My text in its former part says, They desire a better country, that is, a heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God.' If Abraham, instead of stopping under the oak tree at Mamre, had gone down into Sodom with Lot, and taken up his quarters there; or if he had become a naturalised citizen of Hebron, and struck up alliances with the children of Heth, would the Sodomites or the Hebronites or the Hittites have thought any the better of him therefor? As long as he kept apart from them, he witnessed to the promise, and God looked upon him and blessed him. But if, professing to lo0k for the city which hath the foundations,' he had not been content to dwell in tabernacles, God would have been ashamed of him to be called his God.
Translate that into plain English, and it is this. As long as Christian people live like pilgrims and strangers, they are worthy of being called God's, and God is glad to be called theirs. And as long as they do so, the world will know a religious man when it sees him, and, though it may not like him, it will at least respect him. But a secularised Church or individuals who say that they are Christians, and who have precisely the same estimates of good and evil as the world has, and live by the same maxims, and pursue the same aims, and never lift their eyes to look at the City beyond the river, these are a disgrace to God and to themselves, and to the religion which they say they profess.
I cannot but feel--and feel, I think, in growing degree--that one main clause of the woful feebleness of our average Christianity is that our hopes and visions of the City which hath the foundations have become dim, and that, to a very large extent, the thoughts of the rest that remaineth for the people of God' is dormant in the minds of the mass of professing Christian people.
Oh, dear friends! if we will yield to that sweet, strong appeal that is made to us in the name, and, feeling that God is ours and we are His, will turn our hearts and thoughts more than, alas! we have done, to that blessed hope, Jesus will not be ashamed to call us brethren, nor God be ashamed to be called our God. Let us beware that we are not ashamed to be called His, nor to declare plainly that we seek a country.'
