1 Corinthians 4:5-6

THE LORD’S COMING

‘Until the Lord come.’

1 Corinthians 4:5

What—we may well ask—are likely to be the practical effects, what are the actual gains which a continual recollection of our Lord’s coming is calculated to produce in the conduct of our lives?

Out of many such beneficial effects I can only attempt to indicate two.

I. We may be certain that the thought of the Coming is meant to act as an incentive.—And I think it is not hard to see how it may become an incentive of a very intelligible and most practical kind. We all of us, I imagine, know the value of setting our minds upon an intermediate goal—upon a something, that is, which has to be reached on the way to the end which we are hoping we may eventually attain. It is not the end, but it is an end. It is one of the many evidences of the Divine care that this method of the intermediate goal has been adopted in the course of man’s spiritual progress. Landmarks have been placed, points to be aimed at, from which, when they have been reached, a fresh start might be made. One of the ablest of Continental theologians has said that the world’s history has been divided into stages answering to the announcements—He is coming, He has come, He is coming again! During long centuries men were required to look no farther than the first coming of Christ; the best hopes of the truest souls were fixed upon that. If only from afar they might see that day, it was enough; they rejoiced and were glad. At last He came, and this goal had been attained. For a while there was a pause, that faithful seekers who had waited and toiled might be allowed to realise the fulfilment of their desire. And then the goal was moved, and set farther on. The Second Coming is for us now what the First had been. It is not the end. It will but introduce a fresh stage—a more marvellous stage of which we can form only the most indistinct ideas. ‘Then cometh the end.’ Happily we need not greatly concern ourselves with all that is to happen in that further future. It is enough that we live and work for the nearer goal. When we reach it we shall find ourselves on a high-standing ground. Then the view will open, and we shall see much more that is beyond. That will be the great examination, when we and our work are to be judged. And then our new tasks will be given as we are fitted for them. ‘Yet a little while, and He that will come shall come.’ ‘Surely, I am coming fast!’ Another turn of the road may take us to the top; the surprise visit of the Great Examiner may be nearer than we think. When we feel tired and care-laden, when the way is steep and the lesson harder than usual, what a difference it might make to remind ourselves that it will not go on so for ever. After all, it is only ‘until the Lord come.’ How much simpler and stronger life would be, how much freer from the sense of bondage to circumstances, how much holier and brighter, if we took that for our watchword for every year and all the year!

II. The thought of our Lord’s coming will not only rouse and strengthen us to do things; it will also keep us from doing things, unnecessary things, and from one thing more especially. Possibly few of us would guess what that one thing is. Let us listen to the Apostle as he describes it. Having spoken of the duty of faithfulness in the discharge of appointed duty, St. Paul goes on to say: ‘But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you … and then shall every man have praise of God.’ You see what he means. The thought of the Lord’s coming is to serve not only as an incentive to action, it is to be also a restraint upon criticism. That is certainly a matter about which we have most of us great need to think seriously. It is extraordinary how much time and energy even good people spend in criticising one another, in speculating as to their respective merits and attainments, in trying to determine how this one and that one stands in God’s sight. The tendency is evidently a strong one in our human nature. And regenerate human nature is not free from it. These Christians at Corinth, to whom St. Paul was writing, had been employing a great deal of time and thought in discriminating and adjudicating between the supposed claims and merits of those who had been given them as their teachers. The result was not merely time wasted, but temper lost and unity shattered, the Church enfeebled and its influence almost destroyed. If St. Paul could read the correspondence columns of our newspapers, and could listen to the conversation that passes when religious people meet to-day, would he think that we needed his warning and his remedy less than did those whom he was addressing in his Epistle? And what was His remedy? Simply this—leave it! It is really no business of yours. You had better have done with everything of the kind. We believe that One is coming to be our Judge. Leave it till then, ‘until the Lord come.’

—Rev. Dr. A. W. Robinson.

Illustration

‘We know how it is with schoolboys or undergraduates. Speak to them of ultimate success to be achieved in life and they will listen respectfully, but your words are too vague, and they have little effect. But say, “Work as hard as you can for this examination or that prize,” and the case is changed at once. That is a thing upon which it is possible to fix the mind and concentrate effort. So, again, we know how the traveller on the road, or up the mountain, cheers himself along by dividing his labour. He knows that he has a good deal of ground to cover, but he says to himself: “At all events I can get to such and such a point; it will be time enough, when I get there, to think about what is beyond.” So he sets himself to reach that midway point, and bends all his strength to arrive at it. He might have despaired if it had not been that he had that mark within measurable distance to aim at.’