The Great Expectation

“Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord w at hand.” — PHILLIPPIANS iv. 4.

IT is not easy to decide just what the apostles expected with reference to the second coming of the Lord. Sometimes it seemed as if they looked almost immediately to see the opening sky and the descending chariot. At other times, with a more general faith, they seemed to anticipate what has come to pass, the slow and spiritual occupation of the standards and purposes of human life by the spirit of Jesus, to be quickened at some future day and brought to some great consummation which it is impossible to describe beforehand, but which, when it comes, will centre about him and crown him as the Master of the world. Sometimes one of these thoughts, sometimes the other seems to represent St. Paul’s anticipation. But, whatever was the form which their expectation more or less definitely assumed, the great fact about him and the other disciples was that they always were expecting. Their

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look was always forward; a:, <1 they found abundant clearness and abundant inspiration in their expectancy when they described the thing which they expected as a “coming of the Lord.” 4* Maranatha.” “The Lord will come.” It was one of their customs to greet one another with that salutation.

We cannot probably imagine how completely this habit of expectation had possession of their lives. It must have given color and meaning to everything they did. Every step they took in life brought them a little nearer to that great end and purpose. They set out on a voyage, and as they turned their eyes away from the fading shore and looked across the broad waters, they seemed to be sailing out to meet the coming Lord. Two of them parted from each other, not knowing when they were to meet again, and they said to themselves. Whenever it is it will be in some nearer presence of the Lord. One of them moved to a new dwelling, and, as he entered into the door of what was to be his future home, its rooms became sacred to him because in them he was to witness the approach of Christ; in them Christ was to be nearer to him than ever in the house which he had left behind. “Now is our salvation nearer than when we first believed.” Those words which once came from the apostle’s lips, expressed the feeling and the power which was always in all the apostles’ hearts.

And it has been this expectation of a coming of the Lord which, ever since the time of tin- apostles, has always been the inspiration of the Christian world. The noblest souls always have believed that humanity was capable of containing, and was sure sooner or later to receive, a larger and deeper infusion of divinity. The promise of Christianity is as yet but half fulfilled. All that has been done yet in all the Christian centuries is only the sketch and prelude of what is yet to be done. This has been the faith of every Christian reformer. This is what has made it easy for souls which loved the dear associations of the past as much as any others, to cut loose from them and sail out on unknown seas. It has not been mere wilfulness. It has been really the profoundest faith. It has dared to think of human history not as a great flat plain on which men wan dered pleasantly but aimlessly, always coming back at last to the dead camp-fires where they had slept be fore, but as a flight of shining stairs up which men were to struggle toilsomely but eagerly toward a day of the Lord, a kingdom of heaven which was waiting for them at the top.

And as the noblest souls have thought of the world’s history, so the most earnest men and women have always thought of their own lives. The power of any life lies in its expectancy. “What do you hope for? What do you expect?” The answer to these questions is the measure of the degree in which a man is living. He who can answer these questions by the declaration, “The Lord is at hand: I am expecting a higher, deeper, more pervading mastery of Christ” — we know that he is thoroughly alive.

And, as I have already intimated, one of the

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great signs of how strong life is in such ;i man be the way in which he leaves his past. What a difference there is in men about” that! Some men are always driven out of their past and leave it only because they cannot stay there. Other men go forth from their past because they have grown weary and disgusted with it, and are willing to 11« from it for pure love of change. Other nn-n It MM their past full of honor for it, full of gratitude I’mthe equipment which it has given them for tlu-ir future life, but full also of the attraction of the future in which the equipment which their past has given them is to be used. Here on a ship’s deck which goes sailing out of port some day there are three men together. All of them are leaving the home-land. Behind all three alike, standing on the same deck, the same land fades away and is lost out of sight But is it the same thing to all of them? Has leaving home for all of them the same meaning? One is an exile, who, having committed flagrant crime, is permitted to live only on condition that he shall leave his country and never come back to it again. One is an idler, who, having exhausted the surface of the land where he belongs, is sailing nm to feed his restlessness in mere change, in the inertnight uf things he never saw before. The third is a discoverer, who has gathered all the knowledge and character which he could gain at home, and is now set to use them in reading the secret of some hidden country and making the world larger for mankind. How different they are! with what different they see the familiar shore sink down into the sea 1 But they are not more different than are three men who leave any one period of life behind them and go out into a new one, one of them simply with the feeling that he cannot help himself, another with the vague sense that the past has grown tame and the future will offer something new, and the third with the eager hope that the Lord is at hand, that in the larger circumstances and with the maturer powers he will come nearer. to and know more of Christ. You know of course why I have thus begun to speak to you to-day. It is the last Sunday of 1884. The year which came to us twelve months ago, all fresh and young, is old and weary. Before next Sun day a new year will come to crowd him from his place. On such a Sunday it is not a mere habit, it is a natural and healthy instinct, which makes us stand between the new year and the old, between the living and the dead, and listen to them as they speak to one another. Can we not almost hear the words they say, and is not their deepest burden something like this which I have tried to express? The old year says to the new year, 44Take this man and show him greater things than I have been able to show him. You must be for him a richer, fuller day of the Lord than I could be.” The new year says to the old, “I will take him and do for him the best that I can do. But all that I can do for him will be possible only in virtue of the preparation which you have made, only because of what you have done for him already.”

We want to think then about men going forward to greater things, leaving the past, in hope and expectation of a greater future. As I announce that subject, I can almost hear some cynical bystander say, “You may spare yourself the trouble of that sermon. For one half of your hearers it will bo needless. For the other half it will be useless. The young people know without your telling them, know better than you can tell them, that the future ip v.-ry great and glorious and splendid; and you will not convince the people who are no longer young that the future will be in any great way different from the past. Perhaps there are a few just trembling between youth and age, not having wholly lost the vision of the one nor gained the insight of the other, whom you may persuade to cling to their illusions a little longer; but is that really worth your while? By-and-by the eyes must open and the vision disappear, and then the monotony of life must be accepted, arid the man give up all expectation of anything except running the same round of routine till he dies.”

I want at least to bear a protest against the mockery of such words as those, and to assert that that cry, uThe Lord is at hand,” may and ought to be in the ears of every man as he goes from the old year to the new.

There are really two divisions of our subject. We may think first of the way in which a man becomes more conscious of the God who is already close to him, and second of the way in which God actually comes closer to him, year by year. They are what the philosophers would call the subjective and the objective thoughts of God’s nearness. And we start with that which must be true, the assertion that the more varied and manifold a man’s experiences have become, the more he has the chance to know of God, the more chance God has to show Himself to him. Every new experience is a new opportunity of knowing God. Every experience is like a jewel set into the texture of our life, on which God shines and makes interpretation and revelation of himself. You hang a great rich dark cloth up into the sunlight, and the sun shines on it and shows the broad general color that is there. Then one by one you sew great precious stones upon the cloth, and each one, as you set it there, catches the sunlight and pours it forth in a flood of peculiar glory. A diamond here, an emerald there, an opal there, the sun seems to rejoice as he finds each moment a new interpreter of his splendor, until at last the whole jewelled cloth is burning and blazing with the gorgeous revelation.

Now a much-living life, a life of manifold experiences, is like a robe which bursts forth of itself to jewels. They are sewn on from the outside. They burn out of its substance as the stars burn out of the heart of the night. And God shines with new revelation upon every one. And the man who feels himself going out of a dying year with these jewels of experience which have burned forth from his life during its months, and knowing that God in the New Year will shine upon them and reveal Himself by them, may well go full of expectation, saying, “The Lord is at hand.”

Life may be always expecting new sight of God, because life is always acquiring new experiences on which, through which, God may d«-«-lniv Hisnearness and His love. We may, if we will, turn the jewelled cloth away from the sun, but if we let him Rhine upon it, he must make himself known. To most of you — shall I not say to all of you? — have come in this past year, some new experiences, some things which you have never known before. Some of you have known for the first time what it is to be poor. Perhaps some of you have known for the first time what it is to be rich. Some of you have had your first sickness. Some of you have felt for the first time the keenest suffering in the death of your best beloved. Some of you have begun the new joy of family life. Some of you have become fathers or mothers. Some of you with yet deeper changes, which bore no outside witness of themselves, have laid hold upon new and inspiring ideas. Some of you have given yourselves up to a profession; some of you have made a new friend; some of you have entered into the communion of the Church and put on Jesus Christ. These are the jewels on the cloth of gold of your life. As you go forth, knowing that God must have something new of himself to show to you through these experiences as they become more and more set and fastened in your life as its habits and possessions, can you help being full of expectation?

Can you help saying to yourself: “The Lord is at hand”?

Is there not something of the same kind when in the midst of some great experience you look forward to meeting again, with the power of that new experience in you, your most noble and many-sided friend? “It may be,” you say to yourself, “that this experience will be the key which I have needed to unlock that closed chamber of his nature, before which I have so often stood and wondered.” You see him coming to you, and new light streams forth from him. You have gained a new power of reflecting him. Henceforth your whole life with him is going to be a richer, deeper thing. Make this mutual; let each of two friends, with multiplying experience, gain new power to reflect the other’s light; and have you not the whole philosophy of deepening friendship, of the way in which those who are true friends become more and more to each other every year, the longer that they live?

A soul goes forth from this world and enters into heaven. Surely a part of that intensified and deepened sight of God which is to be its privilege and glory there, will lie in the abundance of experience which it has accumulated here, and which will belong to it forever. Every treasured experience will be to it like an eye with which to gaze on God. We shall know him better forever and forever, be cause of that success or this disappointment, because this friend played us false, or because the market turned just as our fortune was on the point of being made. Could anything make the events which happen to us here on earth seem more interesting and significant than such a truth as that?

Thus much we say of the way in which the Lord is constantly coming by the ever increasing ‘capacity, the ever multiplying experience of man, to discover and display more and more fully how near He is already. But this subjective interpretation is not all There is the other, the objective side. We must pass to that. In these days man is so conscious of himself, so large a portion of his time and thought is given to the consideration of himself, he is so aware of the fact of his own activity, that some times it seems as if God were wholly passive, stand ing off there and waiting for man to come to Him; and meanwhile only making revelation of Himself to man as man turns to Him this or that side of his reflecting nature. Other times have been full of the truth of the activity of God. The Old Testament is all alive with that idea, and constantly in history there have recurred ages full of the spirit of the Old Testament, which think of God as He was thought of in those vigorous and stirring books. That God is seeking after man, changing His methods of treatment according to man’s behavior, actually coming nearer to or going farther off from man, not simply making Himself known as near or far, but actually changing from near to far, from far to near, that is the Old Testament truth; and the New Testament, with the Incarnation for its light and glory, evidently has not lost or thrown away that truth.

No religion can live and be thoroughly strong unless it keeps that truth of the activity of God. Some religions, like Calvinism, have kept it so strongly that they have lost or made little of the other truth, of the activity of man. In our time, as I said, man is so aware of himself, and of what he has to do, that there is sometimes danger lest he forget — sometimes he certainly has forgotten — the activity of God.

Let us remember that great truth, and then, does not man’s expectation of the future lift itself up and become wonderfully enlarged? Not merely, I shall grow so that I shall be able to understand vastly more of what God is and of what He is doing. God also will be ever doing new things. He is forever active. He has purposes concerning me which He has not yet unfolded. Therefore each year grows sacred with wondering expectation. Therefore I and the world may go forth from each old year into the new which follows it, certain that in that new year God will have for us some new treatment which will open for us some novel life.

The world, as it looks back upon the past years, knows that God’s active care for it has proved itself abundantly in all his various treatments. One year He lifted the curtain from a hidden continent, and gave his children a whole new world in which to carry out His purposes. Another year He revealed to them a strange, simple, little invention which made the treasured knowledge of the few to be the free heritage of all. Another year He touched the solid frame of a great spiritual despotism, and it trembled and quaked, and thousands of its slaves came forth free men. Another year, in our own time, in our own la i id, He sent the message of lil pert y to a nation of bondmen, and the fetters fell off from their limbs. We call these events of history. They have a ri-ht to be called the comings of the Lord. They all are echoo.- illustrations of that great coming of the Lord from which they who have known of it agree by instinctive consent to date their history, the birth of the child of Bethlehem, the Man of Nazareth and Calvary, into the world.

When we once think thus of the events of history as the activities of God, as the comings of the Lord to man, then there comes a great vitality into the story of mankind. It is all alive. And then we stand before the yet unopened history of a new and say, “What will God do?” Something of what he will do we can guess, as a child can guess soim — thing of the future actions of the wisest man by intuitions of his character; but what we guess is very little and very vague. Still there is enough left on which to feed our wonder. What will God do this year? How will he come near to man? It may be, 0 that it might be! that he will break up this awful sluggishness of Christendom, this terrible torpidity of the Christian Church, and give us a great, true revival of religion. It may be that he will speak some great imperious command to the brutal and terrible spirit of war, and will open the gate upon a bright period of peace throughout the world. It may be that he will draw back the curtain and throw some of his light upon the question, of how the poor and the rich may live together in more cordial brotherhood. It jrcay be that he will lead up from the depths of their common faith a power of unity into the sects of a divided Christendom. Perhaps he will smite this selfishness of fashionable life, and make it earnest. Perhaps by some terrible catastrophe he will teach the nation that corruption is ruin, and that nothing but integrity can make any nation strong. Perhaps this! perhaps that! We make our guesses, and no man can truly say. Only we know that with a world that needs so much, and with a God who knows its needs and who loves it and pities it so tenderly, there must be in the long year some approach of His life to its life, some coming of the Lord!

And if we know this of the world, shall we not also know it of ourselves? For us too God is certainly active. We look forward into the opening months and we say, Yes, no doubt something will happen, some change will come. It may be one thing or another. It may be fuller life; it may be death. It may be what we wish or what we dread. When we are young men we try to anticipate what is coming. As we grow to be older men we are very apt to give that up in hopelessness and merely wonder what will come. If we have no religion (or do not use the religion which we have, as many religious men do not), we think of what will happen as the falling of accidents or as the maturing of self-ripening processes. If we think of it at all religiously, we talk about God sending messages to us. If our religion is a real life thing, we feel God actually coming to us Himself, in all the unknown things which arc to happen to us before another New Year’s day. Ah, af ter all, that is everything. To know that there is no accident. To know that indeed there is no such thing as a mere message of God. To know that He is always coming to us. To know that there is nothing happening to us which is not His coming. To know all that, is to find the most trivial life made solemn, the most cruel life made kind, the most sad and gloomy life made rich and beautiful.

These are the two ways then in which the Lord comes, is always coming, to His servants. He opens their eyes to see how near He is already, and He does actually draw nearer to their lives. And now I must say a little about the other words of St Paul in this text of ours, in which he describes what ought to be the result of this expectation of the coming of the Lord upon a man’s life. “Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand.” Moderation! Is not the word almost strange at first? Does it not almost chill us? Moderation! we cry. Nay, but in him whose soul is full of glorious expectation will not enthusiasm be the great condition? Will not his soul expand and claim its larger heritage? Will not those other words of Paul describe him to him self: “All things are yours!” Who shall talk to him of moderation? What a hard, cold word it is!

But this word moderation — forbearance, the new version renders it — is one of St. 1 ‘aid’s -n-at v

Men are known by their favorite words. And as Paul uses this word it has more meaning in it than we can put into any one single word by which we can translate it. Indeed it is one of those words descriptive of character, which have no hope of being understood except as they find a conception of the character which they try to describe already present in the mind of him to whom the description is given, and are able to point to it and to say: “That is what I mean.” It is self-restraint, it is self-possession.

There is — all man’s self-knowledge has borne witness to it — there is somewhere in the human mind an image of human character in which all wayward impulses are restrained, not by outside compulsion, but by the firm grasp of a power which holds everything into obedience from within by the central purpose of the life. This character dreads fury and excitement as signs of feebleness. It hates exaggeration of statement, because exaggeration of statement means weakness of belief. It shrinks from self-display just in proportion as it accepts the responsibilities of selfhood. It is patient because it is powerful. It is tolerant because it is sure. It is hopeful for every man because it has found solid ground in the midst of the great turmoil for itself to stand on, and believes that all other men have the same right to solid ground to stand on as itself It is this character, I think, which St. Paul calls by his great word moderation. It is self-possession. It is the self found and possessed in God. It is the sweet reasonableness which was in Jesus,of whom it was writ ten that he should not strive nor cry, neither should his voice be heard in the streets; that lie should not break the bruised reed, and the smoking flax lie should not quench until he sent forth judgment un to victory. In these words I think we have the true description of what St. Paul means by moderation.

In the midst of eager and sometimes frantic struggles after virtue and after power, is there not some thing very great and refreshing in this setting up of moderation as the perfection of life? Be yourself in God, it seems to say, and virtue and power will take care of themselves.

And St. Paul says that this great self-possession in God must come to any man who really expects the coming of the Lord. 0, my dear friends, if you ki:< w that in -the most evident of all ways, which is by death, the Lord were coming to you to-morrow, and if you could be perfectly free from all base feeling, from fear and flurry, from defiance and from dread, from exaggerations and depressions belonging to that awful moment, if so you could calmly lie and listen while the great, quiet footsteps came nearer and nearer to your door, what would be the condition which it would make in you? Would it be anything like this which I have tried to describe? Would it be any elevation, refinement, solemnity, and broad ening of life? Would it be the calming of frivolity, the release of charity, the kindling of hope? Would it not be all of these?

Not yet for us does that great solemn footfall sound outside the door. But none the less is the Lord at hand. I have preached to you in vain to-day unless I have made you feel that He is always at hand. All expectation may be expectation of Him. AJ1 expectation then ought, if Paul is right, to be the birth place of this lofty character of moderation. And is it not? Tell me, what would you like to do for any friend of yours, or for your son, who was foolishly exuberant, overrunning into frivolities and quarrels and silly theories of life, into petulant discontent and all the base ambitions of the hour? What would you like to do to save him? Would you not be sure that if you only could set a noble expectation before him, and give it dominion over his whole soul, he would certainly be saved?

That is St. Paul’s doctrine! There is salvation for us all. Oh friends, the old year is fast slipping back behind us. We cannot stay in it if we would. We must go forth and leave our past. Let us go forth nobly. Let us go as those whom greater thoughts, and greater deeds await beyond. Let us go humbly, solemnly, bravely, as those must go who go to meet the Lord. With firm, quiet, serious steps, full of faith, full of hope, let us go to meet Him who will certainly judge us when we meet him, but who loves us while he judges us, and who, if we are only obedient, will make us by the discipline of all the years, fit for the everlasting world, where life shall count itself by years no longer.