The World's Great Sermons, Volume 05: Guthrie to Mozley
Religion
The World's Great Sermons, Volume 05: Guthrie to Mozley
Sermons
It is a mark of grace that the believer, in his progress heavenward,
grows more and more alive to the claims of Jesus. If you "know the
love of Christ," His is the latest name you will desire to utter;
His is the latest thought you will desire to form; upon Him you will
fix your last look on earth; upon Him your first in heaven. When
memory is oblivious of all other objects--when all that attracted
the natural eye is wrapt in the mists of death, when the tongue is
cleaving to the roof of our mouth, and speech is gone, and sight is
gone, and hearing gone, and the right hand, lying powerless by our
side, has lost its cunning, Jesus! then may we remember Thee! If the
shadows of death are to be thrown in deepest darkness on the valley,
when we are passing along it to glory, may it be ours to die like
that saint, beside whose bed wife and children once stood, weeping
over the wreck of faded faculties, and a blank, departed memory. One
had asked him, "Father, do you remember me?" and received no answer;
and another, and another, but still no answer. And then, all making
way for the venerable companion of a long and loving pilgrimage--the
tender partner of many a past joy and sorrow, his wife draws near.
She bends over him, and as her tears fall thick upon his face, she
cries, "Do you not remember me?" A stare, but it is vacant. There
is no soul in that filmy eye; and the seal of death lies upon these
lips. The sun is down, and life's brief twilight is darkening fast
into a starless night. At this moment, one calm enough to remember
how the love of Christ's spouse is "strong as death," a love that
"many waters can not quench," stooped to his ear, and said, "Do
you remember Jesus Christ?" The word was no sooner uttered than it
seemed to recall the spirit, hovering for a moment, ere it took
wing to heaven. Touched as by an electric influence, the heart beat
once more to the name of Jesus; the features, fixt in death, relax;
the countenance, dark in death, flushes up like the last gleam of
day; and, with a smile in which the soul passed away to glory, he
replied, "Remember Jesus Christ! dear Jesus Christ! He is all my
salvation, and all my desire."
By conversion man is ennobled.
While infidelity regards man as a mere animal, to be dissolved at
death into ashes and air, and vice changes man into a brute or
devil, Mammon enslaves him. She makes him a serf, and condemns him
to be a gold-digger for life in the mines. She puts her collar
on his neck, and locks it; and bending his head to the soil, and
bathing his brow in sweat, she says, Toil, toil, toil; as if this
creature, originally made in the image of God, this dethroned and
exiled monarch, to save whom the Son of God descended from the
skies, and bled on Calvary, were a living machine, constructed of
sinew, bone, and muscle, and made for no higher end than to work to
live, and live to work.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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