^ A. Maclaren,
HEBREWS IV. i6 349
further inquiry, assure you that you are mistaken. At this very moment you need grace to cure your anxiety and distrust, to check your impatience and presumptuous curiosity. Cast your care upon God for every needful support when you shall be called to suffer and die; and come to His throne for grace that may enable you to live to some good and useful purpose in the mean- time. Till the present time cease to be a time of need, it is indecent, it is foolish, to look beyond it, and to distress your- selves with a premature anxiety about the morrow.^
^ Wants and needs are different things. We often want what we do not need, and need what we do not want. We distinguish between young wants and needs, and " know how to give good gifts to our children." Is not the infinite Mind wise enough, and the infinite Love strong enough, to subordinate our wants to our needs and disappoint us in the short run, if need be, to develop and delight us in the long one ? Ileal needs override incidental wants ; we cannot always have what we please, if we are to have what God pleases — and what is best for us. To want what God wishes, is a swift way to have His wishes come true, and to have our real needs amply supplied.^
^ Jesus calls on us to claim God as a helper as He did, and then with that help to resist evil as He did ; to contend against trial in His solitary reliance on His Father ; to win inward vigour, inward peace, by living for work and dying for love ; not to be in- different, dreaming, but to hunger for righteousness, to strive to enter in at the strait gate, to lay down our life for the sheep, to rise incessantly out of dreams into daylight. God will not make us do that by miracle. But He will be in it when we begin it, or desire to begin it, as our help and strength, a very present power. Not the weakening help or the degrading strength which by taking everything out of our hands leaves us undeveloped and unexercised, but the help which is inspiration, and the strength which flows from encouragement; nay, more, which flows from the consciousness of being loved, from knowledge of the glorious character of Him who loves, and from the mighty motives which the knowledge that we shall gain perfection wakes within us to enkindle work, to sweeten trial, to enlarge thought, and to fill work, thought, and trial with healthy joy. In one word, God does not make us grow into His likeness, He helps us through the laws of our nature to grow into it ourselves.^
^ Robert "Walker, Sermons on Practical Subjects, 225. 2 M. D. Babcock, ThougMsfor Every -Day Living, 24. * Stopford A. Brooke.
Salvation to the Uttermost.
Literature.
Cunningham (W.), Sermons from 1828-1860, 224
Dixon (A. C), Through Night to Morning, 65.
Hamilton (J.), Works, i. 142 ; ii. 242.
Jay (W.), Short Discourses, ii. 639.
Jenkins (E. E.), Sermons, 118.
Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year : Ascension Day to Trinity
Sunday, 42 ; Lent to Passiontide, 386. Lees (H. C), The Sunshine of the Good News, 32. Manning (H. E.), Sermons, iii. 255. Murray (A.), JVith Christ, 204. Nicoll (W. R.), Sunday Evening, 355. Parr (R. H.), The Path of the Just, 265. Riddle (T. W.), The Pathway of Victory, 13. Spurgeon (C. H.), New Park Street Pulpit, ii. (1856), No. 84.
„ „ Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xii. (1886), No. 1915.
Wilmot-Buxton (H. J.), The Children's Bread, 79. Christian World Pulpit, xxiv. 210 (H. W. Beecher) ; xxix. 161 (J. Aldis) ;
Ixxxiv. 117 (J. Macmillan). Churchman's Pulpit : Sermons to the Young, xvi. 208 (H. M. Hart). Homiletic Review^ xxxL 452 (W. Hoyt).
SSt
Salvation to the Uttermost.
Wherefore also he is able to save to the uttermost them that draw near unto God through him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.— Heb. vii. 25.
The Epistle to the Hebrews is largely occupied in declaring that the office and work of Jesus Christ, as the great High Priest, is the reality of which the ritual of the Jewish altar, with its priests and sacrifices, its solemn and splendid worship, its comforting message to the sin-stained conscience, was but a dim shadow and type. This text is one of the many passages in the Epistle where the contrast is drawn between the eternal and unchangeable Priesthood and the ministries of all earthly priests, whose office, though of Divine appointment, derives all its value from the work of the great High Priest on high. The earthly priests were mortal men, and as one died after another the office was trans- mitted to their successors. It was not so with Christ. His Priesthood will endure as long as this world shall last. " They indeed have been made priests many in number, because that by death they are hindered from continuing: but he, because he abideth for ever, hath his priesthood unchangeable. Wherefore also he is able to save to the uttermost them that draw near unto God through him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them."
^ The time was now very short, and for the sake of the elect his days had been abbreviated. One of his comments upon the Scripture statement that the Lord Jesus Christ is able to save to the uttermost those that come unto God by Him expresses the truth in the striking form that " He is able to save wp to the goal," and now the goal was almost in sight. " What is the goal ? The goal is Love on the Happy Hill," and the Happy Hill was beginning to rise above the Waste.^