Christ Our Life
“In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk.” — ACTS iii. 6.
EVERYWHERE power is seeking opportunity, and fulness is seeking need, throughout the universe of God. The teeming hills send their streams down into the thirsty plains. The winds rush in to fill the vacant fields of space. Knowledge is always trying to widen its field and fill with its abundance some new emptiness of ignorance. The search is mutual and, going on everywhere, it makes the unity of the vast world. The mighty globe is bound together by these cords of power running out in help, and need running out in appeal, all over its surface.
Add to this another truth, — that all the power and all the richness in the world are really one, are really God, — that, take what form they will, come through what channels they may, they all proceeds from one great central Love and Abundance, which is God, — and then the unity is more complete and more im pressive. Then the study of the endless variety of the channels through which the power and supply of God flow into needy places becomes supremely interesting. The schoolmaster is teaching his scholar in the school. The philanthropist is freeing the slave out of his bondage. The father is feeding the children at his table. The artist is painting his picture on the wall. The farmer is turning the forest to a fruitful field. The merchant is making the world the master of its wealth. How various are the activities! How the earth quivers and sparkles with their abundance and their difference! But if we believe and if we say that they all come from God, that, in a sense, they all are God uttering and giving Himself in many ways, through many channels, is not the sight then far more wonderful and beautiful? It has gained loftiness and unity with out losing distinctness and variety. And each one of the channels through which flow the power and abundance of God, no longer counting itself a spring of original supply, must find a profounder dignity and interest in itself and catch infinite visions of what may be accomplished and attained through it. The schoolmaster opens his books and says, “Here is God’s truth.” The emancipator says to the slave, “Go forth into God’s freedom.” The father invites his children to come and eat the bread of God. The artist feels thrilling through his soul and his brush some of God’s beauty. The farmer and the merchant open the field or the ocean that the bounty of God may flow through them. Has not each found its nobleness? Is not each full of dignity? May not each think of itself as incapable of comparison with any other, because, whatever of God’s power any other channel may bring, there is something of God which must come through this and this alone?
I am led to these thoughts as I consider the disciples of Jesus when, after their Lord had passed out of their sight, they found His power beginning to use them for its channels. Peter and John went up to the Temple and at the gate they found the lame man lying. He called to them for alms, and though they had no money which they could give him, something began to stir within them. How they must have wondered at themselves! A thought, a dream, a hope that possibly they might do something more than drop a penny in his outstretched hand, — a strange, unreasonable wish that they might actually lift him up and set him on his feet, and give strength to his poor, tottering ankle-bones and make him walk. How they must have wondered at themselves! Deep feelings were stirring in their souls — not merely pity for the man’s misery, though that was there, but other feelings, — a sense of the sadness of weak limbs and defective life, a longing for the completeness of vitality, a perception of the mysterious unity of life, so that he who had most of it ought to be able to give it to those who had least, — all of these emotions the disciples must have found moving tumultuously in their hearts, and they must have been amazed. Was this some new-discovered quality and power in themselves, something which had been sleeping unsuspected in them ever since they were boys in Capernaum and Bethsaida? Why was it that they had never dreamed of any such capacity before?
And then they said to themselves: “This has come to us since we had to do with Jesus. It is since we were His disciples that this new power began to stir within us.” And then they must have said: “It is the same which stirred in Him. Do you not remember how we used to see the same in His face which now is in ourselves? He too was full of pity, and loved life, and counted the loss or the defect of life a woe, and tried to give of His own life to others.” They remembered all this in Jesus; and then they came back to themselves and all was clear. All this was in them as they belonged to Him. It was in them because it was in Him. This desire and power to heal was His, not theirs. He was the spring and fountain out of which the divine water flowed. They were only the channels down which it poured to its result.
Everything must have become credible to them when they understood that. They could believe in the power when it was not theirs, but His. The channel could open itself freely when it felt the stream behind it. And so they looked into the lame man’s face and said: “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk.” And he obeyed.
The critical moment which came then to the disciples is always coming to whoever is called to exercise power in the world. He who is moved to do something is either a fountain and source of power, or else he is a channel of power through which comes the efficiency of God. Which is he? Which are you? According to the answer to that question comes the whole nature and degree of the man’s efficiency. Very silently, often very unconsciously, the answer to that question is being given. Every where men, who are doing the same outward work, part with each other when the answer has been given one way for one and another for the other. He only enters on the highest life who decides fully for himself that he is but a channel of power, and thenceforth feels behind himself the movement of the infinite life, and does all things in the name of Christ. I want to trace out with you what some of the consequences in life will be of such a fundamental conviction with regard to the source of power. But first I want you to feel how absolutely universal is the possibility of that conception. It applies to everything. Whatever a man does, no matter how secular he chooses to call his action, he may do it in the name of Christ. The divine power working behind him, using him for the channel of its utterance, that is what does everything. Not merely the acts which we call sacred, but everything is done by God, and the man only opens his life to God’s efficiency. Not wickedness, indeed, — and there wick’ edness seems to appear as that which it has so often been described to be, — negation, death, the ceasing of activity. It is the ceasing of the activity of God, interrupted and interfered with by the will of man; but all good action, all healthy activity, however secular it seems to be, is really God, declaring Him self and uttering his power through the appropriate channel of the life of man. And the acting man who is aware of this, claims it and declares it as he does His action, “In the name of Christ.”
I. I ask you to notice, in the first place, how such a conception as this establishes the nobleness of life. Our life feels everywhere the lack of nobleness. Very pathetic, almost the most pathetic thing we see, I think, is the effort which men make every where to compel life to look noble, — when in their hearts they feel deep suspicions that it is not noble, but ignoble all the while. They make artificial motives for it which are not its real ones. They make fellowships with other men who are living the same life as themselves, as if that would look dignified and precious in the multitude which was base and petty in the single worker. They declaim about the dignity of all labor. Or, if they have to give up in despair the effort to glorify their own vocation, they take some avocation, some outside work which seems to deal with nobler things, and try in that to find some nobler color for their lives. How many men, pressed by the bondage of necessity, driven each morning to their work, are thus pathetically, sometimes very beautifully, trying to find or feign for their lives a nobleness which all the time they feel is lacking.
And now, what is there which can really do for men what they are thus pathetically trying to do for themselves? What can take your life and ennoble it, O my friend? If really Christ could be felt behind it, and it could all be really an utterance of Him, would not the work be done? If you could genuinely know that it was His will which was finding fulfilment in what you did, whether your work were the writing of state papers or the building of bricks into the wall, so that as you shaped a new sentence or spread a new layer of mortar you could say, “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth,” would not the spell of sordidness be broken, the suspicion of pettiness be dissipated from your life? We are dominated and confused by two things — the accidents of our surroundings and the opinions of our brethren. Many a soul really doing brave and useful work struggles and writhes under the burden of these two oppressions. They are both gone, they disappear, they crush us down no longer, just so soon as our work becomes Christ’s work and not we but He is really doing it, and we are doing it only in His name.
Be sure, O, my young friends, that you are doing something honest, human, useful — no matter how humble or useful it may be — and then this nobleness waits at your doors. Be doing something of which it is conceivable that a man can say, “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth I do this thing.” A man can say that who drives sheep or digs a ditch. A man cannot say that who sells liquor to make his fellow creatures brutes, or who forces his dollars out of the crowded tenement where men’s and women’s and children’s souls are ruined. Be something, do something, of which you can say, “Christ does it! I do it in Christ’s name,” and then nobleness waits at your door. Any moment it may enter in, and sordidness and pettiness give way at its coming.
This which I am preaching is, I think, the full, real meaning of that phrase which fascinates us with its sound, but whose exact definition some of us perhaps have found it hard to give. “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk.” It is the idea of all power finding its source in Him. It involves all the various thoughts with regard to the disciple’s relation to his Lord, which come to their combined consummation in the complete dedication of the disciple’s life, making it altogether the servant and expression of the Master’s will. Gratitude is in it, admiration is there, love which desires communion, the sense of oneness of intrinsic nature, — all these press the man-life on the Christ-life and make it aware that its true glory and effectiveness is in uttering Him. All this I take to be wrapped up in those rich words: “In the name of Christ.”
2. And notice, in the second place, how in what these words express there lies the true secret of the unity of various lives. There are two notions of unity in men’s minds. One of them is really the notion of uniformity. It has no place for diversity. It wants almost complete identity between the things which it compares. The other rejoices in diversity, and finds its unifying principle in the common motive or purpose out of which an infinite diversity of many actions may proceed. How vain the search for any unity but this! It is the unity of nature. The budding, bursting spring is full of it; a thou sand trees all different from one another are all one in the oneness of the great life-power which throbs and pulsates in them all. And souls the most unlike, most widely separated from each other, are one
CHRIST OUR LIFE IO/
in Christ. Christ is their principle of unity. The thinker pondering deep problems, the workman struggling with the obstinacy of material, the worshipper lost in his adoration, the men of all centuries, the men of all lands, — they are all one, if all their lives are utterances of the same Christ. It seems to me to be beautiful, the way in which each new Christian strikes into this unity and becomes a part of it immediately. A man has been living by himself, seeming to find all his sources of activity in his own life. By and by the change comes and he is Christ’s. The pulse of universal Christian life begins to beat through him. Now he is one with all men who, anywhere, are doing anything by Christ for Christ! How he lays hold of and comprehends the ages! All the past is his; he knows what men were doing in the days of Abraham and David. All the future is his; he knows what men will be doing in the millennium, — not the forms of their activity, but its heart and soul, its meaning and its spiritual experience. All this he knows the moment that he has begun to do his special work “in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.” He is set into the living system. The star is taken up by the chorus of the stars and joins their music. Still the man goes on at his little work, — adding up figures, selling goods, driving his little machine, — but he is one with the greatest; he is one with the least. O, that the children might learn that, and feel their lives from the beginning set into the unity of that utterance of Christ which is the complete activity of the world! How much conceit among those who thought themselves great, how much complaint among those who thought themselves little, such a conception of life would save!
3. It is time for me to touch another question which may have been suggested to you as I have spoken. ‘What effect,” you will ask, “will this absorption into Christ have upon that development of personal distinctness, that character, that individuality which all men who are anything desire to possess? To do everything, to be everything, in Christ’s name — will not that blur everything into in distinctness and keep your life, my life, from standing out vigorous and clear? Nay, in my own name let me live my life and do my work!”
But surely this implies a narrow and crude thought of individuality. What is the Individual? A being distinct not only in himself, but in all his peculiar relations to the Infinite and Total Being. It is in the relation to that mass of being upon which every individual being rests, and to which it belongs, that individuality asserts itself. Wycliffe, Howard, Napoleon, each of them is a distinct, distinguishable figure among men. But how? By the way in which he manifests our universal human nature, and by the effects which he produces on it. Take any one of them out of all connection with the universal human life, and while, no doubt, his distinctive personality would still be there, it would be a crippled, ineffective thing. It would find no opportunity either of exhibition or of education. Put Wycliffe, or Howard, or Napoleon into his true place, and he shines with his own radiance and does his own work because of his true own place in which he stands. You see to what this tends, — that the true and natural relations of a human life bring out and strengthen and do not destroy or hide its individuality. You put a solitary man into a family, or into a warm friendship, and how his personality comes out! How much more of a man, how much more of this man which God meant for him to be, he is!
Now, Christ is the most natural home of man. He is the human manifestation of Divinity. Where then as in Him shall man naturally implant himself and be at home? And because the implanting of man in Christ is natural, and not unnatural, therefore the individuality of him who is set in Christ is developed and not destroyed, and the Christian be comes more and not less himself the more truly and devotedly he is a Christian.
And the true Bible figure of the Church is also the home. It is the family of God. And so, while it keeps the great sense of comprehensive unity, it will never blur or stifle the freedom and variety and spontaneousness of individual life.
Indeed, all true conception of originality and individuality must include the truth of the necessary belonging of the individual in the great whole. No self is its whole self which is itself alone. Part of the selfhood of everything is its share in the complete being of which it is a part. Will you take the man and uproot him from all his belongings? Take him out of his fatherhood, his business, his scholarship, his citizenship, his church, and then tell me, have you got him in his true personality? Has not his personality disappeared with all those separations? The time may come when, loosing himself from all these associations, leaving them behind as outgrown things, the man’s soul, pure and personal, shall soar away to some existence where they can have no place. But who can say into what new sceneries and societies of a celestial city, and a perfected human family, and a triumphant church that freed soul shall unite itself, claiming anew its personality in its associations? And, however that may be, it certainly will come to pass that there the soul will fix itself in God, and realize its individuality and know itself in Him.
If this be true, then men will become not less, but more themselves as they all feel behind their lives the Power of Jesus, and do all things in His name. It will be like the pouring of the sunlight on the earth, giving to everything a radiance which is the sun’s and yet is the thing’s own. It will be like the pouring of the brook down the dry channel, making each pebble shine with its true color. So acts burst into radiance when the great glory burns behind them. You are doing things with lower motives, and so with lower powers (for the motives of deeds are the powers of deeds); and this change comes, the great love of Christ takes possession of you, you love Him with the overwhelming gratitude which acknowledges His love. Your life presses it self in and occupies His life. His power fills you. “Not I live, but Christ,” you cry, in Paul’s great words. And then every act is yours with wonderful and new distinctness. You and Christ are the unit of this new, strange life. Strangelife? Yes, but only strange as the absolutely natural is strange when it strikes into the midst of the unnatural which has possessed the world; only strange as the whole is strange when, surging up from the depths, it takes possession of and overwhelms and harmonizes the parts! In that strange life each act, each thought, each word, flashes with light, glows with color, quivers with power, distinctive and unique, as it is done, or thought, or spoken in the name of Jesus Christ.
What shall we say of our poor, colorless religion? What shall we think of our Church, which often seems to swamp and drown instead of bringing out lustrously the characters of those who live in it? What can we think except that it has not really filled itself with its Master’s power? It does things which He could never do. It turns away from tasks which His soul longs for. It is not because they have given themselves to Him, but because they have given themselves to Him so partially, so feebly, that the members of His Church seem often to have lost instead of gaining personal distinctness and the full power of their own true life. You must go deeper into the stream which now only the tip of your foot is touching. You must be more of a Christian, not less. You must give yourself up heart and soul to Christ, that Christ may make you all yourself. Has not He Himself told the story? You must lose your life utterly in Him that you may find it.
Let me say only one thing more. The defect in a man’s life is double. It is in the things he does not do, and it is in the things he does do. I have been thinking mostly about the things which a man does not do, and of how his activity would be stimulated if he felt behind all his life the Power of Christ. But consider the other side. Think how the soul which lived by Christ would become incapable of many an action which, if he thought of his life as having no deeper sources than himself, he might freely do. He thinks of himself as an utterance of Christ. What Christ is He will be — nothing else. What Christ does He will do — nothing else. “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth” shall be the stamp which he will set on every action. Is not the range of his action limited at once? He can do nothing which will not hold that seal, no thing over which those words cannot be said. He raises his arm in passion to strike some defenceless creature a cruel and vindictive blow. “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth,” he says, and his arm falls powerless. He cannot strike. He sets out on some career of reputable deceit. He has his approved lie all ready on his lips, but before he utters it, he says, “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth,” and the lie is as impossible for him as for Christ Himself. Ah, how everywhere it is true that higher power means also more restraint! To be able to do one thing means always not to be able to do something else. Let any man here in society accept Christ’s power as his moving principle, and what then? A hundred old familiar doors must close.
But one great door opens, and through that he goes in to another life.
Here, then, my friends, is the whole doctrine which I wished to preach. It is the great redemption from a blank, narrow, and lonely thought of life, if there is behind us a vast Power of life by which we live and in whose name all that we do is done. Moses stands by the rock, about to smite it and bid the water flow. All God’s omnipotence is behind him. All the love and care, all the infinite nature of God is waiting to utter itself through this poor Hebrew who stands, rod in hand, before the mountain. What opportunity there is for him to glorify his life! How he may become like a very right arm of the Almighty! If he will only lift up his voice and cry, “In the name of God, let the water come for the thirsty people!” But listen, What is it that he says? “Hear now, ye rebels! must /bring you water out of this rock?” How the man shrinks and shrivels as we look at him and hear him speak! Just he, and nothing more! his little, narrow personality. Just Moses. Nay, not Moses! for the true Moses is Moses full of God, and this Moses who speaks has cast God away, and so he is not really his whole self. No wonder that that losing of his chance to be his best was the beginning of his death! We all begin to die when we let go the chance to live our fullest life.
May God help us to give ourselves to Christ, who, as St. Paul says, “is our life,” so that He may flow freely forth through us. May we do all things “in His name.” May we do nothing which we cannot do “in His name.” So may some of His work get done through us, and we, in doing it, grow strong and pure and unselfish and like Him, becoming so our own true selves.