Hebrews 11:4

Hebrews 11:4

Faith as Acting on Worship.

I. All faith implies an effort, a motion of the will towards God. It maintains not existence merely, but living energy; it is not otiose, but active; it even asks, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?" Think of this as regards worship. To be real it must be a business in which we take an active part a homage to a Presence which we feel. If there are any to whom the Lord's day, with its special duty, or each day's ordinary duty of prayer and praise, is a mere blank of unoccupied thought, a mere spiritual void, then be sure that the world, the flesh, and the devil, are filling the vacuum. You come away the better or the worse from every service; you are either drawing near to God and receiving of Him, or you are practising unbelief, decomposing your assurance into doubt, and rehearsing the earlier stages of that hardening of the heart of which the Israelites are the standing type, who walked for a whole generation in God's presence, and knew Him not, and perished by the way.

II. Praise is valueless except it express faith. Take the oldest hymn of the distinctively Christian Church, which we have inherited from its earliest ages the Te Deum. That hymn has doubtless been so universally received throughout the West because it appeals so peculiarly to our faith as Christians. That is the simple account of it; it contains a creed, but under the most personal of aspects. Is it possible to utter such words as those of the Te Deumwithout an emotion of faith and not be self-convicted? Exactly in proportion as it embodies the articles of the faith, and displays each separate credendumin near connection with our most deeply seated hopes and our most awful fears, in that proportion does it demand the inward, the subjective faith in us which is the Divine quality in the heart of man. Faith alone can put a life into our worship.

H. Hayman, Rugby Sermons,p. 16.

Unselfish Immortality.

I. It is so that every great man speaks to men. Dead, they live; buried, they rise again; and they speak with more power after death than during life, for jealousy and envy no longer dog their footsteps, and their faults are seen as God sees them, through that veil of charity which justice weaves; and their good is disentangled from their evil, and set in clear light, because so wise and true is the heart of mankind, in spite of all its wrong and folly, that in its memory it is the good and not the evil that survives.

II. Our home and our society are to us what the world is to a great man the sphere we may fill with work that cannot die. The statesman moulds a people into order and progress, partly by the force of character, partly by great measures. We are the statesmen of our little world. Every day mother and father stamp their character upon their children's lives, mould their manners, conscience, and their future by the measures by which they direct the household. This is our work, and all of it lives after you lives with tenfold power when you are dead, multiplies in the lives of those who have known you well.

III. Take noble care of the works that are handed down to to you, and the voices that come to you from the silent world. We look too carelessly on that store and its riches. The past spreads a banquet before you; eat and be thankful. The eating will nourish your whole being; the thankfulness will help you to digest the food. And as you do this the sense of the enduring life of human kind will grow on you; you will begin, through long unweaving of yourself with the past, to feel unwoven with an infinite future. This last result will make you worthy yourself to speak when you are dead, to follow your works in men to come. To do this with regard to Christ is to become a Christian.

IV. Considering that universal communion of those who have among men done and thought nobly or beautifully, and how among this communion there is neither nation, nor time, nor place, nor language, but mankind is all, and in all we, entering into this region through sharing in the works and speech of all those who have been good and great in all lands, become ourselves universal in thought and feeling. We shall arise into the conception of an everlasting life for this vast and glorious race that has so wonderfully thought, and done, and loved, and turn, believing, with outstretched hands and eager eyes, to Him who said, "God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to Him."

S. A. Brooke, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xvii., p. 401.

References: Hebrews 11:4. Homilist,2nd series, vol. ii., p. 588; J. G. Rogers, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxviii., p. 225; W. J. Woods, Ibid.,vol. xxxiii., p. 200.