Westminster Sermons: with a PrefaceKingsley, Charles
Religion
Westminster Sermons: with a Preface
Kingsley, Charles
Sermons, English -- 19th century
What, then, are we to believe and do? Shall we degenerate into a lazy
scepticism, which believes that everything is a little true, and
everything a little false--in plain words, believes nothing at all? Or
shall we degenerate into faithless fears, and unmanly wailings that the
flood of infidelity is irresistible, and that Christ has left His Church?
We shall do neither, if we believe the text. That tells us of a firm
standing-ground amid the wreck of fashions and opinions. Of a kingdom
which cannot be moved, though the heavens pass away like a scroll, and
the earth be burnt up with fervent heat.
And it tells us that the King of that kingdom is He, who is called Jesus
Christ--the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.
An eternal and changeless kingdom, and an eternal and changeless King.
These the Epistle to the Hebrews preaches to all generations.
It does not say that we have an unchangeable cosmogony, an unchangeable
eschatology, an unchangeable theory of moral retribution, an unchangeable
dogmatic system: not to these does it point the Jews, while their own
nation and worship were in their very death-agony, and the world was
rocking and reeling round them, decay and birth going on side by side, in
a chaos such as man had never seen before. Not to these does the Epistle
point the Hebrews: but to the changeless kingdom and to the changeless
King.
My friends, do you really believe in that kingdom, and in that King? Do
you believe that you are now actually in a kingdom of heaven, which
cannot be moved; and that the living, acting, guiding, practical, real
King thereof is Christ who died on the Cross?
These are days in which a preacher is bound to ask his congregation--and
still more to ask himself--whether he really believes in that kingdom,
and in that King; and to bid himself and them, if they have not believed
earnestly enough therein, to repent, in this time of Lent, of that at
least; to repent of having neglected that most cardinal doctrine of
Scripture and of the Christian faith.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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