PUBLIC-DOMAIN CHRISTIAN BOOK
The Great Texts of the Bible — Volume 17
James Hastings · 205,313 words · 212 reading sections
Section 121
His isolation grows defined. * H. Howard, The Summits of the Sovl, 180, 302 WORK OUT YOUR OWN SALVATION II. The Spikit that Befits the High Enterpkisb. " Fear and trembling." 1. This fear does not mean mistrust or doubt, which would keep the mind in a continual apprehension of falling short of salvation, but a di…
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^ Not the slavish fear which brings the spirit into bondage, but rather that modest, humble, sensitive spirit which yields to God as the quivering grass of the meadow yields to every breeze that sweeps over its waving wealth of stems ; so the soul, in deep contrition before God, trembles lest it should be found doing i…
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The great religions of the East, Hinduism and Buddhism, lay all the stress upon the human will. The key-note of those systems is, "Work out your own salvation." The power that saves you is of yourself; the chains that bind you are of your own forging ; the virtue that delivers you is of your own merit. There is no need…
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^ Rose leaves, placed within a vase, can influence the atmo- sphere of a room, creating an odour which is pleasing to the sense. Can the spirit of man, placed within its vase of clay, create a moral atmosphere which it will be healthful or injurious for others to breathe ? Your mind has immediately given an affirmative…
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PHILIPPIANS II. 12, 13 311 agents, are not from us in their motive cause. The will is wrought in us by God, and the action is wrought by us, as the instruments of the inworking agency of God. ^ Feelings are given not merely to be enjoyed, but as motives of action. Professor James advises that we should not even liste…
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PHILIPPIANS III. 7-9 317 of the inner circle of the Israelites. These were the inherited privileges of the Apostle. (2) He proceeds to enumerate certain other privileges which depended on his own personal choice and activity. First : " as touching the law, a Pharisee." This was as much as to say that he attached hims…
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^ As the painter rubs off half of his gold leaf ere the letters which he is painting on the sign-board appear distinctly — so, much of what is precious in life has to be taken away ere God's glory is fulfilled in us, and our title as Christ's disciples is made manifest.^ ^ Gregory Nazianzen, a foremost Father of the C…
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^ In Wales and in Scotland, in the mining districts, " winning " the coal, or the mineral, is a common expression, by which is meant sinking a shaft deep down to get out the ore in richer abundance. Let us take that idea. Paul, on the day when he first discovered Christ, found himself to be the possessor of a large est…
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^ If we obey Christ, His commandments will soon shine in their own light. " He that followeth me shall not walk in dark- ness, but shall have the light of life." It is not by mere medita- tion that we come to see the real beauty and excellence of Christ's commandments ; we must obey them before we see how beautiful and…
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^ A man found in Christ is as a bird is found in the air — his native element. Watch the little songster, as it wings its way » J. H. Jowett. ^ Mrs. Hamilton King, "The Sermon in the Hospital." 326 THE EXCELLENT EXCHANGE through the ether far up towards the clouds, and then sends down to earth its shower of melody.…
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1 J. A. Kerr Bain. 328 THE EXCELLENT EXCHANGE ^ A strong thinker of the past generation, Isaac Taylor, ol Ongar, somewhere says that to the end of time a Vicarious Atone- ment (in the old evangelical sense of those words) will be assailed with objections ; and that to the end of time the awakened, the thoroughly awak…
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^ E. B. Pusey. 330 THE EXCELLENT EXCHANGE or choose what we prefer. It is a surrender to a great and awful Will, of whose workings we know little, but which means to triumph, whatever we may do to hinder or delay its purpose. We must work indeed by the best light that we have. We must do the next thing, and the kind …
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" All things." He made the statement just as broad and in- clusive as possible. Not all his ill-grounded hopes merely ; not the advantages merely which came to him from his conformity to the law, for what was "gain" to him in these respects he " counted loss " ; but " all things " — personal comfort, personal ends, per…
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^ Kingsley once questioned Turner as to his source of inspira- tion for his masterpiece of colour and arrangement, " The Storm at Sea." " I painted it," replied Turner, " under the stimulus of a personal experience. I was, at my own desire, lashed to the mast of a ship in a gale ojff the coast of Holland that I might s…
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^ Phillips Brooks, Sermons for the Principal Festivals, 270. ' H. P. Liddon, Easter in St. Paul's, 124. 340 THE POWER OF HIS RESURRECTION have robbed him of all. Testimonies might be false, the vision at Damascus an optical delusion of over-strained hours, and he would have been of all men most miserable; but by fait…
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*|| That so many thousands of human beings have assembled to worship our Lord and God beneath the dome of this Cathedral Church this Easter night, is a statistical fact which, if it were ascertained, would have no particular interest if it were not that linked to that fact is the idea of its vast, its complex, its huma…
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^ When Christ rose from the dead, He was henceforth free from all the conflict, separated from all the struggle : the sacrifice was over, the victory won ; and as the world had done its worst with Him, He had done with the world. When He rose. His home was in Heaven. And as we submit our spirits to the spirit of the ri…
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^ When all went well with St. Paul and he felt his powers sufficient for the task he had in hand, he could not realize the presence of the unseen Partner of his labours. But when he was 1 Life of R. W. Dale, 329. ' A. L. Moore, From Advent to Advent, 144. PHILIPPIANS III. lo, II 347 swept off his feet in some storm…
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PHILIPPIANS III. lo, II 349 waterfalls are at play, light awaits the call of science, which can change the midnight darkness of great empires into noonday. And the power of the resurrection, the glory of its unknown forces, its mystic possibilities are not always known in the quiet scenes of life and amidst its pastor…
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PHILIPPIANS III. 10, II 351 If yet below the blossom grow, Then earth is holy yet: But if it bloom forgotten, woe To those who dare forget ! No flower so healing and so sweet Expands beneath the skies; Unknown in Eden, there unmeet; Its name ? Self-sacrifice ! The very name we scarce can frame And yet that flowe…
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3. The resurrection is a present experience. We are so apt to^ think of the resurrection as a remote truth, to be realized in some distant future, when some day we shall die and live again, that the very idea of attaining to such a resurrection now is not easy to grasp. But here we have a resurrection which can be atta…
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^ We shall have known by anticipation some of the phantoms that haunt the dark valley of the shadow of death, and perhaps seen also in the experience of others that He is always there ; seen, perhaps, what Archbishop Benson saw when he sat by the bedside of his dying son. "That he saw Christ," is the Archbishop's witne…
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Ever since the day when Christ called to him from on high — stopped him at the gate of Damascus, struck from his hand the weapon of persecution, and shrivelled up in his bosom, as by a lightning flash, the commission of the High Priest — ever since that day, which had turned his former gains into losses, and made him c…
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1. St. Paul was a man who had to bear about with him throughout his life t;^ bitter memory of a misdirected past. He had become an Apostle, the chief agent in the propagation of the Christian religion ; but he^ could not escape the memory of days when he had done everything to thwart the religion which he now confessed…
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^ H. Dudden, Christ and Christ's Religion, 249. ' H. Macmillan, The Ministry of Nature, 232. 364 PRESSING ON IF One great truth for us all, says Goethe, is not that the past is sullied, but that the future is unsullied. It is in this sense that we should forget the things that are behind and reach on to the things…
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Put forth thy hand to touch the hfe to be, And thou shalt find the joys of long ago No more the things behind. There is a death of memory that is brought Not by oblivion, but by coming light, — It fades as childhood fades in manhood's thought; It dies as starlight dies at morning's sight, Not needing things behind. …
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^ Whymper, in his Scrambles Amongst the Alps, says that when you are on the summit of Mont Blanc "you look down upon the rest of Europe. There is nothing to look up to ; all is below ; there is no one point for the eye to rest upon. The man who is there is somewhat in the position of one who has attained all that he de…
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I count this thing to be grandly true, That a noble deed is a step toward God, Lifting the soul from the common clod To a purer air and a broader view. We rise by the things that are under our feet, By what we have mastered of good or gain, By the pride deposed and the passion slain, And the vanquished ills that we …
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1. St. Paul, in these words, is strengthening the Christians at Philippi, by setting before them the greatness of their calling and of their destiny. They had much need of encom-agement ; for a time of sore and peculiar trial was then upon them. They had to endure not only bitter persecutions and the assault of An…
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^ The term used by Paul has nothing to do with what we in the present day commonly mean by conversation (the word used in the Authorized Version), that is, talking. It means rather our life, that is, not the way of life in which we choose to live, but the state of life for which God made us, to which we belong, whether…
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^ Are we not strangers here ? Is it not strange that we so often meet and part without a word of our home, or the way to it, or our advance toward it ? ^ 2. Citizenship implies honour and privilege. Both in Eome and in its colonies the privileges of citizenship were great, and greatly prized. Eome was the centre and m…
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^ Alfred Rowland. 382 CITIZENSHIP IN HEAVEN and destroyed them. The girl wept for a while, and then put her hand into her bosom and drew out thence her certificate of home, exclaiming with joy, " Thank God ! the bears have not got this." In the sealing of God's Spirit we have the certificate of our heavenly home, and…
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(1) We should cheerfully obey the laws of heaven. According to the Apostle, the standard of our living, and its sanctions, and its way of thinking and proceeding, and, in a word, our city, with its interests and its objects, being in heaven, the earnest business ^ "W. Sinclair. » A. H. Strong, Miscellanies, ii. 170…
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II. The King whose Coming we Await. 1. The spiritual commonwealth must have a head; the city must have a King. Now Jesus Christ sits in the place of power : ' J. H. Jowett, in The British Congrcgationalist, Feb. 28, 1907. 2 A. C. Price, Fifty Sermons, xi. 271. ^ Thomas Hill Green, 31. EPH.-COL. — 25 386 CITIZENSHI…
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^ It seems to me as if, were I a layman in the days when some doctrine had got loose, as it were, into the wind and was being blown across the common and up and down the streets, I should go to church on Sunday, not wanting my minister to give me an oracular answer to all the questions which had been stated about it, b…
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* Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 111. 390 CITIZENSHIP IN HEAVEN " I live, yet not I." It was the result, not of conscious self- culture, but of deliberate self-sacrifice. The less they considered self, the more freely they spent themselves in the service of their Master and His cause, the more fully and vividly they …
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(1) The needs of the hody impose certain limitations on the soul. — Improve the social order as we may, this world will remain a hard, stern place, a valley of humiliation for most of its inhabi- tants. We submit to our daily drudgery as a matter of course. We have no alternative. We have been drilled into it by the pa…
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(1) The resurrection of the dead is an individual promise. — It is a hope to us one by one ; not like those grand promises which are made to the Church at large, in which we may, each of us, doubtless, have our share, but in which we seem to share only all together. The promise of the resurrection is to each single sou…
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^ Our nature, as a whole, has been ennobled as well as invigorated by the Son of God. Bending from His throne of Heaven, in the immensity of His love. He has taken it upon Him in its integrity. He has taken body and soul alike, and joined it by an indissoluble union to His own eternal Person. That body which was born o…
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(2) Better still, Eevelation. " Them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him." And best of all, the Eevelation — the quiet form of Good Friday night, the Eisen Jesus on Easter Day ! As certainly as sleep implies awaking, so — since Jesus was buried and rose again — the grave means resurrection from the dead, …
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404 CHRISTIAN JOY become moodily reminiscent of past glories and of vanished feasts. He feels the days before him. The pains of to-day are only the birth-pangs of a better to-morrow. The immediate difficulty is only a prickly burr which contains most toothsome fruit. Rome may separate the Apostle from his fellows, she…
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PHILIPPIANS IV. 4 407 ff What holy whispers would pass to and fro between the Father and us if, at every heart's beat and at every pulse of breath, we could repeat our untiring hallelujah with them on high, who, again and again, at each pause, at each close of God's unceasing display are ever saying, again and yet aga…
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1 W. J. Arniitage, The Fruit of the Spirit, 22. ^ Life of William Edward Collins, Bishop of Oihraltar, 51. ' A. "W. Robinson, The Voice of Joy and Health, 188. PHILIPPIANS IV. 4 409 ^ The secret of happiness is not found in selfishly seeking for it, as an end in life, any more than Prince de Leon found the fountain…
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'Twixt gleams of joy and clouds of doubt Our feelings come and go ; Our best estate is tossed about In ceaseless ebb and flow. 1 T. L. Cuyler. " E. W. Barbour, Thoughts, 2. PHILIPPIANS IV. 4 411 No mood of feeling, form of thought, Is constant for a day ; But Thou, 0 Lord, Thou changest not: The same Thou art al…
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^ I do not believe there lives on God's earth a man who has lived through more sorrow, shame, toil, danger, drags and insult than I have. This I know, whatever tries other men, everything that had deadly power to try me came. For fifteen years, from thirty-three to forty-eight or fifty, I never knew real health, and ha…
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^ Napoleon, when sent to Elba, adopted, in proud defiance of his fate, the motto, " Uhicunque felix." It was not true in his case ; but the Christian may be truly " happy everywhere " and always.^ III. The Duty of Eejoicing. The joy of the Lord is a duty. It is so because it is the natural effect of faith, because w…
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^ Anyone can rejoice " when there's nothing whatever to grumble at " — though some people often fail to do so, even then — but, as Mark Tapley would say, there's " some credit in being jolly " when everything goes wrong. What a pleasure it is to see anyone with a beaming smile, even though we know that the face wearing…
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^ Bishoi) Francis Paget. ' Walter C. Smith, Hilda Among the Broken Gods. The Antidote to Anxiety. 4?« Literature. Allon (H.), The Indwelliiig Christ, 107. Barry (A.), Sermons Preached at Westminster Ahhey, 313. Dewliurst (E. M.), The King and His Servants, 160. Gordon (S. D.), Quiet Talks on Service, 193. Hare…
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PHILIPPIANS IV. 6 425 over-solicitude which burdens and benumbs the heart, and saps energy from brain and liand, and makes men forget that God is over them, and will provide for all the exigencies of their lives. ^ The word " careful," used in the Authorized Version, " Be careful for nothing," has somewhat changed it…
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^ Anxiety has no place in the life of one of God's children. Christ's serenity was one of the most unmistakable signs of His filial trust. He was tired and hungry and thirsty and in pain ; but we cannot imagine Him anxious or fretful. His mind was kept in perfect peace because it was stayed on God. The life lived by th…
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^ E. A. Abbott, Anglican Career of Cardinal Newman. 2 W. Kniglit, Things New and Old, 101. ^ F^nclon, Letters to Women. 430 THE ANTIDOTE TO ANXIETY II. A Precept. " Let your requests be made known unto God." Eelief can never be obtained, and the Divine command of the text obeyed j3^.aLmfii;e_egQrt..fli.iyll.l^ No…
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432 THE ANTIDOTE TO ANXIETY mensely longer than the thing that flung it. Put your anxieties into definite speech. It will very often reduce their proportions to your own apprehension. Speaking of them, even to a man who may be able to do little to help, eases them wonderfully. Put them into definite speech to God ; an…
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He is not a man of little faith who puts little things into his prayer. That very thing shows him to be a man of great faith. A feeble pulsation in the heart may keep the life-blood circulating for a while near the centre and in the vitals ; but it requires a great strong life in the heart to send the blood down into t…
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^ In our own little world we have glorious sun-light flooding ourselves and bathing all things round about us, flooding ourselves and bathing us every day of every year. It is a most wonderful thing, this light. In many respects it is an impenetrable mystery and incomprehensibility. But it is not a secret. It lies open…
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^ I cannot see for the glory of that light — there is to me just now such a light on the things of God that I cannot rightly see them. God is a glorious God — Christ is a glorious Christ — the salvation which is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory is a very glorious object.^ 2. But how is goodness made visible and seen…
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4. This glory, it should be noticed, is not simply heaven, and it is not entirely future. Chrisjb in us is the hope of the full manifestation of our character in love which never can be here ; but it begins here. We love at once, as soon as we recognize ^ E. H. Divall, A Believer's Songs, 86. COLOSSIANS I. 27 443 th…
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' B. M. Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion, 14. COLOSSIANS I. 27 445 tranquil hours should produce it, but also the times when all we can do is to endure, and when all our comfort comes to us from God's Word.i ^ Dean Stanley used hopefulness as a test of all systems of truth. Kightly so. God is the God of hope, and…
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^ Mrs. Watts, in George Frederic Waits, ii. 269. 8 B. Wilberforce, The Hope of Glory, 17. " Ruskin, Stones of Venice ( Works, x. 399). COLOSSIANS I. 27 447 But soon the stern fight was decided, When a bow threw its span o'er the storm, And the cold blinding tempest subsided, While joy to my bosom leapt warm; For tha…
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^ Think seriously, you who are in Christ, of that life in Christ which you ought to live. And how will you say, one day, that your life has been lived, according to the life of Christ, if Christ has not dwelt in the details, the constituents of that life ; if your own desires, your own thoughts, your own wisdom, your o…
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(2) The truest evidence of the reality of this life is that sense of common love, that thrill of common sympathy, which leads us to care for others and to work for others. Let us determine that the world shall be somewhat the better that we are living in it, and we shall be giving practical outward expression to that "…
977 wordsSource & rights
Public-domain historical edition (1910); OCR text from Internet Archive. OCR may contain scanning/transcription errors. Verify quotations against page images when precision matters.
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Historical Christian writing; not Scripture.