The Halo of Christ's Second Coming

Some people lay great emphasis on Christ’s second coming, and any of you who may know the halo with which it edged the character of the late Dr. Andrew Bonar will not need to have it proved to you how much this can affect Christian life. An intimate friend of Mr. Moody, the evangelist, told me he once heard him say that he had never known any one greatly blessed in his kind of work who was not greatly under the influence of this doctrine.

There are some extravagances connected with the doctrine of the second coming which make it difficult to some minds — and I confess to being one myself — to rest upon it. But there is one feature of our Lord’s second coming, at all events, about which no one could have any doubt.

He is the Judge of man and He is coming to wind up the affairs of this present dispensation and appoint men their station and degree in eternity according to their deeds. Now, I say, that ought to be one of the powerful motives of Christian life and Christian work. I daresay many of you remember a passage in the Epistle of St. Paul where he is discoursing on the motives of Christian work and he places this before them all, “We must all appear before the judgement-seat of Christ; that everyone may receive the things done in his body according to what he hath done, whether it be good or bad.”

What did he mean? He was thinking first of all of his own accountability. At the judgement-seat he would have to give an account of the charge put in his hands; but it seems to me that he was thinking more of those to whom he was preaching.

They would be there on the Judgement Day, and they might turn and accuse him to his face, “If you had been more faithful, if you had not spared yourself, if you had urged us more powerfully and lovingly, we might not have been here in this condemnation.” Is there anyone who knows salvation himself and has the opportunity of making it known to others to whom that ought not to be a powerful motive ? Well, my hearers, these are the three ways, I think, of thinking about Christ — as the Christ who was, the Christ who is, and the Christ who is to be; the Christ of Palestine, the Christ in Heaven, the Christ in the new Heaven and the new earth.