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

Author: Alexander Maclaren

Release Date: October 5, 2004 [EBook #13601]

Language: English

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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 Caesars. 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 mediaeval 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