various instances, constantly appearing in the condensed statements of the Gospels, they give to the teachings of those Gospels

The Poiver of Chn's/'s Words. 31

an intensely human aspect. We see, that, though the truth is Divine, it will not reject the ordinary channels of approach to the human mind ; it will utilize them all according to their existence and condition in the various classes of men. All men — and, since men differ according to the times in which they live, all ages — will not be approached in the same way ; and yet, as all men are approachable on some side of desire or reason, this swiftly moving religion, which is depicted as appealing to so many men, and as strong in so many ways, will have an appropriate means of approach to all, so that none may escape its blessings if they really wish them. That path of approach is to be discovered, not by unnatural departures from ordinary life, but by the right use of all the tendencies which give to each man and to each generation its peculiar character. Christ, as the Gospels represent Him, is at the centre of human life. It is useless, it is vain, to leave any point of human life and to go to another in hopes of getting nearer to Him; for straight from Him to every point there is a direct line, down which the ready soul may look, up which the ready saving power will move.

One of these paths of approach is stated in our text; and it is such a human one, and has so much affinity for men of our times, that we can with profit learn more of it. Certain officers, sent from the chief priests and Pharisees to arrest Christ, heard the words of Christ, and were so impressed by them that they returned without accompHshing their purpose. Those words disarmed their opposition, and apparently opened the way for a better feeling in their hearts toward Christ, which may or may not have been followed out by those men to a result of perfect belief. It was a method of conviction which agrees very largely with all that we know of God's ordinary modes of working among men. No voice from heaven startled those officers with words of attestation, no miracles appealed to their sense of wonder or desire for benefit, no blinding vision made them feel their own insignificance and worthlessness. It was a much simpler and nobler method than either of these which was used : as men listening to a fellow-man, they found the spell growing stronger and stronger ; words such as they had never heard before, gradually brought the conviction of a power above that of all other men, until at last the thought of opposition to such a character seemed irreverence, and the conception of their ability to injure or even to fetter such a man seemed folly.

If the words of Jesus had such an effect at that time over men full of hostility, and armed with power

The Power cf Christ's Words. 33

to exert it, we may well believe that they are equally powerful to-day. Where what appear like more supernatural forces cannot enter, this mode of appeal can have an effectiveness, which we need never distrust. For the power of living thoughts and words is greater in the world to-day than ever before. The changes of circumstances, through which the world has passed so rapidly since Christ came, have made the material surroundings and actions of past ages almost unimaginable to us. And yet from those ages, both in religious and in secular history, the words of great men live among us with all the power of their original utterance. The man who spoke them is a reality, even though the times in which He lived have long ago disappeared. There is a supernatural power to words that is strangely pervasive ; they pass from age to age and from country to country. They know no limits of climate or of race ; the human heart recognizes their power, no matter where it beats, or how it is clothed. The religion of Christ, intended for all times, received its most potent earthly instrument in the spoken words of its Founder ; by those it was sure of perpetuity and of diffusion. Going into times when miracles had ceased, and visions were treated as the vagaries of a disordered brain, they would carry that wdiich all men would appreciate ; they would be the gate of approach to a deeper study, a fuller comprehension^ and a maturer faith in the great IMaster. The embodiment of His power in His words was a prophetic look by Christ into the times to come. Institutions would change ; temples would decay ; the very face of nature would not remain the same. The living thing from those days, sent forward into the times of universal literature which were to come, was to be the words of Christ. They would not be bound to the soil, accessible to a few travellers alone ; they would not be wrapped up in antiquities, known only to scholars. They would be carried into connection with individual lives ; they could be treasured in the homes and the hearts of every man and of every class. Still more, to exalt the function of words was to give value and currency to a universal coin in which every man's purse abounded ; it was to make the possibility of following in the line of the Master's work the possession of every man to whom breath had been given. It stamped Christianity as the gospel of humanity, calling out the power, and intensifying the responsibility, of every human soul.

All these aspects of that method of conviction, which God employed with those officers of the Pharisees, have great significance to-day. Despite the material researches and speculations of these

The Pcwer of Christ's Words. 35

times, they are times in which spiritual force, as it passes from age to age and from country to country, is more evident than ever before. The progress of learning and the growth of mutual intercourse have given the spiritual power in man an audience which knows no limits of time or place. Amid all these voices which come to us from every side, the words of Jesus of Nazareth are more prominent than ever. The expression of a band of Jewish officers, with their probably slight acquaintance with literature or orators, was . merely a strong statement : " Never man spake like this man." To-day it has a literal meaning. No words have touched so many hearts ; none have appeared so wonderful in their simplicity and their depth ; none have been found to be so free from petty prejudice, and so tender of every feeling of the human heart ; none have stood, as they have, the ever-renewed comparison with each successive generation of writers ; none have been able to endure so calmly amidst all misinterpretations alike of enemies and of friends ; none have revealed such new resources of meaning, as new emergencies have driven men to them for help. These are facts which each new race of critics makes stronger ; they are facts which, in their historical reality, appeal to men living in a world of realities, which, in their spiritual signifi-