My Redeemer Liveth 4/25/43

Scripture: Luke 24: 1-6; Job 19: 23-25

Text: Job 19: 25a “For I know that my Redeemer liveth.”

Christmas and Easter seem to be the outstanding occasions of joy in Christendom. Young and old join in the gladness of both seasons. Wherever those great community sunrise services were held this morning, the children doubtless mingled with their elders in the joyful recognition of a great truth. Voices of all are lifted in the “Alleluias” of Easter. It is one of those days on which many families attend church together with an especial appropriateness.

There are deep seated reasons for the joy of Easter. These reasons are to be found in the great convictions of the Christian faith. One of these convictions is of course that which is always emphasized by the Easter narrative. After every evil they could think of had been let loose on their Lord, the disciples, who had seen his earthly career brought to a tragic close, were roused from their despair by the news and the conviction, that death could not control him. Here, in their Christ, is a soul that lives eternally. And if He lives, so may we all. That conviction is one of the most vital in the Christian faith.

Men and women who have heard him say “Because I live, ye shall live also” have faced their own future without fear, secure in a complete trust.

These are days when we need the assurance of great convictions. In the midst of swift changes and unrevealed tomorrows, the assurance of the eternal holds us steady. A dozen years ago, one of the world’s great sculptors, Lorado Taft, still worked in his Chicago studio, and created splendid figures. Like all great artists his work was made what it was by the spirit of the artist. One clue to that spirit is found in a remark Taft made to a friend when he said, “What we sculptors need is to get back into our work the hint of eternity.”

Long before the time of Jesus, the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes had stopped in the midst of a rather gloomy mood to say in quite a different vein: “He hath made everything beautiful in its time; also he hath set eternity in their heart.” [Ecclesiastes 3: 11].

People were never meant to be enslaved by fear. One of Jesus’ oft-repeated expressions was “Fear not.” And the sequel to that reassuring command is in his words: “I have overcome the world.” [John 16: 33].

A little child played in a splendid garden. He was at liberty to go in and out among its bushes and to play on the lawns near its beds of flowers. But there was one spot in the garden where he never went. He dreaded it, and stayed carefully away from it. It was really just a long, winding path among overshadowing trees. A nurse had foolishly told him that ogres and hobgoblins lived there, and thus had so filled with dread his tiny being that he feared the place without reason.

One day his older brother, after they had had much fun playing together for a while, took him by the hand and led him over to the entrance of the grove. Leaving the terror-struck little fellow there, he himself walked, whistling, the entire length of the path and back. When he returned, he took the little fellow’s hand, and they walked through it together. From that moment, the child’s fear vanished.

In some such fashion as that, Jesus, having himself walked into the valley of human woes and dread, offers his hand and says, “Lo, I am with you always.” And those who walk with him are enabled to say, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me.” [Psalm 23: 4].

Let me say again that the confidence that the living Christ brings to us is not the security of escape. No such assurance is promised, or offered, to those who merely run from trouble. What Christ offers is the ability to meet evil with the victory already in one’s soul.

As a matter of fact, he expects that we will carry our crosses, just as he did his. “He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” [Matthew 10: 39]. “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” [Matthew 16: 24].

A member of one communion, perhaps in doubt and ignorance of any other, asks a member of our communion, “Do you of the Congregational Church go as far as the cross?” And he is assured that we do. No one worthy the name of Christian may dare stop short of the cross. For it alone gives sufficient meaning to the love of God in Christ.

Ozora Stearns Davis, assured already by his surgeon that he faced death, without hope of reprieve from the ailment that had overtaken him, spoke with greatest assurance of the life-giving convictions that had sustained him in healthful vigor and that sustained him even more surely in fatal illness. Let Dr. Davis, as another older brother, speak to us for a minute this morning:

“The great conviction that I have won out of pain,” he says, “is that the new commandment of Jesus sums up all the meaning of life, all that we need to know about it, here and forevermore. ‘As I have loved you!’ In that exquisite sentence there is no touch or taint of the meaning of love as it is often debauched by misuse.

“Seeking other words to interpret what I mean by a life of Christlike love, I would describe it in the language of the Beatitudes; I would sum it up in kindness. I am convinced now that the only times when my life has been worth while, have been when I was unselfish, and kind, and generous in my relations with others. When I have been self-seeking, or merely aggressive, I have not been worthy of my Master, or of my life at its highest and best. It was not when I was ‘putting over’ something that I was really living; it was when I was putting myself under my own burdens cheerfully and under the loads of others, with quiet helpfulness, that I was living.

“Perhaps this is only another way of saying that the Cross is the true and glorious symbol of the Christian faith. Printed on a little board, which I have used for some years to hold my writing tablet, are five worlds given my in a book by Sundar Singh: “Si crucem portas portabit te.’ ‘If you carry the cross, it will carry you.’ I have proved its truth. Back, in manifold forms and in measure overflowing, have come to me every service that I have tried to render, every kindness that ever I have shown. If we covet help and affection in a bitter experience, I know that the way to be sure of it is to love and live in the spirit of Jesus.”

My friends, this is a day for the expression of our deep faith in what is eternal. A profound yet simple and childlike faith in God will carry you through day after day. You will not comprehend God. That is not necessary. Neither does any other child comprehend his father. If he know his father and counts on him, that is enough.

This is a day for simple, confident, childlike prayer. Many a man or woman shies off, or neglects it, giving as an excuse that there is no time for the necessary techniques of prayer nor for an understanding of its exact nature. Forget it! Men pray in battle when there is no time for anything but a God-ward plea for care and strength. People are praying today - and the spirit which prompts it is the hope of the world.

Have you read the dispatches that tell of Palm Sunday crowds in the capital of atheist Russia? The Associated Press brings news that the crowds in the 26 remaining Eastern Orthodox churches of Moscow were the largest on last Sunday that anyone can remember since the Bolshevik revolution. Traffic was tied up in some instances by the crowds outside waiting to get in. Soldiers and officers of the Red Army were seen among the worshippers.

Don’t be reticent about praying. It is what we ought all to be doing and should have been doing throughout the careless, self-satisfied years of the last two decades.

This is a day for loyalty to the church. Not for approval of the hypocrites who may be found among its members, but faith in Christ’s church which is greater than the people who join and imperfectly support it. Its ministry reaches to the ends of the earth and the limits of the sea. The gospel of its Christ is still the world’s hope, for every noble plan and practice of men and nations is rooted in His spirit.

Don’t be afraid of service and sacrifice. They are the refiner’s fires of the Divine, cheerfully to be welcomed whenever He makes it clear that his purposes have need of our selves.

An older man who had been through the refiner’s fires and knew whereof he spoke, writing a second time to a younger friend said: “God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” [II Timothy 1: 7]. Again he said, “I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.” [II Timothy 1: 12].

The certain joy of Easter was anticipated in the faithful heart of an Old Testament man who had been through fierce trial. And he said, “I know that my Redeemer liveth.”

Our Redeemer liveth. Through the rivers of blood and sweat and tears; the grief, the evil, the terror; the wrong and the counter-wrong; his righteousness shall surely triumph. And of his kingdom, there shall be no end.

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Dates and places delivered:

Wisconsin Rapids, April 25, 1943