I do not need, I suppose, to spend a moment in showing you that this
relationship, which is laid down in our text, subsists between Jesus
Christ and men, and it subsists between Jesus Christ and all men. For
the people about whom the Apostle is saying that they have 'denied the
Lord that bought them' can, by no construction, be supposed to be true
Christians, but were enemies that had crept into the Church without any
real allegiance to Jesus Christ, and were trying to wreck it, and to
destroy His work. So there is no reference here to a little elected
group out of the midst of humanity, who especially belonged to Jesus
Christ, and for whom the price has been paid; but the outlook of my text
in its latter portion is as wide as humanity. The Lord--that is, Jesus
Christ--owns all men.
Let me expand that thought in one or two illustrations which may help to
make it perhaps more vivid. The slave's owner has absolute authority
over him. You remember the occasion when a Roman officer, by reflecting
upon the military discipline of the legion, and the mystical power that
the commander's word had to set all his men in obedient activity, had
come to the conclusion that, somehow or other, this Jesus whom he
desired to heal his servant had a similar power in the material
universe, and that just as he, subordinate officer though he was, had
yet--by reason of the fact that he was 'under authority,' and an organ
of a higher authority--the power to say to his servant, 'Go,' and he
would go; and to another one, 'Come,' and he would come; so this Christ
had power to say to disease, 'Depart,' and it would depart; and to
health, 'Come,' and it would come; and to all the material forces of the
universe, 'Do this,' and obediently they would do it. That is the
picture, in another region, of the relation which Jesus Christ bears to
men, though, alas, it is not the picture of the relation which men bear
to Christ. But to all of us He has the right to say, wherever we are,
'Come,' the right to say, 'Go,' the right to say, 'Do,' the right to
say, 'Be this, that, and the other thing.'
Absolute authority is His; what should be yours? Unconditional
submission. My friend, it is no use your calling yourself a Christian
unless that is your attitude. My sermon to-night has something else to
do than simply to present truths to you. It has to press truths on you,
and to appeal not only to your feelings, not only to your
understandings, but to your wills. And so I come with this question: Do
you, dear friend, day by day, yield to the absolute Master the absolute
submission? And is that rebellious will--which is in you, as it is in us
all--tamed and submitted so as that you can say, 'Speak, Lord! Thy
servant heareth'? Is it?
Further, the owner has the right, as part of that absolute authority of
which I have been speaking, to settle without appeal each man's work. In
those Eastern monarchies where the king was surrounded, not by
constitutional ministers, but by his personal slaves, he made one man a
shoeblack or a pipe-bearer, and the man standing next to him his prime
minister. And neither the one nor the other had the right to say a word.
Jesus Christ has the right to regulate your life in all its details, to
set you your tasks. Some of us will get what the world vulgarly calls
'more important duties'; some will get what the world ignorantly calls
more 'insignificant' ones. What does that matter? It was our Owner that
set us to our work, and if He tells us to black shoes, let us black them
with all the pith of our elbows, and with the best blacking and brushes
we can find; and if He sets us to work, which people think is more
important and more conspicuous, let us do that too, in the same spirit,
and for the same end.
Again, the owner has the absolute right of possession of all the slave's
possessions. He gets a little bit of land in the corner of his master's
plantation, and grows his vegetables, yams, pumpkins, a leaf of tobacco
or two, or what not, there. And if his master comes along and says,
'These are mine,' the slave has no recourse, and is obliged to accept
the conditions and to give them up. So Jesus Christ claims ours as well
as us--ours because He claims us--and whilst, on the other hand, the
surrender of external good is incomplete without the surrender of the
inward will, on the other hand the abandonment and surrender of the
inward life is incomplete, if it be not hypocritical, without the
surrender of external possessions. All the slave's goods belonged to the
owner.
And the owner has another right. He can say, 'Take that man's child and
sell him in the market!' and he can break up the family ties and
separate husband and wife, and parent and child, and not a word can be
said. Our Master comes, not with rough authority, but with loving,
though absolute authority, and He sometimes untwines the hands that are
most closely clasped, and says to the one of the two that have grown
together in love and blessedness, 'Come!' and he cometh, and to the
other 'Go!' and she goeth. Blessed they who can say, 'It is the Lord!
Let Him do what seemeth Him good.'
Now, dear friends, this absolute authority cannot be exercised by any
man upon another man, and this unconditional submission, which Jesus
Christ asks from us all, ought not to be rendered by any man to a man.
It is a degradation when a human creature is put even in the external
relation of slavery and servitude to another human creature, but it is
an honour when Jesus Christ says to me, 'Thou art Mine,' and I say to
Him, 'I am Thine, O Lord, truly I am Thy servant; Thou hast loosed my
bonds.' In the old Saxon monarchies, some antiquarians tell us, the
foundation of our modern nobility or aristocracy is found in that the
king's servants became nobles. Jesus Christ's slave is everybody else's
master. And it is the highest honour that a man can have to bow himself
before that Lord, and to take His yoke upon him and learn of Him. So
much, then, for my first point; now a word with regard to the second.