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We are ambassadors therefore on behalf of Christ, as though God were intreating by us: we beseech you on behalf of Christ, be ye reconciled to God.—2Co_5:20.
2. The Christian ministry has, in the course of history, fulfilled itself in many ways. The methods of one age have not been the methods of another. The clergy have been variously organized; the Christian Society has run a parallel course to the State. There has been continuity of government in and through changes of system; for the standing necessities which government exists to meet never change, though the actual forms in which they must be met are never long the same. Every generation comes fresh to its problems, and has to learn the lesson of duty, and submit itself to the yoke of discipline. The proper and inalienable services of the Christian ministry will never be superfluous. The unseen world is too closely pressed by the world of sight and sense to vindicate its claim to human regard. There is need for Christ’s testimony being taken up, uttered in intelligible terms of the age, applied in actual life, pressed home by authoritative voices, illustrated by consecrated characters.
As an ambassador for Christ, I regard a preacher of the gospel as filling the most responsible office any mortal can occupy His pulpit is, in my eyes, loftier than a throne; and of all professions, learned or unlearned, his, though usually in point of wealth the poorest, I esteem the most honourable. That office is one angels themselves might covet.1 [Note: Thomas Guthrie, in Memoir, i. 272.]
An Ambassador is a Commissioner
1. The commission is from God, and the ambassador owes his standing to Divine authority. What is it that makes a man an ambassador of the king? It is not that he chooses or wishes to be so, or that he is clothed in a certain robe, or is a member of a certain family; but it is solely and exclusively that he has the commission of his sovereign. What is it that makes a man a minister of Christ? Not any form or ceremonial, however beautiful and good; not ordination by presbyter or bishop, however useful and proper in its place; but the commission of the King of kings, the Lord Jesus Christ. In other words, the minister of the gospel is here said to sustain to Christ, the heavenly King, precisely the relationship which an earthly ambassador sustains to an earthly monarch; and if none can make an ambassador but the sovereign, so none can constitute a man a· minister of Christ but He who rules by His power, inspires by His wisdom, and creates faith by His grace. Whatever rites of ordination are proper for the public declaration and consecration of those who are the ministers of Christ, the minister is assumed to have been first called by the Holy Spirit. He is ordained, not that he may be made a minister, but because he has been set apart for that great office. An ambassador of the king, when he goes to a foreign court to reside, does not there make law, but simply executes the commission entrusted to him; he does not declare and define the terms of communion between his own kingdom and another, but simply declares what is the will of his sovereign, or his government, in reference to that other country. So a minister of the gospel is not to make law, but to preach law already made; he is not to make a sacrifice, but to proclaim a sacrifice already furnished; he is not to set up a rule of faith, but to call attention to a rule of faith already complete. That ambassador best discharges the duties entrusted to him by his sovereign who expresses least of his own mind, and most clearly the sovereign’s mind; and that minister best discharges the duties which he owes to God who gives the least of human conjectures, and who declares most plainly and distinctly the will and word of the Lord Jesus Christ.
There is one condition before any man can deliver such a message as this; it is, first, that he should have had it delivered to his own soul. Unless the message has within it that reality which only comes from its being a real part of your own life, a great deal of what you are saying must inevitably be words, and nothing else. If there be any truth that you are setting forth of which it is possible for you to say, “Had it been untrue I should have been just the same as I am,” then depend upon it such a belief as that is not a belief that would enable you to impress the truth upon your people—it is not a belief that will enable you to be a real ambassador of Christ to deliver that message. Spiritual teaching must be backed up by truth of life, or else it loses its power.1 [Note: Frederick Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, i. 408.]
2. The substance of the commission is this: “Be ye reconciled to God.” To sue for love, to beg that an enemy will put away his enmity is the part of the inferior rather than of the superior, is the part of the offender rather than of the offended; is the part of the vanquished rather than of the victor; is the part, surely, not of the king but of the rebel. And yet here, in the sublime transcending of all human precedent and pattern which characterizes the Divine dealing, we have the places of the suppliant and of the supplicated inverted, and Love upon the Throne bends down to ask of the rebel that lies powerless and sullen at His feet, and yet is not conquered until his heart be won, though his limbs be manacled, that he would put away all the bitterness out of his heart, and come back to the love and the grace which are ready to pour over him. “He that might the vengeance best have taken, finds out the remedy.” He against whom we have transgressed prays us to be reconciled; and the Infinite Love lowers Himself in the lowering which is, in another aspect, the climax of His exaltation, to pray the rebels to accept His amnesty.
Conceive a king with an overwhelming power—furnished with everything to command success, able, at any moment, to crush the rebellious force which had outraged him in every possible way—just on the eve of taking the most complete vengeance, at the very height of his supremacy, and in the moment of the surest confidence of his victory, sending forth a flag of truce to the enemy—and in the most suppliant and endearing terms, for no advantage of his own, but entirely for that enemy’s sake—beseeching an embassy and a reconciliation. Conceive that the result of that proposition, if accepted, is nothing less than the elevation of that pardoned state, to all the privileges and dignities which its captor could bestow, even to the position of equality with his own dearest and most obedient children. Conceive that so dear was this reconciliation to that all-conquering monarch, that, to compass it, he spared not his dearest and his best, and that even when his well-beloved son had been murdered by the treachery of those to whom he was bearing the white flag of his father’s clemency, still he continued to send forth more messengers with the same offers, and never ceased to use all the arguments, and to take on himself the suitor’s part, as though he were the guilty one! What an unparalleled passage that would be in the history of man! And yet, what is that to the grandeur of this simple fact here set forth, “We are ambassadors therefore on behalf of Christ, as though God were intreating by us: we beseech you on behalf of Christ, be ye reconciled to God”?
I read the other day that a father in Watford last year was greatly troubled about his son, who had gone wrong, and who was now ill and despondent and wrote to him, very tremblingly and fearfully, as if to ask whether there was any hope. The father sent a telegram to him, and the telegram consisted of one word; the one word was “Home,” and it was signed “Father.” Now the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is God’s telegram to the sinful world, summed up in one word, “Home,” and signed by one name, “Father.”1 [Note: R. F. Horton, How the Cross Saves, 102.]
3. The message is for all men. The supplement which stands in our Authorized Version in this text is a misleading and unfortunate one. “As though God did beseech you” and “we pray you” unduly narrow the scope of the Apostolic message, and confuse the whole course of the Apostolic reasoning here. For he has been speaking of a world which is reconciled to God, and he finds a consequence of that reconciliation of the world in the fact that he and his fellow-preachers are entrusted with the word of reconciliation. The scope of their message, then, can be no narrower than the scope of the reconciliation; and, inasmuch as that is world-wide, the beseeching must be co-extensive therewith, and must cover the whole ground of humanity. It is a universal message that is set forth here. The Corinthians, to whom St. Paul was speaking, are, by his hypothesis, already reconciled to God, and the message which he has in trust for them is given in the subsequent words: “We then, as workers together with God, beseech you also that ye receive not the grace of God in vain.” But the message, the pleading of the Divine heart, “be ye reconconciled to God,” is a pleading that reaches over the whole range of a reconciled world.
In 1854, when the British fleet was lying in Nagasaki Bay, the Japanese Government was extremely anxious that we should not land, and General Wakasa was appointed to watch the fleet and to prevent the British troops from landing. It happened that, as he rowed about the bay in fulfilment of his duty, some careless sailor on one of those English men-of-war had dropped his New Testament overboard. Probably he cared very little for his New Testament and he parted with it without any regret. But it so happened that General Wakasa picked it up out of the sea, and he was curious to know what this book was. He got an interpreter to tell him what it was. He became interested in it. He procured a Chinese New Testament and read it through—it brought him to Christ. Twelve years later General Wakasa came down to Verbeck, the missionary, and asked to be baptized because he had found the Saviour. Your British sailor let his New Testament fall into the sea, but that New Testament converted the General of the Japanese army, and his family, and the whole circle of his friends, and planted the blessed truth of reconciliation in the islands of Japan. That is the logic of missions. The first duty is to let the world know, and let every race of men know, to have it in every language, to put it within reach of every human being, that God is “in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.”1 [Note: R. F. Horton, How the Cross Saves, 109.]
4. To turn a deaf ear to this message is to incur great guilt. It is an awful and solemn power that every poor little speck of humanity has, to lift itself up in God’s face, and say, in answer to all His pleadings, “I will not!” as if the dwellers in some little island, a mere pin-point of black, barren rock, jutting up at sea, were to declare war against a kingdom that stretched through twenty degrees of longitude on the mainland. So we, on our little bit of island, our pin-point of rock in the great waste ocean, can separate ourselves from the great Continent; or, rather, God has, in a fashion, made us separate in order that we may either unite ourselves with Him, by our willing yielding, or wrench ourselves away from Him by our antagonism and rebellion.
God cannot prise open a man’s heart with a crowbar, as it were, and force Himself inside. The door opens from within. “Behold! I stand at the door and knock.” There is an “if.” “If any man open I will come in.” Hence the beseeching, hence the wail of wisdom that cries aloud and no man regards it; of love that stands at the entering in of the city, and pleads in vain, and says, “I have called, and ye have refused.… How often would I have gathered … and ye would not.”
We heard his footfall on the vacant stair
The whole night long. We lay awake in bed
And heard him climb;—but those who slept instead
Smiled and assured us that he was not there.
We had our own important things to care
About—place, profit and the daily bread;
And then the street so thundered in one’s head
And often life’s a commonplace affair!
Yet then we heard him!—we not they were right:
We heard him—Yes! tho’ now we sleep by night
Almost as soundly as we sleep by day,
We waked, we heard him, heard—and nothing more.1 [Note: G. C. Lodge, Poems and Dramas, ii. 152.]
An Ambassador is a Representative
We are ambassadors not only “for Christ,” but “on Christ’s behalf.” And the same preposition is repeated in the subsequent clause. “We pray you,” not merely “in Christ’s stead,” though that is much, but “on His account,” which is more—as if it lay very near His heart that we should put away our enmity; and as if in some transcendent and wonderful manner the all-perfect, self-sufficing God was made glad, and the Master, who is His image for us, “saw of the travail of his soul, and,” in regard to one man, “was satisfied,” when the man lets the warmth of God’s love in Christ thaw away the coldness out of his heart, and kindle there an answering flame. An old divine says, “We cannot do God a greater pleasure, or more oblige His very heart, than to trust in Him as a God of love.”
There is one absolute essential to successful preaching and to beneficial hearing—firm faith that it is God’s own appointed plan for the conversion of souls, and that He never will withhold the blessing when it is earnestly sought. The moment you allow the mind to fix itself solely and exclusively on the human element in preaching—the man, the talent, the oratory—you miss the good of preaching. The way to regard it is this: to look upon the man as but the machine in God’s hand, doing God’s work. Then you reap the benefit; because you listen reverently, patiently, receptively. This is far too little enforced and far too little understood.1 [Note: Dr. MacGregor of St. Cuthberts, 97.]
The clergyman is not simply an officer or servant of God or workman of God, but His ambassador and herald to tell men about God Himself. He must bring distinctly before men the reality of the heaven of which the earth and all that it contains is but the symbol and vesture. And, since all human teaching is but the purging of the ear to hear God’s teaching, and since the whole man, and not certain faculties only, must enter into the Divine presence, the sacraments must be the centre and crown (I don’t mean central subject) of his teaching, for there the real heights and depths of heaven are most fully revealed, and at the same time the commonest acts and things of earth are most closely and clearly connected with the highest heaven. This is, briefly, my view of a clergyman’s work; and by this, I think, must the nature of the Spirit’s inward motion be determined.2 [Note: F. J. A. Hort, in Life and Letters, i. 279.]
2. The Christian ambassador must spare no pains to be a true copy of the Master whom he represents. David Brainerd was a young American missionary to the Red Indians. Weak and ill in body he died at twenty-nine, but what a noble history he left. He travelled, in spite of suffering, four thousand miles a year, through woods, over mountains and rivers. At night he lay out in the open woods, or in log and turf huts. He ate the Indians’ coarse food, learned their strange language, and preached to them in their wigwams, full of smoke and filth, the Indians often laughing and drinking around. And he tells us why he so lived and suffered: first “to be conformed to Jesus in toil and suffering”; and second, “I cared not where or how I lived, or what hardships I went through, so that I could but win souls to Christ.”
To one who asked MacGregor in the zenith of his power what were the things which stood behind his preaching, the answer was characteristically descriptive of what was felt by every listening hearer of his ministry: “All through, from the beginning, I have tried to be true to my colours—preaching Christ and Him crucified. The rock of my faith is the eternal Sonship of the Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. All flows from that. Religion without that is a pithless, marrowless concern. On that I rest my own eternal hopes; on the work done for me; on Christ as the Redeemer of men; the love of God in sending His Son, in giving Him as a sacrifice for the sins of the world; the love of Christ in executing His Father’s loving purpose; and the love and power of the Holy Ghost in applying the benefits which Christ secured for us.” These doctrines he never preached with bated breath. “The clarion voice gave no uncertain call.” A herald charged with a direct commission, he might fitly have begun and closed every one of his sermons with the words, “Thus saith the Lord.”1 [Note: Dr. MacGregor of St. Cuthberts, 163.]
An Ambassador is a Diplomatist
Diplomacy! What ideas do we not commonly connect with the word? Ambiguity, manœuvre, chicane, over-reaching, fraud. Not such must be our diplomacy. Only let people feel that we have a single heart and a single eye; only let them see that in all our words and all our acts we seek not theirs but them; not ourselves, but our work; not ourselves, but Christ Jesus our Lord; and the battle is already half won. Duplicity, untruthfulness, insincerity, self-assertion, self-seeking in any form—this it is which mars a man’s influence.
Remember how often Christ has said, “The Father has sent me. I am sent. I do the will of him who has sent me.”
These words have always been obscure to me.
Only now has the simple, clear, and joyous meaning of these words been revealed to me. I arrived at the comprehension of them through doubt and suffering.
Their meaning is this, that Christ has taught all men the life which He considered the true one for Himself. But He considers His life an embassy, a fulfilment of the will of Him who sent Him.
But the will of Him who sent is the rational (good) life of the whole world. Consequently, it is the business of life to carry the truth into the world.
If I am God’s messenger, my chief business does not only consist in fulfilling the commandments—they are only conditions under which I must fulfil the ambassadorship—but in living in such a way as to carry into the world with all means given me that truth which I know, that truth which is entrusted to me.
It may happen that I shall myself often be bad, that I shall be false to my mission; all this cannot for a moment destroy the meaning of my life: “To shine with that light which is in me, so long as I am able, so long as there is light in me.”
The conviction of the ambassadorship has the following practical effect upon me (I speak for myself and, I know, for others also).
Outside the physical necessities, in which I try to confine myself to the least, as soon as I am drawn to some activity,—speaking, writing, working,—I ask myself (I do not even ask, I feel it) whether with this work I serve Him who sent me. I joyously surrender myself to the work and forget all doubts and—fly, like a stone, and am glad that I am flying.
But if the work is not for Him who has sent me, it does not even attract me, I simply feel ennui, and I only try to get rid of it, I try to observe all the rules given for messengers. But this does not even happen. It seems to me that a man can live in such a way as to sleep, or in such a way as with his whole soul, with delight, to serve Him who sent him.1 [Note: Tolstoy, Thoughts and Aphorisms (Works, xix. 100).]
2. The ambassador must use the most persuasive modes of speech. He must entreat and beseech those to whom he is sent. It is, indeed, a strange thing that men should need beseeching to take what is the greatest good, and indeed the only good, that the human soul can gain—reconciliation with God. But it is a fact that all of us need beseeching, and most of us who have come to Christ have come because some dear voice entreated. And it is the duty of every Christian to use every art of entreaty, every sanctified art of entreaty—argument, reasoning, pleading—but also literally beseeching, wooing, winning, pleading with men to be reconciled to God.
Entreating and beseeching—these are wonderful words to use in regard to God’s dealings with men. We can understand how fitting it is for man to beseech God for those Divine gifts without which he must perish. We can understand also that man should entreat God to be gracious unto him with strong crying and tears. But that God should beseech and Christ should entreat men to accept the greatest gifts is marvellous indeed. But such is the fact, such are the terms of a minister’s commission. “We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be ye reconciled to God.”
There was put up in the town of Bedford, some twenty-five or thirty years ago, a statue to the memory of John Bunyan. On the pedestal of the statue are engraved these words: “It had eyes lifted up to Heaven, the best of books in his hand, the law of truth was written upon its lips, the world was behind his back; it stood as if it pleaded with men, and a crown of gold did hang over its head.” This was the picture which Christian saw in the Interpreter’s house, and this is the picture which the sculptor has sought to embody in his bronze. “It stood as if it pleaded with men”—what better picture could we have of the great Apostle? Thrice in the one short passage (2Co_5:20 to 2Co_6:1) is the word of entreaty on his lips, with such tender solicitude did he urge upon his readers, and does he urge upon us, “Be ye reconciled to God.”1 [Note: G. Jackson, Memoranda Paulina, 261.]
It was after midnight that Jamie rose and crept to Leeby’s bedside. Leeby was shaking the bed in her agony. Jess heard what they said.
“Leeby,” said Jamie, “dinna greet, an’ I’ll never do’t again.”
He put his arms round her, and she kissed him passionately.
“Oh, Jamie,” she said, “hae ye prayed to God to forgie ye?”
Jamie did not speak.
“If ye was to die this nicht,” cried Leeby, “an’ you no made it up wi’ God, ye wouldna gang to heaven. Jamie, I canna sleep till ye’ve made it up wi’ God.”
But Jamie still hung back. Leeby slipped from her bed, and went down on her knees.
“O God, O dear God,” she cried, “mak’ Jamie to pray to you!”
Then Jamie went down on his knees too, and they made it up with God together.1 [Note: J. M. Barrie, A Window in Thrums, 174.]
3. The ambassador must use all dispatch in executing his commission. He must be urgent as well as persuasive. “He who has before his mental eye the Four Last Things,” says Newman, “will have the true earnestness, the horror, or the rapture, of one who witnesses a conflagration, or discerns some rich and sublime prospect of natural scenery. His countenance, his manner, his voice, speak for him, in proportion as his view has been vivid and minute. The great English poet has described this sort of eloquence when a calamity had befallen—
Yea, this man’s brow, like to a title-leaf,
Foretells the nature of a tragic volume.
Thou tremblest; and the whiteness in thy cheek
Is apter than thy tongue to tell thy errand.2 [Note: J. H. Newman, Idea of a University.]
Bishop Paget writes from Priest Leys, to the Rev. G. S. Barrett, of Norwich, thanking him for his book, Religion in Daily Life:—
… “A friend of mine said to me once about my father-in-law [Dean Church] after an University sermon at Oxford: ‘Well, at all events he has one great quality as a preacher—he makes one thoroughly uncomfortable’;—and I am thankful for some thoroughly disturbing words of yours. And I am thankful, too, with all my heart, for the resolute gathering of all daily life, of all its relations and opportunities and tasks and phases and problems, into the light of our Lord’s teaching, to be ruled by His demand and estimated by His standard:—together with the recurring witness to the gladness of a disciplined life, the rest that is hidden in the strenuousness of obedience.”3 [Note: Francis Paget, Bishop of Oxford, 143.]
Sometimes while preaching I have felt as if I could imitate that Roman ambassador who met a certain king, and told him that the Romans forbade him to advance farther. The king somewhat jested at the stern command of the Romans, but the ambassador stooped down, and with his stick drew a ring in the dust round the king, and said, “You must give your answer before you come out of that circle; for if you step over that line, the Romans will accept it as a signal of war.” I have sometimes felt, when preaching to this great congregation, as if there were some who had to decide for God or for the world before they stepped out of this place, for God’s ambassador had, as it were, drawn a line all round them, and said to them, “Choose ye this day whom ye will serve. If the Lord be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him.”1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]
Literature
Cameron (J.), Sermons and Memoir, 13.
Cooper (T. J.), Love’s Unveiling, 49.
Fowler (G. H.), Things Old and New, 153.
Garbett (E.), The Soul’s Life, 34.
Henson (H. H.), Preaching to the Times, 174.
Horton (R. F.), How the Cross Saves, 101.
Jackson (G.), Memoranda Paulina, 260.
Lightfoot (J. B.), Ordination Addresses, 44.
Maclaren (A.), Expositions: 1 and 2 Corinthians, 380.
Meyer (F. B.), In the Beginning God, 163.
Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, iv. 33; viii. 361.
Randolph (B. W.), The Threshold of the Sanctuary, 30.
Robertson (A. T.), The Glory of the Ministry, 203.
Robertson (J.), Sermons and Expositions, 3.
Robinson (C. S.), Studies in the New Testament, 48.
Snell (B. J.), in The Sermon Year Book, ii. 1.
Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xix. (1873), No. 1124; lv. (1909), No. 3148.
Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), vi. (1869), No. 627.
Watson (F.), The Christian Life Here and Hereafter, 161.
Watson (J.), Preparing for Home, 238.
Church of England Magazine, x. 296 (E. Parker); xv. 166 (W. Stone); xx. 200 (W. H. Brett).
Homiletic Review, liii. 306 (R. Smith).