The Pillar in God's Temple

“Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out; and I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God,... and my new name.” — REV. iii. 12.

IT is very many years since these great words were sent abroad into a world of straggle. We can hardly read them without remembering on what countless souls they have fallen in a shower of strength. Men and women everywhere, wrestling with life, have heard the promise to “him that overcometh;” and, though much of the imagery in which the promise was conveyed was blind to them, though they very vaguely identified their conflict with the battle which these far-off people in the Book of the Revelation were engaged in fighting, still, the very sound of the words has brought them inspiration. Let us study the promise a little more care fully this morning. Perhaps it will always be worth more to us if we do. A text which we have once studied is like a star upon which we have once looked through the telescope. We always see it afterwards, full of the brightness and color which that look showed us. Even if it grows dim behind a cloud, or other nearer stars seem to outshine it, we never think it dull or small after we have once looked deep into its depths.

“To him that overcometh,” reads the promise; and the first thing that we want to understand is what the struggle is in which the victory is to be won. It is the Savior Christ who speaks. His voice comes out of the mystery and glory of heaven to the church in Philadelphia, and this book, in which His words are written, stands last in the New Testament. The gospel story is all told. The work of incarnation and redemption is all done. Jesus has gone back to His Father, and now is speaking down to men and women on the earth, who are engaged there in the special struggle for which He has prepared the conditions, and to which it has been the purpose of His life and death to summon them. Let us remember that. It is a special struggle. It is not the mere human fight with pain and difficulty which every living mortal meets. It is not the wrestling for place, for knowledge, for esteem, for any of the prizes which men covet. Nay, it is not absolutely the struggle after righteousness; it is not the pure desire and determination to escape from sin, considered simply as the aspiration of a man’s own nature and the determination of a man’s own will. It is not to these that Christ looks down and sends His promise. He had called out a special struggle on the earth. He had bidden men struggle after goodness, out of love and gratitude and loyalty to Him.

If the motive, everywhere and always, is the greatest and most important part of every action, then there must always be a difference between men who are striving to do right and not to do wrong, according to the love which sets them striving. If it is love of themselves, their struggle will be one thing. If it is love of the abstract righteousness, it will be another. If it is love of

Christ, it will be still another. Jesus is talking to the men and women there among the Asian mountains, and to the hosts of men and women who were to come after them upon the earth, who should be fighters against sin, against their own sin, who should struggle to be pure and brave and true and spiritual and unselfish, because they loved Christ, because He had lived and died for them, because they belonged to Him, because He would be honored and pleased by their goodness, grieved and dishonored by their wickedness; because by goodness they would come into completer sympathy with Him, and gain a fuller measure of His love. It is to men and women in this struggle that Christ speaks, and promises them the appropriate reward which belongs to perseverance and success in just that obedience of loyalty and love.

For one of the discoveries that we make, as soon as we grow thoughtful about life at all, is that the world is not merely full of struggle, but full of many kinds of struggle, which vary very much in value. We begin by very broad and superficial classifications. Men are happy or unhappy; men are wise or foolish; men are generous or stingy. But by and by such broad divisions will not satisfy us. The great regions into which we have classified our fellow-men begin to break up and divide. There are all kinds of happiness, all kinds of wisdom, all kinds of generosity. It means little to us, when we have once found this out, to be told that a man is happy, wise, or generous, until we have learned also the special quality of this quality as it appears in him, how he came to possess it, and how he works it out in life. And so in all the world-full of struggling men, as we observe them we find by and by that there are differences. A great, broad mass of eager, dissatisfied, expectant faces it appears at first; a wild and restless tossing hither and thither, as if a great ship had broken asunder in mid -ocean, and her frightened people, with one common fear and dread of being drowned, were struggling indiscriminately in the waves. But at last all that changes, and we wonder how it ever could have looked so to us. Struggle comes to seem as various as life. The objects for which men struggle, and the strength by which men struggle, grow endlessly various. And then, among the mass that seemed one general and monotonous turmoil, there stand out these — there shine out these — whose struggle is against sin, for holiness, and by the love of Christ. Other men struggle against poverty, against neglect; for ease, for power, for fame; and by the love of self, the noble abstract love of righteousness; but, scattered through the whole mass thickly enough to give it character and add a new, controlling strain to the eternal music of aspiring discontent which rises from the swarm of human living, there are these stragglers against sin, by the love of Christ. They are by your side. They are in your houses. They meet you in the street. Your children are catching sight of that struggle, and its fascination and its power, in the times when they are silent and thoughtful, and seem to be passing out of your familiar understanding. Your friend, whose carelessness concerning the things about which you are eager seems so strange to you, is careless about them only be cause he is fighting a deeper fight. He is fighting against sin, by the love of Christ. Therefore, he does not dread the poverty and the unpopularity against which your selfishness makes you so eager to fear and fight.

This then is the peculiar straggle to the victory in which Christ, out of heaven, gives His promise. And now the promise can be understood if we understand the struggle. The two belong together. “Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out.” The ideas of the pillar in a building, in a temple, are these two: incorporation and permanence. The pillar is part of the structure; and when it is once set in its place it is to be there as long as the temple stands. How clear the picture stands before us. There is a great, bright, solemn temple, where men come to worship. Its doors are ever open; its windows tempt the sky. There are many and many things which have to do with such a temple. The winds come wandering through its high arches. Perhaps the birds stray in and build their nests, and stray away again when the short summer is done. The children roam across its threshold, and play for a few moments on its shining floor. Banners and draperies are hung upon its walls awhile, and then carried away. Poor men and women, with their burdens and distress, come in and say a moment’s prayer, and hurry out. Stately processions pass from door to door, making a brief disturbance in its quiet air. Generation after generation comes and goes and is forgotten, each giving its place up to another; while still the temple stands, receiving and dismissing them in turn, and outliving them all. All these are transitory. All these come into the temple and then go out again. But a day comes when the great temple needs enlargement. The plan which it embodies must be made more perfect. It is to grow to a completer self. And then they bring up to the doors a column of cut stone, hewn in the quarry for this very place, fitted and fit for this place and no other; and, bringing it in with toil, they set it solidly down as part of the growing structure, part of the expanding plan. It blends with all the other stones. It loses while it keeps its individuality. It is useless, except there where it is; and yet there, where it is, it has a use which is peculiarly its own, and different from every other stone’s. The walls are built around it. It shares the building’s changes. The reverence that men do to the sacred place falls upon it. The lights of sacred festivals shine on its face. It glows in the morning sunlight, and grows dim and solemn as the dusk gathers through the great expanse. Generations pass before it in their worship. They come and go, and the new generations follow them, and still the pillar stands. The day when it was hewn and set there is forgotten; as children never think when an old patriarch, whom they see standing among them, was born. It is part of the temple where the men so long dead set it so long ago. From the day that they set it there, it “goes no more out.”

Can we not see perfectly the meaning of the figure? There are men and women everywhere who have some thing to do with God. They cannot help touching and being touched by Him, and His vast purposes, and the treatment which He is giving to the world. They cross and recross the pavement of His providence. They come to Him for what they want, and He gives it to them, and they carry it away. They ask Him for bread, and then carry it off into the chambers of their own selfishness and eat it. They ask Him for power, and then go off to the battlefields or workshops of their own selfishness and use it. They are forever going in and out of the presence of God. They sweep through His temple like the wandering wind; or they come in like the chance worshipper, and bend a moment’s knee before the altar. And then there are the other men who are struggling to escape from sin, by the love of Christ. How different they are. The end of everything for them is to get to Christ, and put themselves in Him, and stay there. They do not so much want to get to Christ that they may get away from sin, as they want to get away from sin that they may get to Christ. God is to them not merely a great helper of their plans; He is the sum of all their plans, the end of all their wishes, the Being to whom their souls say, not “Lord, help me do what I will;” but, “Lord, show me Thy will that I may make it mine, and serve myself in serving Thee.” When such a soul as that comes to Christ, it is like the day when the marble column from the quarry was dragged up and set into the temple aisle. Such a soul becomes part of the great purpose of God. It can go no more out. It has no purpose or meaning outside of God. Its life is hid there in the sacred aisles of God’s life. If God’s life grows dark, the dusk gathers around this pillar which is set in it. If God’s life brightens, the pillar burns and glows. Men who behold this soul, think instantly of God. They cannot picture the pillar outside of the temple; they cannot picture the soul outside of the fear, the love, the communion, the obedience of God.

The New Testament abounds with this idea and the discrimination which we have been trying to make. When the Prodigal Son comes back to his Father, he cries out, “I am not worthy to be called Thy son; make me as one of Thy hired servants;” but the Father answers, “This, My son, was dead, and is alive again;” and the pillar is set up in the temple. When Jesus looks into His disciples’ faces at the last supper, He says: “Henceforth I call you not servants, for the servant knoweth not what his Lord doeth; but I have called you friends, for all things which I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you.” The servant is the drapery hung upon the nails; the friend is the pillar built into the wall. Paul writes to the Romans: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God.” It is the calm assurance of the pillar which feels the pressure of the wall around it, and defies any temptation to entice it, or any force to tear it away.

Nor is there anything unphilosophical, or unintelligible, or merely mystical in all this. The same thing essentially occurs everywhere. Two men both come to know another man, richer and larger than either of them. Something called friendship grows up between each of them and him. But the first of the two men who seek this greater man, comes and goes into and out of his great neighbor’s life. He keeps the purposes of his own life distinct. He comes to his rich friend for knowledge, for strength, for inspiration, and then he carries them off and uses them for his own ends. The other friend gives up all ends iri life which he has valued, and makes this new man’s, this greater man’s purposes, his. He wants what this great man wants, because this great man wants it. Naturally and easily we say that he “lives in” this other man. By and by you cannot conceive of him as separate from this greater life. The reward of his loving devotion is that he is made a pillar in the temple of his friend, and goes no more out.

Two men both love their country. One loves her because of the advantage that he gets from her, the help that she gives to his peculiar interests. The other loves her for herself, for her embodiment of the ideas which he believes are truest and divinest and most human. One uses the country. The other asks the country to use him. One goes into the country’s ser vice and gathers up money or knowledge or strength, and then, as it were, goes out and carries them with him to help the tasks which he has to do in his own private life. The other takes all his private interests, and sacrifices them to the country’s good. And what is the reward of this supreme devotion, which there will always be some little group of supremely patriotic men ready to make in every healthy state? Will they not belong to the state, and will it not belong continually to them? They will never be lost out of its history. They will become its pillars and share its glory, as they helped to support its life.

The same is true about the church. There are the multitudes who go in and out, who count the church as theirs, who gather from her thought, knowledge, the comfort of good company, the sense of safety; and then there are others who think they truly, as the light phrase so deeply means, “belong to the church.” They are given to it, and no compulsion could separate them from it. They are part of its structure. They are its pillars. Here and hereafter they can never go out of it. Life would mean nothing to them outside the church of Christ.

And, to give just one more example, so it is with truth. The men who seek truth for what she has to give them, who want to be scholars for the emoluments, the honors, the associations, which scholarship will bring, these are the men who will turn away from truth so soon as she has given them her gifts, and leave herself dishonored, — who will turn away from any truth which has no gifts to give. But, always, there are a few seekers who want truth’s self, and not her gifts. Once scholars, they are scholars always. They really put their lives into the structure of the world’s advancing knowledge. There those lives always remain, like solid stones for the scholarship of the years to come to build upon. There is no world conceivable to which their souls can go, where they will not turn to seek what it is possible there for souls like theirs to know.

Thus everywhere, in every interest of human life, there is a deeper entrance and a more permanent abiding which is reserved for those who have come into the profoundest sympathy with its principles, and the most thorough unselfish consecration to its work. Come back, then, from these illustrations, to the Christian life, and see there the larger exhibition of the same law which they illustrate. God is the Governor of all the world. The purpose of His government, the one design on which it all proceeds, is that the whole world, through obedience to

Him, should be wrought into His likeness, and made the utterance of His character. Let that thought dwell before your mind, and feel, as you must feel, what a sublime and glorious picture it involves. Then remember that God does not treat the world in one great, vague generality. He sees the world all made up of free souls, of men and women. The world can become like Him by obedience, only as the souls of men and women become like Him by obedience. Each soul, your soul and mine, must enter into that consummation, must realize the idea of that picture by itself, by its own free submission; helped, no doubt, by the movement of souls all about it, and by the great promise of the world’s sal vation, but yet acting for itself, by its own personal resolve. To each soul, then, to yours and mine, God brings all. the material of this terrestrial struggle, — all the temptations, all the disappointments, all the successes, all the doubts and perplexities, all the jarring of interests, all the chances of hinderance and chances of help which come flocking about every new-born life. The struggle begins, begins with every living creature, is beginning to-day with these boys and girls about you, just as you can remember that years and years ago it began with you. What is it to succeed in that struggle? What success shall you set before them to excite their hope and energy? On what success shall you congratulate yourself? Is it success in the struggle of life simply to get through with decency and die without disgrace or shame? Is it success in the struggle of life just to have so laid hold on God’s mercy, to have so made our peace with Him, that we know we shall not be punished for our sins? Is it success in the struggle of life even to have so lived in His presence that every day has been bright with the sense that He was taking care of us? These things are very good; but if the purpose of God’s government of the world and of us is what I said, then the real victory in the struggle can be nothing less than the accomplishment in us of that which it is the object of all His government to accomplish in the world. When, truly obedient, we have been made like Him whom we obey, then, only then, we have overcome in the struggle of life. And then we must be pillars in His temple. With wills harmonized with His will; with souls that love and hate in truest unison of sympathy with His; with no purposes left in us but His purposes, — then we have come to what He wants the world to come to. We have taken our places in the slowly rising temple of His will. To whatever worlds He carries our souls when they shall pass out of these imprisoning bodies, in those worlds these souls of ours shall find themselves part of the same great temple; for it belongs not to this earth alone. There can be no end of the universe where God is, to which that growing temple does not reach, the temple of a creation to be wrought at last into a perfect utterance of God by a perfect obedience to God.

0 my dear friends, that is the victory that is awaiting you. Slowly, through all the universe, that temple of God is being built. Wherever, in any world, a soul, by free-willed obedience, catches the fire of God’s likeness, it is set into the growing walls, a living stone. When, in your hard fight, in your tiresome drudgery, or in your terrible temptation, you catch the purpose of your being, and give yourself to God, and so give Him the chance to give Himself to you, your life, a living stone, is taken up and set into that growing wall. And the other living, burning stones claim and welcome and embrace it. They bind it in with themselves. They make it sure with their assurance, and they gather sureness out of it. The great wall of divine likeness through human obedience grows and grows, as one tried and purified and ripened life after another is laid into it; and down at the base, the corner-stone of all, there lies the life of Him who, though He was a son, yet learned obedience by the things which He suffered, and, being made perfect, became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey Him.

In what strange quarries and stone-yards the stones for that celestial wall are being hewn! Out of the hill sides of humiliated pride; deep in the darkness of crushed despair; in the fretting and dusty atmosphere of little cares; in the hard, cruel contacts that man has with man; wherever souls are being tried and ripened, in what ever commonplace and homely ways; — there God is hewing out the pillars for His temple. 0, if the stone can only have some vision of the temple of which it is to lie a part forever, what patience must fill it as it feels the blows of the hammer, and knows that success for it is simply to let itself be wrought into what shape the Master wills.

Upon the pillar thus wrought into the temple of God’s loving kingdom there are three inscriptions. I can only in one word ask you to remember what they are: “I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, and my new name.”

The soul that in obedience to God is growing into His likeness, is dedicated to the divine love, to the hope of the perfect society, and to the ever new knowledge of redemption and the great Redeemer. Those are its hopes; and, reaching out forever and ever, all through eternity, those hopes it never can exhaust. Those writings on the pillar shall burn with purer and brighter fire the longer that the pillar stands in the temple of Him whom Jesus calls “My God.”

May all this great promise ennoble and illumine the struggle of our life; keep us from ever thinking that it is mean and little; lift us above its details while it keeps us forever faithful to them; and give us victory at last through Him who has already overcome.