THE COMING OF THE KINGDOM
‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’
Do not think that St. John was juggling with words. He meant what he said; he knew of and cared for the fears and hopes and longings and wants around him. We mean to-day what we say when we pray ‘Thy kingdom come.’ Jesus Christ is a King, Who knows our every need better than we know it ourselves, Who is touched with our infirmities, and feels our sorrows, and will right them if we will let Him. There was only one thing then, and there is only one thing now which prevents the reign of Jesus Christ, and that is man himself—man who will not have Christ to reign over him.
I. Christ claims a universal dominion.—He claims the whole world. Hence the missionary leaves home and friends and goes out in steady confidence. Here in this England of ours Jesus Christ claims an absolute sovereignty over it all. And yet how far we are from recognising it. Here as of old there are many wistful ears anxiously straining for the news of deliverance. There is the huge mass of indifference without God in the world; there is reckless waste and hopeless want; there is sin in all its terrible defiance of the very laws of human existence. There is suffering and misery, and, worse than all, an inability for a man to assert his powers as a man to make his own way in the world. There is confusion and difficulty, misunderstanding and suspicion, wherever we turn. Pray on, wherever you may be; pray for those dark spots of sin and those sad spots of sorrow which darken our Christian cities. The waves of the sea are mighty, and rage horribly; but He that dwelleth on high is mightier. The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand. Jesus Christ reigns.
II. The need of patience.—Patience—how we hate that word! But no lasting good is to be had without it. We can always cut the knot of a difficulty, but the truly great man wants to untie it. Of course it is true that destitution and hunger and want ought to be, and must be, attended to at once by wise remedies. They do not brook delay. But we want a solution of a recurring difficulty, the adjustment of what seems to be an inequality of opportunity. Be assured of this, that there is no lack of ardent desire on the part of every right-minded man to do all he can to help while these great questions are being worked out. There is always a danger of impatience. Think of the slaves! What was patience to them? It seemed as if Christ had nothing to say to their cruel grievance. His kingdom came and slavery stayed. But Christ had enunciated principles which tended to make slavery impossible, and gradually, through long years, slavery has been dying out. So it was with those blood-stained shows, in which men killed each other for sport: Christ seemed to have done nothing to stop them, when all of a sudden it was found that the whole system collapsed at the earnest preaching of one devoted man, because Christian principles had condemned it and made it impossible. So it has been with the position of woman; so it has been with wars of aggression; so it will be with the evils which paralyse us to-day. ‘Sirs, ye are brethren.’ ‘By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one towards another.’ These are the laws of Christ’s kingdom; these He will set up and proclaim, if we will let Him. But we are all apt to think that we know better. ‘We can hurry man, but we cannot hurry God.’
III. The Kingdom of God is within you.—It is not only the cause and the measure which we must think of, but the man. If, therefore, you feel that God has called you to help solve a very difficult problem, let me beseech you each to look to yourselves. There are problems in our own lives as difficult as the problems in large cities. A man may be beaten down by temper, or by passion, or by desire—by a hundred things, so that he becomes useless for work in God’s service. Let us each, in our several ways, work towards the same end—the solving of a great and pressing difficulty—and to that end let us offer to God ourselves, each of us as we are and what we are. ‘Men make a city, and not walls,’ was said on a famous occasion; and it is the individual man who counts in carrying forward Christ’s kingdom. If God says ‘Speak to the children of Israel that they go forward,’ then we can advance, even through the Red Sea, towards our promised land; but, on the other hand, ‘except the Lord build the house, their labour is but lost that build it.’
—Canon Newbolt.
Illustration
(1) ‘A modern writer, speaking of the impression left on his mind by a visit to the Grande Chartreuse, in the days when it was still occupied by its devoted band of religious men, describes to us the solemnity of the night offices and the suggestiveness of those solemn intercessions: “I heard them,” he says, “interceding for men who, at that moment of the dark night, were forgetting God, and truth, purity, and goodness. I heard the murmur of the solemn petition which had gone up to the throne of grace night after night for many centuries, prayers for the poor and the wretched, for the guilty and the crime-laden, for the dying and the dead, for the faint-hearted that they might hope again in God, for the light-headed lest they might forget Him.” ’