2 Corinthians 3:1-5 Do we begin again to commend ourselves? or need we, as some others, letters of commendation to you… An "epistle" is a letter. "Epistle" is a word formed from the Greek; "letter" from the Latin. "Epistle" does not occur in the English Old Testament; there is always "letter," or (quite as often and quite as correctly), in the plural form, "letters." "An epistle of Christ," then, is "a letter of (from) Christ." We do not possess any letter of Jesus Christ's. There was a spurious correspondence, known to the early Church, between Christ and a prince of Mesopotamia, who applied to Him for help in sickness, but it was a forgery. Indeed, by the nature of the case it must have been so, for there were no Christians in Mesopotamia till Christ Himself was gone back to heaven. The nearest approach to an actual epistle of Christ is found in the addresses to the seven Churches in the Book of Revelation. The text was suggested to me by the occasion. We are welcoming this afternoon to the mother church of the diocese a large company of men whose every-day life connects them with the postal service of the country. It seems natural to inquire whether there is anything about your work in the Bible. There is more about it there than you might suppose. A Concordance will present a somewhat full record under the heads of Epistle, Letter, and Letters. Many of the entries are sad and sorrowful ones. The first (I think) of all is that fatal letter of King David to his unworthy confidant, Joab, about Uriah. See there what a letter may have in it — a cruel and treacherous edict of murder. And the next in order is like it. It is the letter of the wicked queen Jezebel to the elders of Jezreel about Naboth. But let it just show us what you may be carrying in that sacred budget of the daily letters. Let it give an element of awe, of solemnity, to the daily ministration. There may be corruption in that bundle, and you may be innocent of it. Soon after we come to the threatening letter of Sennacherib. Momentous issues hang upon that daily stamping, sorting, delivering. Issues, not all of evil-some of eternal good, to give an expected, a blessed end. Three centuries ago there was no post-office in England. Why, indeed, should there be, when so few people could write? People dwelt apart, managed their own little dwellings, cared not for news of their country's welfare or their country's relations with foreign countries, bought and sold in their own little hamlets. London and Edinburgh were a week apart as to tidings of battles or revolutions. Thus the world vegetated, thus the world slept. I will bid you to think but of three of the departments of life to which you, in the exercise of a laborious and often depressing service, minister. 1. Think of it in its business aspect. What would happen if that daily sorting and stamping and carrying were but for one day intermitted? Why, the wheels of the world would be stopped by its stoppage. 2. Think of it in its family aspect. Communications passing week by week between the home and the schoolboy son, or the servant son, or the sailor or soldier son, or the colonist son, or the exile son for fault or no fault of his. You, you are ministering to these sweetest and most beautiful instincts of nature as you tread your weary round. 3. Its business aspect and its family aspect. Has not your work yet one more — its religious, its Christian, its Christlike aspect? Oh, the influence breathed by letters upon solitary, straying, tempted lives! I do not think it is always the religious letter — strictly so called and ostentatiously so labelled — which does this work of works. No; there are letters — from mother, from sister, from brother, from friend — which even name not the name of God, and yet do Him service in the heart's heart of the receiver. I need not here warn any one against corrupting by letters. "A curious thought strikes me," Dr. Johnson said, a century and more ago, to his biographer — "a curious thought strikes me — we shall receive no letters in the grave." Yes, this is one of the thoughts which make the state beyond death so bare and blank to our conception. "No letters?" Then no information (is it so?) as to the state of the survivors — their health and wealth, their prosperity or adversity, their marriages and deaths, their joys and sorrows, their falls and risings again. "We shall receive no letters in the grave." Then let us so live as not to miss them. Let us have a life quite within and above, quite independent of, and extraneous to, the life of earth and time. Let us have so read and so written our letters, while we can, as to have no remorse for them in the world beyond death. (Dean Vaughan.) Parallel Verses KJV: Do we begin again to commend ourselves? or need we, as some others, epistles of commendation to you, or letters of commendation from you? |
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