_UNFULFILLED CHRISTIAN WORK._
"And unto the angel of the Church in Sardis write; These things
saith He that hath the seven Spirits of God, and the seven stars; I
know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead.
Be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready
to die: for I have not found thy works perfect before God."—REV.
iii. 1, 2.
Reading the last clause a little more literally will more fully bring
out the meaning: "For I have found no works of thine fulfilled
before My God."—R.V.
The passage forms a picture—God on His throne, Christ by His side, the
work of the Churches on earth travelling up to God, and presenting
itself before the throne Divine, and Christ, as the Churches pass in
procession, judging them. The religious activity of the Church in Sardis
swept by before God's throne, under Christ's eyes, and as it passed He
saw that not one single task undertaken by that Church was done fully;
everything was half-done, and therefore worthless. It was not that the
church was doing nothing, but it was doing nothing worth doing. These
were the facts. Christ's judgment on the facts is this: "Thou hast a
name that thou livest, and art dead." A Church all whose labours are but
half done is dead. Yet there were good men and women in the congregation
at Sardis. If you read on you find this said by Christ: "Thou hast a few
names even in Sardis which have not defiled their garments."
So, then, a Church may be dead though it contains living members. How
can that be? A Church is not a mere number of individuals added to one
another; something results from that combination of separate
individuals; something very different, with fresh powers and added
responsibilities, rises out of grouping together a number of individual
Christians, that is a Church. A Church, a congregation (it is in that
sense I use the word "Church" all through this discourse), has an
individuality of its own; a Church has a character of its own; a Church
has a spirit of its own; a Church has capacities of its own; a Church
can do what no individual nor any mere number of individuals added
together can do; a Church, as soon as it is constituted, creates a new
kind of life, a new kind of being, a new kind of activities. No
individual Christian, however good he may be, can out of himself make
Christian fellowship, Christian devotion, Christian labour and
co-operation, all that social life which springs from the union of
severed individuals; no separate Christian, nor any number of separate
Christians, can produce that. A Church, therefore, is something distinct
from the individual members of whom it is built. A house is not a
thousand bricks; it is something quite different, something made not
merely by the presence of the bricks, but by their being built together.
Each separate element of the building, when united, is able to do its
share in the great work that none of them, or any member of them, could
do without that combination which forms the edifice. A Church, a
congregation, has its own character. Each provincial town in England has
a character of its own; and an intelligent man, with quick sympathies,
recognises the difference of spirit when he enters a town from that
which was prevalent in the town he left. One is Radical, one is very
Materialistic; one is full of poetry, and imagination, and literature;
and the individual residing in the town is affected by the general
spirit of that town. Every school has a character of its own, a spirit
of its own; not that each boy in the school is just modelled on that
type, but to a large extent each individual pupil is affected by the
spirit of the school. The spirit of the school exists in the boys that
dominate it. It is the same with Churches. In one congregation you are
conscious of warmth, and enthusiasm, and friendliness, and love; in
another congregation you are conscious of stiffness, and a rigid
propriety, and distance, and coldness, and artificiality. In one Church
you are conscious of a large, and liberal, and generous spirit; in
another Church you are conscious of factions, fighting, and meanness and
stinginess. That is a fact; you have felt it. A mere stranger entering
the building on a Sunday morning feels it; it is there, there in the
very faces of the people as they sit in their pews, there in the
minister as he stands in the pulpit. A public speaker said to me this
last week, "I may come with my address to a weekday meeting, but it all
depends upon the spirit and mood of the meeting; it is one thing in one
place, and another in another;" and if you have ever tried to speak in a
Church or at a meeting you will have found it to be so. There may be a
dozen men present in that meeting whose spirit is all that you may want,
but they cannot make the result; the general result of it is determined
by the mass. So it may come to pass that in a congregation there may be
not a few individual members who are warm, living, earnest servants of
Jesus Christ; but their goodness is not of the dominating kind; they
have piety, but they lack manly power; they have good feeling and good
intentions, but they have not character; they cannot command the whole;
they cannot give their spirit to the mass of men; they just survive, but
they cannot take the offensive; they have need of protection. They live
themselves, but do not live half so strongly or half so healthily as
they would in a congregation which was warm to the very tips of its
fingers and the fringes of its garments; they are living, but the Church
is dead.
What is the life of a Church? The life of a Church is loving loyalty to
Jesus Christ, present more or less in the actual human heart of all the
members; an inner, hidden thing, that you cannot weigh in a balance,
that you cannot set down in figures in an annual report, that you cannot
exhibit to a non-believer or a worldling, but the greatest, the most
powerful force in all our world.
The life of a Church is a living, real presence of Jesus Christ, as a
daily influence on the conduct, the thoughts, the words, the deeds of
all the members of that Church. The life of a Church is the living
presence of Jesus Christ in every committee of management, in every
meeting of Sunday-school teachers, in every social gathering of the
congregation; a living loyalty and devotion to the Lord Jesus Christ,
born out of a grateful certainty that He died to save us, born out of a
grand sympathy with Him, and under the belief that He is willing to save
all the men and women and all the little children who are round about
us. That is the living life of a Church, and nothing else is. You may
have a perfect orthodoxy, and death; you may have great activity, and
yet you may have death. Nothing is the life of a Church but actual
living loyalty and love to the real living Lord of the Church, Jesus
Christ.
Christ stands at the right hand of God, judging the Churches. He judges
them by their works. But the life of a Church is not a thing of the
hands or of the tongue; it is a thing of the heart. At the same time
Christ has to make His judgment just; He has to go upon visible facts,
and He can safely proceed upon the Church's work. Wherever there is life
it cannot be still; it works, it moves, it beats, it becomes warmed; it
must come out. If a Church has no works it has no life. What are those
works which are the visible signs of a living Church? They are these: No
dry, spasmodic zeal for orthodoxy when some heresy crops up which makes
a public sensation; no straight, rigid propriety, and fineness of
outward form, and æsthetic culture of ceremonial. The life that is
loving loyalty to Christ, present in the heart of every individual
member of a congregation, comes out in this way: it makes hearty singing
on a Sunday. Even a man who has no musical voice, and who is a little
weary, cannot help singing when his heart is stirred, even if he stops
short in case he should make discord to his neighbours. It is all
nonsense to say that people have grateful hearts to Christ when they sit
with shut mouths to Christ's praise. I know well that habit has a great
deal to do with it. It is the way of some Churches to sing heartily, and
it is the way of some other Churches to let the choir do the singing;
and I know, therefore, that you must not too absolutely take such a test
as a standard by which you will judge whether or not there is a living
warmth, and enjoyment, and cheering in the service and in the
congregation. I believe all that, nevertheless I have seen the most
stiff and silent congregation roused to sing when their hearts were
aroused. Such silence is a bad habit. And how about the prayers? Men
will not merely listen to the words, and will not criticise a man when
he prays; men will be reverent; men will, by their very attitude, make
it felt that souls are face to face with God. Men will not be sitting
finding fault with all the blurs and blemishes that there are in the
services (which there must be in every human service) when their hearts
are being fed, and when their souls are going out to God. There will be
no lack of Sunday-school teachers; and the Sunday-school teachers in
such a Church will not do their work in a listless and negligent way,
and fail in keeping their appointments and engagements, but will do it
as if it were a pleasure. It is not the blame of Sunday-school teachers
in a dead Church if they are teachers of that sort; it is the blame of
the dead Church. How can they keep alive? Shall we put the penalty upon
those who are partially living? No; it is the great mass of death, and
decay, and coldness which is to blame. Let us visit the sins on the
guilty parties.
A living Church will show its life in hearty, generous liberality to
every good cause. A living Church will show its life by bravery and
courage in taking up new responsibilities that may offer themselves, and
working them most heartily. A living Church is living, not because it
does one or all of these things, but because it loves loyalty to the
Lord Jesus, who died for it, and feels that goodness and holiness are
the grandest things in the world, and is eager to have all the children
taught to love the Lord Jesus, and all the young people who are going
out amid the temptations of life strengthened and helped to withstand
them, and old people whose lives are embittered when a disaster comes
upon them made tender, and soft, and submissive, by the life of Christ
in that Church and among their Christian neighbours. Yes, the life of a
Church is not a mere liking for what Christ loves, and a wish to please
Him, but real life and real love to Christ will come out, not in
correctness of creed, but in life and in work. It is an awful thing when
a Church is dead, with all the children in it gathering to go to a
Church which is cold, and to a dragging service, and to spiritless
singing, and to melancholy prayer, and to a dry preaching. Ay, I have
seen children who hated religion, because their parents, as I believe,
were living in a dead Church. I have often said, "Cut your connection
with such a Church; go rather to another denomination, which has life."
I venture to say that a father who loves his child will sacrifice
anything in order that that child may have pleasant and attractive views
of religion. But shall the child's first idea of religion come to him in
the shape of a crippled and broken-down failure? Fathers and mothers are
absolutely bound thus to promote the spiritual interests of their
children; it is worth more than anything else that is done for them; and
I say that a Church which is gathering those young people around it, and
keeping them from more dangerous places, and leading them to have it in
their hearts to come and sit down with Christian people, is doing more
than all the world will ever do. It is worth taking a great deal of
trouble to belong to a living Church, and it is the absolute duty of
every member of every Church to do all he can not merely to make himself
alive, but to make the whole Church full of warm, living life.
When a Church is dead, or only half alive, the defect shows itself
specifically and certainly in this manner: The Church's work is only
half done, and can only half be fulfilled, when only a portion of its
members fulfil their allotted task to their Master. If, in a Church
which numbers five hundred, only fifty are doing the utmost they can do,
the Church's measure of work will not be fulfilled before the
judgment-seat of God. Fifty individuals cannot do what it takes five
hundred to do. A half done work, how it is spoiled! The army were
defending the frontier bravely and successfully; but one cowardly
regiment gave way, and the ranks were broken, and all the bravery, and
the blood, and the death of the brave men were lost—lost by the
cowardice. The work of a Church that is wearily done, in its life and
extent, by a few living men and women in it, is poorly done; they do it
with such a struggle; they are so weary and worn out; they have not
pleasure, they have not enthusiasm, in doing it. How can they have? Oh,
it is hard when a few men and women have to do all the teaching, and all
the visiting, and all the work at the meetings! it spoils their work; it
is not fair play. I appeal to you to determine whether I speak truly or
not. One man cannot do another man's work. One link of a chain cannot do
duty for another link, and if the one goes, sometimes the chain is worth
nothing at all. The work of a dead or half-dead Church stands before
God's judgment-seat unfulfilled. How can it tell on the careless? how
can it tell on the worldly? Do you think that they will be just, and
say, "Ah, look at what the fifty are doing"? No, you may be quite sure
that they will look at the deficiency of the four hundred and fifty, and
say, "Is this a Church of Christ?" Who blames them?
A living Church must work, and it must work on, and it must send life
through every part and fragment of its whole frame, or else it has begun
to die. It is not a small thing, of no concern, if some members of a
Church are doing nothing by being idle. The work that a Church has to do
is the creation of living Christian character, and of the conviction
that being in Church on Sunday and belonging to a congregation make a
man a kinder brother, or a more loving father or husband, and make a
woman a better mother or a more kindly neighbour. That is the best work
a Church can do, and that does not come to a man through a dead Church.
A living Church must be making itself felt all around in the world
outside by work of that kind; and I say that it is not a matter of no
consequence if some members of a Church are not receiving and not
transmitting that warmth and activity. It is not a small matter if one
organ of my body be dying, be passing into mortification; it means death
to the whole body, and I must cut it off unless life can be brought back
again into it. It is the very law of life, as God has made it, that
everything which has life in it must be working; it cannot stop. If your
heart stops it is death; nothing else can make it stop but death. If any
organ in your body is always receiving, but giving nothing, and not
sending out what it gets, improved, to the rest, it means diseased life,
it means death. Does the stomach receive its daily food to keep it to
itself, as we so often receive the prayers and sermons in a Church? No;
as soon as the feeding is done the hard work begins; the stomach gives
it to the blood, and what does the blood do? As the great carrier of the
system, it delivers it here and there—here a little to this muscle,
there to that bone, there to the brain, and all through the body. And
what the muscles and the other parts have received do they keep? No; if
the various portions of the body did not give out what they receive they
would get choked; it would be death by surfeit; they must work. And so
the circle of life goes round; stop it at any one point, and you spoil
the whole circle. If the blood-vessels do not do their work, if the
muscles do not do their work, and so on throughout the entire system, it
means this, that that body is not healthy; it means death to the whole
frame. A business man said to me yesterday, "As soon as a man ceases
pushing his business, and does not endeavour to extend it, it falls
off." He does not want actually to increase it, but he must adopt that
plan to keep it up to its present mark. The Church, alas! has
not been willing to increase its work, desiring to take on other
responsibilities; it does not say, "I cannot rest while people are cold
and not interested in doing the Church's work, not bent upon bringing in
sinners, and bringing children into the Sunday-schools to be taught to
love and reverence religion, and causing people whose life is sour and
bitter to be soothed and comforted."
What I have been pressing upon you is the law of life. Is it a hard law?
No, it is a kind law. That is how God rewards you for what you have
done; He gives you more work to do. In reading the parable of the men to
whom it was assigned to rule over the cities did you ever mark how they
were rewarded? Here is a man who has actively and effectively used ten
talents. How does his lord reward him—by giving him a sinecure? No; he
says, "You shall be ruler over ten cities;" and in the same way the man
who has been successful with five talents is made ruler over five
cities. Did you ever know a man who had served his country well, and
benefited it, wish to withdraw into a drawing-room, and spend the
remainder of his life in luxury and ease? Did you ever know a successful
general who wanted to get a big fortune and to retire? No; successful
men cannot be rewarded better than by giving them a deal more to
do—larger responsibilities, larger powers, a larger sense of strength
successfully exerted. That is the blessing and the joy which shall go
with larger toil, and grander accomplishment, and brighter goodness. The
few who are used to work shall have plenty of work. I take it as a sign
that God is pleased with the results of a Church when He gives them new
work to do, and the heart to take it up. It is not extra work; it is the
reward of the past, and it is a step that shall lead you to a higher
throne. Nay, more; work is indispensable to the enjoyment of a Church's
good. No Church can heartily enjoy what we call religious privileges
unless it is working hard; and no individual member of that Church will
get the good of it unless he is taking a part in the Church's work. He
does not need to be an office-bearer or anything of that sort; his work
may be just friendliness to others in the house of God, showing a kind
spirit to them or taking an interest in them, showing neighbourliness by
his Church character. Do not think that it is a high array of talents
that is required; no, it is the Church's function of being "all of one
mind," and knit together and helping one another, and sympathising with
one another, being bound up in the common lot of disasters and trials. I
say that no individual member, unless he is taking his part, is a living
member of that Church. If people are very fastidious about the doctrines
which are preached, if people are searching into the sense of every hymn
or prayer, if people are finding fault with the way in which everything
is done, then it may be that the Church is to blame; but if the Church
is doing its work as well as any poor human Church can do it, I advise
such a one to say to himself, "May not I be to blame?" If you think that
the daily food which is provided for you is not properly cooked, and it
is not of the proper sort, and does not taste well, is it not your
doctor you want to go to, to ask him to cure you of dyspepsia? And in
all probability he will recommend to you exercise and hard work. A
hard-working man does not complain even of dry bread; he is not
particular; he has an appetite. I have known, in the Church to which I
belonged before I began to preach, how pleased I was even with sermons
which had no originality in them if I saw that they were part of the
common work. It was my home, and you do not criticise your own home; and
you do not criticise your father and mother; you believe in the power
which you get from your father, because he is yours. Throw yourself into
the Church, become a part of it, take an interest in everything, and it
is wonderful how little you will have of criticism about you. Take
plenty of spiritual exercise, and you may be sure that even a bare and
poor spiritual diet will agree wonderfully with you.
Christ reckons with Churches—Christ at God's right hand, what is He
about? When He was down here on earth He went hither and thither,
seeking the lost; He forgave the woman that wept at His feet; He saved
the dying thief. Oh, gentle, loving Saviour Jesus, "the same yesterday,
and to-day, and for ever"! And at God's right hand He is loving, and
pitying, and forgiving my sins, and pleased with my tears of
repentance—forbearing, tender, saving Jesus! We preach that; we should
not be men, we should not be Christians, if we did not preach that; we
could not live without that thought of Jesus. But let us be true; do not
let us hide facts. That same Jesus stands at God's right hand, judging
the Churches, reckoning with them. Oh, to a penitent sinner He is all
heart, but to a slothful servant He is a faithful Master! He reckons
with Churches; He reckons with individuals. It would not be kind if He
did not reckon with you. Would you wish Him not to reckon? Would you
like to say, "I do not care whether He does anything with me or not"?
Ah, I should begin to think that Christ did not love you at all if He
did not reckon with you, if he were not grieved and angry when you did
not do your duty to Him and to your neighbour! Where would be the
dignity of life if we did not believe in a great last judgment, with a
stern reckoning with sin? We should sink to the level of the animals if
there were no judgment. It proves that man has an immortal spirit. What
does it matter, with the animals, what they do? But God must reckon with
man, and He would not be reigning if man had not to reckon on an awful
judgment-day for every spirit. It is a proof to me that I am of moment,
and that my human spirit has dignity; it makes clear to me my place in
the universe, and my claim to immortality; it shows me that I am of
sufficient importance to necessitate God's reckoning with me. Churches,
too, must be reckoned with. It would argue that they were mere
nurseries, were hospitals for people to be convalescent in, mere
nonentities, counting for nothing in the great work of the world and the
mighty purpose of God, if we did not know that Christ was to reckon with
them. They have great powers given to them, they have great
capabilities, they have tremendous responsibilities; they can fulfil
God's purposes in the world, and nothing but their supineness and
listlessness hinders them; and God and Christ must reckon with Churches.
I would not have it different. Let Them reckon with them, and let me
remember that They will reckon with me and my Church; and let me be full
of good works. Christ must reckon with it, for the Church's sake. How
could He but care? Oh, if we did but believe what we preach and what we
read in our Gospels! It is that Jesus lost all things which men look
for; that He turned aside from every joy of life; that He gathered
sorrows around Him; that His great heart was broken upon the cross; that
He spent all His life—for what? That He might save men from eternal
banishment from God; that He might put happiness instead of misery into
every house where there are unholiness and evil; that He might make men
brighter and better. His great heart was all warm and eager for it. Oh,
what He has sacrificed! He is a disappointed, lost man if He fails, and
if He succeeds it must be done through His congregations, through His
Churches, through men and women here. How can He but care? how can He
but watch? As all the Church's activity goes by before God's throne, the
recording angel takes it down. Does He see a Church whose members have
taught the little children on the Sunday afternoon to love Him better; a
Church which has made men whose faith in Him was nearly crushed out by
sinful practices think again of Christ and heaven; a Church which has
put a man once more on his feet, and given him to his wife and children,
and they have been glad because the father and husband has loved them
again? How can it but be that those who fight for Him should rejoice
when a Church is thus acting for God, as compared with a Church that
does nothing? Oh, if we could but believe and feel, when we come into
church on a Sunday morning, that Jesus is watching all that is going
on—watching to see if our hearts are made more soft and tender, more
reverent and gentle, more full of kind thoughts to those who sit round
about us—watching to see if we speak a kind word—watching to see if we
resolve to do more for Him—watching to see if we can give liberally to
help in what is being done for Him, and to support those who have
special gifts for special work! The Lord Jesus has His eyes upon us in
this spiritual Church framework. It does bind us together, and, thank
God! I will say of ourselves has bound us together for much good work,
and I believe will bind us more closely together. If every Sunday
morning we only felt and believed it, and came and knelt and praised,
and listened with light in our hearts, we should do our work well and
have the reward of very faithful servants.