Verse 46
I. Christ has a house here below as well as in heaven above. Here is the light of His Word imparted to us; here is His dwelling and here are His provisions; the table which He furnishes for us. We must not surely think to find our Saviour in the highways of ambition and pride, in the pleasures of wealth or luxury, or in the eager pursuit of anything belonging to this world. These things are not to be found in the house of His Father, neither may they come nigh His dwelling. But if we seek for Christ we shall find Him in the methods of virtue and the paths of God's commandments; in the persons of the poor, and in the blessed privilege of waiting upon the distressed; in the hours of our own most serious retirements. We shall find Him in holy readings and pious meditations, in the offices of religion and in the house of prayer.
II. Sure enough Christ is here; here most especially does He show and manifest Himself to the humble, devout, and faithful soul. For although He is here, and here He manifests Himself, yet all do not see Him here, but only the pure in heart; even as He Himself afterwards taught in the Sermon on the Mount, saying, "Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God." So it was indeed when at the first He came to His Temple veiled in our flesh, forty days only after His birth; for the holy Simeon, the devout Anna, the blessed Virgin, the righteous Joseph saw the Lord; but from other eyes He was hidden: to the thoughtless and the worldly, to the self-willed, and to the proud, the Child that day presented in the Temple seemed merely the ordinary offspring of mean parents, only those faithful servants of God saw Him that should redeem Israel, and be a Light to lighten the Gentiles. An habitual delight in God's House; an habitual reverence and awe here; and a continual remembrance, when we return to the world, of the things we have heard and seen and professed, and of which we have been partakers here these are the only sure signs that we do not come here in vain that we here learn of Christ, and have a real communion with Him.
Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times," vol. vii., p. 7.
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