The World's Great Sermons, Volume 07: Hale to Farrar
Religion
The World's Great Sermons, Volume 07: Hale to Farrar
Sermons
It is very, very sad to mark how ready we are to measure Christ's
gifts to us by our narrow wants and limited desires; not by the
greatness of His love, not by His exhaustless riches, not by the
fulness of the grace of the Eternal, who is the Father and friend of
all men. If ever we shall pass beyond the gratifying of ourselves,
and allow Christ to gratify Himself in blessing us, we shall find
in a glad experience what the simple words mean, "I am come that
they might have life"--oh, friends, do not stop there, finish the
sentence,--"I am come that they might have life, and that they might
have it more abundantly." We ask life of Him, and He gives us life,
and offers length of days forever and forever. We pray that we may
live; and we set up a goal at seventy or ninety years, when He draws
no line across our path. "I give eternal life," He says. We pray for
help that we may live; He offers more than that in the unrivaled
sentence, "Because I live, ye shall live also." We think of life as
being, and are content. We use existence as a synonym of living, but
He said, "This is eternal life, to know God, and me."
So for ourselves; we are to live as His disciples. We wish to be
true, useful, and generous. We wish to do in small measure such
things as He did,--in His name to give the cup of water, and the
healing of the sick. He grants all that we desire, then speaks out
of His own heart, and His desire, "The works that I do shall ye do,
and greater works than these"; for the miracles which attract us or
baffle us, which draw us to His love, or possibly turn us from His
word, which are only miracles because they are strange to us, are to
be exceeded in the things which we do, when by our teaching we open
the eyes of men that they may see God, and lift them up to the ways
of holy living, and raise them from being into life. Our visions of
heaven in our reverent imagination, even in the exultant words of
the Revelation, are not equal to the simple truths which He taught,
and men learned to repeat after Him. For what are golden streets
and jeweled walls beside that which He meant, "In my Father's house
are many mansions." "I go to prepare a place for you." "Ye shall
behold my glory." "Ye shall be loved as I am loved." The thought of
Christ far outruns the aspiration of the world, as it comes to us
from the lips of that disciple whom Jesus loved, "We shall be like
him, for we shall see him even as he is."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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