The Preacher and His Models: The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891Stalker, James
Religion
The Preacher and His Models: The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891
Stalker, James
Preaching
Perhaps, however, we see even more suggestively how his whole mind was
occupied with this subject by observing the way in which the mere
incidental mention of the name of Christ sends him off into the most
sublime statements regarding Him. For example, when he is speaking to
husbands about loving their wives, the thought strikes him that this
love is like that of Christ to His people; and he breaks forth:
"Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the Church and
gave Himself for it, that He might sanctify and cleanse it with the
washing of water by the word, that He might present it to Himself a
glorious Church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing." In
like manner, happening to be recommending generosity, he thinks of the
generosity of Christ, and away he breaks into an incomparable
description of His descent from the throne of the Highest to the death
of the cross: "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus,
who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with
God," and so on; and, not content with following Him down, in
accordance with the thought with which he started, he pursues the
subject under the impulse of sheer love, following Him up to the
highest heaven: "Wherefore God also hath highly exalted Him and given
Him a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every
knee should bow, of things in heaven and things in earth and things
under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus
Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father." When is it that the
mind thus starts off into a subject at any chance hint or suggestion,
pouring out the most astonishing ideas in the most felicitous
language? It is only when it is possessed with it, and when its ideas
are so hot and molten, that they are ready to avail themselves of any
outlet.
What may be called the inner or spiritual life of St. Paul may most of
all be said to have been all Christ. His own theory of this innermost
life is that it is a kind of living over again of the life of Christ:
we die with Him to sin; we are buried with Him in baptism; as He rose,
so we rise again to newness of life; He ascended to sit on the throne
of the Father, and we are seated with Him in heavenly places. He is
the very soil in which this life grows, and the atmosphere which it
breathes; a Christian is "a man in Christ," and all the functions of
his interior and even of his exterior life are performed in this
element: he speaks in Christ, he marries in Christ, he dies in Christ,
and in the resurrection he will rise in Christ.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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