Below is a sermon preached by Thomas Chalmers after the Disruption of 1843. Listen to the audio here; and a PDF of the sermon may be found below. Let confessional Presbyterians once again roll up their sleeves and build the walls of Zion!
* * * *
THE OUTWARD BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE OF GOD
Thomas Chalmers, D.D.
A sermon preached at the opening of the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, holden at Glasgow, 17th October, 1843. Third edition. Glasgow: William Collins, South Frederick St., 1843.
Nehemiah xi. 16.
“And Shabbethai and Jozabad, of the chief of the Levites, had the oversight of the outward business of the house of God.”
The outward business of the house of God is of chief necessity and importance at the commencement of a Church, or at some of those great changes and enlargements which it is often made to undergo. At the outset of the Jewish Church, beside the regulations for the maintenance of the priesthood and distribution of the various offices, we read much of the time and labour expended on the structure of the tabernacle. The same thing might be observed on the occasion of great enlargements, or revivals, or deliverances—as at the rearing and successive great repairs of the temple in Jerusalem; and more noticeably still in the doings of Ezra and Nehemiah, on their return from their captivity, and the re-establishment both of their national and sacred polity. At the commencement, too, of the Christian Church, he who was the most gifted of its apostles—though pre-eminently a man of faith and prayer, and perhaps the most conversant among them in the vitalities of that high and hidden walk which constitutes the new obedience of the Gospel—still did he busy himself most of all with the matters of a mere external regulation, as journeys and collections, and the various questions of Church government and Church order. And descending from these primitive to later and uninspired times, where shall we find a more striking exemplification of the same union, than among the fathers of our own Church? We mean the devotedness of their piety as combined with the varied and profound wisdom of their economics. Had their conceptions all been realised, on the subject of schools and colleges, and a provision for the poor, as well as the various parts and offices of our great ecclesiastical institute, never, perhaps, was a more goodly apparatus devised, not for the Christian instruction alone, but for the moral, nay for the civil and secular well-being of the people in any land. Though these conceptions were not realised, though they were frustrated by the resistance of men in power, and by the unprincipled rapacity of the nobles in these days—this should not prevent us from doing homage to the conceptions themselves, as having been fraught with all the wisdom of experience, and of profoundest skill in the management, we could even say the philosophy of human affairs.
(more…)
“The Bible rescues the cause [of benevolence] from the mischief to which a heedless or unthinking sensibility would expose it. It brings it under the cognizance of a higher faculty— a faculty of steadier operation than to be weary in well-doing, and of sturdier endurance than to give it up in disgust. It calls you to consider the poor. It makes the virtue of relieving them a matter of computation as well as of sentiment; and, in so doing, it puts you beyond the reach of the various delusions, by which you are at one time led to prefer the indulgence of pity to the substantial interest of its object; at another, are led to retire chagrined and disappointed from the scene of duty, because you have not met with the gratitude or the honesty that you laid your account with; at another, are led to expend all your anxieties upon the accommodation of time, and to overlook eternity It is the office of consideration to save you from all these fallacies.”
