The Storm and Strife of Life.
I. It was with the clearest prevision of the course of the development of Christendom that the Saviour uttered this dark prediction. He knew that strife would sunder, and famine would waste, and sword would slay with a tenfold force and fierceness; and in a measure through that very Gospel of peace which He sent His disciples forth in peril of their lives to proclaim. He knew that the new impulse, the new inspiration, which His Gospel offered would fire with a new intensity every passion of man's heart, would set the evil as well as the good under the strongest stimulus; would stir them up to fight out their battle with sterner purposes and larger resources; and thus, so profound was the problem of redemption, prolong through ages that discord which it was the deepest desire of His heart to destroy. The action of Christianity in healing sin-struck humanity is like the stimulating treatment in fever. Feed the system; kindle new strength. The disease will be fed as well as the vital power. The pain will be sharper, the battle will be sterner; but if there be vis vitæin the system, under the stimulus it will conquer at last. And man will conquer through Christ, though the pain be sharper and the conflict longer than any but the Saviour dreams; for the vis vitæ,the vital power in humanity, through the Incarnation, is Christ Christ in you, in the world, the hope of glory; which hope, unless man wilfully renounces it, God lives to fulfil.
II. Our great comfort under the burden and the strain of our pilgrimage is that the Lord is its Prophet, the Lord who came to share it that He might lift it, that it might not crush but train us, might not exhaust but educate our powers, and strengthen us to win the inheritance of glory. Sadly enough, we may be sure, the Lord prophesies this lot of tribulation to man and to mankind, for He was touched to tears even by human sorrows which a word could heal. But the fact that His lips utter the prophecy robs it of all its terror. The strife may live on and grow; the load may live on and grow, but the life grows with it, stronger, larger, with wider horizon, with firmer standing ground, with more far-reaching arms, with more glorious hopes.
J. Baldwin Brown, Christian World Pulpit,vol. i., p. 370.
References: Matthew 24:6. F. W. Farrar, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxii., p. 49. Matthew 24:11. J. H. Hitchens, Ibid.,vol. xxvii., p. 228. Matthew 24:12; Matthew 24:13. C. Girdlestone, Twenty Parochial Sermons,3rd series, p. 135; J. Keble, Sermons on Various Occasions,p. 328.