Now, we are all familiar with the great evangelical point of view from
which the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ are usually
contemplated. To many of us Christ's sacrifice is nothing more or less
than the means by which the world is reconciled to God, and Christ's
Resurrection nothing more than the seal which was set by Divinity upon
that work. 'Crucified for our offences, and raised again for our
justification,' as Paul has it--that is the point of view from which
most evangelical or orthodox Christian people are contented to regard
the solemn fact of the Death and the radiant fact of the Resurrection.
You cannot be too emphatic about these truths, but you may be too
exclusive in your contemplation of them. You do well when you say that
they are the Gospel; you do not well when you say, as some of you do,
that they are the whole Gospel. For there is another stream of teaching
in the New Testament, of which my text is an example, and a multitude of
other passages that I cannot refer to now are equally conspicuous
instances, in which that death and that Resurrection are regarded, not
so much in respect to the power which they exercise in the
reconciliation of the world to God, as in their aspect as the type of
all noble and true Christian life. You remember how, when our Lord
Himself touched upon the fruitful issues of His death, and said: 'Except
a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if
it die it bringeth forth much fruit,' He at once went on to say that a
man that loved his life would lose it; and that a man that lost his life
would find it, and proceeded to point, even then, and in that
connection, to His Cross as our pattern, declaring: 'If any man serve
Me, let him follow Me; and where I am, there shall also My servant be.'
'Made like Him, like Him we rise;
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies.'
So, then, a risen life is the type of all noble life, and before there
can be a risen life there must have been a death. True, we may say that
the spiritual facts in a man's experience, which are represented by
these two great symbols of a death and a rising, are but like the
segment of a circle which, seen from the one side is convex and from the
other is concave. But however loosely we may feel that the metaphors
represent the facts, this is plain, that unless a man dies to flesh, to
self-will, to the world, he never will live a life that is worth calling
life. The condition of all nobleness and all growth upwards is that we
shall die daily, and live a life that has sprung victorious from the
death of self. All lofty ethics teach that; and Christianity teaches it,
with redoubled emphasis, because it says to us, that the Cross and the
Resurrection are not merely imaginative emblems of the noble and the
Christian life, but are a great deal more than that. For, brethren, do
not forget--if you do, you will be hopelessly at sea as to large tracts
of blessed Christian truth--that by faith in Jesus Christ we are brought
into such a true deep union with Him as that, in no mere metaphorical or
analogous sense, but in most blessed reality, there comes into the
believing heart a spark of the life that is Christ's own, so that with
Him we do live, and from Him we do live a life cognate with His, who,
having risen from the dead, dieth no more, and over whom death hath no
dominion. So it is not a metaphor only, but a spiritual truth, when we
speak of being risen with Christ, seeing that our faith, in the measure
of its genuineness, its depth and its operative power upon our
characters, will be the gate through which there shall pass into our
deadness the life that truly is, the life that has nought to do with
death or sin. And this unity with Jesus, brought about by faith, brings
about that the depths of the Christian life are hid with Christ in God,
and that we, risen with Him, do even now sit 'at the right hand in
heavenly places,' whilst our feet, dusty and sometimes blood-stained,
are journeying along the paths of life. This is the great teaching of my
text, and of a multitude of other places; and this is the teaching which
modern Christianity, in its exclusive, or all but exclusive,
contemplation of the Cross as the sacrifice for sin, has far too much
forgotten. 'Ye are risen with Christ.'
Let me remind you that this veritable death and rising again, which
marks the Christian life, is set forth before us in the initial rite of
the Christian Church. Some of you do not agree with me in my view,
either of what is the mode or of who are the subjects of that ordinance,
but if you know anything about the question, you know that everybody
that has a right to give a judgment agrees with us Baptists in
saying--although they may not think that it carries anything obligatory
upon the practice of to-day--that the primitive Church baptized by
immersion. Now, the meaning of baptism is to symbolise these two
inseparable moments, dying to sin, to self, to the world, to the old
past, and rising again to newness of life. Our sacramentarian friends
say that, in my text, it was in baptism that these Colossian Christians
rose again with Christ. I, for my part, do not believe that, but that
baptism was the speaking sign of what lies at the gate of a true
Christian life I have no manner of doubt.
So the first thought of our text is not only taught us in words, but it
stands manifest in the ritual of the Church as it was from the
beginning. We die, and we rise again, through faith and by union through
faith, with Christ 'that died, yea, rather that is risen again, who is
even at the right hand of God.'