So there are the two sources, you see: the one is the blessedness of the Christian life, the other the sorrows of the outward life, and both may converge upon the brightening of our Christian hope. Our rainbow is the child of the marriage of the sun and the rain. The Christian hope comes from being "justified by faith, having peace with G.o.d ... and access into grace," and it comes from tribulation, which "worketh patience," and patience which "worketh approval." The one spark is struck from the hard flint by the cold steel, and the other is kindled by the sun itself, but they are both fire.
And so, lastly, we have here--
III. The one emotion with which the Christian should front all the facts, inward and outward, of his earthly life.
"We glory in the hope," "we glory in tribulation," I need not dwell upon the lesson which is taught us here by the fact that the Apostle puts as one in a series of Christian characteristics this of a steadfast and all-embracing joy. I do not believe that we Christian people half enough realise how imperative a Christian duty, as well as how great a Christian privilege, it is to be glad always. You have no right to be anxious; you are wrong to be hypochondriac and depressed, and weary and melancholy. True; there are a great many occasions in our Christian life which minister sadness. True; the Christian joy looks very gloomy to a worldly eye. But there are far more occasions which, if we were right, would make joy instinctive, and which, whether we are right or not, make it obligatory upon us. I need not speak of how, if that hope were brighter than it commonly is with us, and if it were more constantly present to our minds and hearts, we should sing with gladness. I need not dwell upon that great and wonderful paradox by which the co-existence of sorrow and of joy is possible. The sorrows are on the surface; beneath there may be rest. All the winds of heaven may rave across the breast of ocean, and fret it into clouds of spume against a storm-swept sky. But deep down there is stillness, and yet not stagnation, because there is the great motion that brings life and freshness; and so, though there will be wind-vexed surfaces on our too-often agitated spirits, there ought to be deeper than these the calm setting of the whole ocean of our nature towards G.o.d Himself. It is possible, as this Apostle has it, to be "sorrowful, yet always rejoicing." It is possible, as his brother Apostle has it, to "rejoice greatly, though now for a season we are in sorrow through manifold temptations." Look back upon your lives from the point of view that your tribulation is an instrument to produce hope, and you will be able to thank G.o.d for all the way by which He has led you.
Now, brethren, the plain lesson of all this is just that we have here, in these texts, a linked chain, one end of which is wrapped around our sinful hearts, and the other is fastened to the Throne of G.o.d. You cannot drop any of the links, and you must begin at the beginning, if you are to be carried on to the end. If we are to have a joy immovable, we must have a "steadfast hope." If we are to have a "steadfast hope," we must have a present "grace." If we are to have a present "grace," and "access" to the fullness of G.o.d, we must have "peace with G.o.d." If we are to have "peace with G.o.d," we must have the condemnation and the guilt taken away. If we are to have the condemnation and the guilt taken away, Jesus Christ must take them.
If Jesus Christ is to take them away, we must have faith in Him. Then you can work it backward, and begin at your own end, and say, "If I have faith in Jesus Christ, then every link of the chain in due succession will pa.s.s through my hand, and I shall have justifying, peace, access, the grace, erectness, hope, and exultation, and at last He will lead me by the hand into the glory for which I dare to hope, the glory which the Father gave to Him before the foundation of the world, and which He will give to me when the world has pa.s.sed away in fervent heat."
A THREEFOLD CORD
"And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of G.o.d is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us."--ROMANS v. 5.
We have seen in former sermons that, in the previous context, the Apostle traces Christian hope to two sources: one, the series of experiences which follow "being justified by faith" and the other, those which follow on trouble rightly borne. Those two golden chains together hold up the precious jewel of hope. But a chain that is to bear a weight must have a staple, or it will fall to the ground. And so Paul here turns to yet another thought, and, going behind both our inward experiences and our outward discipline, falls back on that which precedes all. After all is said and done, the love of G.o.d, eternal, self-originated, the source of all Christian experiences because of the work of Christ which originates them all, is the root fact of the universe, and the guarantee that our highest antic.i.p.ations and desires are not unsubstantial visions, but morning dreams, which are proverbially sure to be fulfilled. G.o.d is love; therefore the man who trusts Him shall not be put to shame.
But you will notice that here the Apostle not only adduces the love of G.o.d as the staple, so to speak, from which these golden chains hang, but that he traces the heart"s being suffused with that love to its source, and as, of course, is always the case in the order of a.n.a.lysis, that which was last in time comes first in statement. We begin at the surface, and go down and down and down from effect to cause, and yet again to the cause of that cause which is itself effect. We strip off, as it were, layer after layer, until we get to the living centre--hope comes from the love, the love comes from the Spirit in the heart. And so to get at the order of time and of manifestation, we must reverse the order of a.n.a.lysis in my text, and begin where it ends. So we have here three things--the Spirit given, the love shed abroad by that Spirit, and the hope established by that love. Now just look at them for a moment.
I. The Spirit given.
Now, the first point to notice here is that the Revised Version presents the meaning of our text more accurately than the Authorised Version, because, instead of reading "is given," it correctly reads "was given." And any of you that can consult the original will see that the form of the language implies that the Apostle is thinking, not so much of a continuous bestowment, as of a definite moment when this great gift was bestowed upon the man to whom he is speaking.
So the first question is, when was that Spirit given to these Roman Christians? The Christian Church has been split in two by its answers to that question. One influential part, which has taken a new lease of life amongst us to-day, says "in baptism," and the other says "at the moment of faith." I am not going to be tempted into controversial paths now, for my purpose is a very different one, but I cannot help just a word about the former of these two answers. "Given in baptism," say our friends, and I venture to think that they thereby degrade Christianity into a system of magic, bringing together two entirely disparate things, an external physical act and a spiritual change. I do not say anything about the disastrous effects that have followed from such a conception of the medium by which this greatest of all Christian gifts is effected upon men. Since the Spirit who is given is life, the result of the gift of that Spirit is a new life, and we all know what disastrous and debasing consequences have followed from that dogma of regeneration by baptism. No doubt it is perfectly true that normally, in the early Church, the Divine Spirit was given at baptism; but for one thing, that general rule had exceptions, as in the case of Cornelius, and, for another thing, though it was given _at_ baptism, it was not given _in_ baptism, but it was given through faith, of which in those days baptism was the sequel and the sign.
But I pa.s.s altogether from this, and fall back on the great words which, to me at least, if there were no other, would determine the whole answer to this question as to when the Spirit was given: "This spake He of the Holy Ghost, which they that _believe_ on Him should receive"; and I would ask the modern upholders of the other theory the indignant question which the Apostle Paul fired off out of his heavy artillery at their ancient a.n.a.logues, the circ.u.mcisers in the Galatian Church: "This only would I know of you: Received ye the Holy Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?"
The answer which the evangelical Christian gives to this ancient question suggested by my text, "When was that Divine Spirit bestowed?" is congruous with the spirituality of the Christian faith, and is eminently reasonable. For the condition required is the opening of the whole nature in willing welcome to the entrance of the Divine Spirit, and as surely as, wherever there is an indentation of the land, and a concavity of a receptive bay, the ocean will pour into it and fill it, so surely where a heart is open for G.o.d, G.o.d in His Divine Spirit will enter into that heart, and there will shed His blessed influences.
So, dear brethren, and this is the main point to which I wish to direct your attention, the Apostle here takes it for granted that all these Roman Christians knew in themselves the truth of what he was saying, and had an experience which confirmed his a.s.sertion that the Divine Spirit of G.o.d was given to them when they believed. Ah! I wonder if that is true about us professing Christians; if we are aware in any measure of a higher life than our own having been breathed into us; if we are aware in any measure of a Divine Spirit dwelling in our spirits, moulding, lifting, enlightening, guiding, constraining, and yet not coercing? We ought to be, "Know ye not that the Spirit dwelleth in you, except ye be rejected?" Brethren, it seems to me to be of the very last importance, in this period of the Church"s history, that the proportion between the Church"s teaching as to the work of Christ on the Cross, and as to the consequent work of the Spirit of Christ in our hearts and spirits, should be changed.
We must become more mystical if we are not to become less Christian.
And the fact that so many of us seem to imagine that the whole Gospel lies in this, that "He died for our sins according to the Scriptures," and have relegated the teaching that He, by His Spirit, lives in us, if we are His disciples, to a less prominent place, has done enormous harm, not only to the type of Christian life, but to the conception of what Christianity is, both amongst those who receive it, and amongst those who do not accept it, making it out to be nothing more than a means of escape from the consequences of our transgression, instead of recognising it for what it is, the impartation of a new life which will flower into all beauty, and bear fruit in all goodness.
There was a question put once to a group of disciples, in astonishment and incredulity, by this Apostle, when he said to the twelve disciples in Ephesus, "Did you receive the Holy Ghost when you believed?" The question might well be put to a mult.i.tude of professing Christians amongst us, and I am afraid a great many of them, if they answered truly, would answer as those disciples did, "We have not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost."
And now for the second point in my text--
II. The love which is shed abroad by that Spirit.
Now, I suppose I do not need to do more than point out that "the love of G.o.d" here means His to us, and not ours to Him, and that the metaphor employed is but partially represented by that rendering "shed abroad." "Poured out" would better convey Paul"s image, which is that of a flood sent coursing through the heart, or, perhaps, rather lying there, as a calm deep lake on whose unruffled surface the heavens, with all their stars, are reflected. Of course, if G.o.d"s love to us thus suffuses a heart, then there follows the consciousness of that love; though it is not the consciousness of the love that the Apostle is primarily speaking of, but that which lies behind it, the actual flowing into the human heart of that sweet and all-satisfying Love. This Divine Spirit that dwells in us, if we are trusting in Christ, will pour it in full streams into our else empty hearts. Surely there is nothing incongruous with the nature either of G.o.d or of man, in believing that thus a real communication is possible between them, and that by thoughts the occasions of which we cannot trace, by moments of elevation, by swift, piercing convictions, by sudden clear illuminations, G.o.d may speak, and will speak, in our waiting hearts.
"Such rebounds the inmost ear Catches often from afar.
Listen, prize them, hold them dear; For of G.o.d, of G.o.d, they are."
But we must not forget, too, that, according to the whole strain of New Testament thinking, the means by which that Divine Spirit does pour out the flashing flood of the love of G.o.d into a man"s heart is, as Jesus Christ Himself has taught us, by taking the things of Christ and showing them to us.
Now, as I said about a former point of my sermon, that the Apostle was taking for granted that this gift of the Spirit belonged to all Christian people; so here again he takes for granted that in every Christian heart there is, by a divine operation, the presence of the love, and of the consciousness of the love, of G.o.d.
And, again, the question comes to some of us stunningly, to all of us warningly, Is that a transcript of our experience? It is the ideal of a Christian life; it is meant that it should be so, and should be so continuously. The stream that is poured out is intended to run summer and winter, not to be dried up in drought, nor made turbid and noisy in flood, but with equable flow throughout. I fear me that the experience of most good people is rather like one of those tropical wadies, or nullahs in Eastern lands, where there alternate times of spate and times of drought; and instead of a flashing stream, pouring life everywhere, and full to the top of its banks, there is for long periods a dismal stretch of white sun-baked stones, and a chaos of tumbled rocks with not a drop of water in the channel. The Spirit pours G.o.d"s love into men"s spirits, but there may be dams and barriers, so that no drop of the water comes into the empty heart.
Our Quaker friends have a great deal to say about "waiting for the springing of the life within us." Never mind about the phraseology: what is meant is profoundly true, that no Christian man will realise this blessing unless he knows how to sit still and meditate, and let the gracious influence soak into him. Thus being quiet, he may, he will, find rising in his heart the consciousness of the love of G.o.d.
You will not, if you give only broken momentary sidelong glances; you will not, if you do not lie still. If you hold up a cup in a shaking hand beneath a fountain, and often twitch it aside, you will get little water in it; and unless we "wait on the Lord," we shall not "renew our strength." You can build a dam as they do in Holland that will keep out, not only the waters of a river, but the waters of an ocean, and not a drop will come through the dike. Brethren, we must keep ourselves in the love of G.o.d.
Lastly, we have here--
III. The hope that is established by the love poured out.
I need not dwell at any length upon this point, because, to a large extent, it has been antic.i.p.ated in former sermons, but just a word or two may be permitted me. That love, you may be very sure, is not going to lose its objects in the dust. The old Psalmist who knew so much less than we do as to the love of G.o.d, and knew nothing of the whispers of a Divine Spirit within his heart charged with the message of the love as it was manifested in Jesus Christ, had risen to a height of confidence, the beauty of the expression of which is often lost sight of, because we insist upon dealing with it as merely being a Messianic prophecy, which it is, but not merely: "Thou wilt not leave my soul in Sheol, neither wilt Thou suffer Thy beloved" (for that is the real meaning of the word translated "thy Holy One")--"Thou wilt not suffer the child of Thy love to see corruption." Death"s bony fingers can untie all true lover"s knots but one; and they fumble at that one in vain. G.o.d will not lose His child in the grave.
That love, we may be very sure, will not foster in us hopes that are to be disappointed. Now, it is a fact that the more a man feels that G.o.d loves him, the less is it possible for him to believe that that love will ever terminate, or that he shall "all die." In the lock of a ca.n.a.l, as the water pours in, the vessel rises. In our hearts, as the flood of the full love of G.o.d pours in, our hopes are borne up and up, nearer and nearer to the heavens. Since it is so, we must find in the fact that the constant and necessary result of communion with Him here on earth is a conviction of the immortality of that communion, a very, very strong guarantee for ourselves that the hope is not in vain. And if you say that that is all merely subjective, yet I think that the universality of the experience is a fact to be taken into account even by those who doubt the reality of the hope, and for ourselves, at all events, is a sufficient ground on which to rest. We have the historical fact of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. We have the fact that wherever there has been earthly experience of true communion with G.o.d, there, and in the measure in which it has been realised, the thermometer of our hopes of immortality, so to speak, has risen. "G.o.d is love," and G.o.d will not bring the man that trusts Him to confusion.
And may we not venture to say that, contemplating the a.n.a.logous earthly love, we are permitted to believe that that divine Lover of our souls desires to have His beloved with Him, and desires that there be no separation between Him and them, either, if I might so say, in place or in disposition? As certainly as husband and wife, lover and friend, long to be together, and need it for perfection and for rest, so surely will that divine love not be satisfied until it has gathered all its children to its breast and made them partakers of itself.
There are many, many hopes that put the men who cherish them to shame, partly because they are never fulfilled, partly because, though fulfilled, they are disappointed, since the reality is so much less than the antic.i.p.ation. Who does not know that the spray of blossom on the tree looks far more lovely hanging above our heads than when it is grasped by us? Who does not know that the fish struggling on the hook seems heavier than it turns out to be when lying on the bank? We go to the rainbow"s end, and we find, not a pot of gold, but a huddle of cold, wet mist. There is one man that is ent.i.tled to say: "To-morrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant." Who is he? Only the man whose hope is in the Lord his G.o.d.
If we open our hearts by faith, then these three lines of sequence of which we have been speaking will converge, and we shall have the hope that is the shining apex of "being justified by faith," and the hope that is the calm result of trouble and agitation, and the hope that, travelling further and higher than anything in our inward experience or our outward discipline, grasps the key-word of the universe, "G.o.d is love," and triumphantly makes sure that "neither death nor life, nor angels, nor princ.i.p.alities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of G.o.d which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
WHAT PROVES G.o.d"S LOVE
"G.o.d commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."--ROMANS v. 8.
We have seen in previous sermons on the preceding context that the Apostle has been tracing various lines of sequence, all of which converge upon Christian hope. The last of these pointed to the fact that the love of G.o.d, poured into a heart like oil into a lamp, brightened that flame; and having thus mentioned the great Christian revelation of G.o.d as love, Paul at once pa.s.ses to emphasise the historical fact on which the conviction of that love rests, and goes on to say that "the love of G.o.d is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given to us, _for_ when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the unG.o.dly." Then there rises before him the thought of how transcendent and unparalleled a love is that which pours its whole preciousness on unworthy and unresponsive hearts. He thinks to himself--"We are all unG.o.dly; without strength--yet, He died for us. Would any man do that? No! for," says he, "it will be a hard thing to find any one ready to die for a righteous man--a man rigidly just and upright, and because rigidly just, a trifle hard, and therefore not likely to touch a heart to sacrifice; and even for a good man, in whom austere righteousness has been softened and made attractive, and become graciousness and beneficence, well! it is just within the limits of possibility that somebody might be found even to die for a man that had laid such a strong hand upon his affections. But G.o.d commendeth His love in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us." Now, when Paul says "commend," he uses a very significant word which is employed in two ways in the New Testament. It sometimes means to establish, or to prove, or to make certain. But "prove" is a cold word, and the expression also means to recommend, to set forth in such a way as to appeal to the heart, and G.o.d does both in that great act. He establishes the fact, and He, as it were, sweeps it into a man"s heart, on the bosom of that full tide of self-sacrifice.
So there are two or three points that arise from these words, on which I desire to dwell now--to lay them upon our hearts, and not only upon our understandings. For it is a poor thing to prove the love of G.o.d, and we need that not only shall we be sure of it, but that we shall be softened by it. So now let me ask you to look with me, first, at this question--
I. What Paul thought Jesus Christ died for.
"Died _for_ us." Now that expression plainly implies two things: first, that Christ died of His own accord, and being impelled by a great motive, beneficence; and, second, that that voluntary death, somehow or other, is for our behoof and advantage. The word in the original, "for," does not define in what way that death ministers to our advantage, but it does a.s.sert that for those Roman Christians who had never seen Jesus Christ, and by consequence for you and me nineteen centuries off the Cross, there is benefit in the fact of that death. Now, suppose we quote an incident in the story of missionary martyrdom. There was a young lady, whom some of us knew and loved, in a Chinese mission station, who, with the rest of the missionary band, was flying. Her life was safe. She looked back, and saw a Chinese boy that her heart twined round, in danger. She returned to save him; they laid hold of her and flung her into the burning house, and her charred remains have never been found. That was a death for another, but "Jesus died for us" in a deeper sense than that. Take another case. A man sets himself to some great cause, not his own, and he sees that in order to bless humanity, either by the proclamation of some truth, or by the origination of some great movement, or in some other way, if he is to carry out his purpose, he must give his life. He does so, and dies a martyr. What he aimed at could only be done by the sacrifice of his life. The death was a means to his end, and he died for his fellows. That is not the depth of the sense in which Paul meant that Jesus Christ died for us. It was not that He was true to His message, and, like many another martyr, died. There is only one way, as it seems to me, in which any beneficial relation can be established between the Death of Christ and us, and it is that when He died He died for us, because "He bare our sins in His own body on the tree."
Dear brethren, I dare say some of you do not take that view, but I know not how justice can be done to the plain words of Scripture unless this is the point of view from which we look at the Cross of Calvary--that there the Lamb of Sacrifice was bearing, and bearing away, the sins of the whole world. I know that Christian men who unite in the belief that Christ"s death was a sacrifice and an atonement diverge from one another in their interpretations of the way in which that came to be a fact, and I believe, for my part, that the divergent interpretations are like the divergent beams of light that fall upon men who stand round the same great luminary, and that all of them take their origin in, and are part of the manifestation of, the one transcendent fact, which pa.s.ses all understanding, and gathers into itself all the diverse conceptions of it which are formed by limited minds. He died for us because, in His death, our sins are taken away and we are restored to the divine favour.
I know that Jesus Christ is said to have made far less of that aspect of His work in the Gospels than His disciples have done in the Epistles, and that we are told that, if we go back to Jesus, we shall not find the doctrine which for some of us is the first form in which the Gospel finds its way into the hearts of men. I admit that the fully-developed teaching followed the fact, as was necessarily the case. I do not admit that Jesus Christ "spake nothing concerning Himself" as the sacrifice for the world"s sins. For I hear from His lips--not to dwell upon other sayings which I could quote--I hear from His lips, "The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister"--that is only half His purpose--"and to give His life a ransom instead of the many." You cannot strike the atoning aspect of His death out of that expression by any fair handling of the words.
And what does the Lord"s Supper mean? Why did Jesus Christ select that one point of His life as the point to be remembered? Why did He inst.i.tute the double memorial, the body parted from the blood being a sign of a violent death? I know of no explanation that makes that Lord"s Supper an intelligible rite except the explanation which says that He came, to live indeed, and in that life to be a sacrifice, but to make the sacrifice complete by Himself bearing the consequences of transgression, and making atonement for the sins of the world.
Brethren, that is the only aspect of Christ"s death which makes it of any consequence to us. Strip it of that, and what does it matter to me that He died, any more than it matters to me that any philanthropist, any great teacher, any hero or martyr or saint, should have died? As it seems to me, nothing. Christ"s death is surrounded by tenderly pathetic and beautiful accompaniments. As a story it moves the hearts of men, and "purges them, by pity and by terror." But the death of many a hero of tragedy does all that.
And if you want to have the Cross of Christ held upright in its place as the Throne of Christ and the attractive power for the whole world, you must not tamper with that great truth, but say, "He died for our sins, according to the Scriptures."
Now, there is a second question that I wish to ask, and that is--
II. How does Christ"s death "commend" G.o.d"s love?
That is a strange expression, if you will think about it, that "_G.o.d_ commendeth His love towards us in that _Christ_ died." If you take the interpretation of Christ"s death of which I have already been speaking, one could have understood the Apostle if he had said, "Christ commendeth His love towards us in that Christ died." But where is the force of the fact of a _man"s_ death to prove _G.o.d"s_ love? Do you not see that underlying that swift sentence of the Apostle there is a presupposition, which he takes for granted? It is so obvious that I do not need to dwell upon it to vindicate his change of persons, viz. that "G.o.d was in Christ," in such fashion as that whatsoever Christ did was the revelation of G.o.d.