THE PREACHER'S THEME
Preach the Cross, then, as God's all-sufficient answer to man's perpetual question, "How can I win salvation? How can I achieve self-conquest?" There are people in all our congregations to-day asking that question, just as Saul of Tarsus asked it in the lecture-room of Gamaliel, as Luther asked it in the monastery at Erfurt, as John Wesley asked it in the Holy Club at Oxford. Laboriously these men hewed out (to use Jeremiah's figure) their broken cisterns, toiling to store up their good works and creditable achievements, their charities, austerities and penances. But for Saul and Luther and Wesley the day came when their question "How shall I win salvation?" was answered from the throne of God. And the answer was, "You can't! Take it at the Cross for nothing, or not at all" "I have gotten me Christ," cried Donald Cargill in the hour of his execution, "and Christ hath gotten me the victory!"
But it is the whole human situation, not simply the plight of the individual, which the Cross transforms. Let no one, listening to your preaching, have any doubt that when we Christians say that the dark demonic powers which leave their dreadful trail of devastation across the world are ultimately less powerful than Jesus, we really mean it—just as the early disciples meant it when they declared that Christ had raided the realm of Satan and broken the fast-bound chains of hell. If there are professing Christians to-day who do not see the relevance of the Gospel to the desperate situation of this tortured world, it can only
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