PUBLIC-DOMAIN CHRISTIAN BOOK
Unspoken Sermons, Series I., II., and III.
MacDonald, George, 1824-1905 · 174,677 words · 216 reading sections
The Voice Of Job.
He cannot find him! Yet is he in his presence all the time, and his words enter into the ear of God his Saviour. The grandeur of the poem is that Job pleads his cause with God against all the remonstrance of religious authority, recognizing no one but God, and justified therein. And the grandest of all is this, that h…
924 wordsSECTION 122The Voice Of Job.
Away with the thought that God could have been a perfect, an adorable creator, doing anything less than he has done for his children! that any other kind of being than Jesus Christ could have been worthy of all-glorifying worship! that his nature demanded less of him than he has done! that his nature is not absolute lo…
835 wordsSECTION 123The Voice Of Job.
It will be answered that we have fallen, and God is thereby freed from any obligation, if any ever were. It is but another lie. No amount of wrong-doing in a child can ever free a parent from the divine necessity of doing all he can to deliver his child; the bond between them cannot be broken. It is the vulgar, slavish…
1,104 wordsSECTION 124The Voice Of Job.
But be it well understood that when I say _rights_, I do not mean _merits_--of any sort. We can deserve from him nothing at all, in the sense of any right proceeding from ourselves. All our rights are such as the bounty of love inconceivable has glorified our being with-- bestowed for the one only purpose of giving the…
801 wordsSECTION 125The Voice Of Job.
He that has looked on the face of God in Jesus Christ, whose heart overflows, if ever so little, with answering love, sees God standing with full hands to give the abundance for which he created his children, and those children hanging back, refusing to take, doubting the God-heart which knows itself absolute in truth …
791 wordsSECTION 126The Voice Of Job.
The argument implied, not expressed, in the poem, seems to be this-- that Job, seeing God so far before him in power, and his works so far beyond his understanding that they filled him with wonder and admiration--the vast might of the creation, the times and the seasons, the marvels of the heavens, the springs of the s…
1,407 wordsSECTION 127The Voice Of Job.
Seeing God, Job forgets all he wanted to say, all he thought he would say if he could but see him. The close of the poem is grandly abrupt. He had meant to order his cause before him; he had longed to see him that he might speak and defend himself, imagining God as well as his righteous friends wrongfully accusing him;…
730 wordsSECTION 128The Voice Of Job.
Two things are clearly contained in, and manifest from this poem:--that not every man deserves for his sins to be punished everlastingly from the presence of the Lord; and that the best of men, when he sees the face of God, will know himself vile. God is just, and will never deal with the sinner as if he were capable o…
680 wordsSECTION 129Self-Denial.
Friends, our cross may be heavy, and the _via dolorosa_ rough; but we have claims on God, yea the right to cry to him for help. He has spent, and is spending himself to give us our birthright, which is righteousness. Though we shall not be condemned for our sins, we cannot be saved but by leaving them; though we shall …
1,202 wordsSECTION 130Self-Denial.
Verily it is not to thwart or tease the poor self Jesus tells us. That was not the purpose for which God gave it to us I He tells us we must leave it altogether--yield it, deny it, refuse it, lose it: thus only shall we save it, thus only have a share in our own being. The self is given to us that we may sacrifice it; …
1,229 wordsSECTION 131Self-Denial.
And in this regard we must not fail to see, or seeing ever forget, that, when Jesus tells us we must follow him, we must come to him, we must believe in him, he speaks first and always as _the Son_ of the Father--and that in the active sense, as the obedient God, not merely as one who claims the sonship for the ground …
910 wordsSECTION 132Self-Denial.
I have wondered whether the word of the Lord, 'take up his cross,' was a phrase in use at the time: when he used it first he had not yet told them that he would himself be crucified. I can hardly believe this form of execution such a common thing that the figure of bearing the cross had come into ordinary speech. As th…
811 wordsSECTION 133Self-Denial.
All high things can be spoken only in figures; these figures, having to do with matters too high for them, cannot _fit_ intellectually; they can be interpreted truly, understood aright, only by such as have the spiritual fact in themselves. When we speak of a man and his soul, we imply a self and a self, reacting on ea…
1,345 wordsSECTION 134Self-Denial.
Some of the things a man may have to forsake in following Christ, he has not to forsake because of what they are in themselves. Neither nature, art, science, nor fit society, is of those things a man will lose in forsaking himself: they are God's, and have no part in the world of evil, the false judgments, low wishes, …
751 wordsSECTION 135The Truth In Jesus.
Good souls many will one day be horrified at the things they now believe of God. If they have not thought about them, but given themselves to obedience, they may not have done them much harm as yet; but they can make little progress in the knowledge of God, while, if but passively, holding evil things true of him. If, …
824 wordsSECTION 136The Truth In Jesus.
I will not now enquire how it comes that the writer of the passage quoted seems to put forward these so-called beliefs as representing Christianity, or even the creed of those who call themselves Christians, seeing so many, and some of them of higher rank in literature than himself, believing in Christ with true hearts…
719 wordsSECTION 137The Truth In Jesus.
But it is by no means my object to set forth what I believe or do not believe; a time may come for that; my design is now very different indeed. I desire to address those who call themselves Christians, and expostulate with them thus:-- Whatever be your _opinions_ on the greatest of all subjects, is it well that the i…
1,105 wordsSECTION 138The Truth In Jesus.
'Do I believe or feel this thing right?'--the true question is forgotten: 'Have I left all to follow him?' To the man who gives himself to the living Lord, every belief will necessarily come right; the Lord himself will see that his disciple believe aright concerning him. If a man cannot trust him for this, what claim …
659 wordsSECTION 139The Truth In Jesus.
'But I do not know how to awake and arise!' I will tell you:--Get up, and do something the master tells you; so make yourself his disciple at once. Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have this day done one thing because he said, Do it, or once abstained because he said, Do …
1,584 wordsSECTION 140The Truth In Jesus.
Well do I know it is faith that saves us--but not faith in any work of God--it is faith in God himself. If I did not believe God as good as the tenderest human heart, the fairest, the purest, the most unselfish human heart could imagine him, yea, an infinitude better, higher than we as the heavens are higher than the e…
971 wordsSECTION 141The Truth In Jesus.
The whole secret of progress is the doing of the thing we know. There is no other way of progress in the spiritual life; no other way of progress in the understanding of that life: only as we do, can we know. Is there then anything you will not leave for Christ? You cannot know him--and yet he is the Truth, the one th…
1,427 wordsSECTION 142The Truth In Jesus.
If any of you tell me my doctrine is presumptuous, that it is contrary to what is taught in the New Testament, and what the best of men have always believed, I will not therefore proceed to defend even my beliefs, the principles on which I try to live--how much less my opinions! I appeal to you instead, whether or not …
718 wordsSECTION 143The Truth In Jesus.
The one only thing truly to reconcile all differences is, to walk in the light. So St Paul teaches us in his epistle to the Philippians, the third chapter and sixteenth verse. After setting forth the loftiest idea of human endeavour in declaring the summit of his own aspiration, he says--not, 'This must be your endeavo…
656 wordsSECTION 144The Creation In Christ.
Whereto then we have attained let us walk by that same! Sun and wind and rain, the Lord Is to seed his Father buried For he is the living Word, And the quickening Spirit. BORDIGHERA: _May_ 3, 1889. _All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life w…
918 wordsSECTION 145The Creation In Christ.
We must not wonder things away into nonentity, but try to present them to ourselves after what fashion we are able--our shadows of the heavenly. For our very beings and understandings and consciousnesses, though but shadows in regard to any perfection either of outline or operation, are yet shadows of his being, his un…
681 wordsSECTION 146The Creation In Christ.
It was, I answer, that act in him that corresponded in him, as the son, to the self-existence of his father. Now what is the deepest in God? His power? No, for power could not make him what we mean when we say _God._ Evil could, of course, never create one atom; but let us understand very plainly, that a being whose es…
755 wordsSECTION 147The Creation In Christ.
This choice of his own being, in the full knowledge of what he did; this active willing to be the Son of the Father, perfect in obedience--is that in Jesus which responds and corresponds to the self-existence of God. Jesus rose at once to the height of his being, set himself down on the throne of his nature, in the act…
652 wordsSECTION 148The Creation In Christ.
'And the life was the light of men.' The life of which I have now spoken became light to men in the appearing of him in whom it came into being. The life became light that men might see it, and themselves live by choosing that life also, by choosing so to live, such to be. There is always something deeper than anythi…
871 wordsSECTION 149The Creation In Christ.
Friends, if you think anything less than this could redeem the world, or make blessed any child that God has created, you know neither the Son nor the Father. The bond of the universe, the chain that holds it together, the one active unity, the harmony of things, the negation of difference, the reconciliation of all f…
899 wordsSECTION 150The Creation In Christ.
When a man truly and perfectly says with Jesus, and as Jesus said it, 'Thy will be done,' he closes the everlasting life-circle; the life of the Father and the Son flows through him; he is a part of the divine organism. Then is the prayer of the Lord in him fulfilled: 'I in them and thou in me, that they made be made p…
762 wordsSECTION 151The Knowing Of The Son.
_Ye have neither heard his voice at any time, nor seen his shape. And ye have not his word abiding in you; for whom he hath sent, him ye believe not_.--John v. 37, 38. We shall know one day just how near we come in the New Testament to the very words of the Lord. That we have them with a difference, I cannot doubt. Fo…
667 wordsSECTION 152The Knowing Of The Son.
You are not called upon to tell. The question for you is whether you have the spirit of Christ yourself. The question is for you to put to yourself, the question is for you to answer to yourself: Am I alive with the life of Christ? Is his spirit dwelling in me? Everyone who desires to follow the Master has the spirit o…
661 wordsSECTION 153The Knowing Of The Son.
In the saying before us, I see enough to enable me to believe that its words embody the mind of Christ. If I could not say this, I should say, 'The apostle has here put on record a saying of Christ's; I have not yet been able to recognise the mind of Christ in it; therefore I conclude that I cannot have understood it, …
676 wordsSECTION 154The Knowing Of The Son.
The word _see_ is used in one sense in the one statement, and in another sense in the other. In the one it means _see with the eyes_; in the other, _with the soul_. The one statement is made of all men; the other is made to certain of the Jews of Jerusalem concerning themselves. It is true that no man hath seen God, an…
1,437 wordsSECTION 155The Knowing Of The Son.
But I would not forget that there are many in whom foolish forms cover a live heart, warm toward everything human and divine; for the worst-fitting and ugliest robe may hide the loveliest form. Every covering is not a clothing. The grass clothes the fields; the glory surpassing Solomon's clothes the grass; but the trad…
426 wordsSECTION 156The Mirrors Of The Lord.
_But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the spirit of the Lord_.--II. Corinthians iii. 18. We may see from this passage how the apostle Paul received the Lord, and how he understands his life to be the light of men, and …
984 wordsSECTION 157The Mirrors Of The Lord.
Paul says that the sight of the Lord will take that veil from their hearts. His light will burn it away. His presence gives liberty. Where he is, there is no more heaviness, no more bondage, no more wilderness or Mount Sinai. The Son makes free with sonship. And now comes the passage whose import I desire to make more…
672 wordsSECTION 158The Mirrors Of The Lord.
It seems, then, to me, that the true simple word to represent the Greek, and the most literal as well by which to translate it, is the verb _mirror_--when the sentence, so far, would run thus: 'But we all, with unveiled face, mirroring the glory of the Lord,--.' I must now go on to unfold the idea at work in the heart…
1,032 wordsSECTION 159The Mirrors Of The Lord.
What less than such a splendour of hope would be worthy the revelation of Jesus? Filled with the soul of their Father, men shall inherit the glory of their Father; filled with themselves, they cast him out, and rot. The company of the Lord, soul to soul, is that which saves with life, his life of God-devotion, the soul…
316 wordsSECTION 160The Truth.
I am the truth.--John xiv. 6 When the man of the five senses talks of _truth_, he regards it but as a predicate of something historical or scientific proved a fact; or, if he allows that, for aught he knows, there may be higher truth, yet, as he cannot obtain proof of it from without, he acts as if under no conceivabl…
654 wordsSECTION 161The Truth.
Here I would anticipate so far as to say that there are _truths_ as well as _facts_, and lies against truths as well as against facts. When the Pharisees said _Corban_, they lied against the truth that a man must honour his father and mother. Let us go up now from the region of facts that seem casual, to those facts t…
809 wordsSECTION 162The Truth.
We are here in a region far above that commonly claimed for science, open only to the heart of the child and the childlike man and woman--a region in which the poet is among his own things, and to which he has often to go to fetch them. For things as they are, not as science deals with them, are the revelation of God t…
728 wordsSECTION 163The Truth.
God's science in the flower exists for the existence of the flower in its relation to his children. If we understand, if we are at one with, if we love the flower, we have that for which the science is there, that which alone can equip us for true search into the means and ways by which the divine idea of the flower wa…
974 wordsSECTION 164The Truth.
The truth _of a thing_, then, is the blossom of it, the thing it is made for, the topmost stone set on with rejoicing; truth in a man's imagination is the power to recognize this truth of a thing; and wherever, in anything that God has made, in the glory of it, be it sky or flower or human face, we see the glory of God…
990 wordsSECTION 165The Truth.
The moral philosopher who regards duties only as facts of his system; nay, even the man who rewards them as truths, essential realities of his humanity, but goes no farther, is essentially a liar, a man of untruth. He is a man indeed, but not a true man. He is a man in possibility, but not a real man yet. The recogniti…
743 wordsSECTION 166The Truth.
But when the soul, or heart, or spirit, or what you please to call that which is the man himself and not his body, sooner or later becomes aware that he needs some one above him, whom to obey, in whom to rest, from whom to seek deliverance from what in himself is despicable, disappointing, unworthy even of his own inte…
1,093 wordsSECTION 167Freedom.
When my being is consciously and willedly in the hands of him who called it to live and think and suffer and be glad--given back to him by a perfect obedience--I thenceforward breathe the breath, share the life of God himself. Then I am free, in that I am true--which means one with the Father. And freedom knows itself …
860 wordsSECTION 168Freedom.
Whoever will not do what God desires of him, is a slave whom God can compel to do it, however he may bear with him. He who, knowing this, or fearing punishment, obeys God, is still a slave, but a slave who comes within hearing of the voice of his master. There are, however, far higher than he, who yet are but slaves. T…
1,056 wordsSECTION 169Freedom.
Yet is their very rebellion in some sense but the rising in them of his spirit against their false notion of him--against the lies they hold concerning him. They do not see that, if his work, namely, they themselves, are the chief joy to themselves, much more might the life that works them be a glory and joy to them th…
754 wordsSECTION 170Freedom.
But one who reads may call out, in the agony and thirst of a child waking from a dream of endless seeking and no finding, 'I am bound like Lazarus in his grave-clothes! what am I to do?' Here is the answer, drawn from this parable of our Lord; for the saying is much like a parable, teaching more than it utters, appeali…
777 wordsSECTION 171Kingship.
The only free man, then, is he who is a child of the Father. He is a servant of all, but can be made the slave of none: he is a son of the lord of the universe. He is in himself, in virtue of his truth, free. He is in himself a king. For the Son rests his claim to royalty on this, that _he was born and came into the wo…
941 wordsSECTION 172Kingship.
Jesus is a king because his business is to bear witness to the truth. What truth? All truth; all verity of relation throughout the universe--first of all, that his father is good, perfectly good; and that the crown and joy of life is to desire and do the will of the eternal source of will, and of all life. He deals thu…
721 wordsSECTION 173Kingship.
Remember, friends, I said, 'It is as if he said.' I am daring to present a shadow of the Lord's witnessing, a shadow surely cast by his deeds and his very words! If I mistake, he will forgive me. I do not fear him; I fear only lest, able to see and write these things, I should fail of witnessing, and myself be, after a…
812 wordsSECTION 174Justice.
_Also unto thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy; for thou renderest to every man according to his work_.--Psalm lxii. 12. Some of the translators make it _kindness_ and _goodness_; but I presume there is no real difference among them as to the character of the word which here, in the English Bible, is translated mercy. The …
722 wordsSECTION 175Justice.
One thing must surely be plain--that the punishment of the wrong-doer makes no atonement for the wrong done. How could it make up to me for the stealing of my watch that the man was punished? The wrong would be there all the same. I am not saying the man ought not to be punished--far from it; I am only saying that the …
869 wordsSECTION 176Justice.
'But no one ever doubts that God gives fair play!' 'That may be--but does not go for much, if you say that God does this or that which is not fair.' 'If he does it, you may be sure it is fair.' 'Doubtless, or he could not be God--except to devils. But you say he does so and so, and is just; I say, he does not do so …
750 wordsSECTION 177Justice.
The common idea, then, is, that the justice of God consists in punishing sin: it is in the hope of giving a larger idea of the justice of God in punishing sin that I ask, '_Why is God bound to punish sin_?' 'How could he be a just God and not punish sin?' 'Mercy is a good and right thing,' I answer, 'and but for sin …
682 wordsSECTION 178Justice.
'But that is to have no mercy.' You mistake. God does destroy sin; he is always destroying sin. In him I trust that he is destroying sin in me. He is always saving the sinner from his sins, and that is destroying sin. But vengeance on the sinner, the law of a tooth for a tooth, is not in the heart of God, neither in h…
1,402 wordsSECTION 179Justice.
'What atonement is there?' Every atonement that God cares for; and the work of Jesus Christ on earth was the creative atonement, because it works atonement in every heart. He brings and is bringing God and man, and man and man, into perfect unity: 'I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one.' 'Tha…
665 wordsSECTION 180Justice.
'That is not the sort of love I care about!' No; how should you? I well believe it! You cannot care for it until you begin to know it. But the eternal love will not be moved to yield you to the selfishness that is killing you. What lover would yield his lady to her passion for morphia? You may sneer at such love, but …
1,064 wordsSource & rights
Public domain in the USA; original historical text digitized by Project Gutenberg.
Project Gutenberg source record →
Historical Christian writing; not Scripture.