Hebrews 9:22 And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission. I. I wish to fix your thoughts on THE EXAMPLE INVOLVED IN THE SACRIFICE WHEREBY CHRIST REDEEMED THE WORLD. I would press on you the duty, the blessedness, the happiness of self-sacrifice, and the present and urgent need for it. I would ask you to consider whether God does not summon all of you to the sacrifice of self to help the world, and some of you to such self-sacrifice in its fullest forms, as the very law of your highest life. II. You know well HOW THOROUGHLY HIS GREAT SAINTS AND SERVANTS HAVE LEARNED THIS LESSON. They have not been satisfied with the easy compromise and full-fed prosperity of a worldly, popular, and successful religionism. Instead of being content to swim with the easy streams of fashionable orthodoxy, they struck out vehemently against them. Instead of trimming their sails to the veering wind, they were ready to drive their frail shallops into the very teeth of the storm. Instead of answering the world or the Church according to their idols, they smote those idols in the face. Like the apostles, they held not their lives dear unto themselves; they left father and mother and lands and ease; they counted all things but dross, in comparison with the love of Christ their Lord. III. DOES CHRIST, THEN, CALL US TO AGONY AND RUIN, AND TO ALL THAT WE LEAST LOVE? Yea, and nay. "Yea," in so far as brief agony and apparent ruin may lie in the path of duty and holiness; and "yea," in so far as that which we least love ought rather to be what is dearest to us; but " nay," inasmuch as the cross borne gladly is itself the secret of blessedness. You pity the hated prophet, the burning martyr, the persecuted saint? And do you think that he needs your pity, rather than the man who, rich and successful, is torn, day and night, by the many-headed monster of unruly passions, which, the more they are gratified, ravin the more clamorously for gratification? Do you pity God's martyrs, and do you not rather pity those who, living to indulge their own vilest impulses, have, as the devil's martyrs, made their own bodies and minds a very curse to themselves and to all the world? Nay, you are wrong. It is Nero on his gilded chair who is to be pitied, not St. Paul in his rags and wretchedness. That man is blessed, blessed even in the dungeon or at the stake, who is pure, and just, and loving, and innocent. IV. BLESSEDNESS IS A LOFTIER AND A DEEPER THING THAN HAPPINESS; but I go further, and say that in self-sacrifice you will not only find blessedness, but even a joy, a happiness, a gladness such as the world can neither give nor take away. Disenchantment in success, weariness in riches, satiety in self-indulgence, inward wretchedness amid outward prosperity, are the heritage of the world. Tiberius is "tristissimus, ut constant hominum"; and Severus cries, "Omnia fui, et nihil expedit"; but joy in the Lord, joy in the Holy Ghost, joy in believing, joy unspeakable and full of glory, joy even amid much affliction, has ever been the unique and miraculous paradox of Christianity. Read the Epistle to the Philippians, written by a hunted fugitive in prison with weak eyes, in wretched health, a spectacle of shame; his name a hissing, the chain which coupled him to the rude soldier clanking with every motion of his hand: then read the "Tristia" of Ovid, or the letters of , or the "Consolation ad Polybium" of Seneca, written in an exile incomparably less trying, and you will see that while the poet, and the orator, and the stoic are full of base adulation and womanish complaints, the letter of this poor, sick, deserted Jewish prisoner bursts again and again into irrepressible music, flashes from line to line with gleams of indomitable joy. V. So THEN, WHEN CHRIST CALLS YOU TO SELF-SACRIFICE, HE CALLS YOU TO JOY AS WELL AS TO BLESSEDNESS. He takes from you no single element of natural and innocent joy: neither the joy of nature, nor of art, nor of youth, nor of healthy life; nay, He would illuminate, He would intensify ever)" one of these by expanding them to infinitude: or, if indeed He love you so much as to ask you for His sake to sacrifice them all, even then He gives you in the place of them a beatitude which no one can conceive save he who possesseth it. And yet, alas! how few accept this call; how many prefer the sin, which can only be got rid of by the sacrifice of self. (Archdeacon Farrar.) Parallel Verses KJV: And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission. |
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