“And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets.” – Zechariah 8:5

” These men of old, these prophets, how they toiled and strove, how they entered into every department of human life with their messages and their fire, and inspiration, and daring and suffering and blood. What matters it if they never saw the city, if they saw it from afar? They set their faces toward it and died in faith, not having received the promises, and yet the promises would be much longer postponed if they had not so suffered and toiled, and had not to striven.” – G. Campbell Morgan

I stumbled across a gem of a sermon from G. Campbell Morgan as I was doing some work on other things this morning, looking through some dusty volumes of his sermons, and had to share. The sermon is called The Children’s Playground in the City of God and presents a wonderful picture of the City of God from Zechariah 8:5 and how and why Christians should strive to bring it about in our own contexts.

Morgan asks, “what would the city look like where boys and girls could play freely together in the streets?” In the City of God, the playground is the streets. In this city, the children play, and Morgan suggests that true play leads to Godly work. The kind of work that is full of passion and laughter.

He also notes that boys and girls will play together in purity and holiness, with the strength of manhood strengthening womanhood and the refinement of womanhood refining manhood. We likely just lost our feminist audience, as if there was one to begin with, but Morgan is spot on from a biblical perspective, which is what we’re concerned with.

His next point is that, in this city, there are no evil influences on the streets to pollute young life. Children are protected and evil is stifled so that is has no place, even in the dark alleys of the city. Morgan declares with biblical faithfulness and boldness foreign to the sensitive mouths of modern, effeminate preachers, “In the City of the King the dictum of Jesus will be in operation and the man who is found causing a little child to offend will have a millstone hung about his neck, and will be drowned in the depth of the sea, while angels rejoice.”

He also makes clear that, not only will the streets be fit for the children, the children will be fit for the streets. The children will be raised in God fearing, Christ exalting homes with parents who bring them up in the love and discipline of the Lord.

Finally, Morgan declares that, though the Millennial reality of this city is far off, the church is to strive to institute the City of God here now, to labor to make this vision a reality in our world. Morgan scoffs at the notion that the drug dealer and the pornographer and the gang leaders be left alone. It is the responsibility of the church to, as cited in the quote above, enter into every department of human life with the message of Jesus Christ and His Lordship over the earth.

Morgan declares that this begins by making Christ Lord of your home (where he is already Lord anyway). We are to set the Millennium up in our own home, to strive for it as a present reality. Every home dedicated to the idea of the Lordship of Jesus Christ over all areas of life is a contribution towards building God’s city. But we cannot stop there, we must press boldly on.

He concludes, “In a few years, at least the majority of us will have gone out to the great Beyond, but let us do something. Let us, at any rate, come to close grips with the devil. Let us leave the impress of our fingers somewhere on him, or else let us be ashamed to look into the face of Jesus Christ when the day breaks and the shadows flee away.

When that day breaks, will we be wearing bloody armor and the stench of sulfur, or will we be cloistered in our rooms with our little lamps, trying to keep out the darkness?

Read the Entire Sermon Here

“…it is a time in which the gospel will be spread over the whole earth, and cordially be embraced both by Jews and Gentiles; when these prophesies will be fulfilled which speak of the cessation of wars – of the stone cut out without hands becoming a great mountain and filling the whole earth – of the little leaven leavening the whole lump – of the knowledge of the Lord covering the earth as the waters cover the sea…and of the kingdom and dominion, and the greatness of the kingdom, under the whole heaven, being given to the people of the saints of the Most High [1].”

[1] Fuller, Andrew. “Exposition of the Apocalypse.” The Works of Andrew Fuller. Banner of Truth. Pg. 476