SUNDAY READING.
. JUDGMENT. PESMur: PREACHED BY REV. A. fi. COLVILE, M.A., at St. Mary's Chun\h, \ew Plymouth, on Sunday, February 18. "Thou art weighed in the balances and found wonting."—[Un. 5, '27. ''The Father hath committed all judgment to the Sou."—St. John o, 22. "Thou art veighed in the balances." The writing on the wall, traced by the finger of God, not proclaimed the downfall of a great king and a great empire. We most of us remember the scene and can picture it —the riotous, assembly in the banquetting hall, the blazing lights, the (lowing wine drunk in an insolont spirit of bravado from the consecrated vessels of the temple, the wild talk, the senseless bragging and boasting, the reckless display of wealth and luxury, and beneath it all the real life of the Empire rotten and crumbling and tottering to its fall. Over and over again has history repeated itself; over ami over again has that judgment come, swift and relentless. A nation that fails to justify its high place in God's eternal scheme, that has no room for Him in its thoughts and desires, that misuses its power and privilege, that cares nothing for the spiritual life of its people while it boasts frantically of its own strength and riches, is doomed —glittering on the outside, rotten at the core, the judgment of God goes out against it; and this judgment comes, remember, not only to autocracies but to democracies; not only to King or Kaiser or Tsar, but to Parliament and Press and People, comes the writing on the Wall: "Thou art weighed in the balances and art. found wanting."
THE JUSTICE OF GOD. It is the justice of God, and we can no more do without the jus-' tice of Cod than we can do without His love; iii fact, there can be no real love where there is not also justice. If the first thing we long to be assured of about God is His love, the second thing Is His justice. In fact, the desire in man's heart for justice to be done him is so strong that it takes the form of a demand; with us men, indeed, justice comes before love. We cannot demand love: we can only appeal for it. We demand justice from society; we demand it of our rulers, our judges, our magistrates, our juries; we leel that it is our right, and that the assurance oi justice alone makes a healthy corporate liic possible. Think of our own little community. What would more seriously threaten its welfare than the unwillingness of juries to punish a man when evidence had proved lain guilty. \\'e may perhaps be inclined to laugh over some llagrant case which is almost Gil. uertian in its pervcrseness, but in truth we should ratner treat it as a serious danger. A man when he enters a court of law commits his own honor and oiten enough the honor of those dear to him, into the hands of his fellow citizens, and if those iellow.citizens lail to give him justice to the best ol thciir aoility, he is a deeply wronged man, whether it is a question ofa lew pounds or a matter ol life and death. olore an uneasy feeling of insecurity spreads over the whole town; ilicre are talse weights in the balances—we cannot depend on the justice of society; and it is just these sort of failures, these "interested" or sentimental decisions that in under communities have led to the setting up of lynch law, with all its terrible excesses. Our first demand irom our fellows is
THE DEMAND FOR JUSTICE, and not only for official justice either-; in our informal relations with our neighbors ik do expect that at least they should try to be just to us, even if they cannot love us. Think again oi our town and parish. How much reckless, idle, slanderous talk there is everywhere, how many little cliques and mysterious '■pulls" and unworthy spites exist, second-hand spites very often. Personally, I We never made any attempt to find my way through the tangle; indeed, here a clergyman should be like Gallio, "caring for none of these things," but you know perfectly well that it is so, and an absolutely innocent and unconscious person may have to suffer grave injustice because he ha; unwittingly trodden on the toes of someone who is second cousin live times removed to the man with the pull. This sort of thing may easily make a small town (and I am not thinking of this one alone; I found it just the same in England) a very uncomfortable place to live, in, Remember 'that we, too, hold the scales, and almost every day in our life we weigh our brother in the balance and often, according to our own ideas, "find him wanting," ' and how many times have we also thrown into the scales our own interests, our own grievances, our own spites and jealousies, and have thus unduly depressed the balance against our fellow by using false weights, and have therefore denied him the very first thing he demands from us, and has a right to demand, viz., justice? GOD-S JUDGMENT, And that which we demand from our fello.w-mcn we shall certainly receive from God, Nt without fear or favor or partiality. Each individual life is weighed in God's balances, which are true to a hair and cannot be depressed unduly on one side or the other. Try to lift your thoughts for a moment above the judgment of your fellows and think of the judgment of God. Remember what will be cast in the scales against you, your waste of time, your many aimless and self-centred thoughts, your sharp and bitter speeches, the wounds you inflicted on gentle souls, those mean, rotten little deeds of which your memory makes you tingle with shame, your miserable stories about others, your ready imputation of low motives, your own quickness to take offence. Weighed in the balance—what shall we have that God can put into the other scale—the very things that we might have had in our favor seem piled up ugaiu&C us—if only IVhad kept out of that temptation? If only I had acted on my better impulse and not been such a coward; if only I had done more for others with the gifts with which God entrusted me I could have faced his judgment without fear. Christ said to me so often that He 'Himself was in the sick and lone--ly and miserable, and I would not look at Him or go near Him. How many times did the call come to help on His work in the parish in which I lived and I refused? I said that I had too many other duties, I said that I was shy, that I could do no good. I too readily accepted what I called "my limitations." If only I had ,' gone when I heard the call I might have had something that God could have put ';{aa tip totlaaeej or not lS' ac-
"tual work done, for that, too, is full of fev.'S, but the good-will and intention to do the work and the sacrifice of self that, made it possible. Yes, and those precious gifts of Cod that came to us through His Church—the Holy Sacrament, Christ's own legacy to us, which ko have neglected; the command, ''.Do tfts in remembrance of Me'' which we Ji/ve disregarded; the Bible hardly ever opened; the prayers dry and perfunctory, even the sermons which we have deliberately chosen not to ''hear,' 1 which we have merely criticised or passed oft" on to someone else—all these things piled up against us. What chance Shall we have in THE BALANCES OF GOD'S JUSTICE? It is a stem picture, and, moreover, it is God's answer to our demand. We canont appeal to the justice of God against our fellows without also inviting His judgment on ourselves. Do you think that I can look back on my ministry here during the last live years and remember all the words 1 have spoken to you from this pulpit, strong words too many of them, without thinking cf God's judgment on myself, without coming back like the Psalmist and making that prayer, "Try me, 0 God, and seek the ground of my heart, prove me and examine my thoughts'-'V Yes, God's justice is a reality; the figure of the balances and the weights is a true one; ''found wanting'' is a very real sentence that must of necessity be passed on many an individual soul, "found wanting'' not according to the weights and measures of the world, but according to the standards of God, according to the opportunities He has given us, according to the measure of His love revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Truly, my friends, if bare justice were all we had to expect from God we might well despair; but God's relation to man neither begins nor ends with justice. The beginning is love, and the end is love, and Christ's standard of justice as revealed to us in the gospel i s no hard, inflexible thing, no rigid, unbending rule to be applied to all alike; it is shot through and through with tlie wisdom of. discerning love. I was speaking this morning of that essential quality of Christian love which a man shows to his neighbor when he instinctively sees and fastens on what is good and beautiful in the life, and refuses to stop in mere contemplation of the evil; and that is in trutli the expression of the Christ-spirit; it is the wisdom and love of Him Whose mission was not only to destroy the works of the devil, but to find and bring out what was good in man, what the world disregarded, what they themselves were hardly conscious of, that He might cast it into the balances in their favor. Yes, surely it is true to say that in a greater degree than any other who has ever trod this earth, Christ saw the pathos of human afe. It is a great gift, my friends, to oe able to iind humor in people and things about you; it is a still greater gift to be able to discern pathos. By the use of the one you are able to protect yourself, by tne use of the other you are able to PASS TRUE AND MERCIFUL JUDGMENTS on the lives of others. And, my friends, Jesus Christ came it'.to the world because God saw the pathos of human life. There are those who have represented the Creator as a great Humorist, and life as a grim joke. Such a theory, of course, takes no account of Christ. It was the appeal of pathos that brought Christ into the world. And 'He,"to Whom all judgment was ■ committed, passed among men and women, realised their sorrow and their shame, their ignorance and their littleness, their dumb longing for freedom, how over and over again they "know not what they do." And discerning thus the deep pathos of the human soul, He found possibilities of good in men for which the world had never thought of looking—in Mary •Magdalene, in the woman of .Samaria, in Zaeeheus, in the thief upon the cross, in publicans and sinners and outcastsHe saw the pathos of their lives and found and brought out the good that was in them. "The lather has committed all jtidg- . ment to the Son." Here is our comfort - and our hope—the appeal to Christ. As ! long as we are hard and cold and selfish , and self-satisfied—then for us there are ! the balances of God's justice, true to a . hair, and think if all that colossal pride i end self-love and those constant refusals . be thrown into the adverse scale, what , chance is there for us? Weighed awl , found wanting. That is the sentense. > Cut if we appeal to Christ, if we judge i ourselves, seeing ourselves for what we . are in the light of His love, taking His : life and words and not the opinion oi ; our neighbors as our standard; if wc t appeal to Him as the thief up'on tht t Cross appealed, "Lord, rcnenibor me,' ■ then truly I believe that many othei j voices within us echo that appeal. They '■■ are the voices that express the pathos j of our lives. They are the voices ol . which Browning speaks in words I have 3 quoted and love to quote: "Thoughts hardly to be packed ' Tnto a narrow act Fancies that broke through language 3 and escaped ' Ail I could never be—all men ignored in me." Yes, we are sometimes richer than wc know; and these things of which we r have been only dimly conscious Christ 2 will cast into "the balances in our favor; r "this was 1 worth to God, Whose whec^ 3 the pitcher shaped." 3 My friends, let us go out boldly tc 1 meet our judgment now, trusting the > justice of Christ, remembering Hi; ? mercy, His compassion, His patience, His c forbearance. "Try me, 0 God, and seel; ' the ground of my heart." Cry to Hire t thus and He will hear you, He will hem: ' out to you His light nnd His truth ane" r Hfs salvation. He will teach you so tc i live and work for Him now that whet , this'life's opportunities are passed yoi: - may commit yourself, if with awe, yd ; without fear into His all-mereiful hands
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Taranaki Daily News, 3 March 1917, Page 6
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2,259SUNDAY READING. Taranaki Daily News, 3 March 1917, Page 6
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