The Fellowship of the Kingdom of Patience.
I. The ultimate basis of our fellowship we find where we find everything "in Jesus," for such is the literal phrase of our text. But it is hard to say here whether the individual or the community comes first. Both are in Jesus; "the Head of every man is Christ," and "He is the Head of the body." Union with the Lord, personal union, is the precious secret and deep foundation of all our fellowship. "He that is joined to the Lord is one spirit." The spirit common to Him and to His people makes them partakers with Christ and all His interests, even as Christ becomes a Partaker with us and all that is ours. The Christian is no longer his own; he has come out of himself; he has a new life, breathes in a new world, the sun, and the air, and the nourishment, and the life, and the end of which is the Lord. He is a man still, but a man in Christ.
II. Christ's presence is in the Church of earth; His glory, and ornaments, and symbolic attributes are all taken from the lower sanctuary; His right hand is strong with the power of a human-angel ministry. The candlesticks that receive their light from Him reflect on Him their glory. Hence the fellowship of Christ's kingdom has its sphere in the visible Church or Churches established throughout the world the Churches, for they are seven; the Church, for seven is, as we see by the seven spirits, the symbol of unity in diversity. All true Churches are one in the unity of this common object: the kingdom of Jesus.
III. Every one of us is a companion in the service of the kingdom of the Cross. Such it is now, whatever its coming glories may be. The service of this kingdom has for its fundamental law personal self-sacrifice; no law was more constantly, none more sternly, none more affectingly, enforced by our Lord than this. Only by much tribulation do we enter into the kingdom of God; only by much tribulation does it enter into us.
IV. Tribulation worketh patience, is a principle of personal religion which we may carry into our relation to the great fellowship. The kingdom is one of slow development, and all who serve it must wait in patience, which is, like charity, one of its royal laws. Our apocalyptic patience has to do with the future; it is the "waiting for the end." We must labour in the patience of uncertainty. The Lord is at hand; but we must be found labouring as well as watching.
V. The glorious consummation will surely come. The bright prospect precedes our text and sheds its glory on it. "Behold, He cometh!" was the inspiring assurance in the strength of which the last Apostle greeted the Church: "I John, your brother and companion in this hope." Then will the kingdom be revealed without its ancient attributes of tribulation and patience.
W. B. Pope, Sermons and Charges,p. 64.
The Kinghood of Patience.
That is a very remarkable phrase, "the kingdom and patience." Kinghood, instead of being dissevered from patience, is bound up with it; the kingly virtues are all intertwined with patience and dependent on it. The kingdom, the Divine kingdom, is inherited through faith and patience; and the kingly man is the patient man.
I. In Jesus there are these two elements: dominion and patience. Nothing is more beautiful than the patience of Christ as related to His uncompromising fidelity to His standard of duty and of truth, His holding by His principles while He holds on at the same time to those slow, backward pupils in the school of faith and of self-sacrifice. Christ's mission, in its very nature, involved long, patient waiting. It was the mission of a sower, sowing seed of slow growth. The harvest of Christ's ideas was not going to be reaped in three years, nor in a hundred. He was content to await the slow growth of the Gospel seed, the slow pervasion of the Gospel leaven, to wait for the consummation of a sovereignty based on the spiritual transformation wrought by the Gospel. His course in this stands out as the sublimest illustration of patience in all time, and stamps Him as the true King of the ages.
II. Christ therefore by His own example, no less than byHis word, commends to us this kingly virtue of patience. Each morning we wake to a twofold fight: with the world outside and with the self within. God help us if patience fail; God help us if there be not something within which keeps firm hold of the exceeding great and precious promises, which will not suffer faith to fail that He that hath begun a good work will perfect it, which is not disheartened at slow progress, and which, spite of the tears and the dust, keeps our faces turned toward the place where we know the crown and the glory are, though we cannot see them.
M. R. Vincent, The Covenant of Peace,p. 234.
Revelation 1:9 (R.V.)
I. Note the common royalty: "I John am a partaker with you in the kingdom."
II. Note the common road to that common royalty. "Tribulation" is the path by which all have to travel who attain the royalty.
III. Note the common temper in which the common road to the common royalty is to be trodden. "Patience" is the link, so to speak, between the kingdom and the tribulation.
A. Maclaren, The Unchanging Christ,p. 247.
References: Revelation 1:9. J. M. Neale, Sermons for the Church Year,vol. i., p. 50. Revelation 1:9-16. Homilist,3rd series, vol. v., p. 266.