2 Corinthians 4:18

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

‘While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen.’

2 Corinthians 4:18

The Apostle is here engaged with a matter of personal experience. He is explaining to his converts, as a true pastor will sometimes care to do, certain secrets of his activity, an activity in itself so exhausting, so wearing, nay, if we may use the word, so lacerating in its course of toils and sufferings, but which yet finds him always ready to go on.

I. Behind it, within it, was the secret of the Lord.—The veil of tired and suffering humanity concealed below it, beating with immortality, the Life of Jesus. And while the man felt ‘the things seen,’ and handled them, and sometimes endured and sometimes wonderfully used them, he saw, with the open eyes of the soul, not them but the things unseen, the things eternal, as the true landscape of his life. For this cause he did not faint. The outward man, he admits, was perishing, but it did not matter. The inward man, the pulse of the machine, was renewing day by day.

II. There is such a ‘secret of the Lord,’ and that it is for us to-day, if indeed we are His disciples. It is a talisman as potent in the twentieth century as in the first. Now as then the eternal Master claims our whole devotion, in whatever path it is to be shown. Now as then world, flesh, and devil cross that path at every turn, and make the Christian life not only difficult, but impossible, if we try to live it of ourselves. But now as then the oil of heaven is ready to run in from behind the wall. The life of Jesus, the living Lord dwelling in the heart, can still prove inexhaustible, victorious, in the mortal flesh. The things which are not seen can be still brought within the spirit’s sight, and then that which is impossible with man is, in man, found possible with God.

III. This is no poor plausible theory, fit for a reverie, annihilated by life.—Who has not known examples of it, modern as ourselves? There was the mother, given wholly to every duty of domestic love, yet wholly also instinct with the unearthly power of her beloved Saviour’s presence. There was the friend, alive to every problem of his period, practical and laborious in its service, yet for whom the mastering and empowering passion, elastic with eternal life, was always Jesus Christ. There was that other friend, put to fiery proof in the extremes of pain and weakness, yet still lifted by an unseen embrace above them, calm to the end, and cheerful, and full of thought for others, and all because the Lord was with him, and was in him; so he would affirm with indescribable simplicity and joy.

IV. The facts of conquering faith are no antiquarian study.—The living specimens of the immortal race are all around us. The life of Jesus and the things unseen are modern as well as ancient, contemporary always, because they are eternal; ‘the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever.’ And for us all at our baptism it was prayed that those forces might be our own. It was asked, and the Cross sealed the prayer upon our brows, not that we might walk in a vain shadow of the Christian life, but that we might have power and strength to have victory, and might triumph, against the devil, the world, and the flesh.

Bishop H. C. G. Moule.

Illustration

‘The Apostle’s life might be illustrated by that remarkable scene in the Pilgrim’s Progress where the Interpreter, in his house of parables, takes the Traveller in to watch the fire which burns on ever brighter under difficulties. There is the glowing hearth, always more alive with flame. Yet in front of it stands one who continually casts water on the heat, to put it out. Christian is much perplexed. Then his host leads him round behind the wall, and lo! another Agent is at work there, pouring through a secret channel oil into the fire; and the paradox is explained. So it was with the Apostle’s life, and the forces which threatened hard to bear it down.’