Taken with editing from Ambrose’s work, Looking Unto Jesus. Ambrose (1604-1664) was an English Puritan.
The most excellent subject to speak or write of is Jesus Christ. Augustine, having read Cicero’s works, commended them for their eloquence, but he passed this sentence on them: “They are not sweet, because the name of Jesus is not in them”. And Bernard said nearly the same: “If thou writest, it doth not relish with me, unless I read Jesus there; if thou disputest or conferrest, it doth not relish well with me, unless Jesus sound there”. Indeed all we say is but unsavoury, if it be not seasoned with this salt. Paul says, “I determined not to know anything among you save Jesus Christ and Him crucified”. He resolved with himself, before he preached among the Corinthians, that this should be the only point of knowledge that he would profess himself to have skill in, and that in the course of his ministry he would labour to bring them to. This he made “the breadth, and length, and depth, and height” of his knowledge: yea, doubtless, says he, “I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord” (Eph 3:18, Phil 3:8).
An ancient Roman orator.
A twelfth-century cleric.
In this knowledge of Christ, there is an excellence above all other knowledge in the world; there is nothing more pleasing and comfortable, more animating and enlivening, more ravishing and soul contenting. Only Christ is the sum and centre of all divine revealed truths; we can preach nothing else as the object of our faith, as the necessary element of your souls’ salvation, which does not some way or other either meet in Christ, or refer to Christ; only Christ is the whole of man’s happiness, the Sun to enlighten him, the Physician to heal him, the Wall of fire to defend him, the Friend to comfort him, the Pearl to enrich him, the Ark to support him, the Rock to sustain him under the heaviest pressures, “as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest, as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land” (Is 32:2). Only Christ is that ladder between earth and heaven, the Mediator between God and man, a mystery which the angels of heaven desire to pry and peep and look into (1 Pet 1:12).
Here is a blessed subject indeed; who would not be glad to pry into it, to be acquainted with it? “This is life eternal, that they might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent” (Jn 17:3). Come then, let us look on this Sun of righteousness: we cannot receive harm but good by such a look; indeed by looking long on the natural sun we may have our eyes dazzled and our faces blackened; but by looking unto Jesus Christ, we shall have our eyes clearer and our faces fairer; if “the light of the eyes rejoiceth the heart” (Prov 15:30). How much more, when we have such a blessed object to look upon? As Christ is more excellent than all the world, so this sight transcends all other sights; it is the epitome of a Christian’s happiness, the quintessence of evangelical duties: ‘looking unto Jesus’.”