Unspoken Sermons Series I, II, and III

by George MacDonald

fire. These will soon bring him to some of his spiritual senses. But it will be far better for him to be thus sharply tutored, than to go on a snail’s pace in the journey of the spiritual life. And for arrogance, I have seen nothing breed it faster or in more offensive forms than the worship of the letter. And to whom shall a man, whom the blessed God has made, look for what he likes best, but to that blessed God? If we have been indeed enabled to see that God is our

What I must say is this: that, by the Word of God, I do not understand The Bible. The Bible is a Word of God, the chief of his written words, because it tells us of The Word, the Christ; but everything God has done and given man to know is a word of his, a will of

his; and inasmuch as it is a will of his, it is a necessity to man, without which he cannot live: the reception of it is man’s life. For inasmuch as God’s utterances are a whole, every smallest is essential: he speaks no foolishness-there are with him no vain repetitions. But by the

word of the God and not Maker only, who is God just because he speaks to men, I must understand, in the deepest sense, every revelation of Himself in the heart and consciousness of man, so that the man...

The true self is that which can look Jesus in the face, and say My Lord.

Will thou his will. Say to him: “My God, I am very dull and low and hard; but thou art wise and

high and tender, and thou art my God. I am thy child. Forsake me not.”

Then, if ever the time should come, as perhaps it must come to each of us, when all consciousness of

well-being shall have vanished, when the earth shall be but a sterile promontory, and the heavens a dull and pestilent congregation of vapours, when man nor woman shall delight us more, nay, when God himself shall be but a name, and Jesus an old story, then, even then, when a Death far worse than “that phantom of grisly bone” is griping at our hearts, and

having slain love, hope, faith, forces existence upon us only in agony, then, even then, we shall be able to cry out with our Lord, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Nor shall we die then, I think, without being able to take up his last wo...

How the earthly father would love a child who would creep into his room with angry, troubled face, and sit down at his feet, saying when asked what he wanted: “I feel so naughty, papa, and I want to get good”! Would he say to his child: “How dare you!

Go away, and be good, and then come to me?” And shall we dare to think God would send us away if we came thus, and would not be pleased that we came, even if we were angry as Jonah?

But how can we love a man or a woman who is cruel and unjust to us?- who sears with contempt, or cuts off with wrong every tendril we would put forth to embrace?-who is mean, unlovely, carping, uncertain, self-righteous, self-seeking, and self-admiring?-who can even sneer, the most inhuman of human faults, far worse in its essence than mere murder?

A time comes to every man when he must obey, or make such refusal-and know it.

although never can man be saved without being freed from his possessions, it is yet only hard, not impossible, for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

‘Trust in the living God. His will is your life.’

‘I do trust him in spiritual matters.’ ‘Everything is an affair of the spirit. If God has a way, then that is the only way. Every little thing in which you would have your own way, has a mission for your redemption; and he will treat you as a naughty child until you take your Father’s way for yours.’

For the misery would be not merely the absence of all being other than his own self, but the fearful, endless, unavoidable presence of that self.

The man who minds only himself must at last go mad if God did not interfere.

and I can only widen my assertion: until you yourself are the son of God you were born to be, you will never find life a good thing.

He has the victory who, in the midst of pain and weakness, cries out, not for death, not for the repose of forgetfulness, but for strength to fight; for more power, more consciousness of being, more God in him; who, when sorest wounded, says with Sir Andrew Barton in the old ballad:- Fight on my men, says Sir Andrew Barton, I am hurt, but I am not slain; I'll lay me down and bleed awhile, And then I'll rise and fight again; -and that with no silly notion of playing the hero-what have creatures like us to do with heroism who are not yet barely honest!-but because so to fight is the truth, and the only way.

The true man trusts in a strength which is not his, and which he does not feel, does not even always desire; believes in a power that seems far from him, which is yet at the root of his fatigue itself and his need of rest-rest as far from death as is labour.

Self, accepted as the law of self, is the one demon-enemy of life; God is the only Saviour from it, and from all that is not God, for God is life, and all that is not God is death. Life is the destruction of death, of all that kills, of all that is of death’s kind.

God is the God of comfort, known of man as the refuge, the life-giver, or not known at all.

Although a man must do right if it send him to Hades, yea, even were it to send him for ever to hell itself, yet, while the Lord liveth, we need not fear: all good things must grow out of and hang upon the one central good, the one law of life- the Will, the One Good.

To submit absolutely to him is the only reason: circumstance as well as all being must then bud and blossom as the rose. And it will!-what

what matter whether in this world or the next, if one day I know my life as a perfect bliss, having neither limitation nor hindrance nor pain nor sorrow more than it...

God is offering us the one thing we cannot live without-his own self: we must make room for him; we must cleanse our hearts that he may come in; we must do as the Master tells us, who knew all about the Father and the way to him-we must deny ourselves, and take up our cross daily, and follow him.

The self is given to us that we may sacrifice it; it is ours that we like Christ may have somewhat to offer-not that we should torment it, but that we should deny it; not that we should cross

it, but that we should abandon it utterly: then it can no more be vexed.

Thank God, we are nowise bound to accept any man’s explanation of God’s ways and God’s doings, however good the man may be, if it do not commend itself to our conscience.

The man’s conscience may be a better conscience than ours, and his judgment clearer; nothing the more can we accept while we cannot see good: to do so would be to sin.

The one, holding doctrines of devils, is yet a child of God; the other, holding the doctrines of Christ and his Apostles, is of the world, yea, of the devil.

Do you ask, ‘What is faith in him?’

I answer, The leaving of your way, your objects, your self, and the taking of his and him; the leaving of your trust in men, in money, in opinion, in character, in atonement itself, and doing as he tells you.

whether they are truly sorry for their sins-the way to madness of the brain, and despair of the heart.

it is God and the man one. God and man together, the vital energy flowing unchecked from the creator into his creature-that is the salvation of the creature.

The old race of the Pharisees is by no means extinct; they were St Paul’s great trouble, and are yet to be found in every religious community under the sun.

He made himself what he is by deathing himself into the will of the eternal Father, through which will he was the eternal Son-thus plunging into the fountain of his own life, the

There is always something deeper than anything said-something of which all human, all divine words, figures, pictures, motion-forms, are but the outer laminar spheres through which the central reality shines more or less plainly.

The question is not at present, however, of removing mountains, a thing that will

one day be simple to us, but of waking and rising from the dead now.

God is all right-why should we mind standing in the dark for a minute outside his window? Of course we miss the inness, but there is a bliss of its own in waiting. What if the rain be falling, and the wind blowing;

what if we stand alone, or, more painful still, have some dear one beside us, sharing our outness; what even if the window be not shining, because of the curtains of good inscrutable drawn across it; let us think to ourselves, or say to our friend, ‘God is; Jesus is

not dead; nothing can be going wrong, however it may look so to hearts un...

and it blinded them-admirable symbol of the wilful blindness of old Mosaist or modern Wesleyan, admitting no light that his Moses or his Wesley did not see, and thus losing what of the light he saw and reflected.

Peter says the Lord gives the spirit to them that obey him: the spirit of the Master, and that alone, can guide you to any theory that it will be of use to you to hold.

If his child say, ‘I will not be good; I prefer to die; let me die!’ his dealing with that child will be as if he said-‘No;

You shall not die; you shall live to thank me that I would not hear your prayer. You know what you ask, but not what you refuse.’

Be sure that the thing that God gives, the righteousness that is of God, is a real thing, and not a contemptible legalism.