The Apostle goes on, in the last words of my text, to say, 'Which thing'
(viz., this combination of the old and the new) 'is true in Him and in
you.' 'True in Him'--that is to say, Christ, the old Christ that was
declared to these Asiatic Christians as they were groping amidst the
illusions of their heathenism, is perpetually becoming new as new
circumstances emerge, and new duties are called for, and new days come
with new burdens, hopes, possibilities, or dangers. The perpetual
newness of the old Christ is what is taught here.
Suppose one of these men in Ephesus heard for the first time the story
that away in Judea there had lived the manifestation of God in the
flesh, and that He, in His wonderful love, had died for men, that they
might be saved from the grip of their sins. And suppose that man barely
able to see, had yet seen that much, and clutched at it. He was a
Christian, but the Christ that he discerned when he first discerned Him
through the mists, and the Christ that he had in his life and in his
heart, after, say, twenty years of Christian living, are very different.
The old Christ remained, but the old Christ was becoming new day by day,
according to the new necessities and positions. And that is what will be
our experience if we have any real Christianity in us. The old Christ
that we trusted at first was able to do for us all that we asked Him to
do, but we did not ask Him at first for half enough, and we did not
learn at first a tithe of what was in Him. Suppose, for instance, some
great ship comes alongside a raft with ship-wrecked sailors upon it, and
in the darkness of the night transfers them to the security of its deck.
They know how safe they are, they know what has saved them, but what do
they know compared with what they will know before the voyage ends of
all the reservoirs of power and stores of supplies that are in her?
Christ comes to us in the darkness, and delivers us. We know Him for our
Deliverer from the first moment, if we truly have grasped Him. But it
will take summering and wintering with Him, through many a long day and
year, before we can ever have a partially adequate apprehension of all
that lies in Him.
And what will teach us the depths of Christ, and how does He become new
to us? Well, by trusting Him, by following Him, and by the ministry of
life. Some of us, I have no doubt, can look back upon past days when
sorrow fell upon us, blighting and all but crushing; and then things
that we had read a thousand times in the Bible, and thought we had
believed, blazed up into a new meaning, and we felt as if we had never
understood anything about them before. The Christ that is with us in the
darkness, and whom we find able to turn even it, if not into light, at
least into a solemn twilight not unvisited by hopes, that Christ is more
to us than the Christ that we first of all learnt so little to know. And
life's new circumstances, its emerging duties, are like the strokes of
the spade which clears away the soil, and discloses the treasure in all
its extent which we purchased when we bought that field. We buy the
treasure at once, but it takes a long time to count it. The old Christ
is perpetually the new Christ.
So, brethren, Christian progress consists not in getting away from the
original facts, the elements of the Gospel, but it consists in
penetrating more deeply into these, and feeling more of their power and
their grasp. All Euclid is in the definitions and axioms and postulates
at the beginning. All our books are the letters of the alphabet. And
progress consists, not in advancing beyond, but in sinking into, that
initial truth, 'God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.'
I might say a word here as to another phase of this perpetual newness of
the old Christ--viz., in His adaptation to deal with all the
complications and perplexities and problems of each successive age. It
has taken the Church a long, long time to find out and to formulate,
rightly or wrongly, what it has discovered in Jesus. The conclusions to
be drawn from the simple Gospel truth, the presuppositions on which it
rests, require all the efforts of all the Church through all the ages,
and transcend them all. And I venture to say, though it may sound like
unsupported dogma, that for this generation's questionings, social,
moral, and political, the answer is to be found in Him. He, and He only,
will interpret each generation to itself, and will meet its clamant
needs. There is none other for the world to-day but the old Christ with
the new aspect which the new conditions require.
Did it ever strike you how remarkable it is, and, as it seems to me, of
how great worth as an argument for the truth of Christianity it is, that
Jesus Christ comes to this, as to every generation, with the air of
belonging to it? Think of the difference between the aspect which a
Plato or a Socrates presents to the world to-day, and the aspect which
that Lord presents. You do not need to strip anything off Him. He
committed Himself to no statements which the progress of thought or
knowledge has exploded. He stands before the world to-day fitting its
needs as closely as He did those of the men of His own generation. The
old Christ is the new Christ.
III. Lastly, in the Christian life the old commandment is perpetually
new.
'Which thing is true ... in you.' That is to say, 'the commandment which
ye received at the beginning,' when ye received Christ as Saviour, has
in itself a power of adapting itself to all new conditions as they may
emerge, and will be felt increasingly to grow stringent, and
increasingly to demand more entire conformity, and increasingly to sweep
its circle round the whole of human life. For this is the result of all
obedience, that the conception of duty becomes more clear and more
stringent. 'If any man will do His will' the reward shall be that he
will see more and more the altitude of that will, the length and breadth
and depth and height of the possible conformity of the human spirit to
the will of God. And so as we advance in obedience we shall see
unreached advances before us, and each new step of progress will declare
more fully how much still remains to be accomplished. In us the 'old
commandment' will become ever new.
And not only so, but perpetually with the increasing sweep and
stringency of the obligation will be felt an increasing sense of our
failure to fulfil it. Character is built up, for good or for evil, by
slow degrees. Conscience is quickened by being listened to, and stifled
by being neglected. A little speck of mud on a vestal virgin's robe, or
on a swan's plumage, will be conspicuous, while a splash twenty times
the size will pass unnoticed on the rags of some travel-stained
wayfarer. The purer we become, the more we shall know ourselves to be
impure.
Thus, my brother, there opens out before us an endless course in which
all the blessedness that belongs to the entertaining and preservation of
ancient convictions, lifelong friends, and familiar truths, and all the
antithetical blessedness that belongs to the joy of seeing, rising upon
our horizon as some new planet with lustrous light, will be united in
our experience. We shall at once be conservative and progressive;
holding by the old Christ and the old commandment, and finding that both
have in them endless novelty. The trunk is old; every summer brings
fresh leaves. And at last we may hope to come to the new Jerusalem, and
drink the new wine of the Kingdom, and yet find that the old love
remains, and that the new Christ, whose presence makes the new heavens
and the new earth, is 'the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever,' the
old Christ whom, amid the shadows of earth, we tried to love and copy.