New Park Street Pulpit · Sermon No. 196
Delivered on Sabbath Morning, May 30, 1858.
“Beloved, now are we the sons of God.”—1 John 3:2.
I SHALL not pretend to preach from the whole of my text this morning, short though it be. The word “now” is to me the most prominent word in the text, and I shall make it so this morning. “Beloved, now are we the sons of God.”
It is astonishing how distance blunts the keen edge of anything that is disagreeable. War is at all times a most fearful scourge. The thought of slain bodies and of murdered men must always harrow up the soul; but because we hear of these things in the distance, there are few Englishmen who can truly enter into their horrors. If we should hear the booming of cannon on the deep which girdles this island; if we should see at our doors the marks of carnage and bloodshed; then should we more thoroughly appreciate what war means. But distance takes away the horror, and we therefore speak of war with too much levity, and even read of it with an interest not sufficiently linked with pain. As it is with war, so it is with death. Death is a frightful thing; he who is the bravest must still fear before it, for at best it is a solemn thing to die. Man, therefore, adopts the expedient of putting off all thoughts of death: it may be very near to him, but he conceives it to be at a distance, and then the same effect is produced as when war is at a distance; its horror is forgotten, and we speak of it with less solemnity. So likewise with true religion; men are constrained to believe that there is truth in religion. Though there are some fool-hardy enough to deny it, the most of us in this enlightened land are obliged to acknowledge that there is a power in Godliness. What, then, does the worldling do? He practices the same expedient. He puts religion far away; he knows that its disagreeableness will be diminished by his believing it to be distant. Hence there has sprung up in the minds of the unregenerate world a notion that religion is a thing to be accomplished just at the close of life, and the usual prayer of an ungodly man, when in the slightest degree pricked in his conscience, is, “Oh, that I may be saved at last!” He does not feel anxious to be saved now; religion is a thing for which he has no appetite, and therefore believing it essential to insure his eternal welfare, he adopts the alternative of saying, “I hope to have it at last.”
The religion, then, of the present, is not the worldling’s religion. He tolerates that which speaks of eternity; that which deals with dying beds; that which leads him to look back with a specious repentance upon a life spent in sin, but not that which will enable him to look forward to a life spent in holiness. Very differently, however, do we act with affairs of the present life, for things that are sweet to us, become the more sweet by their nearness. Was there ever a child who longed for his father’s house who did not feel that the holidays grew more sweet in his estimation the shorter the time was that he had to tarry?
What man is there who having once set his heart on riches, did not find his delight in the thought of being rich increase with the nearness of his approach to the desired object? And are we not all of us accustomed, when we think a good thing is at a distance, to try if we can shorten the time between us and it. We try anything and everything to push on the lagging hours; we chide them, wish that Time had double wings, that he might swiftly fly and bring the expected season. When the Christian talks of heaven, you will always hear him try to shorten the distance between himself and the happy land; he says,—
“A few more rolling suns at most
Will land me on fair Canaan’s coast.”
There may be many years between him and paradise, but still he is prone to say,
“The way may be rough, but it cannot be long.”
Thus do we all delight to shorten the distance between us and the things for which we hope. Now let us just apply this rule to religion. They who love religion love a present thing. The Christian who really seeks salvation, will never be happy unless he can say, “Now am I a child of God.” Because the worldling dislikes it, he puts it from him, because the Christian loves it, therefore its very fairest feature is its present existence, its present enjoyment in his heart. That word “now” which is the sinners warning, and his terror, is to the Christian, his greatest delight and joy. “There is therefore”—and then the sweetest bell of all rings—“there is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus;” to the sinner that same idea is the blackest of all, “He that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed on the Son of God.”
This morning, in God’s name, I shall endeavor to plead with men, and show them the importance of having a present religion. I am quite certain that this is a habit which is too much kept in the back-ground. I am sure from mixing with mankind, that the current belief is, that religion is a future thing, perhaps the wish is father to the thought. I am certain the ground of it is, men love not religion, and therefore they desire to thrust it far from them.