'I follow that,' says Paul, 'if that I may apprehend.' This letter was
written far on in his career, in the time of his imprisonment in Rome,
which all but ended his ministerial activity; and was many years after
that day on the road to Damascus. And yet, matured Christian and
exercised Apostle as he was, with all that past behind him, he says, 'I
follow after, that I may apprehend.' Ah, brother, our experience must be
incomplete, for we have an infinite aim set before us, and there is no
end to the possibilities of plunging deeper and deeper and deeper into
the knowledge of Christ, and having larger and larger and larger
draughts of the fulness of His life. We have only been like goldseekers,
who have contented themselves as yet with washing the precious grains
out of the gravel of the river. There are great reefs filled with the
ore that we have not touched. Thank God for the necessary incompleteness
of our 'apprehending.' It is the very salt of life. To have realised our
aims, to have fulfilled our ideals, to have sucked dry the cluster of
the grapes is the death of aspiration, of hope, of blessedness; and to
have the distance beckoning, and all experience 'an arch, wherethro'
gleams the untravelled world to which we move,' is the secret of
perpetual youth and energy.
Because incomplete, our experience should be progressive; and that is a
truth that needs hammering into Christian people to-day. About how many
of us can it be said that our light 'shineth more and more unto the
noonday.' Alas! about an enormous number of us it must be said, 'When
for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you.'
All our churches have many grown babies, and cases of arrested
development--people that ought to be living on strong meat, and are
unable to masticate or digest it, and by their own fault have still need
of the milk of infancy. There is an old fable about a strange animal
that fastened itself to the keel of sailing ships, and by some uncanny
power was able to arrest them in mid-ocean, though the winds were
filling all their sails. There is a remora, as they called it, of that
sort adhering to a great many Christian people, and keeping them fixed
on one spot, instead of 'following after, if that they may apprehend.'
Dear friends--and especially you younger Christians--Christ has laid
hold of you. Well and good! that is the beginning. He has laid hold of
you for an end. That end will not be reached without your effort, and
that effort must be perpetual. It is a life-long task. Ay! and even up
yonder the apprehending will be incomplete. Like those mathematical
lines that ever approximate to a point which they never reach, we shall
through Eternity be, as it were, rising, in ascending and ever-closer
drawing spirals, to that great Throne, and to Him that sits upon it. So
that, striking out the humble 'may' from our text, the rest of it
describes the progressive blessedness of the endless life in the
heavens, as truly as it does the progressive duty of the Christian life
here, and the glorified flock that follows the Lamb in the heavenly
pastures may each say: I follow after in order to apprehend that 'for
which,' long ago and down amidst the dim shadows of earth, 'I was
apprehended of Christ Jesus.'