'Whosoever therefore shall confess Me before men, him
will I confess also before My Father which is in heaven.
33. But whosoever shall deny Me before men, him will I
also deny before My Father which is in heaven. 34. Think
not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to
send peace, but a sword. 35. For I am come to set a man
at variance against his father, and the daughter against
her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother
in law. 36. And man's foes shall be they of his own
household. 37. He that loveth father or mother more than
Me is not worthy of Me: and he that loveth son or
daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. 38. And he
that taketh not his cross, and followeth after Me, is
not worthy of Me. 39. He that findeth his life shall
lose it: and he that loseth his life for My sake shall
find it 40. He that receiveth you receiveth Me, and he
that receiveth Me receiveth Him that sent Me. 41. He
that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet shall
receive a prophet's reward; and he that receiveth a
righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall
receive a righteous man's reward. 42. And whosoever
shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup
of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I
say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward.'
--MATT. x. 32-42.
The first mission of the apostles, important as it was, was but a
short flight to try the young birds' wings. The larger portion of
this charge to them passes far beyond the immediate occasion, and
deals with the permanent relations of Christ's servants to the world
in which they live, for the purpose of bringing it into subjection
to its true King. These solemn closing words, which make our present
subject, contain the duty and blessedness of confessing Him, the vision
of the antagonisms which He excites, His demand for all-surrendering
following, and the rewards of those who receive Christ's messengers,
and therein receive Himself and His Father.
I. The duty and blessedness of confessing Him (vs. 32, 33). The
'therefore' is significant. It attaches the promise which follows to
the immediately preceding thoughts of a watchful, fatherly care,
extending like a great invisible hand over the true disciple.
Because each is thus guarded, each shall be preserved to receive the
honour of being confessed by Christ. No matter what may befall His
witnesses, the extremest disaster shall not rob them of their reward.
They may be flung down from the house-tops where they lift up their
bold voices, but He who does not let a sparrow fall to the ground
uncared for, will give His angels charge concerning them who are so
much more precious, and they shall be borne up on outstretched wings,
lest they be dashed on the pavement below. Thus preserved, they shall
all attain at last to their guerdon. Nothing can come between Christ's
servant and his crown. The tender providence of the Father, whose
mercy is over all His works, makes sure of that. The river of the
confessor's life may plunge underground, and be lost amid persecutions,
but it will emerge again into the brighter sunshine on the other side
of the mountains.
The confession which is to be thus rewarded, like the denial opposed
to it, is, of course, not merely a single utterance of the lip. So
far Judas Iscariot confessed Christ, and Peter denied Him. But it is
the habitual acknowledgment by lip and life, unwithdrawn to the end.
The context implies that the confession is maintained in the face of
opposition, and that the denial is a cowardly attempt to save one's
skin at the cost of treason to Jesus. The temptation does not come
in that sharpest form to us. Perhaps some cowards would be made
brave if it did. It is perhaps easier to face the gibbet and the
fire, and screw oneself up for once to a brief endurance, than to
resist the more specious blandishments of the world, especially when
it has been christened, and calls itself religious. The light laugh
of scorn, the silent pressure of the low average of Christian
character, the close associations in trade, literature, public and
domestic life which Christians have with non-Christians, make many a
man's tongue lie silent, to the sore detriment of his own religious
life. 'Ye have not yet resisted unto blood,' and find it hard to
fulfil the easier conflict to which you are called. The sun has more
power than the tempest to make the pilgrim drop his garment. But the
duty remains the same for all ages. Every man is bound to make the
deepest springs of his life visible, and to stand to his
convictions, whatever they be. If he do not, his convictions will
disappear like a piece of ice hid in a hot hand, which will melt and
trickle away. This obligation lies with infinitely increased weight
on Christ's servants; and the consequences of failing to discharge
it are more tragic in their cases, in the exact proportion of the
greater preciousness of their faith. Corn hoarded is sure to be
spoiled by weevils and rust. The bread of life hidden in our sacks
will certainly go mouldy.
The reward and punishment of confession and denial come to them not
as separate acts, but as each being the revelation of the spiritual
condition of the doers. Christ implies that a true disciple cannot
but be a confessor, and that therefore the denier must certainly be
one whom He has never known. Because, therefore, each act is
symptomatic of the doer, each receives the congruous and
correspondent reward. The confessor is confessed; the denier is
denied. What calm and assured consciousness of His place as Judge
underlies these words! His recognition is God's acceptance; His
denial is darkness and misery. The correspondence between the work
and the reward is beautifully brought out by the use of the same
word to express each. And yet what a difference between our
confession of Him and His of us! And what a hope is here for all who
have tremblingly, and in the consciousness of much unworthiness,
ventured to say that they were Christ's subjects, and He their King,
brother, and all! Their poor, feeble confession will be endorsed by
His. He will say, 'Yes, this man is mine, and I am his.' That will
be glory, honour, blessedness, life, heaven.
II. The vision of the discord which follows the coming of the King
of peace. It is not enough to interpret these words as meaning that
our Lord's purpose indeed was to bring peace, but that the result of
His coming was strife. The ultimate purpose is peace; but an
immediate purpose is conflict, as the only road to the peace. He is
first King of righteousness, and after that also King of peace. But,
if His kingdom be righteousness, purity, love, then unrighteousness,
filthiness, and selfishness will fight against it for their lives.
The ultimate purpose of Christ's coming is to transform the world
into the likeness of heaven; and all in the world which hates such
likeness is embattled against Him. He saw realities, and knew men's
hearts, and was under no illusion, such as many an ardent reformer
has cherished, that the fair form of truth need only be shown to
men, and they will take her to their hearts. Incessant struggle is
the law for the individual and for society till Christ's purpose for
both is realised.
That conflict ranges the dearest in opposite ranks. The gospel is
the great solvent. As when a substance is brought into contact with
some chemical compound, which has greater affinity for one of its
elements than the other element has, the old combination is
dissolved, and a new and more stable one is formed, so Christianity
analyses and destroys in order to synthesis and construction. In
verse 21 our Lord had foretold that brother should deliver up
brother to death. Here the severance is considered from the opposite
side. The persons who are 'set at variance' with their kindred are
here Christians. Perhaps it is fanciful to observe that they are all
junior members of families, as if the young would be more likely to
flock to the new light. But however that may be, the separation is
mutual, but the hate is all on one side. The 'man's foes' are of his
own household; but he is not their foe, though he be parted from
them.
III. Earthly love may be a worse foe to a true Christian than even
the enmity of the dearest; and that enmity may often be excited by
the Christian subordination of earthly to heavenly love. So our Lord
passes from the warnings of discord and hate to the danger of the
opposite--undue love.
He claims absolute supremacy in our hearts. He goes still farther,
and claims the surrender, not only of affections, but of self and
life to Him. What a strange claim this is! A Jewish peasant, dead
nineteen hundred years since, fronts the whole race of man, and
asserts His right to their love, which is strange, and to their
supreme love, which is stranger still. Why should we love Him at
all, if He were only a man, however pure and benevolent? We may
admire, as we do many another fair nature in the past; but is there
any possibility of evoking anything as warm as love to an unseen
person, who can have had no knowledge of or love to us? And why
should we love Him more than our dearest, from whom we have drawn,
or to whom we have given, life? What explanation or justification
does He give of this unexampled demand? Absolutely none. He seems to
think that its reasonableness needs no elucidation. Surely never did
teacher professing wisdom, modesty, and, still more, religion, put
forward such a claim of right; and surely never besides did any
succeed in persuading generations unborn to yield His demand, when
they heard it. The strangest thing in the world's history is that
to-day there are millions who do love Jesus Christ more than all
besides, and whose chief self-accusation is that they do not love
Him more. The strange, audacious claim is most reasonable, if we
believe that Jesus is the Son of God, who died for each of us, and
that each man and woman to the last of the generations had a
separate place in His divine human love when He died. It is meet to
love Him, if that be true; it is not, unless it be. The requirement
is as stringent as strange. If the two ever seem to conflict, the
earthly must give way. If the earthly be withdrawn, there must be
found sufficiency for comfort and peace in the heavenly. The lower
must not be permitted to hinder the flight of the heavenly to its
home. 'More than Me' is a rebuke to most of us. What a contrast
between the warmth of our earthly and the tepidity or coldness of
our heavenly love! How spontaneously our thoughts, when left free,
turn to the one; how hard we find it to keep them fixed on the
other! How sweet service is to the dear ones here; how reluctantly
it is given to Christ! How we long, when parted, to rejoin them; how
little we are drawn to the place where He is! We have all to confess
that we are 'not worthy of' Him; that we requite His love with
inadequate returns, and live lives which tax His love for its
highest exercise, the free forgiveness of sins against itself.
Compliance with that stringent law, and subordinating all earthly
love to His, is the true elevating and ennobling of the earthly. It
is promoted, not degraded, when it is made second, and is infinitely
sweeter and deeper then than when it was set in the place of
supremacy, where it had no right to be.
But Christ's demand is not only for the surrender of the heart, but
for the giving up of self, and, in a very profound sense, for the
surrender of life. How enigmatical that saying about taking up the
cross must have sounded to the disciples! They knew little about the
cross, as a punishment; they had not yet associated it in any way
with their Lord. This seems to have been the first occasion of His
mentioning it, and the allusion is so veiled as to be but partially
intelligible. But what was intelligible was bewildering. A strange
royal procession that, of the King with a cross on His shoulder, and
all His subjects behind Him with similar burdens! Through the ages
that procession has marched, and it marches still. Self-denial for
Christ's sake is 'the badge of all our tribe.' Observe that word
'take.' The cross must be willingly and by ourselves assumed. No
other can lay it on our shoulders. Observe that other word 'his.'
Each man has his own special form in which self-denial is needful
for him. We require pure eyes, and hearts kept in very close
communion with Jesus, to ascertain what our particular cross is. He
has them of many patterns, shapes, sizes, and materials. We can
always make sure of strength to carry the one which He means us to
carry, but not of strength to bear what is not ours.
IV. We have the rewards of those who receive Christ's messengers,
and therein receive Him and His Father. Our Lord first identifies
these twelve with Himself in a manner which must have sounded
strange to them then, but have heartened them for their work by the
consciousness of His mysterious oneness with them. The whole
doctrine of Christ's unity with His people lay in germ in these
words, though much more was needed, both of teaching and of
experience, before their depth of blessing and strengthening could
be apprehended. _We_ know that He dwells in His true subjects
by His Spirit, and that a most real union subsists between the head
and the members, of which the closest unions of earth are but faint
shadows, so as that not only those who receive His followers receive
Him, but, more wonderful still, His followers are received at the
last by God Himself as joined to Him, and portions of His very self,
and therefore 'accepted in the Beloved.' Our Lord adds to these
words the thought that, in like manner, to receive Him is to receive
the Father, and so implies that our relation to Him is in certain
real respects parallel with His relation to the Father. We too are
sent. He who sends abides with us, as the Son ever abode in God, and
God in Him. We are sent to be the brightness of Christ's glory, and
to manifest Him to men, as He was sent to reveal the Father.
A LIFE LOST AND FOUND
[Footnote: Preached after the funeral of Mr. F. W. Crossley.]
'He that loseth his life for My sake shall find it.'
--MATT. x. 39.
My heart impels me to break this morning my usual rule of avoiding
personal references in the pulpit. Death has been busy in our own
congregation this last week, and yesterday we laid in the grave all
that was mortal of a man to whom Manchester owes more than it knows.
Mr. Crossley has been for thirty years my close and dear friend. He
was long a member of this church and congregation. I need not speak
of his utter unselfishness, of his lifelong consecration, of his
lavish generosity, of his unstinted work for God and man; but
thinking of him and of it, I have felt as if the words of my text
were the secret of his life, and as if he now understood the fulness
of the promise they contain: 'He that loseth his life for My sake
shall find it.' Now, looking at these words in the light of the
example so tenderly beloved by some of us, so sharply criticised by
many, but now so fully recognised as saintly by all, I ask you to
consider--
I. The stringent requirement for the Christian life that is here
made.
Now we shall very much impoverish the meaning and narrow the sweep
of these great and penetrating words, if we understand by 'losing
one's life' only the actual surrender of physical existence. It is
not only the martyr on whose bleeding brows the crown of life is
gently placed; it is not only the temples that have been torn by the
crown of thorns, that are soothed by that unfading wreath; but there
is a daily dying, which is continually required from all Christian
people, and is, perhaps, as hard as, or harder than, the brief and
bloody passage of martyrdom by which some enter into rest. For the
true losing of life is the slaying of self, and that has to be done
day by day, and not once for all, in some supreme act of surrender
at the end, or in some initial act of submission and yielding at the
beginning, of the Christian life. We ourselves have to take the
knife into our own hands and strike, and that not once, but ever,
right on through our whole career. For, by natural disposition, we
are all inclined to make our own selves to be our own centres, our
own aims, the objects of our trust, our own law; and if we do so, we
are dead whilst we live, and the death that brings life is when, day
by day, we 'crucify the old man with his affections and lusts.'
Crucifixion was no sudden death; it was an exquisitely painful one,
which made every nerve quiver and the whole frame thrill with
anguish; and that slow agony, in all its terribleness and
protractedness, is the image that is set before us as the true ideal
of every life that would not be a living death. The world is to be
crucified to me, and I to the world.
We have our centre in ourselves, and we need the centre to be
shifted, or we live in sin. If I might venture upon so violent an
image, the comets that career about the heavens need to be caught
and tamed, and bound to peaceful revolution round some central sun,
or else they are 'wandering stars to whom is reserved the blackness
of darkness for ever.' So, brethren, the slaying of self by a
painful, protracted process, is the requirement of Christ.
But do not let us confine ourselves to generalities. What is meant?
This is meant--the absolute submission of the will to commandments
and providences, the making of that obstinate part of our nature
meek and obedient and plastic as the clay in the potter's hands. The
tanner takes a stiff hide, and soaks it in bitter waters, and
dresses it with sharp tools, and lubricates it with unguents, and
his work is not done till all the stiffness is out of it and it is
flexible. And we do not lose our lives in the lofty, noble sense,
until we can say--and verify the speech by our actions--'Not my will
but Thine be done.' They who thus submit, they who thus welcome into
their hearts, and enthrone upon the sovereign seat in their wills,
Christ and His will--these are they who have lost their lives. When
we can say, 'I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me,' then, and
only then, have we in the deepest sense of the words 'lost our
lives.'
The phrase means the suppression, and sometimes the excision, of
appetites, passions, desires, inclinations. It means the hallowing
of all aims; it means the devotion and the consecration of all
activities. It means the surrender and the stewardship of all
possessions. And only then, when we have done these things, shall we
have come to practical obedience to the initial requirement that
Christ makes from us all--to lose our lives for His sake.
I need not diverge here to point to that life from which my thoughts
have taken their start in this sermon. Surely if there was any one
characteristic in it more distinct and lovely than another, it was
that self was dead and that Christ lived. There may be sometimes a
call for the actual--which is the lesser--surrender of the bodily
life, in obedience to the call of duty. There have been Christian
men who have wrought themselves to death in the Master's service.
Perhaps he of whom I have been speaking was one of these. It may be
that, if he had done like so many of our wealthy men--had flung
himself into business and then collapsed into repose--he would have
been here to-day. Perhaps it would have been better if there had
been a less entire throwing of himself into arduous and clamant
duties. I am not going to enter on the ethics of that question. I do
not think there are many of this generation of Christians who are
likely to work themselves to death in Christ's cause; and perhaps,
after all, the old saying is a true one, 'Better to wear out than to
rust out.' But only this I will say: we honour the martyrs of
Science, of Commerce, of Empire, why should not we honour the
martyrs of Faith? And why should they be branded as imprudent
enthusiasts, if they make the same sacrifice which, when an explorer
or a soldier makes, his memory is honoured as heroic, and his cold
brows are crowned with laurels? Surely it is as wise to die for
Christ as for England. But be that as it may; the requirement, the
stringent requirement, of my text is not addressed to any spiritual
aristocracy, but is laid upon the consciences of all professing
Christians.