Acts 11:20

THE SUBJECT OF ALL PREACHING

‘And some of them were men of Cyprus and Cyrene, which, when they were come to Antioch, spake unto the Grecians, preaching the Lord Jesus.’

Acts 11:20

At the very beginning of Christian history we find the Church gaining greatly from persecution.

I. The first result of the tribulation that arose about Stephen was to threaten the infant Church with destruction. The Society at Jerusalem was dispersed. The Apostles now stood to their posts, but the probabilities pointed to their early martyrdom as the only result of their heroism. Luke, looking back on the whole episode from the standpoint of the next generation, is able to recognise the influence of that first persecution. It compelled two most necessary things.

(a) On the one hand, the Church was forced to engage in missionary labours.

(b) On the other, Christianity was forced to become catholic. There was considerable danger that the disciples in Jerusalem should settle down to the decent position of an estimable and pious sect. But even this was not all.

(c) A catholic propaganda cannot work with a particular Gospel. The zealots of particularism are the foster-parents of universalism. The creed must be worthy of the Church. And so we find that these exiles, who had become by force of circumstances missionaries, were the first to solve the problem which so gravely perplexed the Apostles. They forced the hands of their rulers by boldly offering their message to all who would listen to it.

II. Notice the suggestive summary of the catholic Gospel as it was first proclaimed—‘preaching the Lord Jesus.’ How should this new Jewish religion present itself to these Greeks? What should be the means of access to their hearts? How would it appeal to them? The answer must be found in the spiritual power of the Personality of Jesus. The missionaries, of course, built on the foundation of the universal belief in God. They started from the assumptions of theism, and they presented to their hearers the living Christ, the true Exponent of the Divine, the true Representative of the human. This intensely personal character of their preaching continually merges into view in the records of the Acts.

III. The Person of Christ is that element of Christianity which is neither temporal, nor local, nor transitory.—And other elements only come to have a certain permanence as they vindicate a relationship with that. Ecclesiastical systems, dogmatic systems, are growths conditioned in their growing by the myriad circumstances which condition all terrestrial developments. They have a relative fitness, a relative authority, a relative truth; but they fail and pass as conditions of existence change, and they who build their faith on them and entwine about them the deep affections of their hearts are predestined to infinite disappointment. ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away,’ saith the Lord; and as we regard the long story of Christianity we can understand what He meant. Everything has changed. Men’s notions of social order have changed, and their habits of life and modes of thought, and their codes of honour, and their systems of belief, and their organisations of worship. We live amid a world of extinct beliefs; we are girded with the wreckage of the century. Here alone is the thing that changes not; here the rock on which we build, on which our feet may find firm treading; here the unity which gathers into itself all the ages, and vindicates from the remotest past a living fellowship in the most distant future. Jesus Christ is ‘the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.’ Here is the secret of all the Church’s continuous life.

IV. There is no escape from the duty of missions.—If we may venture to divine the purposes of God from the opportunities which He places within man’s reach, and the responsibilities which accumulate upon them, then we can hardly be mistaken in thinking that it is His purpose to convert the world mainly by the agencies of the English-speaking race. We are constantly reminded, not always by the pleasantest experiences, that our Empire has attained gigantic dimensions. We have gathered under our flag one-fourth of the human race. The notion of Empire is native to the English mind as two millenniums since it was native to the Roman mind. The Church of the English-speaking race stands towards the populations of Asia and Africa as the Church of Rome stood in the fifth century towards the populations of Europe. If the past may provide an interpretation for the future, then Canterbury is destined in the religious history of mankind to equal, nay, to eclipse, the fame of Rome.

—Rev. Canon Henson.

Illustration

‘The explanation of much of our missionary failure abroad, and here at home, must be sought in the fact that we have weighted our missions with the scandals of divisions and the distractions of our controversies. We have preached systems, we have preached causes, we have preached theology rather than the living Person of our Divine Lord. We have tried to make men members of something or other before we have brought them to be disciples. We have need to go back to the first methods, to revert to the first principles. It is the urgent necessity of our time, as well for the preservation of religion at home as for the bringing to the heathen the life-giving message of the Gospel, that this degrading warfare of competing denominations shall cease; and it can only cease by raising again into its true central prominence the apostolic creed which underlies all Christian beliefs, and is the common platform of all Christian discipleship—Jesus as Lord!’