Читать книгу The Potter and the Clay - Arthur F. Winnington Ingram - Страница 7

"O God, wonderful art Thou in Thy holy places: Thou wilt give strength and power unto Thy people. Blessed be God."—Ps. lxviii. 35.

At the great Convention of all the clergy of London in Advent, 1915, we saw reasons for thinking that what the world had been losing sight of was the majesty of God; the lowered sense of sin, the neglect of worship, the uppishness of man, the pessimism of the day, and the querulous impatience under discomfort, are all signs of the loss of the sense of the majesty of God.

But I want now to go farther than this; I want to prove that the only way to revive praise, hope, peace, sacrifice, and courage, is to revive a belief, not only in the majesty, but in the splendour of God. It was said not long ago that even good Christians believed all the Creed except the first clause of it.

But if we leave out the first clause, "I believe in God," see what happens.

1. Prayer becomes unreal. It is only a delight when it is felt to be communion with a very noble and splendid person.

"Lord, what a change within us one short hour

Spent in Thy presence can prevail to make!"[3]

is only true if that short and glorious hour is spent with an inspiring and glorious personality. When, like Moses, our faces should shine as we come down from the mount.

2. Praise becomes practically impossible. Sometimes we say, "We really must praise God more." But we cannot make ourselves praise, any more than we can move a boat by swinging up and down in it. We must pull against something to make it move. What we want is an adequate idea of the splendour of God. When we come in sight of Mont Blanc or Niagara, or when we hear of some gallant deed on the battlefield, we say "How splendid!" quite naturally. We shall praise quite naturally when we catch sight—if only for a moment—of the true character of God, or believe He has done something great.

3. Religion, which means something which binds us to God, becomes an uninspiring series of detailed scruples about ourselves. Self-examination is most necessary; but it was well said by an experienced guide of souls that, "for every time we look at ourselves, we ought to look nine times at God."

Do some of you feel as I speak that your religion does not help you; that, while you have not given up your prayers, or coming to church, it is rather a burden than a help, or at any rate not such a help as it might be? It is because you have lost sight of the splendour of God.

4. Or, again, are you suffering from depression? You hardly know why, but everything seems to go wrong; you seem oppressed with what old writers called "accidie." Your will has lost its spring; the note of your life has lost its hope and its joyousness. You drag through life rather than "rise up with wings like an eagle" or "run," or even "walk." This is all because you have lost faith or never had faith in the splendour of God.

5. Or, on the contrary, you are busy from morning till night, and you are too busy for prayer or church; you are immersed in a thousand schemes for making money for yourself or for your family or for the good of mankind. And yet, with all your business abilities, you don't inspire people; you are conscious of a want yourself, and other people are more conscious of it. It is simply that you are without the one thing which matters; you are the planet trying to shine without its sun; you are ignoring the splendour of God.

I. For consider how splendid God is! These writers of the psalms had many limitations. They had a very inadequate belief in the life after the grave; they knew nothing about the Incarnation; they had no Christmas Day, Easter Day, Ascension Day, or Whit Sunday, to inspire them. But they are bursting with glorious song, because of their sense of the splendour of God. "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made, Thou art God from everlasting, and world without end."

1. He is splendid, first, in His wonderful Power. I should not think of arguing with you as to the existence of God; although, to any thinking mind, the marvellous intricacy of the whole creation, from the largest sun to the smallest insect, demands a Thinking Mind; the thunder of the four hundred million consciences of mankind demands a Righteous Person. And a Creator who is at once wise and good is a God. No! it is not only His existence which should mean so much to us, but His astonishing power.

I remember when I was at Niagara being taken down to the great power-station, and through that power-station the power of Niagara Falls lighted, among other things, the whole of the great province of Ontario so that the solitary worker in some small town was working with the light from a great power-station which he had never seen, and in which he only, perhaps, partly believed.

But think of the Power-Station which works the whole universe; which gives the light to twenty million suns which have been counted and God knows how many which have never been seen, and yet which gives strength to the boy far from home as he leaps across the parapet into the battle. Well may another psalmist cry: "O God, wonderful art Thou in Thy holy places: Thou shalt give strength and power unto Thy people. Blessed be God."

And, surely, even if there were no other characteristic of the splendour of God, this ought to encourage us more than it does. To believe that in prayer you are in touch with unfathomable strength; that if you co-operate with God you have at your disposal His unrivalled and incomparable power—this ought to put heart into the most timid. We understand what Archbishop Trench meant when he said:

"We kneel how weak; we rise how full of power!"

2. But the power of God is really only the beginning of it. The next characteristic of the splendour of God is in His Generosity. "Thou openest Thine Hand, and fillest all things living with plenteousness," says the psalmist. You could scarcely get a more beautiful description of the open-handedness of God, and the ease with which God showers His gifts upon the world.

(a) When you come to think of it, there is no explanation of man's possession of life, except the open-handedness of God. He simply gave him life, and there is nothing more to be said about it. It is at present still a scientific truth that "Life only comes from life." Life has never been yet spontaneously generated. When men thought they had succeeded in creating life, it was discovered that some previous germ of life had been left in the hermetically sealed vessel. But even if, in the years to come, some sort of life was produced from apparently dead matter, would it really have any bearing on the age-long belief that this free, joyous life of man and animal has come from God? When you ask why He gave life, there is only one answer: That so many more living, sentient beings might sun themselves in the sunshine of His own happiness, He opened His Hand and life came out.

(b) But He was not content with giving life. He gave all the colour of life; He painted the most glorious world out of the riches of His marvellous imagination; every variety of flower; every plumage of bird; every species of tree—often brought to the best by the slow process of evolution. He gave it all; He flung it out in all the exuberance of delight in what was "very good." He gave colour to our own life. He gave us our warm friendships; our keen intellectual interest in problems; the love of mother, wife, husband, father, child. He flung it all out, like a joyous giver; "He filled all things living with plenteousness."

(c) But not content with this life, He had another ready when this was over. He knew the boys wanted life, and that this life would not be enough to satisfy them, especially if they died early; so He had another ready for them. And here, again, another psalmist dashes in with his word of praise: "He asked life of Thee, and Thou gavest him a long life, even for ever."

This is our glorious hope to-day. It is only when we have grasped the splendour of the generosity of God that we can really appraise the meanness of man.

Nearly all the ills of our life on earth—the poverty, the class hatred, the wars—come from an unfair grasping at an unfair share of the gifts of the generous God.

"They ask no thrones; they only ask to share

The common liberty of earth and air,"

some poet sang of the gipsies.

God gave plenty of land, and plenty of water, and plenty of air, and if the New Testament motto had been followed, "Having food and raiment, with these we shall have enough," the generosity of God would have been mirrored in the generosity of man.

3. But even this marvellous power and generosity would not excite the passionate love of mankind, but for His Humility. Power may only awe; the merely generous Lord or Lady Bountiful, kind as they often are, are sometimes felt to do it in a spirit of patronage and self-pleasing; they like to be thought bountiful and kind, and have their reward in the grateful looks and even obsequious demeanour of the recipients of their bounty. But it is Christmas which really stirs the blood. That this powerful, generous Being should manifest His power and shower down His gifts was wonderful; but that He should give Himself—this was sublime! This is what stirred heaven to its depths—"Glory to God in the highest!"

The crowning splendour of God was His Humility. He was great when He said, "Let there be light, and there was light." He was mighty when He opened His Hand and filled all things living with plenteousness. But He was greatest of all when He lay as a babe in the manger. Well may the adoring Christian look up at Christmas and salute this third revelation of the splendour of God:

"Thou didst leave Thy throne and Thy kingly crown

When Thou camest to earth for me. …

Oh, come to my heart, Lord Jesus:

There is room in my heart for Thee!"

II. What, then, ought this belief in the splendid power, generosity, and humility of God to produce in us?

1. It must produce Praise. It must make us say: "Praise God in His holiness; praise Him in the firmament of His power."

You have caught sight of Mont Blanc and you have seen Niagara, and you say quite naturally, "How splendid!"

2. It produces Hope. War, slaughter, misery, can't be the end, if such a God exists. It may be inevitable from man's lust, ambition, and greed; but it can't be the end—if God's people work with God: there must be a kingdom coming at last in which dwelleth, not ambition, tyranny, or cruelty, but "righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost."

3. It produces Peace. Once believe in the splendour of God, and you get "the peace of God, which passeth all understanding." "Thou wilt keep him," says the prophet, "in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee." The world is not out of God's Hand, as some people would persuade us, nor any individual in the world. "The very hairs of your head are all numbered," and "ye are of more value than many sparrows."

4. And it produces answering Sacrifice and Courage. What we want to-day is "the warrior's mind," which gives and does not heed the cost, which fights and does not heed the wounds; and we can only be nerved for this by the splendid self-sacrifice of God Himself.

If man is God's child, then it must be a case of "Like Father, like son," and the splendour of God must be answered by the nobility of man. To know such a God is to live, to serve such a God is to reign; with such a faith, death loses its sting, and the grave its terrors. For to die is to pass into the presence of One who has shown Himself powerful and generous and humble. And the response of the grateful soul, with ten times the conviction of the psalmist, when he thinks of what happened on Christmas Day, will be the same words uttered so many thousand years ago:

"O God, wonderful art Thou in Thy holy places. … He will give strength and power unto His people. Blessed be God."