Verses 42-51
Chapter 84
Prayer
Almighty God, thou art always coming: behold Jesus Christ is born amongst us every day, every night the shepherds sing and hear the song of the angels, and are filled with great joy because the delivering life has come into the world. May Christ be born in us the hope of glory, and may he come to us with the light of every morning, and shine upon us all the night long through every star. Enable us always to hear the footfall of thy coming, that we may always watch and be ready, and be found amongst those servants who are blessed because of their industry and vigilance.
Enable us to know the uncertainty of our life as we surely know the littleness of its span. So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. May we know how to reckon our days well, with all soberness and accuracy, that we be not found amongst those fools who suppose they can never die. Enable us by the ministry of thy Holy Spirit, ever indwelling and ever working within us, to see life as it is, in its simplicity and mystery, in its immediate duty and its far-off anticipations, in its tragedy of sin, in its need of divine help, and enable us, having seen all this, to avail ourselves of divine answers to the whole necessity, and to live in thy truth and walk in the light of thy revelation. Teach us that greatest of all lessons, self-renunciation, utter, complete, joyous, triumphant trust in God.
In thee we would live and move and have our being, not only by the necessity of nature, but by the compulsion and sweet constraint of sympathy and love. We have undertaken for ourselves, and behold a great failure is the result. We cannot touch the inner wound, we cannot heal the disease which consumes our life, but there is balm in Gilead, there is a Physician there, there is One who is mighty to save, Jesus Christ of God, Emmanuel, Wonderful, Counsellor, the Prince of peace, known to us by many names expressing one love, and completing one grand capacity to deliver. We bless thee for Jesus Christ: we needed his name for our names are poor without it; we needed his presence as flowers need the sun. Thou hast not withheld him: by a great shining of love he fills the whole sky, and by infinite tenderness of grace, he re-lights the lamp of our hope day by day, so that we can look beyond death and the grave and all things terrible and feast our vision on the Paradise of God. Whilst we are here, make us quick to know thee well, clear-sighted that we may see the inner meaning of thy word, and conscientious, that with all faithfulness of purpose and service we may do the immediate duty, and find in it a great reward.
We commend one another tenderly to thy care. We find no fault with one another, for when we stand in thy presence, we are all guilty before God, but we pray for one another with all the desire and simplicity of eager love, that every one may have a blessing all his own, that there may fall upon us a common benediction, impartial as the glory which lights every corner of the earth. Pity our littlenesses: in the day of our feebleness and humiliation look not upon us with the scorn we cannot bear. Pardon our sin: when it is greatest, thy love is greatest: where sin abounds, grace doth much more abound. Thou wilt have the heathen for thine inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession, and thy blood shall take away the sin of the whole world. This is our joy, this our hope, and out of this glad prospect do we draw every song that our heart would sing.
O Living One, cause death itself to die; O thou in whose heart there is no purpose but of love to the children of men, drive out of our hearts all anger, wrath, bitterness, clamour, and selfishness, and make our spirits sanctuaries of thine own presence.
We commend unto thy tender love all for whom we ought to pray the old, who will soon become young again; the young, who know nothing of the mystery and sadness of the world into which they have come; the poor, to whom it is a hardship to live; the rich, who have the responsibility of wealth; the wayward and the wandering, the prodigal, who seems as if unable to come home again, the hard heart that even our love cannot soften. We pray for the sick and those that are ill at ease, for all who are housed in our hospitals and are there receiving the ministrations of science and Christian charity. We pray that thou wouldst make their bed in their affliction, comfort them in their manifold sorrows, and sanctify unto them every visitation of thy purpose. Prosper thou all wise and learned men who are searching into the causes and the remedies of disease; let a great light shine upon them in all their inquiries, and may the time come when disease shall be unknown because sin is no longer in the world.
The Lord give us this day sweet messages from Heaven: may we hear great voices, like rushing, mighty winds, and tender voices, the very whispers of God's own love, so that according to our necessity all the revelation of Heaven may be adjusted. Make every preacher of the gospel today as a flame of fire, anoint him with an unction from the Holy One, and make the Christian pulpit this day vindicate itself as the supreme institution of the world for the education and inspiration and ennoblement of the human mind. To this end do thou make even our weakness a cause of strength, and make all thy preachers but instruments on which thou wilt discourse the music of the eternal decrees and the infinite love. Amen.
The Two Futures
You know that he will come, you do not know at what precise hour he will appear. The future is known, yet unknown. Consider what the future is. It touches the uttermost bound of time. If one might perpetrate a contradiction in terms, it is the horizon of eternity, the furthest away point in a line which has no limits. We are obliged thus to talk in self-contradictory speech when we would represent the great and grand things of creation. Number has to be set aside or talked of in terms that appear to be confusing, as the Three are One, and the One is Three.
There are two futures. This is a fact which is so often forgotten in the reasoning of men. There is a grand future, and a little one; the great future in which Imagination holds court, the future of fancy and speculation, the unmapped land of dream and fancy and vision, where life is to be a miracle, and every day a keen surprise. That is the future which the poets have taken under their care, that is the future whose firmament they have punctuated with radiant stars; but there is a little future in which Imagination has been supplanted by Anxiety, the future that is just about to dawn, the near To-morrow, the Presently that makes weak men restless and strong men quiet in hopefulness.
With these two futures we are well acquainted. The danger is that we confuse them in our view and reasoning, and should thus be talking about two totally different things in one and the same way. We have a future which we consign to Imagination: we have another future which we hand over to Anxiety, and anxiety often beats imagination, gets a firmer grip of some men than Imagination can ever get; men who take thought for tomorrow may take no thought for eternity: anxiety bars and limits and bounds them with prison boundaries and forces. Their anxiety is greater than their imagination because their selfishness is greater than their religion. Herein it is that so many persons get wrong.
So we have two futures, the near and the distant, the future in which Anxiety plays its vexatious and harassing part, and the great future where Imagination revels and poetises and dreams; and my difficulty, as a religious teacher, is this, that my scholars or pupils will so give way to little carking mean anxiety as to leave no space or time or opportunity for the consideration of that grand future which must come and bring with it all that we mean by the sweet pure name of Heaven.
Let us see how Jesus Christ himself treated the question of the future. His action in relation to it was varied yet consistent, and, as usual, was authoritatively instructive. In the first place Jesus Christ used the future as a source of inspiration, but it was not the little future of tomorrow, it was the great future of all time unborn that he so used; he often spoke of the Grand Future. "Hereafter ye shall see heaven opened," said he. "What thou knowest not now, thou shalt know hereafter." "I have many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now." "Fear not, little flock: it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." "He that endureth unto the end shall be saved." "When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him." You do not wonder that a man who could project himself thus infinitely across the ages, should say, from the point of his final projection, "Take no thought for the morrow, do not be the victims of anxiety; have a future, but let it be a grand one, apocalyptic in its possibility and colour and form and tone, worthy of the mind that dreams it; and do not be the victims of anxiety and petty care and carking vexation." He provided for that particular element, so to say, of the human mind, which must take hold of the future, but as he saw that element rising and asserting itself, he put within its grasp something worthy of its capacity.
The New Testament is full of the same thought. What wonder that Jesus Christ said, "I am not come to destroy the prophets"? The world must live in its prophecies. Today is too small a boundary for the soul: one world at a time was not enough for the soldier Alexander 'tis not enough for a man in whom the divinity has come. The prophets lived in the sunny future, so did Christ set his little church under its warm rays, and bless it with the promise that the voice of the turtle should be one day heard above the roar of the storm. Our life is not to be locked up in the narrow prison of one day. Among the riches of the church are not only things present but things to come. These things to come make up the mystery of glory which burns in the apocalypse. A nation is to be born in a day, the enemy of man, the old Abaddon is to be encoiled in chains that cannot be broken, the dead are to be raised incorruptible, death itself shall die, the grave-scars are to be rubbed out of the green earth, sorrow and sighing are to flee away, the whole creation, forgetting its grievous overthrow and its sharp pain, shall stand fast on eternal pillars and be beautiful as a palace built for God.
Nor is this the poetry of speech; it is the reality of fact. The word poetry is often misunderstood: it is the blossom of reality, the uppermost phase and culminating beauty of hard history and stern fact. Tell me does he talk mere poetry, in the sense of talking only that which is visionary and impossible, who takes a root or a seed of a flower and says, "Out of this shall come strength and shapeliness, bud and blossom and fruit: birds shall sing in its branches and men shall lie down at noon beneath its cool shade or out of this little seed shall come a flower, an apocalypse in itself, and the bee shall draw honey from its hidden cell"? If we had never seen the outcome of root or seed we should say concerning such a man "Visionary, poetical, romantic, dreamy, utterly without practical sagacity and arithmetical and measurable aptitude in relation to things of time and sense." But the man is no mere poet in the sense of creating universes in words only: rightly judged, the man who so speaks about root or seed is only an historian by anticipation; he is a reasoner, he is the prince of logicians.
In viewing the future, therefore, do not be drawn away by the cry of poetry or romance. He is no visionary who sees in the seed time the prose out of which will come the poetry of harvest. On the other hand he would be the loose reasoner who sees seed only in the seed, wood only in the root, and did not see in the seed waving cornfields, and food for the lives of men. There shall be a handful of corn on the top of the mountains, the fruit thereof, the poetry thereof, shall shake like Lebanon. Was he only a word-painter who so spoke? Credit him with the most penetrating vision and with that grand historical capacity which sees all possibilities in the germ and seed of things.
There is a poetry which is the highest form of fact. If a man could have said in England two hundred years ago, that communication with the ends of the earth would one day be a question of mere moments, and that according to the face of the clock men would be talking in New York about something which had happened in London actually before it had taken place, he would have been regarded as the wildest of lunatics, without practical aptitude, one of the dreaming seers that you can make nothing of, a puzzle in providence, the very mystery of Omnipotence. Yet would he not in reality have been the severest of reasoners, the most acute and penetrating of logicians? We who have no faith discount and discredit the faith of other men. The passionless man can never understand passion, the literalist cannot follow the logic of prophecy, the moral Laplander can never be made to dream of the luxuriant Christian tropics. You cannot be more than you are. But do not therefore say that other men are no more gifted than yourselves. There are men to whom there has been no future in the sense of cloud and mystery and chaos, but to whom the future has given up its secret in many a fore-blessing rain, in many a secret hint, in many a quiet night visit in many a glowing dream.
Do not let us therefore measure others by ourselves. We have to take our view of the future from Christ, and he regarded the future as an inspiration. It was his sanctuary of retreat: he lived in it, he projected himself beyond the fevered day, and lived in the calm eternity. We must do the same, or we shall be vexed and stung with details which come and go with the fickle wind. Blessed is the future which is coming upon Christ's church, a day without a threatening cloud, an infinite paradise without one thorn or noxious plant, a home from which no child has wandered, a sweet heaven unvisited by sin and untroubled by pain. Such is the flower which comes out of the Christian seed, and he who foresees and foretells its coming is not a speaker of words but a prophet of facts. Therefore comfort one another with these words. If in this life only we have hope, we are of all men most miserable. We have reckoned this world at a cheap rate because of the power of an endless life. If there be no endless life, we have done this world an injustice. Our light affliction, therefore, is but for a moment, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which arc seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal. In proportion as we live in heaven are we masters of earth: just as we hide ourselves in the sanctuary of the great future and view all things from Christ's standpoint are we at rest, and amid raging seas and rocking mountains our eyes look upon the river, the streams whereof make glad the city of God. Let us see to it that we follow Christ in this, namely, that we do not live in the little future which is mastered by anxiety, but in the great future, which yields its riches to a reverent imagination.
In the next place, Christ treated the future as unknown and yet well known. "Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come. Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not, the Son of man cometh. Of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only." Here we have a quantity spoken of that is well known yet unknown, unknown yet well known. Have we any parallel to this in our lower courses of thinking and action? Most assuredly we have. We know that tomorrow will come: tell me what will tomorrow bring with it a sullen face of cloud or a bright countenance of June light, blessing the lands that wait for it with all the benediction of summer? We know the great fact that to morrow will dawn; we know not what will be the incidents of the day, who shall live, who shall die, what controversies will be adjusted, what correspondence will turn our thoughts into new directions, and tax our energies with new claims. We know it we do not know it.
So with the harvest: the harvest will surely come, but will it be good or bad, early or late, satisfying or disappointing? Will it be well gathered or ill gathered? The harvest is known, but the incidents of its quality and abundance no man can know, with certainty. And death will come. When? Thank God we cannot tell. Who could face his duty, if he knew to a moment when and how he would die? The great future is revealed, the detailed future is mercifully kept back. Watch therefore therefore be ye also ready. That is all.
So then from the parallels or analogies which are supplied by our own life I can understand in part Christ's treatment of the future. The Lord will come: great events will transpire, the trumpet shall sound and the elect shall be gathered together from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other. The long-waiting earth shall receive her Lord when? Of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only. There are some secrets which can be at rest in only one heart.
And yet Jesus Christ viewed the future as having an immediate influence on the present, therefore he called for vigilance and readiness, and rebuked the men who were so miscalculating the coming of the future that they did injury to their fellow-servants. He had such a knowledge of history that he was enabled to tell his age that in the days of Noah men were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, and knew not until the flood came in great blotches of black rain upon the hot streets, and the lightning flashed and the thunder rolled and the whole heaven became a deluge and the wicked were lost. "So," said he, "it will be about this coming of my own. Men will chaffer with one another, hold wordy controversy with one another in points theological and ecclesiastical, and will speak about difficulties which a reverent heart could have subdued and dissolved, or be indulging in selfish appetite and desire until the great trumpet sound and the event transpire. Such was his grasp of the future, such his insight into its breadth and narrowness!
We cannot improve though we might enlarge his lesson, when he condensed his instruction into one word, "Watch." A great expectation warms the heart, a grand dream helps us to bear the burden of the sweltering day, and noble thought ennobles the mind which entertains it. He who has only a wall in front of him is in a prison. He who is bounded by a horizon has an infinite liberty.
Now Christ comes into the region which we term practical, and in that region he says, "Be ready: WATCH: be in the tower: be looking out: at any moment the crisis of creation may supervene." To work in this spirit is to work well.
Jesus Christ was always practical, though oftentimes he said things which seemed to be of a visionary nature. He was practical when he told his church to take care of the poor and to visit the sick and bless the unblest and give joy to him who was sad of heart. Christianity has its own secularism as well as its own theology. To hear some persons talk one would imagine that Christianity was only the latest phase of the theological imagination. Christianity has its humanities as well as its divinities. There are two commandments in its infinite law, the love of God, the love of man. There is no religion under heaven so hard-working as Christianity: it never rests. Hindooism has its At Home, Mahometanism makes no proselytes, Confucianism lets the world alone, but Christianity lets nobody alone. It is the working religion, the missionary religion, the energetic faith, the revolutionary force. Do give Christianity the credit of being the hardest working religion known amongst men. I do not mean merely hard-working in any ceremonial sense, but in the largest sense of beneficence, love, evangelisation, caring for everybody, never resting, until the last man is brought in. Not judging by majorities, but judging by individualities; counting every man one, and reckoning that its work is unfinished till the last man is homed in the very heart of Christ.
Our Christianity is nothing if it be not thus practical. He only is the visionary theologian who is so lost in theological speculation as to neglect the ignorance, the disease, the poverty which are lying round about his very house and path.
" This Gospel shall be preached for a witness to all nations, and then shall the end be. " "That is the end of Jerusalem, before the destruction whereof the Gospel was preached throughout the world. Witness Paul, saying, Their sound hath gone out into all the earth; and again, The Gospel is preached to every creature under heaven, so that ye may see it running from Jerusalem into Spain. And if one only apostle, Paul, spread the Gospel so far, what shall we think did all the rest? And this was a great miracle for the convincing of the unbelieving Jews before their destruction, for the Gospel to be preached in all parts of the world, in twenty or thirty years at the most; if this would not move them to believe, nothing could." (Chrysostom). "This must not be understood as done by the apostles, for there are many barbarous nations of Africa amongst whom the Gospel was never yet preached, as we may gather by such as have been captives there. This therefore remaineth yet to be accomplished; and because it is a secret when the world shall be filled with the Gospel, it is a secret likewise when shall be the day of judgment, before which this must be." (Augustine.)
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