The faithful servant / A sermon, preached in St. Peter's, Southborough, on occasion of the death of the Rev. Stephen Langston

by Edward Hoare

I. The Master’s Verdict. “Thou hast been faithful.”

It does not say, “Thou hast been rich,” or “great,” or “powerful,” or “brilliant,” but “faithful.” And it is remarkable that the master said exactly the same words to the servant who had the two talents, as he did to the one that had the five. They were not equally gifted, but both were declared to be faithful. This is a great encouragement for those who are conscious that they have not the same gifts as our venerable father. We may not have his powerful, and melodious, voice; his intimate acquaintance with our great English divines; or his marvellous power of exhibiting truth. We may have only two talents, or perhaps only one, when he had five; but God may give us grace to be faithful, and we may faithfully use that one talent to his glory. God said to Moses, “What is that in thine hand?” And, though there was nothing there but a common, rough, shepherd’s rod, God used it for the performance of the greatest miracles in Israel’s history. So he says to each of us, “What is that in thine hand?” And whatever it is, however humble, he gives us the sacred privilege of using it faithfully in his service.

But I do not want to consider general principles this morning, so much as to turn your attention to the special case of him whom we have all known as so faithful a servant of his most blessed Lord and Saviour.

(1) To appreciate that faithfulness, we must note first, that IT BEGAN IN EARLY LIFE. His was an early call.

There is no age in life at which it does not please God to call his people to himself. We see people called sometimes in childhood, sometimes in middle life, and sometimes in old age when tottering to the grave. It is difficult to say at which age conversion brings the greatest joy in heaven. There is a marvellous mercy when the old man who has resisted every influence throughout a long life, is touched at last by the love of Christ, and brought with a broken heart to the throne of grace. But there is also a peculiar joy when the spirited boy is led in his boyhood to receive the message which his mother teaches him, and so to spend his whole life that he may say in his old age, as Obadiah did, “I thy servant fear the Lord from my youth.” Now this was the case with our friend. His faith in the Lord Jesus Christ was not an afterthought late in life. His father and grandfather were both pious men; and it was in his father’s parish, (for his father was a clergyman,) and in his father’s home, that as a spirited school boy he was first brought to the Lord. Even before he went to College he began to conduct cottage lectures in his father’s parish. That ministry therefore to which you used to listen with such intense interest, contained the ripened experience of a long life, from the beginning consecrated to God. Is there not a lesson in this for fathers and mothers? Is there not an encouragement to train up those committed to them in the Lord? Is there not an illustration of the truth of the promise, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it?” And is there not a word also for young men? Does it not call on them to begin early, and to begin at once, and in the midst of all the play, and all the work of early life, to fall down before God’s footstool, and cry, “Lord save me, Lord make me thine, now, at once, and for ever?”

(2.) He was Faithful in his Stability.

It is sixty-three years since he was ordained to the ministry, but throughout the whole of that long period he was never known to waver. And how full of disturbing causes has that whole period been! The minds of men have been unsettled, and there has been a general shaking of thought. The stagnation which prevailed when he commenced his ministry has given place to a general fermentation, and during those sixty-three years we have had wave after wave passing over the Church. In his early days there was great excitement about the gift of tongues and prophecy under the leadership of that wonderful christian orator Edward Irving. Then followed what we used to call “tractarianism,” taught by that master mind Newman, and since developed in the open Romanism of the Ritualist. Then arose those who call themselves “The Brethren,” as if they alone were children in the Lord’s family, and who have done so much to disturb and unsettle those who have been walking most conscientiously with God. And lastly, there was wafted from America what many welcome as a new rule for holiness. In addition to all which there have been from without the steady efforts of Popery to pervert the purity, and of Infidelity to sap the foundations of the faith. So wave has followed wave, but in the midst of it all our venerable friend was kept firm as a rock with his principles unchanged, and his faith unshaken. As a consistent and honest Churchman he rejoiced in the thirty-nine Articles, and never for one moment wavered in his fidelity to their clear testimony to the truth of God. And as a student of sacred Scripture, he clung to the great, grand distinctive truths of the Gospel, such as atonement through the substitution of the Lord Jesus, justification by faith, new birth by the Holy Ghost, sanctification by the Spirit, preservation through God’s unchanging faithfulness, and a full salvation in all its parts through the free grace that is in Christ Jesus. These were the great principles of his faith and ministry all through his life, and through God’s mercy nothing shook him. You may compare the old man of eighty-six with the boy of sixteen, and you will find no change in principle. You may compare the last Sermon preached last year with the first Sermon which was preached in his father’s pulpit in the year 1815, and you will find the great message substantially the same. As he himself said, the last time he occupied this pulpit, “In the Church where I was baptized, in the village in which I was born, I began my ministry on December 24th, 1815. I remember the text was “This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.” 1 Timothy i. 15. There I began, there I continued, there I am still, and there, God helping me, I hope to end glorying in the Gospel which I know to be the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.”

(3.) He was Faithful in the Fulness of his Teaching.

If we are to stand stedfast for seventy years, we must have something solid on which to rest, and one great reason why people shift about as much as they do, is, that they have no stability in their principles. The reason of this again very frequently is that they take partial views of truth. They are one-sided christians, and so lose their balance; whereas we want our foundation to be well built, and to rest all round with an even pressure on the rock. Surely this was most remarkably the case with the ministry of this faithful man. He did not clip, or twist, the sacred Scripture to fit his system, but he was ready to sacrifice the symmetry of his system in order to bring out the whole teaching of God himself in his inspired Word. He rested absolutely on Scripture as the only and sufficient rule of faith, and wherever Scripture led him there he was prepared to follow. It was this that gave such a richness, such a fulness, and such a comprehensiveness to his ministry.

Nothing, for example, could exceed his exhibition of the love of the Lord Jesus. It was his joy to exalt him as a Saviour, and to hold converse with him as a friend. But with all that the love of the Father was always prominent. The Father’s holy law, and the Father’s purpose, the Father’s gift, the Father’s covenant, and the Father’s home, were always in view.