The Everlasting Gospel.
Some one not long ago published a book with the title "Gospels of Yesterday." It discussed the writings of several authors who in our generation have caught the popular ear, and analysed their doctrines with keen incisiveness. Gospels of yesterday how many there have been of them. They lasted as long as they could, but the world outgrew them. There is only one Gospel which is everlasting, which can pass from country to country, from continent to continent, and be everywhere at home; which time cannot wither nor custom stale; which has the safe and certain reversion of all the future. Now why is this? What makes the Gospel of Christ everlasting? To this question I give two answers. First, it is a message to what is universal in man; and secondly, it is a message to what is peculiar in every man.
I. Its universal message. The reason why so many gospels have been doomed to become gospels of yesterday has been because they have addressed themselves to what is transient or partial in human nature. Religions have been the religions of single tribes or single countries, and have not been adopted for other parts of the world; philosophies have addressed themselves to select sections of that community, like that one which inscribed over the entrance to its school in Athens the intimation, "Let no one ignorant of mathematics enter here." Men have been hailed as saviours of society because they have been able to give relief from a need pressing at some particular time, or because their doctrines have fallen in with some passing phase of popular sentiment. But the glory of Christianity is that its teaching is addressed to what is most characteristic in human nature, and absolutely the same in all members of the human race, whether they be rich or poor, whether they inhabit the one hemisphere or the other, and whether they live in ancient or modern times. The three great watchwords of the Gospel the soul, sin, and eternity which it is uttering continually wherever its voice is heard at all, are enough to show why it is an everlasting Gospel. Nowhere in the wide world and at no period in the lapse of ages can human beings be found to whom these words will not have all the reality and all the interest of life and death, and if the Gospel can tell how the infinitely precious soul is to be saved, how sin is to be overcome and blotted out, and how eternity is to be transmuted from a dream of terror into a home and an inheritance, then it can never lack an audience.
II. Its particular message. The Gospel has a message for the difference in each specimen of human nature, and for each quarter of the globe and each age of the world, as well as for that which is common to all. God has a special message for every age. His Gospel has a word in season for every condition of life, for the child, and the young man in his prime, and for old age, a word for the multitude and a word for the few. The Chinese, when they accept the Gospel, will find secrets in it which the British have never discovered; the twentieth century will discover phases of the Christian life which are lacking to the nineteenth. We have not exhausted Christ, and we have not exhausted the Gospel of Christ.
J. Stalker, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xli., p. 397.
Reference: Revelation 14:6. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. i., p. 122.