Professor Ofsacredhistory, College of Thebible

SERMONS

DELIVERED IN LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY,

JUNE--SEPTEMBER, 1893.

BY

J. W. McGARVEY

PROFESSOR OFSACREDHISTORY, COLLEGE OF THEBIBLE,

LEXINGTON, KY.

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LOUISVILLE, KY.

GUIDEPRINTING& PUBLISHINGCOMPANY,

1894.

Copyright, 1894, by

J. W. MCGARVEY.

TO

"THE BROADWAY CHURCH,"

LEXINGTON, KY.,

In whose pulpit nearly all of these sermons wereoriginally delivered; in whose service I havespent the most useful years of my life as apreacher, and among whose membersI count many of my warmest friends, this volume is affectionately inscribed as atoken of gratitude formany expressionsofCHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP.

PREFACE.

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I have no partiality for volumes of sermons; for I have derived from them comparatively little benefit. In this I suppose myself to be different from many others; for with many good people such volumes appear to be favorites. They should certainly prove helpful to religious persons who are frequently denied the privilege of hearing the living preacher; and they serve as a homiletical aid to such young preachers as can study them without imitating them. I think that I should not have been moved to the preparation of the present volume, but for the deep regret which I have often experienced, in common with many thoughtful men, that some preachers whom we have known, and on whose lips we have hung almost entranced, have left behind them, when they departed this life, nothing but the faint remembrance of sermons which we should have been glad to read again and again, and which were worthy of being transmitted to many generations. If any of mine approach these in merit, or even if they possess the merit which partial friends have often ascribed to them, I have thought that they might prove useful to some after my voice shall no longer be heard.

Notwithstanding the considerations just mentioned, these sermons would probably have died with their author, but for the fact that I had occasion to deliver them where facilities for reporting them were at hand, and that the Guide Publishing Company thought so well of them before hearing them as to provide for their [[@Page:v]]publication. It has not been my custom to write sermons, either before or after delivery; and only two in this volume were written by my own hand. With the exception of the one on Inspiration, the one on The Jerusalem Church and the one of Mocking God, they all appear as they came from the pen of the stenographer, verbal mistakes alone being corrected. If, then, the value of a printed sermon depends in part, as I think it does, on its retention of the style and manner of the speaker, these will possess this merit. Their imperfections of style will be as truthful as any other part of the representation which they will make; and if, on this account, they shall smell less of midnight oil, the reader maybe compensated if they shall have some of the freshness of morning dew.

I must express my thanks to the Broadway Church, Louisville, Ky., in whose temporary service all of these sermons were delivered during the summer of the year 1893, for the many courtesies which made that summer's work most agreeable; to Miss Mattie C. Huber, the stenographer, for the faithful and cheerful execution of her responsible task; and to the GUIDEPublishing Company, whose promptness and accuracy in every business transaction I can not too highly commend.

THE AUTHOR.

LEXINGTON, KY., December, 1893.

CONTENTS.

Title Page.

Copyright Page.

Dedication.

Contents.

Preface.

Sermon I: Inspiration.

Sermon II: Sin and Its Punishment.

Sermon III: Sin and Its Punishment: Objections Considered.

Sermon IV: Redemption in Christ.

Sermon V: The Remission of Sins.

Sermon VI: Conditions of Forgiveness.

Sermon VII: Faith.

Sermon VIII: Repentance.

Sermon IX: Baptism.

Sermon X: Cases of Conversion: The Eunuch.

Sermon XI: Cases of Conversion: Cornelius.

Sermon XII: Cases of Conversion: Lydia.

Sermon XIII: Cases of Conversion: Paul.

Sermon XIV: Cases of Non-Conversion: Felix.

Sermon XV: Cases of Non-Conversion: Agrippa.

Sermon XVI: God Is Not Mocked.

Sermon XVII: Divine Providence: Joseph.

Sermon XVIII: Divine Providence: Queen Esther.

Sermon XIX: The Jerusalem Church.

Sermon XX: Church Finances.

Sermon XXI: A Church Inspected.

Sermon XXII: The River Jordan.

Sermon XXIII: Prayer: Its Efficacy.

Sermon XXIV: Believing a Lie.

About the Electronic Edition.

SERMON I: INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES:

Sermon File Type

/

Sermon

Passages / I. Cor. 2:9-13
Topics / Scriptures, Inspiration
Tags
Speaker / J. W. McGarvey
Venue
Date / 05/28
Teaching objective:
Desired action:

ADDRESSDELIVEREDMAY28THBEFORE THEY. M. C. A.

OFTHEUNIVERSITY OFMISSOURI.

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There can be no Christian Association that is not founded on the Bible. Everything that is properly styled Christian owes its existence to the belief in the divine origin and authority of that book; for although there were Christians and a Christian church before the completion of the book, since it was completed all Christian faith depends upon it. No one is entitled to membership in such an association who does not espouse this belief; yet in a Young Men's Christian Association of our day it is scarcely possible that questioning in regard to the origin and authority of the Bible do not frequently arise. You who are members of the Association which I now have the honor of addressing, have doubtless heard it said that the earlier books of the Old Testament, instead of being such as our fathers have taught us to believe them, were written by J., and E., and D., and P., and R., of whom this is about all that we know. They were written so long after the events which they record, and by men with sources of information so unreliable, that we can depend upon the truth of very little that they say. Indeed, it is more than hinted that they did not hesitate to perpetrate pious frauds--a kind of fraud never perpetrated by a pious man--when these were necessary to any special [[@Page:1]]purpose which they had in view. As to the historical books of the New Testament, they also were written, you have been told, by men who lived at too late a day to be well informed, so that their writings must be carefully sifted before we can determine what in them is true and what is to be referred to misinformation, to myth, and to legend.

In opposition to all this you and I have been taught to regard the writer of every book entitled to a place in this sacred collection as having been controlled in the selection of his matter and guided in the composition of it by God's Holy Spirit. We have learned, in other words, to believe Paul when he says: "Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, and which entered not into the heart of man, whatsoever things God hath prepared for them that love him. But unto us God revealed them through the Spirit. * * * Which things also we speak, not in words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Spirit teacheth; combining spiritual things with spiritual." (1 Cor. 2:9-13).

These statements present the main issue between belief and unbelief as regards the books which we style, collectively, the word of God. From among the many lines of argumentation along which the discussion of this issue has taken its course, I have selected a single one for the subject of this address; and as the question is of vital importance to the existence of your Association, I am sure that I shall have your undivided attention while I attempt to discuss it.

Again and again, almost from time immemorial, it has been argued that if the Spirit of God had guided the sacred penmen after the manner affirmed by Paul, all the books would have been written in one style instead of being marked as they are by all the varieties of style and [[@Page:2]]diction which naturally distinguished their respective writers. To this it has been as often answered, that the infinite Spirit of God could as easily guide a number of writers along the course of their own respective styles and within the limits of their own previously acquired knowledge of words, as in any other way. This seems to be a satisfactory answer. But still it must be conceded that if the Spirit of God exercised any direction over the selection by these men of their words, their modes of expression, or the matter of their narrations, it is but natural to suppose that we may find traces of the fact in characteristics which the writings would not otherwise possess--characteristics by which they may be distinguished as inspired writings. I believe that such characteristics can be pointed out, and that, when properly considered, they furnish conclusive proof of the inspiration in question. I shall confine myself, for the sake of brevity and concentration, to the historical writings of the New Testament, and to their matter rather than their style.

We invite your attention, first of all, to a peculiarity of the historical writers of the New Testament, which has often elicited wondering comment, the unexampled impartiality with which they set forth the sins and follies of friends and foes alike. There is no attempt at concealment of their own sins; there is no toning down, no apology. They are described without hesitation, and with the same fullness of detail, as are the worst deeds of their enemies. The proposal of James and John to call down fire from heaven on an offending village, is as bluntly recorded as the murder of the innocents of Bethlehem by Herod; the dispute among the apostles as to who should be greatest, is as plainly set forth as the dissensions among the Pharisees concerning Jesus; and although, when the Gospels were written, Peter was the [[@Page:3]]most prominent and the most honored man in the whole church, they every one describe his cowardly denial of his Lord with as much fullness of detail as they do the dastardly betrayal by Judas. They offer no apologies for Peter; and they have no word of reproach for Judas. What writers since the world began, describing events in which their deepest feelings and their dearest interests were involved, have approached these writers in this particular? If they were guided by the impartial Spirit of God, this accounts for it; but who shall account for it on any other hypothesis?

In the second place, you can scarcely fail to have observed the imperturbable calmness with which they describe all events alike--the most wonderful as the most common-place, the most touching as the most indifferent. The most astounding miracles are described by them with no more manifestations of excitement in their manner than the most trivial everyday events. They betray no more feeling when they speak of the murder of John the Baptist, than when they speak of his voice crying in the wilderness. They are as calm and self-possessed when describing the agony in the garden and the overwhelming scenes of Calvary, as when they tell of Jesus passing through the fields on the Sabbath, or taking His seat at Jacob's well. They use no word of exultation when Jesus arose from the dead, or when He ascended on high; and their tones betray no trembling or tearfulness amid His outcries on the cross, no tenderness as His mangled form is quietly laid in the tomb. Yet these are the very men of whom it is said, that they were mourning and weeping when the first announcement of the resurrection broke upon their ears (Mark, 16:10). Who can account for this--for this elevation of these plain men above all the emotions which [[@Page:4]]characterize other men when writing of scene in which their tenderest sympathies and dearest hopes are involved? The experience is superhuman. It is accounted for only when we know that they were restrained by the Spirit of Him,

"Who sees with equal eye as God of all,

A hero perish or a sparrow fall;

Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,

And now a bubble burst, and now a world."

In the third place we invite attention to the unexampled brevity of the New Testament narratives; and first, to their brevity as whole books. Never since time began were a set of writers burdened with a theme so momentous in their own estimation, or so momentous in reality. Never were writers so oppressed, when they thought of brevity, by the multitude of wondrous details before them, and the difficulty of determining what to insert and what to omit, when the eternal well-being of a world depended on what they should write. One of them shows how keenly he felt this sense of oppression, when he exclaims with startling hyperbole: "If they should be written, every one, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books that should be written" (John, 22:25). What, then, could have induced these four evangelists, thus weighted down by the abundance of their materials, overwhelmed with a sense of the importance of their theme, and burning with a desire to vindicate the fame of their adored Master, to compress their accounts intothirty-six pages eachof this little book which I hold in my hand? What, but some restraining and irresistible power, guided by superhuman judgment? As to the book of Acts, the argument is the same in kind, and perhaps greater in force; for this writer had to deal with the widespread and ever-varying [[@Page:5]]fortunes of the church through a period of thirty years, the most eventful and thrillingly interesting period of its whole history to the present day; and yet he condenses the story into nearly the same narrow limits.

When, secondly, we study this brevity with respect to the accounts given of single incidents, the wonder remains the same. Out of the many examples we select a few. Few scenes have ever been witnessed on earth of deeper interest from several points of view than that of the baptism of our Lord. There was the humble yet lofty mien of him who came to be baptized; the surprising demeanor of the great preacher as he confessed his unworthiness to baptize such a person; the solemn act of the baptism itself; the still deeper solemnity of the prayer on the river's bank; the startling voice which was heard from heaven--the voice of Jehovah--which had not thus broken the silence of the skies since it thundered from the summit of Mount Sinai; the graceful descent of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove; and the oracle, big with the fate of a lost world, in which God confessed his own beloved Son. What man with a writer's instinct could have stopped short of many pages in describing the scene so as to do it justice. But the sublime story is disposed of by the first Evangelist in twelve short lines, in six each by the second and third; and in a mere allusion quoted from the lips of another person by the fourth. Again, the one event which, above all others, these four writers felt themselves obliged to set forth with overwhelming proof, was the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, the event, as they confessed, on which their own pretensions and their eternal hopes depended; yet of the twelve appearances of Jesus after his resurrection, only two are mentioned by the first Evangelist, only three by the second, only three by the third, and only four by the fourth. [[@Page:6]]We wonder and wonder why every one did not give all the evidence and press it home upon the reader by many words of comment. In the book of Acts the same surprise confronts us. Never did a writer have a more prolific theme, or one on which he would be more delighted to dwell than that wild commingling of prayers and maledictions, lamentations and silent despair, which filled every street of Jerusalem, when Saul made havoc of the Church, entering into every house and dragging to prison both men and women, until the ten thousand saints were driven to the four winds, and the Church in Jerusalem, the only Church then in existence, was dispersed and apparently destroyed. A whole volume would scarcely have sufficed to describe all the harrowing scenes; and the writer to whom we owe what we know of it was a companion of the principal actor in it for many years; yet some irresistible constraining power shriveled his account of it intofour short lines!Next to this event in the history of the young Church, with respect to those tragic elements in which historians love to revel, stands the death by martyrdom of James, the son of Zebedee. The death of Stephen was tragical and heartrending, but that of the Apostle James, about eight years later, was far more so, both because he was one of the original twelve on whose labors the future of the whole Church seemed to depend, and because it was a cold-blooded murder by a descendant of the tyrant who had butchered all the infants of Bethlehem in the vain effort to murder the Son of God. How you and I would love to know the exact motive of this murder! How we should be strengthened to know something of the brave or of the forgiving words which James uttered with his last breath--to know, in a word, how the first apostle who fell a martyr to his faith met the grim monster! And how it would have delighted any [[@Page:7]]Christian who knew the facts to tell them to his brethren, and hand them down to posterity! But this New Testament writer was allowed only a sentence ofseven wordsin the Greek for the whole story, and they are represented by onlyelevenin our English version. Truly, if it were said of Jesus, " Never man spake like this man," we must say, never man wrote like these men; and the logical inference is that they wrote as he spoke under the restraining power of the Spirit of God.