The Good News of God. Charles Kingsley

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СКАЧАТЬ if you will receive it, all questions—depend upon this one root question, who is God?

      But certainly this question of worshipping God must depend upon who God is.  For how he ought to be worshipped depends on what will please him.  And what will please him, depends on what his character is.

      If God be, as some fancy, hard and arbitrary, then you must worship him in a way in which a hard arbitrary person would like to be addressed; with all crouching, and cringing, and slavish terror.

      If God be again, as some fancy, cold, and hard of hearing, then you must worship him accordingly.  You must cry aloud as Baal’s priests did to catch his notice, and put yourselves to torment (as they did, and as many a Christian has done since) to move his pity; and you must use repetitions as the heathen do, and believe that you will be heard for your much speaking.  The Lord Jesus called all such repetitions vain, and much speaking a fancy: but then, the Lord Jesus spoke to men of a Father in heaven, a very different God from such as I speak of—and, alas! some Christian people believe in.

      But, my friends, if you believe in your heavenly Father, the good God whom your Lord Jesus Christ has revealed to you; and if you will consider that he is good, and consider what that word good means, then you will not have far to seek before you find what worship means, and how you can worship him in spirit and in truth.

      For if God be good, worshipping him must mean praising and admiring him—adoring him, as we call it—for being good.

      And nothing more?

      Certainly much more.  Also to ask him to make us good.  That, too, must be a part of worshipping a good God.  For the very property of goodness is, that it wishes to make others good.  And if God be good, he must wish to make us good also.

      To adore God, then, for his goodness, and to pray to him to make us good, is the sum and substance of all wholesome worship.

      And for that purpose a man may come to church, and worship God in spirit and in truth, though he be dissatisfied with himself, and ashamed of himself; and knows that he is wrong in many things:—provided always that he wishes to be set right, and made good.

      For he may come saying, ‘O God, thou art good, and I am bad; and for that very reason I come.  I come to be made good.  I admire thy goodness, and I long to copy it; but I cannot unless thou help me.  Purge me; make me clean.  Cleanse thou me from my secret faults, and give me truth in the inward parts.  Do what thou wilt with me.  Train me as thou wilt.  Punish me if it be necessary.  Only make me good.’

      Then is the man fit indeed to come to church, sins and all:—if he carry his sins into church not to carry them out again safely and carefully, as we are all too apt to do, but to cast them down at the foot of Christ’s cross, in the hope (and no man ever hoped that hope in vain)—that he will be lightened of that burden, and leave some of them at least behind him.  Ay, no man, I say, ever hoped that in vain.  No man ever yet felt the burden of his sins really intolerable and unbearable, but what the burden of his sins was taken off him before all was over, and Christ’s righteousness given to him instead.

      Then a man is fit, not only to come to church, but to come to Holy Communion on Christmas-day, and all days.  For then and there he will find put into words for him the very deepest sorrows and longings of his heart.  There he may say as heartily as he can (and the more heartily the better), ‘I acknowledge and bewail my manifold sins and wickedness.  The remembrance of them is grievous unto me; the burden of them is intolerable:’ but there he will hear Christ promising in return to pardon and deliver him from all his sins, to confirm and strengthen him in all goodness.  That last is what he ought to want; and if he wants it, he will surely find it.

      He may join there with the whole universe of God in crying, ‘Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts, heaven and earth are full of Thy glory:’ and still in the same breath he may confess again his unworthiness so much as to gather up the crumbs under God’s table, and cast himself simply and utterly upon the eternal property of God’s eternal essence, which is—always to have mercy.  But he will hear forthwith Christ’s own answer—‘If thou art bad, I can and will make thee good.  My blood shall wash away thy sin: my body shall preserve thee, body, soul, and spirit, to the everlasting life of goodness.’

      And so God will bless that man’s communion to him; and bless to him his keeping of Christmas-day; because out of a true penitent heart and lively faith he will be offering to the good God the sacrifice of his own bad self, that God may take it, and make it good; and so will be worshipping the everlasting and infinite Goodness, in spirit and in truth.

      SERMON VII

      GOD’S INHERITANCE

Gal. iv. 6, 7

      Because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.  Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.

      This is the second good news of Christmas-day.

      The first is, that the Son of God became man.

      The second is, why he became man.  That men might become the sons of God through him.

      Therefore St. Paul says, You are the sons of God.  Not—you may be, if you are very good: but you are, in order that you may become very good.  Your being good does not tell you that you are the sons of God: your baptism tells you so.  Your baptism gives you a right to say, I am the child of God.  How shall I behave then?  What ought a child of God to be like?  Now St. Paul, you see, knew well that we could not make ourselves God’s children by any feelings, fancies, or experiences of our own.  But he knew just as well that we cannot make ourselves behave as God’s children should, by any thoughts and trying of our own.

      God alone made us His children; God alone can make us behave like his children.

      And therefore St. Paul says, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts: by which we cry to God, Our Father.

      But some will say, Have we that Spirit?

      St. Paul says that you have: and surely he speaks truth.

      Let us search, then, and see where that Spirit is in us.  It is a great and awful honour for sinful men: but I do believe that if we seek, we shall find that He is not far from any one of us, for in Him we live and move, and have our being; and all in us which is not ignorance, falsehood, folly, and filth, comes from Him.

      Now the Bible says that this Spirit is the Spirit of God’s Son, the Spirit of Christ:—and what sort of Spirit is that?

      We may see by remembering what sort of a Spirit Christ had when on earth; for He certainly has the same Spirit now—the Spirit which proceedeth everlastingly from the Father and from the Son.

      And what was that Like?  What was Christ Like?  What was his Spirit Like?  It was a Spirit of Love, mercy, pity, generosity, usefulness, unselfishness.  A spirit of truth, honour, fearless love of what was right: a spirit of duty and willing obedience, which made Him rejoice in doing His Father’s will.  In all things the spirit of a perfect Son, in all things a lovely, noble, holy spirit.

      And now, my dear friends, is there nothing in you like that?  You may forget it at times, you may disobey it very often: but is there not something in all your hearts more or less, which makes you love and admire what is right?

      When you hear of a noble action, is there nothing in you which makes you approve and admire it?  Is there nothing in your hearts which makes you pity those who are in sorrow and long to help them?  Nothing which stirs your heart up when СКАЧАТЬ