"A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within
you."--EZEKIEL xxxvi. 26.
In the beautiful and suggestive dream of Solomon, which is recorded in
the third chapter of the First Book of Kings, God appears to him, saying,
"Ask what I shall give thee"; and Solomon's answer is, "O Lord, I am but
a child set over this great people, give me, I pray Thee, a hearing
heart." And God said to him, "Because thou hast asked this thing, and
hast not asked for thyself long life, nor riches; behold, I have done
according to thy words. I have given thee a wise and understanding
heart, and I have also given thee that which thou hast not asked, both
riches and honour." And the record of this vision was clearly meant to
indicate that the supreme gift of the wisest of men was the hearing or
understanding heart. On the other hand, there is nothing against which
our Lord in the Gospels utters stronger warnings than that dulness or
deadness of spirit which is described as having eyes that see not, and
ears that are dull of hearing, and hearts that do not understand. And in
illustration of this we read how, while the crowds throng or press upon
Jesus, it is the stricken woman who, with soul sensitive to His
influence, feels the virtue come out of Him though she only touches the
hem of His garment.
Thus we are warned to beware lest that should come upon us which was the
ruin of the Jews, dulness or deadness of spiritual faculty; and we are
exhorted to pray for and to cherish the hearing heart, the soul that sees
and feels spiritual influences, and is sensitive to every high call. And
if your soul is thus open and receptive, it is marvellous how full the
world becomes to you of Divine voices. They come upon you unexpected,
unsought, sending through your heart some illuminating flash of surprise,
so that you wonder at your previous dulness; they strike you with the
sudden shock of some new knowledge or insight, and make you feel, as
never before, the true nature of your daily conduct or your duty and your
relation to other men; or they come as the unresting presence of some new
thought, which, once roused, haunts and troubles you with questions which
you cannot answer, or feelings which you cannot get rid of.
When the soul is roused in this way we see and feel the hatefulness of
any sin that may have tempted or beset us; or we contrast our own life
with that of those whose lot is so much harder than ours, and we are
struck with shame at our selfishness, or waste, or our indifference to
the privation, and sin, and suffering that are all around us in the
world.
Or sometimes these Divine voices in our ears bring it home to us how much
we are losing out of our life's higher possibilities, if from sinful or
selfish habit, from dulness of spirit or lack of sympathy, we cut
ourselves off in thought and feeling and interest from the great needs,
the great sorrows, the great pulsations of the larger world.
But why, you may ask, do I dwell on all this? It is because these are
the true Advent voices for us, coming as they do to rouse us out of
narrow preoccupation, to open our eyes to the sinfulness of sin, to make
us feel that the self-centred, isolated, self-seeking life is a life of a
low type, and to stir us with social and religious interests and
enthusiasms.
These calls that come to you, whether invited or not, and that stir your
heart, speaking to you out of the multitudinous life of the time you live
in, are like the watchmen on the walls of Jerusalem, which never hold
their peace day nor night.
This ferment of higher life within us and around us, these voices of the
Spirit in us, as it struggles to lift us out of the region of fleshly
influences, is renewed in every generation and in every single life. If
you hear no such voices, if the phenomena of life make no such impression
upon you, if you are deaf to all these calls, and care for none of these
things, then it is clear that your soul is not yet awake in you; you are
living with a dull or darkened heart. It is a sort of cave life, or
subterranean life, you lead in such a case, a life of lower rank and
lesser hopes.
Yet these voices from above, that come as the witness of the Divine
Spirit with our spirit that we are the children of God, never fail us.
They do not belong only to times far off. We are not to think of them
merely as enshrined in the Bible and peculiar to it; but as living voices
that are speaking to us to-day out of the depths of the Divine life, in
which our life is sustained.
But we have always to bear this in mind, that the Divine voices speak to
men with most stirring effect in every generation when they speak to them
through the pressing needs of their own day. To the Jews the voice of
God came in the inspired language of their deliverers and prophets--in
their unceasing warnings, and their impassioned appeals, and their
revelations of new truth. To the first generation of Christians these
same voices came in the shape of strong Advent hopes. Many things
contributed to lift the Apostles and their followers nearer to God than
men of ordinary times. They had seen the Lord; they had lived in His
presence; they had gone through much tribulation; the tongue of fire had
rested on them; the Spirit had taken full possession of them; but we
cannot read the New Testament without feeling that the most stirring, the
most regenerative influence in their society was the vividness and
intensity of their Advent hope. Their expectation of the Lord's return
lifted them out of the temptations of the world and above the trials of
it. It took hold of their active powers, and made them new men.
Their Advent expectation was not the vague, half mystic, half sentimental
movement of the heart, which just touches the lives of so many Christians
during our Advent seasons, while it does not really alter any of their
earthly concerns.
Christ was very near to the Apostolic Christians. As the eastern sky
brightened every morning they felt that it might be the light of His
coming; they thought of Him as only hidden from them by the neighbouring
cloud. They looked for Him to return at midnight, or at the
cock-crowing, or in the noonday, and none could say how soon. And so it
came to pass that this expectation made those first believers, those
humble followers of Christ, those Galilean fishermen, those obscure
provincials, instinct with that great life which lifts men above the
world, and constitutes them a new power in it.
Our lives are largely influenced by the thought of slow development; but
we miss a great deal of the secret of all higher life if we forget this
wonderful exaltation of the poor and ignorant and obscure by this gift of
the Spirit and the inspiration of Divine hope. It was not by any method
which we could have forecast that those men found out this charm which
takes the heart captive and regenerates the life. In their presence we
feel the force of the prophet's words, "Not by might nor by power, but by
My spirit, saith the Lord."
But then there rises the question, How are these Divine influences to
become powerful in us also?
On the one hand, we are conscious that as we live involved or entangled
in the worldly life, or in any form of external life around us, the
spiritual part of us slumbers or is overlaid. It loses its practical
power over our thought, our feeling, and our conduct--our lamp goes out.
Whilst on the other hand we are conscious that the special form of Advent
expectation which inspired and possessed the first generation of
Christians is gone from us past recovery. We see clearly enough as we
read the New Testament what that first generation expected, and how the
expectation transformed their lives; but we see also that they were
mistaken in their hope, and that God's providential plan proved to be far
greater than their human conception of it. What, then, are our Advent
hopes?
There are two things which we should keep clear in our minds concerning
them. One, that they must be based upon our feeling of the living
influence of Christ and the working of the Holy Spirit; and the other is
that the voices of the Spirit must come to us out of the needs of our own
life and of the time we live in if they are to lead us to practical
issues. When we look out upon the world and its life we feel that Advent
hopes must take some new form if they are to preserve reality and to be
fulfilled.
We see decaying faith in some quarters, and selfishness growing where
faith decays; we see ignorance and want and all their crop of sin and
misery deep-rooted in the life of every city; and the prospect which
these things suggest, the problems that meet us as we think of them,
might well fill us with misgiving. And they would indeed do so were it
not for the fact that the revelation of such things brings with it
another revelation also; it seizes on men's souls and stirs them as with
a Divine summons. And thus we have these hopeful signs for the future
rising around us, even where things look darkest, that the great problems
of humanity are felt in our day to be above all things its social and
religious problems. And seeing that the aspirations of the time--the
feelings, the purposes, the aims, and hopes that lift men--grow out of
the needs of the time and the problems of its life, we look forward--we
have good ground for looking forward--to a generation of men who shall be
distinguished by religious earnestness and by social enthusiasm.
But if this be so, what will your share be in this coming life? The
Spirit of God, as we now understand it, comes to us with calls of this
kind.
If you would hasten the Advent of Christ in your own soul and in the
souls of others, you must discard selfishness, you must rise above self-
indulgence, you must prepare to merge yourself in the social life, for
the social good; seeing that the growth of this good is the only sure and
certain sign of the coming of the Lord. So, then, the Angel of the
Advent is thus calling us. The future before you is big with social and
religious issues, and the Spirit of Christ is brooding over it, and you
and such as you are to be His chosen instruments in helping forward these
issues.