A SERMON PREACHED ON CHRISTMAS DAY A.D. 1914.
“And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”—St. Luke ii. 13, 14.
“And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”—St. Luke ii. 13, 14.
If Christmas this sad year is to be a real comfort and help to us, we must realize very clearly what it is that was the cause of the joy of the Angels, and has been always the source of the true joy of Christmas, during the nineteen hundred years or more since that first outburst of heavenly praise and song. The reason had been announced by one Angel to the shepherds abiding in the fields in the words, “Fear not; for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” The Jewish people were looking and longing for the Christ Who would come, as is expressed in Zacharias’ song,to deliver them from the hand of their enemies, and to grant unto them that they “might serve Him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before Him all the days of their life.” This was the promise which, as Zacharias said, had been given by the mouth of God’s prophets since the world began, for which they had craved through long suffering, and captivity, and disappointment; and it is this promise which the angel declared was now fulfilled. A Saviour had been born to them, One Who was able to realize for them the great hopes of blessing which the prophets had held out. He would be able, in the words of another angel, “to save them from their sins,” and by saving them from their sins to save them from the sufferings and sorrows which those sins had entailed upon them. By the birth of our Lord that had become an accomplished fact. There existed from that moment One Who stood between heaven and earth, between God and man, and united both—the Son of God and the Son of Man, with power “to save to the uttermost all who come unto God by Him,” and able, first byHis sacrifice for our sins, and then by His exercise of the royal authority and power which are entrusted to Him, to put down all enemies under His feet, and to deliver up the Kingdom to God the Father, “that God may be all in all.”
That is the grand consummation which, to the vision of the Angels, was comprehended in this simple saying, “Unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” Let us clearly observe that it is not merely the future hope, but the present fact, which causes the Angels’ rejoicing. The Saviour is born, the King is revealed, the work of redemption is actually commenced. “Glory to God,” they exclaimed, “in the highest, and on earth peace; goodwill toward men.” The goodwill of God toward men is now embodied in the Babe Who is Christ the Lord; or, as it is translated in the Revised Version (in different words, but with the same meaning), God’s goodwill is manifested “to men in whom He is well pleased.” It is much more than a general declaration of peace and goodwill. It is a grand revelation, a revelation which opened theheavens and evoked from a host of Angels, such as had never before nor has since been seen, a burst of glory to God for the blessing that from that moment there was a living Saviour in human form in the world.
Now I wish to urge this fact upon you this morning in all its glorious reality, because it is in that fact alone that we can find comfort and help amidst the dark distress of such a Christmas as this, and because it affords us the one supreme guidance in our deep perplexity. The feeling is in all our hearts, and the phrase on many lips, “What a contrast is exhibited by this tremendous and cruel war to the words of hope and peace in the angels’ song,” and the old complaint is uttered, Where is the promise of His coming—the coming of the Prince of Peace? But we have only to consider the immediate sequel of the first Christmas Day, to realize that the assurance given by the angels, and their joy, involved no such facile creation of a time of peace and righteousness as the eager hopes of men imagine. The first result of the Saviour’s coming to His people, and claiming their trust and allegiance, was that they rejected Him andcrucified Him. He rose from the dead and sent His Apostles to proclaim His resurrection and His full assumption of His power as a King and Saviour, but they continued to reject Him; and the result was that, instead of entering on that Kingdom of righteousness and peace and glory of which their prophets had spoken, their nation was crushed in scenes of “blood and fire and vapour of smoke,” and all the bright hopes of Zacharias were apparently extinguished. So the world went on, Christmas after Christmas, and century after century, through successive scenes of war and destruction and desolation, of which the spectacles of which we read day by day afford us a horribly vivid example. If the angels’ song had meant simply to promise peace on earth, it was contradicted by the experience, not merely of bitter times like the present, but by every year and every century which followed.
But where, then, is the fulfilment of the promise? You have the record and the evidence of it in your New Testament. There, in the history of the Apostles and disciples of our Lord, and in their Epistles,you behold a body of men whose souls are filled with peace, and with the sense of the goodwill of God, and who are living the life described and enjoined by our Lord in the Gospels—the life of the Sermon on the Mount, and of His parting discourses to His disciples recorded by St. John. They are living in the midst of that world of passion and violence and tyrannical domination of which I have spoken, and yet they speak to us in tones of the most profound peace, and joy, and hope, and even exultation. The reason is that, through faith in our Lord, in His sacrifice, and in the promise of His spirit, they have found peace with God—the peace of which the angels spoke; they live in the blessed assurance of His goodwill, and they look forward with infinite rejoicing to His return, to establish, as He promised, a new heaven and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.
That spiritual Kingdom of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost has subsisted continuously from that time to this. It is here in the midst of us. There are souls whom we are privileged to know, who are visibly living in that kingdomof Divine peace and goodwill, and who, when they leave us here, pass, as we and they are assured, into fuller realization of that kingdom, looking forward to its complete establishment and revelation at the Day of the general Resurrection. That is the kingdom Of the Lord’s elect, of the Saviour’s followers, of the saints—perfect or imperfect, but still saints, of all ages, the Church of Christ and the Kingdom of God. It is a kingdom within which every Christian soul is admitted by baptism to his place and his privilege, and it rests only with him to claim its blessings by his faith and his life. In a word: the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles are the record of the fulfilment of the angels’ promise of peace and love and Divine goodwill, for all who would submit to the King and Saviour whose advent they proclaimed, and who would receive His blessings in the way in which He offered them. To all whom would “repent and believe and be baptised in the Name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins,” the promises of the angelic song were fulfilled, and they have been fulfilled similarly to this hour.
But has the promise, then, no bearingon the ordinary secular life of mankind? Are the instincts of men wrong in looking eagerly to it, as they have done from generation to generation, for the prophetic assurance of peace between men, as well as of peace between men and God—of goodwill from man to man, as well as from God to man and man to God. Most certainly they have not been wrong in that eager hope and expectation; but where they have been wrong, and still are wrong, is in their conception of the methods and means by which that secular peace and those purely human blessings and happiness are to be realized. If Christ is, as the angels said, the Saviour, the Saviour of the world; if He is the King Who alone can save His people from their sins; and if war and all the miseries of the world are, in one form or another, the consequences of those sins, then the only way of obtaining salvation from those sins, and deliverance from those miseries which are God’s judgments upon them, is by submitting ourselves entirely to Him, repenting of our failure in obedience to Him, living only by His laws, and seeking His grace and His Spirit for our guidance and inspiration.Have we done that? Has Europe at large been doing it these last fifty years?
People ask how such a war as this can be possible after nineteen centuries of Christianity. What do you mean by Christianity? If you only mean that, during the greater part of those centuries, there has been a general and nominal acknowledgment of the authority of Christ and of His laws, such a description of the condition of the world during that time may be allowed. But if you mean a real submission of the mass of men and women, in heart and life, to the will, the love, and the Spirit of Christ, then we have not really had nineteen centuries of Christianity, and the state of the modern world, out of which this war has arisen, has not been a Christian state. It is notorious for instance, and not impugned anywhere, that the spirit of Germany, which has provoked this war, has not only not been a Christian spirit, but has been violently anti-Christian. The Divine authority of Christ as the King and Saviour of the world has been openly and vehemently impugned for at least a generation or two, especially in the public and authoritative teaching in the Universities,which have such immense influence in German life. Christ to them has not been the King of kings and Lord of Lords, the very incarnation of God, “the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person.”
If we are honest, we must also acknowledge that in far too great a degree the same failure has prevailed among ourselves. It has, to say the least of it, not been sufficiently recognized in our literature of late years, or in our public life, that “all form is formless, order orderless,” which is not entirely subject to Christ and informed by His Spirit. The very vice with which we now charge the Germans has been more than a temptation among ourselves. We have had great writers among us exalting statesmen and kings of the past on the ground of their mere strength. It was a great English writer of the last century who glorified Frederick the Great of Prussia as an example of a really strong king; and it is not a long step from that glorification to the worship which has been paid on the Continent of late to the supremacy of strength and self-assertion. That is not the Christian spirit, and the “redruin and the breaking up of laws,” into which Europe is now plunged, is to be charged, not to any weakness in Christianity, but to a grievous neglect, and in some degree to the very negation, of Christianity.
The peace and goodwill which the message of the angels promised is, in fact, within the scope of Christianity, and might be realized in the world at large, but solely on the condition of the true methods being observed—on condition, that is, of Christ, and the law of Christ, being acknowledged from the heart as the true and only source of peace and truth and goodwill, and on the condition of penitent, humble, and earnest devotion to Him. That is the one supreme condition on which peace to the world is promised by the Gospel. When emperors, and kings, and statesmen, and soldiers, and men and women in general believe the angels’ proclamation that Christ is their only Saviour, their only King, that He alone, by His sacrifice, His laws, and His grace can save His people from their sins, then, but then only, may they hope in the life of the State, as well as in that of the Church, to realize the angels’ promise of peace and goodwill.In a word: it is not by strength, nor by liberty, nor even by law, that the blessings of which Christmas holds out the promise can be realized. It is only by Christian liberty, Christian law, and Christian strength—that is to say, liberty and law, and strength exerted in obedience to the will of Christ—that these blessings can be obtained. It is not Christianity that has failed; it is not the angelic song that has disappointed us. It is nominal Christians who have failed, from not being Christians in reality. And the angelic song has proved its truth by the very disasters which have fallen upon men who have not lived as though Christ were their Saviour and their King.
But, thank God, if these considerations point to our weakness, they also point to our hope, and to the means for our deliverance. We have still as much reason to rejoice as the angels had when they sang this song, because the great joy of it lies in the eternal fact that there is a Saviour and there is a King, Who, if His people will trust Him, will save them from their sins and all the miseries that their sins involve. If our own lives andthe life of our nation and the life of Europe can be made truly Christian, if we can bring more of the love of Christ and the life of Christ into our daily existence, we have the assurance that He will save us, and will extirpate the abuses and the falsehoods which have brought the nations of Europe to this terrible pass.
In a few days we are to have a Day of Humble Prayer and Intercession to Almighty God. Let it be, above all, a day of humble acknowledgment of our failure as individuals and as a nation in His true faith and obedience. I would fain it had been called by the good old Christian and English name of a Day of Humiliation. We ought to be humiliated. We have, in such ways as I have indicated, been contented with a half-Christian life in public affairs and in society. We and our men of letters, and men of learning, and men of affairs, have been affected with the same half-heartedness in our allegiance to Christ, which shocks us when we see it displayed in all its nakedness in other countries, and especially in the one which is chiefly opposed to us. Let us be humiliated for it before God, not caring, in comparisonwith our true relation to Him, what interpretation the world may put on our repentance.
But let us also rejoice more than ever in the assurance of Christmas that a Saviour has been born to us, that we have an eternal King in our Lord Jesus Christ, Who can save us from our sins, and our ruin, and ourselves, if we will but give ourselves up to Him absolutely. Let us realize with infinite thankfulness that the souls of those who are now sacrificing their lives for us are in His saving and merciful hands. Let us be reminded by the angelic vision that we ourselves, and the souls of those who have passed and are passing away, are not brought merely into contact with the “blackness and darkness and tempest” of war, but are come unto “Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, and to an innumerable company of Angels, and to the general assembly of the Church of the Firstborn and to Christ the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect.” Let us realize this more than we have yet done. Let us realize the truth of the Angels’ proclamation that Christ and Christ alone is our Saviour and our King, that He alone cansave us, individuals and nations alike, from our sins; and then, in spite of all the distress and anxiety which surrounds us, this may prove the most blessed Christmas of our lives, and it may bring us a happiness which will last unto life eternal.