“Some Missing Notes in Contemporary Christianity” is an address delivered by Dr. Leonard Greenway at a Reformation Day rally held at the Dimnent Memorial Chapel of Hope College in Holland, Michigan on October 31, 1972. This meeting was attended by the delegates to the CRC-RCA Conference held October 31–November 2. Dr. Greenway is pastor of the Riverside Christian Reformed Church of Grand Rapids, Michigan.
It happened some years ago in Grand Rapids, when Karl Wecker was the conductor of the Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra. Old-timers in Western Michigan music circles remember Karl Wecker as a music craftsman of the 6rst rank, ‘a competent director and performer. It was the night before a concert and they were having their final rehearsal. Karl Wecker suddenly interrupted the full orchestral score. “I missed a few notes,” he said, as he looked in the direction of the flute section. Sure enough, one of the flutists momentarily had lost his place and had skipped a few notes. The sensitive ears of the conductor had noticed it. Amazing keeness in hearing! Something to be envied by all musicians.
I should like to have that serve as an illustration of something we need in religion, in the spiritual life, in the church, a sensitivity to God’s truth; and, correspondingly, to every defection from the truth. Many of us had forefathers in the faith who, though they had not gone far in academic education—some of them not beyond the eighth grade—nevertheless knew the Bible and knew the standards of the church. It did not take them long to detect a departure from the historic faith or a significant shift in doctrinal emphasis. And some of them could be very forthright in pointing out the error or the change in doctrinal emphasis.
In many areas of the church today we have lost that sensitiveness to the truth and to the presence of enemies of the truth. I fear that in our Reformed Church—and I am using “Reformed” in the broader sense encompassing all Calvinistic bodies and fellowships—we have allowed our Reformed ears to become dull in hearing, our Reformed eyes blurred in seeing, and our Reformed mouths inarticulate, if not indeed, actually silent.
It is a subtle thing, this developing apathy. We don’t become doctrinally torpid overnight. The stages through which a congregation or denomination moves into this deplorable dullness and sluggishness are joined by many sequences that develop almost imperceptibly. Dr. James Dobson, in his book, Dare to Discipline, describes an experiment done on a sleepy frog that had been placed in a pan of slightly warm water under which the heat was increased very gradually. Since the frog is a cold-blooded creature, his body temperature remains approximately the same as the water around him and he does not notice the slow change taking place. Well, as the temperature slowly intensified on this frog, he remained oblivious to his danger. He could easily have hopped his way to safety, but apparently was thinking about something else. He just sat there, contentedly peering over the edge of the pan while the steam curled ominously around his nostrils. Eventually the frog was boiled to death! Boiled to death without knowing it!
We human beings have some of these same perceptual inadequacies. We can quickly react against sudden dangers that confront us and with almost instant mobilization enlist our full strength. But a threatening problem that has arisen very slowly over a decade or two, or longer, can “boil” us in complacent ignorance. Blindness to gradual deterioration, how that characterizes many a church! Insensitive to missing notes! If the Protestant Reformers could come back to us today to assess our present church situation, would they miss something? ] am sure there would be many things that would fascinate them, impress them, even excite them. Our organization and efficiency, our buildings and educational centers, would certainly amaze them. But would there be missing notes? I think so. I should like to discuss briefly three missing notes in contemporary Christianity.
THE NOTE OF THEOLOGICAL CERTAINTY
First, the missing note of Theological Certainty. Do you realize that in the past half century we have witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of theologies and philosophies that have left people today, and particularly young people, confused, apathetic, and even despairing? I fear that it is more than a mere coincidence that the rapidly-increasing usage of illusion-creating drugs -so common today—comes at a time when a succession of theologians and philosophers divide their time between setting up their new systems and discounting all previous systems. Indeed, we modern sophisticates have almost reached the point where we wait to see what the style of this year’s thinking is going to be, much as we wait to see the new styling of this year’s automobiles. In both instances we may experience a sense of letdown if, after all, no radical change of style is forthcoming. As rapidly as we adopt today’s new teaching and approaches we cast off yesterday’s dogmas, and with them the heavy volumes that only yesterday were best sellers.
There was the Liberalism of the 1920’s that basked in the afterglow of the War which was supposed to make the world safe for democracy. Then came the Neo Orthodoxy of Barth, Brunner and Reinhold Niebuhr who could not share the Older Liberalism’s confidence in the moral progress of man. Men like Schubert Ogden and Henry Nelson Wieman thought they had something better in their Neo Naturalism. Paul Tillich, however, felt that his “Ecstatic Naturalism” with God as the “Ground of Being” was more credible.
So the succession continued. The Death-of-God-Theology with its blasphemous subtitle, Christian Atheism, produced a flurry of excitement. With God no longer necessary, marked optimism respecting the capabilities of man made its appearance. This fitted in beautifully with the subsequent Ecumenical Theology which sought, and continues to seek, a religious unity based upon a humanitarian common denominator with Jesus Christ as the paragon of sacrificial love. Out of this ecumenical movement has come another movement which goes by the name of Evangelical Catholicism. Here the effort is being made to effect a reunion of Protestantism with the Church of Rome under the papacy, to be sure, but with liturgical diversity and with considerable freedom regarding doctrinal differences. Evangelical Catholicism, mark you, seeks for unity before there is doctrinal consensus, which, of course, is a serious error.
So it goes on and on. One candle after another is lit and rapidly burns down, but there appears to be no dearth of new candles. Meanwhile, the books that plummeted these thinkers and their schools of thought into prominence surprisingly soon are found on dis· count tables. Barth’s monumental set of Church Dogmatics, according to a recent announcement, will not be republished!
New Theology! New Morality! New Christianity! Even to question the credentials of the New is to expose oneself to the charge of being a prisoner of the past. A prisoner of the past! Say, maybe we have a clue there to the direction we must take. Certainly to be a Christian means to be bound to some important things in the past. Some very important things, I should say! There are some precious past tenses in the Christian Faith. There arc some ancient historic moorings from which Christianity cannot be set loose and still remain Christianity. Here is one of them: “God having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by divers portions and in divers manners, hath at the end of these days spoken unto us in his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the world; who being the effulgence of his glory, and the very image of his substance, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had made puri6cation of sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high” (Heb. 1:1–3).
There you have it! God has spoken! And we have His self-revelation. It is the Holy Bible, forever settled in heaven and the only Word that will settle things on earth. Here is the end to our theological confusion. Here is the way out of the labyrinth man has contrived in his wisdom. God has spoken! Here is theological certainty. This is the Word that brings the Body of Christ into manifestation in a given congregation. This is the Word which alone provides the basis for church unity and church union. Bringing churches together in any other arrangement than that which is based squarely and unequivocally upon the total Biblical witness is to build a house on quicksand and to add another debit to an already bankrupt record of ill-conceived human ventures.
The Protestant Reformation has often been characterized as a Back to the Bible Movement. It was that emphatically! And that is what we need today. Get back to God’s infallible Word, the Bible, and restore the missing note of theological certainty.
THE NOTE OF PASSIONATE FORTHRIGHTNESS
The second missing note in contemporary Christianity is that of Passionate Forthrightness. A candidate for public office on one occasion was addressing the citizens of a New England town, and he was doing his best to dodge every divisive issue. In the midst of his oratory a listener shouted, “What about the new schoolhouse?” The new schoolhouse was one of the burning issues of the campaign. The speaker hesitated a moment, then said: “My fellow citizens, l am happy to have an opportunity to give my views on that important subject. It is a plain question and it shall have a plain answer. My friends, if the proposed school building is a good thing, I am for it. If it is a bad thing, I am against it.”
Such evasiveness often is characteristic of the way we deal with issues in the church. We can be so shifty, so hesitant, so invertebrate. There are a lot of pussyfooters and sidesteppers in religion. We have lost the temper of our Damascus blade. One of Bernard Shaw’s literary friends once said to him, “Shaw, if you keep on writing the way you arc doing, you won’t have a friend left.” To which Shaw retorted, “If you keep on writing the way you are doing, you won’t have an enemy, and that’s a lot worse.” And we get the paint of that, don’t we? Jesus said, “Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you” (Luke 6:26).
Christ did not found a discussion club for the eventual discovery of truth. He founded a teaching, missionary church for the proclamation of truth. For empirical science truth is the terminus ad quem, the point of arrival. For theology it is the terminus a quo, the starting point. And the proclamation of this truth must be passionately forth right. The truth deserves it! The God of truth deserves it! Listen to these words of Martin Luther: “It does not befit a Christian heart not to take pleasure in firm assertions. Yes, it must take pleasure in firm assertions, or else it cannot be Christian. By firm assertion I mean (lest we play with words) stedfastly adhering, affirming, confessing defending, and invincibly maintaining. Let the skeptics and academics be far from us Christians, but let there be in our midst firm assertors, men twice as inflexible as the very Stoics. Take away firm assertions and you have taken away Christianity. The Holy Spirit is no skeptic, and has written into our hearts not doubts or mere opinions, but firm assertions, firmer and more certain than life and sense itself.”
Worldly-minded people, including church members, who throng the way that leads to destruction, need to be told in plain language “Except ye repent, ye shall perish.” Of course they don’t like to hear that. There are people in the church who think it is more in accord with the canons of good taste to ask in soft conversational tones, “Might it not be well, all things considered, to envision a change in your general orientation?” That’s the way many of us, I fear, would prefer to have it said. But Jesus says it the other way, “Repent or perish.” The missing note of passionate forthrightness! Alas, how true! In our Reformed theology we say that the Sovereignty of God is the great, formative, regnant principle, and then we proceed to mollycoddle when we apply this principle to Divine grace. We say it is God’s grace, but we center the message on man. We say it is God’s saving grace, and then we tell the sinner he is capable himself of at least partially retrieving his loss by acting thus and so, and the Sovereign God is represented as waiting upon the will of the sinner. We say to rebels whose citizenship obviously appears to be in the kingdom of darkness, “God love . . . you and has a wonderful plan for your life,” and we say it without qualification, and in such a way as to give the unmistakable impression that Cod would not think of being angry with an evildoer. We are averse to talking about God’s sword of wrath. We hesitate to tell sinners that what God’s love provided at Calvary was what God’s holiness demanded, so that both holiness and love are together at Calvary. Not just love, but holiness, tool We shy away from telling sinners that God’s grace is love that flows down. It is God’s love stooping. It is always the love of the higher for the lower. Never can we be gracious to Him. It is His good pleasure to be gracious to us!
In a day when worshippers of man’s science would conduct God to the frontier and bow him out with thanks for His provisional services we need to reinstitute the forthright preaching and teaching of our Reformed fathers who said unashamedly, God is God! “Calvinism” says Warfield, “is the product of an overwhelming vision of God, born from the reflection in the heart of man of the majesty of a God who will not give His glory to another.” The Reformers saw all of life and thought under the central light of the glory of the Sovereign God. They threaded their confessional statements on this strong, unbreakable strand. Surely, this faith deserves nothing less than passionate forthrightness in its proclamation and transmission.
THE NOTE OF PERSONAL EXPECTANCY
The third missing note in contemporary Christianity is the note of Personal Expectancy. Expectancy of what? The Lord’s return! Jesus is coming again! The history of the church on earth is to terminate in a glorious consummation. “The Lord shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God.” The King is coming, not to become a King but as one who already reigns as King.
This expectancy, this blessed hope, stands in sharp contrast to the modernistic millenarianism that envisions a kingdom man proposes to build, a kingdom on horizontal lines, a paradise of man’s planting. No, the real Kingdom is God’s building, God’s work, God’s glory. Never do we pray, “Our kingdom come.” We pray “Thy kingdom come.” The Kingdom that is above makes possible the Kingdom that is within. Only the Kingdom that descends to meet us can make us arise. This is the Divine Dominion that shall fill the earth with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
So many people in the church appear to lack this expectancy. This earth, even with its sin and its curse, looks so good to them. Here they have driven deep the stakes of their earthly dwelling. Here they have laid up their treasures. Here they live as if in an abiding city. What harmful effects this has on our young people as they see us so fascinated with this present world. What misdirection we give them when we fondle the toys of our affluency!
God help us to keep only a light touch upon the things of this perishing world, and to teach our young people to do likewise. One of the greatest services we can render our covenant children is to let them feel the force, the influence, and the blessedness of a life that is turned towards the coming Christ, to let them see the light in our eyes as we, like Abraham, look for the city which hath the foundations, whose builder and maker is God. The good news of the Gospel is the news of that salvation which comes from God, not from man, and which brings us at last to the New Jerusalem where the tabernacle of God is with men and where sorrow and weeping shall be no more. To be a preacher of that Gospel is a priceless privilege.
Bishop George Meade of the Methodist Church tells a story about his little son who, while sitting in church on Sunday, had the habit of reviewing the books of the Bible by associating each book with one of the lighted bulbs in the illuminated arch over the pulpit. One Sunday morning during the service the child appeared to be excited about something. He could hardly wait to reach the door where his father was shaking hands with the departing worshippers. You know what, Dad, you know what!?”, he exclaimed, “While you were preaching Lamentations went out!” Drawing the lad aside, Bishop Meade said to his son, “Always remember, son, that when the true Gospel is preached and hearts believe, lamentations goes out.” The child never forgot that object lesson. And we can profit from it too. To believe the true Gospel is to experience the comfort of the Blessed Hope.
Let the note of its expectancy be heard in our pulpits with clearer accent so that God’s footsore pilgrims may the more confidently and joyfully complete their journey, knowing “the best is yet to be, the last of life for which the first was made.”
It happened some years ago in Grand Rapids, when Karl Wecker was the conductor of the Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra. Old-timers in Western Michigan music circles remember Karl Wecker as a music craftsman of the 6rst rank, ‘a competent director and performer. It was the night before a concert and they were having their final rehearsal. Karl Wecker suddenly interrupted the full orchestral score. “I missed a few notes,” he said, as he looked in the direction of the flute section. Sure enough, one of the flutists momentarily had lost his place and had skipped a few notes. The sensitive ears of the conductor had noticed it. Amazing keeness in hearing! Something to be envied by all musicians.
I should like to have that serve as an illustration of something we need in religion, in the spiritual life, in the church, a sensitivity to God’s truth; and, correspondingly, to every defection from the truth. Many of us had forefathers in the faith who, though they had not gone far in academic education—some of them not beyond the eighth grade—nevertheless knew the Bible and knew the standards of the church. It did not take them long to detect a departure from the historic faith or a significant shift in doctrinal emphasis. And some of them could be very forthright in pointing out the error or the change in doctrinal emphasis.
In many areas of the church today we have lost that sensitiveness to the truth and to the presence of enemies of the truth. I fear that in our Reformed Church—and I am using “Reformed” in the broader sense encompassing all Calvinistic bodies and fellowships—we have allowed our Reformed ears to become dull in hearing, our Reformed eyes blurred in seeing, and our Reformed mouths inarticulate, if not indeed, actually silent.
It is a subtle thing, this developing apathy. We don’t become doctrinally torpid overnight. The stages through which a congregation or denomination moves into this deplorable dullness and sluggishness are joined by many sequences that develop almost imperceptibly. Dr. James Dobson, in his book, Dare to Discipline, describes an experiment done on a sleepy frog that had been placed in a pan of slightly warm water under which the heat was increased very gradually. Since the frog is a cold-blooded creature, his body temperature remains approximately the same as the water around him and he does not notice the slow change taking place. Well, as the temperature slowly intensified on this frog, he remained oblivious to his danger. He could easily have hopped his way to safety, but apparently was thinking about something else. He just sat there, contentedly peering over the edge of the pan while the steam curled ominously around his nostrils. Eventually the frog was boiled to death! Boiled to death without knowing it!
We human beings have some of these same perceptual inadequacies. We can quickly react against sudden dangers that confront us and with almost instant mobilization enlist our full strength. But a threatening problem that has arisen very slowly over a decade or two, or longer, can “boil” us in complacent ignorance. Blindness to gradual deterioration, how that characterizes many a church! Insensitive to missing notes! If the Protestant Reformers could come back to us today to assess our present church situation, would they miss something? ] am sure there would be many things that would fascinate them, impress them, even excite them. Our organization and efficiency, our buildings and educational centers, would certainly amaze them. But would there be missing notes? I think so. I should like to discuss briefly three missing notes in contemporary Christianity.
THE NOTE OF THEOLOGICAL CERTAINTY
First, the missing note of Theological Certainty. Do you realize that in the past half century we have witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of theologies and philosophies that have left people today, and particularly young people, confused, apathetic, and even despairing? I fear that it is more than a mere coincidence that the rapidly-increasing usage of illusion-creating drugs -so common today—comes at a time when a succession of theologians and philosophers divide their time between setting up their new systems and discounting all previous systems. Indeed, we modern sophisticates have almost reached the point where we wait to see what the style of this year’s thinking is going to be, much as we wait to see the new styling of this year’s automobiles. In both instances we may experience a sense of letdown if, after all, no radical change of style is forthcoming. As rapidly as we adopt today’s new teaching and approaches we cast off yesterday’s dogmas, and with them the heavy volumes that only yesterday were best sellers.
There was the Liberalism of the 1920’s that basked in the afterglow of the War which was supposed to make the world safe for democracy. Then came the Neo Orthodoxy of Barth, Brunner and Reinhold Niebuhr who could not share the Older Liberalism’s confidence in the moral progress of man. Men like Schubert Ogden and Henry Nelson Wieman thought they had something better in their Neo Naturalism. Paul Tillich, however, felt that his “Ecstatic Naturalism” with God as the “Ground of Being” was more credible.
So the succession continued. The Death-of-God-Theology with its blasphemous subtitle, Christian Atheism, produced a flurry of excitement. With God no longer necessary, marked optimism respecting the capabilities of man made its appearance. This fitted in beautifully with the subsequent Ecumenical Theology which sought, and continues to seek, a religious unity based upon a humanitarian common denominator with Jesus Christ as the paragon of sacrificial love. Out of this ecumenical movement has come another movement which goes by the name of Evangelical Catholicism. Here the effort is being made to effect a reunion of Protestantism with the Church of Rome under the papacy, to be sure, but with liturgical diversity and with considerable freedom regarding doctrinal differences. Evangelical Catholicism, mark you, seeks for unity before there is doctrinal consensus, which, of course, is a serious error.
So it goes on and on. One candle after another is lit and rapidly burns down, but there appears to be no dearth of new candles. Meanwhile, the books that plummeted these thinkers and their schools of thought into prominence surprisingly soon are found on dis· count tables. Barth’s monumental set of Church Dogmatics, according to a recent announcement, will not be republished!
New Theology! New Morality! New Christianity! Even to question the credentials of the New is to expose oneself to the charge of being a prisoner of the past. A prisoner of the past! Say, maybe we have a clue there to the direction we must take. Certainly to be a Christian means to be bound to some important things in the past. Some very important things, I should say! There are some precious past tenses in the Christian Faith. There arc some ancient historic moorings from which Christianity cannot be set loose and still remain Christianity. Here is one of them: “God having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by divers portions and in divers manners, hath at the end of these days spoken unto us in his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the world; who being the effulgence of his glory, and the very image of his substance, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had made puri6cation of sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high” (Heb. 1:1–3).
There you have it! God has spoken! And we have His self-revelation. It is the Holy Bible, forever settled in heaven and the only Word that will settle things on earth. Here is the end to our theological confusion. Here is the way out of the labyrinth man has contrived in his wisdom. God has spoken! Here is theological certainty. This is the Word that brings the Body of Christ into manifestation in a given congregation. This is the Word which alone provides the basis for church unity and church union. Bringing churches together in any other arrangement than that which is based squarely and unequivocally upon the total Biblical witness is to build a house on quicksand and to add another debit to an already bankrupt record of ill-conceived human ventures.
The Protestant Reformation has often been characterized as a Back to the Bible Movement. It was that emphatically! And that is what we need today. Get back to God’s infallible Word, the Bible, and restore the missing note of theological certainty.
THE NOTE OF PASSIONATE FORTHRIGHTNESS
The second missing note in contemporary Christianity is that of Passionate Forthrightness. A candidate for public office on one occasion was addressing the citizens of a New England town, and he was doing his best to dodge every divisive issue. In the midst of his oratory a listener shouted, “What about the new schoolhouse?” The new schoolhouse was one of the burning issues of the campaign. The speaker hesitated a moment, then said: “My fellow citizens, l am happy to have an opportunity to give my views on that important subject. It is a plain question and it shall have a plain answer. My friends, if the proposed school building is a good thing, I am for it. If it is a bad thing, I am against it.”
Such evasiveness often is characteristic of the way we deal with issues in the church. We can be so shifty, so hesitant, so invertebrate. There are a lot of pussyfooters and sidesteppers in religion. We have lost the temper of our Damascus blade. One of Bernard Shaw’s literary friends once said to him, “Shaw, if you keep on writing the way you arc doing, you won’t have a friend left.” To which Shaw retorted, “If you keep on writing the way you are doing, you won’t have an enemy, and that’s a lot worse.” And we get the paint of that, don’t we? Jesus said, “Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you” (Luke 6:26).
Christ did not found a discussion club for the eventual discovery of truth. He founded a teaching, missionary church for the proclamation of truth. For empirical science truth is the terminus ad quem, the point of arrival. For theology it is the terminus a quo, the starting point. And the proclamation of this truth must be passionately forth right. The truth deserves it! The God of truth deserves it! Listen to these words of Martin Luther: “It does not befit a Christian heart not to take pleasure in firm assertions. Yes, it must take pleasure in firm assertions, or else it cannot be Christian. By firm assertion I mean (lest we play with words) stedfastly adhering, affirming, confessing defending, and invincibly maintaining. Let the skeptics and academics be far from us Christians, but let there be in our midst firm assertors, men twice as inflexible as the very Stoics. Take away firm assertions and you have taken away Christianity. The Holy Spirit is no skeptic, and has written into our hearts not doubts or mere opinions, but firm assertions, firmer and more certain than life and sense itself.”
Worldly-minded people, including church members, who throng the way that leads to destruction, need to be told in plain language “Except ye repent, ye shall perish.” Of course they don’t like to hear that. There are people in the church who think it is more in accord with the canons of good taste to ask in soft conversational tones, “Might it not be well, all things considered, to envision a change in your general orientation?” That’s the way many of us, I fear, would prefer to have it said. But Jesus says it the other way, “Repent or perish.” The missing note of passionate forthrightness! Alas, how true! In our Reformed theology we say that the Sovereignty of God is the great, formative, regnant principle, and then we proceed to mollycoddle when we apply this principle to Divine grace. We say it is God’s grace, but we center the message on man. We say it is God’s saving grace, and then we tell the sinner he is capable himself of at least partially retrieving his loss by acting thus and so, and the Sovereign God is represented as waiting upon the will of the sinner. We say to rebels whose citizenship obviously appears to be in the kingdom of darkness, “God love . . . you and has a wonderful plan for your life,” and we say it without qualification, and in such a way as to give the unmistakable impression that Cod would not think of being angry with an evildoer. We are averse to talking about God’s sword of wrath. We hesitate to tell sinners that what God’s love provided at Calvary was what God’s holiness demanded, so that both holiness and love are together at Calvary. Not just love, but holiness, tool We shy away from telling sinners that God’s grace is love that flows down. It is God’s love stooping. It is always the love of the higher for the lower. Never can we be gracious to Him. It is His good pleasure to be gracious to us!
In a day when worshippers of man’s science would conduct God to the frontier and bow him out with thanks for His provisional services we need to reinstitute the forthright preaching and teaching of our Reformed fathers who said unashamedly, God is God! “Calvinism” says Warfield, “is the product of an overwhelming vision of God, born from the reflection in the heart of man of the majesty of a God who will not give His glory to another.” The Reformers saw all of life and thought under the central light of the glory of the Sovereign God. They threaded their confessional statements on this strong, unbreakable strand. Surely, this faith deserves nothing less than passionate forthrightness in its proclamation and transmission.
THE NOTE OF PERSONAL EXPECTANCY
The third missing note in contemporary Christianity is the note of Personal Expectancy. Expectancy of what? The Lord’s return! Jesus is coming again! The history of the church on earth is to terminate in a glorious consummation. “The Lord shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God.” The King is coming, not to become a King but as one who already reigns as King.
This expectancy, this blessed hope, stands in sharp contrast to the modernistic millenarianism that envisions a kingdom man proposes to build, a kingdom on horizontal lines, a paradise of man’s planting. No, the real Kingdom is God’s building, God’s work, God’s glory. Never do we pray, “Our kingdom come.” We pray “Thy kingdom come.” The Kingdom that is above makes possible the Kingdom that is within. Only the Kingdom that descends to meet us can make us arise. This is the Divine Dominion that shall fill the earth with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
So many people in the church appear to lack this expectancy. This earth, even with its sin and its curse, looks so good to them. Here they have driven deep the stakes of their earthly dwelling. Here they have laid up their treasures. Here they live as if in an abiding city. What harmful effects this has on our young people as they see us so fascinated with this present world. What misdirection we give them when we fondle the toys of our affluency!
God help us to keep only a light touch upon the things of this perishing world, and to teach our young people to do likewise. One of the greatest services we can render our covenant children is to let them feel the force, the influence, and the blessedness of a life that is turned towards the coming Christ, to let them see the light in our eyes as we, like Abraham, look for the city which hath the foundations, whose builder and maker is God. The good news of the Gospel is the news of that salvation which comes from God, not from man, and which brings us at last to the New Jerusalem where the tabernacle of God is with men and where sorrow and weeping shall be no more. To be a preacher of that Gospel is a priceless privilege.
Bishop George Meade of the Methodist Church tells a story about his little son who, while sitting in church on Sunday, had the habit of reviewing the books of the Bible by associating each book with one of the lighted bulbs in the illuminated arch over the pulpit. One Sunday morning during the service the child appeared to be excited about something. He could hardly wait to reach the door where his father was shaking hands with the departing worshippers. You know what, Dad, you know what!?”, he exclaimed, “While you were preaching Lamentations went out!” Drawing the lad aside, Bishop Meade said to his son, “Always remember, son, that when the true Gospel is preached and hearts believe, lamentations goes out.” The child never forgot that object lesson. And we can profit from it too. To believe the true Gospel is to experience the comfort of the Blessed Hope.
Let the note of its expectancy be heard in our pulpits with clearer accent so that God’s footsore pilgrims may the more confidently and joyfully complete their journey, knowing “the best is yet to be, the last of life for which the first was made.”