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The sermon presents Christ as the center of divine consolation because He entered human suffering, bore sin on the cross, rose victorious, ascended to the Father, and will return in glory. Comfort is grounded not in human virtue or changing circumstances but in Christ’s finished and accepted sacrifice and His unchanging person. The invitation is broad and urgent: self-righteous people must relinquish confidence in their works, while sinners and backsliders may come to Christ exactly as they are. Faith receives Christ’s promise that no one who comes to Him will be cast out.
Theological center: Christ’s complete saving work—from eternal covenant and incarnation through crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and return—is the believer’s unfailing consolation.
Applications: Trust Christ’s Finished Work · Come to Christ As You Are · Trust Christ Without Delay · Consider Christ’s Whole Pathway
Primary texts: Philippians 2:1 · Acts 1:9 · 1 Corinthians 15:20
“If there be therefore any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels and mercy.” Philippians 2:1 THE language of man has received a new coinage of words since the time of his perfection in Eden. Adam could scarcely have understood the word consolation, for the simple reason that he did not understand in Eden the meaning of the word sorrow. O how has our language been swollen through the floods of our griefs and tribulations! It was not sufficiently wide and wild for man when he was driven out of the garden into the wide, wide world. After he had once eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, as his knowledge was extended so must the language be by which he could express his thoughts and feelings. But my hearers, when Adam first needed the word consolation, there was a time when he could not find the fair jewel itself. Until that hour when the first promise was uttered, when the seed of the woman was declared as being the coming man who should bruise the serpent’s head. Adam might masticate and digest the word sorrow, but he could never season and flavor it with the hope or thought of consolation. Or if the hope and thought might sometimes flit across his mind like a lightning flash in the midst of the tempest’s dire darkness, yet it must have been too transient, too unsubstantial to have made glad his heart, or to soothe his sorrows. Consolation is the dropping of a gentle dew from heaven on desert hearts beneath. True consolation, such as can reach the heart, must be one of the choicest gifts of divine mercy. And surely, we are not erring from sacred Scripture when we avow that in its full meaning, consolation can be found nowhere save in Christ, who has come down from heaven, and who has again ascended to heaven, to provide strong and everlasting consolation for those whom He has bought with His blood. You will remember, my dear friends, that the Holy Spirit, during the present dispensation, is revealed to us as the Comforter. It is the Spirit’s business to console and cheer the hearts of God’s people. He does convince of sin, He does illuminate and instruct, but still the main part of His business lies in making glad the hearts of the renewed, in confirming the weak, and lifting up all those who are bowed down. Whatever the Holy Ghost may not be, He is evermore the Comforter to the church, and this age is peculiarly the dispensation of the Holy Spirit, in which Christ cheers us not by His presence, as He shall do by and by, but by the indwelling and constant abiding of the Holy Ghost the Comf…