Hebrews 4:15

Hebrews 4:15

I. The soul of man in this passage through the years of time, which is the preface, the ante-chamber, the school, the exercise-ground of an eternal existence, has to go through temptation. Man comes into life fitted and equipped to meet his trial, to meet temptation, as he comes fitted and equipped to provide for his bodily wants, to subdue the earth, to live in society, to develop and improve the marvellous endowments of his nature. The soul comes with reason, with conscience, with knowledge, with will, with grace; and as the day goes on the question is ever presenting itself, How shall it use that great gift of will? The beginning of the history of the first man, the prelude and figure of what was to follow, was the history of a trial, a temptation, a defeat. The first scene in the victory of the Second Man was a temptation, a victory, the type and firstfruit of what man might hope for. The Bible opens with man ensnared and vanquished; it closes with the great sevenfold promise to him that overcometh, and with the vision of the glory of those who overcame. And what is all that is written in it, between the first page and the last, but the record of how, to men and to nations, there came the day of opportunity, the day of visitation, the day of proof, and how that day was met, and how they bore themselves in it, and what were its issues?

II. What we see in the great lives in the Bible finds place in the most commonplace of our modern lives. He was "in all points tempted like as we are." We may turn the words round, and say with all reverence that like as He was tempted, so are we, even the humblest among us, tempted, tried, according to the measure of what we can bear, but as truly and with all depending on the issue. The hour is coming which must soon decide it betray, make manifest, what has been going on, not only in the great storms of adversity and passion, those great critical decisions of will for or against what is right, to which we often confine the name of temptations, but in those secret, undisclosed, prolonged workings of choice, of effort, of self-surrender, which prepare men for what they do in public, and which are as real and serious as what they do in public. We rise in the morning, and the day will try us, show what we are, touch some spring, some dormant motive deep down in our nature which reveals the truth about it to one who sees us; and as we go through each day's proof and trial, we are fitting ourselves for the event of the trial of tomorrow, and the current of our life and character is set by unperceived and insensible influences either towards that eternal life which God has prepared for man, or towards that eternal death from which, for the soul, there is no rising.

R. W. Church, Penny Pulpit, new series, No. 704.

References: Hebrews 4:15 . S. Martin, Sermons, p. 157; J. R. Macduff, Communion Memories, p. 194; C. Stanford, Central Truths, p. 122; S. Rawson, Church of England Pulpit, vol. ix., p. 192; Ibid., vol. x., p. 409; W. Landels, Christian World Pulpit, vol. iii., p. 321; Ibid., vol. iv., p. 312; H. W. Beecher, Ibid., vol. xii., p. 88; Ibid., vol. xiv., p. 77; Ibid., vol. xv., p. 67; Ibid., vol. xxviii., p. 422; J. B. Heard, Ibid., vol. xx., p. 120.