793
THE KING’S BUSINESS
irrelevant factor in the purposes of common life? Why, reverence is the very clue to fruitful, practical living. Reverence is creative of hope; nay, a more definite em phasis can be given to the assertion; rev erence is a constituent of hope. Annihilate reverence, and life loses its fine Sensitive ness, and when sensitiveness goes out of a life the hope that remains is only a flippant rashness, a thoughtless impetuosity, the careless onrush of the kine, and not a firm, assured perception of a triumph that is only delayed. A reverent homage before the sublimities of yesterday is the condi tion of a fine perception of the hidden tri umphs of the morrow. And, therefore, I do not regard it as an accidental conjunc tion that the psalmist puts them together and proclaims the evangel that “the Lord taketh pleasure in them that fear him, in them that hope in his mercy.” To feel the days before me I must revere the purpose which throbs behind me. I must bow in reverence if I would anticipate in hope. GOD’S REDEMPTIVE PURPOSE Here, then, is the Apostle Paul, with the redemptive purpose interweaving itself with all the entanglements of his common life, a purpose reaching back into the awful depths of the eternities, and issuing from those depths in amazing fulness of grace and glory. No one can be five minutes in the companionship of the Apostle Paul without discovering how wealthy is his sense of the wealthy, redeeming ministry of God. What a wonderful consciousness he ha.^ of the sweep and fulness of the divine grace ! You know the variations of the glorious air : “the unsearchable riches of Christ” ; “riches in glory in Christ Jesus” ; “all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ” ; “the riches of his good ness and forbearance and long-suffering.” The redemptive purpose of God bears upon thè life of the apostle and upon the race whose privileges he shares, not in an un certain and reluctant shower, but in a great and marvelous flood. And what to him is the resultant enfranchisement? What are the spacious issues of the glorious work?
redemption in the apostle’s thought by which I am impressed. I stand in awed amazement before its vast, far-stretching reaches into the eternities. Said an old villager to me concerning the air of his elevated hamlet, “Ay, sir, it’s a fine air is this westerly breeze; I like to think of it as having traveled from the distant fields of the Atlantic !” And here is the Apos tle Paul, with the quickening wind of redemption blowing about him in loosen ing, vitalizing, strengthening influence, and to him, in all his thinking, it had its birth in the distant fields of eternity! To the apostle redemption was not a small de vice, an afterthought, a patched-up expedi ent to meet an unforseen emergency. The redemptive purpose lay back in the abyss of the eternities, and in a spirit of rever ent questioning the apostle sent his trem bling thoughts .into those lone and silent fields. He emerged with whispered secrets such as these: “fore-knew,” “fore-or dained,” “chosen in him before the founda tion of the world,” “eternal life promised before times eternal,” “the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ,Jesus our SUBLIME -COMPANIONSHIP Brethren, does our common thought of redemptive glory reach back into this august and awful presence? Does the thought of the modern disciple journey in this distant pilgrimage? Or do we now regard it as unpractical and irrelevant? There is no more insidious peril in modern religious life than the debasement of our conception of the practical. If we divorce the practical from the sublime, the prac tical will become the superficial, and will degenerate into a very lean and forceless thing. When Paul went on this lonely pil grimage his spirit acquired the posture of a finely sensitive reverence. People who live and move beneath great domes acquire a certain calm and stately dignity. It is in companionship with the sublimities that awkwardness and coarseness are destroyed. We lose our reverence when we desert the august. But has reverence no relationship to the practical? Shall we discard it as an
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker