young people growing up in the home. He is wealthy, with a reputable
position in society. But there is a sinister something in the
background of his life, and he sets himself to do what he knows full
well is an irreparable wrong to an inexperienced and defenceless
creature. He makes no fight against the wicked prompting, and does the
hurt which if another man were to do to one of his own family he would
willingly shoot him dead. And say when the hurt is done, a
searchlight--he knows not whence it comes--is flashed across his soul
and he sees himself as he is, a base scoundrel before God and man, will
it help him to think of his sin as good in the making? For whatever he
may become, he has done his part to damn another. And let his
conscience become, as it can become, and woe to him if it do not
become, as real as the wicked thing he has done, and his first and
devastating question will be, not can God forgive him, but can he ever
forgive himself? Let his one hope come to be in some means of
expiation, which can give him a degree of rest from the sin by paying
what he can of its wages, and he will begin to realize what is meant,
not by the remission of the consequences of sin, but by the remission
of sin. He will know the need, where the need is agony, which God in
Christ has met for us, and which, had He not met, would have left the
need something greater than God Himself. It is when a man must have
peace with himself or die to all that is immortal in him--it is then I
will trust him never again to pass by with unconcern the anguish of Him
who bore our sin in His own body on the tree.
Sometimes we look at the Lamb of God without feeling that we are
sinners, and then we have a thousand difficult questions to ask. At
other times the burden of sin is so heavy upon us, we see the
sinfulness of sin so vividly, that we get away from the mere accident
of place and time as far as it relates to sin, we see sin as God saw
it, and must ever see it--then it is we look to the Crucified One.
"When I feel myself in my heart of hearts a sinner," I once heard Dr.
Parker say, "a trespasser against God's law and God's love; when I feel
that a thought may overwhelm me in destruction, that a secret,
unexpressed desire may shut me out of heaven and make me glad to go to
hell to be away from the face of Him that sitteth upon the throne--then
when I am told that Jesus Christ was wounded for my transgressions,
that upon Him was laid the chastisement of my peace, I press my way
through all the difficulties and say: If I perish I will pray and
perish at the Cross; for if this be not sufficient, it hath not entered
into the heart of man to solve the problem of human depravity, and the
human consciousness of sin."
I am not seeking to explain or defend what I am saying. I may try to
make it a little more clear before I close. For the moment I am
putting before you what I believe to be the truth of very truth. To
some I may be speaking in an unknown tongue, but not to all. If there
is one here who, with some years behind him, has ever been in serious
conference with himself, he knows that there is something radically
wrong with himself, which calls for something he is powerless to
supply. He knows that the springs of his being have been poisoned, and
he has no detergent to make them sweet. It is the fashion in our day
to speak of the old description of "hell-deserving sinner" as marred by
exaggeration, if not to say morbid. I do not fall into that fashion,
for it expresses just what I am--a hell-deserving sinner. When the
great Puritan, John Newton, saw a man taken out to be hanged, he said:
"But for the grace of God there goes John Newton." It is when the true
idea of sin is realized under the convincing power of the Holy Spirit,
that the "necessity of the sacrificial work of Christ will be felt,
understood, and become the one foundation of human hope."
Do you say that you have felt nothing of this convicting and convincing
power? Then I ask: Have you ever passed through an hour of serious
inquest with your own soul? Have you ever tried to know yourself even
as you are known? The debate cannot be all on one side. A man only
knows that he is ignorant through the need of a knowledge he has not
got. Before I can persuade you that Christ is your Saviour, you must
realize that it is a Saviour you need. Before you can start out for
Christ you must come to yourself. And while men make a mock of sin,
while they regard it as a matter of indifference, or profess to explain
it away under the terms of science and philosophy, we need not wonder
that they have so little faith in higher things. We need go no further
for an explanation of the thoughtless unbelief which is eating its way
like a festering sore to the heart of our modern world. If the lusts
of the flesh and the pride of life sum up the totality of our being
here, why should that crowd on the artist's canvas be represented as
moved by an anguish that touches no chord in its soul; which is,
indeed, foreign to its every thought, sympathy, and pursuit? So long
as men are indifferent about the very question, Why that anguish? vain
is the appeal, "To you is it nothing your Saviour should die?" So long
as men are utterly unconcerned about the fact, and nature, and effects
of moral evil, then selfishness will remain for men the only recognized
law of self-preservation.
And here is where I come into line with the practical side of the
Christian evangel. The Cross of Christ is no arbitrary arrangement.
It is not the expedient of a system cunningly devised by priest,
theologian, or Church. It is the grimmest, sanest, divinest thing ever
set up in this human world. The Cross is symbol of the only Power that
can enter the lists against selfishness, and enter to throw it. And
let me plead with you to think about this: every wrong in the world has
selfishness, if not for its root, yet at its root. Cast out the
selfishness which is sin, and you cast out the first and the last thing
that stands between us and the new heaven and the new earth. Think of
this, and you will better understand the anguish of Him who carries the
sorrow, and is wounded in the wounds made by man's inhumanity to man.
Refuse to think of it, and cease to wonder why countless thousands
mourn; why the strong oppress the weak; why might is worshipped as
right; why men seem to fear nothing but the hell of not making money.
Think of it, and cease to wonder why men's bodies and souls are
sacrificed in what is little better than a murderous struggle to exist;
why one man has so much more than he earns, and others earn so much
more than they have. Think of it and cease to wonder why our age is
distinguished by a bad pre-eminence of restlessness, by feverishness, a
panting for excitement, and a poisonous atmosphere of pessimism.
The Cross of Christ means the life that lives in unselfish service as
against the selfishness that is death and defeat. It means not only
individuals and Churches, but the race, redeemed and lifted from the
dark and narrow life of self, into the life and light of the kingdom of
God. Can we wonder, then, that the rejection of the Cross blasts our
beliefs in everything divine and hopeful, and is accompanied everywhere
by a "melancholy introspection and lack-lustre view of human life?"
Recall then in this connection what I have said about sin, and the
relation of Christ's death to the forgiveness of sin. What I am saying
now does not include all that is implied in that relation; but see in
it what I have just put before you, and you will realize that I am not
talking in mere morbid terms, nor in those of theology except so far as
it is the theology of life. Long as men are willingly in their
sin--which means selfishness in all its deadly forms--can we wonder at
the unbelief portrayed on that canvas? Can we marvel why the Christ is
still despised and rejected?
It may be asked, and justly, what are the professed followers of Christ
doing to convince men of their need of Him as their Saviour; to
convince them by lives that are the evidence of triumph over sin? What
are Christian people, what are the Churches doing to fight down the
wrongs, the hurtful conditions, the curse-centres that degrade men,
keep them ignorant, and as by a satanic ingenuity hide the real Christ
from those who most need to find Him, and are the least able to oppose
the things that make Him so misunderstood and even unknown? How far
are we responsible, not only for the deliberately cultivated wickedness
of men who choose evil as their good, but for the indifference that
passes by only because our lives have never compelled its attention?
The Church is a Church but to the extent that it is the organic
expression of Christ's life, the visible Body of His soul. What, I ask
in all faithfulness, are we doing to make real and living to men the
presence of a Lord who is ever suffering in their sin and for it? The
artist was well inspired to give his picture a twentieth-century
setting. What an amount of grim Calvary there is in Glasgow every day
under the shadow of our Churches; ah! and behind the sanction of their
power. That is the word that should smite us; it is the word that must
be said--behind the sanction of their power.
The world would begin to see Christ, if we ourselves would see Him
crucified, not merely in the remote Palestine of the first century,
but, I say once more, in this Glasgow of to-day. In the foul slum, in
the haunt of shame, in the abode of crime and wretchedness, in the
places where children are robbed of their birthright before they know
what things mean; in the sweater's den, in the heartless side of
business competition, in the drink hells, in frivolous pursuits and
brainless amusements, in the insolence of wealth, and the sullenness of
poverty--in every place or thing where despite is done to the Divine
Humanity. Let us feel that whatever wrong is done to a single human
being, throughout the world-wide family of man, is literally done to
Jesus Christ, and we shall better understand that central Figure in the
artist's picture. Let us see Christ crucified in whatever evil is
done, in whatever good is left undone that we could do, and sin will
become to us not a term only, not a thing to be excused and explained
away, but a real and tremendous horror. We shall feel it to be what it
is, a stab struck at the living heart of Jesus Christ. As it has been
truly said: "Fellowship with Christ's sufferings will become less of a
mystical phrase, and more of a vital fact."
"To you is it nothing, all ye that pass by?" As I sat and looked at
that picture, this was the question that oppressed my thoughts. And
then the further question forced itself--Why, in so many cases, and to
all human seeming, is it just that--nothing? It is not enough to talk
of sin, and unbelief, and indifference, outside our life: they are real
enough, but do they suggest no responsibility on our part? Let it be a
call to prayer, an incentive to unceasing watchfulness lest one should
be passing by because there is nothing in us which constrains him, or
persuades her, to look and be saved, to look and live.
I said at the opening of this address that I would tell you later why I
include it in this series. I am not sure that I can keep my word.
What has been said will glance from your mind unless you have, like
Luther, and for the same reason, wrestled with the question: "How shall
a man be just with God?" But assuming that as yet this is outside your
experience, still you know the difference between what may but
arbitrarily be called sin, and sin that is what it is called. Believe
me when I say that the first, and worst, and nearest of all problems
for each man of us, and for societies, is the fact of sin; and that
with it no one deals, or can deal, save Him upon whom the chastisement
of our peace was laid, and with whose stripes we are healed. What is
the exact relation between the death of Christ and the forgiveness of
sin no one can tell us; but that there is a relation charged with
redeeming power is not a theory about Christianity--it is Christianity.
I read some time ago that a "Van Missioner," who was preaching
Unitarianism in the villages of Hampshire, found himself at one of them
interrupted by a number of farm labourers, who began to sing--
"What can wash away my sin?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus!
What can make me whole again?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.
It washes white as snow,
No other fount I know."
To the modern enlightenment which patronizes Jesus as a teacher and
rejects Christ as a Saviour, the theology, or sentiment, in these lines
is not so much crude as grotesque. At the best it is but curiously
reminiscent of the ignorance of a by-gone day. Doubtless this
well-meaning man had much to say worth hearing; but he was talking in
the name of religion, and to these villagers there was in it the lack
of the one thing, which is the lack of all. Theology apart, these
simple folk found in these crude lines the heart of saving truth. It
is my conviction that they were right. In this conviction I live, and
in it, by God's grace, I trust I may die and live again.
"I do not despise Jesus: with all that is best in me do I reverence Him
as one of the world's supreme teachers; but I cannot regard Him as more
than that," said a friend to me after reading over the manuscript of
this address. "And yet," he added quietly, "if there is anything in
Christianity which distinguishes it from any other great religion, it
must be near to the place you have been trying to get at."
'WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED?'
"What must I do to be saved?"--Acts xvi. 30.
"If any man will do his will, he shall know."--St. John vii. 17.
IX
'WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED?'
"When I was well into my teens," said a very intelligent woman to me
some time ago, "and for long after I had left them, I listened to
preachers and preaching; and such powers as I had I put into my
listening, for I wanted to get at something I could hold for sure and
real in the promises of religion. I was told Sunday by Sunday to
believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, to trust in Him, and commit to His
keeping my soul's welfare. And as far as I knew what belief meant I
believed; and tried to persuade myself that I was trusting Christ. But
I was not conscious that it made any real difference in my life; that
it gave me anything I had not before. Hence I gradually came to the
conclusion that either the preachers could not tell me what it was on
which I had specifically to lay hold, or it was useless for me to
prosecute my attempt to grasp it."
This woman said what many think, who are as yet within listening
distance of our pulpits. They want to understand what they must do and
believe, to lay hold of that which can make a difference in their life;
which can find in it, or bring into it, something that answers in very
truth to what the Bible calls "the power of God unto salvation."
It is, surely, a reasonable thing to ask. As religious teachers we can
have no right to plead with people to believe what we are not prepared
to help them to understand. Some of you may have reason, as you think,
to endorse this woman's testimony as a fair statement of your own
experience. Can I help you? Most gladly will I do so if I can.
One thing should be said, as I come closer to the attempt. If you are
really anxious to find help, guard against mistaken impressions of what
that help should be, or can be. In religion, as in all the deeper
places of human life, one great teacher is experience; and you can
neither anticipate nor rush experience. A mother says in answer to
certain questions of her child: "Wait until you are older and you will
find out." That, to the child, is no answer at all; but, while the
child is a child, it is the only answer there is.
Divine truth is infallible; but, as it has often been pointed out,
there is no human infallible apprehension of divine truth. We have to
admit that there may be, and indeed must be, many phases and aspects of
saving truth which we cannot comprehend. There are others, again, of
which we get only distant and fugitive glimpses as we study the Word of
God. But we shall also admit, that these higher reaches of truth are
not those alone on which our faith is called to repose. It may seem to
many of you, that in my treatment of the subject now before us, I
overlook much that is essential to the Christian doctrine of salvation.
I may even seem to eliminate the supernatural element from it. A
little thought, however, should correct the latter impression. In
passing I have only to say, that I am not trying to exhaust this theme,
but simply to give it a setting which, I venture to think, is worth
consideration.
"What must I do to be saved?"--a question which may be put in two very
different states of moral being. It may be asked in a temper merely
curious and academic; or it may, as in the case of the text, voice a
profound sense of need. If we would be saved, we must realize that we
need to be saved. It was when the prodigal "came to himself" that he
said: "I will arise and go to my father."
We are to be saved from what? and into what are we to be saved? In
other words, not only must old things pass away, but all things must
become new. From what, I repeat, are we to be saved? There is but one
answer to the question: We are to be saved from sin by being delivered
from the power of evil; and sin is the wilful assertion of our
self-will against the holy will of God. The sense of sin may vary in
different people; it may vary with the moods of the same personal
experience. There are people who appear to be quite callous about the
evil within them and the evil they do. But just as our moral nature is
educated, just as we grow in sympathy with the divine will, do we
become increasingly sensitive to the distance there is between what we
are, and do, and the holiness of Him who is a consuming fire. We feel
that the Apostle was neither morbid, nor did he exaggerate the actual
situation when he cried: "O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver
me from the body of this death?"
It has been said that the "only way to be saved from sin is to cease to
sin." And it is true that a man cannot, at the same time, sin in any
given direction, and cease from that sin. But it is also true that he
may cease from sin in the sense of not doing certain things, and yet be
the greater sinner in the sight of God, because of the motive which
acts as his deterrent or restraining force. I have seen men repent of
their sin, as the process was called, when I have had no faith in it
whatever. They were not repenting of their sin, but lamenting the cost
of its indulgence.
We must do more than cease to do evil things only because evil has its
price; we must learn to do well by learning to love all that is meant
by well. There is no escape from evil except through love of good.
The Christian salvation, which means the saving of the whole self-hood
of man, is a positive thing from its inception into its endless
development. Where it is repression it is that there may be
expression. This, I imagine, is what Robert L. Stevenson must have
meant when he said "We are not damned for doing wrong, but for not
doing right." Christ, he contends, "would never hear of negative
morality; 'thou shalt' was ever His word, with which He superseded,
'thou shalt not.'" According to Stevenson--I do not say he is right,
but I do quote his words as worth attention--we are not damned so much
for yielding to evil, as for not getting into our life its oppositive
virtue; some content vital enough to cast out the evil, and to keep it
out. To go on fighting some besetting sin is only to repeat, for the
most part, an experience many of us know but too well. It almost
invariably ends one way. In weariness and despair we ask: "Why should
we war with evil? It is more than our test, it is our fate; let us
take what sweet we can before it becomes all bitter." Which is but
another way of saying: "Evil, be thou my good."
Mark well, then, our next step. It is not enough to tell us that we
must conquer the wrong by doing the right. The question is this: Is
there any power, anything in what is called saving grace, which is
adequate to the struggle on our part, and which appropriated can make
us, to use the Apostle's description, "more than conquerors"?
There is; and I will try, first, to tell you what it is, and, secondly,
how we may realize it. It is--call it by what name we may for the
moment--that which casts out the mean, the ignoble, and the selfish, by
filling out life with the great, the noble, and the unselfish. It is,
in a word, the salvation which means the "highest character and
blessedness, which we, individually and collectively, are capable of
reaching and realizing." Let us, then, call it what it is--the power
of God unto salvation. And how are we to get it into our possession?
The answer is, it needs no getting in. Potentially it is there. "The
kingdom of God is within you," says Jesus, and it is ours to bring it
out in all its actual reality. It is the greater which includes the
less, of the gracious possessions God has put in our being, and of
which we know so little because we do not work these inward mines:
"Work out your own salvation, for it is God that worketh in you."
Some one makes a great inventor say: "Anybody might have done it, but
the secret came to me." Do you believe the first part of this
statement? Would you hold me true in saying that anybody might have
anticipated the discovery of wireless telegraphy? There are times when
the world appears to halt for want of some new thing, or for want of
some one to put new meaning into the old. And when the fulness of time
has come, the secret, which has been sleeping through centuries of men,
awakes in a man. He is the chosen of Providence to deliver unto us
that which he also has received.
What is true of a few in the endowment of what we call genius, may be
true of us all in the power of God unto salvation. When we were "made
in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth," the
Maker of us all put a part of Himself into the mysterious substance.
"Let each man," says Browning, "think himself a thought, an act, a
breath of God." There is evil in our nature; but evil can mar us only
so far as we allow it to become sin. It is in victory over evil that
we find character and make. There is evil in our nature, but there is
also a germ of God which He can touch into immortality and glorify with
the very splendour of His own image and being. When that germ is
quickened into life, we are, in the language of theology, converted; as
it develops and becomes the more life and the fuller, we are, in the
same language, sanctified and made meet for the Master's use.
Is there anything mysterious in this; anything we may not understand?
Christ did not think so, if we may judge from His conversation with
Nicodemus. "Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again."
Our Lord, if I understand Him aright, tells this master of Israel that
there is nothing more wonderful about this new birth than there is
about a new affection or a new love. And what cannot love do? No one
enters our life except through love. They may influence it profoundly,
but that of itself gives no admittance to the heart. What, I ask
again, cannot love do? Have we never known lives changed, and indeed
transformed by a new affection? I have seen love work miracles; and so
far from not believing in such miracles within their sphere, I believe
in nothing else. But does that which wakes love put it there? Is some
new thing added to life? Rather let us say that it is life coming to
its own; just finding what was already there. This may be what the
Psalmist means when he speaks of deep calling to deep. The deep in man
answers to the deep of attraction which appeals to it. If man was
conceived in the image of God, then God is immanent in man. This is
not to say that this immanence is equal to, or implies the whole
content of what is known as Christian salvation. It is true that the
"eye and the brain must be there before the light can be perceived or
any object interpreted." But it has been pointed out with equal truth
that the "eye would be useless did not the light come to it, and that
the brain would have nothing to work on, were not objects from without
brought for our perception." [1] Which means that immanence alone
would be powerless apart from some transcendent influence. Unless this
be so, what are we to say of the multitudes which sit in darkness and
the shadow of death? Our salvation is in the answer of the life
immanent to the life transcendent, and the connecting and combining
power is the Holy Spirit.
But what, in the next place, is our part in this matter? How is this
power to come? How, to use a better term, are we to realize it? Have
we to wait for something, or have we to do something to make it a real
experience?
A youth, let us say, or a girl, is beginning to learn music, to play
the violin or the piano. At first it is drudgery, and its immediate
results are a trial unto all that are in the house. The parent or
teacher says: "Persevere, obey instructions, and as you pass through
routine into the soul, the task will soon be lost in the pleasure."
The beginner may not believe it; but granted the facility is there, and
determination to bend to the task of learning, and the reward comes.
That which is within is brought out, and by the only way it can be
brought out: "Stir up the gift that is in thee."