Professor W. G. Elmslie, D.D.: Memoir and Sermons

by William Gray Elmslie

"Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me."—Rev. iii. 20.

GOD is close to us. Every moment of our life He is doing countless things in us and around us. If a man were to do these things we should see him with our eyes, we could touch him with our hands; we should not fail to observe his presence. Because we cannot see God with our bodily eye, or grasp Him with our hand, we forget His working, we lose sight of His nearness.

When you were children, some time or other, I suppose, in your young lives, you got hold of a flower-seed, and planted it in a pot of moist earth, and set it in the sunniest corner of your room. Morning after morning, when you awoke, you ran to see if the flower had begun to grow. At last your eagerness was rewarded by the sight of some tiny leaves which had sprung up during one night. Then the stalk appeared, frail and tender, and then more leaves, and buds, and branchlets, till at length there stood, blooming before you, a fair and fragrant flower.

Who made it? Somebody worked to produce that flower. It could not make itself. The dead earth could not shape that lovely leaf; the bright sunshine could not paint those tendrils. A deep-thinking man, when he sees these wonderful things, must ask himself, Who fashioned them? Not the sunshine nor the air, but God, if there is a God, willed that that plant should grow. God toiled to make the plant—in your room, at your side.

At this moment, in your breast, your heart is beating. All your life it has gone on beating. It is not you who sustain its motion. Even when you forget it, when you are asleep, its pulsations do not cease. Somebody works to keep your heart beating. God, who is the foundation of all life, out of whose loving heart it streams, and back to whom it must return, has to remember your heart.

But God comes still nearer to you. Do you remember a time in your life when, in your inmost heart, that hidden, secret chamber where you dream your dreams, and love your loves, and pour out your sorrows all alone, you felt a strange influence? It was a vague unrest, a great self-weariness. It was as if all brightness, hope, and satisfaction had gone from your life, and had left behind them, in departing, a sick, wistful longing to find something new, something brighter, better, and more noble than you yet had known. It was as if you could hear voices calling, and your heart moved within you, as if some new friend might be there. Do you know what that was? It was God. It was the great Heart that made your heart, longing and pleading to have it for His own. "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me." Do you believe that? You, men and women, who love your Bible, and are angry if any man seems to speak against it, or throw doubt upon one jot or tittle of its letter, have you ever thought what that means if it is true? Ay! it stands written there, and you have read it a hundred times, and think you believe it; but do you indeed know what it means? It means that God, the Eternal, Infinite, Almighty God, who wields these worlds of shining stars, and keeps them in their mighty courses; that God, the Spotless, the Holy, the Stainless, cares with a great longing to have the heart and love of you; you, who are no saint; you, the most commonplace and lowly, the most insignificant and sinful of men. Is that easy to believe? Is it easy to believe that God would miss something if your heart never went out in tender affection and adoration towards Him; that He should take pains and trouble to get Himself into your poor, battered heart—that heart which is so filled with sordid cares as to how you may make a living, and the envyings and strivings which accompany; in which such sinful, base, and vicious thoughts too often dwell? Is it possible that the great, holy God wishes to get in there?

It is not easy to believe it. One of the greatest religious thinkers who ever lived, by the confession of believers and unbelievers alike; a man who laboured so much under the effort to find out God, and became so absorbed in the quest, that the name of "God-intoxicated" was applied to him; a man who conceived more than any one else of the grandeur and transcendency of God, till he found this poor world of ours and the whole universe fade into insignificance before the thought of Him; this man, this great philosopher, Spinoza, said, "A man should love God with his whole being, but he must not expect God to love him in return." And the bible says, "We love Him, because He first loved us." Which is true?

There are two things, I think, which make it hard to believe that we can be of consequence to God—that God holds each one of us in a separate thought of knowledge, sympathy, and Fatherly affection. One of them is this: How is it possible for God to do it? Think of the myriads of men and women on this world of ours, and the possibility of this universe teeming with countless creatures of God's creative power and Fatherly love. How is it possible that God should know each one of us, and love us each one? God, so omnipotent, so transcendent, so almighty! But the very thing that makes the difficulty to our reason seems to me the very thing that should undo it. If God were not so great, then I could not have the hope that I was something to Him by myself.

Is it not a fact that it is precisely a weak, uncultured, low, and undeveloped intellect that finds it difficult to give attention to a great mass of details, holding each apart, and doing justice to each? Precisely as you rise in the scale of intellect and mental power, that capacity increases quite incalculably. It is the great genius of a general who not merely directs his army as a mass, but holds it at every point, knows the value of every unit of force at his command, follows the movement of each squadron, troop, and even of each single individual, and precisely by this faculty is able to overthrow the enemy and lead the army to victory.