A CLERGYMAN sat in his quiet study in a Yorkshire village. He was an earnest man, throwing the whole of his energy into the work he had undertaken, so that for years he preached two or three times every day in one or other of the scattered hamlets which composed his parish.
His conduct too was irreproachable; and, as he preached the law, and urged his people to keep it, inculcating morality with much diligence, it is not surprising that a change became evident among them, and outward and gross sins far less frequent.
If he was not well pleased with himself, others were well pleased with him; he was spoken of in the religious literature of the day as “the most perfect example of a parish priest which the nation had produced.”
And now this exemplary man sits studying his Greek Testament. He is deep in the third chapter of the Ephesians, and has come to verse 8, when a long word arrests him— “The unsearchable (unexplorable) riches of Christ.”
“The apostle uses remarkable expressions,” he thought; “he speaks of heights, depths, lengths, breadths, and unsearchables, where I seem to find everything plain, easy, and rational. Surely though I use the words ‘gospel,’ ‘faith,’ and ‘grace’ with him, my ideas of them must be different from his.”
So he determined to find out what the apostle Paul’s “ideas” really were, and with this in view studied anew all his epistles; and oh, the discovery he made! The Holy Spirit who indited them used these marvelous scriptures to clergyman that he himself was nothing else than a guilty, lost, and undone sinner.
He had assented to the truths of the gospel before; he had believed them in his head, but he had never bowed to them with his heart, never accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as his own personal Saviour, and believing on Him found life through His name. It was only as so much dry history that he had hitherto believed in His birth and death, His blood-shedding and resurrection; now he saw that they were vital facts on which his own eternal salvation depended; and as a lost and helpless sinner he laid hold on the hope set before him; he fled for refuge to a God-given Saviour; and he exclaimed with the apostle Paul, “The Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
Ah, then he understood the apostle’s glowing expressions. Oh, what lengths and breadths and depths and heights he now saw in the glories of Him who had gone down to death, even the death of the cross, for his sake! Oh, how unsearchable, how past finding out, the wisdom and the grace that had formed such a plan, and formed it in order to save him!
And what a change came over his preaching, too! He felt himself that there was no hope for a sinner except in the blood of Jesus; and no possibility of doing anything acceptable to God, except as first made “accepted in the Beloved.” He told his hearers they were lost, and needed a Saviour; that a Saviour had been provided for them by God Himself, and that they were welcome to come to Him just as they were.
It was not reformation he now preached, but Christ—Christ crucified, Christ risen, Christ glorified—and God honored his testimony. Instead of outward morality, there was an inward change, even “from darkness to light,” from “death unto life,” in very many of his hearers; and from these little Yorkshire hamlets was many a jewel taken to shine in the Saviour’s crown forever.
The voice that proclaimed to them their need and God’s great provision for it is silent now; he is resting from his labors until the resurrection morning; but the truth he learned and then taught is sounding in your ears today: are you giving a merely rational assent to it, or is the Christ of God the one living object of your heart? have you believed on the Son, and believing, obtained life through His name?
T.