New Park Street Pulpit · Sermon No. 146
Delivered on Sabbath Morning, August 16, 1857.
“For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”—Philippians 1:21.
HOW OMINOUSLY these words follow each other in the text—“live,” “die.” There is but a comma between them, and surely as it is in the words so is it in reality. How brief the distance between life and death! In fact there is none. Life is but death’s vestibule, and our pilgrimage on earth is but a journey to the grave. The pulse that preserves our being beats our death march, and the blood which circulates our life is floating it onward to the deeps of death. To-day we see our friends in health, to-morrow we hear of their decease. We clasped the hand of the strong man but yesterday, and to-day we close his eyes. We rode in the chariot of comfort but an hour ago, and in a few more hours the last black chariot must convey us to the home of all living. Oh, how closely allied is death to life! The lamb teat sporteth in the field must soon feel the knife. The ox that loweth in the pasture is fattening for the slaughter. Trees do but grow that they may be felled. Yea, and greater things than these feel death. Empires rise and flourish, they flourish but to decay, they rise to fall. How often do we take up the volume of history, and read of the rise and fall of empires. We hear of the coronation and the death of kings. Death is the black servant who rides behind the chariot of life. See life! and death is close behind it. Death reacheth far throughout this world, and hath stamped all terrestrial things with the broad arrow of the grave. Stars die mayhap; it is said that conflagrations have been seen far off in the distant ether, and astronomers have marked the funerals of worlds, the decay of those mighty orbs that we had imagined set for ever in sockets of silver to glisten as the lamps of eternity. But blessed be God, there is one place where death is not life’s brother, where life reigns alone; “to live,” is not the first syllable which is to be followed by the next, “to die.” There is a land where deathknells are never tolled, where winding-sheets are never woven, where graves are never digged. Blest land beyond the skies! To reach it we must die. But if after death we obtain a glorious immortality, our text is indeed true: “To die is gain.”
If you would get a fair estimate of the happiness of any man you must judge him in these two closely connected things, his life and his death. The heathen Solon said, “Call no man happy until he is dead; for you know not what changes may pass upon him in life.” We add to that—Call no man happy until he is dead; because the life that is to come, if that be miserable, shall far outweigh the highest life of happiness that hath been enjoyed on earth. To estimate a man’s condition we must take it in all its length. We must not measure that one thread which reacheth from the cradle to the coffin. We must go further; we must go from the coffin to the resurrection, and from the resurrection on throughout eternity. To know whether acts are profitable, I must not estimate their effects on me for the hour in which I live, but for the eternity in which I am to exist. I must not weigh matters in the scales of time; I must not calculate by the hours, minutes and seconds of the clock, but I must count and value things by the ages of eternity.
Come, then, beloved; we have before us the picture of a man, the two sides of whose existence will both of them bear inspection; we have hi life, we have his death: we have it said of his life, “to live is Christ,” of his death, “to die is gain;” and if the same shall be said of any of you, oh! ye may rejoice! Ye are amongst that thrice happy number whom the Lord hath loved, and whom he delighteth to honor.
We shall now divide our text very simply into these two points, the good man’s life, and the good man’s death.
I. As to HIS LIFE, we have that briefly described thus: “For me to live is Christ.” The believer did not always live to Christ. When he was first born into this world he was a slave of sin, and an heir of wrath, even as others. Though he may have afterwards become the greatest of saints, yet until divine grace hath entered his heart, he is “in the gall of bitterness and in the bonds of iniquity.” He only begins to live to Christ when God the Holy Spirit convinceth him of his sin, and of his desperate evil nature, and when by grace he is brought to see the dying Saviour making a propitiation for his guilt. From that moment when by faith he sees the slaughtered victim of Calvary, and casts his whole life on him, to be saved, to be redeemed, to be preserved, and to be blest by the virtue of his atonement and the greatness of his grace, from that moment the man begins to live to Christ.
And now shall we tell you as briefly as we can what living to Christ means.
It means, first, that the life of a Christian derives its parentage from Christ. “For me to live is Christ.” The righteous man has two lives. He has one which he inherited from his parents; he looks back to an ancestral race of which he is the branch, and he traces his life to the parent stock; but he has a second life, a life spiritual, a life which is as much above mere mental life, as mental life is above the life of the animal or the plant; and for the source of this spiritual life he looks not to father or mother, nor to priest nor man, nor to himself, but he looks to Christ. He says, “O Lord Jesus, the everlasting Father, the Prince of peace, thou art my spiritual parent; unless thy Spirit had breathed into my nostrils the breath of a new, holy and spiritual life, I had been to this day “dead in trespasses and sins.” I owe my third principle, my spirit, to the implantation of thy grace. I had a body and a soul by my parents, I have received the third principle, the spirit from thee, and in thee I live, and move, and have my being. My new, my best, my highest my most heavenly life, is wholly derived from thee. To thee I ascribe it. My life is hid with Christ in God. It is no longer I that live, but Christ that liveth in me.” And so the Christian says, “For me to live is Christ,” because for me to live is to live a life whose parentage is not of human origin, but of divine, even of Christ himself. Again he intended to say, that Christ was the sustenance of his life, the food his newborn spirit fed upon. The believer hath three parts to be sustained. The body, which must have its proper nutriment; the soul, which must have knowledge and thought to supply it; and the spirit which must feed on Christ. Without bread I become attenuated to a skeleton, and at last I die; without thought my mind becomes dwarfed, and, and dwindles itself until I become the idiot, with a soul that hath just life, but little more. And without Christ my newborn spirit must become a vague shadowy emptiness. It cannot live unless it feeds on that heavenly manna which came down from heaven. Now the Christian can say, “The life that I live is Christ,” because Christ is the food on which he feeds and the sustenance of his new-born Spirit.