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
Sunday comes. It breaks across the current of his worldliness. It
suggests thoughts of death and judgment and everlasting existence. Is
that home? Can the worldly man feel Sunday like a foretaste of his
Father's mansion? If we could but know how many have come here to-day,
not to have their souls lifted up heavenwards, but from curiosity, or
idleness, or criticism, it would give us an appalling estimate of the
number who are living in a far country, "having no hope and without
God in the world."
The second truth conveyed to us in this parable is the unsatisfying
nature of worldly happiness. The outcast son tried to satiate his
appetite with husks. A husk is an empty thing; it is a thing which
looks extremely like food, and promises as much as food; but it is not
food. It is a thing which when chewed will stay the appetite, but
leaves the emaciated body without nourishment. Earthly happiness is a
husk. We say not that there is no satisfaction in the pleasures of a
worldly life. That would be an overstatement of the truth. Something
there is, or else why should men persist in living for them? The
cravings of man's appetite may be stayed by things which cannot
satisfy him. Every new pursuit contains in it a new hope; and it is
long before hope is bankrupt. But my brethren, it is strange if a man
has not found out long before he has reached the age of thirty, that
everything here is empty and disappointing. The nobler his heart and
the more unquenchable his hunger for the high and the good, the sooner
will he find that out. Bubble after bubble bursts, each bubble tinted
with the celestial colours of the rainbow, and each leaving in the
hand which crushes it a cold damp drop of disappointment. All that is
described in Scripture by the emphatic metaphor of "sowing the wind
and reaping the whirlwind," the whirlwind of blighted hopes and
unreturned feelings and crushed expectations--that is the harvest
which the world gives you to reap.
And now is the question asked, Why is this world unsatisfying?
Brethren, it is the grandeur of the soul which God has given us, which
makes it insatiable in its desires--with an infinite void which cannot
be filled up. A soul which was made for God, how can the world fill
it? If the ocean can be still with miles of unstable waters beneath
it, then the soul of man, rocking itself upon its own deep longings,
with the Infinite beneath it, may rest. We were created once in
majesty, to find enjoyment in God, and if our hearts are empty now,
there is nothing for it but to fill up the hollowness of the soul with
God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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