CONFESSING CHRIST
‘Whosoever shall confess Me before men, him shall the Son of Man also confess before the angels of God.’
Luke 12:8
We must not be ashamed to let all men see that we believe in Christ, and serve Christ, and love Christ, and care more for the praise of Christ than for the praise of men.
I. The duty of confessing Christ is incumbent on all Christians in every age of the Church. Let us never forget that. It is not for martyrs only, but for all believers, in every rank of life. It is not for great occasions only, but for our daily walk through an evil world.
II. The difficulty of confessing Christ is undoubtedly very great. It never was easy at any period. It never will be easy as long as the world stands. It is sure to entail on us laughter, ridicule, contempt, mockery, enmity, and persecution. The world which hated Christ will always hate true Christians.
III. The grand motive to stir us up to bold confession is forcibly brought before us. Our Lord declares, that if we do not confess Him before men, He will ‘not confess us before the angels of God’ at the last day. He will refuse to acknowledge us as His people. He will disown us as cowards, faithless, and deserters. He will not plead for us. He will not be our Advocate. He will not deliver us from the wrath to come. He will leave us to reap the consequences of our cowardice, and to stand before the bar of God helpless, defenceless, and unforgiven. What an awful prospect is this!

THE UNPARDONABLE SIN
‘And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him: but unto him that blasphemeth against the Holy Ghost it shall not he forgiven.’
Luke 12:10
It is impossible to deny that there is such a thing as an unpardonable sin.
I. What is it?—It would seem to be from our Lord’s words the sin of deliberately rejecting God’s truth with the heart, while the truth is clearly known with the head. It is—
( a) The sin of combining light in the understanding with determined wickedness in the will.
( b) The sin into which many fell after Pentecost when they rejected the Holy Spirit and refused to listen to the apostles.
( c) The sin into which many hearers of the Gospel nowadays fall by determined clinging to the world.
( d) The sin which is commonly accompanied by utter deadness, hardness, and insensibility of heart.
II. Let us pray that we may be delivered from a cold, speculative, unsanctified head-knowledge of Christianity. It is a rock on which thousands make shipwreck to all eternity. No heart becomes so hard as that on which the light shines, but finds no admission. The same fire which melts the wax hardens the clay. Whatever light we have, let us use it.
Illustrations
(1) ‘The distinction drawn between “speaking against the Son of Man,” and “blaspheming against the Holy Ghost,” ought not to be overlooked. The explanation is probably something of this kind. The sin against the Son of Man was committed by those who did not know Christ to be the Messiah in the days of His humiliation, and did not receive Him, believe Him, or obey Him, but ignorantly rejected Him, and crucified Him. Many of those who so sinned were pardoned, we cannot doubt; as, for example, on the day of Pentecost, after Peter’s preaching. The sin against the Holy Ghost was committed by those, who, after the day of Pentecost, and the outpouring of the Spirit, and the full publication of the Gospel, persisted in unbelief and obstinate impenitence, and were given over to a reprobate mind. These especially grieved the Spirit, and resisted the ministration of the Holy Ghost. That this was the state of many of the Jews appears from several places in the Acts, and especially Acts 28:25-28. See also 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16.’
(2) ‘That those who are troubled with fear that they have committed the unpardonable sin, are just the persons who have not committed it, is the judgment of all the soundest divines. Utter hardness, callousness, and insensibility of conscience, are probably leading characteristics of the man who has sinned the unpardonable sin. He is “let alone,” and given over to a reprobate mind.’

A MAN’S LIFE
‘A man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.’
Luke 12:15
A man’s life! What a marvellous gift! Wherefore should a living man complain, though he be stripped of everything else, if there is left to him that wonderful thing called life?
I. In itself.—A man’s life, capable of almost infinite happiness, and capable of almost infinite misery—to what heights may it not climb, and to what depths descend, and to what in the great future may not your life here open! and all that future, coloured for better or worse in the way that you spend your man’s life.
II. In its effect upon others.—And if your life may mean so much to you, how much may it not mean also to other men, to those with whom you daily work, to the circle of your home, to the circle of your neighbourhood, and to the wider circle of the State? A man’s life, if he be a Napoleon, may blast the lives of myriads; a man’s life, if he be a Luther, or a St. Francis, or a Gordon, or a Shaftesbury, may bless the lives of uncounted thousands.
III. Once to live.—And this wonderful thing which is capable of so much usefulness, or of injuring and blasting the lives of others, is in your disposal, and you have but one chance. It is appointed unto man once to die, and it is appointed unto each man once to live. You have but one die to cast, and upon your casting it will depend the epitaph that will be written upon your existence here and hereafter.
Illustrations
(1)‘Whatever crazy sorrow saith,
No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly longed for death.
’Tis life whereof our nerves are scant,
Oh, life, not death, for which we pant,
More life and fuller that I want.’
(2) ‘Must we not confess each to ourselves that we are apt to live at random? We are swayed by the circumstances which we ought to control. We find it a relief when we are spared (as we think) the necessity for reflection or decision: a book lightly taken up, a friend’s visit, a fixed engagement, fill up the day with fragments; and day follows day as a mere addition. There is no living idea to unite and harmonise the whole. Of course we cannot make, or to any great extent modify, the conditions under which we have to act; but we can consciously render them tributary to one high purpose. We can regard them habitually in the light of our supreme end. This is, as it seems to me, the first result of zeal, and it is in spiritual matters as elsewhere, that great results are most surely gained by the accumulation of small things. If we strive continuously towards a certain goal, the whole movement of our life, however slow, will be towards it, and as we move, the gathered force will make our progress more steady and more sure.’
(SECOND OUTLINE)
WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH YOUR LIFE?
A man’s life! Young man, with your one life, what will you do with it? Take care of your object, take care of your ideal, take care of the true power for living it.
I. Take care of your object.—What is your object? Is it to get on? Let it be to get up. Choose for what you will live.
( a) The lowest grade of man is the man whose object is to get and scrape together gold, silver, precious stones, bank shares, stocks, always watching the money markets.
( b) There are the men who do—politicians, legislators, and the men who like to be called practical men—they are useful men; their object is to do.
( c) The third grade are the men whose object is to know. It seems sometimes to me as if they have got such a pile of information upon their brains, that they have lost the power of real knowledge. Information is not knowledge. But there are men who seek to know. It is a lofty and a great object to seek to know.
( d) But there is a fourth grade beyond. The men whose object is to be. These are the saints of all the ages, who are always seeking to build up strong and, beautiful, and holy character. These are the men of the cloister; these are the men of the Church
( e) But there is a loftier grade than this; for the man who lives to build a noble character may be a selfish man. It is much to be a saint, but the highest and noblest grade is to be a saviour, to live for others, to be unconscious when your face shines, because you are seeking to win the world, by your death, if it must be so, for Christ.
What is the object of your life? To get, to do, to know, to be, or to give up your lives to save other men? For if this last be your object, a man who lives for others is a man who is, and the man who knows, and the man who does, and the man who has. Be the last, and you include the other four.
II. As to your ideal, read biography if you will. Some of us have learned our noblest lessons from good biography. But make no man your ideal. Let your ideal be the great Brother Man Who has trodden our world, and Who always goes before us, giving us an example that we should follow His steps. Never rest until you have made the life of Jesus not only your study but your ideal. And as for the power of your life, let it be gotten from yielding your life to Him.
III. Lay your man’s life at His feet.—I ask that you should lay that life at His feet, and whilst I speak, ask Him to wash away the stain which your young manhood may have contracted, to put your sins beneath His most precious blood, that it may sweep them away for ever. Then present your object to Him, your mind, that He may think through it; your eyes, that He may weep through them; your voice and lips, that He may speak by them; your hands and feet that He may work through them; your whole body, that it may be used by Him for His own higher purposes; your manhood for Jesus, your young life for Jesus. In the name of Jesus I beseech, I entreat, I implore you, young man, to give yourself to Him, for he that loses his life at the feet of Jesus finds it for always; whilst a man who keeps his life for himself loses it utterly, utterly and for ever. ‘A man’s life.’ ‘I knew a Man in Christ’—that completes, and only completes, a man’s life.

THE MINISTRY AND THE KINGDOM
‘Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.’
Luke 12:32
I ask you to dwell with me for a little while on some thoughts about the Christian ministry, its ennobling hopes, its inevitable perils. I have taken as a text our Lord’s own words to His disciples.
I. Sureness of victory.—The phrase rings out high encouragement and cheer. And the hearers needed such cheer. They were just then, it would seem, beginning to realise, however dimly, that their position was not going to be quite what they had been picturing to themselves a little while before. Yes, the triumphs they had looked for and talked about were going to be quite different from what they had first supposed. The work set them to do would not be in the least like what in the enthusiasm of the first days they had imagined, and so the Master is encouraging them. You are not going to have, He says, the applause of men; you are not going to have sympathy. Things will seem to be all going against you, but you are to conquer all the same. The Father loves His little flock, and bids them remember that they are part of His army, that army which is marching along with Him at its head. It would be disloyal to look upon it except as certain to triumph. The men who feel (and which of our clergy has not felt it hundreds of times, quite as often as our critics can?) the men who feel their own littleness in power, in experience, in moral courage, in stern resolve, sometimes even in earnestness of purpose, are allowed to remember with confidence that they in their office are but a little portion of that great thing, His Kingdom, which has advanced and is advancing to victory. If the man, weak as he is, be but faithful to what we rightly call his ‘high calling,’ he will be carried along in the unresting, irresistible march of Christ’s army. He will co-operate in his Captain’s work and share in His triumph.
II. The history of the Kingdom.—Look back to what that living force of His has done in the world, not by the clergy, but by the Church, clergy and people both. Look forth upon what wants doing now. Look upward and onward to Him Who is at our head, and to the promise He has given. Then, indeed, thank God and take courage. What is it, one wonders, that makes good men so often seem to forget the history of the Kingdom of Christ, which makes them speak as though the Church were engaged simply in holding a beleaguered fortress, or were joining in what might be called a forlorn hope against a resistless foe, instead of expecting and proclaiming all along the line the victory of our Master. It has not been when the Church of Christ was meekly bowing its head to a coming storm that the Church has been most blest. It has been when, with head erect and with larger expectancy, men and women were going forth in quietness and confidence against cruelty and impurity and selfishness and greed, against dishonesty in word or act; inspired, glowing with a desire to let people know and understand the revelation of their Father’s love, and the story of Bethlehem and Nazareth and Calvary, the spoken word, miracle, and parable, the uplifted Cross and the opened tomb. We are proud of, and we are reliant upon, His promise to be with us all the days. But do we always remember that that promise is linked indissolubly to the command, ‘Go forth, bear My message of pardoning love. Do your part. Then, because you are fulfilling My trust and My command, Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world.’ Well, we say all that, and then there arises unbidden in the minds of not a few of us, and I am sure it is rising now, the disquieting question, But is this advance so sure a thing after all? Is it so certain that the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus is making way amongst us? We hear such voices raised sometimes, we are reminded of what is called a flood of infidelity surging around us, or of active anti-Christian influence now at work in our midst from the University common room to the workshop, influencing our legislature, permeating the newspapers, and making its voice heard in our streets. Is this a time for us to be speaking in tones of assurance about the victorious progress of the Master’s Kingdom in our midst? I firmly believe it is. So far as our own national Christianity is concerned, the thoughtful observer can surely find no reason for hesitation or doubt. We are bound as well as privileged to thank God and take courage. The walls of our old cathedrals and parish churches have looked down, some of them for hundreds and hundreds of years, upon a variety of scenes connected with our Church’s history. They have echoed as the centuries have passed to voices of very different men, face to face with needs constantly changing, constantly new as well as old. But never in the long and varied series of men and things have our altars and our pulpits been the centre of a greater earnestness, of more practical efforts and aims, more widespread care, a deeper personal devotion, above all, harder and more genuine work for Christ, than in the last twenty or twenty-five years of English history. Shortcomings and blunders have left their mark upon every page of our Church’s story, and very certainly they are leaving it not least upon the page only half-written now. We need penitence and humiliation, even shame, as we contrast what we might have been and ought to be with what we are. And so remembering, we bring the past with all its failures, and the present with all its weaknesses, all its cares and all its sin, unto Him that loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood, and made us a kingdom of priests unto God our Father. And we ask Him for faith to give substance to our hope, and make our prayers come true. We know only too well the mass of sin and wrong, and the dead weight of sheer indifference which lies across our path, but we should be false to Him Who has called us if we did not still, in face of our weaknesses and failures, note that on the whole the onward march of our Church’s life in these later days is steady and persistent.
III. From generation to generation.—We have all heard of the classic contest of the burning torch. The account of it takes many forms, but the most significant was this: A band of youths of one tribe contended against a band of youths of another tribe. The contestants of each tribe were stationed at intervals along the course, and a lighted torch was handed to the first runner of each tribe. He was to run at his topmost speed and hand it on to the youth stationed next to him, who was to run and hand it on to the next, and so on until the goal was reached. The tribe was winner whose last runner first reached the goal with the torch still burning. It is from such a picture that one gathers the true meaning of the word tradition—handing on. One generation of workers, one generation of hearers and worshippers, handing on the torch of inspiration and work to another. ‘One generation shall praise Thy work unto another and declare Thy power.’ ‘Thy power,’ that which helped ministers and people in the past, that self-same power will be given to you according to your need, given to you in answer to and in proportion to your daily prayers, given to you in the blessed Sacrament of the Lord’s love, given to you for crisis-times of joy and sorrow, and for the ordinary common, prosaic, humdrum days, given it will be, and when given it must be borne and handed on. ‘Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s pleasure to give you the Kingdom.’
Archbishop Randall Davidson.
Illustration
‘Infidelity, we are told, is rife amongst us, and wickedness abounds on every hand. Yes, it is absolutely true, but when was it not true? Is it a peculiarity of our time? Take a century or two ago and compare, with as much care in regard to detail as you can bring to the work, its literature, its popular creed, its moral standard, with ours to-day. Do we always realise what the faith and morals of educated England were a century ago, in the days of the Prince Regent and his friends? Or to take a more favourable period, two hundred years ago—the reign of Queen Anne—a time, that is, when the Church was supposed to be especially awake and powerful, when the characteristic torpor, the somnolence of the coming eighteenth century, had not yet begun. Turn to the sparkling pages of the journals and magazines, the Tatler and the Spectator of that day, and see how men like Steele and Addison, clear thinkers, draw a picture of moral turpitude and intellectual creedlessness blacker, surely, by far than anything we are familiar with to-day. Take Addison’s scathing essay on the supposed visit of an Indian king to St. Paul’s Cathedral, or Swift’s satirical “Argument against abolishing Christianity.” It is necessary to understand this aright, to realise a prevalence of godlessness among educated people to which the twentieth century offers, I think, no parallel at all. Pass on half a century to 1751, and we find a most careful and most learned public man, Bishop Butler, opening his famous charge to the clergy of Durham with a complaint that “the influence of religion is wearing out of the minds of men”; and again, “it is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted by many persons that Christianity is not so much an object for inquiry, but is now discovered to be fictitious, nothing remains but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule.” He proceeds to answer all that, but that was the thought about religion in men’s minds at that time. It would be easy to multiply such statements from the pages of friends and foes. Archbishop Secker, in 1776, speaking of the country squires of his time, says: “If they sometimes vouchsafed their attendance at Divine service in the country, they seldom or never would do so in town.” Bishop Newton, a hundred and twenty years ago, quotes as a signal and unusual instance of attention to religious duty, that a particular man, whom he named, regularly attended the service of the Church every Sunday morning even when he held political office. Sunday, a great historian tells us, was in those days the usual day for Cabinet Councils. Montesquieu, writing a little earlier, in a tone of bitterest hostility to England, said he could not see evidence of any religion whatever in the country. The subject excited nothing but ridicule, so far as he could learn. Not more than four or five members of the House of Commons, he affirmed, were regular attenders at Church. No doubt he exaggerated, but he was a great writer and thinker, and he described what he believed to be true. Fifty years later another French writer said there “was only just enough religion left in England to distinguish Tories, who had little, from Whigs, who had none.” The whole literature of three generations tells the same tale. The picture is, no doubt, overdrawn, but it is important for us to remember when we hear constant talk of the evils in the world to-day and the impossibility of our standing up against them, that there have always been these evils, and that there is no use being faint-hearted. It is only by such comparisons as the foregoing that we are to recognise the Church’s onward march. It seems to us slow, but it is progress after all, and the sentence I have quoted would be ludicrously inappropriate as statements of existing facts to-day.’

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF OPPORTUNITY
‘Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing.’
Luke 12:43
Our Lord is speaking of His second coming. Learn
I. The importance of doing in our Christian life.—We hear a great deal about people’s intentions, and hopes, and wishes, and feelings, and professions. It would be well if we could hear more about people’s practice. It is not the servant who is found wishing and professing, but the servant who is found ‘doing’ whom Jesus calls ‘blessed.’
II. The danger of those who neglect the duties of their calling.—Of such our Lord declares that they ‘shall be cut in sunder, and their portion appointed with the unbelievers.’
III. The greater a man’s religious light is, the greater is his guilt if he act not up to it.—The servant which ‘knew his lord’s will, but did it not, shall be beaten with many stripes.’ ‘Unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.’

CHRISTS BAPTISM OF SUFFERING
‘I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished.’
Luke 12:50
I. The whole structure of this sentence is in exact keeping with the common notion of baptism, seeing that a condition of greater freedom is evidently looked forward to by Christ as certain to result from those waves of fire through which He had to pass. He laboured under a species of bondage prior to His agony and death; and the consequence of the agony and death would, he knew, be deliverance from this bondage. There is, therefore, peculiar fitness in His describing that agony and death as a baptism with which He should be baptized.
II. ‘How am I straitened till it be accomplished!’
( a) It was one consequence of our Saviour’s sufferings and death that the gift of the Holy Spirit should be poured forth on His disciples. Until, therefore, the baptism was accomplished, there could be little or none of that preparation of heart on the part of His followers which was indispensable to the reception of the spiritual magnificence and majesty of the Gospel.
( b) Although the Spirit was given without measure to the Saviour, He was nevertheless hemmed round by spiritual adversaries, and He had continually before Him a task overwhelming in its difficulties. Is not the contrast of the state which preceded, aed that which succeeded, the baptism of agony sufficient in itself to account for expressions even more sternly descriptive of bondage than that of our text?
( c) Christ had not yet won the headship over all things, and, therefore, He was straitened by being circumscribed in Himself, in place of expanding into myriads.
These, with like reason, serve to explain, in a degree, the expression of our text; though we frankly confess that so awful and inscrutable is everything connected with the anguish of the Mediator, that we can only be said to catch glimmerings of a fullness which would overwhelm us, we may suppose, with amazement and dread.
—Rev. Canon Melvill.
Illustration
‘This baptism is plainly not that of water, nor that of the Holy Ghost, but the baptism of suffering. It is the same baptism of which our Lord said to James and John, “Ye shall be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with.” The expression is one of those which shows the wisdom of our translators of the Bible in adhering to the word “baptism,” and not rendering it either “immersion” or “sprinkling.” The effect of either of these words in the present verse, instead of “baptism,” needs only to be tried. Few would like to substitute for our present translation, “I have an immersion to be immersed with”; or, “I have a sprinkling to be sprinkled with.”
‘The Greek word translated “straitened,” is the same that is rendered in Acts 18:5, “pressed”; and in 2 Corinthians 5:14, “constrains.” It is supposed by some that the feeling our Lord meant to express, was that of pain and distress in the prospect of His coming sufferings and crucifixion. This is the opinion of Stier. It seems, however, highly improbable. It is supposed by others that the expression is like John 12:27 and Luke 22:42, and is meant to imply the conflict between our Lord’s human will, which naturally shrank from suffering, and His Divine will, which was set on accomplishing the work He came to do. This opinion is supported by many. Yet it does not seem quite to harmonise with the context, and is not altogether satisfactory. The most probable view appears to be that the expression, “I am straitened,” was intended to show us the burning desire by which our Lord was constrained to accomplish the work of our redemption. It is like the saying, “With desire I have desired to eat the passover with you.” Theophylact and Euthymius both support this view.’