The World's Great Sermons, Volume 07: Hale to Farrar
Religion
The World's Great Sermons, Volume 07: Hale to Farrar
Sermons
But to large numbers of Christian men a discovery which in substance
is identical with this has actually come in response to their trust
in Christ. Nothing is more intensely real than the sense of guilt;
it is as real as the eternal distinction between right and wrong
in which it is rooted. And nothing is more intensely real than
the sense of release from guilt which comes from the discovery
and assurance of the remission of sins. The evil things which a
man has done cannot be undone; but when they have been forgiven
through Christ, the iron chain which so bound him to them as to
make the guilt of them eternally his has been broken; before God
and his own conscience he is no longer guilty of them. This is the
Christian mystery of justification, which, according to Paul--and
his words have been confirmed in the experience of millions of
Christian men--is "the power of God unto salvation to every one that
believeth." It changes darkness into light; despair into victorious
hope; prostration into buoyancy and vigor. It is one of the supreme
motives to Christian living, and it makes Christian living possible.
The man who has received this great deliverance is no longer a
convict, painfully observing all prison rules with the hope of
shortening his sentence, but a child in the home of God.
There are experiences of another kind by which the faith of
Christian men is verified. Of these one of the most decisive and
most wonderful is the consciousness that through Christ he has
passed into the eternal and divine order. He belongs to two worlds.
He is just as certain that he is environed by things unseen and
eternal as that he is environed by things seen and temporal. In the
power of the life given to him in the new birth he has entered into
the kingdom of God. He is conscious that that diviner region is
now the native land of his soul. It is there that he finds perfect
rest and perfect freedom. It is a relief to escape to its eternal
peace and glory from the agitations and vicissitudes, the sorrows
and successes, of this transitory world. It is not always that
he is vividly conscious of belonging to that eternal order; this
supreme blessedness is reserved for the great hours of life; but
he knows that it lies about him always, and that at any moment the
great Apocalypse may come. And even when it is hidden, its "powers"
continue to act upon him, as the light and heat of the sun pass
through the clouds by which the burning splendor is softened and
concealed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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