EAN OF Poe 
 % 
  UUN ae t 926 
 
 
 
 
 Ley OGIOAL gue 
 
 iste, PRAISE LIers Was ees 
 Ross, Hugh Gordon. 
 Studies of the mind of Jesus 
 
 
 
Bihie it 
 7 : . : 
 
 
 
 Pan es in 
 ey Rx Tahoe oO 
 
= 
 ee 
 Siva 
 
 Bb 
 
 Le 
 
 oy ‘ 
 maker ao ea 
 
 
 

 
 in dee } 
 AY 
 a iy 
 Pie 
 
 bit ‘4 
 ‘ riey 
 e My ty 
 LA 
 
 } 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 
 
 Oban ce 
 
 Studies of the Mind of Tesi 
 
 BY 
 
 HUGH GORDON ARLOSS, M.A. 
 
 (ABERDEEN) 
 
 Minister of the First Congregational Church 
 Pittsfield, Massachusetts 
 
 Sometime Lecturer in Homiletics in 
 Hartford Theological Seminary 
 
 HA 
 
COPYRIGHTED 
 1926 
 Hugh Gordon Ross, M. A. 
 
 Press of the 
 Eagle Printing and Binding Company 
 Pittsfield, Mass. 
 1926 
 
This little book 
 is 
 
 DEDICATED 
 to all my friends in 
 
 St. ANDREW’S PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, JOHANNESBURG 
 St. ANDREW’S PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, CAPETOWN 
 PLyMouTH CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, SEATTLE, WASH. 
 First CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, PITTSFIELD, Mass. 
 
 to whom it has been 
 my privilege to 
 preach 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF JESUS 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2022 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 https://archive.org/details/studiesofmindofjOOross_0 
 
 om. 
 
SHoretoord 
 
 the Christian message, those in the city who 
 
 were not in the habit of attending any church, 
 we decided to hold a service every Sunday even- 
 ing, in a theatre. Almost from the first these 
 services proved, from the point of view of numbers, 
 highly successful. Many who attended them had 
 not been inside a church for years. The audiences 
 included some who were strangers to the New 
 Testament, and who knew little of the meaning of 
 the Gospel. But from week to week, through five 
 seasons, the interest was maintained and, according 
 to credible reports, much good accomplished 
 through such sermons as are offered to the public 
 in this book. 
 
 I am well aware that the authorities on the 
 science of homiletics will find much to criticise in 
 these pages. The nature of my audience demanded 
 the use of colloquialisms, familiarities and repeti- 
 tions that would be out of place in any ordinary 
 pulpit, and I have no hope that anyone deeply 
 versed in Christian ways of thinking will learn 
 anything here. At the same time, the sermons are 
 published with the thought that they may reach 
 and help such persons as those to whom they, 
 and many others like them, were originally 
 addressed. 
 
 S IVE YEARS AGO, in an effort to reach, with 
 
 HUGH GORDON ROSS 
 Pittsfield, Massachusetts 
 
sth ARY Ne n M3 pik Rid Ys Y , ay? di rhs ) shat a) ae 
 ‘ 4 ‘ Ay "e's 7 4 
 \ ‘ » } » x " " m9 aa. : oats We . i ae tet uw i 
 ‘ f i] i 
 
 _ 
 
 
 
 * | ty 
 : ace ‘ 
 lie wt " Y 
 4 ri d ) ¥ 
 AR PAT ut te 
 } co ay 
 { Fate i { 
 1 4 i 
 i 
 if 
 a 
 y i 
 , 
 i - 
 * ¢ 
 .% 
 F 
 , 
 t 
 ri 
 ny r 
 | 
 vAal 
 - 
 "\ 
 4 . 
 on ‘ 
 4 
 1 
 td i y 
 if 
 ch 
 aa 
 } Md 4 : 
 ? i ‘ ? 
 tid q 
 4 
 4 ¥ 
 it Mats niet. , 
 > A eg ; mF 
 
 rv Wi uu) 
 
 a 4 
 
 
 
Che Supreme Ceacher 
 
 ERY late one night, or rather, very early one 
 
 morning, Socrates,—one of the most famous 
 teachers in the history of the world,—was 
 lying in his bed asleep. He was roused by a 
 tremendous hammering upon his door, and 
 when he called to the person outside to enter, he saw 
 coming into his room a young Athenian friend of his 
 who was evidently full of excitement. Socrates asked 
 him what brought him to his house at that unearthly 
 hour of the day and he said, ““Haven’t you heard the 
 news?” “What news?” “Why,” he said, ““Protagoras 
 has come to town. Don’t you know that Protagoras 
 is one of the greatest teachers in the world? Don’t 
 you want to come and hear what he has to say? How 
 can you lie in your bed when a man like that is teach- 
 ing in the city? Get your clothes on and let’s go and 
 listen to him.’ And that young man would give 
 Socrates no peace and no rest until he got out of his 
 bed, put on his clothes and went with him to the 
 house where Protagoras was teaching. 
 
 As I have read that famous old story,—which you 
 will find in the beginning of the dialogue of Plato 
 which bears the name of ‘“‘Protagoras’—this has 
 passed through my mind:—What would happen if it 
 should become known in the middle of this approach- 
 ing night, that Jesus Christ of Nazareth, in the very 
 form and fashion that he wore in the days of His 
 
 
 
 page seven 
 
flesh, had arrived in this city, and was teaching in 
 one of our homes? What do you think would happen? 
 Of course, it is probably a little bold to answer for 
 other people; and yet I feel inclined to say that, if 
 that message were to reach our slumbering homes a 
 few hours after we leave this building,—there would 
 not be a man or a woman, or a child able to walk, 
 who would not go as fast as legs could carry them, 
 to the place where Jesus Christ was to be found and 
 heard! What an experience it would be, to be able to 
 stand around and listen to that holy voice speaking as 
 it spoke its wondrous messages to the people two 
 thousand years ago! 
 
 While that, of course, is impossible and unthinka- 
 ble, in the providence of God it so happens that we 
 have in all our homes, I hope, a copy of a large part of 
 the teaching of Jesus Christ. We can go home tonight 
 and open our New Testament and we can listen, as 
 we read, to the very words that Jesus uttered, although 
 not, of course, in our language, as He spoke those 
 parables and as He preached those sermons to the 
 people among whom He lived. I regard that,—and I 
 am sure you agree with me in regarding that,—as 
 one of the greatest privileges which we as rational 
 beings enjoy,—the privilege of being able to come 
 into touch whenever we please with the mind of Jesus. 
 Here in these Sunday evening hours, that is the very 
 thing that we hope to do. We are simply going to sit 
 around the feet of Jesus and we are going to find out 
 what He has to say to us on the questions which He 
 Himself discussed. 
 
 page eight 
 
Do you believe that it is possible for a group of 
 thoughtful men and women like ourselves to spend 
 half an hour with Jesus every Sunday evening, with- 
 out deriving great profit to ourselves and without 
 making, through that profit, a precious contribution 
 to the religious thinking and to the religious behaviour 
 of the community to which we belong? I do not be- 
 lieve that is possible. I believe that it is inevitable 
 that, if we come humbly and reverently to learn of 
 this supreme Teacher, there will come into our lives 
 new light and new power and new patience and new 
 insight and new zeal and new forbearance and new 
 passion for holy things; and if our lives are touched 
 and changed in those ways, we can not but touch and 
 change the lives of others. What a noble thing it would 
 be if we could make a contribution like that to the 
 life of this city where we live! 
 
 Let us think this evening for a few moments of 
 some of the qualities of the teaching of Jesus, which 
 make it desirable and profitable for us to sit at his 
 feet and learn of Him. First of all, there is the quality 
 of simplicity. I mentioned a few moments ago the 
 name of one of the great teachers of the world— 
 Plato. Well now, a man needs to be a fairly studious 
 individual in order to make very much of Plato. 
 Plato’s teaching comes to us in a form which it is very 
 difficult to appreciate and understand; and so if you 
 were to go through America tonight and count the 
 men and women in the country who really know 
 Plato, you would be surprised to find how few they 
 are. But Jesus comes to us with His great and gracious 
 messages embodied in the very simplest forms of 
 
 page nine 
 
language, so that even a little child can make some- 
 thing of them and rejoice in their beauty. 
 
 That is the difficulty with some of these teachers,— 
 the great scientists and the great philosophers,—we 
 can’t understand them; perhaps they are trying to 
 say something very good and very wonderful but 
 we can’t understand them. A few weeks ago there 
 was a famous scientist giving a lecture on physics in 
 Liverpool, and the lecture was put on the radio; and 
 the next morning people asked, ““What on earth was 
 that we had on the radio last night? We didn’t under- 
 stand a single word of it; we don’t want to hear a 
 thing like that again.’ There weren’t a hundred men 
 in England who understood that. 
 
 Could you find a hundred men in America who 
 would not understand anything Jesus said, if we 
 were to read some of these messages of the Son of 
 God? How grateful we ought to be, and how grateful 
 many of us are, that Jesus spoke so simply! And one 
 of the qualities of the simplicity of Jesus was the way 
 in which He bound up some of His utterances in these 
 memorable little phrases. We read some of them 
 tonight. ““Ye are the light of the world.” “‘Ye are the 
 salt of the earth.”’““Come unto Me and I will give you 
 rest.”’ “In My Father’s house are many mansions.”’ 
 “T am the good shepherd.’ Why, we could mention 
 hundreds of exquisite little sentences like those, 
 which could be picked at random, which we can 
 not forget once we have heard them. They simply 
 stick in our souls forever, doing us wondrous good. 
 That is the first quality we are all glad of—the sim- 
 plicity of the teaching of Jesus; for we are not all 
 
 page ten 
 
great scholars, and, if it were difficult, a great many 
 of us would never understand or enjoy it at all! 
 
 There is another thing—it is the atmosphere of the 
 teaching of Jesus. Did you ever notice, as you read 
 the New Testament, how Jesus always deals with 
 the great and the supreme matters of human interest? 
 He is always on the high and lofty levels of thought 
 and speech, talking to us about God or about our own 
 destiny or about the ways and the means which we 
 may employ to make our lives more radiant and more 
 fruitful in every good and lovely thing. 
 
 And the consequence of that is this: That there is 
 not a man or a woman or a child in the world who is 
 not capable of being interested in the message of 
 Jesus. You can think tonight of lots of things that all 
 the people in the world are not interested in. For 
 instance, who is going to be the next president of the 
 United States? That may be a very interesting ques- 
 tion to you, but there are millions of people in the 
 world who don’t care who is going to be the next 
 president of the United States. Is Germany to con- 
 tinue to be a Republic? Well, there are people in this 
 country and in other countries who are interested in 
 that question, but there are many millions who are 
 not interested in it at all. I can imagine myself going 
 into your home and asking you that question, and 
 your answer would be: ““What do [ care? That doesn’t 
 interest me. I am interested in other things.’ Come 
 and look at the people who are sitting around the feet 
 of Jesus tonight; just shut your eyes a moment and 
 get that picture before your imagination,—Jesus 
 Christ’s class; the great men—statesmen, merchants, 
 
 page eleven 
 
scientists, and they are sitting around listening to 
 Jesus, learning of Him; the simple, uneducated, un- 
 tutored people—thousands and thousands of them, 
 in India, China, Africa,—there they are in the group, 
 and what hundreds of thousands of bright and happy 
 little children who know nothing at all about these 
 political and diplomatic questions that interest some 
 of us—there they sit around Jesus, listening and 
 drinking it all in to their little souls. 
 
 There never was in the history of the world another 
 teacher who had a class like the class that Jesus 
 teaches,—all sorts and conditions of men, all sorts 
 and conditions of women, all interested in what He 
 says. Why? Because He talks, and talks always, 
 about those questions in which human beings, as 
 such, are interested—God and sin and redemption 
 and heaven and hell! That is why Jesus has such a 
 motley class around Him every day,—because He is 
 interesting them in the central places of their lives. 
 It is going to do us some good—isn’t it, to get away 
 with Jesus to those supreme and central questions, 
 that in the long run control all our thinking and 
 all our acting, with respect to the questions that are 
 not supreme, but subordinate ? 
 
 And then there is another quality. Jesus always 
 practised what He preached. Jesus never asked any- 
 one to do anything that He was not Himself actually 
 doing, or willing, when a certain situation arose, to 
 do. That has not been true of many of the teachers of 
 the world. Teachers like Socrates, like Plato, many 
 of the great modern teachers of morality, would be 
 only too willing to declare-——as many of them have 
 
 page twelve 
 
actually declared in their own books,—that their 
 conception of the moral life was so high and noble a 
 thing that it was impossible for them to live accord- 
 ing to their own teaching! 
 
 That is a remarkable thing about Jesus, isn’t it? 
 His teaching about the moral life of men is the high- 
 est and the deepest that has ever been offered in the 
 history of the race; and in spite of that fact, it is im- 
 possible for anyone in this house tonight to point to a 
 situation recorded in the New Testament where Jesus 
 did not live up to His own standard! Just’ because 
 that is so remarkable a fact, men and women in all 
 the ages since Jesus lived have insisted upon drawing 
 from that fact a stupendous inference,—that Jesus 
 must have had some peculiar and unique relation to 
 God. But we will come to that later on. All that I 
 want to emphasize here this evening is this:—What 
 a glorious satisfaction there is in sitting at the feet of 
 a teacher who is living out day by day before our eyes, 
 in the pages of the New Testament, the very thing 
 He teaches other men! And that is a satisfaction that 
 we may all have as we look into the eyes of Jesus and 
 listen to the things He says to us! 
 
 Now finally, I want to speak to you for a moment 
 about the effectiveness of the teaching of Jesus. Of 
 course, there are some people who go about the world 
 wearing spectacles with smoked glass in them; there- 
 fore, the world always seems to them just a little bit 
 darker than it really is; they look around the world 
 and they don’t see any great improvement, the world 
 isn’t getting on very far or fast; Jesus’ teaching hasn’t 
 amounted to very much. Let us go on an imaginary 
 
 page thirteen 
 
trip this evening,—it won’t take us long, and it won’t 
 cost us anything. We will go to a typical little New 
 England town,—it has no name nor can it be found 
 on any map. 
 
 We are arriving, just going into the town. What is 
 the first thing you see? I suppose the first thing is 
 rows and rows of little homes, just the kind of homes 
 you live in yourselves, perhaps. What is going on 
 there? In spite of all that is said in the newspapers 
 and in spite of all the scandalous stories,—in a re- 
 markably large number of those homes you would 
 find tonight a man who loves his wife purely and 
 faithfully, and you would find these two people con- 
 scientiously striving to do the very best for each other 
 that they can do with the resources at their disposal. 
 You would find them deeply and intelligently con- 
 cerned about the education and the development 
 and the future of their little children. In other words, 
 you would find beauty, purity, honest labor, eager 
 hope, filling the rooms of that little home. I want to 
 say to you that the fact that there are so many homes 
 of that character in America tonight, and scattered 
 all over the world, is due directly to the fact that 
 Jesus stood upon this planet once, and uttered the 
 teaching that we are going to study in these Sunday 
 evenings together! 
 
 Still, we are not through with the trip yet. Let us 
 leave those homes and walk along a little way, and 
 we will probably come to a hospital. What is the in- 
 spiration of these great American and European and 
 Indian and African hospitals? Why is it that these 
 poor, sick and suffering people are being looked after 
 
 page fourteen 
 
tonight all over the world, with all this expensive, 
 loving care, even if they can’t afford to pay a penny 
 for it? The inspiration of that work of loving kindness 
 came directly from the teaching of Jesus! 
 
 A little further on in the same village you will come 
 probably to a church, pointing its finger-to the skies, 
 —a church in which some humble teacher stands from 
 Sunday to Sunday, expressing to his people the very 
 truth that he has found in Christ, and bringing the 
 hand of Jesus, with its gracious touch, near to every 
 life in that community. The teaching of Jesus is the 
 secret and the source of the beauty and of the power 
 and of the service that are to be found in that little 
 New England town; and that is true of thousands of 
 towns all over the world tonight! 
 
 Don’t you believe the man who says that the teach- 
 ing of Jesus hasn’t counted for much. If you were to 
 take out of American life at this moment everything 
 which has come to have a place in it owing directly 
 to the teaching of Jesus,—what do you suppose you 
 would have left? Nothing that would be worth your 
 while to keep,—nothing! We owe all that is good in 
 our national life directly to the teaching of Jesus! 
 You may say there is one thing that the teaching of 
 Jesus hasn’t done very much to destroy and abolish 
 from the children of men, and that is the hideous in- 
 stitution which we call War. 
 
 That, of course, is a large question and I will only 
 permit myself at this moment to say this about it. 
 Men talk of this and that and the other way of stop- 
 ping war; some of them are writing essays and enter- 
 ing competitions and striving for prizes, with all their 
 
 page fifteen 
 
wonderful proposals as to how in the world war is to 
 be stopped. I am not going to win any prize and I am 
 not going to try any competition; but I am going to 
 give you now the true answer to that question, and 
 it is this-—When the souls and the minds and the 
 imaginations of men and women everywhere are 
 impregnated and taken captive by the teaching of 
 the Son of God, then we will beat our swords into 
 plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks, and 
 we shall learn the art of war no more! That is the real 
 and the only true answer, and that is what we are 
 engaged in here these Sunday evenings. We are going 
 to try to impregnate our own minds and consciences 
 and imaginations with the teaching of Jesus; and to 
 that extent we shall play our part in abolishing and 
 destroying from our midst and from the world, this 
 hateful thing that we call war, which still stalks across 
 the earth in so many baleful, hideous forms! 
 
 page sixteen 
 
What Jesus Caught Concerning God 
 
 
 
 (@E®|F you were to make a study,—as I dare say 
 
 141 some of you have made a study,—of the his- 
 tory of human thought, you would discover 
 that that history consists very largely of the 
 attempts made by thoughtful men to arrive 
 at the truth concerning God. If you were to go away 
 back, for example, and study some of the books 
 written by the ancient Greeks, you would discover 
 that what they were doing was striving to discover 
 the truth about God; and if you were to make a study 
 of the books written in our own lifetime by some of 
 the great philosophical thinkers of this country, you 
 would find that what those thinkers are still trying 
 to do is to arrive at the truth concerning God. Men 
 have felt in all lands and in all ages, that there is 
 nothing in our life that is more important than that 
 we should find out the truth about God. Everything 
 else in our life seems to depend on what we believe 
 about God; therefore, it would seem to be unspeak- 
 ably important that our beliefs about God should be 
 as true as we can possibly make them. 
 
 This evening we are going to ask what it is that 
 Jesus teaches about God and I am going to answer 
 that question in the words of Jesus Himself; because 
 it is at His feet that we wish in these meetings to sit 
 and it is to His voice that we desire to listen. So I am 
 going to pick out tonight, from the recorded teaching 
 
 
 
 page seventeen 
 
of Jesus, three of the most wonderful and helpful 
 things that Jesus said about God; and I want to say 
 that if there are those here, young people perhaps, 
 who find some things that will be said, difficult to 
 understand, you hold on to these three great words of 
 Jesus and carry them away with you in your minds 
 and in your hearts and think them over during the 
 week; and you will find that you will get far more 
 good out of them than you could ever get out of me 
 or any other man who could come and stand and speak 
 on this platform. 
 
 The first word is this: “God ts a spirit.’ Ever since 
 Jesus uttered those words, men have felt that they 
 constitute one of the greatest of the messages of 
 Jesus. What do they mean? When Jesus said that God 
 is a spirit, He meant, first of all, that God is a per- 
 sonal being. Of course, you know perfectly well that 
 there have been lots of people in the world, and even 
 important religious teachers, who have not believed 
 that God is a personal being; there has been one, at 
 least, of the great religious systems still in existence, 
 exercising an extremely powerful: influence in the 
 continent of Asia, which does not believe that God 
 is a person at all. That is one form of the religion of 
 Buddhism. Jesus tells us that God is a person and 
 the more we think about that, the more carefully we 
 examine that, the more clearly does its importance 
 dawn upon our minds. | 
 
 What is a person? What do we mean by saying 
 that God is a person? That is a very important ques- 
 tion. I will also quite frankly admit that it is a very 
 difficult question; but this, at any rate, must be said 
 
 page eighteen 
 
in answer to it—that no one is entitled to the name of 
 person who does not possess two things,—first, a 
 mind; and secondly, a will. We call ourselves persons 
 because we possess what we are pleased to call our 
 minds. Perhaps some of us do not possess very power- 
 ful minds; we are not among the great intellectual 
 leaders of the world, some of us, perhaps none of us; 
 but at the same time we have a mind. We say we make 
 up our mind, or we change our mind; everybody is 
 familiar with that expression; and we have also a will. 
 We don’t need to be very old before people say that 
 we have wills of our own. Perhaps sometimes you have 
 taken somebody into your house to see your baby 
 and the first thing you heard him say was, “‘The little 
 fellow has a will of his own’, probably because he 
 doesn’t want to do what you want him to do, or 
 something of that sort. Any sort of creature who has 
 not a mind and a will is not a person; and the higher 
 and better a mind and will you have, the more en- 
 titled are you to the name of person. And there was 
 one great thinker once who said that nobody on earth 
 has a complete mind and a complete will; the only 
 person in existence that has a complete mind and will 
 is God, and therefore, He is the only real person, and 
 we are all striving and struggling to be persons like Him. 
 
 In other words,—if I may put it into the language 
 of another great thinker, an American thinker,—per- 
 sonality has to be defined in terms of purpose. What 
 is a purpose? A purpose is something that you make 
 up your mind about and which you then exercise your 
 will upon; and when Jesus said that God is a spirit, 
 meaning that God is a person, He taught that God 
 
 page nineteen 
 
is a being Who, in His own life, conceives and carries 
 out purposes. That is a tremendous thing to believe 
 about God, but of course that is not enough for us to 
 know. The purposes that God conceives and carries 
 out might be very unwise purposes, or they might 
 even be very cruel purposes. We have known people in 
 history who have conceived and carried out purposes of 
 very great cruelty, also purposes of great unwisdom 
 and foolishness. What if God were a person like that? 
 
 And so we pass on to the second great word of Jesus, 
 one of the most wonderful things that Jesus has given 
 to us as a spiritual possession forevermore, and one of 
 those statements which have affected the whole his- 
 tory of human thinking and of human behavior since 
 Jesus first uttered it in Judea:—‘‘Your Father in 
 heaven is perfect.” That is one of the great utterances 
 of the New Testament; that is one of the greatest 
 utterances in the history of religion. ‘““Your Father in 
 heaven is perfect.” First of all, this God Who is a 
 person is our father. What does that mean? First, I 
 think it means to say that we owe our very existence 
 to that God Who is a person. He determined that He 
 would create us and it is through His power and His 
 wisdom that we are here at all. It is He that made us 
 and not we ourselves. 
 
 But that is not all it means, because Jesus wouldn’t 
 have used the word “‘Father” if that was all He meant 
 to convey. When Jesus calls God the Father who is in 
 heaven, He means us to think of God as one Who is 
 deeply interested in the creatures that He has made, 
 just as the fathers in this building tonight are very 
 deeply interested in their children at home. What 
 
 page twenty 
 
would you think of a father who would be prepared 
 to say to you, “Oh yes, those are my children, but I 
 am not interested in them?” What a dreadful thing 
 that would be for a father to say! When Jesus tells us 
 that this great divine person is our Father in heaven, 
 He means by that that God is deeply and permanently 
 interested in the children whom He Himself has made. 
 What a precious and wonderful thing it is for us here 
 tonight to be able to believe that God, the creator and 
 ruler of the universe, is interested in us, interested in 
 each of us, that in one single word, God loves His 
 children! That is what is meant by calling God our 
 Father; but that is not all that Jesus says in that re- 
 markable utterance of His. 
 
 He says that our Father who is in heaven is perfect. 
 It seems to me that what He meant when he said that, 
 was this: That the purpose which God had when He 
 created you and me, was a purpose of absolute wisdom, 
 as well as of absolute goodness. This purpose of God 
 is not yet completed. God is still working out his 
 purpose for you and for me and what a wonderful 
 thing it is for us to believe,—as we may believe if we 
 are followers of Jesus,—that God is working out in 
 our lives day by day for us a purpose that is abso- 
 lutely wise and absolutely good; that God never makes 
 any mistakes; and that God never does any evil to 
 his children! What a rich and wonderful little utter- 
 ance it is, isn’t it? ““Your father in heaven is perfect.” 
 How it binds us up with God and makes us feel safe 
 and comfortable in the embrace of those almighty and 
 most holy arms! 
 
 page twenty-one 
 
There is one more word that I want to refer to to- 
 night. It is this: “Are not two sparrows sold for a 
 farthing? Yet one of them shall not fall to the ground 
 uithout your Father.” I have kept that till the last 
 because I believe it to be the best. This life of ours is 
 all the time full of mystery; and from time to time 
 there comes into our human life some great sorrow 
 or some great pain or some great trial, and when that 
 hour and that experience come to us, we are all of us 
 tempted to think that God our Father has forgotten 
 us, or else that it is not true to say that God is our 
 Father at all. 
 
 Now, in this golden word of Jesus which I have 
 quoted to you tonight, He deliberately attempts to 
 make us believe that the love and the care of God is 
 absolutely omnipresent, if you will allow me to use 
 such a word as that. You can not go into any corner 
 of the earth where you will not find the care of God 
 waiting for you. You can not go into any sort of ex- 
 perience, no matter how grim and bleak it may appear 
 to be, in which God’s care is not waiting for you. As 
 we heard from the choir this very evening: “‘His tender 
 mercies are over all His works.’ Think of that poor 
 little sparrow, practically valueless, falling to the 
 ground, nobody paying any attention to it, save God, 
 and His hand is almighty and controls the sparrow’s 
 fall. And just as God controls the fall of the sparrow, 
 just as that little sparrow has its place in the providen- 
 tial purpose of the living Father, so also have your 
 sorrows and your trials and your pains and your 
 tribulations. God is over-ruling and controlling every 
 one of them and He is over-ruling and controlling them 
 
 page twenty-two 
 
for your good! That is what Jesus teaches, that is 
 what Jesus means when He declares that not a spar- 
 row falls to the ground without our Father. 
 
 Isn’t it a glorious thing to be able to go back into 
 the world tomorrow morning feeling such arms around 
 us,—knowing that such a heart beats for us in the 
 central places of the life of God,—that we are dear to 
 Him and that there is not a thing in our life, no matter 
 how small it may be, that is not of interest and con- 
 cern to our Father who is in heaven? I submit that in 
 those three statements of Jesus we have the greatest 
 and the best thing that He ever taught about God; 
 and I want you, as I said at the beginning, to think 
 them over as you go from this theatre tonight; talk 
 them over as you go to your homes this evening and 
 tomorrow; and just see what a precious inheritance 
 Jesus has given us in making it possible for us to be- 
 lieve these things about God! 
 
 If we have a father like that,—so great, so good, 
 so near in His grace,—what sort of sons and daughters 
 do you think we ought to be? Don’t you think we 
 ought to try to be as good to God as we can? Don’t 
 you think that we ought in all that we do to try to 
 show forth our love and our gratitude to Him for 
 being so good to us? And our study of God’s nature 
 and character here tonight will not have been in vain 
 if there would be one son or one daughter who will go 
 out of this place in a moment or two and walk along 
 the streets saying, “I will be a better son, I will be a 
 better daughter, of the glorious ea from tonight 
 till the end of my life!” 
 
 page twenty-three 
 
Wheat Fess Caught Concerning Himself 
 
 
 
 @ L@|N every age since Jesus lived on this earth, 
 “| there have been multitudes of men and of 
 women who have believed and declared very 
 | extraordinary things about Him. And ee 
 
 *2 ¢=0| scattered all over the face of the world, 
 every land that you can mention, there is a great com- 
 pany of men and women of all trades and professions, 
 of all ranks in society, serving under all sorts of flags 
 and all sorts of governments, who regard and wor- 
 ship Jesus as divine. So wonderful a conception of a 
 person who once lived as a man on this world of our 
 own, is something which requires an explanation. 
 
 If any person in this building tonight were to say 
 of himself or of any friend of his, or of any other figure 
 in the history of the world, that he was divine—in 
 the sense in which that word has always been used by 
 the Christian church, of Jesus—that person’s friends 
 would instantly believe that he had taken leave of his 
 senses. Why, then, should so many intelligent men and 
 women believe about Jesus what every one of them 
 would refuse to believe about any other human person 
 that has ever lived? My answer to that extremely 
 important question is, that the explanation of this 
 impressive fact is to be found in the teaching of Jesus, 
 and especially in what Jesus taught about Himself. 
 For those who seriously desire to know what Jesus 
 taught about Himself, what claims Jesus made upon 
 His own behalf, there is in my opinion no passage in 
 
 
 
 
 page twenty-four 
 
the whole of the New Testament which is more im- 
 portant than that wonderful passage which begins 
 with words that are familiar to everybody: “Come 
 unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I 
 will give you rest.” If you read the whole of that right 
 to the end of the chapter, you find that Jesus is taking 
 up a position of supreme authority and power, de- 
 claring that no man but Himself can give to men, 
 what men most deeply need and yearn for; claiming 
 that He, however, can give it to them, and that in 
 royal and unfailing abundance. 
 
 And if you cast your eye back in that same chapter 
 a few verses, you will come upon one of the most re- 
 markable utterances that ever fell from the lips of 
 Jesus. At first sight, it doesn’t appeal to us so deeply 
 as that gracious invitation I have just quoted; and 
 yet, when you study it carefully, you find that it is 
 bound up with that invitation and that it gives to the 
 invitation with which the chapter closes, all the 
 precious meaning that it contains for us; and this is 
 the passage which I am referring to: ““No man knoweth 
 the Father but the Son and he to whomsoever the 
 Son willeth to reveal Him.” What an extraordinary 
 statement that is! 
 
 In the first place, let me say about that statement, 
 that here Jesus quite deliberately and very plainly 
 claims for Himself a complete knowledge of God. We 
 have to note the fact that no other person who ever 
 lived on earth, so far as we know, has ever made that 
 claim upon his own behalf. None of the great prophets 
 ever made that claim; no founder of any religion save 
 our own ever made that claim; none of the great phil- 
 
 page twenty-five 
 
osophers or scientists ever made that claim. Why, 
 some of you will remember that last Sunday evening, 
 in this very place, it was pointed out that if you 
 studied the whole history of human thought, you 
 would discover that it consists very largely of an 
 attempt on the part of thoughtful people everywhere, 
 to know the truth about God. The strange thing about 
 Jesus is, that He claims to have possessed that for 
 which all other men toil and labor without ceasing— 
 a complete knowledge of God! 
 
 Just think what a blasphemous thing it would be 
 for me or for you to claim that our knowledge of God 
 was complete. Why, you do not have even a com- 
 plete knowledge of your next-door neighbor; no, you 
 do not have a complete knowledge even of your own 
 child, or of whatever person it is that lives nearest to 
 you in the circle of love in the home. Our knowledge 
 is so fragmentary; we secure it piece by piece, and day 
 by day and year by year we patiently strive to build 
 the pieces up into a beautiful temple of truth. Jesus 
 claims to possess a complete knowledge of God! 
 
 Let me ask you now to consider for a moment what 
 that really involves, with regard to the moral life of 
 Jesus. There was a principle which Jesus was very 
 fond of expounding to His disciples when He lived in 
 the world with them, and it was a principle which all 
 true thinkers have come to see as one of extreme im- 
 portance in all our moral strivings, and it was this: 
 That our knowledge of God grows and increases only 
 insofar as we from day to day obey the law of God; 
 the only avenue to knowledge of God is obedience to 
 His will. Now then, if that principle is sound—and I 
 
 page twenty-six 
 
think that not one man or woman here will question 
 the statement—and if Jesus claimed to possess an 
 absolute and complete knowledge of God,—the neces- 
 sary inference is that He claimed also to be in His 
 moral life absolutely and completely obedient to the 
 will of God; because, only with an absolute obedience 
 would an absolute knowledge be possible. 
 
 Therefore, in this extraordinary statement of Jesus 
 which I have quoted to you tonight, we find Him ex- 
 plicitly claiming a perfect knowledge of the divine 
 Being, claiming also, by a necessary implication, 
 absolute obedience to the will of God in His moral 
 life; in other words, claiming moral perfection! Now, 
 it is one thing for a human being to set up claims for 
 himself; it is quite another thing for his neighbors 
 and his friends and especially for his enemies, to admit 
 the validity of those claims. Suppose, for example, 
 that some man in this theatre tonight were publicly 
 to claim tomorrow, in the newspapers, that he was 
 the best man in the city. How many people do you 
 suppose would agree with you? Do you suppose that 
 your own wife would agree with you? Well, I hope 
 she would; but still she would probably regard you 
 as rather silly in making such a claim as that. But I 
 can’t believe that your business friends would agree 
 with you; they would say among themselves, ““Why, 
 I know ten men better than that fellow.”’ You couldn’t 
 get away with it. And as for your enemies, in the 
 paper next day they would have all sorts of letters 
 telling all sorts of failures and shortcomings that they 
 had detected in your life for the last twenty years. 
 They would explode your claim in two or three days; 
 
 page twenty-seven 
 
you know it, and so you don’t make any such state- 
 ment. 
 
 What about this claim of Jesus? The truth about 
 this claim of Jesus is that, as He walked about among 
 His friends and among His foes, there was to be found 
 no man capable of laying his finger on any corner in 
 the life of Jesus and saying, “Here thou hast failed. 
 Here thy claim of moral beauty and perfection breaks 
 down.”’ Not only has the life of Jesus been put to the 
 test, the severe test, of the observation and the criti- 
 cism of those of His own time and place, but the life 
 of Jesus has been put to the test of history; because 
 I want to say, and I am sure you believe it is true,— 
 that no human life ever lived on this planet has been 
 so minutely examined under the microscope by every 
 sort of historian and philosopher, as the life of Jesus. 
 And what is the verdict? In the Nineteenth Century 
 one of the deepest and most conscientious philosophie 
 thinkers in England was John Stuart Mill. Mill did 
 not believe in Jesus in the sense in which most of you 
 and in which I believe in Him. He did not believe 
 that Jesus was the bearer to this world of a divine 
 revelation which could never be surpassed. Mill did 
 not believe that Jesus was the Son of God, in the sense 
 in which we believe Him to be the Son of God. But 
 Mill, having examined with the eyes of an historian 
 and a scientist and a philosopher, the life of Jesus, 
 said that it would be impossible to set up any higher 
 moral standard for any man’s life than that that man 
 should so live that Christ would approve his life! 
 That means to say that if Mill was not prepared to 
 say all that some of us would say about Jesus, at any 
 
 page twenty-eight 
 
rate, he did believe, he was forced by the evidence to 
 believe, that Jesus’ was the purest and the most 
 lovely human life of which history has any record! 
 
 In other words, the claim that Jesus made for Him- 
 self of moral beauty and perfection, has been corrob- 
 orated by almost the unanimous testimony of thought- 
 ful men and women everywhere. No man can find a 
 flaw in the moral character of Jesus. Now then, if we, 
 by putting to the test that part of His claim which 
 is capable of being put to such a test, discover that 
 claim to be true, are we not compelled, as thoughtful 
 and honest people, to draw the necessary inference, 
 namely, that if the moral life of Jesus was perfect in 
 its beauty, He must have been talking nothing less 
 than the sober, simple truth when He declared that 
 He possessed a perfect knowledge of God! 
 
 If we accept this statement of Jesus with respect 
 to Himself,—that His knowledge of God is complete, 
 —what bearing has that upon our meetings here on 
 Sunday nights? Simply this: That the voice of Jesus 
 comes to us with an assurance and an authority never 
 before possessed by any voice that was ever heard in 
 the world. No wonder that we are reverent and patient 
 as we seek to learn, at the feet of this supreme, in- 
 comparable teacher, the things He tells us about God 
 and about men and about destiny! 
 
 There are two more things which I will say tonight 
 very briefly, because we shall have to take them up 
 later. Out of the moral perfection of Jesus, there 
 arises His claim to be also our Saviour. From those 
 forces within us and around us which mar our own 
 moral beauty and perfection, those things that keep 
 
 page twenty-nine 
 
us from the heights where Jesus trod, He claims to 
 be able to deliver us. ‘I am come to seek and to save 
 the lost.” “The Son of Man came not to be ministered 
 unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom 
 for many.” Jesus yearns to be the Saviour of us all 
 and to bring into our lives, no matter who we are, no 
 matter what our earthly lot may be,—that beauty 
 that was in Him and which has won the heart of the 
 world! 
 
 And this also—there is nothing,—and I say these 
 words very deliberately—there is nothing in the 
 recorded teaching of Jesus which is more emphati- 
 cally declared over and over again, sometimes in 
 language of imagery, sometimes in the language of 
 plain and simple prose, than that He will one day 
 come to be our Judge! Our lives are to be set up against 
 His perfect life; His beauty is to be the standard of 
 our judgment. That is a very solemn truth to me, 
 because I feel from day to day that I can deceive lots 
 of people with regard to the real meaning and value 
 and quality of my life, but it is impossible to deceive 
 Jesus. There is no judge in the world that has never 
 been deceived by evidence laid before him in a court 
 of justice; but when Jesus stands before us as our 
 Judge, He knows—there is no deceiving of the mind 
 of Christ—and on His part there can be no erroneous 
 judgment. 
 
 Let us carry this away with us tonight—we may 
 have Jesus for our Saviour; we must have Jesus for 
 our Judge! Let us think these things over; let us go 
 back over the history of the world since Jesus lived 
 and died and rose again, and let us see how His claim 
 
 page thirty 
 
has been more and more completely corroborated 
 with every new age and generation; and then let us 
 ask ourselves whether we are not prepared this very 
 night to bow upon our knees before His blessed face 
 and say to Him, in the words of one of the church’s 
 oldest and noblest songs: 
 “Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ; 
 Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father!” 
 
 page thirty-one 
 
What Jesus Tanght Concerning Din 
 
 Q OBODY can read the New Testament with- 
 ff] out discovering not only that Jesus had a 
 great deal to say about sin, but also that He 
 thought of Himself as standing in a very 
 remarkable relation to the sin of the world. 
 Most of the people in this building tonight will re- 
 member that, before Jesus was born, a remarkable 
 statement was made concerning him and it was this: 
 “Thou shalt call His name Jesus, because He will 
 
 
 
 save His people from their sins.” “Jesus” means 
 ‘Saviour’. When we begin to study the gospel story 
 with a view to learning, for ourselves, what Jesus 
 taught on this subject of sin, we are surprised perhaps 
 a little to discover that Jesus nowhere said anything 
 about a subject that has been of great interest to 
 thoughtful men and women throughout the history 
 of the Christian religion, namely, this: What is the 
 origin of sin? Where did sin come from? How did sin 
 arise in a world that was made by a good God? 
 
 A great many large and difficult volumes have been 
 written on that subject; a great many scholarly peo- 
 ple have spent years in thinking about it and in speak- 
 ing about it and in writing about it; but in the New 
 Testament you will not find one word that was ever 
 said by Jesus on that subject. Apparently, it was a 
 question which had no interest for Him and which 
 He regarded as being of very little importance to us, 
 
 page thirty-two 
 
because if He had thought of it as being important, 
 He would no doubt have said something about it. 
 The important thing in the mind of Jesus was, not 
 how sin came to exist, but the fact that sin does ac- 
 tually exist. It was with this horrible reality of 
 evil that Jesus concerned Himself and it was from 
 the dominion of this horrible reality that He gave 
 His life to deliver the children of men. 
 
 The first thing with regard to this fact of sin that 
 I would like to say in our study of the teaching of 
 Jesus tonight, is this—that according to the thought 
 of Jesus, sin is absolutely universal among men and 
 women. If you would like me to prove that Jesus be- 
 lieved that, I think the very easiest way to satisfy 
 you is to refer to the Lord’s Prayer, in the very heart 
 of which you find this petition:—‘“‘Forgive us our 
 trespasses.”’ That was a prayer which was given by 
 Jesus to His friends and which I believe He meant 
 His friends to hand on to their friends through the 
 generations that were yet to come; so that we ourselves 
 tonight, and all other lovers of the name of Jesus 
 throughout the world, are familiar with that prayer 
 and constantly use it, reminding ourselves every 
 time we bow our heads and say those sacred words, 
 that Jesus believed that it was necessary for all men 
 to use such a petition; because sin was a real fact and 
 a real force in the life of every one of them. 
 
 There is no man, there is no woman anywhere 
 who is wholly free from the presence and from the 
 power of sin! Sometimes we imagine that that is 
 rather an extreme way of putting it and we are 
 tempted to say within ourselves, “‘Well, I think I 
 
 page thirty-three 
 
know some men and women in whose lives there 
 appears to be no sin of any kind at all’’. Let us bring 
 our own lives and the lives of all men everywhere to 
 the test of the standard of Jesus Himself tonight, and 
 that standard is this: “Be ye therefore perfect, as 
 your Father in heaven is perfect.” Jesus conceives 
 as being in some measure under the power of sin 
 every life which is not yet wholly what God would 
 have it to be. Where is the man in this audience this 
 evening who would be prepared to say that he is 
 already perfect? Where is the man to be found, the 
 sane and thoughtful man, who would be willing to 
 come forward onto this platform or any other plat- 
 form and declare, “Since such and such a day I have 
 lived a perfect life?’? No such man is to be found. 
 
 I wonder if everybody in this theatre has heard of 
 a little book which was written a great many years 
 ago, called by the name of “The Shorter Catechism?” 
 Oh yes, I know some of you have heard of it and some 
 of you don’t want to hear any more about it, because 
 many of us, when we were younger than we are today, 
 had to learn the Shorter Catechism in the Sunday 
 School and in the day school, too. But I defy any man 
 to stand up today and say he did harm to himself by 
 it. One of the questions in the Shorter Catechism is 
 —‘What is sin?” And here is the answer: “‘Sin is any 
 want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law 
 of God.” 
 
 Suppose we take that old-fashioned answer, which 
 I may say here is wholly according to the mind of 
 Jesus, and apply that to our own lives just as we are 
 living them now. “Any want of conformity to, or 
 
 page thirty-four 
 
transgression of, the law of God.” There are, of course, 
 many people who do not go about spending their 
 time and their strength deliberately breaking the law 
 of God. There are comparatively few people in any 
 community who do that; nevertheless, most of us 
 find ourselves occasionally, when the temptation is 
 very strong, breaking some of the laws of God. But 
 whether we deliberately break His laws or not, surely 
 it is true that there is not one of us here this evening 
 who is not daily coming short of a complete con- 
 formity to that most holy law. 
 
 Do you ever go to bed at night patting yourself on 
 the back (if I may use such an expression) on account 
 of the fact that during the day that is then closing, 
 you have lived your life fully, absolutely, up to the 
 very limit of God’s highest and most exacting re- 
 quirement for you? I should think, on the contrary, 
 that most of us when we retire to rest, trouble our- 
 selves oftentimes over the fact that we have lost this 
 or that opportunity of doing good; that here or there 
 we have indeed failed to live up to the stature of 
 Christian manhood or of Christian womanhood. We 
 may not be able to recall a single hour of the day in 
 which we have deliberately said to God, “I will not 
 do this thing that thou requirest of me” and yet we 
 find it impossible to say that we have indeed lived 
 completely as His children. That is what Jesus set 
 before us as the real standard of our life. ““Be ye there- 
 fore perfect, as your Father who is in heaven is per- 
 fect”’, and anything that is short of that brings us 
 into the category of sinners and makes us confess 
 
 page thirty-five 
 
humbly before His throne tonight that we have in- 
 deed, all of us, sinned! 
 
 At the same time, while Jesus believed and stated 
 repeatedly, directly or indirectly, that all the men 
 and women round about Him were sinful, He did not 
 say that all men and women were equally sinful. On 
 the contrary, He made it very plain that in His mind 
 some sins were far worse than others; and the strange 
 thing about the mind of Jesus on this subject is, that 
 the sins which He most violently condemned were 
 not the sins which we, as a rule, are inclined most 
 violently to condemn. In fact, Jesus divided sinners 
 into two great groups; and the first of these groups 
 contained those whom He described by the general ex- 
 pression of *‘publicans and sinners.’’ Who were these 
 publicans and sinners? These were men and women 
 who had by degrees given themselves over at last 
 wholly to evil ways,—thieves, liars, adulterers, men 
 and women of all kinds of unclean ways of life; and 
 it is a notorious fact that Jesus spent much of His 
 time on earth in the company of people like that. So 
 much indeed was this the case, that from time to 
 time people used to come to the disciples of Jesus and 
 say to them, “Does your Master know what sort of 
 people those are He is going about with? These are 
 the worst people in the town and if He doesn’t take 
 care, He will become contaminated and like them in 
 the end.” And when Jesus heard those stories He used 
 to say, no doubt with a gracious smile upon His face, 
 “IT am come not to call the righteous but sinners to 
 repentance. To live among these people is the very 
 purpose for which I came into the world;’’ because 
 
 page thirty-six 
 
Jesus saw at the very centre of the most rotten life 
 on earth, some gleam that had not yet been extin- 
 guished, and He was sure that if only He could get 
 down to the depths of that poor, poisoned life and 
 lay His gracious hand upon that still wholesome place, 
 He could bring that life right back and up and out, 
 until at last that creature that seemed to be utterly 
 lost and hopeless might become, not in name only 
 but in deed and in truth, a child of the living Father! 
 Jesus lived among these men because He was seeking 
 their souls; He was yearning for their salvation. That 
 is what He came for. “The Son of Man is come to 
 seek and to save that which was lost.” 
 
 We have no right ever to despair of any man or of 
 any woman, no matter how bad and hopeless looking 
 the case may be; for Jesus never despaired of anybody. 
 There is something in the worst of men that can still 
 respond to the voice and to the touch of God! That is 
 the teaching of Jesus. 
 
 There was another class of sinners, and they were 
 called the Pharisees and they were sinners of a very 
 different order. They didn’t go about publicly sinning, 
 as these other poor creatures did; they were not re- 
 garded, as these other people were regarded, as the 
 off-scourings of society. The Pharisees, many of them, 
 held the most important positions, the most con- 
 spicuous stations, both in the city and in the syna- 
 gogue; men who were looked up to by their fellow 
 citizens as leaders of thought, leaders of policy, leaders 
 in commerce, leaders in every good word and work. 
 And yet Jesus took with those Pharisees just the very 
 reverse course from that which He took with the other 
 
 page thirty-seven 
 
group, and He tore their outside veils and coverings 
 off them, and He revealed, behind all their camouflage 
 of religion, a life which at the very heart and centre 
 of it was unwholesome and corrupt! Jesus told those 
 Pharisees very plainly to their faces on more than 
 one occasion that, while they garbed themselves in 
 the robes and the cloaks of religion, inside there 
 was nothing to be found but pride and selfishness 
 and cruelty and self-righteousness,—the things which, 
 in the mind of Jesus, were the worst things in the 
 world! So strongly did Jesus believe that to be true, 
 that He once said to a group of Pharisees these most 
 terrible words:—“The harlots shall go into the king- 
 dom of God before you!”’ 
 
 Just think of that—church people, church members, 
 officers in the church of that time—and Jesus said to 
 them, “Do you see those poor, miserable, poisonous 
 off-scourings moving about our streets and byways? 
 Well, they are nearer the kingdom of God than you 
 are!’ That is a very significant fact. It is as if the Son 
 of God would say to all of us, “If you want to be a 
 sinner, be a sinner; if you want to be a selfish man, be 
 a selfish man. Come out into the open places with 
 your name upon your brow, so that all men will know 
 what you are and what you strive to do. But the great- 
 est enemy of goodness in the world, the greatest 
 enemy of God, is the man who is unclean and who is 
 selfish and who is proud in his heart, and who pro- 
 fesses outside to be a leader, in the realms of morals 
 and religion.” That is why Jesus spoke to the Phar- 
 isees of His day in language which is unparalleled in 
 
 page thirty-eight 
 
His own recorded utterances, and I think unparalleled 
 anywhere else, in its fearful severity. 
 
 If there is a publican or a harlot listening to me 
 tonight, I want to say to you that Jesus Christ, by 
 His love and by His holy purity, is able to give you 
 back your purity and your self-respect and to set 
 you again amongst clean and decent people in this 
 community. But if there is a Pharisee here tonight, 
 then I want to tell you that it is going to be a very 
 difficult thing for you ever to get into the kingdom of 
 God; because, in order to get even to the gate of the 
 kingdom, you will have to strip yourself of all your 
 pretense and you will have to allow God to take all 
 that pride and all that selfishness and all that self- 
 righteousness out of your soul! There is no room for 
 that sort of thing in the streets of the heavenly king- 
 dom! 
 
 Those were the two great classes of evil in the time 
 of Jesus; those are the two great classes of evil in any 
 age,—the evil that goes about openly and makes no 
 pretense of being anything else; and the evil which 
 goes about masquerading as piety. We had in one of 
 our songs tonight that wonderful parable of the Phar- 
 isee and the publican. That poor publican didn’t say 
 very much to God, did he? He just said, ““God, be 
 merciful to me, a sinner.’”’ As I heard those words 
 sung to us this evening I thought to myself that noth- 
 ing in the world would do us more good than that 
 everyone of us should bow our heads and bow our 
 hearts before God tonight and say just those very 
 same words. Let us get rid, in this quiet hour, 
 of all pretense, of all hypocrisy, of all unreality; and 
 
 page thirty-nine 
 
let us confess to God what we know in our souls to be 
 true,—that we are all of us sinful men or sinful women; 
 that there is none of us perfect yet. Let us cast our- 
 selves upon the divine mercy, that we may be par- 
 doned, and upon the divine grace, that we may be 
 made strong. That is the teaching of Jesus. 
 
 Let me sum the whole thing up in this one single 
 sentence. Sin has its seat in the heart, but sometimes 
 it comes out of the heart in manifest forms of evil, 
 while at other times it remains in the heart doing its 
 destructive and corroding work,—and this latter is 
 the more dangerous of the two for the individual soul, 
 according to the mind of Christ. What you and I have 
 to do is to have these hearts of ours cleansed; we have 
 got to have the springs of our life made sweet and 
 clean, so that we may be like those good trees of which 
 Jesus speaks in the passage that we read tonight, from 
 which there grows nothing but good and wholesome 
 and luscious fruit! That we shall have to study next 
 Sunday evening. We couldn’t leave the matter here. 
 Having studied what Jesus has to say about sin, next 
 Sunday we shall study what Jesus said about the ways 
 and the means through which we are to be delivered 
 from its hateful power! 
 
 page forty 
 
What Jesus Caught Concerning Salvation 
 
 E have arrived at what I think everybody re- 
 | gards as the very soul and centre of the teach- 
 ing of Jesus. We have noticed more than once 
 
 
 
 been regarded by the ives as the Saviour 
 of men. The whole life of Jesus was somehow bound 
 up with this matter of salvation; and if you were to 
 take out of the gospel story, and out of the rest of 
 the New Testament, every reference that there is to 
 salvation, whether under that name or under some 
 similar name,—everything relating to forgiveness, 
 everything relating to reconciliation, everything re- 
 lating to men being at peace with God, everything 
 that relates to the new life that we may find in the 
 fellowship of God,—if you were to take all that out 
 of the New Testament, how much do you suppose 
 would be left? That would be an excellent exercise 
 for some of us some Sunday evening; or some other 
 evening when we have an hour or two to spare,— 
 just simply read through the New Testament and cut 
 out everything in it that relates to the salvation of the 
 lives of men. I believe you would be surprised to dis- 
 cover what a poor, little page or two you would have 
 left when you had finished. Christianity is a religion 
 of salvation. It is, of course, a very bold and daring 
 thing to try to discuss this great subject in one short 
 evening; and yet there are some things that we sim- 
 
 page forty-one 
 
ply must say about it, even if we can’t say all that 
 should be said. 
 
 If somebody were to ask you what, in your judg- 
 ment, is the controlling idea of all the recorded teach- 
 ing of Jesus, what would you say? I would say, the 
 fatherhood of God. And of course, when we speak of 
 the fatherhood of God, we instantly think of ourselves 
 as God’s children; because the idea of God being a 
 father is devoid of meaning unless we are His children, 
 and this great double thought runs through all the 
 teaching of Jesus in a way which completely controls 
 that teaching. It is in relation to that great double 
 idea that we are to set tonight this other idea of sal- 
 vation. 
 
 Last Sunday evening we discovered that, accord- 
 ing to the mind of Jesus, there is no man in the world 
 who is not a sinner; and by that I mean to say that 
 there is not a single child of the heavenly Father 
 who is really treating his Father properly. There is 
 not one of us behaving as we ought to behave, when 
 we remember that we are sons and daughters of the 
 living God. And when Jesus stood in the world among 
 those sinful people that were round about Him, He 
 saw how badly and how thoughtlessly they were 
 treating God,—some of them in ignorance and some 
 of them in deliberate and persistent sin. And He saw 
 those men and women restored to the Father’s friend- 
 ship and to the precious service of the Father’s home; 
 and the difference between the one state and the other 
 is the meaning of salvation. And if you want to see 
 the whole thing put into one perfect picture, all you 
 have to do is to read over that familiar story in the 
 
 page forty-two 
 
fifteenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel, the story of the 
 Prodigal Son. When that son went back from the 
 swine-troughs to his father’s beautiful house, that was 
 salvation. 
 
 Now then, let us be perfectly definite and perhaps 
 a little personal this evening in connection with this 
 serious matter. Here in this room at this moment 
 there is a man who is not treating his heavenly Father 
 properly; and by his ill treatment of his Father he 
 has divorced himself for the time being from his 
 Father’s home. Let us begin to watch that man, taking 
 his homeward journey tonight. What a blessed thing 
 it would be if he would take this journey! In order to 
 help him back home, if I can, I am going to tell him 
 the steps by which his salvation will be made a real 
 perfect and beautiful thing; and the first step,—not 
 according to my way of thinking, but according toJesus 
 Christ’s—is repentance. There can be no salvation 
 for the man who does not repent. What is repentance? 
 Sometimes we are told that repentance is sorrow— 
 sorrow for sin; but there is a great deal of sorrow for 
 sin that is not repentance. You are sorry perhaps, 
 some of you, for some sin you committed ten or 
 fifteen or twenty years ago; but the meaning of that 
 sorrow is, that you feel that, if you hadn’t committed 
 that sin, you might be a richer or a happier man to- 
 night than you are; and in all your sorrow there may 
 be no thought of God. 
 
 But the sorrow that makes repentance is the sorrow 
 which comes to a man’s soul when he realizes that he 
 has offered to God, as a service, as a reward for His 
 great measureless love in Christ Jesus, nothing but 
 
 page forty-three 
 
thoughtlessness, nothing but disobedience, nothing 
 but shameful and deliberate sinfulness. Many and 
 many a time that thought has gripped a man’s mind 
 and a man’s conscience, sometimes as he has walked 
 along the street, and sometimes as he has played and 
 smiled with his friends,—the thought comes over him, 
 “What a mess I have made of my life as a child of 
 God! What business have I to offer a life like this to 
 my heavenly Father?’ And when that man’s whole 
 soul is filled with shame and sorrow for the way in 
 which he has treated his Father in heaven, he is not 
 far from salvation! 
 
 Just think. Have you been treating God the way 
 you ought to treat Him? Have you been the sort of 
 son that you ought to have been in relation to this 
 Father Who is in heaven? If not, what are you going 
 to do about it? Do you feel any of this shame and 
 sorrow tonight in your heart? Because, if you don’t, 
 I am afraid there is little to be said to you; but 
 if you do, then come you right back to God with 
 nothing in your mind at all but just this shame and 
 sorrow. That is all that God asks you to bring, and 
 you are to bow before His face and say to Him, ‘“‘Oh, 
 my Father, Iam sorry. That is all Ican say. Iam sorry. 
 I am filled with shame and bitter pain at the way in 
 which I have treated Thee.” And the teaching of Jesus 
 is this—that the moment that man comes back to 
 God with that sorrow in his heart and those words 
 upon his lips, God forgives and restores him! 
 
 Don’t you remember the parable? Why, before 
 that son had half the story of his shame and sorrow 
 out of his mouth, the father had stopped him and told 
 
 page forty-four 
 
his servants to bring the robe and the ring and the 
 shoes, and to kill the fatted calf and to make merry 
 in the home, because this beloved son had come back. 
 There is that sort of a welcome waiting for the sinful 
 man in this meeting tonight, just so soon as, with 
 shame and sorrow in his soul, he comes back to God! 
 That is the second element in salvation—restoration 
 —restoration to the sense of God’s precious smile; 
 restoration to the sense that God is no longer against 
 us, as He always is against sin in every form; but 
 that God is on our side, that we are once more children 
 in the Father’s home! That is what I mean by restora- 
 tion, and we can be assured that, once this evil of 
 the past is forgiven, it is absolutely and utterly blotted 
 out from the very memory of the Father. 
 
 Did you ever think of it? God is the only father in 
 the universe who can forget when He forgives! No 
 other father can do that. There may be a father here 
 tonight whose son sometime in the distant past 
 treated him badly, treated him with callous indiffer- 
 ence, or perhaps even with deliberate cruelty; and 
 long, long since, the whole thing has been forgiven 
 and you and your son are on the best possible terms 
 today. But have you forgotten? I don’t believe you 
 have; I don’t believe you can forget. It sticks there,— 
 the memory of those hateful days when you and your 
 son were at bitter enmity, because of the way he 
 treated you, his father. But God, when He forgives 
 us, forgets as well, and never again will He bring up 
 those evil things of the past, but He has blotted them 
 out forever! 
 
 page forty-five 
 
Just before we pass on from that, let us stay a 
 moment. It is all very well to say that God forgives 
 and forgets; but what about those people on the earth 
 who have been the objects of my sinful behavior? 
 We have done our injuries to God through our fellow 
 creatures. Men and women have been the victims of 
 our sin; and if God is willing to forgive and able to 
 forget, what about these men and women living near 
 us in the world? We have done them grievous injury. 
 What about it? There is this about it—that Jesus 
 teaches, just as plainly as He teaches anything, that 
 repentance is always bound up with restitution, 
 where restitution is possible. | 
 
 I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good thing for some of 
 us to make this Christmas season a very blessed time 
 for ourselves and for our neighbors, by making resti- 
 tution. Is there someone in this city that you have 
 wronged? Is there someone in this city that you are 
 wronging daily? Is there someone in this city who is 
 at enmity with you because of your evil treatment of 
 him? Wouldn’t it be a very great and blessed thing 
 if you would go to that man before Christmas,— 
 walk into his office or into his house, and tell him 
 that you have come to make restitution? Or if the 
 wrong you did that man was of such a kind that you 
 cannot make restitution, then you go to that man 
 just the same and ask him to forgive you. Tell him, 
 just as you tell God, that you are sorry for what you 
 have done; and I believe that if you do that, that 
 man will spring off his chair and hold out his hand to 
 you, and your enmity will be forgotten and you will 
 be better friends than ever, beginning with this very 
 
 page forty-six ° 
 
week before Christmas! That would be a splendid 
 thing if somebody would do that after we leave this 
 service tonight. 
 
 But I have a word, just one word, for the man that 
 has been wronged. When we receive injuries from 
 other people, we sometimes make it very hard for 
 them to come and ask to be forgiven; we just make 
 ourselves as cold as we can; and when we see this fellow 
 coming along the street towards us, we cross the street 
 so that we won’t have to meet him or speak to him. 
 We will make no approach; we will make it as hard 
 as we can for him to admit that he is wrong and ask 
 to be forgiven. That is not the way God does with us. 
 While we were yet sinners, Christ died for the un- 
 godly. God in Christ Jesus came and begged of us to 
 be reconciled with Himself; and wouldn’t it be a 
 good thing if some of those of you who have suffered 
 injury from your neighbor, were to take the initiative 
 in this matter? Instead of waiting for that sinful man 
 to come to your house, you go to his house and ask 
 him whether this trouble that is between you can 
 not be blotted out, the way that God blots out our 
 sins from the book of His remembrance? Take that 
 man by the hand and say, “I am willing to forgive 
 you if you are willing to be a friend of mine again. 
 Let us blot it all out and let us live as children of the 
 blessed Father ought to live; so that I, who have 
 done the wrong will try to make restitution to you, 
 and you to whom the wrong has been done, will come 
 half way, or more than half way, to meet me and will 
 make the matter of restitution easier and more prec- 
 ious all round,—just the way that Jesus makes this 
 
 page forty-seven 
 
whole matter of repentance and forgiveness so much 
 easier, by coming the whole way to meet us. 
 
 That isn’t all. I have yet to say the two best things 
 in connection with this matter of salvation, and the 
 first is this:—When you get back into the holy fellow- 
 ship of your Father in heaven, and feel that these 
 clouds are blotted out from between you,—you will 
 find in that restored fellowship a pledge and a promise 
 of the most wonderful thing possible to men, namely, 
 absolute victory over evil! It is a humiliating truth, 
 that even those in this building tonight who have 
 lived the Christian life the longest and the deepest, 
 are constantly doing things outwardly and inwardly 
 which are vexing our heavenly Father. Not the best 
 man among us is a perfect man yet; but the teaching 
 of Jesus is, that we are going to be perfect some day 
 through the fellowship and the love of God; and what 
 a wonderful gospel that is! Some day, out of these 
 lives of ours, out of the life of every man who will 
 come penitently to God to be forgiven, every vestige, 
 every root of sin, is to be torn and thrown away, and 
 we are going to be like Jesus; and when all sin has 
 been taken away and when our lives are like the life 
 of Jesus, that is salvation! Some of us, many of us, I 
 hope, are being saved now through this love of God 
 in Jesus Christ our Lord; but none of us is wholly 
 saved. Sin is still there and some day we are going to 
 be saved utterly, because He is able to save to the 
 uttermost! 
 
 And the other thing that I want to say is this:— 
 That when we find in the love of God our salvation 
 from sin, we are going to find in that same love our 
 
 page forty-eight 
 
4 
 
 salvation from some other things as well. When I 
 come so close to the loving heart of God as to see in 
 my own experience that He so loves my life that He 
 is willing to go any length that it may be redeemed, 
 —even the length of manifesting Himself to me in the 
 life and in the death of Jesus Christ His Son,—then 
 I am going to draw this inference,—that no evil thing 
 can ever come to my life from the hand of God! And 
 from that moment I am saved from all fear and I am 
 saved from all fretting; and no matter what happens 
 round about me, no matter what the pains and the 
 sorrows and the disappointments of life may be, I 
 now know that the biggest thing, the central thing, 
 in all the universe, is that divine love which received 
 me back after I had sinned so long and so deliberately 
 against it; and with that love I feel that I am saved 
 utterly. 
 
 That is the secret of what, in the New Testament, 
 is called the “‘peace of God which passes understand- 
 ing.’ The man who knows the power of God’s love is 
 a man from whose soul all fear and all misgiving and 
 all doubts about the providential order, are banished 
 forevermore! That is the sort of salvation that we 
 covet for every man here who hasn’t got it tonight; 
 and we may have it, we may begin to have it now, 
 if only we will take the first step,—and the first step, 
 as I said in the beginning, is to come just as we are 
 to the heavenly Father’s feet and say to Him, “Oh 
 God, Thou God and Father of Jesus Christ, my Lord, 
 I am sorry!” Then, as Jesus Himself put it, there will 
 be joy in the presence of the angels of God. 
 
 page forty-nine 
 
What Jesus Caught Concerning the 
 Hileaning of Greatness 
 
 ac |ERHAPS there is no word that enters more 
 frequently into our common conversation 
 than the word “‘great’’. Just you listen tomor- 
 row in talking with your friends, and, if you 
 
 ~~. | can, count the number of times that you hear 
 this word “great” in the course of the day. We talk 
 about a great speech, or a great game, or a great joke, 
 or a great gift, or a great man. I suppose it is not 
 really unfair to suggest that we use that word very 
 often without thinking of what it means, or of what 
 it ought to mean, just as the great majority of us use 
 lots of words without thinking of their true signifi- 
 cance. But suppose that someone were to challenge 
 you tomorrow and suppose he were to stop you right 
 in the middle of your talk, if you had used that word, 
 and should say to you, ““What exactly do you mean 
 by ‘great’? For example, you spoke a moment ago 
 about a great man. What precisely did you mean?” 
 Suppose he went further than that and said to you, 
 “IT would like to know just for the sake of curiosity 
 what man you regard as the greatest man in all the 
 world today?” 
 
 Well, you would have to stop and think. I don’t 
 suppose anybody would be willing to answer that 
 question off-hand; but this at least is certain, that 
 the answer that you would give to that kind of ques- 
 
 
 
 page fifty 
 
tion would depend altogether on the standard by 
 which, in your own mind, greatness among men is 
 measured. It may, for instance, be your opinion that 
 the greatness of a man ought to be measured by his 
 wealth. Then you would try to discover who is the 
 richest man in the world. I think I saw a photograph 
 of him in the paper the other day. And you would 
 draw the inference that he must be the greatest man 
 on earth, because he has more money than any other 
 man, so far as others have given us insight into their 
 private possessions. Or a man’s greatness might be 
 measured by the amount of power which he has or 
 which he uses, and you would begin to wonder who 
 is the most powerful man in the world. You might 
 think perhaps of some employer of labor, or of some 
 statesman or monarch, and that would be your answer 
 to the question. You might, however, take a different 
 point of view altogether and you might say, “In my 
 opinion a man’s greatness is to be measured wholly 
 by his wisdom.” Then you would begin to wonder 
 within yourself who is the wisest man on earth? The 
 deepest thinker? The man who has secured the largest 
 grasp of the truth? And perhaps you might mention 
 the name of some illustrious scientist. 
 
 These answers would all be very interesting, but 
 it is much more interesting to learn from the New 
 Testament that that very question was put to Jesus 
 two thousand years ago, and one day, as He stood 
 among His friends, one of them asked Jesus: ““Whom 
 do you consider to be the greatest?” In the answer 
 that Jesus gave to that question we find ourselves, 
 as it seems to me, pretty near the very heart of His 
 
 page fifty-one 
 
teaching, because it is not possible to deny that, in 
 the answer which Jesus gave to that question, He 
 made a contribution to human thought that had never 
 been made before. In other words, the answer to that 
 question, as it fell from the lips of Jesus, contains one 
 of the essential elements of what we regard as a Chris- 
 tian philosophy of life. Now, I am very sorry to say— 
 because I am afraid it may hurt your feelings a little 
 —that, according to the mind of Jesus, all the answers 
 proposed to the question a moment ago, are wrong. 
 According to Jesus a man’s wealth has no relation 
 whatsoever to that man’s greatness, except this— 
 that Jesus one day did say, in the most explicit fashion, 
 that it is an exceedingly difficult thing for a rich man 
 ever to become a great man; and according to the 
 mind of Jesus, the power that a man exercises over 
 his fellow creatures, has nothing whatever to do with 
 his greatness. Sometimes great power has been pos- 
 sessed and used by some of the worst men in history, 
 —by the Emperor Nero, for example. You could not 
 imagine Jesus admitting that the Emperor Nero was 
 a great man. And when Jesus discusses this subject 
 of greatness, He doesn’t say one word about wisdom, 
 either. The most wonderful scholar in the world, the 
 most famous scientist that ever lived, may turn out 
 to be, or to have been, a man who, in the judgment 
 of Jesus, does not deserve the name of great. If these 
 answers are all wrong, according to Jesus, what is the 
 right answer? What is His answer? 
 
 In the first place, the foundation of all greatness, 
 according to the mind of Jesus, is a man’s love to God. 
 If you can point to a man in whose life there is no love 
 
 page fifty-two 
 
to God, then he may be a great scholar or he may be 
 a great ruler or he may be a great financier,—but it 
 is untrue to say that he is a great man. The kind of 
 character which Jesus regards as great can not be 
 builded up at all, can not even begin to be builded up, 
 until there has been laid the foundation of a deep, in- 
 telligent, passionate love of God. That is the first 
 thing of all. 
 
 Out of that love to God, however, there arises in 
 the life of men a quality upon which Jesus first, among 
 all the teachers of the world, set the stamp and name 
 of greatness and what do you think that quality was? 
 Humility! In the Christian system of virtues, humility 
 is one of the greatest and most shining of all, and the 
 meaning of the place that Jesus gave to this modest 
 virtue, is this: When a man begins to think of the stu- 
 pendous truth that God loves him, it seems to that 
 man always and inevitably the most wonderful thing 
 in the world, that God—whom it is impossible for us 
 truly even to think of, whose greatness is beyond our 
 imaginations, whose holiness can not be put into our 
 common human language—that that God should call 
 him into His service! What a marvellous thing it is 
 that God should ask me to serve Him! If God wants 
 my service, I don’t care how simple or how lowly or 
 how mean the service may seem to be, I will rejoice 
 in the great and glorious privilege of doing it for Him. 
 That is the meaning of humility in the service of our 
 Father who is in heaven. It is so great a privilege to 
 serve Him at all that the very lowliest service that 
 He asks us for, fills our lives with joy and gladness, 
 and we are only too eager to give it. 
 
 page fifty-three 
 
At the same time, this love to God and this humility 
 in His service, both manifest themselves in our rela- 
 tions with our fellows. You can not love God and hate 
 your brother; and you can not serve God while refus- 
 ing all the time to serve your brethren; and so this 
 humility in the mind of the man that Jesus would 
 describe as being great, takes the form of willingness 
 to serve the very humblest and the very lowliest of 
 his fellows, in the meanest and the lowliest way. 
 
 You see, poor James and John, in that New Testa- 
 ment story, were anxious to serve God in conspicuous 
 ways; they wanted to occupy places which would be so 
 glorious that all men would speak about them, talk 
 about the service they were rendering; realize what 
 wonderful men James and John must be; and as Jesus 
 thought over that situation in their minds, He said 
 to them one day: “Do you know what is wrong with 
 you? What is wrong with you is, that you need to be 
 converted. You need to be turned right around and to 
 look and move in the opposite direction.” That is a 
 startling thing, that Jesus should say to men who had 
 lived in His company and His fellowship for years, 
 that they were not yet converted? I dare say that is 
 true of many of us who have lived in the company 
 and fellowship of Jesus for years, members of churches, 
 professing Christian men and women; and yet if we 
 realized our own minds tonight we would have to 
 admit that we have not yet begun to take the point 
 of view of Jesus with regard to the true greatness of 
 life. We measure our lives and our success in terms 
 of money or in terms of power or in terms of something 
 else which is absolutely scorned and rejected by Jesus 
 
 page fifty-four 
 
as a standard and measure of greatness! What we 
 have to realize is, that there can be no greatness of 
 life for us until, out of a consuming love to God, there 
 rises a passionate love for our fellow men; and until 
 that love to God and men is able and willing to take 
 the form of the lowliest service in the world! 
 
 More than that, this humble man of whom the Lord 
 is speaking to us in this study, is one who never looks 
 for any sort of reward save only the boundless joy 
 that he derives from the service itself. That is another 
 remarkable thing. There are lots of men who would 
 be willing to render even lowly and menial services 
 to their fellows, provided they would be paid enough 
 for doing it. But the humble man, the man whose 
 humility is the fruit of a great love, never thinks of 
 pay or of reward, either from his fellow men or from 
 his Father who is in heaven. He loves to serve God 
 and his fellows! 
 
 If we take this teaching of Jesus and apply it to our 
 original question, what do you think the result would 
 be? Suppose we were to put the question thus:— 
 Who of all the men in the world today is, according 
 to the standard of Jesus, the greatest man? Of course, 
 we have to confess that that is a question that we 
 have no power and that we have no right to answer. 
 But this I will say,—that if Jesus Christ were to come 
 visibly into our midst now and to give us the true 
 answer to that question, I believe that the name that 
 Jesus would utter would surprise every man and every 
 woman in this building! Because I believe it would 
 be a name that none of us ever heard before. It may 
 be some simple quiet saint in some far-off cottage in 
 
 page fifty-five 
 
the Middle West prairies, who lives there day by day 
 serving his God and his fellows, with a great love; 
 doing all he can and passionately desiring that he 
 could do more, for the spiritual enrichment and up- 
 lifting and upbuilding of other lives. It may be some 
 missionary of the cross of Christ who, having turned 
 his back on home and native land and every sort of 
 social advantage and advancement, has gone down 
 into the islands of the ocean or into the wilds of Asia 
 or of Africa, with no object, no purpose in view, but 
 simply to serve the Lord he loves and to serve the 
 men and women round about him in their darkness. 
 
 I do not know, but it is wonderful to think that it 
 is possible for all of us to be great, in Jesus Christ’s 
 sense of the term. Most of us can never be great men 
 in the world’s sense of the term; we haven’t enough 
 money, we haven’t enough power, we haven’t enough 
 learning, we are deficient in something or another. 
 But if we love God and if out of that love there comes 
 a service, humble yet glowing and passionate, a service 
 of Him and of the people around us,—we shall graduate 
 in Christ’s school of greatness, and although our ma- 
 terial reward may be nothing or small, we shall have 
 a crown of which no power on earth or out of the 
 earth shall ever be able to rob us! 
 
 page fifty-six 
 
What Jesus Caught Concerning 
 His Oon Death 
 
 max_ |VERY reader of the New Testament, even 
 +! the most careless and casual, must have been 
 struck by the fact that there is no other event 
 in the career of Jesus which is described with 
 t the fulness of detail which characterizes every 
 one of the four accounts of His crucifixion. From that 
 fact we would be, I think, entitled to infer, even if we 
 did not otherwise know it to be true, that the death 
 of Jesus was a matter of supreme interest and import- 
 ance to the mind of the early church. What gave its 
 interest and importance to the death of Jesus? How 
 did men come to believe concerning the death of 
 Jesus, the perfectly tremendous things that they did 
 come to believe about it? We have only to open some 
 of the letters of the Apostle Paul, or to linger for a 
 moment among the pages of the Acts of the Apostles, 
 to discover that it was the belief of the early Christian 
 church,—I think I'am not wrong when I say the uni- 
 versal belief of that church,—that the death of Jesus 
 had both for God and for men an importance which 
 had never belonged before and which would never 
 belong again to any other event in human history. 
 
 Of course, we are, some of us, familiar with the view 
 that all this idea about the saving power of the cross 
 of Jesus, was invented, and that it was invented chiefly 
 by the Apostle Paul. The most serious objection which 
 
 
 
 page fifty-seven 
 
can be brought against that view, is that the Apostle 
 Paul himself explicitly states that he did not invent 
 the early church’s conception of the meaning of the 
 death of Jesus; for we are all of us, or most of us at any 
 rate, familiar with the passage which begins with these 
 words: “I received what I delivered unto you, how 
 Jesus died for our sins’’; by which of course he plainly 
 means that this conception of the meaning of the 
 death of Jesus, was something which had been handed 
 on to him by those who had been Christians before 
 him. In other words, even at the stage of Christian 
 history which preceded the conversion of Paul, the 
 Christian church was sure that it was right in inter- 
 preting the death of Jesus as it did always interpret 
 it. Whence came the assurance of the church? It seems 
 to me that there is only one reasonable answer to that 
 question and it is this: That the church’s idea of the 
 redeeming value of the death of Jesus, and the church’s 
 assurance that it was right in entertaining and in 
 propagating that idea, came from Jesus Himself. In 
 other words, Jesus Christ, in the course of His earthly 
 ministry, had introduced His friends to this stupen- 
 dous conception of the meaning of His own death, with 
 which we are all very familiar, and yet with which 
 none of us is familiar enough. 
 
 As a matter of fact, when we read the recorded 
 teaching of Jesus, we learn first of all, that at a com- 
 paratively early stage in His ministry He began to 
 speak to His friends about His death; but the way in 
 which He spoke about it had this very startling 
 characteristic,—that He gave His friends to under- 
 stand that when He came to die, He would not die, 
 
 page fifty-eight 
 
as we say, naturally, but He would die by violent 
 means. In other words, He told His disciples to ex- 
 pect not so much that He would die, as that He would 
 be put to death. It was very difficult for those who 
 loved Jesus to accustom themselves to that declara- 
 tion or even to accept it as true; and so, very patiently 
 and very insistently Jesus mentioned the grave matter 
 once and again and again; but when the end of His 
 ministry drew near He took them,—if we may use 
 such an expression,—more deeply into His confidence 
 and He tried to show them how this death that He 
 was about to die, was not to be a fate thrust upon Him 
 by wicked men, but the very destiny for the fulfilling 
 of which He had come into the world. Jesus tried to 
 convince His disciples that His death was to be, not 
 only from the point of view of those who would ob- 
 serve it, a tragedy, but also, from His point of view 
 and God’s, a willing and determined sacrifice. 
 
 There are especially two passages in the recorded 
 utterances of Jesus which bring us very intimately 
 into contact with His mind on this holy subject. The 
 first is closely connected with the experience of Jesus 
 and His disciples which we were studying last Sunday 
 evening. You remember they were discussing once 
 with one another, what was the meaning of greatness 
 and who among them was the greatest; and in the 
 course of that very solemn conversation, Jesus said to 
 His disciples, “Even the Son of Man came not to be 
 ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life 
 a ransom for many.” You see what the meaning of 
 that statement must have been in the mind of Jesus. 
 I do not mean for one moment to be so presumptuous 
 
 page fifty-nine 
 
as to say that you or I or any Christian man can see 
 quite to the depths and grasp the whole significance 
 of that utterance of Jesus; but I do most emphati- 
 cally mean to say that there are elements in its mean- 
 ing which Jesus never intended any of us to miss, and 
 first of all, as I have already hinted, Jesus here ex- 
 plicitly states that He came into the world for the 
 purpose of giving up His life. 
 
 In the second place, He teaches that in the giving 
 up of His life, He would deal with the souls of men as 
 some great benefactor might deal with men imprisoned 
 and enslaved, if he should pay the price of their de- 
 liverance and set them forever free. “‘“My life’, He 
 says, “is to be the ransom. I am to pay the price which 
 will enable men to enter into freedom out of the bond- 
 age of their sins.”” Whatever may be the full and final 
 interpretation of that, it seems to me that Jesus can 
 not have meant less than this when He uttered those 
 unspeakably solemn words. 
 
 And the other passage which must be described as 
 essential, or rather, the group of passages, is that 
 group in which Jesus founds what we know now in the 
 Christian church as the Lord’s Supper. In the course 
 of that eventful evening, the most eventful in the his- 
 tory of the world, perhaps,—you remember how Jesus 
 took bread and broke it and gave to His disciples and 
 said to them, ““Take, eat; this is (in symbol, in picture, 
 in parable), my body, my flesh.” And after they had 
 eaten the bread, He took the cup also and said, ‘“This 
 cup is the new covenant in my blood.’ What does 
 that mean? What did Jesus mean by the new cove- 
 nant? He was thinking, as it seems to me, of that great 
 
 page sixty 
 
passage in the Book of Jeremiah wherein that mighty 
 prophet had foretold a day when God would come 
 among His people and would establish among them a 
 new covenant, which would take the place of the old 
 covenant of Sinai, the very essence and centre of which 
 covenant would be an undertaking on the part of God 
 to forgive and blot out the sins of all His people. 
 “This”, says Jesus, “is my blood of the new cove- 
 nant, shed for many for the remission of sins.’ Jesus 
 directly relates His own death to God’s forgiveness 
 of the sins of men. 
 
 It seems to me that there is no escape from that. 
 We may agree with it, or we may not agree with it. 
 We may regard it as the greatest and the most solemn 
 and the most profound thing ever uttered by the lips 
 of man, or we may regard it as something with which 
 we men of the Twentieth Century have nothing 
 whatever to do; but it stands as a fact. that this and 
 nothing less than this, is what Jesus taught as the 
 meaning and significance of His own death; that by 
 His death forgiveness of sins was to come into the 
 lives of men and that men were to be delivered from 
 the bondage of evil and brought into the glorious 
 liberty of the Sons of God! 
 
 Of course, there are some of us who are perfectly 
 willing to accept that as the true interpretation of 
 the cross, simply on the ground that it was taught by 
 Jesus Himself. Others, however, probably would like 
 a little corroboration for so stupendous a conception 
 and that corroboration I am prepared to give you 
 now,—corroboration, namely, from history and from 
 experience. First of all, the man who takes this view 
 
 page sixty-one 
 
of the meaning of the death of Jesus finds, inevitably 
 and invariably, new tides of moral power flowing into 
 and through his life, and by the side of those moral 
 streams there begin also to flow no less cleansing 
 streams of uttermost hatred for sin in all its forms. 
 
 Is there a man here tonight who loves sin and who 
 is playing with it from day to day and who is allowing 
 it to poison the springs of his life? Well then, I don’t 
 know much about you, but there is one thing I do 
 know, and that is, that you have never seriously 
 taken the point of view of Jesus with regard to the 
 meaning of His Cross; because if you had, you would 
 hate sin. 
 
 It is almost to put the same thing in other 
 words, when I say further that every great historic 
 revival of religion in the history of Christianity, has 
 been associated with the preaching of this interpreta- 
 tion of the cross. Did you ever know of a revival of 
 religion which occurred in association with a preacher 
 who didn’t know what to believe about Jesus, or who 
 didn’t think there was any particular significance 
 about His death? I do not wish myself to speak scorn- 
 fully of the beliefs of any man; but I am bound to say 
 that I have never read or heard of such a revival of 
 religion. Sometimes we wonder why there is no great 
 revival in our own day. I believe that before we can 
 have a revival, both preachers and hearers will have 
 to come to believe more deeply and radiantly than 
 many of us at this present moment do, in Christ’s 
 interpretation of His own death. That is what I be- 
 lieve. 
 
 page sixty-two 
 
Once more, did you ever hear of any mighty mis- 
 sion or of any powerful missionary society that was 
 ever born elsewhere than at the cross, as interpreted 
 by Jesus? Do you know anything about the history of 
 religious and missionary societies? I am sure many 
 of you know a great deal about them, and will cor- 
 roborate me when [ say that the passion with which 
 those societies and those individuals went into the 
 ends of the earth to be the instruments of the redemp- 
 tion of our fellows, was a passion which was born in 
 them at the cross of Christ, interpreted as God’s un- 
 speakable and immeasurable gift to mankind. 
 
 And finally, is it not true that it is at the cross, as 
 interpreted by Jesus, that men have come to believe 
 without the possibility of any subsequent misgiving, 
 in the love of God? Do you think that men would ever 
 have come to believe thus in the love of God, if it 
 hadn’t been for the redeeming death of Jesus? If you 
 don’t believe in the redeeming death of Jesus now, 
 I want to ask you if you are absolutely sure in your 
 own mind of the love of God; and if you are, I want 
 to ask you, why? Is there any absolute demonstra- 
 tion in history that God Almighty loves men, apart 
 from the awful demonstration of the cross? I am my- 
 self not sure that there is. There is a great deal of 
 pious thinking about the love of God, a great deal of 
 able and intellectual speculation concerning it; but 
 absolute assurance I know not where to find, save at 
 the cross of Him Who loves me and gave Himself for 
 me! In other words, history and Christian experience 
 conspire to corroborate the teaching of Jesus about 
 His own death. Do you think that if that interpreta- 
 
 page sixty-three 
 
tion was altogether false and mistaken, these glorious 
 and triumphant results could have flowed from the 
 men and women and groups, transformed into the 
 likeness of the Son of God, through a passionate and 
 unspeakable gratitude to Jesus for something that 
 He really never did at all? Is that a possible thing to 
 believe? 
 
 But if, by the testimony of Jesus supported by the 
 glad and glorious testimony of a thousand thousand 
 saints throughout the world, as well as thousands and 
 thousands more in the heavenly places, we are to 
 accept this view of the death of Jesus as true,—what 
 then? Is there anything that we are expected to do or 
 that we are bound to do as a result of taking that view 
 of the death of Jesus,—that for my redemption and the 
 redemption of all mankind, He deliberately laid down 
 His life? There is only one thing that any of us can do: 
 
 ‘Just as I am, without one plea, 
 But that Thy blood was shed for me, 
 And that thou bid’st me come to thee, 
 O, Lamb of God, I come!” 
 
 That’s all. 
 
 page sixty-four 
 
What Jesus Caught Concerning Prayer 
 
 \S|OME of you, I am afraid, are thinking that 
 
 : ‘ this is not a very suitable subject for the Sun- 
 p74) day evening before Christmas, and if that is 
 *: : what you are thinking, I am very sorry; be- 
 | cause I will have to disagree with you. What- 
 ever we may think about Christmas, I know, and I 
 suppose some of you know, very much to your cost, 
 what the children think about it. A Christmas without 
 any presents would be a poor sort of a Christmas for 
 a child. I have no hesitation in saying that the very 
 best present that it is possible for God to receive, is 
 the simple, humble, believing prayer of a man or a 
 woman or of a child who loves Him. And when we are 
 thinking in these days of the gifts that we are giving 
 to one another and by which we try to express our 
 love or our admiration, let us remember this,—that 
 God, the eternal Father of us all, is constantly ex- 
 pecting gifts from us; and the best gift, far and away 
 the best, that we can ever give Him, is to bow before 
 His holy face and offer our prayers. 
 
 Of course, there are some people who don’t believe 
 in prayer,—very clever people who tell us that prayer 
 is no use, partly because God is so good that He gives 
 us the very best things that He can give us, whether 
 we pray or not; and partly because God is so wise 
 that it is mere foolishness on our part to tell Him 
 what He ought to do; therefore, prayer is meaningless, 
 
 
 
 page sixty-five 
 
and if it is meaningless, it is of course valueless; there- 
 fore, these clever people do not pray any more. 
 
 Some years ago, ten years perhaps, I sat in a meeting 
 such as this in a small South African town, and I 
 listened to a sermon preached by one of the greatest 
 Christian men that ever lived in Africa. His name 
 was Andrew Murray, and I am quite sure that that 
 name is familiar to some of you. Andrew Murray at 
 that time was so old and weak that, instead of standing 
 on the platform, he sat on a chair. The text that he 
 chose was this: “Alone, praying.’’ You will remember 
 how we are told in the New Testament that on one 
 occasion Jesus was away in a solitary place, alone, 
 praying; and as long as I live, I shall never forget the 
 sermon that that aged saint preached upon that text, 
 because he told us something of the significance that 
 prayer assumes in the mind of a man who is prepared 
 to study carefully the place that prayer occupied in 
 the life of Jesus. 
 
 You will remember that, in one of our earlier studies, 
 we learned that the deepest of all the ideas, the con- 
 trolling idea in the teaching of Jesus, is that of the 
 fatherhood of God. It would be strange, would it not, 
 if the fatherhood of God should be the deepest truth 
 in the world, while on the other hand, it should prove 
 to be a useless and a foolish thing to pray? Because 
 what, after all, is prayer, but just children talking to 
 their father? If it is true that God is our Father, then 
 prayer is the most natural thing in the world; and 
 when we say that something is the most natural thing 
 in the world, what do we mean? What do we mean 
 when we say that it is the most natural thing in the 
 
 page sixty-six 
 
world for us to breathe or to eat? We mean by saying 
 that, that when you breathe or when you eat, you 
 are really responding to a vital, deep-seated necessity 
 of your nature. If you ceased to breathe or if you 
 ceased to eat, how long do you suppose you would 
 live? And when it is said that prayer is the most 
 natural thing in the world, what is meant is, that 
 prayer is an absolute necessity, if we are to live the 
 sort of life that God, our Father, expects us to live. 
 It is, therefore, not surprising to find that, in the life 
 of Jesus Himself, prayer occupied not only a large 
 place, but a most vital and commanding place. You 
 just glance through the story of the life of Jesus again 
 when you have time, and see for yourself how, again 
 and again and again, sometimes for a whole night, 
 Jesus goes away by Himself and prays to His Father 
 in heaven. And it is as plainly written across the life 
 of Jesus as anything that is written there, that He 
 believed, that He felt sure, that life would be an im- 
 possible thing to Him without this communion with 
 His heavenly Father! It was natural with Jesus to 
 pray, just because in His prayer He expressed one of 
 the profoundest necessities of His being. 
 
 Let us remember that from that fact we are entitled, 
 in fact, we are compelled, to draw one or two very im- 
 portant inferences, and the first of them is this:—The 
 prayer life of Jesus was associated, as we saw some 
 evenings ago, with the deepest knowledge of God 
 that has ever been possessed by anyone in the whole 
 history of the human race. If, for Jesus, with His su- 
 preme knowledge of God, it was a natural and a neces- 
 sary thing to pray, who are we, with our poor shallow 
 
 page sixty-seven 
 
knowledge of God,—as the knowledge of the very best 
 and wisest of us is poor and shallow compared with 
 His,—to rise up and say that it is quite useless and 
 foolish to pray? From the prayer life of Jesus we draw 
 an inference which is forever valid to the mind of the 
 man who believes in Jesus, and that is, that prayer 
 must have a central place in every Christian life! | 
 
 Then there is another. Not only was this prayer 
 life of Jesus bound up with His perfect knowledge of 
 God, but the prayer life of Jesus was bound up with 
 something else which we noted on a former occasion, 
 namely, with the absolutely sinless character of Jesus 
 Himself. That is an interesting thing, isn’t it? Are 
 you a sinless man? Have you overcome every last 
 element of evil in your nature? Are you free from sin, 
 in thought and word and deed? If you are, then I for 
 one am prepared to listen to you and to give some 
 weight to your judgment, when you come and tell me 
 that, from day to day in your sinless experience, you 
 find it fruitless and valueless to pray. But if you are 
 a sinner, like myself, striving every day against 
 temptation and day by day being laid by the heels in 
 the dust,—then I say to you that I attribute no value 
 to your word when you tell me that you do not 
 believe in prayer. And when I think of the life of 
 Jesus, free from sin and filled with prayer,—because 
 I believe that these two qualities of the life of Jesus 
 were very far from being unrelated,—I believe that 
 the strength and the beauty and the glory of the life 
 of Jesus were there, because of the communion which 
 He held so constantly with His Father! 
 
 page sixty-eight 
 
We find Jesus offering to God prayers of thanks- 
 giving. We read in the New Testament that from 
 time to time Jesus would stand among His friends and 
 sometimes among His enemies, too, and lift up His 
 eyes to heaven and say, “I thank Thee, O Father.” 
 Only the other day I was reading something that had 
 been written by a great English preacher, and what 
 do you think that preacher suggested? He suggested 
 that men and women in our day are becoming less 
 and less sensible of what they owe to God, and that 
 in our Christian lives there is far too little expression 
 of gratitude to God. Oh, let us remind ourselves at 
 this Christmas season of the boundless loving-kind- 
 ness of our Father Who is in heaven! And in the midst 
 of our joy, let us take a few moments, as we look 
 around our homes and the homes of our friends, and 
 see them filled with joy and with every good thing, 
 and as we see the homes that have been filled with 
 sorrow, touched with a kind of heavenly joy in the 
 assurance that God gives to His disconsolate children, 
 —let us spare a moment to raise our eyes to heaven 
 and say, after the manner of Jesus Christ our Master, 
 “T thank Thee, O Father!’ What a dreadful thing it 
 is to think that we should ever cease to be grateful to 
 God; and if we are grateful, let us express it! 
 
 Sometimes we hear people say of a certain kind of 
 a man, “Oh, he is very grateful for all that you do for 
 him, but he doesn’t like to say anything about it.” 
 I think that is a poor sort of man. If somebody has 
 shown you loving-kindness in your own life, in your 
 business affairs, wherever it is,—it seems to me that 
 it is your bounden duty as a decent citizen, to say 
 
 page sixty-nine 
 
nothing of your character as a Christian gentleman, 
 to express your gratitude for the good thing that has 
 been given to you or done for you. And so it is with 
 God. Let us take greater delight in expressing our 
 gratitude to God, Who is the giver of every good and 
 perfect gift. 
 
 In the second place, we find Jesus asking God in 
 His prayers for different things for Himself. Oh, yes, 
 Jesus believed in petitionary prayer. Go with Jesus, 
 after you have taken your shoes off your feet, into the 
 garden of Gethsemane, and there you will learn, be- 
 fore His face, the most awful lesson that the world was 
 ever taught in this matter of petitionary prayer. Jesus 
 prayed to God that day the most dreadful petitionary 
 prayer that was ever prayed—“‘TIf it be possible, let 
 this cup pass from me.” Jesus believed in petition 
 and, because He believed in it, we have a right to 
 believe in it also. Sometimes we are afraid to offer 
 God our petitions, in case He won’t grant the things 
 we ask for. It is none of our business. Do you remem- 
 ber, in this awful petition of Jesus, how He said, ‘‘Yet 
 not my will, but thine, be done’? Tell God what you 
 want. Spread before Him all the passionate desire of 
 your soul and then leave it to Him. But if we are to 
 argue from the fact that we are not sure whether God 
 will give us what we ask, that we ought not to ask for 
 anything, then we are getting pretty near to the po- 
 sition of a man who would say that a child really has 
 no right to ask his father for anything. If there is any 
 father in this room tonight whose child has not asked 
 him the last few days for a great many things. I would 
 like to know that child’s name and nature, because I 
 
 page seventy 
 
suppose most fathers are deeply troubled because of 
 the things that the child wants, and is not going to 
 get. But that is not going to do him any harm, because 
 when he gets what he is going to get, he will be so 
 pleased that he will forget about the other things he 
 wanted. 
 
 That is the way with us. God is going to give us 
 great good gifts in answer to our waiting, faithful 
 prayers. But it is our duty to ask, to talk about the 
 desires of our soul with this Father Who is in heaven, 
 and I hope that in your prayers, as well as gratitude, 
 there will be petition; and as the years go on, our 
 petitions will become wiser and wiser, just as your 
 children, as they grow up from year to year, will grow 
 wiser and wiser in the things they ask for at Christ- 
 mas or any other time. 
 
 The third thing we notice in the prayers of Jesus is, 
 that He spoke to God constantly about the needs of 
 other people. Jesus had the whole world in its dread- 
 ful neediness always in his imagination, and He used 
 to pray to God for the men and the women and the 
 little children of the world. In other words, Jesus be- 
 lieved in and practised intercessory prayer. That is 
 another difficulty some of us have, and perhaps some 
 of us say to ourselves, “If I pray for myself, maybe it 
 will do some good; but what good are my prayers for 
 another man?” The simple truth of the matter is, that 
 the history of the world is filled with instances of men 
 and women who have been encouraged, strengthened, 
 sent on their ways rejoicing, of men and women who, 
 in not a few cases, have had their lives wholly changed, 
 by the prayers of someone else. 
 
 page seventy-one 
 
In the slums of the city of London, there was a 
 wretched little boy who was rapidly dying of disease, 
 but he had learned to know God and to love Christ; 
 and in the same tumble-down tenement there lived a 
 drunken cab driver, but the drunken cab driver had 
 a tender heart; and from time to time, when he came 
 in from his weary days in the streets of London, he 
 would go into the suffering boy’s room and talk with 
 him a little while, sometimes bringing him simple 
 gifts. The poor boy’s heart was broken because his 
 friend was so drunken, and one night, as the cab 
 driver stumbled up the rickety old stairs, he heard the 
 boy talking. When he got to the door, he found the 
 little fellow kneeling in his bed, praying to God, and 
 what he was saying was this: “Oh God, don’t let this 
 dear friend of mine get drunk any more. I love him so 
 much that I don’t want him to be a man like that.” 
 The old cab driver waited until the boy was finished, 
 then went in and sat by his bed. He said to him, ““Do 
 you really love a poor old waif like me?” The boy said, 
 “Yes, I love you; but you are not a waif; you are a 
 man.” And the cab driver went away to his bed and 
 thought things over. Soon the boy died. And as that 
 old man sat in his cab in the streets of London, he 
 thought of that face and that little prayer, and the 
 result was that he was absolutely won to God, and 
 cleanness and decency of living; and the beginning of 
 it was the prayer of a little child in the slums of Lon- 
 don! 
 
 Let no man ever dare to say that intercessory prayer 
 counts for nothing in the world. If Jesus believed 
 that, do you think He would have interceded for His 
 
 page seventy-two 
 
friends on earth? Do you think He would ever live 
 to make intercession for us, if He believed there was 
 no use? Listen to me. I don’t want to be too dogmatic 
 and I don’t want to thrust my notions of great, big, 
 deep, difficult subjects down the throat of any other 
 man,—but at this Christmas season I do want to say 
 to you, just as tenderly and as emphatically as I can, 
 that if tonight you make up your mind that, instead 
 of taking the judgment of some person who knows 
 very little about it, and nothing at all from his own 
 experience,—you will take the judgment of Jesus 
 Christ on this supreme matter of prayer; and if you 
 make up your mind that from tonight you will follow 
 the example, not of the man who never prays because 
 he thinks it is a useless waste of time, but of Jesus 
 Christ, the Son of God, the holy Redeemer of the 
 World, Who was constantly found upon His knees in 
 prayer,—then I will promise you that you will never 
 regret that decision! There are great difficulties in 
 connection with this matter of prayer, difficulties 
 that are raised by scientists, by philosophers, by un- 
 believing men; but I want to say to you that until I 
 discover someone whose judgment and whose char- 
 acter are to be more completely relied upon, in this 
 grave and solemn matter, I am going to take the judg- 
 ment and follow the example of Jesus! And tonight I 
 would invite you to do the same thing! 
 
 page seventy-three 
 
What Jesus Caught Concerning the 
 Kingdom of God 
 
 HERE can be no doubt about it, and it is just 
 
 as well to admit it frankly, that we human 
 beings are very proud people; and our pride 
 often leads us to believe, and sometimes to 
 assert, that this world in which we live is the 
 mite world there is, or, at any rate, the only world 
 that is worth talking about. When we read our news- 
 papers or the great works of literature, we often fail 
 to let our thoughts rise above this present world. 
 We forget that there may be worlds that we may know 
 nothing about, floating somewhere in space, where 
 there may be intelligent beings like ourselves, possibly 
 even beings who are far more intelligent than our-_ 
 selves. 
 
 But there is, at any rate, one other world, even if 
 it is invisible, not merely to us but to the most ex- 
 pert astronomer that ever lived,—a world where in- 
 telligent beings live, and where the social order is 
 something so glorious and so far above our earthly 
 ways, that we cannot even imagine it. The name 
 that was given by Jesus Himself to that glorious 
 order was Heaven. Jesus believed in it, and He 
 believed that heaven was the name of an order or a 
 society over which the living God presided, and the 
 most remarkable feature of that social order, accord- 
 ing to the mind of Jesus, was that every member of it 
 
 
 
 page seventy-four 
 
controlled his life, not partly but wholly according to 
 the will of God. What a wonderful society it must be! 
 God and saints who, in their holy love to Him, offer 
 Him through the eternal days a perfect and unfailing 
 obedience; for they know that the only happiness for 
 God and the only happiness for themselves, and the 
 only prosperity of the community, is to be derived 
 solely and absolutely from such implicit and unques- 
 tioning obedience. That society is not wholly foreign 
 to our lives, because there 1s no man or woman in this 
 building tonight who has not some beloved friend 
 who is a member of it. Those who have been de- 
 livered from all the pain and from all the struggle and 
 from all the sorrow of this present earthly life and 
 have gone home to that supernal realm where God is, 
 where God presides, and where all His saints serve 
 Him day and night without ceasing,—nay, not by 
 night, because there is no night there,—that is the 
 kingdom of God. One of the most remarkable utter- 
 ances that ever fell from the lips of Jesus is one which 
 finds its place in a series of utterances so familiar to 
 all of us that we sometimes, I am afraid, miss its won- 
 der and its glory: ““Thy will be done on earth, as it is 
 done in heaven.”’ The passion of Jesus was that here, 
 on this solid world, men and women like us should so 
 love God that there would go out from their hearts 
 to Him the kind of obedience which is offered to Him 
 in the unseen world by the saints that have been re- 
 deemed! 
 
 When Jesus Christ came into the world, He brought 
 the kingdom of God with Him; because, by His life 
 and by His teaching He gave men, for the first time 
 
 page seventy-five 
 
in the history of the race, clearly to see, or as clearly 
 as men can see here below, what sort of a society the 
 heavenly kingdom is. This life that Jesus lived for 
 God and for us in the world, is the sort of life that is 
 lived out yonder in the unseen, holy world; and as that 
 life was lived among men, they beheld its glory and 
 they were drawn to it,—not all men, not at first many 
 men, but here a man and there a man and here an- 
 other little group of men,—and so the kingdom of 
 God was established here in the world of ordinary 
 mortals; and from the day that Jesus first proclaimed 
 that truth, the kingdon of God has been growing in 
 the world! That is to say, men have been coming 
 more and more to see that the kind of life that Jesus 
 lived and the kind of life that Jesus made possible for 
 us, is the highest kind of life that it is possible for us 
 to imagine. They have been, not always in great 
 crowds, but always one by one through the passing 
 ages, and sometimes in larger companies, pressing 
 in to the kingdom of God. 
 
 The kingdom of God on earth is composed of the 
 same kind of people of whom it is composed in heaven, 
 namely, men and women and little children who have 
 come to love God and who desire nothing more pas- 
 sionately than to be obedient to His holy will! If that 
 is the kind of man that you are, then you are already 
 a citizen of the kingdom of God, and day by day you 
 are striving to see the will of God done on earth even 
 as it is done in heaven. That is why Jesus coupled 
 those two petitions together in the prayer He gave us; 
 because it is by your striving to do that holy will on 
 
 page seventy-six 
 
earth and by my striving to do it and by our striving 
 to do it together, that His kingdom comes! 
 
 What do you suppose, in your more thoughtful 
 moments, is going to be the final destiny of this world 
 on which we live? I believe that it is not extravagant 
 nonsense, but downright truth and sober science, to 
 say that the day is coming,—it may not be yet for 
 a great multitude of years,—but the day is assuredly 
 coming when this earth will have become such a 
 world as will not be capable of supporting on its 
 surface any intelligent life, or any life at all; when 
 there will be no more human life on this planet; when 
 there will be no more marrying and giving in marriage; 
 when there will be no more business, as we know it 
 now in our social order; no more churches; no more 
 theatres; nothing but the world, as cold and dead as 
 “yon dead world, the moon!’ That I believe, accord- 
 ing to the best scientific thought of the moment, is the 
 destiny of our world! If that is true, you may be in- 
 clined to ask, What is going to become of all of us? 
 What is going to become of this human race? Is all 
 this struggle and turmoil, all this patient striving 
 after higher and better things, to count for nothing 
 in the world in the end? That wasn’t the idea of Jesus. 
 
 The idea of Jesus was, that men and women on 
 this world, perishing even as it is beneath our feet 
 which sometimes so thoughtlessly trust its solid char- 
 acter, are becoming more and more, under the dis- 
 cipline of His holy grace and love, fit for the higher 
 life of the heavenly kingdom. In other words, down 
 here below, as we build up the kingdom of God upon 
 the earth, we are at the same time really and truly 
 
 page seventy-seven 
 
building up the kingdon of God above; because we are 
 bringing men and women into the knowledge, and 
 from that into the likeness, of Jesus Christ our Lord 
 and Master. The destiny of the world is to be, I be- 
 lieve, a very cold and tragic destiny. The destiny of 
 the kingdom of God upon the earth is to be,—as I 
 believe and as Jesus Christ Himself taught us to be- 
 lieve,—a destiny of unspeakable glory, of immeasur- 
 able beauty and might, because at last God shall reign 
 over a kingdom of intelligent beings among whom 
 there shall not be found so much as one individual 
 who will not wholly and constantly offer to Him com- 
 plete and glad obedience! 
 
 There can be no wonder or surprise in our minds, 
 if that is true, that Jesus laid it upon those who loved 
 Him as a very sacred and a very urgent obligation, that 
 they should bring other men and women into this 
 most glorious of all secrets; and it remains our busi- 
 ness, whether we face the fact or not, to proclaim 
 first of all by our lives, then perhaps by our lips, and 
 then by every sort of gift that we are capable of be- 
 stowing upon such service, the glories of the divine 
 kingdom and to bring men, women, children into the 
 liberties and into the gladness of its citizenship. 
 
 We saw a few nights ago all that is required for 
 membership in this wonderful society. According to 
 the teaching of the divine Master Himself, nothing 
 is required but repentance, nothing but that we 
 should turn from our evil ways and come back to 
 God and bow before Him and say to Him that we 
 desire above all things to belong to that group, to 
 that community, to that kingdom in which men love 
 
 page seventy-eight 
 
Him and obey His will. Now therefore, if there is any 
 man tonight who, through this past year, has been 
 outside of that glorious society, who has not been 
 living as a citizen of the kingdom of God upon the 
 earth, I would like to say to him that this is a very 
 good time for Him to take the simple yet decisive 
 step, and to become, just as he sits now in this house, 
 a member of the kingdom of God! Don’t you feel 
 drawn to the kind of life that Jesus makes possible 
 even to mortal sinners like ourselves? Don’t you feel 
 sure that for you and for all of us there would be 
 greater gladness and richer and more real prosperity, 
 if only you and we would more completely obey the 
 holy law of God, which is a law of love? Let all those 
 who are outside come inside tonight; let us make up 
 our minds that we shall enter the New Year all be- 
 longing to the same kingdom, all belonging to the 
 same family; because God’s kingdom and God’s 
 family are one and the same thing, because the King 
 is the Father! 
 
 If we do that, then it will make a great difference 
 with some of us; it will make a great difference with 
 the way in which we live after this. For one thing, as 
 we meet men and women on the streets, we will in- 
 stantly regard them, either as actual or potential 
 citizens of the kingdom of God, and that will help us 
 to get rid of a great deal of selfishness and a great 
 deal of hatred and a great deal of prejudice and a 
 great deal of suspicion, all of which I dare say lurk 
 in the minds and hearts of many of us this very 
 night. We will treat these men and women on our 
 streets, and we will treat men and women in other 
 
 page seventy-nine 
 
lands, as members of the same society; because, re- 
 member, it is not to us merely that the great 
 invitation is given, but it is to all men everywhere,— 
 it doesn’t matter what their nationality is, it doesn’t 
 matter what their color is, it doesn’t matter what 
 their character is. All men everywhere are invited by 
 Jesus to join the kingdom of God! Therefore, we will 
 not despise others; we will not hate others; we will 
 not regard others as somehow in a lower scale than 
 our own; but our hearts will be filled with the sort of 
 passion that filled the very heart of Jesus, to have 
 everyone come in and enjoy the unspeakable pleasure 
 and the unspeakable blessings of this holy society 
 whose head and king is God! 
 
 There are lots of difficult questions which scholars 
 discuss in learned books about the Kingdom of God 
 and its past and its future. I am far more interested 
 at this moment in the present of the kingdom of God, 
 and I would like you to take this opportunity of step- 
 ping across the threshold and coming in! Let us do 
 that, and if we do, we shall give to the very heart of 
 Jesus, the founder of that kingdom in our world, the 
 deepest, yea, the only sort of satisfaction that can 
 ever come to His waiting, holy heart! 
 
 page eighty 
 
What Jesus Caught Concerning 
 Kis Second Coming 
 
 HERE is nothing in the whole realm of New 
 
 Testament study which is more certain than 
 that Jesus, during His earthly ministry, 
 taught that He would return. If any person 
 is prepared to dispute that statement, all that 
 I myself could say to him would be that, if he does 
 not believe that Jesus taught the church to expect 
 His second coming, it is absolutely impossible to be 
 sure of anything at all in connection with the New 
 Testament; therefore, we may as well put it in the 
 back of the fire. At the same time, it has to be frankly 
 admitted that New Testament scholars are unani- 
 mous, or nearly unanimous, in asserting that it is ex- 
 ceedingly difficult for anybody to be sure that he 
 knows just what Jesus meant, when He said that He 
 would come back, and this difficulty 1s created by the 
 fact that there is in the teaching of Jesus, on the sub- 
 ject, an apparent contradiction. 
 
 In certain passages Jesus is represented as declar- 
 ing that His return would take place almost imme- 
 diately after His departure; while in other passages 
 He is represented as teaching His disciples and His 
 friends to expect that the development of the king- 
 dom of God on the earth would be a very slow and a 
 very prolonged development,—apparently indicating 
 that His return was not to be looked for in the near 
 
 
 
 page eighty-one 
 
future, but that it had to be regarded as a distant 
 event. The contradiction which is apparent in the 
 teaching of Jesus on this subject takes another form, 
 because in certain passages He is represented as de- 
 claring that His coming back to the world is to be a 
 spectacular event, something which all men will be 
 able to see; while in other passages He speaks of His 
 coming as if it were a purely spiritual thing; so that 
 when we take all these passages and put them to- 
 gether with this apparent contradiction running right 
 through the teaching of Jesus on the subject, our first 
 impression is one of great bewilderment, and we say 
 to ourselves, Who is sufficient for these things? Can 
 we ever understand what Jesus meant at all? It is my 
 belief,—and I think that those of you who have 
 attended these meetings and studied the teaching of 
 Jesus with us, will agree with me,—that if it can be 
 shown that some great truth bulks largely in the mind 
 and in the teaching of Jesus, it is necessary for us to 
 accept it as absolute and final; while, on the other 
 hand, I think we are entitled to say that when Jesus 
 uttered His abundant teaching with regard to this 
 matter of His second coming, He did not mean to 
 leave us wholly in the dark, as to His meaning. 
 
 Of course, there are many doctrines taught by Jesus 
 which are, and which must remain, to some extent, 
 mysterious and obscure to all of us; but there is no 
 doctrine taught by Jesus which He left wholly ob- 
 secure, for that would be equivalent to saying that 
 His doctrine on the subject was without value to us. 
 Now therefore, it seems to me that the proper thing 
 for us to do is to take the recorded utterances of Jesus 
 
 page eighty-two 
 
as they come to us in the New Testament, and see 
 whether we can not find some consistent doctrine 
 running through them all. It is, of course, possible, 
 and for myself, I think it is entirely likely, that many 
 statements made by Jesus on this subject were mis- 
 understood by those who heard them, and that that 
 misunderstanding on the part of the friends of Jesus 
 was responsible for what I have called the apparent 
 contradiction in His teaching. 
 
 What I mean is this: From certain utterances of 
 their Master, His friends had drawn a sure and cer- 
 tain inference that He would one day return to them. 
 They were persuaded that He was to return soon, 
 and that all that was meant by the coming back of 
 Jesus, was to be manifested and expressed in an event 
 of history which would occur at an early date. Of 
 course, if that is what the friends of Jesus expected, 
 they were wrong, and it is absolutely impossible for 
 any sane man to deny that; because, in the full and 
 final sense of the term, Jesus did not return soon, and 
 the fact that He did not return soon, in the full and 
 final sense of that term, is, I think, a perfectly good 
 ground on which we may base this inference—that 
 the disciples were simply misunderstanding their 
 Master when they expected something that didn’t 
 happen; and I am certain in my own mind that Jesus 
 never foretold what never occurred. 
 
 But the question is: Is there any sense at all in which 
 Jesus did return to the world? Has Jesus ever re- 
 turned to the world since He made His wondrous 
 promises to His friends? I think He has. I sometimes 
 think that the expression “the second coming of 
 
 page eighty-three 
 
Jesus” is liable to be misunderstood, from its very 
 form. Jesus has returned more than once to the world 
 since He died upon the cross. He returned, in the very 
 first place, in His resurrection glory, and He lingered 
 in that mysterious fellowship with His disciples for 
 several days. Later still, Jesus returned in the form 
 of a mighty outpouring of His holy spirit on the 
 church, when those who loved Him came, by the 
 moving and the guiding of that spirit, to understand 
 and comprehend Him as they had never understood 
 or comprehended Him before. What was Pentecost, 
 that wonderful Pentecost of the opening chapters of 
 the Book of Acts, but another coming of Jesus into 
 the world? 
 
 I believe that, as we look back over the history of 
 the church, we can see the comings of Christ, we can 
 see great spiritual happenings, revivals of religion, as 
 we are accustomed to call them, when Jesus suddenly 
 and on a large scale has come, and has come into His 
 own! What is the meaning of a religious revival save a 
 new coming of the Son of Man to individuals and com- 
 munities? If there was to be a revival of religion in 
 this city tomorrow which would not include and in- 
 volve such a new experience of Jesus Christ, I for one 
 would not care to see it. Furthermore, I think we 
 have traced the comings of Jesus, not merely in the 
 happenings of spiritual experience, but in the happen- 
 ings of what we are accustomed to regard as the 
 secular world, a world which, none the less, is con- 
 trolled by the same spirit. In the great catastrophes 
 of history, when God has come in dreadful ways to 
 teach His truth to men, when God has made an ex- 
 
 page eighty-four 
 
ample of some renegade, turncoat, disloyal people, 
 when God has manifested His majesty and the majesty 
 of His law,—Jesus Christ has come anew into the 
 hearts of men, as the revealer of God and as the 
 Redeemer of their hurt and spoiled lives! 
 
 We are accustomed to hear a great deal about the 
 harm that the war,—the Great World War,—did to 
 religion and to the religious faith of certain people. 
 I am not prepared tonight to say that there is nobody 
 in the world who lost his faith because of the Great 
 War,—I suppose there are such people,—but I do 
 want to tell you this—that through the Great War and 
 through the tragedy and the tribulation of it, Jesus 
 Christ has come into the hearts and lives of multi- 
 tudes of men and women. There are men and women 
 all over the world tonight to whom, on the fourth of 
 August, 1914, Jesus meant precious little; and today 
 there is nothing in heaven or on earth that means 
 more to those self-same men and women than Jesus 
 Christ and Him crucified and His everlasting love! 
 I believe that Jesus has come to the world through 
 the War. 
 
 And then again, Jesus Himself said, in what is 
 perhaps the most precious passage of the New Testa- 
 ment, “If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come 
 again and receive you unto myself.” Jesus apparently 
 desires us to think of the very act and hour of death 
 as a new coming of our Lord to our spirits. He comes 
 to us when He calls us to Himself. Never did Jesus 
 speak a word whose truth has been more amply and 
 more solemnly vindicated by history, than when He 
 said, ““‘Watch, therefore, for in an hour when ye think 
 
 page eighty-five 
 
not, the Son of Man shall come.” Are you prepared 
 for the coming of the Son of Man? What if it should 
 be your turn this week? There is nothing on earth 
 that is so certain as that one day Jesus Christ will call 
 for you; and there is nothing in the world that is more 
 uncertain than when that call shall come! 
 
 And I think it is true, besides, that Jesus is gradually 
 day by day and year by year, coming to His church 
 and through the church to the world? No greater 
 slander upon history,—and I think that is practically 
 the same thing as to say that no greater slander upon 
 God,—has ever been uttered than the slander that 
 the world is growing worse. The world is not growing 
 worse! Look over the world; take your map out when 
 you go home; look at Africa, India, China, Japan, 
 South America, look at the countries of Europe, and 
 what you will discover is this: That in spite of all the 
 tragedies and in spite of all the enmities, Jesus has, 
 as a matter of fact, been coming to have a larger and 
 a stronger grip of the lives of men and of nations than 
 He ever had before. America is not in the League of 
 Nations—that is a political theme that I have noth- 
 ing to do with tonight—but the League of Nations is 
 a reality, and, what is more, it is going to be a reality 
 as long as Christian civilization lasts. What I want to 
 ask you is this—Could it have come into existence 
 one hundred years ago? And I say that it could not. 
 Jesus has today a bigger grip of the world than He 
 had one hundred years ago. At the same time, after 
 we have cut it down and after we have refined it as 
 much as we feel inclined to do, the simple fact of the 
 matter remains, that Jesus taught that the kingdom 
 
 page eighty-six 
 
of God would somehow be consummated by His 
 personal return. 
 
 You may say that is something that it is impossible 
 or difficult to believe, under our present conditions. 
 We have come to know much about things since Jesus 
 lived and died; still I am here to hand over to you the 
 very teachings of Jesus Christ Himself, that is, what 
 He taught. What the manner of His coming is to be, 
 I dare not try to guess. What the hour of that coming 
 is to be, it would be sheer folly even to discuss; but 
 what I do press upon myself and upon you is this— 
 that from day to day we should be so engaged in our 
 bodies and our minds and our spirits, that when Jesus 
 comes, we shall not be ashamed before Him at His 
 coming! 
 
 I brought a book down tonight with me;—that is 
 a thing I never do, except to bring the Bible,—because 
 I wanted to read a sentence to you which I thought 
 you would like. It is this: A lady once asked John 
 Wesley, “Suppose that you knew you were to die at 
 twelve o’clock tomorrow night? How would you spend 
 the intervening time?” “‘How, indeed?” he replied. 
 “Why, just as I intend to spend it now. I should 
 preach this night at Gloucester and again at five to- 
 morrow morning. (Think of people going to a service 
 at five o’clock in the morning). After that, I should 
 ride to Tewkesbury, preach in the afternoon and meet 
 the societies in the evening. I should then repair to 
 friend Martin’s house who expects to entertain me, 
 converse and pray with the family as usual, retire to 
 my room at ten o'clock, commend myself to my 
 
 page eighty-seven 
 
heavenly Father, lie down to rest and wake up in 
 glory.” 
 
 In other words, his preparation for the Lord’s com- 
 ing was, to go about the ordinary tasks of life. When 
 Jesus comes, let Him find us waiting for Him, in the 
 performing of the highest kind of service of Him and 
 of our fellows, to which we can lay our hands! 
 
 page eighty-eight 
 

 
 Sea | 
 ' i yeh ia 
 sia Teen 
 
 b 
 5 
 
ne edi 
 
 ae Ue 
 
 + 
 Wie i i} 
 oe, . voll 
 
 in 
 
 Auth 
 : we 
 
 
 

 
 4 
 
 Ae RAUL APP ne 
 INS RN Ys 
 
 
 
 hy gees at Land ay, Ve ee : 
 1 EEE] RM CAME, LEM \Kitns $F Blew Boas 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 re 
 ‘ 1 ® 
 a Ah Wg "Bs "py hae ee yu 
 is ORg ie } Cin Pale’. ’ ad yi Litas " ; { 
 ts UG) eR Dv) ee, Dee ig! Di eer d | We 
 - i SAY eae aay pt ie a eel TFVAG iy 
 cht» oy AUR #8 ne Sivan sie) are viet 
 i F cone a x BIAS, 5 vPoaue tas iv tir 
 ; , arate FAR . ee A. Afi oy bhivran f ‘a ae 
 i eet Tate Mas NMS RN diel y V! 
 Gta) 5 ye "hoe a he wily eet) , 
 anh Al (at Ve | } d RU ae 
 ue A ee \ neh ee ee 
 ; hy ' of vi 
 A hare ey ey Ce 
 oP) > ern oF ried nY is , 
 tt : revi \ ied f ne ' 
 ; f i: had * ghee T a 
 | ee | 5 i Pe I | a 
 i i mh aay ei 
 - te s ia iF 
 i 
 , } 4 i 
 * ' u hi, i yy 
 . | ? 1 ot wr yh ‘) } ¢ y 
 t ; v ha! : { ' J 
 i i 
 ‘ ' 
 ' ’ | 4 
 ‘ 5 
 @ 
 4 
 | 
 ? 
 5 
 i 7 j 
 1 ve i 
 a 
 ‘ i 2 
 % 
 ’ i 
 a4 
 , T 
 ‘ert, 
 } 
 } I 
 4 
 i 
 ’ y 
 } , 
 ~ 
 ' 
 i 
 a ‘ 
 ‘ae ey 
 y 
 \ : P 
 i 
 vas 
 i ’ 
 | A 
 4 
 a 
 { i 
 7, ) 
 : 
 ae | ‘ 
 { 
 Daa 
 Ma \ 4 ’ | 
 5 
 veal y 
 fa eA a 
 Art} a f 
 i el) Powe 
 “1 
 
 
 
 ‘ ) hier 
 Pads 4 ‘ 
 La ‘ ms i 
 cea Ne Pi Ca St, ad ae 
 ly i ) sh Phd al th Ate Ay 
 uD f wie & a } e AP) y 
 i f 9 ‘ 
 M , j | f “a ry i un : 
 ve } ¢ oD ot : Liv . ey. ; r 
 ke ae! th Ary Dy aye yer ‘ neo te se 
 J : 6 ‘ty iu i y ied Bas Toe A) . 4 ‘y @ © 
 Yes sy ens Bay, APO) Ce Paar | ‘ a 
 » on » 7 i 7 
 é : : j Vey , , y : Ai as 
 g Ly : ese Crm: | iz : 
 OF i ® ¢ 
 > 
 
 
 
 
 oe bem, so: i os oe rim 
 
 
 
 shin ak A oe 
 
 
 
 = 
 os 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 yf? We hee 
 ae a ie 4 \ 7) re ‘ hs in 
 ¢ iy ‘ \ } a i es < p 
 
 in ae | 
 ‘eri ' 
 
 F Hi J bd 
 
 fu) ans 
 a ie Ne Fath a} 
 We ie sh : 
 
 
 
 
 aah M 
 
 iia Wats) 
 ’ Wk at AL | mice th 
 
 nk Alans ut vier LR Pot ; 
 
 y Pgh aba ay eas 
 
 ae yh sie rand a, Fi 
 
 
 
 
 — nia a 
 —- a ga 
 
 RMR. Sp AR Fa 
 ’ Dee y , 7 id 
 yee F Bp hs; fe - 
 
 we a aa 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 CPUC Main NGG 
 
 Wits 
 
 
 
 
 
 # : 
 | t baa 
 / rai hy “ 
 d i oe 
 TN Nate nny ot 
 cay Yuitt ms 2) ‘ 
 Vie $0) ws iy al 
 ‘} ; 4 
 
 ms ; Pais at by 
 Hy Ph 
 
 
 
at) 
 
 f ney y 
 Mer? ees), Ht 
 vate My, 
 
 Is ge) 
 
 aoa 
 
 oe 
 
 
 
é 
 eel 
 
 Maye Oa MMP ph Sette A UNG iN A ip 
 Ae ane es DAMIAN RLY, Sate Dp ALS Le Me 
 
 j 
 ) 
 
 Pee Be tas 
 
 7 hi 
 ‘ : 
 
 N Matto 4 
 
 
 
ain Ay aur L\ 4 pan \ 
 foe 7 Be Pie 
 
 , ; 4 wre 
 
 eo UNG Pode: Ok TEAR Ti hah AA i a 
 
 ‘dae nb 
 ¥ an ie 
 oh e aa 
 ars 
 
 bat rae” 
 
 rae 
 
 = T 
 
 * 
 “ 
 
 v. 
 
 A¢ 
 \! 
 i} 
 
 
 
LOLI 
 
 
 
 1 1012 01033 0282