Ephesians 1

Ephesians 1:1-6

THE THREE AUTHORS OF ! Ephesians 1:1-23PAUL is the author of the Epistle to the Ephesians. Its date is approximately 64 A. D. and it is probably the first in order of his prison Epistles. Tychicus was his postman, carrying not alone this Epistle, but with it probably the one to the Colossians and to Philemon. In view of the fact that in his Epistle to the Colossians (Colossians 4:16), he speaks of another Epistle already written to the Laodiceans, and to be read by them, this may have been a somewhat circular letter, sent to Ephesus first, and later to the Laodiceans.It is peculiarly a Church Epistle. It deals with that body of which Christ is the Head; and which is called “the Church of God”.The Apostolic Greeting (Ephesians 1:1-2), is worthy a chapter, but we pass it over in the interest of what follows, namely the three authors of salvation.This chapter indelibly impresses three great truths: The Believer is Predestinated by the Father; The Believer is Purchased by the Son; The Believer is Empowered by the Spirit.THE IS BY THE FATHER “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ; “According as He hath chosen us, in Him, before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love: “Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, “To the praise of the glory of His grace, wherein He hath made us accepted in the Beloved”. This language holds a number of words upon which the student of Scripture should pause. First upon the word—“Father”. God is not a force, but a Father! A writer says, “When I say ‘A force’ I am somewhere, at large; and almost think I am lost; but when I say ‘Father’ I am at home, and all my heart grows still.” You remember the language of the sweet singer:“I was in God’s nursery to-night as the evening was getting dim, And I sat with God’s children, and they were talking of Him; And another child was with them, though Him I could not see, They say that God has an elder Son, I think it was He. “‘Father’ He said first of all; though I could not see for the gloom, Yet the instant He said it I felt some one else in the room; And the room itself must have grown in a very little space, For the child called to Father in Heaven and Heaven is a far-away place. “But oh, what an echo was left by that one single sound. It crept into every corner and wandered round and round; The very air felt holy wherever the echo came; Cried the children, ‘Oh, that it were ever so. Hallowed be that Name!” “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”. Sir Robert Anderson once said to me, “Never again speak of ‘Jesus,’ it suits the Unitarian too well, and the critical student as well; employ the biblical phrase ‘the Lord Jesus Christ.’ Defend His claims; decry His critics; declare His Deity!” “Who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ”. We are told that “places” is a poor translation and that “in the heavenlies” is right, reminding us that in the earth we are but “pilgrims and strangers”; and that our spiritual experiences are forever suggesting the Home to which we journey and the land to which we truly belong, to all of which we are heirs in Christ, “according as He hath chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love”.It is a remarkable phrase—“Chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world”. God always expected to have a Church. God, from the beginning, knew what agency He would set against the world’s sin; and from the beginning, God knew that “the gates of hell should not prevail” against Him, “having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will”. Here let us pause and begin an outline!Predestination is by the exercise of God’s will.

It is, therefore, all of grace. Peter, in his First Epistle, second verse, speaks of the “elect according to the fore-knowledge of God, the Father”.

Jesus said to His own disciples, “Ye have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you”. The sinner, of himself, would never even seek salvation, much less secure it! “The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost”, and it is all of grace; all of the good will of God from the beginning. The term “predestination” which has alarmed many, is only another expression of the eternal compassion, the eternal plan, the eternal purpose, the eternal project—redemption!The believer’s position, however, is by the exercise of man’s will. He has “predestinated us unto the adoption of children, by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will”; but He will never foreclose on that which He has purchased without our personal consent. The day one is willing to be adopted, that day he becomes God’s child. And yet, lest we boast, that after all we have the merit of our wills, we ought to be reminded that He makes us “willing in the day of His power”.

Now, adoption is to bring to all the privileges of the truly born. Dr.

Jowett says truly that “sin is a voluntary breaking away from the Divine order, a conscious and deliberate violation of the Divine will”, and that “sin results in a certain distortion, a certain twist in our relationship to the Highest, which evidences itself in the disturbing and maiming sense of guilt.” A great experimental thinker has said that “sin is the God-resisting disposition in virtue of which, man, in self-sufficiency and pride, opposes himself to God, and thereby withdraws himself from the active ministry of God’s life and love.”Whatever relationship we may have maintained by reason of original creation it has been distorted and twisted and needs to be righted and straightened and God has provided for that “by Jesus Christ”. As Jowett says, “Matthew Arnold once told us that ‘sin is an infirmity to be got rid of,’ but forgot to tell us how!” Another counsels, “Get rid of sin by healthy developments and favorable conditions.” But, alas, who has found such conditions and accomplished such development? Men who have made endeavors, have been compelled to cry out at last, as Paul—the educated, as Paul—the beautifully environed, as Paul—the noble, as Paul —the eloquent, cried, “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me”? And no man who has been unable to say “I thank God through Jesus Christ my Lord” has ever found another way. All of this is “to the praise of the glory of His grace, wherein He hath made us accepted in the Beloved”.Now, experience is the realization of this relationship. We saw a child taken out of a Home, a few days since, to be adopted.

The act itself had little significance to him; but of the fruitfulness of that adoption he will find out from experience! As he comes later under the hand of that beautiful woman; as he comes into the fulness of her love, and into that of the noble man who united with her in that adoption; as he shares with them that home, and sees that the best even is reserved for him; as he goes forth beautifully clothed and abundantly fed; as he goes forth to the public school, and later finds himself in the University, his experience will deepen his relationship.

It is so with us! Our adoption is done the moment we consent to it; but the joy of it all, to the praise and glory of His grace—comes to us in ever-increasing measure until we shall break forth in song:“My Father is rich in houses and lands, He holdeth the wealth of the world in His hands! Of rubies and diamonds, of silver and gold, His coffers are full, He has riches untold.” And then add the refrain to express our relationship—“I am a child of the King!”But, as we have been predestinated by the Father so we have beenP BY THE SON “In whom we have redemption through His Blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace; “Wherein He hath abounded toward us in all wisdom and prudence; “Having made known unto us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He hath purposed in Himself: “That in the dispensation of the fulness of times He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in Heaven, and which are on earth; even in Him; “In whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of Him who worketh all things after the counsel of His own will: “That we should be to the praise of His glory, who first trusted in Christ. “In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the Word of Truth, the Gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise” (Ephesians 1:7-13). This Scripture justifies three remarks. First; The Believer was bought by the Son of God. You can object as much as you like to the term redemption, defined as “buying back you can say as often as you will that you never belonged to the devil, consequently you could not be bought back, but the testimony of all human experience is against your claim. Christ said, “Ye are of your father, the devil”, and men have never failed to illustrate it. “His servants ye are to whom ye obey”. If we are to be manumitted, One must appear and purchase us that He might set us free. Dr. James M. Gray had occasion to write: “O listen to our wondrous story, Counted once among the lost, Yet, One came down from Heaven’s glory Saving us at awful cost. “No angel could His place have taken Highest of the high tho’ He, The loved One on the Cross forsaken, Was one of the Godhead three,” and greater occasion even for his refrain: “Who saved us from eternal loss? Who but God’s Son upon the Cross? What did He do? He died for you. Where is He now? In Heaven interceding. Believe it thou, In Heaven interceding!” “There is one God, and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). It is reported that Charles Lamb on one occasion was sitting with a body of friends and the question was asked, “What would you do if Plato, Aristotle or Shakespeare should enter the room at this moment?” “I would rise,” said Lamb, “and receive them with great respect.” “And what would you do if Christ should enter?” “I should kneel at His feet,” replied the same great writer. Lamb is supposed to have belonged to the liberal wing of the visible church, and to have denied the Deity of Christ; yet, by this answer, he practically confessed that, after all, he recognized Him as more than a man—as the very God who appeared in our behalf.The price He paid for us was His own precious Blood. “In whom we have redemption through His Blood”. It is the day when men hate the doctrine of the Blood. They have found a new name for it, and called it “the gospel of the shambles;” but apart from it, there is no Gospel at all, since “without shedding of blood is no remission”. The Lamb “slain from the foundation of the world” is presented in Scripture as its one and only hope. Abel’s blood by another generation was good, but we must have a blood that speaks better things than that of Abel, or sinners are forever doomed.Dr.

Clark tells in his journal of missionary travel, how once in India, he listened in a humble tent to the song of a lot of coolies who had been a band of cutthroats and murderers, and yet had been marvelously redeemed. One of them named Kothabye, had been the chief of a robber band and had at last been captured and sold as a slave.

But no master would keep him, he was so wicked. At last a missionary bought him with the hope of saving him. One day he heard the missionary tell how the Blood of Christ could cleanse a sinner. Coming to him he asked, “Could He cleanse a murderer?” “Yes,” said the missionary. “But if he had killed five men?” “Yes,” said the missionary, “the Blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin.” “But if he had killed ten men?” “Yes,” said the missionary, “all manner of sin shall be forgiven men.” “But if he had killed twenty men?” “Yes,” said the missionary, “though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow”. “But if he had killed thirty men?” “Though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool”, answered the missionary. “Then”, said he, “I am that sinner, for I have killed thirty men.” But the Blood of Jesus Christ saved even that man, and he was now the leader of the coolie band and they were the greatest company of soul-winners known to that region. The writer, referring to it, said: “Perhaps you have no such record, and no deep sense of sin.” Listen, the sin offering was for sins of ignorance especially; the very condition of guilt was this, “Though he wist it not, yet he is guilty”. God knows that without the shedding of blood there is no remission; and Christ appeared to make the sacrifice in behalf of each and every one!The praise, then, belongs to Him and to Him alone.

One of the greatest sermons to which I ever gave audience was preached by Thomas Spurgeon, and one of the most impressive features of it the oft-repeated phrase, “It is all of grace!” The blotting out of the sins of the past is His gracious work. A writer declared that he walked across the valley of Dead Men in the South Island.

Looking back over the way, he saw his tracks in the sand and marked how crooked his path, though he had intended to walk straight. It became a parable to him; he said, “This is my life. Every footprint, crooked!” “Then I fell asleep. When I awakened hours afterwards, I could see no marks on the sand; every footprint was gone; not one to be seen; the tide had been in, and when it receded there was no sign of the crooked steps; and I said to my soul, ‘that is a fresh reminder of what God has done for me.’ “Yes; but it was through the Son, and the praise belongs to Him. That is why we sing:“All hail the power of Jesus’ Name, Let angels prostrate fall, Bring forth the royal diadem, And crown Him Lord of all.” And that is why “Sinners whose love can ne’er forget The wormwood and the gall, Should spread their trophies at His feet, And crown Him Lord of all.” But we call attention to the further suggestion of this Scripture, namely, that if the Church has been predestinated by the Father, and purchased by the Son, it isE BY THE SPIRIT “That we should be to the praise of His glory, who first trusted in Christ. “In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the Word of Truth, the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise” (Ephesians 1:12-13). There is nothing in all human thought so wonderful as the redemption of man. We ought not to marvel, therefore, that the entire God-head—Father, Son and Spirit—engaged together; nor should we be surprised to discover that each holds His specific office, and does His specific work. If the Father predestinated redemption and the Son purchased it, the Spirit makes it possible.He seals the Lord’s servants. A careful study of the words employed with reference to the Spirit will also show that wherever there is a distinction, there is also a difference. “Baptize” is one word; “endue” is another; “seal” is a third. On one occasion Jesus Christ said to the multitudes that had sought Him for the loaves and fishes: “Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you: for Him hath God the Father sealed”. A.

J. Gordon says: “This sealing must evidently refer back to His reception of the Spirit at the Jordan.” It is maintained that the old Jewish priest had a custom of carefully examining the lamb selected for the offering, and if he found no defect in it, he put the temple seal upon it, thus certifying that it was fit for sacrifice and for food. Just previous to His baptism, John called attention to Christ, by saying, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”. It ought not to amaze us, therefore, that when He appeared at Jordan, under the Father’s omniscient scrutiny, He was a Lamb “without blemish and without spot”, concerning whom the Father Himself could say: “This is My beloved Son in whom I am well pleased”; and then set upon Him the seal of the Holy Spirit, descending in the form of a dove.Gordon contends that the disciple is like his Lord in this, “In whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise”. In conversion the believer receives the testimony of God and sets his seal to it that God is true; in consecration God sets His seal upon the believer, that he is true. Paul writes to the Corinthians, “Now He which stablisheth us with you in Christ, and hath anointed us, is God; who hath also sealed us, and given the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts” (2 Corinthians 1:21-22).Christopher Wordsworth, realizing this truth wrote:—“Come, ever, blessed Spirit, come, And make Thy servant’s heart Thy home; May each a living temple be Hallowed forever, Lord, to Thee; Enrich that Temple’s holy shrine With sevenfold gifts of grace divine,— With wisdom, light and knowledge bless, Strength, counsel, fear and godliness. “Oh, Trinity, in unity! One only God and persons three In whom, through whom, by whom we live, In Thee we praise and glory give; Oh, grant to us to use Thy grace, That we may see Thy glorious face, And ever with the heavenly host Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.” He instructs the Lord’s Servants.The Apostle prayed for the Ephesians that,—“The God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him; “The eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that ye may know what is the hope of His calling, and what the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints. “And what is the exceeding greatness of His power to usward who believe” (Ephesians 1:17-19). G. G. Findlay, a great English expositor, remarks, “The spirit of wisdom and revelation will proceed from the Holy Ghost dwelling in those Gentile believers.”When the mind of the Old Testament Prophet is illumined it is the work of the Spirit.Daniel’s wisdom in interpreting dreams was given to him by God—the revealer of secrets—an adequate description of the Third Person of the Godhead. In the New Testament, Christ said of the Holy Ghost, “When He is come He shall guide you into all truth”. The effect of His instruction is found in the circumstance that men of different creeds, and coming from all quarters of the earth, discover a marvelous harmony of thought, when the Holy Ghost illumines them.Bernard was a monk, steeped in the spirit of Catholicism. But when his heart was opened to the Holy Ghost, he wrote,—“Jesus, the very thought of Thee, With sweetness fills my breast.” And every true member of the Protestant Church, listening to that song, believes that Bernard was visited by the Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of his understanding being enlightened, and that he knew what was the “hope of His calling, and what the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what the exceeding greatness of His power to usward who believe”.In other words, the Spirit-led men of the earth, called by whatever name you may care to employ, separated by any distance that may intervene, and partitioned by any denominational labels that may be employed, are, in spite of all, an answer to the Master’s prayer,—“That they may be one, even as We are one”. But the chapter does not conclude until a further step is taken.He, the Holy Ghost, exalts God’s Son. It was that Holy Ghost of promise—“Which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead, and set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places, “Far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come: “And hath put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be the head over all things to the Church, “Which is His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all” (Ephesians 1:20-23). The same Spirit that quickened Christ from the dead, inspires every believer in Christ to exalt Him, above all—all men—all angels—all archangels; to name Him as the Head over all, “to the Church which is His body,” to mention Him as that One which filleth all in all.In other words, He is literally fulfilling the Lord’s promise, “He shall not speak of Himself; He shall take of Mine and shall show it unto you”. And wherever a man is Spirit-illumined, Christ is not only His Lord, but He is the only Lord and Lord of all. You may find Him in the fold of Unitarianism; his philosophy and theology may be as unsound and unscriptural as commonly characterizes that company, and yet, if the Spirit of God ever breathes upon him, He will bring him to say of the Christ as did Sir John Bowring the great singer,—“In the Cross of Christ I glory Towering o’er the wrecks of time; All the light of sacred story Gathers round its head sublime.”

Ephesians 1:7-8

BY THE BLOOD Ephesians 1:7-8ONE cannot read this Epistle to the Ephesians without being impressed by the fact that the Apostle Paul has introduced into this Epistle a unique style, or custom, namely, that of setting forth some sweet and essential doctrine, and then closing His statement with a doxology such as “praise to the glory of His grace”, or “praise to His glory”. And, if at some time you will read the Epistle to the Ephesians at a single sitting, you will see better occasions for these outbursts of praise from the Apostle than any cursory reading would ever bring. The first of these doxologies occurs in the sixth verse, and is a signal for a new start upon another phase of the great subject of this Epistle, and that phase is redemption.Three things only will I attempt in the few minutes allotted to this talk.The first is the clear statement of the text; the second comes of its interpretation in the light of other Scripture, while the third lesson to be learned is the one without which the other two are in vain. IS BY THE BLOOD That is the statement of the text, “In whom we have redemption through His Blood”. I have employed the word “purchase”, because every student of Scripture understands that the Blood of Jesus is the price paid for our redemption.In his First Epistle to the Corinthians, 6th chapter, 20th verse, Paul says, “For ye are bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s” (1 Corinthians 6:20). And again, in 1 Corinthians 7:23, “Ye are bought with a price: be not ye the servants of men”. And the context is in evidence that the price paid was the precious Blood of Jesus. That is why we sing,“Christ has for sin atonement made, What a wonderful Saviour! We are redeemed, the price is paid, What a wonderful Saviour! “I’ll praise Him for the cleansing Blood, What a wonderful Saviour! That reconciled my soul to God, What a wonderful Saviour! “What a wonderful Saviour is Jesus, my Jesus! What a wonderful Saviour is Jesus my Lord!” The purchase price was precious. In 1 Peter 1:18-19 we read, “Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, * * but with the precious Blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot”.You will remember that in the Book of Acts, Acts 20:28, Paul says to the elders of the Church at Ephesus, “Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the Church of God, which He hath purchased with His own Blood”. And in his Epistle to the Hebrews 9:12, the same Apostle writes, “Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by His own Blood He entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us”. The most precious thing in Heaven’s possession—the life of the Son of God—was laid on the altar of redemption.God paid all the price“I hear the Saviour say, ‘Thy strength indeed is small, Child of weakness, watch and pray, Find in Me thine all in all’. “Jesus paid it all, All to Him I owe; Sin had left a crimson stain, He washed it white as snow. “Lord, now indeed I find Thy power, and Thine alone, Can change the leper’s spots, And melt the heart of stone. “For nothing good have I Whereby Thy grace to claim— I’ll wash my garment white In the Blood of Calvary’s Lamb. “Jesus paid it all, All to Him I owe; Sin had left a crimson stain, He washed it white as snow.” Mr. Spurgeon says, “I had the pleasure of visiting the Leonine City in Rome a short time after the Italian troops had taken possession, and I noticed that every house had marked up most conspicuously the arms of the Kingdoms of Italy and the name of Victor Emanuel. They were not content to have it over their doors, but all over the fronts of the houses you read “Victor Emanuel, King of Italy”, showing that they were right glad to escape from the dominion of the pope, and to avow their allegiance to a constitutional king. Surely, if for a human monarch, and earthly freedom which he brought, man would thus set up his escutcheon everywhere, you and I who believe in Jesus are bound to exhibit the Blood-red token, and to keep it always conspicuous. Let others believe the priest, we believe Jesus. Let others trust their works, we trust the shed Blood. Let others rely on frames and feelings, discipline and development, we believe in Jesus Christ, and Him only; and we are to nail to the mast the Blood-red banner of atoning sacrifice.”“My faith is built on nothing less, Than Jesus’ Blood and righteousness. I dare not trust the sweetest frame But wholly lean on Jesus’ Name. On Christ the solid rock I stand All other ground is sinking sand.” IS TO ALL It is rare that I find myself disposed to dissent from anything Mr. Spurgeon says, but he has a printed sermon in which he discusses the subject of redemption, saying, “There is one class of men who believe in what is called ‘general redemption’, affirming it to be an undoubted truth that Jesus Christ has shed His Blood for every man, and that the intention of Christ in His death was the salvation of all men”, and then he goes on to combat that idea, and to set forth the doctrine of particular redemption in which view I hold he was wrong, and for the following reasons:First,—God is no respecter of persons. In II Samuel we read, “Neither doth God respect any person” (2 Samuel 14:14), And in Acts 10:34, touching the conversion of Cornelius, “Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons; but in every nation he that feareth Him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with Him”. The simple reason is that God does not see men as men see one another, for “man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart”, and He knows what is in man, recognizes always his immortal part, and in consequence his immortal worth.One of the grievous sins of the hour is in this respect of persons, this bowing down before people that are in high station, and fine feathers, without any reference to whether they have much character; this despising of people who are in humble station and in mean clothing, e’en though they have excellent character; it is not of God.“A man’s a man for a’ that”! Robert Burns had a better conception at this point than many a professed Christian. He was once taken to task by a young English blood, with whom he was walking, for recognizing an honest farmer in the open street, when Burns exclaimed, “Why you fantastic gomeral, it was not the great coat, the schone bonnet, and the saunders boat-hose that I spoke to, but the man that was in them; and that man, sir, for truth and worth, would weigh down you and me and ten more such any day”.God was no respecter of persons, and so I believe that when He wrought redemption, He wrought it for every man, for “God is love”.Surely the shed Blood was sufficient for every man, for we read in Romans 5:17-18,“If by one man’s offence death reigned by one; much more they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ. “Therefore as by the offence of one, judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life”. Martin Luther says the devil once appeared unto him with a long scroll, upon which he had written the catalogue of his sins. At first Luther was affrightened, but suddenly remembering, he said, “Ah, Satan, you have told the truth, but not the whole truth. Attach this sentence to what you have written, ‘The Blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin’.”You will remember that in the Book of Revelation the Apostle says, “I heard a loud voice saying in Heaven, Now is come salvation and strength and the Kingdom of our God, and the power of His Christ, for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night, And they overcame him by the Blood of the Lamb” (Revelation 12:10-11).My third reason for saying that redemption is proffered to all is that the Scriptures speak to all. In John 1:29 the Word is, “Next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”, and in John’s First Epistle 1 John 2:2 we read, “And He is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world”, hence I say redemption is proffered to all. IS ONLY TO BE It is already perfected according to our text,“To the praise of the glory of His grace, wherein He hath made us accepted in the Beloved; “In whom we have redemption through His Blood, the forgiveness of sins”. And to the Colossians Paul wrote the same thing,“Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light: “Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the Kingdom of His dear Son, “In whom we have redemption through His Blood, even the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1:12-14). Those who put this redemption aside must perish.In Hebrews 10:28-29 the Scriptures say,“He that despised Moses’ Law died without mercy under two or three witnesses: “Of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the Blood of the Covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing; and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace”? It was the Blood of Jesus Christ that paid the price of our souls, and that Blood alone that can wash away the pollution of them.If He were any other than the Son of God, this would not be so. As Dr. Talmage says, “The blood of Paul that soaked the dust of the guillotine; the blood of Hugh Lattimer, that consumed in the fire; the blood of the high-souled martyrs that reddened the mouths of the lions in the Coliseum, have just as much worth to your soul as the Blood of Christ unless you take this last as expiatory, and feel the truth that the Blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sins.”But those that possess this redemption are safe. It is purchased by the Blood. It is perfected by the work of Jesus Christ. It is proffered to all, but it is only valuable to them that appropriate it. “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life”. “He that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the Name of the only begotten Son of God”. “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus”, for they have appropriated His redemption.

They are secure in His salvation.Dr. Torrey, in his little book, “How to Obtain the Fullness of Power”, tells the story of an old woman who lay dying.

Her rector heard of it and called upon her. “They tell me,” he said, “that you are dying.” “Yes,” she replied. “And have you made your peace with God?” “No,” came the answer. “Then are you not afraid to meet God?” “No.” The minister was excited and said, “Woman, do you realize that you have but a short time to live, and that you will soon meet a holy God?” “Yes, I realize it perfectly.” “And you are not afraid?” “No, not at all.” “And you have not made your peace with God? What do you mean woman?” exclaimed the minister. There was radiance in every feature as she answered, “I did not make my peace, because I did not need to. Christ made peace more than 1800 years ago by the Blood of His Cross, and I have accepted the peace He made and am simply resting in that”.No wonder Dr. Torrey says, “Oh, blessed is the one who has learned to rest in the peace Christ made, who counts his sins forgiven because Christ’s Blood was shed, and Christ says so.” “We have redemption through His Blood, the forgiveness of sins according to His grace”, and every saved soul has a right to join this morning in the song, once rejected, but now printed in every standard hymnal,“There is a fountain filled with blood, Drawn from Immanuel’s veins; And sinners, plunged beneath that flood, Lose all their guilty stains. ‘The dying thief rejoiced to see That fountain in his day; And there have I, as vile as he, Washed all my sins away. “Thou dying Lamb, Thy precious Blood Shall never lose its power, Till all the ransomed Church of God Be saved to sin no more. “E’er since, by faith, I saw the stream Thy flowing wounds supply, Redeeming love has been my theme, And shall be till I die.”

Ephesians 1:17

THE CHURCH, CHRIST’S SOLE AND BODY Ephesians 1:17; Ephesians 1:22-23THERE are few subjects more often, or earnestly discussed, at the present time than the Church. Prophets of evil there are who declare its day is about done, and its destiny is substantially sealed. Professional optimists there are who take an exactly opposite view, namely, that the Church is just coming to herself, and that her glory is a thing of the future. Without at all attempting in this chapter to settle that discussion, or even to seriously engage in the same, we propose another direction for thought, namely, that suggested by our theme, “The Church, Christ’s Sole and Sufficient Body”. Paul writing to the Ephesians spoke of Jesus Christ (Ephesians 1:17; Ephesians 1:22-23) the Head of all things to the Church which is His Body, and in that brief and defining statement, gave us good occasion to reflect upon the certain great facts involved in the very constitution of the Church itself; facts that might be stated as follows: It Is Formed by His Spirit; It Is the Lone Exhibit of His Life, and It Suffices for All Spiritual Expression.IT IS FORMED BY HIS SPIRIT The true Church is made up of His children. When He said to Nicodemus, “Ye must be born again”, He was not only stating a necessity for place in the Kingdom of God when it shall come, but also an experience that should precede Church fellowship. If the angels which kept their first estate constitute “the general assembly and Church of the firstborn, which are written in Heaven”, the ecclesia, or “called-out ones” of earth are the consequence of faith in Jesus Christ effecting a new creation in Him. “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new”, and “whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God”. A true Church, therefore, is constituted of regenerate ones. For one to experience saving grace and not to associate himself with believers in a church fellowship, is to fail equally in discovering the Divine will and in walking in the Divinely appointed way.Campbell Morgan thought when Paul cried out, “Who art Thou, Lord?” that the very use of the word, “Lord”, testified to the great change that had come, and he affirms, “This man has joined the church at Damascus before he arrived there. Do you not see that he has taken the crown off his own life from his own head and put it on the head of Jesus”? That is the way to become a member of a church, and of such THE Church is made.“The church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ, her Lord, She is His new creation, by water and the Word, From Heaven He came and sought her, to be His holy bride, With His own Blood He bought her, and for her life He died”. The Church inherits His nature. The biological law of life is not barred from the spiritual realm; “to every seed it is given to bring forth after its kind” obtains in the church. In spite of all the faults and deficiencies, schemings, and sins that belong to the human nature of man, into the true church member has come a new nature, destined to eventual and perfect triumph, namely, the nature of Christ. Of that the Apostle John was writing when he said, “Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin, for his seed remaineth in him”, a remark that has a two-fold application, originally and perfectly to Christ, and in a secondary sense certainly to Christians, for the immediate context adds, “In this the children of God are manifest”.“Christ also loved the Church, and gave Himself for it; “That He might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the Word, “That He might present it to Himself a glorious Church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing: but that it should be holy and without blemish” (Ephesians 5:25-27). Christ is the one and only Head of the Church. “Head over all things to the Church, which is His Body”. Therefore the Church is subject unto Christ, and one might add, subject to Christ alone. Such Scripture anticipates the attempted autocracies and hierarchies destined to take place in her human history. Whether these had already manifested themselves as menacing powers in apostolic days, we are not in doubt. Peter, in his First Epistle (1 Peter 5:2-3) exhorts the elders to “feed the flock of God which is among you, taking the oversight thereof, not by constraint, but willingly; not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind; neither as being lords over God’s heritage, but being ensamples to the flock”.If that great Apostle were alive today, he would thunder against the ecclesiastical hierarchies of the century. Paul would join him in this.

When he was writing to Timothy he declared, “This is a true saying, If a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work”, and then he proceeds to tell what a bishop should be like, “blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach; not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous; One that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity”. How strange to conclude a discourse like that and say not a word about his ruling the whole state of churches! He has reason, for the very simple fact is that no such bishop ever lived in New Testament times! The whole papal system, whether it exist with Rome or those who have partly come out of her, is lacking in a Biblical basis, and on that very account has been subjected to increasing abuses.How far we have departed from the New Testament ideal of a bishop who was the “episcopas” or overseer, the pastor of a single flock, one realizes when he compares some present-day ecclesiastical potentates with Paul’s Letter to Titus. Here he tells that a bishop, among other things, should hold “fast the faithful word as he has been taught, that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers”, but never once mentions the great hierarchical powers of administration. If therefore men rise up to exercise an overlordship of this sort, they not only do it without the authority of the Word, but in opposition to the sole headship of the Son of God.This brings us to our second remark concerning the Church:IT IS THE LONE EXHIBIT OF HIS LIFE He elects to live in it. The Head lives in the Body. Christ lives in the Church. It is true of the regenerated individual and it should also be true of the Church, that “the body is the temple of the Holy Ghost”. The temple may be unworthy its tenant— in fact, it always is, and often sadly so. That does not in any wise detract from the character or greatness of the Tenant, Himself. Diogenes is said to have lived in a tub, but in spite of that fact, he was a philosopher. When Christ decided to manifest Himself in the Church, He appreciated that, made up of mortal men as it would be, it would fall short at many points and fail to represent Him in many ways.

He also knew, as men should understand, that its deficiencies would not detract from His perfection. On the other hand, His perfection would tend to correct its deficiencies and perfect its character.Recently, I read, in a Canadian magazine, a most charming story of Western prairie life, written by a young English woman. She was a university graduate and had married an officer in the army. When the war was over and she came with her husband to his own land in Canada, she shortly found herself called upon to go with him to the Western plains, and take possession of a ranch which had been deserted by its tenant. The plain log house was a strange contrast to her palatial English home. The weeds that ran even to the door were ugly looking things when she remembered the blooming flowers of her father’s country estate.

The rough board floor and leaky roof caused her heart to sink, but she was a girl of spirit and set her deft hands to work. Getting her husband to plow up a portion of the prairie about the house, she used her landscape knowledge in laying out a lawn and garden.

Securing from him roughly constructed boxes, she nailed them along the window sills, filled them with rich dirt and planted flower seeds there. Getting small round boulders from a nearby creek, she laid out paths, and whitewashed the stones. The husband patched the roof, and inside the house her fingers were busy daily, till every aspect pleased. In a few weeks her friends who visited her were ecstatic over the neatness and beauty of the whole scene. The entire premises had taken on the character of her tenancy.It was a most delapidated house into which our Lord consented to come, and yet the Church of God is today the world’s most beautiful body, due to one solitary circumstance, namely, that He elected to live in it.He deigns to be known by it. It is called, by the pen of inspiration, “His Body”, and again, “The Body of Christ”.

It will never perfectly become Him until he takes it from earth, and in the translation, perfects the same. But the body is often sadly incomplete in its expression of the indwelling Spirit.

Alexander H. Stephens was most diminutive and all his life long an invalid. His big wheel chair was a familiar object on the streets of Washington. Feeble, emaciated in body, racked with aches and pains, and yet in that little frame lodged a mind that was matchless. Thomas Dixon once said, “Men knew that back of the pale face, shrivelled hand and dwarfed body that lay so lightly in that chair, there was the spirit of a lion, and his acquaintances either loved or feared him, while all respected”. He mastered all circumstances by means of his mighty brain. One forgets a deficient body when a brain like that controls it, and consents to indwell it. So with the Church of God.

The members of “the body” are far from perfect, but have a Head of perfection.The world has no other vision of Him. Our Lord once said, “He that hath seen Me, hath seen the Father”, and again the pen of inspiration speaks of Him as “the express image of the Father”. It is not true that he that hath seen the Church hath seen Christ, but it is true that the Church is the only vision of Him that men get. We are His “epistles” and while we poorly express Him, we become, by our very relationship to Him, the manifestation of His person to most men. The discerning, however, will judge Him not by His Body, the Church, but rather by His Spirit which indwells it.Abraham Lincoln was to most people an ungainly and homely man, but to the woman whose son he had pardoned, he was the handsomest man she had ever seen.The illustration holds in the view men get of Christ. To the outside world, which looks only upon the Church, “His Body”, there is no beauty in Him that they should desire Him, but to the one who has come to know His saving grace, He becomes “the Fairest among ten thousand and the one altogether lovely”, and to such an one, even the Church, His physical manifestation, is attractive in the last degree.

The greatest testimony of one’s Christian experience is at this point: “We know that we have passed from death unto life because we love the brethren”. We do not forget the day when the two disciples walked to the village of Emmaus, from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs. “And it came to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus Himself drew near, and went with them.

But their eyes were holden that they should not know Him”. However, when He took bread and blessed and gave it to them, “their eyes were opened, and they knew Him”. Many a man comes into touch with Christ in the person of the church and does not recognize Him, but when for such a man the Bread of Life is broken and the cup of salvation is tasted, the vision clears. One’s eye must be enlightened, “that he may know what is the hope of his calling and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints”. “Blessed are your eyes if ye see”.Finally,THE CHURCH FOR ALL He provided no other means. It has always seemed to men a strange thing that Christ should have committed His cause absolutely to man’s care, and yet such was His course from the beginning. Perhaps no illustration employed by a modern writer has been so often repeated as Gordon’s vision of Christ and Gabriel, walking in the heavenlies together and talking of His sacrifice on Calvary. Gabriel asked Him what plan He had for publishing the great good news that His death atoned for sin, and He responded by saying, “I left that with James and Peter and John and Andrew and others, to make it known”. Gabriel said, “But suppose they should forget or fail, or that their successors in the far off twentieth century should cease to bear a testimony? Then what other provision have you for getting this good news to all the world?” to which Christ answered, “I have no other plan”.That is a truth upon which we need to lay emphasis at this moment.

The Church of God is the only institution definitely ordained unto the redemption of man. Men are great in organizing movements.

Most of them are not formed after any pattern seen in the mount, and they follow one another in quick succession to the “Movement Cemetery”. We have had the “Brotherhood Movement”, “the Laymen’s Forward Movement”, “The Men and Religion Movement”, “The Interchurch World Movement”; we now have “The New World Movement”, and every denomination has a “denominational movement”. Not a one of them expects to survive the short term set for its course only a few months since. No man will have the hardihood to even suggest their continuance beyond a five year term. It is little wonder! The Spirit never patterned them, and God never appointed them.

They are like the grass; in the morning they grow up and flourish; in the evening, they are cut down and withered.Not so the Church of God—the gates of hell cannot prevail against it.It is reported that when physicians told Douglas Jerrold that he was dying, the old man started at the statement, and rising on his elbow, exclaimed, “What, man; die and leave these little ones helpless! I cannot; I will not die!” He lived, and three years more were added before the final call came.

In other words, his indomitable will grasped death by the throat and held him at arm’s length for three seasons; but the Church is a thousandfold mightier than that. Again and again men have prophesied its death. The Unitarian philosophers are telling us, even now, it is perishing from the face of the earth. The Church can afford to laugh at such doleful prophecies. She is not 2,000 years old, but 2,000 years young! Dark days have swept over her; disasters have smitten her again and yet again.

Persecutors have been determined to wipe her from the earth; false philosophies have sought to pervert her message and blind the minds of her members, but through it all she walks with increasing strength and her power waxes!He needs no other medium. As one looks back over the past, he realizes the folly of which men have been guilty in refusing to build after the “pattern shown in the mount” and in adopting plans all their own.

Men have concluded they knew more about how to win the world to righteousness than God did, and they have started all sorts of organizations in order to accomplish it: Play-grounds, social settlements, Boy and Girl Scout movements, Outing Camps, Big Brother and Big Sister movements, the Y. M. and Y. W. C. A’s, Conferences, Colleges, Universities, Theological Seminaries, and on and on, and on, ad infinitum; and it begins to be increasingly evident that not a single one of them, nor all of them combined are accomplishing ought for a world’s redemption, save as some of them happen to clearly ally themselves with a true church and to be a medium of expression of the same. More and more, thoughtful men are finding that these multiplied agencies are in not a few instances setting themselves squarely against the interest of the Church of God, and are becoming its most menacing enemies.Take the famous Lake Geneva Conference: For recent years its teaching on Sunday School work has been of such a character as to make Sunday School work worthless and decapitate the Church altogether by denying the Deity of Jesus Christ and eviscerate the Church itself by striking at its very vitals.Take the Y.

M. and Y. W.

C. A’s of America and make the few exceptions to the rule the occasional ones that have remained loyal to our Lord, and the remaining portion of them today are the greatest single menace that the Church of God sees. The majority of their secretaries have been educated in rationalistic schools; evangelism has died out of their halls, and only Unitarian sentiment is any longer welcomed by most of those who are in places of power! It would be practically impossible at this moment for a conservative preacher to secure a hearing in the average Y. M. C.

A., but those ministers who doubt the authority of the Word, question the Virgin Birth, rule the reported miracles out of the revelation, are not only welcomed there, but they are constantly bidden. Meetings are now being often held to encourage local ministers to take greater interest.

It will accomplish it for liberal ministers, but conservative men will feel no interest until there is a reform. We know all moneys invested today in such Y. M. C. A’s are moneys not only lost to the Church of God, but set busy against the Church of God.These remarks apply with equal aptness to a multitude of colleges that have been founded by the Church. A writer to an Eastern paper recently said, “The Congregationalists were pioneers in education in America. They sent a line of schools across the continent, Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Bowdoin, Amherst, Williams and Oberlin”. Certainly; and could you call another list of institutions in America that are as flagrantly opposing “the faith once delivered” as this same cross-continent line of colleges and universities?

There is not a single one of them that stands four-square today for those fundamentals that have been the life force of the Church of God. There is not a single one of them into which one can send a young Christian, with any assured prospect of having him returned a Christian at the end of his college course. “They are the enemies of the Cross of Christ”, and the modernistic spirit, which has mastered in them, is more and more conquering in the colleges of all the denominations, until now the making of the list of schools loyal to the God of heaven and earth, to the Deity of Christ, to the Bible, the Text Book of the Church, is a task that sorrows one in that it is so shortly accomplished. Millions upon millions of dollars the churches have contributed to make these scholastic institutions possible, and when we have built them up to places of power, they have turned upon their creators to rend them, and by attacking the Bible, the Church’s only Text Book, they have sought either to so far befog the testimony of the Church that men through it may not find the way, or blot out that testimony altogether. And yet in spite of this piece of history, now perfectly understood by the unprejudiced, the appeal for more money for these extra-Biblical institutions is not subsiding but growing, and requests for donations are no longer depended upon for their development, but drives are instituted instead. Men who believe God and follow His Word are increasingly refusing to fall into line and perform their part at the crack of the whip of ecclesiastical masters.And yet for an example of all of this, or any evidence that such was ever God’s will or way, I search my Bible in vain. In the Old Testament and in the New, I find no play-grounds approved; no social settlements suggested; no Y.

M. or Y. W.

C. A.’s organized; no Brotherhood Movements financed; no confederacies formulated. The Gospels are a record of how the Church was brought into being. The Book of the Acts is a history of the Church at work. The Epistles are, with few exceptions, addressed to the Churches of the living God, and the Book of Revelation opens with a series of seven such Letters to Churches and closes with a scene that translates “the Church” and turns it into the Kingdom of Heaven! In all this volume of literature, I find no single intimation or reference to even such institutions as Visiting Nurses Associations, none to hospitals, none to brotherhoods.Now, do not mistake me!

I believe the Visiting Nurses Association to be an admirable institution and worthy of a citizen’s support. I believe the Red Cross Society to be the finest expression of humanitarianism.

I believe that play-grounds for children are institutions worthy of approval. I believe hospitals and schools are necessities of the state, but my position is this: that the Church is the one and only institution through which God has called His elect to operate, and it is the profoundest pity, the most egregious blunder, that men have gone outside of her and organized extra institutions that have become inimical to her, to do the very work that was designated to her; that she is fitted to accomplish and upon the discharge of which her spiritual success absolutely depends.There isn’t a social service, an ethical ideal that belongs within the realm of Christian obligation that cannot be better discharged by the hands of an active church than by any extra-organization ever conceived. If you would make a contribution to play-grounds, and I should be glad to see you do it, make it in the name of the Church of God. If the Church is to visit the sick, and surely that is her obligation, let her do it through her members only. The City Hospitals of every metropolis in America will welcome as cordially the Christian minister and Christian worker as any denominationally supported hospital born or grown big to this hour. Why then, will you tell me, should millions of dollars go into denominational hospitals to discover upon the completion and short time operation of the same that we are compelled to receive the children of the world, to employ ofttimes physicians and nurses of the world, who have no religious convictions whatever, who have no God, or Christ?

Why take out of the hands of the state the offices that belong to it, instead of doing what the Church of God was set to do, save men and women?Why invest millions in great denominational universities, and present to the world institutions that are no whit different in religious atmosphere and opportunities for Christian service from the state taxed and supported schools? Will any well-instructed man now claim a spiritual superiority for them?

I grant you, our forefathers when out of their poverty they founded these schools, did it with the certain expectation of making them Christian to the core, of permitting only Christian teachers to appear in them, and employing the Bible as the chief of all text books, but what one of them abides by this dream of the dear men now dead?The principal difficulty with all these institutions has been in the circumstance that they have been built apart from a church, conducted independently of a church, and in the process of time have departed from the faith that made the church. Spurgeon’s College remains faithful, but Spurgeon’s College remains linked indissolubly with Spurgeon’s Church. The work of man for man, the basal idea of the Y. M. C. A., is right, but in the name of the New Testament, why not let it be done in the church, by the church and for the church?I say the same concerning education of the highest and most Christian sort, and if I believed the day would come when the school I founded and superintend would be divorced from the church that gave it birth, I should entertain the gravest alarm as to whether it would remain loyal.If a man really wants to invest his Christian influence so that it will bring the largest fruit in return, employ his time and talents so that they will most honor God, no institution has ever been born or will ever be begotten that provides him such an opportunity as a church, and I had rather be the man who leaves as a monument to his labors a great, true Church of God, so ramified in its work as to reach the poor, and minister to them; the sick, and reveal to them the Great Physician; the discouraged, and impart to them the brightest of hopes; the sinful, and show them salvation’s way; than to contribute to any other institution that has ever been named among men.

Give me a Church of God, modeled after the New Testament pattern, filled with His Spirit, and I will show you a Church of God that will serve society at every point, that will be a contributing agency to every element of permanence in the state, and that will be the exponent of the only righteousness that can bless, and make great a nation!Turn to the Book of the Acts and have the early Christians come back for a report and be impressed with the things upon which they speak. It is not upon play-grounds, though I hope at times they were playful men.

It was not upon social settlements, though I trust they walked in the midst of the people as gracious ensamples of how to live. It was not upon hospitals and colleges, though their presence was healing and their speech educational. It was not upon Y. M. and Y. W. C. A’s, though they did effective work with young men and women. It was upon the power of the Gospel in the lives of the individuals and the growth of the Church of the living God, the Divinely ordained institution.And what inspiring reports they are!

Thousands convicted and converted, and daily additions to the Church as they were being saved, contributions to the Church, care of the needy by the Church, healing through the Church, Letters to the Church, conferences between the Churches, officers for the Church, the Church commissioned to the end of the earth, and the promise of Christ with the Church to the end of the age! Thus the New Testament program, and God has not changed His appointment. If I had my way today I would let the state manage all affairs that belong to the state, and the Church of God assert her influence upon every phase of human life, seeking to control the affairs of her own organization only and accepting as great commission to the world the work of pointing men to Christ, the Inspirer of intellects and the Saviour of souls.“I love Thy Church, O God; her walls before Thee stand, Dear as the apple of Thine eye and graven on Thy hand; For her my tears shall fall, for her my prayers ascend, To her my cares and toils be given, till toils and cares shall end.”

Ephesians 1:22-23

THE CHURCH, CHRIST’S SOLE AND BODY Ephesians 1:17; Ephesians 1:22-23THERE are few subjects more often, or earnestly discussed, at the present time than the Church. Prophets of evil there are who declare its day is about done, and its destiny is substantially sealed. Professional optimists there are who take an exactly opposite view, namely, that the Church is just coming to herself, and that her glory is a thing of the future. Without at all attempting in this chapter to settle that discussion, or even to seriously engage in the same, we propose another direction for thought, namely, that suggested by our theme, “The Church, Christ’s Sole and Sufficient Body”. Paul writing to the Ephesians spoke of Jesus Christ (Ephesians 1:17; Ephesians 1:22-23) the Head of all things to the Church which is His Body, and in that brief and defining statement, gave us good occasion to reflect upon the certain great facts involved in the very constitution of the Church itself; facts that might be stated as follows: It Is Formed by His Spirit; It Is the Lone Exhibit of His Life, and It Suffices for All Spiritual Expression.IT IS FORMED BY HIS SPIRIT The true Church is made up of His children. When He said to Nicodemus, “Ye must be born again”, He was not only stating a necessity for place in the Kingdom of God when it shall come, but also an experience that should precede Church fellowship. If the angels which kept their first estate constitute “the general assembly and Church of the firstborn, which are written in Heaven”, the ecclesia, or “called-out ones” of earth are the consequence of faith in Jesus Christ effecting a new creation in Him. “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new”, and “whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God”. A true Church, therefore, is constituted of regenerate ones. For one to experience saving grace and not to associate himself with believers in a church fellowship, is to fail equally in discovering the Divine will and in walking in the Divinely appointed way.Campbell Morgan thought when Paul cried out, “Who art Thou, Lord?” that the very use of the word, “Lord”, testified to the great change that had come, and he affirms, “This man has joined the church at Damascus before he arrived there. Do you not see that he has taken the crown off his own life from his own head and put it on the head of Jesus”? That is the way to become a member of a church, and of such THE Church is made.“The church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ, her Lord, She is His new creation, by water and the Word, From Heaven He came and sought her, to be His holy bride, With His own Blood He bought her, and for her life He died”. The Church inherits His nature. The biological law of life is not barred from the spiritual realm; “to every seed it is given to bring forth after its kind” obtains in the church. In spite of all the faults and deficiencies, schemings, and sins that belong to the human nature of man, into the true church member has come a new nature, destined to eventual and perfect triumph, namely, the nature of Christ. Of that the Apostle John was writing when he said, “Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin, for his seed remaineth in him”, a remark that has a two-fold application, originally and perfectly to Christ, and in a secondary sense certainly to Christians, for the immediate context adds, “In this the children of God are manifest”.“Christ also loved the Church, and gave Himself for it; “That He might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the Word, “That He might present it to Himself a glorious Church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing: but that it should be holy and without blemish” (Ephesians 5:25-27). Christ is the one and only Head of the Church. “Head over all things to the Church, which is His Body”. Therefore the Church is subject unto Christ, and one might add, subject to Christ alone. Such Scripture anticipates the attempted autocracies and hierarchies destined to take place in her human history. Whether these had already manifested themselves as menacing powers in apostolic days, we are not in doubt. Peter, in his First Epistle (1 Peter 5:2-3) exhorts the elders to “feed the flock of God which is among you, taking the oversight thereof, not by constraint, but willingly; not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind; neither as being lords over God’s heritage, but being ensamples to the flock”.If that great Apostle were alive today, he would thunder against the ecclesiastical hierarchies of the century. Paul would join him in this.

When he was writing to Timothy he declared, “This is a true saying, If a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work”, and then he proceeds to tell what a bishop should be like, “blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach; not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous; One that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity”. How strange to conclude a discourse like that and say not a word about his ruling the whole state of churches! He has reason, for the very simple fact is that no such bishop ever lived in New Testament times! The whole papal system, whether it exist with Rome or those who have partly come out of her, is lacking in a Biblical basis, and on that very account has been subjected to increasing abuses.How far we have departed from the New Testament ideal of a bishop who was the “episcopas” or overseer, the pastor of a single flock, one realizes when he compares some present-day ecclesiastical potentates with Paul’s Letter to Titus. Here he tells that a bishop, among other things, should hold “fast the faithful word as he has been taught, that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers”, but never once mentions the great hierarchical powers of administration. If therefore men rise up to exercise an overlordship of this sort, they not only do it without the authority of the Word, but in opposition to the sole headship of the Son of God.This brings us to our second remark concerning the Church:IT IS THE LONE EXHIBIT OF HIS LIFE He elects to live in it. The Head lives in the Body. Christ lives in the Church. It is true of the regenerated individual and it should also be true of the Church, that “the body is the temple of the Holy Ghost”. The temple may be unworthy its tenant— in fact, it always is, and often sadly so. That does not in any wise detract from the character or greatness of the Tenant, Himself. Diogenes is said to have lived in a tub, but in spite of that fact, he was a philosopher. When Christ decided to manifest Himself in the Church, He appreciated that, made up of mortal men as it would be, it would fall short at many points and fail to represent Him in many ways.

He also knew, as men should understand, that its deficiencies would not detract from His perfection. On the other hand, His perfection would tend to correct its deficiencies and perfect its character.Recently, I read, in a Canadian magazine, a most charming story of Western prairie life, written by a young English woman. She was a university graduate and had married an officer in the army. When the war was over and she came with her husband to his own land in Canada, she shortly found herself called upon to go with him to the Western plains, and take possession of a ranch which had been deserted by its tenant. The plain log house was a strange contrast to her palatial English home. The weeds that ran even to the door were ugly looking things when she remembered the blooming flowers of her father’s country estate.

The rough board floor and leaky roof caused her heart to sink, but she was a girl of spirit and set her deft hands to work. Getting her husband to plow up a portion of the prairie about the house, she used her landscape knowledge in laying out a lawn and garden.

Securing from him roughly constructed boxes, she nailed them along the window sills, filled them with rich dirt and planted flower seeds there. Getting small round boulders from a nearby creek, she laid out paths, and whitewashed the stones. The husband patched the roof, and inside the house her fingers were busy daily, till every aspect pleased. In a few weeks her friends who visited her were ecstatic over the neatness and beauty of the whole scene. The entire premises had taken on the character of her tenancy.It was a most delapidated house into which our Lord consented to come, and yet the Church of God is today the world’s most beautiful body, due to one solitary circumstance, namely, that He elected to live in it.He deigns to be known by it. It is called, by the pen of inspiration, “His Body”, and again, “The Body of Christ”.

It will never perfectly become Him until he takes it from earth, and in the translation, perfects the same. But the body is often sadly incomplete in its expression of the indwelling Spirit.

Alexander H. Stephens was most diminutive and all his life long an invalid. His big wheel chair was a familiar object on the streets of Washington. Feeble, emaciated in body, racked with aches and pains, and yet in that little frame lodged a mind that was matchless. Thomas Dixon once said, “Men knew that back of the pale face, shrivelled hand and dwarfed body that lay so lightly in that chair, there was the spirit of a lion, and his acquaintances either loved or feared him, while all respected”. He mastered all circumstances by means of his mighty brain. One forgets a deficient body when a brain like that controls it, and consents to indwell it. So with the Church of God.

The members of “the body” are far from perfect, but have a Head of perfection.The world has no other vision of Him. Our Lord once said, “He that hath seen Me, hath seen the Father”, and again the pen of inspiration speaks of Him as “the express image of the Father”. It is not true that he that hath seen the Church hath seen Christ, but it is true that the Church is the only vision of Him that men get. We are His “epistles” and while we poorly express Him, we become, by our very relationship to Him, the manifestation of His person to most men. The discerning, however, will judge Him not by His Body, the Church, but rather by His Spirit which indwells it.Abraham Lincoln was to most people an ungainly and homely man, but to the woman whose son he had pardoned, he was the handsomest man she had ever seen.The illustration holds in the view men get of Christ. To the outside world, which looks only upon the Church, “His Body”, there is no beauty in Him that they should desire Him, but to the one who has come to know His saving grace, He becomes “the Fairest among ten thousand and the one altogether lovely”, and to such an one, even the Church, His physical manifestation, is attractive in the last degree.

The greatest testimony of one’s Christian experience is at this point: “We know that we have passed from death unto life because we love the brethren”. We do not forget the day when the two disciples walked to the village of Emmaus, from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs. “And it came to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus Himself drew near, and went with them.

But their eyes were holden that they should not know Him”. However, when He took bread and blessed and gave it to them, “their eyes were opened, and they knew Him”. Many a man comes into touch with Christ in the person of the church and does not recognize Him, but when for such a man the Bread of Life is broken and the cup of salvation is tasted, the vision clears. One’s eye must be enlightened, “that he may know what is the hope of his calling and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints”. “Blessed are your eyes if ye see”.Finally,THE CHURCH FOR ALL He provided no other means. It has always seemed to men a strange thing that Christ should have committed His cause absolutely to man’s care, and yet such was His course from the beginning. Perhaps no illustration employed by a modern writer has been so often repeated as Gordon’s vision of Christ and Gabriel, walking in the heavenlies together and talking of His sacrifice on Calvary. Gabriel asked Him what plan He had for publishing the great good news that His death atoned for sin, and He responded by saying, “I left that with James and Peter and John and Andrew and others, to make it known”. Gabriel said, “But suppose they should forget or fail, or that their successors in the far off twentieth century should cease to bear a testimony? Then what other provision have you for getting this good news to all the world?” to which Christ answered, “I have no other plan”.That is a truth upon which we need to lay emphasis at this moment.

The Church of God is the only institution definitely ordained unto the redemption of man. Men are great in organizing movements.

Most of them are not formed after any pattern seen in the mount, and they follow one another in quick succession to the “Movement Cemetery”. We have had the “Brotherhood Movement”, “the Laymen’s Forward Movement”, “The Men and Religion Movement”, “The Interchurch World Movement”; we now have “The New World Movement”, and every denomination has a “denominational movement”. Not a one of them expects to survive the short term set for its course only a few months since. No man will have the hardihood to even suggest their continuance beyond a five year term. It is little wonder! The Spirit never patterned them, and God never appointed them.

They are like the grass; in the morning they grow up and flourish; in the evening, they are cut down and withered.Not so the Church of God—the gates of hell cannot prevail against it.It is reported that when physicians told Douglas Jerrold that he was dying, the old man started at the statement, and rising on his elbow, exclaimed, “What, man; die and leave these little ones helpless! I cannot; I will not die!” He lived, and three years more were added before the final call came.

In other words, his indomitable will grasped death by the throat and held him at arm’s length for three seasons; but the Church is a thousandfold mightier than that. Again and again men have prophesied its death. The Unitarian philosophers are telling us, even now, it is perishing from the face of the earth. The Church can afford to laugh at such doleful prophecies. She is not 2,000 years old, but 2,000 years young! Dark days have swept over her; disasters have smitten her again and yet again.

Persecutors have been determined to wipe her from the earth; false philosophies have sought to pervert her message and blind the minds of her members, but through it all she walks with increasing strength and her power waxes!He needs no other medium. As one looks back over the past, he realizes the folly of which men have been guilty in refusing to build after the “pattern shown in the mount” and in adopting plans all their own.

Men have concluded they knew more about how to win the world to righteousness than God did, and they have started all sorts of organizations in order to accomplish it: Play-grounds, social settlements, Boy and Girl Scout movements, Outing Camps, Big Brother and Big Sister movements, the Y. M. and Y. W. C. A’s, Conferences, Colleges, Universities, Theological Seminaries, and on and on, and on, ad infinitum; and it begins to be increasingly evident that not a single one of them, nor all of them combined are accomplishing ought for a world’s redemption, save as some of them happen to clearly ally themselves with a true church and to be a medium of expression of the same. More and more, thoughtful men are finding that these multiplied agencies are in not a few instances setting themselves squarely against the interest of the Church of God, and are becoming its most menacing enemies.Take the famous Lake Geneva Conference: For recent years its teaching on Sunday School work has been of such a character as to make Sunday School work worthless and decapitate the Church altogether by denying the Deity of Jesus Christ and eviscerate the Church itself by striking at its very vitals.Take the Y.

M. and Y. W.

C. A’s of America and make the few exceptions to the rule the occasional ones that have remained loyal to our Lord, and the remaining portion of them today are the greatest single menace that the Church of God sees. The majority of their secretaries have been educated in rationalistic schools; evangelism has died out of their halls, and only Unitarian sentiment is any longer welcomed by most of those who are in places of power! It would be practically impossible at this moment for a conservative preacher to secure a hearing in the average Y. M. C.

A., but those ministers who doubt the authority of the Word, question the Virgin Birth, rule the reported miracles out of the revelation, are not only welcomed there, but they are constantly bidden. Meetings are now being often held to encourage local ministers to take greater interest.

It will accomplish it for liberal ministers, but conservative men will feel no interest until there is a reform. We know all moneys invested today in such Y. M. C. A’s are moneys not only lost to the Church of God, but set busy against the Church of God.These remarks apply with equal aptness to a multitude of colleges that have been founded by the Church. A writer to an Eastern paper recently said, “The Congregationalists were pioneers in education in America. They sent a line of schools across the continent, Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Bowdoin, Amherst, Williams and Oberlin”. Certainly; and could you call another list of institutions in America that are as flagrantly opposing “the faith once delivered” as this same cross-continent line of colleges and universities?

There is not a single one of them that stands four-square today for those fundamentals that have been the life force of the Church of God. There is not a single one of them into which one can send a young Christian, with any assured prospect of having him returned a Christian at the end of his college course. “They are the enemies of the Cross of Christ”, and the modernistic spirit, which has mastered in them, is more and more conquering in the colleges of all the denominations, until now the making of the list of schools loyal to the God of heaven and earth, to the Deity of Christ, to the Bible, the Text Book of the Church, is a task that sorrows one in that it is so shortly accomplished. Millions upon millions of dollars the churches have contributed to make these scholastic institutions possible, and when we have built them up to places of power, they have turned upon their creators to rend them, and by attacking the Bible, the Church’s only Text Book, they have sought either to so far befog the testimony of the Church that men through it may not find the way, or blot out that testimony altogether. And yet in spite of this piece of history, now perfectly understood by the unprejudiced, the appeal for more money for these extra-Biblical institutions is not subsiding but growing, and requests for donations are no longer depended upon for their development, but drives are instituted instead. Men who believe God and follow His Word are increasingly refusing to fall into line and perform their part at the crack of the whip of ecclesiastical masters.And yet for an example of all of this, or any evidence that such was ever God’s will or way, I search my Bible in vain. In the Old Testament and in the New, I find no play-grounds approved; no social settlements suggested; no Y.

M. or Y. W.

C. A.’s organized; no Brotherhood Movements financed; no confederacies formulated. The Gospels are a record of how the Church was brought into being. The Book of the Acts is a history of the Church at work. The Epistles are, with few exceptions, addressed to the Churches of the living God, and the Book of Revelation opens with a series of seven such Letters to Churches and closes with a scene that translates “the Church” and turns it into the Kingdom of Heaven! In all this volume of literature, I find no single intimation or reference to even such institutions as Visiting Nurses Associations, none to hospitals, none to brotherhoods.Now, do not mistake me!

I believe the Visiting Nurses Association to be an admirable institution and worthy of a citizen’s support. I believe the Red Cross Society to be the finest expression of humanitarianism.

I believe that play-grounds for children are institutions worthy of approval. I believe hospitals and schools are necessities of the state, but my position is this: that the Church is the one and only institution through which God has called His elect to operate, and it is the profoundest pity, the most egregious blunder, that men have gone outside of her and organized extra institutions that have become inimical to her, to do the very work that was designated to her; that she is fitted to accomplish and upon the discharge of which her spiritual success absolutely depends.There isn’t a social service, an ethical ideal that belongs within the realm of Christian obligation that cannot be better discharged by the hands of an active church than by any extra-organization ever conceived. If you would make a contribution to play-grounds, and I should be glad to see you do it, make it in the name of the Church of God. If the Church is to visit the sick, and surely that is her obligation, let her do it through her members only. The City Hospitals of every metropolis in America will welcome as cordially the Christian minister and Christian worker as any denominationally supported hospital born or grown big to this hour. Why then, will you tell me, should millions of dollars go into denominational hospitals to discover upon the completion and short time operation of the same that we are compelled to receive the children of the world, to employ ofttimes physicians and nurses of the world, who have no religious convictions whatever, who have no God, or Christ?

Why take out of the hands of the state the offices that belong to it, instead of doing what the Church of God was set to do, save men and women?Why invest millions in great denominational universities, and present to the world institutions that are no whit different in religious atmosphere and opportunities for Christian service from the state taxed and supported schools? Will any well-instructed man now claim a spiritual superiority for them?

I grant you, our forefathers when out of their poverty they founded these schools, did it with the certain expectation of making them Christian to the core, of permitting only Christian teachers to appear in them, and employing the Bible as the chief of all text books, but what one of them abides by this dream of the dear men now dead?The principal difficulty with all these institutions has been in the circumstance that they have been built apart from a church, conducted independently of a church, and in the process of time have departed from the faith that made the church. Spurgeon’s College remains faithful, but Spurgeon’s College remains linked indissolubly with Spurgeon’s Church. The work of man for man, the basal idea of the Y. M. C. A., is right, but in the name of the New Testament, why not let it be done in the church, by the church and for the church?I say the same concerning education of the highest and most Christian sort, and if I believed the day would come when the school I founded and superintend would be divorced from the church that gave it birth, I should entertain the gravest alarm as to whether it would remain loyal.If a man really wants to invest his Christian influence so that it will bring the largest fruit in return, employ his time and talents so that they will most honor God, no institution has ever been born or will ever be begotten that provides him such an opportunity as a church, and I had rather be the man who leaves as a monument to his labors a great, true Church of God, so ramified in its work as to reach the poor, and minister to them; the sick, and reveal to them the Great Physician; the discouraged, and impart to them the brightest of hopes; the sinful, and show them salvation’s way; than to contribute to any other institution that has ever been named among men.

Give me a Church of God, modeled after the New Testament pattern, filled with His Spirit, and I will show you a Church of God that will serve society at every point, that will be a contributing agency to every element of permanence in the state, and that will be the exponent of the only righteousness that can bless, and make great a nation!Turn to the Book of the Acts and have the early Christians come back for a report and be impressed with the things upon which they speak. It is not upon play-grounds, though I hope at times they were playful men.

It was not upon social settlements, though I trust they walked in the midst of the people as gracious ensamples of how to live. It was not upon hospitals and colleges, though their presence was healing and their speech educational. It was not upon Y. M. and Y. W. C. A’s, though they did effective work with young men and women. It was upon the power of the Gospel in the lives of the individuals and the growth of the Church of the living God, the Divinely ordained institution.And what inspiring reports they are!

Thousands convicted and converted, and daily additions to the Church as they were being saved, contributions to the Church, care of the needy by the Church, healing through the Church, Letters to the Church, conferences between the Churches, officers for the Church, the Church commissioned to the end of the earth, and the promise of Christ with the Church to the end of the age! Thus the New Testament program, and God has not changed His appointment. If I had my way today I would let the state manage all affairs that belong to the state, and the Church of God assert her influence upon every phase of human life, seeking to control the affairs of her own organization only and accepting as great commission to the world the work of pointing men to Christ, the Inspirer of intellects and the Saviour of souls.“I love Thy Church, O God; her walls before Thee stand, Dear as the apple of Thine eye and graven on Thy hand; For her my tears shall fall, for her my prayers ascend, To her my cares and toils be given, till toils and cares shall end.”