THE PEOPLE OF GOD ARE ONE.
By H. L. Hastings
THE people of God are one. 1. They are of one fallen race. There is no aristocracy here; all are the children of him who was of the earth, earthy; all are full of sin and prone to evil. 2. They are one in actual transgression; for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. All were rebels; all ruined; all lost. 3. They were one in guilt and condemnation. The wages of sin is death, and the law of God condemned, and the sword of wrath waited to destroy them all. None were free from the guilt, none exempt from the common doom that overhung a guilty race. 4. They are one by a common redemption through the blood of Him who died for them on the cross. One ransom price was paid for them all; for they were not redeemed by corruptible things, as silver and gold, but by the precious blood of Christ, as of a Lamb without blemish and without spot. A common ruin involved them, a common redemption delivers them. 5. They are one in the conviction of sin by the power of the Holy Ghost. It convinces the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment. Every Christian has felt its power, and has seen himself sinful, guilty, lost, under the preaching of God’s word and the illumination of his Spirit. 6. They are one in conversion to God; in being born again to a new and better life; in being made new creatures in Christ Jesus, from whom old things are passed away, and to whom all things have become new; in hating the things they once loved, in loving the things they once despised. 7. They are one in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Because they are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into their hearts, whereby they cry, “Abba Father.” This Spirit is one Spirit in all the church; and if any man have not the Spirit of Christ he is none of his; and in all the children of God it bears the same blessed fruits of love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance, against which there is no law. “I believe in the Holy Ghost,” is the voice of every Christian, and this is not merely the repetition of an ancient creed, but the testimony to a present and universal experience among the people of God. For by one Spirit have they all been baptized into one body, and are all one in Christ Jesus. 8. They are one in labor. People speak of the rivalries and the quarrels of Christians, but often these are simply the result of honest zeal, modified by circumstances around them. Set two men to hoeing on a small plot of ground, and they will interfere with each other. On the New England hills, where stones are so plenty and soil is so scarce, boys will sometimes steal earth from the next row to make their own corn hills respectable in size. But you set each of those boys out in the middle of the western prairie, where he can have all the soil he wants to dig, and there is no quarrel then. So churches sometimes get too close to each other, and there is friction. But their work is one. Let them scatter and find room to labor freely. Let there be twenty hands in a shop, all busy as they can be, and there is peace; but let half of them have nothing to do but to talk politics and trade jackknives, and they will probably quarrel before noon. Set the machinery in motion, and let the work drive them, and all is harmony again. So the work of the church is one work. In preaching the gospel, in feeding the hungry, in clothing the naked, in enlightening the ignorant, and lifting up the lowly, Christians labor unitedly. Infidelity never built a hospital or an asylum. Christianity has founded them all, and the schools and charities that bless the world to-day are but illustrations of the united labor of God’s people, who are one. 9. The people of God are one in essential faith. They differ in opinions, in thoughts, in guesses, in whims; but in their confidence in the living God, the loving Saviour, and the abiding word, they are one. On this bed rock of “faith that worketh by love,” they stand together. Men say, “We believe differently on certain points.” You do not believe at all on most of them. Your confidence never rises to the dignity of faith—the faith that saves, the faith that purifies the heart. You agree in ten things that you know about, and believe you disagree about five things which you guess at. Are you not one? 10. We are one in prayer. When Christians argue, they differ; when they pray, they unite. Around one common altar they lift united cries to God; and, no matter whose voice leads the worship, all the people say amen. One spirit inspires the petitions of those who pray always in the Holy Ghost; and with one heart and one mind they supplicate the mercy of the Most High. 11. They are one in praise and song. Differ as they may, they all unite here. Toplady had one class of opinions, and Wesley another; and they wrote some harsh and bitter things, it may be; but now their friends get together, and over their graves one sings,— “Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in thee,” and all join the strain with united voices; and another strikes up,— “Jesus, lover of my soul, Let me to thy bosom fly,” and every voice blends gloriously in the song. Standing the other day by the grave of John Wesley, in City Road Chapel yard, and plucking the foliage growing there, I rejoiced in the truth which he declared; and just across the way, in Bunhill fields, I stood beside the grave of Watts and sung his hymn:— “How long shall death, the tyrant, reign, And triumph o’er the just?” and I thought that his faith, so sweetly sung, was my faith, and the faith of all the church of the living God. Standing in the same old pulpit in which Bunyan preached when in London, I prayed to the same God whom he adored, and published the same salvation which he proclaimed; and while at every turn I saw tokens of the substantial unity of the people of the Lord, I could most heartily adopt the sturdy old pilgrim’s words: “Since you desire to know by what name I would be called, I desire to be and hope I am, a Christian; and I desire God should count me worthy to be called a Christian, a believer, or any such name which is sanctified by the Holy Ghost. But as for those factious titles of Anabaptists, Independents, Presbyterians, and the like, I believe they came neither from Jerusalem nor Antioch, but rather from hell and Babylon; for they naturally tend to divisions, and we may know them by their fruits.” 12. The people of God are one in sorrow, in suffering, in persecution, in affliction, in death. When one member suffers, all suffer; when one rejoices, all rejoice. One Shepherd leads through the dark valley, and one voice from Heaven whispers over their pallid forms and silent tombs, “Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord.” Lovely and pleasant in their lives, in their deaths they are not divided. 13. They are one in hope and expectation. They may see now as in a glass darkly, and their eyes may fail to pierce some of the mists that hang around them; but in the grand realities of eternity they are one. They look for one kingdom, one crown, one glory, one reward, in the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ at his coming. And, finally, they are one in resurrection and eternal life. They shall put on immortality together; they shall be like Christ, their living Lord; they shall be victorious over death and hell, and shall sing one song of endless triumph in the paradise of God. And with all these great, grand, glorious elements of unity and strength, shall we be told that Christians differ about tweedledum and tweedle-dee? Shall we listen to Christians who say we cannot be united? Why, you are united, and how are you going to help yourselves? Our union is a fact; Christ prayed and bled for it; the Holy Spirit sealed it; and we rejoice in it. Do you separate yourself? How can you? If the foot or the hand say, “I am not of the body,” is it therefore not of the body? Let us, then, accept the fact of our unity. It is not a union through each other with Christ, but it is a union with each other through Christ. My hands are not united because they clasp each other—I may clasp a dead man’s hand—but they are united because they are joined to one central head and heart, and soul, and pervaded by one spirit of life. The branches of a tree are not one because they interlace above, nor are they separate because, when they are swayed by the wind, they clash and chafe against one another. Their union is in the central root to which each branch is joined—by which they live, and from which their life is fed. So the people of God are one in their Head and Lord; one in his love, his grace, his peace, his power, his suffering, his death, his resurrection, his glory. And many of the differences and dissensions that disturb the unity of God’s people are purely imaginary, or are the result of mere misapprehension. You have heard of Dr. Chalmers and Dr. Stewart, who once met in the streets of Edinburgh, and fell into an argument about something or other; and for a long discussion about something that nobody understands, give me two wiry Scotsmen! Well, they argued and argued, and could not agree, till, their time being exhausted, Dr. Chalmers said,— “You will find my views on the subject very well put in a little tract entitled ‘Difficulties in the Way of Believing.’” “Why,” said Dr. Stewart, with amazement, “I wrote that tract myself!” Half of our differences will disappear when things are once stated as they should be. While in the heat of street debate, we neither understand the faith of others, nor correctly express our own. It is time to put away these childish things, and come down to the plain, sober truths of the gospel. Said Luther, “I preach in plain language that the common people can understand; and if I know Hebrew and Greek, I reserve them for our learned meetings where we discuss such subtleties and such profundities that God himself, I know, must marvel at us!” The way of life is plain, and while we walk this way and point others to it, we shall be one, as Christ desired. But when we strive about words, and contend about trifles, we do the devil’s work, and hinder those for whom the Saviour died. The Duke of Wellington once stood by a battery that was hurling shot and death into a thicket where a body of soldiers were posted. “Pretty well aimed, captain,” said he, “but no more of it; that’s our own forty-second.” Ah! is not the eye of the Captain of our salvation to-day on many a battery which is doing just the same deadly work on men that he has posted to hold the fort till he shall come? Let us save our powder and shot to fight the devil—close up the ranks, and advance the whole line in battle array. I noticed, years ago, when regiments were going to war, that all had some distinctive mark, some stripe, or belt, or epaulette, or cockade, or red pantaloons, or something of the kind to distinguish them. And these things did very well for dress parade and general muster, and sham fights; but when they came to real warfare, every cross belt was a mark for a bullet to find their hearts; every cockade helped to guide the sharpshooters to hit their heads; every man wearing red pantaloons was likely to get shot in the legs; and every bit of brass or lace was only a mark to invite the death-dealing bolt. And soon they laid these things all aside; so that a major general would hide his stars, and donning a slouched hat and a teamster’s blouse, go quietly about his business and escape the dreaded bullets. And I noticed when those soldiers came marching home battle-scarred, bronzed, and weather-beaten, with their war-stained raiment and bullet-riddled flags, they all wore one uniform—the regulation blue! Every rag of regimental finery was gone; they were soldiers of one army. And so, while sectarian uniforms may do for holiday service, yet in real warfare there is no uniform like the whole armor of God. A common peril unites, a common labor joins, both heart and hand. In the late war some western regiments almost quarrelled with others from the eastern part of the country; but when the battle hung trembling in the scales, and the jaws of death were closing around them, and these despised eastern men came to the rescue and saved them from destruction, they were brothers ever after. And so, if we plunge heartily into the fight of faith we shall find out who our friends are, and shall rejoice to be companions of all that fear God; shall say with Christ himself, “Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in Heaven, the same is my brother and sister and mother.”—H. L. Hastings.