April 10, 2010
RJB was a Christ-centered preacher. I include below selections from my notes on a sermon he preached around 1850 while he was pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Lexington, Kentucky. It was published in Elijah Wilson, The Living Pulpit: or Eighteen Sermons by Eminent Living Divines of the Presbyterian Church (Philadelphia: William S. & Alfred Martien, 1865).
His text was one of my favorites: “Christ, who is our life” Colossians 3:4. I’ll give you a few excerpts to show that R. J. Breckinridge, for all his faults, had a firm grasp on the gospel!
“The grand point of view in which we should habitually contemplate the Scriptures, is as a divine revelation of the only mode in which lost sinners can be saved. As a history…As a spiritual system…As a code of morals…As a source of support, of consolation, of peace, and of joy…it can avail us nothing, except as we receive its precepts, and accept its doctrines, and believe its statements, as one and the other bear directly upon the grand conception of the Gospel—salvation for lost sinners. Every thing short of this is little better than trifling with our own souls. Every thing inconsistent with this is little else than handling the word of God deceitfully.” (263-364)
“Amongst ten thousand other passages, my text is all alive with this precious Saviour, and this great salvation. To him as our life, and to the nature of the life we enjoy in him, in our spiritual, or mortal, and our eternal being, the apostle, in this passage, directs our thoughts…” (266)
Then RJB took them through a brief summary of the history of creation, fall and redemption, before showing three aspects of our life in Christ:
First, Everything else in scripture hinges on this new spiritual life created by the Spirit in our regeneration. Warns against low view of the Spirit, because “the life of God in the soul remains the fundamental necessity of every renewed heart, as it is the first and simplest element of practical Christianity.” (274-275) And Paul “does not content himself with saying, that we have a life derived from Christ, nor yet that Christ has bestowed on us a life essentially like his own; but he mounts to the loftiest height, and declares that Christ is himself our life! Christ is found in his people, the hope of glory. In receiving, accepting, and relying upon him, there is a lofty and hallowed sense in which they are nourished by him.” (275)
Second, it shows that the imputation of Christ’s righteousness is necessary (and the imputation of Adam’s sin). “you will perceive how absolutely our life depends on Christ, and how completely the whole scheme of the resurrection rests upon him and terminates in him. Since the fall, we are as essentially mortal as we are depraved.” (283) But in Christ, “Death and resurrection will produce on the bodies of the righteous a change so far analogous as is possible to the change wrought upon their souls by regeneration and sanctification.” (284)
Third, “Christ as the life of our eternal being. The Scriptures hardly recognize what we ordinarily call life, as an estate worthy of that name.” (286) God alone has life in himself – which is also in the Lord Jesus. Turns to the glorious resurrection of the just, and then the judgment of the just made perfect – not to ascertain whether they will be saved, nor worthy of eternal life-“for every one of them has already received it at the hands of Christ.” At this judgment all the good and ill of his life are revealed – and the glorified savior pronounces them blessed and welcome. And then the judgment of the unjust. (291)
RJB concludes his sermon by summarizing the rest of Colossians 3 in the light of this central truth. “We ought, says he, to seek those things which are above, and set our affections on them, and not on things on the earth; remembering that we are dead, and that our life is hid with Christ in God. We ought to mortify our members which are upon the earth; for the lack of doing which, we are prone to fall into those sins, for the sake of which the wrath of God cometh on the children of disobedience, and in which we once lived ourselves. But now, seeing that we have put off the old man, with his deeds, and have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him; we ought continually to shun all evil, and pursue all good; under the fixed and felt conviction, that to us Christ is all and in all.”
I am beginning to understand why Breckinridge was so well beloved by the congregations where he preached, and by the young men who studied under him (whether at Jefferson College in 1845-1847, or at Danville Theological Seminary in 1853-1869). As a preacher he always sought to hold forth Christ. He once commented that he preferred not to divide the “exposition” from the “application” but tried to weave the two together.
