But, on the other hand, if we clasp that Cross in simple trust, we find that it is the power which saves us out of all sins, sorrows, and dangers, and "shall save us" at last "into His heavenly kingdom."
Dear friends, that message leaves no man exactly as it found him. My words, I feel, in this sermon, have been very poor, set by the side of the greatness of the theme; but, poor as they have been, you will not be exactly the same man after them, if you have listened to them, as you were before. The difference may be very imperceptible, but it will be real. One more, almost invisible, film, over the eyeball; one more thin layer of wax in the ear; one more fold of insensibility round heart and conscience--or else some yielding to the love; some finger put out to take the salvation; some lightening of the pressure of the sickness; some removal of the peril and the danger. The same sun hurts diseased eyes, and gladdens sound ones. The same fire melts wax and hardens clay. "This Child is set for the rise and fall of many in Israel." "To the one He is the savour of life unto life; to the other He is the savour of death unto death." _Which_ is He, for He _is_ one of them, to you?
THE APOSTLE"S THEME
"I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified."--1 COR. ii. 2.
Many of you are aware that to-day I close forty years of ministry in this city--I cannot say to this congregation, for there are very, very few that can go back with me in memory to the beginning of these years. You will bear me witness that I seldom intrude personal references into the pulpit, but perhaps it would be affectation not to do so now. Looking back over these long years, many thoughts arise which cannot be spoken in public. But one thing I may say, and that is, that I am grateful to G.o.d and to you, dear friends, for the unbroken harmony, confidence, affection, and forbearance which have brightened and lightened my work. Of its worth I cannot judge; its imperfections I know better than the most unfavourable critic; but I can humbly take the words of this text as expressive, not, indeed, of my attainments, but of my aims. One of my texts, on my first Sunday in Manchester, was "We preach Christ and Him crucified," and I look back, and venture to say that the n.o.ble words of this text have been, however imperfectly followed, my guiding star.
Now, I wish to say a word or two, less personal perhaps, and yet, as you can well suppose, not without a personal reference in my own consciousness.
I. Note here first, then, the Apostolic theme--Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
Now, the Apostle, in this context, gives us a little autobiographical glimpse which is singularly and interestingly confirmed by some slight incidental notices in the Book of the Acts. He says, in the context, that he was with the Corinthians "in weakness and in fear and in much trembling," and, if we turn to the narrative, we find that a singular period of silence, apparent abandonment of his work and dejection, seems to have synchronised with his coming to the great city of Corinth. The reasons were very plain. He had recently come into Europe for the first time and had had to front a new condition of things, very different from what he had found in Palestine or in Asia Minor. His experience had not been encouraging.
He had been imprisoned in Philippi; he had been smuggled away by night from Thessalonica; he had been hounded from Berea; he had all but wholly failed to make any impression in Athens, and in his solitude he came to Corinth, and lay quiet, and took stock of his adversaries. He came to the conclusion which he records in my text; he felt that it was not for him to argue with philosophers, or to attempt to vie with Sophists and professional orators, but that his only way to meet Greek civilisation, Greek philosophy, Greek eloquence, Greek self-conceit, was to preach "Christ and Him crucified." The determination was not come to in ignorance of the conditions that were fronting him. He knew Corinth, its wealth, its wickedness, its culture, and knowing these he said, "I have made up my mind that I will know nothing amongst you save Jesus Christ and Him crucified."
So, then, this Apostle"s conception of his theme was--the biography of a Man, with especial emphasis laid on one act in His history--His death. Christianity is Christ, and Christ is Christianity. His relation to the truth that He proclaimed, and to the truths that may be deducible from the story of His life and death, is altogether different from the relation of any other founder of a religion to the truths that he has proclaimed. For in these you can accept the teaching, and ignore the teacher. But you cannot do that with Christianity; "I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life"; and in that revealing biography, which is the preacher"s theme, the palpitating heart and centre is the death upon the Cross. So, whatever else Christianity comes to be--and it comes to be a great deal else--the principle of its growth, and the germ which must vitalise the whole, lie in the personality and the death of Jesus Christ.
That is not all. The history of the life and the death want something more to make them a gospel. The fact, I was going to say, is the least part of the fact; as in some vegetable growths, there is far more underground than above. For, unless along with, involved in, and deducible from, but capable of being stated separately from, the external facts, there is a certain commentary or explanation of them: the history is a history, the biography is a biography, the story of the Cross is a touching narrative, but it is no gospel.
And what was Paul"s commentary which lifted the bare facts up into the loftier region? This--as for the person, Jesus Christ "declared to be the son of G.o.d with power"--as for the fact of the death, "died for our sins according to the Scriptures." Let in these two conceptions into the facts--and they are the necessary explanation and presupposition of the facts--the Incarnation and the Sacrifice, and then you get what Paul calls "my gospel," not because it was his invention, but because it was the trust committed to him. That is the Gospel which alone answers to the facts which he deals with; and that is the Gospel which, G.o.d helping me, I have for forty years tried to preach.
We hear a great deal at present, or we did a few years ago, about this generation having recovered Jesus Christ, and about the necessity of going "back to the Christ of the Gospels." By all means, I say, if in the process you do not lose the Christ of the Epistles, who is the Christ of the Gospels, too. I am free to admit that a past generation has wrapped theological cobwebs round the gracious figure of Christ with disastrous results. For it is perfectly possible to know the things that are said about Him, and not to know Him about whom these things are said. But the mistake into which the present generation is far more likely to fall than that of subst.i.tuting theology for Christ, is the converse one--that of subst.i.tuting an undefined Christ for the Christ of the Gospels and the Epistles, the Incarnate Son of G.o.d, who died for our salvation. And that is a more disastrous mistake than the other, for you can know nothing about Him and He can be nothing to you, except as you grasp the Apostolic explanation of the bare facts--seeing in Him the Word who became flesh, the Son who died that we might receive the adoption of sons.
I would further point out that a clear conception of what the theme is, goes a long way to determine the method in which it shall be proclaimed. The Apostle says, in the pa.s.sage which is parallel to the present one, in the previous chapter, "We preach Christ crucified"; with strong emphasis on the word "preach." "The Jew required a sign"; he wanted a man who would do something. The Greek sought after wisdom; he wanted a man who would perorate and argue and dissertate.
Paul says, "No!" "We have nothing to _do_. We do not come to philosophise and to argue. We come with a message of fact that has occurred, of a Person that has lived." And, as most of you know, the word which he uses means in its full signification, "to proclaim as a herald does."
Of course, if my business were to establish a set of principles, theological or otherwise, then argumentation would be my weapon, proofs would be my means, and my success would be that I should win your credence, your intellectual consent, and conviction. If I were here to proclaim simply a morality, then the thing that I would aim to secure would be obedience, and the method of securing it would be to enforce the authority and reasonableness of the command. But, seeing that my task is to proclaim a living Person and a historical fact, then the way to do that is to do as the herald does when in the market-place he stands, trumpet in one hand and the King"s message in the other--proclaim it loudly, confidently, not "with bated breath and whispering humbleness," as if apologising, nor too much concerned to b.u.t.tress it up with argumentation out of his own head, but to say, "Thus saith the Lord," and to what the Lord saith conscience says, "Amen." Brethren, we need far more, in all our pulpits, of that unhesitating confidence in the plain, simple proclamation, stripped, as far as possible, of human additions and accretions, of the great fact and the great Person on whom all our salvation depends.
II. So let me ask you to notice the exclusiveness which this theme demands.
"Nothing but," says Paul. I might venture to say--though perhaps the tone of the personal allusions in this sermon may seem to contradict it--that this exclusiveness is to be manifested in one very difficult direction, and that that is, the herald shall efface himself. We have to hold up the picture; and if I might take such a metaphor, like a man in a gallery who is displaying some masterpiece to the eyes of the beholders, we have to keep ourselves well behind it; and it will be wise if not even a finger-tip is allowed to steal in front and come into sight. One condition, I believe, of real power in the ministration of the Gospel, is that people shall be convinced that the preacher is thinking not at all about himself, but altogether about his message. You remember that wonderfully pathetic utterance from John the Baptist"s stern lips, which derives much additional pathos and tenderness from the character of the man from whom it came, when they asked him, "Who art thou?" and his answer was, "I am a Voice." I am a Voice; that is all! Ah, that is the example! We preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus as Lord. We must efface ourselves if we would proclaim Christ.
But I turn to another direction in which this theme demands exclusiveness, and I revert to the previous chapter where in the parallel portion to the words of my text, we find the Apostle very clearly conscious of the two great streams of expectation and wish which he deliberately thwarted and set at nought. "The Jews require a sign--but we preach Christ crucified. The Greeks seek after wisdom,"
but again, "we preach Christ crucified." Now, take these two. They are representations, in a very emphatic way, of two sets of desires and mental characteristics, which divide the world between them.
On the one hand, there is the sensuous tendency that wants something done for it, something to see, something that sense can grasp at; and so, as it fancies, work itself upwards into a higher region. "The Jew requires a sign"--that is, not merely a miracle, but something to look at. He wants a visible sacrifice; he wants a priest. He wants religion to consist largely in the doing of certain acts which may be supposed to bring, in some magical fashion, spiritual blessings. And Paul opposes to that, "We preach Christ crucified." Brethren, the tendency is strong to-day, not only in those parts of the Anglican communion where sacramentarian theories are in favour, but amongst all sections of the Christian Church, in which there is obvious a drift towards more ornate ritual, and aesthetic services, as means of attracting to church or chapel, and as more important than proclaiming Christ. I am free to confess that possibly some of us, with our Puritan upbringing and tendency, too much disregard that side of human nature. Possibly it is so. But for all that I profoundly believe that if religion is to be strong it must have a very, very small infusion of these external aids to spiritual worship, and that few things more weaken the power of the Gospel that Paul preached than the lowering of the flag in conformity with desires of men of sense, and subst.i.tuting for the simple glory of the preached Word the meretricious, and in time impotent, and always corrupting, attractions of a sensuous worship.
Further, "The Greeks seek after wisdom." They wanted demonstration, abstract principles, systematised philosophies, and the like. Paul comes again with his "We preach Christ and Him crucified." The wisdom is there, as I shall have to say in a moment, but the form that it takes is directly antagonistic to the wishes of these wisdom-seeking Greeks. The same thing in modern guise besets us to-day. We are called upon, on all sides, to bring into the pulpit what they call an ethical gospel; putting it into plain English, to preach morality, and to leave out Christ. We are called upon, on all sides, to preach an applied Christianity, a social gospel--that is to say, largely to turn the pulpit into a Sunday supplement to the daily newspaper. We are asked to deal with the intellectual difficulties which spring from the collision of science, true or false, with religion, and the like. All that is right enough. But I believe from my heart that the thing to do is to copy Paul"s example, and to preach Christ and Him crucified. You may think me right or you may think me wrong, but here and now, at the end of forty years, I should like to say that I have for the most part ignored that cla.s.s of subjects deliberately, and of set purpose, and with a profound conviction, be it erroneous or not, that a ministry which listens much to the cry for "wisdom" in its modern forms, has departed from the true perspective of Christian teaching, and will weaken the churches which depend upon it. Let who will turn the pulpit into a professor"s chair, or a lecturer"s platform, or a concert-room stage or a politician"s rostrum, I for one determine to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
III. Lastly, observe the all-sufficient comprehensiveness which this theme secures.
Paul says "nothing but"; he might have said "everything in." For "Jesus Christ and Him crucified" covers all the ground of men"s needs. No doubt many of you will have been saying to yourselves whilst you have been listening, if you have been listening, to what I have been saying, "Ah! old-fashioned narrowness; quite out of date in this generation." Brethren, there are two ways of adapting one"s ministry to the times. One is falling in with the requirements of the times, and the other is going dead against them, and both of these methods have to be pursued by us.
But the exclusiveness of which I have been speaking, is no narrow exclusiveness. Paul felt that, if he was to give the Corinthians what they needed, he must refuse to give them what they wanted, and that whilst he crossed their wishes he was consulting their necessities.
That is true yet, for the preaching that bases itself upon the life and death of Jesus Christ, conceived as Paul had learned from Jesus Christ to conceive them, that Gospel, whilst it brushes aside men"s superficial wishes, goes straight to the heart of their deep-lying universal necessities, for what the Jew needs most is not a sign, and what the Greek needs most is not wisdom, but what they both need most is deliverance from the guilt and power of sin. And we all, scholars and fools, poets and common-place people, artists and ploughmen, all of us, in all conditions of life, in all varieties of culture, in all stages of intellectual development, in all diversities of occupation and of mental bias, what we all have in common is that human heart in which sin abides, and what we all need most to have is that evil drop squeezed out of it, and our souls delivered from the burden and the bondage. Therefore, any man that comes with a sign, and does not deal with the sin of the human heart, and any man that comes with a philosophical system of wisdom, and does not deal with sin, does not bring a Gospel that will meet the necessities even of the people to whose cravings he has been aiming to adapt his message.
But, beyond that, in this message of Christ and Him crucified, there lies in germ the satisfaction of all that is legitimate in these desires that at first sight it seems to thwart. "A sign?" Yes, and where is there power like the power that dwells in Him who is the Incarnate might of omnipotence? "Wisdom?" Yes, and where is there wisdom, except "in Him in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge"? Let the Jew come to the Cross, and in the weak Man hanging there, he will find a mightier revelation of the power of G.o.d than anywhere else. Let the Greek come to the Cross, and there he will find wisdom and righteousness, sanctification and redemption.
The bases of all social, economical, political reform and well-being, lie in the understanding and the application to social and national life, of the principles that are wrapped in, and are deduced from, the Incarnation and the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ. We have not learned them all yet. They have not all been applied to national and individual life yet. I plead for no narrow exclusiveness, but for one consistent with the widest application of Christian principles to all life. Paul determined to know nothing but Jesus, and to know everything in Jesus, and Jesus in everything. Do not begin your building at the second-floor windows. Put in your foundations first, and be sure that they are well laid. Let the Sacrifice of Christ, in its application to the individual and his sins, be ever the basis of all that you say. And then, when that foundation is laid, exhibit, to your heart"s content, the applications of Christianity and its social aspects. But be sure that the beginning of them all is the work of Christ for the individual sinful soul, and the acceptance of that work by personal faith.
Dear friends, ours has been a long and happy union but it is a very solemn one. My responsibilities are great; yours are not small. Let me beseech you to ask yourselves if, with all your kindness to the messenger, you have given heed to the message. Have you pa.s.sed beyond the voice that speaks, to Him of whom it speaks? Have you taken the truth--veiled and weakened as I know it has been by my words, but yet in them--for what it is, the word of the living G.o.d? My occupancy of this pulpit must in the nature of things, before long, come to a close, but the message which I have brought to you will survive all changes in the voice that speaks here. "All flesh is gra.s.s ... the Word of the Lord endureth for ever." And, closing these forty years, during a long part of which some of you have listened most lovingly and most forbearingly, I leave with you this, which I venture to quote, though it is my Master"s word about Himself, "I judge you not; the word which I have spoken unto you, the same shall judge you in the last day."
G.o.d"S FELLOW-WORKERS
"Labourers together with G.o.d."--1 COR. iii. 9.
The characteristic Greek tendency to factions was threatening to rend the Corinthian Church, and each faction was swearing by a favourite teacher. Paul and his companion, Apollos, had been taken as the figureheads of two of these parties, and so he sets himself in the context, first of all to show that neither of the two was of any real importance in regard to the Church"s life. They were like a couple of gardeners, one of whom did the planting, and the other the watering; but neither the man that put the little plant into the ground, nor the man that came after him with a watering-pot, had anything to do with originating the mystery of the life by which the plant grew.
That was G.o.d"s work, and the pair that had planted and watered were nothing. So what was the use of fighting which of two nothings was the greater?
But then he bethinks himself that that is not quite all. The man that plants and the man that waters are something after all. They do not communicate life, but they do provide for its nourishment. And more than that, the two operations--that of the man with the dibble and that of the man with the watering-pot--are one in issue; and so they are partners, and in some respects may be regarded as one. Then what is the sense of pitting them against each other?
But even that is not quite all; though united in operation, they are separate in responsibility and activity, and will be separate in reward. And even that is not all; for, being nothing and yet something, being united and yet separate, they are taken into partic.i.p.ation and co-operation with G.o.d; and as my text puts it, in what is almost a presumptuous phrase, they are "labourers together with Him." That partnership of co-operation is not merely a partnership of the two, but it is a partnership of the three--G.o.d and the two who, in some senses, are one.
Now whilst this text is primarily spoken in regard to the apostolic and evangelistic work of these early teachers, the principle which it embodies is a very wide one, and it applies in all regions of life and activity, intellectual, scholastic, philanthropic, social.
Where-ever men are thinking G.o.d"s thoughts and trying to carry into effect any phase or side of G.o.d"s manifold purposes of good and blessing to the world, there it is true. We claim no special or exclusive prerogative for the Christian teacher. Every man that is trying to make men understand G.o.d"s thought, whether it is expressed in creation, or whether it is written in history, or whether it is carven in half-obliterated letters on the const.i.tution of human nature, every man who, in any region of society or life, is seeking to effect the great designs of the universal loving Father--can take to himself, in the measure and according to the manner of his special activity, the great encouragement of my text, and feel that he, too, in his little way, is a fellow-helper to the truth and a fellow-worker with G.o.d. But then, of course, according to New Testament teaching, and according to the realities of the case, the highest form in which men thus can co-operate with G.o.d, and carry into effect His purposes is that in which men devote themselves, either directly or indirectly, to spreading throughout the whole world the name and the power of the Saviour Jesus Christ, in whom all G.o.d"s will is gathered, and through whom all G.o.d"s blessings are communicated to mankind. So the thought of my text comes appropriately when I have to bring before you the claims of our missionary operations.
Now, the first way in which I desire to look at this great idea expressed in these words, is that we find in it
I. A solemn thought.
"Labourers together with G.o.d." Cannot He do it all Himself? No. G.o.d needs men to carry out His purposes. True, on the Cross, Jesus spoke the triumphant word, "It is finished!" He did not thereby simply mean that He had completed all His suffering; but He meant that He had then done all which the world needed to have done in order that it should be a redeemed world. But for the distribution and application of that finished work G.o.d depends on men. You all know, in your own daily businesses, how there must be a middleman between the mill and the consumer. The question of organising a distributing agency is quite as important as any other part of the manufacturer"s business.
The great reservoir is full, but there has to be a system of irrigating-channels by which the water is carried into every corner of the field that is to be watered. Christian men individually, and the Church collectively, supply--may I call it the missing link?--between a redeeming Saviour and the world which He has redeemed in act, but which is not actually redeemed, until it has received the message of the great Redemption that is wrought. The supernatural is implanted in the very heart of the ma.s.s of leaven by the Incarnation and Sacrifice of Jesus Christ; but the spreading of that supernatural revelation is left in the hands of men who work through natural processes, and who thus become labourers together with G.o.d, and enable Christ to be to single souls, in blessed reality, what He is potentially to the world, and has been ever since. He died upon the Cross. "It is finished." Yes--because it is finished, our work begins.
Let me remind you of the profound symbolism in that incident where our Lord for once appeared conspicuously, and almost ostentatiously, before Israel as its true King. He had need--as He Himself said--of the meek beast on which He rode. He cannot pa.s.s, in His coronation procession, through the world unless He has us, by whom He may be carried into every corner of the earth. So "the Lord has need" of us, and we are "fellow-labourers with Him."
But this same thought suggests another point. We have here a solemn call addressed to every Christian man and woman.
Do not let us run away with the idea that, because here the Apostle is speaking in regard to himself and Apollos, he is enunciating a truth which applies only to Apostles and evangelists. It is true of all Christians. My knowledge of and faith in Jesus Christ as my own personal Saviour impose upon me the obligation, in so far as my opportunities and capacities extend, thus to co-operate with Him in spreading His great Name. Every Christian man, just because he is a Christian, is invested with the power--and power to its last particle is duty--and is, therefore, burdened with the honourable obligation to work for G.o.d. There is such a thing as "coming to the help of the Lord," though that phrase seems to reverse altogether the true relation. It is the duty of every Christian, partly because of loyalty to Jesus, and partly because of the responsibility which the very const.i.tution of society lays upon every one of us, to diffuse what he possesses, and to be a distributing agent for the life that he himself enjoys. Brethren! there is no possibility of Christian men or women being fully faithful to the Saviour, unless they recognise that the duty of being a fellow-labourer with G.o.d inevitably follows on being a possessor of Christ"s salvation; and that no Apostle, no official, no minister, no missionary, has any more necessity laid upon him to preach the Gospel, nor pulls down any heavier woe on himself if he is unfaithful, than has and does each one of Christ"s servants.
So "we are fellow-labourers with G.o.d." Alas! alas! how poorly the average Christian realises--I do not say discharges, but realises--that obligation! Brethren, I do not wish to find fault, but I do beseech you to ask yourselves whether, if you are Christians, you are doing anything the least like what my text contemplates as the duty of all Christians.
May I say a word or two with regard to another aspect of this solemn call? Does not the thought of working along with G.o.d prescribe for us the sort of work that we ought to do? We ought to work in G.o.d"s fashion, and if we wish to know what G.o.d"s fashion is, we have but to look at Jesus Christ. We ought to work in Jesus Christ"s fashion. We all know what that involved of self-sacrifice, of pain, of weariness, of utter self-oblivious devotion, of gentleness, of tenderness, of infinite pity, of love running over. "The master"s eye makes a good servant." The Master"s hand working along with the servant ought to make the servant work after the Master"s fashion. "As My Father hath sent Me, so send I you." If we felt that side by side with us, like two sailors hauling on one rope, "the Servant of the Lord" was toiling, do you not think it would burn up all our selfishness, and light up all our indifference, and make us spend ourselves in His service? A fellow-labourer with G.o.d will surely never be lazy and selfish. Thus my text has in it, to begin with, a solemn call.
It suggests
II. A signal honour.
Suppose a great painter, a Raphael or a Turner, taking a little boy that cleaned his brushes, and saying to him, "Come into my studio, and I will let you do a bit of work upon my picture." Suppose an aspirant, an apprentice in any walk of life, honoured by being permitted to work along with some one who was recognised all over the world as being at the very top of that special profession. Would it not be a feather in the boy"s cap all his life? And would he not think it the greatest honour that ever had been done him that he was allowed to co-operate, in however inferior a fashion, with such an one? Jesus Christ says to us, "Come and work here side by side with Me," But Christian men, plenty of them, answer, "It is a perpetual nuisance, this continual application for money! money! money! work!
work! work! It is never-ending, and it is a burden!" Yes, it is a burden, just because it is an honour. Do you know that the Hebrew word which means "glory" literally means "weight"? There is a great truth in that. You cannot get true honours unless you are prepared to carry them as burdens. And the highest honour that Jesus Christ gives to men when He says to them, not only "Go work to-day in My vineyard," but "Come, work here side by side with Me," is a heavy weight which can only be lightened by a cheerful heart.