NATIONAL PREACHER. No. 11, VOL. XXVI.] NOVEMBER, 1852. [WHOLE NO. 311. SERMON DLXXXIV. BY THE REV. JAMES W. ALEXANDER, D. D., PASTOR OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, FIFTH AVENUE AND NINETEENTH ST. ALL IS YOURS. "All things are yours; whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours; and ye are Christ's; and Christ is God's." 1 COR. 3: 21-23. Our troubles arise, in great measure, from our ignorance of what God intends for us. He means that his church shall be greater, purer, and happier, than it has ever conceived. And all our discontent, repinings, and griefs, would be at once suppressed, if the Spirit were to reveal to us the things which God has prepared for them that love him. Especially would contentions among brethren vanish, if they could only see the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints. This is the train of thought which gives occasion to the passage now before us. The apostle Paul had founded a church at Corinth, and remained with them eighteen months. When he had been some time absent he heard bad news from the beloved Corinthians. There were contentions among them, as he heard from some of the house of Chloe. They were setting up one teacher or apostle against another. The banners of their factions bore the names of these leaders. Their cries were: I am of Paul, and I of Apollos, and I of Cephas, and I of Christ.' The apostle was astonished and afflicted. Is Christ divided? was Paul crucified for you? or were ye baptized in the name of Paul? In his grief, he is constrained to address them as yet 'carnal.' "For whereas there is among you envying and strife and divisions, are ye not carnal?" He reminds them of the true place of ministers. "I have planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth, but God that giveth the increase. For we are laborers together with God; ye are God's husbandry, ye are God's building." The plain truth is, there is a tendency in fallen men, even in the church, to pervert their own blessings, and to make the ministry itself an occasion of rivalry and strife. God has marked this with his displeasure. He has never given countenance in his word to any undue exaltation of his servants; and when such extravagant fondness is coupled with pride and schismatic separation, it is offensive in his sight. The wisdom of the apostle is manifested in his mode of correcting this error. He draws away their attention from the servants to the Master, and from instruments to the infinite mercies which they convey. He seems amazed at their perverse disputings. It is as if, in a desert, a company who had come upon a fountain of overflowing living water, should sit down by the brink, and neglect the refreshing spring, and spend their strength in contending about the comparative value of the poor earthen vessels. As though he had said: We who minister are indeed your servants for Jesus' sake. Let a man so account of us, as of the ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God. We bring you a treasure; but we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us. Learn not to think of men above that which is written, that no one of you he puffed up for one against another. Look from the frail vessel to the treasure. Consider your vast inheritance, and rise above these insignificant incidents. "Therefore, let no man glory in men for all things are yours; whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas." Such is the connection of ideas in this interesting context. DOCTRINE: The highest privileges, hopes, and blessings are given to believers, because of their union with Christ, and God the Father by him. We may follow the spring into the place of the stream, or we may trace up the stream to the spring it is the latter method which I now propose, inviting you to consider these propositions: I. Christ is God's; II. Ye are Christ's; III. All things are yours. And how would our hearts leap for joy, if we could comprehend all the glorious reality of these truths! I. Christ is God's. Here you behold the first golden link, taking hold of the throne of God and of the Lamb. This is the sacred and eternal fount of all our mercies. "Salvation is of God." The Godhead, without immediate respect to persons, may be intended; and then the Mediator as God-man, standing between divinity and our fallen race is distinguished from God, as absolutely considered. Or the Almighty Father may be intended; and then the Second Person of the adorable Trinity is held up to our view, as uniting himself with manhood, and covenanting with our race. In either view, we behold Jesus our Redeemer standing before us, and laying his hands on us for good, and pointing with gracious invitation to the august summit, namely, to the inaccessible throne of Jehovah. This he may well do; for Christ is God's.' The. name of Christ is a term of office, being the Greek rendering of the Hebrew Messiah; the corresponding English word being Anointed. In undertaking for us, Jesus receives the holy oil, in a prophetic anointing, a priestly anointing, and a kingly anointing. He discharges the functions of all three, in accomplishing redemption; and his name as Mediator is Christ. But none of these things could he do, unless he were possessed of a divine title. He would never bring us nigh, if he were not eternally nigh himself. But this work he can fully carry on, for Christ is God's.' He is the Son of God, who is in the bosom of the Father; a relation which we cannot comprehend, but which is positively revealed. The filial name is one of nearness and tenderness. even on earth; and we know not but that God has made it so' that we might by this type the better understand the connection of the heavenly Persons. Christ is the First Begotten, and (in strictness of speech) the Only Begotten. Earthly love, when it mounts highest, is a poor, weak, flickering, half-quenched flame; but O who shall tell us what is meant by heavenly love-divine love-love before all ages-love without all bounds-everlasting, infinite, incomprehensible, of the Father to the Son-of God to God! a love moving on the scale of divine immensity, and acting itself forth in harmony with the divine bliss of the ever-blessed Potentate! Who shall tell us of the waves of infinite complacency and affection, each of which is an ocean, flowing and re-flowing through the unknown ages about the throne of God and the Lamb ! Then should we understand the dimensions of the saying. "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son.' Christ is the "beloved Son," in whom the adorable Father is evermore "well-pleased." "The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into his hands." Nay, his will is, "that all men should honor the Son, even as they honor the Father." "He that hath seen Him, hath seen the Father; for he and the Father are one." But this Son of the Highest, in the prosecution of his work, emptied himself of his manifested glory, and bound himself to the yoke, for our sakes. It is impossible to get a glimpse of him as Christ, as anointed mediator, without looking at this. It was not merely God coming down to man this he did in paradise. It was not merely God anointing man: this he did in the prophets. It was not merely God indwelling this he did in the holy of holies. But it was God becoming man. It was divinity incarnate. If there is a sentence worthy of being sounded with all the harmonies of earth and all the music of the heavens, and of being sweetly and sublimely chanted, with all the pathos and all the triumph of celestial voices, it is that sentence, The Word was made Flesh! He dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. Herein is the love of God manifested, that he sent his Son to be the Saviour of the world. For our sakes indeed it pleased the Lord to bruise him, and to put him to shame, and to accumulate our guilt, and to lay our chastisement and curse: yet never was he more pleasing unto God, than when he was obeying unto death. And at that moment, when the earth trembled and the heavens moaned, and the Son of the Highest, having undergone hours of ignominy and torture, was hanging between heaven and earth, a ghastly, bloody corpse, the depth of humiliation and the extreme of curse, at that moment (if ever) might the word be taken up in heaven, and carried from chorus to chorus of all the angelic people, Christ is God's! But death could not hold him. Heaven was longing for him. He burst the stony obstacles of the sepulchre. He ascended on high, leading captivity captive. "God is gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet; sing praises to God, sing praises." "The chariots of God are twenty thousand, even thousands of angels: the Lord is among them as in Sinai, in the holy place." The gates, the everlasting doors, have lifted up their heads, and the king of glory hath gone in. He sitteth at the right hand of God; he ever liveth to make intercession for us. God hath highly exalted him, and given him a name above every name. There he sits, expecting till all his enemies be made his footstool. It is Messiah, it is Christ, it is our Redeemer that there sits. And what he asks, he hath. He cannot ask amiss, he cannot ask in vain. His lightest wish were enough to rend the universe. His breath of intercession is mighty as that which formed all worlds. From that right hand of majesty, he says, as he extends the golden sceptre, "Believe me, that I am in the Father and the Father in me.' "And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son." If on earth, then surely in heaven, he may say, "I know that thou hearest me always." Thus contemplating the first link of this connexion we may say with Paul, Christ is God's. The great problem which vexes man, is, how to approach God. Now it is solved. We have no conception of such love, but it has accomplished this ineffable union. II. Ye are Christ's. This is the second particular in the golden chain that binds us to God. You have seen what God As near as God is to Christ; now see what Christ is to you. is to Christ, so near is Christ to his people. this better one day; as he has said, "At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.' Ye are Christ's! This is enough, if you fully reach its meaning, and comprehend who and what Christ is. Ye are his, because God made you over unto him, in a covenant before all worlds. The record of your names is in the book of life; and it is called His book, and it is the Lamb's "book of life from the foundation of the world." "All that the Father giveth me shall come to me :"" of all that he hath given me shall I lose nothing." If you have in you the marks of his people, then were you his before you were in being; as contemplated in the everlasting covenant. Nay, not one step could be taken towards the restoration of sinners, until they were contemplated in Christ as their covenanting-head and surety and representative. 66 Ye are not Ye are Christ's because he has purchased you. your own, ye are bought with a price; and what a price! the sufferings and blood and sin-bearing of a Divine Mediator. If any thing can, this makes you his property. Every drop from those sacred veins marks you out as belonging to him forever. Every commemoration of it, at the Lord's table, renews your sense of the glorious connexion. We love that which has cost us much; we are most tenderly attached to those for whom we have suffered, and Christ never looks on his people without the remembrance that he has died for them. What can be a better foundation of a claim to property in any, than dying for them? Ye are Christ's, then, by the depth of his agonies, and the price of his atonement. And since He remembers it, for your sake, O be persuaded, on your part, to remember it for his sake. Say therefore, "the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me." Ye are Christ's, because he has taken you into union with himself. This is not a fabulous or a metaphorical union. "We are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones." What the head and the heart is to the body, that is Christ to you. The trunk of the vine is not more united to the branches, nor the root and fatness of the olive tree to the leaves and fruit, than Christ is to you. Your nature is now made to partake of his nature; your life is a product of his |