He will teach us all to know ourselves as we have never known ourselves before. In His awful light, we shall see light (Psalm 36.9). We shall see ourselves. All of us – we shall see ourselves, not as we appear to others, not as we appear each to himself, in our self-indulgent thoughts, but as we are. The day for disguises, for false impressions, for half-truths which dare not be more, will have passed – passed beyond recall, passed forever.
Those who have really loved and served Jesus Christ amid misunderstanding and coldness, but with an inward sense of His loving presence which has made them indifferent to outward things, will, then, be seen as they are – saved amid imperfections, saved because robed in a righteousness which is not their own. When Christ, who is their life, shall appear, then will they also appear with Him in glory (Colossians 3.4). It will be their day of triumph over all the criticisms levelled at their presumed folly. It will be their day of recompense for all the humiliations and sufferings they have undergone.
But, not they only will be manifested in the light of Jesus Christ. “God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil” (Ecclesiastes 12.14).
All the sins which have been concealed through shame of discovery or through hypocrisy, all that has been forgotten, neglected, ignored, will start up before our eyes into vivid reality, as if memory has not grown weak, as if time had not passed since the moment of commission. Habits as well as acts, intentions as well as completed efforts, words as well as works, will reappear, each with a photographic distinctness, before our eyes, just as each was present to us at the very moment of conception or utterance or action, only illuminated as to its true character by a moral light which nothing can escape.
We shall try to take refuge, perhaps, in the “vain things which charm us most” here and now. But, they will, then, have ceased to charm. They, too, will be judged of by us as they are judged of now by God and His angels. Ambitions, reputations, titles, stations, possessions, which are now so much to us, will be nothing, then. These things were really weighed by Jesus Christ when He hung upon the cross of shame. It was a sentence – the crucifixion – solemnly passed on the whole outward life of man as being, relatively to his inward and eternal life, worthless. This is not understood now, except by a small minority. It will be as clear as the daylight to all at the Day of Judgment (Isaiah 2.12-17).
From: “The Last Judgment,” a sermon on Luke 21.27, from Advent in St. Paul’s: Sermons Bearing Chiefly on the Two Comings of Our Lord by H. P. Liddon; 1 volume edition (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1891), pp. 23-24. Sermon preached at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, England, on December 10, 1871.
H. P. Liddon (1829-1890), was Canon and Chancellor of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, and – with J. C. Ryle – was one of the best conservative Anglican preachers in England during the last half of the 19th century.
