Beneath the poetry of my text there lie very definite conceptions of a
very solemn and grave character, and these conceptions are the
foundation of the ringing summons that follows, and which reposes upon
a double basis--viz. '_for_ thy light is come,' and '_for_ darkness
covers the earth.' There is a double element in the representation. We
have a darkened earth, and a sunlit and a sunlike church; and unless we
hold these two convictions--both of them-in firm grasp, and that not
merely as convictions that influence our understanding, but as ever
present forces acting on our emotions, our consciences, our wills, we
shall not do the work which God has set us to do in the world. I need
not dwell long on the former of these, or speak of that funeral pall
that wraps the whole earth. Only remember that it is no darkness that
came from His hand who forms the light and creates darkness, but is
like the smoke that lies over our great cities--the work of many an
earth-born fire, whose half-consumed foulness hides the sun from us. If
we take the sulphureous and smoky pall that wraps the earth, and
analyse its contents, they are these: the darkness of ignorance, the
darkness of sorrow, the darkness of sin. Of ignorance; for throughout
the wide regions that lie beneath that covering spread over all nations
is there any certitude about God, about man, about morals, about
responsibilities, about eternity? Peradventures, guesses, dreams,
precious fragments of truth, twisted in with the worst of lies, noble
aspirations side by side with bestial representations--these are the
things on which our brethren repose, or try to repose. We do not forget
that light which lighteneth every man that cometh into the world.
We do not forget, of course, that everywhere there are feelings after
Him, and everywhere there are gleams and glimpses of a vanishing light,
else life were impossible; but oh, dear brethren, let us not forget
either that the people sit in darkness of ignorance, which is the
saddest darkness that can afflict men.
And it is a darkness of sorrow, for all the ills that flesh is heir to
press, unalleviated and unsustained by any known helper in the heavens,
upon millions of our fellows. They stand, as the great German poet
describes himself as standing, in one of the most pathetic of his
lyrics, before the marble image of the fair goddess, who has pity on
her face and beauty raying from her limbs, but she has no arms. So
tears fall undried. The light-hearted savage is a fiction. What a heavy
gloom lies upon his past and his present, which darkens into an
impenetrable mist that wraps and hides the future!
And the darkness is a darkness of sin as well as of sorrow and of
ignorance. On that point I need not dwell. We all believe that all have
'sinned and come short of the glory of God,' and we all believe that
idolatry, as we see it, and as it is wrought out, is an ally of
impurity and of sin. The process is this: men make gods in their own
image, and the gods make devils of the men. 'They that make them are
like unto them, so is every one that trusteth in them.' We need no
other principle than that to account for the degradation of heathenism
and for the obscenities and foul transgression within the very courts
of the temple.
Now, dear friends, that I may not dwell too long upon the A B C of our
belief, let me urge you in one sentence to be on your guard against
present-day tendencies which weaken the force of this solemn, tragical
conviction as to the realities of heathendom. The new science of
comparative religion has done much for us. I am not saying one word
against this pursuit, or the conclusions which are drawn from it. But I
pray you to remember that the underlying truths buried beneath the
system that any men hold as their religion are one thing, and the
practical working of that system, as we see it in daily life, is
altogether another. The actual character of heathenism is not to be
learned from the sacred books of all nations and the precious gleams of
wisdom and feeling after the Divine which we recognise in man. As a
simple matter of fact, all over the world the religion of heathen
nations is a mass of obscenity, intertwined so closely with nobler
thoughts that the two seem to be inseparable. Unalleviated sorrows,
hideous foulnesses, a gross ignorance covering all the most important
realities for men--these are the facts with which we have to grapple.
Do not let us forget them.
And on the other side, remember the contrasted picture here of the
sunlit and sunny church. The incarnation of Jesus Christ is the
fulfilment of my text. 'We behold His glory, the glory as of the only
begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.' If you and I are
Christians, we are bound to believe in Him as the exclusive source of
certainty. We hear from Him no peradventure, but His word is, 'Verily,
verily, I say unto you,' and on that word we rest all our knowledge of
God, of duty, of man, and of the future. Instead of fears, doubt,
perhapses, we have a living Christ and His rock-word. And in Him is all
joy, and in Him is the cleansing from all sin. And this threefold
radiance, into which the one pure light may be analysed, falls upon us.
It falls all over the world as well; but they into whose hearts it has
come, they whose faces are turned to it, they receive it in a sense in
which the unreceptive and unresponsive darkness of the world does not.
The light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness will have none of
it, and so it is darkness yet. The light shineth upon us, and if by His
mercy we have opened our hearts to it, then, according to the profound
teaching of this context, we are not only a sun-lighted but a sunlike
Church, and to us the commandment comes, 'Arise, shine, for thy light
is come,' and has turned thy poor darkness into a sun too.
If we have the light we shall be light. That is but putting in a
picturesque form the very central truth of Christianity. The last word
of the gospel is transformation. We become like Him if we live near
Him, and the end for which the Master became like unto us in His
incarnation and passion was that we might become like to Him by the
reception of His very own life unto our souls. Light makes many a
surface on which it falls flash, but in the optics of earth it is the
rays which are not absorbed that are reflected; but in this loftier
region the illumination is not superficial but inward, and it is the
light which is swallowed up within us that then comes forth from us.
Christ will dwell in our hearts, and we shall be like some poor little
diamond-shaped pane of glass in a cottage window which, when the sun
smites it, is visible over miles of the plain. If that sun falls upon
us, its image will be mirrored in our hearts and flashing in our lives.
The clouds that lie over the sunset, though in themselves they be but
poor, grey, and moist vapour, when smitten by its beneficent radiance,
become not unworthy ministers and attendants upon its glory. So, my
brethren, it may be with us, for Christ comes to be our light, Because
He is in us and with us we are changed into His likeness, and the names
that are most appropriate to Him He shares with us. Is He the
'Son'?--we are sons. Is He 'the Light of the world'? His own lips tell
us, 'Ye are the light of the world.' Is He the Christ? The Psalm says:
'Touch not my Christs, and do My prophets no harm.' Critics have
quarrelled over these last chapters of the Book of Isaiah, as to whom
the servant of the Lord is; whether he is the personal or collective
Israel, whether he is Christ or His Church. Let us take the lesson that
He and we are so united that His office that made the union possible,
wherein He was sacrificed on the Cross for us all--belongs by
derivation to His servants, and that He, the Sun of Righteousness,
moves in the heavens circled by many another sun.
So, dear friends, these two convictions of these two facts, the dark
earth, the sunlit, sunlike church, lie at the basis of all our
missionary work. If once we begin to doubt about them, if once we begin
to think that men have got a good deal of light already, and can do
very well without much more, or if we at all are hesitant about our
possession of the light, and the certitudes and the joys that are in
it, then good-bye to our missionary zeal. We shall soon begin to ask
the question, 'To what purpose is this waste?'--though the lips that
first asked it, by the bye, did not much recommend it--and shall
consider that money and resources and precious lives are too precious
to be thrown away thus. But if we rightly appreciate the force of these
twin principles, then we shall be ready to listen to the ringing
summons.
II. We have here, in the second place, based upon these two facts, the
summons to the Church. 'Shine, for thy light is come.' If we _have_
light, we _are_ light. If we are light, we shall shine; but the shining
is not altogether spontaneous and effortless. Stars do not need to be
bidden to shine nor candles either; but _we_ need the exhortation,
because there are many things that dim the brilliance of our light and
interfere with its streaming forth. True, the property of light is to
shine, but we can rob the inward light of its beams. The silent witness
of a Christian life transformed into the likeness of Jesus Christ is,
perhaps, the best contribution that any of us can make to the spread of
His kingdom. It is with us as it is with the great lights in the
heavens. 'There is no speech nor language; their voice is not heart,'
yet, 'their line has gone through all the earth, and their words to the
end of the world.' So we may quietly ray out the light in us and
witness the transforming power of our Master by the transparent purity
of our lives. But the command suggests likewise effort, and that effort
must be in the direction of the specific vocal proclamation of His name.
I take both these methods of fulfilling the command into my view, in
the further remarks that I make, and I put that which I have to say
upon this into three sentences: if we are light, we shall be able to
shine; if we are light, we are bound to shine; if we are light, we
shall wish to shine. We shall be able to shine. And man can manifest
what he is unless he is a coward. Any man can talk about the things
that are interesting to him if only they are interesting to him. Any
man that has Jesus Christ can say so; and perhaps the utterance of the
simple personal conviction is the best method of proclaiming His name.
All other things are surplusage. They are good when they come, they may
be done without. Learning, eloquence, and the like of these, are the
adornments of the lamp, but it does not matter whether the lamp be a
gorgeous affair of gilt and crystal, or whether it be a poor piece of
block tin; the main question is: are there wick and oil in it? The
pitcher may be gold and silver, or costly china, or it may be a poor
potsherd. Never mind. If there is water in it, it will be precious to a
thirsty lip. And so, dear brethren, I press this upon you: every
Christian man has the power, if he is a Christian, to proclaim his
Master, and if he has the Light he will be able to show it. I pause for
a moment to say that this suggests for us the condition of all faithful
and effectual witness for Jesus Christ. Cultivate understanding and all
other faculties as much as you like: but oh! you Christian ministers,
as well as others in less official and public positions, remember this:
the fitness to impart is to possess, and that being taken for granted,
the main thing is secured. As long as the electric light is in contact
with the battery, so long does it burn. Electricians have been trying
during the past few years to make accumulators, things in which they
can store the influence and put it away in a corner and use it so that
the light need not be in connection with the battery; and they have not
succeeded--at least it is only a very partial success. You and I cannot
start accumulators. Let us remember that personal contact with Jesus is
power, and only that personal contact is so. Arise, shine! but if thou
hast gone out of the light, thou wilt shine no more.
But again, if we are light we are bound to shine. That is an obvious
principle. The capacity to shine is the obligation to shine, for we are
all knit together by such mystical cords in this strange brotherhood of
humanity that every one of us holds his possession as trust property
for the use and behoof of others, and in the present case that which we
have received, and the price at which we have received it, give an edge
to the keenness of the obligation, and add a new grip to the stringency
of the command. It is because Christ has given Himself thus to us that
the possession of Him binds us to the imitation of His example, and the
impartation of Him to all our brethren. The obligation lies at our
doors, and cannot be delegated or devolved.
If we have light, we shall wish to shine. What shall we say about the
Christian people who never really had such a wish? God forbid that I
should say they have no light; but this I will say, it burns very
dimly. Dear brethren, there is no better test of the depth and the
purity of our personal attachment to, and possession of, our Master
than the impulse that will spring from them to communicate Him to
others. 'Necessity is laid upon me, yea, woe is me if I preach not.'
That should be the word of every one of us, and it will be so in the
measure in which we ourselves have thoroughly laid hold of Jesus
Christ. 'This is a day of good tidings, and we cannot hold our peace,'
said the handful of lepers in the camp. 'If we are silent some mischief
will come to us.' 'Thy word, when I shut it up in my bones and said, I
will speak no more in Thy name, was like a fire, and was weary of
forbearing and could not stay.' Brother, do you know anything of the
divine necessity to share your blessing with the men around you? Did
you ever feel what it was to carry a burden of the Lord that drove you
to speech, and left you no rest until you had done what it impelled you
to do? If not, I beseech you to ask yourselves whether you cannot get
nearer to the sun than away out there on the very edge of its system,
receiving so few of its beams, and these so impotent that they can
scarcely do more than melt the surface of the thick-ribbed ice that
warps your spirit. If we are light we shall be enabled, we shall be
bound, we shall wish, to shine. Christian men and women, is this true
of you?