The object of the Christian man's quest is Jesus Christ. He is
Incarnate Infinitude; and that cannot be exhausted. The seeker after
Jesus Christ is the Christian soul. That soul is the incarnate
possibility of indefinite expansion and approximation and assimilation;
and that cannot be exhausted. And so, with a Christ who is infinite,
and a seeker whose capacities may be indefinitely expanded, there can
be no satiety, there can be no limit, there can be no end to the
process. This wine-skin will not burst when the new wine is put into
it. Rather like some elastic vessel, as you pour it will fill out and
expand. Possession enlarges, and the more of Christ's fullness is
poured into a human heart, the more is that heart widened out to
receive a greater blessing.
Dear brethren, there is one course of life, and I believe but one, on
which we may all enter with the sure confidence that in the nature of
things, in the nature of Christ, and in the nature of ourselves, there
is no end to growth and progress. Think of the freshness and
blessedness and energy that puts into a life. To have an unattained and
unattainable object, a goal to which we can never come, but to which we
may ever be approximating, seems to me to be the secret of perpetual
joy and of perpetual youthfulness. To say, 'forgetting the things that
are behind, I reach forward unto the things that are before,' is a
charm and an amulet that repels monotony and weariness, and goes with a
man to the very end, and when all other aims and objects have died down
into grey ashes, that flame, like the fabled lamp in Virgil's tomb,
burns clear in the grave, and lights us to the eternity beyond.
For certainly, if there be neither satiety nor limit to Christian
progress here, there can be no better and stronger evidence that
Christian progress here is but the first 'lap' of the race, the first
_stadium_ of the course, and that beyond that narrow, dark line which
lies across the path, it runs on, rising higher, and will run on for
ever.
'On earth the broken arc; in heaven the perfect round.'
Seek for what you are sure to find; seek for what will never disappoint
you; seek for what will abide with you for ever. The very first word of
Christ's recorded in Scripture is a question which He puts to us all:
'_What_ seek ye?' Well for us, if like the two to whom it was
originally addressed, we answer, 'We are not seeking a What; we are
seeking a Whom.—Master, where dwellest Thou?' And if we have that
answer in our hearts, we shall receive the invitation which they
received, 'Come and see,'—come and seek. 'Ye shall seek Me' is a
gracious invitation, an imperative command, and a faithful promise that
if we seek we shall find. 'Whoso findeth _Him_ findeth life; whoso
misseth _Him_'—whatever else he has sought and found—'wrongeth his own
soul.'
'AS I HAVE LOVED'
'A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another: as I have
loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know
that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another.'—JOHN xiii.
34, 35.
Wishes from dying lips are sacred. They sink deep into memories and
mould faithful lives. The sense of impending separation had added an
unwonted tenderness to our Lord's address, and He had designated His
disciples by the fond name of 'little children.' The same sense here
gives authority to His words, and moulds them into the shape of a
command. The disciples had held together because He was in their midst.
Will the arch stand when the keystone is struck out? Will not the
spokes fall asunder when the nave of the wheel is taken away? He would
guard them from the disintegrating tendencies that were sure to set in
when He was gone; and He would point them to a solace for His absence,
and to a kind of substitute for His presence. For to love the brethren
whom they see would be, in some sense, a continuing to love the Christ
whom they had ceased to see. And so, immediately after He said:
'Whither I go ye cannot come,' He goes on to say: 'Love one another as
I have loved you.'
He called this a 'new commandment,' though to love one's neighbour as
one's self was a familiar commonplace amongst the Jews, and had a
recognised position in Rabbinical teaching. But His commandment
proposed a new object of love, it set forth a new measure of love, so
greatly different from all that had preceded it as to become almost a
new kind of love, and it suggested and supplied a new motive power for
love. This commandment 'could give life' and fulfil itself. Therefore
it comes to us as a 'new commandment'—even to us—and, unlike the words
which preceded it, which we were considering in former sermons, it is
wholly and freshly applicable to-day as in the ages that are passed. I
ask you, first, to consider—