Inducements to Holiness.
I. The argument which is drawn from the greater nearness of death (for this is evidently the argument here employed) is not of the same urgency when applied to the believer as to the unbeliever. If I ply the unbeliever with the fact that he is approaching nearer and nearer destruction, I just tell him that he has less time in which to escape and therefore less likelihood of obtaining deliverance. He must do it before daybreak, and the night is far spent. But when I turn with a like argument to the believer, and bid him cast off the works of darkness because the day is at hand, there is by no means the same appearance of force in the motive. "Now is our salvation nearer than when we believed"; and if a man be secure of salvation, so that his attainment of it does not depend on his striving for the rest of his life, to tell him that the end is at hand does not look like plying him with a proof of the necessity of exertion. But it is no Scriptural, and therefore no legitimate, feeling of security which can engender or excuse sluggishness. The only Scriptural certainty that a man will be saved is the certainty that he will struggle. Struggling is incipient salvation. Christ died to save us from our sins, and therefore the more striving there is against sin the more proportion is there of salvation. The Christian's life is emphatically a life of labour. Ought not then this well-ascertained principle the principle that the consciousness of the greater nearness of the end of a task generates fresh strength for the working it out ought not this thoroughly to convince us that to remind a man of there being less time for toil should urge him to toil with more energy?
II. And if this suffice not to explain why the day being at hand should animate the Christian to the casting off of the works of darkness, we have two other reasons to advance reasons why the consciousness of having less time to live should urge a man who feels sure of salvation to strive to be increasingly earnest in all Christian duties. The first reason is, because there is less time in which to strive for a high place in the kingdom of God; the second, because there is less time in which to glorify the Creator and Redeemer. Let these reasons be well considered and pondered, and they will, we think, show that there is full motive to "the casting off the works of darkness and putting on the armour of light" in the announced fact that the "night is far spent, the day is at hand."
H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit,No. 2286.
The Day of the Lord.
It is more than eighteen hundred years since the Apostle uttered this exulting cry. We cannot repeat it today when once more we come to our Advent time without some sense of hopelessness. For what has come of it? we ask; is the night gone, is the day at hand? Century after century, with the indestructible aspiration of the heart, has this note of joy been taken up. and the aspiration has been disappointed and the joy unreached. The drama of mankind has been charged with so much action, apparently wasted, and so much suffering, apparently squandered, on the ground of this incessant hope, and yet the great end seems no nearer. On and on, stumbling in the night with bleeding feet and wearied brain, the great world has struggled forward, hoping for the dawn. "There is no radiance," it mutters, "on the mountains yet. I hope for ever, that is my doom; but the night is deep, and the day delays. Would God I could see the morning glow!"
I. St. Paul was wrong when he expected the final close in his own time; but he was right in this that a new day was near at hand. We are wrong when we think we are near to the last great hour of time; but we are right when our heart tells us that God is coming to bring light to our own souls, to awaken our nation out of wrong into right, to set on foot new thoughts which will renew the life of mankind, for that is His continuous and Divine work. The reason, then, denies the nearness of the time when God will close this era of the world, and denies it on account of the slowness of God's work. In reality God's work is never slow or fast; it always marches at a constant pace; but to our sixty or seventy years it seems of an infinite tardiness. We live and grasp our results so hurriedly, and we have so short a time in which to work, that we naturally find ourselves becoming impatient with God. To work quickly seems to us to work well. But we forget how, even in our little life, we lose the perfection of results by too great rapidity. We seclude no hours of wise quiet, and our thought is not matured. God never makes these mistakes, the mistakes of haste. He never forgets to let a man, a nation, the whole of mankind rest at times, that they may each assimilate the results of an era of activity.
II. But though that great day is far away, the heart asserts, and truly, that when there is deepest night over nations and the world and men, a day of the Lord is at hand; that a dawn is coming not the last day, not the final dawn, but the uprising of Christ in light, deliverance, knowledge, and love. The belief is born not only out of our natural hatred of evil and suffering and the desire to be freed, but out of actual experience. Again and again have these days of the Lord come, has the night vanished and the sunlight burst on the world, not only in religion, but in the regeneration of societies, in the revolutions of nations, in the rush of great and creative thoughts over the whole of the civilised world. Men sunk in misery, ignorance, and oppression cried to the watchers, and the prophets answered, "The night is far spent," we see the coming day. And never has their answer been left unfulfilled.
S. A. Brooke, The Spirit of the Christian Life,p. 262.
References: Romans 13:12. H. J. Wilmot Buxton, The Life of Duty,vol. i., p. 1; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. v., p. 271; A. Jessopp, Norwich School Sermons,p. 219. Romans 13:12-14. E. Blencowe, Plain Sermons to a Country Congregation,vol. ii., p. 1.Romans 13:14. Homilist,3rd series, vol. vii., p. 96; Archbishop Maclagan, Church of England Pulpit,vol. iv., p. 273; F. W. Farrar, Contemporary Pulpit,vol. vi., p. 286; H. Bushnell, Christ and His Salvation,p. 371.Romans 13:14. J. B. Mozley, University Sermons,p. 46.