Luke 18:3

Luke 18:3

The Church's Widowhood. That the Church is, nay must be,in a state of widowhood appears from such things as these:

I. The Father's purpose concerning her. That purpose has great things in store for her, in the ages to come; but at present her lot is to be weakness, poverty, hardship, and the endurance of wrong. Through much tribulation she must enter the kingdom.

II. Her conformity to her Lord. He is her pattern, not merely as to character, but as to the whole course of life. In Him she learns what her lot on earth is to be. He, the rejected One, even among His own, she must be rejected too; He, the hated One, she must be hated too. Better treatment than He met with she is not entitled to expect: nor should she wish to have.

III. Her standing by faith. It is the world's unbeliefthat so specially makes it the world; so it is the Church's faiththat makes her what she is, the Church. As one believing in a kingdom to come, she shakes herself free from the entanglements of time. She becomes a stranger here, having no continuing city, but satisfied with the tent of the desert, till she reach the city of habitation.

IV. The condition of the world out of which she is called. It is an evil world. It lieth in wickedness, and her calling is to come out from it, and, like Noah, to condemn it. She has nothing in common with it. All is uncongenial.

V. Her prospects. She is an heir of God, and a joint-heir with Christ Jesus. An everlasting kingdom, an unfading crown, an eternal weight of glory these are her prospects. What has she, then, to do with a world where all these are unrecognised, nay, despised or disowned? In her orphanage, or strangership, or widowhood, she still moves before us as the separated, rejected, lonely one, in the midst of an unfriendly world, that far outnumbers her, and that feels itself strangely incommoded and made uncomfortable by the presence of one who sets light by all the precious and pleasurable things of earth, having her eye and her heart fixed upon something more glorious, of which the world knows nothing.

H. Bonar, Short Sermons,p. 376.

References: Luke 18:3. Homiletic Magazine,vol. vii., p. 81.Luke 18:4. Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxvii., p. 199. Luke 18:5. Expositor,1st series, vol. iv., p. 32.Luke 18:6. Homilist,vol. v., p. 284.