The Immutable Christ “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today and forever” Heb. 13:8.
The Challenge of the New Year W E are leaving the old year exactly as it stands. No single hour of it can be changed now. No unholy wish or unkind word cart be recalled or taken back. It is irrevocably fixed and holds its story for good or ill forever. We are entering upon the new year and it stands ready to be made whatever we determine to make it. Its pages are white, ready to record whatever we choose to write upon it. Its life is plastic, ready to be moulded after our thought. We cannot unmake 1926 but we can make 1927. What shall we make it ? This question challenges us to courage ous thinking and high resolve. He must be dead indeed who does not endeavor to think and resolve in answer to this question. Indifference to it is not, and cannot be the sign of superior thinking or courage but the luring shadow of an indifference that must be fatal in the living of life. Clear and courageous thinking is necessary to high and holy resolve. Think of the year to which we are now bidding farewell! Honestly face its record and dare to put a right value upon its life. We know wherq sye failed and why. We may be inclined to blame our circumstances for the failures but if we are honest and frank we know that the fatal break was not in our circumstances but in ourselves. We failed, and we failed because we made wrong choices and yielded to unworthy motives. In the last analysis we willed the shadows and failures into our lives. The circumstances were difficult and exceedingly trying but we did not have to yield to the unchristian feeling and speak the unkind and blighting word. A dif ferent feeling and word would have been better for us and for those whose lives were scorched by our unholy blame. This thought should lead to high resolve on the threshold of the New Year. We should resolve that it shall be different and better. We can make it different, and in order to be true to God, ourselves and our fellows we must make it better. “To every man there openeth If we would look back upon the High Way at the end of the year we must now choose to enter upon it. “Every man decideth which way his soul shall go.” If we could now change last year we would make it all High Way. We cannot do that but we can now choose to make all 1927 High Way. Christ’s way is the High W ay ; every other way is a Low Way. "■ Neuman 'can scale the highest heights of 1927 and leave Christ out of his thinking and life. If we would know the highest, Jesus must have the supreme place in our program. The New Year will be determined by the place we give Him. We know His way,—it is the way of Love. He does not require great riches or learning to enter upon it and to pursue its course. It is open to all but we must individually choose as to whether we are willing to ga A High Way and a Low, And every man decideth The way his soul shall go.”
HE writer of “Hebrews” has been giving emphasis to the fact that the believer is represented at the right hand of the throne of God by One who still has a human heart (although He is God) and so can be touched with the feeling of our infirmities. This union of human and divine is forever indissoluble in Christ.
Without that permanent manhood, He could not succor those who are tempted, and have compassion on them. In the yesterday of His life on earth, in the today of His priesthood, and in the tomorrow of His coming as King, He remains both Son of God and Son of man. His earthly robe of human tenderness did not, like Elijah’s mantle, drop off as He passed into the skies. He has not, as one religious sect teaches, taken on a spirit form, no longer human. Unto all eternity we have one Mediator, THE MAN Christ Jesus (1 Tim. 2:5) the God-man. Were He suddenly to appear now at your side, it would be that same Jesus whom the disciples knew, with the same warm heart beating in His breast. This “same Jesus” is coming back again for His own (Acts 1:11). j, What a rock for our wave-tossed souls is this truth concerning the unchanging Christ! Is not the phenome non of the abiding power of Christ in the lives of men after these 1900 years an unanswerable testimony to this truth? Dr. Maclaren once said: “All other men, however, burning and shining their light, flicker and die out into extinction and but for a season can the world rejoice in any of their beams; but this Jesus dominates the ages and is as fresh today, in spite of all that men say, as He was centuries ago. They tell us He is losing His power; that the mists of oblivion are wrapping Him around as He moves slowly to the doom which awaits Him in common with all the great names of the world. But Christ is not done with yet, nor is He less available for the necessities of this generation with its perplexities and difficulties than He was in the past.” Stand on the seashore and think that those waters have been rolling and dashing for thousands of years, yet they shqw no signs of waste. Watch the sun rise above the hill-crests and think that its beams have melted the snows of thousands of winters and renewed the verdure of as many springs, painted the flowers of as' many,,summers, ripened the Jruits of a§ many ,autumns. Y.gt it is not dimmed, nor is its power in the least abated. These are but images of the immutable Christ. It was Dr. Guthrie who said: “When judgment flames shall have licked up the waters of the sea and the light of the glorious sun shall be quenched in darkness or veiled in the smoke of the pit, the fullness of Christ shall surge on throughout eternity, in the bliss of the redeemed.”
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