Reconciliation, Atonement, and Judgment The point at which I broke off yesterday was this. I was pointing out that objective atonement is absolutely necessary. Of course, it is quite necessary also that we should know what is meant by an objective atonement. The real objective element in atonement is not that something was offered to God, but that God made the offering. And in this conne ...read
Reconciliation: Philosophic and Christian I place on the board before you five points as to Christ's reconciling work which I think vital:
1. It is between person and person. 2. Therefore it affects both sides. 3. It rest on atonement. 4. It is a reconciliation of the world as one whole. 5. It is final in its nature and effect.
I was saying yesterday that two cautions ought ...read
The Ceaselessness of Prayer Prayer as Christian freedom, and prayer as Christian life--these are two points I would now expand.
I. First, as to the moral freedom involved and achieved in prayer.
Prayer has been described as religion in action. But that as it stands is not a sufficient definition of the prayer which lives on the Cross. The same thing ...read
The Cross The Great Confessional In the days of our fathers Christian belief was more solid within the Church than it is now; and the defending and expounding of Christianity, more especially the defending of it, had to concern itself with outsiders - outside the Church, and outside Christianity very often. Today our difficulties have changed; and a great part of our exposition mu ...read
The Difference Between God's Sacrifice and Man's
What I am going to say is not directly unto edification, but indirectly it is so must certainly. Directly it is rather for that instruction which is a need in our Christian life as essential as edification. We cannot do without either. On the one hand instruction with no idea of edification at all becomes mere academical discourse. It may ...read
The Great Sacrificial Work Is To Reconcile Corinthians 5:14-6:2; Romans 5:1-11; Colossians 1:10-29; Ephesians 2:16
The great need of the religious world today is a return to the Bible. That is necessary for two reasons, negative and positive. Negatively, because the most serious feature of the hour in the life of the Church is the neglect of the Bible for personal use and stu ...read
The Insistency of Prayer In all I have said I have implied that prayer should be strenuously importunate. Observe, not petitionary merely, nor concentrated, nor active alone, but importunate. For prayer is not only meditation or communion. Nor ought it to be merely submissive in tone, as the "quietist" ideal is. We need not begin with "Thy will be done" if we but end ...read
The Inwardness of Prayer It is difficult and even formidable thing to write on prayer, and one fears to touch the Ark. Perhaps no one ought to undertake it unless he has spent more toil in the practice of prayer than on its principle. But perhaps also the effort to look into its principle may be graciously regarded by Him who ever liveth to make intercession as itself a pr ...read
The Moral Reactions of Prayer All religion is founded on prayer, and in prayer it has its test and measure. To be religious is to pray, to be irreligious is to be incapable of prayer. The theory of religion is really the philosophy of prayer; and the best theology is compressed prayer. The true theology is warm, and it steams upward into prayer. Prayer is access to whatever we ...read
The Naturalness of Prayer We touch the last reality directly in prayer. And we do this not by thought's natural research, yet by a quest not less laborious. Prayer is the atmosphere of revelation, in the strict and central sense of that word. It is the climate in which God's manifestation bursts open into inspiration. All the mediation of Nature and of things sinks h ...read
The Precise Problem Today There is a popular impression about both philosophy and theology that the history of their problems is very sterile; that it is not a long development, carrying the discussion on with growing insight from age to age, and passing from thinker to thinker with growing depth, but rather a scene in which each newcomer demolishes the work of his predeces ...read
The Threefold Cord There are three great aspects of the work of Christ which have in turn held the attention of the Church, and come home with special force to its spiritual situation at a special time. There are:
1. Its triumphant aspect; 2. Its satisfactionary aspect; 3. Its regenerative aspect.
The first emphasizes the finality of our Lord's victory ...read
The Timeliness of Prayer Let him pray now that never prayed before,
And him that prayed before but pray the more.
The nearer we are driven to the God of Christ, the more we are forced on paradox when we begin to speak. I have been led to allude to this more than once. The magnalia dei are not those great simplicities of life on which some orde ...read
The Vicariousness of Prayer The work of the ministry labours under one heavy disadvantage when we regard it as a profession and compare it with other professions. In these, experience brings facility, a sense of mastery in the subject, self-satisfaction, self-confidence; but in our subject the more we pursue it, the more we enter into it, so much the more are we cast down wit ...read
