067. A SOCIETY OF GOD'S ORDAINING

A SOCIETY OF GOD’S ORDAINING The future still confronts us, but we have learned some useful lessons from the past. We have come to believe in a Providence that makes even seeming evil the means of good. We know that God does not forget his people. "Though the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall there be fruit in the vines; the labor of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls; yet will I rejoice in the Lord; I will joy in the God of my salvation. Jehovah the Lord is my strength, and he maketh my feet like hinds’ feet, and he will make me to walk upon mine high places." Since this is a society of God’s ordaining and upholding, the words which Longfellow wrote of the ship of State, our Federal Union, may be applied in a more spiritual sense to our Missionary Union:

Sail on, O Union strong and great!

Humanity with all its fears, With all its hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

We know what Master laid thy keel, What workmen wrought thy ribs of steel, Who made each mast and sail and rope, What anvils rang, what hammers beat, In what a forge and what a heat Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!

Fear not each sudden sound and shock, ’Tis of the wave and not the rock;

’Tis but the flapping of the sail And not a rent made by the gale! In spite of rock and tempest’s roar, In spite of false lights on the shore, Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea! Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee, Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, Our faith triumphant o’er our fears, Are all with thee,—are all with thee!"

Although the English Baptist Missionary Society began its work a little more than a century ago, it is only eighty years since American Baptists engaged in foreign missions. On May 18, 1814, there was formed in Philadelphia the General Missionary Convention, of which our Missionary Union is the continuation. During these fourscore years since Judson and Rice were appointed its first missionaries, what heroism abroad and what sacrifice at home have distinguished its annals! The very continuity of its existence is a wonder of divine Providence; its unexampled successes, in spite of pecuniary reverses and martyr deaths, are witness that some principle grander than that which animates any secular organization is its moving power. That principle is the love of Christ. Shall we commemorate the achievements of our Missionary Union, and not stand in awe before the impelling energy that has wrought them all? As I asked you a year ago to contemplate the decrees of God as the great encouragement to missions, so I ask you now to contemplate The Love Of Christ As The Great Motive To Missions. Not our love to Christ, for that is a very weak and uncertain thing. Nor even Christ’s love to us, for that is something still external Christ’s Love In Us to us. Each of these leaves a separation between Christ and us, and fails to act as a moving power within. I speak of the larger love of Christ, which includes both these. Just as God’s decree furnishes the great encouragement to missions because it involves and brings in its train the church’s decree to preach the gospel to the perishing, so Christ’s love furnishes the constraining motive to missions because it involves and brings in its train the church’s deathless love for the souls for whom Christ died. Not simply our love to Christ, not simply Christ’s love to us, but rather Christ’s love in us, going out toward the lost, is the motive that has founded and sustained our Union in the past, and that will deliver and prosper it in years to come.

I bring to you the old commandment which you have had from the beginning; but I would make it a new commandment to you this morning by showing you that the law of love is a law of life, that it is no arbitrary demand but is grounded in the nature of things, that it is only the expression of the organic relation which Christ sustains to humanity and humanity sustains to Christ. And I lay down as a truth of Scripture the statement that Christ and humanity are bound together as one organism. I mean nothing less than this, that all men everywhere, saints and sinners, Jews and Gentiles, since the incarnation and before the incarnation, are bound to Christ, and Christ is bound to them, by the ties of a common life. We are familiar with the thought that Christ is the Head of the church, that all regenerate souls constitute his body, that he lives and dwells in every true believer. But there is a prior union with Christ which Scripture declares to us but which we have strangely neglected. Christ is also the natural head of universal humanity; in him, the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation, were all things created—all the physical universe, all the angelic hierarchies, all the race of man—and in him, who upholds all things by the word of his power, all things, including humanity, consist or hold together, from hour to hour. The whole race is one in Christ. Have we thought of Christ’s life as animating only believers? That is true of Christ’s spiritual life. But there is a natural life of Christ also, and that life pulses and throbs in all men everywhere. All men are created in Christ, before they are recreated in him. The whole race lives, moves, and has its being in him; for he is the soul of its soul and the life of its life. There is an organism of humanity as well as an organism of the church, and Christ is the center and life of the one as he is the center and life of the other. The ancient feeling of the organic unity of the family and of the State was only the dawning of this larger conception of the unity of the race. Shakespeare shows how deeply he saw into the moving idea of the classic world, when in "Coriolanus" he makes Caius Marcius say to the rabble, "Get you home, ye fragments!" The mob had in it no sense of the organic unity of the Roman people, and so they were worthless fragments, without significance or value. Rome would never have been great if the idea of a larger life had not taken possession of her people,—a life that transcended the powers of the individual and included many generations in its scope. Principcs mortales, rempnblicam ceternam was the noblest maxim of Tacitus. Now we have applied all this to the church, but we have not extended the doctrine beyond the Church, any more than Aristotle extended it beyond the State. He said that "The whole is before the parts," but he meant by "the whole" only the pan-Hellenic world, the commonwealth of Greeks; he never thought of humanity, and the word "mankind" never fell from his lips. He could not understand the unity of humanity, because he knew nothing of Christ, its organizing principle. But we can see that all humanity is one, because Christ, the whole in which all the individual members participate, is "before all things," as well as "in all" and "through all."