“ … I must remind you of the gospel that I preached to you; the gospel which you received,

on which you have taken your stand, and which is now bringing you salvation.

Do you hold fast the gospel as I preached it to you?”

(I Corinthians 15:1-2)

I remember standing in the Library of Louisville Seminary when I was a student there and looking at a new book on the shelf. I remember the title was, And the Life Everlasting and the author’s name was John Baillie. I had heard some of my fellow students and some of the faculty discuss the book. I had been intrigued by what they said. I intended to read that book.

But somehow, I never got around to it while in was in Seminary. I became interested in other things. Other books claimed my attention. When I got out of Seminary I became so involved in the struggle for the coming of the Kingdom of God into the lives of people now that my interest in the life beyond death, though a part of my Christian faith, faded far into the background of my consciousness.

Years later, at a ministers’ conference I met Dr. John Baillie, and I remembered that book of his on The Life Everlasting. I heard Dr. Baillie lecture at that conference and was attracted to his scholarship. I bought and read some of the other books he had written, but not The Life Everlasting.

Later still, after coming to Memphis, I was privileged to see and hear Dr. Baillie again on his last visit to the States. He was ill and thin and worn and his skin was like wrinkled parchment, but his mind was like a rapier. That was just before he went back to Scotland to die.

Again my thoughts returned to that volume he had written which first introduced his name to me. Not long afterward a friend gave me that book, so at last Baillie’s book, And the Life Everlasting, was on a shelf in my study. But it stayed there unopened.

Then finally, one day, when driven by personal losses and the need for carrying on my ministry; by the change and decay I saw all around me in the structures and institutions of our contemporary society, I was driven to that book and I read it. Then it’s exposition of scripture, its comprehensive survey of worldwide anthropology, its deep philosophical reasoning, its sifting of the historical facts of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, pressed into my thoughts and into my convictions, influencing what I said and did, even to the point of forming the character of my relationships.

Toward the close of his first Corinthian letter St. Paul asked his fellow Christians a question: “What have you done with the gospel that was preached to you?” This question of Paul’s reminds me of my long and checkered relationship with the Baillie book. For from the hurried summary Paul gives of that gospel which he had preached to the Corinthians it is abundantly clear that it was essentially the resurrection gospel.

1. H. Dodd says that this brief synopsis Paul gives of his preaching in I Corinthians 15 is really the outline of all the earliest apostolic preaching. He introduces it by the set phrase customarily employed for denoting traditional material: “I have delivered unto you that which I also had received — that Christ was crucified for our sins, that He died and was buried, that He rose from the dead and was seen by over 500 persons — all trustworthy witnesses. These are facts of the gospel I preached unto you. And the significance for you is that by this unprecedented event God has raised him from the dead to become the first of a new order of humanity whom God is bringing into being through the power of an endless life He has let loose in the world.”

I think it not amiss for us to raise for ourselves on this Sunday after Easter this same question Paul asked his Corinthian Christian friends: “What have you done with this gospel which was preached unto you?”

Too often, I fear, we’ve done with the resurrection gospel what I was doing with the Baillie book on The Life Everlasting.

First, for most of us, comes fascination with the wonder of the resurrection gospel. Every Easter Sunday crowds flock into the churches. The triumphant church music, the colorful pageantry and the messages of hope thrill our hearts, but for many it is only a brief fascination. The high festival of Easter Sunday with its record attendance is followed by low Sunday with the poorest attendance of the whole year.

If fascination is the first human response to the resurrection gospel, then the second is forgetfulness and neglect. People become engrossed with all the other interesting things this life affords. They soon forget.

Too often the third step is rejection of the gospel’s message. The hard facts of life where we live out our days deny the hope proclaimed in the gospel message. How can such things be — that the dead shall rise — when we see our dearest and fairest go down to death.

And we have seen so many people angered and repulsed by the church’s preoccupation with life beyond the grave because they believe it has been this very doctrine of rewards beyond this vale of tears which has made the church insensitive to human suffering in this life or too timid to attack its obvious wrongs. Some have even branded the Christian belief in life beyond the grave a pernicious doctrine preached for the express purpose of anesthetizing the poor and the oppressed so they will patiently endure a life of woe now in hope of emerging into a better life beyond.

What have we done with the gospel of the resurrection? People have alternately been fascinated by it, and forgetful of it. They have rejected it as impossible in a scientific age; they have even been repulsed by its eclipsing the harder, nobler way of building a better world. These are some of the things people have always been doing with the resurrection gospel.

But there remains the best thing that people may do with the resurrection gospel, we may build our life in faith upon its invincible hope. In seeking to size up a new acquaintance we often ask: “Where do you live?” For if we know where a person lives: in the city or the country; in the suburbs or the ghetto, it tells us something about his economic and social status. But the question, “Where do you live,” is not only a geographical question. It can be a moral and ethical and spiritual question. Where do you really live? What are the environs of your spiritual situation? Do you live this side of Easter? Have you held fast the resurrection gospel that was preached to you?

St. Paul told those Corinthian Christians that if they had not held fast the gospel that was preached unto them they were still in their sins. If they had built their lives upon the gospel then they were raised already to the new life that Christ brings. To the Colossian Christians Paul wrote:

“If you are then risen with Christ, reach out for the highest gifts of heaven where your Master reigns in power. Give your heart to the heavenly things, not to the passing things of earth. For as far as the world is concerned you are already dead and your true life is a hidden one in Christ … Insofar, then, as you have to live upon this earth, consider yourselves dead to worldly contacts: have nothing to do with sexual immorality, dirty mindedness, uncontrolled desires, and the lust for other people’s goods … But now, put all these things behind you … In this new person of God’s design there is no distinction between Greek and Hebrew, Jew or Gentile, foreigner or savage, slave or free man, male or female. Christ is all that matters, for Christ lives in them all.”

The alarmingly rapid rate of increase in drug addiction, especially among the young, has sickened and frightened all thinking Americans. What is to be done? We pinned our hope early on education. Just get the facts of the danger and the damage of drug abuse before our young people and they will turn from this destroyer, so we thought. But now it seems that the faster the crash education program moves the more young people succumb to the ravages of drugs. Why?

Some studies of our culture suggests that what America has been experiencing for a couple of decades is a flight from reason, such as Europeans experienced in the 15^th and 16^th century when the plague was destroying millions and people were turning eagerly to unreason just because it offered an escape from the intolerable, most realistic, fear of death. Madness was preferable, “more attractive to 16^th century man than the ugly reality of a life that necessarily ended in death.”

So the parallel has been drawn in our time between the atomic destruction that began in Hiroshima, the atrocities of Vietnam, the growing fears of population explosion, air and water pollution, the ceaseless race and class warfare and the sterility and boredom of our affluent society. So people argue today that if reason produced our kind of a world, they prefer unreason. What they want is a way to escape because of the unpleasantness of existence, to blow their minds — so education and all reasonable appeals will fail to woo them away from the nirvana of drugs and unbridled sex — natural or perverted.

What can be done? Why, introduce them to a new world of reality where there is a new spiritual situation — a new address for living. On the walls of the salt mines in North Africa, where first century Christians, enslaved because of their faith, were sent to labor all their days in perpetual darkness, are carved the word: “ Vita” — “Life,” over and over in large, deep letters, still discernable to this day — “Vita, Vita, Vita.” In the most confining and debasing of circumstances these poor prisoners had found a mysterious resource that transformed their existence. It was the new life that comes through a relationship of faith and trust and obedience to the resurrected living Christ.

In a novel I’m reading a young American soldier — a hero of the Korean War — finds the strength to survive the loneliness, cruelty, and torture of two years imprisonment through reading and memorizing the words from his pocket New Testament. And his friends, who observed the manner of his daily life among them thereafter described his calm, brave, compassionate integrity by saying: “Michael is an unleaning tower … Michael McGuire does not have a conscience — he is a conscience.” From his meditations on the gospel the mind and love of Christ became incarnate in him.

It is the problems of the future that increasingly press in upon the souls of people today and drive them to despair. The threat of atomic destruction, of communist conquests, of inflation, pollution, population explosion and the depletion of vital resources, and all the myriad uncertainties that plague our days.

It is the Christian theology of the future which deals with these problems, not just in terms of what people need and want, but with the added dimension of what God has revealed in Jesus Christ raised from the dead as the standard by which the future is to be judged and completed.

Can we with the whole church affirm: “I believe in the life everlasting?” What have we really done with the gospel that has been preached unto us? Have we let it become the spiritual locale in which we really live and move and have our being?