may thus make others in their poverty sharers of your own rich blessings. Have you experienced the truth of that word, "The weary find eternal rest, And all the sons of want are blest"? Then be well assured that in those lands where we look forward, if God will, to help in training a native ministry, there are not a few in whom that weariness seems to be a very profound conviction; often expressed pathetically and sadly; their poetry tinged with a melancholy dejection arising from the overburdening pressure of the sense of sin. When this cry in its wail of agony reaches English ears, what does the Lord say to us as a Church and nation but this, "Behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it!"* May you thus consciously have the open door set before you, and have the burden of a world's need and sins so laid upon you that you cannot rest till something be done to testify, in a more worthy manner, your solemn sense of your calling! And being first yourselves more wholly yielded to your Lord, may you be led to place at His disposal the silver and gold; that when the day shall come in which the Lord of the servants shall return to see how much every man has gained by trading, you may not know the anguish and confusion of the servant with the buried talent, and the unfaithfully discharged stewardship; but be able to say with glad thankfulness, "Lord, Thou deliveredst unto me the two-the five talents; behold, I have gained beside them, the two—the five talents more."+ * Rev. iii. 8. + Matt. xxv. 20, 22. XVI. I habe set before thee the Blessing and the Curse. I COR. xvi. 22. "If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Ana Τ thema Maran-atha." IT may seem somewhat strange that I should take for the last sermon in the year a verse savouring rather of terror and wrath, than of that love and peace which one would wish to blend with the last breathings of the old year; and indeed I have brought myself with some difficulty to do so. My comfort is, that there are many reassuring and strengthening thoughts connected with what is at first sight somewhat startling and alarming, and I can at least promise that if I deal with the one, I shall not omit the other. We shall hear of the blessing as well as of the curse; it is only with a view to the larger blessing that we treat of the curse at all. And then there is something which we need even more than comfort at the end of the year, which is, a just estimate of our true state before God; candid, unprejudiced, self-searching; a laying bare of our souls before Him, with reverence and with godly fear; a summing up of past experience with a view to a more profitable employment of time, talents, and opportunities for the future; thankful acknowledgment of sparing and longsuffering mercy; with confession of shortcomings, sorrow for backslidings; a girding up of the loins, and gathering up of all that is in us to humble and prayerful resolve that the future, by God's grace, shall not be thrown away as the past, but that we shall be more what Christ bought us that we might be; more what we are pledged to be, more what we have promised ourselves, aye, perhaps, promised our God that we will be. If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be accursed. We will first speak of this love to the Lord Jesus Christ Why it is asked of us? What it is? Whence it comes? Then enquire, What could have induced the Apostle to say such a dreadful thing? Then the reason or argument by which he enforces it. When we look back from the New Testament to the Old, we find that man was not invited all at once to love God, but rather to fear, to obey, and to cleave to Him. It is in Deuteronomy, first of all, that not the whole race of mankind, but the children of Israel, as a redeemed, preserved, consecrated people, were called to this service of love. This is in keeping with the character of the book, being a kind of gospel of the Pentateuch, as a whole fuller and richer in its spiritual significance than the other books; drawing out the deeper and more hidden veins of spiritual truth. It was natural that as the plan of redemption, God's eternal purpose of love to man, was more distinctly revealed to faith, man could far better conceive the thought of loving God; nay, could not help but love; and accordingly it is in those books where God's character, as a pardoning, saving, redeeming God is dwelt upon more largely and emphatically, that God is proposed as an object of man's love, as well as of his reverence and fear; accordingly, in Deuteronomy, the Psalms, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, we are rendered more familiar with the thought of man's love to God, because precisely in those books we are reminded of God's amazing condescension in having fixed His love upon His Church. "Take ye good heed unto yourselves, that ye love the Lord your God."* This charge is frequently repeated throughout Deuteronomy, and that because such abundant proofs of God's love had been vouchsafed: "Yea, He loved the people; all His saints are in thy hand."+"The Lord did not set His love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people, for ye were the fewest of all people: but because the Lord loved you." So in the Psalms, "I will love Thee, O Lord, my strength."§ "O love the Lord, all ye His saints."|| But if even in those twilight days enough of God's counsels of love was revealed to stir up answering love in the hearts of His people, how much more was this the case in New Testament days, when it could be said, "The darkness is past, and the true light now shineth."¶ "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins."** There was an epiphany of the kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man. Christ loved the church, and gave Himself for it; clung to it from the very pit of destruction; cast all its sins behind His back. The Church's unworthiness to become the object of Christ's love is set forth strikingly in Ezek. xvi., under the figure of a child cast forth in the open field. He finds it thus cast forth, helpless, naked, loathsome, unpitied: first, compassion is awakened; then the resolve * Josh. xxiii. II. + Deut. xxxiii. 3. Deut. vii. 7, 8. § Ps. xviii. 1. ¶ John ii. 8. ** I John iv. 10. to recover, to cleanse, and to save alive; and then the same free grace plans and executes a covenant of love. "I looked upon thee, and thy time was the time of love : I sware unto thee, and entered into a covenant with thee, saith the Lord God, and thou becamest mine."* And the Gospel contains the portraiture of this love; nothing is attempted like a laboured description. Every recorded word and act, in the simplest and most natural manner, sets it forth; love sinned against, resisted, scorned, yet longsuffering and never-failing; nothing like weak, wailing complaint that He was not loved, who was worthiest of their love, being love itself incarnate, but only that they shut themselves out of love, by closing their hearts to its melting, stirring appeals, and to its clearest, most convincing tokens. In Him was unbared God's love, not towards a favoured race, but "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." + Not to Jews, but to poor outcasts of Ephesus he could say, "For His great love wherewith He loved us." And by the magnet of that love some hearts that terror never wrought upon were broken, and yielded to the obedience of faith. What must it have been to hear Him preach in the synagogue at Nazareth, "He hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives; "§ or standing on the last day of the feast and crying, "If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink"? || what to have witnessed the mercy, compassion, and concern of Christ for lost, helpless, undone sinners; to see tears flow out of hard, stony hearts till now impenetrable; sunken souls Eph. ii. 4. || John vii. 37. § Luke iv. 18. * Ezek. xvi. 8. † John iii. 16. |