EXPOSITIONS OF
HOLY SCRIPTURE

ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D. D., Litt. D.

SECOND CORINTHIANS,
GALATIANS,
AND PHILIPPIANS

CHAPTERS I TO END

COLOSSIANS, THESSALONIANS,
AND FIRST TIMOTHY

EXPOSITIONS OF
HOLY SCRIPTURE

ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D. D., Litt. D.

SECOND CORINTHIANS

Chaps. VII to End

GALATIANS AND
PHILIPPIANS

[v]

CONTENTS

[1]

II. CORINTHIANS

HOPE AND HOLINESS

It is often made a charge against professing Christians
that their religion has very little to do with common
morality. The taunt has sharpened multitudes of
gibes and been echoed in all sorts of tones: it is very
often too true and perfectly just, but if ever it is, let
it be distinctly understood that it is not so because of
Christian men’s religion but in spite of it. Their
bitterest enemy does not condemn them half so emphatically
as their own religion does: the sharpest censure
of others is not so sharp as the rebukes of the New
Testament. If there is one thing which it insists upon
more than another, it is that religion without morality
is nothing—that the one test to which, after all, every
man must submit is, what sort of character has he and
how has he behaved—is he pure or foul? All high-flown
pretension, all fervid emotion has at last to face
the question which little children ask, ‘Was he a good
man?’

The Apostle has been speaking about very high and
mystical truths, about all Christians being the temple
of God, about God dwelling in men, about men and
women being His sons and daughters; these are the[2]
very truths on which so often fervid imaginations
have built up a mystical piety that had little to do
with the common rules of right and wrong. But Paul
keeps true to the intensely practical purpose of his
preaching and brings his heroes down to the prosaic
earth with the homely common sense of this far-reaching
exhortation, which he gives as the fitting
conclusion for such celestial visions.

I. A Christian life should be a life of constant self-purifying.

This epistle is addressed to the church of God which
is at Corinth with all the saints which are in all Achaia.

Looking out over that wide region, Paul saw
scattered over godless masses a little dispersed company
to each of whom the sacred name of Saint
applied. They had been deeply stained with the vices
of their age and place, and after a black list of criminals
he had had to say to them ‘such were some of you,’
and he lays his finger on the miracle that had changed
them and hesitates not to say of them all, ‘But ye are
washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in
the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our
God.’

The first thing, then, that every Christian has is a
cleansing which accompanies forgiveness, and however
his garment may have been ‘spotted by the flesh,’ it
is ‘washed and made white in the blood of the Lamb.’
Strange cleansing by which black stains melt out of
garments plunged in red blood! With the cleansing
of forgiveness and justification comes, wherever they
come, the gift of the Holy Spirit—a new life springing
up within the old life, and untouched by any contact
with its evils. These gifts belong universally to the
initial stage of the Christian life and require for[3]
their possession only the receptiveness of faith. They
admit of no co-operation of human effort, and to
possess them men have only to ‘take the things that
are freely given to them of God.’ But of the subsequent
stages of the Christian life, the laborious and
constant effort to develop and apply that free gift is
as essential as, in the earliest stage, it is worse than
useless. The gift received has to be wrought into the
very substance of the soul, and to be wrought out in
all the endless varieties of life and conduct. Christians
are cleansed to begin with, but they have still daily to
cleanse themselves: the leaven is hid in the three
measures of meal, but ”tis a life-long task till the
lump be leavened,’ and no man, even though he has the
life that was in Jesus within him, will grow up ‘into
the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ’
unless, by patient and persistent effort, he is ever
pressing on to ‘the things that are before’ and daily
striving to draw nearer to the prize of his high calling.
We are cleansed, but we have still to cleanse ourselves.

Yet another paradox attaches to the Christian life,
inasmuch as God cleanses us, but we have to cleanse
ourselves. The great truth that the spirit of God in
a man is the fontal source of all his goodness, and that
Christ’s righteousness is given to us, is no pillow on
which to rest an idle head, but should rather be a
trumpet-call to effort which is thereby made certain of
success. If we were left to the task of self-purifying
by our own efforts we might well fling it up as impossible.
It is as easy for a man to lift himself from
the ground by gripping his own shoulders as it is for
us to rise to greater heights of moral conduct by our
own efforts; but if we can believe that God gives the[4]
impulse after purity, and the vision of what purity is,
and imparts the power of attaining it, strengthening
at once our dim sight and stirring our feeble desires
and energising our crippled limbs, then we can ‘run
with patience the race that is set before us.’

We must note the thoroughness of the cleansing
which the Apostle here enjoins. What is to be got rid
of is not this or that defect or vice, but ‘all filthiness
of flesh and spirit.’ The former, of course, refers
primarily to sins of impurity which in the eyes of the
Greeks of Corinth were scarcely sins at all, and the
latter to a state of mind when fancy, imagination, and
memory were enlisted in the service of evil. Both are
rampant in our day as they were in Corinth. Much
modern literature and the new gospel of ‘Art for Art’s
sake’ minister to both, and every man carries in himself
inclinations to either. It is no partial cleansing
with which Paul would have us to be satisfied: ‘all‘
filthiness is to be cast out. Like careful housewives
who are never content to cease their scrubbing while
a speck remains upon furniture, Christian men are to
regard their work as unfinished as long as the least
trace of the unclean thing remains in their flesh or in
their spirit. The ideal may be far from being realised
at any moment, but it is at the peril of the whole
sincerity and peacefulness of their lives if they, in the
smallest degree, lower the perfection of their ideal in
deference to the imperfection of their realisation of it.

It must be abundantly clear from our own experience
that any such cleansing is a very long process. No
character is made, whether it be good or bad, but by
a slow building up: no man becomes most wicked all
at once, and no man is sanctified by a wish or at a
jump. As long as men are in a world so abounding[5]
with temptation, ‘he that is washed’ will need daily
to ‘wash his feet’ that have been stained in the foul
ways of life, if he is to be ‘clean every whit.’

As long as the spirit is imprisoned in the body and
has it for its instrument there will be need for much
effort at purifying. We must be content to overcome
one foe at a time, and however strong may be the
pilgrim’s spirit in us, we must be content to take one
step at a time, and to advance by very slow degrees.
Nor is it to be forgotten that as we get nearer what
we ought to be, we should be more conscious of the
things in which we are not what we ought to be. The
nearer we get to Jesus Christ, the more will our
consciences be enlightened as to the particulars in
which we are still distant from Him. A speck on a
polished shield will show plain that would never have
been seen on a rusty one. The saint who is nearest
God will think more of his sins than the man who is
furthest from him. So new work of purifying will
open before us as we grow more pure, and this will
last as long as life itself.

II. The Christian life is to be not merely a continual
getting rid of evil, but a continual becoming good.

Paul here draws a distinction between cleansing
ourselves from filthiness and perfecting holiness, and
these two, though closely connected and capable of
being regarded as being but the positive and negative
sides of one process, are in reality different, though
in practice the former is never achieved without the
latter, nor the latter accomplished without the former.
Holiness is more than purity; it is consecration. That
is holy which is devoted to God, and a saint is one
whose daily effort is to devote his whole self, in all his
faculties and nature, thoughts, heart, and will, more[6]
and more, to God, and to receive into himself more and
more of God.

The purifying which Paul has been enjoining will
only be successful in the measure of our consecration,
and the consecration will only be genuine in the
measure of our purifying. Herein lies the broad and
blessed distinction between the world’s morality and
Christian ethics. The former fails just because it
lacks the attitude towards a Person who is the very
foundation of Christian morality, and changes a hard
and impossible law into love. There is no more futile
waste of breath than that of teachers of morality who
have no message but Be good! Be good! and no motive
by which to urge it but the pleasures of virtue and the
disadvantages of vice, but when the vagueness of the
abstract thought of goodness solidifies into a living
Person and that Person makes his appeal first to our
hearts and bids us love him, and then opens before us
the unstained light of his own character and beseeches
us to be like him, the repellent becomes attractive: the
impossible becomes possible, and ‘if ye love Me keep
My commandments’ becomes a constraining power and
a victorious impulse in our lives.

III. The Christian life of purifying and consecration
is to be animated by hope and fear.

The Apostle seems to connect hope more immediately
with the cleansing, and holiness with the fear of God,
but probably both hope and fear are in his mind as the
double foundation on which both purity and consecration
are to rest, or the double emotion which is to
produce them both. These promises refer directly to
the immediately preceding words, ‘I will be a Father
unto you and ye shall be My sons and daughters,’
in which all the blessings which God can give or men[7]
can receive are fused together in one lustrous and all-comprehensive
whole. So all the great truths of the
Gospel and all the blessed emotions of sonship which
can spring up in a human heart are intended to find
their practical result in holy and pure living. For this
end God has spoken to us out of the thick darkness;
for this end Christ has come into our darkness; for
this end He has lived; for this end He died; for this
end He rose again; for this end He sends His Spirit
and administers the providence of the world. The
purpose of all the Divine activity as regards us men is
not merely to make us happy, but to make us happy
in order that we may be good. He whom what he
calls his religion has only saved from the wrath of God
and the fear of hell has not learned the alphabet of
religion. Unless God’s promises evoke men’s goodness
it will be of little avail that they seem to quicken
their hope. Joyful confidence in our sonship is only
warranted in the measure in which we are like our
Father. Hope often deludes and makes men dreamy
and unpractical. It generally paints pictures far lovelier
than the realities, and without any of their shadows;
it is too often the stimulus and ally of ignoble lives,
and seldom stirs to heroism or endurance, but its many
defects are not due to itself but to its false choice of
objects on which to fix. The hope which is lifted from
trailing along the earth and twining round creatures
and which rises to grasp these promises ought to be,
and in the measure of its reality is the ally of all
patient endurance and noble self-sacrifice. Its vision
of coming good is all directed to the coming Christ,
and ‘every man that hath this hope in Him, purifieth
himself even as He is pure.’

In Paul’s experience there was no contrariety between[8]
hope set on Jesus and fear directed towards God. It
is in the fear of God that holiness is to be perfected.
There is a fear which has no torment. Yet more, there
is no love in sons or daughters without fear. The
reverential awe with which God’s children draw near
to God has in it nothing slavish and no terror. Their
love is not only joyful but lowly. The worshipping
gaze upon His Divine majesty, the reverential and
adoring contemplation of His ineffable holiness, and
the poignant consciousness, after all effort, of the
distance between us and Him will bow the hearts that
love Him most in lowliest prostration before Him.
These two, hope and fear, confidence and awe, are
like the poles on which the whole round world turns
and are united here in one result. They who ‘set their
hope in God’ must ‘not forget the works of God but
keep His commandments’; they who ‘call Him Father,’
‘who without respect of persons judgeth’ must ‘pass
the time of their sojourning here in fear,’ and their
hopes and their fears must drive the wheels of life,
purify them from all filthiness and perfect them in
all holiness.

SORROW ACCORDING TO GOD

Very near the close of his missionary career the
Apostle Paul summed up his preaching as being all
directed to enforcing two points, ‘Repentance towards
God, and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.’ These two,
repentance and faith, ought never to be separated
in thought, as they are inseparable in fact. True[9]
repentance is impossible without faith, true faith
cannot exist without repentance.

Yet the two are separated very often, even by
earnest Christian teachers. The tendency of this day
is to say a great deal about faith, and not nearly
enough in proportion about repentance; and the
effect is to obscure the very idea of faith, and not
seldom to preach ‘Peace! peace! when there is no
peace.’ A gospel which is always talking about faith,
and scarcely ever talking about sin and repentance,
is denuded, indeed, of some of its most unwelcome
characteristics, but is also deprived of most of its
power, and it may very easily become an ally of
unrighteousness, and an indulgence to sin. The
reproach that the Christian doctrine of salvation
through faith is immoral in its substance derives most
of its force from forgetting that ‘repentance towards
God’ is as real a condition of salvation as is ‘faith in
our Lord Jesus Christ.’ We have here the Apostle’s
deliverance about one of these twin thoughts. We
have three stages—the root, the stem, the fruit;
sorrow, repentance, salvation. But there is a right
and a wrong kind of sorrow for sin. The right kind
breeds repentance, and thence reaches salvation; the
wrong kind breeds nothing, and so ends in death.

Let us then trace these stages, not forgetting that
this is not a complete statement of the case, and needs
to be supplemented in the spirit of the words which I
have already quoted, by the other part of the inseparable
whole, ‘faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ.’

I. First, then, consider the true and the false sorrow
for sin.

The Apostle takes it for granted that a recognition
of our own evil, and a consequent penitent regretful[10]ness,
lie at the foundation of all true Christianity.
Now I do not insist upon any uniformity of experience
in people, any more than I should insist that all their
bodies should be of one shape or of one proportion.
Human lives are infinitely different, human dispositions
are subtly varied, and because neither the one
nor the other are ever reproduced exactly in any two
people, therefore the religious experience of no two
souls can ever be precisely alike.

We have no right to ask—and much harm has been
done by asking—for an impossible uniformity of
religious experience, any more than we have a right to
expect that all voices shall be pitched in one key, or
all plants flower in the same month, or after the same
fashion. You can print off as many copies as you
like, for instance, of a drawing of a flower on a
printing-press, and they shall all be alike, petal for
petal, leaf for leaf, shade for shade; but no two hand-drawn
copies will be so precisely alike, still less will
any two of the real buds that blow on the bush. Life
produces resemblance with differences; it is machinery
that makes facsimiles.

So we insist on no pedantic or unreal uniformity;
and yet, whilst leaving the widest scope for divergencies
of individual character and experience, and
not asking that a man all diseased and blotched with
the leprosy of sin for half a lifetime, and a little child
that has grown up at its mother’s knee, ‘in the nurture
and admonition of the Lord,’ and so has been kept
‘innocent of much transgression,’ shall have the same
experience; yet Scripture, as it seems to me, and the
nature of the case do unite in asserting that there are
certain elements which, in varying proportions indeed,
will be found in all true Christian experience, and of[11]
these an indispensable one—and in a very large
number, if not in the majority of cases, a fundamental
one—is this which my text calls ‘godly sorrow.’

Dear brethren, surely a reasonable consideration of
the facts of our conduct and character point to that as
the attitude that becomes us. Does it not? I do not
charge you with crimes in the eye of the law. I do
not suppose that many of you are living in flagrant
disregard of the elementary principles of common
every-day morality. Some are, no doubt. There are,
no doubt, unclean men here; there are some who eat
and drink more than is good for them, habitually;
there are, no doubt, men and women who are living
in avarice and worldliness, and doing things which the
ordinary conscience of the populace points to as faults
and blemishes. But I come to you respectable people
that can say: ‘I am not as other men are, unjust,
adulterers, or even as this publican’; and pray you,
dear friends, to look at your character all round, in the
light of the righteousness and love of God, and to
plead to the indictment which charges you with neglect
of many a duty and with sin against Him. How do
you plead, ‘guilty or not guilty, sinful or not sinful?’
Be honest with yourselves, and the answer will not be
far to seek.

Notice how my text draws a broad distinction
between the right and the wrong kind of sorrow for
sin. ‘Godly sorrow’ is, literally rendered,’sorrow
according to God,’ which may either mean sorrow
which has reference to God, or sorrow which is in
accordance with His will; that is to say, which is
pleasing to Him. If it is the former, it will be the
latter. I prefer to suppose that it is the former—that
is, sorrow which has reference to God. And then,[12]
there is another kind of sorrow, which the Apostle
calls the ‘sorrow of the world,’ which is devoid of that
reference to God. Here we have the characteristic
difference between the Christian way of looking at
our own faults and shortcomings, and the sorrow of
the world, which has got no blessing in it, and will
never lead to anything like righteousness and peace.
It is just this—one has reference to God, puts its sin
by His side, sees its blackness relieved against the
‘fierce light’ of the Great White Throne, and the other
has not that reference.

To expand that for a moment,—there are plenty of
us who, when our sin is behind us, and its bitter fruits
are in our hands, are sorry enough for our faults. A
man that is lying in the hospital a wreck, with the
sins of his youth gnawing the flesh off his bones, is
often enough sorry that he did not live more soberly
and chastely and temperately in the past days. That
fraudulent bankrupt who has not got his discharge
and has lost his reputation, and can get nobody to
lend him money enough to start him in business again,
as he hangs about the streets, slouching in his rags, is
sorry enough that he did not keep the straight road.
The ‘sorrow of the world’ has no thought about God
in it at all. The consequences of sin set many a man’s
teeth on edge who does not feel any compunction for
the wrong that he did. My brethren, is that the
position of any that are listening to me now?

Again, men are often sorry for their conduct without
thinking of it as sin against God. Crime means
the transgression of man’s law, wrong means the
transgression of conscience’s law, sin is the transgression
of God’s law. Some of us would perhaps
have to say—’I have done crime.’ We are all of us[13]
quite ready to say: ‘I have done wrong many a
time’; but there are some of us who hesitate to take
the other step, and say: ‘I have done sin.’ Sin
has, for its correlative, God. If there is no God
there is no sin. There may be faults, there may
be failures, there may be transgressions, breaches of
the moral law, things done inconsistent with man’s
nature and constitution, and so on; but if there be a
God, then we have personal relations to that Person
and His law; and when we break His law it is more
than crime; it is more than fault; it is more than
transgression; it is more than wrong; it is sin. It is
when you lift the shutter off conscience, and let the
light of God rush in upon your hearts and consciences,
that you have the wholesome sorrow that worketh
repentance and salvation and life.

Oh, dear friends, I do beseech you to lay these
simple thoughts to heart. Remember, I urge no rigid
uniformity of experience or character, but I do say
that unless a man has learned to see his sin in the
light of God, and in the light of God to weep over it, he
has yet to know ‘the strait gate that leadeth unto life.’

I believe that a very large amount of the superficiality
and easy-goingness of the Christianity of to-day
comes just from this, that so many who call
themselves Christians have never once got a glimpse
of themselves as they really are. I remember once
peering over the edge of the crater of Vesuvius, and
looking down into the pit, all swirling with sulphurous
fumes. Have you ever looked into your hearts, in
that fashion, and seen the wreathing smoke and the
flashing fire there? If you have, you will cleave to
that Christ, who is your sole deliverance from sin.

But, remember, there is no prescription about depth[14]
or amount or length of time during which this sorrow
shall be felt. If, on the one hand, it is essential, on
the other hand there are a great many people who
ought to be walking in the light and the liberty of
God’s Gospel who bring darkness and clouds over
themselves by the anxious scrutinising question: ‘Is
my sorrow deep enough?’ Deep enough! What for?
What is the use of sorrow for sin? To lead a man to
repentance and to faith. If you have as much sorrow
as leads you to penitence and trust you have enough.
It is not your sorrow that is going to wash away your
sin, it is Christ’s blood. So let no man trouble himself
about the question, Have I sorrow enough? The one
question is: ‘Has my sorrow led me to cast myself on
Christ?’

II. Still further, look now for a moment at the next
stage here. ‘Godly sorrow worketh repentance.’

What is repentance? No doubt many of you would
answer that it is ‘sorrow for sin,’ but clearly this text
of ours draws a distinction between the two. There
are very few of the great key-words of Christianity
that have suffered more violent and unkind treatment,
and have been more obscured by misunderstandings,
than this great word. It has been weakened
down into penitence, which in the ordinary acceptation,
means simply the emotion that I have already
been speaking about, viz., a regretful sense of my own
evil. And it has been still further docked and
degraded, both in its syllables and in its substance,
into penance. But the ‘repentance’ of the New
Testament and of the Old Testament—one of the twin
conditions of salvation—is neither sorrow for sin nor
works of restitution and satisfaction, but it is, as the
word distinctly expresses, a change of purpose in[15]
regard to the sin for which a man mourns. I cannot
now expand and elaborate this idea as I should
like, but let me remind you of one or two passages in
Scripture which may show that the right notion of the
word is not sorrow but changed attitude and purpose
in regard to my sin.

We find passages, some of which ascribe and some
deny repentance to the Divine nature. But if there be
a repentance which is possible for the Divine nature,
it obviously cannot mean sorrow for sin, but must
signify a change of purpose. In the Epistle to the
Romans we read, ‘The gifts and calling of God are
without repentance,’ which clearly means without
change of purpose on His part. And I read in the
story of the mission of the Prophet Jonah, that ‘the
Lord repented of the evil which He had said He would
do unto them, and He did it not.’ Here, again, the
idea of repentance is clearly and distinctly that of a
change of purpose. So fix this on your minds, and lay
it on your hearts, dear friends, that the repentance of
the New Testament is not idle tears nor the twitchings
of a vain regret, but the resolute turning away of the
sinful heart from its sins. It is ‘repentance toward
God,’ the turning from the sin to the Father, and that
is what leads to salvation. The sorrow is separated
from the repentance in idea, however closely they may
be intertwined in fact. The sorrow is one thing, and
the repentance which it works is another.

Then notice that this change of purpose and breaking
off from sin is produced by the sorrow for sin, of
which I have been speaking; and that the production
of this repentance is the main characteristic difference
between the godly sorrow and the sorrow of the
world. A man may have his paroxysms of regret, but[16]
the question is: Does it make any difference in his
attitude? Is he standing, after the tempest of sorrow
has swept over him, with his face in the same direction
as before; or has it whirled him clean round, and set
him in the other direction? The one kind of sorrow,
which measures my sin by the side of the brightness
and purity of God, vindicates itself as true, because it
makes me hate my evil and turn away from it. The
other, which is of the world, passes over me like the
empty wind through an archway, it whistles for a
moment and is gone, and there is nothing left to show
that it was ever there. The one comes like one of
those brooks in tropical countries, dry and white for
half the year, and then there is a rush of muddy
waters, fierce but transient, and leaving no results
behind. My brother! when your conscience pricks,
which of these two things does it do? After the
prick, is the word of command that your Will issues
‘Right about face!’ or is it ‘As you were’? Godly
sorrow worketh a change of attitude, purpose, mind;
the sorrow of the world leaves a man standing where
he was. Ask yourselves the question: Which of the
two are you familiar with?

Again, the true means of evoking true repentance is
the contemplation of the Cross. Law and the fear of
hell may startle into sorrow, and even lead to some
kind of repentance. But it is the great power of
Christ’s love and sacrifice which will really melt the
heart into true repentance. You may hammer ice to
pieces, but it is ice still. You may bray a fool in a
mortar, and his folly will not depart from him. Dread
of punishment may pulverise the heart, but not change
it; and each fragment, like the smallest bits of a
magnet, will have the same characteristics as the[17]
whole mass. But ‘the goodness of God leads to
repentance’ as the prodigal is conquered and sees the
true hideousness of the swine’s trough, when he
bethinks himself of the father’s love. I beseech you
to put yourselves under the influence of that great
love, and look on that Cross till your hearts melt.

III. We come to the last stage here. Salvation is
the issue of repentance. ‘Godly sorrow worketh repentance
unto salvation not to be repented of.’

What is the connection between repentance and
salvation? Two sentences will answer the question.
You cannot get salvation without repentance. You
do not get salvation by repentance.

You cannot get the salvation of God unless you
shake off your sin. It is no use preaching to a man,
‘Faith, Faith, Faith!’ unless you preach along with
it,’Break off your iniquities.’ ‘Let the wicked forsake
his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and
let him turn unto the Lord.’ The nature of the case
forbids it. It is a clear contradiction in terms, and an
absolute impossibility in fact, that God should save a
man with the salvation which consists in the deliverance
from sin, whilst that man is holding to his sin. Unless,
therefore, you have not merely sorrow, but repentance,
which is turning away from sin with resolute
purpose, as a man would turn from a serpent, you
cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.

But you do not get salvation for your repentance.
It is no case of barter, it is no case of salvation by
works, that work being repentance:

[18]

What is the connection between repentance and
faith? There can be no true repentance without trust
in Christ. There can be no true trust in Christ without
the forsaking of my sin. Repentance without faith,
in so far as it is possible, is one long misery; like the
pains of those poor Hindoo devotees that will go all
the way from Cape Comorin to the shrine of Juggernaut,
and measure every foot of the road with the
length of their own bodies in the dust. Men will do
anything, and willingly make any sacrifice, rather
than open their eyes to see this,—that repentance,
clasped hand in hand with Faith, leads the guiltiest
soul into the forgiving presence of the crucified Christ,
from whom peace flows into the darkest heart.

On the other hand, faith without repentance is not
possible, in any deep sense. But in so far as it is
possible, it produces a superficial Christianity which
vaguely trusts to Christ without knowing exactly
what it is trusting Him for, or why it needs Him; and
which has a great deal to say about what I may call
the less important parts of the Christian system, and
nothing to say about its vital centre; which preaches
a morality which is not a living power to create;
which practises a religion which is neither a joy nor a
security. The old word of the Master has a deep truth
in it: ‘These are they which heard the word, and anon
with joy received it.’ Having no sorrow, no penitence,
no deep consciousness of sin, ‘they have no root in
themselves, and in time of temptation they fall away.’
If there is to be a profound, an all-pervading, life-transforming-sin,
and devil-conquering faith, it must[19]
be a faith rooted deep in penitence and sorrow for
sin.

Dear brethren, if, by God’s grace, my poor words
have touched your consciences at all, I beseech you, do
not trifle with the budding conviction! Do not seek
to have the wound skinned over. Take care that you
do not let it all pass in idle sorrow or impotent regret.
If you do, you will be hardened, and the worse for it,
and come nearer to that condition which the sorrow of
the world worketh, the awful death of the soul. Do
not wince from the knife before the roots of the
cancer are cut out. The pain is merciful. Better the
wound than the malignant growth. Yield yourselves
to the Spirit that would convince you of sin, and
listen to the voice that calls to you to forsake your
unrighteous ways and thoughts. But do not trust to
any tears, do not trust to any resolves, do not trust
to any reformation. Trust only to the Lord who died
on the Cross for you, whose death for you, whose
life in you, will be deliverance from your sin. Then
you will have a salvation which, in the striking
language of my text, ‘is not to be repented of,’ which
will leave no regrets in your hearts in the day when
all else shall have faded, and the sinful sweets of this
world shall have turned to ashes and bitterness on the
lips of the men that feed on them.

‘The sorrow of the world works death.’ There are
men and women listening to me now who are half
conscious of their sin, and are resisting the pleading
voice that comes to them, who at the last will open
their eyes upon the realities of their lives, and in a
wild passion of remorse, exclaim: ‘I have played the
fool, and have erred exceedingly.’ Better to make
thorough work of the sorrow, and by it to be led to[20]
repentance toward God and faith in Christ, and so
secure for our own that salvation for which no man
will ever regret having given even the whole world,
since he gains his own soul.

GIVING AND ASKING

A collection from Gentile churches for their poor
brethren in Jerusalem occupied much of Paul’s time
and efforts before his last visit to that city. Many
events, which have filled the world with noise and
been written at length in histories, were less significant
than that first outcome of the unifying spirit of
common faith. It was a making visible of the grand
thought, ‘Ye are all one in Christ Jesus.’ Practical
help, prompted by a deep-lying sense of unity which
overleaped gulfs of separation in race, language, and
social conditions, was a unique novelty. It was the
first pulsation of that spirit of Christian liberality which
has steadily grown in force and sweep ever since.
Foolish people gibe at some of its manifestations.[21]
Wiser ones regard its existence as not the least of the
marks of the divine origin of Christianity.

This passage is a striking example of the inimitable
delicacy of the Apostle. His words are full of what we
should call tact, if it were not manifestly the spontaneous
utterance of right feeling. They are a perfect
model of the true way to appeal for money, and set
forth also the true spirit in which such appeals should
be made.

In verses 1 to 5, Paul seeks to stimulate the liberality
of the Corinthians by recounting that of the Macedonian
churches. His sketch draws in outline the picture of
what all Christian money-giving should be. We note
first the designation of the Macedonian Christians’
beneficence as ‘a grace’ given by God to them. It
is twice called so (vers. 1, 4), and the same name is
applied in regard to the Corinthians’ giving (vers. 6, 7).
That is the right way to look at money contributions.
The opportunity to give them, and the inclination to
do so, are God’s gifts. How many of us think that
calls for service or money are troublesome obligations,
to be got out of as easily as possible! A true Christian
will be thankful, as for a love token from God, for
every occasion of giving to Him. It would be a sharp
test for many of us to ask ourselves whether we can
say, ‘To me . . . is this grace given,’ that I should part
with my money for Christ’s sake.

Note, further, the lovely picture of these Macedonian
givers. They were plunged in sorrows and troubles,
but these did not dry their fountains of sympathy.
Nothing is apt to be more selfish than grief; and if we
have tears to spare for others, when they are flowing
bitterly for ourselves, we have graduated well in
Christ’s school. Paul calls the Macedonians’ troubles[22]
‘proof of their affliction,’ meaning that it constituted a
proof of their Christian character; that is, by the
manner in which it was borne; and in it they had still
‘abundance of joy,’ for the paradox of the Christian
life is that it admits of the co-existence of grief and
gladness.

Again, Christian giving gives from scanty stores.
‘Deep poverty’ is no excuse for not giving, and will be
no hindrance to a willing heart. ‘I cannot afford it’ is
sometimes a genuine valid reason, but oftener an insincere
plea. Why are subscriptions for religious
purposes the first expenditure to be reduced in bad
times?

Further, Christian giving gives up to the very edge
of ability, and sometimes goes beyond the limits of so-called
prudence. In all regions ‘power to its last
particle is duty,’ and unless power is strained it is not
fully exercised. It is in trying to do what we cannot do
that we do best what we can do. He who keeps well
within the limits of his supposed ability will probably
not do half as much as he could. While there is a
limit behind which generosity even for Christ may
become dishonesty or disregard of other equally sacred
claims, there is little danger of modern Christians
transgressing that limit, and they need the stimulus to
do a little more than they think they can do, rather
than to listen to cold-blooded prudence.

Further, Christian giving does not wait to be asked,
but takes the opportunity to give as itself ‘grace’ and
presses its benefactions. It is an unwonted experience
for a collector of subscriptions to be besought to
take them ‘with much entreaty,’ but it would not
be so anomalous if Christian people understood their
privileges.[23]

Further, Christian giving begins with the surrender
of self to Christ, from which necessarily follows the
glad offering of wealth. These Macedonians did more
than Paul had hoped, and the explanation of the unexpected
largeness of their contributions was their
yielding of themselves to Jesus. That is the deepest
source of all true liberality. If a man feels that he
does not own himself, much less will he feel that his
goods are his own. A slave’s owner possesses the
slave’s bit of garden ground, his hut, and its furniture.
If I belong to Christ, to whom does my money belong?
But the consciousness that my goods are not mine, but
Christ’s, is not to remain a mere sentiment. It can
receive practical embodiment by my giving them to
Christ’s representatives. The way for the Macedonians
to show that they regarded their goods as Christ’s, was
to give them to Paul for Christ’s poor saints. Jesus
has His representatives still, and it is useless for people
to talk or sing about belonging to Him, unless they
verify their words by deeds.

Verse 6 tells the Corinthians that the success of the
collection in Macedonia had induced Paul to send Titus
to Corinth to promote it there. He had previously
visited it on the same errand (chap. xii. 14), and now is
coming to complete ‘this grace.’ The rest of the
passage is Paul’s appeal to the Corinthians for their
help in the matter, and certainly never was such an
appeal made in a more dignified, noble, and lofty tone.
He has been dilating on the liberality of others, and
thereby sanctioning the stimulating of Christian liberality,
in the same way as other graces may legitimately
be stimulated, by example. That is delicate ground to
tread on, and needs caution if it is not to degenerate
into an appeal to rivalry, as it too often does, but in[24]
itself is perfectly legitimate and wholesome. But,
passing from that incitement, Paul rests his plea on
deeper grounds.

First, Christian liberality is essential to the completeness
of Christian character. Paul’s praise in verse 7 is
not mere flattery, nor meant to put the Corinthians
into good humour. He will have enough to say hereafter
about scandals and faults, but now he gives them
credit for all the good he knew to be in them. Faith
comes first, as always. It is the root of every Christian
excellence. Then follow two graces, eminently
characteristic of a Greek church, and apt to run to seed
in it,—utterance and knowledge. Then two more, both
of a more emotional character,—earnestness and love,
especially to Paul as Christ’s servant. But all these
fair attributes lacked completeness without the crowning
grace of liberality. It is the crowning grace,
because it is the practical manifestation of the highest
excellences. It is the result of sympathy, of unselfishness,
of contact with Christ, of drinking in of His spirit,
Love is best. Utterance and knowledge and earnestness
are poor beside it. This grace is like the diamond
which clasps a necklace of jewels.

Christian giving does not need to be commanded. ‘I
speak not by way of commandment.’ That is poor
virtue which only obeys a precept. Gifts given because
it is duty to give them are not really gifts, but taxes.
They leave no sweet savour on the hand that bestows,
and bring none to that which receives. ‘I call you not
servants, but friends.’ The region in which Christian
liberality moves is high above the realm of law and its
correlative, obligation.

Further, Christian liberality springs spontaneously
from conscious possession of Christ’s riches. We can[25]not
here enter on the mysteries of Christ’s emptying
Himself of His riches of glory. We can but touch the
stupendous fact, remembering that the place whereon
we stand is holy ground. Who can measure the nature
and depth of that self-denuding of the glory which He
had with the Father before the world was? But, thank
God, we do not need to measure it, in order to feel the
solemn, blessed force of the appeal which it makes to
us. Adoring wonder and gratitude, unfaltering trust
and absolute self-surrender to a love so self-sacrificing,
must ever follow the belief of that mystery of Divine
mercy, the incarnation and sacrifice of the eternal Son.

But Paul would have us remember that the same
mighty act of stooping love, which is the foundation of
all our hope, is to be the pattern for all our conduct.
Even in His divinest and most mysterious act, Christ is
our example. A dewdrop is rounded by the same laws
which shape the planetary spheres or the sun himself;
and Christians but half trust Christ if they do not
imitate Him. What selfishness in enjoyment of our
‘own things’ could live in us if we duly brought ourselves
under the influence of that example? How
miserably poor and vulgar the appeals by which money
is sometimes drawn from grudging owners and tight-buttoned
pockets, sound beside that heart-searching
and heart-moving one, ‘Ye know the grace of our Lord
Jesus Christ!’

Further, Christian liberality will not go off in good
intentions and benevolent sentiments. The Corinthians
were ready with their ‘willing’ on Titus’s previous
visit. Now Paul desires them to put their good feelings
into concrete shape. There is plenty of benevolence
that never gets to be beneficence. The advice here has
a very wide application: ‘As there was the readiness[26]
to will, so there may be the completion also.’ We all
know where the road leads that is paved with good
intentions.

Further, Christian liberality is accepted and rewarded
according to willingness, if that is carried into act
according to ability. While the mere wish to help is
not enough, it is the vital element in the act which
flows from it; and there may be more of it in the
widow’s mite than in the rich man’s large donation—or
there may be less. The conditions of acceptable
offerings are twofold—first, readiness, glad willingness
to give, as opposed to closed hearts or grudging
bestowals; and, second, that willingness embodied in
the largest gift possible. The absence of either vitiates
all. The presence of both gives trifles a place in God’s
storehouse of precious things. A father is glad when
his child brings him some utterly valueless present,
not because he must, but because he loves; and many
a parent has such laid away in sacred repositories.
God knows how to take gifts from His children, not less
well than we who are evil know how to do it.

But the gracious saying of our passage has a solemn
side; for if only gifts ‘according as a man hath’ are
accepted, what becomes of the many which fall far
short of our ability, and are really given, not because
we have the willing mind, but because we could not get
out of the unwelcome necessity to part with a miserably
inadequate percentage of our possessions. Is God
likely to be satisfied with the small dividends which we
offer as composition for our great debt?[27]

RICH YET POOR

The Apostle has been speaking about a matter which,
to us, seems very small, but to him was very great
viz., a gathering of pecuniary help from the Gentile
churches for the poor church in Jerusalem. Large
issues, in his estimation, attended that exhibition of
Christian unity, and, be it great or small, he applies the
highest of all motives to this matter. ‘For ye know
the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was
rich yet for your sakes He became poor.’ The trivial
things of life are to be guided and shaped by reference
to the highest of all things, the example of Jesus
Christ; and that in the whole depth of His humiliation,
and even in regard to His cross and passion. We
have here set forth, as the pattern to which the
Christian life is to be conformed, the deepest conception
of what our Lord’s career on earth was.

The whole Christian Church is about to celebrate the
nativity of our Lord at this time. This text gives us
the true point of view from which to regard it. We
have here the work of Christ in its deepest motive,
‘The grace of our Lord Jesus.’ We have it in its transcendent
self-impoverishment, ‘Though He was rich,
yet for our sakes He became poor.’ We have it in its
highest issue, ‘That ye through His poverty might
become rich.’ Let us look at those points.

I. Here we have the deepest motive which underlies
the whole work of Christ, unveiled to us.[28]

‘Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.’
Every word here is significant. It is very unusual in
the New Testament to find that expression ‘grace’
applied to Jesus Christ. Except in the familiar benediction,
I think there are only one or two instances of such
a collocation of words. It is ‘the grace of God’ which,
throughout the New Testament, is the prevailing expression.
But here ‘grace is attributed to Jesus’;
that is to say, the love of the Divine heart is, without
qualification or hesitation, ascribed to Him. And what
do we mean by grace? We mean love in exercise to
inferiors. It is infinite condescension in Jesus to love.
His love stoops when it embraces us. Very significant,
therefore, is the employment here of the solemn full
title, ‘the Lord Jesus Christ,’ which enhances the condescension
by making prominent the height from
which it bent. The ‘grace’ is all the more wonderful
because of the majesty and sovereignty, to say the
least of it, which are expressed in that title, the Lord.
The highest stoops and stands upon the level of the
lowest. ‘Grace’ is love that expresses itself to those
who deserve something else. And the deepest motive,
which is the very key to the whole phenomena of the
life of Jesus Christ, is that it is all the exhibition, as it
is the consequence, of a love that, stooping, forgives.
‘Grace’ is love that, stooping and forgiving, communicates
its whole self to unworthy and transgressing
recipients. And the key to the life of Jesus is that
we have set forth in its operation a love which is
not content to speak only the ordinary language of
human affection, or to do its ordinary deeds, but is
self-impelled to impart what transcends all other gifts
of human tenderness, and to give its very self. And
so a love that condescends, a love that passes by un[29]worthiness,
is turned away by no sin, is unmoved to
any kind of anger, and never allows its cheek to flush
or its heart to beat faster, because of any provocation
and a love that is content with nothing short of entire
surrender and self-impartation underlies all that
precious life from Bethlehem to Calvary.

But there is another word in our text that may well
be here taken into consideration. ‘For your sakes,’
says the Apostle to that Corinthian church, made up
of people, not one of whom had ever seen or been seen
by Jesus. And yet the regard to them was part of the
motive that moved the Lord to His life, and His death.
That is to say, to generalise the thought, this grace,
thus stooping and forgiving and self-imparting, is a
love that gathers into its embrace and to its heart all
mankind; and is universal because it is individualising.
Just as each planet in the heavens, and each tiny
plant upon the earth, are embraced by, and separately
receive, the benediction of that all-encompassing arch
of the heaven, so that grace enfolds all, because it takes
account of each. Whilst it is love for a sinful world,
every soul of us may say: ‘He loved me, and’—therefore—’gave
Himself for me.’ Unless we see beneath
the sweet story of the earthly life this deep-lying
source of it all, we fail to understand that life itself.
We may bring criticism to bear upon it; we may apprehend
it in diverse affecting, elevating, educating
aspects; but, oh! brethren, we miss the blazing centre
of the light, the warm heart of the fire, unless we see
pulsating through all the individual facts of the life
this one, all-shaping, all-vitalising motive; the grace—the
stooping, the pardoning, the self-communicating,
the individualising, and the universal love of Jesus
Christ.[30]

So then, we have here set before us the work of
Christ in its—

II. Most mysterious and unique self-impoverishment.

‘He was . . . He became,’ there is one strange contrast.
‘He was rich . . . He became poor,’ there is
another. ‘He was . . . He became.’ What does that
say? Well, it says that if you want to understand Bethlehem,
you must go back to a time before Bethlehem.
The meaning of Christ’s birth is only understood when
we turn to that Evangelist who does not narrate it.
For the meaning of it is here; ‘the Word became
flesh, and dwelt among us.’ The surface of the fact is
the smallest part of the fact. They say that there is
seven times as much of an iceberg under water as
there is above the surface. And the deepest and most
important fact about the nativity of our Lord is that
it was not only the birth of an Infant, but the Incarnation
of the Word. ‘He was . . . He became.’ We have
to travel back and recognise that that life did not begin
in the manger. We have to travel back and recognise
the mystery of godliness, God manifest in the flesh.

And these two words ‘He was . . . He became,’ imply
another thing, and that is, that Jesus Christ who died
because He chose, was not passive in His being born,
but as at the end of His earthly life, so at its beginning
exercised His volition, and was born because He
willed, and willed because of ‘the grace of our Lord
Jesus.’

Now in this connection it is very remarkable, and
well worth our pondering, that throughout the whole
of the Gospels, when Jesus speaks of His coming into
the world, He never uses the word ‘born’ but once, and
that was before the Roman governor, who would not
have understood or cared for anything further, to[31]
whom He did say,’To this end was I born.’ But even
when speaking to him His consciousness that that word
did not express the whole truth was so strong that He
could not help adding—though He knew that the hard
Roman procurator would pay no attention to the
apparent tautology—the expression which more truly
corresponded to the fact, ‘and for this cause came I
into the world.’ The two phrases are not parallel.
They are by no means synonymous. One expresses the
outward fact; the other expresses that which underlay
it. ‘To this end was I born.’ Yes! ‘And for this
cause came I.’ He Himself put it still more definitely
when He said, ‘I came forth from the Father, and am
come into the world. Again, I leave the world and go
unto the Father.’ So the two extremities of the earthly
manifestation are neither of them ends; but before the
one, and behind the other, there stretches an identity
or oneness of Being and condition. The one as the
other, the birth and the death, may be regarded as, in
deepest reality, not only what He passively endured,
but what He actively did. He was born, and He died,
that in all points He might be ‘like unto His brethren.’
He ‘came’ into the world, and He ‘went’ to the
Father. The end circled round to the beginning, and
in both He acted because He chose, and chose because
He loved.

So much, then, lies in the one of these two antitheses
of my text; and the other is no less profound and
significant. ‘He was rich; He became poor.’ In this
connection ‘rich’ can only mean possessed of the
Divine fulness and independence; and ‘poor’ can only
mean possessed of human infirmity, dependence, and
emptiness. And so to Jesus of Nazareth, to be born
was impoverishment. If there is nothing more in His[32]
birth than in the birth of each of us, the words are
grotesquely inappropriate to the facts of the case.
For as between nothingness, which is the alternative,
and the possession of conscious being, there is surely
a contrast the very reverse of that expressed here.
For us, to be born is to be endowed with capacities,
with the wealth of intelligent, responsible, voluntary
being; but to Jesus Christ, if we accept the New Testament
teaching, to be born was a step, an infinite step,
downwards, and He, alone of all men, might have been
‘ashamed to call men brethren.’ But this denudation
of Himself, into the particulars of which I do not care
to enter now, was the result of that stooping grace
which ‘counted it not a thing to be clutched hold of, to
be equal with God; but He made Himself of no reputation,
and was found in fashion as a man, and became
obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross.’

And so, dear friends, we know the measure of the
stooping love of Jesus only when we read the history
by the light of this thought, that ‘though He was
rich’ with all the fulness of that eternal Word which
was ‘in the beginning with God,’ ‘He became poor,’
with the poverty, the infirmity, the liability to temptation,
the weakness, that attach to humanity; ‘and
was found in all points like unto His brethren,’ that
He might be able to help and succour them all.

The last thing here is—

III. The work of Christ set forth in its highest
issue.

‘That we through His poverty might become rich.’
Of course, the antithetical expressions must be taken
to be used in the same sense, and with the same width
of application, in both of the clauses. And if so, just
think reverently, wonderingly, thankfully, of the infinite[33]
vista of glorious possibility that is open to us here.
Christ was rich in the possession of that Divine glory
which Had had with the Father before the world was.
‘He became poor,’ in assuming the weakness of the
manhood that you and I carry, that we, in the human
poverty which is like His poverty, may become rich
with wealth that is like His riches, and that as He
stooped to earth veiling the Divine with the human,
we may rise to heaven, clothing the human with the
Divine.

For surely there is nothing more plainly taught in
Scriptures, and I am bold to say nothing to which any
deep and vital Christian experience even here gives
more surely an anticipatory confirmation, than the
fact that Christ became like unto us, that each of us
may become like unto Him. The divine and the
human natures are similar, and the fact of the
Incarnation, on the one hand, and of the man’s glorification
by possession of the divine nature on the other,
equally rest upon that fundamental resemblance
between the divine nature and the human nature which
God has made in His own image. If that which in
each of us is unlike God is cleared away, as it can be
cleared away, through faith in that dear Lord, then the
likeness as a matter of course, comes into force.

The law of all elevation is that whosoever desires to
lift must stoop; and the end of all stooping is to lift
the lowly to the place from which the love hath bent
itself. And this is at once the law for the Incarnation
of the Christ, and for the elevation of the Christian. ‘We
shall be like Him for we shall see Him as He is.’ And
the great love, the stooping, forgiving, self-communicating
love, doth not reach its ultimate issue, nor effect
fully the purposes to which it ever is tending, unless and[34]
until all who have received it are ‘changed from glory
to glory even into the image of the Lord.’ We do not
understand Jesus, His cradle, or His Cross, unless on the
one hand we see in them His emptying Himself that He
might fill us, and, on the other hand, see, as the only
result which warrants them and satisfies Him, our
complete conformity to His image, and our participation
in that glory which He has at the right hand of
God. That is the prospect for humanity, and it is
possible for each of us.

I do not dwell upon other aspects of this great self-emptying
of our Lord’s, such as the revelation in it to
us of the very heart of God, and of the divinest thing
in the divine nature, which is love, or such as the sympathy
which is made possible thereby to Him, and
which is not only the pity of a God, but the compassion
of a Brother. Nor do I touch upon many other aspects
which are full of strengthening and teaching. That
grand thought that Jesus has shared our human
poverty that we may share His divine riches is the very
apex of the New Testament teaching, and of the
Christian hope. We have within us, notwithstanding
all our transgressions, what the old divines used to
call a ‘deiform nature,’ capable of being lifted up into
the participation of divinity, capable of being cleansed
from all the spots and stains which make us so unlike
Him in whose likeness we were made.

Brethren, let us not forget that this stooping, and
pardoning, and self-imparting love, has for its main
instrument to appeal to our hearts, not the cradle but
the Cross. We are being told by many people to-day
that the centre of Christianity lies in the thought of
an Incarnation. Yes. But our Lord Himself has told
us what that was for.[35]

‘The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but
to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many.’
It is only when we look to that Lord in His death, and
see there the very lowest point to which He stooped,
and the supreme manifestation of His grace, that we
shall be drawn to yield our hearts and lives to Him in
thankfulness, in trust, and in imitation: and shall set
Him before us as the pattern for our conduct, as well
as the Object of our trust.

Brethren, my text was spoken originally as presenting
the motive and the example for a little piece of
pecuniary liability. Do you take the cradle and the
Cross as the law of your lives? For depend upon it,
the same necessity which obliged Jesus to come down
to our level, if He would lift us to His; to live our life
and die our death, if He would make us partakers of
His immortal life, and deliver us from death; makes it
absolutely necessary that if we are to live for anything
nobler than our own poor, transitory self-aggrandisement,
we too must learn to stoop to forgive, to impart
ourselves, and must die by self-surrender and sacrifice,
if we are ever to communicate any life, or good of
life, to others. He has loved us, and given Himself for
us. He has set us therein an example which He commends
to us by His own word when He tells us that
‘if a corn of wheat’ is to bring forth ‘much fruit’ it
must die, else it ‘abideth alone.’ Unless we die, we
never truly live; unless we die to ourselves for others,
and like Jesus, we live alone in the solitude of a self-enclosed
self-regard. So living, we are dead whilst we
live.[36]

WILLING AND NOT DOING

The Revised Version reads: ‘But now complete the
doing also; that as there was the readiness to will, so
there may be the completion also out of your ability.’
A collection of money for the almost pauper church at
Jerusalem bulked very largely in the Apostle’s mind
at the date of the writing of the two letters to the
Corinthian church. We learn that that church had
been the first to agree to the project, and then had
very distinctly hung back from implementing its
promises and fulfilling its good intentions. So the
Apostle, in the chapter from which my text is taken,
with wonderful delicacy, dignity, and profundity, sets
forth the true principle, not only of Christian giving,
but of Christian asking. The text advises that the gushing
sentiments of brotherly sympathy and liberality
which had inspired the Corinthians a year ago should
now bear some fruit in action. So Paul is going to
send Titus, his right-hand man at the time, to hurry
up and finish off the collection and have done with it.
The text is in effect the message which Titus was to
carry; but it has a far wider application than that.
It is a needful advice for us all about a great many
other things: ‘As there was a readiness to will, so let
there be a performance also.’

Resolutions, noble and good and Christlike, have a
strange knack of cheating the people who make them.
So we all need the exhortation not to be befooled by
fancying that we have done, when we have only willed.
Of course we shall not do unless we will. But there is[37]
a wide gap, as our experience witnesses, between the
two things. We all know what place it is to which,
according to the old proverb, the road is paved with
good intentions; and the only way to pull up that
paving is to take Paul’s advice here and always, and
immediately to put into action the resolves of our
hearts. Now I desire to say two or three very plain
and simple things about this matter.

I. I would have you consider the necessity of this
commandment.

Consider that the fault here warned against is a
universal one. What different men we should be if
our resolutions had fruited in conduct! In all regions
of life that is true, but most emphatically is it true in
regard to religion. The damning tragedy of many
lives, and I dare say of those of some of my hearers,
is that men have over and over again determined that
they would be Christians, and they are not Christians
yet; just because they have let ‘the native hue of
resolution be sicklied over’ by some paleness or other,
and so have resolved and resolved and resolved till
every nerve of action is rotted away, and they will die
unchristian. I dare say that there are men or women
listening to me now, perhaps with grey hairs upon
them, who can remember times, in the springtide of
their youth, when they said, ‘I will give my heart to
Jesus Christ, and set my faith upon Him’; and they
have not done it yet. Now, therefore, ‘as there was
a readiness to will, let there be also the performance.’

But it is not only in regard to that most important
of all resolves that I wish to say a word. All Christians,
I am sure, know what it is, over and over again, to
have had stirrings in their hearts which they have been
able to consolidate into determination, but have not[38]
been able to carry into act. ‘The children have come
to the birth, and there is not strength to bring them
forth.’ That is true about all of us, more or less, and
it is very solemnly true of a great many of us professing
Christians. We have tried to cure—we have
determined that we will cure—manifest and flagrant
defects or faults in our Christian life. We have
resolved, and some nipping frost has come, and the
blossoms have dropped on the grass before they have
ever set into fruit. I know that is so about you, because
I know that it is so about myself. And therefore, dear
brethren, I appeal to you, and ask you whether the
exhortation of my text has not a sharp point for every
one of us—whether the universality of this defect does
not demand that we all should gravely consider the
exhortation here before us?

Then, again, let me remind you how this injunction
is borne in upon us by the consideration of the strength
of the opposition with which we have always to contend,
in every honest attempt to bring to act our best
resolutions. Did you ever try to cure some little habit,
some mere trifle, a trick of manner or twist of the
finger, or some attitude or tone that might be ugly and
awkward, and that people told you that it would be
better to get rid of? You know how hard it is. There
is always a tremendous gulf between the ideal and its
realisation in life. As long as we are moving in vacuo
we move without any friction or difficulty; but as soon
as we come out into a world where there are an atmosphere
and opposing forces, then friction comes in, and
speed diminishes; and we never become what we aim
to be. We begin with grand purposes, and we end
with very poor results. We all start, in our early
days, with the notion that our lives are going to be[39]
radiant and beautiful, and all unlike what the limitations
of power and the antagonisms that we have to
meet make of them at last. The tree of our life’s doings
has to grow, like those contorted pines on the slopes of
the Alps, in many storms, with heavy weights of snow
on its branches, and beaten about by tempests from
every quarter of the heavens; and so it gets gnarled
and knotted and very unlike the symmetrical beauty
that we dreamed would adorn it. We begin with saying:
‘Come! Let us build a tower whose top shall reach to
heaven’; and we are contented at last, if we have put
up some little tumble-down shed where we can get
shelter for our heads from the blast.

And the difficulty in bringing into action our best
selves besets us in the matter of translating our resolutions
into practice. What are arrayed against it? A
feeble will, enslaved too often by passions and flesh
and habits, and all about us lie obstacles to our
carrying into action our conscientious convictions, our
deepest resolutions; obstacles to our being true to our
true selves; to which obstacles, alas, far too many of
us habitually, and all of us occasionally, succumb. That
being the case, do not we all need to ponder in our
deepest hearts, and to pray for grace to make the
motto of our lives, ‘As there was a readiness to will,
let there be a performance’?

II. Consider the importance of this counsel.

That is borne in upon mind and conscience by looking
at the disastrous effects of letting resolutions
remain sterile. Consider how apt we are to deceive
ourselves with unfulfilled purposes. The quick response
which an easily-moved nature may make to
some appeal of noble thought or lofty principle is
mistaken for action, and we are tempted to think that[40]
willing is almost as good as if we had done what we
half resolved on. And there is a kind of glow of satisfaction
that comes when such a man thinks, ‘I have
done well in that I have determined.’ The Devil will
let you resolve as much as you like—the more the
better; only the more easily you resolve, the more
certainly he will block the realisation. Let us take
care of that seducing temptation which is apt to lead
us all to plume ourselves on good resolutions, and to
fancy that they are almost equivalent to their own
fulfilment. Cheques are all very well if there be bullion
in the bank cellars to pay them with when they fall
due, but if that be not so, then the issuing of them is
crime and fraud. Our resolutions, made and forgotten
as so many of our good resolutions are, are very little
better.

Note, too, how rapidly the habit of substituting
lightly-made resolutions for seriously-endeavoured
acts grows.

And mark, further, how miserable and debilitating
it is to carry the dead weight of such unaccomplished
intentions.

Nothing so certainly weakens a man as a multitude
of resolves that he knows he has never fulfilled. They
weaken his will, burden his conscience, stand in the
way of his hopes, make him feel as if the entail of
evil was too firm and strong to be ever broken. ‘O
wretched man that I am!’ said one who had made
experience of what it was to will what was good, and
not to find how to perform, ‘who shall deliver me from
the body of this death?’ It is an awful thing to have
to carry a corpse about on your back. And that was
what Paul thought the man did who loaded his own
shoulders with abortive resolutions, that perished in[41]
the birth, and never grew up to maturity. Weak and
miserable is always the man who is swift to resolve
and slow to carry out his resolutions.

III. And now let me say a word before I close about
how this universal and grave disease is to be coped with.

Well, I should say to begin with, let us take very
soberly and continually into our consciousness the recognition
of the fact that the disease is there. And
then may I say, let us be rather slower to resolve than
we often are. ‘Better is it that thou shouldest not
vow than that thou shouldest vow and not pay.’
The man who has never had the determination to give
up some criminal indulgence—say, drink—is possibly
less criminal, and certainly less weak, than the man
who, when his head aches, and the consequences of his
self-indulgence are vividly realised by him, makes up
his mind to be a teetotaller, and soon stumbles into
the first dram-shop that is open, and then reels out
a drunkard. Do not vow until you have made up your
minds to pay. Remember that it is a solemn act to
determine anything, especially anything bearing on
moral and religious life; and that you had far better
keep your will in suspense than spring to the resolution
with thoughtless levity and leave it with the same.

Further, the habit of promptly carrying out our
resolves is one that, like all other habits, can be cultivated.
And we can cultivate it in little things, in the
smallest trifles of daily life, which by their myriads
make up life itself, in order that it may be a fixed
custom of our minds when great resolves have to be
made. The man who has trained himself day in and
day out, in regard to the insignificances of daily life,
to let act follow resolve as the thunder peal succeeds
the lightning flash, is the man who, if he is moved to[42]
make a great resolve about his religion, or about his
conduct, will be most likely to carry it out. Get the
magical influence of habit on your side, and you
will have done much to conquer the evil of abortive
resolutions.

But then there is something a great deal more than
that to be said. The Apostle did not content himself,
in the passage already referred to, with bewailing the
wretchedness of the condition in which to will was
present, but how to perform he found not. He asked,
and he triumphantly answered, the question, ‘Who
shall deliver me?’ with the great words, ‘I thank God
through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ There is the secret;
keep near Him, trust Him, open your hearts to the
influences of that Divine Spirit who makes us free
from the law of sin and death. And if thus, knowing
our weakness, recognising our danger, humbly trying
to cultivate the habit of prompt discharge of all discerned
duty, we leave ourselves in Jesus Christ’s hands,
and wait, and ask, and believe that we possess, His
cleansing Spirit, then we shall not ask and wait in
vain. ‘Work out your own salvation, . . . for it is God
that worketh in you, both the willing and the doing.’

ALL GRACE ABOUNDING

In addition to all his other qualities the Apostle was an
extremely good man of business; and he had a field for
the exercise of that quality in the collection for the
poor saints of Judea, which takes up so much of this
letter, and occupied for so long a period so much of his[43]
thoughts and efforts. It was for the sake of showing
by actual demonstration that would ‘touch the hearts’
of the Jewish brethren, the absolute unity of the two
halves of the Church, the Gentile and the Jewish, that
the Apostle took so much trouble in this matter. The
words which I have read for my text come in the midst
of a very earnest appeal to the Corinthian Christians
for their pecuniary help. He is dwelling upon the same
thought which is expressed in the well-known words:
‘What I gave I kept; what I kept I lost.’

But whilst the words of my text primarily applied
to money matters, you see that they are studiously
general, universal. The Apostle, after his fashion, is
lifting up a little ‘secular’ affair into a high spiritual
region; and he lays down in my text a broad general
law, which goes to the very depths of the Christian
life.

Now, notice, we have here in three clauses three
stages which we may venture to distinguish as the
fountain, the basin, the stream. ‘God is able to make
all grace abound toward you’;—there is the fountain.
‘That ye always, having all-sufficiency in all things’;—there
is the basin that receives the gush from the
fountain. ‘May abound in every good work’;—there
is the steam that comes from the basin. The fountain
pours into the basin, that the flow from the basin may
feed the stream.

Now this thought of Paul’s goes to the heart of
things. So let us look at it.

I. The Fountain.

The Christian life in all its aspects and experiences
is an outflow from the ‘the Fountain of Life,’ the giving
God. Observe how emphatically the Apostle, in the
context, accumulates words that express universality:[44]
‘all grace . . . all-sufficiency for all things . . . every
good work.’ But even these expressions do not satisfy
Paul, and he has to repeat the word ‘abound,’ in order
to give some faint idea of his conception of the full
tide which gushes from the fountain. It is ‘all grace,’
and it is abounding grace.

Now what does he mean by ‘grace’? That word is a
kind of shorthand for the whole sum of the unmerited
blessings which come to men through Jesus Christ.
Primarily, it describes what we, for want of a better
expression, have to call a ‘disposition’ in the divine
nature; and it means, then, if so looked at, the unconditioned,
undeserved, spontaneous, eternal, stooping,
pardoning love of God. That is grace, in the
primary New Testament use of the phrase.

But there are no idle ‘dispositions’ in God. They
are always energising, and so the word glides from
meaning the disposition, to meaning the manifestation
and activities of it, and the ‘grace’ of our Lord is that
love in exercise. And then, since the divine energies
are never fruitless, the word passes over, further, to
mean all the blessed and beautiful things in a soul
which are the consequences of the Promethean truth
of God’s loving hand, the outcome in life of the inward
bestowment which has its cause, its sole cause, in God’s
ceaseless, unexhausted love, unmerited and free.

That, very superficially and inadequately set forth,
is at least a glimpse into the fulness and greatness of
meaning that lies in that profound New Testament
word, ‘grace.’ But the Apostle here puts emphasis on
the variety of forms which the one divine gift assumes.
It is ‘all grace’ which God is able to make abound
toward you. So then, you see this one transcendent
gift from the divine heart, when it comes into our[45]
human experience, is like a meteor when it passes
into the atmosphere of earth, and catches fire and
blazes, showering out a multitude of radiant points of
light. The grace is many-sided—many-sided to us, but
one in its source and in its character. For at bottom,
that which God in His grace gives to us as His grace is
what? Himself; or if you like to put it in another
form, which comes to the same thing—new life through
Jesus Christ. That is the encyclopædiacal gift, which
contains within itself all grace. And just as the
physical life in each of us, one in all its manifestations,
produces many results, and shines in the eye,
and blushes in the cheek, and gives strength to the
arm, and flexibility and deftness to the fingers and
swiftness to the foot: so also is that one grace which,
being manifold in its manifestations, is one in its
essence. There are many graces, there is one Grace.

But this grace is not only many-sided, but abounding.
It is not congruous with God’s wealth, nor with His
love, that He should give scantily, or, as it were, should
open but a finger of the hand that is full of His gifts,
and let out a little at a time. There are no sluices on
that great stream so as to regulate its flow, and to give
sometimes a painful trickle and sometimes a full gush,
but this fountain is always pouring itself out, and it
‘abounds.’

But then we are pulled up short by another word in
this first clause: ‘God is able to make.’ Paul does not
say, ‘God will make.’ He puts the whole weight of
responsibility for that ability becoming operative upon
us. There are conditions; and although we may have
access to that full fountain, it will not pour on us ‘all
grace’ and ‘abundant grace,’ unless we observe these,
and so turn God’s ability to give into actual giving.[46]
And how do we do that? By desire, by expectance, by
petition, by faithful stewardship. If we have these
things, if we have tutored ourselves, and experience
has helped in the tuition, to make large our expectancy,
God will smile down upon us and ‘do exceeding
abundantly above all’ that we ‘think’ as well as
above all that we ‘ask.’ Brethren, if our supplies are
scant, when the full fountain is gushing at our sides,
we are ‘not straitened in God, we are straitened in
ourselves.’ Christian possibilities are Christian obligations,
and what we might have and do not have, is our
condemnation.

I turn, in the next place, to what I have, perhaps too
fancifully, called

II. The Basin.

‘God is able to make all grace abound toward you,
that ye, having always all-sufficiency in all things,
may,’ . . . etc.

The result of all this many-sided and exuberant outpouring
of grace from the fountain is that the basin
may be full. Considering the infinite source and the
small receptacle, we might have expected something
more than ‘sufficiency’ to have resulted.

Divine grace is sufficient. Is it not more than sufficient?
Yes, no doubt. But what Paul wishes us to
feel is this—to put it into very plain English—that the
good gifts of the divine grace will always be proportioned
to our work, and to our sufferings too. We
shall feel that we have enough, if we are as we ought
to be. Sufficiency is more than a man gets anywhere
else. ‘Enough is as good as a feast.’ And if we have
strength, which we may have, to do the day’s tasks, and
strength to carry the day’s crosses, and strength to
accept the day’s sorrows, and strength to master the[47]
day’s temptations, that is as much as we need wish to
have, even out of the fulness of God. And we shall
get it, dear brethren, if we will only fulfil the conditions.
If we exercise expectance, and desire and
petition and faithful stewardship, we shall get what
we need. ‘Thy shoes shall be iron and brass,’ if the
road is a steep and rocky one that would wear out
leather. ‘As thy days so shall thy strength be.’ God
does not hurl His soldiers in a blundering attack on
some impregnable mountain, where they are slain in
heaps at the base; but when He lays a commandment
on my shoulders, He infuses strength into me, and
according to the good homely old saying that has
brought comfort to many a sad and weighted heart,
makes the back to bear the burden. The heavy task or
the crushing sorrow is often the key that opens the
door of God’s treasure-house. You have had very little
experience either of life or of Christian life, if you have
not learnt by this time that the harder your work, and
the darker your sorrows, the mightier have been God’s
supports, and the more starry the lights that have
shone upon your path. ‘That ye, always having all-sufficiency
in all things.’

One more word: this sufficiency should be more
uniform, is uniform in the divine intention, and in
so far as the flow of the fountain is concerned. Always
having had I may be sure that I always shall have. Of
course I know that, in so far as our physical nature
conditions our spiritual experience, there will be ups
and downs, moments of emancipation and moments of
slavery. There will be times when the flower opens,
and times when it shuts itself up. But I am sure that
the great mass of Christian people might have a far
more level temperature in their Christian experience[48]
than they have; that we could, if we would, have far
more experimental knowledge of this ‘always’ of my
text. God means that the basin should be always full
right up to the top of the marble edge, and that the
more is drawn off from it, the more should flow into
it. But it is very often like the reservoirs in the hills
for some great city in a drought, where great stretches
of the bottom are exposed, and again, when the
drought breaks, are full to the top of the retaining
wall. That should not be. Our Christian life should
run on the high levels. Why does it not? Possibilities
are duties.

And now, lastly, we have here what, adhering to my
metaphor, I call

III. The stream.

‘That ye, always having all-sufficiency in all things,
may abound to every good work.’

That is what God gives us His grace for; and that is
a very important consideration. The end of God’s
dealings with us, poor, weak, sinful creatures, is character
and conduct. Of course you can state the end in
a great many other ways; but there have been terrible
evils arising from the way in which Evangelical
preachers have too often talked, as if the end of God’s
dealings with us was the vague thing which they call
‘salvation,’ and by which many of their hearers take
them to mean neither more nor less than dodging Hell.
But the New Testament, with all its mysticism, even
when it soars highest, and speaks most about the perfection
of humanity, and the end of God’s dealings
being that we may be ‘filled with the fulness of God,’
never loses its wholesome, sane hold of the common
moralities of daily life, and proclaims that we receive
all, in order that we may be able to ‘maintain good[49]
works for necessary uses.’ And if we lay that to heart,
and remember that a correct creed, and a living faith,
and precious, select, inward emotions and experiences
are all intended to evolve into lives, filled and radiant
with common moralities and ‘good works’—not meaning
thereby the things which go by that name in
popular phraseology, but ‘whatsoever things are lovely
. . . and of good report’—then we shall understand a
little better what we are here for and what Jesus
Christ died for, and what His Spirit is given and lives
in us for. So ‘good works’ is the end, in one very important
aspect, of all that avalanche of grace which
has been from eternity rushing down upon us from
the heights of God.

There is one more thing to note, and that is that, in
our character and conduct, we should copy the ‘giving
grace.’ Look how eloquently and significantly, in the
first and last clauses of my text, the same words recur.
‘God is able to make all grace abound, that ye may
abound in all good work.’ Copy God in the many-sidedness
and in the copiousness of the good that flows
out from your life and conduct, because of your possession
of that divine grace. And remember, ‘to him
that hath shall be given.’ We pray for more grace;
we need to pray for that, no doubt. Do we use the
grace that God has given us? If we do not, the
remainder of that great word which I have just quoted
will be fulfilled in you. God forbid that any of us
should receive the grace of God in vain, and therefore
come under the stern and inevitable sentence,
‘From him that hath not shall be taken away, even
that which he hath!’[50]

GOD’S UNSPEAKABLE GIFT

It seems strange that there should ever have been any
doubt as to what gift it is which evokes this burst of
thanksgiving. There is but one of God’s many mercies
which is worthy of being thus singled out. There
is one blazing central sun which shines out amidst
all the galaxy of lights which fill the heavens. There
is one gift of God which, beyond all others, merits the
designation of ‘unspeakable.’ The gift of Christ draws
all other divine gifts after it. ‘How should He not
with Him also freely give us all things.’

The connection in which this abrupt jet of praise
stands is very remarkable. The Apostle has been
dwelling on the Christian obligation of giving bountifully
and cheerfully, and on the great law that a glad
giver is ‘enriched’ and not impoverished thereby,
whilst the recipients, for their part, are blessed by
having thankfulness evoked towards the givers. And
that contemplation of the happy interchange of benefit
and thanks between men leads the fervid Apostle to
the thoughts which were always ready to spring to his
lips—of God as the great pattern of giving and of the
gratitude to Him which should fill all our souls. The
expression here ‘unspeakable’ is what I wish chiefly
to fix upon now. It means literally that which cannot
be fully declared. Language fails because thought
fails.

I. The gift comes from unspeakable love.

God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten
Son. The love is the cause of the gift: the gift
is the expression of the love. John’s Gospel says that[51]
the Son which is in the bosom of the Father has declared
Him. Paul here uses a related word for unspeakable
which might be rendered ‘that which cannot be fully
declared.’ The declaration of the Father partly consists
in this, that He is declared to be undeclarable,
the proclamation of His name consists partly in this
that it is proclaimed to be a name that cannot be proclaimed.
Language fails when it is applied to the
expression of human emotion; no tongue can ever
fully serve the heart. Whether there be any thoughts
too great for words or no, there are emotions too
great. Language is ever ‘weaker than our grief’ and
not seldom weaker than our love. It is but the surface
water that can be run off through the narrow
channel of speech: the central deep remains. If it be
so with human affection, how much more must it be
so with God’s love? With lowly condescension He uses
all sweet images drawn from earthly relationships, to
help us in understanding His. Every dear name is
pressed into the service—father, mother, husband, wife,
brother, friend, and after all are exhausted, the love
which clothed itself in them all in turn, and used them
all to give some faint hint of its own perfection,
remains unspoken. We know human love, its limitations,
its changes, its extravagances, its shortcomings,
and cannot but feel how unworthy it is to mirror for
us that perfection in God which we venture to name
by a name so soiled. The analogies between what we
call love in man and love in God must be supplemented
by the differences between them, if we are ever to
approach a worthy conception of the unspeakable love
that underlies the unspeakable gift.

II. The gift involves unspeakable sacrifice.

Human love desires to give its most precious[52]
treasures to its object and is then most blessed: divine
love cannot come short of human in this most characteristic
of its manifestations. Surely the copy is not
to surpass the original, nor the mirror to flash more
brightly than the sun which, at the brightest, it but
reflects. In such a matter we can but stammer when
we try to find words. As our text warns us, we are
trying to utter the unutterable when we seek to speak
of God’s giving up for us; but however such a thought
may seem to be forbidden by other aspects of the
divine nature, it seems to be involved in the great
truth that ‘God is love.’ Since He is, His blessedness
too, must be in imparting, and in parting with what
He gives. A humble worshipper in Jewish times loved
enough to say that he would not offer unto God an
offering that cost him nothing, and that loving height
of self-surrender was at the highest, but a lowly imitation
of the love to which it looked up. When Paul in
the Epistle to the Romans says, ‘He that spared not
His own Son but delivered Him up for us all,’ he is
obviously alluding to, and all but quoting, the divine
words to Abraham, ‘Seeing thou hast not withheld
thy son, thine only son, from Me,’ and the allusion
permits us to parallel what God did when He sent His
Son with what Abraham did when, with wrung heart,
but with submission, he bound and laid Isaac on the
altar and stretched forth his hand with the knife in it
to slay him. Such a representation contradicts the
vulgar conceptions of a passionless, self-sufficing, icy
deity, but reflection on the facts of our own experience
and on the blessed secrets of our own love, leads us to
believe that some shadow of loss passed across the infinite
and eternal completeness of the divine nature
when ‘God sent forth His Son made of a woman.’[53]
And may we not go further and say that when Jesus
on the Cross cried from out of the darkness of eclipse,
‘My God! My God! Why hast Thou forsaken me?’
there was something in the heavens corresponding to
the darkness that covered the earth and something in
the Father’s heart that answered the Son’s. But our
text warns us that such matters are not for our handling
in speech, and are best dealt with, not as matters
of possibly erring speculation, but as materials for
lowly thanks unto God for His unspeakable gift.

But whatever may be true about the love of the
Father who sent, there can be no doubt about the love
of the Son who came. No man helps his fellows in
suffering but at the cost of his own suffering. Sympathy
means fellow-feeling, and the one indispensable
condition of all rescue work of any sort is that the
rescuer must bear on his own shoulders the sins or
sorrows that he is able to bear away. Heartless help
is no help. It does not matter whether he who ‘stands
and says, “Be ye clothed and fed,”‘ gives or does not
give ‘the things necessary,’ he will be but a ‘miserable
comforter’ if he has not in heart and feeling entered
into the sorrows and pains which he seeks to alleviate.
We need not dwell on the familiar truths concerning
Him who was a ‘man of sorrows and acquainted with
grief.’ All through His life He was in contact with
evil, and for Him the contact was like that of a naked
hand pressed upon hot iron. The sins and woes of the
world made His path through it like that of bare feet
on sharp flints. If He had never died it would still
have been true that ‘He was wounded for our transgressions
and bruised for our iniquities.’ On the
Cross He completed the libation which had continued
throughout His life and ‘poured out His soul unto[54]
death’ as He had been pouring it out all through His
life. We have no measure by which we can estimate
the inevitable sufferings in such a world as ours of
such a spirit as Christ’s. We may know something of
the solitude of uncongenial society; of the pain of
seeing miseries that we cannot comfort, of the horrors
of dwelling amidst impurities that we cannot cleanse,
and of longings to escape from them all to some
nest in the wilderness, but all these are but the
feeblest shadows of the incarnate sorrows whose name
among men was Jesus. Nothing is more pathetic than
the way in which our Lord kept all these sorrows close
locked within His own heart, so that scarcely ever did
they come to light. Once He did permit a glimpse into
that hidden chamber when He said, ‘O faithless generation,
how long shall I be with you, how long shall I
suffer you?’ But for the most part His sorrow was
unspoken because it was ‘unspeakable.’ Once beneath
the quivering olives in the moonlight of Gethsemane,
He made a pitiful appeal for the little help which three
drowsy men could give Him, when He cried, ‘My soul
is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death. Tarry ye
here and watch with Me,’ but for the most part the
silence at which His judges ‘marvelled greatly,’ and
raged as much as they marvelled, was unbroken, and
as ‘a sheep before her shearers is dumb,’ so ‘He opened
not His mouth.’ The sacrifice of His death was, for
the most part, silent like the sacrifice of His life.
Should it not call forth from us floods of praise and
thanks to God for His unspeakable gift?

III. The gift brings with it unspeakable results.

In Christ are hid ‘all the treasures of wisdom and
knowledge.’ When God gave us Him, He gave us a
storehouse in which are contained treasures of truth[55]
which can never be fully comprehended, and which,
even if comprehended, can never be exhausted. The
mystery of the Divine Name revealed in Jesus, the
mystery of His person, are themes on which the
Christian world has been nourished ever since, and
which are as full of food, not for the understanding
only, but far more for the heart and the will, to-day as
ever they were. The world may think that it has left
the teaching of Jesus behind, but in reality the teaching
is far ahead, and the world’s practise is but slowly
creeping towards its imperfect attainment. The Gospel
is the guide of the race, and each generation gathers
something more from it, and progresses in the measure
in which it follows Christ; and as for the race, so for
the individual. Each of Christ’s scholars finds his own
gift, and in the measure of his faithfulness to what he
has found makes ever new discoveries in the unsearchable
riches of Christ. After all have fed full there still
remain abundant baskets full to be taken up.

He who has sounded the depths of Jesus most completely
is ever the first to acknowledge that he has been
but as a child ‘gathering pebbles on the beach while
the great ocean lies unsounded before him.’ No single
soul, and no multitude of souls, can exhaust Jesus;
neither our individual experiences, nor the experiences
of a believing world can fully realise the endless wealth
laid up in Him. He is the Alpha and the Omega of all
our speech, the first letter and the last of our alphabet,
between which lie all the rest.

The gift is completed in consequences yet unspeakable.
Even the first blessings which the humblest faith
receives from the pierced hands have more in them
than words can tell. Who has ever spoken adequately
and in full correspondence with reality what it is to have[56]
God’s pardoning love flowing in upon the soul? Many
singers have sung sweet psalms and hymns and
spiritual songs on which generations of devout souls
have fed, but none of them has spoken the deepest
blessedness of a Christian life, or the calm raptures of
communion with God. It is easy to utter the words
‘forgiveness, reconciliation, acceptance, fellowship,
eternal life’; the syllables can be spoken, but who
knows or can utter the depths of the meanings? After
all human words the half has not been told us, and as
every soul carries within itself unrevealable emotions,
and is a mystery after all revelation, so the things
which God’s gift brings to a soul are after all speech
unspeakable, and the words ‘cannot be uttered’ which
they who are caught up into the third heavens hear.

Then we may extend our thoughts to the future
form of Christian experience. ‘It doth not yet appear
what we should be.’ All our conceptions of a future
existence must necessarily be inadequate. Nothing
but experience can reveal them to us, and our experience
there will be capable of indefinite expansion, and
through eternity there will be endless growth in the
appropriation of the unspeakable gift.

For us the only recompense that we can make for the
unspeakable gift is to receive it with ‘thanks unto
God’ and the yielding up of our hearts to Him. God
pours this love upon us freely, without stint. It is
unspeakable in the depths of its source, in the manner
of its manifestation, in the glory of its issues. It is
like some great stream, rising in the trackless mountains,
broad and deep, and leading on to a sunlit
ocean. We stand on the bank; let us trust ourselves
to its broad bosom. It will bear us safe. And let us
take heed that we receive not the gift of God in vain.[57]

A MILITANT MESSAGE

None of Paul’s letters are so full of personal feeling
as this one is. It is written, for the most part, at a
white heat; he had heard from his trusted Titus tidings
which on one hand filled him with a thankfulness of
which the first half of the letter is the expression; but
there had also been tidings of a very different kind,
and from this point onwards the letter is seething with
the feelings which these had produced. There was in
the Corinthian Church a party, probably Judaisers,
which denied his authority and said bitter things about
his character. They apparently had contrasted the
force of his letters and the feebleness of his ‘bodily
presence’ and speech. They insinuated that his ‘bark
was worse than his bite.’ Their language put into
plain English would be something like this, ‘Ah! He
is very bold at a distance, let him come and face us
and we shall see a difference. Vapouring in his letters,
he will be meek enough when he is here.’

These slanderers seem to have thought of Paul as if
he ‘warred according to flesh,’ and it is this charge,
that he was actuated in his opposition to the evils in
Corinth by selfish considerations and worldly interests,
which seems to have set the Apostle on fire. In answer
he pours out quick, indignant questionings, sharp irony,
vehement self-vindication, passionate remonstrances,
flashes of wrath, sudden jets of tenderness. What a
position for him to have to say, ‘I am not a low
schemer; I am not working for myself.’ Yet it is the
common lot of all such men to be misread by little,[58]
crawling creatures who cannot believe in heroic self-forgetfulness.
He answers the taunt that he ‘walked
according to the flesh’ in the context by saying, ‘Yes,
I live in the flesh, my outward life is like that of other
men, but I do not go a-soldiering according to the flesh.
It is not for my own sinful self that I get the rules of
my life’s battle, neither do I get my weapons from the
flesh. They could not do what they do if that were their
origin: they are of God and therefore mighty.’ Then
the metaphor as it were catches fire, and in our text
he expands the figure of a warfare and sets before us
the destruction of fortresses, the capture of their
garrisons, and the leading of them away into another
land, the stern punishment of the rebels who still hold
out, and the merciful delay in administering it. It has
been suggested that there is an allusion in our text to
the extermination of the pirates in Paul’s native Cilicia
which happened some fifty or sixty years before his
birth and ended in destroying their robber-holds and
taking some thousands of prisoners. Whether that be
so or no, the Apostle’s kindled imagination sets forth
here great truths as to the effects which his message is
meant to produce and, thank God, has produced.

I. The opposing fortresses.

The Apostle conceives of himself and of his brother
preachers of Christ as going forth on a merciful warfare.
He thinks of strong rock fortresses, with lofty
walls set on high, and frowning down on any assailants.
No doubt he is thinking first of the opposition which
he had to front in Corinth from the Judaisers to whom
we have referred, but the application of the metaphor
goes far beyond the petty strife in Corinth and carries
for us the wholesome lesson that one main cause which
keeps men back from Christ is a too high estimate of[59]
themselves. Some of us are enclosed in the fortress of
self-sufficiency: we will not humbly acknowledge our
dependence on God, and have turned self-reliance into
the law of our lives. There are many voices, some of
them sweet and powerful, which to-day are preaching
that gospel. It finds eager response in many hearts,
and there is something in us all to which it appeals.
We are often tempted to say defiantly, ‘Who is Lord
over us?’ And the teaching that bids us rely on ourselves
is so wholly in accord with the highest wisdom
and the noblest life that what is good and what is evil
in each of us contribute to reinforce it. Self-dependence
is a great virtue, and the mother of much energy
and nobleness, but it is also a great error and a great
sin. To be so self-sufficing as not to need externals is
good; to be so self-sufficing as not to need or to see
God is ruin and death. The title which, as one of our
great thinkers tells us, a humourist put on the back of
a volume of heterodox tracts, ‘Every man his own
redeemer,’ makes a claim for self-sufficiency which
more or less unconsciously shuts out many men from
the salvation of Christ.

There is the fortress of culture and the pride of it in
which many of us are to-day entrenched against the
Gospel. The attitude of mind into which persons of
culture tend to fall is distinctly adverse to their reception
of the Gospel, and that is not because the Gospel
is adverse to culture, but because cultured people do
not care to be put on the same level with publicans
and harlots. They would be less disinclined to go into
the feast if there were in it reserved seats for superior
people and a private entrance to them. If the wise and
prudent were more of both, they would be liker the
babes to whom these things are revealed, and they[60]
would be revealed to them too. Not knowledge but
the superciliousness which is the result of the conceit
of knowledge hinders from God, and is one of the
strongest fortresses against which the weapons of our
warfare have to be employed.

There is the fortress of ignorance. Most men who
are kept from Christ are so because they know neither
themselves nor God. The most widely prevailing
characteristic of the superficial life of most men is
their absolute unconsciousness of the fact of sin; they
neither know it as universal nor as personal. They
have never gone deeply enough down into the depths
of their own hearts to have come up scared at the
ugly things that lie sleeping there, nor have they ever
reflected on their own conduct with sufficient gravity
to discern its aberrations from the law of right, hence
the average man is quite unconscious of sin, and is a
complete stranger to himself. The cup has been drunk
by and intoxicated the world, and the masses of men
are quite unaware that it has intoxicated them.

They are ignorant of God as they are of themselves,
and if at any time, by some flash of light, they see
themselves as they are, they think of God as if He were
altogether such an one as themselves, and fall back on
a vague trust in the vaguer mercy of their half-believed-in
God as their hope for a vague salvation. Men who
thus walk in a vain show will never feel their need of
Jesus, and the lazy ignorance of themselves and the
as lazy trust in what they call their God, are a fortress
against which it will task the power of God to make
any weapons of warfare mighty to its pulling down.

II. The casting down of fortresses.

The first effect of any real contact with Christ and
His Gospel is to reveal a man to himself, to shatter his[61]
delusive estimates of what he is, and to pull down
about his ears the lofty fortress in which he has
ensconced himself. It seems strange work for what
calls itself a Gospel to begin by forcing a man to cry
out with sobs and tears, Oh, wretched man that I am!
But no man will ever reach the heights to which Christ
can lift him, who does not begin his upward course by
descending to the depths into which Christ’s Gospel
begins its work by plunging him. Unconsciousness of
sin is sure to lead to indifference to a Saviour, and
unless we know ourselves to be miserable and poor and
blind and naked, the offer of gold refined by fire and
white garments that we may clothe ourselves will
make no appeal to us. The fact of sin makes the need
for a Saviour; our individual sense of sin makes us
sensible of our need of a Saviour.

Paul believed that the weapons of his warfare were
mighty enough to cast down the strongest of all
strongholds in which men shut themselves up against
the humbling Gospel of salvation by the mercy of God.
The weapons to which he thus trusted were the same
to which Jesus pointed His disciples when, about to
leave them, He said, ‘When the Comforter is come He
will convict the world of sin because they believe not
in Me.’ Jesus brought to the world the perfect revelation
of the holiness of God, and set before us all a
divine pattern of manhood to rebuke and condemn our
stained and rebellious lives, and He turned us away
from the superficial estimate of actions to the careful
scrutiny of motives. By all these and many other
ways He presented Himself to the world a perfect man,
the incarnation of a holy God and the revelation and
condemnation of sinful humanity. Yet, all that miracle
of loveliness, gentleness, and dignity is beheld by men[62]
without a thrill, and they see in Him no ‘beauty that
they should desire Him,’ and no healing to which they
will trust. Paul’s way of kindling penitence in impenitent
spirits was not to brandish over them the
whips of law or to seek to shake souls with terror of
any hell, still less was it to discourse with philosophic
calm on the obligations of duty and the wisdom of
virtuous living; his appeal to conscience was primarily
the pressing on the heart of the love of God in Christ
Jesus our Lord. When the heart is melted, the conscience
will not long continue indurated. We cannot
look lovingly and believingly at Jesus and then turn
to look complacently on ourselves. Not to believe on
Him is the sin of sins, and to be taught that it is so is
the first step in the work of Him who never merits the
name of the Comforter more truly than when He convicts
the world of sin.

For a Christianity that does not begin with the deep
consciousness of sin has neither depth nor warmth and
has scarcely vitality. The Gospel is no Gospel, and we
had almost said, ‘The Christ is no Christ’ to one who
does not feel himself, if parted from Christ, ‘dead in
trespasses and sins.’ Our religion depends for all its
force, our gratitude and love for all their devotion,
upon our sense that ‘the chastisement of our peace
was laid upon Him, and that by His stripes we are
healed.’ Since He gave Himself for us, it is meet that
we give ourselves to Him, but there will be little
fervour of devotion or self-surrender, unless there has
been first the consciousness of the death of sin and
then the joyous consciousness of newness of life in
Christ Jesus.

III. The captives led away to another land.

The Apostle carries on his metaphor one step further[63]
when he goes on to describe what followed the casting
down of the fortresses. The enemy, driven from their
strongholds, have nothing for it but to surrender and
are led away in captivity to another land. The long
strings of prisoners on Assyrian and Egyptian monuments
show how familiar an experience this was. It
may be noted that perhaps our text regards the
obedience of Christ as being the far country into
which ‘every thought was to be brought.’ At all
events Paul’s idea here is that the end of the whole
struggle between ‘the flesh’ and the weapons of God
is to make men willing captives of Jesus Christ. We
are Christians in the measure in which we surrender
our wills to Christ. That surrender rests upon, and is
our only adequate answer to, His surrender for us.
The ‘obedience of Christ’ is perfect freedom; His
captives wear no chains and know nothing of forced
service; His yoke is easy, not because it does not press
hard upon the neck but because it is lined with love,
and ‘His burden is light’ not because of its own weight
but because it is laid on us by love and is carried by
kindred love. He only commands himself who gladly
lets Christ command him. Many a hard task becomes
easy; crooked things are straightened out and rough
places often made surprisingly plain for the captives
of Christ, whom He leads into the liberty of obedience
to Him.

IV. Fate of the disobedient.

Paul thinks that in Corinth there will be found some
stiff-necked opponents of whom he cannot hope that
their ‘obedience shall be fulfilled,’ and he sees in the
double issue of the small struggle that was being
waged in Corinth a parable of the wider results of the
warfare in the world. ‘Some believed and some believed[64]
not’; that has been the brief summary of the experience
of all God’s messengers everywhere, and it is their
experience to-day. No doubt when Paul speaks of
‘being in readiness to avenge all disobedience,’ he is
alluding to the exercise of his apostolic authority
against the obdurate antagonists whom he contemplates
as still remaining obdurate, and it is beautiful
to note the long-suffering patience with which he will
hold his hand until all that can be won has been won.
But we must not forget that Paul’s demeanour is but a
faint shadow of his Lord’s, and that the weapons which
were ready to avenge all disobedience were the weapons
of God. If a man steels himself against the efforts of
divine love, builds up round himself a fortress of self-righteousness
and locks its gates against the merciful
entrance of convictions of sin and the knowledge of a
Saviour, and if he therefore lives, year in, year out, in
disobedience, the weapons which he thinks himself to
have resisted will one day make him feel their edge.
We cannot set ourselves against the salvation of Jesus
without bringing upon ourselves consequences which
are wholly evil and harmful. Torpid consciences,
hungry hearts, stormy wills, tyrannous desires, vain
hopes and not vain fears come to be, by slow degrees,
the tortures of the man who drops the portcullis and
lifts the bridge against the entrance of Jesus. There
are hells enough on earth if men’s hearts were displayed.

But the love which is obliged to smite gives warning
that it is ready to avenge, long before it lets the blow
fall, and does so in order that it may never need to fall.
As long as it is possible that the disobedient shall
become obedient to Christ, He holds back the vengeance
that is ready to fall and will one day fall ‘on all[65]
disobedience.’ Not till all other means have been
patiently tried will He let that terrible ending crash
down. It hangs over the heads of many of us who are
all unaware that we walk beneath the shadow of a
rock that at any moment may be set in motion and
bury us beneath its weight. It is ‘in readiness,’ but it
is still at rest. Let us be wise in time and yield to the
merciful weapons with which Jesus would make His
way into our hearts. Or if the metaphor of our text
presents Him in too warlike a guise, let us listen to
His own gentle pleading, ‘Behold, I stand at the door
and knock; if any man hear My voice, and open the
door, I will come in to him.’

SIMPLICITY TOWARDS CHRIST

The Revised Version, amongst other alterations, reads,
‘the simplicity that is towards Christ.’

The inaccurate rendering of the Authorised Version
is responsible for a mistake in the meaning of these
words, which has done much harm. They have been
supposed to describe a quality or characteristic belonging
to Christ or the Gospel; and, so construed, they
have sometimes been made the watchword of narrowness
and of intellectual indolence. ‘Give us the simple
Gospel’ has been the cry of people who have thought
themselves to be evangelical when they were only lazy,
and the consequence has been that preachers have been
expected to reiterate commonplaces, which have made
both them and their hearers listless, and to sink the
educational for the evangelistic aspect of the Christian
teacher’s function.[66]

It is quite true that the Gospel is simple, but it is also
true that it is deep, and they will best appreciate its
simplicity who have most honestly endeavoured to
fathom its depth. When we let our little sounding
lines out, and find that they do not reach the bottom,
we begin to wonder even more at the transparency of
the clear abyss. It is not simplicity in Christ, but
towards Christ of which the Apostle is speaking; not a
quality in Him, but a quality in us towards Him. I
wish, then, to turn to the two thoughts that these
words suggest. First and chiefly, the attitude towards
Christ which befits our relation to Him; and, secondly
and briefly, the solicitude for its maintenance.

I. First, then, look at the attitude towards Christ
which befits the Christian relation to Him.

The word ‘simplicity’ has had a touch of contempt
associated with it. It is a somewhat doubtful compliment
to say of a man that he is ‘simple-minded.’ All
noble words which describe great qualities get oxidised
by exposure to the atmosphere, and rust comes over
them, as indeed all good things tend to become deteriorated
in time and by use. But the notion of the word
is really a very noble and lofty one. To be ‘without a
fold,’ which is the meaning of the Greek word and of its
equivalent ‘simplicity,’ is, in one aspect, to be transparently
honest and true, and in another to be out and
out of a piece. There is no underside of the cloth,
doubled up beneath the upper which shows, and running
in the opposite direction; but all tends in one way.
A man with no under-currents, no by-ends, who is
down to the very roots what he looks, and all whose
being is knit together and hurled in one direction,
without reservation or back-drawing, that is the
‘simple’ man whom the Apostle means. Such sim[67]plicity
is the truest wisdom; such simplicity of devotion
to Jesus Christ is the only attitude of heart and mind
which corresponds to the facts of our relation to Him.
That relation is set forth in the context by a very
sweet and tender image, in the true line of scriptural
teaching, which in many a place speaks of the Bride
and Bridegroom, and which on its last page shows us
the Lamb’s wife descending from Heaven to meet her
husband. The state of devout souls and of the community
of such here on earth is that of betrothal.
Their state in heaven is that of marriage. Very beautiful
it is to see how this fiery Paul, like the ascetic
John, who never knew the sacred joys of that state,
lays hold of the thought of the Bridegroom and the
Bride, and of his individual relation to both as indicating
the duties of the Church and the solicitude of
the Apostle. He says that he has been the intermediary
who, according to Oriental custom, arranged
the preliminaries of the marriage, and brought the
bride to the bridegroom, and, as the friend of the latter,
standing by rejoices greatly to hear the bridegroom’s
voice, and is solicitous mainly that in the tremulous
heart of the betrothed there should be no admixture of
other loves, but a whole-hearted devotion, an exclusive
affection, and an absolute obedience. ‘I have espoused
you,’ says he, ‘to one husband that I may present you
as a chaste virgin to Christ. But I fear lest . . . your
mind should be corrupted from the simplicity that is
towards Him.’

Now that metaphor carries in its implication all that
anybody can say about the exclusiveness, the depth,
the purity, the all-pervasiveness of the dependent love
which should knit us to Jesus Christ. The same thought
of whole-hearted, single, absolute devotion is conveyed[68]
by other Scripture metaphors, the slave and the soldier
of Christ. But all that is repellent or harsh in these is
softened and glorified when we contemplate it in the
light of the metaphor of my text.

So I might leave it to do its own work, but I may
perhaps be allowed to follow out the thought in one or
two directions.

The attitude, then, which corresponds to our relation
to Jesus Christ is that, first, of a faith which looks to
Him exclusively as the source of salvation and of light.
The specific danger which was alarming Paul, in reference
to that little community of Christians in Corinth,
was one which, in its particular form, is long since dead
and buried. But the principles which underlay it, the
tendencies to which it appealed, and the perils which
alarmed Paul for the Corinthian Church, are perennial.
He feared that these Judaising teachers, who dogged
his heels all his life long, and whose one aim seemed to
be to build upon his foundation and to overthrow his
building, should find their way into this church and
wreck it. The keenness of the polemic, in this and in
the contextual chapters, shows how real and imminent
the danger was. Now what they did was to tell people
that Jesus Christ had a partner in His saving work.
They said that obedience to the Jewish law, ceremonial
and other, was a condition of salvation, along with
trust in Jesus Christ as the Messiah. And because they
thus shared out the work of salvation between Jesus
Christ and something else, Paul thundered and lightened
at them all his life, and, as he tells us in this
context, regarded them as preaching another Jesus,
another spirit, and another gospel. That particular
error is long dead and buried.

But is there nothing else that has come into its place?[69]
Has this old foe not got a new face, and does not it live
amongst us as really as it lived then? I think it does;
whether in the form of the grosser kind of sacramentarianism
and ecclesiasticism which sticks sacraments
and a church in front of the Cross, or in the form of
the definite denial that Jesus Christ’s death on the
Cross is the one means of salvation, or simply in the
form of the coarse, common wish to have a finger in
the pie and a share in the work of saving oneself, as a
drowning man will sometimes half drown his rescuer
by trying to use his own limbs. These tendencies that
Paul fought, and which he feared would corrupt the
Corinthians from their simple and exclusive reliance on
Christ, and Christ alone, as the ground and author of
their salvation, are perennial in human nature, and
we have to be on our guard for ever and for ever
against them. Whether they come in organised, systematic,
doctrinal form, or whether they are simply the
rising in our own hearts of the old Adam of pride and
self-trust, they equally destroy the whole work of
Christ, because they infringe upon its solitariness and
uniqueness. It is not Christ and anything else. Men
are not saved by a syndicate. It is Jesus Christ alone,
and ‘beside Him there is no Saviour.’ You go into a
Turkish mosque and see the roof held up by a forest
of slim pillars. You go into a cathedral chapter-house
and see one strong support in the centre that
bears the whole roof. The one is an emblem of the
Christless multiplicity of vain supports, the other of
the solitary strength and eternal sufficiency of the one
Pillar on which the whole weight of a world’s salvation
rests, and which lightly bears it triumphantly aloft.
‘I fear lest your minds be corrupted from the simplicity’
of a reasonable faith directed towards Christ.[70]

And in like manner He is the sole light and teacher
of men as to God, themselves, their duty, their destinies
and prospects. He, and He alone, brings these things
to light. His word, whether it comes from His lips or
from the deeds which are part of His revelation, or
from the voice of the Spirit which takes of His and
speaks to the ages through His apostles, should be ‘the
end of all strife.’ What He says, and all that He says,
and nothing else than what He says, is the creed of the
Christian. He, and He only, is ‘the light which lighteth
every man that cometh into the world.’ In this day of
babblements and confusions, let us listen for the voice
of Christ and accept all which comes from Him, and let
the language of our deepest hearts be, ‘Lord, to whom
shall we go? Thou only hast the words of eternal
life.’

Again, our relation to Jesus Christ demands exclusive
love to Him. ‘Demands’ is an ugly word to bracket
with love. We might say, and perhaps more truly,
permits or privileges. It is the joy of the betrothed
that her duty is to love, and to keep her heart clear
from all competing affections. But it is none the less
her duty because it is her joy. What Christ is to you,
if you are a Christian, and what He longs to be to us
all, whether we are Christians or not, is of such a
character as that the only fitting attitude of our hearts
to Him in response is that of exclusive affection. I do
not mean that we are to love nothing but Him, but I
mean that we are to love all things else in Him, and
that, if any creature so delays or deflects our love as
that either it does not pass, by means of the creature,
into the presence of the Christ, or is turned away from
the Christ by the creature, then we have fallen beneath
the sweet level of our lofty privilege, and have won for[71]
ourselves the misery due to distracted and idolatrous
hearts. Love to one who has done what He has done
for us is in its very nature exclusive, and its exclusiveness
is all-pervasive exclusiveness. The centre diamond
makes the little stones set round it all the more lustrous.
We must love Jesus Christ all in all or not at
all. Divided love incurs the condemnation that falls
heavily upon the head of the faithless bride.

Dear friends, the conception of the essence of religion
as being love is no relaxation, but an increase, of its
stringent requirements. The more we think of that
sweet bond as being the true union of the soul with
God, who is its only rest and home, the more reasonable
and imperative will appear the old commandment,
‘Thou shalt love Him with all thy heart, and soul, and
strength, and mind.’

But, further, our relation to Jesus Christ is such as
that nothing short of absolute obedience to His commandment
corresponds to it. There must be the simplicity,
the single-mindedness that thus obeys, obeys
swiftly, cheerfully, constantly. In all matters His
command is my law, and, as surely as I make His
command my law, will He make my desire His motive.
For He Himself has said, in words that bring together
our obedience to His will and His compliance with
our wishes, in a fashion that we should not have ventured
upon unless He had set us an example, ‘If ye
love Me, keep My commandments. If ye ask anything
in My name I will do it.’ The exclusive love that binds
us, by reason of our faith in Him alone, to that Lord
ought to express itself in unhesitating, unfaltering,
unreserved, and unreluctant obedience to every word
that comes from His mouth.

These brief outlines are but the poorest attempt to[72]
draw out what the words of my text imply. But such
as they are, let us remember that they do set forth the
only proper response of the saved man to the saving
Christ. ‘Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.’ Anything
short of a faith that rests on Him alone, of a love
that knits itself to His single, all-sufficient heart, and
of an obedience that bows the whole being to the sweet
yoke of His commandment is an unworthy answer to
the Love that died, and that lives for us all.

II. And now I have only time to glance at the solicitude
for the maintenance of this exclusive single-mindedness
towards Christ.

Think of what threatens it. I say nothing about the
ferment of opinion in this day, for one man that
is swept away from a thorough whole-hearted faith by
intellectual considerations, there are a dozen from
whom it is filched without their knowing it, by their
own weaknesses and the world’s noises. And so it is
more profitable that we should think of the whole
crowd of external duties, enjoyments, sweetnesses,
bitternesses, that solicit us, and would seek to draw us
away. Who can hear the low voice that speaks peace
and wisdom when Niagara is roaring past his ears?
‘The world is too much with us, late and soon. Buying
and selling we lay waste our powers,’ and break ourselves
away from our simple devotion to that dear
Lord. But it is possible that we may so carry into all
the whirl the central peace, as that we shall not be
disturbed by it; and possible that ‘whether we eat or
drink, or whatsoever we do, we may do all to His glory,’
so that we can, even in the midst of our daily pressing
avocations and cares be keeping our hearts in the
heavens, and our souls in touch with our Lord.

But it is not only things without that draw us away.[73]
Our own weaknesses and waywardnesses, our strong
senses, our passions, our desires, our necessities, all
these have a counteracting force, which needs continual
watchfulness in order to be neutralised. No man can
grasp a stay, which alone keeps him from being immersed
in the waves, with uniform tenacity, unless
every now and then he tightens his muscles. And no
man can keep himself firmly grasping Jesus Christ
without conscious effort directed to bettering his hold.

If there be dangers around us, and dangers within
us, the discipline which we have to pursue in order to
secure this uniform, single-hearted devotion is plain
enough. Let us be vividly conscious of the peril—which
is what some of us are not. Let us take stock of ourselves
lest creeping evil may be encroaching upon us,
while we are all unaware—which is what some of us
never do. Let us clearly contemplate the possibility of
an indefinite increase in the closeness and thoroughness
of our surrender to Him—a conviction which has
faded away from the minds of many professing Christians.
Above all, let us find time or make time for the
patient, habitual contemplation of the great facts
which kindle our devotion. For if you never think of
Jesus Christ and His love to you, how can you love
Him back again? And if you are so busy carrying
out your own secular affairs, or pursuing your own
ambitions, or attending to your own duties, as they
may seem to be, that you have no time to think of
Christ, His death, His life, His Spirit, His yearning
heart over His bride, how can it be expected that you
will have any depth of love to Him? Let us, too, wait
with prayerful patience for that Divine Spirit who will
knit us more closely to our Lord.

Unless we do so, we shall get no happiness out of our[74]
religion, and it will bring no praise to Christ or profit
to ourselves. I do not know a more miserable man
than a half-and-half Christian, after the pattern of, I
was going to say, the ordinary average of professing
Christians of this generation. He has religion enough
to prick and sting him, and not enough to impel him
to forsake the evil which yet he cannot comfortably
do. He has religion enough to ‘inflame his conscience,’
not enough to subdue his will and heart. How many
of my hearers are in that condition it is for them to
settle. If we are to be Christian men at all, let us be it
out and out. Half-and-half religion is no religion.

STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS

This very remarkable page in the autobiography of
the Apostle shows us that he, too, belonged to the
great army of martyrs who, with hearts bleeding and
pierced through and through with a dart, yet did their
work for God. It is of little consequence what his
thorn in the flesh may have been. The original word
suggests very much heavier sorrow than the metaphor
of ‘a thorn’ might imply. It really seems to mean
not a tiny bit of thorn that might lie half concealed in[75]
the finger tip, but one of those hideous stakes on which
the cruel punishment of impalement used to be inflicted.
And Paul’s thought is, not that he has a little, trivial
trouble to bear, but that he is, as it were, forced quivering
upon that tremendous torture.

Unquestionably, what he means is some bodily ailment
or other. The hypothesis that the ‘thorn in the flesh’
was the sting of the animal nature inciting him to evil
is altogether untenable, because such a thorn could
never have been left when the prayer for its removal
was earnestly presented; nor could it ever have been,
when left, an occasion for glorifying. Manifestly it
was no weakness removable by his own effort, no
incapacity for service which in any manner approximated
to being a fault, but purely and simply some
infliction from God’s hand (though likewise capable of
being regarded as a ‘messenger of Satan’) which
hindered him in his work, and took down any proud
flesh and danger of spiritual exaltation in consequence
of the largeness of his religious privileges.

Our text sets before us three most instructive windings,
as it were, of the stream of thoughts that passed
through the Apostle’s mind, in reference to this burden
that he had to carry, and may afford wholesome contemplation
for us to-day. There is, first, the instinctive
shrinking which took refuge in prayer. Then there is
the insight won by prayer into the sustaining strength
for, and the purposes of, the thorn that was not to be
plucked out. And then, finally, there is the peace of
acquiescence, and a will that accepts—not the inevitable,
but the loving.

I. First of all we see the instinctive shrinking from
that which tortured the flesh, which takes refuge in
prayer.[76]

There is a wonderful, a beautiful, and, I suppose, an
intentional parallel between the prayers of the servant
and of the Master. Paul’s petitions are the echo of
Gethsemane. There, under the quivering olives, in the
broken light of the Paschal moon, Jesus ‘thrice’ prayed
that the cup might pass from Him. And here the
servant, emboldened and instructed by the example of
the Master, ‘thrice’ reiterates his human and natural
desire for the removal of the pain, whatever it was,
which seemed to him so to hinder the efficiency and
the fulness, as it certainly did the joy, of his service.

But He who prayed in Gethsemane was He to whom
Paul addressed his prayer. For, as is almost always
the case in the New Testament, ‘the Lord’ here
evidently means Christ, as is obvious from the connection
of the answer to the petition with the Apostle’s
final confidence and acquiescence. For the answer was,
‘My strength is made perfect in weakness’; and the
Apostle’s conclusion is, ‘Most gladly will I glorify in
infirmity,’ that the strength or ‘power of Christ may
rest upon me.’ Therefore the prayer with which we
have to deal here is a prayer offered to Jesus, who
prayed in Gethsemane, and to whom we can bring our
petitions and our desires.

Notice how this thought of prayer directed to the
Master Himself helps to lead us deep into the sacredest
and most blessed characteristics of prayer. It is only
telling Christ what is in our hearts. Oh, if we lived in
the true understanding of what prayer really is—the
emptying out of our inmost desire and thoughts before
our Brother, who is likewise our Lord—questions as to
what it was permissible to pray for, and what it was
not permissible to pray for, would be irrelevant, and
drop away of themselves. If we had a less formal[77]
notion of prayer, and realised more thoroughly what
it was—the speech of a confiding heart to a sympathising
Lord—then everything that fills our hearts would
be seen to be a fitting object of prayer. If anything is
large enough to interest me, it is not too small to be
spoken about to Him.

So the question, which is often settled upon very
abstract and deep grounds that have little to do with
the matter—the question as to whether prayer for
outward blessings is permissible—falls away of itself.
If I am to talk to Jesus Christ about everything that
concerns me, am I to keep my thumb upon all that
great department and be silent about it? One reason
why our prayers are often so unreal is, because they
do not fit our real wants, nor correspond to the
thoughts that are busy in our minds at the moment of
praying. Our hearts are full of some small matter of
daily interest, and when we kneel down not a word
about it comes to our lips. Can that be right?

The difference between the different objects of prayer
is not to be found in the rejection of all temporal and
external, but in remembering that there are two sets
of things to be prayed about, and over one set must
ever be written ‘If it be Thy will,’ and over the other it
need not be written, because we are sure that the
granting of our wishes is His will. We know about
the one that ‘if we ask anything according to His will,
He heareth us.’ That may seem to be a very poor and
shrunken kind of hope to give a man, that if his prayer
is in conformity with the previous determination of
the divine will, it will be answered. But it availed for
the joyful confidence of that Apostle who saw deepest
into the conditions and the blessedness of the harmony
of the will of God and of man. But about the other[78]
set we can only say, ‘Not my will, but Thine be done.’
With that sentence, not as a formula upon our lips but
deep in our hearts, let us take everything into His
presence—thorns and stakes, pinpricks and wounds out
of which the life-blood is ebbing—let us take them all
to Him, and be sure that we shall take none of them in
vain.

So then we have the Person to whom the prayer is
addressed, the subjects with which it is occupied, and
the purpose to which it is directed. ‘Take away the
burden’ was the Apostle’s petition; but it was a mistaken
petition and, therefore, unanswered.

II. That brings me to the second of the windings, as
I have ventured to call them, of this stream—viz. the
insight into the source of strength for, and the purpose
of, the thorn that could not be taken away. The Lord
said unto me, ‘My grace is sufficient for thee. For My
strength’ (where the word ‘My’ is a supplement, but a
necessary one) ‘is made perfect in weakness.’

The answer is, in form and in substance, a gentle
refusal of the form of the petition, but it is a more than
granting of its essence. For the best answer to such
a prayer, and the answer which a true man means
when he asks, ‘Take away the burden,’ need not be the
external removal of the pressure of the sorrow, but the
infusing of power to sustain it. There are two ways
of lightening a burden, one is diminishing its actual
weight, the other is increasing the strength of the
shoulder that bears it. And the latter is God’s way, is
Christ’s way, of dealing with us.

Now mark that the answer which this faithful prayer
receives is no communication of anything fresh, but it
is the opening of the man’s eyes to see that already he
has all that he needs. The reply is not, ‘I will give[79]
thee grace sufficient,’ but ‘My grace’ (which thou hast
now) ‘is sufficient for thee.’ That grace is given and
possessed by the sorrowing heart at the moment when
it prays. Open your eyes to see what you have, and
you will not ask for the load to be taken away. Is not
that always true? Many a heart is carrying some
heavy weight; perhaps some have an incurable sorrow,
some are stricken by disease that they know can never
be healed, some are aware that the shipwreck has been
total, and that the sorrow that they carry to-day will lie
down with them in the dust. Be it so! ‘My grace (not
shall be, but) is sufficient for thee.’ And what thou
hast already in thy possession is enough for all that
comes storming against thee of disease, disappointment,
loss, and misery. Set on the one side all possible
as well as all actual weaknesses, burdens, pains, and set
on the other these two words—’My grace,’ and all these
dwindle into nothingness and disappear. If troubled
Christian men would learn what they have, and would
use what they already possess, they would less often
beseech Him with vain petitions to take away their
blessings which are in the thorns in the flesh. ‘My
grace is sufficient.’

How modestly the Master speaks about what He
gives! ‘Sufficient’? Is not there a margin? Is there
not more than is wanted? The overplus is ‘exceeding
abundant,’ not only ‘above what we ask or think,’ but
far more than our need. ‘Two hundred pennyworth of
bread is not sufficient that every one may take a little,’
says Sense. Omnipotence says, ‘Bring the few small
loaves and fishes unto Me’; and Faith dispensed them
amongst the crowd; and Experience ‘gathered up of the
fragments that remained’ more than there had been
when the multiplication began. So the grace utilised[80]
increases; the gift grows as it is employed. ‘Unto him
that hath shall be given.’ And the ‘sufficiency’ is not
a bare adequacy, just covering the extent of the need,
with no overlapping margin, but is large beyond expectation,
desire, or necessity; so leading onwards to
high hopes and a wider opening of the open mouths of
our need that the blessing may pour in.

The other part of this great answer, that the Christ
from Heaven spoke in or to the praying spirit of this
not disappointed, though refused, Apostle, unveiled the
purpose of the sorrow, even as the former part had
disclosed the strength to bear it. For, says He, laying
down therein the great law of His kingdom in all
departments and in all ways, ‘My strength is made
perfect’—that is, of course, perfect in its manifestation
or operations, for it is perfect in itself already. ‘My
strength is made perfect in weakness.’ It works in and
through man’s weakness.

God works with broken reeds. If a man conceits
himself to be an iron pillar, God can do nothing with
or by him. All the self-conceit and confidence have to
be taken out of him first. He has to be brought low
before the Father can use him for His purposes. The
lowlands hold the water, and, if only the sluice is open,
the gravitation of His grace does all the rest and
carries the flood into the depths of the lowly heart.

His strength loves to work in weakness, only the
weakness must be conscious, and the conscious weakness
must have passed into conscious dependence.
There, then, you get the law for the Church, for the
works of Christianity on the widest scale, and in
individual lives. Strength that conceits itself to be
such is weakness; weakness that knows itself to be
such is strength. The only true source of Power, both[81]
for Christian work and in all other respects, is God
Himself; and our strength is ours but by derivation
from Him. And the only way to secure that derivation
is through humble dependence, which we call faith in
Jesus Christ. And the only way by which that faith
in Jesus Christ can ever be kindled in a man’s soul is
through the sense of his need and emptiness. So when
we know ourselves weak, we have taken the first step
to strength; just as, when we know ourselves sinners,
we have taken the first step to righteousness; just as
in all regions the recognition of the doleful fact of our
human necessity is the beginning of the joyful confidence
in the glad, triumphant fact of the divine fulness.
All our hollownesses, if I may so say, are met with His
fulness that fits into them. It only needs that a man
be aware of that which he is, and then turn himself to
Him who is all that he is not, and then into his empty
being will flow rejoicing the whole fulness of God.
‘My strength is made perfect in weakness.’

III. Lastly, mark the calm final acquiescence in the
loving necessity of continued sorrow. ‘Most gladly,
therefore, will I rather glory in my infirmity that the
power of Christ may rest upon me.’ The will is entirely
harmonised with Christ’s. The Apostle begins with
instinctive shrinking, he passes onwards to a perception
of the purpose of his trial and of the sustaining
grace; and he comes now to acquiescence which is not
passivity, but glad triumph. He is more than submissive,
he gladly glories in his infirmity in order that
the power of Christ may ‘spread a tabernacle over’
him. ‘It is good for me that I have been afflicted,’ said
the old prophet. Paul says, in a yet higher note of
concord with God’s will, ‘I am glad that I sorrow. I
rejoice in weakness, because it makes it easier for me[82]
to cling, and, clinging, I am strong, and conquer evil.’
Far better is it that the sting of our sorrow should be
taken away, by our having learned what it is for,
and having bowed to it, than that it should be taken
away by the external removal which we sometimes
long for. A grief, a trial, an incapacity, a limitation, a
weakness, which we use as a means of deepening our
sense of dependence upon Him, is a blessing, and not a
sorrow. And if we would only go out into the world
trying to interpret its events in the spirit of this great
text, we should less frequently wonder and weep over
what sometimes seem to us the insoluble mysteries of
the sorrows of ourselves and of other men. They are
all intended to make it more easy for us to realise our
utter hanging upon Him, and so to open our hearts to
receive more fully the quickening influences of His
omnipotent and self-sufficing grace.

Here, then, is a lesson for those who have to carry
some cross and know they must carry it throughout
life. It will be wreathed with flowers if you accept it.
Here is a lesson for all Christian workers. Ministers
of the Gospel especially should banish all thoughts
of their own cleverness, intellectual ability, culture,
sufficiency for their work, and learn that only when
they are emptied can they be filled, and only when
they know themselves to be nothing are they ready
for God to work through them. And here is a lesson
for all who stand apart from the grace and power
of Jesus Christ as if they needed it not. Whether
you know it or not, you are a broken reed; and the
only way of your ever being bound up and made
strong is that you shall recognise your sinfulness,
your necessity, your abject poverty, your utter emptiness,
and come to Him who is righteousness, riches,[83]
fulness, and say, ‘Because I am weak, be Thou my
strength.’ The secret of all noble, heroic, useful, happy
life lies in the paradox, ‘When I am weak, then am I
strong,’ and the secret of all failures, miseries, hopeless
losses, lies in its converse, ‘When I am strong, then am
I weak.’

NOT YOURS BUT YOU

Men are usually quick to suspect others of the vices to
which they themselves are prone. It is very hard for
one who never does anything but with an eye to what
he can make out of it, to believe that there are other
people actuated by higher motives. So Paul had, over
and over again, to meet the hateful charge of making
money out of his apostleship. It was one of the
favourite stones that his opponents in the Corinthian
Church, of whom there were very many, very bitter
ones, flung at him. In this letter he more than once
refers to the charge. He does so with great dignity,
and with a very characteristic and delicate mixture of
indignation and tenderness, almost playfulness. Thus,
in the context, he tells these Corinthian grumblers
that he must beg their pardon for not having taken
anything of them, and so honoured them. Then he
informs them that he is coming again to see them for
the third time, and that that visit will be marked by
the same independence of their help as the others had
been. And then he just lets a glimpse of his pained
heart peep out in the words of my text. ‘I seek not
yours, but you.’ There speaks a disinterested love[84]
which feels obliged, and yet reluctant, to stoop to say
that it is love, and that it is disinterested. Where did
Paul learn this passionate desire to possess these people,
and this entire suppression of self in the desire? It
was a spark from a sacred fire, a drop from an infinite
ocean, an echo of a divine voice. The words of my
text would never have been Paul’s if the spirit of them
had not first been Christ’s. I venture to take them in
that aspect, as setting forth Christ’s claims upon us,
and bearing very directly on the question of Christian
service and of Christian liberality.

I. So, then, first of all, I remark, Christ desires
personal surrender.

‘I seek not yours, but you,’ is the very mother-tongue
of love; but upon our lips, even when our love
is purest, there is a tinge of selfishness blending with
it, and very often the desire for another’s love is as
purely selfish as the desire for any material good. But
in so far as human love is pure in its desire to possess
another, we have the right to believe the deep and
wonderful thought that there is something corresponding
to it in the heart of Christ, which is a revelation
for us of the heart of God; and that, however little we
may be able to construe the whole meaning of the fact,
He does stretch out an arm of desire towards us; and
for His own sake, as for ours, would fain draw us near
to Himself, and is ‘satisfied,’ as He is not without it,
when men’s hearts yield themselves up to Him, and let
Him love them and lavish Himself upon them. I do
not venture into these depths, but I would lay upon
our hearts that the very inmost meaning of all that
Jesus Christ has said, and is saying, to each of us by
the records of His life, by the pathos of His death, by
the miracle of His Resurrection, by the glory of His[85]
Ascension, by the power of His granted Spirit, is, ‘I
seek you.’

And, brethren, our self-surrender is the essence of our
Christianity. Our religion lies neither in our heads
nor in our acts; the deepest notion of it is that it is
the entire yielding up of ourselves to Jesus Christ our
Lord. There is plenty of religion which is a religion
of the head and of creeds. There is plenty of religion
which is the religion of the hand and of the tongue,
and of forms and ceremonies and sacraments; external
worship. There is plenty of religion which surrenders
to Him some of the more superficial parts of our
personality, whilst the ancient Anarch, Self, sits undisturbed
on his dark throne, in the depths of our
being. But none of these are the religion that either
Christ requires or that we need. The only true notion
of a Christian is a man who can truly say, ‘I live, yet
not I, but Christ liveth in me.’

And that is the only kind of life that is blessed; our
only true nobleness and beauty and power and sweetness
are measured by, and accurately correspond with,
the completeness of our surrender of ourselves to Jesus
Christ. As long as the earth was thought to be the
centre of the planetary system there was nothing but
confusion in the heavens. Shift the centre to the sun
and all becomes order and beauty. The root of sin,
and the mother of death, is making myself my own
law and Lord; the germ of righteousness, and the first
pulsations of life, lie in yielding ourselves to God in
Christ, because He has yielded Himself unto us.

I need not remind you, I suppose, that this self-surrender
is a great deal more than a vivid metaphor:
that it implies a very hard fact; implies at least two
things, that we have yielded ourselves to Jesus Christ,[86]
by the love of our hearts, and by the unreluctant submission
of our wills, whether He commands or whether
He sends sufferings or joys.

And, oh, brethren, be sure of this, that no such giving
of myself away, in the sweet reciprocities of a higher
than human affection, is possible, in the general, and
on the large scale, if you evacuate from the Gospel the
great truth, ‘He loved me, and gave Himself for me.’
I believe—and therefore I am bound to preach it—that
the only power which can utterly annihilate and cast
out the dominion of self from a human soul is the
power that is lodged in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on
the Cross for sinful men.

And whilst I would fully recognise all that is noble,
and all that is effective, in systems either of religion,
or of irreligious morality, which have no place within
their bounds for that great motive, I am sure of this,
that the evil self within us is too strong to be exorcised
by anything short of the old message, ‘Jesus Christ
has given His life for thee, wilt thou not give thyself
unto Him?’

II. Christ seeks personal service.

‘I seek . . . you’; not only for My love, but for My
tools; for My instruments in carrying out the purposes
for which I died, and establishing My dominion in the
world. Now I want to say two or three very plain
things about this matter, which lies very near my
heart, as to some degree responsible for the amount of
Christian activity and service in this my congregation.
Brethren, the surrender of ourselves to Jesus Christ in
acts of direct Christian activity and service, will be the
outcome of a real surrender of ourselves to Him in
love and obedience.

I cannot imagine a man who, in any deep sense, has[87]
realised his obligations to that Saviour, and in any
real sense has made the great act of self-renunciation,
and crowned Christ as his Lord, living for the rest of
his life, as so many professing Christians do, dumb and
idle, in so far as work for the Master is concerned. It
seems to me that, among the many wants of this
generation of professing Christians, there is none that
is more needed than that a wave of new consecration
should pass over the Church. If men who call themselves
Christians lived more in habitual contact with
the facts of their redeeming Saviour’s sacrifice for
them, there would be no need to lament the fewness of
the labourers, as measured against the overwhelming
multitude of the fields that are white to harvest. If
once that flood of a new sense of Christ’s gift, and a
consequent new completeness of our returned gifts to
Him, flowed over the churches, then all the little empty
ravines would be filled with a flashing tide. Not a
shuttle moves, not a spindle revolves, until the strong
impulse born of fire rushes in; and then, all is activity.
It is no use to flog, flog, flog, at idle Christians, and try
to make them work. There is only one thing that will
set them to work, and that is that they shall live nearer
their Master, and find out more of what they owe to
Him; and so render themselves up to be His instruments
for any purpose for which He may choose to use
them.

This surrender of ourselves for direct Christian service
is the only solution of the problem of how to win the
world for Jesus Christ. Professionals cannot do it.
Men of my class cannot do it. We are clogged very
largely by the fact that, being necessarily dependent
on our congregations for a living, we cannot, with as
clear an emphasis as you can, go to people and say,[88]
‘We seek not yours, but you.’ I have nothing to
say about the present ecclesiastical arrangements of
modern Christian communities. That would take me
altogether from my present purposes, but I want to
lay this upon your consciences, dear brethren, that
you who have other means of living than proclaiming
Christ’s name have an advantage, which it is
at your peril that you fling away. As long as the
Christian Church thought that an ordained priest was
a man who could do things that laymen could not do,
the limitation of Christian service to the priesthood was
logical. But when the Christian Church, especially as
represented by us Nonconformists, came to believe that
a minister was only a man who preached the Gospel,
which every Christian man is bound to do, the limitations
of Christian service to the official class became an
illogical survival, utterly incongruous with the fundamental
principles of our conception of the Christian
Church. And yet here it is, devastating our churches
to-day, and making hundreds of good people perfectly
comfortable, in an unscriptural and unchristian indolence,
because, forsooth, it is the minister’s business
to preach the Gospel. I know that there is not nearly
as much of that indolence as there used to be. Thank
God for that. There are far more among our congregations
than in former times who have realised the
fact that it is every Christian man’s task, somehow or
other, to set forth the great name of Jesus Christ. But
still, alas, in a church with, say, 400 members, you may
knock off the last cypher, and you will get a probably
not too low statement of the number of people in it
who have realised and fulfilled this obligation. What
about the other 360 ‘dumb dogs, that will not bark’?
And in that 360 there will probably be several men[89]
who can make speeches on political platforms, and in
scientific lecture-halls, and about social and economical
questions, only they cannot, for the life of them, open
their mouths and say a word to a soul about Him
whom they say they serve, and to whom they say they
belong.

Brethren, this direct service cannot be escaped from,
or commuted by a money payment. In the old days a
man used to escape serving in the militia if he found a
substitute, and paid for him. There are a great many
good Christian people who seem to think that Christ’s
army is recruited on that principle. But it is a mistake.
‘I seek you, not yours.’

III. Lastly, and only a word. Christ seeks us, and
ours.

Not you without yours, still less yours without you.
This is no place, nor is the fag end of a sermon the
time, to talk about so wide a subject as the ethics of
Christian dealing with money. But two things I will
say—consecration of self is extremely imperfect which
does not include the consecration of possessions, and,
conversely, consecration of possessions which does not
flow from, and is not accompanied by, the consecration
of self, is nought.

If, then, the great law of self-surrender is to run
through the whole Christian life, that law, as applied
to our dealing with what we own, prescribes three
things. The first is stewardship, not ownership; and
that all round the circumference of our possessions.
Depend upon it, the angry things that we hear to-day
about the unequal distribution of wealth will get
angrier and angrier, and will be largely justified in
becoming so by the fact that so many of us, Christians
included, have firmly grasped the notion of posses[90]sion,
and utterly forgotten the obligation of stewardship.

Again, the law of self-surrender, in its application to
all that we have, involves our continual reference to
Jesus Christ in our disposition of these our possessions.
I draw no line of distinction, in this respect, between
what a man spends upon himself, and what he spends
upon ‘charity,’ and what he spends upon religious
objects. One principle is to govern, getting, hoarding,
giving, enjoying, and that is, that in it all Christ shall
be Master.

Again, the law of self-surrender, in its application to
our possessions, implies that there shall be an element
of sacrifice in our use of these; whether they be
possessions of intellect, of acquirement, of influence, of
position, or of material wealth. The law of help is
sacrifice, and the law for a Christian man is that he
shall not offer unto the Lord his God that which costs
him nothing.

So, dear friends, let us all get near to that great
central fire till it melts our hearts. Let the love which
is our hope be our pattern. Remember that though
only faintly, and from afar, can the issues of Christ’s
great sacrifice be reproduced in any actions of ours,
the spirit which brought Him to die is the spirit
which must instruct and inspire us to live. Unless we
can say, ‘He loved me, and gave Himself for me; I
yield myself to Him’; and unless our lives confirm the
utterance, we have little right to call ourselves His
disciples.[91]

GALATIANS

FROM CENTRE TO CIRCUMFERENCE

We have a bundle of paradoxes in this verse. First,
‘I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live.’ The
Christian life is a dying life. If we are in any real
sense joined to Christ, the power of His death makes
us dead to self and sin and the world. In that region,
as in the physical, death is the gate of life; and, inasmuch
as what we die to in Christ is itself only a living
death, we live because we die, and in proportion as we
die.

The next paradox is, ‘Yet not I, but Christ liveth in
me.’ The Christian life is a life in which an indwelling
Christ casts out, and therefore quickens, self. We gain
ourselves when we lose ourselves. His abiding in us
does not destroy but heightens our individuality. We
then most truly live when we can say, ‘Not I, but
Christ liveth in me’; the soul of my soul and the self
of myself.

And the last paradox is that of my text, ‘The life
which I live in the flesh, I live in’ (not ‘by’) ‘the
faith of the Son of God.’ The true Christian life moves
in two spheres at once. Externally and superficially
it is ‘in the flesh,’ really it is ‘in faith.’ It belongs not
to the material nor is dependent upon the physical[92]
body in which we are housed. We are strangers here,
and the true region and atmosphere of the Christian
life is that invisible sphere of faith.

So, then, we have in these words of my text a
Christian man’s frank avowal of the secret of his own
life. It is like a geological cutting, it goes down from
the surface, where the grass and the flowers are,
through the various strata, but it goes deeper than
these, to the fiery heart, the flaming nucleus and
centre of all things. Therefore it may do us all good
to make a section of our hearts and see whether the
strata there are conformable to those that are here.

I. Let us begin with the centre, and work to the
surface. We have, first, the great central fact named
last, but round which all the Christian life is gathered.

‘The Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself
for me.’ These two words, the ‘loving’ and the
‘giving,’ both point backwards to some one definite
historical fact, and the only fact which they can have
in view is the great one of the death of Jesus Christ.
That is His giving up of Himself. That is the signal
and highest manifestation and proof of His love.

Notice (though I can but touch in the briefest
possible manner upon the great thoughts that gather
round these words) the three aspects of that transcendent
fact, the centre and nucleus of the whole
Christian life, which come into prominence in these
words before us. Christ’s death is a great act of self-surrender,
of which the one motive is His own pure
and perfect love. No doubt in other places of Scripture
we have set forth the death of Christ as being
the result of the Father’s purpose, and we read that in
that wondrous surrender there were two givings up
The Father ‘freely gave Him up to the death for us[93]
all.’ That divine surrender, the Apostle ventures, in
another passage, to find dimly suggested from afar, in
the silent but submissive and unreluctant surrender
with which Abraham yielded his only begotten son on
the mountain top. But besides that ineffable giving
up by the Father of the Son, Jesus Christ Himself,
moved only by His love, willingly yields Himself. The
whole doctrine of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ has been
marred by one-sided insisting on the truth that God
sent the Son, to the forgetting of the fact that the Son
‘came’; and that He was bound to the Cross neither
by cords of man’s weaving nor by the will of the
Father, but that He Himself bound Himself to that
Cross with the ‘cords of love and the bands of a man,’
and died from no natural necessity nor from any
imposition of the divine will upon Him unwilling, but
because He would, and that He would because He
loved. ‘He loved me, and gave Himself for me.’

Then note, further, that here, most distinctly, that
great act of self-surrendering love which culminates
on the Cross is regarded as being for man in a special
and peculiar sense. I know, of course, that from the
mere wording of my text we cannot argue the atoning
and substitutionary character of the death of Christ,
for the preposition here does not necessarily mean
‘instead of,’ but ‘for the behoof of.’ But admitting
that, I have another question. If Christ’s death is for
‘the behoof of’ men, in what conceivable sense does it
benefit them, unless it is in the place of men? The
death ‘for me’ is only for me when I understand that
it is ‘instead of’ me. And practically you will find
that wherever the full-orbed faith in Christ Jesus as
the death for all the sins of the whole world, bearing
the penalty and bearing it away, has begun to falter[94]
and grow pale, men do not know what to do with
Christ’s death at all, and stop talking about it to a
very large extent.

Unless He died as a sacrifice, I, for one, fail to see in
what other than a mere sentimental sense the death of
Christ is a death for men.

And lastly, about this matter, observe how here we
have brought into vivid prominence the great thought
that Jesus Christ in His death has regard to single
souls. We preach that He died for all. If we believe
in that august title which is laid here as the vindication
of our faith on the one hand, and as the ground
of the possibility of the benefits of His death being
world-wide on the other—viz. the Son of God—then
we shall not stumble at the thought that He died for
all, because He died for each. I know that if you only
regard Jesus Christ as human I am talking utter
nonsense; but I know, too, that if we believe in the
divinity of our Lord, there need be nothing to stumble
us, but the contrary, in the thought that it was not an
abstraction that He died for, that it was not a vague
mass of unknown beings, clustered together, but so
far away that He could not see any of their faces,
for whom He gave His life on the Cross. That is the
way in which, and in which alone, we can embrace
the whole mass of humanity—by losing sight of the
individuals. We generalise, precisely because we do
not see the individual units; but that is not God’s
way, and that is not Christ’s way, who is divine.
For Him the all is broken up into its parts, and when
we say that the divine love loves all, we mean that
the divine love loves each. I believe (and I commend
the thought to you) that we do not fathom the depth
of Christ’s sufferings unless we recognise that the sins[95]
of each man were consciously adding pressure to the
load beneath which He sank; nor picture the wonders
of His love until we believe that on the Cross it distinguished
and embraced each, and, therefore, comprehended
all. Every man may say, ‘He loved me, and
gave Himself for me.’

II. So much, then, for the first central fact that is
here. Now let me say a word, in the second place,
about the faith which makes that fact the foundation
of my own personal life.

‘I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me,
and gave Himself for me.’ I am not going to plunge
into any unnecessary dissertations about the nature
of faith; but may I say that, like all other familiar
conceptions, it has got worn so smooth that it glides
over our mental palate without roughening any of the
papillæ or giving any sense or savour at all? And I
do believe that dozens of people like you, who have
come to church and chapel all your lives, and fancy
yourselves to be fully au fait at all the Christian truth
that you will ever hear from my lips, do not grasp
with any clearness of apprehension the meaning of
that fundamental word ‘faith.’

It is a thousand pities that it is confined by the
accidents of language to our attitude in reference to
Jesus Christ. So some of you think that it is some
kind of theological juggle which has nothing to do
with, and never can be seen in operation in, common
life. Suppose, instead of the threadbare, technical
‘faith’ we took to a new translation for a minute, and
said ‘trust,’ do you think that would freshen up the
thought to you at all? It is the very same thing
which makes the sweetness of your relations to wife
and husband and friend and parent, which, transferred[96]
to Jesus Christ and glorified in the process, becomes
the seed of immortal life and the opener of the gate of
Heaven. Trust Jesus Christ. That is the living centre
of the Christian life; that is the process by which we
draw the general blessing of the Gospel into our own
hearts, and make the world-wide truth, our truth.

I need not insist either, I suppose, on the necessity,
if our Christian life is to be modelled upon the Apostolic
lines, of our faith embracing the Christ in all
these aspects in which I have been speaking about His
work. God forbid that I should seem to despise rudimentary
and incomplete feelings after Him in any
heart which may be unable to say ‘Amen’ to Paul’s
statement here. I want to insist very earnestly, and
with special reference to the young, that the true
Christian faith is not merely the grasp of the person,
but it is the grasp of the Person who is ‘declared to be
the Son of God,’ and whose death is the voluntary self-surrender
motived by His love, for the carrying away
of the sins of every single soul in the whole universe.
That is the Christ, the full Christ, cleaving to whom
our faith finds somewhat to grasp worthy of grasping.
And I beseech you, be not contented with a partial
grasp of a partial Saviour; neither shut your eyes to
the divinity of His nature, nor to the efficacy of His
death, but remember that the true Gospel preaches
Christ and Him crucified; and that for us, saving faith
is the faith that grasps the Son of God ‘Who loved
me and gave Himself for me.’

Note, further, that true faith is personal faith, which
appropriates, and, as it were, fences in as my very
own, the purpose and benefit of Christ’s giving of
Himself. It is always difficult for lazy people (and
most of us are lazy) to transfer into their own personal[97]
lives, and to bring into actual contact with themselves
and their own experience, wide, general truths. To
assent to them, when we keep them in their generality,
is very easy and very profitless. It does no man any
good to say ‘All men are mortal’; but how different it
is when the blunt end of that generalisation is shaped
into a point, and I say ‘I have to die!’ It penetrates
then, and it sticks. It is easy to say ‘All men are
sinners.’ That never yet forced anybody down on
his knees. But when we shut out on either side the
lateral view and look straight on, on the narrow line
of our own lives, up to the Throne where the Lawgiver
sits, and feel ‘I am a sinful man,’ that sends us to our
prayers for pardon and purity. And in like manner
nobody was ever wholesomely terrified by the thought
of a general judgment. But when you translate it
into ‘I must stand there,’ the terror of the Lord
persuades men.

In like manner that great truth which we all of us
say we believe, that Christ has died for the world, is
utterly useless and profitless to us until we have
translated it into Paul’s world, ‘loved me and gave
Himself for me.’ I do not say that the essence of faith
is the conversion of the general statement into the
particular application, but I do say that there is no
faith which does not realise one’s personal possession
of the benefits of the death of Christ, and that until
you turn the wide word into a message for yourself
alone, you have not yet got within sight of the blessedness
of the Christian life. The whole river may flow
past me, but only so much of it as I can bring into my
own garden by my own sluices, and lift in my own
bucket, and put to my own lips, is of any use to me.
The death of Christ for the world is a commonplace of[98]
superficial Christianity, which is no Christianity; the
death of Christ for myself, as if He and I were the
only beings in the universe, that is the death on which
faith fastens and feeds.

And, dear brother, you have the right to exercise it.
The Christ loves each, and therefore He loves all;
that is the process in the divine mind. The converse
is the process in the revelation of that mind; the Bible
says to us, Christ loves all, and therefore we have the
right to draw the inference that He loves each. You
have as much right to take every ‘whosoever’ of the
New Testament as your very own, as if on the page
of your Bible that ‘whosoever’ was struck out, and
your name, John, Thomas, Mary, Elizabeth, or whatever
it is, were put in there. ‘He loved me.’ Can you
say that? Have you ever passed from the region of
universality, which is vague and profitless, into the
region of personal appropriation of the person of Jesus
Christ and His death?

III. And now, lastly, notice the life which is built
upon this faith.

The true Christian life is dual. It is a life in the
flesh, and it is also a life in faith. These two, as I
have said, are like two spheres, in either of which a
man’s course is passed, or, rather, the one is surface
and the other is central. Here is a great trailing
spray of seaweed floating golden on the unquiet
water, and rising and falling on each wave or ripple.
Aye! but its root is away deep, deep, deep below the
storms, below where there is motion, anchored upon
a hidden rock that can never move. And so my life,
if it be a Christian life at all, has its surface amidst
the shifting mutabilities of earth, but its root in the
silent eternities of the centre of all things, which is[99]
Christ in God. I live in the flesh on the outside, but
if I am a Christian at all, I live in the faith in regard
of my true and proper being.

This faith, which grasps the Divine Christ as the
person whose love-moved death is my life, and who
by my faith becomes Himself the Indwelling Guest in
my heart; this faith, if it be worth anything, will
mould and influence my whole being. It will give
me motive, pattern, power for all noble service and
all holy living. The one thing that stirs men to true
obedience is that their hearts be touched with the
firm assurance that Christ loved them and died for
them.

We sometimes used to see men starting an engine
by manual force; and what toil it was to get the
great cranks to turn, and the pistons to rise! So we
set ourselves to try and move our lives into holiness
and beauty and nobleness, and it is dispiriting work.
There is a far better, surer way than that: let the
steam in, and that will do it. That is to say—let the
Christ in His dying power and the living energy of His
indwelling Spirit occupy the heart, and activity
becomes blessedness, and work is rest, and service is
freedom and dominion.

The life that I live in the flesh is poor, limited,
tortured with anxiety, weighed upon by sore distress,
becomes dark and gray and dreary often as we travel
nearer the end, and is always full of miseries and of
pains. But if within that life in the flesh there be a
life in faith, which is the life of Christ Himself brought
to us through our faith, that life will be triumphant,
quiet, patient, aspiring, noble, hopeful, gentle, strong,
Godlike, being the life of Christ Himself within us.

So, dear friends, test your faith by these two tests,[100]
what it grasps and what it does. If it grasps a whole
Christ, in all the glory of His nature and the blessedness
of His work, it is genuine; and it proves its
genuineness if, and only if, it works in you by love;
animating all your action, bringing you ever into the
conscious presence of that dear Lord, and making
Him pattern, law, motive, goal, companion and reward.
‘To me to live is Christ.’

If so, then we live indeed; but to live in the flesh is
to die; and the death that we die when we live in
Christ is the gate and the beginning of the only real
life of the soul.

THE EVIL EYE AND THE CHARM

The Revised Version gives a shorter, and probably
correct, form of this vehement question. It omits the
two clauses ‘that ye should not obey the truth’ and
‘among you.’ The omission increases the sharpness of
the thrust of the interrogation, whilst it loses nothing
of the meaning.

Now, a very striking metaphor runs through the
whole of this question, which may easily be lost sight
of by ordinary readers. You know the old superstition
as to the Evil Eye, almost universal at the date of this
letter and even now in the East, and lingering still
amongst ourselves. Certain persons were supposed to
have the power, by a look, to work mischief, and by
fixing the gaze of their victims, to suck the very life
out of them. So Paul asks who the malign sorcerer
is who has thus fascinated the fickle Galatians, and is
draining their Christian life out of their eyes.[101]

Very appropriately, therefore, if there is this reference,
which the word translated ‘bewitched’ carries
with it, he goes on to speak about Jesus Christ as
having been displayed before their eyes. They had seen
Him. How did they come to be able to turn away to
look at anything else?

But there is another observation to be made by way
of introduction, and that is as to the full force of the
expression ‘evidently set forth.’ The word employed,
as commentators tell us, is that which is used for the
display of official proclamations, or public notices, in
some conspicuous place, as the Forum or the market,
that the citizens might read. So, keeping up the metaphor,
the word might be rendered, as has been suggested
by some eminent scholars, ‘placarded’—’Before whose
eyes Jesus Christ has been placarded.’ The expression
has acquired somewhat ignoble associations from
modern advertising, but that is no reason why we
should lose sight of its force. So, then, Paul says, ‘In
my preaching, Christ was conspicuously set forth. It
is like some inexplicable enchantment that, having
seen Him, you should turn away to gaze on others.’
It is insanity which evokes wonder, as well as sin which
deserves rebuke; and the fiery question of my text
conveys both.

I. Keeping to the metaphor, I note first the placard
which Paul had displayed.

‘Jesus Christ crucified has been conspicuously set
forth before you,’ he says to these Galatians. Now, he
is referring, of course, to his own work of preaching
the Gospel to them at the beginning. And the vivid
metaphor suggests very strikingly two things. We see
in it the Apostle’s notion of what He had to do. His
had been a very humble office, simply to hang up a pro[102]clamation.
The one virtue of a proclamation is that
it should be brief and plain. It must be authoritative,
it must be urgent, it must be ‘writ large,’ it must be
easily intelligible. And he that makes it public has
nothing to do except to fasten it up, and make sure
that it is legible. If I might venture into modern
phraseology, what Paul means is that he was neither
more nor less than a bill-sticker, that he went out with
the placards and fastened them up.

Ah! if we ministers universally acted up to the
implications of this metaphor, do you not think the
pulpit would be more frequently a centre of power
than it is to-day? And if, instead of presenting our
own ingenuities and speculations, we were to realise
the fact that we have to hide ourselves behind the
broad sheet that we fasten up, there would be a new
breath over many a moribund church, and we should
hear less of the often warrantable sarcasms about the
inefficiency of the modern pulpit.

But I turn from Paul’s conception of the office to his
statement of his theme. ‘Jesus was displayed amongst
you.’ If I might vary the metaphor a little, the placard
that Paul fastened up was like those that modern advertising
ingenuity displays upon all our walls. It was
a picture-placard, and on it was portrayed one sole figure—Jesus,
the Person. Christianity is Christ, and Christ
is Christianity; and wherever there is a pulpit or a
book which deals rather with doctrines than with Him
who is the Fountain and Quarry of all doctrine, there
is divergence from the primitive form of the Gospel.

I know, of course, that doctrines—which are only
formal and orderly statements of principles involved
in the facts—must flow from the proclamation of the
person, Christ. I am not such a fool as to run amuck[103]
against theology, as some people in this day do. But
what I wish to insist upon is that the first form of
Christianity is not a theory, but a history, and that
the revelation of God is the biography of a man. We
must begin with the person, Christ, and preach Him.
Would that all our preachers and all professing
Christians, in their own personal religious life, had
grasped this—that, since Christianity is not first a
philosophy but a history, and its centre not an ordered
sequence of doctrines but a living person, the act that
makes a man possessor of Christianity is not the
intellectual process of assimilating certain truths, and
accepting them, but the moral process of clinging, with
trust and love, to the person, Jesus.

But, further, if any of you consult the original, you
will see that the order of the sentence is such as to
throw a great weight of emphasis on that last word
‘crucified.’ It is not merely a person that is portrayed
on the placard, but it is that person upon the Cross.
Ah! brethren, Paul himself puts his finger, in the words
of my text, on what, in his conception, was the throbbing
heart of all his message, the vital point from which all
its power, and all the gleam of its benediction, poured
out upon humanity—’Christ crucified.’ If the placard
is a picture of Christ in other attitudes and in other
aspects, without the picture of Him crucified, it is
an imperfect representation of the Gospel that Paul
preached and that Christ was.

II. Now, think, secondly, of the fascinators that draw
away the eyes.

Paul’s question is not one of ignorance, but it is a
rhetorical way of rebuking, and of expressing wonder.
He knew, and the Galatians knew, well enough who it
was that had bewitched them. The whole letter is a[104]
polemic worked in fire, and not in frost, as some argumentation
is, against a very well-marked class of
teachers—viz. those emissaries of Judaism who had
crept into the Church, and took it as their special
function to dog Paul’s steps amongst the heathen
communities that he had gathered together through
faith in Christ, and used every means to upset his
work.

I cannot but pause for a moment upon this original
reference of my text, because it is very relevant to the
present condition of things amongst us. These men
whom Paul is fighting as if he were in a sawpit with
them, in this letter, what was their teaching? This:
they did not deny that Jesus was the Christ; they did
not deny that faith knit a man to Him, but what they
said was that the observance of the external rites
of Judaism was necessary in order to entrance into
the Church and to salvation. They did not in their
own estimation detract from Christ, but they added
to Him. And Paul says that to add is to detract, to
say that anything is necessary except faith in Jesus
Christ’s finished work is to deny that that finished
work, and faith in it, are the means of salvation; and
the whole evangelical system crumbles into nothingness
if once you admit that.

Now, is there anybody to-day who is saying the same
things, with variations consequent upon change of
external conditions? Are there no people within the
limits of the Christian Church who are reiterating the
old Jewish notion that external ceremonies—baptism
and the Lord’s Supper—are necessary to salvation and
to connection with the Christian Church? And is it
not true now, as it was then, that though they do not
avowedly detract, they so represent these external rites[105]
as to detract, from the sole necessity of faith in the perfected
work of Jesus Christ? The centre is shifted from
personal union with a personal Saviour by a personal
faith to participation in external ordinances. And I
venture to think that the lava stream which, in this
Epistle to the Galatians, Paul pours on the Judaisers
of his day needs but a little deflection to pour its hot
current over, and to consume, the sacramentarian
theories of this day. ‘O foolish Galatians, who hath
bewitched you?’ Is it not like some malignant sorcery,
that after the Evangelical revival of the last century
and the earlier part of this, there should spring up
again this old, old error, and darken the simplicity of
the Gospel teaching, that Christ’s work, apprehended
by faith, without anything else, is the means, and the
only means, of salvation?

But I need not spend time upon that original application.
Let us rather come more closely to our own
individual lives and their weaknesses. It is a strange
thing, so strange that if one did not know it by one’s
own self, one would be scarcely disposed to believe it
possible, that a man who has ‘tasted the good word
of God and the powers of the world to come,’ and has
known Jesus Christ as Saviour and Friend, should
decline from Him, and turn to anything besides. And
yet, strange and sad, and like some enchantment as it
is, it is the experience at times and in a measure, of us
all; and, alas! it is the experience, in a very tragical
degree, of many who have walked for a little while
behind the Master, and then have turned away and
walked no more with Him. We may well wonder;
but the root of the mischief is in no baleful glitter of
a sorcerer’s eye without us, but it is in the weakness of
our own wills and the waywardness of our own hearts,[106]
and the wandering of our own affections. We often
court the coming of the evil influence, and are willing
to be fascinated and to turn our backs upon Jesus.
Mysterious it is, for why should men cast away diamonds
for paste? Mysterious it is, for we do not usually
drop the substance to get the shadow. Mysterious it
is, for a man does not ordinarily empty his pockets of
gold in order to fill them with gravel. Mysterious it
is, for a thirsty man will not usually turn away from
the full, bubbling, living fountain, to see if he can find
any drops still remaining, green with scum, stagnant
and odorous, at the bottom of some broken cistern.
But all these follies are sanity as compared with the
folly of which we are guilty, times without number,
when, having known the sweetness of Jesus Christ,
we turn away to the fascinations of the world. Custom,
the familiarity that we have with Him, the attrition
of daily cares—like the minute grains of sand that are
cemented on to paper, and make a piece of sandpaper
that is strong enough to file an inscription off iron—the
seductions of worldly delights, the pressure of our
daily cares—all these are as a ring of sorcerers that
stand round about us, before whom we are as powerless
as a bird in the presence of a serpent, and they bewitch
us and draw us away.

The sad fact has been verified over and over again
on a large scale in the history of the Church. After
every outburst of renewed life and elevated spirituality
there is sure to come a period of reaction when torpor
and formality again assert themselves. What followed
the Reformation in Germany? A century of death.
What followed Puritanism in England? An outburst
of lust and godlessness.

So it has always been, and so it is with us individually,[107]
as we too well know. Ah, brethren! the seductions are
omnipresent, and our poor eyes are very weak, and we
turn away from the Lord to look on these misshapen
monsters that are seeking by their gaze to draw us into
destruction. I wonder how many professing Christians
are in this audience who once saw Jesus Christ a great
deal more clearly, and contemplated Him a great deal
more fixedly, and turned their hearts to Him far more
lovingly, than they do to-day? Some of the great
mountain peaks of Africa are only seen for an hour or
two in the morning, and then the clouds gather around
them, and hide them for the rest of the day. It is like
the experience of many professing Christians, who see
Him in the morning of their Christian life far more
vividly than they ever do after. ‘Who hath bewitched
you?’ The world; but the arch-sorcerer sits safe in
our own hearts.

III. Lastly, keeping to the metaphor, let me suggest,
although my text does not touch upon it, the Amulet.

One has seen fond mothers in Egypt and Palestine
who hang on their babies’ necks charms, to shield them
from the influence of the Evil Eye; and there is a
charm that we may wear if we will, which will keep
us safe. There is no fascination in the Evil Eye if you
do not look at it.

The one object that the sorcerer has is to withdraw
our gaze from Christ; it is not illogical to say that
the way to defeat the object is to keep our gaze fixed
on Christ. If you do not look at the baleful glitter
of the Evil Eye it will exercise no power over you;
and if you will steadfastly look at Him, then, and only
then, you will not look at it. Like Ulysses in the
legend, bandage the eyes and put wax in the ears,
if you would neither be tempted by hearing the songs,[108]
nor by seeing the fair forms, of the sirens on their
island. To look fixedly at Jesus Christ, and with the
resolve never to turn away from Him, is the only safety
against these tempting delights around us.

But, brethren, it is the crucified Christ, looking to
whom, we are safe amidst all seductions and snares.
I doubt whether a Christ who did not die for men has
power enough over men’s hearts and minds to draw
them to Himself. The cords which bind us to Him are
the assurance of His dying love which has conquered
us. If only we will, day by day, and moment by
moment, as we pass through the duties and distractions,
the temptations and the trials, of this present life, by
an act of will and thought turn ourselves to Him, then
all the glamour of false attractiveness will disappear
from the temptations around us, and we shall see that
the sirens, for all their fair forms, end in loathly fishes’
tails and sit amidst dead men’s bones.

Brethren, ‘looking off unto Jesus’ is the secret of
triumph over the fascinations of the world. And if
we will habitually so look, then the sweetness that we
shall experience will destroy all the seducing power of
lesser and earthly sweetness, and the blessed light of
the sun will dim and all but extinguish the deceitful
gleams that tempt us into the swamps where we shall
be drowned. Turn away, then, from these things;
cleave to Jesus Christ; and though in ourselves we
may be as weak as a humming-bird before a snake,
or a rabbit before a tiger, He will give us strength, and
the light of His face shining down upon us will fix
our eyes and make us insensible to the fascinations
of the sorcerers. So we shall not need to dread the
question, ‘Who hath bewitched you?’ but ourselves
challenge the utmost might of the fascination with[109]
the triumphant question, ‘Who shall separate us from
the love of Christ?’

Help us, O Lord! we beseech Thee, to live near Thee.
Turn away our eyes from beholding vanity, and enable
us to set the Lord always before us that we be not
moved.

LESSONS OF EXPERIENCE

This vehement question is usually taken to be a
reminder to the fickle Galatians that their Christian
faith had brought upon them much suffering from
the hands of their unbelieving brethren, and to imply
an exhortation to faithfulness to the Gospel lest
they should stultify their past brave endurance.
Yielding to the Judaising teachers, and thereby escaping
the ‘offence of the Cross,’ they would make their
past sufferings vain. But it may be suggested that
the word ‘suffered’ here is rather used in what is its
known sense elsewhere, namely, with the general idea
of feeling, the nature of the feeling being undefined.
It is a touching proof of the preponderance of pain
and sorrow that by degrees the significance of the
word has become inextricably intertwined with the
thought of sadness; still, it is possible to take it in the
text as meaning experienced or felt, and to regard the
Apostle as referring to the whole of the Galatians’ past
experience, and as founding his appeal for their steadfastness
on all the joys as well as the sorrows, which
their faith had brought them.

[110]

Taking the words in this more general sense they
become a question which it is well for us to ask ourselves
at such a time as this, when the calendar
naturally invites us to look backwards and ask ourselves
what we have made of all our experiences in the
past, or rather what, by the help of them all, we have
made of ourselves.

I. The duty of retrospect.

For almost any reason it is good for us to be delivered
from our prevailing absorption in the present.
Whatever counterpoises the overwhelming weight of
the present is, so far, a blessing and a good, and whatever
softens the heart and keeps up even the lingering
remembrance of early, dewy freshness and of the
high aspirations which, even for a brief space, elevated
our past selves is gain amidst the dusty commonplaces
of to-day. We see things better and more clearly
when we get a little away from them, as a face is
more distinctly visible at armslength than when held
close.

But our retrospects are too often almost as trivial and
degrading as is our absorption in the present, and to
prevent memory from becoming a minister of frivolity
if not of sin, it is needful that such a question as that
of our text be urgently asked by each of us. Memory
must be in closest union with conscience, as all our
faculties must be, or she is of little use. There is a
mere sentimental luxury of memory which finds a
pensive pleasure in the mere passing out from the hard
present into the soft light, not without illusion in its
beams, of the ‘days that are no more.’ Merely to live
over again our sorrows and joys without any clear discernment
of what their effects on our moral character
have been, is not the retrospect that becomes a man,[111]
however it might suit an animal. We have to look
back as a man might do escaping from the ocean on
to some frail sand-bank which ever breaks off and
crumbles away at his very heels. To remember the
past mainly as it affected our joy or our sorrow is as
unworthy as to regard the present from the same
point of view, and robs both of their highest worth.
To remember is only then blessed and productive of
its highest possible good in us, when the question of
our text insists on being faced, and the object of retrospect
is not to try to rekindle the cold coals of past
emotions, but to ascertain what effect on our present
characters our past experiences have had. We have
not to turn back and try to gather some lingering
flowers, but to look for the fruit which has followed
the fallen blossoms.

II. The true test for the past.

The question of our text implies, as we have already
suggested, that our whole lives, with all their various
and often opposite experiences, are yet an ordered
whole, having a definite end. There is some purpose
beyond the moment to be served. Our joys and our
sorrows, our gains and our losses, the bright hours and
the dark hours, and the hours that are neither
eminently bright nor supremely dark, our failures and
our successes, our hopes disappointed or fulfilled, and
all the infinite variety of condition and environment
through which our varying days and years have led
us, co-operate for one end. It is life that makes men;
the infant is a bundle of possibilities, and as the years
go on, one possible avenue of development after
another is blocked. The child might have been almost
anything; the man has become hardened and fixed
into one shape.[112]

But all this variety of impulses and complicated
experiences need the co-operation of the man himself
if they are to reach their highest results in him. If he
is simply recipient of these external forces acting upon
him, they will shape him indeed, but he will be a poor
creature. Life does not make men unless men take
the command of life, and he who lets circumstances
and externals guide him, as the long water weeds in a
river are directed by its current, will, from the highest
point of view, have experienced the variations of a
lifetime in vain.

No doubt each of our experiences has its own immediate
and lower purpose to serve, and these purposes
are generally accomplished, but beyond these each has
a further aim which is not reached without diligent
carefulness and persistent effort on our parts. If we
would be sure of what it is to suffer life’s experiences
in vain, we have but to ask ourselves what life is
given us for, and we all know that well enough to be
able to judge how far we have used life to attain the
highest ends of living. We may put these ends in
various ways in our investigation of the results of our
manifold experiences. Let us begin with the lowest—we
received life that we might learn truth, then if our
experience has not taught us wisdom it has been in
vain. It is deplorable to have to look round and see
how little the multitude of men are capable of forming
anything like an independent and intelligent opinion,
and how they are swayed by gusts of passion, by blind
prejudice, by pretenders and quacks of all sorts. It is
no less sad for us to turn our eyes within and discover,
perhaps not without surprise and shame, how few of
what we are self-complacent enough to call our
opinions are due to our own convictions.[113]

If we ever are honest enough with ourselves to
catch a glimpse of our own unwisdom, the question of
our text will press heavily upon us, and may help to
make us wiser by teaching us how foolish we are. An
infinite source of wisdom is open to us, and all the rich
variety of our lives’ experiences has been lavished on
us to help us, and what have we made of it all?

But we may rise a step higher and remember that
we are made moral creatures. Therefore, whatever
has not developed infant potentialities in us, and made
them moral qualities, has been experienced in vain.
‘Not enjoyment and not sorrow is our destined end and
way.’ Life is meant to make us love and do the good,
and unless it has produced that effect on us, it has
failed. If this be true, the world is full of failures, like
the marred statues in a bad sculptor’s studio, and we
ourselves have earnestly to confess that the discipline
of life has too often been wasted upon us, and that of
us the divine complaint from of old has been true:
‘In vain have I smitten thy children, they have received
no correction.’

There is no sadder waste than the waste of sorrow,
and alas! we all know how impotent our afflictions
have been to make us better. But not afflictions only
have failed in their appeal to us, our joys have as often
been in vain as our sorrows, and memory, when it
turns its lamp on the long past, sees so few points at
which life has taught us to love goodness, and be good,
that she may well quench her light and let the dead
past bury its dead.

But we must rise still higher, and think of men as
being made for God, and as being the only creatures
known to us who are capable of religion. ‘Man’s chief
end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever.’ And[114]
this chief end is in fullest harmony with the lower ends
to which we have just referred, and they will never be
realised in their fullest completeness unless that completeness
is sought in this the chief end. From of old
meditative souls have known that the beginning of
wisdom is the fear of the Lord, and that that fear is as
certainly the beginning of goodness. It was not an
irrelevant rebuke to the question, ‘What good thing
shall I do?’ when Jesus set the eager young soul who
asked it, to justify to himself his courteous and superficial
application to Him of the abused and vulgarised
title of ‘Good,’ and pointed him to God as the only Being
to whom that title, in its perfectness, could be given.
If ‘there is none good but one, that is God,’ man’s goodness
must be drawn from Him, and morality without
religion will in theory be incomplete, and in practice
a delusion. If, then, men are made to need God, and
capable of possessing Him, and of being possessed by
Him, then the great question for all of us is, has life,
with all its rapid whirl of changing circumstance and
varying fortunes, drawn us closer to God, and made us
more fit to receive more of Him? So supreme is this
chief end that a life which has not attained it can only
be regarded as ‘in vain’ whatever other successes it
may have attained. So unspeakably more important
and necessary is it, that compared with it all else sinks
into nothingness; hence many lives which are dazzling
successes in the eyes of men are ghastly failures in
reality.

Now, if we take these plain principles with us in our
retrospect of the past year we shall be launched on a
very serious inquiry, and brought face to face with a
very penitent answer. Some of us may have had great
sorrows, and the tears may be scarcely dry upon our[115]
cheeks: some of us may have had great gladnesses,
and our hearts may still be throbbing with the thrill:
some of us may have had great successes, and some of
us heavy losses, but the question for us to ask is not of
the quality of our past experiences, but as to their
effects upon us. Has life been so used by us as to help
us to become wiser, better, more devout? And the
answer to that question, if we are honest in our
scrutiny of ourselves, and if memory has not been a
mere sentimental luxury, must be that we have too
often been but unfaithful recipients alike of God’s
mercies and God’s chastisements, and have received
much of the discipline of life, and remained undisciplined.
The question of our text, if asked by me,
would be impertinent, but it is asked of each of us
by the stern voice of conscience, and for some of us
by the lips of dear ones whose loss has been among
our chiefest sufferings. God asks us this question, and
it is hard to make-believe to Him.

III. The best issue of the retrospect.

The world says, ‘What I have written I have written,’
and there is a very solemn and terrible reality in the
thought of the irrevocable past. Whether life has
achieved the ends for which it was given or no, it
has achieved some ends. It may have made us into
characters the very opposite of God’s intention for us,
but it has made us into certain characters which, so
far as the world sees, can never be unmade or re-made.
The world harshly preaches the indelibility of character,
and proclaims that the Ethiopian may as soon be
expected to change his skin or the leopard his spots
as the man accustomed to do evil may learn to do
well. That dreary fatalism which binds the effects of a
dead past on a man’s shoulders, and forbids him to hope[116]
that anything will obliterate the marks of ‘what once
hath been,’ is in violent contradiction to the large
hope brought into the world by Jesus Christ. What
we have written we have written, and we have no
power to erase the lines and make the sheet clean
again, but Jesus Christ has taken away the handwriting
‘that was against us,’ nailing it to His cross.
Instead of our old sin-worn and sin-marked selves,
He proffers to each of us a new self, not the outcome
of what we have been, but the image of what
He is and the prophecy of what we shall be. By
the great gift of holiness for the future by the impartation
of His own life and spirit, Jesus makes
all things new. The Gospel recognises to the full
how bad some who have received it were, but it can
willingly admit their past foulness, because it contrasts
with all that former filth their present cleanness,
and to the most inveterately depraved who have
trusted in Christ rejoices to say, ‘Ye were washed, ye
were sanctified, ye were justified in the name of the
Lord Jesus Christ.’

THE UNIVERSAL PRISON

The Apostle uses here a striking and solemn figure,
which is much veiled for the English reader by the
ambiguity attaching to the word ‘concluded.’ It
literally means ‘shut up,’ and is to be taken in its
literal sense of confining, and not in its secondary
sense of inferring. So, then, we are to conceive of a
vast prison-house in which mankind is confined. And[117]
then, very characteristically, the Apostle passes at
once to another metaphor when he goes on to say
‘under sin.’ What a moment before had presented
itself to his vivid imagination as a great dungeon is
now represented as a heavy weight, pressing down
upon those beneath; if, indeed, we are not, perhaps,
rather to think of the low roof of the dark dungeon
as weighing on the captives.

Further, he says that Scripture has driven men into
this captivity. That, of course, cannot mean that
revelation makes us sinners, but it does mean that it
makes us more guilty, and that it declares the fact of
human sinfulness as no other voice has ever done.
And then the grimness of the picture is all relieved
and explained, and the office ascribed to God’s revelation
harmonised with God’s love, by the strong, steady
beam of light that falls from the last words, which tell
us that the prisoners have not been bound in chains for
despair or death, but in order that, gathered together
in a common doleful destiny, they may become recipients
of a common blessed salvation, and emerge
into liberty and light through faith in Jesus Christ.

So here are three things—the prison-house, its
guardian, and its breaker. ‘The Scripture hath shut
up all under sin, in order that the promise by faith
of Jesus Christ might be given unto all them that
believe.’

I. First, then, note the universal prison-house.

Now the Apostle says two things—and we may put
away the figure and look at the facts that underlie it.
The one is that all sin is imprisonment, the other is
that all men are in that dungeon, unless they have
come out of it through faith in Jesus Christ.

All sin is imprisonment. That is the direct contrary[118]
of the notion that many people have. They say to
themselves, ‘Why should I be fettered and confined
by these antiquated restrictions of a conventional
morality? Why should I not break the bonds, and do
as I like?’ And they laugh at Christian people who
recognise the limitations under which God’s law has
put them; and tell us that we are ‘cold-blooded folks
who live by rule,’ and contrast their own broad ’emancipation
from narrow prejudice.’ But the reality is the
other way. The man who does wrong is a slave in the
measure in which he does it. If you want to find out—and
mark this, you young people, who may be
deceived by the false contrasts between the restraints
of duty and the freedom of living a dissolute life—if
you want to find out how utterly ‘he that committeth
sin is the slave of sin,’ try to break it off, and you will
find it out fast enough. We all know, alas! the impotence
of the will when it comes to hand grips with
some evil to which we have become habituated; and
how we determine and determine, and try, and fail,
and determine again, with no better result. We are
the slaves of our own passions; and no man is free who
is hindered by his lower self from doing that which his
better self tells him he ought to do. The tempter
comes to you, and says, ‘Come and do this thing, just
for once. You can leave off when you like, you know.
There is no need to do it a second time.’ And when
you have done it, he changes his note, and says, ‘Ah!
you are in, and you cannot get out. You have done it
once; and in my vocabulary once means twice, and
once and twice mean always.’

Insane people are sometimes tempted into a house of
detention by being made to believe that it is a grand
mansion, where they are just going to pay a flying[119]
visit, and can come away when they like. But once
inside the walls, they never get past the lodge gates
any more. The foolish birds do not know that there is
lime on the twigs, and their little feet get fastened to
the branch, and their wings flutter in vain. ‘He that
committeth sin is the slave of sin—shut up,’ dungeoned,
‘under sin.’

But do not forget, either, the other metaphor in our
text, in which the Apostle, with characteristic rapidity,
and to the horror of rhetorical propriety, passes at
once from the thought of a dungeon to the thought
of an impending weight, and says, ‘Shut up under
sin.’

What does that mean? It means that we are guilty
when we have done wrong; and it means that we are
under penalties which are sure to follow. No deed
that we do, howsoever it may fade from the tablets of
our memory, but writes in visible characters, in proportion
to its magnitude, upon our characters and lives.
All human acts have perpetual consequences. The
kick of the rifle against the shoulder of the man that
fires it is as certain as the flight of the bullet from its
muzzle. The chalk cliffs that rise above the Channel
entomb and perpetuate the relics of myriads of
evanescent lives; and our fleeting deeds are similarly
preserved in our present selves. Everything that a
man wills, whether it passes into external act or not,
leaves, in its measure, ineffaceable impressions on himself.
And so we are not only dungeoned in, but weighed
upon by, and lie under, the evil that we do.

Nor, dear friends, dare I pass in silence what is too
often passed in silence in the modern pulpit, the plain
fact that there is a future waiting for each of us
beyond the grave, of which the most certain character[120]istic,
certified by our own forebodings, required by the
reasonableness of creation, and made plain by the
revelation of Scripture, is that it is a future of retribution,
where we shall have to carry our works; and
as we have brewed so shall we drink; and the beds
that we have made we shall have to lie upon. ‘God
shut up all under sin.’

Note, again, the universality of the imprisonment.

Now I am not going to exaggerate, I hope. I want
to keep well within the limits of fact, and to say
nothing that is not endorsed by your own consciences,
if you will be honest with yourselves. And I say that
the Bible does not charge men universally with gross
transgressions. It does not talk about the virtues that
grow in the open as if they were splendid vices; but it
does say, and I ask you if our own hearts do not tell
us that it says truly, that no man is, or has been, does,
or has done, that which his own conscience tells him
he should have been and done. We are all ready to
admit faults, in a general way, and to confess that we
have come short of what our own consciousness tells
us we ought to be. But I want you to take the other
step, and to remember that since we each stand in a
personal relation to God, therefore all imperfections,
faults, negligences, shortcomings, and, still more,
transgressions of morality, or of the higher aspirations
of our lives, are sins. Because sin—to use fine words—is
the correlative of God. Or, to put it into plainer
language, the deeds which in regard to law may be
crimes, or those which in regard to morality may be
vices, or in regard to our own convictions of duty may
be shortcomings, seeing they all have some reference
to Him, assume a very much graver character, and
they are all sins.[121]

Oh, brethren, if we realise how intimately and inseparably
we are knit to God, and how everything that
we do, and do not do, but should have done, has an
aspect in reference to Him, I think we should be less
unwilling to admit, and less tinged with levity and
carelessness in admitting, that all our faults are transgressions
of His law, and we should find ourselves
more frequently on our knees before Him, with the
penitent words on our lips and in our hearts, ‘Against
Thee, Thee only have I sinned, and done this evil in Thy
sight.’

That was the prayer of a man who had done a foul
evil in other people’s sight; who had managed to
accumulate about as many offences to as many people
in one deed as was possible. For, as a king he had
sinned against his nation, as a friend he had sinned
against his companion, as a captain he had sinned
against his brave subordinate, as a husband he had
sinned against his wife, and he had sinned against
Bathsheba. And yet, with all that tangle of offences
against all these people, he says, ‘Against Thee, Thee
only.’ Yes! Because, accurately speaking, the sin
had reference to God, and to God alone. And I wish
for myself and for you to cultivate the habit of connecting,
thus, all our actions, and especially our imperfections
and our faults, with the thought of God, that
we may learn how universal is the enclosure of man
in this dreadful prison-house.

II. And so, I come, in the second place, to look at the
guardian of the prison.

That is a strange phrase of my text attributing the
shutting of men up in this prison-house to the merciful
revelation of God in the Scripture. And it is made
still more striking and strange by another edition of[122]
the same expression in the Epistle to the Romans,
where Paul directly traces the ‘concluding all in disobedience’
to God Himself.

There may be other subtle thoughts connected with
that expression which I do not need to enter upon
now. But one that I would dwell upon, for a moment,
is this, that one great purpose of Scripture is to convince
us that we are sinful in God’s sight. I do not
need to remind you, I suppose, how that was, one
might almost say, the dominant intention of the whole
of the ceremonial and moral law of Israel, and explains
its many else inexplicable and apparently petty commandments
and prohibitions. They were all meant to
emphasise the difference between right and wrong,
obedience and disobedience, and so to drive home to
men’s hearts the consciousness that they had broken
the commandments of the living God. And although
the Gospel comes with a very different guise from that
ancient order, and is primarily gift and not law, a
Gospel of forgiveness, and not the promulgation of
duty or the threatening of condemnation, yet it, too,
has for one of its main purposes, which must be accomplished
in us before it can reach its highest aim in us,
the kindling in men’s hearts of the same consciousness
that they are sinful men in God’s sight.

Ah, brethren, we all need it. There is nothing that
we need more than to have driven deep into us the
penetrating point of that conviction. There must be
some external standard by which men may be convinced
of their sinfulness, for they carry no such
standard within them. Your conscience is only you
judging on moral questions, and, of course, as you
change, it will change too. A man’s whole state determines
the voice with which conscience shall speak to[123]
him, and so the worse he is, and the more he needs it,
the less he has it. The rebels cut the telegraph wires.
The waves break the bell that hangs on the reef, and so
the black rocks get many a wreck to gnaw with their
sharp teeth. A man makes his conscience dumb by
the very sins that require a conscience trumpet-tongued
to reprehend them. And therefore it needs that God
should speak from Heaven, and say to us, ‘Thou art
the man,’ or else we pass by all these grave things
that I am trying to urge upon you now, and fall back
upon our complacency and our levity and our unwillingness
to take stock of ourselves, and front the facts
of our condition. And so we build up a barrier between
ourselves and God, and God’s grace, which nothing
short of that grace and an omnipotent love and an all-powerful
Redeemer can ever pull down.

I wish to urge in a few words, yet with much
earnestness, this thought, that until we have laid to
heart God’s message about our own personal sinfulness
we have not got to the place where we can in the least
understand the true meaning of His Gospel, or the
true work of His Son. May I say that I, for one, am
old-fashioned enough to look with great apprehension
on certain tendencies of present-day presentations of
Christianity which, whilst they dwell much upon the
social blessings which it brings, do seem to me to be in
great peril of obscuring the central characteristic of
the Gospel, that it is addressed to sinful men, and that
the only way by which individuals can come to the possession
of any of its blessings is by coming as penitent
sinners, and casting themselves on the mercy of God in
Jesus Christ? The beginning of all lies here, where Paul
puts it, ‘the Scripture hath herded all men,’ in droves,
into the prison, that it might have mercy upon all.[124]

Dear friend, as the old proverb has it, deceit lurks in
generalities. I have no doubt you are perfectly willing
to admit that all are sinful. Come a little closer to the
truth, I beseech you, and say each is sinful, and I am
one of the captives.

III. And so, lastly, the breaker of the prison-house.

I need not spend your time in commenting on the
final words of this text. Suffice it to gather their
general purport and scope. The apparently stern
treatment which God by revelation applies to the
whole mass of mankind is really the tenderest beneficence.
He has shut them up in the prison-house in
order that, thus shut up, they may the more eagerly
apprehend and welcome the advent of the Deliverer.
He tells us each our state, in order that we may the
more long for, and the more closely grasp, the great
mercy which reverses the state. And so how shallow
and how unfair it is to talk about evangelical Christianity
as being gloomy, stern, or misanthropical! You
do not call a doctor unkind because he tells an unsuspecting
patient that his disease is far advanced, and
that if it is not cured it will be fatal. No more should
a man turn away from Christianity, or think it harsh
and sour, because it speaks plain truths. The question
is, are they true? not, are they unpleasant?

If you and I, and all our fellows, are shut up in this
prison-house of sin, then it is quite clear that none of
us can do anything to get ourselves out. And so the
way is prepared for that great message with which
Jesus opened His ministry, and which, whilst it has a
far wider application, and reference to social as well as
to individual evils, begins with the proclamation of
liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison
to them that are bound.[125]

There was once a Roman emperor who wished that
all his enemies had one neck, that he might slay them
all at one blow. The wish is a fact in regard to Christ
and His work, for by it all our tyrants have been
smitten to death by one stroke; and the death of Jesus
Christ has been the death of sin and death and hell—of
sin in its power, in its guilt, and in its penalty. He
has come into the prison-house, and torn the bars
away, and opened the fetters, and every man may,
if he will, come out into the blessed sunshine and
expatiate there.

And if, brethren, it is true that the universal
prison-house is opened by the death of Jesus
Christ, who is the Propitiation for the sins of the
whole world, and the power by which the most
polluted may become clean, then there follows, as
plainly, that the only thing which we have to do
is, recognising and feeling our bound impotence, to
stretch out chained hands and take the gift that He
brings. Since all is done for each of us, and since none
of us can do sufficient for himself to break the bond,
then what we should do is to trust to Him who has
broken every chain and let the oppressed go free.

Oh, dear friend, if you want to get to the heart of
the sweetness and the blessedness and power of the
Gospel, you must begin here, with the clear and
penitent consciousness that you are a sinful man in
God’s sight, and can do nothing to cleanse, help, or
liberate yourself. Is Jesus Christ the breaker of the
bond for you? Do you learn from Him what your
need is? Do you trust yourself to Him for Pardon, for
cleansing, for emancipation? Unless you do, you will
never know His most precious preciousness, and you
have little right to call yourself a Christian. If you[126]
do, oh, than a great light will shine in the prison-house,
and your chains will drop from your wrists, and the
iron door will open of its own accord, and you will
come out into the morning sunshine of a new day,
because you have confessed and abhorred the bondage
into which you have cast yourselves, and accepted the
liberty wherewith Christ hath made you free.

THE SON SENT

It is generally supposed that by the ‘fulness of time’
Paul means to indicate that Christ came at the moment
when the world was especially prepared to receive
Him, and no doubt that is a true thought. The Jews
had been trained by law to the conviction of sin;
heathenism had tried its utmost, had reached the full
height of its possible development, and was decaying.
Rome had politically prepared the way for the spread
of the Gospel. Vague expectations of coming change
found utterance even from the lips of Roman courtier
poets, and a feeling of unrest and anticipation pervaded
society; but while no doubt all this is true and becomes
more certain the more we know of the state of things
into which Christ came, it is to be noted that Paul is
not thinking of the fulness of time primarily in reference
to the world which received Him, but to the Father
who sent Him. Our text immediately follows words
in which the air is described as being ‘under guardians
and stewards’ until the time appointed of His Father,
and the fulness of time is therefore the moment which
God had ordained from the beginning for His coming.[127]
He, from of old, had willed that at that moment this
Son should be born, and it is to the punctual accomplishment
of His eternal purpose that Paul here directs
our thoughts. No doubt the world’s preparedness is
part of the reason for the divine determination of the
time, but it is that divine determination rather than
the world’s preparedness to which the first words of
our text must be taken to refer.

The remaining portion of our text is so full of meaning
that one shrinks from attempting to deal with it
in our narrow space, but though it opens up depths
beyond our fathoming, and gathers into one concentrated
brightness lights on which our dim eyes can
hardly look, we may venture to attempt some imperfect
consideration even of these great words. Following
their course of thought we may deal with

I. The mystery of love that sent.

The most frequent form under which the great fact
of the incarnation is represented in Scripture is that
of our text—’God sent His Son.’ It is familiar on the
lips of Jesus, but He also says that ‘God gave His Son.’
One can feel a shade of difference in the two modes of
expression. The former bringing rather to our thoughts
the representative character of the Son as Messenger,
and the latter going still deeper into the mystery of
Godhead and bringing into view the love of the
Father who spared not His Son but freely bestowed
Him on men. Yet another word is used by Jesus Himself
when He says, ‘I came forth from God,’ and that
expression brings into view the perfect willingness
with which the Son accepted the mission and gave
Himself, as well as was given by God. All three phases
express harmonious, though slightly differing aspects
of the same fact, as the facets of a diamond might[128]
flash into different colours, and all must be held fast if
we would understand the unspeakable gift of God.
Jesus was sent; Jesus was given; Jesus came. The
mission from the Father, the love of the Father, the
glad obedience of the Son, must ever be recognised as
interpenetrating, and all present in that supreme act.

There have been many men specially sent forth from
God, whose personal existence began with their birth,
and so far as the words are concerned, Jesus might
have been one of these. There was a man sent from
God whose name was John, and all through the ages
he has had many companions in his mission, but there
has been only one who ‘came’ as well as ‘was sent,’
and He is the true light which lighteth every man.
To speak in theological language of the pre-existence
of the Son is cold, and may obscure the truth which it
formulates in so abstract a fashion, and may rob it of
power to awe and impress. But there can be no
question that in our text, as is shown by the juxtaposition
of ‘sent’ and ‘born,’ and in all the New Testament
references to the subject, the birth of Jesus is not
regarded as the beginning of the being of the Son.
The one lies far back in the depths of eternity and the
mystery of the divine nature, the other is a historical
fact occurring in a definite place and at a dated
moment. Before time was the Son was, delighting in
the Father, and ‘in the beginning was the word and
the word was with God,’ and He who in respect of His
expression of the Father’s mind and will was the Word,
was the Son in respect of the love that bound the
Father and Him in one. Into the mysteries of that
love and union no eyes can penetrate, but unless our
faith lays hold of it, we know not the God whom Jesus
has declared to us. The mysteries of that divine union[129]
and communion lie beyond our reach, but well within
the grasp of our faith and the work of the Son in the
world, ever since there was a world, is not obscurely
declared to all who have eyes to see and hearts to
understand. For He has through all ages been the
active energy of the divine power, or as the Old Testament
words it, ‘The Arm of the Lord,’ the Agent of
creation, the Revealer of God, the Light of the world
and the Director of Providence. ‘He was in the world
and the world was made by Him, and the world knew
Him not.’

Now all this teaching that the Son was long before
Jesus was born is no mere mysterious dogma without
bearing on daily needs, but stands in the closest connection
with Christ’s work and our faith in it. It is the
guarantee of His representative character; on it depends
the reliableness of His revelation of God. Unless
He is the Son in a unique sense, how could God have
spoken unto us in Him, and how could we rely on His
words? Unless He was ‘the effulgence of His glory and
the express image of His person’: how could we be
sure that the light of His countenance was light from
God and that in His person God was so presented as
that he who had seen Him had seen the Father? The
completeness and veracity of His revelation, the authoritative
fulness of His law, the efficacy of His sacrifice
and the prevalence of His intercession all depend on
the fact of His divine life with God long before His
human life with men. It is a plain historical fact that
a Christianity which has no place for a pre-existent
Son in the bosom of the Father has only a maimed
Christ in reference to the needs of sinful men. If our
Christ were not the eternal Son of God, He will not be
the universal Saviour of men.[130]

Nor is this truth less needful in its bearing on modern
theories which will have nothing to say to the supernatural,
and in a fatalistic fashion regard history as
all the result of an orderly evolution in which the
importance of personal agents is minimised. To it
Jesus, like all other great men, is a product of His age,
and the immediate result of the conditions under which
He appeared. But when we look far beyond the manger
of Bethlehem into the depths of Eternity and see God
so loving the world as to give His Son, we cannot but
recognise that He has intervened in the course of
human history and that the mightiest force in the
development of man is the eternal Son whom He sent
to save the world.

II. The miracle of lowliness that came.

The Apostle goes on from describing the great fact
which took place in heaven to set forth the great fact
which completed it on earth. The sending of the Son
took effect in the birth of Jesus, and the Apostle puts
it under two forms, both of which are plainly designed
to present Christ’s manhood as His full identification of
Himself with us. The Son of God became the son of a
woman; from His mother He drew a true and complete
humanity in body and soul. The humanity which He
received was sufficiently kindred with the divinity
which received it to make it possible that the one
should dwell in the other and be one person. As born
of a woman the Son of God took upon Himself all
human experiences, became capable of sharing our
pure emotions, wept our tears, partook in our joys,
hoped and feared as we do, was subject to our changes,
grew as we grow, and in everything but sin, was a man
amongst men.

But the Son of God could not be as the sons of men.[131]
Him the Father heard always. Even when He came
down from Heaven and became the Son of Man, He
continued to be ‘The Son of Man which is in Heaven.’
Amid all the distractions and limitations of His earthly
life, the continuity and depth of His communion with
the Father were unbroken and the completeness of His
obedience undiminished. He was a Man, but He was
also the Man, the one realised ideal of humanity that
has ever walked the earth, to whom all others, even
the most complete, are fragments, the fairest foul, the
most gracious harsh. In Him and in Him only has
been ‘given the world assurance of a man.’

The other condition which is here introduced is ‘born
under the law,’ by which it may be noted that the
Apostle does not mean the Jewish law, inasmuch as he
does not use the definite article with the word. No
doubt our Lord was born as a Jew and subject to the
Jewish law, but the thought here and in the subsequent
clause is extended to the general notion of law. The
very heart of our Lord’s human identification is that
He too had duties imperative upon Him, and the
language of one of the Messianic psalms was the voice
of His filial will during all His earthly life; ‘Lo! I
come, in the volume of the Book it is written of Me, I
delight to do Thy will and Thy law is within My heart.’
The very secret of His human life was discovered by
the heathen centurion, at whose faith He marvelled,
who said, ‘I also am a man under authority’; so was
Jesus. The Son had ever been obedient in the sweet
communion of Heaven, but the obedience of Jesus was
not less perfect, continual and unstained. It was the
man Jesus who summed up His earthly life in ‘I do
always the things that please Him’; it was the man
Jesus who, under the olives in Gethsemane, made the[132]
great surrender and yielded up His own will to the
will of the Father who sent Him.

He was under law in that the will of God dominated
His life, but He was not so under it as we are on whom
its precepts often press as an unwelcome obligation,
and who know the weight of guilt and condemnation.
If there is any one characteristic of Jesus more conspicuous
than another it is the absence in Him of any
consciousness of deficiency in His obedience to law, and
yet that absence does not in the smallest degree infringe
on His claim to be ‘meek and lowly in heart.’
‘Which of you convinceth Me of sin?’ would have been
from any other man a defiance that would have provoked
a crushing answer if it had not been taken as a
proof of hopeless ignorance of self, but when Christ asks
the question, the world is silent. The silence has been
all but unbroken for nineteen hundred years, and of
all the busy and often unfriendly eyes that have been
occupied with Him and the hostile pens that have been
eager to say something new about Him, none have
discovered a flaw, or dared to ‘hint a fault.’ That
character has stamped its own impression of perfectness
on all eyes even the most unfriendly or indifferent.
In Him there is seen the perfect union and balance of
opposite characteristics; the rest of us, at the best,
are but broken arcs; Jesus is the completed round.
He is under law as fully, continuously and joyfully
obedient; but for Him it had no accusing voice, and it
laid on Him no burden of broken commandments. He
was born of a woman, born under law, but he lived
separate from sinners though identified with them.

III. The marvel of exaltation that results.

Our Lord’s lowliness is described in the two clauses
which we have just been considering. They express[133]
His identification with us from a double point of view,
and that double point of view is continued in the final
clauses of our text which state the double purpose of
God in sending His Son. He became one with us that
we might become one with Him. The two elements of
this double purpose are stated in the reverse order to
the two elements of Christ’s lowliness. The redemption
of them that were under law is presented as the
reason for His being born under law, and our reception
of the ‘adoption of sons’ is the purpose of the Son’s
being sent and born of a woman. The order in which
Paul here deals with the two parts of the divine
purpose is not to be put down to mere rhetorical ornament,
but corresponds to the order in which these two
elements are realised by men. For there must be
redemption from law before there is the adoption of
sons.

We have already had occasion to point out that ‘law’
here must be taken in the wide sense and not restricted
to the Jewish law. It is a world-wide redemption
which the Father’s love had in view in sending His
Son, but that all-comprehending, fatherly love could
not reach its aim by the mere forth-putting of its own
energy. A process was needed if the divine heart was
to accomplish its desire, and the majestic stages in
that process are set forth here by Paul. The world
was under law in a very sad fashion, and though Jesus
has come to redeem them that are under law, the
crushing weight of commandments flouted, of duties
neglected, of sins done, presses heavily upon many of
us. And yet how many of us there are who do not
know the burden that we carry and have had no personal
experience like that of Bunyan’s Christian with
the pack on his back all but weighing him down?[134]
Jesus Christ has become one of us, and in His sinless
life has ‘magnified the law and made it honourable,’
and in His sinless death He endures the consequences
of sin, not as due to Himself, but because they are
man’s. But we must carefully keep in view, that as
we have already pointed out, we are to think of Christ’s
mission as His coming as well as the Father’s sending,
and that therefore we do not grasp the full idea of our
Lord’s enduring the consequences of sin unless we
take it as meaning His voluntary identification of Himself
in love with us sinful men. His obedience was
perfect all His life long, and His last and highest act
of obedience was when He became obedient unto death,
even the death of the Cross.

This is the only means by which the burden of law
in any of its forms can be taken away from us. For a
law which is not loved will be heavy and hard however
holy and just and good it may be, and a law which we
have broken will become sooner or later its own
avenger. Faithful in Pilgrim’s Progress tells how ‘So
soon as a man overtook me he was but a word and a
blow, for down he knocked me and laid me for dead. . . . He
struck me another deadly blow on the breast
and beat me down backward, so I lay at his foot as
dead as before, so when I came to myself again I cried
him “Mercy,” but he said, “I know not how to show
mercy,” and with that knocked me down again; he
had doubtless made an end of me but that one came
by and bid him forbear. . . . I did not know him at
first, but as he went by I perceived the holes in his
hands and in his sides.’ He was born under law that
He might redeem them that were under law.

The slaves bought into freedom are received into the
great family. The Son has become flesh that they who[135]
dwell in the flesh may rise to be sons, but the Son
stands alone even in the midst of His identification
with us, and of the great results which follow for us
from it. He is the Son by nature; we are sons by
adoption. He became man that we might share in the
possession of God. When the burden of law is lifted off
it is possible to bestow the further blessing of sonship,
but that blessing is only possible through Him in whom,
and from whom, we derive a life which is divine life.
There is a profound truth in the prophetic sentence,
‘Behold I and the children which God hath given me!’
for, in one aspect, believers are the children of Christ,
and in another, they are sons of God.

We have been speaking of the Son’s identification
with us in His mission, and our identification with
Him, but that identification depends on ourselves and
is only an accomplished fact through our faith. When
we trust in Him it is true that all His—His righteousness,
His Sonship, His union with the Father—is ours,
and that all ours—our sins, our guilt, our alienation
from God and our dwelling in the far-off land of rags
and vice—is His. In His voluntary identification with
us, He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.
It is for us to determine whether we will lay on Him
our iniquities, as the Father has already laid the
iniquities of us all. Are we by faith in Him who was
born of a woman, born under law, making our very
own the redemption from the law which He has wrought
and the adoption of sons which He bestows?[136]

WHAT MAKES A CHRISTIAN: CIRCUMCISION
OR FAITH?

It is a very singular instance of imaginative misreading
of plain facts that the primitive Church should be
held up as a pattern Church. The early communities
had apostolic teaching; but beyond that, they seem to
have been in no respect above, and in many respects
below, the level of subsequent ages. If we may judge
of their morality by the exhortations and dehortations
which they received from the Apostle, Corinth and
Thessalonica were but beginners in holiness. If we
may judge of their intelligence by the errors into which
they were in danger of falling, these first congregations
had indeed need that one should teach them which
were the first principles of the oracles of God. It could
not be otherwise. They were but just rescued from
heathenism, and we need not wonder if their spirits
long bore the scars of their former bondage. If we
wish to know what the apostolic churches were like,
we have but to look at the communities gathered by
modern missionaries. The same infantile simplicity,
the same partial apprehensions of the truth, the same
danger of being led astray by the low morality of their
heathen kindred, the same openness to strange heresy,
the same danger of blending the old with the new, in
opinion and in practice, beset both.

The history of the first theological difference in the
early churches is a striking confutation of the dream
that they were perfect, and a striking illustration of[137]
the dangers to which they were exposed from the
attempt, so natural to us all, to put new wine into old
bottles. The Jewish and the Gentile elements did not
coalesce. The point round which the strife was waged
was not whether Gentiles might come into the Church.
That was conceded by the fiercest Judaisers. But it
was whether they could come in as Gentiles, without
first being incorporated into the Jewish nation by
circumcision, and whether they could remain in as
Gentiles, without conforming to Jewish ceremonial
and law.

Those who said ‘No’ were members of the Christian
communities, and, being so, they still insisted that
Judaism was to be eternal. They demanded that the
patched and stiff leathern bottle, which had no elasticity
or pliability, should still contain the quick fermenting
new wine of the kingdom. And certainly, if ever man
had excuse for clinging to what was old and formal,
these Judaising Christians held it. They held by a law
written with God’s own finger, by ordinances awful
by reason of divine appointment, venerable by reason
of the generations to which they had been of absolute
authority, commended by the very example of Christ
Himself. Every motive which can bind heart and
conscience to the reverence and the practice of the
traditions of the Fathers, bound them to the Law and
the ordinances which had been Israel’s treasure from
Abraham to Jesus.

Those who said ‘Yes’ were mostly Gentiles, headed
and inspired by a Hebrew of the Hebrews. They
believed that Judaism was preparatory, and that its
work was done. For those among themselves who
were Jews, they were willing that its laws should still
be obligatory; but they fought against the attempt to[138]
compel all Gentile converts to enter Christ’s kingdom
through the gate of circumcision.

The fight was stubborn and bitter. I suppose it is
harder to abolish forms than to change opinions.
Ceremonies stand long after the thought which they
express has fled, as a dead king may sit on his throne
stiff and stark in his golden mantle, and no one come
near enough to see that the light is gone out of his
eyes, and the will departed from the hand that still
clutches the sceptre. All through Paul’s life he was
dogged and tormented by this controversy. There was
a deep gulf between the churches he planted and this
reactionary section of the Christian community. Its
emissaries were continually following in his footsteps.
As he bitterly reproaches them, they entered upon
another man’s line of things made ready to their hand,
not caring to plant churches of circumcised Gentiles
themselves, but starting up behind him as soon as his
back was turned, and spoiling his work.

This Epistle is the memorial of that foot-to-foot feud.
It is of perennial use, as the tendencies against which
it is directed are constant in human nature. Men are
ever apt to confound form and substance, to crave
material embodiments of spiritual realities, to elevate
outward means into the place of the inward and real,
to which all the outward is but subsidiary. In every
period of strife between the two great opponents, this
letter has been the stronghold of those who fight for
the spiritual conception of religion. With it Luther
waged his warfare, and in this day, too, its words are
precious.

My text contains Paul’s condensed statement of
his whole position in the controversy. It tells us
what he fought for, and why he fought, against the[139]
attempt to suspend union to Christ on an outward
rite.

I. The first grand principle contained in these words
is that faith working by love makes a Christian.

The antithesis of our text appears in somewhat varied
forms in two other places in the Apostle’s writings. To
the Corinthians he says, ‘Circumcision is nothing, and
uncircumcision is nothing, but the keeping of the commandments
of God.’ His last word to the Galatians—the
gathering up into one strong sentence of his
whole letter—is, ‘In Christ Jesus, neither circumcision
availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new
creature.’

Now, all these assertions embody substantially the
same opposition between the conception of Christianity
as depending upon a ceremonial rite, and as being a
spiritual change. And the variations in the second
member of the contrast throw light on each other. In
one, the essential thing is regarded from the divine
side as being not a rite performed on the body, but a
new nature, the result of a supernatural regeneration.
In another, the essential thing is set forth as being not
an outward act, but an inward principle, which produces
appropriate effects on the whole being. In yet
another the essential thing is conceived as being not a
mere ceremonial, but practical obedience, the consequence
of the active principle of faith, and the sign of
the new life. There is an evident sequence in the three
sayings. They begin with the deepest, the divine act
of a new creation—and end with the outermost, the
last result and object of both the others—deeds of
conformity to God’s law.

This one process in its triple aspects, says Paul, constitutes
a man a Christian. What correspondence is[140]
there between it, in any of its parts, and a carnal
ordinance? They belong to wholly different categories,
and it is the most preposterous confusion to try to mix
them up together. Are we to tack on to the solemn
powers and qualities, which unite the soul to Christ,
this beggarly addition that the Judaisers desire, and to
say, the essentials of Christianity are a new creature,
faith, obedience—and circumcision? That is, indeed,
sewing old cloth on a new garment, and huddling
together in grotesque chaos things which are utterly
diverse. It is as absurd bathos as to say the essentials
of a judge are integrity, learning, patience—and an
ermine robe!

There would be less danger of being entangled in
false notions of the sort which devastated Galatia and
have afflicted the Church ever since, if people would
put a little more distinctly before their own minds
what they mean by ‘religion’; what sort of man they
intend when they talk about ‘a Christian.’ A clear
notion of the thing to be produced would thin away a
wonderful deal of mist as to the way of producing it.
So then, beginning at the surface, in order to work
inward, my first remark is that religion is the harmony
of the soul with God, and the conformity of the life to
His law.

The loftiest purpose of God, in all His dealings, is to
make us like Himself; and the end of all religion is the
complete accomplishment of that purpose. There is
no religion without these elements—consciousness of
kindred with God, recognition of Him as the sum of
all excellence and beauty, and of His will as unconditionally
binding upon us, aspiration and effort after a
full accord of heart and soul with Him and with His
law, and humble confidence that that sovereign beauty[141]
will be ours. ‘Be ye imitators of God as dear children’
is the pure and comprehensive dictate which expresses
the aim of all devout men. ‘To keep His commandments’
goes deeper than the mere external deeds.
Were it not so, Paul’s grand words would shrink to a
very poor conception of religion, which would then
have its shrine and sphere removed from the sacred
recesses of the inmost spirit to the dusty Babel of the
market-place and the streets. But with that due and
necessary extension of the words which results from
the very nature of the case, that obedience must be
the obedience of a man, and not of his deeds only,
and must include the submission of the will and the
prostration of the whole nature before Him; they teach
a truth which, fully received and carried out, clears
away whole mountains of theoretical confusion and
practical error. Religion is no dry morality; no slavish,
punctilious conforming of actions to a hard law. Religion
is not right thinking alone, nor right emotion
alone, nor right action alone. Religion is still less the
semblance of these in formal profession, or simulated
feeling, or apparent rectitude. Religion is not nominal
connection with the Christian community, nor participation
in its ordinances and its worship. But to be
godly is to be godlike. The full accord of all the soul
with His character, in whom, as their native home,
dwell ‘whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things
are lovely,’ and the full glad conformity of the will to
His sovereign will, who is the life of our lives—this,
and nothing shallower, nothing narrower, is religion
in its perfection; and the measure in which we have
attained to this harmony with God, is the measure in
which we are Christians. As two stringed instruments
may be so tuned to one keynote that, if you strike the[142]
one, a faint ethereal echo is heard from the other,
which blends undistinguishably with its parent sound;
so, drawing near to God, and brought into unison with
His mind and will, our responsive spirits vibrate in
accord with His, and give forth tones, low and thin
indeed, but still repeating the mighty music of heaven.
‘Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing,
but the keeping of the commandments of God.’

But our text tells us, further, that if we look backwards
from character and deed to motive, this harmony
with God results from love becoming the ruling power of
our lives. The imitation of the object of worship has
always been felt to be the highest form of worship.
Many an ancient teacher, besides the Stoic philosopher,
has said, ‘He who copies the gods worships them
adequately.’ One of the prophets lays it down as a
standing rule, ‘The people will walk every one in the
name of his God.’ But it is only in the Christian attitude
towards God that the motive power is found which
makes such imitation more than an impossible duty,
even as it is only in the revealed character of God that
a pattern is found, to imitate which is to be perfect.
Everywhere besides, harmony with the gods meant
discord with conscience and flagrant outrages of the
commonest moralities. Everywhere else, the task of
copying them was one lightened by no clear confidence
in their love, and by no happy consciousness of our
own. But for us, the love revealed is the perfect law,
and the love evoked is the fulfilling of the law.

And this is the might and nobleness of the Christian
love to God; that it is no idle emotion or lazy rapture,
no vague sentiment, but the root of all practical goodness,
of all strenuous effort, of all virtue, and of all
praise. That strong tide is meant to drive the busy[143]
wheels of life and to bear precious freightage on its
bosom; not to flow away in profitless foam. Love is
the fruitful mother of bright children, as our great
moralist-poet learned when he painted her in the
House of Holiness:

There is discord between man and God which can
only be removed by the sweet commerce of love, established
between earth and heaven. God’s love has come
to us. When ours springs responsive to Him, then the
schism is ended, and the wandering child forgets his
rebellion, as he lays his aching head on the father’s
bosom, and feels the beating of the father’s heart. Our
souls by reason of sin are ‘like sweet bells jangled,
out of tune and harsh.’ Love’s master hand laid upon
them restores to them their part in ‘the fair music
that all creatures make to their great Lord,’ and brings
us into such accord with God that

But this text leads to a still further consideration,
namely, the dominion of love to God in our hearts arises
from faith.

We thus reach the last link, or rather the staple, of
the chain from which all hangs. Religion is harmony
with God; that harmony is produced by love; and that
love is produced by faith. Therefore the fundamental
of all Christianity in the soul is faith. Would this
sound any fresher and more obvious if we varied the
language, and said that to be religious we must be like
God, that to be like Him we must love Him, and that
to love Him we must be sure that He loves us? Surely
that is too plain to need enlarging on.

And is it not true that faith must precede our love
to God, and affords the only possible basis on which
that can be built? How can we love Him so long as
we are in doubt of His heart, or misconceive His
character, as if it were only power and wisdom, or
awful severity? Men cannot love an unseen person at
all, without some very special token of his personal
affection for them. The history of all religions shows
that where the gods have been thought of as unloving,
the worshippers have been heartless too. It is only
when we know and believe the love that God hath to
us, that we come to cherish any corresponding emotion
to Him. Our love is secondary, His is primary; ours
is reflection, His the original beam; ours is echo, His
the mother-tone. Heaven must bend to earth before
earth can rise to heaven. The skies must open and
drop down love, ere love can spring in the fruitful
fields. And it is only when we look with true trust to
that great unveiling of the heart of God which is in[145]
Jesus Christ, only when we can say, ‘Herein is love—that
He gave His Son to be the propitiation for our
sins,’ that our hearts are melted, and all their snows
are dissolved into sweet waters, which, freed from
their icy chains, can flow with music in their ripple
and fruitfulness along their course, through our otherwise
silent and barren lives. Faith in Christ is the
only possible basis for active love to God.

And this thought presents the point of contact between
the teaching of Paul and John. The one dwells
on faith, the other on love, but he who insists most on
the former declares that it produces its effects on
character by the latter; and he who insists most on
the latter is forward to proclaim that it owes its very
existence to the former.

It presents also the point of contact between Paul
and James. The one speaks of the essential of
Christianity as faith, the other as works. They are
only striking the stream at different points, one at the
fountain-head, one far down its course among the
haunts of men. They both preach that faith must be
‘faith that worketh,’ not a barren assent to a dogma,
but a living trust that brings forth fruits in the life.
Paul believes as much as James that faith without
works is dead, and demands the keeping of the commandments
as indispensable to all true Christianity.
James believes as much as Paul that works without
faith are of none effect. So all three of these great
teachers of the Church are represented in this text, to
which each of them might seem to have contributed a
word embodying his characteristic type of doctrine.
The threefold rays into which the prism parts the
white light blend again here, where faith, love, and
work are all united in the comprehensive saying, ‘In[146]
Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth anything,
nor uncircumcision, but faith which worketh by love.’

The sum of the whole matter is this—He who is one
in will and heart with God is a Christian. He who
loves God is one in will and heart with Him. He who
trusts Christ loves God. That is Christianity in its
ultimate purpose and result. That is Christianity in
its means and working forces. That is Christianity in
its starting-point and foundation.

II. But we have to consider also the negative side of
the Apostle’s words. They affirm that in comparison
with the essential—faith, all externals are infinitely
unimportant.

Paul’s habit was always to settle questions by the
widest principles he could bring to bear upon them—which
one may notice in passing is the very opposite
to the method that has been in favour with many
Church teachers and guides since, who have preferred
to live from hand to mouth, and to dispose of difficulties
by the narrowest considerations that would avail to
quiet them. In our text the question in hand is settled
on a ground which covers a great deal more than the
existing dispute. Circumcision is regarded as one of
a whole class—namely, the class of outward rites and
observances; and the contrast drawn between it and
faith extends to all the class to which it belongs. It is
not said to be powerless because it is an Old Testament
rite, but because it is a rite. Its impotence lies in the
very nature which it has in common with all external
institutions, whether they be of the Old Testament or
of the New, whether they be enjoined of God or invented
by men. To them all the same characteristic
cleaves. Compared with faith they are of no avail.
Not that they are absolutely useless. They have their[147]
place, but ‘in Christ Jesus‘ they are nothing. Union
to Him depends on quite another order of facts, which
may or may not exist along with circumcision, or with
baptism, or with the Lord’s Supper. However important
these may be, they have no place among the
things which bind a soul to its Saviour. They may be
helps to these things, but nothing more. The rite does
not ensure the faith, else the antithesis of our text
were unmeaning. The rite does not stand in the place
of faith, or the contrast implied were absurd. But the
two belong to totally different orders of things, which
may co-exist indeed, but may also be found separately;
the one is the indispensable spiritual experience which
makes us Christians, the other belongs to a class of
material institutions which are much as helps to, but
nothing as substitutes or equivalents for, faith.

Keep firm hold of the positive principle with which
we have been dealing in the former part of this sermon,
and all forms and externals fall as a matter of course
into their proper place. If religion be the loving
devotion of the soul to God, resting upon reasonable
faith, then all besides is, at the most, a means which
may further it. If loving trust which apprehends the
truth, and cleaves to the Person, revealed to us in the
Gospel, be the link which binds men to God, then the
only way by which these externals can be ‘means of
grace’ is by their aiding us to understand better and
to feel more the truth as it is in Jesus, and to cleave
closer to Him who is the truth. Do they enlighten
the understanding? Do they engrave deeper the loved
face carven on the tablets of memory, which the
attrition of worldly cares is ever obliterating, and the
lichens of worldly thoughts ever filling up? Do they
clear out the rubbish from the channels of the heart,[148]
that the cleansing stream may flow through them?
Do they, through the senses, minister to the soul its
own proper food of clear thought, vivid impressions,
loving affections, trustful obedience? Do they bring
Christ to us, and us to Him, in the only way in which
approach is possible—through the occupation of mind
and heart and will with His great perfectness? Then
they are means of grace, precious and helpful, the gifts
of His love, the tokens of His wise knowledge of our
weakness, the signs of His condescension, in that He
stoops to trust some portion of our remembrance of
Him to the ministry of sense. But in comparison with
that faith which they cannot plant, though they may
strengthen it, they are nothing; and in the matter of
uniting the soul to God and making men ‘religious,’
they are of no avail at all.

And such thoughts as these have a very wide sweep,
as well as a very deep influence. Religion is the
devotion of the soul to God. Then everything besides
is not religion, but at most a means to it. That is true
about all Christian ordinances. Baptism is spoken
about by Paul in terms which plainly show that he
regarded it as ‘nothing’ in the same sense, and under
the same limitations, as he thought that circumcision
was nothing. ‘I baptized some of you,’ says he to
the Corinthians; ‘I scarcely remember whom, or how
many. I have far more important work to do—to
preach the Gospel.’ It is true about all acts and forms
of Christian worship. These are not religion, but
means to it. Their only value and their only test is—Do
they help men to know and feel Christ and His
truth? It is true about laws of life, and many points
of conventional morality. Remember the grand freedom
with which the same Apostle dealt with questions[149]
about meats offered to idols, and the observance of
days and seasons. The same principle guided him
there too, and he relegated the whole question back to
its proper place with, ‘Meat commendeth us not to
God; for neither if we eat are we the better, neither
if we eat not are we the worse.’ ‘He that regardeth
the day, regardeth it unto the Lord; and he that regardeth
not the day, to the Lord he doth not regard
it.’ It is true, though less obviously and simply, about
subordinate doctrines. It is true about the mere
intellectual grasp of the fundamental truths of God’s
revelation. These, and the belief of these, are not
Christianity, they are helps towards it.

The separation is broad and deep. On one side are
all externals, rites, ceremonies, politics, Church arrangements,
forms of worship, modes of life, practices of
morality, doctrines, and creeds—all which are externals
to the soul: on the other is faith working through love,
the inmost attitude and deepest emotion of the soul.
The great heap is fuel. The flame is loving faith. The
only worth of the fuel is to feed the flame. Otherwise
it is of no avail, but lies dead and cold, a mass of
blackness. We are joined to God by faith. Whatever
strengthens that faith is precious as a help, but is
worthless as a substitute.

III. There is a constant tendency to exalt these
unimportant externals into the place of faith.

The whole purpose of the Gospel may be described
to be our deliverance from the dominion of sense, and
the transference of the centre of our life to the unseen
world. This end is no doubt partly accomplished by
the help of sense. So long as men have bodily organisations,
there will be need for outward helps. Men’s
indolence, and men’s sense-ridden natures, will take[150]
symbols for royalties, bank-notes for wealth. The eye
will be tempted to stay on the rich colours of the glowing
glass, instead of passing through them to heaven’s light
beyond. To make the senses a ladder for the soul to
climb to heaven by, will be perilously likely to end in
the soul going down the ladder instead of up. Forms
are sure to encroach, to overlay the truth that lies at
their root, to become dimly intelligible, or quite unmeaning,
and to constitute at last the end instead of the
means. Is it not then wise to minimise these potent
and dangerous allies? Is it not needful to use them
with the remembrance that a minute quantity may
strengthen, but an overdose will kill—ay, and that the
minute quantity may kill too? Christ instituted two
outward rites. There could not have been fewer if
there was to be an outward community at all, and they
could not have been simpler; but look at the portentous
outgrowth of superstition, and the unnumbered
evils, religious, moral, social, and even political, which
have come from the invincible tendency of human
nature to corrupt forms, even when the forms are the
sweet and simple ones of Christ’s own appointment.
What a lesson the history of the Lord’s Supper, and its
gradual change from the domestic memorial of the
dying love of our Lord to the ‘tremendous sacrifice,’
reads us as to the dangerous ally which spiritual religion—and
there is no other religion than spiritual—enlists
when it seeks the help of external rites!

But remember that this danger of converting religion
into outward actions has its root in us all, and is not
annihilated by our rejection of an elaborate ceremonial.
There is much significance in the double negation of
my text, ‘Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision.’ If
the Judaisers were tempted to insist on the former,[151]
as indispensable, their antagonists were as much
tempted to insist on the latter. The one were saying,
‘A man cannot be a Christian unless he be circumcised.’
The other would be in danger of replying, ‘He cannot
be a Christian if he is.’ There may be as much
formalism in protesting against forms as in using
them. Extremes meet; and an unspiritual Quaker,
for instance, is at bottom of the same way of thinking
as an unspiritual Roman Catholic. They agree in their
belief that certain outward acts are essential to worship,
and even to religion. They only differ as to what
these acts are. The Judaiser who says, ‘You must be
circumcised,’ and his antagonist who says, ‘You must
be uncircumcised,’ are really in the same boat.

And this is especially needful to be kept in mind by
those who, like the most of us, hold fast by the free
and spiritual conception of Christianity. That freedom
we may turn into a bondage, and that spirituality into
a form, if we confound it with the essentials of Christianity,
and deny the possibility of the life being
developed except in conjunction with it. My text has
a double edge. Let us use it against all this Judaising
which is going on round about us, and against all the
tendency to it in our own hearts. The one edge smites
the former, the other edge the latter. Circumcision is
nothing, as most of us are forward to proclaim. But,
also, remember, when we are tempted to trust in our
freedom, and to fancy that in itself it is good, uncircumcision
is nothing. You are no more a Christian for
your rejection of forms than another man is for his
holding them. Your negation no more unites you to
Christ than does his affirmation. One thing alone does
that,—faith which worketh by love, against which sense
ever wars, both by tempting some of us to place religion[152]
in outward acts and ceremonies, and by tempting
others of us to place it in rejecting the forms which
our brethren abuse.

IV. When an indifferent thing is made into an
essential, it ceases to be indifferent, and must be fought
against.

Paul proclaimed that circumcision and uncircumcision
were alike unavailing. A man might be a good
Christian either way. They were not unimportant in
all respects, but in regard to being united to Christ, it
did not matter which side one took. And, in accordance
with this noble freedom, he for himself practised
Jewish rites; and, when he thought it might conciliate
prejudice without betraying principle, had Timothy
circumcised. But when it came to be maintained as a
principle that Gentiles must be circumcised, the time
for conciliation was past. The other side had made
further concession impossible. The Apostle had no
objection to circumcision. What he objected to was
its being forced upon all as a necessary preliminary to
entering the Church. And as soon as the opposite
party took that ground, then there was nothing for it
but to fight against them to the last. They had turned
an indifferent thing into an essential, and he could no
longer treat it as indifferent.

So whenever parties or Churches insist on external
rites as essential, or elevate any of the subordinate
means of grace into the place of the one bond which
fastens our souls to Jesus, and is the channel of grace
as well as the bond of union, then it is time to arm for
the defence of the spirituality of Christ’s kingdom, and
to resist the attempt to bind on free shoulders the
iron yoke. Let men and parties do as they like, so
long as they do not turn their forms into essentials.[153]
In broad freedom of speech and spirit, which holds by
the one central principle too firmly to be much troubled
about subordinate matters—in tolerance of diversities,
which does not spring from indifference, but from the
very clearness of our perception of, and from the very
fervour of our adherence to, the one essential of the
Christian life—let us take for our guide the large,
calm, lofty thoughts which this text sets forth before
us. Let us thankfully believe that men may love
Jesus, and be fed from His fulness, whether they be on
one side of this undying controversy or on the other.
Let us watch jealously the tendencies in our own hearts
to trust in our forms or in our freedom. And whensoever
or wheresoever these subordinates are made
into things essential, and the ordinances of Christ’s
Church are elevated into the place which belongs to
loving trust in Christ’s love, then let our voices at least
be heard on the side of that mighty truth that ‘in
Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth anything,
nor uncircumcision, but faith which worketh by love.’

‘WALK IN THE SPIRIT’

We are not to suppose that the Apostle here uses the
familiar contrast of spirit and flesh to express simply
different elements of human nature. Without entering
here on questions for which a sermon is scarcely a
suitable vehicle of discussion, it may be sufficient for
our present purpose to say that, as usually, when
employing this antithesis the Apostle means by Spirit
the divine, the Spirit of God, which he triumphed in
proclaiming to be the gift of every believing soul. The[154]
other member of the contrast, ‘flesh,’ is similarly not
to be taken as equivalent to body, but rather as meaning
the whole human nature considered as apart
from God and kindred with earth and earthly things.
The flesh, in its narrower sense, is no doubt a predominant
part of this whole, but there is much in
it besides the material organisation. The ethics of
Christianity suffered much harm and were degraded
into a false and slavish asceticism for long centuries, by
monastic misunderstandings of what Paul meant by
the flesh, but he himself was too clear-sighted and too
high-toned to give his adhesion to the superficial
notion that the body is the seat and source of sin. We
need look no further than the catalogue of the ‘works
of the flesh’ which immediately follows our text, for,
although it begins with gross sins of a purely fleshly
kind, it passes on to such as hatred, emulations, wrath,
envyings and suchlike. Many of these works of the
flesh are such as an angel with an evil heart could do,
whether he had a body or not. It seems therefore
right to say that the one member of the contrast is the
divine Spirit of holiness, and the other is man as he is,
without the life-giving influence of the Spirit of God.
In Paul’s thought the idea of the flesh always included
the idea of sin, and the desires of the flesh were to him
not merely rebellious, sensuous passion, but the sinful
desires of godless human nature, however refined, and
as some would say, ‘spiritual’ these might be. We do
not need to inquire more minutely as to the meaning
of the Apostle’s terms, but may safely take them as, on
the one hand, referring to the divine Spirit which
imparts life and holiness, and on the other hand, to
human nature severed from God, and distracted by evil
desires because wrenched away from Him.[155]

The text is Paul’s battle-cry, which he opposed to the
Judaising disturbers in Galatia. They said ‘Do this
and that; labour at a round of observances; live by
rule.’ Paul said, ‘No! That is of no use; you will
make nothing of such an attempt nor will ever conquer
evil so. Live by the spirit and you will not need a
hard outward law, nor will you be in bondage to the
works of the flesh.’ That feud in the Galatian churches
was the earliest battle which Christianity had to fight
between two eternal tendencies of thought—the conception
of religion as consisting in outward obedience
to a law, and consequently as made up of a series of
painful efforts to keep it, and the conception of religion
as being first the implanting of a new, divine life, and
needing only to be nourished and cared for in order
to drive forth evils from the heart, and so to show
itself living. The difference goes very far and very
deep, and these two views of what religion is have
each their adherents to-day. The Apostle throws the
whole weight of his authority into the one scale, and
emphatically declares this as the one secret of victory,
‘Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lusts of
the flesh.’

I. What it is to walk in the Spirit.

The thought which is but touched upon here is set
forth more largely, and if we may so say, profoundly,
in the Epistle to the Romans (chap. viii.). There, to
walk after the flesh, is substantially the same as to be
carnally minded, and that ‘mind of the flesh’ is regarded
as being by fatal necessity not ‘subject to the
law of God,’ and consequently as in itself, with regard
to future consequences, to be death. The fleshly mind
which is thus in rebellion against the law of God is
sure to issue in ‘desires of the flesh,’ just as when the[156]
pressure is taken off, some ebullient liquid will bubble.
They that are after the flesh of course will ‘mind the
things of the flesh.’ The vehement desires which we
cherish when we are separated from God and which we
call sins, are graver as a symptom than even they are
in themselves, for they show which way the wind blows,
and are tell-tales that betray the true direction of our
nature. If we were not after the flesh we should not
mind the things of the flesh. The one expression
points to the deep-seated nature, the other to the
superficial actions to which it gives rise.

And the same duality belongs to the life of those
who are ‘after the Spirit.’ ‘To walk,’ of course, means
to carry on the practical life, and the Spirit is here
thought of not so much perhaps as the path on which
we are to travel, but rather as the norm and direction
by which we are to travel on life’s common way. Just
as the desires of the flesh were certain to be done by
those who in their deepest selves belonged to the flesh,
so every soul which has received the unspeakable gift
of newness of life through the Spirit of God will have
the impulses to mind and do the things of the Spirit. If
we live in the Spirit we shall also—and let us also—walk
in the Spirit.

But let us make no mistakes, or think that our text
in its great commandment and radiant hope has any
word of cheer to those who have not received into
their hearts, in however feeble a manner and minute a
measure, the Spirit of the Son. The first question for
us all is, have we received the Holy Ghost?—and the
answer to that question is the answer to the other,
have we accepted Christ? It is through Him and
through faith in Him that that supreme gift of a living
spirit is bestowed. And only when our spirits bear[157]
witness with that Spirit that we are the children of
God, have we a right to look upon the text as pointing
our duty and stimulating our hope. If our practical
life is to be directed by the Spirit of God, He must
enter into our spirits, and we shall not be in Him but
in the measure that He is in us. Nor will our spirits
be life because of righteousness unless He dwells in us
and casts forth the works of the flesh. There will be
no practical direction of our lives by the Spirit of God
unless we make conscience of cultivating the reception
of His life-giving and cleansing influences, and unless
we have inward communion with our inward guide,
intimate and frank, prolonged and submissive. If we
are for ever allowing the light of our inward godliness
to be blown about by gusts, or to show in our inmost
hearts but a faint and flickering spark, how can we
expect that it will shine safe direction on our outward
path?

II. Such walking in the Spirit conquers the flesh.

We all know it as a familiar experience that the
surest way to conquer any strong desire or emotion is
to bring some other into operation. To concentrate
attention on any overmastering thought or purpose,
even if our object is to destroy it, is but too apt to
strengthen it. And so to fix our minds on our own
desires of the flesh, even though we may be honestly
wishing to suppress them, is a sure way to invest them
with new force; therefore the wise counsels of sages
and moralists are, for the most part, destined to lead
those who listen to them astray. Many a man has, in
good faith, set himself to conquer his own evil lusts
and has found that the nett result of his struggles has
been to make the lusts more conspicuous and correspondingly
more powerful. The Apostle knows a better[158]
way, which he has proved to his own experience, and
now, with full confidence and triumph, presses upon his
hearers. He would have them give up the monotonous
and hopeless fight against the flesh and bring another
ally into the field. His chief exhortation is a positive,
not a negative one. It is vain to try to tie up men with
restrictions and prohibitions, which when their desires
are stirred will be burst like Samson’s bonds. But if
once the positive exhortation here is obeyed, then it
will surely make short work of the desires and passions
which otherwise men, for the most part, do not wish
to get rid of, and never do throw off by any other
method.

We have pointed out that in our text to walk in the
Spirit means to regulate the practical life by the Spirit
of God, and that the ‘desires of the flesh’ mean the
desires of the whole human nature apart from God. But
even if we take the contrasted terms in their lower and
commonly adopted sense, the text is true and useful.
A cultivated mind habituated to lofty ideas, and quick
to feel the nobility of ‘spiritual’ pursuits and possessions,
will have no taste for the gross delights of sense,
and will recoil with disgust from the indulgences in
which more animal natures wallow. But while this is
true, it by no means exhausts the great principle laid
down here. We must take the contrasted terms in
their fullest meaning if we would arrive at it. The
spiritual life derived from Jesus Christ and lodged in
the human spirit has to be guarded, cherished and
made dominant, and then it will drive out the old. If
the Spirit which is life because of righteousness is
allowed free course in a human spirit, it will send forth
its powers into the body which is ‘dead because of sin,’
will regulate its desires, and if needful will suppress[159]
them. And it is wiser and more blessed to rely on this
overflowing influence than to attempt the hopeless
task of coercing these desires by our own efforts.

If we walk in the Spirit, we shall thereby acquire
new tastes and desires of a higher kind which will
destroy the lower. They to whom manna is sweet as
angel’s food find that they have lost their relish for the
strong-smelling and rank-flavoured Egyptian leeks and
garlic. A guest at a king’s table will not care to
enter a smoky hovel and will not be hungry for the
food to be found there. If we are still dependent on
the desires of the flesh we are still but children, and if
we are walking in the Spirit we have outgrown our
childish toys. The enjoyment of the gifts which the
Spirit gives deadens temptation and robs many things
that were very precious of their lustre.

We may also illustrate the great principle of our
text by considering that when we have found our
supreme object there is no inducement to wander
further in the search after delights. Desires are confessions
of discontent, and though the absolute satisfaction
of all our nature is not granted to us here,
there is so much of blessedness given and so many of
our most clamant desires fully met in the gift of life in
Christ, that we may well be free from the prickings of
desires which sting men into earnest seeking after
often unreal good. ‘The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy,
peace,’ and surely if we have these we may well leave
the world its troubled delights and felicities. Christ’s
joy remains in us and our joy is full. The world desires
because it does not possess. When a deeper well is
sunk, a shallower one is pretty sure to give out. If we
walk in the Spirit we go down to the deepest water-holding
stratum, and all the surface wells will run dry.[160]

Further, we may note, that this walking in the Spirit
brings into our lives the mightiest motives of holy
living and so puts a bridle on the necks and a bit in
the mouths of our untamed desires. Holding fellowship
with the divine Indweller and giving the reins into
His strong hand, we receive from Him the spirit of
adoption and learn that if we are children then are
we heirs. Is there any motive that will so surely still
the desires of the flesh and of the mind as the blessed
thought that God is ours and we His? Surely their
feet should never stumble or stray, who are aware of
the Spirit of the Son bearing witness with their spirit
that they are the children of God. Surely the measure
in which we realise this will be the measure in which
the desires of the flesh will be whipped back to their
kennels, and cease to disturb us with their barks.

The whole question here as between Paul and his
opponents just comes to this; if a field is covered with
filth, whether is it better to set to work on it with wheel-barrows
and shovels, or to turn a river on it which will
bear away all the foulness? The true way to change
the fauna and flora of a country is to change the
level, and as the height increases they change themselves.
If we desire to have the noxious creatures
expelled from ourselves, we must not so much labour
at their expulsion as see to the elevation of our own
personal being and then we shall succeed. That is
what Paul says, ‘Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not
fulfil the lusts of the flesh.’

III. Such a life is not freed from the necessity of
struggle.

The highest condition, of course, would be that we
had only to grow, not to fight. It will come some day
that all evil shall drop away, and that to walk in the[161]
Spirit will need no effort, but that time has not come
yet. So in addition to all that we have been saying in
this sermon, we must further say that Paul’s exhortation
has always to be coupled with the other to fight
the good fight. The highest word for our earthly lives
is not ‘victory’ but ‘contest.’ We shall not walk in
the Spirit without many a struggle to keep ourselves
within that charmed atmosphere. The promise of our
text is not that we shall not feel, but that we shall not
fulfil, the desires of the flesh.

Now this is very commonplace and threadbare
teaching, but it is none the less important, and is
especially needful to be strongly emphasised when
we have been speaking as we have just been doing.
It is a historical fact, illustrated over and over again
since Paul wrote, and not without illustration to-day,
that there is constant danger of lax morality infecting
Christian life under pretence of lofty spirituality.
So it must ever be insisted upon that the test of a
true walking in the Spirit is that we are thereby
fitted to fight against the desires of the flesh. When
we have the life of the Spirit within us, it will
show itself as Paul has said in another place by the
righteousness of the law being fulfilled in us, and by
our ‘mortifying the deeds of the body.’ The gift of the
Spirit does not take us out of the ranks of the combatants,
but teaches us to fight, and arms us with its
own sword for the conflict. There will be abundant
opportunities of courage in attacking the sin that doth
so easily beset us, and in resisting temptations which
come to us by reason of our own imperfect sanctification.
But there is all the difference between fighting
at our own hand and fighting with the help of God’s
Spirit, and there is all the difference between fighting[162]
with the help of an unseen ally in heaven and fighting
with a Spirit within us who helpeth our infirmities and
Himself makes us able to contend, and sure, if we keep
true to Him, to be more than conquerers through Him
that loveth us.

Such a conflict is a gift and a joy. It is hard but it is
blessed, because it is an expression of our truest love;
it comes from our deepest will; it is full of hope and of
assured victory. How different is the painful, often
defeated and monotonous attempt to suppress our
nature by main force, and to tread a mill-horse round!
The joyous freedom and buoyant hope taught us in the
gospel way of salvation have been cramped and confined
and all their glories veiled as by a mass of cobwebs
spun beneath a golden roof, but our text sweeps away
the foul obstruction. Let us learn the one condition of
victorious conflict, the one means of subduing our
natural humanity and its distracting desires, and let
nothing rob us of the conviction that this is God’s way
of making men like angels. ‘Walk in the Spirit, and ye
shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh.’

THE FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT

‘The fruit of the Spirit,’ says Paul, not the fruits, as
we might more naturally have expected, and as the
phrase is most often quoted; all this rich variety of
graces, of conduct and character, is thought of as one.
The individual members are not isolated graces, but
all connected, springing from one root and constituting
an organic whole. There is further to be noted that[163]
the Apostle designates the results of the Spirit as
fruit, in strong and intentional contrast with the
results of the flesh, the grim catalogue of which
precedes the radiant list in our text. The works of
the flesh have no such unity, and are not worthy of
being called fruit. They are not what a man ought to
bring forth, and when the great Husbandman comes,
He finds no fruit there, however full of activity the
life has been. We have then here an ideal of the
noblest Christian character, and a distinct and profound
teaching as to how to attain it. I venture to
take the whole of this list for my text, because the
very beauty of each element in it depends on its being
but part of a whole, and because there are important
lessons to be gathered from the grouping.

I. The threefold elements of character here.

It is perhaps not too artificial to point out that we
have here three triads of which the first describes the
life of the Spirit in its deepest secret; the second, the
same life in its manifestations to men; and the third,
that life in relation to the difficulties of the world, and
of ourselves.

The first of these three triads includes love, joy, and
peace, and it is not putting too great a strain on the
words to point out that the source of all three lies in
the Christian relation to God. They regard nothing
but God and our relation to Him; they would be all
the same if there were no other men in the world, or
if there were no world. We cannot call them duties
or virtues; they are simply the results of communion
with God—the certain manifestations of the better life
of the Spirit. Love, of course, heads the list, as the
foundation and moving principle of all the rest. It is
the instinctive act of the higher life and is shed abroad[164]
in the heart by the Holy Spirit. It is the life sap
which rises through the tree and given form to all the
clusters. The remaining two members of this triad
are plainly consequences of the first. Joy is not so
much an act or a grace of character as an emotion
poured into men’s lives, because in their hearts abides
love to God. Jesus Christ pledged Himself to impart
His joy to remain in us, with the issue that our joy
should be full. There is only one source of permanent
joy which takes possession of and fills all the corners
and crannies of the heart, and that is a love towards
God equally abiding and all-pervasive. We have all
known joys so perturbed, fragmentary and fleeting,
that it is hard to distinguish them from sorrows, but
there is no need that joys should be like green fruits
hard and savourless and ready to drop from the tree.
If God is ‘the gladness of our joy,’ and all our delights
come from communion with Him, our joy will never
pass and will fill the whole round of our spirits as the
sea laves every shore.

Peace will be built upon love and joy, if our hearts
are ever turning to God and ever blessed with the
inter-communion of love between Him and us. What
can be strong enough to disturb the tranquillity that
fills the soul independent of all externals? However
long and close may be the siege, the well in the castle
courtyard will be full. True peace comes not from
the absence of trouble but from the presence of God,
and will be deep and passing all understanding in
the exact measure in which we live in, and partake
of, the love of God.

The second triad is long-suffering, kindness, goodness.
All these three obviously refer to the spiritual
life in its manifestations to men. The first of them[165]—long-suffering—describes
the attitude of patient endurance
towards inflictors of injury or enemies, if we
come forth from the blessed fellowship with God,
where love, joy, and peace reign unbroken, and are met
with a cold gust of indifference or with an icy wind of
hate. The reality of our happy communion and the
depth of our love will be tested by the patience of our
long-suffering. Love suffereth long, is not easily provoked,
is not soon angry. He has little reason to
suppose that the love of God is shed abroad in his
heart, or that the Spirit of God is bringing forth fruit
in him, who has not got beyond the stage of repaying
hate with hate, and scorn with scorn. Any fool can
answer a fool according to his folly, but it takes a wise
and a good man to overcome evil with good, and to
love them that hate; and yet how certainly the fires
of mutual antagonism would go out if there were only
one to pile on the fuel! It takes two to make a quarrel,
and no man living under the influence of the Spirit of
God can be one of such a pair.

The second and third members of this triad—kindness,
goodness, slide very naturally into one another.
They do not only require the negative virtue of not
retaliating, but express the Christian attitude towards
all of meeting them, whatever their attitude, with
good. It is possible that kindness here expresses the
inward disposition and goodness, the habitual actions
in which that disposition shows itself. If that be the
distinction between them, the former would answer to
benevolence and the latter to beneficence. These
three graces include all that Paul presents as Christian
duty to our fellows. The results of the life of the
Spirit are to pass beyond ourselves and to influence
our whole conduct. We are not to live only as mainly[166]
for the spiritual enjoyments of fellowship with God.
The true field of religion is in moving amongst men,
and the true basis of all service of men is love and
fellowship with God.

The third triad—faithfulness, meekness, temperance—seems
to point to the world in which the Christian life
is to be lived as a scene of difficulties and oppositions.
The rendering of the Revised Version is to be preferred
to that of the Authorised in the first of the three, for it
is not faith in its theological sense to which the Apostle
is here referring. Possibly, however, the meaning may
be trustfulness just as in 1 Corinthians xiii. it is given
as a characteristic of love that it ‘believeth all things.’
More probably, however, the meaning is faithfulness,
and Paul’s thought is that the Christian life is to
manifest itself in the faithful discharge of all duties
and the honest handling of all things committed to it.
Meekness even more distinctly contemplates a condition
of things which is contrary to the Christian
life, and points to a submissiveness of spirit which does
not lift itself up against oppositions, but bends like a
reed before the storm. Paul preached meekness and
practised it, but Paul could flash into strong opposition
and with a resonant ring in his voice could say ‘To
whom we gave place by subjection, No! not for an
hour.’ The last member of the triad—temperance—points
to the difficulties which the spiritual life is apt
to meet with in the natural passions and desires, and
insists upon the fact that conflict and rigid and
habitual self-control are sure to be marks of that
life.

II. The unity of the fruit.

We have already pointed out the Apostles remarkable
use of the word ‘fruit’ here, by which he indicates[167]
that all the results of the life of the Spirit in the human
spirit are to be regarded as a whole that has a natural
growth. The foundation of all is of course that love
which is the fulfilling of the law. It scarcely needs to
be pointed out how love brings forth both the other
elements of the first triad, but it is no less important to
note that it and its two companions naturally lead on
to the relations to men which make up the second
triad. It is, however, worth while to dwell on that
fact because there are many temptations for Christian
people to separate between them. The two tables of
the law are not seldom written so far apart that their
unity ceases to be noted. There are many good people
whose notions of religious duties are shut up in
churches or chapels and limited to singing and praying,
reading the Bible and listening to sermons, and who,
even while they are doing good service in common life,
do not feel that it is as much a religious duty to
suppress the wish to retaliate as it is to sit in the
sunshine of God’s love and to feel Christ’s joy and
peace filling the heart. On the other hand many loud
voices, some of them with great force of words and
influence on the popular mind, are never wearied of
preaching that Christianity is worn out as a social
impulse, and that the service of man has nothing to
do with the love of God. As plainly Paul’s first triad
naturally leads to his third. When the spiritual life
has realised its deepest secret it will be strong to manifest
itself as vigorous in reference to the difficulties of
life. When that heart is blessed in its own settled
love, abounding joy and untroubled peace, faithfulness
and submission will both be possible and self-control
will not be hard.

III. The culture of the tree which secures the fruit.[168]

Can we suppose that the Apostle here is going back
in thought to our Lord’s profound teaching that every
good tree bringeth forth good fruit, but the corrupt
tree bringeth forth evil fruit? The obvious felicity of
that metaphor often conceals for us the drastic force
of its teaching, it regards all a man’s conduct as but
the outcome of his character, and brushes aside as
trifling all attempts at altering products, whilst the
producer remains unaltered. Whether Paul was here
alluding to a known saying of Jesus or no, he was
insisting upon the very centre of Christian ethics, that
a man must first be good in order to do good. Our
Lord’s words seemed to make an impossible demand—’Make
the tree good’—as the only way of securing good
fruit, and it was in accordance with the whole cast of the
Sermon on the Mount that the means of realising that
demand was left unexpressed. But Paul stood on this
side of Pentecost, and what was necessarily veiled in
Christ’s earlier utterances stood forth a revealed and
blessed certainty to him. He had not to say ‘Make the
tree good’ and be silent as to how that process was to
be effected; to him the message had been committed,
‘The Spirit also helpeth our infirmity.’ There is but
one way by which a corrupt tree can be made good,
and that is by grafting into the wild briar stock a
‘layer’ from the rose. The Apostle had a double message
to proclaim, and the one part was built upon the other.
He had first to preach—and this day has first to believe
that God has sent His own Son in the likeness of sinful
flesh and as an offering for sin—and then he had to
proclaim that, through that mission, it became possible
that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us
who ‘walk not after the flesh but after the spirit.’ The
beginning, then, of all true goodness is to be sought in[169]
receiving into our corrupt natures the uncorrupted
germs of the higher life, and it is only in the measure
in which that Spirit of God moves in our spirits and,
like the sap in the vine, permeates every branch and
tendril, that fruit to eternal life will grow. Christian
graces are the products of the indwelling divine life,
and nothing else will succeed in producing them. All
the preachings of moralists and all the struggles
after self-improvement are reduced to impotence and
vanity by the stern, curt sentence—’a corrupt tree cannot
bring forth good fruit.’ Surely it should come
to us all as a true gospel when we feel ourselves
foiled by our own evil nature in our attempts to be
better, that the first thing we have to do is not to
labour at either of the two impossible tasks of the
making our bad selves good, or of the getting good
fruits from bad selves, but to open our spirits through
faith in Jesus for the entrance into us of His Spirit
which will change our corruption into incorruption,
and cleanse us from all filthiness of flesh and spirit.
Shall we not seek to become recipient of that new life,
and having received it, should we not give diligence
that it may in us produce all its natural effects?

These fruits, though they are the direct results of the
indwelling Spirit and will never be produced without its
presence, are none the less truly dependent upon our
manner of receiving that Spirit and on our faithfulness
and diligence in the use of its gifts. It is, alas! sadly
too true, and matter of tragically common experience
that instead of ‘trees of righteousness, the planting of
the Lord’ heavy with ruddy clusters, there are but
dwarfed and scrubby bushes which have scarcely life
enough to keep up a little show of green leaves and
‘bring no fruit to perfection’. Would that so-called[170]
Christian people would more earnestly and searchingly
ask themselves why it is that, with such possibilities
offered to them, their actual attainments should be
so small. They have a power which is able to do for
them exceeding abundantly above all that they can
ask or think, and its actual effects on them are well on
this side of both their petitions and their conceptions.
There need be no difficulty in answering the question
why our Christian lives do not correspond more closely
to the Spirit that inspires them. The plain answer is
that we have not cultivated, used, and obeyed Him. The
Lord of the vineyard would less often have to ask
‘Wherefore when I looked that it should bring forth
grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?’ if we listened
more obediently to the pathetic command which surely
should touch a grateful heart—’Grieve not the holy
Spirit of God whereby ye are sealed unto the day
of redemption.’

IV. How this is the only worthy fruit.

We have already pointed out that the Apostle in the
preceding context varies his terms, and catalogues the
actions that come from the godless self as works, whilst
those which are the outcome of the Spirit are fruit.
The distinction thus drawn is twofold. Multiplicity
is contrasted with unity and fruit with works. The
deeds of the flesh have no consistency except that of evil;
they are at variance with themselves—a huddled mob
without regularity or order; and they are works indeed,
but so disproportionate to the nature of the doer and
his obligations that they do not deserve to be called
fruit. It is not to attach too much importance to an
accidental form of speech to insist upon this distinction
as intended to be drawn, and as suggesting to us very
solemn thoughts about many apparently very active[171]
lives. The man who lives to God truly lives; the busiest
life which is not rooted in Him and directed towards
Him has so far missed its aim as to have brought forth
no good fruit, and therefore to have incurred the
sentence that it is cut down and cast into the fire.
There is a very remarkable expression in Scripture,
‘The unfruitful works of darkness,’ which admits the
busy occupation and energy of the doers and denies
that all that struggling and striving comes to anything.
Done in the dark, they seemed to have some significance,
when the light comes in they vanish. It is for us
to determine whether our lives shall be works of
the flesh, full, perhaps, of a time of ‘sound and fury,’
but ‘signifying nothing,’ or whether they shall be
fruits of the Spirit, which we ‘who have gathered shall
eat in the courts of His holiness.’ They will be so if,
living in the Spirit, we walk in the Spirit, but if we ‘sow
to the flesh’ we shall have a harder husbandry and a
bitterer harvest when ‘of the flesh we reap corruption,’
and hear the awful and unanswerable question, ‘What
fruit had ye then of those things whereof ye are now
ashamed?’

BURDEN-BEARING

The injunction in the former of these verses appears,
at first sight, to be inconsistent with the statement in
the latter. But Paul has a way of setting side by side
two superficially contradictory clauses, in order that
attention may be awakened, and that we may make an
effort to apprehend the point of reconciliation between
them. So, for instance, you remember he puts in one[172]
sentence, and couples together by a ‘for,’ these two
sayings: ‘Work out your own salvation’; ‘It is God
that worketh in you.’ So here he has been exhorting
the Galatian Christians to restore a fallen brother.
That is one case to which the general commandment,
‘Bear ye one another’s burdens,’ is applicable.

I cannot here enter on the intervening verses by
which he glides from the one to the other of these two
thoughts which I have coupled together, but I may
just point out in a word the outline of his course of
thought. ‘Bear ye one another’s burden,’ says he; and
then he thinks, ‘What is it that keeps men from bearing
each other’s burdens?’ Being swallowed up with
themselves, and especially being conceited about their
own strength and goodness. And so he goes on: ‘If
a man think himself to be something when he is nothing,
he deceives himself.’ And what is the best cure for
all these fancies inside us of how strong and good we
are? To look at our work with an impartial and rigid
judgment. It is easy for a man to plume himself on
being good, and strong, and great; but let him look at
what he has done, and try that by a high standard,
and that will knock the conceit out of him. Or, if his
work stands the test, then ‘he shall have rejoicing in
himself, and not’ by comparing himself with other
people. Two blacks do not make a white, and we are
not to heighten the lustre of our own whiteness by
comparing it with our neighbour’s blackness. Take
your act for what it is worth, apart altogether from
what other people are. Do not say, ‘God! I thank
thee that I am not as other men are . . . or even
as this publican’; but look to yourself. There is an
occupation with self which is good, and is a help to
brotherly sympathy.[173]

And so the Apostle has worked round, you see, to
almost an opposite thought from the one with which
he started. ‘Bear ye one another’s burdens.’ Yes, but
a man’s work is his own and nobody else’s, and a
man’s character is his own and nobody else’s, so ‘every
man shall bear his own burden.’ The statements are
not contradictory. They complete each other. They
are the north and the south poles, and between them
is the rounded orb of the whole truth. So then, let me
point out that:

I. There are burdens which can be shared, and there
are burdens which cannot.

Let us take the case from which the whole context
has arisen. Paul was exhorting the Galatians, as I
explained, in reference to their duty to a fallen brother;
and he speaks of him—according to our version—as
‘overtaken in a fault.’ Now, that is scarcely his idea,
I think. The phrase, as it stands in our Bibles, suggests
that Paul is trying to minimise the gravity of the
man’s offence; but just in proportion as he minimised
its gravity would he weaken his exhortation to restore
him. But what he is really doing is not to make
as little as possible of the sin, but to make as much
of it as is consistent with the truth. The word ‘overtaken’
suggests that some sin, like a tiger in a jungle,
springs upon a man and overpowers him by the suddenness
of the assault. The word so rendered may perhaps
be represented by some such phrase as ‘discovered’;
or, if I may use a ‘colloquialism,’ if a man be caught
‘red-handed.’ That is the idea. And Paul does not
use the weak word ‘fault,’ but a very much stronger
one, which means stark staring sin. He is supposing
a bad case of inconsistency, and is not palliating it
at all. Here is a brother who has had an unblemished[174]
reputation; and all at once the curtain is thrown aside
behind which he is working some wicked thing; and
there the culprit stands, with the bull’s-eye light flashed
upon him, ashamed and trembling. Paul says, ‘If you
are a spiritual man’—there is irony there of the graver
sort—’show your spirituality by going and lifting him
up, and trying to help him.’ When he says, ‘Restore
such an one,’ he uses an expression which is employed
in other connections in the New Testament, such as
for mending the broken meshes of a net, for repairing
any kind of damage, for setting the fractured bones
of a limb. And that is what the ‘spiritual’ man has to
do. He is to show the validity of his claim to live on
high by stooping down to the man bemired and broken-legged
in the dirt. We have come across people who
chiefly show their own purity by their harsh condemnation
of others’ sins. One has heard of women
so very virtuous that they would rather hound a fallen
sister to death than try to restore her; and there are
saints so extremely saintly that they will not touch
the leper to heal him, for fear of their own hands
being ceremonially defiled. Paul says, ‘Bear ye one
another’s burdens’; and especially take a lift of each
other’s sin.

I need not remind you how the same command
applies in relation to pecuniary distress, narrow circumstances,
heavy duties, sorrows, and all the ‘ills
that flesh is heir to.’ These can be borne by sympathy,
by true loving outgoing of the heart, and by the
rendering of such practical help as the circumstances
require.

But there are burdens that cannot be borne by any
but the man himself.

There is the awful burden of personal existence. It[175]
is a solemn thing to be able to say ‘I.’ And that carries
with it this, that after all sympathy, after all nestling
closeness of affection, after the tenderest exhibition of
identity of feeling, and of swift godlike readiness to
help, each of us lives alone. Like the inhabitants of
the islands of the Greek Archipelago, we are able to
wave signals to the next island, and sometimes to send
a boat with provisions and succour, but we are parted,
‘with echoing straits between us thrown.’ Every man,
after all, lives alone, and society is like the material
things round about us, which are all compressible,
because the atoms that compose them are not in actual
contact, but separated by slenderer or more substantial
films of isolating air. Thus there is even in the
sorrows which we can share with our brethren, and
in all the burdens which we can help to bear, an
element which cannot be imparted. ‘The heart knoweth
its own bitterness’, and neither ‘stranger’ nor other
‘intermeddleth’ with the deepest fountains of ‘its
joy.’

Then again, there is the burden of responsibility
which can be shared by none. A dozen soldiers may
be turned out to make a firing party to shoot the
mutineer, and no man knows who fired the shot, but
one man did fire it. And however there may have
been companions, it was his rifle that carried the
bullet, and his finger that pulled the trigger. We say,
‘The woman that Thou gavest me tempted me, and
I did eat.’ Or we say, ‘My natural appetites, for which
I am not responsible, but Thou who madest me art,
drew me aside, and I fell’, or we may say, ‘It was not
I; it was the other boy.’ And then there rises up in
our hearts a veiled form, and from its majestic lips
comes ‘Thou art the man’; and our whole being echoes[176]
assent—Mea culpa; mea maxima culpa—’My fault, my
exceeding great fault.’ No man can bear that burden.

And then, closely connected with responsibility there
is another—the burden of the inevitable consequences
of transgression, not only away yonder in the future,
when all human bonds of companionship shall be
broken, and each man shall ‘give account of himself
to God,’ but here and now; as in the immediate context
the Apostle tells us, ‘Whatsoever a man soweth, that
shall he also reap.’ The effects of our evil deeds come
back to roost; and they never make a mistake as to
where they should alight. If I have sown, I, and no
one else, will gather. No sympathy will prevent to-morrow’s
headache after to-night’s debauch, and nothing
that anybody can do will turn the sleuth-hounds off
the scent. Though they may be slow-footed, they have
sure noses and deep-mouthed fangs. ‘If thou be wise
thou shalt be wise for thyself, and if thou scornest
thou alone shalt bear it.’ So there are burdens which
can, and burdens which cannot, be borne.

II. Jesus Christ is the Burden-bearer for both sorts
of burdens.

‘Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law
of Christ,’ not only as spoken by His lips, but as set
forth in the pattern of His life. We have, then, to turn
to Him, and think of Him as Burden-bearer in even
a deeper sense than the psalmist had discerned, who
magnified God as ‘He who daily beareth our burdens.’

Christ is the Burden-bearer of our sin. ‘The Lord
hath laid’—or made to meet—’upon Him the iniquity
of us all.’ The Baptist pointed his lean, ascetic finger
at the young Jesus, and said, ‘Behold the Lamb of
God which beareth’—and beareth away—’the sin of
the world.’ How heavy the load, how real its pressure,[177]
let Gethsemane witness, when He clung to human companionship
with the unutterably solemn and plaintive
words, ‘My soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death.
Tarry ye here and watch with Me.’ He bore the burden
of the world’s sin.

Jesus Christ is the bearer of the burden of the consequences
of sin, not only inasmuch as, in His sinless
humanity, He knew by sympathy the weight of the
world’s sin, but because in that same humanity, by
identification of Himself with us, deeper and more
wonderful than our plummets have any line long
enough to sound the abysses of, He took the cup of
bitterness which our sins have mixed, and drank it all
when He said, ‘My God! My God! Why hast Thou
forsaken Me?’ Consequences still remain: thank God
that they do! ‘Thou wast a God that forgavest them,
and Thou didst inflict retribution on their inventions.’
So the outward, the present, the temporal consequences
of transgression are left standing in all their power, in
order that transgressors may thereby be scourged from
their evil, and led to forsake the thing that has wrought
them such havoc. But the ultimate consequence, the
deepest of all, separation from God, has been borne by
Christ, and need never be borne by us.

I suppose I need not dwell on the other aspects of
this burden-bearing of our Lord, how that He, in a very
deep and real sense, takes upon Himself the sorrows
which we bear in union with, and faith on, Him. For
then the griefs that still come to us, when so borne,
are transmitted into ‘light affliction which is but for
a moment.’ ‘In all their afflictions He was afflicted.’
Oh, brethren! you with sad hearts, you with lonely
lives, you with carking cares, you with pressing, heavy
duties, cast your burden on the Christ, and He ‘will[178]
sustain you,’ and sorrows borne in union with Him will
change their character, and the very cross shall be
wreathed in flowers.

Jesus bears the burden of that solemn solitude which
our personal being lays upon us all. The rest of us
stand round, and, as I said, hoist signals of sympathy,
and sometimes can stretch a brotherly hand out and
grasp the sufferer’s hand. But their help comes from
without; Christ comes in, and dwells in our hearts, and
makes us no longer alone in the depths of our being,
which He fills with the effulgence and peace of His
companionship. And so for sin, for guilt, for responsibility,
for sorrow, for holiness, Christ bears
our burdens.

Yes! And when He takes ours on His shoulders, He
puts His on ours. ‘My yoke is easy, and My burden is
light.’ As the old mystics used to say, Christ’s burden
carries him that carries it. It may add a little weight,
but it gives power to soar, and it gives power to progress.
It is like the wings of a bird, it is like the sails
of a ship.

III. Lastly, Christ’s carrying our burdens binds us to
carry our brother’s!

‘So fulfil the law of Christ.’ There is a very biting
sarcasm, and, as I said about another matter, a grave
irony in Paul’s use of that word ‘law’ here. For the
whole of this Epistle has been directed against the
Judaising teachers who were desirous of cramming
Jewish law down Galatian throats, and is addressed to
their victims in the Galatian churches who had fallen
into the trap. Paul turns round on them here, and
says, ‘You want law, do you? Well, if you will have
it, here it is—the law of Christ.’ Christ’s life is our law.
Practical Christianity is doing what Christ did. The[179]
Cross is not only the ground of our hope, but the
pattern of our conduct.

And, says Paul in effect, the example of Jesus Christ,
in all its sweep, and in all the depth of it, is the only
motive by which this injunction that I am giving you
will ever be fulfilled. ‘Bear ye one another’s burdens.’
You will never do that unless you have Christ as the
ground of your hope, and His great sacrifice as the
example for your conduct. For the hindrance that
prevents sympathy is self-absorption; and that natural
selfishness which is in us all will never be exorcised
and banished from us thoroughly, so as that we shall
be awake to all the obligations to bear our brother’s
burdens, unless Christ has dethroned self, and is the
Lord of our inmost spirits.

I rejoice as much as any man in the largely increased
sense of mutual responsibility and obligation of mutual
aid, which is sweetening society by degrees amongst us
to-day, but I believe that no Socialistic or other schemes
for the regeneration of society which are not based on
the Incarnation and Sacrifice of Jesus Christ will live
and grow. There is but one power that will cast out
natural selfishness, and that is love to Christ, apprehending
His Cross as the great example to which our
lives are to be conformed. I believe that the growing
sense of brotherhood amongst us, even where it is not
consciously connected with any faith in Christianity,
is, to a very large extent, the result of the diffusion
through society of the spirit of Christianity, even
where its body is rejected. Thank God, the river
of the water of life can percolate through many a mile
of soil, and reach the roots of trees far away, in the
pastures of the wilderness, that know not whence the
refreshing moisture has come. But on the wide scale[180]
be sure of this: it is the law of Christ that will fight
and conquer the natural selfishness which makes bearing
our brother’s burdens an impossibility for men.
Only, Christian people! let us take care that we are not
robbed of our prerogative of being foremost in all such
things, by men whose zeal has a less heavenly source
than ours ought to have. Depend upon it, heresy has
less power to arrest the progress of the Church than
the selfish lives of Christian professors.

So, dear friends, let us see to it that we first of all
cast our own burdens on the Christ who is able to bear
them all, whatever they are. And then let us, with
lightened hearts and shoulders, make our own the
heavy burdens of sin, of sorrow, of care, of guilt,
of consequences, of responsibility, which are crushing
down many that are weary and heavy laden. For be
sure of this, if we do not bear our brother’s burdens,
the load that we thought we had cast on Christ will
roll back upon ourselves. He is able to bear both us
and our burdens, if we will let Him, and if we will fulfil
that law of Christ which was illustrated in all His life,
‘Who, though He was rich, yet for our sakes became
poor,’ and was written large in letters of blood upon
that Cross where there was ‘laid on Him the iniquity
of us all.’

DOING GOOD TO ALL

‘As we have therefore’—that points a finger backwards
to what has gone before. The Apostle has been
exhorting to unwearied well-doing, on the ground of[181]
the certain coming of the harvest season. Now, there
is a double link of connection between the preceding
words and our text; for ‘do good’ looks back to ‘well-doing,’
and the word rendered ‘opportunity’ is the
same as that rendered ‘season.’ So, then, two thoughts
arise—’well-doing’ includes doing good to others, and
is not complete unless it does. The future, on the
whole, is the season of reaping; the present life on
the whole is the season of sowing; and while life as
a whole is the seed-time, in detail it is full of opportunities,
openings which make certain good deeds
possible, and which therefore impose upon us the obligation
to do them. If we were in the habit of looking
on life mainly as a series of opportunities for well-doing,
how different it would be; and how different we
should be!

Now, this injunction is seen to be reasonable by
every man, whether he obeys it or not. It is a
commonplace of morality, which finds assent in all
consciences, however little it may mould lives. But I
wish to give it a particular application, and to try to
enforce its bearing upon Christian missionary work.
And the thought that I would suggest is just this, that
no Christian man discharges that elementary obligation
of plain morality, if he is indifferent to this great
enterprise. ‘As we have an opportunity, let us do good
to all.’ That is the broad principle, and one application
is the duty of Christian men to diffuse the Gospel
throughout the world.

I. Let me ask you to look at the obligation that is
thus suggested.

As I have said, well-doing is the wider, and doing
good to others the narrower, expression. The one
covers the whole ground of virtue, the other declares[182]
that virtue which is self-regarding, the culture which
is mainly occupied with self, is lame and imperfect,
and there is a great gap in it, as if some cantle had
been cut out of the silver disc of the moon. It is only
full-orbed when in well-doing, and as a very large constituent
element of it, there is included the doing good
to others. That is too plain to need to be stated. We
hear a great deal to-day about altruism. Well, Christianity
preaches that more emphatically than any other
system of thought, morals, or religion does. And
Christianity brings the mightiest motives for it, and
imparts the power by which obedience to that great
law that every man’s conscience responds to is made
possible.

But whilst thus we recognise as a dictate of elementary
morality that well-doing must necessarily include
doing good to others, and feel, as I suppose we all do
feel, when we are true to our deepest convictions, that
possessions of all sorts, material, mental, and all others,
are given to us in stewardship, and not in absolute
ownership, in order that God’s grace in its various
forms may fructify through us to all, my present point
is that, if that is recognised as being what it is, an
elementary dictate of morality enforced by men’s
relationships to one another, and sealed by their own
consciences, there is no getting away from the obligation
upon all Christian men which it draws after it, of
each taking his share in the great work of imparting
the gospel to the whole world.

For that gospel is our highest good, the best thing
that we can carry to anybody. We many of us
recognise the obligation that is devolved upon us by
the possession of wealth, to use it for others as well as
for ourselves. We recognise, many of us, the obliga[183]tion
that is devolved upon us by the possession of
knowledge, to impart it to others as well as ourselves.
We are willing to give of our substance, of our time,
of our effort, to impart much that we have. But some
of us seem to draw a line at the highest good that we
have, and whilst responding to all sorts of charitable
and beneficent appeals made to us, and using our
faculties often for the good of other people, we take
no share and no interest in communicating the highest
of all goods, the good which comes to the man in
whose heart Christ rests. It is our highest good,
because it deals with our deepest needs, and lifts us to
the loftiest position. The gospel brings our highest
good, because it brings eternal good, whilst all other
benefits fade and pass, and are left behind with life
and the dead flesh. It is our highest good, because if
that great message of salvation is received into a
heart, or moulds the life of a nation, it will bring after
it, as its ministers and results, all manner of material
and lesser benefit. And so, giving Christ we give our
best, and giving Christ we give the highest gift that a
weary world can receive.

Remember, too, that the impartation of this highest
good is one of the main reasons why we ourselves
possess it. Jesus Christ can redeem the world alone,
but it cannot become a redeemed world without the
help of His servants. He needs us in order to carry
into all humanity the energies that He brought into
the midst of mankind by His Incarnation and Sacrifice;
and the cradle of Bethlehem and the Cross of Cavalry
are not sufficient for the accomplishment of the purpose
for which they respectively came to pass, without
the intervention and ministry of Christian people. It
was for this end amongst others, that each of us who[184]
have received that great gift into our hearts have been
enriched by it. The river is fed from the fountains of
the hills, in order that it may carry verdure and life
whithersoever it goes. And you and I have been
brought to the Cross of Christ, and made His disciples,
not only in order that we ourselves might be blessed
and quickened by the gift unspeakable, but in order
that through us it may be communicated, just as each
particle when leavened in the mass of the dough communicates
its energy to its adjacent particle until the
whole is leavened.

I am afraid that indifference to the communication
of the highest good, which marks sadly too many
Christian professors in all ages, and in this age, is a
suspicious indication of a very slight realisation of the
good for themselves. Luther said that justification
was the article of a standing or a falling church. That
may be true in the region of theology, but in the region
of practical life I do not know that you will find a test
more reliable and more easy of application than this,
Does a man care for spreading amongst his fellows the
gospel that he himself has received? If he does not,
let him ask himself whether, in any real sense, he has
it. ‘Well-doing’ includes doing good to others, and
the possession of Christ will make it certain that we
shall impart Him.

II. Notice the bearing of this elementary injunction
upon the scope of the obligation.

‘Let us do good to all men.’ It was Christianity that
invented the word ‘humanity’; either in its meaning
of the aggregate of men or its meaning of a gracious
attitude towards them. And it invented the word
because it revealed the thing on which it rests.
‘Brotherhood’ is the sequel of ‘Fatherhood,’ and the[185]
conception of mankind, beneath all diversities of race
and culture and the like, as being an organic whole,
knit together by a thousand mystical bands, and each
atom of which has connection with, and obligations to,
every other—that is a product of Christianity, however
it may have been in subsequent ages divorced
from a recognition of its source. So, then, the gospel
rises above all the narrow distinctions which call themselves
patriotism and are parochial, and it says that
there is ‘neither circumcision nor uncircumcision, Jew
nor Greek, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free,’ but all
are one. Get high enough up upon the hill, and the
hedges between the fields are barely perceptible. Live
on the elevation to which the Gospel of Jesus Christ
lifts men, and you look down upon a great prairie,
without a fence or a ditch or a division. So my text
comes with profound significance, ‘Let us do good to
all,’ because all are included in the sweep of that great
purpose of love, and in the redeeming possibilities of
that great death on the Cross. Christ has swept the
compass, if I may say so, of His love and work all
round humanity; and are we to extend our sympathies
or our efforts less widely? The circle includes the
world; our sympathies should be as wide as the circle
that Christ has drawn.

Let me remind you, too, that only such a world-wide
communication of the highest good that has blessed
ourselves will correspond to the proved power of that
Gospel which treats as of no moment diversities that
are superficial, and can grapple with and overcome,
and bind to itself as a crown of glory, every variety of
character, of culture, of circumstance, claiming for its
own all races, and proving itself able to lift them all.
‘The Bread of God which came down from heaven’ is[186]
an exotic everywhere, because it came down from
heaven, but it can grow in all soils, and it can bring
forth fruit unto eternal life everywhere amongst mankind.
So ‘let us do good to all.’

And then we are met by the old objection, ‘The eyes
of a fool are in the ends of the earth. Keep your
work for home, that wants it.’ Well! I am perfectly
ready to admit that in Christian work, as in all others
there must be division of labour, and that one man’s
tastes and inclinations will lead him to one sphere and
one form of it; and another man’s to another; and I
am quite ready, not to admit, but strongly to insist,
that, whatever happens, home is not to be neglected.
‘All men’ includes the slums in England as well as the
savages in Africa, and it is no excuse for neglecting
either of these departments that we are trying to do
something in the other. But it is not uncharitable to
say that the objection to which I am referring is most
often made by one or other of two classes, either by
people who do not care about the Gospel, nor recognise
the ‘good’ of it at all, or by people who are ingenious
in finding excuses for not doing the duty to which they
are at the moment summoned. The people that do
the one are the people that do the other. Where do
you get your money from for home work? Mainly
from the Christian Churches. Who is it that keeps
up missionary work abroad? Mainly the Christian
Churches. There is a vast deal of unreality in that
objection. Just think of the disproportion between
the embarrassment of riches in our Christian appliances
here in England and the destitution in these
distant lands. Here the ships are crammed into a
dock, close up against one another, rubbing their yards
upon each other; and away out yonder on the waters[187]
there are leagues of loneliness, where never a sail is
seen. Here, at home, we are drenched with Christian
teaching, and the Churches are competing with each
other, often like rival tradespeople for their customers;
and away out yonder a man to half a million is considered
a fair allowance. ‘Let us do good to all.’

III. Lastly, note the bearing of this elementary precept
on the occasions that rise for the discharge of the
duty.

‘As we have opportunity.’ As I have already said,
the Christian way to look at our circumstances is to
regard them as openings for the exercise of Christian
virtue, and therefore summonses to its discharge. And
if we regarded our own position individually, so we
should find that there were many, many doors that
had long been opened, into which we had been too
blind or too lazy, or too selfishly absorbed in our own
concerns, to enter. The neglected opportunities, the
beckoning doors whose thresholds we have never
crossed, the good that we might have done and have
not done—these are as weighty to sink us as the
positive sins, the opportunities for which have appealed
to our worse selves.

But I desire to say a word, not only about the opportunities
offered to us individually, but about those
offered to England for this great enterprise. The prophet
of old represented the proud Assyrian conqueror
as boasting, ‘My hand hath gathered as a nest the
riches of the peoples . . . and there was none that
moved the wing, or opened the mouth, or peeped.’ It
might be the motto of England to-day. It is not for
nothing that we and our brethren across the Atlantic,
the inheritors of the same faith and morals and
literature, and speaking the same tongue, have had[188]
given to us the wide dominion that we possess, I
know that England has not climbed to her place without
many a crime, and that in her ‘skirts is found the
blood of poor innocents,’ but yet we have that connection,
for good or for evil, with subject races all
over the earth. And I ask whether or not that is an
opportunity that the Christian Church is bound to
make use of. What have we been intrusted with it
for? Commerce, dominion, the impartation of Western
knowledge, literature, laws? Yes! Is that all? Are
you to send shirting and not the Gospel? Are you to
send muskets that will burst, and gin that is poison,
and not Christianity? Are you to send Shakespeare,
and Milton, and modern science, and Herbert Spencer,
and not Evangelists and the Gospels? Are you to
send the code of English law and not Christ’s law of
love? Are you to send godless Englishmen, ‘through
whom the name of God is blasphemed amongst the
Gentiles,’ and are you not to send missionaries of the
Cross? A Brahmin once said to a missionary, ‘Look
here! Your Book is a good Book. If you were as
good as your Book you would make India Christian in
ten years.’

Brethren! the European world to-day is fighting and
scrambling over what it calls the unclaimed corners of
the world; looking upon all lands that are uncivilised
by Western civilisation either as markets, or as parts
of their empire. Is there no other way of looking at
the heathen world than that? How did Christ look at
it? He was moved when He saw the multitudes as
‘sheep having no shepherd.’ Oh! if Christian men, as
members of this nation, would rise to the height of
Christ’s place of vision, and would look at the world
with His eyes, what a difference it would make! I[189]
appeal to you, Christian men and women, as members
of this nation, and therefore responsible, though it
may be infinitesimally, for what this nation is doing
in the distant corners of the world, and urge on you
that you are bound, so far as your influence goes, to
protest against the way of looking at these heathen
lands as existing to be exploited for the material
benefit of these Western Powers. You are bound to
lend your voice, however weak it may be, to the
protests against the savage treatment of native races—against
the drenching of China with narcotics, and
Africa with rum; to try to look at the world as Christ
looked at it, to rise to the height of that great vision
which regards all men as having been in His heart
when He died on the Cross, and refuses to recognise
in this great work ‘Barbarian, Scythian, bond or free.’
We have awful responsibilities; the world is open to
us. We have the highest good. How shall we obey
this elementary principle of our text, unless we help as
we can in spreading Christ’s reign? Blessed shall we
be if, and only if, we fill the seed-time with delightful
work, and remember that well-doing is imperfect unless
it includes doing good to others, and that the best
good we can do is to impart the Unspeakable Gift to
the men that need it.

THE OWNER’S BRAND

The reference in these words is probably to the cruel
custom of branding slaves as we do cattle, with initials
or signs, to show their ownership. It is true that in[190]
old times criminals, and certain classes of Temple servants,
and sometimes soldiers, were also so marked,
but it is most in accordance with the Apostle’s way of
thinking that he here has reference to the first class,
and would represent himself as the slave of Jesus
Christ, designated as His by the scars and weaknesses
which were the consequences of his apostolic zeal.
Imprisonment, beating by the Jewish rod, shipwrecks,
fastings, weariness, perils, persecutions, all these he
sums up in another place as being the tokens by which
he was approved as an apostle of Jesus Christ. And
here he, no doubt, has the same thought in his mind,
that his bodily weakness, which was the direct issue
of his apostolic work, showed that he was Christ’s.
The painful infirmity under which, as we learn, he
was more especially suffering, about the time of writing
this letter, may also have been in his mind.

All through this Epistle he has been thundering and
lightning against the disputers of this apostolic
authority. And now at last he softens, and as it
were, bares his thin arm, his scarred bosom, and bids
these contumacious Galatians look upon them, and
learn that he has a right to speak as the representative
and messenger of the Lord Jesus.

So we have here two or three points, I think, worth
considering. First, think for a moment of the slave of
Christ; then of the brands which mark the ownership;
then of the glory in the servitude and the sign; and
then of the immunity from human disturbances which
that service gives. ‘From henceforth let no man
trouble me. I bear in my body the marks of the Lord
Jesus.’

I. First, then, a word or two about that conception
of the slave of Christ.[191]

It is a pity that our Bible has not rendered the
title which Paul ever gives himself at the beginning
of his letters, by that simple word ‘slave,’ instead of
the feebler one, ‘servant.’ For what he means when
he calls himself the ‘servant of Jesus Christ’ is not
that he bore to Christ the kind of relation which servants
among us bear to those who have hired and paid
them, and to whom they have come under obligations
of their own will which they can terminate at any
moment by their own caprice; but that he was in the
roughest and simplest sense of the word, Christ’s slave.

What lies in that metaphor? Well, it is the most
uncompromising assertion of the most absolute
authority on the one hand, and claim of unconditional
submission and subjection on the other.

The slave belonged to his master; the master could
do exactly as he liked with him. If he killed him
nobody had anything to say. He could set him to
any task; he could do what he liked with any little
possession or property that the slave seemed to have.
He could break all his relationships, and separate him
from wife and kindred.

All that is atrocious and blasphemous when it is
applied to the relations between man and man, but it
is a blessed and magnificent truth when it is applied to
the relations between a man and Christ. For this
Lord has absolute authority over us, and He can do
what He likes with everything that belongs to us; and
we, and our duties, and our circumstances, and our
relationships, are all in His hands, and the one thing
that we have to render to Him is utter, absolute,
unquestioning, unhesitating, unintermittent and unreserved
obedience and submission. That which is
abject degradation when it is rendered to a man, that[192]
which is blasphemous presumption when it is required
by a man, that which is impossible, in its deepest
reality, as between man and man, is possible, is blessed,
is joyful and strong when it is required by, and
rendered to, Jesus Christ. We are His slaves if we
have any living relationship to Him at all. Where,
then, in the Christian life, is there a place for self-will;
where a place for self-indulgence; where for murmuring
or reluctance; where for the assertion of any rights
of my own as against that Master? We owe absolute
obedience and submission to Jesus Christ.

And what does the metaphor carry as to the basis
on which this authority rests? How did men acquire
slaves? Chiefly by purchase. The abominations of
the slave market are a blessed metaphor for the deep
realities of the Christian life. Christ has bought you
for His own. The only thing that gives a human soul
the right to have any true authority over another
human soul is that it shall have yielded itself to the
soul whom it would control. We must first of all give
ourselves away before we have the right to possess,
and the measure in which we give ourselves to another
is the measure in which we possess another. And so
Christ our Lord, according to the deep words of one of
Paul’s letters, ‘gives Himself for us, that He might
purchase unto Himself a people for His possession.’
‘Ye are not your own; ye are bought with a
price.’

Therefore the absolute authority, and unconditional
surrender and submission which are the very essence
of the Christian life, at bottom are but the corresponding
and twofold effects of one thing, and that is
love. For there is no possession of man by man except
that which is based on love. And there is no[193]
submission of man to man worth calling so except that
which is also based therein.

Therefore the Christian slavery, with its abject submission,
with its utter surrender and suppression of
mine own will, with its complete yielding up of self to
the control of Jesus, who died for me; because it is
based upon His surrender of Himself to me, and in its
inmost essence it is the operation of love, is therefore
co-existent with the noblest freedom.

This great Epistle to the Galatians is the trumpet
call and clarion proclamation of Christian liberty. The
breath of freedom blows inspiringly through it all.
The very spirit of the letter is gathered up in one of
its verses, ‘I have been called unto liberty,’ and in its
great exhortation, ‘Stand fast therefore in the liberty
wherewith Christ hath made you free.’ It is then
sufficiently remarkable and profoundly significant that
in this very letter, which thus is the protest of the
free Christian consciousness against all limitations
and outward restrictions, there should be this most
emphatic declaration that the liberty of the Christian
is slavery and the slavery of the Christian is freedom.
He is free whose will coincides with his outward law.
He is free who delights to do what he must do. He is
free whose rule is love, and whose Master is Incarnate
Love. ‘If the Son make you free, ye shall be free
indeed.’ ‘O Lord, truly I am Thy servant, Thou hast[194]
loosed my bands.’ ‘I bear in my body’ the charter of
my liberty, for I bear in my body the ‘brand of the
Lord Jesus.’

II. And so now a word in the next place about these
marks of ownership.

As I have said, the Apostle evidently means thereby
distinctly the bodily weaknesses, and possibly diseases,
which were the direct consequences of his own apostolic
faithfulness and zeal. He considered that he
proved himself to be a minister of God by his stripes,
imprisonments, fastings, by all the pains and sufferings
and their permanent consequences in an enfeebled
constitution, which he bore because he had preached
the Cross of Christ. He knew that these things were
the result of his faithful ministry. He believed that
they had been sent by no blundering, blind fate; by
no mere secondary causes; but by his Master Himself,
whose hand had held the iron that branded into the
hissing flesh the marks of His ownership. He felt
that by means of these he had been drawn nearer to
his Master, and the ownership had been made more
perfect. And so in a rapture of contempt of pain, this
heroic soul looks upon even bodily weakness and
suffering as being the signs that he belonged to Christ,
and the means of that possession being made more
perfect.

Now, what is all that to us Christian people who
have no persecutions to endure, and none of whom I
am afraid have ever worked hard enough for Christ to
have damaged our health by it? Is there anything in
this text that may be of general application to us all?
Yes! I think so. Every Christian man or woman
ought to bear, in his or her body, in a plain, literal
sense, the tokens that he or she belongs to Jesus[195]
Christ. You ask me how? ‘If thy foot or thine hand
offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee.’

There are things in your physical nature that you
have to suppress; that you have always to regulate
and coerce; that you have sometimes entirely to cast
away and to do without, if you mean to be Jesus
Christ’s at all. The old law of self-denial, of subduing
the animal nature, its passions, appetites, desires, is as
true and as needful to-day as it ever was; and for us
all it is essential to the loftiness and purity of our
Christian life that our animal nature and our fleshly
constitution should be well kept down under heel and
subdued. As Paul himself said in another place, ‘I
bring under my body, and I keep it in subjection, lest
by any means I should myself, having proclaimed to
others the laws of the contest, be rejected from the
prize.’ Oh, you Christian men and women! if you are
not living a life of self-denial, if you are not crucifying
the flesh, with its affections and lusts, if you are not
bearing ‘about in the body the dying of the Lord
Jesus, that the life also of Christ may be manifested
in your mortal body,’ what tokens are there that you
are Christ’s slaves at all?

Then, besides this, we may expand the thought even
further, and say that, in a very real sense, all the pains
and sorrows and disappointments and afflictions that
mainly touch our mortal part should be taken by us
as, and made by us to be, the tokens that we belong
to the Master.

But it is not only in limitations and restrictions and
self-denials and pains that Christ’s ownership of us
ought to be manifested in our daily lives, and so by
means of our mortal bodies, but if there be in our
hearts a deep indwelling possession of the grace and[196]
sweetness of Christ, it will make itself visible, ay! even
in our faces, and ‘beauty born of’ our communion
with Him ‘shall pass into’ and glorify even rugged
and care-lined countenances. There may be, and there
ought to be, in all Christian people, manifestly visible
the tokens of the indwelling serenity of the indwelling
Christ. And it should not be left to some moment of
rapture at the end of life, for men to look upon us, to
behold our faces, ‘as it had been the face of an angel,’
but by our daily walk, by our countenances full of a
removed tranquillity, and a joy that rises from within,
men ought to take knowledge of us that we have been
with Jesus, and it should be the truth—I bear in my
body the tokens of His possession.

III. Now, once more notice the glorying in the
slavery and its signs.

‘I bear,’ says Paul; and he uses, as many of you may
know, a somewhat remarkable word, which does not
express mere bearing in the sense of toleration and
patient endurance, although that is much; nor mere
bearing in the sense of carrying, but implies bearing
with a certain triumph as men would do who, coming
back victorious from conflict, and being received into
the city, were proud to show their scars, the honourable
signs of their courage and constancy. So, with a
triumph that is legitimate, the Apostle solemnly and
proudly bears before men the marks of the Lord
Jesus. Just as he says in another place:—’Thanks be
unto God, which always leadeth us about in triumph
in Jesus Christ,’ He was proud of being dragged at
the conqueror’s chariot wheels, chained to them by the
cords of love; and so he was proud of being the slave
of Christ.

It is a degradation to a man to yield abject submis[197]sion,
unconditional service to another man. It is the
highest honour of our natures so to bow before that
dear Lord. To prostrate ourselves to Him is to lift
ourselves high in the scale of being. The King’s servant
is every other person’s master. And he that feels
that he is Christ’s, may well be, not proud but conscious,
of the dignity of belonging to such a Lord.
The monarch’s livery is a sign of honour. In our old
Saxon kingdom the king’s menials were the first
nobles. So it is with us. The aristocracy of humanity
are the slaves of Jesus Christ.

And let us be proud of the marks of the branding
iron, whether they come in the shape of sorrows and
pains, or otherwise. It is well that we should have to
carry these. It is blessed, and a special mark of the
Master’s favour that He should think it worth His
while to mark us as His own, by any sorrow or by
any pain. Howsoever hot may be the iron, and howsoever
deeply it may be pressed by His firm, steady,
gentle hand upon the quivering flesh and the shrinking
heart, let us be thankful if He, even by it, impresses on
us the manifest tokens of ownership. Oh, brethren!
if we could come to look upon sorrows and losses with
this clear recognition of their source, meaning and
purpose, they change their nature, the paradox is
fulfilled that we do ‘gather grapes of thorns and figs
of thistles.’ ‘I bear in my body,’ with a solemn triumph
and patient hope, ‘the marks of the Lord Jesus.’

IV. And now, lastly, the immunity from any disturbance
which men can bring, which these marks, and
the servitude they express, secure.

‘From henceforth let no man trouble me.’ Paul
claims that his apostolic authority, having been established
by the fact of his sufferings for Christ, should[198]
give him a sacredness in their eyes; that henceforth
there should be no rebellion against his teaching and
his word. We may expand the thought to apply more
to ourselves, and say that, in the measure in which we
belong to Christ, and hear the marks of His possession
of us, in that measure are we free from the disturbance
of earthly influences and of human voices; and from
all the other sources of care and trouble, of perturbation
and annoyance, which harass and vex other men’s
spirits. ‘Ye are bought with a price,’ says Paul elsewhere.
‘Be not the servants of men.’ Christ is your
Master; do not let men trouble you. Take your
orders from Him; let men rave as they like. Be
content to be approved by Him; let men think of you
as they please. The Master’s smile is life, the Master’s
frown is death to the slave; what matters it what
other people may say? ‘He that judgeth me is the
Lord.’ So keep yourselves above the cackle of ‘public
opinion’; do not let your creed be crammed down
your throats even by a consensus of however venerable
and grave human teachers. Take your directions
from your Master, and pay no heed to other voices if
they would command. Live to please Him, and do
not care what other people think. You are Christ’s
servant; ‘let no man trouble’ you.

And so it should be about all the distractions and
petty annoyances that disturb human life and harass
our hearts. A very little breath of wind will ruffle all
the surface of a shallow pond, though it would sweep
across the deep sea and produce no effect. Deepen
your natures by close union with Christ, and absolute
submission to Him, and there will be a great calm in
them, and cares and sorrows, and all the external
sources of anxiety, far away, down there beneath your[199]
feet, will ‘show scarce so gross as beetles,’ whilst you
stand upon the high cliff and look down upon them
all. ‘From henceforth no man shall trouble me.’ ‘I
bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.’

My brother! Whose marks do you bear? There are
only two masters. If an eye that could see things as
they are, were to go through this congregation, whose
initials would it discern in your faces? There are
some of us, I have no doubt, who in a very horrid
sense bear in our bodies the marks of the idol that we
worship. Men who have ruined their health by
dissipation and animal sensualism—are there any of
them here this morning? Are there none of us whose
faces, whose trembling hands, whose diseased frames,
are the tokens that they belong to the flesh and the
world and the devil? Whose do you bear?

Oh! when one looks at all the faces that pass one
upon the street—this all drawn with avarice and
earthly-mindedness; that all bloated with self-indulgence
and loose living—when one sees the mean faces,
the passionate faces, the cruel faces, the vindictive
faces, the lustful faces, the worldly faces, one sees how
many of us bear in our bodies the marks of another
lord. They have no rest day nor night who worship
the beast; and whosoever receiveth the mark of his
name.

I pray you, yield yourselves to your true Lord, so on
earth you may bear the beginnings of the likeness
that stamps you His, and hereafter, as one of His
happy slaves, shall do priestly service at His throne
and see His face, and His name shall be in your
foreheads.[200]

PHILIPPIANS

LOVING GREETINGS

The bond between Paul and the church at Philippi
was peculiarly close. It had been founded by himself,
as is narrated at unusual length in the book of Acts.
It was the first church established in Europe. Ten
years had elapsed since then, possibly more. Paul is
now a prisoner in Rome, not suffering the extremest
rigour of imprisonment, but still a prisoner in his own
hired house, accessible to his friends and able to do
work for God, but still in the custody of soldiers,
chained and waiting till the tardy steps of Roman law
should come up to him, or perhaps till the caprice of
Nero should deign to hear his cause. In that imprisonment
we have his letters to the Philippians, Ephesians,
Colossians, and Philemon, which latter three are closely
connected in time, the two former in subject, and the
two latter in destination. This letter stands apart
from those to the great Asiatic churches.[201]

Its tone and general cast are unlike those of most of
his letters. It contains no doctrinal discussions and
no rebukes of evil, but is an outpouring of happy love
and confidence. Like all Paul’s epistles it begins with
salutations, and like most of them with prayer, but
from the very beginning is a long gush of love. These
early verses seem to me very beautiful if we regard
them either as a revelation of the personal character
of the Apostle, or as a picture of the relation between
teacher and taught in its most blessed and undisturbed
form, or as a lovely ideal of friendship and love in any
relation, hallowed and solemnised by Christian feeling.

Verses one and two contain the apostolic greeting.
In it we note the senders. Timothy is associated with
Paul, according to his custom in all his letters even
when he goes on immediately to speak in the singular.
He ever sought to hide his own supremacy and to bring
his friends into prominence. He was a great, lowly soul,
who had no pride in the dignity of his position but felt
the weight of its responsibility and would fain have
had it shared. He calls Timothy and himself the slaves
of Christ. He regarded it as his highest honour to be
Christ’s born servant, bound to absolute submission to
the all-worthy Lord who had died to win him. It is to
be noted that there is no reference here to apostolic
authority, and the contrast is very remarkable in this
respect with the Epistle to the Galatians, where with
scornful emphasis he asserts it as bestowed ‘not from
men, neither through man, but through Jesus Christ
and God the Father.’ In this designation of himself, we
have already the first trace of the intimate and loving
relationship in which Paul stood to the Philippians.
There was no need for him to assert what was not
denied, and he did not wish to deal with them officially,[202]
but rather personally. There is a similar omission in
Philemon and a pathetic substitution there of the
‘prisoner of Jesus Christ’ for the ‘slave of Christ Jesus.’

The persons addressed are ‘all the saints in Christ
Jesus.’ As he had not called himself an apostle, so he
does not call them a church. He will not lose in
an abstraction the personal bond which unites them.
They are saints, which is not primarily a designation of
moral purity, but of consecration to God, from whom
indeed purity flows. The primitive meaning of the
word is separation; the secondary meaning is holiness,
and the connection between these two meanings contains
a whole ethical philosophy. They are saints in
Christ Jesus; union with Him is the condition both of
consecration and of purity.

The Philippian community had an organisation
primitive but sufficient. We do not enter on the discussion
of its two offices further than to note that the
bishops are evidently identical with the elders, in the
account in Acts xx. of Paul’s parting with the Ephesian
Christians, where the same persons are designated by
both titles, as is also the case in Titus i. 5 and 7; the
one name (elder) coming from the Hebrew and designating
the office on the side of dignity, the other (bishop)
being of Greek origin and representing it in terms of
function. We note that there were several elders then
in the Philippian church, and that their place in the salutation
negatives the idea of hierarchical supremacy.

The benediction or prayer for grace and peace is
couched in the form which it assumes in all Paul’s
letters. It blends Eastern and Western forms of greeting.
‘Grace’ being the Greek and ‘Peace’ the Hebrew
form of salutation. So Christ fuses and fulfils the
world’s desires. The grace which He gives is the self-[203]imparting
love of God, the peace which He gives is its
consequence, and the salutation is an unmistakable
evidence of Paul’s belief in Christ’s divinity.

This salutation is followed by a great burst of
thankful love, for the full apprehension of which we
must look briefly at the details of these verses. We
have first Paul’s thankfulness in all his remembrance
of the Philippians, then he further defines the times of
his thankfulness as ‘always in every supplication of
mind on behalf of you all making my supplication with
joy.’ His gratitude for them is expressed in all his
prayers which are all thank-offerings. He never thinks
of them nor prays for them without thanking God for
them. Then comes the reason for his gratitude—their
fellowship in furtherance of the gospel, from the first
day when Lydia constrained him to come into her
house, until this moment when now at the last their care
of him had flourished again. The Revised Version’s
rendering ‘fellowship in furtherance of’ instead of
‘fellowship in’ conveys the great lesson which the
other rendering obscures—that the true fellowship is
not in enjoyment but in service, and refers not so
much to a common participation in the blessedness as
in the toils and trials of Christian work. This is
apparent in an immediately following verse where the
Philippians’ fellowship with Christ is again spoken of
as consisting in sharing both in His bonds and in the
double work of defending the gospel from gainsayers
and in positively proclaiming it. Very beautifully in
this connection does he designate that work and toil
as ‘my grace.’

The fellowship which thus is the basis of his thanksgiving
leads on to a confidence which he cherishes for
them and which helps to make his prayers joyful[204]
thanksgivings. And such confidence becomes him
because he has them in his heart, and ‘love hopeth all
things’ and delights to believe in and anticipate all
good concerning its object. He has them in his heart
because they faithfully share with him his honourable,
blessed burdens. But that is not all, it is ‘in the
tender mercies’ of Christ that he loved them. His love
is the love of Christ in him; his being is so united to
Jesus that his heart beats with the same emotion as
throbs in Christ’s, and all that is merely natural and
of self in his love is changed into a solemn participation
in the great love which Christ has to them. This,
then, being the general exposition of the words, let us
now dwell for a little while on the broad principles
suggested by them.

I. Participation in the work of Christ is the noblest
basis for love and friendship.

Paul had tremendous courage and yet hungered for
sympathy. He had no outlets for his love but his
fellow Christians. There had, no doubt, been a wrenching
of the ties of kindred when he became a Christian,
and his love, dammed back and restrained, had to pour
itself on his brethren.

The Church is a workshop, not a dormitory, and
every Christian man and woman is bound to help in
the common cause. These Philippians help Paul by
sympathy and gifts, indeed, but by their own direct work
as well, and things are not right with us unless leaders
can say, ‘Ye all are partakers of my grace.’ There are
other real and sweet bonds of love and friendship, but
the most real and sweetest is to be found in our
common relation to Jesus Christ and in our co-operation
in the work which is ours because it is His and
we are His.[205]

II. Thankful, glad prayer flows from such co-operation.

The prisoner in his bonds in the alien city had the
remembrance of his friends coming into his chamber
like fresh, cool air, or fragrance from far-off gardens. A
thrill of gladness was in his soul as often as he thought
on them. It is blessed if in our experience teacher
and taught are knit together thus; without some such
bond of union no good will be done. The relation of
pastor and people is so delicate and spiritual, the
purpose of it so different from that of mere teaching,
the laws of it so informal and elastic, the whole power
of it, therefore, so dependent on sympathy and mutual
kindliness that, unless there be something like the bond
which united Paul and the Philippians, there will be
no prosperity or blessing. The thinnest film of cloud
prevents deposition of dew. If all men in pulpits could
say what Paul said of the Philippians, and all men in
pews could deserve to have it said of them, the world
would feel the power of a quickened Church.

III. Confidence is born of love and common service.

Paul delights to think that God will go on because
God has already begun a good work in them, and Paul
delights to think of their perfection because he loves
them. ‘God is not a man that He should lie, or the
son of man that He should repent.’ His past is the
guarantee for His future; what He begins He finishes.

IV. Our love is hallowed and greatened in the love
of Christ.

Paul lived, yet not he, but Christ lived in him. It is
but one illustration of the principle of his being that
Christ who was the life of his life, is the heart of his
love. He longed after his Philippian friends in the
tender mercies of Christ Jesus. This and this only is[206]
the true consecration of love when we live and love in
the Lord; when we will as Christ does, think as He
does, love as He does, when the mind that was in Christ
Jesus was in us. It is needful to guard against the
intrusion of mere human affection and regard into our
sacred relations in the Church; it is needful to guard
against it in our own personal love and friendship.
Let us see that we ourselves know and believe the love
wherewith Christ hath loved us, and then let us see
that that love dwells in us informing and hallowing
our hearts, making them tender with His great tenderness,
and turning all the water of our earthly affections
into the new wine of His kingdom. Let the law for
our hearts, as well as for our minds and wills, be ‘I live,
yet not I but Christ liveth in me.’

A COMPREHENSIVE PRAYER

What a blessed friendship is that of which the natural
language is prayer! We have many ways, thank God,
of showing our love and of helping one another, but
the best way is by praying for one another. All that
is selfish and low is purged out of our hearts in the act,
suspicions and doubts fade away when we pray for
those whom we love. Many an alienation would have
melted like morning mists if it had been prayed about,
added tenderness and delicacy come to our friendships
so like the bloom on ripening grapes. We may test
our loves by this simple criterion—Can we pray about[207]
them? If not, should we have them? Are they
blessings to us or to others?

This prayer, like all those in Paul’s epistles, is wonderfully
full. His deep affection for, and joy in, the
Philippian church breathes in every word of it. Even
his jealous watchfulness saw nothing in them to
desire but progress in what they possessed. Such a
desire is the highest that love can frame. We can wish
nothing better for one another than growth in the love
of God. Paul’s estimate of the highest good of those
who were dearest to him was that they should be more
and more completely filled with the love of God and
with its fruits of holiness and purity, and what was his
supreme desire for the Philippians is the highest purpose
of the gospel for us all, and should be the aim of
our effort and longing, dominating all others as some
sovereign mountain peak towers above the valleys.
Looking then at this prayer as containing an outline
of true progress in the Christian life, we may note:

I. The growth in keenness of conscience founded on
growth in love.

Paul does not merely desire that their love may
abound, but that it may become more and more ‘rich
in knowledge and all discernment.’ The former is perhaps
accurate knowledge, and the latter the application
of it. ‘Discernment’ literally means ‘sense,’ and here,
of course, when employed about spiritual and moral
things it means the power of apprehending good and
bad as such. It is, I suppose, substantially equivalent
to conscience, the moral tact or touch of the soul by
which, in a manner analogous to bodily sense, it ascertains
the moral character of things. This growth of
love in the power of spiritual and moral discernment
is desired in order to its exercise in ‘proving things[208]
that differ.’ It is a process of discrimination and testing
that is meant, which is, I think, fairly represented
by the more modern expression which I have used—keenness
of conscience.

I need spend little time in remarking on the absolute
need of such a process of discrimination. We are surrounded
by temptations to evil, and live in a world
where maxims and principles not in accordance with
the gospel abound. Our own natures are but partially
sanctified. The shows of things must be tested.
Apparent good must be proved. The Christian life is
not merely to unfold itself in peace and order, but
through conflict. We are not merely to follow impulses,
or to live as angels do, who are above sin, or as animals
do who are beneath it. When false coin is current it
is folly to accept any without a test. All around us
there is glamour, and so within us there is need for
careful watchfulness and quick discrimination.

This keenness of conscience follows on the growth of
love. Nothing makes a man more sensitive to evil
than a hearty love to God. Such a heart is keener to
discern what is contrary to its love than any ethical
maxims can make it. A man who lives in love will be
delivered from the blinding influence of his own evil
tastes, and a heart steadfast in love will not be swayed
by lower temptations. Communion with God will,
from its very familiarity with Him, instinctively discern
the evil of evil, as a man coming out of pure air
is conscious of vitiated atmosphere which those who
dwell in it do not perceive. It used to be said that
Venice glass would shiver into fragments if poison were
poured into the cup. As evil spirits were supposed to
be cast out by the presence of an innocent child or a
pure virgin, so the ugly shapes that sometimes tempt[209]
us by assuming fair disguises will be shown in their
native hideousness when confronted with a heart filled
with the love of God.

Such keenness of judgment is capable of indefinite
increase. Our consciences should become more and
more sensitive: we should always be advancing in our
discovery of our own evils, and be more conscious of
our sins, the fewer we have of them. Twilight in a
chamber may reveal some foul things, and the growing
light will disclose more. ‘Secret faults’ will cease to
be secret when our love abounds more and more in
knowledge, and in all discernment.

II. The purity and completeness of character flowing
from this keenness of conscience.

The Apostle desires that the knowledge which he
asks for his Philippian friends may pass over into
character, and he describes the sort of men which he
desires them to be in two clauses, ‘sincere and void of
offence’ being the one, ‘filled with the fruits of righteousness’
being the other. The former is perhaps predominantly
negative, the latter positive. That which
is sincere is so because when held up to the light it
shows no flaws, and that which is without offence is so
because the stones in the path have been cleared away
by the power of discrimination, so that there is no
stumbling. The life which discerns keenly will bring
forth the fruit which consists of righteousness, and
that fruit is to fill the whole nature so that no part
shall be without it.

Nothing lower than this is the lofty standard towards
which each Christian life is to aim, and to which it can
indefinitely approximate. It is not enough to aim at
the negative virtue of sincerity so that the most
searching scrutiny of the web of our lives shall detect[210]
no flaws in the weaving, and no threads dropped or
broken. There must also be the actual presence of
positive righteousness filling life in all its parts. That
lofty standard is pressed upon us by a solemn motive,
‘unto the day of Christ.’ We are ever to keep before
us the thought that in that coming day all our works
will be made manifest, and that all of them should be
done, so that when we have to give account of them
we shall not be ashamed.

The Apostle takes it for granted here that if the
Philippian Christians know what is right and what is
wrong, they will immediately choose and do the right.
Is he forgetting the great gulf between knowledge and
practice? Not so, but he is strong in the faith that love
needs only to know in order to do. The love which
abounds more and more in knowledge and in all discernment
will be the soul of obedience, and will delight
in fulfilling the law which it has delighted in beholding.
Other knowledge has no tendency to lead to practice,
but this knowledge which is the fruit of love has for its
fruit righteousness.

III. The great Name in which this completeness is
secured.

The Apostle’s prayer dwells not only on the way by
which a Christian life may increase itself, but in its
close reaches the yet deeper thought that all that
growth comes ‘through Jesus Christ.’ He is the Giver
of it all, so that we are not so much called to a painful
toil as to a glad reception. Our love fills us with the
fruits of righteousness, because it takes all these from
His hands. It is from His gift that conscience derives
its sensitiveness. It is by His inspiration that conscience
becomes strong enough to determine action,
and that even our dull hearts are quickened into a glow[211]
of desiring to have in our lives, the law of the spirit of
life, that was in Christ Jesus, and to make our own all
that we see in Him of ‘things that are lovely and of
good report.’

The prayer closes with a reference to the highest
end of all our perfecting—the glory and praise of God;
the former referring rather to the transcendent
majesty of God in itself, and the latter to the exaltation
of it by men. The highest glory of God comes
from the gradual increase in redeemed men’s likeness
to Him. They are ‘the secretaries of His praise,’ and
some portion of that great honour and responsibility
lies on each of us. If all Christian men were what
they all might be and should be, swift and sure in their
condemnation of evil and loyal fidelity to conscience,
and if their lives were richly hung with ripened clusters
of the fruits of righteousness, the glory of God would
be more resplendent in the world, and new tongues
would break into praise of Him who had made men so
like Himself.

A PRISONER’S TRIUMPH

Paul’s writings are full of autobiography, that is
partly owing to temperament, partly to the profound[212]
interpenetration of his whole nature with his religion.
His theology was but the generalisation of his experience.
He has felt and verified all that he has to say.
But the personal experiences of this sunny letter to his
favourite church have a character all their own. In
that atmosphere of untroubled love and sympathy a
shyer heart than Paul’s would have opened: his does so
in tenderness, gladness, and trust. We have here the
unveiling of his inmost self in response to what he
knew would be an eager desire for news of his welfare.
This whole section appears to me to be a wonderful
revelation of his prison thoughts, an example of what
we may call the ennobling power of a passionate
enthusiasm for Christ. Remember that he is a
prisoner, shut out from his life’s work, waiting to be
tried before Nero, whose reign had probably, by this
time, passed from its delusive morning of dewy promise
to its lurid noon. The present and the future were
dark for him, and yet in spite of them all comes forth
this burst of undaunted courage and noble gladness.
We simply follow the course of the words as they lie,
and we find in them,