Hope a duty? That strikes one as somewhat strange. I very much doubt
whether the ordinary run of good people do recognise it as being as
imperative a duty for them to cultivate hope as to cultivate any other
Christian excellence or virtue. For one man that sets himself
deliberately and consciously to brighten up, and to make more operative
in his daily life, the hope of future blessedness, you will find a
hundred that set themselves to other kinds of perfecting of their
Christian character. And yet, surely, there do not need any words to
enforce the fact that this hope full of immortality is no mere luxury
which a Christian man may add to the plain fare of daily duty or leave
untasted according as he likes, but that it is an indispensable element
in all vigorous and life-dominating Christian experience.
I do not need to dwell upon that, except just to suggest that such a
vividness and continuity of calm anticipation of a certain good beyond
the grave is one of the strongest of all motives to the general
robustness and efficacy of a Christian life. People used to say a few
years ago, a great deal more than they do now, that the Christian
expectation of Heaven was apt to weaken energy upon earth, and they used
to sneer at us, and talk about our 'other worldliness' as if it were a
kind of weakness and defect attached to the Christian experience. They
have pretty well given that up now. Anti-Christian sarcasm, like
everything else, has its fashions, and other words of reproach and
contumely have now taken the place of that. The plain fact is that no
man sees the greatness of the present, unless he regards it as being the
vestibule of the future, and that this present life is unintelligible
and insignificant unless beyond it, and led up to by it, and shaped
through it, there lies the eternal life beyond. The low flat plain is
dreary and desolate, featureless and melancholy, when the sky above it
is filled with clouds. But sweep away the cloud-rack, and let the blue
arch itself above the brown moorland, and all glows into lustre, and
every undulation is brought out, and tiny shy forms of beauty are found
in every corner. And so, if you drape Heaven with the clouds and mists
born of indifference and worldliness, the world becomes mean, but if
you dissipate the cloud and unveil heaven, earth is greatened. If the
hope of the grave that is to be brought onto you at the revelation of
Jesus Christ shines out above all the flatness of earth, then life
becomes solemn, noble, worthy of, demanding and rewarding, our most
strenuous efforts. No man can, and no man will, strike such effectual
blows on things present as the man, the strength of whose arm is derived
from the conviction that every stroke of the hammer on things present is
shaping that which will abide with him for ever.
My text not only enjoins this hope as a duty, but also enjoins the
perfection of it as being a thing to be aimed at by all Christian
people. What is the perfection of hope? Two qualities, certainty and
continuity. Certainty; the definition of earthly hope is an anticipation
of good less than certain, and so, in all the operations of this great
faculty, which are limited within the range of earth, you get blended as
an indistinguishable throng, 'hopes and fears that kindle hope,' and
that too often kill it. But the Christian has a certain anticipation of
certain good, and to him memory may be no more fixed than hope, and the
past no more unalterable and uncertain than the future. The motto of our
hope is not the 'perhaps,' which is the most that it can say when it
speaks the tongue of earth, but the 'verily! verily!' which comes to its
enfranchised lips when it speaks the tongue of Heaven. Your hope,
Christian man, should not be the tremulous thing that it often is, which
expresses itself in phrases like 'Well! I do not know, but I tremblingly
hope,' but it should say, 'I know and am sure of the rest that
remaineth, not because of what I am, but because of what He is.'
Another element in the perfection of hope is its continuity. That hits
home to us all, does it not? Sometimes in calm weather we catch a sight
of the gleaming battlements of 'the City which hath foundations,' away
across the sea, and then mists and driving storms come up and hide it.
There is a great mountain in Central Africa which if a man wishes to see
he must seize a fortunate hour in the early morning, and for all the
rest of the day it is swathed in clouds, invisible. Is that like your
hope, Christian man and woman, gleaming out now and then, and then again
swallowed up in the darkness? Brethren! these two things, certainty and
continuity, are possible for us. Alas! that they are so seldom enjoyed
by us.
III. And now one last word. My text speaks about the discipline or
cultivation of this Christian hope.
It prescribes two things as auxiliary thereto. The way to cultivate the
perfect hope which alone corresponds to the gift of God is 'girding up
the loins of your mind, and being sober.' Of course, there is here one
of the very few reminiscences that we have in the Epistles of the
_ipsissima verba_ of our Lord. Peter is evidently referring to our
Lord's commandment to have 'the loins girt and the lamps burning, and ye
yourselves like unto men that wait for their Lord.' I do not need to
remind you of the Eastern dress that makes the metaphor remarkably
significant, the loose robes that tangle a man's feet when he runs, that
need to be girded up and belted tight around his waist, as preliminary
to all travel or toil of any kind. The metaphor is the same as that in
our colloquial speech when we talk about a man 'pulling himself
together.' Just as an English workman will draw his belt a hole tighter
when he has some special task to do, so Peter says to us, make a
definite effort, with resolute bracing up and concentration of all your
powers, or you will never see the grace that is hurrying towards you
through the centuries. There are abundance of loose, slack-braced people
up and down the world, in all departments, and they never come to any
good. It is a shame that any man should have his thoughts so loosely
girt and vagrant as that any briar by the roadside can catch them and
hinder his advance. But it is a tenfold shame for Christian people, with
such an object to gaze upon, that they should let their minds be
dissipated all over the trivialities of Time, and not gather them
together and project them, as I may say, with all their force towards
the sovereign realities of Eternity. A sixpence held close to your eye
will blot out the sun, and the trifles of earth close to us will prevent
us from realising the things which neither sight, nor experience, nor
testimony reveal to us, unless with clenched teeth, so to speak, we make
a dogged effort to keep them in mind.
The other preliminary and condition is 'being sober,' which of course
you have to extend to its widest possible signification, implying not
merely abstinence from, or moderate use of, intoxicants, or material
good for the appetites, but also the withdrawing of one's self sometimes
wholly from, and always restraining one's self in the use of, the
present and the material. A man has only a given definite quantity of
emotion and interest to expend, and if he flings it all away on the
world he has none left for Heaven. He will be like the miller that
spoils some fair river, by diverting its waters into his own sluice, in
order that he may grind some corn. If you have the faintest film of dust
on the glass of the telescope, or on its mirror, if it is a reflecting
one, you will not see the constellations in the heavens; and if we have
drawn over our spirits the film of earthly absorption, all these bright
glories above will, so far as we are concerned, cease to be.
So, brethren, there is a solemn responsibility laid upon us by the gift
of that great faculty of looking before and after. What did God make you
and me capable of anticipating the future for? That we might let our
hopes run along the low levels, or that we might elevate them and twine
them round the very pillars of God's Throne; which? I do not find fault
with you because you hope, but because you hope so meanly, and about
such trivial and transitory things. I remember I once saw a sea-bird
kept in a garden, confined within high walls, and with clipped wings,
set to pick up grubs and insects. It ought to have been away out,
hovering over the free ocean, or soaring with sunlit wing to a height
where earth became a speck, and all its noises were hushed. That is what
some of you are doing with your hope, degrading it to earth instead of
letting it rise to God; enter within the veil, and gaze upon the glory
of the 'inheritance incorruptible and undefiled.'