New Year's Day.
There is something exceedingly solemn in the opening of a new year. At such times more than others, when even the trifler is visited for an instant by serious thought, does the Christian love to trace the hand of God in the Church and in the world, to abstract himself from the whirl of business, and politics, and controversy, and calmly answer the important question, "Where am I, and whither tending?"
I. The words of the text form part of the ascription of praise uttered in heaven by the four living creatures, who symbolise, as I believe, the creation of God. They express a sense of the holiness and eternity of the Almighty, that He is essentially pure, and just, and merciful, and that His being and operations extend through past and present and to come. Now just such a sense of the holiness and providence of God befits us at the opening of another year of our lives. To have a firm persuasion that He is a pure, and just, and merciful Being, to trace His operations as such in this His world, is the most precious result of human knowledge and the highest triumph of the intellect of man. And as this view of the world is the highest result of wisdom, so is it likewise a cause of abundant consolation to the believer in Christ. It furnishes to him the comforting assurance that all things are working together for good, that the Lord reigneth, be the earth never so unquiet; and every onward step in the advancement of man, while it elates others with unbecoming pride, fills him with humble joy.
II. At present much of what God has done is unintelligible to us; more of what He is doing, seeing that we ourselves are a part of it, is hidden from us; and what He will do and bring on the world, who shall presume to say? But let us remember that to His people, those who in their hearts and lives serve and love Him, a day will come when, gifted with nobler faculties, breathing a purer air, and gazing with a keener vision, they will trace all His dealings with men in their completeness, and confess that He hath done all things well. Then the blurred and blotted map of the world's history will be restored, the vacant regions of human memory filled up, every corner of darkness and mystery lit with the beams of the Sun of light and righteousness.
H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons,vol. i., p. 1.
(with 1 John 5:20)
Preached on Trinity Sunday.
To-day we are called upon to keep the festival of revelation. Every other great festival of our Church commemorates a fact through which God has been pleased to teach men something of His purpose of love; Trinity Sunday encourages us to reflect for a brief space on that final truth, most absolute, most elementary, most practical, which gives unity and stability to all knowledge. The view of the Divine nature which it offers for our devout contemplation is the charter of human faith.
I. The conception of the Triune God is not given to us first in an abstract form. The abstract statement is an interpretation of facts, a human interpretation of vital facts, an interpretation wrought out gradually in the first years of the Church, and still mastered gradually in our individual growth. We are required each, in some sense, to win for ourselves the inheritance which is given to us, if the inheritance is to be a blessing. We learn through the experience of history and life how God acts, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and by the very necessity of thought we are constrained to gather up these lessons into the simplest possible formula. So we come to recognise a Divine Trinity, which is not sterile, monotonous simplicity. We come to recognise One in whom is the fulness of all conceivable existence in the richest energy, One absolutely self-sufficient and perfect, One in whom love finds absolute consummation, One who is in Himself a living God, the fountain and the end of all life.
II. The conception of the Triune God illuminates the idea of creation. It enables us to gain firm hold of the truth that the learning which we observe under the condition of time answers to a Being beyond time; that history is the writing out at length of that which we may speak of as a Divine thought. The same conception illuminates the idea of the Incarnation. It enables us to see that the Incarnation in its essence is the crown of the Creation, and that man, being made capable of fellowship with God, has in his very constitution a promise of the fulfilment of his highest destiny.
III. This truth is not speculative, but practical. The Chris tian conception of God is the translation into the language of thought of the first Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide. By our faith in these facts we confess that the Divine life has been united with human life. We confess, even if we do not distinctly realise the force of the confession, that the Divine life is the foundation and the end of human life. And we live, so far as life deserves the name, by this faith by which consciously or unconsciously we are stirred to toil and sustained in sacrifice.
Bishop Westcott, Oxford Review and Journal; May 24th, 1883.
References: Revelation 4:8. F. W. Farrar, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxxiii., p. 357. Revelation 4:10. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xix., No. 1002; Homilist,1st series, vol. vi., p. 425.Revelation 4:10; Revelation 4:11. M. Dix, Sermons Doctrinal and Practical,p. 145; Preacher's Monthly,vol. v., p. 286. Revelation 4:11. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. ii., p. 12.Revelation 5:1-10. Ibid.,vol. i., p. 417. Revelation 5:4; Revelation 5:5. A. James, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxix., p. 21.Revelation 5:5; Revelation 5:6. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. ii., p. 414.