Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chapters I to XIV — John Shaqi
Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chapters I to XIVMaclaren, Alexander
Religion
Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chapters I to XIV
Maclaren, Alexander
Bible. John -- Commentaries
Next, he turns to the highest honour and the most imperative duty laid,
not only upon mighty men and officials, but upon all on whose happy
eyeballs this Light has shone, and into whose darkened hearts the joy
and peace and purity of it have flowed, and he says, 'He was sent'—and
they are sent—'to bear witness of that Light.' It is the noblest
function that a man can discharge. It is a function that is discharged
by the very existence through the ages of a community which, generation
after generation, subsists, and generation after generation manifests
in varying degrees of brightness, and with various modifications of
tint, the same light. There is the family character in all true
Christians, with whatever diversities of idiosyncrasies, and national
life or ecclesiastical distinctions. Whether it be Francis of Assisi or
John Wesley, whether it be Thomas a Kempis or George Fox, the light is
one that shines through these many-coloured panes of glass, and the
living Church is the witness of a living Lord, not only before it, and
behind it, and above it, but living in it. They are 'light' because
they are irradiated by Him. They are 'light' because they are 'in the
Lord.' But not only by the fact of the existence of such a community is
the witness-bearing effected, but it comes as a personal obligation,
with immense weight of pressure and immense possibilities of joy in the
discharge of it, to every Christian man and woman.
What, then, is the witness that we all are bound to bear, and shall
bear if we are true to our obligations and to our Lord? Mainly, dear
brethren, the witness of experience. That a Christian man shall be able
to stand up and say, 'I know this because I live it, and I testify to
Jesus Christ because I for myself have found Him to be the life of my
life, the Light of all my seeing, the joy of my heart, my home, and my
anchorage'—that is the witness that is impregnable. And there is no
better sign of the trend of Christian thought to-day than the fact that
the testimony of experience is more and more coming to be recognised by
thoughtful men and writers as being the sovereign attestation of the
reality of the Light. 'I see'; that is the proof that light has touched
my eyeballs. And when a man can contrast, as some of us can, our
present vision with our erstwhile darkness, then the evidence, like
that of the sturdy blind man in the Gospels, who had nothing to say in
reply to the subtleties and Rabbinical traps and puzzles but only 'I
was blind; now I see'—his experience is likely to have the effect that
it had in another miracle of healing: 'Beholding the man which was
healed standing amongst them, they could say nothing against it.' I
should think they could not.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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