The Christ Life

“i!”HE expression has been made to me by f a returned missionary, that in China and Japan they are getting to find the difference between Christians and the friends

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of Jesus. For a time they were deceived by the name Christian. Every sailor and foreign resident in these parts called himself a Christian, as distinguished from heathens. And so, as the natives found many of these men fairly outrivalling heathen co”^ruption, they became disgusted. They said if these drinking, blasphemous sailors and grasping merchants are Christians, we do not want Christianity. He said they were now calling true Christians

Jesus’ people, and all the others were merely Christians. They meant that these were Christ’s friends and had His resemblance in person and character. This is the distinction I would bring before you — the Christian life and the Christ life. There is all the difference between them that there is between a system of truth and a living person; all the difference there is between ideas and living, loving hearts. Christian life raay be a hf e conformed or committed to certain principles of truth. But Christ life is a living thing and a divine thing. Christian life may be your own earnest attempt to imitate Christ, and act consistently with the teachings of His Word, but Christ life is Christ’s own life in your heart and life, made real in you, and overcoming in you what your own strength could not overcome. This may be a new thought to some, but let me tell you it is the oest thought in the universe It is nearly all I know that is effectual in the blessed Gospel; that which brings into the heart ana life the Saviour

Himself. Let us look at it more deliberately, and linger over some of the points we should not hasten past.

PERSONALITY.

The first thought that comes up in connection with this is the thought of personality. The things we value in history are not the records of events, the geographical or historical information, but what they reveal of the men and women that have lived. That which makes a country great is not its lofty mountains and beautiful plains, its magnificent scenery and its Eden-like climate, for many of the fairest scenes of earth may claim all this, and yet they are waste and desolate for want of men. That which makes a country great is glorious men and women, far more than things or events, resources or incomparable advantages. That is what we cherish in our annals, — not our art, poetry and traditions and memories, but our heroes.

And so again, if we come down to the nearer realm of our own life, what do we value most? Not our houses and lands, our commerce and wealth, nor our earthly advantages. You would give everything on earth for one frail little life for which others would not give a farthing. There is more to you in one human heart than in all the world. And this morning your treasures are in your friends, those that have become in some sense your own. Personality, then, is the dearest and most precious thing in the world.

THE PERSONAL GOD.

And if this be so in secular things, now easy it is to rise to the thought of personality in God! I am so glad He is revealed to us as a person, and not a doctrine — a living being that we can touch somehow with the susceptibility of our spirit, that we can take in the arms of trust and love, that we can know in the depths of our consciousness, a good, and glorious and divine reality, even more than any other individual. The other day in Minneapolis, I met a dear friend just recovering from the terrible snare of Christian Science, who had been under its power until her heart and spirit were almost drawn away from Christ. “How strange,” she said, ’ that I never thought; they taught me that Christ was a principle. I might as well try to love a grape vine on my wall as to love a principle. And with gladness and joy she added, ^’Oh, it is a person; He is my blessed Saviour.” Read the story of His life, and back of the events shines out most vividly the Man Himself; not only the character that is so beautiful; not only that crystallization of all that was wise, and gentle and lovely, but behind all that was the Christ Himself, the living One, whom our thought, our very consciousness can grasp and gather out of all the story. So vivid it is that even infidelity has been compelled to say that the most remarkable thing in the Bible and the hardest thing to explain away, is not the Bible itself, but the Christ in the Bible.

Christ’s individuality.

So again, in His own words, no other man has left so much of Himself. Other men talk in the abstract; but He is always living and concrete; it is always I. There are no other records of human utterances so full of the personal pronoun as the sentences of the Lord Jesus Christ. It would be disgusting; it would be the most egregious egotism in anybody else but Jesus to find in every sentence the constant recurrence of I, I, I; and yet it comes from Him with such a consciousness of His majesty, of His right to do it, with such a sense thrown upon you that He is entitled to speak of Himself, that the personality is greater than the truth He has revealed, and the truth would be valueless without Him behind it. And so you feel it is all right. Look at His address to His disciples: ^I and my Father are one. I am the bread of life. I am the light of the world. Without me ye can do nothing.” It is the living Christ all through.

And not only is it the historical Christ that stands out from His teaching, but it is the Christ who is as real and living still. It is not only a memory of the past; a Christ, the most vivid person in the past, but it is the Christ who is still alive, and who, instead of being an historical figure, instead of being a cherished memory, is as near to-day as when He walked through Galilee, and taught and wrought His miracles.

The healing of His seamless gobe, <Aa^6

Is by our beds of pain, We touch Him ‘mid life’s throng and press,

And we are whole again.

Of no one else is this true. Some believe that the spirits of the past are near. Men can talk of others who have crossed the ocean of time as coming back to us here; but we know there is something that separates them from our touch, and our physical humanity. But we know this Christ is still as real as when Mary touched His feet. We know that not only is that tender heart throbbing still, but those hands are still real. That face is still human. The flesh and bones are still tangible if we could draw near enough, and that Jesus Christ is a risen and immutable person, the same yesterday, to-day and forever. His resurrection has opened the tomb, and crystalHzed forever all that was true of Him then. And so this Sabbath morning as we gather round our communion table we know while we partake of these sacred emblems, that they are a reality, and not a memory only; that not only did He institute these memorials, but somehow His own hand is put- 4 ting this cup to our lips, and making His flesh vital and actual to our physical and spiritual needs.

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