Christ, the Age, and the Church.
I. The character of our age. It is a distinctive age. Whatever may be said of it in the future, this at least will not be affirmed that it was an age of meagre and unmarked peculiarity. It may indeed not be helpful to individual distinctiveness. I am not sure whether the personal set or type is not being overwhelmed in our time, and the individual with his mark and self-assertion lost in the very freedom and liberty which men have come to enjoy. But the age itself is marked enough. It is unlike all others. (1) It is an age of great power over material conditions. In former generations men were either indifferent to nature, friendly with nature, or terrified by nature. (2) In no way has the result of this triumph over nature shown itself more clearly than in what we regard as the second striking feature which the age presents, viz., the highly developed intercommunication between all parts of the world. (3) It is a natural step from this condition of our time to the next which we note, that of its widely-spread individualism. (4) From all this it follows necessarily that the spirit of our time will be materialistic, alike in its intellectual inquiries, and in its conduct and action.
II. The age being such it requires an inspiration of a moral kind which may direct its energies and control its evil tendency. That inspiration, that government, that law, is Jesus Christ, who has been appointed by God as the Saviour, and through His Spirit the Sanctifier of men. His is the light in which the ages must walk; His the teaching, by which they are schooled; His the presence living, real, immediate by which they are animated, round which they gather, and of which, at last, the age will finally become the proper and becoming body. (1) Christ must be apprehended by the age in His historical reality. (2) Christ must also be felt by the age as a personal presence. (3) The age needs to apprehend Christ in the supremely spiritual quality of His person and work.
L. D. Bevan, Christ and the Age,p. 3.
I. Note some of the general results that flow from this relationship of Christ to His people. (1) To be in Christ is to have Christ interposed between you and the condemnation of the law. (2) The believer, as in Christ, has really fulfilled the righteousness of the law, and answered all its demands, either for obedience or for punishment. (3) The believer, as in Christ, stands accepted by the Father. (4) Christ, in the believer, is the Author of a new life in him. (5) Christ, in the believer, destroys the power of sin in him. (6) Christ, in the believer, leads us to look for the transplantation of the graces which adorned Him into the believer.
II. Note how, in virtue of this relationship between Him and them, Christ is to His people the hope of glory. (1) He is so, because from their felt relationship to Him, the burden of sin is removed from their conscience, and they are able, with some confidence, to look up to God as reconciled to them and as their Friend and Father. (2) He is so, as living and reigning with His people, and assimilating them to Himself.
A. D. Davidson, Lectures and Sermons,p. 292.
References: Colossians 1:27. Parker, Pulpit Analyst,p. 61; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. vii., p. 228; Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxix., No. 1720; Homilist,2nd series, vol. ii., p. 530; 4th series, vol. i., p. 165; Expositor,1st series, vol. ix., p. 284.Colossians 1:27; Colossians 1:28. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. i., p. 541.