THE POWER OF CHRIST'S RESURRECTION.
By Rev. S. Graves, D. D.
PAUL greatly desired to know this. What is it? It is something more than that display of power which was manifest in his literal resurrection, great as that was, by which he was "declared to be the Son of God with power." Christ's resurrection was unlike any other that had ever taken place. It was a resurrection invested with "the power of an immortal life." "Christ being raised from the dead, dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him." Christ risen and exalted to Heaven, in our glorified human nature, is the connecting-link between this world and the next—the visible and the invisible; and through the risen Christ comes down to us, flows in upon us, "the powers of the world to come." And so the reality of a future life, of a personal resurrection, of the continuity and identity of the life that now is, and that which is to come,—all the power which truths like these, set forth in the strong light of facts, hold over us, is due to the resurrection of Christ. What dignity does this give to life, with what responsibilities does it weight the days we are passing here—eternal issues gather around them! The words we speak, the works we do, the very thoughts which shape themselves in our minds, take on infinite values, in the light of Christ's resurrection. What a place it makes of the home, the office, the shop, the store, where so much of the earnest work of life is done! How these places are made by it the court of the invisible world which opens out into the eternities, and takes on the glory or the gloom of their unending states! Herein is found, herein is seen and felt "the power of Christ's resurrection." Then, again, Christ's resurrection is the final and finishing proof of our Lord's divinity. It established Christianity as an historical and divine religion; made it a faith at once solid in basis, and full of life and power. Christ its head and founder is a living person; whereas the founders of all other religions live only in the memories and reverence of their followers. It is therefore the doctrine of the resurrection—the resurrection element in the Christian religion—that gave it at first its power to conquer the old pagan world, and is its conquering power to-day. Moral precepts the world had before Christ's day, many of them of great beauty and truth, which he himself adopted—for the Christian religion, in its fullness, embodies all divine truth. But of themselves they lacked power to change the character and lives of men. And there are religious systems to-day which discard or belittle the resurrection of Christ, and put forward moral precepts, sentiment, abstract virtues. But they are as cold and powerless to move men in the deeper experiences of life, to stay the progress of vice and turn it back, as the northern lights are to change December snows into the blossoming of June. It is the doctrine and reality of "Christ crucified," risen, and alive forevermore, that gives vitality to faith, and commands a power which men feel—which the world has felt to its very extremes. But manifest and marvelous as the power of the resurrection is seen to be in those directions, it was more than this which Paul desired to know when he exclaims: "That I may know Him and the power of his resurrection." To know this power is to have it as an experience. Not an easy thing. It doesn't come of itself; we don't glide into it. The path by which it is reached lay, in Paul's case, through suffering—"the fellowship of his sufferings." It was realized by a conformity to his death—"being made conformable to his death." Christ was not raised from the dead until he had died; nor can we know "the power of his resurrection" until we have first died with him, come into such a soul-identity with him—such a life-and-death fellowship with him—as to have been, in the intense language of Scripture, "crucified with Christ"—"dead with him." What does baptism mean apart from such an experience as this? Baptism means, unless it be a solemn farce, I am dead with Christ, buried with Christ, and out of this experience, risen with Christ; between the world-life I was living, and my now-life, there lies a sepulcher—the very portals of the grave stand closed between the two. And "the power of Christ's resurrection"—the personal, practical, experimental knowledge of this—is attainable only through such a "fellowship with the sufferings" of Christ, and such a conformity to his death. How much of such experience is found among the people of God to-day? How much resurrection-life is there in the churches of our land, which has come up from the grave of worldliness, and self-seeking, and pleasure, and personal gratifications, and entered into the strong, pure, masterful life of God? We have, I fear, fallen into a false interpretation of many apostolic sayings, accounting that their significance lay in those peculiar times when a death of martyrdom was almost imminent. "I die daily," "I bear about in my body the dying of the Lord Jesus," "I will not glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ by which"—not "whom"—"I am crucified unto the world and the world unto me." It wasn't the cross of wood erected on Calvary, that Paul here glories in, but that "by which he was crucified to the world and the world to him." The deepest meaning of the cross is self-surrender, self-sacrifice, self-immolation. In this is its great power. And until it is so apprehended in the practical experience of Christians more generally, its power will be hidden and restrained. There is a truth of deep and vital significance to the Christian church set forth in the Roman Catholic mass—though held by the Papists under a mystical and semi-idolatrous view—of the repeated and continuous sacrifice of Christ, which is to be realized, not through priestly mummeries by "the elevation of the host," but in the thorough Christliness of Christians; in the spirit of self-sacrifice, and even of substitution, up to their measure, for the perishing about them—putting our soul in their souls' stead—the giving up and giving away of the truest life within us, to save them, which had its full and perfect realization in the sacrifice of Christ. And so Paul says, "Death worketh in us, but life in you;" and so, too, there is to be "a filling up of that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ." It is in this experience that is found, in its most real sense, the power of Christ's resurrection—Christ crucified, Christ risen in his people, the spirit of calvary, and the tomb of Joseph, in the hearts of believers; in the life of the church. With this power renewed, Pentecost would come again, and in larger measures. Who can doubt it?—Examiner and Chronicle.