Every day I find happy Christian people. I find some of them with no second coat, some of them in huts and tenement houses, not one earthly comfort afforded them; and yet they are as happy as happy can be. They sing "Rock of Ages" as no other people in the world sing it. They never wore any jewelry in their life but one gold ring, and that was the ring of G.o.d"s undying affection. Oh, how happy religion makes us!
Did it make you gloomy and sad? Did you go with your head cast down? I do not think you got religion, my brother. That is not the effect of religion. True religion is a joy. "Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace."
Why, religion lightens all our burdens. It smooths all our way. It interprets all our sorrows. It changes the jar of earthly discord for the peal of festal bells. In front of the flaming furnace of trial it sets the forge on which scepters are hammered out. Would you not like to-day to come up from the swine-feeding and try this religion? All the joys of heaven would come out and meet you, and G.o.d would cry from the throne: "Put a ring on his hand."
You are not happy. I see it. There is no peace, and sometimes you laugh when you feel a great deal more like crying. The world is a cheat. It first wears you down with its follies, then it kicks you out into darkness. It comes back from the ma.s.sacre of a million souls to attempt the destruction of your soul to-day. No peace out of G.o.d, but here is the fountain that can slake the thirst. Here is the harbor where you can drop safe anchorage.
Would you not like, I ask you--not perfunctorily, but as one brother might talk to another--would you not like to have a pillow of rest to put your head on? And would you not like, when you retire at night, to feel that all is well, whether you wake up to-morrow morning at six o"clock, or sleep the sleep that knows no waking? Would you not like to exchange this awful uncertainty about the future for a glorious a.s.surance of heaven? Accept of the Lord Jesus to-day, and all is well.
If on your way home some peril should cross the street and dash your life out, it would not hurt you. You would rise up immediately. You would stand in the celestial streets. You would be amid the great throng that forever worship and are forever happy. If this day some sudden disease should come upon you, it would not frighten you. If you knew you were going you could give a calm farewell to your beautiful home on earth, and know that you are going right into the companionship of those who have already got beyond the toiling and the weeping.
You feel on Sat.u.r.day night different from the way you feel any other night of the week. You come home from the bank, or the store, or the shop, and you say: "Well, now my week"s work is done, and to-morrow is Sunday." It is a pleasant thought. There is refreshment and reconstruction in the very idea. Oh, how pleasant it will be, if, when we get through the day of our life, and we go and lie down in our bed of dust, we can realize: "Well, now the work is all done, and to-morrow is Sunday--an everlasting Sunday."
"Oh, when, thou city of my G.o.d, Shall I thy courts ascend?
Where congregations ne"er break up, And Sabbaths have no end."
There are people in this house to-day who are very near the eternal world. If you are Christians, I bid you be of good cheer. Bear with you our congratulations to the bright city. Aged men, who will soon be gone, take with you our love for our kindred in the better land, and when you see them, tell them that we are soon coming. Only a few more sermons to preach and hear. Only a few more heart-aches. Only a few more toils. Only a few more tears. And then--what an entrancing spectacle will open before us!
"Beautiful heaven, where all is light, Beautiful angels clothed in white, Beautiful strains that never tire, Beautiful harps through all the choir; There shall I join the chorus sweet, Worshiping at the Saviour"s feet."
I stand before you on this Sabbath, the last Sabbath preceding the great feast-day in this Church. On the next Lord"s-day the door of communion will be open, and you will all be invited to come in. And so I approach you now with a general invitation, not picking out here and there a man, or here and there a woman, or here and there a child; but giving you an unlimited invitation, saying: "Come, for all things are now ready." We invite you to the warm heart of Christ, and the inclosure of the Christian Church. I know a great many think that the Church does not amount to much--that it is obsolete; that it did its work and is gone now, so far as all usefulness is concerned. It is the happiest place I have ever been in except my own home.
I know there are some people who say they are Christians who seem to get along without any help from others, and who culture solitary piety. They do not want any ordinances. I do not belong to that cla.s.s.
I can not get along without them. There are so many things in this world that take my attention from G.o.d, and Christ, and heaven, that I want all the helps of all the symbols and of all the Christian a.s.sociations; and I want around about me a solid phalanx of men who love G.o.d and keep His commandments. Are there any here who would like to enter into that a.s.sociation? Then by a simple, child-like faith, apply for admission into the visible Church, and you will be received.
No questions asked about your past history or present surroundings.
Only one test--do you love Jesus?
Baptism does not amount to anything, say a great many people; but the Lord Jesus declared, "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved," putting baptism and faith side by side. And an apostle declares, "Repent and be baptized, every one of you." I do not stickle for any particular mode of baptism, but I put great emphasis on the fact that you ought to be baptized. Yet no more emphasis than the Lord Jesus Christ, the Great Head of the Church, puts upon it.
The world is going to lose a great many of its votaries next Sabbath.
We give you warning. There is a great host coming in to stand under the banner of the Lord Jesus Christ. Will you be among them? It is going to be a great harvest-day. Will you be among the gathered sheaves?
Some of you have been thinking on this subject year after year. You have found out that this world is a poor portion. You want to be Christians. You have come almost into the kingdom of G.o.d; but there you stop, forgetful of the fact that to be almost saved is not to be saved at all. Oh, my brother, after having come so near to the door of mercy, if you turn back, you will never come at all. After all you have heard of the goodness of G.o.d, if you turn away and die, it will not be because you did not have a good offer.
"G.o.d"s spirit will not always strive With hardened, self-destroying man; Ye who persist His love to grieve May never hear his voice again."
May G.o.d Almighty this hour move upon your soul and bring you back from the husks of the wilderness to the Father"s house, and set you at the banquet, and "put a ring on your hand."
HOW HE CAME TO SAY IT.
"If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha."--I COR. xvi: 22.
The smallest lad in the house knows the meaning of all those words except the last two, Anathema Maranatha. Anathema, to cut off.
Maranatha, at His coming. So the whole pa.s.sage might be read: "If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be cut off at His coming."
Well, how could the tender-hearted Paul say that? We have seen him with tears discoursing about human want, and flushed with excitement about human sorrow; and now he throws those red-hot iron words into this letter to the Corinthians. Had he lost his patience? Ok, no. Had he resigned his confidence in the Christian religion? Oh, no. Had the world treated him so badly that he had become its sworn enemy? Oh, no.
It needs some explanation, I confess, and I shall proceed to show by what process Paul came to the vehement utterance of my text. Before I close, if G.o.d shall give His Spirit, you shall cease to be surprised at the exclamation of the Apostle, and you yourselves will employ the same emphasis, declaring, "If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha."
If the photographic art had been discovered early enough, we should have had the facial proportions of Christ--the front face, the side face, Jesus sitting, Jesus standing--provided He had submitted to that art; but since the sun did not become a portrait painter until eighteen centuries after Christ, our idea about the Saviour"s personal appearance is all guess work. Still, tradition tells us that He was the most infinitely beautiful being that ever walked our small earth.
If His features had been rugged, and His gait had been ungainly, that would not have hindered Him from being attractive. Many men you have known and loved have had few charms of physiognomy. Wilberforce was not attractive in face. Socrates was repulsive. Suwarrow, the great Russian hero, looked almost an imbecile. And some whom you have known, and honored, and loved, have not had very great attractiveness of personal appearance. The shape of the mouth, and the nose, and the eyebrow, did not hinder the soul from shining through the cuticle of the face in all-powerful irradiation.
But to a lovely exterior Christ joined all loveliness of disposition.
Run through the galleries of heaven, and find out that He is _a non-such_. The sunshine of His love mingling with the shadows of His sorrows, crossed by the crystalline stream of His tears and the crimson flowing forth of His blood, make a picture worthy of being called the masterpiece of the eternities. Hung on the wall of heaven, the celestial population would be enchanted but for the fact that they have the grand and magnificent original, and they want no picture. But Christ having gone away from earth, we are dependent upon four indistinct pictures. Matthew took one, Mark another, Luke another, and John another. I care not which picture you take, it is lovely.
Lovely? He was altogether lovely.
He had a way of taking up a dropsical limb without hurting it, and of removing the cataract from the eye without the knife, and of starting the circulation through the shrunken arteries without the shock of the electric battery, and of putting intelligence into the dull stare of lunacy, and of restringing the auditory nerve of the deaf ear, and of striking articulation into the stiff tongue, and of making the stark-naked madman dress himself and exchange tombstone for ottoman, and of unlocking from the skeleton grip of death the daughter of Jairus to embosom her in her glad father"s arms. Oh, He was lovely--sitting, standing, kneeling, lying down--always lovely.
Lovely in His sacrifice. Why, He gave up everything for us. Home, celestial companionship, music of seraphic harps, balmy breath of eternal summer, all joy, all light, all music, and heard the gates slam shut behind Him as He came out to fight for our freedom, and with bare feet plunged on the sharp javelins of human and satanic hate, until His blood spurted into the faces of those who slew Him. You want the soft, low, minor key of sweetest music to describe the pathos; but it needs an orchestra, under swinging of an archangel"s baton, reaching from throne to manger, to drum and trumpet the doxologies of His praise. He took everybody"s trouble--the leper"s sickness, the widow"s dead boy, the harlot"s shame, the Galilean fisherman"s poor luck, the invalidism of Simon"s mother-in-law, the sting of Malchus"
amputated ear.
Some people cry very easily, and for some it is very difficult to cry.
A great many tears on some cheeks do not mean so much as one tear on another cheek. What is it that I see glittering in the mild eye of Jesus? It was all the sorrows of earth, and the woes of h.e.l.l, from which He had plucked our souls, accreted into one transparent drop, lingering on the lower eyelash until it fell on a cheek red with the slap of human hands--just one salt, bitter, burning tear of Jesus. No wonder the rock, the sky, and the cemetery were in consternation when He died! No wonder the universe was convulsed! It was the Lord G.o.d Almighty bursting into tears. Now, suppose that, notwithstanding all this, a man can not have any affection for Him. What ought to be done with such hard behavior?
It seems to me that there ought to be some chastis.e.m.e.nt for a man who will not love such a Christ. Does it not make your blood tingle to think of Jesus coming over the tens of thousands of miles that seem to separate G.o.d from us, and then to see a man jostle Him out, and push Him back, and shut the door in His face, and trample upon His entreaties? While you may not be able to rise up to the towering excitement of the Apostle in my text, you can at any rate somewhat understand his feelings when he cried out: "After all this, "if a man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha.""
Just look at the injustice of not loving Him. Now, there is nothing that excites a man like injustice. You go along the street, and you see your little child buffeted, or a ruffian comes and takes a boy"s hat and throws it into the ditch. You say: "What great meanness, what injustice that is!" You can not stand injustice. I remember, in my boyhood days, attending a large meeting in Tripler Hall, New York.
Thousands of people were huzzaing, and the same kind of audiences were a.s.sembled at the same time in Boston, Edinburgh, and London. Why?
Because the Madaii family, in Italy, had been robbed of their Bible.
"A little thing," you say. Ah, that injustice was enough to arouse the indignation of a world. But while we are so sensitive about injustice as between man and man, how little sensitive we are about injustice between man and G.o.d. If there ever was a fair and square purchase of anything, then Christ purchased us. He paid for us, not in shekels, not in ancient coins inscribed with effigies of Hercules, or aegina"s tortoise, or lyre of Mitylene, but in two kinds of coin--one red, the other glittering--blood and tears! If anything is purchased and paid for, ought not the goods to be delivered? If you have bought property and given the money, do you not want to come into possession of it?
"Yes," you say, "I will have it. I bought and paid for it." And you will go to law for it, and you will denounce the man as a defrauder.
Ay, if need be, you will hurl him into jail. You will say: "I am bound to get that property. I bought it. I paid for it!"
Now, transpose the case. Suppose Jesus Christ to be the wronged purchaser on the one side, and the impenitent soul on the other, trying to defraud Him of that which He bought at such an exorbitant price, how do you feel about that injustice? How do you feel toward that spiritual fraud, turpitude and perfidy? A man with an ardent temperament rises and he says that such injustice as between man and man is bad enough, but between man and G.o.d it is reprehensible and intolerable, and he brings his fist down on the pew, and he says: "I can stand this injustice no longer. After all this purchase, "if any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha"!"
I go still further, and show you how suicidal it is for a man not to love Christ. If a man gets in trouble, and he can not get out, we have only one feeling toward him--sympathy and a desire to help him. If he has failed for a vast amount of money, and can not pay more than ten cents on a dollar--ay, if he can not pay anything--though his creditors may come after him like a pack of hounds, we sympathize with him. We go to his store, or house, and we express our condolence. But suppose the day before that man failed, William E. Dodge had come into his store and said: "My friend, I hear you are in trouble. I have come to help you. If ten thousand dollars will see you through your perplexity, I have a loan of that amount for you. Here is a check for the amount of that loan." Suppose the man said: "With that ten thousand dollars I could get through until next spring, and then everything will be all right; but, Mr. Dodge, I don"t want it; I won"t take it; I would rather fail than take it; I don"t even thank you for offering it." Your sympathy for that man would cease immediately. You would say: "He had a fair offer; he might have got out; he wants to fail; he refuses all help; now let him fail." There is no one in all this house who would have any sympathy for that man.
But do not let us be too hasty. Christ hears of our spiritual embarra.s.sments, he finds that we are on the very verge of eternal defalcation. He finds the law knocking at our door with this dun: "Pay me what thou owest."
We do not know which way to turn. Pay? We can not pay a farthing of all the millions of obligation. Well, Christ comes in and says: "Here is My name; you can use My name. Your name would be worthless, but My red handwriting on the back of this obligation will get you through anywhere." Now suppose the soul says: "I know I am in debt; I can"t meet these obligations either in time or eternity; but, oh, Christ, I want not Thy help; I ask not Thy rescue. Go away from me." You would say: "That man, why, he deserves to die. He had the offer of help; he would not take it. He is a free agent; he ought to have what he wants; he chooses death rather than life. Ought you not give him freedom of choice?" Though awhile ago there was only one ardent man who understood the Apostle, now there are hundreds in the house who can say, and do say within themselves: "After all this ingrat.i.tude, and rejection, and obstinacy, "if any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha.""
I go a step further, and say it is most cruel for a man not to love Jesus. The meanest thing I could do for you would be needlessly to hurt your feelings. Sharp words sometimes cut like a dagger. An unkind look will sometimes rive like the lightning. An unkind deed may overmaster a sensitive spirit, and if you have made up your mind that you have done wrong to any one, it does not take you two minutes to make up your mind to go and apologize. Now, Christ is a bundle of delicacy and sensitiveness. How you have shocked His nerves! How you have broken His heart!
Did you, my brother, ever measure the meaning of that one pa.s.sage: "Behold, I stand at the door and knock"? It never came to me as it did this morning while I was thinking on this subject. "Behold, I stand at the door and knock." Some January day, the thermometer five degrees below zero, the wind and sleet beating mercilessly against you, you go up the steps of a house where you have a very important errand. You knock with one knuckle. No answer. You are very earnest, and you are freezing. The next time you knock harder. After awhile with your fist you beat against the door. You must get in, but the inmate is careless or stubborn, and he does not want you in. Your errand is a failure.
You go away.
The Lord Jesus Christ comes up on the steps of your heart, and with very sore hand he knocks hard at the door of your soul. He is standing in the cold blasts of human suffering. He knocks. He says: "Let me in.
I have come a great way. I have come all the way from Nazareth, from Bethlehem, from Golgotha. Let Me in. I am shivering and blue with the cold. Let Me in. My feet are bare but for their covering of blood. My head is uncovered but for a turban of brambles. By all these wounds of foot, and head, and heart, I beg you to let Me in. Oh, I have been here a great while, and the night is getting darker. I am faint with hunger. I am dying to get in. Oh, lift the latch--shove back the bolt! Won"t you let Me in? Won"t you? "Behold, I stand at the door and knock!""
But after awhile, my brother, the scene will change. It will be another door, but Christ will be on the other side of it. He will be on the inside, and the rejected sinner will be on the outside, and the sinner will come up and knock at the door, and say: "Let me in, let me in. I have come a great way. I came all the way from earth. I am sick and dying. Let me in. The merciless storm beats my unsheltered head.
The wolves of a great night are on my track. Let me in. With both fists I beat against this door. Oh, let me in. Oh, Christ, let me in.
Oh, Holy Ghost, let me in. Oh, G.o.d, let me in. Oh, my glorified kindred, let me in." No answer save the voice of Christ, who shall say: "Sinner, when I stood at your door you would not let Me in, and now you are standing at My door, and I can not let you in. The day of your grace is past. Officer of the law, seize him." And while the arrest is going on, all the myriads of heaven rise on gallery and throne, and cry with loud voice, that makes the eternal city quake from capstone to foundation, saying: "If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha."
Sabbath audience in the Brooklyn Tabernacle, and all to whom these words shall come on both sides the sea, notice here the tremendous alternative: it is not whether you live in Pierrepont Street or Carlton Avenue, walk Trafalgar Square or the "Canongate;" nor whether your dress shall be black or brown; nor whether you shall be robust or an invalid; nor whether you shall live on the banks of the Hudson, the Shannon, the Seine, the Thames, the Tiber; but it is a question whether you will love Christ or suffer banishment; whether you will give yourselves to Him who owns you or fall under the millstone; whether you will rise to glories that have no terminus or plunge to a depth which has no bottom. I do not see how you can take the ten-thousandth part of a second to decide it, when there are two worlds fastened at opposite ends of a swivel, and the swivel turns on one point, and that point is now, now. Is it not fair that you love Him? Is it not right that you love Him? Is it not imperative that you love Him? What is it that keeps you from rushing up and throwing the arms of your affection about His neck?
My text p.r.o.nounces Anathema Maranatha upon all those who refuse to love Christ. Anathema--cut off. Cut off from light, from hope, from peace, from heaven. Oh, sharp, keen, sword-like words! Cut off!
Everlastingly cut off! Behold, therefore, the goodness and severity of G.o.d: on them which fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in His goodness; otherwise thou also shalt be cut off.
Maranatha--that is the other word. "When he comes" is the meaning of it.