December 1925
T H E K I N G ’ S
B U S I N E S S
538
We are interested in letters and plans and specifications, hut they never take the place of living personalities, and God has not left us orphans in a silent world. His Word is precious, and is sufficient for the purpose for which it was given, but it was never given to take the place of the living Christ and the Holy Spirit who takes of the things of Christ and reveals them to us. When He was here He lived the perfect life— God’s ideal life for man. He constantly walked and talked with God, and His testimony is final and it stands forever against the unscriptural, unnatural and unhistorical idea of a silent God.
The belief that he was not deluded when he thus sang, has led to the greatest achievements of history. Men believe that they hear the voice of God and they dare to respond and undertake the impossible in obedience to its command. It is only right that we should say with great emphasis that the voice of God, however it speaks, never calls contrary to the Word that He has written and given to be our infallible rule of faith and practice, yet when He gave us this infallible rule of faith and practice He surely did not mean that He was to rob us of that living fel lowship which is essential to the realization of what is truest and deepest in Christian life.
JË? ÉÈ Ê k manuel: A Christmas M ed ita tion What the Presence of Christ With His People Means in Their Every Day Life Rev. A. D. Beiden, B. D., in “The Life of Faith”
till he reached the top of the steeple, and there in longing he cried, “Where art Thou, Lord?” only to be met by the startling reply, “Down here amongst My people!” ' That is the lesson of Christmas—-Christ is Immanuel— God with us. The religion of Christ’s day had made God a stranger; it had hid den Him, like every religion whose ceremonial is greatly developed, be hind an elaborate programme of ap proach and a formidable array of min ute moralities. Christ in Every-Day Life There are people, and their number is legion these days, who are fond of saying that they have no “religious bump.” They wili say it apologeti cally, but one can detect a subtle ele ment of relief in their tones as though they were not altogether sorry to be free of the responsibility involved in such a “bump.” Such a condition, however, is no disqualification, but rather a supreme advantage, if they desire to be Christian, for it is of the very essence of Christ’s revelation that it is not in great knowledge, nor in many talents, nor in place and power, but in simple every-day life that the human heart enshrines God and all the host of heaven. “Whosoever receiveth a little child in My name, receiveth Me,” Is your life like that inn at Bethle hem, so full of others that there is no room for Him? May that not be be- 1 cause you do not recognize Him? You have been expecting some Great One! You thought He was incompatible with others! You thought of Him as be« longing to the stars and suns, but He belongs much more to the sweet re unions of loving hearts, to the faithful remembrance of humble souls, to Christmas gifts and Christmas cheer. (Continued on page 564)
of Gael sharing our humanity and re vealing His character in terms of our own life. The medium chosen by God for His great self-revelation was the medium of our own nature. The beau tiful stories of the birth of Jesus are all laden with this great fact. Their theme is the condescension of the Great to the humble. Angels are linked to shepherds; the great and wise of the earth to a little out-cast Babe; the Eternal Son of God is born of working- class folk; the Son of Heaven finds no better shelter on earth than the stable of an inn; the mightiest revelation in the spiritual history of mankind trans pires in an obscure little outlying prov ince of the empire. The quiet and humble and despised ones of the earth are caught up to the chief places in the vast drama of redemption— that drama which is as wide as the universe, as high as heaven, as deep as hell. Where God is Found And when this little Babe, so feeble and lowly in His Advent, but so majes tic in His real Being, became con sciously the Teacher of men, it was the same great truth that He taught— re ligion was not to be realized, God was not to be found, by escaping from hu manity, by despising its every-day ex perience, by discarding the real world of fact for some mood of exalted emo tion. Instead, the commonest service rendered in love was real contact with God. Only in the highest possibilities of human relationship was God to be found amongst men. “If a man keep My commandments, We will come unto him, and We will make Our abode with •him.”. There is somewhere a quaint poem in which the author depicts a parish priest so eager to find God that he has tened away from the common crowd and climbed the belfry of his church
T is curious that this beautiful name “Immanuel” is so lit tle used for Jesus. Doubtless it is because the word is
never directly applied to Him in Scrip ture. It is a word of prophecy origi nally used by Isaiah concerning the coming Deliverer of Israel, whose iden tity is not clearly indicated. The Divine Deliverer Isaiah, like every real prophet, spoke greater things than he realized, and his glowing picture of Immanuel, the Di vine Deliverer, is only adequately filled out by Jesus centuries after the proph et’s vision. Upon the prophet’s lips this word signified all the hunger of human souls for the discovery of God, not in some far distant heaven, but in the midst of human affairs. Christmas is God’s splendid answer to that Hun ger. The meaning of “Immanuel” is “God with us,” the first part of the word being familiar to us in the term “immanent,” and no phrase could bet ter express the essential meaning of Christmas. The incarnation of God in Christ was the great point of- transition in the history of the world, at which the Unseen God, previously so dimly felt and imperfectly understood, be came visible and tangible in the midst of time and sense. The distant God of current religious thought and feeling became the God of whom the apostles were at last able to declare, “that which was from the beginning, which we have listened to, which we have seen with our own eyes, and our own hands have handled; the Life of the ages which' was with the Father and was manifested to us.” The first Christmas was the occasion when the idea of God as being apart from and different from our common humanity was superseded by the fact
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