Sermons for the Times

by Charles Kingsley

And why should it not be so? Do you fancy God less of a father than you are? Is He not The Father, the perfect Father, ‘from whom every fatherhood in heaven and earth is named?’ Oh, believe that He is indeed a Father; believe that all the love and care which you can show to your children is as much poorer than the love and care God shows to you, as your obedience to your earthly parents is poorer and weaker than the love and obedience of Jesus Christ to His Father. God is as much better a Father than you are, as Jesus Christ is a better Son than you are. There is a sum of proportions; a rule-of-three sum; work it out for yourselves, and then distrust God’s love if you dare.

And believe, that whatsoever makes you distrust God’s love is neither the Spirit of God who is the spirit of sonship, nor the spirit of man: but the spirit of the Devil, who loves to slander God to men, that they may shrink from Him, and be afraid to arise and go to their Father, to be received again as sons of God; that so, being kept from true penitence, they may be kept from true holiness, and from their duty to God, which is the duty of sons of God to their Father in heaven.

Believe no such notions, my friends; howsoever humble and reverent they may seem, they are but insults to God; for under pretence of honouring Him, they dishonour Him; for He is love, and he who feareth, that is, who looks up to God with terror and distrust, is not made perfect in love. So says St. John, in the very chapter wherein he tells us that God is love, and has manifested His love to us by sending His Son to be the Saviour of the world; and that the very reason for our loving God is, that He loves us already; and that therefore He who loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love.

Yes, my friends, God is your Father; and God is love; and your duty to God is a duty of love and obedience to a Father who so loved you and all mankind that He spared not His only begotten Son, but freely gave Him for you. ‘Our Father which art in heaven,’ is to be the key-note of all your duty, as it is to be the key-note of all your prayers: and therefore the Catechism is right in teaching the child that God is his Father, and Jesus Christ the perfect Son of God his pattern, and the Holy Spirit of the Father and of the Son his teacher and inspirer, before it says one word to the child about duty to God, or sin against God. How indeed can it tell him what sin is, until it has told him against whom sin is committed, and that if he sins against God he sins against a Father, and breaks his duty to his Father? And how can it tell him that till it has told him that God is his Father? How can it tell him what sin is till it has told him what righteousness is? How can it tell him what breaking his duty is till it has told him what the duty itself is? But the child knows already that God is his Father; and therefore, when the Catechism asks him, ‘What is his duty to God?’ it is as much as to say, ‘My child, thou hast confessed already that thou hast a good Father in heaven, and thou knowest as well as I (perhaps better) what a father means. Tell me, then, how dost thou think thou oughtest to behave to such a Father?’ And the whole answer which is put into the child’s mouth, is the description of duty to a father; of things which there would be no reason for his doing to anyone who was not his father; nay, which he could not do honestly to anyone else, but only hypocritically, for the sake of flattering, and which differs utterly from any notion of duty to God which the heathen have ever had just in this, that it is a description of how a son should behave to a father. Read it for yourselves, my friends, and judge for yourselves; and may God give you all grace to act up to it—not in order that you, by ‘acts of faith,’ or ‘acts of love,’ or ‘acts of devotion,’ may persuade God to love you; but because He loves you already, with a love boundless as Himself; because in Him you live, and move, and have your being, and are the offspring of God; because His mercy is over all His works, and because He loved the world, and sent His Son, not to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved; because He is The Giver, The Father of lights, from whom comes every good and perfect gift; because all which makes this earth habitable—all justice, order, wisdom, goodness, mercy, humbleness, self-sacrifice—all which is fair, or honourable, or useful, in men or angels, in kings on their thrones or in labourers at the plough, in divines in their studies or soldiers in the field of battle—all in the whole universe, which is not useless, and hurtful, and base, and damnable, and doomed (blessed thought that it is so!) to be burned up in unquenchable fire—all, I say, comes forth from the Father of the spirits of all flesh, the Lord of Hosts, who is wonderful in counsel and excellent in working; who spared not His only begotten Son, but freely gave Him for us, and will with Him freely give us all things.

SERMON IX. THE LORD’S PRAYER

Matt. vi. 9, 10. After this manner pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven.

I have shown you what a simple account of our duty to God and to our neighbour the Catechism gives us. I now beg you to remark, that simple and everyday as this same duty is, the Catechism warns us that we cannot do it without God’s special grace, and I beg you to remark further, that the Catechism does not say that we cannot do these things well without God’s special grace, but that we cannot do them at all. It does not say that we cannot do all these things of ourselves, but that we can do none of them. But I want you to remark one thing more, which is very noteworthy: that in this case, for the first time throughout the Catechism, the teacher tells the child something. All along the teacher has, as I have often shown you, been making the child tell him what is right, calling out in the child’s heart thoughts and knowledge which were there already. Now he in his turn tells the child something which he takes for granted is not in the child’s heart, of which, if it is, has been put into it by his teachers, and of which he must be continually reminded, lest he should forget it; namely, that he cannot do these of himself; that, as St. Paul says, ‘in him,’ that is, in his flesh, ‘dwells no good thing;’ that he is not able to think or to do anything as of himself, but his sufficiency is of God, who works in him to will and to do of His good pleasure, who has also given him His Holy Spirit.

The Catechism, in short, takes for granted that the child knows his duty; but it takes for granted also that he does not know how to do that duty. It takes for granted, that in every child there is as St. Paul says, ‘a law in his members warring against the law of his mind, and bringing him into captivity to the law of sin’ (literally, of short coming, or missing the mark) ‘which is in his members.’ Now man’s natural inclination is to suppose that good thoughts are part of himself, and therefore that a good will to put them in practice is in his own power. I blame no one for making that mistake: but I warn them, in the name of the Bible and of the Catechism, that it is a mistake, and one which every man, woman, and child will surely discover to be a mistake, if they try to act on it. Good thoughts are not our own; they are Jesus Christ’s; they come from Him, The Life and The Light of men; they are His voice speaking to our hearts, informing us of His laws, showing us what is good. And good desires are not our own: they come from the Holy Spirit of God, who strives with men, and labours to lift their hearts up from selfishness to love; from what is low and foul, to what is noble and pure; from what is sinful and contrary to God’s will, to what is right and according to God’s will.

This is the lesson which you and I and every man have to learn: that in ourselves dwells no good thing; but that there is One near us mightier than we, from whom all good things do come; and that He loves us, and will not only teach us what is good, but give us the power to do the good we know. But if we forget that, if we take any credit whatsoever to ourselves for the good which comes into our minds, then we shall be surely taught our mistake by sore afflictions and by shameful falls; by God’s leaving us to ourselves, to try our own strength, and to find it weakness; to try our own wisdom, and find it folly; to try our own fancied love of God, and find that after all our conceit of ourselves, we love ourselves better, when it comes to a trial, than we love what is right; until, in short, we are driven with St. Paul to feel that, howsoever much our hearts may delight in the Law of God, there is a corrupt nature in us which fights against our delight in God’s law, and will surely conquer it, and make us slaves to our own fancies, slaves to our passions, slaves to ourselves, ay, slaves to the very lowest and meanest part of ourselves: unless we can find a deliverer; unless we can find some one stronger than us, who can put an end to this hateful, shameful war within us between good wishes and bad deeds.

And then, if we will but cry with St. Paul, ‘Oh, wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’ we shall surely, sooner or later, hear a voice within our hearts, a voice full of love, of comfort, of fellow-feeling for us,—‘I will deliver thee, my child; I, even I thy Father in heaven; I will teach thee, and inform thee in the way wherein thou shouldest go; and I will guide thee with mine eye.’ And then with St. Paul we shall be able to answer our own question, and say, ‘Who will deliver me? I thank God, that God Himself will deliver me, through Jesus Christ our Lord.’