“Scripture, dear friends, is most plain, most emphatic, in its statements that the effect of living in momentary expectancy of our Lord’s return touches the spiritual life and service at every point. ‘We know,’ wrote John, ‘that when He shall appear we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as He is pure.’ That, beloved, is the general statement. Now let us look at some of the separate particular statements.
“Writing to the Philippians, Paul connects heavenly mindedness with the return of the Lord for His Church saying, ‘For our conversation’—our manner of living, our citizenship—‘is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.’ To the Colossians the great apostle showed how the coming of the Lord was to be the incentive to mortification of self. ‘When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with Him in glory. Mortify, therefore, your members which are upon the earth,’ etc. James taught that the real cure for impatience was this dwelling in the hope and expectancy of our Lord’s coming again. ‘Be ye also patient,’ he wrote; ‘stablish your hearts; for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh!’ We live in an age which is cursed with impatience—children, young men and women, parents, business people, domestic people, pastors, Christian workers, Sunday-school teachers, all alike have their spiritual lives and their work marred by impatience. A real, moment-by-moment heart-apprehension of the possible coming of Jesus in the next moment of time, is the only real cure for this universal impatience in the Christian Church.
“Then take another great sin in the Church, beloved—censoriousness. Oh, the damage it does to the one who indulges in it, and the suffering it causes to the one who is the victim of it. But here, again, a full, a constant realization of the near coming of our Lord will check censoriousness. Writing to the Corinthians, in his first epistle, Paul says, ‘Therefore, judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and make manifest the counsels of the hearts.’
“The great quickener, too, of Christian diligence is to be found in the coming of the Lord. Peter writes to us saying, ‘But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, ... seeing then that these things shall be, ... what manner of persons ought we to be in all holy living and godliness; looking for and hasting the coming.... Wherefore, beloved, seeing that ye look for such things, be diligent that ye may be found of Him in peace, without spot, and blameless.’
“May I say, too, in all gentleness and love, that it has seemed to me, for years, that the missing link in nearly all ‘holiness’ preaching (so called) is this much-neglected expectancy of our Lord’s return. Paul connects holiness and the second coming of Christ, in his first epistle to the Thessalonians, saying, ‘The God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your spirit, soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.’
“The scoff of the world, dear friends, against us, as Christians, is that the professed bond of love is absent from our life. And here again God’s Word shows us that a real living in expectancy of our Lord’s return would teach us to love one another. In that same epistle I have just quoted, Paul says, ‘The Lord make you to increase and abound in love one toward another, and toward all men, even as we do toward you: to the end He may stablish your hearts unblameable in holiness before God, even our Father, at the coming of our Lord with all His saints.’
“I have only time, this afternoon, for but one more of these references, and that is a very elementary though a very essential one. Paul, in that same epistle, teaches that to be saved means that we are saved to serve. ‘Ye turned to God,’ he says, ‘to serve ... and to wait for His Son from heaven.’
“I must close, friends. But before I do, do let me beseech every Christian here this afternoon to go aside with God, and with His plain, unadulterated Word. Assure yourself that Jesus is coming again, that He is coming soon, and that you are so living that you shall ‘not be ashamed at His coming.’ Should He tarry till Thursday next, and He is willing to suffer me to meet you here again, we will continue this great subject on the line of the three judgments. Let us close our meeting by singing hymn number 308.”
Like one in a strange, delicious dream, Tom Hammond rose with the others and sang: