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‘Whosoever shall be ashamed of Me and of My words, of him shall the Son of Man be ashamed, when He shall come in His own glory, and in His Father’s, and of the holy angels.’
Luk_9:26
I. Disobedience.—The first is disobedience—conscious, wilful disobedience—to the Gospel law. We are naturally so attracted by the Gospel as the revelation of God’s free grace and mercy, that we often forget another aspect of it. We forget that it, too, after its own manner, is a law. Christ was a higher and greater Lawgiver than was Moses, and His Gospel is the more exacting, because His Gospel is a more spiritual code than was that of the Pentateuch. It is a law of liberty, no doubt, because in Christ’s household obedience is not wrung out of unassisted and reluctant human nature by the sole force of penal sanctions; but it is not a law of licence. The Christian, justified freely, is not free to do whatever his lower nature may desire. The Sermon on the Mount is just as much a part of the everlasting Gospel as is the parable of the Prodigal Son; the twelfth chapter of the Epistles to the Romans is just as much as the third, or the fourth, or the fifth. Now this lofty, pure spiritual law is the standard by which we Christians shall be judged. It greatly concerns Christians to bear in mind how our Lord taught that all judgment will be relative to the opportunities which men enjoy in this life—that to whomsoever much is given of him will much be required.
II. False religious profession.—The second feature for which Christians will be condemned at the Day of Judgment is that of false or merely outward religious profession. Our Lord’s teaching is full of warnings on this score. We may take, for example, the great passage in the Sermon on the Mount in which He contrasted the practical religion of many a Jew in His day with that of a sincere servant of God. When God’s glory and will are lost sight of, and the desire to have the praise of men takes its place; when alms are given to secure a reputation for generosity, when prayers are said to secure a reputation for piety, when fasting is practised to secure a reputation for self-denial, then all are radically bad. The heart is eaten out of a good action by the impure and vicious desire for the praise of men.
III. Failure to make public confession.—The third feature is the failure of men to profess the truth of which they are secretly convinced. This clearly was the failure made at times when Christians were in a minority, or when earnest Christianity was powerfully opposed. There was no temptation to be ashamed of Christ when all the world around was, at any rate professedly, generally devoted to Him; but the temptation was a very formidable one when His Church was still young, and when Christians, so to speak, carried their lives in their hands. Wonderful it is how in those first ages of the Faith, men and women, boys and girls, in all conditions of life, joyfully accepted a painful death rather than be disloyal to their Lord and Saviour. Of the extant records of those early martyrdoms, some, no doubt, were the work of the collectors of the vague and decaying traditions of a later age; but the others bore upon them the undoubted stamp of truth. It is the same story over and over again.
—
Canon Liddon.
Illustration‘St. Peter would not have shrunk from confessing Christ had he been suddenly forced to choose between death and apostasy; but in the antechamber of the High Priest’s palace his fever cooled down. St. Peter meets a maidservant; and was it possible not to be astonished at her impertinence when she challenged him? What was it that made her so formidable? She represented a body of class opinion, the opinion of the class among whom St. Peter moved, and such is our human nature in its weakness, that he who was to become, through the grace of Christ, the first of the Apostles, succumbed in an agony of cowardice and shame—“I know not the man.” ’