errand is to make this complex, complete, energetic missionary
motive more clear to every mind, more thoroughly vigorous and
energetic in every heart. Everything else must be postponed! Do
not let us spend our strength in picking the gospel to pieces,
to see if we can't put it together again in a better fashion! Do
not let us spend our strength in any denominational controversies
or collisions. Let us give ourselves, with all our power, to
making this immense missionary motive operative throughout all the
churches, throughout and in all Christian hearts; till He shall
come whose right it is to reign, and take unto Himself His great
power, and rule, King of nations as well as King of saints. Let
us recognize this as the one truly magnificent errand for man on
the earth. Let us be filled with the Divine Spirit, that we may
accomplish it the more perfectly. Let us never intermit the service.
And if, as we grow older, we grow weary with cares and labors, and
it may be with sorrows, and are disposed sometimes to think we may
now rest, let us remember the word of Arnauld, the illustrious Port
Royalist, whom even his passionate enemies, the Jesuits, admitted
to be great, of whom it is recorded that when some one said to him,
"You have labored long, now is your time to rest!" his reply was,
"Rest? Why rest, here and now, when I have a whole eternity to rest
in!" God in His grace open that tranquil and luminous eternity to
each of us, where we may find rest in nobler praise and grander
work, forevermore; and unto Him be all the praise!
PUNSHON
ZEAL IN THE CAUSE OF CHRIST
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
WILLIAM MORLEY PUNSHON, English Methodist divine, was born at
Doncaster, in Yorkshire, in 1824. His style was brilliant and
elaborate, and while his sermons were written out in the minutest
detail and carefully committed to memory, they were delivered with
a freshness and vigor that rivaled the charm of extemporaneous
eloquence. Every word he uttered was charged with the force and
vitality of his great personality. At the Metropolitan Church,
Toronto, Canada, he preached for many years, drawing thousands of
people to Christ by the zeal, magnetism and power of his pulpit
oratory. He died in 1881.
PUNSHON
1824-1881
ZEAL IN THE CAUSE OF CHRIST
_For whether we be beside ourselves, it is to God: or whether
we be sober, it is for your cause. For the love of Christ
constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for
all, then were all dead; and that he died for all, that they who
live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him
who died for them, and rose again._--2 Cor. v., 13-15.
It is always an advantage for the advocate of any particular cause
to know the tactics of his adversary. He will be the better prepared
for the onset, and repel the attack the more easily. Forewarned
of danger, he will intrench himself in a position from which it
will be impossible to dislodge him. The apostle Paul possest this
advantage in a very eminent degree. In the earlier years of his
apostleship, the Jew and the Greek were the antagonists with whom
he had to contend. Having been himself a member of the straitest
sect of the Jews, he knew full well the antipathy with which they
regarded anything which set itself by its simplicity in contrast
with their magnificent ritual; and he knew also the haughty scorn
with which they turned away from what they deemed the unworthy
accessories of the Nazarene. And, well read as he was in classic
literature, and acquainted with all the habits and tendencies of the
Grecian mind, he could readily understand how the restraints of the
gospel would be deemed impertinent by the voluptuous Corinthian, and
how the philosophic Athenian would brand its teachers mad. And yet,
rejoicing in the experimental acquaintance with the gospel, he says,
for his standing-point of advantage: "We preach Christ crucified,
to the Jews a stumbling-block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to
them that are called, the power of God and the wisdom of God." And
in the words of the text, addressing some of those very Corinthians
upon whom the gospel had exerted its power, he seems to accept
the stigma and vindicate the glorious madness: "For whether we be
beside ourselves, it is to God: or whether we be sober it is for
your cause. For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus
judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead; and that he
died for all, that they who live should not henceforth live unto
themselves, but unto him who died for them, and rose again." The
great purpose of the apostle in these words is to impress upon
us the fact that the cause of Christ in the world, sanctioned by
the weight of so many obligations, fraught with the destinies
of so many millions, should be furthered by every legitimate
means; that for it, if necessary, should be employed the soberest
wisdom; and for it, if necessary, the most impassioned zeal. He
vindicates the use of zeal in the cause of Christ by the three
following considerations: First, from the condition of the world;
secondly, from the obligations of the Church; and, thirdly, from the
master-motive of the Savior's constraining love. To illustrate and
enforce this apostolic argument, as not inappropriate to the object
which has called us together, will be our business for a few brief
moments to-night.
I. The apostle argues and enforces the use of zeal in the cause
of Christ, in the first place, from the condition of the world.
The apostle speaks of the world as in a state of spiritual death.
He argues the universality of this spiritual death from the
universality of the atonement of Christ. "For the love of Christ
constraineth us, because we thus judge, that if one died for all,
then were all dead"--dead in sin, with every vice luxuriant and
every virtue languishing; dead in law, judicially in the grasp
of the avenger; nay, "condemned already," and hastening to the
second death. We need not remind you that this is by no means the
world's estimate of its own condition. It is short-sighted, and,
therefore, self-complacent. There is a veil over its eye; there
is a delusion at its heart. In that delusion it fancies itself
enthroned and stately, like some poor lunatic, an imaginary monarch
under the inflictions of its keeper. The discovery of its true
position comes only when the mind is enlightened from on high. "We
thus judge," not because there is in us any intuitional sagacity,
or any prophetical foresight, by which our judgment is made more
accurate than the judgment of others; but the Holy Spirit has come
down, has wrought upon us--has shown us the plague of our own
hearts--and from the death within us we can the better argue the
death which exists around. And that this is the actual condition
of the world, Scripture and experience combine to testify. The
Bible, with comprehensive impartiality, concludes all "under sin";
represents mankind as a seed of evil-doers--"children that are
corrupters"--sheep that have wandered away from the Shepherd and
Bishop of their souls. In the adjudication of Scripture there is no
exemption from this common character of evil, and from this common
exposure to danger. The men of merciful charities, and the woman
of abandoned life--the proudest peer, and the vilest serf in his
barony--the moralist observer of the decalogue, and the man-slayer,
red with blood, all are comprehended in the broad and large
denunciation: "Ye were by nature children of wrath, even as others."
And out in the broad world, wherever the observant eye travels, you
have abundant confirmation of the testimony of Scripture. You have
it in your own history. The transgressions and sins which constitute
this moral death abound in our age no less than in any former age
of mankind. There are thousands around you who revel in undisguised
corruption. There are thousands more externally reputable who have
only a name to live. You have this confirmation in the nations of
the Continent--some safely bound by the superstition of ages; others
subsiding into a reactionary skepticism. You have this confirmation
further away in the countries which own Mohammedan rule, and cherish
the Mohammedan's dream--where you have unbridled lust, and a tiger's
thirst for blood. You have this confirmation in the far-off regions
of heathenism proper, where the nature, bad in itself, is made a
thousand fold worse by its religion--where the man is the prey of
every error, and the heart the slave of every cruelty--where men
live in destruction, and where men die in despair. Travel where
you will, visit the most distant regions, and search under the
shadow of the highest civilization--penetrate into the depths of
those primeval forests, into whose original darkness you might
have imagined the curse would hardly penetrate, and the result is
uniformly the same. Death is everywhere. You see it, indeed, in all
its varieties now in the rare and fading beauty which it wears just
after the spirit has fled from the clay, when its repose seems the
worn-out casket, which the soul has broken, and thrown away; now,
when there is shed over it a hue of the sublime, and it is carried
amid the tears to burial, and now, when corruption has begun its
work, and its ill odor affects the neighborhood, and spreads the
pestilence--you see it in all its varieties, but uniformly death
is there. We gather from our melancholy pilgrimage no vestige
of spiritual life. Mourners go about the streets, and there are
mourners over many tombs.
Altho, as we have observed just now, a thorough and realizing
estimate of the world's condition comes only when the judgment is
enlightened from on high, the wise men of the world, the minds
that have in all ages towered above their fellows, have felt an
unsatisfactoriness for which they could hardly account; they
have had a vague and morbid consciousness that all was not right
somehow, either with themselves or with their race; they have met
with disturbing forces, signs of irregularity, tokens of misery
and of sin that have ruffled, somewhat, the philosophic evenness
of their minds. Each in his own way, and from his own standpoint,
has guessed at the solution of the problem, and has been ready
with a suggested remedy. The peoples are imbruted; educate them.
The nations are barbarous; civilize them. Men grovel in sensual
pleasure; cultivate the esthetic faculty; open to them galleries
of pictures; bring them under the humanizing influences of art.
Men groan in bondage; emancipate them, and bid them be free! Such
are some of the tumultuous cries that have arisen from earnest
but blind philanthropists, who have ignored the spiritual part of
man's nature, and forgotten altogether the Godward relations of his
soul. All these, as might have been expected, valuable enough as
auxiliaries, worth something to promote the growth and comfort of
a man when life has been once imparted, fail, absolutely fail to
quicken the unconscious dead. In all cases the bed has been shorter
than that a man could lie on it, and the covering narrower than
that he could wrap himself in it. The inbred death lay too deep
for such superficial alchemy; corpses can not by any possibility
animate corpses; and the compassionate bystander from other worlds,
sickened with the many inventions, might be constrained to cry,
"Amid all this tumult of the human, O for something divine!" And
the divine is given--Christ has died for all men. There is hope for
the world's life. This is a death whereby we live; this is a remedy
commensurate with existing need, and intended entirely to terminate
and extinguish that need.
That squalid savage, whose creed is a perpetual terror, and whose
life is a perpetual war--Christ hath died for him. That fettered
and despairing slave, into whose soul the iron has entered, valued
by his base oppressor about on a par with the cattle he tends,
or with the soil he digs--Christ hath died for him. That dark
blasphemer, who lives in familiar crime, whose tongue is set on fire
of hell, whose expatriation would be hailed by the neighborhood
around him as a boon of chiefest value--Christ has died for him.
That dark recluse, whom an awakened conscience harasses, and who, in
the vain hope of achieving merit by suffering, wastes himself with
vigilant penance well-nigh to the grave--Christ has died for him.
Oh, tell these tidings to the world, and it will live. Prophesy of
this name in the motionless valley, and the divine Spirit who always
waits to do honor to Jesus will send the afflatus from the four
winds of heaven, and they shall leap into life to His praise.
Now take these two points. Think in the first place, of the
condition of the world--a condition so disastrous, that nothing but
death can illustrate it--a condition which prostrates every faculty,
which smites the body with unnumbered cruelties, which dwarfs the
mind with prejudices or distorts it into unholy passion, which
banishes the soul and mind within a man in hopeless estrangement
from happiness and God; and then think of the death of Christ,
providing for the furthest need, overtaking the utmost exile,
pouring its abundant life upon the sepulchered nations, diffusing
light, liberty, hope, comfort, heaven: and I appeal to your
enlightened judgment whether you are not bound, those of you who
believe in Jesus, to labor for the world's conversion with intensest
energy and zeal. Oh, if temporal miseries elicit sympathy, and
prompt to help; if the anxieties of a neighborhood gather around a
drowning child, or are fastened upon the rafters of a burning house,
where, solitary and imploring, stands a single man, already charred
by the flame, how much of sympathy, of effort, of liberality, of
zeal, of prayer, are due to a world lying in the wicked one, and
panting after the second death! You will agree with me, that there
is more than license for the poet's words:
"On such a theme,
'Tis impious to be calm!"
And you will rejoice--will you not? to take your stand to-night by
the apostle's side, and to cry, when men deem your zeal impertinence
and your efforts fanaticism, "If we be beside ourselves, it is to
God: and if we be sober, it is for your cause."
II. The apostle argues the necessity for zeal in the cause of
Christ, secondly, from the obligations of the Church, in that He
died for all, that they should live--should not henceforth live
unto themselves, but for Him who died for them and rose again. The
apostle's argument is this--none of us has life in himself; if we
live at all, we live by imparted life; we live because life has been
drafted into our spirits from on high. Then it is not our own; it
belongs to Him who has purchased it for us with His own blood, and
we are bound to employ it in His service, and for His glory. This
also is the conclusion of an enlightened judgment. We judge this as
well as the other, and this is in accordance with the whole tenor
of Scripture. Time would fail us to mention a tithe of the passages
in which devotion--the devotion of the heart and of the service of
God are made matter of constant and of prominent demand. I will just
mention one passage that may serve as an illustration of all: "I
beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye give
your bodies as a living sacrifice." Have you ever gaged the depth of
consecration that slumbers in the heart of those words--"a living
sacrifice"; to be absolutely and increasingly devoted to God, as if
the knife were at the throat, and the life-blood streamed forth in
votive offering? Nay, better than that; because the life-blood could
stream out but once, but the living sacrifice may be a perpetual
holocaust, repeated daily for a lifetime--a living sacrifice, holy
and acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. From the
doctrine of this passage, and of numberless others kindred to it,
it would appear that the regenerate heart is not at liberty to live
for itself, nor to aim supremely at its own gratification; it must
live for Him who has died for it, and who has risen again. You can
not fail, I think, to perceive that compliance with this exhortation
is utterly antagonistic to the ordinary procedure of mankind.
In the age of organization against idolatry, there is one proud,
rampant idolatry which retains its ascendency amongst us.
Selfishness is the most patronized idolatry in the world. It is
the great image whose brightness is exceeding terrible, and before
which all men bow; it is a throne, and an empire, and the likeness
of a kingly crown; it equips armies and mans armaments to gratify
its lust of power. Fastnesses have been explored and caverns
ransacked to appease its thirst for gold. It presides over the
councils of kings and over the diplomacy of cabinets; for it the
merchantman grindeth down his manhood, for it the treader-under-foot
of nations marcheth in his might and in his shame; its votaries
are of all handicrafts--of the learned professions, and of every
walk in life. It hath sometimes climbed on to the judgment-seat,
and perverted justice there. The cowled monk hath hidden it beneath
his robe, and it hath become for him an engine of oppression, and
it hath occasionally robed itself in holy vestments, and entered
the priest's office for a morsel of bread. No grace or virtue of
humanity is free from its contamination. It has breathed, and
patriotism has degenerated into partisanship; it has breathed,
and friendship has been simulated for policy; it has breathed,
and charity has been blemished by ostentation; it has breathed,
and religion has been counterfeited for gold; its sway is a
despotism--its territory wherever man hath trodden, and it is the
undisputed anarch of the world. Now it is against this principle
in human nature, throned within us all, doggedly contesting every
inch of ground, that Christianity goes forth to combat. The gospel
absolutely refuses to allow self to be the governing power, and
assaults it in all its strongholds with precepts of sublime
morality. To the selfishness of avarice it goes up boldly, even
while the miser clutches his gold, and says: "Give to him that
asketh of thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not
thou away." To the selfishness of anger it addresses itself, even
when the red spot is yet on the brow of the angry: "Let not the sun
go down upon thy wrath"; "Bless them that curse you, pray for them
that despitefully use you and persecute you." To the selfishness of
pride, even in its haughtiness and arrogance, it says: "In honor
preferring one another, be clothed with humility, let each esteem
another better than himself." To the selfishness of indifference to
the concerns of others, "Look not on thine own things, but likewise
upon the things of others"; and to the selfishness of souls and
criminal neglect of the great salvation, it speaks in tones of
pathos which that must be a callous heart that can withstand, "Ye
know the graces of our Lord Jesus Christ, who, tho he was rich, yet
for our sins he became poor, that we, through his poverty, might be
made rich." Oh, how small, alongside of august and heavenly precepts
like these, are the sublimest maxims of any merely ethical morality!
It is said that, once, during the performance of a comedy in the
Roman theater, one of the actors gave utterance to the sentiment,
"I am a man; nothing, therefore, that is human can be foreign to
me," and the audience were so struck by the disinterestedness, or
so charmed by the novelty, that they greeted it with thunders of
applause. How much greater wealth of kindly wisdom and prompting to
unselfish action lies hidden in the gospel of Christ, shrined there
as every-day utterances passed by the most of us very slightingly
by! Oh! let there be anything like the genial practise of this
divine morality, and the world would soon lose its aspect of
desolation and of blood; oppression and over-reaching, and fraud
and cruelty, would be frowned out of the societies of men, and
this earth would be once more an ample and a peopled paradise. By
selfishness, as we have thus endeavored to describe it, we mean that
grasping, monopolizing spirit which gets all and gives nothing;
heedful enough of its own fortunes, careless of the concerns and
interests of others. This is the principle in our nature which
Christianity opposes, and with which it ceaselessly wages war. But
there is a sort of selfishness which, for the sake of distinction,
we may call self-love, which is instinctive, and therefore
innocent--that merciful provision by which we are prompted to the
care of our own lives and to the avoidance of everything that would
disquiet or abridge them. This principle in our nature Christianity
encourages; to this principle Christianity addresses itself; and
hence it has connected, married in indissoluble union, man's
chiefest duty and man's highest pleasure. Godliness is profitable
unto all things, having the promise of the life that now is. What
has the dark, morbid, unhappy sensualist to do with it? Godliness
hath the promise of the life "that now is," as well as "that which
is to come." In keeping Thy commandments there is a present reward.
"Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly
in heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls; for my yoke is
easy and my burden is light." "In thy presence there is fulness of
joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore." Just as
it is in man's physical organization, and its adaptation to the
material world around him, when body and mind are alike in health,
we can neither eat, nor drink, nor walk, nor sleep, nor sing, nor
perform any of the commonest actions of life without a sensation of
pleasure; so it is in the spiritual life: there is pleasure in its
every motion. There is pleasure even in the sting of penitence; it is
"A godly grief and pleasing smart,
That melting of a broken heart."
There is pleasure in the performance of duty; there is pleasure
in the enjoyment of privilege; there is pleasure in the overcoming
of temptations, a grand thrill of happiness to see trampled under
foot a vanquished lust or slain desire; there is pleasure in the
exercise of benevolence; there is pleasure in the importunity of
prayer. Hence it is that the apostle seeks to rivet the sense of
personal obligation by the remembrance of personal benefit. "We
thus judge, that he died for all, that they which live should not
henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him who"--owns them?
No. Claims them? No. Will judge them? No; but--"to him who died
for them and rose again." Gratitude is to be the best prompter to
our devotion. Those who live to Christ, those who live by Christ,
will not tamely see His altars forsaken, His Sabbaths desecrated,
His name blasphemed, the blood of the covenant wherewith He was
sanctified accounted an unholy thing. Brethren, are you of that
happy family? Have you obtained life from the dead through His name?
Then you are bound to spend it for His honor, and, watching with
godly jealousy for every possible opportunity of doing good, to
spend and be spent for them who have not yet your Master known. I
call on you to answer this invocation; it belongs to you. There is
no neutrality, believe me, in this war--and if there be some of you
that would like to be dastardly and half-hearted trimmers, you will
find by and by that you have got the hottest place in the battle,
exposed to the cross-fire from the artillery of both parties. I call
on you decisively to-night to answer this invocation. Call up before
your minds the benefits you have individually received; think of
the blessings which the death of Christ has procured for you--the
removal of the blighting curse which shadowed all your life, the
present sense of pardon, mastery over self and over sin, light in
the day of your activity, and songs in the night of your travail;
the teaching Spirit to lead you into still loftier knowledge,
and the sanctifying Spirit to impress upon you the image of the
heavenly; that divine fellowship which lightens the present, and
that majestic hope which makes the future brighter far. Think of
the benefits which the resurrection of Christ has conferred upon
you; light in the shadowed valley, the last enemy destroyed, support
amid the swellings of Jordan, a guide upon the hither side of the
flood, angelic welcomes, the King in his beauty, and "a house not
made with hands, eternal in the heavens." And then, as the sum of
favor is presented, and gratitude arises and the fire burns, and
the heart is full, and the frame quivers with the intensity of its
emotions, just remember that there is a world lying in the wicked
one, that there are multitudes, thousands upon thousands, in your
own city, at your own doors, for whom the Savior died, who never
heard His name; that there are multitudes for whom He has abolished
death who have never felt His resurrection's power. Let your tears
flow; better, far better a tear for God's sake and the world's sake
than the hard-heartedness and darkness of sin. Lift up your voice in
the midst of them; lift it up, be not afraid. Say unto the cities of
Judah, "Behold your God." Men will call you mad, but you can give
them the apostle's answer, "If we be beside ourselves, it is to God;
if we be sober, it is for your cause."