The Continuousness of History—Repentance a Common Term—teaching Positive As Well As Negative—the True Baptism

Prayer

Almighty God, our voice is lifted up to thee in praise and thanksgiving, through Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour, because of all thy tender mercy and thy loving kindness shown unto us since we last assembled here. Thou dost lead us by ways that we know not, and unexpected answers dost thou give to our trouble and our want. We look back to behold a long line of light: that line is thy love, thy care, thy patience; and as we look forward we behold a long line of golden promise and tender assurance, so. that we have no fear clouding and darkening our hearts. This is the Lord's doing, this is the gift of heaven, this is the revelation of God's love to our life, though it be dark, dark with sin and vexed with many cares. What time we are afraid, we put our trust in God; when the sky is black, we know that the sun is still there, and that no force but thine can shake that source of light. Help us to know that the troubles of this life are for a moment, but as their season is short, so their visitation is often sharp. May we put our trust in thy love and righteousness and tender care, and be quiet, though the earth be removed and the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.

Thou hast written thy testimony in our life, thou hast proved thyself every day of our individual history. Thou hast made us and not we ourselves, we are the people of thy pasture and the sheep of thine hand. Thou knowest our frame, thou rememberest that we are dust; every bone thou didst fashion, our reason thou didst set upon its throne, our whole life is brightened by the light of thy presence, and as for the troubles which vex and divide us, behold thou dost so direct them as to bring joy out of our greatest sorrow. What shall we render unto the Lord for all his benefits towards us? We will take the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord, yea, with loudness as men call who are burning with the fire of earnestness. We will not restrain our song before God, but with loud hallelujahs will we praise thee for thy wonderful care, thy continual mercy.

We come always to Jesus, because he is the same yesterday, to-day, for ever,—always fall of love, full of pity, full of thought for our whole life. He died for us and rose again; he is our Saviour; and he is our intercessor; for us he shed his blood, for us he breathed away his heart in priestly prayer. We have no other Saviour; we need no other. His blood is our answer to thy law, his cross the sanctuary of the soul when pursued by its guilt.

We bless thee that we are in thine house, for it is good to be here. Thou dost cause a great calm to fill the sanctuary, and the spirit of peace speaks to the sons of peace, and having fellowship one with another, and with our common Father, great love floods the soul. Forgetting earth and time and dreary sense, we already claim the heritage bought for us by our Saviour Christ. Enjoying this opportunity of communion with God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, may we return to the family, to the marketplace, to all the daily engagements of life, with renewed purity of soul, elevation of purpose, and breadth of charity, accepting our little life as a great opportunity, and diligently working with both hands, not as hired servants, but as loving sons.

Set up thy kingdom within our heart—call it kingdom of God, kingdom of heaven, kingdom of light, kingdom of truth—we shall know it by what name soever it is called, for it will absorb all other masteries and rule us with infinite and gracious dominion. Help us to see the best of one another, teach us to read each other's life in the light of divine hope and redeeming love, fill our hearts with the very love of Christ, and may we prove discipleship by the cross.

Thou knowest the need of every heart, the pain of the wounded spirit, the joy of the delivered soul, the song of those who have great hope, and the purpose of those whose tomorrow is bright with great gladness. The Lord come to us according to our varied necessities, and according to the want or the joy of each heart, let thy blessing be measured unto us. When our purpose is evil, turn our counsel upside down with a ruthless hand; when our aim is good, help us to accomplish our whole purpose. Break the arm that is lifted in rebellion against light, truth, beauty, holiness, and all heavenliness of love and purpose.

The Lord give strength unto those whose desire it is to make the world gladder day by day. The Lord look upon the old man whose life is behind him and speak some gospel of hope to his waiting soul. The Lord speak to the young man that he may estimate the number of his days and their brevity, and work in the spirit of the solemn responsibility. The Lord look upon the missionary at home, the loving mother, the gracious parent, the one who sacrifices herself for her children, and loves them with unutterable affection. The Lord look into the nursery, into the cradle, into the school, among all our young and loved ones, and baptize them with the dew of the morning. The Lord be the physician in the sick chamber, and bear his own gospel to hearts that can listen to no human tongue. The Lord's light brighten over the whole heavens until there be no shadow left. Amen.

Matthew 3:1-6.

1. In those days (thirty years after the events of Chapter II.) came (cometh) John the Baptist, preaching (after the manner of a herald), in the wilderness of Judæa (bordering on the Jordan and the Dead Sea).

2. And saying, repent ye (change your mind and purpose): for the kingdom of heaven (a phrase used by Matthew about thirty times, and by him only in the New Testament) is at hand (has come nigh),

3. For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.

4. And the same John had his raiment of camel's hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins: and his meat was locusts and wild honey.

5. Then went out to him Jerusalem, and all Judæa, and all the region round about Jordan (the whole length of the river valley, including parts of Perea, Samaria, Galilee, and Gaulonitis).

6. And were baptized of him in Jordan, confessing their sins.

If you read the last verse of the second chapter—"And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, he shall be called a Nazarene"—and then read the first verse of the third chapter—"In those days came John the Baptist"—you might suppose that the two events followed one another within a very brief interval, whereas the fact is that thirty years intervened between the last verse of the second chapter and the first verse of the third. The heart is sad at that thought: we do not want the historian to take such wide leaps; we want him to take us down to Nazareth, and give us almost daily glimpses into that obscure but wondrous home. We long to overhear somewhat of the conversation that passes amongst its inmates; especially do we want to look at one with a human face, brightened often with divine flashes, and to listen to a voice like our own, yet much unlike it, so rich, so varied, so tender in pathos, so royal in command. Yet we stand here, at the opening of the third chapter (with one glimpse given by another writer) with thirty years overleaped in silence that is to the imagination provoking.

"In those days came"—literally "in those days cometh" as if all the movement were continuous, without break or gap, as if there were no past tense, as if we lived in a perpetual present, as if history were a continuous breathing, not a succession of shocks, but a perpetual outgo of the divine purpose and the heavenly will. We have broken up our grammar so that we now have present, past, perfect, pluperfect, and future, but there is another grammar in which there is but one mood and one tense, and it is Christ's purpose to draw us up into his own thinking, until all history and all developments, the whole sweep and current of things, shall be to us a living indicative. You go back to take up the past, you break life up into sections, you cut it up into parentheses, you vex the flowing narrative with foot-notes and marginalia, so that I am lost in this wondrous history of the race. He calms me by completing me, withdraws my attention from fractional times and momentary incidents, and fixes it upon the infinite oneness of the divine purpose and way.

In those days came John the Baptist. A transient name. The Baptist must die, the Congregationalism the Presbyterian, the Episcopalian must die—his very name is indicative of the transientness of his coming and purpose. No man can be known by any one little accent of his case throughout immortality. When a man is so specialized the meaning is that his mission is here and gone, whilst you are speaking about him—a breath, a shock, a voice, an echo, a vacancy. Do you still follow the Baptist? Poor laggard, what business hast thou, in this nineteenth century, with following the Baptist? He himself said his mission was introductory, symbolical, a plunge, and all was over. Why art thou still dogging his steps, as if he had aught to give thee? He has eaten up the locusts and wild honey, and his raiment and his leathern girdle are worn out and are not worth thy picking up. O haste thee to catch his Master.

Still, John had a mission, and a great one; and it will be our object to measure it in future expositions. John the Baptist came preaching—a term but little understood. There are few preachers, and ought to be few. There are too many who bear the name who do not understand the vocation. He is not a preacher who stands in one place year after year, talking to the same people, and overfeeding them with intellectual luxuries. Preaching, in the New Testament, is a term which means heralding, going up and down from east to west, crying, shouting, with a ringing voice, "Prepare!" He is the preacher who does so, who breathes through the herald's trumpet, and startles the stagnant air with shattering blasts and says, "The King! the King!" In our days we have degraded preaching into bending the head over a sheet of ill-written paper and mumbling it with very uncertain emphasis. In the New Testament the preacher is the shouting man. We do not like shouting; we object to exclamation; but the true preacher is the vox clamantis. "Prepare! look out! attention!" After the preacher of course will come the teacher, the pastor, the expositor, the man whose business it is to stand in one place and unfold the infinite riches of the divine wisdom; but the preacher—defining that term in the light of the New Testament—is a herald, a man who has a proclamation in his hands, whose sermon is brief because not a speech well composed and elaborate, but a cry, as of a man who should call "Fire" to a sleeping town.

"In those days came John the Baptist, saying, Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." The cry of all widening civilization has been Repent. Do not be startled with the word, as if it were a church term and a Bible word only; it is a word you cannot do without in the history of secular civilization. Do not sneer at the preacher when he says "Repent," as if he had picked up a fanatical word and were using it for fanatical purposes. What is the meaning of this word repent, as used in this connection? The meaning of it is, change your purpose, alter your mind, turn round, face about, you are on the wrong road, return! It is the utterance of men who have a new proposition to make in politics, in commerce, in engineering, in all the ways and processes of advancing life. He who corrects the thinking of his age, having verified his own conclusions in privacy, comes forth and says to his era, "Repent, you are wrong, change your mind, alter your standpoint." When the word is taken up into the religious sphere, and invested with its vital meanings, it still continues the first signification, and enhances that signification with other meanings deeper and grander still. When a man repents of his sin, he knows the bitterness of inward sorrow, his heart weeps blood, his soul is afflicted with grievous distress on account of sin. Then the repentance expresses itself in an outward change of standing, attitude and relationship, coming up out of an inward conviction wrought through infinite pain, and by ministries for which there are ho words.

John's, then, was not a very cheerful ministry, or a very popular or comfortable one. It is pleasanter for me to come down to any assembly and say, "I approve all your doings, I confirm your proceedings, I endorse your policies, Heaven's blessing shine upon you like a summer day!" He who comes with a speech of that kind to the populace, will for the time being be the popular idol. To come into the midst of a city, or to go up and down a land, crying "Repent," is to excite the most desperate prejudice. Who are you? Why this challenging tone? quo warranto? Prove your standing: whence came you, what is the measure of your responsibility? Then will come insinuations as to sinister motive, and implications of dishonest or selfish purpose. Then the tu quoque will be the weapon of the hour. The man whose little sermon is "Repent" sets himself against his age, and will for the time being be battered mercilessly by the age whose moral tone he challenges. There is but one end for such a man—"off with his head." You had better not try to preach repentance until you have pledged your head to Heaven.

The negativeness of this ministry accounts for what is popularly termed the want of success. John's ministry was to clear the ground; he was a pioneer, he was a herald, he was one whose work was more or less of the negative kind, or introductory at the best. Such men do not add up to much in the sum total of vulgar arithmetic. When they are added up into their total by God himself the sum is not inconsiderable. We have reformers amongst us whose business it is to get men into a state of mind to hear the gospel. Having heard the gospel and received it, the men who conducted the introductory ministry are too often forgotten, as though they had done next to nothing. Your business it may be, is to go out and persuade a man to alter his personal habits and his social relationships so as to bring himself within the sound of the Christian gospel. He comes to hear the minister; the minister, baptized with fire and clothed with zeal, arrests the man, and makes him a prisoner of the law. It may be that your outside and comparatively negative work is forgotten by men, but God is not unrighteous to forget your work of faith and labour of love. Yours is a preparational ministry; yours is introductory, and because introductory more or less transient in its public effects and fame. Nevertheless it is a ministry without which the Church cannot live. Persevere through good report and through evil report, and come not to Time's low counter for your pay, but to the judgment-seat of Christ.

Consider well what it is to preach the gospel of repentance. I would rather preach the gospel of comfort; it would suit me personally better to say to every man who hears me, "You are altogether right; all you need is comfort, the kiss and seal of holy peace. Cheer you; it will be well with you." To stand before any man, and say to him, "If we are to make solid work we must begin with the fact that you are as bad as you can be," is to excite prejudice and to create tremendous, if not insuperable, difficulty. Here is the disadvantage of the preacher; he has always to challenge his hearers, charge them with want of integrity; his indictment is heavy, every count of it rising above every other count before it in the gravity of its impeachment. The lecturer comes before you with his kid gloves and scented arrangements, and tells you how delighted he is to have the opportunity of speaking to so large, enlightened, and influential an assemblage. The preacher stands up and says, "Repent"; and who likes to listen to a man whose voice is a charge, whose sentences are thunderbolts? Yet through this ministry of repentance we must all pass ere we can enter into a ministry of reconciliation, and enjoy the infinite calm of God's own peace.

Yet John's ministry was not wholly negative. There is a positive element in it, that should be carefully noted. He said, indeed, "Repent ye," but his deliverance did not end there. He added a reason, "For, or because, the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Do not charge your hearer severely, so as to overwhelm him with intolerable sorrow. Having brought him to his knees in penitence, and broken his heart with contrition, and left him without a rag with which to cover the nakedness of his iniquity, tell him that the kingdom of heaven is at hand, intimating that his repentance is a sorrow that brings joy, that repentance is an introductory necessity, that it endures for a night, and joy cometh, bringing with it its own morning, a day that never dips into the darkness of eventide. So this heroic preacher, so severe, so terrible in aspect, so piercing and rending in voice, has a sweet, sweet tone—"The kingdom of heaven is at hand. The morning cometh, the summer dawns, the rain is over and gone, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land. Attend, repent, change, turn round—for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." A challenge of moral integrity should always be associated with the presentation of a great opportunity. Tell a man to repent only, and leave him there, and you put a dart into his breast. Tell him to repent, and add that the kingdom of heaven, with all its light and healing and redemption, is at hand, and you preach to him something like a complete gospel. The indictment associated with the word repentance must be followed with the inspiration connected with the term, the kingdom of heaven.

"This is he that was spoken of by the prophet." Every preacher who deeply moves his age, is a fulfilment of prophecy. The great man is always to come. History is a process of daily fulfilment of prophecy. We are always startled with conformations of the Divine Word, and when the right man comes, there is something about him which indicates his reality. My sheep know my voice. When a man hears the truth, there is something within him which says, "So it is." I may resent what you say to me, may put my imagination to great stress, for the purpose of getting up excuses and pleas in reply to your charges, when you accuse me of being guilty before God, yet all the while, deep down in my self-reproachful heart, I feel that you are right, and that my palliations do but add to my sin.

What was the result of this man's preaching, so far as this section of the history will enable us to judge? There went out to him Jerusalem and all Judea, and all the region round about Jordan. See the power of one consecrated and burning heart. John was one—the whole valley of the river was shaken by his voice, and men poured around him from every quarter. Believe in individuality of labour, believe that you, solitary thinker, lonely teacher, preacher, reformer—that you in your solitariness may have the power given you of God, of moving a whole age and inspiring a whole nation. Take the large view of your mission; do not be behind the very chief of the apostles, not in your own conceit, but in your interpretation of the breadth and grandeur of the divine call. Everywhere do I read of great results attending one man's ministry. One man is sometimes an army, one man is sometimes a congregation. Despise not the two and the three; there is a religion which can condescend to bless meetings of twos and threes: consider that that condescension is a proof of the divinity of the doctrine. That which is artificial works for the artificial, that which is real works for the human, the vital, the image of God. To-day we call out for thousands to hear us, and if the thousands are not there, we think but little of the few who gather in the house of God. If we were in right mood of heart we should see in every little child an opportunity for preaching with all the fire that could burn in the heart of the most consecrated patriot or a twice-anointed minister of God.

Get away from the baptism of John as soon as you can. We are not always to be standing in introductory rites and ceremonial observances. Again and again would I say that the ministry of John was by its very constitution a temporary and not a permanent ministry. Is it possible that there are men and women amongst us to-day, squabbling with one another about the matter of baptism? With what baptism you have been baptized I care not—if you have been baptized with the dew of the morning, sprinkled with hands prelatic or archiepiscopal—care not if you have been plunged in the middle of all the great seas that roll round the earth. Such baptism is nothing if it has not been followed by the true baptism of blood and Fire. Into what baptism, then, have we been baptized? I believe that a sound argument can be set up in favour of the suggestion that in Christian baptism since the apostolic days there is no water at all. It does not follow that you must have water in order to have baptism, but, my friend, if you want the Atlantic have it: if the drop of dew trembling on the rosebud will suffice you, take it, but they are both nothing but ritualism, ceremonialism and superstition, If you do not seize the inner meaning, cry for the laver of blood, and mightily implore God to visit you with the baptism of fire.

See that the baptismal water does not freeze upon you, and encrust you as with ice, and make a bigot of you. The one baptism of which all other baptisms were indications, types and symbols, is the baptism of blood and the chrism of fire.

Review of the Whole Chapter

Now, looking at the third chapter as a whole, having already gone through it in detail, we seem to see in this brief chapter the history of a whole dispensation, the dispensation of John the Baptist. It begins and ends in these seventeen short verses. In this chapter I read, "Then cometh John," and I also read, "Then cometh JESUS." God thus condenses much into brief space. Sometimes he takes a long line, and we say he has gone into a far country, and we know not when he will return. Sometimes he seems to work with urgency and suddenness, and in a moment to begin and complete a whole dispensation. He is not to be measured by our lines or described by our terms: we cannot tell what he will do—he may take ages countless in which to build a rock, he may take a short night-time in which to begin and complete a whole dispensation of his providence. Thus he baffles all our statistical tables. We have no calculus by which we can tell when he will come, or where he will be at a given period; we cannot take him within our sweep and line. He loves to baffle the ingenuity of man. We have reduced everything now to a law of averages, but God stands out of our reckoning, and no man can say whether he will not come to-night to judge the world. Thus are we kept in continual expectation, thus there is ever near us a ghost that alarms or comforts, according to the mood of our heart. Let us learn that our business is to rest in the Lord and to wait patiently for him, so that whether he come to-night or do not come for long ages yet to elapse, we may be found doing our little best, cultivating our tiny corner, watching, waiting, praying, hoping, suffering with a hero's confidence, toiling with a son's delight, and then, come when he may, it will be summer for our souls, release and freedom for all that makes us mean.

Looking again at this chapter as a whole, we see that it introduces a new name into human history. May I pause a moment to ask you what that new name is? As we have read the chapter over several times together, did you hear one name that struck you as music strikes an attentive soul? It is a short name, it is—Son. "This is my beloved Son." We have made ourselves so familiar with that word that we read it as though it did not mark a new epoch in human history; but if we could have read the Bible through at one long sitting, we should have seen that the line of development moves in this form, Man—Servant—Prophet—Messenger—Son. Last of all he sent his Son also. It is infinitely exciting to see how these new words came into human speech. All the time we felt something was wanting: Man was a great name, Servant a high office, Prophet a marvellous function, Messenger a high ministry—SON takes them up and rounds them into completeness, and lights them with ineffable splendour.

The divine movement is always climacteric, the divine progress is an ascension. God does not begin with Son and work down to servant, nor with man and work down to some insignificant molecule: he begins at the other end, and always the better day is to come. Prophecy meant that the day of light was to dawn upon the hills and valleys of time, and that music was to take the place of groaning. That is the thread or line of the Bible, and because it is so I find in that very movement of ascension a confirmatory illustration, not to say an original and complete argument, on behalf of the divinity and authority of the Book which we worship as divinely inspired and final in its moral revelations.

Then, looking again at the chapter as a whole, we see that it completes what other dispensations only began. The proofs upon this, point are several and brilliant. What is the first word we hear in connection with human history, or with the formation of man? It is make. "Let us make man." In connection with Jesus Christ, "This is my only begotten Son." A Creator, a Father, an Artist, a God. Still the line heightens itself in the same direction. What is the description of the character of man in the first instance? Upright. God made man upright. What is the word used in connection with the Son? Beloved: See how God rises, and how his revelation brightens broadly. Upright—an experiment in moral mechanics: upright—an attitude: upright—negative. Beloved—kindred, sympathetic, approved, complete. It is thus that the Bible grows from root to flower; this is development. We claim that word as a Christian term, we cannot do without it in the church; the whole scheme of the divine administration of human affairs is a development, a progress, an upward marching: see it in the blade, the ear, the full corn in the ear: we would have God's Book judged by that law or science of development, and so judged we are brought from Make to Begotten, from Upright to Beloved, and from Very Good to Well Pleased. Hear ye not the same old, rich voice? "God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good." "Lo, a voice from heaven saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." In both cases he sets himself in a relation of satisfaction to what is before him. Man, standing there, fashioned in his own image, upright, faultless, inexperienced, with a great destiny to work out—on him is written "Very good." The last outcome of this human growth and mystery stands before him on Jordan's banks, and a voice says "Well pleased," and when God is pleased law is satisfied and grace is triumphant.

Then we come further still, from the Us of the creating Trinity to the My of the approving Father. Thus in the creation of man we read, "Let us make man." In the inauguration of the Son we read, "This is my beloved Son." Examine still further, and in other fields and relationships, this suggestion of the continuous, ever-culminating development of the divine purpose, and say if there be not in it a rich fund of spiritual instruction and satisfaction. There has been a divine ideal in the rest towards which God has been slowly moving, through revolution, and war, and distress, and manifold experiences of every human kind, but never did he say "Well pleased" until there stood before him his only begotten Son. Five hundred years before he was not at rest. A century before, his purpose was still a hundred years ahead, but steadily, surely, grandly he moved on, the line now dipping into deep pits, now starting up high hills—still on he moved. You cannot turn God back, though now the ancestral line is lost in a harlot, and now it is put to risk in a wayward king. Still he moves on, and presently he says, "It is finished: this is my beloved SON."

So shall it be in the culmination and upgathering of all things. Jesus Christ must reign till he hath put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death, and when death lies below his feet, he will deliver up the kingdom to God and his Father, and God shall be all in all. Haste thee, calm morning—a flame with every colour of beauty, peaceful with the divine benediction—O, come. The old earth is torn with pain and distressed with intolerable pangs—but that morning cometh. Watchman, what of the night? The night cometh, and also the morning. We are in sad case just now. England was never baser in her morals in many public aspects of her history than she is at this moment. She never more foully debased her journalism, or poured out of her history streams more revolting and pestilential. But God is moving on; it is his old movement; he knows every knot in the line, every twist in the road, every difficulty in the path—but if you could see his eye, it never moves from the point he has set before him, and he will bring in all his purposes and decrees, his completed oaths and covenants fulfilled, for his own mouth hath spoken it.

Are we now to bid farewell to John the Baptist? Are you still in John's baptism? He was a burning and a shining light, but you ought to have left him long ago. Are you still down by Jordan's banks, wanting to take the plunge? Verily I say unto you, amongst them that are born of women there hath not appeared a greater than John the Baptist; nevertheless, he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. You ought, therefore, to take the step from the initial baptism into the inner and Christian one. You ought to leave the letter and pass into the spirit. You ought now to be able to enjoy the large, calm, sweet liberty of the gospel, and not be bound by ordinances, and observances, and divers ceremonies. We have left these behind us: they were useful in their time, they were elements which God used for the further broadening and illumination of his righteousness, so far as our vision was concerned, but now I know nothing of any ceremony: I have outlived it; if I do anything, it is merely to remind me, merely as a suggestion; not as a necessity, but as a help to some higher spiritual blessing.

Do you say you have been baptized, and therefore you are all right? All the water in all the seas and firmaments of heaven would not cleanse you. Do you say you sit down regularly to the Lord's supper? All the wine in all the vineyards of creation would not contain one drop of blood to you, if you are not already hidden in the very heart of the Son of God. Do you say you regularly come to church and observe religious fasts and festivals? Away with all these externals, if they do not indicate contrition, self-renunciation, trust in a living Christ, identification with the Son of God. We are not saved by the outward, but by the inward. All the outward is but symbolical—the inward baptism is a shedding abroad in the heart of the Holy Ghost.

The Lord's peace be in our souls, and the Lord help us to see beyond the letter into all the brightness and beauty of the spirit.