But preach "Christ and him
crucified"--not merely dead two thousand years ago--but risen and
alive for evermore, and with us to the end of the world, the
grandest, most heroic, divinest helper who ever stood by a man, one
all-powerful to help and who never forsakes, and every one of your
hearers who is not dead to truth will catch the life, and go home
alive and not alone.
So long as we preach a dead Christ we shall have a dead church, as
hopeless as the apostles were before the resurrection. "But now is
Christ risen from the dead," "alive for evermore." See how Paul and
Peter and John, and doubtless all the others, talked with him and he
with them, after he was taken from them, and you have found the
secret of their power, and of that of all the great Christian heroes
and martyrs who could truly say, Lord Jesus, we understand each
other. Better yet, prove by experience that it is possible for every
one of us.
And our Lord and Master is the connecting link between God and man,
through whom God's own Holy Spirit is poured like a mighty flood
into the hearts and lives of men, transfiguring them and filling
them with the divine power. This is the biblical idea of
Christianity; man, through Christ, flooded and permeated and
interpenetrated with the Holy Spirit of God. And thus Paul is dead
and yet alive, but fully possessed and dominated by the spirit of
Christ.
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