The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit The Light of the
World A sermon published on Thursday, October 19,
1916 delivered by C.
H.
Spurgeon at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, New England.
John 8, verse 12 Then spake Jesus unto
them, saying, I am the light of the
world.
He that followeth me shall not walk in
darkness, but shall have the light of light.
Our Lord did not speak in this way
at the beginning of His ministry.
He did not thus bear witness to Himself,
saying, I am the light of the world.
But it was befitting on this occasion when
the people before Him had already received sufficient
evidence from other quarters.
John the Baptist, whom all men counted for
a prophet, had testified that Christ was the
true light which lighteth every man that cometh
into the world.
The witness of John they rejected, startling if
not conclusive as it must have been considering
the esteem in which his oracular voice was
held.
Moreover, Jesus Himself had wrought conviction in their
own hearts by His own teaching.
Had they not listened to His famous Sermon
on the Mount, could they not feel the
authority with which He spoke?
Did they not confess to the impressions He
produced on them?
The weight and the wisdom of His discourse
manifested a power that could melt their thoughts
into the very mould of His ministry.
Nor was it merely His teaching, transparent though
that was, but the signs He showed and
the miracles He wrought with the majesty of
His voice and the virtue of His touch
proclaimed that He was the light of the
world.
Thus the infirmities of the creature called forth
His divine compassion.
With radiant eyes of pity He looked on
the wretched and gave them quick relief.
He shone on their sadness like the sun
of righteousness with healing in His beams.
They hailed His visit in every town and
village as the healer of all that were
diseased.
Might not the quick sense of every unprejudiced
spectator detect in Him the Messiah and welcome
His advent to the world?
At length, as though aggrieved by their unbelief,
He speaks loudly and proclaims plainly, I am
the light of the world.
Such high ground does He take before His
adversaries.
Well might He say it to their teeth.
Hardly an hour before He had flashed that
light into their eyes and blinded them with
its brilliance.
They had stood before Him with the unhappy
woman whom they sought to make the instrument
of entangling Him, and anon they had sneaked
out of His presence, conscience stricken, when He
said, He that is without sin among you,
let Him first cast a stone at her.
One ray of His omniscience had lighted up
the secret chambers of their memory and exposed,
at least to themselves, the righteous law they
had broken and the crimes they had to
answer for.
He who could thus convince them is able
to convince the world of sin.
He who lit up the deepest recesses of
the heart is the light of the world.
So Jesus here boldly and openly avowed the
truth concerning Himself when He said, I am
the light of the world.
Let our meditation now be directed to our
Lord Jesus Christ as the light of the
world, the true light, the guiding light, and
the universal light.
Jesus is the light of the world.
That Jesus is the light, the light of
the world, is to be seen in all
parts of His blessed history.
Look at Him in His cradle.
Shines there a star above the house wherein
the young child sleeps.
Brighter far than yonder star is He who
lies cradled in the manger.
He has come, the predictions of whose advent
had illumined centuries of darkness.
As a babe, devout men hail Him, a
light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory
of His people Israel.
To the eyes of faith, what radiance emanates
from the newborn babe?
Look for the like was never looked on
before.
There God is veiled in human flesh.
Behold the mystery of the incarnation.
God is manifest in our nature.
He dwells among us.
The light is clear and dazzling.
Well might the angels have sung glory to
God in the highest on earth, peace, goodwill
towards men.
Sweet babe, thou hast pierced the thick darkness
of earth's sorrow.
Thou hast enlightened her scenes of sadness, infusing
joy into her gloom.
Thy coming revealed the love of God, His
sweet compassion, and His tender pity towards the
guilty sons of men.
With growing years, while His increasing wisdom kept
pace with His increasing stature, He shone, exhibiting
a child's delight in the two tables of
the law, His first concern being to do
His heavenly Father's business, and His constant habit
being to submit Himself and to honor His
earthly parent.
Not rashly or recklessly did He begin to
teach.
His baptism throws a wonderful light upon consecration
to God, and the dire temptations that quickly
followed, in all of which He foiled the
tempter, have thrown a brilliant light on the
pathway of Christian ministers.
As a preacher, He was luminous.
He expounded the spirituality of the law.
Light penetrated the precept through and through as
He made the very essence of purity apparent.
His light cleared the law of the mists
and fogs that the rabbinical writers had gathered
around it.
He shed light, too, upon the covenant of
grace.
He promulgated the gospel of peace among the
sons of men.
He told of God the Father willing to
receive His prodigal children back again into His
bosom.
His parables threw wondrous light upon the dispensation
of the kingdom of heaven.
His counsels and His cautions brought the final
destinies of the righteous and the wicked into
full view.
Eternity dawned on His ears while He spake.
His own life exhibited the power of love,
the value of sympathy, and the virtue of
forgiving injuries.
His death gave yet more palpable evidence of
unfaltering submission to the will of God and
unflinching self-sacrifice for the welfare of men.
O beloved, the light of Christ comes out
brightest upon the cross.
Someone called it the pharaohs of this world
sea.
So it is.
This is the lighthouse that throws its beams
across the dark waters of human guilt and
misery, warns men of the rocks, and guides
them to the haven.
A Savior, God in human flesh, He whom
the seers predicted, a King shall reign in
righteousness.
Appears as the divine symbol represented Him, a
lamb slain.
Behold Him shedding His precious blood to atone
for the sins of men.
Never did such light shine on the law
and the prophets.
Never did such light gleam on the faith
and hope of pure hearts.
Never did such light irradiate the repentance and
conversion by which sinners are retrieved.
Behold the Son as He cometh forth from
His chamber and rejoiceth to finish His course.
He before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been
evidently set forth crucified hath seen a light
which doth outshine all earthly splendor.
The sin and the sorrow, the shame and
the sentence all vanish when we see the
Redeemer die for us.
And if from the gloom of His death
so much comfort can be extracted, what shall
we say when He rose again from the
dead?
His dark sepulcher reflects glory now that He
is risen from the dead.
The shroud, the mattock, and the grave are
shorn of their tears.
And no more a charnel house to fence
the relics of lost innocence, a vault of
ruin and decay.
The imprisoning stone is rolled away into the
sepulcher.
You can peer now that Christ has broken
down the door and rent away the veil.
Through it you can look.
For those that follow Christ, it is a
passage into everlasting life.
He has brought life and immortality to light.
Since He has risen from the tomb and
left the dead, light, clear and transparent, shines
on the exodus of the soul from earth.
On, onward still, track His path as in
His ascension He goes flaming up the skies.
There, there is a road of light that
shows us the way to God.
He enters heaven and sits at the right
hand of the Father.
There is our representative.
He sheds the light of comfort down upon
us.
There He waits.
And while He waits, He wills that where
He is, there should His people be.
Oh, happy thought.
Today, my brethren, amongst the sons of men,
Christ is still the light.
He has sent the Holy Spirit to be
His representative here on earth.
He testifies of Christ.
The divine paraclete occupies the place of our
departed teacher.
The church, inspired by the blessed spirit with
10,000 tongues, proclaims the gospel of salvation.
Ye are the light of the world, said
Jesus.
In His people, Christ still shines forth with
even a brighter light than in the days
of His earthly sojourn.
He has 10,000 reflectors instead of 12.
10,000 times 10,000 tongues proclaim His
gospel.
And 10,000 times 10,000 hearts burn
and blaze with the light of the divine
word.
Christ is the light of the world.
From His cradle to His throne and onward
till He cometh in full splendor at the
second advent, the Lamb is the light that
illuminates this dark earth.
Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I
am the light of the world.
Jesus is the true light.
There are other lights.
Before His coming, there had been some light
typical.
Do you not remember that a golden lamp
stood in the holy place with its seven
branches?
It was an admirable piece of sacred furniture
and highly instructive.
But Jesus seems to put it away.
In fact, it had been already put away.
He had come to put an end to
its meaning by fulfilling its intent.
This was not the light.
It was only the type of the light.
I am the true light, He says.
Even that light which flamed across the desert
way when Moses led the host of God
through the wilderness was but a typical light.
The veritable pillar of cloud and fire is
Jesus who leads the whole host of God's
elect through this weary wilderness to the Canaan
of the blessed.
Jesus Christ was the true light in opposition
to the smoking flax of tradition.
Listen to those rabbis.
They think themselves the light of the world.
Their sophism is an endless strife of words.
Their research is not worth your study.
Their knowledge is not worth the knowing.
They can tell you exactly which is the
middle verse of the Bible and which is
the middle letter of the middle word.
They discussed their paradoxes till they became addle
-headed.
They refined on their subtleties till doctrine dwindled
down into doubt and simple truth was degraded
into silly twaddle.
Their translations of scripture were a travesty and
their commentaries an outrage upon common sense.
But Christ, the true, the heavenly light, extinguishes
all your earthly luminaries.
The Jewish rabbi, the Greek philosopher, the ecclesiastical
father, and the modern theological thinker are meteors
that dissolve into mist.
They make void the word of God through
their traditions or their conjectures, flee away from
the nebulous forms and noxious fumes of their
old traditions and new discoveries.
Believe what Jesus said and his apostles taught
and what you have had revealed to you
in his own pure word, Christ is the
true light.
In opposition to the glare of priest craft
with which so many in all ages have
been enamored, Christ is the light of the
world.
There is some reason to suppose that this
declaration of our Lord bore allusion to a
custom observed among the Jews at that time
in connection with the feast of tabernacles.
Mammonides says that on the previous evening two
enormous candelabra, golden lamps of a vast size,
were set up in the court of the
women in the open air and that these
flamed with such a brilliant light that they
appeared to illuminate the whole city of Jerusalem.
And the women came with a torchlight procession
and stood around these flaming candelabra and there
executed a sort of sacred dance and solemn
pageant.
This was done not on the authority of
Moses, but on the authority of tradition to
keep the people in mind of the cloudy
and fiery pillar of the wilderness.
The feast of tabernacles, you know, was designed
as a memorial of the 40 years that
the children of Israel wandered in the wilderness,
dwelling in tents.
But this particular rite was of their own
invention, a supplementary observance intended to remind the
people of the fiery pillar that illumined the
camp in those days of yore.
Now it is supposed, not, I think, without
good reason, that it was on the morning
after this celebration that Jesus stood in the
court.
The lamps were gone out, but the golden
columns that the ninety-four had flamed still
remained in their places, the remnant of a
spectacle, the lamps minus the light.
Just then the sun was rising in its
own peerless splendor.
The scene they beheld gave force to the
sentence he uttered.
The contrast between the lamps which the priests
had lit, a fit emblem of superstition, were
all going out, perhaps with a noxious smell,
while the mighty orb of day was rising
when Jesus said, I am the light of
the world.
He that followeth me shall not walk in
darkness, whether the scene and the circumstances were
as has been so well imagined or not.
The truth is fitly illustrated by the similitude.
When every lamp that every man is kindled
and fed with the oil of superstition shall
have died out as they must expire, our
Lord Jesus Christ shall, like the morning sun,
make glad the sons of men.
Away ye go, ye bright meteors of the
night, around which the children of superstition execute
their maddened dance of implicit belief.
Away ye go, already ye begin to go
out.
I see how ye all flicker even now.
The day cometh on a pace in which
the blast of God's eternal spirit shall blow
you out in everlasting night.
But Jesus shines, he is the true light,
and will shine on forever.
I live in the twilight of Christianity, said
Voltaire, and he spoke a truth unwittingly.
He thought that it was the twilight of
the evening, but it was the twilight of
the morning, for Jesus shineth brighter and brighter
still, the true light, before which the lamps
of superstition and priestcraft must pale their infectual
fires.
This is what the Savior meant.
He was the true light.
Very different, too, is the light of Christ
from the sparks which are to be seen
all the world over.
Every now and then a scientific gentleman picks
up a flint arrowhead, and he strikes a
wonderful light with it, and he that has
his tinderbox ready and a brimstone match may
soon think he has got the true light,
till another philosopher comes and, with the lid
of the aforesaid tinderbox, puts out that light.
This is the cardinal virtue of philosophers.
They extinguish one another.
Their fine-spun theories do not often survive
the fleeting generation that admires them.
A fresh race starts fresh theories of unbelief,
which live their day like ephemera and then
expire.
Not so the light of Christ.
It burns on and beams forever.
We have friends who have been dazed by
the light of public opinion, a very bright
light that, and we have known some decent
scholars who have been enraptured with the light
of the 19th century, a wonderful luminary indeed,
but slightly darkened by the follies, frauds, and
crimes which every day's newspaper reveals.
We have had the light of erudition, which
lauded Aristotle and made the heathen author supply
a textbook for Christian colleges.
We have heard more than enough of the
light of the church, in which we can
discern nothing but colors and conceits borrowed from
the medieval darkness of Christendom.
But we have the trustworthy and the true
when we hear him exclaim, I am the
light.
Where else shall light be found?
Where shall the bewildered sons of men find
a reliable guide?
In the teaching of the person, the life,
the death, the sacrifice of the Christ of
Nazareth, we have light self-evidential, palpable by
its own brilliance.
Guiding light is here alike clearly visible.
This, to follow, is not fallacious.
I am the light of the world.
He that followeth me shall not walk in
darkness.
Thus then, is he a light that is
to be followed?
Do any of you want to enjoy the
light that streams from Christ?
Be assured you cannot realize it by reading
about it.
You must follow it.
If a man could travel so fast as
always to follow the sun, of course, he
would always be in the light.
If the day should ever come when the
speed of the railway shall be equal to
the speed of the world's motion, then a
man may so live as to never lose
the light.
Now, he that follows Christ shall never walk
in darkness.
To follow him means to commit yourselves to
him, to believe him, and yield yourselves up,
obediently doing what he bids and implicitly accepting
what he says.
You must have no other master.
Say not, I will be taught by Calvin,
or by Luther, or by Wesley, or by
anybody else.
Jesus Christ only must be your light.
His word, by the testimony of his spirit,
must be your soul authority.
Jesus is the guiding light for the soul,
for the soul that panteth after God.
Dost thou say with Philip, show us the
Father, and it sufficeth us?
Jesus saith, I am the way, the truth,
and the life.
No man cometh unto the Father but by
me.
Christ is the guiding light through the multitude
of authors.
If you want to thread your way among
them, let the early fathers, the sturdy reformers,
the rigid Puritans, and the modern evangelists be
your companions, if so it please you.
But let him be your guide, and his
counsel your stay, till you reach the gates
of glory.
Amidst the conflict of opinions, his sure word
will prove your safe chart.
He is the guiding light through sickness and
suffering.
Trust him, and he will make your bed
in your sickness.
He will bring lasting benefits out of your
most lamentable afflictions.
He is the guiding light through death's dark
veil.
In those gloomy shades you need fear no
ill, if you keep close to him.
Son of my soul, thou Saviour dear, it
is not night if thou be night.
Christ has said, He that followeth me shall
not walk in darkness, so the terror by
night flies at his presence.
The atoning blood shall speak peace to you.
Ignorance shall vanish before the brightness he manifests.
Christ shall teach you.
Despair shall dissolve before the sweet beams of
hope.
Even doubt, with all its indecision that comes
of it, melts at the sound of his
animating voice.
This is the way, walk ye in it.
Thrice happy man who commits himself to Jesus,
he shall always have light, and shall never
walk in darkness.
Jesus is the universal light.
He says, I am the light of the
world.
He does not merely say, I am the
light of the Jews, or I am the
light of the Gentiles.
He is both.
He is the light of all mankind.
There is no clear light in which any
man can discern God, or rightly understand himself,
perceive the bitterness of sin, or apprehend the
destiny and the doom of heaven and hell,
but what flows through Jesus Christ.
I do not doubt that among the various
religious professions spread over the world, in many
of which Christianity is much debased, there are
devout persons who enjoy a share of communion
with God and a sense of pardoned sin,
though the tone of their thoughts, like the
tongue of their utterance, widely differs from our
own.
But it is all through our common Lord,
our Saviour, Jesus Christ, they find acceptance.
When I get hold of a book that
teaches erroneous things, yet, if there is a
savour of Jesus Christ in it, I censor
the false without condemning the author.
Never let my animate versions be mistaken for
anathemas.
I sometimes perceive that the man who wrote
it has evidently found salvation, because he has
laid hold of our Lord Jesus Christ.
He that follows him is on the right
tack, though he may err in a thousand
minor considerations, by following Christ in the main
thing he is safe.
Learn of him and obey him in all
things, then shalt thou be blessed thyself and
useful to others.
Happy the man that hath seen this light
and walks in this light of Christ, for
this is the light that lighteth every man
that cometh into the world.
There is a little light in Mohammedanism.
Indeed, considering the age in which Mohammed lived,
he had a very great deal of light.
The religion of the Koran is immeasurably superior
to the religions of the age in which
the Prophet flourished.
He even taught the unity of the Godhead
most clearly.
Yet, the light in the Koran is borrowed
from the Old and New Testament.
It is borrowed light.
The intelligence is pilfered.
The light of the Parsi, the light of
Zoroaster, the light of Confucius came originally from
the sacred books of the Jews.
From one source they must have all come,
for all light comes from the Great Father
of Lights.
Wherever you alight upon any truth in strange
places about man's state and condition or about
God and the way to safety, you may
rest assured that the light, if tracked to
its dawn, would lead you up to Jesus
Christ, for all the true light comes from
Him.
Christ is the light of the world, destined
to shed His beams over the whole earth.
The day comes when all mankind will see
this light.
How often I have been told of late
that the world is all going to rack
and ruin and that all we ought to
do is to try and man a lifeboat
and save a few strugglers hastening ourselves to
leave the wreck before she breaks up.
Well, now, I am not so desponding as
that.
I am of opinion that by God's good
grace we shall tug the old vessel off
the rocks and that the kingdoms of this
world will become the kingdoms of our God
and of His Christ, for the Lord hath
sworn that all flesh shall see the salvation
of God.
I cannot believe that this dispensation will be
wound up as a tremendous failure, that the
gospel zealously preached everywhere shall result in only
a few being saved and that the whole
economy shall go out in darkness as the
snuff of a candle is extinguished.
Nay, I look for better things.
They that dwell in the wilderness shall bow
before Him, and His enemies shall lick the
dust.
The isles shall bring Him tribute.
Sheba and Seba shall offer gifts.
Yea, all kings shall fall down before Him.
I cannot help believing that the gospel yet
is to be triumphant.
I look for the coming of Christ.
Let Him come when He may.
Our hearts will leap for joy to greet
Him.
But for this dispensation to end without success
would almost seem to me like thwarting the
purposes of God.
It is not His way in the world.
He has entered into battle with Satan deliberately,
choosing poor, feeble instruments like ourselves to confound
the forces confronted against Him.
And if He should withdraw His troops from
the field or come Himself to the front
and take up the fight single-handed, which
His chosen legions could not conduct, it would
look as if He had not wisely foreseen
the engagement or had needed to alter His
plans to compass His ends.
His spirit can inspire inveterate feebleness with irresistible
force.
He can use means without miracles, or He
can work wonders without wantonness.
His first act occurred auspiciously.
The Twelve Apostles, like a little compact square
of grenadiers to fight against the foe, is
no ill omen.
It surely does not mean that the battle
shall end till the enemy has turned his
back and fled.
Moreover, He keeps on sending fresh battalions.
He raises up new troops, and every now
and then, when the battle seems to waver,
He recruits the ranks and sends out new
enlistments, strengthening the ranks that are thinned and
harassing the enemy with His reserves.
Courage, my brethren!
There shall be revival after revival.
There shall be reformation after reformation, shock of
battle after shock of battle, and the dread
artillery of God's great gospel shall be fired
off against the hosts of hell.
The gods of the heathen shall fall.
Antichrist shall be overthrown.
Babylon shall sink like a millstone in the
flood.
The crescent of Mohammed must wane into eternal
darkness.
Israel shall behold her king, and the fullness
of the Gentiles shall be gathered at His
feet.
So let our faith excite our courage, and
our courage stimulate our patience, and our patience
give zest to the full assurance of hope
while we worship our Lord Jesus Christ as
the light of the world.
Thus have I carried out my design of
amplifying on the four points that I propounded
to you at the outset.
Let me wind up with a personal question.
Since Christ is the light of the world,
I would ask, how are we acting towards
Him?
Do any of us shun the light?
I know some men slight the privileges they
ought to prize.
They do not want to know Him whose
going forth is as the light of the
morning when the sun rises.
They never read the Bible or search into
the history, the prophecy, and the promises.
They do not like an earnest ministry.
They have a sort of happy-go-lucky
style of religion.
They take in whatever anybody else tells them.
They attend their places of worship as a
matter of habit, and observe all the proprieties
of fashion.
But as to doing right or seeking light,
they seldom or never give it a thought.
They do not count it desirable.
Too much light would expose much that would
not bear inspection.
Dear friend, if you are afraid of light,
be suspicious of yourself, for it is deceit
that dreads detection.
Who are the people that like darkness rather
than light?
If it were put to a meeting of
the inhabitants of London, who would vote for
putting out the gas at night?
Well, I warrant you, every burglar would, every
garritor would, and there are certain libertines who
would rather like it.
Every man that doeth evil hateth the light.
I do not mean to compare you with
those gentlemen Still the saying is very comprehensive.
He that doeth evil hateth the light, neither
cometh the light, lest his deeds should be
reproved.
Of course, when some men sneer, we can
appreciate their sensitiveness.
The doctrine of Christ does not suit the
dissolute.
Lax living never does lead up to an
admiration of pure piety.
What a price the profligate have to pay
for their pleasures.
Are you, my friend, conscious of anything you
want to conceal?
Look closely at it yourself.
Recollect that you will have to look at
it in that great day when the secrets
of all hearts will be exposed.
When Jesus comes to judge the world with
righteousness and his people with equity, from the
light of justice, from the heat of judgment,
nothing whatsoever shall be hid.
Be wise, therefore, to repent now of the
evil, lest calamity reach you when there is
none to commiserate.
Do I see a curl of the lip,
a shrug of the shoulder, a cynical expression
of the countenance, as someone asks, are we
really then to regard the Christ you speak
of, the atonement you preach, the resurrection you
are so confident about as the light of
the present age, the light of other ages,
in fact, the light of the world?
You put it well, my friend, and you
look well as you put the question.
It occurs to me that I might meet
you in altered circumstances when your tone would
be altered likewise.
Flesh is frail.
Your eyes will not be always full of
luster.
Your spirits will not be always blithe and
gay.
Your health will not be always strong and
vigorous.
Not yet have you felt your need of
the light which has irradiated past ages, can
enlighten this age, and will shine with undiminished
glory in the everlasting age.
Proud man, are you a philosopher or a
politician?
Are you a man of science or a
mere sylist, a pretender?
Know this, that in darkness thou didst enter
this world.
Years passed before you dreamed that life had
a purpose, and in darkness denser still thou
must make thine exit.
If, pleased with a fancy or enamored of
a fallacy, thou failest to see the light
that makes time and eternity resplendent.
When we preach the gospel purely and simply,
we seem to be challenging the question on
the part of some of you.
To what purpose?
The light we propound you do not need.
How can I answer you?
No arguments of mine will avail while you
are blind to the perils you must meet
with in transversing those unknown paths and untried
experiences that lie before you.
And as to the objections that any of
you raise, let the man that takes objection
to God's counsel and spurns his kindness answer
for the rashness he will have to rue.
Petty scruples, paltry excuses, they betray your insincerity.
It is absurd to trifle when the outlook
might well make you tremble to plead for
yourselves.
You will not put your cause in the
hands of the counselor, hence the gloom that
comes of your doubts.
Hence the wretchedness of a sinner's reflections on
the grace of his Redeemer.
Do you caveal at the light?
Do you know the reason why?
Well, I think it is for very much
the same reason that made the Brahmin break
the microscope.
He thought it wicked to destroy life of
any kind.
He would not eat meat or feed upon
flesh, fish or fowl, for anybody that destroyed
life would destroy his own soul.
Well, said a missionary, but you must do
violence to your own conscience every time you
drink, for the water you swallow teems with
animalcules, living, moving creatures.
Then he showed him a drop of water
magnified by a microscope.
The evidence was clear, but instead of yielding
to conviction, the Brahmin was enraged at the
instrument which wrought the discovery, so he broke
the microscope in like manner men despise in
attempt to disprove the Gospel, because it reveals
truths that are unwelcome.
It explodes their traditions.
It disparages their opinions.
It debases their cherished taste, and so it
destroys their peace of mind.
It will not let them live comfortably in
sin.
The love of sin and superstition, a zeal
for your clan and your craft, animates your
opposition to malevolence and madness.
Methinks I hear somebody say, I wish I
could see it.
Well, dear friend, I wish I could credit
your candor.
The light that streams from Christ is visible,
but not to eyes that are shut, not
to hearts that are hardened, not to consciences
that are seared.
Open your eyes.
It is all you have to do.
Look, sinner, look and live.
All around you is the light of everlasting
love.
Do but open those poor eyes of yours
that unbelief has kept closed so long.
O Lord, open thou the sinner's eyes that
he may now see.
The light is all around thee, brother.
The light is all around thee.
Others see it and rejoice.
Only let thine eyes be opened and thou
shalt hail the glorious orb which makes manifest
all that is obscure and awful to thy
present apprehension.
Have you seen the light?
Is there one who says, well, thank God
I have seen that light.
Then, dear brother, be grateful and give thanks.
We are none of us as thankful as
we ought to be for the light that
shines in the face of Jesus Christ.
There was a custom on the Alps in
the olden time which I fear has dropped
into destitute.
Someone was appointed to stand upon the topmost
alp with a great cow horn.
And as soon as he beheld the rising
of the sun, with a loud blast he
gave notice.
From peak to peak of the Alps might
then be heard in those good old days
a psalm of praise.
O ye happy souls that have beheld the
rising of the sun of righteousness, tell it
forth with trumpet tongue.
Well, may a thousand voices take up his
praise.
Blessed be the name of Jesus.
Forever be his name adored.
Magnify his grace for the light that shines,
for the goodness it diffuses, for the joy,
the abounding joy, it awakens on every side.
And now, brethren, let gratitude and benevolence prompt
your zeal to spread the light, to reflect
it all around, near and far.
I am very anxious that all the members
of this church should endeavor to disseminate the
light of the knowledge of Christ which has
shone in their own hearts.
I pray you, brethren and sisters, do not
get cold, formal or indifferent.
The truth you have believed through grace is
a precious trust committed to your charge.
You have been a praying people and you
are so still.
Blessed be God's name.
Do not forsake the meetings for prayer.
Frequent them regularly and conspire together to make
them still more full of life and energy.
I have been wont to say with honest
gratitude that most, if not all, the members
in fellowship with us were actually engaged in
some work for Jesus.
Is it so now?
Are you all interested and occupied in telling
and teaching the good news and the great
lessons of the gospel?
We have no notion of leaving to pastors
the whole work of the Christian ministry in
which every faithful disciple should take earnest part.
One man alone, perhaps, may preach to such
a throng as this, but if we are
to have preaching everywhere, you must all preach
by word and deed to circulate the heavenly
wisdom in every sphere of earthly resort.
O my sisters and my brothers, the best
of all preaching, because the most simple and
unostentatious is to be found in the ordinary
intercourse you hold with your fellow creatures when
with a good conversation you avail yourselves of
all the occurrences and opportunities of daily life.
In your families, the sweetness of your temper,
the gentleness of your manners, and the purity
of your actions should bear witness that you
have been with Jesus and learned of Him.
The integrity of your business habits should speak
for the sanctity of your morals and commend
the school in which you have been trained.
Your character must be clear, or the utterance
of your lips will be despised.
Then, an unspoken testimony will take hold of
men's hearts.
Tell your children, your brothers, your sisters and
your intimate friends the way to Jesus.
Tell the strangers who sit by your side,
if you can, something of your own sweet
experience of the life that there is in
Jesus.
God has recently taken away some of our
best workers, as you know.
O brethren, make up for the loss of
one of the best of men, long known
as a deacon and elder in our midst,
who has now laid aside his health departed,
his strength prostrate.
O sisters, try to make up by double
energy for the loss of that good sister
who was a mother among you all.
O, let us all see to it that
there be no gaps in the ranks of
Christ's army which are not quickly filled with
fresh recruits.
If there should happen to be a vacancy
and the man has fallen who stood next
to me, I will try by God's strength
to fight with both hands at this time
till some other shall step up to take
his place.
Since Christ is our light and he has
ordained us to be lights in the world,
let us shine to the utmost of our
capacity until the Master shall take us to
dwell with him in the light forever.
Amen.