Frederick William Robertson (1816 – 1853)
Known as Robertson of Brighton, was an English divine.
Christ's miracles were vivid manifestations to the senses that He is the Saviour of the body and now as then the issues of life and death are in His hands that our daily existence is a perpetual miracle. The extraordinary was simply a manifestation of God's power in the ordinary.
My Saviour! fill up the blurred and blotted sketch which my clumsy hand has drawn of a Divine life, with the fullness of Thy perfect picture. I feel the beauty I cannot realize; robe me in Thine unutterable purity.
God's truth is too sacred to be expounded to superficial worldliness in its transient fit of earnestness.
It is more true to say that our opinions depend upon our lives and habits than to say that our lives depend upon our opinions, which is only now and then true.
Now see what a Christian is, drawn by the hand of Christ. He is a man on whose clear and open brow God has set the stamp of truth; one whose very eye beams bright with honor; in whose very look and bearing you may see freedom, manliness, veracity; a brave man a noble man frank, generous, true, with, it may be, many faults; whose freedom may take the form of impetuosity or rashness, but the form of meanness never.
Christian life is action: not a speculating, not a debating, but a doing. One thing, and only one, in this world has eternity stamped upon it. Feelings pass; resolves and thoughts pass; opinions change. What you have done lasts lasts in you. Through ages, through eternity, what you have done for Christ, that, and only that, you are.
Every unfulfilled aspiration of humanity in the past; all partial representation of perfect character; all sacrifices, nay, even those of idolatry, point to the fulfillment of what we want, the answer to every longing the type of perfect humanity, the Lord Jesus Christ.
A consistent Christian may not have rapture; he has that which is much better than rapture calmness God's serene and perpetual presence.
Mourning after an absent God is an evidence of a love as strong, as rejoicing in a present one.
He who seeks truth must be content with a lonely, little-trodden path. If he cannot worship her till she has been canonized by the shouts of the multitude, he must take his place with the members of that wretched crowd who shouted for two long hours, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians!" till truth, reason, and calmness were all drowned in noise.
There is a power in the soul, quite separate from the intellect, which sweeps away or recognizes the marvelous, by which God is felt. Faith stands serenely far above the reach of the atheism of science. It does not rest on the wonderful, but on the eternal wisdom and goodness of God. The revelation of the Son was to proclaim a Father, not a mystery. No science can sweep away the everlasting love which the heart feds, and which the intellect does not even pretend to judge or recognize.
He is not affected by our mutability; our changes do not alter Him. When we are restless, He remains serene and calm; when we are low, selfish, mean or dispirited, He is still the unalterable I AM, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, in whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. What God is in Himself, not what we may chance to feel Him in this or that moment to be, that is our hope. My soul, "hope thou in God."
The Christian life is not knowing or hearing, but doing.
The mistake we make is to look for a source of comfort in ourselves: self-contemplation, instead of gazing upon God. In other words, we look for comfort precisely where comfort never can be.
It is perilous to separate thinking rightly from acting rightly. He is already half false who speculates on truth and does not do it. Truth is given, not to be contemplated, but to be done. Life is an action not a thought. And the penalty paid by him who speculates on truth, is that by degrees the very truth he holds becomes a falsehood.
I will tell you what to hate. Hate hypocrisy, hate cant, hate indolence, oppression, injustice; hate Pharisaism; hate them as Christ hated them with a deep, living, godlike hatred.
There is a mighty gulf between those who love and those who do not love God To the one class we owe civility, courtesy, kindness, even tenderness. It is only those who love the Lord who should find in our hearts a home.
This is the secret of Christ's kingship "He became obedient wherefore God also hath highly exalted Him." And this is the secret of all obedience and all command. Obedience to a law above you subjugates minds to you who never would have yielded to mere will.
The question is, whether, like the Divine Child in the Temple, we are turning knowledge into wisdom, and whether, understanding more of the mysteries of life, we are feeling more of its sacred law; and whether, having left behind the priests and the scribes and the doctors and the fathers, we are about our Father's business, and becoming wise to God.
Every day in this world has its work; and every day as it rises out of eternity keeps putting to each of us this question afresh, "What will you do before to-day has sunk into eternity and nothingness again? " And now what have we to say with respect to this strange, solemn thing Time? That men do with it through life just what the apostles did for one precious and irreparable hour in the garden of Gethsemane they go to sleep.