Galatians 4:19

FAITH AND CHARACTER

‘Until Christ be formed in you.’

Galatians 4:19

Why not Christianity without Christ? Ah, we are here face to face with a notable distinction. Of no other system, religious or moral, or both combined, can it be said that the Founder was the Faith. Christ preached no system. If you try and get a system out of the Gospels you will have a hopeless task before you. To systematise is to destroy. You cannot systematise a person. You cannot formulate an informing Christ. Do we get our theology from St. Paul? Then let him sum up for us the whole of his theological system in the great avowal, ‘To me to live is Christ.’

I. Religion was a life in the person of its Founder, and it has been a life ever since He founded it. To live Christianity is to ‘live Christ,’ and to live Christ without believing in Christ is a contradiction, palpable, utter.

II. God has set His seal to the preaching of Christ, but has set no seal to the preaching of a Christless morality. How many people were converted to a clean life by the moral sermons of a century ago? How many are converted to such a life by the Socinian or humanitarian Positivist sermons of to-day? It is the sermons that hold by the strong dogmas of the faith, the faith that sees a God-incarnate in the manger, on the Mount of Beatitudes, by Gennesaret’s sea, in Gethsemane, on the Gabbatha pavement, on the Cross, risen from Joseph’s tomb, borne on the clouds from Olivet to the throne of heaven—it is such sermons that change the life-currents, the trend and make of the character, the direction and aim of the daily walk.

III. A word of appeal.—Christians, ‘add to your faith’ character. Alas, that the two, ‘Christian character’ and the ‘character of Christians,’ should not always be one. It is strange, but true, that the world of to-day is the very best judge of what the constituents of this unique character are. It thus does homage to the ideal which itself fails to make real.

—Bishop Alfred Pearson.

Illustrations

(1) ‘Many years ago a poor Spanish sailor was brought into a Liverpool hospital to die. After he had breathed his last, it was found that over his heart a rude but indelible representation of Christ on the Cross had been made by him, by a process common among seamen.… If we could have imprinted in our hearts, and in the hearts of all the members of our churches, what that poor fellow had painfully and with the needle-point punctured over his, we should soon see success at home and abroad rivalling that of the Apostles themselves.’

(2) ‘Dean Farrar had been preaching before the late Queen Victoria on the Second Coming of our Lord, and afterwards, in conversation with the preacher, the Queen exclaimed, “Oh, how I wish that the Lord would come in my lifetime!” “Why,” Farrar asked, “does Your Majesty feel this very earnest desire?” The Queen replied with quivering lips and her whole countenance lighted by deep emotion, “I should so love to lay my crown at His feet.” The Queen would have yielded Him her throne. Yet every heart has a throne, and Christ or Satan sits on that throne.’