1 Cor. Chap. iii. Ver. 21, 22, 23.
"Therefore let no Man glory in Men: for all Things are yours; whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the World, or Life, or Death, or Things present, or Things to come; all are yours, and ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's."
The scope and design of the Blessed Apostle in this passage of his epistle, together with the true meaning and import of his general proposition, "All things are yours," hath been already explained in my first discourse from these words. In my second discourse, I entered upon the consideration of those particular privileges of the Christian, which are enumerated under this general head: And as the first of these privileges had a more immediate and striking reference to the great end he here had in view, which was to convince the Corinthians of the sin and folly of attaching themselves to particular and favourite preachers; I enlarged upon this head, and endeavoured to prove, that Paul, and Apollos, and Cephas, and all other ministers of the Gospel, were no more than the servants of their brethren; that they were "theirs" by a particular privilege, inasmuch as their office, their labours, talents, and several endowments, were entrusted to them for no other purpose, but that God, through them, might communicate "the unspeakable riches of his Grace" to the whole body of Christians. In this character, and in this alone, they were all equally entitled to their esteem and love, but not to any personal preference, or undue exaltation of one above another.
Not content with this, however, the good Apostle, under the full inspiration of Divine Truth, and the glorious enlargement of Divine Love, breaks forth into a further declaration of those still higher privileges, to which the meanest member of the church of Christ is equally and in common entitled, with the greatest and most advanced believers: not only "Paul, and Apollos, and Cephas, are yours; but the world, and life and death, and things present, and things to come: all are yours, and ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's."
"The world is yours!"—Is it so, thou Blessed Apostle? Alas! this strange assertion seems not to be confirmed, either by thine own experience, or the experience of thy fellow-labourers; or of any of those, who have since trod in the footsteps of thy Suffering Master. If bonds and imprisonments, if stripes and persecutions of various kinds, if cruel mockings and insults, if outward and inward tribulations might be admitted as proofs of their having the world in their power, these, alas, will not be found wanting. Sad privilege, indeed! Wretched consolation! to be told that misery is our portion, and that distress and affliction are the Christian's birth-right!—Let us, however, endeavour to solve this seeming paradox, and reconcile the Apostle's declaration with the common experience of Christians.
Whence was it, O Christian! (for I now appeal to the real sensibilities of every believing soul that has tasted of the Good Word of God) whence was it, that thou hast acquired that power and dominion over the world, by which thou canst sustain its adversity and prosperity, its evil and its good, with equal calmness, fortitude, and complacency—for this is that power and dominion, by which alone the world becomes thine! Was it not by those very sufferings, which seem so diametrically opposite to this triumphant state? Thy victory rose from thy defeat; thy consolation, from the depth of thy distress; thy conquest of the world, from its conquest of thee.—Yea, the world furnished thee with arms against itself. Every new affliction gave thee some new acquisition; every sigh, every tear, vanquished some mortal foe.
Bonds and imprisonments, scourging and insults, hunger and thirst, cold and nakedness, war, pestilence, and shipwreck, and all the dire vicissitudes which the world can bring upon us, serve no other purpose than to subdue the pride, envy, covetousness, and wrath of our fallen life; to open the eyes of our inward man, and teach us to look upon this world in its proper light, to fly its visionary pleasures, and support with patience its substantial miseries.
To suffer, therefore, is to triumph; to be distressed, is our glorious privilege; to "be weary and heavy-laden," is the only way to rest and happiness! Sure I am, that there are many here, who can bear witness to this great and awful truth; who can say with the Psalmist, "It is good for me that I have been afflicted." My God hath manifested his love in all my sufferings. I should never have come to the knowledge of his Truth; I should never have experienced the Light of his Grace; I should never have overcome the world, abandoned its delusive prospects, and gained a sure and everlasting inheritance; had not my God made this very world to frown upon me, had he not beset me with its troubles behind and before, and by making me deeply sensible of its evil, taught me to despise even its good. Thus, and thus alone, "the world is the Christian's," because he knows, that every thing in it, under the administration of his Blessed Redeemer, is made subservient to his real happiness, which he is convinced is more effectually promoted by its storms than by its calms, by its frowns than by its smiles.
And if "the world" is thus his, by particular privilege, consequently "the Life" which he lives in it must be so too. The vicissitudes of life arise from the natural instability of worldly enjoyments: but even this instability the believer knows to be under the immediate Guidance of Almighty Love. The real enjoyment of life depends upon the temper and disposition of mind, with which its vicissitudes are received. The Christian, therefore, who knows, that "not an hair of his head can fall to the ground without his Heavenly Father," and whose will is secretly resigned to his Father's, meekly and patiently, daily and hourly giving himself up to his sovereign disposal, he alone can be said to have a true enjoyment of life.—In sickness and in health, in prosperity and in adversity, he alike beholds the hand of his Redeemer opening to him, by these various dispensations, the way to never-ending rest; unfolding his misery by nature, and his happiness by Grace, and rendering every change of outward life instrumental to some blessed change in the life of his inward and spiritual man.
But he has not only the highest enjoyment of this "world," and of "life" in this world, but what is a still more surprising and more glorious privilege, "death too is his." Not, indeed, in the sense in which it belongs to the wicked and unregenerate, to whom it is solely the consequence of guilt, and the dreadful introduction to misery extreme. No—to the real Christian, it is the consequence of a new life, the completion of happiness, the deliverer from woe, the gate that opens into Paradise, the messenger of Redeeming Love. Death, therefore, is the believer's, because, by the strength of his Redeemer, he hath been enabled to make him, who was once his enemy, become his reconciled friend.—The King of Terrors hath dropped his envenomed sting; and his dart flies now for no other use, but a kind and friendly one, even to dislodge the heavenly inhabitant from its frail tabernacle of clay, and open the world of light upon its spiritual senses.