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Reverend Donald Sage Mackay
From The Religion of The Threshold and other sermons, with an introduction by Professor Hugh Black, D.D.
"The sermons in this volume have not had the bebefit of his selection or revision. They do not do justice to his preaching, as the written report rarely does to a great preacher. In Dr. Mackay's case this is all the more true because of the preacher's method of preparing. His sermons were usually dictated and preached afterwards without manuscript, often unfinished, trusting to the spur of the moment for final inspiration. It is probably the defect of the quality of the Celtic temperament that it makes so little of method. Perhaps more method of work would have saved Dr. Mackay from much of the strain of his work, but, on the other hand, it more likely was this which made him a great preacher even if he paid the price in a short life………………….
…………His bent was not so much that of a close thinker or exact scholar. His interests were ethical rather than theological. He evidently took the theology in which he was trained and used it as a convenient basis of thought to enable him to make his ethical and practical applications…..When speaking of his conception of the Divine nature, he finishes with this remark, "But indeed the Trinity has always presented itself to me less as a theological dogma than as an ethical truth, a vivid manifestation of the Divine nature adapted to human needs." The statement of belief which Dr. Mackay gave as a young minister taking up his work would be substantially the statement he would have given at the end…He had a vital interest in the intellectual statement of the faith and brought a fresh mind to its problems. "I accept the doctrine in its less rigid and arbitrary form."// …It is in keeping with the whole bent of his life that his sermons should be practical in the best sense, seeking ever to bring religion into contact with life and the whole of life.
** RELIGION IN HOMESPUN**underline text Delivered when? (Year? City?)
"In the discussion of religious questions today, hardly anything is more persistent than the demand for what is called a practical religion. The hard-headed man of today tells you he has no place for a religion that is set forth like a problem in logic or worked out like a proposition in mathematics. On the contrary, what he wants is a faith that will help him to meet the stress and strain of common life, that finds its proof in daily experience and is vindicated not by what men say, but by what a man does. In a word, the demand today is for a religion in common life.
Personally I do not know anything healthier that just that demand. It is a distinct advance when men begin to regard their religion, not as a Sunday liability, but as a weekday asset; not as an obligation to be discharged by a perfuntory attendance at church but as an inspiration to be realized in the duties of daily life. The question is, — and I am going to answer it if I can this morning, — How is such a religion to be obtained? Where are we to discover the secret of that faith that will becaome a controlling influence in common life?
*Here, then, in our Old Testament text we have a pen and ink portrait, just a swift sketch of one man who solved this problem and made his religion a distinct contribution to his every-day happiness. "He judged the cause of the poor and needy" — that was Josiah's life record, and what were the results? It was well with him. "Was this not to know me saith the Lord?" Josiah came to know God, not by speculating about God, but through the kindly deeds of an unselfish life. He found God, not in a ready-made creed, but in a hand-made life of generous action. He wrought
"With human hands the creed of creeds
In loveliness of perfect deeds,
More high than all poetic thought."
In other words, Josiah's knowledge of God was influenced by his life. It was what he did in common life that determined what he believed. Josiah anticipated, therefore, the great truth of our Savior when he said, "If any man will do the will of God, he shall know the doctrine, whether it be of God." The knowledge of the doctrine according to Christ comes through the doing of the will. Life anticipates creed; doing is the condition of knowing in religious things. Paley has summed up this view of the Scripture regarding religion in common life in his famous aphorism, "In the things of man by knowing we come to love, but in the things of God it is by loving that we come to know."
It is perhaps well to remember just at this point that this is an aspect of religion that runs through the whole Bible. Mathew Arnold once said, truly enough, that "Conduct is three-fourths of life." Well, emphatically the Bible is the book of conduct. As a matter of fact, the Bible is not a bundle of speculations. It is, all in all, the most intensely practical book in all literature, and the strangely worded dogmas that have been drawn from it are due more to human perversity than Divine inspiration. Take for example, that magnificent burst of the prophet Micah, "What does the Lord require of thee, O man, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly before thy God?" Or take that equally practical definition of religion of Saint James, "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world." Finally, we have these words of the Saviour Himself which I have taken as part of our text, "If any man will do the will of God, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God." With them take the other oft-quoted words whose beauty no familiarity robs, "I was an-hungered, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in; naked, and ye clothed me. inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." Josiah judged the cause of the poor and needy. Pascal pithily puts the same truth in an answer to the French infidel who had said to him, "If I had your principles, I should be a better man"; to which Pascal replied, "Begin by being a better man and you will soon have my principles." Our two texts therefore present the working ideal of religion in the homespun of commom life."
The first practical lesson suggested by these words is that the life, the quality of a man's daily thought and action, has a tremendous reactionary influence on his beliefs. Let me illustrate this from the negative standpoint. I know a man whose antecedents were all religious but he cannot become a Christian because he does not believe certain truths in the Bible. There are, he claims, certain difficulties in the record of the Scripture which he cannot harmonize to his satisfaction, and for that reason he stands outside the Church of Christ. Now the man who takes that position may be honest or dishonest. if he is dishonest, his intellectual doubts are of course a cloak to hide moral baseness. He says he cannot believe some things in the Bible for the very good reason that there are other things he dare not believe. He waxes eloquent over what he calls the mistakes of Moses in order to cover up the sins of himself. He denies Christ's truth with his lips because he has already denied Christ's law in his life. For that man, the man who masquerades in his doubts to hide his sins, there is nothing to be said. Religious cant may be bad, but religious recant is a good deal worse. But with the honest doubter, the man who is in sympathy with the spirit of the gospel but who feels the difficulty of accepting certain doctrines, what are you to do? Has the Church of Christ any warrant in shutting that man out of the fold, denying him the privileges of membership and branding him as one who is not a Christian? Too often that is just what has been done. Intellectual doubt has been treated as though it were moral evil. Surely, if we are true to the teachings of Christ, what we want to tell that man is that religion begins, not in an elaborated creed, but in a sanctified will. Spiritual life begins in the soul's willingness to do the will of God. Are you willing to judge the cause of the poor and needy? Are you willing to visit the widow and the fatherless in their affliction? Are you willing to love mercy, to do justly, and walk humbly with your God? Then, on that willingness , on that disposition in your heart to do the Divine will, God receives you as a follower of Christ, and to you he speaks the gracious promise, "You shall know the doctrine, whether it be of God."
Perhaps this may become clearer if we look at it from the negative standpoint and see how a man without this willingness of heart inevitably shuts God out of his life. If to judge the cause of the poor and needy was to know God, then to crush the poor and needy must be to deny God and exclude his presence from the soul. And here, friends, is the sad thing that a man can do all that — oppress the poor and the helpless by selfishness and indifference — and yet be so orthodox in creed that the whole assembly of Westminster divines would pass him for a first-class diploma in divinity. Orthodoxy is often only another name for undigested theology. It does not follow, by any means, that if any man knows the doctrine he will do the will. Nay, on the contrary, where the will is self-centered, and the disposition of the soul turns only on the pivot of his own desires, it is then that religion begins to dissove into nebulous mists. Now, here is the message for each one of us. We want to know God, we would see Jesus, we desire His spirit, we want to grow into His likeness; and all these desires turn on the answer we give to this simple practical question, Are you willing to do His will? But perhaps someone one may say here, before a man can be willing to do God's will he must be first a believer of God? Is not this promise of Christ spoken really to those who are already believers? No, Christ's promises are for all mankind, and one of the most beautiful things in these words is their universality. "If any man." There is no bound set. Jew or Greek, heathen or barbarian, pagan or Christian, they stand within the sunlight of this blessed promise: there is room and welcome for all. If any man is willing to do God's will as that will is revealed to him, this promise is spoken, "He shall know God"; the Father will reveal himself to His child.
That, then, is the first point: the first great essential in practical religion is willingness to do God's will. The second point I emphasize is that the object of all religion must be the knowledge of God's will. To do the will of God we must study what that will is and what it claims from us. And here, perhaps, we touch what has been a distinctive weakness in our Christian teaching and preaching. We have been too eager to impress certain doctrines about God and too lax in teaching the will of God. Think how much energy has been lost, how much Christian harmony has been destroyed in wrangling over dogmas, which are purely matters of speculation, instead of doing, as we ought, gathering together in lowly submission to learn God's will. For, after all, what is it that men come to church for? Primarily to worship God, but secondly to know the will of God. The question that each one ought to ask himself on the Sabbath morning, is, What is God's will for me? How am I to do God's will throughout this week? And how sad it is that so often that question is never answered! Even in our prayers is it not the case that when we say, "God's will be done" we do so with a kind of gulp in our throat, as though God's will were a kind of tyranny, a dread nemesis, that we must submit to as best we can. We are not unlike the woman on shipboard in a raging storm who, having asked the captain if there was any danger and received the answer. "God's will be done," replied, "Surely things are not as bad as that." Now, friends, it is the ignorance of God's will that is the great stumbling block in the way of practical religion — trying to do our own will in harmony with God's will. What I want to emphasize is, that the will of god is the will of a father for his child, a will whose every heart-beat is love — love infinite, eternal, and unchangeable. What God wills is only the best, and is it a hard thing to ask that the end and aim of all our lives should be a willingness to do that will of our Heavenly Father? True, indeed, it is that there are times when we must obey that will in darkness of soul, in dumb amazement; but in that hour this promise shines clear as a star, "He that is willing to do the will shall know the doctrine."
Just take here one or two verses from Scripture which emphasize what God's will is. In writing to Timothy Paul says, "God our Savior willeth to have all men to be saved and come into the knowledge of the truth." Again, in writing to the Thessalonians, he says, "This is the will of God, even your sanctification." and again in the same Epistle he writes. "In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God concerning you." Or, again, "For it is not the will of your heavenly Father that one of these little ones should perish." And so all through scripture a study of God's will reveals to us the depth and intensity of His love; and I am convinced that a more faithful study of this Word of God on the part of each one of us will intensify more and more that willingness to do His will which is the essential mark of religion in common life.
Notice the effect of this view of religion. Its effect may be traced in three ways: First, on ourselves; second on the church; and third, on the world. the result in ourselves will be to deepen our peace and to give us a closer knowledge of god. Josiah the king experienced this: "The it was well with me, and was not this to know God?" It is in the seervice, indeed, amongst our brethren, in stretching out hands of helpfulness and speaking words of sympathy, that god's glory shines within our hearts. it is well with our souls, things dark to us become clear, mysteries are unveiled, and new regions of spiritual experience are opened. Truths that to some of us today seem vague and indefinite — as, for example the truth of Christ's presence real and living in the soul, which to some of us may seem like a fiction — will become living and real in personal experience, as we go forth humbly to do the will of God in daily life.
The effect of this view of religion on the Church will be to bring the churches more closely together in unity of spirit and unity of effort. For, after all, what are the dividing lines that separate the churches of Christendom today? Are they not essentially impractical, or at any rate irrelevant? Do they touch in any way this question of the soul's willingness to do the will of God? No doubt, in the creeds of the varied churches there are various definitions of religion. in one church religion consists in belief in a dogma, in another church it is the acceptance of a form, in another church it is submission to a government, in another church it is a belief in a historic past; but no church so far as it is a denomination stands alone for its willingness to do the will of God. There is the only ground of unity for the denomination of Christendom today. It is not in drawing up articles of compromise, it is not by one church saying too another, "We will surrender so much of our government if you will surrender so much of your creed," that the severed ranks of Christendom will come together. What is needed for Christian unity is not compromise, but submission to the will of God.
And then, lastly, note the effect of a practical religion on the world. When the Christian stands before the world as a living example of God's will, as a man whose one aim is to do God's will in common life, in judging the cause of the poor and the needy, in visiting the widow and the fatherless, the world will find a stronger and more convincing argument for the truth of Christ's evangel that in all the creeds that were ever made or in all the sermons that were ever preached. There will be no fear of the truth of Christianity being questioned when men are found to be willing to do the will of Christ, and hence I make this appeal to each one: for the sake of your Saviour who has redeemed you, for the sake of the world which watches you, for the sake of your own peace and joy, seek to attain a religion that reveals itself in common life, a religion whose creed begins in a sanctified will, in the willingness to do the will of God in daily life.
