A Goodly Heritage

Throughout the Old Testament you find side by side these two trends of thought — a scrupulous carefulness for the observance of all the requirements of ritual worship, and a clear-eyed recognition that it was all external and symbolical and prophetic. I.  THE INCENSE OF PRAYER. The temple was divided into three courts, the outer court, the holy place, and the holiest of all. The altar of incense stood in the second of these, the holy place; the altar of burnt offering stood in the court without. It was not until that altar, with its expiatory sacrifice, had been passed that one could enter into the holy place, where the altar of incense stood. There were three pieces of furniture in that place, the altar of incense, the golden candlestick, and the table of the shewbread. Of these three, the altar of incense stood in the centre. Twice a day the incense was kindled upon it by a priest, by means of live coals brought from the altar of burnt offering in the outer court. And, thus ki...

The wicked man said a good many wrong things "in his heart." The tacit assumptions on which a life is based, though they may never come to consciousness, and still less to utterance , are the really important things. I daresay this "wicked man" with his lips was a good Jew, and said his prayers all properly, but in his heart he had two working beliefs. One is thus expressed, "As for all his enemies, he puffeth at them. He hath said in his heart, I shall not be moved." The other is put into words thus, "He hath said in his heart, God hath forgotten, He hideth His face, He will never see it." That is to say, the only explanation of a godless life, unless the man is an idiot, is that there lie beneath it, as formative principles and unspoken assumptions, guiding and shaping it, one or both of these two thoughts — either "There is no God," or "He does not care what I do, and I am safe to go on for evermore in the present fashion....

I.  THE VINE IN THE VITAL UNITY OF ALL ITS PARTS. We shall best understand this thought if we recur to some of those great vines in royal conservatories, where, for hundreds of yards, the pliant branches stretch along the espaliers, and yet one life pervades the whole, from the root, through the crooked stem, right away to the last leaf at the top of the furthest branch, and reddens and mellows every cluster. This great thought of the unity of life between Jesus Christ and all that believe upon Him is the familiar teaching of Scripture, and is set forth also by the metaphor of the body and its members. Personality remains, but across the awful gulf of the individual consciousness, which parts us from one another, Jesus Christ assumes the Divine prerogative of passing and joining Himself to each of us. A oneness of life, which is the sole cause of fruitfulness and growth, is taught us here. This is a oneness which results 1.  In a oneness of relation to God. In this rel...

Herein is My Father Glorified, that Ye Bear Much Fruit — John 15.8 How can we glorify God? Not by adding to His glory or bringing Him any new glory that He has not. But simply by allowing His glory to shine out through us, by yielding ourselves to Him, that His glory may manifest itself in us and through us to the world. In a vineyard or a vine bearing much fruit, the owner is glorified, as it tells of his skill and care. In the disciple who bears much fruit, the Father is glorified. Before men and angels, proof is given of the glory of God’s grace and power; God’s glory shines out through him. This is what Peter means when he writes: “He that ministers, let him minister as of the ability that God giveth, that God in all things may be glorified through Jesus Christ.” As a man works and serves in a power which comes from God alone, God gets all the glory. When we confess that the ability came from God alone, he that does the work, and they who see it, equally glorify God. It w...

‘In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and confidence shall be your strength.’— ISAIAH xxx. 15 . ISRAEL always felt the difficulty of sustaining itself on the height of dependence on the unseen, spiritual power of God, and was ever oscillating between alliances with the Northern and Southern powers, linking itself with Assyria against Egypt, or with Egypt against Assyria. The effect was that whichever was victorious it suffered; it was the battleground for both, it was the prize of each in turn. The prophet’s warnings were political wisdom as truly as religious. Here Judah is exhorted to forsake the entangling dependence on Egypt, and to trust wholly to God. They had gone away from Him in their fears. They must come back by their faith. To them the great lesson was trust in God. Through them to us the same lesson is read. The principle is far wider than this one case. It is the one rule of life for us all. The two clauses of the text convey substantially the ...

‘All those that put their trust in Thee . . .  them also that love Thy name . . .  the righteous.’— PSALM v. 11, 12 . I have ventured to isolate these three clauses from their context, because, if taken in their sequence, they are very significant of the true path by which men draw nigh to God and become righteous. They are all three designations of the same people, but regarded under different aspects and at different stages. There is a distinct order in them, and whether the Psalmist was fully conscious of it or not, he was anticipating and stating, with wonderful distinctness, the Christian sequence—faith, love, righteousness. These three are the three flights of stairs, as it were, which lead men up to God and to perfection, or if you like to take another metaphor, meaning the same thing, they are respectively the root, the stalk, and the fruit of religion. ‘They that put their trust in Thee . . .  them also that love Thy Name ....

  THE HARVEST OF A GODLESS LIFE ‘Because thou hast forgotten the God of thy salvation, and hast not been mindful of the Rock of thy strength, therefore shalt thou plant pleasant plants, and shalt set it with strange slips: In the day shalt thou make thy plant to grow, and in the morning shalt thou make thy seed to flourish: but the harvest shall be a heap in the day of grief and of desperate sorrow.’— ISAIAH xvii. 10, 11 . The original application of these words is to Judah’s alliance with Damascus, which Isaiah was dead against. He saw that it would only precipitate the Assyrian invasion, as in fact it did. Judah had forsaken God, and because they had done so, they had gone to seek for themselves delights—alliance with Damascus. The image of planting a garden of pleasures, and ‘vine slips of a stranger’ refers to sensuous idolatry as well as to the entangling alliance. Then follows a contemptuous description of the rapid growth of this alliance and of the care with wh...

The pillar of cloud and fire in the Exodus was one: there are to be as many pillars as there are ‘assemblies’ in the new era. Is it straining the language too much to find significance in that difference? Instead of the formal unity of the Old Covenant, there is a variety which yet is a more vital unity. Is there not a hint here of the same lesson that is taught by the change of the one golden lamp-stand into the seven, which are a better unity because Jesus Christ walks among them? The heart of this promise, thus cast into the form of ancient experiences, but with significant variations, is that of true communion with God. That communion makes those who have it glorious. That communion supplies unfailing guidance. A man in close fellowship with God will have wonderful flashes of sagacity, even about small practical matters. The gleam of the pillar will illumine conscience, and shine on many difficult, dark places. The ‘simplicity’ of a saintly soul will often see deeper i...

The Psalmist is like a man standing on the edge of some precipice, and peeping over the brink to the profound beneath, and feeling his head beginning to swim. He clutches at the strong, steady hand of his guide, knowing that, unless he is restrained, over he will go. "Keep Thou back Thy servant from presumptuous sins." So, then, the first lesson we have to take is, to cherish a lowly consciousness of our own tendency to light-headedness and giddiness. "Blessed is the man that feareth always." That fear has nothing cowardly about it. It will not abate in the least the buoyancy and bravery of our work. It will not tend to make us shirk duty because there is temptation in it, but it will make us go into all circumstances realizing that without that Divine help we cannot stand, and that with it we cannot fall. "Hold Thou me up, and I shall be safe." The same Peter that said, "Though all should forsake Thee, yet will not I," was wiser and braver w...

 The only cheerful Christianity is a Christianity that draws its gladness from deep personal experience of communion with Jesus Christ. There is no way of men being religious and happy except being profoundly religious, and living very near their Master, and always trying to cultivate that spirit of communion with Him which shall surround them with the sweetness and the power of His felt presence. We do not want Pharisaic fasting, but we do want that the reason for not fasting shall not be that Christians like eating better, but that their religion must be joyful because they have Christ with them, and therefore cannot choose but sing, as a lark cannot choose but carol. ‘Religion has no power over us, but as it is our happiness,’ and we shall never make it our happiness, and therefore never know its beneficent control, until we lift it clean out of the low region of outward forms and joyless service, into the blessed heights of communion with Jesus Christ, ‘Whom having not seen ...

Law has no tenderness, no pity, no feeling. Tables of stone and a pen of iron are its fitting vehicles. Flashing lightnings and rolling thunders symbolise the fierce light which it casts upon men’s duty and the terrors of its retribution. Inflexible, and with no compassion for human weakness, it tells us what we ought to be, but it does not help us to be it. It ‘binds heavy burdens, and grievous to be borne,’ upon men’s consciences, but puts not forth ‘the tip of a finger’ to enable men to bear them. And this is true about law in all forms, whether it be the Mosaic Law, or whether it be the law of our own country, or whether it be the laws written upon men’s consciences. These all partake of the one characteristic, that they help nothing to the fulfilment of their own behests, and that they are barbed with threatenings of retribution. Like some avenging goddess, law comes down amongst men, terrible in her purity, awful in her beauty, with a hard light in her clear grey eyes—in the ...

      "I will not leave you comfortless," or, as the Revised Version has it, "desolate-I come to you." Now, most of us know, I suppose, that the literal meaning of the word rendered "comfortless," or "desolate," is "orphans." But that is rather an unusual form in which to represent the relation between our Lord and His disciples. And so, possibly, our versions are accurate in giving the general idea of desolation rather than the specific idea conveyed directly by the word. But still it is to be remembered that this whole conversation begins with "Little children "; and there seems to be no strong reason for suppressing the literal meaning of the word, if only it be remembered that it is employed not so much to define Christ's relation to His brethren as to describe the comfortless and helpless condition of that little group when left by Him. They would be like fatherless and motherless children in a cold world. And wha...