Unspoken Sermons, Series I., II., and III.MacDonald, George
Religion
Unspoken Sermons, Series I., II., and III.
MacDonald, George
Sermons, English -- 19th century
By seeing in them what corresponds to the plainest truth he speaks, and
commends itself to the power that is working in you to make of you a
true man; by their appeal to your power of judging what is true; by
their rousing of your conscience. If they do not seem to you true,
either they are not the words of the Master, or you are not true enough
to understand them. Be certain of this, that, if any words that are his
do not show their truth to you, you have not received his message in
them; they are not yet to you the word of God, for they are not in you
spirit and life. They may be the nearest to the truth that words can
come; they may have served to bring many into contact with the heart of
God; but for you they remain as yet sealed. If yours be a true heart,
it will revere them because of the probability that they are words with
the meaning of the Master behind them; to you they are the rock in the
desert before Moses spoke to it. If you wait, your ignorance will not
hurt you; if you presume to reason from them, you are a blind man
disputing of that you never saw. To reason from a thing not understood,
is to walk straight into the mire. To dare to reason of truth from
words that do not show to us that they are true, is the presumption of
Pharisaical _hypocrisy_. Only they who are not true, are capable of
doing it. Humble mistake will not hurt us: the truth is there, and the
Lord will see that we come to know it. We may think we know it when we
have scarce a glimpse of it; but the error of a true heart will not be
allowed to ruin it. Certainly that heart would not have mistaken the
truth except for the untruth yet remaining in it; but he who casts out
devils will cast out that devil.
In the saying before us, I see enough to enable me to believe that its
words embody the mind of Christ. If I could not say this, I should say,
'The apostle has here put on record a saying of Christ's; I have not
yet been able to recognise the mind of Christ in it; therefore I
conclude that I cannot have understood it, for to understand what is
true is to know it true.' I have yet seen no words credibly reported as
the words of Jesus, concerning which I dared to say, 'His mind is not
therein, therefore the words are not his.' The mind of man call receive
any word only in proportion as it is the word of Christ, and in
proportion as he is one with Christ. To him who does verily receive his
word, it is a power, not of argument, but of life. The words of the
Lord are not for the logic that deals with words as if they were
things; but for the spiritual logic that reasons from divine thought to
divine thought, dealing with spiritual facts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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