PUBLIC-DOMAIN CHRISTIAN BOOK
Unspoken Sermons, Series I., II., and III.
MacDonald, George, 1824-1905 · 174,677 words · 216 reading sections
Justice.
If there be no satisfaction to justice in the mere punishment of the wrong-doer, what shall we say of the notion of satisfying justice by causing one to suffer who is not the wrong-doer? And what, moreover, shall we say to the notion that, just because he is not the person who deserves to be punished, but is absolutely…
778 wordsSECTION 182Justice.
'But,' again it may well be asked, 'whence then has sprung the undeniable potency of that teaching?' I answer, From its having in it a notion of God and his Christ, poor indeed and faint, but, by the very poverty and untruth in its presentation, fitted to the weakness and unbelief of men, seeing it was by men invented…
712 wordsSECTION 183Justice.
Their system is briefly this: God is bound to punish sin, and to punish it to the uttermost. His justice requires that sin be punished. But he loves man, and does not want to punish him if he can help it. Jesus Christ says, 'I will take his punishment upon me.' God accepts his offer, and lets man go unpunished--upon a …
949 wordsSECTION 184Justice.
To believe in a vicarious sacrifice, is to think to take refuge with the Son from the righteousness of the Father; to take refuge with his work instead of with the Son himself; to take refuge with a theory of that work instead of the work itself; to shelter behind a false quirk of law instead of nestling in the eternal…
747 wordsSECTION 185Justice.
'Well, then,' will many say, 'if you thus unceremoniously cast to the winds the doctrine of vicarious sacrifice, what theory do you propose to substitute in its stead?' 'In the name of the truth,' I answer, _None_. I will send out no theory of mine to rouse afresh little whirlwinds of dialogistic dust mixed with dirt …
952 wordsSECTION 186Justice.
I believe that there is nothing good for me or for any man but God, and more and more of God, and that alone through knowing Christ can we come nigh to him. I believe that no man is ever condemned for any sin except one--that he will not leave his sins and come out of them, and be the child of him who is his father. …
930 wordsSECTION 187Justice.
Then again, as the power that brings about a making-up for any wrong done by man to man, I believe in the atonement. Who that believes in Jesus does not long to atone to his brother for the injury he has done him? What repentant child, feeling he has wronged his father, does not desire to make atonement? Who is the mov…
687 wordsSECTION 188Light.
I desire to wake no dispute, will myself dispute with no man, but for the sake of those whom certain _believers_ trouble, I have spoken my mind. I love the one God seen in the face of Jesus Christ. From all copies of Jonathan Edwards's portrait of God, however faded by time, however softened by the use of less glaring …
718 wordsSECTION 189Light.
Who would not rejoice to hear from Matthew, or Mark, or Luke, what, in a few words, he meant by the word _gospel_--or rather, what in the story of Jesus made him call it _good news_! Each would probably give a different answer to the question, all the answers consistent, and each a germ from which the others might be r…
1,132 wordsSECTION 190Light.
All man will not, in our present imperfection, see the same light; but light is light notwithstanding, and what each does see, is his safety if he obeys it. In proportion as we have the image of Christ mirrored in us, we shall know what is and is not light. But never will anything prove to be light that is not of the s…
1,066 wordsSECTION 191Light.
'But there is another side to the matter: God is light indeed, but there _is_ darkness; darkness is death, and men are in it.' Yes; darkness is death, but not death to him that comes out of it. It may sound paradoxical, but no man is condemned for anything he has done; he is condemned for continuing to do wrong. He i…
666 wordsSECTION 192Light.
'All manner of sin and blasphemy,' the Lord said, 'shall be forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy against the spirit shall not be forgiven.' God speaks, as it were, in this manner: 'I forgive you everything. Not a word more shall be said about your sins--only come out of them; come out of the darkness of your exile; com…
940 wordsSECTION 193The Displeasure Of Jesus.
_When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping which came with her, he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled_.--John xi. 33. Grimm, in his lexicon to the New Testament, after giving as the equivalent of the word [Greek: embrimaomai] in pagan use, 'I am moved with anger,' 'I roar or growl,' 'I sno…
781 wordsSECTION 194The Displeasure Of Jesus.
The Lord, I say, saw this, or something of this kind, and was not satisfied. He had wanted to give the man something so much better than a pure skin, and had only roused in him an unseemly delight in his own cleanness--_unseemly_, for it was such that he paid no heed to the Lord, but immediately disobeyed his positive …
698 wordsSECTION 195The Displeasure Of Jesus.
Does it affect anyone to the lowering of his idea of the Master that he should ever be angry? If so, I would ask him whether his whole conscious experience of anger be such, that he knows but one kind of anger. There is a good anger and a bad anger. There is a wrath of God, and there is a wrath of man that worketh not …
661 wordsSECTION 196The Displeasure Of Jesus.
The Lord did not call the leprosy to return and seize again upon the man who disobeyed him. He may have deserved it, but the Lord did not do it. He did not wrap the self-confident seeing men in the cloud of their old darkness because they wrapped themselves in the cloud of disobedience. He let them go. Of course they f…
1,350 wordsSECTION 197The Displeasure Of Jesus.
'Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died. But I know, that even now, whatsoever thou wilt ask of God, God will give it thee.' 'Thy brother shall rise again.' 'I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day.' 'I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he …
671 wordsSECTION 198The Displeasure Of Jesus.
He thanks him for hearing a prayer he had made--whether a moment before, or ere he left the other side of the Jordan, I cannot tell. What was the prayer for having heard which he now thanks his father? Surely he had spoken about bringing Lazarus back, and his father had shown himself of one mind with him. 'And I knew t…
720 wordsSECTION 199The Displeasure Of Jesus.
Any Christian woman who has read thus far, I now beg to reflect on what I am going to put before her. Lazarus had to die again, and thanked God, we may be sure, for the glad fact. Did his sisters, supposing them again left behind him in the world, make the same lamentations over him as the former time he went? If they…
741 wordsSECTION 200The Displeasure Of Jesus.
'But you know he does _not_ do it! That was a mere exceptional case.' 'If it was, it is worthless indeed--as worthless as your behaviour would make it. But you are dull of heart, as were Martha and Mary. Do you not see that he is as continually restoring as taking away--that every bereavement is a restoration--that wh…
256 wordsSECTION 201Righteousness.
--_that I may win Christ, and be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith_.--Ep. to the Philippians iii. 8, 9. What does the apostle mean by the righteousness that is of God by faith? He means the sam…
801 wordsSECTION 202Righteousness.
We have the word _imputed_ just once in the New Testament. Whether the evil doctrine may have sprung from any possible misunderstanding of the passage where it occurs, I hardly care to inquire. The word as Paul uses it, and the whole of the thought whence his use of it springs, appeals to my sense of right and justice …
814 wordsSECTION 203Righteousness.
To the man who has no faith in God, faith in God cannot look like righteousness; neither can he know that it is creative of all other righteousness toward equal and inferior lives: he cannot know that it is not merely the beginning of righteousness, but the germ of life, the active potency whence life-righteousness gro…
829 wordsSECTION 204Righteousness.
What, then, is the righteousness which is of God by faith? It is simply the thing that God wants every man to be, wrought out in him by constant obedient contact with God himself. It is not an attribute either of God or man, but a fact of character in God and in man. It is God's righteousness wrought out in us, so that…
1,019 wordsSECTION 205Righteousness.
This then, or something like this, for words are poor to tell the best things, is the righteousness which is of God by faith--so far from being a thing built on the rubbish heap of legal fiction called vicarious sacrifice, or its shadow called imputed righteousness, that only the child with the child-heart, so far ahea…
662 wordsSECTION 206Righteousness.
Brother, when thou sittest at home in thy house, which is the temple of the Lord, open all thy windows to breathe the air of his approach; set the watcher on thy turret, that he may listen out into the dark for the sound of his coming, and thy hand be on the latch to open the door at his first knock. Shouldst thou open…
388 wordsSECTION 207The Final Unmasking.
_For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known_.--Matthew x. 26; Luke xii. 2. God is not a God that hides, but a God that reveals. His whole work in relation to the creatures he has made--and where else can lie his work?--is revelation--the giving them truth, the showing of…
935 wordsSECTION 208The Final Unmasking.
He spoke the words to the men to whom he looked first to spread the news of the kingdom of heaven; but they apply to all who obey him. Few who have endeavoured to do their duty, have not been annoyed, disappointed, enraged perhaps, by the antagonism, misunderstanding, and false representation to which they have been su…
704 wordsSECTION 209The Final Unmasking.
Does the Lord mean that everything a man has ever done or thought must be laid bare to the universe? So far, I think, as is necessary to the understanding of the man by those who have known, or are concerned to know him. For the time to come, and for those who are yet to know him, the man will henceforth, if he is a t…
740 wordsSECTION 210The Final Unmasking.
To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself! Or think what it must be for a man counting himself religious, orthodox, exemplary, to perceive suddenly that there was no religion in him, only love of self; no love of the right, only a great love of being in the right! What a discovery--that he was simply a hypocrite--o…
726 wordsSECTION 211The Final Unmasking.
The good man, conscious of his own evil, and desiring no refuge but the purifying light, will chiefly rejoice that the exposure of evil makes for the victory of the truth, the kingdom of God and his Christ. He sees in the unmasking of the hypocrite, in the unveiling of the covered, in the exposure of the hidden, God's …
681 wordsSECTION 212The Inheritance.
Our friends will know us then: for their joy, will it be, or their sorrow? Will their hearts sink within them when they look on the real likeness of us? Or will they rejoice to find that we were not so much to be blamed as they thought, in this thing or that which gave them trouble? Let us remember, however, that not …
1,074 wordsSECTION 213The Inheritance.
The thing I am reasoning toward is this: that, if everything were thus seen in its derivation from God, then the inheritance of the saints, whatever the form of their possession, would be seen to be light. All things are God's, not as being in his power--that of course--but as coming from him. The darkness itself becom…
788 wordsSECTION 214The Inheritance.
I say, then, that every one of us is something that the other is not, and therefore knows some thing--it may be without knowing that he knows it--which no one else knows; and that it is every one's business, as one of the kingdom of light, and inheritor in it all, to give his portion to the rest; for we are one family,…
675 wordsSECTION 215The Inheritance.
Heaven will be continuous touch with God. The very sense of being will in itself be bliss. For the sense of true life, there must be actual, conscious contact with the source of the life; therefore mere life--in itself, in its very essence good--good as the life of God which is our life--must be such bliss as, I think,…
1,054 wordsSECTION 216*** End Of The Project Gutenberg Ebook Unspoken Sermons, Series I., Ii., And Iii. ***
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144 wordsSource & rights
Public domain in the USA; original historical text digitized by Project Gutenberg.
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Historical Christian writing; not Scripture.