Consider the word with which the Lord's prayer closes the word "Amen." It is the signalem conscientiæ,the seal of our faith; it is the votem desiderii,the fervency of our longing; it is the stamp of our sincerity upon every prayer we use. In the Gospel of St. John, no less than twenty-five times our Lord Jesus Christ ushers in His deepest asseverations with "Amen, amen," translated in our version, "Verily, verily, I say unto you." What, then, is the meaning of this solemn and sacred word? It means truth; it means reality. Every time we use it, we should remember that God can never be the God who delights in fantasies and shams, but that He is the God of reality and of truth. And I want to bring before you the awfulness of truth that is, of reality, of sincerity, of guileless simplicity, both as regards our conduct in the life that now is, and as regards the eternal life of man's spirit.
I. First, as regards our earthly life. We may each of us spend our lives either in the world or in God. If we live in God, "if that life which we now live in the flesh is lived by faith in the Son of God," then we are living in the world of reality; if we are living for the world, if we are setting our affections on the things of the earth, we are living in the midst of fatal delusions and fading shadows. God is the Amen, the eternal reality. He has set His canon against pride, and lust, and hate, and lies. Obey Him or disobey Him at your pleasure and at your peril; believe in Him or disbelieve in Him at your pleasure and at your peril; but He is, and His law is, the sole truth of your life. He who makes the Church of God depend on mere outward form, he who bases its high claims on some unprovable theory which may be a fiction, he who confounds religion with the shibboleths of Churches or of parties or the idle, usurpatious encroachments of priests, builds upon the baseless and shifting sands of multitudes of views and practices now thrust almost by force on groaning congregations and on alienated people. The very best that can be said is that the earth hath bubbles as the water hath, and these are of them. The Church depends solely on the presence of Christ. Where Christ is, there the Church is; and where love and holiness are, there Christ is. Wherever we find the fruits of the Spirit, which are love and holiness, there the Spirit is; and where the Spirit is, there the Church is.
II. We must be true men, or we cannot be true Christians. Reason and conscience illumined by prayer these are the torch-bearers of eternal truth. Seek truth, and you will find it, because God is the God of truth. If you desire heaven, you must, by the aid of Christ's Spirit, win it, for heaven is a temper, and not a place: no priest can give it to you, no ritual can give it to you, no human ordinance can open for you by a millionth of an inch its golden doors; no, you must win it by faithful obedience to the eternal laws of God. Reality, sincerity, holiness; the elementary Christian graces, faith, hope, love; the primary Christian duties, soberness, temperance, chastity these are the things and these are the tests of a true religion; apart from these all else is fringes and phylacteries.
F. W. Farrar, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xliii., p. 353.
The New Creation.
The Son of God is called by the title "the beginning of the creation of God," (1) because He was Himself the Creator of the world; (2) because He is the first cause or principle of its restoration.
I. We have here two great spiritual facts. The first is that the Word, who is by eternal generation of one substance with the Father, by the mystery of the Incarnation became of one substance with us. His union with us is a consubstantial union; His substance as man and our substance are one and the same.
II. The other great fact, issuing from the last, is that as by this substantial union and personal distinctness the Son lives by the Father, so we, distinct in person, but partaking of His substance, live by the Son. As the Son partakes of the Godhead of the Father, so we partake of the manhood of the Son; as He lives by the Father, we live by Him. The miraculous Agent in the Incarnation and in the holy sacraments is the same Third Person of the ever-blessed Three, uniting first the Divine nature to ours in the person of the Son, and now our fallen nature to Him as the beginning of the creation of God.
H. E. Manning, Sermons,vol. iv., p. 176.
References: Revelation 3:14. J. B. Lightfoot, Church of England Pulpit,vol. v., p. 53; Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xii., No. 679; Ibid., Evening by Evening,p. 110. Revelation 3:14-21. Ibid., Sermons,vol. xx., No. 1185.Revelation 3:14-22. Expositor,1st series, vol. iii., p. 433; J. W. Lance, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxi., p. 172; G. Macdonald, Ibid.,vol. xxxvi., p. 72.