In the 22nd chapter of the Gospel of
St. Matthew, St. Matthew's record of the Gospel,
22nd chapter, verse 42 following, verse 41 following,
while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked
them, saying, What think ye of Christ?
Whose son is he?
They say unto him, The son of David.
He saith unto them, How then doth David
in spirit call him Lord?
Saying, The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit
thou on my right hand, till I make
thine enemies their footstool.
If David then call him Lord, how is
he a son?
No man was able to answer him a
word, neither durst any man from that day
forth ask him any more questions.
Now the question here in the 42nd verse,
What think ye of Christ?
is the one that I want to use
tonight.
Let us have a moment of prayer.
Lord, we thank thee for every evidence of
thy presence in our midst.
Soon, very soon, it will be all we
have.
And we want to cultivate it, learn to
recognize it, and appreciate it, and live with
it joyously forever.
For thy presence, thy self, thou wilt be
our eternal home.
Thou hast been our dwelling place in all
generations.
In thee we now live and move and
have our being.
And in those days and centuries before us,
thou wilt be our dwelling place.
And we would learn to be at home
in thy presence.
Breathe, O breathe, thy loving spirit upon us
this evening.
Upon the truth as we attempt to give
it, upon all of us as we listen.
May our response please thy Son, who poured
out his soul for us unto death, and
gave himself a ransom for many.
We ask it in his name.
Amen.
Now, Jesus Christ is Christianity, if the truth
were known.
Or, turning it about, Christianity is Christ.
Paul begins his gospel to Romans by saying,
the gospel of God, his epistle to the
Romans, by saying, the gospel of God concerning
his Son.
For the gospel concerns Jesus Christ and lost
men.
But it concerns Jesus Christ primarily, and most
importantly.
Now, the Church visible has a definite beginning.
It had a definite beginning, a definite historical
origin.
It's easily traced back, link by link, to
its beginning.
Some things are lost in antiquity, and we
are unable to discover their beginnings.
But not so with the Church that we
call the Church of Jesus.
This is easily traced back, link by link,
to its origin.
And that origin is not in an idea
at all, but in a man.
You can trace Communism back to an idea.
You can trace almost every religion of the
world back to the birth of some idea,
false or true.
But when you come to the Church of
Christ, you trace that Church back to a
man.
There's nothing vague or mythological about the man.
He is not lost in the shadows of
the past.
But he is definitely placed as true geography
in time.
His birthplace can be found on any map.
You can turn to any map, and by
a little careful examination, you can put a
pencil down on the very town where he
was born.
The town where he lived and the country
where he roamed and taught and did his
wonders can be located, I say, on any
map.
And the city where he was crucified is
there, written down for us.
And the mount from which he ascended after
his crucifixion and resurrection, it is there.
It can be located.
Any visitor can go there and find it,
and a guide will show him where the
mount is, and he can look at it
and photograph it.
It's there.
And then everything was located evidently as to
time.
Up to a certain point in history, there
was no church.
And then suddenly it broke on the world
and became vastly important, and it has never
been out of the historical eye from that
time to this.
And its appearance coincided with the appearance of
this man that I'm talking about tonight, who
was born in that town, in that country,
at that time.
And the historicity of this man is bound
up with certain great historical figures that identify
him and give further proof that he lived
and existed.
There was Herod, the king of Judea.
There was Cyrenius, governor of Syria.
There was Tiberius Caesar.
There was Pilate, governor of Judea.
There was Annas and Caiaphas, who were high
priests.
These all lived and history records their being
in the world, and they were there when
he was there.
And their place in history had its origin
about the time that they were contemporary with
him for a while.
And his advent is easily the greatest occurrence
in history, because his impact upon the human
race is greater than that of any other
man that ever came to the world.
And for strategic importance, his coming to the
world was the greatest event in the world,
and for quality of the effect on mankind.
There lived a man once by the name
of Marx, and that man taught the world
and gave them certain ideas.
But the quality of those ideas have been
proved by all right-thinking and God-fearing
people to be of the very devil himself.
For out of those ideas there was born
the terrible scourge that we call communism.
And then the perpetuity of the effect upon
the race of man.
He's still here.
He's still to be dealt with.
He's still breathing over everybody's shoulder.
His name is still heard, and after all
the passing of these years, the proof is
among us that his advent was the greatest
occurrence in history.
Now, the church that I mentioned, the church
we know and love, is an extension of
the personality of the man Christ Jesus.
For 1900 years there has been felt a
presence, and the church has not created nor
perpetuated that presence, but that presence has supported
and fired the church.
It is not the church that has kept
the name of Jesus alive, but it's the
Jesus that has kept the name of the
church alive through all these centuries.
Now that brief sketch, and we come to
the question, it was a theological question as
first asked there.
What think ye of the Christ?
And the question of whether the man Jesus
was the Christ or not had not been
settled.
It has been settled now by God having
raised him from the dead and set him
at his own right hand, and then sent
down the Holy Ghost to establish the church.
So instead of making it a merely theological
question, I am going to make it a
practical question.
What do you think of Christ?
Now I would assume that some people may
say, well, the trouble is we're just talking
to each other.
The people who are present here tonight all
believe that Jesus the Christ is God's very
Son.
He is the Lord, and I don't see
why the question should come up at all.
Well, maybe before I get through we'll see
why the question should come up and why
it should be faced and answered boldly, courageously,
and candidly by every one of us.
Because we answer the question, what do you
think of Jesus Christ, by the response we
make to his gospel.
And there are about five responses that I
want to mention tonight briefly.
Some response is hardly to be called a
response at all, because it is what we
call the negative response.
People hear about him and do absolutely nothing
at all.
There were people by the thousands, and I
suppose even tens of thousands in this great
city of Toronto today, who heard chimes.
And in fishing around for some news, they
got a church bell or a hymn on
the radio or television.
And so somehow Christ managed to make himself
heard and felt.
And the stream of people, or twos and
threes and ones, moving off to some local
church, said to all of these people that
there is a man by the name of
Jesus, that he is a historical figure.
He is not a myth, not something that
has been pulled out of acuity and given
a name, but that he is a man
who was born, a woman, at a certain
time, in a certain place, in a certain
country, and that you can trace him back
to his beginning, that is, back to his
earthly beginning.
And then the organization that he formed, you
can trace back.
This one, Jesus, has to be dealt with.
We've got to do something about him.
What's our response?
What do we think of him?
Well, some had that question put to them
today, and they did absolutely nothing at all.
They were indifferent to the whole thing, and
silent.
But these dead souls, nevertheless, are making a
response.
They are answering the question, because this same
man said, He that is not with me
is against me, so that there is no
such thing as neutrality.
During the war they said only the stars
are neutral.
Situations were so plainly black and white, so
obviously opposed good to evil, that only the
stars above could be negative.
Anybody that had any moral sense at all,
the saying had it, had to take sides.
I believe the same is true today in
the question of communism.
I don't believe it is possible to be
neutral and say, Well, I'm not on anybody's
side.
You are on somebody's side.
If you're not on the side of the
Bible and God and Christ and morality and
righteousness and freedom and the dignity of the
individual, then you're on the other side.
There is no middle ground.
And Jesus knew it when he said, He
that is not with me is against me,
and he that gathers not with me scatters
wildly abroad and wastes what he's doing.
Some try to be negative, and we'll go
that far with them.
We'll call it a negative response and say
that it is not a response at all.
But it is a response.
If your little baby was in the home
and that little child was dying, it was
obvious the child was dying, and the doctor
couldn't help, for at least there was hope
that he might be able to help.
And a lazy man lay in his bed,
and nobody could get him to get up
to go for a doctor or call a
doctor.
And the child lay there and moaned.
You say, Well, I'm indifferent.
No, he was not indifferent.
No indifference there.
It was not indifference.
He was against that child and loved himself
better than, his own comforts better than the
child.
And so when the message of Christ comes,
and he stands and says, Come unto me,
all ye that labor and are heavy laden,
and I will give you rest, and we
respond by doing nothing, we're responding all right.
We're responding even though we're doing nothing.
It's a response.
It's a negative response that is a positive
response at last.
Well, then there is a second response, and
that is the response that is intellectual.
Some people see the beauty of the character
of Jesus.
I remember that Friedrich Nietzsche, who taught nihilism,
and the superman, and whose crazy ideas inspired
Hitler to become the devil that he was.
This man said there was something beautiful about
Jesus Christ.
He didn't like Paul, he said, but he
couldn't help but love this Jesus.
Even this evil man recognized in that quiet
figure that moved about in Palestine, taking babies
in his arms and blessing them, and mingling
with the poor and the common people of
his times, and healing the sick and blessing
them wherever he could.
This one had something beautiful about him.
There was something beautiful about the character of
Jesus.
He is the one character in which there
is no flaw to be found.
There is flaw in every character.
There isn't a man in the scriptures, unless
it might be Joseph, that we can't find
fault with.
Certainly Abraham, we can find a lot of
fault with Abraham.
You don't have to try to find it,
it's there, obvious, God put it there.
And then there's Jacob, everybody knows about Jacob,
and lazy old Isaac, everybody knows about him.
And all the way down there was no
man, no woman, that was perfect of character.
And in history it's the same.
And all the great characters that have lived
in the world, we can name them all
down the centuries, and yet there wasn't a
one of them, but what we have to
apologize somewhere and say, well, he was great
in spite of this.
This was a blemish on his character.
This was a blot on his scutcheon, but
he was great in spite of it.
But there is no blot to be found
on the scutcheon of Jesus Christ.
There is not a blot upon his holy
name, not a single moat in the beam,
not a speck upon the white surface of
that holy character.
Not anywhere.
And of course, men grab that intellectually, and
they see the dignity of the teaching of
the man.
I suppose nowhere in the world is there
to be found anything quite so beautiful as
the Sermon on the Mount.
It is so beautiful that it's like a
palace of carved ivory, filled with low music.
It's charming, it's gracious, it's deep, it's strong,
it's noble, it's elevated, it's everything.
And of course, great minds talk about this.
Great minds appreciate it.
It's an intellectual response.
And his effect upon history, mentioned before, this
all has intellectual fascination for men.
When they look at history, they say, this
man stands head and shoulders above any other
character that ever lived in the world.
This simple man, born of a virgin mother
yonder in Palestine, and born in the manger,
and brought up in the carpenter's shop, and
without formal education, yet he moved out and
stands strong and tall and shining above all
of the sons of men.
And of course, there's intellectual fascination there.
And then, others have sentimental response.
A lot of people are sentimental in their
response to Jesus Christ our Lord.
There's an emotional fixation that is created, just
as a moviegoer has an emotional fixation for
some of the characters, some of these fellows
who go about.
I remember when Rudolph Valentino was the big
idol of the day.
He came to one of the large cities,
I've forgotten which one in the United States,
and he was there of what they said,
in person.
And the women all went to see him,
you know, this love-making idol.
And they say that they worked themselves up
to such a fury that they finally, a
lot of them, took off their wedding rings
and tossed them at his feet.
As much as to say, I repudiate all
my vows and my husband and that bum
that I married.
Here, here, I want you.
And threw their wedding rings at his feet.
Well now, that's a fixation.
There's an emotional response, a sentimental response to
a man.
And you will find that possible, entirely possible.
It's impossible to have a sentimental attachment to
the Virgin Mary.
And I have no doubt that some people
love the Virgin Mary with a very beautiful
and wonderful affection.
They love her.
They love the Virgin Mary.
And their Ave Maria rings and vibrates with
reality.
They mean what they're saying.
However false and however far from truth, it's
really true that they love this woman that
they never saw.
They love this woman who's been dead for
1900 years.
They love this woman.
It's entirely possible to get a fixed idea,
an emotional fixation.
And yet it's a powerful and enjoyable thing.
I remember in the days when I used
to do a lot more reading of literature
than I do now, that I read the
writings of Wilde and Rossetti, just to mention
two.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and of Oscar Wilde.
And it's astonishing how these men talk about
Christ.
They write about him and they use him
as an example.
And they say fine things about him and
they make gestures of affection toward him.
And yet neither Gabriel Rossetti nor Wilde were
Christians.
But they had a sentimental attachment to the
man Christ Jesus.
It didn't lead them to God and this
doesn't lead men to God.
It doesn't transform their life.
It doesn't change them.
It doesn't give them a new birth.
It doesn't impart eternal life.
It doesn't justify them.
It doesn't take away their sin.
But it serves as a very beautiful and
high ideal.
Something wonderful and beautiful.
My wife and I rode down from home
this morning in a tax cab.
And I gathered from the young man, a
blond young fellow who was driving, that he
was a Hollander.
And I said, Would you be a Hollander
by any means?
And he said, Yes.
And I said, Are you acquainted with a
town in Holland named Dettingen?
And he said, Yes, I come from near
there.
I said, Do you happen to know Handel's
Tadam sung by the Dettingen choir, Bach choir?
And his face lighted up immediately and he
almost exploded there behind the wheel.
And he began to talk about Bach, as
he called him.
I can't scrape my throat the way he
did, not being Dutch.
But he said, Oh, Bach, he said, and
Handel.
He said, I tell you, if you don't
like church music, you're missing something.
And he just lectured us on the west
of the way down.
He was all a thrill with it.
But he smoked.
He must have been on fire because there
was a place, the hole inside of the
car reeked.
And I doubt whether the man was a
Christian, but he loved church music.
He loved the Tadam, the Adumas.
He loved to hear the great things sung
by the great choirs, composed by the great
Handels and Bachs of generations gone.
Now, it's entirely possible to be religious in
that sentimental fashion and to go to church
and love the sound of music and the
sound of the nasal twang of the pastor.
Not this one.
But the nasal twang of the pastor as
he reads the Psalms and leads us in
prayer.
And it's possible, I say, to become sentimentally
religious and never have been born again.
And it's possible also to have another kind
of response, and that's a moral response.
Now, the moral excellency of the teachings of
Christ I have mentioned before, and they're too
well known for me to spend any time
proving.
Everybody acknowledges the superiority of his moral teachings,
and they do have a claim upon mankind.
There is still a light that lighteth every
man that cometh into the world, and he
must be a pretty low kind of creature
who could know that one would die for
another and not be affected by it.
He would have to be a pretty low
kind of creature that wouldn't like truth better
than error, that wouldn't like telling truth better
than lying, that wouldn't like an honest man
better than a thief.
And so some people make a moral response
to Jesus Christ our Lord, and you will
find it in the newspapers and magazines and
over the radio.
You'll find the politicians running, bringing the changes
on at peace, goodwill toward men.
And you will find greater love hath no
man than this, that he lays down his
life for his friends, and the least of
these, my brethren, and the fatherhood of God
and the brotherhood of man and internationalism and
togetherness.
And all this, you will find it, men
are morally on Jesus' side.
They may in private be scoundrels, but they
have decency enough that they believe in the
morality of Jesus.
And such people as that may live in
fine sections of the town, and when a
petition is made to build a church there,
they say, sure, we'd like to have a
church.
And then they say expansively, we wouldn't want
to rear our children in a neighborhood where
there was not a church.
They believe in the church.
They believe that her teachings have high moral
value.
And so their response to Jesus Christ is
moral.
They're certainly not going to go all the
way with him.
They're certainly not going to be so ridiculous
that they think it's just as bad to
look on a woman lustfully as to commit
adultery with her.
They're certainly not going to be such fools,
they would say, as to believe that if
a man wants your coat, give him your
vest along with it.
They'd say, oh, well, that's extreme.
Of course, that's extreme.
Nobody can carry that out.
But nevertheless, there's something beautiful in the teachings
of Jesus about goodwill toward men and brotherhood
and all that.
So their response is a moral response.
But that is not a redeeming response either.
Any philosopher, old Socrates, would have loved Jesus
for his morality.
Any of the philosophers down the years had
to admit and have to admit now that
the moral teachings of Christ are beyond all
telling in their purity and lofty idealism.
But you can have all that and not
be born again at all, not be saved,
not have eternal life, not be justified, not
have a Redeemer, not have an advocate before
the throne of God, not be ready to
die.
You can be morally on the side of
Jesus.
Not that anybody follows him all the way,
but in their hearts they want to do
it, and they believe in him and say
nice things about him and go to church
and support the church and maybe even get
on the board and become members in good
standing and useful members.
And still, they've never made anything but a
moral response to Jesus.
They've never known what it is to have
that awful sudden moment of awareness when they
pass from death unto life.
They've never known what it was to take
that sudden, awesome, wonderful leap into the arms
of Jesus Christ and to become Christians indeed
and pass from death unto life and have
imparted to them the life of God by
the Holy Ghost and have their names written
in heaven and know that they belong to
God.
They've not had that.
You know, I've been in Canada long enough
now to think there's an awful lot of
this that I'm describing among the fine, lovely
people of Canada.
I said to the council down in Columbus
that I didn't mind going away from Chicago
because I'd found myself among the nicest people
in the world, and I have no hesitation
in saying that.
I think the people that I've met in
Toronto are, from the standpoint of just sheer
human niceness, about the nicest people I've ever
known in my life.
And that takes in all Americans I've known,
too.
I hate to say that, but it's so.
But I believe that.
But better than that is one thing, but
it's another thing altogether to be born again.
It's another thing to come out of your
sin into salvation.
It's another thing to have attached yourself to
Jesus Christ the Lord and be His and
His alone.
It's another thing altogether to be a Christian
and carry a cross.
And that brings us to the last response
that I want to mention tonight, and that
is the spiritual response.
Now, there are a few who make a
spiritual response.
I've said that some have a negative response
in that they don't do anything.
Their response is positive.
They're against Him.
There are others who make an intellectual response,
and they can write books on His place
in history.
There are others who make a sentimental response,
and they're very tender, and they love organ
music and choir music and poetry, and they're
sentimentally attached to Him.
There are others, I say, that have made
a moral response, and they admit the superiority
of His teachings.
But all of this put together in one
man doesn't save that man.
All of this doesn't save that man.
Here is a ship that's sinking.
And out there is a lifeboat.
It's painted white, painted red around the gunwale,
and it's shaped nicely.
And here is a man when the ship
finally jumps overboard to keep from being sucked
down.
Here is a man when the ship sinks
and swims away and looks above him, raises
his head as high as he can, and
he sees this lifeboat.
Half a dozen of these men see it.
And one of them shrugs and strikes out
in another direction.
He's the indifferent one.
Another one is an engineer.
And he begins to, as he swims there
and blows saltwater, he begins to talk to
himself and to anyone within hearing about the
beautiful shape of that boat.
He's an engineer, and he knows about such
things.
Another one is a poet or an artist.
He sees that boat bouncing and floating there
on the waves as they rise and fall,
and he's struck with the beauty of it,
that beautiful white boat floating on that green
water.
He's the sentimental one.
Another one is greatly struck with the heroism
of those on board that boat.
And he says, isn't this wonderful that there's
so much good in humanity?
Look at those sailors there, drenched to the
skin, laboring and struggling to keep the boat
afloat and to bring everybody in.
That's beautiful.
He is the man with the moral response.
But all of these men can perish in
a few minutes from the cold, icy saltwater
they can't keep afloat.
And they can all perish.
And their last thought can be of the
beauty of men who risk their lives to
save other men or of the beauty of
the shape of that boat.
Then there's another kind.
And that's the fellow who yells and begins
to use every trick he knows to propel
himself in the direction of that boat.
And he has the spiritual response.
What think ye of Jesus Christ?
Well, some ignore him.
Others respond variously as I've said.
Then there are the few who cry out,
Lord, Thou Son of David, have mercy on
me.
And they see everything everybody else sees.
The true Christian is not blind to the
moral excellence of his teaching.
The true Christian is not blind to the
emotional appeal of his dying for us.
The true Christian is not blind to all
the beauties that lie in Jesus Christ, the
lily of the valley and the rose of
Sharon.
But he knows that isn't sufficient.
He knows that if he's going to be
saved he must make a spiritual response that
will go to the roots of his being,
that will change his manner of living, that
will reorient him.
This man who makes the spiritual response knows
that it will be necessary for him to
see his sin and admit it.
He knows that there must come a break
with that sin.
It isn't enough to confess it.
Some hate their sins and confess them every
day and commit them again before the sun
sets.
Not that, not them.
They won't be saved.
The man who will be saved, who makes
the right response to the man Christ Jesus,
is the one who says, God, I'm sorry
that I have sinned.
Forgive me for Christ's sake, and I'll not
do it again.
And settles it that he's not going to
do any more of this sinning business.
But he breaks off with everything that's necessary.
He breaks off with the friends that are
ruining him.
He breaks off with the kind of living
that is dragging him down.
He breaks off with it all, changes his
life, and becomes another man.
He's the man who prays past these fears
and these doubts.
He's the man like that fellow Barakamias, was
it?
Who said, Lord Jesus, Son of David, have
mercy on me.
And they tried to stop him, but they
said, the scripture says he cried out all
the more.
The more people that tried to stop him,
the louder he cried.
He wanted Jesus Christ to hear him.
And then surrendered himself to Jesus.
That's the person that is saved.
That's the person that will be saved in
the judgment of the great day.
That's the person whom God knows as his
child.
That's the person who has seen his sin,
who has seen the sufficiency of the Lord
Jesus Christ, who has heard the invitation and
the command to repent and believe on Christ,
and who breaks off with everything and attaches
himself to Jesus Christ as his Lord and
all.
That's the man, and that man will be
saved.
No other man will.
Now there it is.
I've made it just as plain, and I
think it is possible for any man to
make it.
Here stands Jesus Christ, God Almighty's last spoken
word to the world, our hope for all
time.
With him we can't lose, and without him
we can't win.
We perish without him, and we can't perish
with him.
There he stands, above all the world, and
says, Come unto me.
Some make no response at all.
Some look up and say, That's a beautiful
gesture.
And they write a book or a poem
about it.
Others look up and are sentimentally moved and
wipe a tear and say, I love to
hear Rock of Ages sung.
Others make a moral response and say, I'm
going to try to live clean.
I think that's the right way to live.
I don't want to go down in the
gutter.
I want to live clean.
But not one of these, not one of
these will get the benefit of his atonement
or the cleansing of his blood.
Not one of these is a child of
God.
It becomes necessary, I repeat, for the last
time, that if we want to gain the
benefit of his atonement and be washed in
his blood and have him own us before
the throne of God and have God call
us his child and allow us to call
God our Father, there must be a putting
away of every sin.
There must be a breaking off of every
known wrong habit and deed.
There must be a straightening out of our
lives so far as we can straighten them
out.
There must be a committal of ourselves to
Jesus Christ irrevocably, now and for all time
to come.
And if need be, cut off that right
hand.
If need be, pluck out that right eye.
If need be, say goodbye to father and
mother, friends and loved ones, that we might
follow him.
That's the person that will be saved.
The others will not be.
They cannot be.
Because it's all soulish and intellectual.
This is spiritual and profound and eternal.
May God help us to make the right
response and have the right answer.
Let's pray.