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Text: —“And ye shall know the truth and the
truth shall make you free.” John 8:32.
L
VER since the world began there has
been a struggle on the part of man for
freedom. First, there is the struggle for
national and racial freedom. Every na
tion and every race longs for freedom.
There has been a struggle ever for in
dividual, personal freedom. There is
nothing that so galls an individual as to
feel that he is within the grip of shack-
les of any kind.
I was talking some time ago with the keeper of a
prison, and he said, “The hardest thing that pris
oners have to submit to is the shackles. There is
one man in this prison who always cries when I put
the shackles on him, and it nearly breaks my heart
to do it. He does not mind having to work, he does
not mind the plain food; he simply objects to being
shackled. ’ ’
And so I say the world has ever been struggling
to free itself from the shackles that bind in one
way or another, and Jesus has this in wind when He
submits this text. He was speaking to a people who
were under the power of Rome, a people who re
rented their shackles. He was speaking to Jews,
and the Jews were ever restless and chafing at the
thought of bondage, and Jesus seized upon this fact
to arouse attention. When he began to speak to
them about freedom He at once had their attention.
They said, “Now He is speaking about something
in whi-ch we are vitally concerned.” They thought
that He was speaking of civil liberty and freedom,
and so when He speaks the words of my text He has
their undivided attention.
WHAT IS TRUTH?
But it will pay us if *we will stop to see how this
text applied to us during our day and time. What
does Jesus mean when He speaks of truth? I am
quite sure that He means far more than we have
ever grasped. I do not believe that He referred to
the Bible when He said, “Ye shall know the truth.”
It is true that the Bible when properly understood
and properly received and properly lived up to will
bring freedom, such freedom as Jesus speaks of, be
cause it will point us to Him, who is the source of
our liberty.
But when Jesus speaks the words of this’•text
the Bible is not in His mind, nor is He speaking
of His system of salvation, His creed. This is far
removed from His mind.
Then, what is He speaking of? I think that He
is speaking of Himself. “Ye shall know the
truth.” And Jesus himself is the truth. He says,
“I am the way, the truth and the life,” and so
in this text Jesus simply says, “Ye shall know of
me, and I shall make you free.”
But what is' this freedom of which He speaks?
He does not simply mean civil freedom; He does
not simply mean personal liberty, the right to do
as we please; He does not simply mean the free
dom of the nation or the freedom of conscience. He
has reference, I think, to one’s freedom of salva
tion and all that there is involved in it. The free
dom which Jesus speaks of here and proposes to
give, is the freedom of soul and mind and body.
Tn this the whole man is composed, and in this
liberty and freedom the whole man is represented.
First, there is freedom of the soul, or spiritual
freedom which a proper knowledge of Jesus will
bring to pass. There is no need that T should
stop to argue concerning man’s natural state of
bondage. All we have to do to be thoroughly
gripped with the consciousness of. the fact that
man in his unregenerated state is in a state of
bondage is to look out around the history 7 of the
race. The -race of man as we see in history has
ever tendered toward the bad; man’s own history
'has proven that he was born in sin and shapen in
iniquity. But we do not need to go into the pages
of history. We need not look further than our
selves. Every man who knows himself at all
THE REDISCOVERED CHRIST
Tabernacle Sermon by Reb. Len G. Rroughton D. T).
Stenotraphically reported for The Golden Age. —Copyright applied for
The Golden Age for January 28, 1909.
knows that unrestrained by law or religion or
society he is tending over toward the bad. The
man who does not know that has not yet dis
covered himself. You know and I know that
without any sort of restraint thrown around us
we are tending ever towrad that which is sinful
and hurtful. Our tendency is downward.
It began in the Garden of Eden with our first
parents. In the beginning God and Adam walked
side by side. They complemented each other. God
was perfect and Adam was perfect with Him, but
the devil came in and broke this harmony between
God and man, and from that day until this all the
children of the race have had that tendency that
drives away from God and away from righteous
ness, away from truth. Jesus Christ came that
He might through His atoning death bring back
that which had been lost, that he might bring man
back into perfect harmony with the will and the
purpose of God, so that in Jesus Christ there is
that liberty, that freedom from the bondage of
inherited sin, that we all have grappled with in
our unregenerate state, but in Christ we are the
complements of God, complementing his holiness
and his perfection; not in our goodness, but in the
merit of Jesus Christ who has taken us unto Him
self and given us the standing that He has before
God the Father.
Never has another system been born like the
system of redemption born in the heart of God and
wrought out on this earth by the death of Jesus
Christ on Calvary’s Cross. How simple, and yet
how sublime; how magnificent. That lost world
was brought back to God; redeemed and given a
position side by side with the holiness and the per
fection of God, and all this is in and through the
substitutionary work of Jesus as He died in our
stead on the cross.
JESUS CHRIST—THE GOD-MAN.
I do not believe that we have properly preached
that truth. We have given ourselves to the
propagation of our theories and of our creeds, our
systems of belief, rather than inisisting, as we
stand face to face with the lost sinners, upon the
fact that in Christ as the great God personally
without creed or system that in Him and Him alone
there is salvation.
An old prince became greatly convicted of sin
and tried to get peace and failed, until finally he
wrought out as he thought a system of conduct as
near perfect as he could see, and then began to
bring his life up to the level of this great standard
which he had wrought out for the government of
his life, but still there came no peace. Finally
he became convinced that he could get no peace
unless he excluded himself entirely from the world,
and so he had dug for him a cave in a mountain
side and then had a chain forged abcmt his hand
and he had himself chained in this cave and he
gave orders that no one was to epme to him except
the one who was to bring him food and that only
twice a week.
But still he got no peace. All this time he felt
an indescribable longing for the voice of someone
who could speak peace to his heart. Finally while
he was in prayer, agonizing over his condition of
sin, he seemed to hear a gentle voice, saying, “Look
unto me and live,” and he said, “I looked and
beheld Jesus, and seeing Him, I saw —” when he
looked unto Jesus he saw what he could not pos
sibly express and so he simply ends his sentence by
saying, “Seeing Him, I saw.”
I believe that the thing that this world needs
today to save it from sin is preaching of simply
Jesus; Jesus Christ, the God-man. 'Sometimes I
almost wisht hat every creed in Christendom could
be destroyed and that -we could call together a new
set of men to write our creed, and I wish they
would put but one article in it and that is Jesus,
the God man.
But this freedom that Jesus speaks of is also
freedom of the mind; the intellect. We have
made a -great mistake and have lost a great deal
of valuable time in propagating the Christian faith
by supposing that the mind and the soul were
entirely removed from each other, when, as a
matter of fact, they cannot be removed front, each
other. The mind and the soul of man are as
intimately blended together as it is possible for
the divine conception to conceive of. We have
made a great mistake when we have imagined that
Jesus Christ did not have to do with the mind, but
merely with the heart, with the affection, with the
soul. Jesus Christ cannot have to do with the soul
and not have to do with the mind. When the
religion of Jesus Christ is understood it will be seen
to sharpen the whole intellect and quicken the dull
faculty as well as save the soul from sin. If you
wish for an example, come and stand by the shores
of Gennesaret and see that man as he comes
cutting himself with the stones in his pathway until
his blood flows; foaming at the mouth; his reason
departed, and as he comes in contact with Jesus,
Jesus the God-man, and as he speaks a word there ‘
comes into that man’s darkened intellect the light
of hope and at once he sees as never before.
Clothed and in his right mind we find him sitting
at the feet of Jesus, takng instructions from Christ
as to the future conduct of his life. My brethren,
I believe it is absolutely impossible to come into
personal, vital touch with Jesus and not have our
minds quickened, our intellects sharpened. I do
not mean that we will be enabled to read Greek
and Latin and work higher mathematics. That
does not constitute intellectuality. The intel
lectuality that I speak of is the result of this -
personal living and abiding and confidential touch
with Jesus Christ; it is the intellect that is enabled
to see and hear and understand, and understanding
to do as the world about us can never do.
FREEDOM OF INTELLECT.
I shall never forget a lad who was converted in
a meeting of mine who was an idiot and known all
over the community as such. When he * came
forward confessing Christ they smiled, and when
finally he presented hipiself to the church for
membership only three men in a membership of
over four hundred voted. But he had made up his
mind and into the church he came. It was noticed
afterwards that his intellect was brightening; the
Master began to reshape his brain cells and reform
his intellect; and today he is a bright and promising
light, a college graduate.
I have in mind another; a man who had never
seen a multiplication table. He came into personal,
living, confidential touch with Jesus Christ and he
received the Master’s touch and his mind leaped
by veritable bounds until, within less than twelve
months time he whs keeping books, though he had
never had a chance to go to school. If God has
given me any increased vision of late it has been
along this line. He has enabled me to see. that
Jesus, His son, though Himself in human flesh, is
the Master of all created things, and as the Master,
He deserves the right to rule and reign in every
department of man’s life.
But another thing let me say. This freedom is
not only a freedom of soul and a freedom that
brings salvation; a freedom that breaks shackles
that bind us to the things that gall and destroy;
not only a freedom of mind and intellect, but it is
a freedom of body. There is no question upon this
point that is at all admissible when we look into
the life of Jesus. As we trace those three years
of His life that are recorded we see that more than
half of the work of Jesus was done administering’
to the needs of the body and the man who today
leaves out the bodily side of the work of Jesus
leaves out more than half of the work that Jesus
did on earth.
See Him standing by the side of the man with
the withered arm, Ss speaks to him, and his
arm is healed. See Him as He speaks to the man
