He sealed his message with his death.
Now, there is the messenger, and we have to think over the different points about that messenger, to compare our motives to-day with what they are expected to be. (1) Take first of all his realisation that his message was a matter of life or death. I wonder whether some of us are slipping away from that—slipping away from the awe of that first sermon, slipping into little moral essays or interminably long discourses? Are we still men with a message?
One of the tremendous revelations in London, after twenty-six years of life and work there, is the death-struggle that is going on in every human soul. And even now, as Bishop, I find that every available five minutes is taken up by the needs and struggles of some individual soul in the diocese of London. In your parishes it must be just the same. Upon that message you are going to give on Sunday morning or evening depends perhaps the salvation, or perhaps the condemnation, of some soul.
And if we once get into the way of preaching simply interesting lectures—interesting to ourselves—which we have thought out in our studies during the week, we have lost the sense of having a message. One of the most distinguished men then in the Church said to a young preacher sadly: "You seem to preach as if you have something to say, and I only preach because I must say something." Well, if we are drifting into getting up into the pulpit because we must say something, without realising the temptations and struggles of the souls in front of us, we have lost our message; we are no longer messengers.
(2) And then, secondly, what about the old keenness? Am I able to say "the old keenness"? One honest brother came to me one Quiet Day and said: "I have never felt keen at all." He could not speak of the old keenness; he had never had it. He wanted it. The keen messenger stands quivering like Pheidippides:
"Except for that sparkle, thy name, I had mouldered to ash!"
There stands the true messenger quivering with the keenness of his message. What has happened to us if we are no longer keen about our message?
(a) Is it because we have really ceased to believe it? I say that because during this past year I have had some who have openly said (the realisation of it has come to them during the day) that they have largely slipped away from their real belief in Jesus Christ as the Son of God. They started reading Higher Criticism or German theology. Of course, we must read very varied kinds of books; we have no right to be afraid of reading anything that will enable us to help the laity in their difficulties. But these brothers had been reading too many of these books speaking of our Lord as only a man, in which we are told that "He was mistaken in supposing this," or, "No doubt He was under the impression that this was the case"; and they have slipped away from their belief in Jesus Christ as the Son of God. Their faith has really for a time gone; they have not got a message, because they do not believe in the old message. They would have said of such a meditation as we have had together on the Book of Revelation: "How do we know St. John ever wrote it?" And if we meditated upon our Lord's last prayer in St. John's Gospel, they would say: "How do we know that we have the words of the Lord's last prayer?" Thus their minds are really in doubt all the time, so that at last nothing really speaks to them at all. Now, what I advise is a careful study of the writings of such a man as Dr. Swete. He tells us that in that last prayer of our Lord we have, through the medium of St. John or the writer of St. John's Gospel—he believes it was St. John—as nearly as you can get them, the actual words of our Lord's prayer. I am not taking any particular case, but only trying to illustrate a state of mind. If you are losing your message because you are ceasing to believe it, then all the salt has gone out of your ministry till faith comes back. If you face it, and find it is so, ask our Lord, who has come to speak to us now, to restore to you your belief in Him once again, so that He shall be to you the centre of the universe, and you will be really in a position to say again, as you once did,
"How sweet the Name of Jesus sounds
In a believer's ear!"
Then you will be able to preach again.