“But if our Gospel is hidden, it is hidden to those who are lost.”
The business of the Christian minister is to preach this Good News, to publish to the sinners the glad tidings that there is a Savior, to point the guilty to Christ and to be constantly saying to each individual sinner, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved.” I care not what may be the learning or eloquence of the minister, though he may speak with the tongue of men and angles, if he does not preach Christ and bid sinners trust in Him, he has mistaken his mission and missed the grand objective for which he was sent! This Gospel is called in the text “our Gospel.” By this expression I understand that the minister must accept it for himself before he can hold it out to others. I am myself to look to Jesus as my own personal Savior—and then I am to cry to others, “Look unto Him, and be you saved, all the ends of the earth.” I must be able to say—“I came to Jesus, and I drank Of that life-giving stream— and then, but not till then, I am to cry, “Ho, everyone that thirsts, come you to the waters.” What a miserable wretch must he be who preaches to others a Gospel in which he has, himself, no share! He spreads the table and invites others to come to the feast, while he, himself, is starving! He is like a plague-stricken physician who knows the remedy for the dis- ease and sees others cured by it, yet dies with the remedy in his hand. Ah me, of all the portions, that must be most dread- ful in the world to come, as well as most uncomfortable in this present life! Surely it must be the portion of the man who preaches to others what he has never experienced in his own soul. Paul might well call it “our Gospel,” for it had saved him, the chief of sinners, and made him a beloved Apostle of Jesus Christ. He might well call it “our Gospel” for he had held it fast in time of persecution and amid all the perils to which he had been exposed—and he was, at last, to give his life as a sacrifice for it! And it must be “our Gospel,” too, “to have and to hold,” or else we cannot preach it with any power!
In the verse following our text, something more is said about the Gospel—it is there called “the glorious Gospel.” There was something in it that aroused and inflamed the Apostle ’s noblest thoughts. Paul was no boaster. “God forbid that I should glory,” he said—but there was one exception—“save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” He did not stand up as a mere apologist for the Gospel, or say, “I can defend it against all comers and maintain that it is reasonable,” but he gloried in it as the best and highest Truth of God—as wiser than all the Stoic’s wisdom and more full of joy than all the Epicurean’s pleasure! He gloried in that Gospel which brings full and free forgiveness to the penitent! That Gospel which takes the meanest and basest of mankind and makes them princes in the court of the King of kings! That Gospel which comes to men in poverty, in slavery, in the degradation of superstition, idolatry and crime—and lifts them up out of the horrible pit and the miry clay, sets their feet upon the Rock of Ages, cleanses them, clothes them, puts a new song into their mouth, preserves them from falling and, at last, brings them where they shall see the face of God and dwell forever in His Presence! It is, indeed, a glorious Gospel which can do all this! Yet, alas, the most of men are like the rooster on the dunghill who, when he found a pearl, said that he would sooner have found a grain of barley—they think more of their corn and their wine, their feasts and their mirth, than they do of the inexpressibly glorious things of the Kingdom of Heaven. Oh, that they were wise enough to perceive the glories of this glorious Gospel!
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