Christ our Pattern.
I. There are two things very hard to our moral natures, and yet most necessary to our happiness; the one of these is that we should be very much afraid of sin, the other that we should not be afraid of death. We know quite well that we ought to be both the one and the other. But this is not enough; we require to learn how we may become so, as well as to know that we ought to become so. Now it was for this end that Christ lived and died openly amongst us, and that the particulars of His life and death were recorded. He might have borne our nature as truly, and died for our sins as truly, had His life been passed away from the sight of men, or had He, like Moses, resigned His spirit on the top of some lonely mountain into the hands of His heavenly Father. But how much of the best support of our souls should we have lost had this been so. We are not only told briefly that He took our nature upon Him, that He lived upon earth for more than thirty years; but we are made, in a manner, the witnesses of His birth, the companions of His ripened manhood. We see Him forsaken, and we see Him insulted; we see Him enduring the extremity of bodily pain; we see Him and it is the divinest mercy of all suffering the extremity of inward trouble, of desolateness and fear. We see Him in all these, and we see Him triumph over them all; and we hear Him, when all were over-past, giving up His spirit into the hands of God, to show that in all things we too may be more than conquerors "through Him that loved us."
II. The book in which we may read this is in our hands, and we can use it when we will. It hardly matters what particular chapter of the Gospels we open, for Christ's life is in every part of it more or less our pattern. The readiest way to have our faith so strengthened as that it may cast out the evil of our hearts is to make ourselves fully acquainted with all the particulars of Christ's character and life and death. Making His words, on every occasion, familiar to us; so bringing before our minds His actions, so imaging for surely we may and should try to do so His very voice and look, may we bring our souls into constant communion with Him.
T. Arnold, Sermons,vol. iii., p. 17.
Consider the principles which flow from this text.
I. We have an unvarying power. (1) We have a Gospel which can never grow old. (2) We have an abiding spirit. (3) We have a Lord, "the same yesterday, and today, and for ever."
II. The condition of exercising this power is faith.
III. Our faith is ever threatened by subtle unbelief.
IV. Our faith can only be maintained by constant devotion and rigid self-denial.
A. Maclaren, The Secret of Power,p. 1.
References: Matthew 17:19-21. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. x., No. 549; Three Hundred Outlines on the New Testament,p. 23; S. R. Hole, Contemporary Pulpit,vol. ii., p. 154.