Sunday, December 03, 2006
Sermons and Lessons
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
WILLIAM SELBIE, Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford, England; born, Chesterfield, December 24, 1862; educated, Manchester grammar school, Brasenose and Mansfield Colleges, Oxford; lecturer in Hebrew and Old Testament, Mansfield, Oxford, 1889,90; minister of Highgate Congregational Church, London, 1890-1902; Emmanuel Congregational church, Cambridge, after 1902; editor of The British Congregationalist; lecturer on pastoral theology at Cheshunt College, Cambridge.
Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers, in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was a husband unto them, saith the Lord: But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, 1 will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. - Jer. 31: 31-34
Here is the message of a new time, the message of brightest hope and of fullest regeneration in the whole of the Old Testament. This promise of hope our Lord laid hold of as He approached his hour of darkest trial. He held it before the eyes of His disciples when the dread hour of parting from him weighed like a nightmare upon their souls. He planted it at the heart of the sacrament of life and of death which he sent down the Christian ages to bear his remembrance before the eyes of men; "This cup is the new covenant in my blood."
It is the message of a new time for every age and for every soul. It awakens in man's soul the consciousness that he is the master and not the slave of years and centuries. To the old and weary it holds out the promise of newness. He ceases to move mechanically from day to day, allowing the custom and circumstance of the times and period to decide his action and determine his fate, it reveals to him that he is a son of eternity as well as a child of time. He stands above the flow of time, guides its course, determines its character, and gives it an ever new content of worth and meaning out of his own eternal spirit. He looks before and after, and learns that his mastery of the future has not been forfeited to the debts and bonds of the past. He finds that in repentance and forgiveness he may even recover the lordship of the past, and the future opens up before him as a broad heritage upon which he may enter and where he may reign as monarch of the morning and springtide.
How natural to every man is the longing for newness and freshness! It often appears as mere trivial curiosity or superficial love of novelty, but even these are strong intimations of the hope revealed in the new covenant. More solemn and serious are the ever-recurring new vows, new resolves, new promises, which men make in critical and crucial hours and events of their lives, and though the vows and promises I be often broken, and great resolves come to naught, so long as a spark of humanity glows in the soul, man, feeling his mastery over time, renews his hopes, his vows and his covenants. But the justification and power of every new hope, of every regeneration, lie only in the broad principles of the message of the new covenant.
The first and most important fact about the new covenant is that it is God that makes it; "Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant." This is the fundamental religious idea in the Old Testament, and indeed in all religion. Behind every law and ordinance and promise of the Old Testament lies the covenant relation between Jehovah and His people. It is proclaimed with fresh emphasis and with a new wealth of gracious meaning by Jeremiah, but it was implied and often exprest in God's dealing with Adam, with Noah, with Abraham, with Moses, with Saul and with David. It means that Jehovah of His own free will and loving kindness began a friendship with these men, that He graciously condescended to enter into a bond of mutual fellowship and faithfulness with His people. We are not to think of this covenant as a bargain or agreement between equals, but as the offering of gracious terms by the absolute Sovereign, by which, however, He bound Himself in mutual compact with the true Israelites, who received the covenant. The present colloquial usage of the term? covenant ?is apt to lead the mind into the market-place, when two parties meet, each having something which the other needs. One man has corn and the other has money, and the man who has corn needs money and the man who has money needs corn. They each make an offer, and improve their offers until they have found common terms upon which they agree, strike the bargain and make the covenant. But God's covenant with man is not of this kind; there is no market-place wherein we can stand to make terms with God, nor have we any price that He needs us to offer Him. The Hebrew figure of speech which expresses God?s covenant relation with man is derived from a different and an older custom of life?from the battlefield. The picture at the back of the figure is that of the victorious leader, after the battle. He passes over the field of conquest and finds his enemy lying at his feet, beaten, wounded, helpless, and he does not now draw the hostile sword to kill, but bends down to the stricken man, takes him by the hand, sets him on his feet, restores to him life, friendship and hope, and of his free power bestows upon him again the territory, the throne, the crown he had lost. It is so that God finds men, poor, helpless, lying in sin and ruin, and out of his free grace He sets him upon his feet, and bestows upon him the friendship of God and all the hope, joy and riches involved in that. Such is God's new covenant; it is the truth exprest in more technical terms by Paul in his doctrine of justification by faith; it is the truth exprest in language at once more intimate and universal in our Lord's doctrine of the divine fatherhood. God begins the new relation, and all it involves. In Him is the fountain of all new beginnings and out of Him proceeds the binding force of all new covenants. The making of new covenants, the formation of new characters, the acquisition of new powers and riches of life is therefore not so much a matter for us to make new resolves, new vows, new promises, as it is for us to allow God to make the terms of his covenant with our souls. And here is man's hope, the hope for every man, even the man who has often promised, often determined to reform, to rise higher, and who has failed as often. Broken resolutions, the bondage of old habit, and the despair of failure may weigh heavily on his soul; he may have said, "I have tried so often to overcome the same temptation, I have so many times vowed to renounce my besetting sin, but all the vows are broken, and I dare not try again." But there is still one way, an infallible way, the only way - to open wide the gates of the soul, to let God come in to make His own covenant with man.
The next feature of the new covenant is that it becomes for man a covenant of inward principle as distinguished from one of outward rules; "Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand, to bring them out of the land of Egypt," - not like the mosaic covenant of laws and ordinances, "but this is the covenant. . . . I will put my law in their inward parts and in their hearts will I write it." For the child it is good that he should live by rules which be has neither assimilated nor understood, under commands which derive their authority from the knowledge and experience of others who have lived them, but that is not good for the man, because character, moral worth and spiritual strength are only acquired to the extent that virtue and holiness have become spontaneous forces within the soul. There may be a kind of prudence and safety in keeping within the boundaries laid down by law and custom, without knowing or feeling anything of their inner authority, but that is a weak and poor life to live, with no freshness, no growth, no springtide to it, and one easily disturbed by the fascinations of temptation and the storms of passion. But such is not the life of the people of the covenant. God works from within outward; He establishes the fortress of the soul on the foundations of His ever present love, He binds man to Himself in bonds of never-ceasing friendship and faithfulness that become for man principles of life and conduct, convictions of mind and heart that form the very fiber of the soul?s being. The life of the covenant is not a constant effort, an uncertain endeavor to observe more minutely the rules of good conduct, or to keep more faithfully the laws of acknowledged morality, but it is the free outflow in life and conduct of the work of God in the heart within; it is not the painful and regular practice of the bondage of an established law, but the practice of submission to the working of God upon the springs of conduct. Moral progress and growth of the soul are to make inward and subjective those objective ideals and realities of truth, beauty and goodness revealed in God while He impresses His covenant ever deeper upon the human spirit. The morality of the covenant is not something to be adopted and assumed each time we act, and to be neglected when we dwell in repose, but it is in us, as the breath of life in the body, even the power and spirit urging and determining our every act.
From this follows a third feature of the new covenant, that it establishes between God and man a relation of mutual possession as distinguished from mutual obligation; "and I will be their God, and they shall be my people." Law enforces obligations - of man to obey God, and of God to reward or punish man according to his deserts. Such was the relation between God and man conceived under the old legal covenant, now to be superceded. But the new covenant creates a deeper relation. First, God is ours; He not merely undertakes to do this and that for us, but He binds Himself to be ours in all that He is; all His resources and powers are pledged to the service of our salvation. This is the invincible, irresistible might of the new covenant. The power and enthusiasm of Puritanism was derived from its Calvinistic doctrine of predestination and election, for whatever defects in form may have pertained to that doctrine, it meant to them at least that God had given Himself to His people so that He was irrevocably pledged to save them and make them victorious.
And then, we are God's - His own, His property. We are bound, if we accept the covenant bond, not merely to fulfill this or that duty, to keep a number of covenants, perform a number of services, but to give Him ourselves, all that we are, nay more, all that we can be. We make not merely a passive surrender, but give Him our best selves. And this is the place for man?s activity to give to God the largest possession possible of himself. By vows and covenants of his own he will not save his soul, but there are fitting responses to the covenant which God makes with us, so that when He has given Himself to us, we shall not be sparing, and shall never cease giving ourselves to Him.
And this mutual possession of one another by living spirits, as God and man are, involves one deeper and greater relation yet, the final feature of the new covenant; it is a covenant of intimate personal communion as distinguished from one of mediation. "And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, "Know the Lord: for they shall all know me." This is the climax of the new covenant; it contains and creates all that has gone before,
The old covenant of the law had been given by the mediator of men and of angels; and it was itself rather a medium of separation than a bond of union between God and man. Its institutions likewise, the priesthood and the sacrifices rather stood between man and God than brought man to God. But all this belongs to an elementary stage of revelation, fitted for the shy childhood of the race. It obscures the true attitude of God to man, conceals His grace and mercy, and represents Him as a remote avenging Deity, only to be propitiated by the acts of a priestly order which therefore will stand to man as more gracious and powerful than God Himself. But the revelation of the new covenant rends the veil, scatters the clouds, and removes out of the way all mediating agencies, for in it, God Himself comes to man in such a way that they may have personal knowledge of one another. The only mediator of the new covenant is God Himself in Jesus Christ who comes to all in form and manner so near and so intimate that man can receive Him, know Him and hold converse of spirit with Him. In this intimate friendship with God, iniquity is forgiven and sin is forgotten, so that man may know all the freshness, sweetness and joy of the new life which God makes for him and forms within him, by giving Himself unto him in the loving bonds of unfailing friendship and communion.
Related Tags: sermons, lessons, William Selbie
WILLIAM SELBIE, Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford, England; born, Chesterfield, December 24, 1862; educated, Manchester grammar school, Brasenose and Mansfield Colleges, Oxford; lecturer in Hebrew and Old Testament, Mansfield, Oxford, 1889,90; minister of Highgate Congregational Church, London, 1890-1902; Emmanuel Congregational church, Cambridge, after 1902; editor of The British Congregationalist; lecturer on pastoral theology at Cheshunt College, Cambridge.
THE NEW COVENANT
Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers, in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was a husband unto them, saith the Lord: But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, 1 will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. - Jer. 31: 31-34
Here is the message of a new time, the message of brightest hope and of fullest regeneration in the whole of the Old Testament. This promise of hope our Lord laid hold of as He approached his hour of darkest trial. He held it before the eyes of His disciples when the dread hour of parting from him weighed like a nightmare upon their souls. He planted it at the heart of the sacrament of life and of death which he sent down the Christian ages to bear his remembrance before the eyes of men; "This cup is the new covenant in my blood."
It is the message of a new time for every age and for every soul. It awakens in man's soul the consciousness that he is the master and not the slave of years and centuries. To the old and weary it holds out the promise of newness. He ceases to move mechanically from day to day, allowing the custom and circumstance of the times and period to decide his action and determine his fate, it reveals to him that he is a son of eternity as well as a child of time. He stands above the flow of time, guides its course, determines its character, and gives it an ever new content of worth and meaning out of his own eternal spirit. He looks before and after, and learns that his mastery of the future has not been forfeited to the debts and bonds of the past. He finds that in repentance and forgiveness he may even recover the lordship of the past, and the future opens up before him as a broad heritage upon which he may enter and where he may reign as monarch of the morning and springtide.
How natural to every man is the longing for newness and freshness! It often appears as mere trivial curiosity or superficial love of novelty, but even these are strong intimations of the hope revealed in the new covenant. More solemn and serious are the ever-recurring new vows, new resolves, new promises, which men make in critical and crucial hours and events of their lives, and though the vows and promises I be often broken, and great resolves come to naught, so long as a spark of humanity glows in the soul, man, feeling his mastery over time, renews his hopes, his vows and his covenants. But the justification and power of every new hope, of every regeneration, lie only in the broad principles of the message of the new covenant.
The first and most important fact about the new covenant is that it is God that makes it; "Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant." This is the fundamental religious idea in the Old Testament, and indeed in all religion. Behind every law and ordinance and promise of the Old Testament lies the covenant relation between Jehovah and His people. It is proclaimed with fresh emphasis and with a new wealth of gracious meaning by Jeremiah, but it was implied and often exprest in God's dealing with Adam, with Noah, with Abraham, with Moses, with Saul and with David. It means that Jehovah of His own free will and loving kindness began a friendship with these men, that He graciously condescended to enter into a bond of mutual fellowship and faithfulness with His people. We are not to think of this covenant as a bargain or agreement between equals, but as the offering of gracious terms by the absolute Sovereign, by which, however, He bound Himself in mutual compact with the true Israelites, who received the covenant. The present colloquial usage of the term? covenant ?is apt to lead the mind into the market-place, when two parties meet, each having something which the other needs. One man has corn and the other has money, and the man who has corn needs money and the man who has money needs corn. They each make an offer, and improve their offers until they have found common terms upon which they agree, strike the bargain and make the covenant. But God's covenant with man is not of this kind; there is no market-place wherein we can stand to make terms with God, nor have we any price that He needs us to offer Him. The Hebrew figure of speech which expresses God?s covenant relation with man is derived from a different and an older custom of life?from the battlefield. The picture at the back of the figure is that of the victorious leader, after the battle. He passes over the field of conquest and finds his enemy lying at his feet, beaten, wounded, helpless, and he does not now draw the hostile sword to kill, but bends down to the stricken man, takes him by the hand, sets him on his feet, restores to him life, friendship and hope, and of his free power bestows upon him again the territory, the throne, the crown he had lost. It is so that God finds men, poor, helpless, lying in sin and ruin, and out of his free grace He sets him upon his feet, and bestows upon him the friendship of God and all the hope, joy and riches involved in that. Such is God's new covenant; it is the truth exprest in more technical terms by Paul in his doctrine of justification by faith; it is the truth exprest in language at once more intimate and universal in our Lord's doctrine of the divine fatherhood. God begins the new relation, and all it involves. In Him is the fountain of all new beginnings and out of Him proceeds the binding force of all new covenants. The making of new covenants, the formation of new characters, the acquisition of new powers and riches of life is therefore not so much a matter for us to make new resolves, new vows, new promises, as it is for us to allow God to make the terms of his covenant with our souls. And here is man's hope, the hope for every man, even the man who has often promised, often determined to reform, to rise higher, and who has failed as often. Broken resolutions, the bondage of old habit, and the despair of failure may weigh heavily on his soul; he may have said, "I have tried so often to overcome the same temptation, I have so many times vowed to renounce my besetting sin, but all the vows are broken, and I dare not try again." But there is still one way, an infallible way, the only way - to open wide the gates of the soul, to let God come in to make His own covenant with man.
The next feature of the new covenant is that it becomes for man a covenant of inward principle as distinguished from one of outward rules; "Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand, to bring them out of the land of Egypt," - not like the mosaic covenant of laws and ordinances, "but this is the covenant. . . . I will put my law in their inward parts and in their hearts will I write it." For the child it is good that he should live by rules which be has neither assimilated nor understood, under commands which derive their authority from the knowledge and experience of others who have lived them, but that is not good for the man, because character, moral worth and spiritual strength are only acquired to the extent that virtue and holiness have become spontaneous forces within the soul. There may be a kind of prudence and safety in keeping within the boundaries laid down by law and custom, without knowing or feeling anything of their inner authority, but that is a weak and poor life to live, with no freshness, no growth, no springtide to it, and one easily disturbed by the fascinations of temptation and the storms of passion. But such is not the life of the people of the covenant. God works from within outward; He establishes the fortress of the soul on the foundations of His ever present love, He binds man to Himself in bonds of never-ceasing friendship and faithfulness that become for man principles of life and conduct, convictions of mind and heart that form the very fiber of the soul?s being. The life of the covenant is not a constant effort, an uncertain endeavor to observe more minutely the rules of good conduct, or to keep more faithfully the laws of acknowledged morality, but it is the free outflow in life and conduct of the work of God in the heart within; it is not the painful and regular practice of the bondage of an established law, but the practice of submission to the working of God upon the springs of conduct. Moral progress and growth of the soul are to make inward and subjective those objective ideals and realities of truth, beauty and goodness revealed in God while He impresses His covenant ever deeper upon the human spirit. The morality of the covenant is not something to be adopted and assumed each time we act, and to be neglected when we dwell in repose, but it is in us, as the breath of life in the body, even the power and spirit urging and determining our every act.
From this follows a third feature of the new covenant, that it establishes between God and man a relation of mutual possession as distinguished from mutual obligation; "and I will be their God, and they shall be my people." Law enforces obligations - of man to obey God, and of God to reward or punish man according to his deserts. Such was the relation between God and man conceived under the old legal covenant, now to be superceded. But the new covenant creates a deeper relation. First, God is ours; He not merely undertakes to do this and that for us, but He binds Himself to be ours in all that He is; all His resources and powers are pledged to the service of our salvation. This is the invincible, irresistible might of the new covenant. The power and enthusiasm of Puritanism was derived from its Calvinistic doctrine of predestination and election, for whatever defects in form may have pertained to that doctrine, it meant to them at least that God had given Himself to His people so that He was irrevocably pledged to save them and make them victorious.
And then, we are God's - His own, His property. We are bound, if we accept the covenant bond, not merely to fulfill this or that duty, to keep a number of covenants, perform a number of services, but to give Him ourselves, all that we are, nay more, all that we can be. We make not merely a passive surrender, but give Him our best selves. And this is the place for man?s activity to give to God the largest possession possible of himself. By vows and covenants of his own he will not save his soul, but there are fitting responses to the covenant which God makes with us, so that when He has given Himself to us, we shall not be sparing, and shall never cease giving ourselves to Him.
And this mutual possession of one another by living spirits, as God and man are, involves one deeper and greater relation yet, the final feature of the new covenant; it is a covenant of intimate personal communion as distinguished from one of mediation. "And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, "Know the Lord: for they shall all know me." This is the climax of the new covenant; it contains and creates all that has gone before,
The old covenant of the law had been given by the mediator of men and of angels; and it was itself rather a medium of separation than a bond of union between God and man. Its institutions likewise, the priesthood and the sacrifices rather stood between man and God than brought man to God. But all this belongs to an elementary stage of revelation, fitted for the shy childhood of the race. It obscures the true attitude of God to man, conceals His grace and mercy, and represents Him as a remote avenging Deity, only to be propitiated by the acts of a priestly order which therefore will stand to man as more gracious and powerful than God Himself. But the revelation of the new covenant rends the veil, scatters the clouds, and removes out of the way all mediating agencies, for in it, God Himself comes to man in such a way that they may have personal knowledge of one another. The only mediator of the new covenant is God Himself in Jesus Christ who comes to all in form and manner so near and so intimate that man can receive Him, know Him and hold converse of spirit with Him. In this intimate friendship with God, iniquity is forgiven and sin is forgotten, so that man may know all the freshness, sweetness and joy of the new life which God makes for him and forms within him, by giving Himself unto him in the loving bonds of unfailing friendship and communion.
Related Tags: sermons, lessons, William Selbie
