1 Kings 8:57-60

The Lord our God be with us, as He was with our fathers.

The travail of the ages

This text plants us on the border-line between two generations. A king was dead. A king was born. Only a heart-throb divided the two reigns, but within the secrecy of that moment a new age began to be. Our text stations us at a point where, with dramatic impressiveness, we witness the onward march of time, sweeping past and burying in shadow the workers of yesterday; creating fresh conditions, calling out new men, commissioning advanced endeavour, for the day that is to be.. But the text erects for us a higher platform. It lifts our thought to the Eternal, and plants us by the ageless throne. It speaks to us of our God, our fathers’ God, the God of ages. The very name works magic, and lifts us above the fleeting shadows of time and sense. Earth with its grinding effort and its vanishing forms, with its intermittent lights and shifting scenes, fades into mist beneath us. Our souls are loosed. Upward we pass into the white radiance of eternity. Time knows no succession. Space surpasses measurement. Progress is a heightening consciousness without the undulations of effort or the tide-marks of accumulation. Motion is rest. Life is an eternal joy, in which all memory and all hope centralise in a present of infinite peace. Boundless and changeless is the vision. And suffusing it all, constituting it all, is God, our God, our fathers’ God, the God of ages. We think of Him as surpassing the limits of past or future. But the text affords us still another platform. It has shown us man, the shifting. It has unveiled God, the Eternal. Now it passes into petition, and reveals subtle links of love and purpose joining God above to men beneath, and throwing a chain of union across the moving ages. The Eternal fills and saves the temporal. The nations and epochs of a fading life are united in origin and destiny. The children of a day are made sons of God. And that vision is best and brightest of all. God is shown in contact with man. He was with our fathers. He is to be with us. His heart feels. His power obeys His love. Heaven enswathes earth. God in very truth dwells with men. The Eternal becomes the Gracious. The Strong becomes the Worshipful. But if this revelation is necessary to God’s praise, it is not less needful to man’s uplifting. The mere lateral outlook on life has in it the germs of all despair. “That way madness lies.” Ill were it for any man to dwell long on the sight of swift-declining generations, till he has learned to link them with a stable purpose and a noble destiny. Time must be looked at from eternity. Man can only be seen as we stand close by God. History is an enigma and a despair till we read its pages under the lamps of the light eternal. And under those lamps we stand to-day. The light is dimmed by many an earth-cast shadow. Round and above us sweeps the purple haze of mystery. Such are the three outlooks of the text. They are instinct with an atmosphere which is favourable to my purpose. I am to speak to the new generation. I am to commend to young men and maidens the tasks which come from vanished hands, or hands now failing for lack of strength; to stir in them the sense of kinship to the travail of humanity; to create or to revive that zeal for Christ which is the service of man; and to arouse ambition to help the weary ages to the issue of their pain. Where better could I ask them to meet and meditate than amid these outlooks?

I. Achievement. That word is capable of two meanings. In one sense it suggests something absolutely completed; not only work well done, but so done as to overtake all necessity and leave nothing to be added. With that significance we gratefully apply the word to the great facts and provisions of religion, and supremely to that central sacrifice by which Christ offered Himself once for all to put away sin. The gospel is an achievement in the absolute sense; there is no more sacrifice for sin--it is finished--and the last age no more than the first can add to its efficacy or dispense with its grace. But there is another and equally admissible use of this word. It is spoken approximately to denote stages of accomplishment and single steps of progress. In this sense only can we apply it to the upward toil of the ages. Man has finished nothing. He has cleared primeval forests of difficulty, and dug out many a vein of silver thought, and quarried goodly stones of excellence, and made the trenches and laid the foundations for noble structures he had seen in dreams. But he never finished anything. It was not his business to complete. Alas for us if it had been! Imagine a civilisation, an educational system, a political standard, a social ideal, a compact religion, completed once for all by Aaron or Isaiah, by John Knox or Oliver Cromwell! No. It was not their business to finish things,--theirs to contribute to the one toil of progress, to add to the slow structure of humanity. But in that sense they bequeathed achievements. Behind us lie armies of heroes and centuries of toil. Had they not been, and been what they were, we were not here to-day. We do well to recall their memory. Augustine, patiently erecting his city of God as an ideal of the new home in which the new humanity might dwell; Anselm, silent, profound, meek of heart, looking with fixed gaze and reverent soul into universal questions that have no certain answers; Melancthon, the man of brave and gentle spirit, possessed of piercing insight and persuasive speech, abler perhaps to see than to do, yet an architect who made the builder possible; Luther, inspired of God to man’s much-needed service, a man of lion heart and iron will, the executor of Europe’s prayers and God’s purposes, the father of our new liberty because the saviour of our ancient faith. These are they who have done God’s work and lifted humanity into a fairer heritage. From them have we sprung. To them we owe all. Our age has outgrown theirs. In many directions our faiths and outlooks have advanced and broadened. But it is on the foundations which they laid that we have been able to build.

II. Succession. Achievements, as we have seen, grow from age to age. But the workers are taken. The generations move onward with ceaseless change. Abraham had been and was not. David did a big day’s work and then slept with his fathers. Fresh faces greet us as we travel each mile through history. New voices take up the old-time song. It was ever thus. God’s work needs many workmen, and workmen oft renewed. No man, no age, is allowed to stay on. There was one Melchizedek whose presence spanned a longer time; but men know nothing of him, and his like was not repeated. There was one Methuselah who measured years as days, who lived as long as many a dynasty; but he did nothing in particular, and was not made a copy. No age can do God’s whole work, so He puts ages in succession. No man can do more than a set portion, so God is ever sending fresh men. God’s method of rejuvenescence is not to dip an old man in a stream which renews his youth, nor to mix for him an elixir to wing away his years. It is the spring-time method of rejuvenescence which sends fresh leaves upon the ancient tree. But there is another point to note in this succession. The generations are made to overlap each other. Not at one fell moment does one age go and another come.. Every hour men die. Every hour men are born. The change proceeds silently,. and secretly. God enables the succeeding ages to clasp hands. He has so, ordered it that the lessons of experience shall wait upon the untried energies of youth. Ours to-day is this glory of inheritance, this solemn duty of broad human service. Do we perceive? Have we considered? Are we ready? The time is short. We must soon make room for others. What shall the record mark when our day is done! Shall its increase of wealth measure a decrease in heroism, godliness, humanity? Shall its more accessible means of life end in the loss of all that makes life worth living? Because our age has discovered the path to a new and swifter possession of what life can give, are we to allow our larger place to degenerate into a bog of barren selfishness? God forbid.

III. Progress. Solomon not only followed David, he increased upon him. The ages have not only come in succession, but with steady improvement. Isaiah the prophet was more and better than Jephthah the judge. Paul the apostle was of higher capacity and nobler mission than Solomon the king. In this sense history, controlled by providence, has ever moved up as it has pressed on. Succession, spoken of highest things, carries with it the idea of advancement. A horse is not a successor; he is a repetition. Anatomists will tell you that even in a horse there is development; but the most searching study will show you only modifications of a function and adaptations of a limb. A horse is as horses have been--a repetition. But the world was not made for horses, nor for repetitions, else Christ had never supplanted Adam, nor our fair English piety the iron paganism of Rome. Progress marks the ages, and still must mark our time. But what do we mean by progress? There are some things we cannot move from. Would you call that world progressive that broke away from the sun? Would you call that man progressive who in his business repudiated the principles of arithmetic? That word “progress” needs guarding by careful definition. Progress, as the cry of a party, is often the emptiest of all hypocrisies. Progress with some men is only a euphemism for that excitable restlessness which is ever seeking change. But it is not in such sense we speak of progress. That is not progress which leads us away from the fixed sources of spiritual energy. The modern locomotive presents a remarkable advance upon the gaunt machine which first did duty in drawing a train; but it depends on the same force and is governed by obedience to the same laws. Progress does not mean the repudiation of ancient force, but its fuller recognition. And progress can mean nothing else in the spiritual advancement of mankind. Christ was more and better than Moses, had a larger message to speak and a grander work to do; but He came from the same God, and in the same God found His inspiration. The modern teacher of religion presents an interpretation of truth and duty which distances a great stride from early or medieval instruction; but the foundation is the same, and by the same Spirit does he accomplish his task. And because Christ is the “fulness of the Godhead,” our progress must be on Him, not from Him.

IV. Solidarity. The ages are many and fleeting; the race is one and permanent. The work is partial and progressive; the purpose and the goal are ever the same. David departs and Solomon comes, but humanity remains. One age reforms, another consolidates, but the work is one. “The individual withers, and the world is more and more.” And as in destiny so in interest are all men joined. Humanity was made for God: only in God can it find the solution of its problems and the realisation of its dreams. And we shall best help to its issue the pain of progress by first giving ourselves to God, and then by striving to set in right relation to God the weary hearts of men and the multiplied interests of mankind. (C. A. Berry.)

Prayer for the New Year

I. The need that suggested the prayer.

II. The faith that prompted the prayer.

III. The love that dictated the prayer.

IV. The hope that inspired the prayer,

V. The memories that sustained the prayer. (F. W. Brown.)