'I seek not yours, but _you_,' is the very mother-tongue of love; but
upon our lips, even when our love is purest, there is a tinge of
selfishness blending with it, and very often the desire for another's
love is as purely selfish as the desire for any material good. But in so
far as human love is pure in its desire to possess another, we have the
right to believe the deep and wonderful thought that there is something
corresponding to it in the heart of Christ, which is a revelation for us
of the heart of God; and that, however little we may be able to construe
the whole meaning of the fact, He does stretch out an arm of desire
towards us; and for His own sake, as for ours, would fain draw us near
to Himself, and is 'satisfied,' as He is not without it, when men's
hearts yield themselves up to Him, and let Him love them and lavish
Himself upon them. I do not venture into these depths, but I would lay
upon our hearts that the very inmost meaning of all that Jesus Christ
has said, and is saying, to each of us by the records of His life, by
the pathos of His death, by the miracle of His Resurrection, by the
glory of His Ascension, by the power of His granted Spirit, is, 'I seek
you.'
And, brethren, our self-surrender is the essence of our Christianity.
Our religion lies neither in our heads nor in our acts; the deepest
notion of it is that it is the entire yielding up of ourselves to Jesus
Christ our Lord. There is plenty of religion which is a religion of the
head and of creeds. There is plenty of religion which is the religion of
the hand and of the tongue, and of forms and ceremonies and sacraments;
external worship. There is plenty of religion which surrenders to Him
some of the more superficial parts of our personality, whilst the
ancient Anarch, Self, sits undisturbed on his dark throne, in the depths
of our being. But none of these are the religion that either Christ
requires or that we need. The only true notion of a Christian is a man
who can truly say, 'I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.'
And that is the only kind of life that is blessed; our only true
nobleness and beauty and power and sweetness are measured by, and
accurately correspond with, the completeness of our surrender of
ourselves to Jesus Christ. As long as the earth was thought to be the
centre of the planetary system there was nothing but confusion in the
heavens. Shift the centre to the sun and all becomes order and beauty.
The root of sin, and the mother of death, is making myself my own law
and Lord; the germ of righteousness, and the first pulsations of life,
lie in yielding ourselves to God in Christ, because He has yielded
Himself unto us.
I need not remind you, I suppose, that this self-surrender is a great
deal more than a vivid metaphor: that it implies a very hard fact;
implies at least two things, that we have yielded ourselves to Jesus
Christ, by the love of our hearts, and by the unreluctant submission of
our wills, whether He commands or whether He sends sufferings or joys.
And, oh, brethren, be sure of this, that no such giving of myself away,
in the sweet reciprocities of a higher than human affection, is
possible, in the general, and on the large scale, if you evacuate from
the Gospel the great truth, 'He loved me, and gave Himself for me.' I
believe--and therefore I am bound to preach it--that the only power
which can utterly annihilate and cast out the dominion of self from a
human soul is the power that is lodged in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ
on the Cross for sinful men.
And whilst I would fully recognise all that is noble, and all that is
effective, in systems either of religion, or of irreligious morality,
which have no place within their bounds for that great motive, I am sure
of this, that the evil self within us is too strong to be exorcised by
anything short of the old message, 'Jesus Christ has given His life for
thee, wilt thou not give thyself unto Him?'