The World's Great Sermons, Volume 09: Cuyler to Van Dyke
Religion
The World's Great Sermons, Volume 09: Cuyler to Van Dyke
Sermons
is infamy to die and not be missed. Live, immortal friend, live as
the brother of Jesus, live as a fellow workman with Christ in God's
work. Phillips Brooks once said to his people: "I exhort you to pray
for fulness of life--full red blood in the body, full and honest
truth in the mind, fulness of consecrated love to the dying Savior
in the heart."
III. In the next place, life is infinitely valuable, not only
from the dignity of its origin and the results and revenues it
may reach, but from the eternal consequences flowing from it. Ah,
this world, with its curtaining of light, its embroideries of the
heavens, and its carpeting of verdure, is a solemn vestibule to
eternity. My hearer, this world on which you exhibit your nature
this morning is the porch of heaven or the gateway of hell. Here
you may be laying up treasures through Christ and for Christ, to
make you a millionaire to all eternity. Here, by simply refusing
to hearken, by rejecting the cross, by grieving the Spirit, you
may kindle a flame that shall consume and give birth to a worm of
remorse that shall prey on your soul forever and ever. In this brief
twenty years, thirty, or forty, you must, without mistake, settle a
question, the decision of which shall lift you to the indescribable
heights of rapture or plunge you to the depths of darkness and
despair. I am a baby at the thought of the word "eternity"; I have
racked this brain of mine, in its poverty and its weakness, and
have not the faintest conception of it, any more than I have of the
omnipresence of Jehovah; yet one is as real as the other, and you
and I will go on in the continuation of an existence that outnumbers
the years as the Atlantic drops outnumber the drops of a brook; an
existence whose ages are more than the stars that twinkled last
night in the firmament--an existence interminable, yet all swinging
on the pivot of that life in that pew. It is overpowering.
How momentous, then, is life! How grand its possession! what
responsibility in its very breath! what a crime to waste it! what
a glory to consecrate it! what a magnificent outcome when it shall
shuffle off the coil, and break itself free from its entanglements,
and burst into the presence of its Giver, and rise into all the
transcendent glories of its life everlasting!
In view of that, what a solemn thing it is to preach God's word, and
to stand between the living and the dead! And in view of life, its
preciousness and power, its far-reaching rewards and punishments,
let me say here, in closing, that there are three or four practical
considerations that should be prest home upon us and carried out by
us:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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