Hugh Anderson - "A New World Beginning from Today" (December 12, 1957)
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| - | And hath raised up salvation for us | 0:05 |
| in the house of his servant, David. | 0:08 | |
| As he's paved by the mouth of his holy prophets | 0:12 | |
| which have been since the world began | 0:15 | |
| that we should be saved from our enemies | 0:18 | |
| and from the hand of all would hate us to perform | 0:21 | |
| the mercy promise to our fathers | 0:25 | |
| and to remember his holy covenant. | 0:27 | |
| (peaceful organ music) | 0:30 | |
| ♪ Praise God from whom all blessings flow ♪ | 1:10 | |
| ♪ Praise Him all creatures here below ♪ | 1:17 | |
| ♪ Praise Him above ye heavenly host ♪ | 1:24 | |
| ♪ Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost ♪ | 1:31 | |
| ♪ Amen ♪ | 1:39 | |
| - | Heavenly father, we thank thee that Christ has taught us, | 1:47 |
| it is more blessed to give than to receive. | 1:50 | |
| And so as we present these gifts on the altar | 1:55 | |
| we join with the wise men of all ages | 1:58 | |
| who have brought gifts to Jesus. | 2:01 | |
| God accept this gift of our love and of our money | 2:05 | |
| and use it for thy glory. | 2:09 | |
| In Jesus name, amen | 2:12 | |
| (soft organ music) | 2:15 | |
| - | Bless now unto us oh God, the meditations of our hearts | 2:46 |
| and the words of our lips through Jesus Christ, our Lord. | 2:51 | |
| Amen. | 2:57 | |
| We shall not be meeting again together for worship | 3:05 | |
| in the fellowship of The Duke chapel | 3:08 | |
| until the Christmas season is all over. | 3:11 | |
| It is therefore quite natural and quite fitting | 3:15 | |
| that this morning, our thought should be concentrated | 3:18 | |
| upon Christmas and the Christmas message. | 3:22 | |
| In the next few days, many of you will be going back home | 3:26 | |
| to the old places to see your own folks | 3:30 | |
| and your own friends, | 3:33 | |
| and that is a lovely thought indeed. | 3:35 | |
| There is a particular poignancy | 3:38 | |
| about this season of the year for those of us | 3:40 | |
| who are separated from the old folks | 3:43 | |
| and the old home places and a really deep sadness, | 3:45 | |
| but wherever you may be traveling this Christmas, | 3:51 | |
| I want to wish you this morning from this pulpit | 3:55 | |
| a very happy Christmas. | 3:58 | |
| And in fact, in the traditional formula, A Merry Christmas. | 4:00 | |
| But this morning I want to wish for you | 4:05 | |
| something even greater and bigger and better than that. | 4:09 | |
| I want to wish for you a profound Christmas. | 4:13 | |
| And by that, I mean to express the hope | 4:18 | |
| that in this Christmas season, by the grace of God | 4:20 | |
| you will penetrate deep | 4:24 | |
| into the innermost meaning of the coming of Christ. | 4:26 | |
| Now, there are many factors in life today | 4:32 | |
| which militate against our profounder understanding | 4:35 | |
| of the Christian message and of the coming of the Christ. | 4:39 | |
| And I want to mention only three of these factors now | 4:43 | |
| because I think they all play their part in preventing us | 4:47 | |
| from getting right into the heart of the Christmas story. | 4:51 | |
| And the first is that in these days, | 4:57 | |
| there is a tremendous tendency to concentrate | 4:59 | |
| upon the merely pagan elements of the Christmas festival. | 5:03 | |
| We are so taken up by the glitter and the tinsel | 5:07 | |
| that we don't get into the heart of things at all. | 5:11 | |
| And in the very midst of a festival, | 5:15 | |
| which ought to win our hearts away | 5:18 | |
| to deep and abiding spiritual truth, | 5:20 | |
| we seem to be harnessed to the material. | 5:24 | |
| Just two or three weeks back, | 5:29 | |
| I had a letter from a friend back in Scotland. | 5:31 | |
| Not a particularly religious minded man | 5:34 | |
| but he ended that letter with these words, | 5:37 | |
| "Only six weeks to Christmas." | 5:41 | |
| "Shocking, isn't it?" | ||
| I suppose that in the context in that letter, | 5:47 | |
| this word shocking implied that Christmas nowadays | 5:49 | |
| only means a mad race to gather together | 5:53 | |
| the Christmas presents for the friends. | 5:56 | |
| In this sense then we are so taken up | 6:00 | |
| by the material elements in the festival | 6:02 | |
| that we are prevented from getting deep | 6:05 | |
| into its innermost spiritual heart. | 6:08 | |
| We take the Christ out of Christmas. | 6:12 | |
| And secondly another factor militating | 6:16 | |
| against our deeper understanding | 6:18 | |
| of the meaning of Christ's coming, | 6:20 | |
| is the truth that today we so often popularly sentimentalize | 6:23 | |
| the Christmas message. | 6:28 | |
| We think of the Christmas story as a lovely story | 6:32 | |
| about a beautiful thing that happened, blown down to us | 6:35 | |
| from the far away and from long ago. | 6:39 | |
| Now, that is all wrong. | 6:42 | |
| We shouldn't sentimentalize this story above all stories. | 6:44 | |
| Giovanni Papini in his "Life Of Christ" reminds us | 6:49 | |
| that it is rather tragic | 6:54 | |
| that in the history of Christian art, | 6:56 | |
| the stable at Bethlehem has been represented | 6:59 | |
| as a beautiful, white, stuck up creche. | 7:03 | |
| Everything clean and tidy and lovely. | 7:06 | |
| And he goes on to tell us that the stable in Bethlehem | 7:09 | |
| to which Christ came was a real stable, | 7:12 | |
| and the air was heavy with the smell | 7:15 | |
| and foulness of the beasts. | 7:18 | |
| We mustn't sentimentalize this story. | 7:21 | |
| We must try to see instead that Christ really came | 7:23 | |
| into the very depth of our existence | 7:27 | |
| and into the very heart of our world. | 7:30 | |
| And then the third factor militating | 7:33 | |
| against our deeper understanding of the Christmas story, | 7:36 | |
| is the cynicism which is so rampant in our time. | 7:40 | |
| I'm not so sure about America but I know that in Europe, | 7:44 | |
| since the second world war, the dominant philosophy | 7:48 | |
| has been one which has preached anguish | 7:52 | |
| and despair and nothingness. | 7:55 | |
| And human existence in Europe | 7:58 | |
| has been shaken from its hold. | 8:00 | |
| And in a situation and atmosphere like that, | 8:04 | |
| it's likely, isn't it, that the Christmas message | 8:07 | |
| will be thought to be merely an irrelevance. | 8:11 | |
| What I want to say then this morning | 8:15 | |
| is that in the face of all these factors in our modern life | 8:17 | |
| which militate against our deeper understanding | 8:22 | |
| of the Christmas message, | 8:25 | |
| there is urgent and insistent need for us to try hard | 8:27 | |
| to get to the heart of things. | 8:31 | |
| We must try together this morning to go deeper | 8:34 | |
| than the tinsel and superficialities of Christmas, | 8:37 | |
| to go deeper than the loveliness | 8:41 | |
| of a carol or Christmas story, to go deeper than despair. | 8:43 | |
| Are you going to try then this morning together with me, | 8:49 | |
| to go deeper, will you? | 8:53 | |
| It will be a great and profound Christmas, if you do. | 8:55 | |
| One of our most distinguished British orchestra conductors, | 9:01 | |
| Sir Malcolm Sergeant made a tour of the Midwest of America | 9:05 | |
| some years ago. | 9:09 | |
| He found it very interesting and he brought home with him | 9:12 | |
| to London and performed it one fine Christmas Eve, | 9:16 | |
| "A Cowboy Carol from the Midwest". | 9:20 | |
| And I was thrilled by it at the time | 9:23 | |
| and I remember that the current refrain | 9:26 | |
| of that cowboy carol went something like this. | 9:28 | |
| "I get in my saddle and ride, | 9:31 | |
| it's a new world beginning from tonight." | 9:34 | |
| That for Christmas Eve. | 9:43 | |
| What a message, what a wonderful message. | 9:44 | |
| And I want to adapt that just a little this morning | 9:49 | |
| and use it as my theme for today. | 9:52 | |
| It's a new world beginning from today when Christ comes, | 9:55 | |
| because since he has come the world is bound | 10:00 | |
| to be constituted a very different place. | 10:03 | |
| And I want to say first this morning | 10:08 | |
| that it's a new world beginning from today when Christ comes | 10:10 | |
| because Christ's coming means tremendous | 10:15 | |
| and staggering news. | 10:18 | |
| We are living in a news hungry age. | 10:21 | |
| Radio and television and newspapers cater all together | 10:25 | |
| for the public clamor for news. | 10:30 | |
| And I want to say to you here this morning, | 10:34 | |
| wouldn't it be a wonderful thing | 10:37 | |
| if we could only awaken the multitudes of people today | 10:39 | |
| to the astonishing and startling fact | 10:42 | |
| that the greatest of all news was proclaimed | 10:45 | |
| at Bethlehem 2000 years ago, when Christ came. | 10:48 | |
| This is news to thrill the soul and make music in the heart. | 10:51 | |
| This is the news of Christmas, | 10:58 | |
| better than any news that any modern Sputnik | 11:00 | |
| might bleep out about the nature of the physical universe | 11:04 | |
| because this news of the coming of Christ | 11:08 | |
| is news not about the physical constitution of the universe. | 11:10 | |
| It's news about the God who rules the physical universe | 11:14 | |
| and has the world in his hand. | 11:18 | |
| In a day of dark distress and despair | 11:21 | |
| for his people Israel, Isaiah, the prophet of the exile | 11:24 | |
| looked into the future hopefully and saw in vision | 11:29 | |
| and in a moment of high faith, the coming of God. | 11:32 | |
| And he said, "Send a messenger." | 11:36 | |
| "Go say to the cities of Judah, behold your God." | 11:39 | |
| And so I stand here today and I say, | 11:45 | |
| go send a messenger to the cities of America, | 11:48 | |
| send a messenger to the cities of Europe, | 11:51 | |
| send a messenger to the cities of the Far East | 11:54 | |
| and say unto them, behold, your God. | 11:56 | |
| This is the news and the only news which a weary world | 12:00 | |
| is waiting to hear, and this lovely news | 12:03 | |
| can be summed up in the one great word of Christmas time. | 12:07 | |
| In the word Emmanuel, God with us in Jesus Christ. | 12:12 | |
| Now it would be easy to theologize about the incarnation. | 12:20 | |
| We theological teachers are desperately apt to assume | 12:24 | |
| that the man in the pew | 12:29 | |
| is devoutly interested in our subject. | 12:31 | |
| I think we'd do far better to realize | 12:34 | |
| that the man in the pew is first and foremost interested | 12:38 | |
| in life with all its problems and hazards | 12:42 | |
| and difficulties and deep anxieties. | 12:46 | |
| And you would not thank me this morning | 12:50 | |
| for theologizing over much about the incarnation. | 12:52 | |
| You want to know instead what the theology of incarnation | 12:56 | |
| means in terms of your own private personal life. | 13:00 | |
| Well, it means things that are very great | 13:05 | |
| and deep to just you. | 13:07 | |
| In so far as in Christ Christmas time God comes, | 13:11 | |
| he manifests his loving concern for us by taking | 13:17 | |
| upon himself bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, | 13:21 | |
| God shows man in Christ that he truly cares. | 13:27 | |
| And that means that these little lives of ours are embraced | 13:31 | |
| by an all inclusive purpose. | 13:35 | |
| It means that we don't need to say anymore | 13:37 | |
| that life is a tale told by an idiot | 13:40 | |
| full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. | 13:43 | |
| It's a great life and it's going somewhere | 13:46 | |
| and it's full of meaning and full of purpose | 13:49 | |
| in the light of Christ's coming. | 13:53 | |
| And again there's this about the good news of Christmas. | 13:56 | |
| In the deeper moments of our lives, | 14:00 | |
| we feel our estrangement from the source of all true life. | 14:03 | |
| We become conscious of our inner weakness, | 14:08 | |
| our moral failures, our shame and our guilt. | 14:12 | |
| The incarnation means that God has sent someone | 14:17 | |
| to end the estrangement. | 14:20 | |
| God is in Christ, reconciling men unto himself | 14:22 | |
| so that we can now say in the light of his coming, | 14:28 | |
| the Lord is he who's strength doth make me strong. | 14:31 | |
| Then there's this also. | 14:37 | |
| There are many young people here this morning. | 14:39 | |
| Now when you're young and I'm still young too, | 14:43 | |
| you don't think a great deal about the problem | 14:46 | |
| of the end of life, the problem of death | 14:49 | |
| and perhaps it's right that you should not. | 14:53 | |
| No one would want any young person to be morbid, | 14:56 | |
| but sooner rather than later as the years go by, | 15:00 | |
| you begin to see that the last anxiety about death | 15:04 | |
| is perhaps the only problem that really matters | 15:08 | |
| in the universe. | 15:11 | |
| When you've stood in a war cemetery | 15:14 | |
| with the desert sun beating down upon you | 15:17 | |
| and you've seen row after endless row of cross upon cross | 15:20 | |
| bearing the names of some young men | 15:25 | |
| you had learned to love and to admire | 15:27 | |
| taken away in the flower of their youth, | 15:31 | |
| you begin to realize that the problem of death | 15:34 | |
| and what lies beyond it is the only problem | 15:37 | |
| that really matters. | 15:40 | |
| Somewhere, somehow, someday, it's going to be burning | 15:42 | |
| upon each one of us that this ultimate anxiety about death | 15:46 | |
| is life's deepest problem. | 15:51 | |
| Has Christianity any news here? | 15:53 | |
| Of course it has the most wonderful news | 15:56 | |
| in so far as the eternal God becomes man in Christ. | 15:59 | |
| He reveals to man that man is eternal, | 16:04 | |
| that death can't destroy him or defeat him or hold him. | 16:08 | |
| Life is not a dead end street that fades out | 16:14 | |
| into ashes and rubbish, it's going somewhere. | 16:17 | |
| It runs across into the beyond. | 16:21 | |
| The stars shine over the earth, | 16:24 | |
| the stars shine over the sea, | 16:27 | |
| the stars look up to the mighty God, | 16:30 | |
| the star stars look down on me. | 16:33 | |
| The stars will live for a million years, | 16:35 | |
| for a million years and a day, | 16:38 | |
| but Christ and I shall live and love | 16:41 | |
| when the stars have passed away. | 16:45 | |
| It's a new world beginning from today when Christ comes | 16:49 | |
| because Christ's coming means great news | 16:53 | |
| about these lives of ours. | 16:55 | |
| It's also a new world beginning from today when Christ comes | 16:58 | |
| because Christ stands as the real inspiration | 17:03 | |
| behind dynamic social concept based on Christian love. | 17:07 | |
| Christ stands as the inspiration | 17:14 | |
| behind dynamic social concern based on redemptive love. | 17:16 | |
| Within communism, we are led to believe | 17:23 | |
| that men call each other comrade, | 17:26 | |
| but within communism, respect for the comrade | 17:29 | |
| is respect for one who is just another cog in the wheel | 17:32 | |
| of an impersonal and deterministic theory of economics. | 17:36 | |
| Within Christianity on the other hand, respect and affection | 17:42 | |
| for fellowmen is for people for whom Christ also came | 17:46 | |
| and lived and died. | 17:51 | |
| At its highest and best, there is a warmth and glow | 17:54 | |
| and spontaneity about the outgoing of the heart in Christ | 17:58 | |
| towards one's fellow men. | 18:02 | |
| And I stand here this morning and I make no apology | 18:05 | |
| for saying despite all the tragic mistakes | 18:09 | |
| the church has made in its history, | 18:12 | |
| I make no apology for saying that Christ has been | 18:14 | |
| the greatest spur in history towards real social concern | 18:18 | |
| and real social progress. | 18:23 | |
| I believe that Baron Von Hugo was right when he said, | 18:26 | |
| "Christianity taught men to care." | 18:30 | |
| I think this can be exemplified at many points in history. | 18:34 | |
| William Wilberforce, back in England, | 18:39 | |
| after a campaign of 30 years managed to abolish | 18:41 | |
| the institution of slavery. | 18:46 | |
| What inspired him? | 18:48 | |
| What fired him with zeal? | 18:50 | |
| An evangelical passion for the Lord, Jesus Christ. | 18:53 | |
| And in the same sense you can say today | 18:58 | |
| that every hospital in the land is a tribute to Jesus Christ | 19:01 | |
| who sent men out to heal the sick | 19:07 | |
| and bind up the broken hearted and tender wounded. | 19:09 | |
| And bringing this right home to ourselves, | 19:13 | |
| we can say for instance that the hospital here at Duke | 19:16 | |
| is a living Memorial to the quality of compassion | 19:21 | |
| manifested by Jesus Christ. | 19:25 | |
| I say that Christ comes to stand as the inspiration | 19:28 | |
| behind all real social concern and social progress. | 19:32 | |
| I know there are still are many who say today | 19:36 | |
| that the world would've been no poorer | 19:39 | |
| if Christ had never come, but surely we must challenge that. | 19:41 | |
| Try to envisage a world without Christ. | 19:46 | |
| Burn every Bible, close every church, | 19:51 | |
| efface every Christian ideal, substitute unconcern | 19:55 | |
| for the neighbor for love of the neighbor | 20:00 | |
| in the education of the young | 20:02 | |
| and then you've got a world without Christ. | 20:04 | |
| Millions in Europe in the 1930s saw this very thing happen | 20:08 | |
| with living fear in their eyes. | 20:13 | |
| They saw the world there in Germany being made Christless. | 20:16 | |
| For a Nazi Germany, Hitler tried | 20:20 | |
| to systematically blot out the name of Christ | 20:22 | |
| and everything Christ stood for. | 20:26 | |
| And we know now what the sequel was. | 20:29 | |
| The sequel was the resurgence of a brute in man | 20:32 | |
| like the unleashing of some wild thing | 20:36 | |
| from the primeval jungle. | 20:39 | |
| So true is it, that it is Christ | 20:42 | |
| who has taught the world to care and Christ alone. | 20:45 | |
| We owe our best social progress to Jesus Christ, | 20:50 | |
| the inspiration behind dynamic | 20:54 | |
| and redemptive social concern. | 20:57 | |
| And I say thirdly this morning | 21:00 | |
| to take you another step forward, | 21:01 | |
| that it's a new world beginning from today when Christ comes | 21:05 | |
| because Christ is the source of our highest ideals. | 21:08 | |
| There are many people who acknowledge | 21:14 | |
| high principles in life, principles of honor and honesty | 21:16 | |
| and good integrity of character. | 21:21 | |
| And sometimes while acknowledging these principles, | 21:24 | |
| they don't know the real source of them. | 21:27 | |
| And I want to say this morning that if we take this | 21:30 | |
| at a personal level first of all, we shall see better | 21:34 | |
| how Christ is the source of our ideals. | 21:37 | |
| There may be here and there listening to me | 21:41 | |
| a young man and young woman who are very much in love. | 21:45 | |
| In fact, they may be in The Duke chapel this morning. | 21:49 | |
| If my eyes have not deceived me in recent weeks | 21:52 | |
| some such young men and young women, | 21:55 | |
| very much in love with each other and looking forward | 21:59 | |
| to a long companionship unbroken through the years | 22:03 | |
| of mutual all fidelity and trust. | 22:07 | |
| Now they may never think much about it | 22:11 | |
| but the source of this lovely and high ideal of marriage | 22:14 | |
| which they cherish in their hearts is Jesus Christ | 22:18 | |
| and Christ alone. | 22:22 | |
| That's on a personal level. | 22:25 | |
| It's true also on the broader level | 22:27 | |
| that there is the closest correlation for instance, | 22:30 | |
| between Jesus Christ and the democratic ideal. | 22:33 | |
| The democratic ideal for which the people | 22:37 | |
| of this great country have fought so hard | 22:40 | |
| and have sacrificed so much. | 22:42 | |
| This ideal is closely linked up with Jesus Christ | 22:46 | |
| because when Jesus Christ came and taught and revealed | 22:49 | |
| the fatherhood of God, why the other side | 22:53 | |
| of that teaching and revelation is the brotherhood of man. | 22:56 | |
| And the brotherhood of man is surely | 23:00 | |
| an essential element in democracy | 23:03 | |
| and in so far as there are people today who still cherish | 23:06 | |
| the dream of the brotherhood of man, | 23:11 | |
| they have the dream from Jesus Christ. | 23:13 | |
| There are some who can still say today with Robert Burns | 23:16 | |
| our own Scott's poet, "For all that and all that, | 23:20 | |
| it's coming yet for all that, that men to men the world o'er | 23:24 | |
| shall brothers be for all that". | 23:29 | |
| If we cherish this dream of brotherhood today, | 23:33 | |
| we owe both the birth and the continuance of it | 23:37 | |
| to Jesus Christ, the Lord of our ideals. | 23:40 | |
| There is the closest link up | 23:46 | |
| between the democratic ideal and Jesus the Christ | 23:48 | |
| because Jesus also was the one who made a massive campaign | 23:51 | |
| for the inalienable rights and dignities | 23:57 | |
| of the individual man | 24:00 | |
| and that too is an element in democracy. | 24:02 | |
| Jesus was above all in history, | 24:05 | |
| the one who went out to meet the social outcasts, | 24:08 | |
| to befriend the poor and the downtrodden. | 24:12 | |
| And there, men and women, | 24:15 | |
| is an essential element in democracy. | 24:17 | |
| So we owe this great democratic ideal directly | 24:20 | |
| to Jesus Christ the Lord and source | 24:24 | |
| of all our highest ideals. | 24:27 | |
| And this Christmas tide, we should be lifting up our hearts | 24:30 | |
| in blessing and praise to him, the bringer of blessings. | 24:33 | |
| Christ, the bringer of blessing. | 24:37 | |
| And then may I take you another step forward? | 24:41 | |
| It's a new world beginning from today | 24:44 | |
| because Christ haunts the world's conscience | 24:47 | |
| with a fresh concept of manhood. | 24:51 | |
| We are accustomed to say at Christmas time, that Christ | 24:54 | |
| is the revealer of God but there is another side to it. | 24:58 | |
| Christ is also the revealer of man. | 25:02 | |
| He is the new man, the ideal man, the representative man. | 25:05 | |
| Now, if Christ had never come, we could have been content | 25:11 | |
| with our poor petty human standards and our trivial ideals. | 25:17 | |
| If Christ had never come, we could quite easily | 25:22 | |
| have compared our lives with the life | 25:25 | |
| of the fellow down the street. | 25:27 | |
| And when we compare our life | 25:30 | |
| with the life of the fellow down the street | 25:31 | |
| particularly if he is of a different social caste | 25:34 | |
| or a different race or color from ourselves, | 25:37 | |
| we come out pretty well in the comparison, don't we? | 25:41 | |
| We can thank God and say, I thank the Father | 25:45 | |
| that I am not like other men, just a little superior. | 25:49 | |
| But you see since Christ has come, | 25:54 | |
| the new man, the ideal man, we cannot compare ourselves | 25:57 | |
| with our fellows anymore. | 26:01 | |
| We are brought to the light of Christ | 26:03 | |
| and it is with Him we must compare ourselves. | 26:05 | |
| My soul, this is the judgment. | 26:09 | |
| That the light of Christ is come into the world | 26:12 | |
| and we shun the light and creep away | 26:15 | |
| and remain contented with our darkness. | 26:17 | |
| This will not do. | 26:21 | |
| Now that Christ is come, | 26:23 | |
| only this best of all possible bests will do, | 26:25 | |
| so that there is a fearful side to Christ's coming. | 26:30 | |
| Christ constitutes the world a valley of decision | 26:33 | |
| and men in their innermost essence | 26:38 | |
| are determined in their quality of character | 26:42 | |
| by their reaction and response to Jesus the Christ. | 26:46 | |
| In this sense, who can abide the day of his coming, | 26:50 | |
| for his loveliness judges our lovelessness | 26:55 | |
| and beside his shining white purity, | 27:00 | |
| the darkness of our hearts seems very dark and deep. | 27:03 | |
| This is the judgment, he is sifting out the hearts of men | 27:09 | |
| before his judgment seat. | 27:13 | |
| Oh, be swift my soul to answer him, be jubilant my plea. | 27:15 | |
| And then I want just in a word to make this last point. | 27:23 | |
| It's a new world beginning from today when Christ comes | 27:28 | |
| because he who comes into history now transcends history, | 27:32 | |
| forever and forever as the abiding presence. | 27:37 | |
| The Christmas story is not just a lovely story | 27:42 | |
| of the far away and long ago. | 27:46 | |
| The whole New Testament bears witness | 27:49 | |
| to the fact that Jesus the Christ | 27:52 | |
| just couldn't be pushed into the past. | 27:54 | |
| He couldn't be made a memory. | 27:57 | |
| He became for the men of the New Testament | 28:00 | |
| and all men ever since, | 28:02 | |
| the eternal spirit and the abiding presence. | 28:04 | |
| And that is why this morning | 28:09 | |
| at the risk of being considered repetitious, | 28:12 | |
| I have used frequently this word, today, | 28:15 | |
| because today is really the only word | 28:19 | |
| that applies to Jesus the Christ. | 28:21 | |
| Today, this very hour, this very moment, | 28:24 | |
| this Christ who comes at Bethlehem also comes | 28:29 | |
| and confronts men in the present moment of their existence. | 28:32 | |
| He confronts us here and now in this fellowship | 28:37 | |
| which we enjoy today. | 28:42 | |
| And it's going to be | 28:44 | |
| a really lovely and wonderful Christmas, | 28:45 | |
| if we open up our hearts to the abiding presence | 28:47 | |
| and the eternal spirit and Christ really comes to our lives | 28:51 | |
| this Christmas season, because if he comes to us | 28:56 | |
| then we shall feel that here is anywhere. | 29:00 | |
| We are in touch with the final reality of the universe. | 29:04 | |
| Here, we shall feel if anywhere | 29:09 | |
| that our characters are being enriched, | 29:13 | |
| our will strengthened | 29:16 | |
| and our highest ideals beautifully sanctified. | 29:19 | |
| It will in very fact, be a new world for us | 29:24 | |
| beginning from today, if Christ comes to us. | 29:27 | |
| Even so, come Lord Jesus, our Emmanuel. | 29:35 | |
| Even so, come. | 29:41 | |
| Let us pray. | 29:45 |