Verses 1-9
Chapter 1
Prayer
Almighty God, thou hast great charges against us, and we have no answer to the accusation which thou dost make. We are rebels and hard of heart. Though thou hast left our Zion desolate, and burned our cities with fire, the spirit of unbelief is still triumphant within us. Behold it is not in thy thunder and lightning to touch this inner mischief: thou canst not bring us to thyself by punishment: hell saith "It is not in me to save." Therefore hast thou come to us by another and better way, even by the way of redeeming love, by the sacred way of the cross, and of the blood of Jesus Christ, thy Son, and of all the ministry which is embodied in his sweet name.
Thou dost love the world: the world is baptized with tears from heaven, thine heart doth go out after the world, and thou dost yearn to find it. It is thy world, thou dost not cast it off because of its sins, thou dost the rather draw nearer to it with some fonder love. There is joy in the presence of thine angels over a repentant world more than over all the firmament of the unfallen stars. Thou dost cause all wrath to praise thee, and out of sin, as out of a root, wilt thou bring some good that we cannot now foretell. God is all in all to thy power there is no limit, thy mercy endureth for ever, thy compassions are newer than the morning, softer and brighter than the dew. Thy mercies fail not, and the night is written all over with the stars of thy promises. Thou art a great God ana righteous and in thee is no love of sin thou dost hate it with a perfect hatred, and yet toward the sinner thou dost come out of thy pavilion of eternity with all utterances of love and proofs of mercy, and thy cry is towards the children of men.
Give us understanding of these things, we humbly pray thee, that we may thus be led up to the mystery of the cross. In the cross thou hast given thy last and highest proof of love. Last of all thou didst send thy Son: thou hast none other now to send, all other messengers are dumb after the utterance of the eloquence of his love. May we know that the cross was set up for sin, not for our sin only, but for the sin of the whole world, and therefore is as manifold in its mystery as is the sin of all the ages. We rejoice that the way to the cross is open: thou hast set back the gate, thou hast written thy welcomes upon the cross itself, and thou wilt forgive all who pray for pardon. For that sweet word we bless thee: it conquers death, it fills up the void of the grave, it brings the light about us when sevenfold night would distress us with its darkness. Open thou the gate of heaven daily, and say unto each of us, "Thy sins, which are many, are all forgiven thee." This forgiveness we have in Christ, and through Christ and for Christ's sake alone, and because he ever liveth to make intercession for us, we shall be saved to the uttermost.
Thou knowest our heart's complaint, the distress of our life is not hidden from thee, the sighing of our spirit is heard in heaven: have mercy upon us, O God, yea, have mercy upon us, so that where sin aboundeth, grace may much more abound, where accusation doth pierce the heart, there may be a great healing and a perfect comforting of grace. Let thy truth shine upon the understanding, let thy love speak daily to the heart, let all the comforting of thy blessed angels be ministered unto us mile by mile of life's dreary walk, and at the last may we find the beginning, may death be but another phase of life, and as we sink below the horizon of time, may it be to rise upon the infinite horizon of eternity.
Speak comfortably unto us, for we are but bruised reeds; thunder not against us with thy great power or thou wilt utterly take us away; urge not against us thy strength, for we are so weak, but comfort us, lure us, draw us to thyself, with the cords of love and with the bands of a man, and may we, thus treated as feeble creatures and sinners divested of strength, find our rest in the heart of God.
Bless the friends who are now at home in this church bless the stranger within our gates, regard the mocking man and subdue him into reverence, disabuse the prejudiced mind and bring it into holy attention to the spirit of the sanctuary. Release those who are burdened and heavy laden because of tormenting recollections and oppressive accusations. Grant unto us all the spirit of faith, the desire to see more deeply into thy truth, and whilst we are waiting may we know this to be none other than one of the days of the Son of man upon the earth, bright with heaven's own light, glad with music falling from the upper spheres, to make us know the meaning and the mystery of perfect joy. Amen.
1. The former treatise [ λογος , word or discourse] have I made, O Theophilus [ Luk 1:3 ] of all that Jesus began both to do and teach [ Luk 24:19 ].
2. Until the day in which he was taken up, after that he through the Holy Ghost had given commandments unto the apostles whom he had chosen:
3. To whom also he shewed himself alive after his passion [literally, after he had suffered] by many infallible [there is no word in the Greek answering to infallible] proofs, being seen of them forty days [the only passage which gives the time between the Resurrection and the Ascension] and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God [the whole Christian dispensation]:
4. And, being assembled together with them, commanded them that they should not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father, which, saith he, ye have heard of me.
5. For John truly baptized with water; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence.
6. When they therefore were come together, they asked of him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel? [More literally, Art thou restoring?]
7. And he said unto them, It is not for you [your part] to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power [appointed by his own authority].
8. But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me [the keynote of the whole book] both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.
9. And when he had spoken these things, while they beheld, he was taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight [a circumstance not recorded by Matthew or John].
The Beginning of Apostolicity
IT is supposed that the man who wrote this record of the Acts of the Apostles was the author of the third gospel Luke. It would appear as if the gospel and this record also were made rather as private memoranda than written as public documents. This would seem to be addressed to one man for his particular instruction in Christian doctrine and movement. It is but another proof that this is God's way of making himself known to the children of men. He speaks to individuals. He does not address the great seething throng, but he calls a man aside and puts the mystery of the divine purpose into that man's heart, and from an individual centre there goes out a glowing warmth, that fills the whole earth with its gracious ardour. God made Adam, God called Abram, God selected Mary to be the virgin-mother; all through and through history God has called out the particular individual, the one person, and has started his kingdom oftentimes from very small and insignificant beginnings.
But great letters cannot be kept private: where there is anything in a letter it burns its way out. There are some letters that must be published, though they were never meant for publication. They exercise a secret and wonderful power over the receiver, and he says the whole world must be taken into this confidence, for though I have received the communication as addressed to myself alone, it is so good that to keep it back from others would amount to practical felony.
We cannot hide gospels permanently. What is in a letter determines that letter's fortune: what is in a book and not what is said about a book, determines the book's fate in the long run. Though it may be a hundred years, yet it will come up and assert its proper place in literature and command its proper degree of the world's attention. Luke wrote a long account of Christ's ministry to Theophilus, and the whole world has Luke's narrative in its hand today! So Luke undertook further to write the Acts of the Apostles to this same man (beloved of God, and loving God as his name implies), and today the Acts of the Apostles is a document read in every school-house, perused by all students of church history, and in the Acts of the Apostles are the beginnings and the fundamentals of some of the most extraordinary and influential commonwealths that have ever claimed the attention and the homage of the human intellect and the Christian heart.
With a hand so skilful as not to require the touch of mechanical education, Luke divides the great life into two expressive and all-inclusive portions. He says he has written of all that Jesus began both to do and teach. Jesus Christ's life is divided into action and doctrine, miracles and truth, marvellous signs and more marvellous revelations. All Christian life admits of precisely the same division. If we do, but fail to teach, we shall oftentimes be but barren and unanswerable puzzles to those who look on. If we teach, and fail to do, we may bring upon ourselves the just imputation of being theorists and fanatics, at the best devotional sentimentalists who live in sighing and aspiration and wordy doctrine, but have no bone, sinew or force wherewith to encounter all the challenges of this earthly existence.
And yet Jesus Christ only began. God always begins. There can be no ending in anything that God does. Though it may appear to end in itself, yet itself is related to some other and broader self, and so the continuity rolls on, in ever-augmenting accretion and proportion, so that all God's creations are but beginnings. There are no conclusions in truth; there may be resting-places, a peculiar and practical punctuation of statement, so that we may take time to turn into beneficent action that which has been stated in revealing terms but the Book is never closed, God's hand never wrote the word finis: though the Bible be, in point of paper and print, a measurable quantity, it opens a revelation that recedes from us as the horizon recedes from the hands that would grasp it.
So then life becomes a new thing from this standpoint. Men talk about formulating Christian truth: from my point of view you might as well attempt to formulate the light, or to formulate the atmosphere. You cannot formulate, with an adequacy, or any approach to exhaustiveness, quantities that are infinite. There are those who tell us that we have organized geology, organized botany, organized astronomy, therefore why not have organized theology? The answer is simple, sufficient and final, because geology, botany, astronomy, though great and dazzling terms in many of their phases and applications, represent finite and therefore measurable quantities, whereas, theology represents infinite and therefore immeasurable realities. We may have fifty sciences of theology: we can have but one science of botany, geology, or astronomy: it will in every instance grow up into a perfect statement, because all the facts are ascertainable, and all the results are stateable in words but we have a Roman Catholic theology, and a Protestant theology, and Protestant theology is divided into a hundred sub-theologies, showing us that men have been attempting the impossible, and showing us too, thank God, that we are not saved by any theory of truth, but by the truth itself, not by any theory of atonement only, but by the mystery of the cross, realisable only by the penitent and believing heart.
We can begin a theology. In beginning a theology we shall do well, provided that we never mistake beginnings for endings. To have to deal with infinite quantities should challenge our noblest intellectual ambition, and yet should chasten us with the severest moral discipline. We are permitted to suggest, to read together, to meet for common study and fellowship in divine inquiry, and whilst we are communing with one another and with the common Spirit of truth, our hearts will burn within us, and we shall know that we have reached the truth by the degree of sacred ardour which glows in our thankful hearts. As to verbal statements, we may never agree: one man wants one set of words, and another man says the words must all be enlarged, elevated, and glorified; such poor syllables as these will never do. The man who talks so is perfectly right; words have not yet overtaken thoughts; the action of the mind is infinitely in advance of the action or the power of the tongue. We know always more than we can tell: when we have uttered the completest sentence which it is in our power to formulate and express, we know that back in the mind and the heart are things we have not put into that sentence, because no medium of communication is exquisite enough, in its function and power, to express what we want to say in exhaustion of the meaning which makes our hearts glow.
So then we may well be charitable one with another. If Jesus only began both to do and to teach, we can only do the same, and according to the measure of inspiration he may grant. I enlarge this word began in this sentence into more than its merely mechanical meaning: perchance by somewhat of an accommodation I may seize the suggestion of this wondrous word, and if I happen to draw some of you from stubborn conclusions, so as to give you to see they are only feeble beginnings, though I may have impoverished you on the one hand, I ought to have stimulated you on the other. No man has the whole truth. The Book itself is not a full grown garden, it is a seed-house, a storehouse of roots. We have to plant the root, sow the seed, and look upon the wondrous issue of fruitfulness and beauty. "If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing."
We are all beginners. The old grey-haired student lifts up his wrinkled brow from the glowing page and says, "I have hardly begun it." Who then are we, fifty years his juniors, who should start up and say, "We have reached the goal, there is nothing beyond, we have put out our staff and struck the final granite?" Let us "grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ." Let us not count ourselves to have attained, or to be already perfect, but let us press forward towards the mark for the prize of our high calling of God in Christ Jesus, and ever say, humbly, lovingly, and hopefully, "God hath yet more light and truth to bring forth from his holy word."
Notice here that though Jesus Christ both began to do and to teach, he made his beginnings have all the force and urgency of complete endings. He gave commandments unto the apostles whom he had chosen: he did not offer mere suggestions never did Jesus Christ say, "I offer these instructions for your consideration: you can adopt or reject them according to your own finding on further inquiry. Jesus Christ was never less than royal, never did the Son of Man speak ambiguously or incompletely; he spoke finally, royally, commandingly. "A new commandment give I unto you." "Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you." He commanded the apostles. The Lord cannot merely suggest; Paul will come with his pathetic suggestions, begging the Lord's pardon if he be wrong in making them but in Christ's speech there are no parentheses, they shoot right out of mind and heart and mouth with the completeness and finality of positive injunctions.
We are then the slaves of the Lord Jesus Christ. We are none other than the Lord's captives and therefore the Lord's freemen. We do not make the commandments, we obey them we are not as those who walk under the loose rule of mere license, we are men who are bound to a centre, kept within the limits of a specific moral gravitation, and we have come to know this mystery, that there is no liberty without law, that life without law is chaos, that life with law, loyally accepted and obediently realised, becomes a continual stewardship, a holy sacrifice, an everlasting beginning, passing on to increasing satisfactions, as the capacity of the soul enlarges.
With the skill of a scribe well instructed, Luke puts into his third verse a whole library of Christian evidence, so that Theophilus his correspondent may be under no mistake as to what is called amongst us, the missing link. In the third verse Luke says, "Jesus Christ showed himself alive after his passion, to his apostles, by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God." In Luke's mind there was no doubt about the Resurrection: Luke was not a man who had a paid cause to subserve; Luke was not entrusted with a brief for the purpose of defending a case about which he had some latent doubt or difficulty. Luke behaves himself like a frank-hearted and honest man who has a very simple statement to make, and who makes it on the authority of his own observation, consciousness and experience.
The ring of honesty is in that third verse. Beautifully does it bring in the subject of our Lord's speech to the apostles, "speaking," says Luke, "of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God." Jesus Christ had but one subject. You never had to ask what Jesus Christ was preaching about: he was not a preacher with a million texts or a million subjects: he was a preacher with one theme, one utterance, but like the one sky, an eternal variety. We have been accustomed through our studies of the gospel according to Matthew, to the expression, "the kingdom of God." We ourselves could have supplied that ending to this verse of the record. Jesus Christ never talked about anything less than a kingdom, a kingdom that rose above all other empires and masteries and enclosed and included them in its infinite sovereignty.
What Jesus Christ said to the disciples or apostles in those farewell days we must learn from the apostles themselves. Let us understand that apostolic life is but a continuation of the Lord's own life. If the apostles are faithful men, their word will be Christ's word: he promised to tell them more; said he upon one memorable occasion, "I have many things to say to you, but ye cannot bear them now." He carried the burden till they were old enough and strong enough to take it up. He always has some larger burden to transfer to us, but he will never transfer it till our strength be equal to the occasion. Apostolic life will show us more of Christ's meaning than could be Conveyed within the limits of the four gospels. This gives you a new standard by which to value the apostolic writings. Let us not suppose that apostolic writings are mere individual speculations, or personal comments upon a great mystery. Apostolic literature is as much a revelation as is the evangelic biography of the Lord himself.
When the disciples or apostles were assembled together, they came to Jesus and said, "Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?" They never could get away from their little "kingdom" any more than Christ could detach himself from his great royalty. They were all thinking about "kingdoms," but the kingdom of the one was a little vanishing splendour, the kingdom of the other was the whole universe and purpose of God. So we often find ourselves talking Christian language without the full Christian meaning. Sometimes, indeed, the terms we use are identical with the terms Jesus Christ used, and yet, though the terms are identical, the meanings are separated by the diameter of infinity. Jesus Christ said "bread" we also said "bread," but we did not mean what he meant by that suggestive word. Jesus Christ said "kingdom," and we said "kingdom" in the letter we were identical, but our kingdom, like ourselves, was a little thing, marked by extreme frailty, liable at any moment to be blown out like a light in a strong wind. When he said "kingdom" he laid the foundations of it in eternity and lifted up its towers and pinnacles into all the breadth and security of Heaven.
Do let us understand that the same words have not always the same meanings, and further, do let us know that the larger meaning is always the right one. A narrow meaning has always been attempted to be forced upon Christ's words, but the meaning has burst the vessel and would not be contained in such unworthy, because such inadequate, limits. Herein is the function of the religious imagination, always to be seeing the broader spaces, the farther lights, the grander possibilities always to be scourging language, because it is not equal to the expression of the sublimest thought and feeling.
Yet Jesus Christ chided the apostles very gently. He told them in his very promise that they were as yet incomplete men. He said, "Ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you." They were unbaptised in soul: the symbolic water had done its initial work, but they stood there without the sacred fire, the inspiring afflatus, the presence of Heaven in the heart. May it not be so with some of us? We have been the subjects of but one baptism: we are within the Christian circle nominally, and it may be intellectually, but have we received power from on high because we have received the Holy Ghost? What is the Holy Ghost? To that inquiry there is no answer but in the deepest feeling and the sublimest consciousness of the heart. Know that you have the Holy Ghost, not by your narrowness or dogmatism or pertinacity or selfishness, but by your glowing love, your redeeming hopefulness, your continual charity, your indestructible patience. Into what baptism have we been baptised? We have not received the Holy Ghost if we are conducting a narrow ministry. Jesus Christ said so much when he added, "Ye shall be witnesses both in Jerusalem and in all Judea and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts of the earth." No power but the Holy Ghost could take a man through those regions. The man who has been baptized with water only will choose his own parish and sphere of labour and circle of operation, but the man in whom is the burning of the Holy Ghost will say with Wesley, "My parish is the world," and will be constrained by the love of Christ to go out everywhere. The ministry that is called by the name of Christ will be a dwindling quantity in the world's education, except in proportion as it is inspired by God the Holy Ghost.
Have we not grieved the Spirit, have we not in some instances even quenched the Spirit, is there not now ruling in our hearts the dark spirit of fear instead of the bright and joyous spirit of adoption and of hope? You will know whether you are inspired or not by the vastness of your labours. If we are waiting until we be properly equipped and duly sent out, then know that we have been baptized with ice. If we go out with the haste of men who say, "The world is on fire, and the conflagration must be extinguished," perhaps that grand notion of the soul may have been divinely started.
We now pass from the visible ministry of Christ to the invisible ministry of the Holy Ghost. Jesus Christ spake his last words to the apostles, and a cloud received him out of their sight. Nothing more only out of sight. Not out of hearing, not out of sympathy, not out of the region of direct and ever helpful ministry only out of sight. We are not out of his sight. We want sometimes to see him, but he says to us, "Because ye have seen me, ye have believed: blessed are they which have not seen and yet have believed." "Whom having not seen, we love." We shall one day see him as he is. He is out of our sight: we are not out of his memory!
Chapter 2
Prayer
Almighty God, as men run into a fortress for safety, so would we run;'nto thine house, that we may find rest and peace and full security. We have said, Surely the sanctuary will cover us, and the pavilion of God will afford us safety upon the earth. Thou wilt not disappoint us, in thine house shall we find fulness of bread, and great gladness shall be the portion of the hearts that put their trust in thee. Thou wilt do more and more for us, according to the sharpness of our pain and the keenness and urgency of our want. Thou dost call upon us for larger prayers, because our supplications have not yet touched the infinite possibilities of thy replies. Thou givest more grace, thou dost astonish by larger revelations of shining light. We cannot measure the height of thy heaven, it rises as we approach it: the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee, and yet in answer to our prayer thou wilt open the windows of heaven and pour out a blessing upon us, until we have not room enough to receive it. Encourage us by all that is tenderest in thine oath, and in thy promise, to come to thee in the name of Jesus Christ our Saviour, that we may ask large blessings at thine hand. We have not because we ask not: we are not straitened in God, we are straitened in ourselves. We come therefore to pray for such self-enlargement as shall enable us to pray more boldly and importunately, so that through Jesus Christ the Sacrifice and the Priest, we may receive all that our heart needs for its comfort and sanctification.
We have come to praise thee, we have brought with us the trumpet of thankfulness, and the soul of gratitude glows within us, and words are too few and too feeble to express all the emotion of our love. Who but thyself has kept our reasoning power in all its fulness and power of working what hand but thine own has spread our table in the wilderness and filled our cup to overflow, and into what heart but thine could have entered such thoughts of daily redemption, continual pardon and incessant hopefulness? This is the Lord's doing: we will magnify thy name, we will lift up our heart and voice in loud psalm, and praise thee because of thy tender love.
We do not live in ourselves, we live in God, and in God we move and have our being. Hence our prayer to thee, our daily cry, our perpetual hope, and the assurance which makes our hearts glad, that we shall one day be free from all bondage and enter into the joy of spiritual liberty. We have great hopes in our heart; we are not without large store of promise, and sometimes the promise takes fire and burns upward toward thyself in glowing and daring aspiration, so that our prayer becomes a violence, thundering upon the gates of thy kingdom as if we would take the kingdom of heaven by storm. Is not this Christ's encouragement to our heart has he not asked us to seek and knock and pursue our prayer to its utmost bound and desire? We take our stand upon his word, his oath is the secret of our inspiration and of the gravity and vastness of our prayer.
We would have thy Spirit daily in us, a light that is never a burden, an atmosphere that never wearies the heart. We would have his light, his warmth, his comfort and his love, we would be led by him into all truth as into great landscapes rich with harvests, as into infinite palaces stored with all treasure, as into the night when all its stars are ablaze, and the whole sky is alive with planetary fire.
Lead us into all truth. To this end, destroy all prejudice, all misconception, all false ideas, all sectarian notions; emancipate the soul and lead it into all the width and glory of thy liberty. We meet at the Cross where there is hope for the sinning soul. The cross was set up for sinners: but for sin, the cross has no meaning: it is thy great answer to our great shame. Pardon us every one. Let the joy of forgiveness enter into every heart like a singing angel newly sent from the glad heavens. May we all feel that thy forgiving word has been spoken and has taken effect in our guilty hearts.
Help us to do our day's work with both hands, willingly and earnestly, and with all the joyful hopefulness of those who work for a good Master. May we be covetous of the light, may we fear lest one moment should fail us so when the whole day is gone, may every moment bear witness to our fidelity. Help us to be gentle to one another, noble-minded, charitable, all-hopeful, all-forgiving. Show us that we are not judges but sinners, that we have fellowship one with another in the common infirmities of the race, and should bear, in Christ's name and for Christ's sake, one another's burdens.
We pray for one another, and whilst we pray do thou answer, and by a strange burning in the heart may we know that thy reply has found its way to our spirits. Comfort us wherein we need cheer, send unexpected light through gloom that is a trouble, come to us in the night season and speak hopefully of the coming day. In the seed time, tell us that that which we sow, cannot quicken except it die, interpret all mysteries to us lest they turn into temptations and sorrows, give us thy truth so far as we may be able to bear it, and spare us from all weight that would distress and exhaust our little strength. Love us all the day, gather us to thyself all the night, make our houses homes, our dwelling-places the chief attraction of our heart.
We bless thee for the house, for all its sanctities and memories and holy uses: help us so to live at home that men shall expect us there and miss us when our place is vacant. If any have singular sorrow for which there is no speech that may be uttered in public, the Lord send comfort, tender messages to those who bear the smart, they that too may be healed in secret. Upon whom great shocks of surprise have fallen because of sorrow uncalculated, and pains that have been unimagined, let thy blessing come, a healing solace, a new, tender, and complete comfort. The Lord hear us, for Christ's sake. Amen.
The Beginning of Apostolicity
( Continuation. )
WHO could have told beforehand that Jesus Christ would be the first to go? It did not enter our imagination that he would leave us behind, and that he himself would pass away from all the anxiety and distress of Christian service. Our conception would rather have been that he would be the very last to go: he would remain until the last little lamb had been safely enfolded: he would keep down within the sphere of earth and time until the very last weary pilgrim entered into heavenly rest. Instead of this, he himself was the first to leave! Not only so, he told his disciples that by leaving first, he was actually considering their advantage and promoting their usefulness! "It is expedient for you that I go away. I do not go away for mere personal convenience; in going away I am not consulting my own ease or comfort: now, as heretofore, and always, I am considering what is best for you. To remain with you would appear to be the loving course, but it would be in appearance only and not in reality. One day you will see clearly as I see now, that it is expedient for you that I go away.
Being about to go, the last interview between himself and the apostles took place. Last interviews are notably pathetic. The words that would be common on any other occasion acquire a new and significant accent amid the darkening shadows of a farewell interview. Little things that would not be noticed under ordinary circumstances, start up into unusual prominence and effect when we know that the interview will speedily close, and that all earthly and temporal fellowship will be at an end. We should always listen as if in a last interview. "What I say unto one, I say unto all watch. " We should never allow our mind to drop into inattentiveness, as if we should have plenty of opportunities for the purpose of hearing what now slips our ear. Every day should be the world's last day to us in this matter of spiritual attention. Every interview should be the final one with regard to the. operation of the spirit of charity in hearing what each other has to say. We lose so much through inattentiveness; we do not listen in the open common road as we listen in the death-chamber, when every whisper is as a revelation and every sign as an indication carrying with it special claims upon the attention of our love. We lose by unwatchfulness.
Jesus Christ is about to go how will he go? I delight to pause after asking this question, that I may think out for myself all possible replies to it. How will he go? He cannot be allowed to die: that would be a fatal disappointment to the attention which he has strained by every miracle and to the expectation he has excited by every accent of his eloquence. Dogs die: this Man must not die, or if he die he will contradict by one pitiful commonplace, all that was phenomenal and impressive in his life. How will he go? Luke tells us that he was "taken up." In other places we learn that he "ascended." He entered within the action of another gravitation, and instead of being bound to the earth by some centripetal force, he was lifted up as by a mightier law into his own place, and throned in the heavens as the Priest of creation. It is enough: the mind is satisfied by the grand action; nothing of discontent is left to trouble the imagination. Were I reading this upon a poet's page, I would applaud the poet for one of the finest conceptions that ever ennobled and glorified human fancy. He would have treated his hero well. With an infinite subtlety of power he would have answered all the demands of imagination in its most exacting mood.
Jesus Christ then "ascended," and in doing so, he but repeated in one final act all the miracles which had made his previous ministry illustrious. The act of ascension does not separate itself from any point on the long line of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. The ascension became so natural that we paid but little heed to it in its merely phenomenal aspect. We were not startled when we saw him begin to move upward: our education had all been tending in that direction; from the very beginning he had been ascending, so that when he took the final movement, it was but completing that which he had been continuing for years.
Our life should be an ascent! We should not be today where we were ten years ago. Not that we are to ascend by sharp steeps that attract the attention of mankind with somewhat of abruptness: there are ascents so gradual that they do not seem to be ascents at all, measured within any small compass of space or time. Yet looked at as from the beginning to the end, we see that the gradient has evermore lifted itself up by imperceptibleness of degree until the very next thing to do is to step into heaven! It is possible so to live that dying shall be but going home: thank God it is possible so to pray and live and serve as that dying shall be languishing into life. There shall be no. violent contrast between the life and the death, between now and hereafter, between spiritual experience upon earth, and spiritual experience in heaven. It shall be one and the same, and in its realization we shall enter into the mystery of divine fellowship. We are in our life preparing the manner of our death. Your death-day need not come upon you as a surprise such as shocks faith and distresses imagination or falsifies by heavy contradictions all that was most sacred and pathetic in hope. The judgment day, too, can be so anticipated as to become as one of the natural days of the common week! If we close our eyes and shut out wisdom at every entrance and betake ourselves to earthly occupations only, then all the comings of God for he comes in thousands of ways will be surprises that will shock and distress us.
You may know how you will die by knowing how you really live. If your life is a life of faith in the Son of God, a heroic, patient, gentle, pure, noble life, marked by, at all events, the desire to be Christ-like, then you shall "ascend." All that drops away from you will be the flesh and the bones, that have been a distress to you for many a day. Your Self your liberated spirit, shall "ascend." Whoever saw fire going downward? It is in fire to go up, to seek the parent sun out of which it came! We too, living, moving, and ever having our being in God shall not die as the dogs die, but rise to our fount and origin. We shall in very deed "rise with Christ."
If the final interview was pathetic to Christ, it was also pathetic to the disciples. They had their question to ask as certainly as he had his commandments to give. So they came to him with this old question, "Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?" Mark how after his resurrection, he had become "Lord," and the restorer of kingdoms. Everything rests upon the resurrection of Christ: "if Christ be not risen from the dead, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain." The great fabric of Christian faith stands upon one rock, the resurrection of Christ. No matter what he did, or what he taught, or what he appeared to be: if it was in the power of men to kill him in the flesh, and to bury him and keep him in the grave, all his protestations were lies, and all his promises were vanity. Hence, Luke insists that Jesus Christ "showed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs: "hence, all the succeeding apostolic writers insist that Jesus Christ "rose again from the dead," and hence all the great appeals which are made to our faith and our hope rest themselves upon the one rock of the resurrection. But the inquiry that was put to Christ in this instance was put to a man who had risen again, and the inquiry was this "Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?" There are times in history when everything seems to depend upon one man; there are crises which sum themselves up in the judgment of one thinker: we look to him, he carries the keys, he speaks the final word, and from him we expect the policy which alone can ennoble and save the life.
We learn from this inquiry how long-lingering, how all but ineradicable, is the influence of first impressions. The disciples had got it into their minds very early in their Christian thinking that this Man Christ Jesus had come to liberate the Jews from their servitude and oppression, and to give them back their lost kingdom. That was probably the very first idea they had about Jesus Christ and his purpose, and they never could get rid of it. What is so long-lived as prejudice? What is so difficult to get away from as the first impression we form of one another, of any policy, purpose, thought, or action? How difficult for the mind to forget a first name, how all but impossible to substitute the new address for the old, how difficult for the hand in January to write the new year the fingers seem to conspire to write again the familiar date. What we know by this common illustration, we may also know to be true of all higher intellectual and spiritual meditations and engagements. Therefore take care what impression you make upon the young mind about the Christian Sabbath, the Christian Book, the Christian Church, and the Christian idea in all its bearings. Who can wonder that some men hardly can open the Bible with sympathy or hopefulness, because they remember that in early days it was the task-book. Are there not those who quite dread the idea of going to church, because that action is associated in their mind with early impressions of gloom and dreariness and heaviness not to be borne? Was not the church in early days a dark place, and was not the minister a man gifted only with the one faculty of wearying those who paid attention to him; and was not the whole Sabbath a trouble and a burden? Had it been associated with light, music, gladness, joy, the memory of those early engagements would have gone right through all the whole compass of the life, and at the last the pilgrim would have said, "Open unto me the gates of righteousness: I will enter into them and will be glad."
The answer of Jesus Christ seems to be very keen and discouraging in its tone of chiding. Said he, "It is not for you to know the time or the seasons which the Father hath put in his own power." The words may be read in a tone of rebuke, but they were not spoken in that tone. You cannot report a tone hence it is possible to express the very words the speaker said and yet entirely to misrepresent him! Features can be photographed, but life will not submit to have itself taken by any artist, animate or inanimate. Jesus Christ spoke those words in a tone that was instructive, and he immediately followed those words of apparent rebuke with utterances of the largest and tenderest encouragement. The poet speaks of "soft rebukes in blessings ending" if there was any rebuke at all in those words, it was indeed a soft chiding, but there was no mistake about the compass and the emphasis of the blessing. The eighth verse says: "But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you." There is no gift equal to the gift of power. You may answer a man's question immediately, but unless you give him power you do but give him a meal for the passing hunger which will certainly return. When a man in distress comes to you, if instead of answering his immediate necessity, you could give him power to answer his own, you would bestow upon him the most precious of all treasures.
The gift of Christ to the church is a gift of POWER not intellectual power only, though that is not withheld: Jesus Christ has illumined our reason and sharpened every faculty of the mind, and blessed the church with penetrating insight but that is not the power referred to in this instance. Nor did he give merely social power to his church the power that is usually associated with the idea of kingdom, rule, and empire, and authority. What power then did he give? The power of holiness "after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you." Know yourselves to be powerful by the measure of your holiness, and contrariwise know yourselves to be weak, though your mind covers the whole register of intellectual possibility, if the supreme desire of the soul burn not with the ardour of God's own purity.
We have lost the Holy Ghost. We betake ourselves now to church questions and not to soul inquiries. The problem of today is a problem of ecclesiasticism, it is not a problem of redeeming and evangelizing the world. We are building structures, arranging mechanics, adapting means to ends, comparing ourselves with ourselves, instead of being carried away with the whirlwind of divine inspiration, and displaying what the world would call supreme madness in consecration and devotion of heart. Into what baptism have we been baptized? Where is the Holy Ghost? Where is the Ghost at all the Spirit, the Invisible, the Impalpable truth, the infinite Energy, the Force that has no shaping, because of its vastness, and no name because of its multitudinousness? A grand church, a learned church, a rich church these may be but contradictions in terms, but a holy church, an inspired church, a devoted church, a church with one heart, one aim, one speech of love why, she would go forth "fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners." The world can answer our argument, so at least as to confuse the listener, but it can have no reply to an unimpeachable purity.
The power which Jesus Christ gave to his disciples was a power that was to be used. When he puts the staff into my hand, he means me to walk with it; when he gives me opportunities, he means me to use them; when he entrusts me with the custody of time, it is that I may so use it as at last to secure his approval. So this power was to be used gradually "Ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria and unto the uttermost parts of the earth." Do not begin at the end: grow, little by little, often mayhap by imperceptible degrees, but see to it that your motion is constant It is constancy that surprises the world by its conquests. It is not some great brilliant dashing triumph that strikes consternation into the breasts of beholders, it is that subtle, quiet, imperceptible growth, that proceeds night and day, until a culmination is reached that surprises not by its violence but by its completeness and by the tenderness of its working.
The power was to be used enlargingly, from Jerusalem to Judea, to Samaria, to the uttermost parts of the earth, until there was no more ground to be covered, until, the men came back again to their own footprints! You go to the west: go on, farther and farther still, and presently you will find yourselves in the east again! God's universe is a gathering of circles: the stars are not in straight lines, there are no straight lines in God's universe! He moves himself in circles, time is a great cycle; the arch of the sky is the type and symbol of all things unseen.
This is our Christian mission, and nothing so enlarges and emboldens the mind as sympathy with Christ. There can be no little-minded Christians, or if there are, they are Christians in the very earliest stage of their learning, and therefore hardly to be distinguished as such. The Christian man cannot be a small-minded man: he brings within his view the whole horizon of space, and every throbbing pulse of time. Find a sectarian and you find no Christian; pick out a man who says the kingdom of heaven ends here and does not go over there, and he is a man who has stolen his position in the sanctuary; he does not hold it by right of divine gift or election.
All Christians are great men, great souls, great minds; all who are crucified with Christ see all men drawn to the cross. Christianity never bends the head downward towards little and dwindling spaces: it always says, "The world, the whole world, for Christ. Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature." If men would have their minds enlarged, ennobled, emboldened, inspired, they can only enjoy such mental enlargements and quickening by direct sympathy and fellowship with him who is the head of all things, who fills all things, who ascended that he might rule by a longer line and by a more comprehensive mastery.
Have we so learned Christ? Are we little, crippled, sect-loving are we bigoted, narrow in soul, lame in sympathy, prejudiced against other people? "If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing." Know that you are growing in grace when you are growing in charity. Know that you are right, when you are right in heart. A right head coupled with a wrong heart is capable of doing infinite mischief. When the heart is right, when the purpose is pure, when the love is simple and clear, it will keep the rest of the man in proper mood and gesture, and will direct him, not always with mechanical exactness, yet evermore with the most beneficent impulse, to a most beneficent end.
Jesus Christ's last word was about himself. "Ye shall be witnesses unto ME." What sublime audacity! What magnificent confidence! "Ye shall be witnesses unto me, not to one another ye shall be witnesses unto me, and I will sustain you in bearing testimony, I will send the Comforter, I will give you power, I will not leave you comfortless." The church has one subject, one King, one Lord, one thing to say that one thing is Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, and went out of the world to pray for his church and sustain his servants in all the stress of life and in all the anxiety of service.
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