A NEW CREATION
By The Rev W.W. Tulloch, D.D.
"In Christ—a new creature."—2 Corinthians v. 17.
I fancy that we have all felt the need of a change of air, of life, of our physical surroundings, our mental and moral environment; and we have experienced the good that such a change has done us. We have toiled on through the bad weather, the hard work, the much worry of a long winter; or we have been kept at our post and laboured listlessly through a hot and oppressive summer. The wheels of life have dragged slowly. We have felt below par. Everything has been more or less a trouble to us. The routine of daily duty has become dismally monotonous. The zest has departed. Our very sleep is not refreshing. We lie down with our weariness and trouble about us and in us, and when we awaken we are still surrounded and dominated by it. The burden seems no lighter for our repose. No new strength seems to have been gained to face the calls of the new day—a day which it is a trouble even to think about.
Well, we are ordered a change, or, driven by our instincts, we seek one, or the blessed holiday season comes round at last. We go away, and in fresh air, in a change of occupation, amid new interests and associations, we begin to feel quite different. The old lassitude and weariness have passed away. We have not been long in our changed place of abode, when we begin to say to ourselves and to write home that we feel quite new persons—a different man, a different woman. And when we return our very appearance, our talk, the whole attitude in which we regard life, the eagerness with which we take up the old task, tell to all who are interested in us how much improved we are, how much healthier and better we look. More to the purpose, we ourselves feel better in every way. The change has done us ever so much good. In it we have found our old self and yet a new self, and we rejoice and are glad.
A somewhat similar experience often comes to us after reading some book which has influenced us strongly. It has opened to us a longer vista and a higher reach of life. It has given to us new views, new ideas, new aspirations, and made us live with a higher ideal before us. "It has made a new man of me," we say. Old things have passed away. Or we have come under the influence of some pure love, some self-sacrificing devotion, such as made the late Professor Tyndall say in writing of his wife to a friend that she had given him quite a new idea as to the possibilities of human nature. Or in daily association with some active brain, some large-hearted companion, we have formed at once new motives and new interests. All things have become new.
Or, again, we have found a new vocation. The consciousness of the possession of higher powers, of perhaps our real powers, has come to us. We have discovered that we have been endowed with the possession of some gift of which we were not aware. Some power has been lying dormant. It has now been awakened, and upon the very threshold of what we feel must now be a better and a higher life, we realise that we are new creatures.
I was lately reading the life of a famous singer, Jenny Lind, "the Swedish Nightingale," as she was called. She had been singing in public for some time, but she had only been feeling her wings, as the saying goes. But on a certain day there came the moment of moments. "I got up that morning one creature," she herself often said; "I went to bed another creature. I had found my power." And all through her life she kept that day with a religious solemnity. She would ask to have herself remembered on it with prayers. She treated it as a second birthday. And rightly, for on that day she awoke to herself. She became artistically alive. She felt the inspiration and won the sway she now knew she was given to hold. And this consciousness was not merely the recognition that she was singing better than ever. It was more of the nature of a new fact in her life, a disclosure, a revelation. "It was a step," says her biographer, "into a new world of dominion. She knew at last where it was that she stood and what she was to do upon the earth. She learned something of her mission. For to her religious mind the discovery of a gift was the discovery of a mission. She saw the responsibility with which she was charged, through the mere possession of such a power over men." The singer with the gift of God—that was what she became on that evening. She became a new creature.
Well, all these are only illustrations of the greatest truth in the world—that in Christ we may all become new creatures or a new creation.
We are prone by nature to do what is wrong rather than what is right; we are born with passions wild and strong, and early give the reins to evil desires. By the strength of our animal propensities we are often carried to ruin unless we are arrested in our headlong and miserable career. Sometimes—nay, thank God, often—we are thus arrested. For a time, the voice of conscience may have been hushed. Our heart is cold and dead, and there is no spring of life in it at all. But something happens. We are led to think. We come to see the evil of our ways, the ruin that we are bringing on others as well as ourselves—on the wife whom we swore to love and cherish, the children whom we are neglecting, perhaps starving.
And then, all at once, it is borne in upon us that we must change our life's course. A bolt from heaven descends on us in the shape of some punishment or affliction. Our darkness and distress are revealed to us.
We seek the only refuge for the sinner. We flee to Christ, as the belated and weary traveller would flee to a hiding-place from the wind, a refuge from the storm, a covert from the tempest, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. We become converted. In Christ we become a new creation. Oh, happy is it when we do so! Appalling and terrible it is when we do not. How sad and awful is the fate of one given over to the slavery, the bondage, the tyranny of some wicked habit! Unless such an one is visited by the grace of God, unless the heinousness of his guilt is brought home to him, unless divine light strikes in upon his darkened life, he will sink deeper and deeper into degradation, until, perhaps, he is driven to self-destruction like one of whom I lately read, and who left these terribly touching words behind him. "I am now about to finish a revolting, cruel, and wretched existence by an act of my own. I have broken every law of God and man, and can only hope that my memory will rot in the minds of all who knew me. Drink has brought me to this fearful end. I am dying hopeless, friendless, penniless and an outcast." And it might have been so different! Oh, that all who are giving way to any sin would listen to these terrible words of warning, that they would close at once with Christ's offer to make their lives different, to make them new creatures—once more fresh and fair creatures of God, that the old man with his corrupt affections and desires, be put off, and the new man in Christ Jesus be put on, that they would be in Christ!
To be in Christ—you know what is meant by that. You are in Christ if you are living in and by His Spirit; if you are breathing it into your life; giving it forth again, if your life is engrafted on His life as a branch is engrafted upon a tree. He is the Vine; we ought to be as the branches which thus derive their vitality, their beauty, their power of bearing leaf and fruit from the tree. The same soil nourishes it; the same dews feed it; the same breezes fan it. So we ought to have our life fed through Christ from God. If we are in Christ, we shall have the same hatred of sin as He had. We shall be removing ourselves further from evil; we shall ever be getting more like Christ, ever increasing in personal holiness and helpfulness to others, ever also willing to accept whatever He sends us, subordinating our weak, wayward wills to His holy and perfect will. If we let these words of charm, "In Christ," be written over our lives, we shall feel the old fetters fall off, the old unhappiness disappear, the old insubordination cease to assert itself.
(Photo: J. Moffat, Edinburgh.)
THE REV. W. W. TULLOCH, D.D.
We shall hardly know ourselves, the joy of the new life is so great. It is a joy, too, which we cannot keep to ourselves; we wish others to share our happy experience. We are constrained to wish this by the new and imperial impulse by which we are dominated. Because we carry heaven in our hearts we wish that others should do so, too. We look upon the sinner as upon some streamlet of water which is dwindling away day by day and will soon be dried up and the rocky channel left bare. Why? Because it is cut off from the fountain head, from the source away up in the hills near God's sky. And what we wish to do is to open the connection between the two, so that the stream may be fed and do what it is intended to do—flow along in full volume, making melody as it goes and fertilising the region through which it passes. In Christ, we are like the stream connected with its source: like it, we live melodious days and carry music to others. Or look at that branch separated from its parent stem; it is withering, it is dying. Again, a planet cut off from the central force and power—the sun—rushes through the dark night and is lost. So—if we be not in Christ, if we be separated from the true fountain, the living root, the centrifugal force—we shrivel up, we wither, we go to ruin here and hereafter, we die to all that makes existence tolerable and of value; and it might have been so different!
Shall we for the future, if need be, try to make life different to ourselves and others?
Then, if any of us become new creatures, the fact is at once recognised. People ask—What has come to So-and-so? His very appearance is changed; his gait, everything about him is altered for the better. He is regularly at his work and in his place in church. He has a pleasant smile and a kind word for everybody. His wife, who used often to look dull and unhappy, is now bright and cheerful. His children are better dressed than they were; they are more frank and free with him; they take his hand; they go to meet him when he comes home; they consult him about their little joys and sorrows. He is altogether quite different. What has come over him? Oh, the explanation is a very simple one: he has ceased to do evil, he has learned to do well. He has left some course of sin; he is following after a life of holiness. He has left the service of a bad master—the worst of all masters; he is now serving a new master—the best of masters. He has made the friendship of the best of friends; Christ is his master, his friend, his example. He is in Christ. That is the reason of the change, of the new creation. That is the reason of the sunshine he carries about with him, and which he scatters on others. He is like Christ Himself, for all true Christians carry Christ with them, wherever they go; just as every leaf we take off some plants, put into soil, will become a plant exactly like the parent stem from which it is taken, so the Christ-life in a man, if it be genuine, will reproduce its source and origin. The least tiny speck of musk, carry it where you may, diffuses the same kind of fragrance as the plant from which it came. So lives thus hid in Christ with God will be redolent of Him in all places and at all times.
Let us, then, if we would be happy in our present lives—happy in the memories we leave behind us—happy in the great Hereafter—see that we are now in Christ, that we now know the glory and joy of feeling a new creature. It is a great joy to think that old things have passed away, that all things have become new. Then the very earth upon which we live will have a new beauty for us. We shall look upon it as the creation of our Heavenly Father, as the place in which we are to work for Him, making our little corner of it better, happier, more blessed than we found it. Then, too, we shall regard our fellow-men and women quite differently. We find that they are related to us in new ways and with holier, more sacred ties; they are our veritable brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus. We can do them no harm, injure them in no way; rather shall we find it to be our highest duty and privilege to be helpful to them. Then, too, will pain and sorrow assume a different and new aspect. They cease to be altogether evils; they are seen to be blessings in disguise—crosses, indeed, but only sent to bring us nearer to God and to Christ; bitter medicine, indeed, but needed for our spiritual health.
Lastly, death itself, the old foe of the human race, as he is supposed by many to be, takes a new form. The awful and awesome shroud in which he seems to be enveloped falls off, and what we recognise is not the spectral skeleton with the hollow eyes coming to consign us to darkness and to death, but a radiant angel, a sweet, blessed messenger from the Father, bidding us come with him to our happy and eternal Home to meet our loved and lost, to be in Christ and with Christ for ever, with no chance any more of breaking off from Him or losing Him. And, recognising this, we shall go with him with the eagerness of a child to begin a new life, to enter upon a higher existence, to do nobler work with a more untiring zeal and energy, to love with a greater love; and as we stand for a moment to look back upon our earthly life, in the freshness of the Eternal Morning, in the beauty of our new Home, we shall realise that in Christ's Heaven, which through His great mercy and sacrifice we have reached, we are to be new creatures for evermore.
W. W. Tulloch.
Told in Sunshine Room.]
