My text is a benediction, or a prayer; but it is also a prophecy, or a
statement, of the inevitable and uniform results of love to Jesus
Christ. The grace will follow that love, necessarily and certainly, and
the lovers will get the gift of God because their love has brought them
into living contact with Jesus Christ; and His life will flow over into
theirs. I need not remind you that the word 'grace' in Scripture means,
first of all, the condescending love of God to inferiors, to sinners, to
those who deserved something else; and, secondly, the whole fulness of
blessing and gift that follow upon that love. And, says Paul, these
great gifts from heaven, the one gift in which all are comprised, will
surely follow the opening of the heart in love to Jesus Christ.
Ah, brethren! God's grace makes uncommonly short work of ecclesiastical
distinctions. The great river flows through territories that upon men's
maps are painted in different colours, and of which the inhabitants
speak in different tongues. The Rhine laves the pine-trees of
Switzerland, and the vines of Germany, and the willows of Holland; and
God's grace flows through all places where the men that love Him do
dwell. It rises, as it were, right over the barriers that they have
built between each other. The little pools on the sea-shore are separate
when the tide is out, but when it comes up it fills all the pot-holes
that the pebbles have made, and unifies them in one great flashing,
dancing mass; and so God's grace comes to all that love Him, and
confirms their unity.
Surely that is the true test of a living Church. 'When Barnabas came,
and saw the grace of God, he was glad.' It was not what he had expected,
but he was open to conviction. The Church where he saw it had been very
irregularly constituted; it had no orders and no sacraments, and had
been set a-going by the spontaneous efforts of private Christians, and
he came to look into the facts. He asked for nothing more when he saw
that the converts had the life within them. And so we, with all our
faults--and God forbid that I should seem to minimise these--with all
our faults, we poor Nonconformists, left to the uncovenanted mercies,
have our share of that gift of grace as truly, and, if our love be
deeper, more abundantly, than the Churches that are blessed with orders
and sacraments, and an 'unbroken historical continuity.' And when we
are unchurched for our lack of these, let us fall back upon St.
Augustine's 'Where Christ is, there the Church is'; and believe that to
us, even to us also, the promise is fulfilled, 'Lo! I am with you
always, even to the end of the world.'