Sermons Preached at Brighton: Third SeriesRobertson, Frederick William
Religion
Sermons Preached at Brighton: Third Series
Robertson, Frederick William
Church of England -- Sermons; Sermons, English -- 19th century
Once more brethren, necessity can make man conqueror over death. We
can make up our minds to anything when it once becomes inevitable. It
is the agony of suspense that makes danger dreadful. History can tell
us that men can look with desperate calmness upon hell itself when
once it has become a certainty. And it is this after all, that
commonly makes the dying hour so quiet a thing. It is more dreadful in
the distance than in the reality. When a man feels that there is no
help, and he must go, he lays him down to die, as quietly as a tired
traveller wraps himself in his cloak to sleep. It is quite another
thing from all this that Paul meant by victory.
In the first place, it is the prerogative of a Christian to be
conqueror over Doubt. Brethren, do we all know what doubt means?
Perchance not. There are some men who have never believed enough to
doubt. There are some who have never thrown their hopes with such
earnestness on the world to come, as to feel anxiety for fear it
should not all be true. But every one who knows what Faith is, knows
too, what is the desolation of Doubt. We pray till we begin to ask, Is
there one who hears, or am I whispering to myself?--We hear the
consolation administered to the bereaved, and we see the coffin
lowered into the grave, and the thought comes, What if all this
doctrine of a life to come be but the dream of man's imaginative mind,
carried on from age to age, and so believed, because it is a venerable
superstition? Mow Christ gives us victory over that terrible suspicion
in two ways--first, He does it by His own resurrection. We have got a
fact there that all the metaphysics about impossibility cannot rob us
of. In moments of perplexity we look back to this. The grave has once,
and more than once, at the Redeemer's bidding, given up its dead. It
is a world fact. It tells us what the Bible means by our
resurrection--not a spiritual rising into new holiness merely--that,
but also something more. It means that in our own proper identity, we
shall live again. Make that thought real, and God has given you, so
far, victory over the grave through Christ.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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