← catalogue

Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V)

by Alexander Maclaren · English · Gutenberg #13601 · 1,404,673 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V)
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V)

Author: Alexander Maclaren


        
Release date: October 5, 2004 [eBook #13601]
                Most recently updated: December 18, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13601

Credits: Produced by Charles Franks, John Hagerson, and the Project Gutenberg
        Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE: ROMANS CORINTHIANS (TO II CORINTHIANS, CHAP. V) ***




Produced by Charles Franks, John Hagerson, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team





EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE

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

ROMANS
CORINTHIANS _(To II Corinthians, Chap. V)_




EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE

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

ROMANS



CONTENTS

THE WITNESS OF THE RESURRECTION (Romans i. 4, R.V.)

PRIVILEGE AND OBLIGATION (Romans i. 7)

PAUL'S LONGING (Romans i. 11, 12)

DEBTORS TO ALL MEN (Romans i. 14)

THE GOSPEL THE POWER OF GOD (Romans i. 16)

WORLD-WIDE SIN AND WORLD-WIDE REDEMPTION (Romans iii. 19-26)

NO DIFFERENCE (Romans iii. 22)

'LET US HAVE PEACE' (Romans v. 1, R.V.)

ACCESS INTO GRACE (Romans v. 2)

THE SOURCES OF HOPE (Romans v. 2-4)

A THREEFOLD CORD (Romans v. 5)

WHAT PROVES GOD'S LOVE (Romans v. 8)

THE WARRING QUEENS (Romans v. 21)

'THE FORM OF TEACHING' (Romans vi. 17)

'THY FREE SPIRIT' (Romans viii. 2)

CHRIST CONDEMNING SIN (Romans viii. 8)

THE WITNESS OF THE SPIRIT (Romans viii. 16)

SONS AND HEIRS (Romans viii. 17)

SUFFERING WITH CHRIST, A CONDITION OF GLORY WITH CHRIST
   (Romans viii. 17)

THE REVELATION OF SONS (Romans viii. 19)

THE REDEMPTION OF THE BODY (Romans viii. 23)

THE INTERCEDING SPIRIT (Romans viii. 26)

THE GIFT THAT BRINGS ALL GIFTS (Romans viii. 32)

MORE THAN CONQUERORS (Romans viii. 37)

LOVE'S TRIUMPH (Romans viii. 38, 39)

THE SACRIFICE OF THE BODY (Romans xii. 1)

TRANSFIGURATION (Romans xii. 2)

SOBER THINKING (Romans xii. 3)

MANY AND ONE (Romans xii. 4, 5)

GRACE AND GRACES (Romans xii. 6-8)

LOVE THAT CAN HATE (Romans xii. 9, 10, R.V.)

A TRIPLET OF GRACES (Romans xii. 11)

ANOTHER TRIPLET OF GRACES (Romans xii. 12)

STILL ANOTHER TRIPLET (Romans xii. 13-15)

STILL ANOTHER TRIPLET (Romans xii. 16, R.V.)

STILL ANOTHER TRIPLET (Romans xii. 17, 18, R.V.)

STILL ANOTHER TRIPLET (Romans xii. 19-21)

LOVE AND THE DAY (Romans xiii. 8-14)

SALVATION NEARER (Romans xiii. 11)

THE SOLDIER'S MORNING-CALL (Romans xiii. 12)

THE LIMITS OF LIBERTY (Romans xiv. 12-23)

TWO FOUNTAINS, ONE STREAM (Romans xv. 4, 13)

JOY AND PEACE IN BELIEVING (Romans xv. 13)

PHOEBE (Romans xvi. 1, 2, R.V.)

PRISCILLA AND AQUILA (Romans xvi. 3-5)

TWO HOUSEHOLDS (Romans xvi. 10,11)

TRYPHENA AND TRYPHOSA (Romans xvi. 12)

PERSIS (Romans xvi. 12)

A CRUSHED SNAKE (Romans xvi. 20)

TERTIUS (Romans xvi. 22, R.V.)

QUARTUS A BROTHER (Romans xvi. 23)




THE WITNESS OF THE RESURRECTION

   'Declared to be the Son of God with power, ... by the
   resurrection of the dead.'--ROMANS i. 4 (R.V.).


It is a great mistake to treat Paul's writings, and especially this
Epistle, as mere theology. They are the transcript of his life's
experience. As has been well said, the gospel of Paul is an
interpretation of the significance of the life and work of Jesus
based upon the revelation to him of Jesus as the risen Christ. He
believed that he had seen Jesus on the road to Damascus, and it was
that appearance which revolutionised his life, turned him from a
persecutor into a disciple, and united him with the Apostles as
ordained to be a witness with them of the Resurrection. To them all
the Resurrection of Jesus was first of all a historical fact
appreciated chiefly in its bearing on Him. By degrees they discerned
that so transcendent a fact bore in itself a revelation of what would
become the experience of all His followers beyond the grave, and a
symbol of the present life possible for them. All three of these
aspects are plainly declared in Paul's writings. In our text it is
chiefly the first which is made prominent. All that distinguishes
Christianity; and makes it worth believing, or mighty, is inseparably
connected with the Resurrection.

I. The Resurrection of Christ declares His Sonship.

Resurrection and Ascension are inseparably connected. Jesus does not
rise to share again in the ills and weariness of humanity. Risen, 'He
dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over Him.' 'He died unto
sin once'; and His risen humanity had nothing in it on which physical
death could lay hold. That He should from some secluded dimple on
Olivet ascend before the gazing disciples until the bright cloud,
which was the symbol of the Divine Presence, received Him out of
their sight, was but the end of the process which began unseen in
morning twilight. He laid aside the garments of the grave and passed
out of the sepulchre which was made sure by the great stone rolled
against its mouth. The grand avowal of faith in His Resurrection
loses meaning, unless it is completed as Paul completed his 'yea
rather that was raised from the dead,' with the triumphant 'who is at
the right hand of God.' Both are supernatural, and the Virgin Birth
corresponds at the beginning to the supernatural Resurrection and
Ascension at the close. Both such an entrance into the world and such
a departure from it, proclaim at once His true humanity, and that
'this is the Son of God.'

Still further, the Resurrection is God's solemn 'Amen' to the
tremendous claims which Christ had made. The fact of His
Resurrection, indeed, would not declare His divinity; but the
Resurrection of One who had spoken such words does. If the Cross and
a nameless grave had been the end, what a _reductio ad absurdum_
that would have been to the claims of Jesus to have ever been with
the Father and to be doing always the things that pleased Him. The
Resurrection is God's last and loudest proclamation, 'This is My
beloved Son: hear ye Him.' The Psalmist of old had learned to trust
that his sonship and consecration to the Father made it impossible
that that Father should leave his soul in Sheol, or suffer one who
was knit to Him by such sacred bonds to see corruption; and the
unique Sonship and perfect self-consecration of Jesus went down into
the grave in the assured confidence, as He Himself declared, that the
third day He would rise again. The old alternative seems to retain
all its sharp points: Either Christ rose again from the dead, or His
claims are a series of blasphemous arrogances and His character
irremediably stained.

But we may also remember that Scripture not only represents Christ's
Resurrection as a divine act but also as the act of Christ's own
power. In His earthly life He asserted that His relation both to
physical death and to resurrection was an entirely unique one. 'I
have power,' said He, 'to lay down my life, and I have power to take
it again'; and yet, even in this tremendous instance of
self-assertion, He remains the obedient Son, for He goes on to say,
'This commandment have I received of My Father.' If these claims are
just, then it is vain to stumble at the miracles which Jesus did in
His earthly life. If He could strip it off and resume it, then
obviously it was not a life like other men's. The whole phenomenon is
supernatural, and we shall not be in the true position to understand
and appreciate it and Him until, like the doubting Thomas, we fall at
the feet of the risen Son, and breathe out loyalty and worship in
that rapturous exclamation, 'My Lord and my God.'

II. The Resurrection interprets Christ's Death.

There is no more striking contrast than that between the absolute
non-receptivity of the disciples in regard to all Christ's plain
teachings about His death and their clear perception after Pentecost
of the mighty power that lay in it. The very fact that they continued
disciples at all, and that there continued to be such a community as
the Church, demands their belief in the Resurrection as the only
cause which can account for it. If He did not rise from the dead, and
if His followers did not know that He did so by the plainest
teachings of common-sense, they ought to have scattered, and borne in
isolated hearts the bitter memories of disappointed hopes; for if He
lay in a nameless grave, and they were not sure that He was risen
from the dead, His death would have been a conclusive showing up of
the falsity of His claims. In it there would have been no atoning
power, no triumph over sin. If the death of Christ were not followed
by His Resurrection and Ascension, the whole fabric of Christianity
falls to pieces. As the Apostle puts it in his great chapter on
resurrection, 'Ye are yet in your sins.' The forgiveness which the
Gospel holds forth to men does not depend on the mercy of God or on
the mere penitence of man, but upon the offering of the one sacrifice
for sins in His death, which is justified by His Resurrection as
being accepted by God. If we cannot triumphantly proclaim 'Christ is
risen indeed,' we have nothing worth preaching.

We are told now that the ethics of Christianity are its vital centre,
which will stand out more plainly when purified from these mystical
doctrines of a Death as the sin-offering for the world, and a
Resurrection as the great token that that offering avails. Paul did
not think so. To him the morality of the Gospel was all deduced from
the life of Christ the Son of God as our Example, and from His death
for us which touches men's hearts and makes obedience to Him our
joyful answer to what He has done for us. Christianity is a new thing
in the world, not as moral teaching, but as moral power to obey that
teaching, and that depends on the Cross interpreted by the
Resurrection. If we have only a dead Christ, we have not a living
Christianity.

III. Resurrection points onwards to Christ's coming again.

Paul at Athens declared in the hearing of supercilious Greek
philosophers, that the Jesus, whom he proclaimed to them, was 'the
Man whom God had ordained to judge the world in righteousness,' and
that 'He had given assurance thereof unto all men, in that He raised
Him from the dead.' The Resurrection was the beginning of the process
which, from the human point of view, culminated in the Ascension.
Beyond the Ascension stretches the supernatural life of the glorified
Son of God. Olivet cannot be the end, and the words of the two men in
white apparel who stood amongst the little group of the upward gazing
friends, remain as the hope of the Church: 'This same Jesus shall so
come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven.' That great
assurance implies a visible corporeal return locally defined, and
having for its purpose to complete the work which Incarnation, Death,
Resurrection, and Ascension, each advanced a stage. The Resurrection
is the corner-stone of the whole Christian faith. It seals the truths
that Jesus is the Son of God with power, that He died for us, that He
has ascended on high to prepare a place for us, that He will come
again and take us to Himself. If we, by faith in Him, take for ours
the women's greeting on that Easter morning, 'The Lord hath risen
indeed,' He will come to us with His own greeting, 'Peace be unto
you.'




PRIVILEGE AND OBLIGATION

   'To all that be in Rome, beloved of God, called to be
   saints.'--ROMANS i. 7.


This is the address of the Epistle. The first thing to be noticed
about it, by way of introduction, is the universality of this
designation of Christians. Paul had never been in Rome, and knew very
little about the religious stature of the converts there. But he has
no hesitation in declaring that they are all 'beloved of God' and
'saints.' There were plenty of imperfect Christians amongst them;
many things to rebuke; much deadness, coldness, inconsistency, and
yet none of these in the slightest degree interfered with the
application of these great designations to them. So, then, 'beloved
of God' and 'saints' are not distinctions of classes within the pale
of Christianity, but belong to the whole community, and to each
member of the body.

The next thing to note, I think, is how these two great terms,
'beloved of God' and 'saints,' cover almost the whole ground of the
Christian life. They are connected with each other very closely, as I
shall have occasion to show presently, but in the meantime it may be
sufficient to mark how the one carries us deep into the heart of God
and the other extends over the whole ground of our relation to Him.
The one is a statement of a universal prerogative, the other an
enforcement of a universal obligation. Let us look, then, at these
two points, the universal privilege and the universal obligation of
the Christian life.

I. The universal privilege of the Christian life.

'Beloved of God.' Now we are so familiar with the juxtaposition of
the two ideas, 'love' and 'God,' that we cease to feel the
wonderfulness of their union. But until Jesus Christ had done His
work no man believed that the two thoughts could be brought together.

Does God love any one? We think the question too plain to need to be
put, and the answer instinctive. But it is not by any means
instinctive, and the fact is that until Christ answered it for us,
the world stood dumb before the question that its own heart raised,
and when tortured spirits asked, 'Is there care in heaven, and is
there love?' there was 'no voice, nor answer, nor any that regarded.'
Think of the facts of life; think of the facts of nature. Think of
sorrows and miseries and pains, and sins, and wasted lives and
storms, and tempests, and diseases, and convulsions; and let us feel
how true the grim saying is, that

  'Nature, red in tooth and claw,
  With rapine, shrieks against the creed'

that God is love.

And think of what the world has worshipped, and of all the varieties
of monstrosity, not the less monstrous because sometimes beautiful,
before which men have bowed. Cruel, lustful, rapacious, capricious,
selfish, indifferent deities they have adored. And then, 'God hath
established,' proved, demonstrated 'His love to us in that while we
were yet sinners Christ died for us.'

Oh, brethren, do not let us kick down the ladder by which we have
climbed; or, in the name of a loving God, put away the Christian
teaching which has begotten the conception in humanity of a God that
loves. There are men to-day who would never have come within sight
of that sunlight truth, even as a glimmering star, away down upon
the horizon, if it had not been for the Gospel; and who now turn
round upon that very Gospel which has given them the conception,
and accuse it of narrow and hard thoughts of the love of God.

One of the Scripture truths against which the assailant often turns
his sharpest weapons is that which is involved in my text, the
Scripture answer to the other question, 'Does not God love all?' Yes!
yes! a thousand times, yes! But there is another question, Does the
love of God, to all, make His special designation of Christian men as
His beloved the least unlikely? Surely there is no kind of
contradiction between the broadest proclamation of the universality
of the love of God and Paul's decisive declaration that, in a very
deep and real manner, they who are in Christ are the beloved of God.
Surely special affection is not in its nature, inconsistent with
universal beneficence and benevolence. Surely it is no exaltation,
but rather a degradation of the conception of the divine love, if we
proclaim its utter indifference to men's characters. Surely you are
not honouring God when you say, 'It is all the same to Him whether a
man loves Him and serves Him, or lifts himself up in rebellion
against Him, and makes himself his own centre, and earth his aim and
his all.' Surely to imagine a God who not only makes His sun to shine
and His rains and dews to fall on the unthankful and the evil, that
He may draw them to love Him, but who also is conceived as taking the
sinful creature who yet cleaves to his sins to His heart, as He does
the penitent soul that longs for His image to be produced in it, is
to blaspheme, and not to honour the love, the universal love of God.

God forbid that any words that ever drop from my lips should seem to
cast the smallest shadow of doubt on that great truth, 'God so loved
the world that He gave His Son!' But God forbid, equally, that any
words of mine should seem to favour the, to me, repellent idea that
the infinite love of God disregards the character of the man on whom
it falls. There are manifestations of that loving heart which any man
can receive; and each man gets as much of the love of God as it is
possible to pour upon him. But granite rock does not drink in the dew
as a flower does; and the nature of the man on whom God's love falls
determines how much, and what manner of its manifestations shall pass
into his true possession, and what shall remain without.

So, on the whole, we have to answer the questions, 'Does God love
any? Does not God love all? Does God specially love some?' with the
one monosyllable, 'Yes.'

And so, dear brethren, let us learn the path by which we can pass
into that blessed community of those on whom the fullness and
sweetness and tenderest tenderness of the Father's heart will fall.
'If a man love Me, he will keep My words; and My Father will love
him.' Myths tell us that the light which, at the beginning, had been
diffused through a nebulous mass, was next gathered into a sun. So
the universal love of God is concentrated in Jesus Christ; and if we
have Him we have it; and if we have faith we have Him, and can say,
'Neither life, nor death, nor things present, nor things to come, nor
height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate
us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.'

II. Then, secondly, mark the universal obligation of the Christian
life.

'Called to be saints,' says my text. Now you will observe that the
two little words 'to be' are inserted here as a supplement. They may
be correct enough, but they are open to the possibility of
misunderstanding, as if the saintship, to which all Christian people
are 'called' was something future, and not realised at the moment.
Now, in the context, the Apostle employs the same form of expression
with regard to himself in a clause which illuminates the meaning of
my text. 'Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ' says he, in the first
verse, 'called to be an Apostle' or, more correctly, 'a called
Apostle.' The apostleship coincided in time with the call, was
contemporaneous with that which was its cause. And if Paul was an
Apostle since he was called, saints are saints since _they_ are
called. 'The beloved of God' are 'the called saints.'

I need only observe, further, that the word 'called' here does not
mean 'named' or 'designated' but 'summoned.' It describes not the
name by which Christian men are known, but the thing which they are
invited, summoned, 'called' by God to be. It is their vocation, not
their designation. Now, then, I need not, I suppose, remind you that
'saint' and 'holy' convey precisely the same idea: the one expressing
it in a word of Teutonic, and the other in one of classic derivation.

We notice that the true idea of this universal holiness which, _ipso
facto_, belongs to all Christian people, is consecration to God. In
the old days temple, altars, sacrifices, sacrificial vessels, persons
such as priests, periods like Sabbaths and feasts, were called
'holy.' The common idea running through all these uses of the word is
_belonging to God_, and that is the root notion of the New Testament
'saint' a man who is God's. God has claimed us for Himself when He
gave us Jesus Christ. We respond to the claim when we accept Christ.
Henceforth we are not our own, but 'consecrated'--that is, 'saints.'

Now the next step is purity, which is the ordinary idea of sanctity.
Purity will follow consecration, and would not be worth much without
it, even if it was possible to be attained. Now, look what a far
deeper and nobler idea of the service and conditions of moral
goodness this derivation of it from surrender to God gives, than does
a God-ignoring morality which talks and talks about acts and
dispositions, and never goes down to the root of the whole matter;
and how much nobler it is than a shallow religion which in like
manner is ever straining after acts of righteousness, and forgets
that in order to be right there must be prior surrender to God. Get a
man to yield himself up to God and no fear about the righteousness.
Virtue, goodness, purity, righteousness, all these synonyms express
very noble things; but deep down below them all lies the New
Testament idea of holiness, consecration of myself to God, which is
the parent of them all.

And then the next thing to remind you of is that this consecration is
to be applied all through a man's nature. Yielding yourselves to God
is the talismanic secret of all righteousness, as I have said; and
every part of our complex, manifold being is capable of such
consecration. I hallow my heart if its love twines round His heart. I
hallow my thoughts if I take His truth for my guide, and ever seek to
be led thereby in practice and in belief. I hallow my will when it
bows and says, 'Speak, Lord! Thy servant heareth!' I hallow my senses
when I use them as from Him, with recognition of Him and for Him. In
fact, there are two ways of living in the world; and, narrow as it
sounds, I venture to say there are only two. Either God is my centre,
and that is holiness; or self is my centre, in more or less subtle
forms, and that is sin.

Then the next step is that this consecration, which will issue in all
purity, and will cover the whole ground of a human life, is only
possible when we have drunk in the blessed thought 'beloved of God.'
My yielding of myself to Him can only be the echo of His giving of
Himself to me. He must be the first to love. You cannot argue a man
into loving God, any more than you can hammer a rosebud open. If you
do you spoil its petals. But He can love us into loving Him, and the
sunshine, falling on the closed flower, will expand it, and it will
grow by its reception of the light, and grow sunlike in its measure
and according to its nature. So a God who has only claims upon us
will never be a God to whom we yield ourselves. A God who has love
for us will be a God to whom it is blessed that we should be
consecrated, and so saints.

Then, still further, this consecration, thus built upon the reception
of the divine love, and influencing our whole nature, and leading to
all purity, is a universal characteristic of Christians. There is no
faith which does not lead to surrender. There is no aristocracy in
the Christian Church which deserves to have the family name given
especially to it. 'Saint' this, and 'Saint' that, and 'Saint' the
other--these titles cannot be used without darkening the truth that
this honour and obligation of being saints belong equally to all that
love Jesus Christ. All the men whom thus God has drawn to Himself, by
His love in His Son, they are all, if I may so say, objectively holy;
they belong to God. But consecration may be cultivated, and must be
cultivated and increased. There is a solemn obligation laid upon
every one of us who call ourselves Christians, to be saints, in the
sense that we have consciously yielded up our whole lives to Him; and
are trying, body, soul, and spirit, 'to perfect holiness in the fear
of the Lord.'

Paul's letter, addressed to the 'beloved in God,' the 'called saints'
that are in Rome, found its way to the people for whom it was meant.
If a letter so addressed were dropped in our streets, do you think
anybody would bring it to you, or to any Christian society as a
whole, recognising that we were the people for whom it was meant? The
world has taunted us often enough with the name of saints; and
laughed at the profession which they thought was included in the
word. Would that their taunts had been undeserved, and that it were
not true that 'saints' in the Church sometimes means less than 'good
men' out of the Church! 'Seeing that we have these promises, dearly
beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of flesh and
spirit; perfecting holiness in the fear of the Lord.'




PAUL'S LONGING[1]

   'I long to see you, that I may impart unto you some
    spiritual gift, to the end ye may be established;
    12. That is, that I may be comforted together with
    you, by the mutual faith both of you and me.'--ROMANS i. 11, 12.


I am not wont to indulge in personal references in the pulpit, but I
cannot but yield to the impulse to make an exception now, and to let
our happy circumstances mould my remarks. I speak mainly to mine own
people, and I must trust that other friends who may hear or read my
words will forgive my doing so.

In taking such a text as this, I desire to shelter myself behind
Paul, and in expounding his feelings to express my own, and to draw
such lessons as may be helpful and profitable to us all. And so there
are three things in this text that I desire to note: the manly
expression of Christian affection; the lofty consciousness of the
purpose of their meeting; and the lowly sense that there was much to
be received as well as much to be given. A word or two about each of
these things is all on which I can venture.

I. First, then, notice the manly expression of Christian affection
which the Apostle allows himself here.

Very few Christian teachers could or should venture to talk so much
about themselves as Paul did. The strong infusion of the personal
element in all his letters is so transparently simple, so obviously
sincere, so free from any jarring note of affectation or unctuous
sentiment that it attracts rather than repels. If I might venture
upon a paradox, his personal references are instances of
self-oblivion in the midst of self-consciousness.

He had never been in Rome when he wrote these words; he had no
personal relations with the believers there; he had never looked them
in the face; there were no sympathy and confidence between them, as
the growth of years. But still his heart went out towards them, and
he was not ashamed to show it. 'I _long_ to see you,'--in the
original the word expresses a very intense amount of yearning blended
with something of regret that he had been so long kept from them.

Now it is not a good thing for people to make many professions of
affection, and I think a public teacher has something better to do
than to parade such feelings before his audiences. But there are
exceptions to all rules, and I suppose I may venture to let my heart
speak, and to say how gladly I come back to the old place, dear to me
by so many sacred memories and associations, and how gladly I reknit
the bonds of an affection which has been unbroken, and deepening on
both sides through thirty long years.

Dear friends! let us together thank God to-day if He has knit our
hearts together in mutual affection; and if you and I can look each
other, as I believe we can, in the eyes, with the assurance that I
see only the faces of friends, and that you see the face of one who
gladly resumes the old work and associations.

But now, dear brethren, let us draw one lesson. Unless there be this
manly, honest, though oftenest silent, Christian affection, the
sooner you and I part the better. Unless it be in my heart I can do
you no good. No man ever touched another with the sweet constraining
forces that lie in Christ's Gospel unless the heart of the speaker
went out to grapple the hearts of the hearers. And no audience ever
listen with any profit to a man when they come in the spirit of
carping criticism, or of cold admiration, or of stolid indifference.
There must be for this simple relationship which alone binds a
Nonconformist preacher to his congregation, as a _sine qua non_ of
all higher things and of all spiritual good, a real, though oftenest
it be a concealed, mutual affection and regard. We have to thank God
for much of it; let us try to get more. That is all I want to say
about the first point here.

II. Note the lofty consciousness of the purpose of their meeting.

'I long to see you, that I may impart unto you some spiritual gift.'
Paul knew that he had something which he could give to these people,
and he calls it by a very comprehensive term, 'some spiritual
gift'--a gift of some sort which, coming from the Divine Spirit, was
to be received into the human spirit.

Now that expression--a spiritual gift--in the New Testament has a
variety of applications. Sometimes it refers to what we call
miraculous endowments, sometimes it refers to what we may call
official capacity; but here it is evidently neither the one nor the
other of these more limited and special things, but the general idea
of a divine operation upon the human spirit which fills it with
Christian graces--knowledge, faith, love. Or, in simpler words, what
Paul wanted to give them was a firmer grasp and fuller possession of
Jesus Christ, His love and power, which would secure a deepening and
strengthening of their whole Christian life. He was quite sure he had
this to give, and that he could impart it, if they would listen to
what he would say to them. But whilst thus he rises into the lofty
conception of the purpose and possible result of his meeting the
Roman Christians, he is just as conscious of the limitations of his
power in the matter as he is of the greatness of his function. These
are indicated plainly. The word which he employs here, 'gift' is
never used in the New Testament for a thing that one man can give to
another, but is always employed for the concrete results of the grace
of God bestowed upon men. The very expression, then, shows that Paul
thought of himself, not as the original giver, but simply as a
channel through which was communicated what God had given. In the
same direction points the adjective which accompanies the noun--a
'_spiritual_ gift'--which probably describes the origin of the gift
as being the Spirit of God, rather than defines the seat of it when
received as being the spirit of the receiver. Notice, too, as bearing
on the limits of Paul's part in the gift, the propriety and delicacy
of the language in his statement of the ultimate purpose of the gift.
He does not say 'that I may strengthen you,' which might have sounded
too egotistical, and would have assumed too much to himself, but he
says 'that ye may be strengthened,' for the true strengthener is not
Paul, but the Spirit of God.

So, on the one hand, the Christian teacher is bound to rise to the
height of the consciousness of his lofty vocation as having in
possession a gift that he can bestow; on the other hand, he is bound
ever to remember the limitations within which that is true--viz. that
the gift is not his, but God's, and that the Spirit of the Lord is
the true Giver of all the graces which may blossom when His word,
ministered by human agents, is received into human hearts.

And, now, what are the lessons that I take from this? Two very simple
ones. First, no Christian teacher has any business to open his mouth,
unless he is sure that he has received something to impart to men as
a gift from the Divine Spirit. To preach our doubts, to preach our
own opinions, to preach poor platitudes, to talk about politics and
morals and taste and literature and the like in the pulpit, is
profanation and blasphemy. Let no man open his lips unless he can
say: 'The Lord hath showed me this; and this I bring to you as His
word.' Nor has a Christian organisation any right to exist, unless it
recognises the communication and reception and further spreading of
this spiritual gift as its great function. Churches which have lost
that consciousness, and, instead of a divine gift, have little more
to offer than formal worship, or music, or entertainments, or mere
intellectual discourse, whether orthodox or 'advanced,' have no right
to be; and by the law of the survival of the fittest will not long
be. The one thing that warrants such a relationship as subsists
between you and me is this, my consciousness that I have a message
from God, and your belief that you hear such from my lips. Unless
that be our bond the sooner these walls crumble, and this voice
ceases, and these pews are emptied, the better. 'I have,' says, Paul,
'a gift to impart; and I long to see you that I may impart it to
you.' Oh! for more, in all our pulpits, of that burdened
consciousness of a divine message which needs the relief of speech,
and longs with a longing caught from Christ to impart its richest
treasures.

That is the one lesson. And the other one is this. Have you, dear
friends, received the gift that I have, under the limitations already
spoken of, to bestow? There are some of you who have listened to my
voice ever since you were children--some of you, though not many,
have heard it for well on to thirty years. Have you taken the thing
that all these years I have been--God knows how poorly, but God knows
how honestly--trying to bring to you? That is, have you taken Christ,
and have you faith in Him? And, as for those of you who say that
you are Christians, many blessings have passed between you and me
through all these years; but, dear friends, has the chief blessing
been attained? Are you being strengthened day by day for the burdens
and the annoyances and the sorrows of life by your coming here? Do I
do you any good in that way; are you better men than when we first
met together? Is Christ dearer, and more real and nearer to you; and
are your lives more transparently consecrated, more manifestly the
result of a hidden union with Him? Do you walk in the world like the
Master, because you are members of this congregation? If so, its
purpose has been accomplished. If not, it has miserably failed.

I have said that I have to thank God for the unbroken affection that
has knit us together. But what is the use of such love if it does not
lead onwards to this? I have had enough, and more than enough, of
what you call popularity and appreciation, undeserved enough, but
rendered unstintedly by you. I do not care the snap of a finger for
it by comparison with this other thing. And oh, dear brethren! if all
that comes of our meeting here Sunday after Sunday is either praise
or criticism of my poor words and ways, our relationship is a curse,
and not a blessing, and we come together for the worse and not for
the better. The purpose of the Church, and the purpose of the
ministry, and the meaning of our assembling are, that spiritual gifts
may be imparted, not by me alone, but by you, too, and by me in my
place and measure, and if that purpose be not accomplished, all other
purposes, that are accomplished, are of no account, and worse than
nothing.

III. And now, lastly, note the lowly consciousness that much was to
be received as well as much to be given.

The Apostle corrects himself after he has said 'that I may impart
unto you some spiritual gift,' by adding, 'that is, that I may be
comforted (or rather, encouraged) together with you by the mutual
faith both of you and me.' If his language were not so transparently
sincere, and springing from deep interest in the relationship between
himself and these people, we should say that it was exquisite
courtesy and beautiful delicacy. But it moves in a region far more
real than the region of courtesy, and it speaks the inmost truth
about the conditions on which the Roman Christians should
receive--viz. that they should also give. There is only one Giver who
is only a Giver, and that is God. All other givers are also
receivers. Paul desired to see his Roman brethren that he might be
encouraged; and when he did see them, as he marched along the Appian
Way, a shipwrecked prisoner, the Acts of the Apostles tells us, 'He
thanked God and took courage.' The sight of them strengthened him and
prepared him for what lay before him.

Paul's was a richly complicated nature--firm as a rock in its will,
tremulously sensitive in its sympathies; like some strongly-rooted
tree with its stable stem and a green cloud of fluttering foliage
that moves in the lightest air. So his spirit rose and fell according
to the reception that he met from his brethren, and the manifestation
of their faith quickened and strengthened his.

And he is but one instance of a universal law. All teachers, the more
genuine they are, the more sympathetic they are, are the more
sensitive of their environment. The very oratorical temperament
places a man at the mercy of surroundings. All earnest work has ever
travelling with it as its shadow seasons of deep depression; and the
Christian teacher does not escape these. I am not going to speak
about myself, but this is unquestionably true, that every Elijah,
after the mightiest effort of prophecy, is apt to cover his head in
his mantle and to say, 'Take me away; I am not better than my
fathers.' And when a man for thirty years, amidst all the changes
incident to a great city congregation in that time, has to stand up
Sunday after Sunday before the same people, and mark how some of them
are stolidly indifferent, and note how others are dropping away
from their faithfulness, and see empty places where loving forms used
to sit--no wonder that the mood comes ever and anon, 'Then, said I,
surely I have laboured in vain and spent my strength for nought.' The
hearer reacts on the speaker quite as much as the speaker does on the
hearer. If you have ice in the pews, that brings down the temperature
up here. It is hard to be fervid amidst people that are all but dead.
It is difficult to keep a fire alight when it is kindled on the top
of an iceberg. And the unbelief and low-toned religion of a
congregation are always pulling down the faith and the fervour of
their minister, if he be better and holier, as they expect him to be,
than they are.

'He did not many works because of their unbelief.' Christ knew the
hampering and the restrictions of His power which came from being
surrounded by a chill, unsympathetic environment. My strength and my
weakness are largely due to you. And if you want your minister to
preach better, and in all ways to do his work more joyfully and
faithfully, the means lie largely in your own hands. Icy
indifference, ill-natured interpretations, carping criticisms, swift
forgetfulness of one's words, all these things kill the fervour of
the pulpit.

On the other hand, the true encouragement to give a man when he is
trying to do God's will, to preach Christ's Gospel, is not to pat him
on the back and say, 'What a remarkable sermon that was of yours!
what a genius! what an orator!' not to go about praising it, but to
come and say, 'Thy words have led me to Christ, and from thee I have
taken the gift of gifts.'

Dear brethren, the encouragement of the minister is in the conversion
and the growth of the hearers. And I pray that in this new lease of
united fellowship which we have taken out, be it longer or
shorter--and advancing years tell me that at the longest it must be
comparatively short--I may come to you ever more and more with the
lofty and humbling consciousness that I have a message which Christ
has given to me, and that you may come more and more receptive--not
of _my_ words, God forbid--but of Christ's truth; and that so we
may be helpers one of another, and encourage each other in the
warfare and work to which we all are called and consecrated.

[Footnote 1: Preached after long absence on account of illness.]



DEBTORS TO ALL MEN

  'I am a debtor both to the Greeks and to the Barbarians,
   both to the wise and to the unwise.'--ROMANS i. 14.


No doubt Paul is here referring to the special obligation laid upon
him by his divine call to be the Apostle to the Gentiles. He was
entrusted with the Gospel as a steward, and was therefore bound to
carry it to all sorts and conditions of men. But the principle
underlying the statement applies to all Christians. The indebtedness
referred to is no peculiarity of the Apostolic order, but attaches to
every believer. Every servant of Jesus Christ, who has received the
truth for himself, has received it as a steward, and is, as such,
indebted to God, from whom he got the trust, and to the men for whom
he got it. The only limit to the obligation is, as Paul says in the
context, 'as much as in me is.' Capacity, determined by faculties,
opportunities, and circumstances, prescribes the kind and the degree
of the work to be done in discharge of the obligation; but the
obligation is universal. We are not at liberty to choose whether we
shall do our part in spreading the name of Jesus Christ. It is a debt
that we owe to God and to men. Is that the view of duty which the
average Christian man takes? I am afraid it is not. If it were, our
treasuries would be full, and great would be the multitude of them
that preached the Word.

It is no very exalted degree of virtue to pay our debts. We do not
expect to be praised for that; and we do not consider that we are at
liberty to choose whether we shall do it or not. We are dishonest if
we do not. It is no merit in us to be honest. Would that all
Christian people applied that principle to their religion. The world
would be different, and the Church would be different, if they did.

Let me try, then, to enforce this thought of indebtedness and of
common honesty in discharging the indebtedness, which underlies these
words. Paul thought that he went a long way to pay his debts to
humanity by carrying to everybody whom he could reach the 'Name that
is above every name.'

I. Now, first, let me say that we Christians are debtors to all men
by our common manhood.

It is not the least of the gifts which Christianity has brought to
the world, that it has introduced the new thought of the brotherhood
of mankind. The very word 'humanity' is a Christian coinage, and it
was coined to express the new thought that began to throb in men's
hearts, as soon as they accepted the message that Jesus Christ came
to give, the message of the Fatherhood of God. For it is on that
belief of God's Fatherhood that the belief of man's brotherhood
rests, and on it alone can it be secured and permanently based.

Here is a Jew writing to Latins in the Greek language. The phenomenon
itself is a sign of a new order of things, of the rising of a flood
that had surged over, and in the course of ages would sap away and
dissolve, the barriers between men. The Apostle points to two of the
widest gulfs that separated men, in the words of my text. 'Greeks and
Barbarians' divides mankind, according to race and language. 'Wise
and unwise' divides them according to culture and intellectual
capacity. Both gulfs exist still, though they have been wonderfully
filled up by the influence, direct and indirect, of the Gospel of
Jesus Christ. The fiercest antagonisms of race which still subsist
are felt to belong to a decaying order, and to be sure, sooner or
later, to pass away. I suppose that the gulf made by the increased
culture of modern society between civilised and the savage peoples,
and, within the limits of our own land, the gulf made by education
between the higher and the lower layers of our community--I speak not
of higher and lower in regard to wealth or station, but in regard to
intellectual acquirement and capacity--are greater than, perhaps,
they ever were in the past. But yet over the gulf a bridge is thrown,
and the gulf itself is being filled up. High above all the
superficial distinctions which separate Jew and Gentile, Greek and
Barbarian, educated and illiterate, scientific and unscientific, wise
and unwise, there stretches the great rainbow of the truth that all
are one in Christ Jesus. Fraternity without Fatherhood is a ghastly
mockery that ended a hundred years ago in the guillotine, and to-day
will end in disappointment; and it is little more than cant. But when
Christianity comes and tells us that we have one Father and one
Redeemer, then the unity of the race is secured.

And that oneness which makes us debtors to all men is shown to be
real by the fact that, beneath all superficial distinctions of
culture, race, age, or station, there are the primal necessities and
yearnings and possibilities that lie in every human soul. All men,
savage or cultivated, breathe the same air, see by the same light,
are fed by the same food and drink, have the same yearning hearts,
the same lofty aspirations that unfulfilled are torture; the same
experience of the same guilt, and, blessed be God! the same Saviour
and the same salvation.

Because, then, we are all members of the one family, every man is
bound to regard all that he possesses, and is, and can do, as
committed to him in stewardship to be imparted to his fellows. We are
not sponges to absorb, but we are pipes placed in the spring, that we
may give forth the precious water of life.

Cain is not a very good model, but his question is the world's
question, and it implies the expectation of a negative answer--'Am I
my brother's keeper?' Surely, the very language answers itself, and,
although Cain thinks that the only answer is 'No,' wisdom sees that
the only answer is 'Yes.' For if I am my brother's brother, then
surely I am my brother's keeper. We have a better example. There is
another Elder Brother who has come to give to His brethren all that
Himself possessed, and we but poorly follow our Master's pattern
unless we feel that the mystic tie which binds us in brotherhood to
every man makes us every man's debtor to the extent of our
possessions. That is the Christian truth that underlies the modern
Socialistic idea, and, whatever the form in which it is ultimately
brought into practice as the rule of mankind, the principle will
triumph one day; and we are bound, as Christian men, to hasten the
coming of its victory. We are debtors by reason of our common
humanity.

II. We are debtors by our possession of the universal salvation.

The principle which I have already been laying down applies all
round, to everything that we have, are, or can do. But its most
stringent obligation, and the noblest field for its operations, are
found in reference to the Christian man's possession of the Gospel
for the joy of his own heart, and to the duties that are therein
involved. Christ draws men to Himself for their own sakes, blessed be
His name! but not for their own sakes only. He draws them to Himself,
that they, in their turn, may draw others with whose hands theirs are
linked, and so may swell the numbers of the flock that gathers round
the one Shepherd. He puts the dew of His blessing into the chalice of
the tiniest flower, that it may 'share its dewdrop with another
near.' Just as every particle of inert dough as it is leavened
becomes in its turn leaven, and the medium for leavening the particle
contiguous to it, so every Christian is bound, or, to use the
metaphor of my text, is a debtor to God and man, to impart the Gospel
of Jesus Christ. 'Greek and Barbarian,' says Paul, 'wise or unwise';
all distinctions vanish. If I can get at a man, no matter what
colour, his race, his language, his capacity, his acquirements,
he is my creditor, and I am defrauding him of what he has a right to
expect from me if I do not do my best to bring him to Jesus Christ.

This obligation receives additional weight from the proved adaptation
of the Gospel to all sorts and conditions of men. Alone of all
religions has Christianity proved itself capable of dominating every
type of character, of influencing every stage of civilisation, of
assuming the speech of every tongue, and of wearing the garb of every
race. There are other religions which are evidently destined only to
a narrow field of operations, and are rigidly limited by geographical
conditions, or by stages of civilisation. There are wines that are
ruined by a sea voyage, and can only be drunk in the land where the
vintage was gathered; and that is the condition of all the ethnic
religions. Christianity alone passes through the whole earth, and
influences all men. The history of missions shows us that. There has
yet to be found the race that is incapable of receiving, or is beyond
the need of possessing, or cannot be elevated by the operation of,
the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

So to all men we are bound, as much as in us is, to carry the Gospel.
The distinction that is drawn so often by the people who never move a
finger to help the heathen either at home or abroad, between the home
and the foreign field of work, vanishes altogether when we stand at
the true Christian standpoint. Here is a man who wants the Gospel; I
have it; I can give it to him. That constitutes a summons as
imperative as if we were called by name from Heaven, and bade to go,
and as much as in us is to preach the Gospel. Brethren! we do not
obey the command, 'Owe no man anything,' unless, to the extent of our
ability, or over the whole field which we can influence at home or
abroad, we seek to spread the name of Christ and the salvation that
is in Him.

III. We are debtors by benefits received.

I am speaking to men and women a very large proportion of whom get
their living, and some of whom amass their wealth, by trade with
lands that need the Gospel. It is not for nothing that England has
won the great empire that she possesses--won it, alas! far too often
by deeds that will not bear investigation in the light of Christian
principle, but won it.

What do we owe to the lands that we call 'heathen'? The very speech
by which we communicate with one another; the beginning of our
civilisation; wide fields for expanding population and emigration;
treasures of wisdom of many kinds; an empire about which we are too
fond of crowing and too reluctant to recognise its
responsibilities--and Manchester its commerce and prosperity! Did God
put us where we are as a nation only in order that we might carry the
gifts of our literature, great as that is; of our science, great as
that is; of our law, blessed as that is; of our manufactures, to
those distant lands? The best thing that we can give is the thing
that all of us can help to give--the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 'Who
knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as
this?'

IV. Lastly, we are debtors by injuries inflicted.

Many subject-races seem destined to fade away by contact with our
race; and if we think of the nameless cruelties, and the iliad of
woes which England's possession of this great Colonial Empire has had
accompanying it, we may feel that the harm in many aspects outweighs
the good, and that it had been better for these men to be left
suckled in creeds outworn, and ignorant of our civilisation, than to
receive from us the fatal gifts that they often have received. I do
not wish to exaggerate, but if you will take the facts of the case as
brought out by people that have no Christian prejudices to serve, I
think you will acknowledge that we as a nation owe a debt of
reparation to the barbarians and the unwise.

What about killing African tribes by the thousand with the vile stuff
that we call rum, and send to them in exchange for their poor
commodities? What about introducing new diseases, the offspring of
vice, into the South Sea Islands, decimating and all but destroying
the population? Is it not true that, as the prophet wailed of old
about a degenerate Israel, we may wail about the beach-combers and
other loafers that go amongst savage lands from England--'Through you
the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles.' A Hindoo once said
to a missionary, 'Your Book is very good. If you were as good as your
Book you would conquer India in five years.' That may be true or it
may not, but it gives us the impression that is produced by godless
Englishmen on heathen peoples. We are taking away their religion from
them, necessarily, as the result of education and contact with
European thought. And if we do not substitute for it the one faith
that elevates and saves, the last state of that man will be worse
than the first.

We can almost hear the rattle of the guns on the north-west frontier
of India to-day. There is another specimen of the injuries inflicted.
This is not the place to talk politics, but I feel that this is the
place to ask this question, 'Are Christian principles to have
anything to do in determining national actions?' Is it Christian to
impose our yoke on unwilling tribes who have as deep a love for
independence as the proudest Englishmen of us all, and as good a
right to it? Are punitive expeditions and Maxim guns instalments of
our debt to all men? I wonder what Jesus Christ, who died for Afridis
and Orakzais and all the rest of them, thinks about such conduct?

Brethren, we are debtors to all men. Let us do our best to influence
national action in accordance with the brotherhood which has been
revealed to us by the Elder Brother of us all; and let us, at least
for our own parts, recognise, and, as much as in us is, discharge the
debt which, by our common humanity, and by our possession of the
universal Gospel we owe to all men, and which is made more weighty by
the benefits we receive from many, and by the injuries which England
has inflicted on not a few. Else shall we hear rise above all the
voices that palliate crime, on the plea of 'State necessity,' the
stern words of the Master, 'In thy skirts is found the blood of the
souls of poor innocents.' We are debtors; let us pay our debts.




THE GOSPEL THE POWER OF GOD[1]

   'I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ: for it is
   the power of God unto salvation to every one that
   believeth.'--ROMANS i. 16.


To preach the Gospel in Rome had long been the goal of Paul's hopes.
He wished to do in the centre of power what he had done in Athens,
the home of wisdom; and with superb confidence, not in himself, but
in his message, to try conclusions with the strongest thing in the
world. He knew its power well, and was not appalled. The danger was
an attraction to his chivalrous spirit. He believed in flying at
the head when you are fighting with a serpent, and he knew that
influence exerted in Rome would thrill through the Empire. If we
would understand the magnificent audacity of these words of my text
we must try to listen to them with the ears of a Roman. Here was a
poor little insignificant Jew, like hundreds of his countrymen down
in the Ghetto, one who had his head full of some fantastic nonsense
about a young visionary whom the procurator of Syria had very wisely
put an end to a while ago in order to quiet down the turbulent
province; and he was going into Rome with the notion that his word
would shake the throne of the Cæsars. What proud contempt would have
curled their lips if they had been told that the travel-stained
prisoner, trudging wearily up the Appian Way, had the mightiest thing
in the world entrusted to his care! Romans did not believe much in
ideas. Their notion of power was sharp swords and iron yokes on the
necks of subject peoples. But the history of Christianity, whatever
else it has been, has been the history of the supremacy and the
revolutionary force of ideas. Thought is mightier than all visible
forces. Thought dissolves and reconstructs. Empires and institutions
melt before it like the carbon rods in an electric lamp; and the
little hillock of Calvary is higher than the Palatine with its regal
homes and the Capitoline with its temples: 'I am not ashamed of the
Gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation.'

Now, dear friends, I have ventured to take these great words for my
text, though I know, better than any of you can tell me, how sure my
treatment of them is to enfeeble rather than enforce them, because I,
for my poor part, feel that there are few things which we, all of us,
people and ministers, need more than to catch some of the infection
of this courageous confidence, and to be fired with some spark of
Paul's enthusiasm for, and glorying in, the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

I ask you, then, to consider three things: (1) what Paul thought was
the Gospel? (2) what Paul thought the Gospel was? and (3) what he
felt about the Gospel?

I. What Paul thought was the Gospel?

He has given to us in his own rapid way a summary statement,
abbreviated to the very bone, and reduced to the barest elements, of
what he meant by the Gospel. What was the irreducible minimum? The
facts of the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, as you will find
written in the fifteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the
Corinthians. So, then, to begin with, the Gospel is not a statement
of principles, but a record of facts, things that have happened in
this world of ours. But the least part of a fact is the visible part
of it, and it is of no significance unless it has explanation, and so
Paul goes on to bind up with the facts an explanation of them. The
mere fact that Jesus, a young Nazarene, was executed is no more a
gospel than the other one, that two brigands were crucified beside
Him. But the fact that could be seen, plus the explanation which
underlies and interprets it, turns the chronicle into a gospel, and
the explanation begins with the name of the Sufferer; for if you want
to understand His death you must understand who it was that died. His
death is a thought pathetic in all aspects, and very precious in
many. But when we hear 'Christ died according to the Scriptures,' the
whole symbolism of the ancient ritual and all the glowing
anticipations of the prophets rise up before us, and that death
assumes an altogether different aspect. If we stop with 'Jesus died,'
then that death may be a beautiful example of heroism, a sweet,
pathetic instance of innocent suffering, a conspicuous example of the
world's wages to the world's teachers, but it is little more. If,
however, we take Paul's words upon our lips, 'Brethren, I declare
unto you the Gospel which I preached ... how that Christ died ...
according to the Scriptures,' the fact flashes up into solid beauty,
and becomes the Gospel of our salvation. And the explanation goes on,
'How that Christ died for our sins.' Now, I may be very blind, but I
venture to say that I, for my part, cannot see in what intelligible
sense the Death of Christ can be held to have been for, or on behalf
of, our sins--that is, that they may be swept away and we delivered
from them--unless you admit the atoning nature of His sacrifice for
sins. I cannot stop to enlarge, but I venture to say that any
narrower interpretation evacuates Paul's words of their deepest
significance. The explanation goes on, 'And that He was buried.' Why
that trivial detail? Partly because it guarantees the fact of His
Death, partly because of its bearing on the evidences of His
Resurrection. 'And that He rose from the dead according to the
Scriptures.' Great fact, without which Christ is a shattered prop,
and 'ye are yet in your sins.'

But, further, notice that my text is also Paul's text for this
Epistle, and that it differs from the condensed summary of which I
have been speaking only as a bud with its petals closed differs from
one with them expanded in their beauty. And now, if you will take the
words of my text as being the keynote of this letter, and read over
its first eight chapters, what is the Apostle talking about when he
in them fulfils his purpose and preaches 'the Gospel' to them that
are at Rome also? Here is, in the briefest possible words, his
summary--the universality of sin, the awful burden of guilt, the
tremendous outlook of penalty, the impossibility of man rescuing
himself or living righteously, the Incarnation, and Life, and Death
of Jesus Christ as a sacrifice for the sins of the world, the hand of
faith grasping the offered blessing, the indwelling in believing
souls of the Divine Spirit, and the consequent admission of man into
a life of sonship, power, peace, victory, glory, the child's place in
the love of the Father from which nothing can separate. These are the
teachings which make the staple of this Epistle. These are the
explanations of the weighty phrases of my text. These are at least
the essential elements of the Gospel according to Paul.

But he was not alone in this construction of his message. We hear a
great deal to-day about Pauline Christianity, with the implication,
and sometimes with the assertion, that he was the inventor of what,
for the sake of using a brief and easily intelligible term, I may
call Evangelical Christianity. Now, it is a very illuminating thought
for the reading of the New Testament that there are the three sets of
teaching, roughly, the Pauline, Petrine, and Johannine, and you
cannot find the distinctions between these three in any difference as
to the fundamental contents of the Gospel; for if Paul rings out,
'God commendeth His love toward us in that while we were yet sinners
Christ died for us,' Peter declares, 'Who His own self bare our sins
in His own body on the tree,' and John, from his island solitude,
sends across the waters the hymn of praise, 'Unto Him that loved us
and washed us from our sins in His own blood.' And so the proud
declaration of the Apostle, which he dared not have ventured upon in
the face of the acrid criticism he had to front unless he had known
he was perfectly sure of his ground, is natural and
warranted--'Therefore, whether it were I or they, so we preach.'

We are told that we must go back to the Christ of the Gospels, the
historical Christ, and that He spoke nothing concerning all these
important points that I have mentioned as being Paul's conception of
the Gospel. Back to the Christ of the Gospels by all means, if you
will go to the Christ of all the Gospels and of the whole of each
Gospel. And if you do, you will go back to the Christ who said, 'The
Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to
give His life a ransom for many.' You will go back to the Christ who
said, 'And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men
unto Me.' You will go back to the Christ who said, 'The bread that I
will give is My flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.'
You will go back to the Christ who bade His followers hold in
everlasting memory, not the tranquil beauty of His life, not the
persuasive sweetness of His gracious words, not the might of His
miracles of blessing, but the mysterious agonies of His last hours,
by which He would have us learn that there lie the secret of His
power, the foundation of our hopes, the stimulus of our service.

Now, brethren, I have ventured to dwell so long upon this matter,
because it is no use talking about the Gospel unless we understand
what we mean by it, and I, for my part, venture to say that that is
what Paul meant by it, and that is what I mean by it. I plead for no
narrow interpretation of the phrases of my text. I would not that
they should be used to check in the smallest degree the diversities
of representation which, according to the differences of individual
character, must ever prevail in the conceptions which we form and
which we preach of this Gospel of Jesus Christ. I want no parrot-like
repetition of a certain set of phrases embodied, however great may be
their meanings, in every sermon. And I would that the people to whom
those truths are true would make more allowance than they sometimes
do for the differences to which I have referred, and would show a
great deal more sympathy than they often do to those, especially
those young men, who, with their faces toward Christ, have not yet
grown to the full acceptance of all that is implied in those gracious
words. There is room for a whole world of thought in the Gospel of
Christ as Paul conceived it, with all the deep foundations of
implication and presupposition on which it rests, and with all the,
as yet, undiscovered range of conclusions to which it may lead.
Remember that the Cross of Christ is the key to the universe, and
sends its influence into every region of human thought.

II. What Paul thought the Gospel was.

'The power of God unto salvation.' There was in the background of the
Apostle's mind a kind of tacit reference to the antithetical power
that he was going up to meet, the power of Rome, and we may trace
that in the words of my text. Rome, as I have said, was the
embodiment of physical force, with no great faith in ideas. And over
against this carnal might Paul lifts the undissembled weakness of the
Cross, and declares that it is stronger than man, 'the power of God
unto salvation.' Rome is high in force; Athens is higher; the Cross
is highest of all, and it comes shrouded in weakness having a poor
Man hanging dying there. That is a strange embodiment of divine
power. Yes, and because so strange, it is so touching, and so
conquering. The power that is draped in weakness is power indeed.
Though Rome's power did make for righteousness sometimes, yet its
stream of tendency was on the whole a power to destruction and
grasped the nations of the earth as some rude hand might do rich
clusters of grapes and squeeze them into a formless mass. The tramp
of the legionary meant death, and it was true in many respects of
them what was afterwards said of later invaders of Europe, that where
their horses' hoofs had once stamped no grass ever grew. Over against
this terrific engine of destruction Paul lifts up the meek forces of
love which have for their sole object the salvation of man.

Then we come to another of the keywords about which it is very
needful that people should have deeper and wider notions than they
often seem to cherish. What is salvation? Negatively, the removal and
sweeping away of all evil, physical and moral, as the schools speak.
Positively, the inclusion of all good for every part of the composite
nature of a man which the man can receive and which God can bestow.
And that is the task that the Gospel sets to itself. Now, I need not
remind you how, for the execution of such a purpose, it is plain that
something else than man's power is absolutely essential. It is only
God who can alter my relation to His government. It is only God who
can trammel up the inward consequences of my sins and prevent them
from scourging me. It is only God who can bestow upon my death a new
life, which shall grow up into righteousness and beauty,
caught of, and kindred to, His own. But if this be the aim of the
Gospel, then its diagnosis of man's sickness is a very much graver
one than that which finds favour amongst so many of us now. Salvation
is a bigger word than any of the little gospels that we hear
clamouring round about us are able to utter. It means something a
great deal more than either social or intellectual, or still more,
material or political betterment of man's condition. The disease lies
so deep, and so great are the destruction and loss partly
experienced, and still more awfully impending over every soul of us,
that something else than tinkering at the outsides, or dealing, as
self-culture does, with man's understanding or, as social gospels do,
with man's economical and civic condition, should be brought to bear.
Dear brethren, especially you Christian ministers, preach a social
Christianity by all means, an applied Christianity, for there does
lie in the Gospel of Jesus Christ a key to all the problems that
afflict our social condition. But be sure first that there is a
Christianity before you talk about applying it. And remember that the
process of salvation begins in the deep heart of the individual and
transforms him first and foremost. The power is 'to every one that
believeth.' It is power in its most universal sweep. Rome's Empire
was wellnigh ubiquitous, but, blessed be God, the dove of Christ
flies farther than the Roman eagle with beak and claw ready for
rapine, and wherever there are men here is a Gospel for them. The
limitation is no limitation of its universality. It is no limitation
of the claim of a medicine to be a panacea that it will only do good
to the man who swallows it. And that is the only limitation of which
the Gospel is susceptible, for we have all the same deep needs, the
same longings; we are fed by the same bread, we are nourished by the
same draughts of water, we breathe the same air, we have the same
sins, and, thanks be to God, we have the same Saviour. 'The power of
God unto salvation to every one that believeth.'

Now before I pass from this part of my subject there is only one
thing more that I want to say, and that is, that you cannot apply
that glowing language about 'the power of God unto salvation' to
anything but the Gospel that Paul preached. Forms of Christianity
which have lost the significance of the Incarnation and Death of
Jesus Christ, and which have struck out or obscured the central facts
with which I have been dealing, are not, never were, and, I may
presumptuously venture to say, never will be, forces of large account
in this world. Here is a clock, beautiful, chased on the back, with a
very artistic dial-plate, and works modelled according to the most
approved fashion, but, somehow or other, the thing won't go. Perhaps
the mainspring is broken. And so it is only the Gospel, as Paul
expounds it and expands it in this Epistle, that is 'the power of God
unto salvation.' Dear brethren, in the course of a sermon like this,
of course, one must lay himself open to the charge of dogmatising.
That cannot be helped under the conditions of my space. But let me
say as my own solemn conviction--I know that that is not worth much
to you, but it is my justification for speaking in such a
fashion--let me say as my solemn conviction that you may as well take
the keystone out of an arch, with nothing to hold the other stones
together or keep them from toppling in hideous ruin on your
unfortunate head, as take the doctrine that Paul summed up in that
one word out of your conception of Christianity and expect it to
work. And be sure of this, that there is only one Name that lords it
over the demons of afflicted humanity, and that if a man goes and
tries to eject them with any less potent charm than Paul's Gospel,
they will turn upon him with 'Jesus I know, and Paul I know, but who
are you?'

III. What Paul felt about this Gospel.

His restrained expression, 'I am not ashamed,' is the stronger for
its very moderation. It witnesses to the fixed purpose of his heart
and attitude of his mind, whilst it suggests that he was well aware
of all the temptations in Rome to being ashamed of it there. Think of
what was arrayed against him--venerable religion, systematised
philosophies, bitter hatred and prejudice, material power and wealth.
These were the brazen armour of Goliath, and this little David went
cheerily down into the valley with five pebble stones in a leathern
wallet, and was quite sure how it was going to end. And it ended as
he expected. His Gospel shook the kingdom of the Roman, and cast it
in another mould.

And there are temptations, plenty of them, for us, dear friends,
to-day, to bate our confidence. The drift of what calls itself
influential opinion is anti-supernatural, and we all are conscious of
the presence of that element all round about us. It tells with
special force upon our younger men, but it affects us all. In this
day, when a large portion of the periodical press, which does the
thinking for most of us, looks askance at these truths, and when, on
the principle that in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is
the king, popular novelists become our theological tutors, and when
every new publishing season brings out a new conclusive destruction
of Christianity, which supersedes last season's equally complete
destruction, it is hard for some of us to keep our flags flying. The
ice round about us will either bring down the temperature, or, if it
stimulates us to put more fuel on the fire, perhaps the fire may melt
it. And so the more we feel ourselves encompassed by these
temptations, the louder is the call to Christian men to cast
themselves back on the central verities, and to draw at first hand
from them the inspiration which shall be their safety. And how is
that to be done? Well, there are many ways by which thoughtful, and
cultivated, students may do it. But may I venture to deal here rather
with ways which all Christian people have open before them? And I am
bold to say that the way to be sure of 'the power of God unto
salvation' is to submit ourselves continually to its cleansing and
renewing influence. This certitude, brethren, may be contributed to
by books of apologetics, and by other sources of investigation and
study which I should be sorry indeed to be supposed in any degree to
depreciate. But the true way to get it is, by deep communion with the
living God, to realise the personality of Jesus Christ as present
with us, our Friend, our Saviour, our Sanctifier by His Holy Spirit.
Why, Paul's Gospel was, I was going to say, altogether--that would be
an exaggeration--but it was to a very large extent simply the
generalisation of his own experience. That is what all of us will
find to be the Gospel that we have to preach. 'We speak that we do
know and testify that we have seen.' And it was because this man
could say so assuredly--because the depths of his own conscience and
the witness within him bore testimony to it--'He loved me and gave
Himself for me,' that he could also say, 'The power of God unto
salvation to every one that believeth.' Go down into the depths,
brother and friend; cry to Him out of the depths. Then you will feel
His strong, gentle grip lifting you to the heights, and that will
give power that nothing else will, and you will be able to say, 'I
have heard Him myself, and I know that this is the Christ, the
Saviour of the world.'

But there is yet another source of certitude open to us all, and that
is the history of the centuries. Our modern sceptics, attacking the
truth of Christianity mostly from the physical side, are strangely
blind to the worth of history. It is a limitation of faculty that
besets them in a good many directions, but it does not work anywhere
more fatally than it does in their attitude towards the Gospel. After
all, Jesus Christ spoke the ultimate word when He said, 'By their
fruits ye shall know them.' And it is so, because just as what is
morally wrong cannot be politically right, so what is intellectually
false cannot be morally good. Truth, goodness, beauty, they are but
three names for various aspects of one thing, and if it be that the
difference between B.C. and A.D. has come from a Gospel which is not
the truth of God, then all I can say is, that the richest vintage
that ever the world saw, and the noblest wine of which it ever drank,
did grow upon a thorn. I know that the Christian Church has sinfully
and tragically failed to present Christ adequately to the world. But
for all that, 'Ye are My witnesses, saith the Lord'; and nobler
manners and purer laws have come in the wake of this Gospel of Jesus
Christ. And as I look round about upon what Christianity has done in
the world, I venture to say, 'Show us any system of religion or of no
religion that has done that or anything the least like it, and then
we will discuss with you the other evidences of the Gospel.'

In closing these words, may I venture relying on the melancholy
privilege of seniority, to drop for a minute or two into a tone of
advice? I would say, do not be frightened out of your confidence
either by the premature paean of victory from the opposite camp, or
by timid voices in our own ranks. And that you may not be so
frightened, be sure to keep clear in your mind the distinction
between the things that can be shaken and the kingdom that cannot be
moved. It is bad strategy to defend an elongated line. It is
cowardice to treat the capture of an outpost as involving the
evacuation of the key of the position. It is a mistake, to which many
good Christian people are sorely tempted in this day, to assert such
a connection between the eternal Gospel and our deductions from the
principles of that Gospel as that the refutation of the one must be
the overthrow of the other. And if it turns out to be so in any case,
a large part of the blame lies upon those good and mistaken people
who insist that everything must be held or all must be abandoned. The
burning questions of this day about the genuineness of the books of
Scripture, inspiration, inerrancy, and the like, are not so
associated with this word, 'God so loved the world ... that whosoever
believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life,' as
that the discovery of errors in the Second Book of Chronicles shakes
the foundations of the Christian certitude. In a day like this truth
must change its vesture. Who believes that the Dissenting Churches of
England are the highest, perfect embodiment of the Kingdom of God?
And who believes that any creed of man's making has in it all and has
in it only the everlasting Gospel? So do not be frightened, and do
not think that when the things that can be shaken are removed, the
things that cannot be shaken are at all less likely to remain. Depend
upon it, the Gospel, whose outline I have imperfectly tried to set
before you now, will last as long as men on earth know they are
sinners and need a Saviour. Did you ever see some mean buildings that
have by degrees been gathered round the sides of some majestic
cathedral, and do you suppose that the sweeping away of those
shanties would touch the solemn majesty of the mediæval glories of
the building that rises above them? Take them away if need be, and
it, in its proportion, beauty, strength, and heavenward aspiration,
will stand more glorious for the sweeping away. Preach positive
truth. Do not preach doubts. You remember Mr. Kingsley's book
_Yeast_. Its title was its condemnation. Yeast is not meant to be
drunk; it is meant to be kept in the dark till the process of
fermentation goes on and it works itself clear, and then you may
bring it out. Do not be always arguing with the enemy. It is a great
deal better to preach the truth. Remember what Jesus said: 'Let them
alone, they are blind leaders of the blind, they will fall into the
ditch.' It is not given to every one of us to conduct controversial
arguments in the pulpit. There are some much wiser and abler brethren
amongst us than you or I who can do it. Let us be contented with, not
the humbler but the more glorious, office of telling what we have
known, leaving it, as it will do, to prove itself. You remember what
the old woman, who had been favoured by her pastor with an elaborate
sermon to demonstrate the existence of God, said when he had
finished; 'Well, I believe there is a God, for all the gentleman
says.'

As one who sees the lengthening shadows falling over the darkening
field, may I say one word to my junior brethren, with all whose
struggles and doubts and difficulties I, for one, do most tenderly
sympathise? I beseech them--though, alas! the advice condemns the
giver of it as he looks back over long years of his ministry--to be
faithful to the Gospel how that 'Jesus Christ died for our sins
according to the Scriptures.' Dear young friends, if you only go
where Paul went, and catch the inspiration that he caught there, your
path will be clear. It was in contact with Christ, whose passion for
soul-winning brought Him from heaven, that Paul learned his passion
for soul-winning. And if you and I are touched with the divine
enthusiasm, and have that aim clear before us, we shall soon find out
that there is only one power, one name given under heaven among men
whereby we can accomplish what we desire--the name of 'Jesus Christ
that died, yea, rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right
hand of God, and also maketh intercession for us.' If our aim is
clear before us it will prescribe our methods, and if the inspiration
of our ministry is, 'I determine not to know anything among you save
Jesus Christ and Him crucified,' then, whether men will hear or
whether they will forbear, they shall know that there hath been a
Prophet among them.

[Footnote 1: Preached before Baptist Union.]


WORLD-WIDE SIN AND WORLD-WIDE REDEMPTION

   'Now we know, that what things soever the law saith, it
   saith to them who are under the law; that every mouth
   may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty
   before God. 20. Therefore by the deeds of the law there
   shall no flesh be justified in His sight: for by the
   law is the knowledge of sin. 21. But now the
   righteousness of God without the law is manifested,
   being witnessed by the law and the prophets; 22. Even
   the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus
   Christ unto all and upon all them that believe; for
   there is no difference: 23. For all have sinned, and
   come short of the glory of God: 24. Being justified
   freely by His grace, through the redemption that is
   in Christ Jesus; 25. Whom God hath set forth to be a
   propitiation through faith in His blood, to declare His
   righteousness for the remission of sins that are past,
   through the forbearance of God; 26. To declare, I say,
   at this time His righteousness; that He might be just,
   and the justifier of him which believeth in
   Jesus.'--ROMANS iii. 19-26.


Let us note in general terms the large truths which this passage
contains. We may mass these under four heads:

I. Paul's view of the purpose of the law.

He has been quoting a mosaic of Old Testament passages from the
Psalms and Isaiah. He regards these as part of 'the law,' which term,
therefore, in his view, here includes the whole previous revelation,
considered as making known God's will as to man's conduct. Every word
of God, whether promise, or doctrine, or specific command, has in it
some element bearing on conduct. God reveals nothing only in order
that we may know, but all that, knowing, we may do and be what is
pleasing in His sight. All His words are law.

But Paul sets forth another view of its purpose here; namely, to
drive home to men's consciences the conviction of sin. That is not
the only purpose, for God reveals duty primarily in order that men
may do it, and His law is meant to be obeyed. But, failing obedience,
this second purpose comes into action, and His law is a swift witness
against sin. The more clearly we know our duty, the more poignant
will be our consciousness of failure. The light which shines to show
the path of right, shines to show our deviations from it. And that
conviction of sin, which it was the very purpose of all the previous
Revelation to produce, is a merciful gift; for, as the Apostle
implies, it is the prerequisite to the faith which saves.

As a matter of fact, there was a far profounder and more inward
conviction of sin among the Jews than in any heathen nation. Contrast
the wailings of many a psalm with the tone in Greek or Roman
literature. No doubt there is a law written on men's hearts which
evokes a lower measure of the same consciousness of sin. There are
prayers among the Assyrian and Babylonian tablets which might almost
stand beside the Fifty-first Psalm; but, on the whole, the deep sense
of sin was the product of the revealed law. The best use of our
consciousness of what we ought to be, is when it rouses conscience to
feel the discordance with it of what we are, and so drives us to
Christ. Law, whether in the Old Testament, or as written in our
hearts by their very make, is the slave whose task is to bring us to
Christ, who will give us power to keep God's commandments.

Another purpose of the law is stated in verse 21, as being to bear
witness, in conjunction with the prophets, to a future more perfect
revelation of God's righteousness. Much of the law was symbolic and
prophetic. The ideal it set forth could not always remain
unfulfilled. The whole attitude of that system was one of
forward-looking expectancy. There is much danger lest, in modern
investigations as to the authorship, date, and genesis of the Old
Testament revelation, its central characteristic should be lost sight
of; namely, its pointing onwards to a more perfect revelation which
should supersede it.

II. Paul's view of universal sinfulness.

He states that twice in this passage (vs. 20 to 24), and it underlies
his view of the purpose of law. In verse 20 he asserts that 'by the
works of the law shall no flesh be justified,' and in verses 23 and
24 he advances from that negative statement to the positive assertion
that all have sinned. The impossibility of justification by the works
of the law may be shown from two considerations: one, that, as a
matter of fact, no flesh has ever done them all with absolute
completeness and purity; and, second, that, even if they had ever
been so done, they would not have availed to secure acquittal at a
tribunal where motive counts for more than deed. The former is the
main point with Paul.

In verse 23 the same fact of universal experience is contemplated as
both positive sin and negative falling short of the 'glory' (which
here seems to mean, as in John v. 44, xii. 43, approbation from God).
'There is no distinction,' but all varieties of condition, character,
attainment, are alike in this, that the fatal taint is upon them all.
'We have, all of us, one human heart.' We are alike in physical
necessities, in primal instincts, and, most tragically of all, in the
common experience of sinfulness.

Paul does not mean to bring all varieties of character down to one
dead level, but he does mean to assert that none is free from the
taint. A man need only be honest in self-examination to endorse the
statement, so far as he himself is concerned. The Gospel would be
better understood if the fact of universal sinfulness were more
deeply felt. Its superiority to all schemes for making everybody
happy by rearrangements of property, or increase of culture, would be
seen through; and the only cure for human misery would be discerned
to be what cures universal sinfulness.

III. So we have next Paul's view of the remedy for man's sin. That is
stated in general terms in verses 21, 22. Into a world of sinful men
comes streaming the light of a 'righteousness of God.' That
expression is here used to mean a moral state of conformity with
God's will, imparted by God. The great, joyful message, which Paul
felt himself sent to proclaim, is that the true way to reach the
state of conformity which law requires, and which the
unsophisticated, universal conscience acknowledges not to have been
reached, is the way of faith.

The message is so familiar to us that we may easily fail to realise
its essential greatness and wonderfulness when first proclaimed. That
God should give righteousness, that it should be 'of God,' not only
as coming from Him, but as, in some real way, being kindred with His
own perfection; that it should be brought to men by Jesus Christ, as
ancient legends told that a beneficent Titan brought from heaven, in
a hollow cane, the gift of fire; and that it should become ours by
the simple process of trusting in Jesus Christ, are truths which
custom has largely robbed of their wonderfulness. Let us meditate
more on them till they regain, by our own experience of their power,
some of the celestial light which belongs to them.

Observe that in verse 22 the universality of the redemption which is
in Christ is deduced from the universality of sin. The remedy must
reach as far as the disease. If there is no difference in regard to
sin, there can be none in regard to the sweep of redemption. The
doleful universality of the covering spread over all nations, has
corresponding to it the blessed universality of the light which is
sent forth to flood them all. Sin's empire cannot stretch farther
than Christ's kingdom.

IV. Paul's view of what makes the Gospel the remedy.

In verses 21 and 22 it was stated generally that Christ was the
channel, and faith the condition, of righteousness. The personal
object of faith was declared, but not the special thing in Christ
which was to be trusted in. That is fully set forth in verses 24-26.
We cannot attempt to discuss the great words in these verses, each of
which would want a volume. But we may note that 'justified' here
means to be accounted or declared righteous, as a judicial act; and
that justification is traced in its ultimate source to God's
'grace,'--His own loving disposition--which bends to unworthy and
lowly creatures, and is regarded as having for the medium of its
bestowal the 'redemption' that is in Christ Jesus. That is the
channel through which grace comes from God.

'Redemption' implies captivity, liberation, and a price paid. The
metaphor of slaves set free by ransom is exchanged in verse 25 for a
sacrificial reference. A propitiatory sacrifice averts punishment
from the offerer. The death of the victim procures the life of the
worshipper. So, a propitiatory or atoning sacrifice is offered by
Christ's blood, or death. That sacrifice is the ransom-price through
which our captivity is ended, and our liberty assured. As His
redemption is the channel 'through' which God's grace comes to men,
so faith is the condition 'through' which (ver. 25) we make that
grace ours.

Note, then, that Paul does not merely point to Jesus Christ as
Saviour, but to His death as the saving power. We are to have faith
in Jesus Christ (ver. 22). But that is not a complete statement. It
must be faith in His propitiation, if it is to bring us into living
contact with His redemption. A gospel which says much of Christ, but
little of His Cross, or which dilates on the beauty of His life, but
stammers when it begins to speak of the sacrifice in His death, is
not Paul's Gospel, and it will have little power to deal with the
universal sickness of sin.

The last verses of the passage set forth another purpose attained by
Christ's sacrifice; namely, the vindication of God's righteousness in
forbearing to inflict punishment on sins committed before the advent
of Jesus. That Cross rayed out its power in all directions--to the
heights of the heavens; to the depths of Hades (Col. i. 20); to the
ages that were to come, and to those that were past. The suspension
of punishment through all generations, from the beginning till that
day when the Cross was reared on Calvary, was due to that Cross
having been present to the divine mind from the beginning. 'The judge
is condemned when the guilty is acquitted,' or left unpunished. There
would be a blot on God's government, not because it was so severe,
but because it was so forbearing, unless His justice was vindicated,
and the fatal consequences of sin shown in the sacrifice of Christ.
God could not have shown Himself just, in view either of age-long
forbearance, or of now justifying the sinner, unless the Cross had
shown that He was not immorally indulgent toward sin.




NO DIFFERENCE

   'There is no difference.'--ROMANS iii. 22.

The things in which all men are alike are far more important than
those in which they differ. The diversities are superficial, the
identities are deep as life. Physical processes and wants are the
same for everybody. All men, be they kings or beggars, civilised or
savage, rich or poor, wise or foolish, cultured or illiterate,
breathe the same breath, hunger and thirst, eat and drink, sleep, are
smitten by the same diseases, and die at last the same death. We have
all of us one human heart. Tears and grief, gladness and smiles, move
us all. Hope, fear, love, play the same music upon all heart-strings.
The same great law of duty over-arches every man, and the same heaven
of God bends above him.

Religion has to do with the deep-seated identities and not with the
superficial differences. And though there have been many aristocratic
religions in the world, it is the great glory of Christianity that it
goes straight to the central similarities, and brushes aside, as of
altogether secondary importance, all the subordinate diversities,
grappling with the great facts which are common to humanity, and with
the large hopes which all may inherit.

Paul here, in his grand way, triumphs and rises above all these small
differences between man and man, more pure or less pure, Jew or
Gentile, wise or foolish, and avers that, in regard of the deepest
and most important things, 'there is no difference,' and so his
Gospel is a Gospel for the world, because it deals with all men on
the same level. Now I wish to work out this great glory and
characteristic of the Gospel system in a few remarks, and to point
out to you the more important of these things in which all men, be
they what or who they may, stand in one category and have identical
experiences and interests.

I. First, there is no difference in the fact of sin.

Now let us understand that the Gospel does not assert that there is
no difference in the degrees of sin. Christianity does not teach,
howsoever some of its apostles may seem to have taught, or
unconsciously lent themselves to representations which imply the view
that there was no difference between a man who 'did by nature the
things contained in the law,' as Paul says, and the man who set
himself to violate law. There is no such monstrous teaching in the
New Testament as that all blacks are the same shade, all sin of the
same gravity, no such teaching as that a man that tries according to
his light to do what is right stands on exactly the same level as the
man who flouts all such obligations, and has driven the chariots of
his lusts and passions through every law that may stand in his way.

But even whilst we have to insist upon that, that the teaching of my
text is not of an absolute identity of criminality, but only an
universal participation in criminality, do not let us forget that, if
you take the two extremes, and suppose it possible that there were a
best man in all the world, and a worst man in all the world, the
difference between these two is not perhaps so great as at first
sight it looks. For we have to remember that motives make actions,
and that you cannot judge of these by considering those, that 'as a
man thinketh in his heart,' and not as a man does with his hands, 'so
is he.' We have to remember, also, that there may be lives,
sedulously and immaculately respectable and pure, which are white
rather with the unwholesome leprosy of disease than with the
wholesome purity of health.

In Queen Elizabeth's time, the way in which they cleaned the hall of
a castle, the floor of which might be covered with remnants of food
and all manner of abominations, was to strew another layer of rushes
over the top of the filth, and then they thought themselves quite
neat and respectable. And that is what a great many of you do, cover
the filth well up with a sweet smelling layer of conventional
proprieties, and think yourselves clean, and the pinks of perfection.
God forbid that I should say one word that would seem to cast any
kind of slur upon the effort that any man makes to do what he knows
to be right, but this I proclaim, or rather my text proclaims for me,
that, giving full weight and value to all that, and admitting the
existence of variations in degree, the identity is deeper than the
diversity; and there is 'not a just man upon earth that doeth good
and sinneth not.'

Oh, dear friends! it is not a question of degree, but of direction;
not how far the ship has gone on her voyage, but how she heads. Good
and evil are the same in essence, whatever be their intensity and
whatever be their magnitude. Arsenic is arsenic, whether you have a
ton of it or a grain; and a very small dose will be enough to poison.
The Gospel starts with the assertion that there is no difference in
the fact of sin. The assertion is abundantly confirmed. Does not
conscience assent? We all admit 'faults,' do we not? We all
acknowledge 'imperfections.' It is that little word 'sin' which seems
to bring in another order of considerations, and to command the
assent of conscience less readily. But sin is nothing except fault
considered in reference to God's law. Bring the notion of God into
the life, and 'faults' and 'slips' and 'weaknesses,' and all the
other names by which we try to smooth down the ugliness of the ugly
thing, start up at once into their tone, magnitude, and importance,
and stand avowed as _sins_.

Well now, if there be, therefore, this universal consciousness of
imperfection, and if that consciousness of imperfection has only need
to be brought into contact with God, as it were, to flame thus, let
me remind you, too, that this fact of universal sinfulness puts us
all in one class, no matter what may be the superficial difference.
Shakespeare and the Australian savage, the biggest brain and the
smallest, the loftiest and the lowest of us, the purest and the
foulest of us, we all come into the same order. It is a question of
classification. 'The Scripture hath concluded all under sin,' that is
to say, has shut all men up as in a prison. You remember in the
French Revolution, all manner of people were huddled indiscriminately
into the same dungeon of the Paris prisons. You would find a princess
and some daughter of shame from the gutters; a boor from the country
and a landlord, a count, a marquis, a _savant_, a philosopher
and an illiterate workman, all together in the dungeons. They kept up
the distinctions of society and of class with a ghastly mockery, even
to the very moment when the tumbrils came for them. And so here are
we all, in some sense inclosed within the solemn cells of this great
prison-house, and whether we be wise or foolish, we are prisoners,
whether we have titles or not, we are prisoners. You may be a
student, but you are a sinner: you may be a rich Manchester merchant,
but you are a sinner; you may be a man of rank, but you are a sinner.
Naaman went to Elisha and was very much offended because Elisha
treated him as a leper who happened to be a nobleman. He wanted to be
treated as a nobleman who happened to be a leper. And that is the way
with a great many of us; we do not like to be driven into one class
with all the crowd of evildoers. But, my friend, 'there is no
difference.' 'All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.'

II. Again, there is no difference in the fact of God's love to us.

God does not love men because of what they are, therefore He does not
cease to love them because of what they are. His love to the sons of
men is not drawn out by their goodness, their morality, their
obedience, but it wells up from the depths of His own heart, because
'it is His nature and property,' and if I may so say, He cannot help
loving. You do not need to pump up that great affection by any
machinery of obedience and of merits; it rises like the water in an
Artesian well, of its own impulse, with ebullient power from the
central heat, and spreads its great streams everywhere. And
therefore, though our sin may awfully disturb our relations with God,
and may hurt and harm us in a hundred ways, there is one thing it
cannot do, it cannot stop Him from loving us. It cannot dam back His
great love, which flows out for ever towards all His creatures, and
laves them all in its gentle, strong flood, from which nothing can
draw them away. 'In Him we live, and move, and have our being,' and
to live in Him, whatever else it may mean--and it means a great deal
more--is most certainly to live in His love. A man can as soon pass
out of the atmosphere in which he breathes as he can pass out of the
love of God. We can no more travel beyond that great over-arching
firmament of everlasting love which spans all the universe than a
star set in the blue heavens can transcend the liquid arch and get
beyond its range. 'There is no difference' in the fact that all men,
unthankful and evil as they are, are grasped and held in the love of
God.

But there _is_ a difference. Sin cannot dam God's love back, but sin
has a terrible power in reference to the love of God. Two things it
can do. It can make us incapable of receiving the highest blessings
of that love. There are many mercies which God pours 'upon the
unthankful and the evil.' These are His least gifts; His highest and
best cannot be given to the unthankful and the evil. They would if
they could, but they cannot, because they cannot be received by them.
You can shut the shutters against the light; you can close the vase
against the stream. You cannot prevent its shining, you cannot
prevent its flowing, but you can prevent yourself from receiving its
loftiest and best blessings.

And another awful power that my sin has in reference to God's love
is, that it can modify the form which God's love takes in its
dealings with me. We may force Him to do 'His work,' 'His strange
work,' as Isaiah calls it, and to punish when He would fain only
succour and comfort and bless. Just as a fog in the sky does not
touch the sun, but turns it to our eyes into a fiery ball, red and
lurid, so the mist of my sin coming between me and God, may, to my
apprehension and to my capacity of reception, solemnly make different
that great love of His. But yet there is no difference in the fact of
God's love to us.

III. Thirdly, there is no difference in the purpose and power of
Christ's Cross for us all.

'He died for all.' The area over which the purpose and the power of
Christ's death extend is precisely conterminous with the area over
which the power of sin extends. It cannot be--blessed be God!--that
the raven Sin shall fly further than the dove with the olive branch
in its mouth. It cannot be that the disease shall go wider than the
cure. And so, dear friends, I have to come to you now with this
message. No matter what a man is, how far he has gone, how sinful he
has been, how long he has stayed away from the sweetness and grace of
that great sacrifice on the Cross, that death was for him. The power
of Christ's sacrifice makes possible the forgiveness of all the sins
of all the world, past, present, and to come. The worth of that
sacrifice, which was made by the willing surrender of the Incarnate
Son of God to the death of the Cross, is sufficient for the ransom
price of all the sins of all men.

Nor is it only the power of the Cross which is all embracing, but its
purpose also. In the very hour of Christ's death, there stood, clear
and distinct, before His divine omniscience, each man, woman, and
child of the race. And for them all, grasping them all in the
tenderness of His sympathy and in the clearness of His knowledge, in
the design of His sufferings for them all, He died, so that every
human being may lay his hand on the head of the sacrifice, and _know_
'his guilt was there,' and may say, with as triumphant and
appropriating faith as Paul did, 'He loved _me_,' and in that hour of
agony and love 'gave Himself for _me_.'

To go back to a metaphor already employed, the prisoners are gathered
together in the prison, not that they may be slain, but 'God hath
included them all,' shut them all up, 'that He might have mercy upon
all.' And so, as it was in the days of Christ's life upon earth, so
is it now, and so will it be for ever. All the crowd may come to Him,
and whosoever comes 'is made whole of whatsoever disease he had.'
There are no incurables nor outcasts. 'There is no difference.'

IV. Lastly, there is no difference in the way which we must take for
salvation. The only thing that unites men to Jesus Christ is faith.
You must trust Him, you must trust the power of His sacrifice, you
must trust the might of His living love. You must trust Him with a
trust which is self-distrust. You must trust Him out and out. The
people with whom Paul is fighting, in this chapter, were quite
willing to admit that faith was the thing that made Christians, but
they wanted to tack on something besides. They wanted to tack on the
rites of Judaism and obedience to the moral law. And ever since men
have been going on in that erroneous rut. Sometimes it has been that
people have sought to add a little of their own morality; sometimes
to add ceremonies and sacraments. Sometimes it has been one thing and
sometimes it has been another; but there are not two ways to the
Cross of Christ, and to the salvation which He gives. There is only
one road, and all sorts of men have to come by it. You cannot lean
half upon Christ and half upon yourselves, like the timid cripple
that is not quite sure of the support of the friendly arm. You cannot
eke out the robe with which He will clothe you with a little bit of
stuff of your own weaving. It is an insult to a host to offer to pay
for entertainment. The Gospel feast that Christ provides is not a
social meal to which every guest brings a dish. Our part is simple
reception, we have to bring empty hands if we would receive the
blessing.

We must put away superficial differences. The Gospel is for the
world, therefore the act by which we receive it must be one which all
men can perform, not one which only some can do. Not wisdom, nor
righteousness, but faith joins us to Christ. And, therefore, people
who fancy themselves wise or righteous are offended that 'special
terms' are not made with them. They would prefer to have a private
portion for themselves. It grates against the pride of the
aristocratic class, whether it be aristocratic by culture--and that
is the most aristocratic of all--or by position, or anything else--it
grates against their pride to be told: 'You have to go in by that
same door that the beggar is going in at'; and 'there is no
difference.' Therefore, the very width of the doorway, that is wide
enough for all the world, gets to be thought narrowness, and becomes
a hindrance to our entering. As Naaman's servant put a common-sense
question to him, so may I to you. 'If the prophet had bid thee do
some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it?' Ay! that you
would! 'How much more when He says "Wash and be clean!"' There is
only one way of getting dirt off, and that is by water. There is only
one way of getting sin off, and that is by the blood of Jesus Christ.
There is only one way of having that blood applied to your heart, and
that is trusting Him. 'The common salvation' becomes ours when we
exercise 'the common faith.' 'There is no difference' in our sins.
Thank God! 'there is no difference' in the fact that He grasps us
with His love. There is no difference in the fact that Jesus Christ
has died for us all. Let there be no difference in our faith, or
there will be a difference, deep as the difference between Heaven and
Hell; the difference between them that believe and them that believe
not, which will darken and widen into the difference between them
that are saved and them that perish.




LET US HAVE PEACE

   'Let us have peace with God through our Lord Jesus
   Christ.'--ROMANS v. 1. (R.V.).


In the rendering of the Revised Version, 'Let us have peace with God
through our Lord Jesus Christ,' the alteration is very slight, being
that of one letter in one word, the substitution of a long 'o' for a
short one. The majority of manuscripts of authority read 'let us
have,' making the clause an exhortation and not a statement. I
suppose the reason why, in some inferior MSS., the statement takes
the place of the exhortation is because it was felt to be somewhat of
a difficulty to understand the Apostle's course of thought. But I
shall hope to show you that the true understanding of the context, as
well as of the words I have taken for my text, requires the
exhortation and not the affirmation.

One more remark of an introductory character: is it not very
beautiful to see how the Apostle here identifies himself, in all
humility, with the Christians whom he is addressing, and feels that
he, Apostle as he is, has the same need for the same counsel and
stimulus that the weakest of those to whom he is writing have? It
would have been so easy for him to isolate himself, and say, 'Now you
have peace with God; see that you keep it.' But he puts himself into
the same class as those whom he is exhorting, and that is what all of
us have to do who would give advice that will be worth anything or of
any effect. He does not stand upon a little molehill of superiority,
and look down upon the Roman Christians, and imply that they have
needs that he has not, but he exhorts himself too, saying, 'Let all
of us who have obtained like precious faith, which is alike in an
Apostle and in the humblest believer, have peace with God.'

Now a word, first, about the meaning of this somewhat singular
exhortation.

There is a theory of man and his relation to God underlying it, which
is very unfashionable at present, but which corresponds to the
deepest things in human nature, and the deepest mysteries in human
history, and that is, that something has come in to produce the
totally unnatural and monstrous fact that between God and man there
is not amity or harmony. Men, on their side, are alienated, because
their wills are rebellious and their aims diverse from God's purpose
concerning them. And--although it is an awful thing to have to say,
and one from which the sentimentalism of much modern Christianity
weakly recoils--on God's side, too, the relation has been disturbed,
and 'we are by nature the children of wrath, even as others'; not of
a wrath which is unloving, not of a wrath which is impetuous and
passionate, not of a wrath which seeks the hurt of its objects, but
of a wrath which is the necessary antagonism and recoil of pure love
from such creatures as we have made ourselves to be. To speak as if
the New Testament taught that 'reconciliation' was lop-sided--which
would be a contradiction in terms, for reconciliation needs two to
make it--to talk as if the New Testament taught that reconciliation
was only man's putting away his false relation to God, is, as I
humbly think, to be blind to its plainest teaching. So, there being
this antagonism and separation between God and man, the Gospel comes
to deal with it, and proclaims that Jesus Christ has abolished the
enmity, and by His death on the Cross has become our peace; and that
we, by faith in that Christ, and grasping in faith His death, pass
from out of the condition of hostility into the condition of
reconciliation.

With this by way of basis, let us come back to my text. It sounds
strange; 'Therefore, being justified by faith, let up have peace.'
'Well,' you will say, 'but is not all that you have been saying just
this, that to be justified by faith, to be declared righteous by
reason of faith in Him who makes us righteous, is to have peace with
God? Is not your exhortation an entirely superfluous one?' No doubt
that is what the old scribe thought who originated the reading which
has crept into our Authorised Version. The two things do seem to be
entirely parallel. To be justified by faith is a certain process, to
have peace with God is the inseparable and simultaneous result of
that process itself. But that is going rather too fast. 'Being
justified by faith let us have peace with God,' really is just
this--see that you abide where you are; keep what you have. The
exhortation is not to attain peace, but retain it. 'Hold fast that
thou hast; let no man take thy crown.' 'Being justified by faith'
cling to your treasure and let nothing rob you of it--'let us have
peace with God.'

Now a word, in the next place, as to the necessity and importance of
this exhortation.

There underlies it, this solemn thought, which Christian people, and
especially some types of Christian doctrine, do need to have hammered
into them over and over again, that we hold the blessed life itself,
and all its blessings, only on condition of our own cooperation in
keeping them; and that just as physical life dies, unless by
reception of food we nourish and continue it, so a man that is in
this condition of being justified by faith, and having peace with
God, needs, in order to the permanence of that condition, to give his
utmost effort and diligence. It will all go if he do not. All the old
state will come back again if we are slothful and negligent. We
cannot keep the treasure unless we guard it. And just because we have
it, we need to put all our mind, the earnestness of our will, and the
concentration of our efforts, into the specific work of retaining it.

For, consider how manifold and strong are the forces which are always
working against our continual possession of this justification by
faith, and consequent peace with God. There are all the ordinary
cares and duties and avocations and fortunes of our daily life,
which, indeed, may be so hallowed in their motives and in their
activities, as that they may be turned into helps instead of
hindrances, but which require a great deal of diligence and effort in
order that they should not work like grains of dust that come between
the parts of some nicely-fitting engine, and so cause friction and
disaster. There are all the daily tasks that tempt us to forget the
things that we only know by faith, and to be absorbed in the things
that we can touch and taste and handle. If a man is upon an inclined
plane, unless he is straining his muscles to go upwards, gravitation
will make short work of him, and bring him down. And unless Christian
men grip hard and continually that sense of having fellowship and
peace with God, as sure as they are living they will lose the
clearness of that consciousness, and the calm that comes from it. For
we cannot go into the world and do the work that is laid upon us all
without there being possible hostility to the Christian life in
everything that we meet. Thank God there is possible help, too, and
whether our daily calling is an enemy or a friend to our religion
depends upon the earnestness and continuousness of our own efforts.
But there is a worse force than these external distractions working
to draw us away, one that we carry within, in our own vacillating
wills and wayward hearts and treacherous affections and passions that
usually lie dormant, but wake up sometimes at the most inopportune
periods. Unless we keep a very tight hand upon ourselves, certainly
these will rob us of this consciousness of being justified by faith
which brings with it peace with God that passes understanding.

In the Isle of Wight massive cliffs rise hundreds of feet above the
sea, and seem as if they were as solid as the framework of the earth
itself. But they rest upon a sharply inclined plane of clay, and the
moisture trickles through the rifts in the majestic cliffs above, and
gets down to that slippery substance and makes it like the greased
ways down which they launch a ship; and away goes the cliff one day,
with its hundreds of feet of buttresses that have fronted the tempest
for centuries, and it lies toppled in hideous ruin on the beach
below. We have all a layer of 'blue slipper' in ourselves, and unless
we take care that no storm-water finds its way down through the
chinks in the rocks above they will slide into awful ruin. 'Being
justified, let us have peace with God,' and remember that the
exhortation is enforced not only by a consideration of the many
strong forces which tend to deprive us of this peace, but also by a
consideration of the hideous disaster that comes upon a man's whole
nature if he loses peace with God. For there is no peace with
ourselves, and there is no peace with man, and there is no peace in
face of the warfare of life and the calamities that are certainly
before us all, unless, in the deepest sanctuary of our being, there
is the peace of God because in our consciences there is peace with
God. If I desire to be at rest--and there is no blessedness but
rest--if I desire to know the sovereign joy of tranquillity,
undisturbed by my own stormy passions or by any human enmity, and to
have even the 'beasts of the field at peace with' me, and all things
my helpers and allies, there is but one way to realise the desire,
and that is the retention of peace with God that comes with being
justified by faith.

Lastly, a word or two as to the ways by which this exhortation can be
carried into effect.

I have tried to explain how the peace of which my text speaks comes
originally through Christ's work laid hold of by my faith, and now I
would say only three things.

Retain the peace by the exercise of that same faith which at first
brought it. Next, retain it by union with that same Lord from whom
you at first received it. Very significantly, in the immediate
context, we have the Apostle drawing a broad distinction between the
benefits which we have received from Christ's death, and those which
we shall receive through His life. And that is the best commentary on
the words of my text. 'If when we were enemies, we were reconciled to
God by the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be
saved by His life.' So let our faith grasp firmly the great twin
facts of the Christ who died that He might abolish the enmity, and
bring us peace; and of the Christ who lives in order that He may pour
into our hearts more and more of His own life, and so make us more
and more in His own image. And the last word that I would say, in
addition to these two plain, practical precepts is, let your conduct
be such as will not disturb your peace with God. For if a man lets
his own will rise up in rebellion against God's, whether that divine
will command duty or impose suffering, away goes all his peace. There
is no possibility of the tranquil sense of union and communion with
my Father in heaven lasting when I am in rebellion against Him. The
smallest sin destroys, for the time being, our sense of forgiveness
and our peace with God. The blue surface of the lake, mirroring in
its unmoved tranquillity the sky and the bright sun, or the solemn
stars, loses all that reflected heaven in its heart when a cat's paw
of wind ruffles its surface. If we would keep our hearts as mirrors,
in their peace, of the peace in the heavens that shine down on them,
we must fence them from the winds of evil passions and rebellious
wills. 'Oh! that thou wouldest hearken unto Me, then had thy peace
been like a river.'




ACCESS INTO GRACE

   'By whom also we have access by faith into this grace
   wherein we stand.'--ROMANS v. 2.


I may be allowed to begin with a word or two of explanation of the
terms of this passage. Note then, especially, that _also_ which
sends us back to the previous clause, and tells us that our text adds
something to what was spoken of there. What was spoken of there?
'The peace of God' which comes to a man by Jesus Christ through faith,
the removal of enmity, and the declaration of righteousness. But that
peace with God, which is the beginning of everything in the Christian
view, is only the beginning, and there is much to follow. While,
then, there is a progress clearly marked in the words of our text,
and 'access into this grace wherein we stand' is something more than,
and after, the 'peace with God,' mark next the similarity of the text
and the preceding verse. The two great truths in the latter, Christ's
mediation or intervention, and our faith as the condition by which we
receive the blessings which are brought to us in and through Him, are
both repeated, with no unmeaning tautology, but with profound
significance in our text--'By whom also we have access'--as well
as--'the peace of God'--'access _by faith_ into this grace.' So then,
for the initial blessing, and for all the subsequent blessings of the
Christian life, the way is the same. The medium and channel is one,
and the act by which we avail ourselves of the blessings coming
through that one medium is the same. Now the language of my text,
with its talking about access, faith, and grace, sounds to a great
many of us, I am afraid, very hard and remote and technical. And
there are not wanting people who tell us that all that terminology in
the New Testament is like a dying brand in the fire, where the little
kernel of glowing heat is getting covered thicker and thicker with
grey ashes. Yes; but if you blow the ashes off, the fire is there all
the same. Let us try if we can blow the ashes off.

This text seems to me in its archaic phraseology, only to need to be
pondered in order to flash up into wonderful beauty. It carries in it
a magnificent ideal of the Christian life, in three things: the
Christian place, 'access into grace'; the Christian attitude,
'wherein we stand'; and the Christian means of realising that ideal,
'through Christ' and 'by faith.' Now let us look at these three
points.

I. The Christian Place.

There is clearly a metaphor here, both in the word 'access' and in
that other one 'stand.' 'The grace' is supposed as some ample space
into which a man is led, and where he can continue, stand, and
expatiate. Or, we may say, it is regarded as a palace or
treasure-house into which we can enter. Now, if we take that great
New Testament word 'grace,' and ponder its meanings, we find that
they run something in this fashion. The central thought, grand and
marvellous, which is enshrined in it, and which often is buried for
careless ears, is that of the active love of God poured out upon
inferiors who deserve something very different. Then there follows a
second meaning, which covers a great part of the ground of the use of
the phrase in the New Testament, and that is the communication of
that love to men, the specific and individualised gifts which come
out of that great reservoir of patient, pardoning, condescending, and
bestowing love. Then there may be taken into view a meaning which is
less prominent in Scripture but not absent, namely, the resulting
beauty of character. A gracious soul ought to be, and is, a graceful
soul; a supreme loveliness is imparted to human nature by the
communication to it of the gifts which are the results of the
undeserved, free, and infinite love of God.

Now if we take all these three thoughts as blended together in the
grand metaphor of the Apostle, of the ample space into which the
Christian man passes, we get such lessons as this. A Christian life
may, and therefore should, be suffused with a continual consciousness
of the love of God. That would change everything in it. Here is some
great sweep of rolling country, perhaps a Highland moor: the little
tarns on it are grey and cold, the vegetation is gloomy and dark,
dreariness is over all the scene, because there is a great pall of
cloud drawn beneath the blue. But the sun pierces with his lances
through the grey, and crumples up the mists, and sends them flying
beneath the horizon. Then what a change in the landscape! All the
tarns that looked black and wicked are now infantile in their
innocent blue and sunny gladness, and every dimple in the heights
shows, and all the heather burns with the sunshine that falls upon
it. So my lonely doleful life, if that light from God, the beam of
His love, shines down upon it, rises into nobility, and flashes into
beauty, and is calm and fair and great, as nothing else can make it.
You may dwell in love by dwelling in God, and then your lives will be
fair. You have access into the grace; see that you go there. They
tell us that nightingales sing by the wayside by preference, and we
may have in our lives, singing a quiet tune, the continual thought of
the love of God, even whilst life's highway is dusty and rough, and
our feet are often weary in treading it. A Christian life may be, and
therefore should be, suffused with the sense of the abiding love of
God.

Take the other meaning of the word, the secondary and derived
meaning, the communication of that love to us, and that leads us to
say that a Christian life may, and therefore should, be enriched with
continual gifts from God's fullness. I said that the Apostle was
using a metaphor here, regarding the grace as being an ample
space into which a man was admitted, or we may say that he is
thinking of it as a great treasure-house. We have the right of
entrance there, where on every side, as it were, lie ingots of
uncoined gold, and masses of treasure, and we may have just as much
or as little as we choose. It is entirely in our own determination
how much of the wealth of God we shall possess. We have access to the
treasure-house; and this permit is put into our hands: 'Be it unto
thee even as thou wilt.' The size of the sack that the man brings, in
the old story, determined the amount of wealth that he carried away.
Some of you bring very tiny baskets and expect little and desire
little; you get no more than you desired and expected.

That wealth, the fullness of God, takes the shape of, as well as is
determined in its measure by the magnitude of, the vessel into which
it is put. It is multiform, and we get whatever we desire, and
whatever either our characters or our circumstances require. The one
gift assumes all forms, just as water poured into a vase takes the
shape of the vase into which it is poured. The same gift unfolds
itself in an infinite variety of manners, according to the needs of
the man to whom it is given; just as the writer's pen, the
carpenter's hammer, the farmer's ploughshare, are all made out of the
same metal. So God's grace comes to you in a different shape from
that in which it comes to me, according to our different callings and
needs, as fixed by our circumstances, our duties, our sorrows, our
temptations.

So, brethren, how shameful it is that, having the possibility of so
much, we should have the actuality of so little. There is an old
story about one of our generals in India long ago, who, when he came
home, was accused of rapacity because he had brought away so much
treasure from the Rajahs whom he had conquered, and his answer to the
charge was, 'I was surprised at my own moderation.' Ah! there are a
great many Christian people who ought to be ashamed of their
moderation. They have gone into the treasure-house; stacks of jewels,
jars of gold on all sides of them--and they have been content to come
away with some one poor little coin, when they might have been 'rich
beyond the dreams of avarice.' Brethren, you have 'access' to the
fullness of God. Whose fault is it if you are empty?

Then, further, I said there was another meaning in these great words.
The love which may suffuse our lives, the gifts, the consequence of
that love, which may enrich our lives, should, and in the measure in
which they are received will, adorn and make beautiful our lives. For
'grace' means loveliness as well as goodness, and the God who is the
fountain of it all is the fountain of 'whatsoever things are fair,'
as well as of whatsoever things are good. That suggests two
considerations on which I have no time to dwell. One is that the
highest beauty is goodness, and unless the art of a nation learns
that, its art will become filthy and a minister of sin. They talk
about 'Art for Art's sake.' Would that all these poets and painters
who are trying to find beauty in corruption--and there is a
phosphorescent glimmer in rotting wood, and a prismatic colouring on
the scum of a stagnant pond--would that all those men who are seeking
to find beauty apart from goodness, and so are turning a divine
instinct into a servant of evil, would learn that the true
gracefulness comes from the grace which is the fullness of God given
unto men.

But there is another lesson, and that is that Christian people who
say that they have their lives irradiated by the love of God, and who
profess to be receiving gifts from His full hand, are bound to take
care that their goodness is not 'harsh and crabbed,' as not only
'dull fools suppose' it to be, but as it sometimes is, but is musical
and fair. You are bound to make your goodness attractive, and to show
that the things that are 'of good report' are likewise the 'things
that are lovely.'

II. And so, now, turn to the second point here, viz. the Christian
attitude.

'The grace wherein ye _stand_'; that word is very emphatic here,
and does not merely mean 'continue,' but it suggests what I have put
into that phrase, the Christian attitude.

Two things are implied. One is that a life thus suffused by the love,
and enriched by the gifts, and adorned by the loveliness that come
from God, will be stable and steadfast. Resistance and stability are
implied in the words. One very important item in determining a man's
power of resistance, and of standing firm against whatever assaults
may be hurled against him, is the sort of footing that he has. If you
stand on slippery mud, or on the ice of a glacier, you will find it
hard to stand firm; but if you plant your foot on the grace of God,
then you will be able to 'withstand in the evil day, and having done
all to stand.' And how does a man plant his foot on the grace of God?
simply by trusting in God, and not in himself. So that the secret of
all steadfastness of life, and of all successful resistance to the
whirling onrush of temptations and of difficulties, is to set your
foot upon that rock, and then your 'goings' will be established.

Jesus Christ brings to us, in the gift of life in Him, stability
which will check the vacillations of our own hearts. We go up and
down, we yield when pressure is brought to bear against us, we are
carried off our feet often by the sudden swirl of the stream, and the
fitful blast of the wind. But His grace comes in, and will make us
able to stand against all assaults. Our poor natures, necessarily
changeable, and sinfully vacillating and weak, will be uniform, in
the measure in which the grace of God comes into our hearts. Just as
in these so-called petrifying wells, they take a bit of cloth, a
bird's nest, a billet of wood, and plunge it into the water, and the
mineral held in solution there infiltrates into the substance of the
thing plunged in, and makes it firm and inflexible: so let us plunge
our poor, changeful, vacillating resolutions, our wayward, wandering
hearts, our passions, so easily excited by temptation, into that
great fountain, and there will filter into our flexibility what will
make it firm, and into our changefulness what will give in us some
faint copy of the divine immutability, and we shall stand fast in the
Lord and in the power of His might.

Further, in regard to this attitude, which is the result of the
possession of grace, we may say that it indicates not only stability
and steadfastness, but erectness, as in opposition to crouching or
bowing. A man's independence is guaranteed by his dependence upon,
and his possession of, that communicated grace of God. And so you
have the fact that the phase of the Christian teaching which has laid
most stress on the decrees and sovereign will of God, on divine grace
in fact, and too little upon the human side--the phase which is
roughly described as Calvinism--has underlain the liberties of
Europe, and has stiffened men into the rejection of all priestly and
civic domination. 'Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is
liberty,' and if a man has in his heart the grace of God, then he
stands erect as a man. 'Ye are bought with a price; be ye not the
servants of men.' The Christian democracy, the Christian rejection of
all sacerdotal and other domination, flows from the access of each
individual Christian to the fountain of all wisdom, the only source
of law and command, the inspirer of all strength, the giver of all
grace. By faith ye stand. 'Stand fast therefore in the liberty
wherewith Christ has made you free.'

III. Lastly, and only a word; we have here the Christian way of
entrance into grace.

I have already remarked on the emphasis with which, both in my text
and in the preceding clause, there are laid down the two conditions
of possessing this grace, or the peace which precedes it: 'By
Christ--through faith.' Notice, too, that Jesus Christ gives us
'access.' Now that expression is but an imperfect rendering of the
original. If it were not for its trivial associations, one might read
instead of 'access,' introduction, 'by whom we have introduction into
this grace wherein we stand.' The thought is that Jesus Christ
secures us entry into this ample space, this treasure-house, as some
court officer might take by the hand a poor rustic, standing on the
threshold of the palace, and lead him through all the glittering
series of unfamiliar splendour, and present him at last in the
central ring around the king. The reality that underlies the metaphor
is plain. We sinners can never pass into that central glory, nor ever
possess those gifts of grace, unless the barrier that stands between
us and God, between us and His highest gifts of love, is swept away.

I recall an old legend where two knights are represented as seeking
to enter a palace, where there is a mysterious fire burning in the
middle of the portal. One of them tries to pass through, and recoils
scorched; but when the other essays an entrance the fierce fire
sinks, and the path is cleared. Jesus Christ has died, and I say it
with all reverence, as His blood touches the fire it flickers down
and the way is opened 'into the holiest of all, whither the
Forerunner is for us entered.' He both brings the grace and makes it
possible that we should go in where the grace is.

But Jesus Christ's work is nothing to you unless your personal faith
comes in, and so that is pointed to in the second of the clauses
here: '_By faith_ we have access.' That is no arbitrary appointment.
It lies in the very nature of the gift and of the recipient. How can
God give access into that grace to a man who shrinks from being near
Him; who does not want 'access,' and who could not use the grace if
he had it? How can God bestow inward and spiritual gifts upon any man
who closes his heart against them, and will not have them? My faith
is the condition; Christ is the Giver. If I ally myself to Him by my
faith, He gives to me. If I do not, with all the will to do it, He
cannot bestow His best gifts any more than a man who stretches out
his hand to another sinking in the flood can lift him out, and set
him on the safe shore, if the drowning man's hand is not stretched
out to grasp the rescuer's outstretched hand.

Brethren, God is infinitely willing to give the choicest gifts of His
love to us all, to gladden, to enrich, to adorn, to make stable and
erect. But He cannot give them unless you will trust Him. 'It pleased
the Father that in Him should all fullness dwell.' That alabaster box
is brought to earth. It was broken on the Cross that 'the house'
might be 'filled with the odour of the ointment.' Our faith is the
only condition; it is only the condition, but it is the indispensable
condition, of our being anointed with that fragrant anointing. He,
and He only, can give us the fullness of God.




THE SOURCES OF HOPE

   'We rejoice in hope of the glory of God. 3. And not only
   so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that
   tribulation worketh patience; 4. And patience, experience;
   and experience, hope.'--ROMANS v. 2-4.


We have seen in a previous sermon that the Apostle in the foregoing
context is sketching a grand outline of the ideal Christian life, as
all rooted in 'being justified by faith,' and flowering into 'peace
with God,' 'access into grace,' and a firm stand against all
antagonists and would-be masters. In our text he advances to complete
the outline by sketching the true Christian attitude towards the
future. I have ventured to take so pregnant and large a text, because
there is a very striking and close connection throughout the verses,
which is lost unless we take them together. Note, then, 'we rejoice
in hope,' 'we glory in tribulation.' Now, it is one word in the
original which is diversely rendered in these two clauses by
'rejoice' and 'glory.' The latter is a better rendering than the
former, because the original expression designates not only the
emotion of joy, but the expression of it, especially in words. So it
is frequently rendered in the New Testament by the word 'boast,'
which, of course, has unpleasant associations, which scarcely fit it
for use here. So then you see Paul regards it as possible for, and
more than possibly characteristic of, a Christian, that the very same
emotion should he excited by that great bright future hope, and by
the blackness of present sorrow. That is strong meat; and so he goes
on to explain how he thinks it can and must be so, and points out
that trouble, through a series of results, arrives at last at this,
that if it is rightly borne, it flashes up into greater brightness
the hope which has grasped the glory of God. So then we have here,
not only a wonderful designation of the object around which Christian
hope twines its tendrils, but of the double source from which that
hope may come, and of the one emotion with which Christian people
should front the darkness of the present and the brightness of the
future. Ah! how different our lives would be if that ideal of a
steadfast hope and an untroubled joy were realised by each of us. It
may be. It should be. So I ask you to look at these three points
which I have suggested.

I. That wonderful designation of the one object of Christian hope
which should fill, with an uncoruscating and unflickering light, all
that dark future.

'We rejoice in hope of the glory of God.' Now, I suppose I need not
remind you that that phrase 'the glory of God' is, in the Old
Testament, used especially to mean the light that dwelt between the
cherubim above the mercy-seat; the symbol of the divine perfections
and the token of the Divine Presence. The reality of which it was a
symbol is the total splendour, so to speak, of that divine nature, as
it rays itself out into all the universe. And, says Paul, the true
hope of the Christian man is nothing less than that of that glory he
shall be, in some true sense, and in an eternally growing degree, the
real possessor. It is a tremendous claim, and one which leads us into
deep places that I dare not venture into now, as to the resemblance
between the human person and the Divine Person, notwithstanding all
the differences which of course exist, and which only a presumptuous
form of religion has ventured to treat as transitory or
insignificant. Let me use a technical word, and say that it is no
pantheistic absorption in an impersonal Light, no Nirvana of union
with a vague whole, which the Apostle holds out here, but it is the
closest possible union, personality being saved and individual
consciousness being intensified. It is the clothing of humanity with
so much of that glory as can be imparted to a finite creature. That
means perfect knowledge, perfect purity, perfect love, and that means
the dropping away of all weaknesses and the access of strange new
powers, and that means the end of the schism between 'will' and
'ought,' and of the other schism between 'will' and 'can.' It means
what this Apostle says: 'Whom He justified them He also glorified,'
and what He says again, 'We all, beholding as in a glass'--or rather,
perhaps, mirroring as a glass does--'the glory, are changed into the
same image.'

The very heart of Christianity is that the Divine Light of which that
Shekinah was but a poor and transitory symbol has 'tabernacled'
amongst men in the Christ, and has from Him been communicated, and is
being communicated in such measure as earthly limitations and
conditions permit, and that these do point on assuredly to perfect
impartation hereafter, when 'we shall be like Him, for we shall see
Him as He is.' The Three could walk in the furnace of fire, because
there was One with them, 'like unto the Son of God.' 'Who among us
shall dwell with the everlasting fire,' the fire of that divine
perfection? They who have had introduction by Christ into the grace,
and who will be led by Him into the glory.

Now, brethren, it seems to me to be of great importance that this,
the loftiest of conceptions of that future life, should be the main
aspect under which we think of it. It is well to speak of rest from
toil; it is well to speak of all the negations of present
unfavourable, afflictive conditions which that future presents to us.
And perhaps there is none of the aspects of it which appeals to
deeper feelings in ourselves, than those which say 'there shall be no
night there,' 'there shall be no tears there, neither sorrow nor
sighing'; 'there shall be no toil there.' But we must rise above all
that, for our heaven is to live in God, and to be possessors of His
glory. Do not let us dwell upon the symbols instead of the realities.
Do not let us dwell only on the oppositions and contradictions to
earth. Let us rather rise high above symbols, high above negations,
to the positive truth, and not contented with saying 'We shall be
full of blessedness; we shall be full of purity; we shall be full of
knowledge,' let us rather think of that which embraces them all--we
shall be full of God.

So much, then, for the one object of Christian hope. We have here--

II. The double source of that hope.

Observe that the first clause of my text comes as the last term in a
sequence. It began with 'being justified by faith.' The second round
of the ladder was, 'we have peace with God.' The third, 'we have
access into this grace.' The fourth, 'we stand,' and then comes, 'we
rejoice in hope of the glory of God.' That is to say, to put it into
general words, and, of course, presupposing the revelation in Jesus
Christ as the basis of all, without which there is no assured hope of
a future beyond the grave, then the facts of a Christian man's life
are for him the best brighteners of the hope beyond. Of course, that
is so. 'Justified by faith'--'peace with God'--'access into grace';
what, in the name of common-sense, can death do with these things?
How can its blunted sword cut the bond that unites a soul that has
had such experiences as these with the source of them all? Nothing
can be more grotesque, nothing more incongruous, than to think that
that subordinate and accidental fact, whose region is the physical,
has anything whatever to do with this higher region of consciousness.

And, further than that, it is absolutely unthinkable to a man in the
possession of these spiritual gifts, that they should ever come to a
close; and the fact that in the precise degree in which we realise as
our very own possession, here and now, these Christian emotions and
blessings, we instinctively rise to the belief that they are 'not for
an age, but for all time,' and not for all time, but for eternity, is
itself, if not a proof, yet a very strong presumption, if you believe
in God, that a man who thus 'feels he was not made to die' because he
has grasped the Eternal, is right in so feeling. If, too, we look at
the experiences themselves, they all have the stamp of
incompleteness, and suggest completeness by their own incompleteness.
The new moon with its ragged edge not more surely prophesies its
completed silver round, than do the experiences of the Christian life
here, in their greatness and in their smallness, declare that there
come a time and an order of things in which what was thwarted
tendency shall be accomplished result. The tender green spikelet,
pushing up through the brown clods, does not more surely prophesy the
waving yellow ear, nor the broad highway on which a man comes in the
wilderness more surely declare that there is a village at the end of
it, than do the facts of the Christian life, here and now, attest the
validity of the hope of the glory of God.

And so, brethren, if you wish to brighten that great light that fills
the future, see to it that your present Christianity is fuller of
'peace with God,' 'access into grace,' and the firm, erect standing
which flows from these. When the springs in the mountains dry up, the
river in the valley shrinks; and when they are full, it glides along
level with the top of its banks. So when our Christian life in the
present is richest, our Christian hope of the future will be the
brighter. Look into yourselves. Is there anything there that
witnesses to that great future; anything there that is obviously
incipient, and destined to greater power; anything there which is
like a tropical plant up here in 45 degrees of north latitude,
managing to grow, but with dwarfed leaves and scanty flowers and half
shrivelled and sourish fruit, and that in the cold dreams of the warm
native land? Reflecting telescopes show the stars in a mirror, and
the observer looks down to see the heavens. Look into yourselves, and
see whether, on the polished plate within, there are any images of
the stars that move around the Throne of God.

But let us turn for a moment to the second source to which the
Apostle traces the Christian hope here. I must not be tempted to more
than just a word of explanation, but perhaps you will tolerate that.
Paul says that trouble works patience, that is to say, not only
passive endurance, but brave persistence in a course, in spite of
antagonisms. That is what trouble does to a man when it is rightly
borne. Of course the Apostle is speaking here of its ideal operation,
and not of the reality which alas! often is seen when our
tribulations lash us into impatience, or paralyse our efforts.
Tribulation worketh patience, 'and patience _experience_.' That is a
difficult word to put into English. There underlies it the frequent
thought which is familiar in Scripture, of trouble of all kinds as
testing a man, whether as the refiner's fire or the winnower's fan.
It tests a man, and if he bears the trouble with patient persistence,
then he has passed the test and is approved. Patient perseverance
thus works approval, or proof of the man's Christianity, and, still
more, proof of the reality and power of the Christ whom his
Christianity grasps. And so from out of that approval or proof which
comes, through perseverance, from tribulation, there rises, of
course, in that heart that has been tested and has stood, a calm hope
that the future will be as the past, and that, having fought through
six troubles, by God's help the seventh will be vanquished also, till
at last troubles will end, and heaven be won.

Brethren, there is the true point of view from which to look, not
only at tribulations, but at all the trials, for they too bring
trials, that lie in duty and in enjoyment, and in earthly things.
They are meant to work in us a conviction, by our experience of
having been able to meet them aright, of the reality of our grasp of
God, and of the reality and power of the God whom we grasp. If we
took that point of view in regard to all the changes of this
changeful life, we should not so often be bewildered and upset by the
darkest of our sorrows. The shining lancets and cruel cutting
instruments that the surgeon lays out on his table before he begins
the operation are very dreadful. But the way to think of them is that
they are there in order to remove from a man what it does him harm to
keep, and what, if it is not taken away, will kill him. So life, with
its troubles, great and small, is all meant for this, to make us
surer of, and bring us closer to, our God, and to brace and
strengthen us in our own personal character. And if it does that,
then blessed be everything that produces these results, and leads us
thereby to glorying in the troubles by which shines out on us a
brighter hope.

So there are the two sources, you see: the one is the blessedness of
the Christian life, the other the sorrows of the outward life, and
both may converge upon the brightening of our Christian hope. Our
rainbow is the child of the marriage of the sun and the rain. The
Christian hope comes from being 'justified by faith, having peace
with God ... and access into grace,' and it comes from tribulation,
which 'worketh patience,' and patience which 'worketh approval.' The
one spark is struck from the hard flint by the cold steel, and the
other is kindled by the sun itself, but they are both fire.

And so, lastly, we have here--

III. The one emotion with which the Christian should front all the
facts, inward and outward, of his earthly life.

'We glory in the hope,' 'we glory in tribulation,' I need not dwell
upon the lesson which is taught us here by the fact that the Apostle
puts as one in a series of Christian characteristics this of a
steadfast and all-embracing joy. I do not believe that we Christian
people half enough realise how imperative a Christian duty, as well
as how great a Christian privilege, it is to be glad always. You have
no right to be anxious; you are wrong to be hypochondriac and
depressed, and weary and melancholy. True; there are a great many
occasions in our Christian life which minister sadness. True; the
Christian joy looks very gloomy to a worldly eye. But there are far
more occasions which, if we were right, would make joy instinctive,
and which, whether we are right or not, make it obligatory upon us. I
need not speak of how, if that hope were brighter than it commonly is
with us, and if it were more constantly present to our minds and
hearts, we should sing with gladness. I need not dwell upon that
great and wonderful paradox by which the co-existence of sorrow and
of joy is possible. The sorrows are on the surface; beneath there may
be rest. All the winds of heaven may rave across the breast of ocean,
and fret it into clouds of spume against a storm-swept sky. But deep
down there is stillness, and yet not stagnation, because there is the
great motion that brings life and freshness; and so, though there
will be wind-vexed surfaces on our too-often agitated spirits, there
ought to be deeper than these the calm setting of the whole ocean of
our nature towards God Himself. It is possible, as this Apostle has
it, to be 'sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.' It is possible, as his
brother Apostle has it, to 'rejoice greatly, though now for a season
we are in sorrow through manifold temptations.' Look back upon your
lives from the point of view that your tribulation is an instrument
to produce hope, and you will be able to thank God for all the way by
which He has led you.

Now, brethren, the plain lesson of all this is just that we have
here, in these texts, a linked chain, one end of which is wrapped
around our sinful hearts, and the other is fastened to the Throne of
God. You cannot drop any of the links, and you must begin at the
beginning, if you are to be carried on to the end. If we are to have
a joy immovable, we must have a 'steadfast hope.' If we are to have a
'steadfast hope,' we must have a present 'grace.' If we are to have a
present 'grace,' and 'access' to the fullness of God, we must have
'peace with God.' If we are to have 'peace with God,' we must have
the condemnation and the guilt taken away. If we are to have the
condemnation and the guilt taken away, Jesus Christ must take them.
If Jesus Christ is to take them away, we must have faith in Him. Then
you can work it backward, and begin at your own end, and say, 'If I
have faith in Jesus Christ, then every link of the chain in due
succession will pass through my hand, and I shall have justifying,
peace, access, the grace, erectness, hope, and exultation, and at
last He will lead me by the hand into the glory for which I dare to
hope, the glory which the Father gave to Him before the foundation of
the world, and which He will give to me when the world has passed
away in fervent heat.'




A THREEFOLD CORD

   'And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is
   shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is
   given unto us.'--ROMANS v. 5.


We have seen in former sermons that, in the previous context, the
Apostle traces Christian hope to two sources: one, the series of
experiences which follow 'being justified by faith' and the other,
those which follow on trouble rightly borne. Those two golden chains
together hold up the precious jewel of hope. But a chain that is to
bear a weight must have a staple, or it will fall to the ground. And
so Paul here turns to yet another thought, and, going behind both our
inward experiences and our outward discipline, falls back on that
which precedes all. After all is said and done, the love of God,
eternal, self-originated, the source of all Christian experiences
because of the work of Christ which originates them all, is the root
fact of the universe, and the guarantee that our highest
anticipations and desires are not unsubstantial visions, but morning
dreams, which are proverbially sure to be fulfilled. God is love;
therefore the man who trusts Him shall not be put to shame.

But you will notice that here the Apostle not only adduces the love
of God as the staple, so to speak, from which these golden chains
hang, but that he traces the heart's being suffused with that love to
its source, and as, of course, is always the case in the order of
analysis, that which was last in time comes first in statement. We
begin at the surface, and go down and down and down from effect to
cause, and yet again to the cause of that cause which is itself
effect. We strip off, as it were, layer after layer, until we get to
the living centre--hope comes from the love, the love comes from the
Spirit in the heart. And so to get at the order of time and of
manifestation, we must reverse the order of analysis in my text, and
begin where it ends. So we have here three things--the Spirit given,
the love shed abroad by that Spirit, and the hope established by that
love. Now just look at them for a moment.

I. The Spirit given.

Now, the first point to notice here is that the Revised Version
presents the meaning of our text more accurately than the Authorised
Version, because, instead of reading 'is given,' it correctly reads
'was given.' And any of you that can consult the original will see
that the form of the language implies that the Apostle is thinking,
not so much of a continuous bestowment, as of a definite moment when
this great gift was bestowed upon the man to whom he is speaking.

So the first question is, when was that Spirit given to these Roman
Christians? The Christian Church has been split in two by its answers
to that question. One influential part, which has taken a new lease
of life amongst us to-day, says 'in baptism,' and the other says 'at
the moment of faith.' I am not going to be tempted into controversial
paths now, for my purpose is a very different one, but I cannot help
just a word about the former of these two answers. 'Given in
baptism,' say our friends, and I venture to think that they thereby
degrade Christianity into a system of magic, bringing together two
entirely disparate things, an external physical act and a spiritual
change. I do not say anything about the disastrous effects that have
followed from such a conception of the medium by which this greatest
of all Christian gifts is effected upon men. Since the Spirit who is
given is life, the result of the gift of that Spirit is a new life,
and we all know what disastrous and debasing consequences have
followed from that dogma of regeneration by baptism. No doubt it is
perfectly true that normally, in the early Church, the Divine Spirit
was given at baptism; but for one thing, that general rule had
exceptions, as in the case of Cornelius, and, for another thing,
though it was given _at_ baptism, it was not given _in_
baptism, but it was given through faith, of which in those days
baptism was the sequel and the sign.

But I pass altogether from this, and fall back on the great words
which, to me at least, if there were no other, would determine the
whole answer to this question as to when the Spirit was given: 'This
spake He of the Holy Ghost, which they that _believe_ on Him
should receive'; and I would ask the modern upholders of the other
theory the indignant question which the Apostle Paul fired off out of
his heavy artillery at their ancient analogues, the circumcisers in
the Galatian Church: 'This only would I know of you: Received ye the
Holy Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?'

The answer which the evangelical Christian gives to this ancient
question suggested by my text, 'When was that Divine Spirit
bestowed?' is congruous with the spirituality of the Christian faith,
and is eminently reasonable. For the condition required is the
opening of the whole nature in willing welcome to the entrance of the
Divine Spirit, and as surely as, wherever there is an indentation of
the land, and a concavity of a receptive bay, the ocean will pour
into it and fill it, so surely where a heart is open for God, God in
His Divine Spirit will enter into that heart, and there will shed His
blessed influences.

So, dear brethren, and this is the main point to which I wish to
direct your attention, the Apostle here takes it for granted that all
these Roman Christians knew in themselves the truth of what he was
saying, and had an experience which confirmed his assertion that the
Divine Spirit of God was given to them when they believed. Ah! I
wonder if that is true about us professing Christians; if we are
aware in any measure of a higher life than our own having been
breathed into us; if we are aware in any measure of a Divine Spirit
dwelling in our spirits, moulding, lifting, enlightening, guiding,
constraining, and yet not coercing? We ought to be, 'Know ye not that
the Spirit dwelleth in you, except ye be rejected?' Brethren, it
seems to me to be of the very last importance, in this period of the
Church's history, that the proportion between the Church's teaching
as to the work of Christ on the Cross, and as to the consequent work
of the Spirit of Christ in our hearts and spirits, should be changed.
We must become more mystical if we are not to become less Christian.
And the fact that so many of us seem to imagine that the whole Gospel
lies in this, that 'He died for our sins according to the
Scriptures,' and have relegated the teaching that He, by His Spirit,
lives in us, if we are His disciples, to a less prominent place, has
done enormous harm, not only to the type of Christian life, but to
the conception of what Christianity is, both amongst those who
receive it, and amongst those who do not accept it, making it out to
be nothing more than a means of escape from the consequences of our
transgression, instead of recognising it for what it is, the
impartation of a new life which will flower into all beauty, and bear
fruit in all goodness.

There was a question put once to a group of disciples, in
astonishment and incredulity, by this Apostle, when he said to the
twelve disciples in Ephesus, 'Did you receive the Holy Ghost when you
believed?' The question might well be put to a multitude of
professing Christians amongst us, and I am afraid a great many of
them, if they answered truly, would answer as those disciples did,
'We have not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost.'

And now for the second point in my text--

II. The love which is shed abroad by that Spirit.

Now, I suppose I do not need to do more than point out that 'the love
of God' here means His to us, and not ours to Him, and that the
metaphor employed is but partially represented by that rendering
'shed abroad.' 'Poured out' would better convey Paul's image, which
is that of a flood sent coursing through the heart, or, perhaps,
rather lying there, as a calm deep lake on whose unruffled surface
the heavens, with all their stars, are reflected. Of course, if God's
love to us thus suffuses a heart, then there follows the
consciousness of that love; though it is not the consciousness of the
love that the Apostle is primarily speaking of, but that which lies
behind it, the actual flowing into the human heart of that sweet and
all-satisfying Love. This Divine Spirit that dwells in us, if we are
trusting in Christ, will pour it in full streams into our else empty
hearts. Surely there is nothing incongruous with the nature either of
God or of man, in believing that thus a real communication is
possible between them, and that by thoughts the occasions of which we
cannot trace, by moments of elevation, by swift, piercing
convictions, by sudden clear illuminations, God may speak, and will
speak, in our waiting hearts.

  'Such rebounds the inmost ear
    Catches often from afar.
  Listen, prize them, hold them dear;
    For of God, of God, they are.'

But we must not forget, too, that, according to the whole strain of
New Testament thinking, the means by which that Divine Spirit does
pour out the flashing flood of the love of God into a man's heart is,
as Jesus Christ Himself has taught us, by taking the things of Christ
and showing them to us.

Now, as I said about a former point of my sermon,
that the Apostle was taking for granted that this gift of the Spirit
belonged to all Christian people; so here again he takes for granted
that in every Christian heart there is, by a divine operation, the
presence of the love, and of the consciousness of the love, of God.
And, again, the question comes to some of us stunningly, to all of us
warningly, Is that a transcript of our experience? It is the ideal of
a Christian life; it is meant that it should be so, and should be so
continuously. The stream that is poured out is intended to run summer
and winter, not to be dried up in drought, nor made turbid and noisy
in flood, but with equable flow throughout. I fear me that the
experience of most good people is rather like one of those tropical
wadies, or nullahs in Eastern lands, where there alternate times of
spate and times of drought; and instead of a flashing stream, pouring
life everywhere, and full to the top of its banks, there is for long
periods a dismal stretch of white sun-baked stones, and a chaos of
tumbled rocks with not a drop of water in the channel. The Spirit
pours God's love into men's spirits, but there may be dams and
barriers, so that no drop of the water comes into the empty heart.

Our Quaker friends have a great deal to say about 'waiting for the
springing of the life within us.' Never mind about the phraseology:
what is meant is profoundly true, that no Christian man will realise
this blessing unless he knows how to sit still and meditate, and let
the gracious influence soak into him. Thus being quiet, he may, he
will, find rising in his heart the consciousness of the love of God.
You will not, if you give only broken momentary sidelong glances; you
will not, if you do not lie still. If you hold up a cup in a shaking
hand beneath a fountain, and often twitch it aside, you will get
little water in it; and unless we 'wait on the Lord,' we shall not
'renew our strength.' You can build a dam as they do in Holland that
will keep out, not only the waters of a river, but the waters of an
ocean, and not a drop will come through the dike. Brethren, we must
keep ourselves in the love of God.

Lastly, we have here--

III. The hope that is established by the love poured out.

I need not dwell at any length upon this point, because, to a large
extent, it has been anticipated in former sermons, but just a word or
two may be permitted me. That love, you may be very sure, is not
going to lose its objects in the dust. The old Psalmist who knew so
much less than we do as to the love of God, and knew nothing of the
whispers of a Divine Spirit within his heart charged with the message
of the love as it was manifested in Jesus Christ, had risen to a
height of confidence, the beauty of the expression of which is often
lost sight of, because we insist upon dealing with it as merely being
a Messianic prophecy, which it is, but not merely: 'Thou wilt not
leave my soul in Sheol, neither wilt Thou suffer Thy beloved' (for
that is the real meaning of the word translated 'thy Holy
One')--'Thou wilt not suffer the child of Thy love to see
corruption.' Death's bony fingers can untie all true lover's knots
but one; and they fumble at that one in vain. God will not lose His
child in the grave.

That love, we may be very sure, will not foster in us hopes that are
to be disappointed. Now, it is a fact that the more a man feels that
God loves him, the less is it possible for him to believe that that
love will ever terminate, or that he shall 'all die.' In the lock of
a canal, as the water pours in, the vessel rises. In our hearts, as
the flood of the full love of God pours in, our hopes are borne up
and up, nearer and nearer to the heavens. Since it is so, we must
find in the fact that the constant and necessary result of communion
with Him here on earth is a conviction of the immortality of that
communion, a very, very strong guarantee for ourselves that the hope
is not in vain. And if you say that that is all merely subjective,
yet I think that the universality of the experience is a fact to be
taken into account even by those who doubt the reality of the hope,
and for ourselves, at all events, is a sufficient ground on which to
rest. We have the historical fact of the Resurrection of Jesus
Christ. We have the fact that wherever there has been earthly
experience of true communion with God, there, and in the measure in
which it has been realised, the thermometer of our hopes of
immortality, so to speak, has risen. 'God is love,' and God will not
bring the man that trusts Him to confusion.

And may we not venture to say that, contemplating the analogous
earthly love, we are permitted to believe that that divine Lover of
our souls desires to have His beloved with Him, and desires that
there be no separation between Him and them, either, if I might so
say, in place or in disposition? As certainly as husband and wife,
lover and friend, long to be together, and need it for perfection and
for rest, so surely will that divine love not be satisfied until it
has gathered all its children to its breast and made them partakers
of itself.

There are many, many hopes that put the men who cherish them to
shame, partly because they are never fulfilled, partly because,
though fulfilled, they are disappointed, since the reality is so much
less than the anticipation. Who does not know that the spray of
blossom on the tree looks far more lovely hanging above our heads
than when it is grasped by us? Who does not know that the fish
struggling on the hook seems heavier than it turns out to be when
lying on the bank? We go to the rainbow's end, and we find, not a pot
of gold, but a huddle of cold, wet mist. There is one man that is
entitled to say: 'To-morrow shall be as this day, and much more
abundant.' Who is he? Only the man whose hope is in the Lord his God.
If we open our hearts by faith, then these three lines of sequence of
which we have been speaking will converge, and we shall have the hope
that is the shining apex of 'being justified by faith,' and the hope
that is the calm result of trouble and agitation, and the hope that,
travelling further and higher than anything in our inward experience
or our outward discipline, grasps the key-word of the universe, 'God
is love,' and triumphantly makes sure that 'neither death nor life,
nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor
things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall
be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus
our Lord.'




WHAT PROVES GOD'S LOVE

   'God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we
   were yet sinners, Christ died for us.'--ROMANS v. 8.


We have seen in previous sermons on the preceding context that the
Apostle has been tracing various lines of sequence, all of which
converge upon Christian hope. The last of these pointed to the fact
that the love of God, poured into a heart like oil into a lamp,
brightened that flame; and having thus mentioned the great Christian
revelation of God as love, Paul at once passes to emphasise the
historical fact on which the conviction of that love rests, and goes
on to say that 'the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the
Holy Ghost which is given to us, _for_ when we were yet without
strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.' Then there rises
before him the thought of how transcendent and unparalleled a love is
that which pours its whole preciousness on unworthy and unresponsive
hearts. He thinks to himself--'We are all ungodly; without
strength--yet, He died for us. Would any man do that? No! for,' says
he, 'it will be a hard thing to find any one ready to die for a
righteous man--a man rigidly just and upright, and because rigidly
just, a trifle hard, and therefore not likely to touch a heart to
sacrifice; and even for a good man, in whom austere righteousness has
been softened and made attractive, and become graciousness and
beneficence, well! it is just within the limits of possibility that
somebody might be found even to die for a man that had laid such a
strong hand upon his affections. But God commendeth His love in that
while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.' Now, when Paul says
'commend,' he uses a very significant word which is employed in two
ways in the New Testament. It sometimes means to establish, or to
prove, or to make certain. But 'prove' is a cold word, and the
expression also means to recommend, to set forth in such a way as to
appeal to the heart, and God does both in that great act. He
establishes the fact, and He, as it were, sweeps it into a man's
heart, on the bosom of that full tide of self-sacrifice.

So there are two or three points that arise from these words, on
which I desire to dwell now--to lay them upon our hearts, and not
only upon our understandings. For it is a poor thing to prove the
love of God, and we need that not only shall we be sure of it, but
that we shall be softened by it. So now let me ask you to look with
me, first, at this question--

I. What Paul thought Jesus Christ died for.

'Died _for_ us.' Now that expression plainly implies two things:
first, that Christ died of His own accord, and being impelled by a
great motive, beneficence; and, second, that that voluntary death,
somehow or other, is for our behoof and advantage. The word in the
original, 'for,' does not define in what way that death ministers to
our advantage, but it does assert that for those Roman Christians who
had never seen Jesus Christ, and by consequence for you and me
nineteen centuries off the Cross, there is benefit in the fact of
that death. Now, suppose we quote an incident in the story of
missionary martyrdom. There was a young lady, whom some of us knew
and loved, in a Chinese mission station, who, with the rest of the
missionary band, was flying. Her life was safe. She looked back, and
saw a Chinese boy that her heart twined round, in danger. She
returned to save him; they laid hold of her and flung her into the
burning house, and her charred remains have never been found. That
was a death for another, but 'Jesus died for us' in a deeper sense
than that. Take another case. A man sets himself to some great cause,
not his own, and he sees that in order to bless humanity, either by
the proclamation of some truth, or by the origination of some great
movement, or in some other way, if he is to carry out his purpose,
he must give his life. He does so, and dies a martyr. What he aimed
at could only be done by the sacrifice of his life. The death was a
means to his end, and he died for his fellows. That is not the depth
of the sense in which Paul meant that Jesus Christ died for us. It
was not that He was true to His message, and, like many another
martyr, died. There is only one way, as it seems to me, in which any
beneficial relation can be established between the Death of Christ
and us, and it is that when He died He died for us, because 'He bare
our sins in His own body on the tree.'

Dear brethren, I dare say some of you do not take that view, but I
know not how justice can be done to the plain words of Scripture
unless this is the point of view from which we look at the Cross of
Calvary--that there the Lamb of Sacrifice was bearing, and bearing
away, the sins of the whole world. I know that Christian men who
unite in the belief that Christ's death was a sacrifice and an
atonement diverge from one another in their interpretations of the
way in which that came to be a fact, and I believe, for my part, that
the divergent interpretations are like the divergent beams of light
that fall upon men who stand round the same great luminary, and that
all of them take their origin in, and are part of the manifestation
of, the one transcendent fact, which passes all understanding, and
gathers into itself all the diverse conceptions of it which are
formed by limited minds. He died for us because, in His death, our
sins are taken away and we are restored to the divine favour.

I know that Jesus Christ is said to have made far less of that aspect
of His work in the Gospels than His disciples have done in the
Epistles, and that we are told that, if we go back to Jesus, we shall
not find the doctrine which for some of us is the first form in which
the Gospel finds its way into the hearts of men. I admit that the
fully-developed teaching followed the fact, as was necessarily the
case. I do not admit that Jesus Christ 'spake nothing concerning
Himself' as the sacrifice for the world's sins. For I hear from His
lips--not to dwell upon other sayings which I could quote--I hear
from His lips, 'The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to
minister'--that is only half His purpose--'and to give His life a
ransom instead of the many.' You cannot strike the atoning aspect of
His death out of that expression by any fair handling of the words.

And what does the Lord's Supper mean? Why did Jesus Christ select
that one point of His life as the point to be remembered? Why did He
institute the double memorial, the body parted from the blood being a
sign of a violent death? I know of no explanation that makes that
Lord's Supper an intelligible rite except the explanation which says
that He came, to live indeed, and in that life to be a sacrifice, but
to make the sacrifice complete by Himself bearing the consequences of
transgression, and making atonement for the sins of the world.

Brethren, that is the only aspect of Christ's death which makes it of
any consequence to us. Strip it of that, and what does it matter to
me that He died, any more than it matters to me that any
philanthropist, any great teacher, any hero or martyr or saint,
should have died? As it seems to me, nothing. Christ's death is
surrounded by tenderly pathetic and beautiful accompaniments. As a
story it moves the hearts of men, and 'purges them, by pity and by
terror.' But the death of many a hero of tragedy does all that.
And if you want to have the Cross of Christ held upright in its place
as the Throne of Christ and the attractive power for the whole world,
you must not tamper with that great truth, but say, 'He died for our
sins, according to the Scriptures.'

Now, there is a second question that I wish to ask, and that is--

II. How does Christ's death 'commend' God's love?

That is a strange expression, if you will think about it, that
'_God_ commendeth His love towards us in that _Christ_
died.' If you take the interpretation of Christ's death of which I
have already been speaking, one could have understood the Apostle if
he had said, 'Christ commendeth His love towards us in that Christ
died.' But where is the force of the fact of a _man's_ death to
prove _God's_ love? Do you not see that underlying that swift
sentence of the Apostle there is a presupposition, which he takes for
granted? It is so obvious that I do not need to dwell upon it to
vindicate his change of persons, viz. that 'God was in Christ,' in
such fashion as that whatsoever Christ did was the revelation of God.
You cannot suppose, at least I cannot see how you can, that there is
any force of proof in the words of my text, unless you come up to the
full belief, 'God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.'

Suppose some great martyr who dies for his fellows. Well, all honour
to him, and the race will come to his tomb for a while, and bring
their wreaths and their sorrow. But what bearing has his death upon
our knowledge of God's love towards us? None whatever, or at most a
very indirect and shadowy one. We have to dig deeper down than that.
'God commends His love ... in that Christ died.' 'He that hath seen
Me hath seen the Father.' And we have the right and the obligation to
argue back from all that is manifest in the tender Christ to the
heart of God, and say, not only, 'God so loved the world that He'
sent His Son, but to see that the love that was in Christ is the
manifestation of the love of God Himself.

So there stands the Cross, the revelation to us, not only of a
Brother's sacrifice, but of a Father's love; and that because Jesus
Christ is the revelation of God as being the 'eradiation of His
glory, and the express image of His person.' Friends! light does pour
out from that Cross, whatever view men take of it. But the omnipotent
beam, the all-illuminating radiance, the transforming light, the heat
that melts, are all dependent on our looking at it--I do not only
say, as Paul looked at it, nor do I even say as Christ looked at it,
but as the deep necessities of humanity require that the world should
look at it, as the altar whereon is laid the sacrifice for our sins,
the very Son of God Himself. To me the great truths of the
Incarnation and the Atonement of Jesus Christ are not points in a
mere speculative theology; they are the pulsating vital centre of
religion. And every man needs them in his own experience.

I was going to have said a word or two here--but it is not
necessary--about the need that the love of God should be irrefragably
established, by some plain and undeniable and conspicuous fact. I
need not dwell upon the ambiguous oracles which--

  'Nature, red in tooth and claw,
  With rapine'

gives forth, nor on how the facts of human life, our own sorrows, and
the world's miseries, the tears that swathe the earth, as it rolls on
its orbit, like a misty atmosphere, war against the creed that God is
love. I need not remind you, either, of how deep, in our own hearts,
when the conscience begins to speak its _not_ ambiguous oracles,
there does rise the conviction that there is much in us which it is
impossible should be the object of God's love. Nor need I remind you
how all these difficulties in believing in a God who is love, based
on the contradictory aspects of nature, and the mysteries of
providence, and the whisperings of our own consciousness, are proved
to have been insuperable by the history of the world, where we find
mythologies and religions of all types and gods of every sort, but
nowhere in all the pantheon a God who is Love.

Only let me press upon you that that conviction of the love of God,
which is found now far beyond the limits of Christian faith, and
amongst many of us who, in the name of that conviction itself, reject
Christianity, because of its sterner aspects, is historically the
child of the evangelical doctrine of the Incarnation and sacrifice of
Jesus Christ. And if it still subsists, as I know it does, especially
in this generation, amongst many men who reject what seems to me to
be the very kernel of Christianity--subsists like the stream cut off
from its source, but still running, that only shows that men hold
many convictions the origin of which they do not know. God is love.
You will not permanently sustain that belief against the pressure of
outward mysteries and inward sorrows, unless you grasp the other
conviction that Christ died for our sins. The two are inseparable.

And now lastly--

III. What kind of love does Christ's death declare to us as existing
in God?

A love that is turned away by no sin--that is the thing that strikes
the Apostle here, as I have already pointed out. The utmost reach of
human affection might be that a man would die for the good--he would
scarcely die for the righteous. But God sends His Son, and comes
Himself in His Son, and His Son died for the ungodly and the sinner.
That death reveals a love which is its own origin and motive. We love
because we discern, or fancy we do, something lovable in the object.
God loves under the impulse, so to speak, of His own welling-up
heart.

And yet it is a love which, though not turned away by any sin, is
witnessed by that death to be rigidly righteous. It is no mere
flaccid, flabby laxity of a loose-girt affection, no mere foolish
indulgence like that whereby earthly parents spoil their children.
God's love is not lazy good-nature, as a great many of us think it to
be and so drag it in the mud, but it is rigidly righteous, and
therefore Christ died. That Death witnesses that it is a love which
shrinks from no sacrifices. This Isaac was not 'spared.' God gave up
His Son. Love has its very speech in surrender, and God's love speaks
as ours does. It is a love which, turned away by no sin, and yet
rigidly righteous and shrinking from no sacrifices, embraces all ages
and lands. 'God commendeth'--not 'commended.' The majestic present
tense suggests that time and space are nothing to the swift and
all-filling rays of that great Light. That love is 'towards us,' you
and me and all our fellows. The Death is an historical fact,
occurring in one short hour. The Cross is an eternal power, raying
out light and love over all humanity and through all ages.

God lays siege to all hearts in that great sacrifice. Do you believe
that Jesus Christ died for _your_ sins 'according to the Scriptures'?
Do you see there the assurance of a love which will lift you up above
all the cross-currents of earthly life, and the mysteries of
providence, into the clear ether where the sunshine is unobscured?
And above all, do you fling back the reverberating ray from the
mirror of your own heart that directs again towards heaven
the beam of love which heaven has shot down upon you? 'Herein is
love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and gave His Son
to be the propitiation for our sins.' Is it true of us that we love
God because He first loved us?




THE WARRING QUEENS

   'As sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace
   reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus
   Christ our Lord.'--ROMANS v. 21.


I am afraid this text will sound to some of you rather unpromising.
It is full of well-worn terms, 'sin,' 'death,' 'grace,'
'righteousness,' 'eternal life,' which suggest dry theology, if they
suggest anything. When they welled up from the Apostle's glowing
heart they were like a fiery lava-stream. But the stream has cooled,
and, to a good many of us, they seem as barren and sterile as the
long ago cast out coils of lava on the sides of a quiescent volcano.
They are so well-worn and familiar to our ears that they create but
vague conceptions in our minds, and they seem to many of us to be far
away from a bearing upon our daily lives. But you much mistake Paul
if you take him to be a mere theological writer. He is an earnest
evangelist, trying to draw men to love and trust in Jesus Christ. And
his writings, however old-fashioned and doctrinally hard they may
seem to you, are all throbbing with life--instinct with truths that
belong to all ages and places, and which fit close to every one of
us.

I do not know if I can give any kind of freshness to these words, but
I wish to try. To begin with, I notice the highly-imaginative and
picturesque form into which the Apostle casts his thoughts here. He,
as it were, draws back a curtain, and lets us see two royal figures,
which are eternally opposed and dividing the dominion between them.
Then he shows us the issues to which these two rulers respectively
conduct their subjects; and the question that is trembling on his
lips is 'Under which of them do you stand?' Surely that is not fossil
theology, but truths that are of the highest importance, and ought to
be of the deepest interest, to every one of us. They are to you the
former, whether they are the latter or not.

I. So, first, look at the two Queens who rule over human life.

Sin and Grace are both personified; and they are both conceived of as
female figures, and both as exercising dominion. They stand face to
face, and each recognises as her enemy the other. The one has
established her dominion: 'Sin _hath_ reigned.' The other is
fighting to establish hers: 'That Grace _might_ reign.' And the
struggle is going on between them, not only on the wide field of the
world; but in the narrow lists of the heart of each of us.

Sin reigns. The truths that underlie that solemn picture are plain
enough, however unwelcome they may be to some of us, and however
remote from the construction of the universe which many of us are
disposed to take.

Now, let us understand our terms. Suppose a man commits a theft. You
may describe it from three different points of view. He has thereby
broken the law of the land; and when we are thinking about that we
call it crime. He has also broken the law of 'morality,' as we call
it; and when we are looking at his deed from that point of view, we
call it vice. Is that all? He has broken something else. He has
broken the law of God; and when we look at it from that point of view
we call it sin. Now, there are a great many things which are sins
that are not crimes; and, with due limitations, I might venture to
say that there are some things which are sins that are not to be
qualified as vices. Sin implies God. The Psalmist was quite right
when he said; 'Against Thee, Thee only have I sinned'; although he
was confessing a foul injury he had done to Bathsheba, and a glaring
crime that he had committed against Uriah. It was as to God, and in
reference to Him only, that his crime and his vice darkened and
solidified into sin.

And what is it, in our actions or in ourselves considered in
reference to God, that makes our actions sins and ourselves sinners?
Remember the prodigal son. 'Father! Give me the portion of goods that
falleth to me.' There you have it all. He went away, and 'wasted his
substance in riotous living.' To claim myself for my own; to act
independently of, or contrary to, the will of God; to try to shake
myself clear of Him; to have nothing to do with Him, even though it
be by mere forgetfulness and negligence, and, in all my ways to
comport myself as if I had no relations of dependence on and
submission to him--that is sin. And there may be that oblivion or
rebellion, not only in the gross vulgar acts which the law calls
crimes, or in those which conscience declares to be vices, but also
in many things which, looked at from a lower point of view, may be
fair and pure and noble. If there is this assertion of self in them,
or oblivion of God and His will in them, I know not how we are to
escape the conclusion that even these fall under the class of sins.
For there can be no act or thought, truly worthy of a man, situated
and circumstanced as we are, which has not, for the very core and
animating motive of it, a reference to God.

Now, when I come and say, as my Bible teaches me to say, that this is
the deepest view of the state of humanity that sin reigns, I do not
wish to fall into the exaggerations by which sometimes that statement
has been darkened and discredited; but I do want to press upon you,
dear brethren, this, as a matter of _personal_ experience, that
wherever there is a heart that loves, and leaves God out, and
wherever there is a will that resolves, determines, impels to action,
and does not bow itself before Him, and wherever there are hands that
labour, or feet that run, at tasks and in paths self-chosen and
unconsecrated by reference to our Father in heaven, no matter how
great and beautiful subsidiary lustres may light up their deeds, the
very heart of them all is transgression of the law of God. For this,
and nothing else or less, is His law: 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy
God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy
strength, and with all thy mind.' I do not charge you with crimes.
You know how far it would be right to charge you with vices. _I_
do not charge you with anything; but I pray you to come with me and
confess: 'We all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.'

I suppose I need not dwell upon the difficulty of getting a lodgment
for this conviction in men's hearts. There is no sadder, and no more
conclusive proof, of the tremendous power of sin over us, than that
it has lulled us into unconsciousness, hard to be broken, of its own
presence and existence. You remember the old stories--I suppose there
is no truth in them, but they will do for an illustration--about some
kind of a blood-sucking animal that perched upon a sleeping man, and
with its leathern wings fanned him into deeper drowsiness whilst it
drew from him his life-blood. That is what this hideous Queen does
for men. She robes herself in a dark cloud, and sends out her behests
from obscurity. And men fancy that they are free whilst all the while
they are her servants. Oh, dear brethren! you may call this theology,
but it is a simple statement of the facts of our condition. 'Sin hath
reigned.'

And now turn to the other picture, 'Grace might reign.' Then there is
an antagonistic power that rises up to confront the widespread
dominion of this anarch of old. And this Queen comes with twenty
thousand to war against her that has but ten thousand on her side.

Again I say, let us understand our terms. I suppose, there are few of
the keywords of the New Testament which have lost more of their
radiance, like quicksilver, by exposure in the air during the
centuries than that great word Grace, which is always on the lips of
this Apostle, and to him had music in its sound, and which to us is a
piece of dead doctrine, associated with certain high Calvinistic
theories which we enlightened people have long ago grown beyond, and
got rid of. Perhaps Paul was more right than we when his heart leaped
up within him at the very thought of all which he saw to lie
palpitating and throbbing with eager desire to bless men, in that
great word. What does he mean by it? Let me put it into the shortest
possible terms. This antagonist Queen is nothing but the love of God
raying out for ever to us inferior creatures, who, by reason of our
sinfulness, have deserved something widely different. Sin stands
there, a hideous hag, though a queen; Grace stands here, 'in all her
gestures dignity and love,' fair and self-communicative, though a
sovereign. The love of God in exercise to sinful men: that is what
the New Testament means by grace. And is it not a great thought?

Notice, for further elucidation of the Apostle's conception, how he
sacrifices the verbal correctness of his antithesis in order to get
to the real opposition. What is the opposite of Sin? Righteousness.
Why does he not say, then, that 'as Sin hath reigned unto death, even
so might Righteousness reign unto life'? Why? Because it is not man,
or anything in man, that can be the true antagonist of, and victor
over, the regnant Sin of humanity; but God Himself comes into the
field, and only He is the foe that Sin dreads. That is to say, the
only hope for a sin-tyrannised world is in the out-throb of the love
of the great heart of God. For, notice the weapon with which He
fights man's transgression, if I may vary the figure for a moment. It
is only subordinately punishment, or law, or threatening, or the
revelation of the wickedness of the transgression. All these have
their places, but they are secondary places. The thing that will
conquer a world's wickedness is nothing else but the manifested love
of God. Only the patient shining down of the sun will ever melt the
icebergs that float in all our hearts. And wonderful and blessed it
is to think that, in whatsoever aspects man's sin may have been an
interruption and a contradiction of the divine purpose, out of the
evil has come a good; that the more obdurate and universal the
rebellion, the more has it evoked a deeper and more wondrous
tenderness. The blacker the thundercloud, the brighter glows the
rainbow that is flung across it. So these two front each other, the
one settled in her established throne--

'Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell--'

the other coming on her adventurous errand to conquer the world to
herself, and to banish the foul tyranny under which men groan. 'Sin
hath reigned.' Grace is on her way to her dominion.

II. Notice the gifts of these two Queens to their subjects.

'Sin hath reigned in death' (as the accurate translation has it);
'Grace reigns unto eternal life.' The one has established her
dominion, and its results are wrought out, her reign is, as it were,
a reign in a cemetery; and her subjects are dead. If you want a
modern instance to illustrate an ancient saw, think of Armenia. There
is a reign whose gifts to its subjects are death. Sin reigns, says
Paul, and for proof points to the fact that men die.

Now, I am not going to enter into the question here, and now, whether
physical death passes over mankind because of the fact of
transgression. I do not suppose that this is so. But I ask you to
remember that when the Bible says that 'Death passed upon all men,
for all have sinned,' it does not merely mean the physical fact of
dissolution, but it means that fact along with the accompaniments of
it, and the forerunners of it, in men's consciences. 'The sting of
death is sin,' says Paul, in another place. By which he implies,
I presume, that, if it were not for the fact of alienation from God
and opposition to His holy will, men might lie down and die as
placidly as an animal does, and might strip themselves for it 'as for
a bed, that longing they'd been sick for.' No doubt, there was death
in the world long before there were men in it. No doubt, also, the
complex whole phenomenon gets its terror from the fact of men's sin.

But it is not so much that physical fact with its accompaniments
which Paul is thinking about when he says that 'sin reigns in death,'
as it is that solemn truth which he is always reiterating, and which
I pray you, dear friends, to lay to heart, that, whatever activity
there may be in the life of a man who has rent himself away from
dependence upon God--however vigorous his brain, however active his
hand, however full charged with other interests his life, in the very
depth of it is a living death, and the right name for it is death. So
this is Sin's gift--that over our whole nature there come mortality
and decay, and that they who live as her subjects are dead whilst
they live. Dear brethren, that may be figurative, but it seems to me
that it is absurd for you to turn away from such thoughts, shrug your
shoulders, and say, 'Old-fashioned Calvinistic theology!' It is
simply putting into a vivid form the facts of your life and of your
condition in relation to God, if you are subjects of Sin.

Then, on the other hand, the other queenly figure has her hands
filled with one great gift which, like the fatal bestowment which Sin
gives to her subjects, has two aspects, a present and a future one.
Life, which is given in our redemption from Death and Sin, and in
union with God; that is the present gift that the love of God holds
out to every one of us. That life, in its very incompleteness here,
carries in itself the prophecy of its own completion hereafter, in a
higher form and world, just as truly as the bud is the prophet of the
flower and of the fruit; just as truly as a half-reared building is
the prophecy of its own completion when the roof tree is put upon it.
The men that here have, as we all may have if we choose, the gift of
life eternal in the knowledge of God through Jesus Christ His Son,
must necessarily tend onwards and upwards to a region where Death is
beneath the horizon, and Life flows and flushes the whole heaven.
Brother! do you put out your whole hand to take the poisoned gift
from the claw-like hand of that hideous Queen; or do you turn and
take the gift of life eternal from the hands of the queenly Grace?

III. How this queenly Grace gives her gifts.

You observe that the Apostle, as is his wont--I was going to
say--gets himself entangled in a couple of almost parenthetical or,
at all events, subsidiary sentences. I suppose when he began to write
he meant to say, simply, 'as Sin hath reigned unto death, so Grace
might reign unto life.' But notice that he inserts two
qualifications: 'through righteousness,' 'through Jesus Christ our
Lord.' What does he mean by these?

He means this, first, that even that great love of God, coming
throbbing straight from His heart, cannot give eternal life as a mere
matter of arbitrary will. God can make His sun to shine and His rain
to fall, 'on the unthankful and on the evil,' and if God could, God
would give eternal life to everybody, bad and good; but He cannot.
There must be righteousness if there is to be life. Just as sin's
fruit is death, the fruit of righteousness is life.

He means, in the next place, that whilst there is no life without
righteousness, there is no righteousness without God's gift. You
cannot break away from the dominion of Sin, and, as it were,
establish yourselves in a little fortress of your own, repelling her
assaults by any power of yours. Dear brethren, we cannot undo the
past; we cannot strip off the poisoned garment that clings to our
limbs; we can mend ourselves in many respects, but we cannot of our
own volition and motion clothe ourselves with that righteousness of
which the wearers shall be worthy to 'pass through the gate into the
city.' There is no righteousness without God's gift.

And the other subsidiary clause completes the thought: 'through
Christ.' In Him is all the grace, the manifest love, of God gathered
together. It is not diffused as the nebulous light in some chaotic
incipient system, but it is gathered into a sun that is set in the
centre, in order that it may pour down warmth and life upon its
circling planets. The grace of God is in Christ Jesus our Lord. In
Him is life eternal; therefore, if we desire to possess it we must
possess Him. In Him is righteousness; therefore, if we desire our own
foulness to be changed into the holiness which shall see God, we must
go to Jesus Christ. Grace reigns in life, but it is life through
righteousness, which is through Jesus Christ our Lord.

So, then, brother, my message and my petition to each of you
are--knit yourself to Him by faith in Him. Then He who is 'full of
grace and truth' will come to you; and, coming, will bring in His
hands righteousness and life eternal. If only we rest ourselves on
Him, and keep ourselves close in touch with Him; then we shall be
delivered from the tyranny of the darkness, and translated into the
Kingdom of the Son of His love.




'THE FORM OF TEACHING'

   '... Ye have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine
   which was delivered you.'--ROMANS vi. 17.


There is room for difference of opinion as to what Paul precisely
means by 'form' here. The word so rendered appears in English as
_type_, and has a similar variety of meaning. It signifies
originally a mark made by pressure or impact; and then, by natural
transitions, a _mould_, or more generally a _pattern_ or _example_,
and then the copy of such an example or pattern, or the cast from
such a mould. It has also the other meaning which its English
equivalent has taken on very extensively of late years, such as, for
instance, you find in expressions like 'An English type of face,'
meaning thereby the general outline which preserves the
distinguishing characteristics of a thing. Now we may choose between
these two meanings in our text. If the Apostle means type in the
latter sense of the word, then the rendering 'form' is adequ

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/13601