The Close of the Year.
I. "He that overcometh." Then there is light shining in and struggling with the darkness a conflict year-long and lifelong, which, though it has its defeats, may have its victories also, which, though its outward aspect is gloomy, may issue in glory, and honour, and immortality. Years bring us another lesson than the lesson of discouragement. Though much is taken away, much is also gained gained by that very loss. The past has become for us full of rich and precious store: lessons of self-distrust; lessons of charitable thought; lessons of reliance on God. If we have lost bloom, we have gathered ripeness. The future has opened and widened before us. It is no longer the book of dark things, closed and put by till our play is over: the page lies open before us on the desk of life's business; though much in it is hidden, much is revealed to our inner sight, which solemnises us, and stirs us to action. It is no longer the great unknown land talked of as a dream and a mystery, but we are plying our voyage thither, standing at watch, and holding the helm. Already we begin to see its tokens float past us, and to scent the gales which come from its fields. And the present we have learned to distrust it and to question its testimony, have become wiser than to encumber by loading ourselves with its fading flowers; we search for pearls that shall endure.
II. "Who is he that overcometh the world but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?" Here, again, as years pass on we want more of Him, a firmer reliance on His work and His word, to stand among things visible and endure as seeing the invisible. If we would be gaining this victory, we must labour hard for knowledge and obedience, and every way for a greater realising of Christ. Our text is not only an implication of the possibility of victory: it is also a promise to the victor. The Author and Finisher of our faith Himself proclaims it, Himself offers to the conquerors a prize, and pledges for it His own word: "To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with Me in My throne."
H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons,vol. v., p. 319.
The Christian Conqueror.
This is the last of seven honours set before the Christian conquerors in the epistles to the seven Churches; and the throne of which this blessing speaks is itself described in St. John's next vision. We know what a throne it was which he saw unveil itself before him. We see at once that this throne means the centre of creation; that the glory of it is as of One invisible, and, except by His own will, unknowable; and that in that heart and centre of all things lives One who has suffered, One who has died, One who is and who ever has remained sinless: the Lamb that had been slain and dieth no more is in the midst of the throne. Perfect sympathy with pain, perfect deliverance from evil, are there in absolute life and light; and the Lamb, the Victor-Victim, speaks, and says, "He that overcometh, I will give to him to sit down with Me in My throne, even as I also overcame and sat down with My Father in His throne."
I. He that overcometh. When St. John wrote, people, like that faithful martyr Antipas, were overcoming by their own blood, and the whole Apocalypse shows a world about to be red with martyrdoms. Yet even then the word "overcoming" is used in these seven brief letters in connection with trials and difficulties which were not necessarily to end with them. That was only the supreme method of solving such problems of life as were otherwise insoluble. There were final conflicts in those days in which the forces of God and of the world were grappled together in the lives of men; the spirits of light and darkness incarnated themselves in men's daily action in forms so violent that he who meant to give God the victory in his own life could often do it only by giving his own life over to the death. But if the extremity of the struggle is not now commonly suffered to work itself out to the same bitter end with the knowledge of the onlooking world, it never could be suffered now yet similar, and sometimes the same, problems have to be solved in men's lives still, and still the Christian is called to overcome, and still he can often be victor only by being first a victim, as the Lamb was; and if he overcomes, his place is still henceforth the centre of all things. He sits with Him on the throne in true sympathy with the pain of this world, and also having himself a share in this world's deliverance from pain and from all evil.
II. What, then, are these problems which once could only be solved by readiness to die for the right solution, and which still present themselves for solutions for solutions on the rightness or wrongness of which almost all, if not all, about us depends? Such problems when St. John wrote were all the awful wickedness of the age; the conventional false worships which were then the cementing of the State and of all society; slavery; gladiator shows; one vast licentiousness of life. Men and women died freely in combating such things, for there was that within them which was a perpetual war with the spirit of these things. Among the problems outside us are such expenses of civilisation still: licentiousness of life; the classes that are sacrificed to it; the tender age of corruption; again, the miserable, unclean, indecent abodes which are all that civilised towns and villages offer, and grudge, to their myriads or their hundreds; again, our submissiveness to wealth, and our submissiveness to numbers, and our extreme difficulty in the way of simplicity of life or of speech, and now, even now, the ancient difficulty seeming to begin again of how to live, and talk, and think Christianly among unbelievers. One who does his own honest part in healing the world's sorrow and lightening the world's burdens, and is not ashamed to say he does it for Christ he is the overcoming one who helps to solve the world's greatest problems. That is the part which must be greater in the world to come than it can be now; for we shall not find ourselves able to do these things except in the spirit of Christ.
Archbishop Tait, Family Churchman,May 23rd, 1883.