|















| |
|
COLLECTIONS
Commentaries, Word
Studies, Devotionals, Sermons, Illustrations
Old and New Testament. |
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
EXPOSITION OF THE SCRIPTURES
1 THESSALONIANS
by Alexander Maclaren |
FAITH, LOVE, HOPE, AND THEIR FRUITS
‘Your work of faith, and labour of love, and patience of hope. — 1
Thessalonians 1:3
THIS Epistle, as I suppose we all know, is Paul’s first letter. He had
been hunted out of Thessalonica by the mob, made the best of his way to
Athens, stayed there for a very short time, then betook himself to
Corinth, and at some point of his somewhat protracted residence there,
this letter was written. So that we have in it his first attempt, so far
as we know, to preach the Gospel By the pen. It is interesting to notice
how, whatever changes and developments there may have Been in him
thereafter, all the substantial elements of his latest faith beam out in
this earliest letter, and how even in regard to trifles we see the germs
of much that came afterwards. This same triad, you remember, ‘faith, hope,
charity,’ recurs in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, though with a
very significant difference in the order, which I shall have to dwell upon
presently.
The letter is interesting on another account. Remembering that it was only
very short time since these Thessalonians had turned from idols to serve
the living God, there is something very beautiful in the overflowing
generosity of commendation, which never goes beyond veracity, with which
he salutes them. Their Christian character, like seeds sown in some
favoured tropical land, had sprung up swiftly; yet not with the dangerous
kind of swiftness which presages decay of the growth. It was only a few
days since they had been grovelling before idols, but now he can speak of
‘your work of faith, and labour of love, and patience of hope’... and
declare that the Gospel ‘sounded out’ from them — the word which he
employs is that which is technically used for the blast of a trumpet — ‘so
that we need not to speak anything.’
Rapid growth is possible for us all, and is not always superficial.
I desire now to consider that pair of triads — the three
foundation-stones, and the three views of the fair building that is reared
upon them.
I. THE THREE FOUNDATION STONES
That is a natural metaphor to use, but it is not quite correct, for these
three — faith, love, hope — are not to be conceived of as lying side by
side. Rather than three foundations we have three courses of the building
here; the lowest one, faith; the next one, love; and the top one, hope.
The order in 1 Corinthians is different, ‘faith, hope, charity,’ and the
alteration in the sequence is suggested by the difference of purpose. The
Apostle intended in 1 Corinthians to dwell at some length thereafter on
‘charity,’ or ‘love.’ So he puts it last to make the link of connection
with what he is going to say. But here he is dealing with the order of
production, the natural order in which these three evolve themselves. And
his thought is that they are like the shoots that successive springs bring
upon the bough of a tree, where each year hem its own growth, and the
summit of last year’s becomes the basis of next. Thus we have, first,
faith; then, shooting from that, love; and then, sustained by both, hope.
Now let us look at that order.
It is a well-worn commonplace, which you may think it not needful for me
to dwell upon here, that in the Christian theory, both of salvation and of
morals, the basis of everything is trust. And that is no arbitrary
theological arrangement, but it is the only means by which the life that
is the basis both of salvation and of righteousness can be implanted in
men. There is no other way by which Jesus Christ can come into our hearts
than by what the New Testament calls ‘trust,’ which we have turned into
the hard, theological concept which too often glides over people’s minds
without leaving any dint at all — ‘faith.’
Distrust is united with trust. There is no trust without, complementary to
it, self-distrust. Just as the sprouting seed sends one little radicle
downwards, and that becomes the root, and at the same time sends up
another one, white till it reaches the light, and it becomes the stem, so
the underside of faith is self-distrust, and you must empty yourselves
before you can open your hearts to be filled by Jesus. That being so, this
self-distrustful trust is the beginning of everything. That is the alpha
of the whole alphabet, however glorious and manifold may be the words into
which its letters are afterwards combined.
Faith is the hand that grasps. It is the means of communication, it is the
channel through which the grace which is the life, or, rather, I should
say, the life which is the grace, comes to us. It is the open door by
which the angel of God comes in with his gifts. It is like the petals of
the flowers, opening when the sunshine kisses them, and, by opening,
laying bare the depths of their calyxes to be illuminated and coloured,
and made to grow by the sunshine which itself has opened them, and without
the presence of which, within the cup, there would have been neither life
nor beauty. So faith is the basis of everything; the first shoot from
which all the others ascend.
Brethren, have you that initial grace? I leave the question with you. If
you have not that, you have nothing else.
Then again, out of faith rises love. No man can love God unless he behoves
that God loves him. I, for my part, am old-fashioned and narrow enough not
to believe that there is any deep, soul-cleansing or soul-satisfying love
of God which is not the answer to the love that died on the Cross. But you
must believe that, and more than believe it; you must have trusted and
cast yourselves on it, in the utter abandonment of self-distrust and
Christ-confidence, before there will well up in your heart the answering
love to God. First faith, then love. My love is the reverberation of the
primeval voice, the echo of God’s. The angle at which the light falls on
the mirror is the same as the angle at which it is reflected from it. And
though my love at its highest is low, at its strongest is weak: yet, like
the echo that is faint and far, feeble though it be, it is pitched on the
same key, and is the prolongation of the same note as the mother-sound. So
my love answers God’s love, and it will never answer it unless faith has
brought me within the auditorium, the circle wherein the voice that
proclaims ‘I love thee, my child,’ can be heard.
Now, we do not need to ask ourselves whether Paul is here speaking of love
to God or love to man. He is speaking of both, because the New Testament
deals with the latter as being a part of the former, and sure to accompany
it. But there is one lesson that I wish to draw.
If it be true that love in us is thus the result of faith in the love of
God, let us learn how we grow in love. You cannot say, ‘Now I will make an
effort to love.’ The circulation of the blood, the pulsations of the
heart, are not within the power of the will. But you can say, ‘Now I will
make an effort to trust.’ For faith is in the power of the will, and when
the Master said, ‘Ye will not come unto me,’ He taught us that unbelief is
not a mere intellectual deficiency or perversity, but that it is the
result, in the majority of cases — I might almost say in all — of an
alienated will
Therefore, if you wish to love, do not try to work yourself into a
hysteria of affection, but take into your hearts and minds the Christian
facts, and mainly the fact of the Cross, which will set free the frozen
and imprisoned fountains of your affections, and cause them to flow out
abundantly in sweet water. First faith, then love; and get at love through
faith. That is a piece of practical wisdom that it will do us all good to
keep in mind.
Then the third of the three, the topmost shoot, is hope. Hope is faith
directed to the future. So it is clear enough that, unless I have that
trust of which I have been speaking, I have none of the hope which the
Apostle regards as flowing from it.
But love has to do with hope quite as much, though in a different way, as
faith has to do with it. For in the direct proportion in which we are
taking into our hearts Christ and His truth, and letting our hearts go out
in love towards Him and communion with Him, will the glories beyond
brighten and consolidate and magnify themselves in our eyes.
The hope of the Christian man is but the inference from his present faith,
and the joy and sweetness of his present love. For surely when we rise to
the heights which are possible to us all, and on which I suppose most
Christian people have been sometimes, though for far too brief seasons;
when we rise to the heights of communion with God, anything seems more
possible to us than that death, or anything that lies in the future,
should have power over a tie so sweet, so strong, so independent of
externals, and so all-sufficing in its sweetness. Thus we shall be sure
that God is our portion for ever, in the precise degree in which, by faith
and love, we feel that ‘He is the strength of our hearts,’ to-day and now.
So, then, we have the three foundation-stones.
And now a word or two, in the second place, about…
II. THE FAIR BUILDING WHICH RISES ON THEM.
I have already half apologised for using the metaphor of a foundation and
a building. I must repeat the confession that the symbol is an inadequate
one. For the Apostle does not conceive of the work and labour and patience
which are respectively allocated to these three graces as being
superimposed upon them, as it were, by effort, so much as he thinks of
them as growing out of them by their inherent nature. The work is’ the
work of faith,’ that which characterises faith, that which issues from it,
that which is its garment, visible to the world, and the token of its
reality and its presence.
Faith works.
It is the foundation of all true work; even in the lowest sense of the
word we might almost say that. But in the Christian scheme it is eminently
the underlying requisite for all work which God does not consider as busy
idleness. I might here make a general remark, which, however, I need not
dwell upon, that we have here the broad thought which Christian people in
all generations need-to have drummed into their heads over and over again,
and that is that inward experiences and emotions, and rotates of mind and
heart, however good and precious, are so mainly as being the necessary
foundations of conduct. What is the good of praying and feeling
comfortable within, and having ‘a blessed assurance,’ a ‘happy
experience,’ ‘sweet communion,’ and so on? What is the good of it all, if
these things do not make us ‘live soberly, righteously, and godly in this
present world’? What is the good of the sails of a windmill going whirling
round, if the machinery has been thrown out of gear, and the great stones
which it ought to actuate are not revolving? What is the good of the screw
of a steamer revolving, when she pitches, clean above the waves? It does
nothing then to drive the vessel onwards, but will only damage the
machinery. And Christian emotions and experiences which do not drive
conduct are of as little use, often as perilous, and as injurious. If you
want to keep your ‘faith, love, hope,’ sound and beneficial, set them to
work. And do not be too sure that you have them, if they do not crave for
work, whether you set them to it or not.
‘Your work of faith.’
There is the whole of the thorny subject of the relation of faith and
works packed into a nutshell. It is exactly what James said and it is
exactly what a better than James said. When the Jews came to Him with
their externalism, and thought that God was to be pleased by a whole
rabble of separate good actions, and so said, ‘What shall we do that we
might work the works of God?’ Jesus said, ‘Never mind about Works. This is
the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He hath sent,’ and out of
that will come all the rest. That is the mother tincture; everything will
flow from that. So Paul says, ‘Your work of faith.’
Does your faith work? Perhaps I should ask other people rather than you.
Do men see that your faith works; that its output is different from the
output of men who are not possessors of a ‘like precious faith’? Ask
yourselves the question, and God help you to answer it.
Love labours.
Labour is more than work, for it includes the notion of toil, fatigue,
difficulty, persistence, antagonism. Ah! the work of faith will never be
done unless it is the toil of love. You remember how Milton talks about
the immortal garland that is to be run for, ‘not without dust and sweat.’
The Christian life is not a leisurely promenade. The limit of our duty is
not ease of work. There must be toil. And love is the only principle that
will carry us through the fatigues, and the difficulties, and the
oppositions which rise against us from ourselves and from without. Love
delights to have a hard task set it by the beloved, and the harder the
task the more poignant the satisfaction. Loss is gain when it brings us
nearer the beloved.
And whether our love be love to God, or its consequence, love to man, it
is the only foundation on which toil for either God or man will over
permanently be rested. Do not believe in philanthropy which has not a
bottom of faith, and do not believe in work for Christ which does not
involve in toil And be sure that you will do neither, unless you have both
these things: the faith and the love.
And then comes the last. Faith works, love toils, hope is patient. Is that
all that ‘hope’ is? Not if you take the word in the narrow meaning which
it has in modern English; but that was not what Paul meant.
He meant something a great deal more than passive endurance, great as that
is. It is something to be able to say, in the pelting of a pitiless storm,
‘Pour on! I will endure.’ But it is a great deal more to be able, in spite
of all, not to bate one jot of heart or hope, but ‘still bear up and steer
right onward’; and that is involved in the true meaning of the word
inadequately rendered ‘patience’ in the New Testament. For it is no
passive virtue only, but it is a virtue which, in the face of the storm,
holds its course; brave persistence, active perseverance, as well as meek
endurance and submission.
‘Hope’ helps us Both to bear and to do. They tell us nowadays that it is
selfish for a Christian man to animate himself, either for endurance or
for activity, By the contemplation of those great glories that lie yonder.
If that is selfishness, God grant we may all Become a great deal more
selfish than we are! No man labours in the Christian life, or submits to
Christian difficulty, for the sake of going to heaven. At least, if he
does, he has got on the wrong tack altogether. But if the motive for Both
endurance and activity be faith and love, then hope has a perfect right to
come in as a subsidiary motive, and to give strength to the faith and
rapture to the love. We cannot afford to throw away that hope, as so many
of us do — not perhaps, intellectually, though I am afraid there is a very
considerable dimming of the clearness, and a narrowing of the place in our
thoughts, of the hope of a future Blessedness, in the average Christian of
this day — but practically we are all apt to lose sight of the recompense
of the reward. And if we do, the faith and love, and the work and toil,
and the patience will suffer. Faith will relax its grasp, love will cool
down its fervour; and there will come a film over Hope’s blue eye, and she
will not see the land that is very far opt. So, dear brethren, remember
the sequence, ‘faith, love, hope,’ and remember the issues, ‘work, toil,
patience.’
><> ><> ><>
GOD’S TRUMPET
‘From you sounded out the word of God.’ — 1 Thessalonians 1:3.
This is Paul’s first letter. It was written very shortly after his first
preaching of the Gospel in the great commercial city of Thessalonlca. But
though the period since the formation of the Thessalonian Church was so
brief, their conversion had already become a matter of common notoriety;
and the consistency of their lives, and the marvellous change that had
taken place upon them, made them conspicuous in the midst of the corrupt
heathen community in which they dwelt. And so says Paul, in the text, by
reason of their work of faith and labour of love and patience of hope,
they had become ensamples to all that believe, and loud proclaimers and
witnesses of the Gospel which had produced this change.
The Apostle employs a word never used anywhere else in the New Testament
to describe the conspicuous and widespread nature of this testimony of
theirs. He says, ‘The word of the Lord sounded out’ from them. That phrase
is one most naturally employed to describe the blast of a trumpet. So
clear and ringing, so loud, penetrating, melodious, rousing, and full was
their proclamation, by the silent eloquence of their lives, of the Gospel
which impelled and enabled them to lead such lives. A grand ideal of a
community of believers!
If our churches to-day were nearer its realisation there would be less
unbelief, and more attraction of wandering prodigals to the Father’s
house. Would that this saying were true of every body of professing
believers ! Would that from each there sounded out one clear accordant
witness to Christ, in the purity and unworld-liness of their Christlike
lives!
I. This metaphor suggests the great purpose of the Church.
It is God’s trumpet, His means of making His voice heard through all the
uproar of the world. As the captain upon the deck in the gale will use his
speaking-trumpet, so God’s voice needs your voice. The Gospel needs to be
passed through human lips in order that it may reach deaf ears. The
purpose for which we have been apprehended of Christ is not merely our own
personal salvation, whether we understand that in a narrow and more
outward, or in a broader and more spiritual sense. No man is an end in
himself, but every man, though he be partially and temporarily an end, is
also a means. And just as, according to the other metaphor, the Kingdom of
Heaven is like leaven, each particle of the dead dough, as soon as it is
leavened and vitalised, becoming the medium for transmitting the strange,
transforming, and living influence to the particle beyond, so all of us,
if we are Christian people, have received that grace into our hearts, for
our own sakes indeed, but also that through us might be manifested to the
darkened eyes beyond, and through us might drop persuasively on the dull,
cold ears that are further away from the Divine Voice, the great message
of God’s mercy. The Church is God’s trumpet, and the purpose that He has
in view in setting it in the world is to make all men know the fellowship
of the mystery and that through it there may ring out, as by some
artificial means a poor human voice will be flung to a greater distance
than it would otherwise reach, the gentle entreaties, and the glorious
proclamation, and the solemn threatenings of the Word, the Incarnate as
well as the written Word, of God.
Of course all this is true, not only about communities, but it is true of
a community, just because it is true of each individual member of it. The
Church is worse than as’ sounding brass,’ it is as silent brass and an
untinkling cymbal, unless the individuals that belong to it recognise
God’s meaning in making them His children, and do their best to fulfil it.
‘Ye are my witnesses,’ saith the Lord. You are put into the witness-box;
see that you speak out when you are there.
II. Another point that this figure may suggest is, the sort of sound that
should come from the trumpet.
A trumpet note is, first of all, clear. There should be no hesitation in
our witness; nothing uncertain in the sound that we give. There are plenty
of so-called Christian people whose lives, if they bear any witness for
the Master at all, are like the notes that some bungling learner will
bring out of a musical instrument: hesitating, uncertain, so that you do
not know exactly what note he wants to produce. How many of us, calling
ourselves Christian people, testify on both sides; sometimes bearing
witness for Christ; and alas ! alas! oftener bearing witness against Him.
Will the trumpet, the instrument of clear, ringing, unmistakable sounds,
be the emblem of your Christian testimony? Would not some poor scrannel-pipe,
ill-blown, be nearer the mark? The note should be clear.
The note should be penetrating. There is no instrument, I suppose, that
carries further than the ringing clarion that is often heard on the field
of battle, above all the strife; and this little church at Thessalonica, a
mere handful of people, just converted, in the very centre of a strong,
compact, organised, self-confident, supercilious heathenism, insisted upon
being heard, and got itself made audible, simply by the purity and the
consistency of the lives of its members. So that Paul, a few weeks, or at
most a few months, after the formation of the church, could say, ‘From you
sounded out the word of the Lord, not only in Macedonia and Achaia,’ your
own province and the one next door to it, ‘but also in every place your
faith to Godward is spread abroad.’ No man knows how far his influence
will go. No man can tell how far his example may penetrate. Thessalonica
was a great commercial city. So is Manchester. Hosts of people of all
sorts came into it as they come here. There were many different circles
which would be intersected by the lives of this Christian church, and
wherever its units went they carried along with them the conviction that
they had turned from idols to serve the living God, and to wait for His
Son from heaven.
And so, dear brethren, if our witness is to be worth anything it must have
this penetrating quality. There is a difference in sounds as there is a
difference in instruments. Some of them carry further than others. A clear
voice will fling words to a distance that a thick, mumbling one never can
attain. One note will travel much further than another. Do you see to it
that your notes are of the penetrating sort.
And then, again, the note should be a musical one. There is nothing to be
done for God by harshness; nothing to be done by discords and gangling;
nothing to be done by scolding and rebuke. The ordered sequence of
melodious sound will travel a great deal further than musical, plain
speech. You can hear a song at a distance at which a saying would be
inaudible. Which thing is an allegory, .and this is its lesson, — Music
goes further than discord; and the witness that a Christian man bears will
travel in direct proportion as it is harmonious, and gracious and gentle
and beautiful.
And then, again, the note should be rousing. You do not play on a trumpet
when you want to send people to sleep; dulcimers and the like are the
things for that purpose. The trumpet means strung-up intensity, means a
call to arms, or to rejoicing; means at any rate, vigour, and is intended
to rouse. Let your witness have, for its utmost signification, ‘Awake!
thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead; and Christ shall give thee
light.’
III. Then, still further, take another thought that may be suggested from
this metaphor, the silence of the loudest note.
If you look at the context, you will see that all the ways in which the
word of the Lord is represented as sounding out from the Thessalonian
Church were deeds, not words. The context supplies a number of them. Such
as the following are specified in it: their work; their toil, which is
more than work; their patience; their assurance; their reception of the
word, in much affliction with joy in the Holy Ghost; their faith to
Godward; their turning to God from idols, to serve and to wait.
That is all. So far as the context goes there might not have been a man
amongst them who ever opened his mouth for Jesus Christ. We know not, of
course, how far they were a congregation of silent witnesses, but this we
know, that what Paul meant when he said, ‘The whole world is ringing with
the voice of the word of God sounding from you,’ was not their going up
and down the world shouting about their Christianity, but their quiet
living like Jesus Christ. That is a louder voice than any other.
Ah! dear friends! it is with God’s Church as it is with God’s heavens; the
‘stars in Christ’s right hand’ sparkle in the same fashion as the stars
that He has set in the firmament. Of them we read: ‘There is neither voice
nor language, their speech is not heard’; and yet, as man stands with
bared head and hushed heart beneath the violet abysses of the heavens,
‘their line’ (or chord, the metaphor being that of a stringed instrument)
‘is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the
world.’ Silent as they shine, they declare the glory of God, and proclaim
His handiwork. And so you may speak of Him without speaking, and though
you have no gift of tongues the night may be filled with music, and your
lives be eloquent of Christ.
I do not mean to say that Christian men and women are at liberty to lock
their lips from verbal proclamation of the Saviour they have found, but I
do mean to say that if there was less talk and more living, the witness of
God’s Church would be louder and not lower; ‘ and men would take knowledge
of us, that we had been with Jesus’; and of Jesus, that He had made us
like Himself.
IV. And so, lastly, let me draw one other thought from this metaphor,
which I hope you will not think fanciful playing with a figure; and that
is the breath that makes the music if the Church is the trumpet, who blows
it? God! It is by His Divine Spirit dwelling within us, and breathing
through us, that the harsh discords of our natural lives become changed
into melody of praise and the music of witness for Him. Keep near Christ,
live in communion with God, let Him breathe through you, and when His
Spirit passes through your spirits their silence will become harmonious
speech; and from you ‘will sound out the word of the Lord.’
In a tropical country, when the sun goes behind a cloud, all the insect
life that was cheerily chirping is hushed. In the Christian life, when the
Son of Righteousness is obscured by the clouds born of our own
carelessness and sin, all the music in our spirit ceases, and no more can
we witness for Him. A scentless substance lying in a drawer, with a bit of
musk, will become perfumed by contact, and will bring the fragrance
wherever it is carried. Live near God, and let Him speak to you and in
you; and then He will speak through you. And if He be the breath of your
spiritual lives, and the soul of your souls, then, and only then, will
your lives be music, the music witness, and the witness conviction. And
only then will there be fulfilled what I pray there may be more and more
fulfilled in us as a Christian community, this great word of our text,
‘from you sounded out,’ clear, rousing, penetrating, melodious, ‘the word
of the Lord,’ so that we, with our poor preaching, need not to speak
anything.
><> ><> ><>
WALKING
WORTHILY
‘Walk worthy of God.’ — 1 Thessalonians 2:12.
HERE we have the whole law of Christian conduct in a nutshell. There may
be many detailed commandments, but they can all be deduced from this one.
We are lifted up above the region of petty prescriptions, and breathe a
bracing mountain air. Instead of regulations, very many and very dry, we
have a principle which needs thought and sympathy in order to apply it,
and is to be carried out by the free action of our own judgments.
Now it is to be noticed that there
are a good many other passages in the New Testament in which, in similar
fashion, the whole sum of Christian conduct is reduced to a ‘walking
worthy’ of some certain thing or other, and I have thought that it might
aid in appreciating the many-sidedness and all-sufficiency of the great,
principles into which Christianity crystallises the law of our life, if we
just gather these together and set them before you consecutively.
They are these: we are told in our text to ‘walk worthy of God.’ Then
again, we are enjoined, in other places, to ‘walk worthy of the Lord,’ who
is Christ. Or again, ‘of the Gospel of Christ.’ Or again, ‘of the calling
wherewith we were called.’ Or again, of the name of ‘saints.’ And if you
put all these together, you will get many sides of one thought, the rule
of Christian life as gathered into a single expression — correspondence
with, and conformity to, a certain standard.
I. And first of all, we have this passage of my text, and the other one to
which I have referred, ‘Walking worthy of the Lord,’ by whom we are to
understand Christ. We may put these together and say that the whole sum of
Christian duty lies in conformity to the character of a Divine Person with
whom we have loving relations.
The Old Testament says: ‘Be ye holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.’ The
New Testament says: ‘Be ye imitators of God, and walk in love.’ So then,
whatever of flashing brightness and infinite profundity in that divine
nature is far beyond our apprehension and grasp, there are in that divine
nature elements — and those the best and divinest in it which it is
perfectly within the power of every man to copy.
In there anything in God that is more Godlike than righteousness and love?
And is there any difference in essence between a man’s righteousness and
God’s; — between a man’s love and God’s? The same gases make combustion in
the sun and on the earth, and the spectroscope tells you that it is so.
The same radiant brightness that flames burning in the love, and flashes
white in the purity of God, even that may be reproduced in man.
Love is one thing, an the universe over. Other elements of the bond that
unites us to God are rather correspondent in us to what we find in Him Our
concavity, so to speak, answers to His convexity; our hollowness to His
fulness; our emptiness to His all-sufficiency. So our faith, for instance,
lays hold upon His faithfulness, and our obedience grasps, and bows
before, His commanding will But the love with which I lay hold of Him is
like the love with which He lays hold on me; and righteousness and purity,
howsoever different may be their accompaniments in an infinite and
uncreated Nature from what they have in our limited and bounded and
progressive being, in essence are one. So, ‘Be ye holy, for I am holy’;
‘Walk in the light as He is in the light,’ is the law available for all
conduct; and the highest divine perfections, if I may speak of
pre-eminence among them, are the imitable ones, whereby He becomes our
Example and our Pattern.
Let no man say that such an injunction is vague or hopeless. You must have
a perfect ideal if you are to live at all by an ideal. There cannot be any
flaws in your pattern if the pattern is to be of any use. You aim at the
stars, and if you do not hit them you may progressively approach them. We
need absolute perfection to strain after, and one day — blessed be His
name — we shall attain it. Try to walk worthy of God and you will find out
how tight that precept grips, and how close it fits.
The love and the righteousness which are to become the law of our lives,
are revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Whatever may sound impracticable in
the injunction to imitate God assumes a more homely and possible shape
when it becomes an injunction to follow Jesus. And just as that form of
the precept tends to make the law of conformity to the divine nature more
blessed and less hopelessly above us, so it makes the law of conformity to
the ideal of goodness less cold and unsympathetic. It makes all the
difference to our joyfulness and freedom whether we are trying to obey a
law of duty, seen only too clearly to be binding, but also above our
reach, or whether we have the law in a living Person whom we have learned
to love. In the one case there stands upon a pedestal above us a cold
perfection, white, complete, marble; in the other case there stands beside
us a living law in pattern, a Brother, bone of our bone and flesh of our
flesh; whose band we can grasp; whose heart we can trust, and of whose
help we can be sure. To say to me: ‘Follow the ideal of perfect
righteousness,’ is to relegate me to a dreary, endless struggling; to say
to me, ‘Follow your Brother, and be like your Father,’ is to bring warmth
and hope and liberty into all my effort. The word that says, ‘Walk worthy
of God,’ is a royal law, the perfect law of perfect freedom.
Again, when we say, ‘Walk worthy of God,’ we mean two things — one, ‘Do
after His example,’ and the other, ‘Render back to Him what He deserves
for what He has done to you.’ And so this law bids us measure, by the side
of that great love that died on the Cross for us all, our poor imperfect
returns of gratitude and of service. He has lavished all His treasure on
you; what have you brought him back? He has given you the whole wealth of
His tender pity, of His forgiving mercy, of His infinite goodness. Do you
adequately repay such lavish love? Has He not ‘sown much and reaped
little’ in all our hearts? Has He not poured out the fulness of His
affection, and have we not answered Him with a few grudging drops squeezed
from our hearts? Oh! brethren! ‘Walk worthy of the Lord,’ and neither
dishonour Him by your conduct as professing children of His, nor affront
Him by the wretched refuse and remnants of your devotion and service that
you bring back to Him in response to His love to you.
II. Now a word about the next form of this all embracing precept.
The whole law of our Christian life may be gathered up in another
correspondence, ‘Walk worthy of the Gospel’ (Philippians 1:27), in a
manner conformed to that great message of God’s love to us.
That covers substantially the same ground as we have’ already been going
over, but it presents the same ideas in a different light. It presents the
Gospel as a rule of conduct. Now people have always been apt to think of
it more as a message of deliverance than as a practical guide, as we all
need to make an effort to prevent our natural indolence and selfishness
from making us forget that the Gospel is quite as much a rule of conduct
as a message of pardon.
It is both by the same act. In the very facts on which our redemption
depends lies the law of our lives.
What was Paul’s Gospel? According to Paul’s own definition of it, it was
this: ‘How that Jesus Christ died for our sins, according to the
Scriptures.’ And the message that I desire now to bring to all you
professing Christians is this: Do not always be looking at Christ’s Cross
only as your means of acceptance. Do not only be thinking of Christ’s
Passion as that which has barred for you the gates of punishment, and has
opened for you the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven. It has done all that;
but if you are going to stop there you have only got hold of a very maimed
and imperfect edition of the Gospel. The Cross is your pattern, as well as
the anchor of your hope and the ground of your salvation, if it is
anything at all to you. And it is not the ground of your salvation and the
anchor of your hope unless it is your pattern. It is the one in exactly
the same degree in which it is the other.
So all self-pleasing, all harsh insistence on your own claims, all neglect
of suffering and sorrow and sin around you, comes under the lash of this
condemnation: ‘They are not worthy of the Gospel.’
And all unforgivingness of spirit and of temper in individuals and in
nations, in public and in private matters, that, too, is in flagrant
contradiction to the principles that are taught on the Cross to which you
say you look for your salvation. Have you got forgiveness, and are you
going out from the presence-chamber of the King to take your brother by
the throat, for the beggarly coppers that he owes you, and say: ‘Pay me
what thou owest!’ when the Master has forgiven you all that great mountain
of indebtedness which you owe Him? Oh, my brother! if Christian men and
women would only learn to take away the scales from their eyes and souls;
not looking at Christ’s Cross with less absolute trustfulness, as that by
which all their salvation comes, but also learning to look at it as
closely and habitually as yielding the pattern to which their lives should
be conformed, and would let the heart-melting thankfulness which it evokes
when gazed at as the ground of our hope prove itself true by its leading
them to an effort at imitating that great love, and so walking worthy of
the Gospel, how their lives would be transformed! It is far easier to
fetter your life with yards of red-tape prescriptions — do this, do not do
that — far easier to out-pharisee the Pharisees in punctilious
scrupulosities, than it is honestly, and for one hour, to take the Cross
of Christ as the pattern of your lives, and to shape yourselves by that.
One looks round upon a lethargic, a luxurious, a self-indulgent, a
self-seeking, a world-besotted professing Church, and asks: ‘Are these the
people on whose hearts a cross is stamped?’ Do these men — or rather let
us say, do we live as becometh the Gospel which proclaims the divinity of
self-sacrifice, and that the law of a perfect human life is perfect
self-forgetfulness, even as the secret of the divine nature is perfect
love? ‘Walk worthy of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.’
III. Then again, there is another form of this same general prescription
which suggests to us a kindred and yet somewhat different standard.
We are also bidden to bring our lives into conformity to, and
correspondence with, or, as the Bible has it, ‘to walk worthy of, the
calling wherewith we are called’ (Ephesians 4:1).
God summons or invites us, and summons us to what? The words which follow
our text answer, ‘Who calleth you into His own kingdom and glory.’ All you
Christian people have been invited, and if you are Christians you have
accepted the invitation; and all you men and women, whether you are
Christians or not, have been and are being invited and summoned into a
state and a world (for the reference is to the future life), in which
God’s will is supreme, and all wills are moulded into conformity with
that, and into a state and a world in which all shall — because they
submit to His will — partake of His glory, the fulness of His uncreated
light.
That being the aim of the summons, that being the destiny that is held out
before us all, ought not that destiny and the prospect of what we may be
in the future, to fling some beams of guiding brightness on to the
present?
Men that are called to high functions prepare themselves therefor. If you
knew that you were going away to Australia in six months, would you not be
beginning to get your outfit ready? You Christian men profess to believe
that you have been called to a condition in which you will absolutely obey
God’s will, and be the loyal subjects of His kingdom, and in which you
will partake of God’s glory. Well then, obey His will here, and let some
scattered sparklers of that uncreated light that is one day going to flood
your soul lie upon your face to-day. Do not go and cut your lives into two
halves, one of them all contradictory to that which you expect in the
other, but bring a harmony between the present, in all its weakness and
sinfulness, and that great hope and certain destiny that blazes on the
horizon of your hope, as the joyful state to which you have been invited.
‘Walk worthy of the calling to which you are called.’
And again, that same thought of the destiny should feed our hope, and make
us live under its continual inspiration. A walk worthy of such a calling
and such a caller should know no despondency, nor any weary, heartless
lingering, as with tired feet on a hard road. Brave good cheer, undimmed
energy, a noble contempt of obstacles, a confidence in our final
attainment of that purity and glory which is not depressed by
consciousness of present failure — these are plainly the characteristics
which ought to mark the advance of the men in whose ears such a summons
from such lips rings as their marching orders.
And a walk worthy of our calling will turn away from earthly things. If
you believe that God has summoned you to His kingdom and glory, surely,
surely, that should deaden in your heart the love and the care for the
trifles that lie by the wayside. Surely, surely, if that great voice is
inviting, and that merciful hand is beckoning you into the light, and
showing you what you may possess there, it is not walking according to
that summons if you go with your eyes fixed upon the trifles at your feet,
and your whole heart absorbed in this present fleeting world.
Unworldliness, in its best and purest fashion — by which I mean not only a
contempt for material wealth and all that it brings, but the sitting loose
by everything that is beneath the stars — unworldliness is the only walk
that is ‘worthy of the calling wherewith ye are called.’
And ‘if you hear that voice ringing like a trumpet call, or a commander’s
shout on the battlefield, into your ears, ever to stimulate you, to rebuke
your lagging indifference; if you are ever conscious in your inmost hearts
of the summons to His kingdom and glory, then, no doubt, by a walk worthy
of it, you will make your calling sure; and there shall ‘an entrance be
ministered unto you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom.’
IV. And the last of the phases of this prescription which I have to deal
with is this.
The whole Christian duty is further crystallised into the one command, to
walk in a manner conformed to, and corresponding with, the character which
is impressed upon us.
In the last chapter of the Epistle to the Romans (verse 2), we read about
a very small matter, that it is to be done ‘worthily of the saints.’ It is
only about the receiving of a good woman who was travelling from Corinth
to Rome, and extending hospitality to her in such a manner as became
professing Christians; but the very minuteness of the details to which the
great principle is applied points a lesson. The biggest principle is not
too big to be brought down to the narrowest details, and that is the
beauty of principles as distinguished from regulations. Regulations try to
be minute, and, however minute you make them, some case always starts up
that is not exactly provided for in them, and so the regulations come to
nothing. A principle does not try to be minute, but it casts its net wide
and it gathers various cases into its meshes. Like the fabled tent in the
old legend that could contract so as to have room for but one man, or
expand wide enough to hold an army, so this great principle of Christian
conduct can be brought down to giving ‘Phoebe our sister, who is a servant
of the church at Cenchrea,’ good food and a comfortable lodging, and any
other little kindnesses, when she comes to Rome. And the same principle
may be widened out to embrace and direct us in the largest tasks and most
difficult circumstances.
‘Worthily of saints’ — the name is an omen, and carries in it rules of
conduct. The root idea of ‘saint’ is ‘one separated to God,’ and the
secondary idea which flows from that is ‘one who is pure.’
All Christians are ‘saints.’ They
are consecrated and set apart for God’s service, and in the degree in
which they are conscious of and live out that consecration, they are pure.
So their name, or rather the great fact which their name implies, should
be ever before them, a stimulus and a law. We are bound to remember that
we are consecrated, separated as God’s possession, and that therefore
purity is indispensable. The continual consciousness of this relation and
its resulting obligations would make us recoil from impurity as
instinctively as the sensitive plant shuts up its little green fingers
when anything touches it; or as the wearer of a white robe will draw it up
high above the mud on a filthy pavement, Walk ‘worthily of saints’ is
another way of saying, Be true to your own best selves. Work up to the
highest ideal of your character. That is far more wholesome than to be
always looking at our faults and failures, which depress and tempt us to
think that the actual is the measure of the possible, and the past or
present of the future. There is no fear of self-conceit or of a mistaken
estimate of ourselves. The more clearly we keep our best and deepest self
before our consciousness, the more shall we learn a rigid judgment of the
miserable contradictions to it in our daily outward life, and even in our
thoughts and desires. It is a wholesome exhortation, when it follows these
others of which we have been speaking (and not else), which bids
Christians remember that they are saints and live up to their name.
A Christian’s inward and deepest self is better than his outward life. We
have all convictions in our inmost hearts which we do not work out, and
beliefs that do not influence us as we know they ought to do, and
sometimes wish that they did. By our own fault our lives but imperfectly
show their real inmost principle. Friction always wastes power before
motion is produced.
So then, we may well gather together all our duties in this final form of
the all-comprehensive law, and say to ourselves, ‘Walk worthily of
saints.’ Be true to your name, to your best selves, to your deepest
selves. Be true to your separation for God’s service, and to the purity
which comes from it. Be true to the life which God has implanted in you.
That life may be very feeble and covered by a great deal of rubbish, but
it is divine. Let it work, let it out. Do not disgrace your name.
These are the phases of the law of Christian conduct. They reach far, they
fit close, they penetrate deeper than the needle points of minute
regulations. If you will live in a manner corresponding to the character,
and worthy of the love of God, as revealed in Christ, and in conformity
with the principles that are enthroned upon His Cross, and in obedience to
the destiny held forth in your high calling, and in faithfulness to the
name that He Himself has impressed upon you, then your righteousness shall
exceed the righteousness of the painful and punctilious pharisaical
obedience to outward commands, and all things lovely and of good report
will spring to life in your hearts and bear fruit in your lives.
One last word — all these exhortations go on the understanding that you
are a Christian, that you have taken Christ for your Saviour, and are
resting upon Him, and recognising in Him the revelation of God, and in His
Cross the foundation of your hope; that you have listened to, and yielded
to, the divine summons, and that you have a right to be called a saint. Is
that presumption true about you, my friend? If it is not, Christianity
thinks that it is of no use wasting time talking to you about conduct.
It has another word to speak to you first, and after you have heard and
accepted it, there will be time enough to talk to you about rules for
living. The first message which Christ sends to you by my lips is, Trust
your sinful selves to Him as your only all-sufficient Saviour. When you
have accepted Him, and are leaning on Him with all your weight of sin and
suffering, and loving Him with your ransomed heart, then, and not till
then, will you be in a position to hear His law for your life, and to obey
it. Then, and not till then, will you appreciate the divine simplicity and
breadth of the great command to walk worthy of God, and the divine
tenderness and power of the motive which enforces it, and prints it on
yielding and obedient hearts, even the dying love and Cross of His Son.
Then, and not till then, will you know how the voice from heaven that
calls you to His kingdom stirs the heart like the sound of a trumpet, and
how the name which you bear is a perpetual spur to heroic service and
priestly purity. Till then, the word which we would plead with you to
listen to and accept is that great answer of our Lord’s to those who came
to for a rule of conduct, instead of for the gift of life: ‘This is the
work of God, that ye should believe on Him whom He hath sent.’
><> ><> ><>
SMALL DUTIES
AND THE GREAT HOPE
1 Thessalonians 4:9. ‘But of the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have
no need that I write unto you…For yourselves know perfectly, that the day
of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night.’ —1 Thessalonians 5:1-2.
THIS letter was written immediately on the arrival of Silas and Timothy in
Corinth (1 Thessalonians 3:6,’ even now’), and is all flushed with the
gladness of relieved anxiety, and throbs with love. It gains in pathetic
interest when we remember that, while writing it, the Apostle was in the
thick of his conflict with the Corinthian synagogue. The thought of his
Thessalonian converts came to him like a waft of pure, cool air to a
heated brow.
The apparent want of connection in the counsels of the two last chapters
is probably accounted for by supposing that he takes up, as they occurred
to him, the points reported by the two messengers. But we may note that
the plain, prosaic duties enjoined in verses 7-12 lead on to the lofty
revelations of the rest of the context without any sense of a gap, just
because to Paul the greatest truths had a bearing on the smallest duties,
and the vision of future glory was meant to shape the homely details of
present work.
I. We need to make an effort to realise the startling novelty of ‘love of
the brethren’ when this letter was written.
The ancient world was honeycombed
with rents and schisms, scarcely masked by political union. In the midst
of a world of selfishness this new faith started up, and by some magic
knit warring nationalities and hostile classes and wide diversities of
culture and position into a strange whole, transcending all limits of race
and language. The conception of brotherhood was new, and the realisation
of it in Christian love was still more astonishing. The world wondered;
but to the Christians the new affection was, we might almost say,
instinctive, so naturally and spontaneously did it fill their hearts.
Paul’s graceful way of enjoining it here is no mere pretty compliment. The
Thessalonians did not need to be bidden to love the brethren, for such
love was a part of their new life, and breathed into their hearts by God
Himself. They were drawn together by common relation to Jesus, and driven
together by common alienation from the world. Occasions of. divergence had
not yet risen. The world had not yet taken on a varnish of Christianity.
The new bond was still strong in its newness. So, short as had been the
time since Paul landed at Neapolis, the golden chain of love bound all the
Macedonian Christians together, and all that Paul had to exhort was the
strengthening of its links and their tightening.
That fair picture faded soon, but it still remains true that the deeper
our love to Jesus, the warmer will be our love to all His lovers. The
morning glow may not come back to the prosaic noonday, but love to the
brethren remains as an indispensable token of the Christian life. Let us
try ourselves thereby.
II. What have exhortations to steady work to do with exhortations to
increasing love?
Not much, apparently; but may not the link be, ‘ Do not suppose that your
Christianity is to show itself only in emotions, however sweet; the plain
humdrum tasks of a working man’s life are quite as noble a field as the
exalted heights of brotherly love.’ A loving heart is good, but a pair of
diligent hands are as good. The juxtaposition of these two commands
preaches a lesson which we need quite as much as the Thessalonians did.
Possibly, too, as we see more fully in the second Epistle, the new truths,
which had cut them from their old anchorage, had set some of them afloat
on a sea of unquiet expectation. So much of their old selves had been
swept away, that it would be hard for some to settle down to the old
routine. That is a common enough experience in all’ revivals,’ and at
Thessalonica it was intensified by speculations about Christ’s coming.
The ‘quiet’ which Paul would have us cultivate is not only external, but
the inward tranquillity of a spirit calm because fixed on God and filled
with love. The secret place of the Most High is ever still, and, if we
dwell there, our hearts will not be disturbed by any tumults without. To
‘do our own business’ is quite a different thing from selfish ‘looking on
our own things,’ for a great part of our business is to care for others,
and nothing dries up sympathy and practical help more surely than a
gossiping temper, which is perpetually buzzing about other people’s
concerns, and knows everybody’s circumstances and duties better than its
own. This restless generation, whose mental food is so largely the
newspaper, with its floods of small-talk about people, be they
politicians, ministers, or murderers, sorely needs these precepts. We are
all so busy that we have no time for quiet meditation, and so much
occupied with trivialities about others that we are strangers to
ourselves. Therefore religious life is low in many hearts.
The dignity of manual labour was a new doctrine to preach to Greeks, but
Paul lays stress on it repeatedly in his letters to Thessalonica.
Apparently most of the converts there were of the labouring class, and
some of them needed the lesson of Paul’s example as well as his precept. A
Christian workman wielding chisel or trowel for Christ’s sake will impress
‘them that are without.’ Dignity depends, not on the nature, but on the
motive, of our work. ‘A servant with this clause makes drudgery divine.’
It is permissible to take the Opinion of those who are not Christians into
account, and to try to show them what good workmen Christ can turn out. It
is right, too, to cultivate a spirit of independence, and to prefer a
little earned to abundant. given as a gift or alms. Perhaps some of the
Thessalonians were trying to turn brotherly love to profit, and to live on
their richer brethren. Such people infest the Church at all times.
III. With what ease, like a soaring song-bird, the letter rises to the
lofty height of the next verses, and how the note becomes more musical,
and the style richer, more sonorous and majestic, with the changed
subject! From the workshop to the descending Lord and the voice of the
trumpet and the rising saints, what a leap, and yet how easily it is made!
Happy we if We keep the future glory and the present duty thus side by
side, and pass without jar from the one to the other!
The special point which. Paul has in view must be kept well in mind. Some
of the Thessalonians seem to have been troubled, not by questions about
the Resurrection, as the Corinthians afterwards were, but by a curious
difficulty, namely, whether the dead saints would not be worse off at
Christ’s coming than the living, and to that one point Paul addresses
himself. These verses are not a general revelation of the course of events
at that coming, or of the final condition of the glorified saints, but an
answer to the question, What is the relation between the two halves of the
Church, the dead and the living, in regard to their participation in
Christ’s glory when He comes again? The question is answered negatively in
verse 15, positively in verses 16 and 17.
But, before considering them, note some other precious lessons taught
here. That sweet and consoling designation for the dead, ‘them who sleep
in Jesus,’ is Christ’s gift to sorrowing hearts. No doubt, the idea is
found in pagan thinkers, but always with the sad addition, ‘an eternal
sleep.’ Men called death by that name in despair. The Christian calls it
so because he knows that sleep implies continuous existence, repose,
consciousness, and awaking. The sleepers are not dead, they will be roused
to refreshed activity one day.
We note how emphatically verse 14 brings out the thought that Jesus died,
since He suffered all the bitterness of death, not only in physical
torments, but in that awful sense of separation from God which is the true
death in death, and that, because He did, the ugly thing wears a softened
aspect to believers, and is but sleep. He died that we might never know
what the worst sting of death is.
We note further that, in order to bring out the truth of the gracious
change which has passed on death physical for His servants, the remarkable
expression is used, in verse 14, ‘fallen asleep through Jesus’; His
mediatorial work being the reason for their death becoming sleep.
Similarly, it is only in verse 16 that the bare word’ dead’ is used about
them, and there it is needed for emphasis and clearness. When we are
thinking of Resurrection we can afford to look death in the face.
We note that Paul here claims to be giving a new revelation made to him
directly by Christ. ‘By (or, "in") the word of the Lord’ cannot mean less
than that. The question arises, in regard to verse 15, whether Paul
expected that the advent would come in his lifetime. It need not startle
any if he were proved to have cherished such a mistaken expectation; for
Christ Himself taught the disciples that the time of His second coming was
a truth reserved, and not included in His gifts to them. But two things
may be noted. First, that in the second Epistle, written very soon after
this, Paul
sets himself to damp down the expectation of the nearness of the advent,
and points to a long course of historical development of incipient
tendencies which must precede it; and, second, that his language here does
not compel the conclusion that he expected to be alive at the second
coming. For he is distinguishing between the two classes of the living and
the dead, and he naturally puts himself in the class to which, at that
time, he and his hearers belonged, without thereby necessarily deciding,
or even thinking about, the question whether he and they would or would
not belong to that class at the actual time of the advent.
The revelation here reveals much, and leaves much unrevealed. It is
perfectly clear on the main point. Negatively, it declares that the
sleeping saints lose nothing, and are not anticipated or hindered in any
blessedness by the living. Positively, it declares that they precede the
living, inasmuch as they ‘rise first’; that is, before the living saints,
who do not sleep, but are changed (1 Corinthians 15:51), are thus
transfigured. Then the two great companies shall unitedly rise to meet the
descending Lord; and their unity in Him, and, therefore, their fellowship
with one another, shall be eternal.
That great hope helps us to bridge the dark gorge of present separation.
It leaves unanswered a host of questions which our lonely hearts would
fain have cleared up; but it is enough for hope to hold by, and for sorrow
to be changed into submission and anticipation. As to the many obscurities
that still cling to the future, the meaning and the nature of the
accompaniments, the shout, the trumpet, and the like, the way of
harmonising the thought that the departed saints attend the descending
Lord, with whom they dwell now, with the declaration here that they rise
from the earth to meet Him, the question whether these who are thus caught
up from earth to meet the Lord in the air come back again with Him to
earth, — all these points of curious speculation we may leave. We know
enough for comfort, for assurance of the perfect reunion of the saints who
sleep in Jesus and of the living, and of the perfect blessedness of both
wings of the great army. We may be content with what is clearly revealed,
and be sure that, if what is unrevealed would have been helpful to us, He
would have told us. We are to use the revelation for comfort stud for
stimulus, and we are to remember that ‘times and seasons,’ are not told
us, nor would the knowledge of them profit us.
Paul took for granted that the Thessalonians remembered the Lord’s word,
which he had, no doubt, told them, that He would come ‘as a thief in the
night.’ So he discourages a profitless curiosity, and exhorts to a
continual vigilance, When He comes, it will be suddenly, and will wake
some who live from a sinful sleep with a shock of terror, and the dead
from a sweet sleep in Him with a rush of gladness, as in body and spirit
they are filled with His life, and raised to share in His triumph.
><> ><> ><>
SLEEPING
THROUGH JESUS
‘Them also which sleep in Jesus’ — 1 Thessalonians 4:14.
THAT expression is not unusual, in various forms, in the Apostle’s
writings. It suggests a very tender and wonderful thought of closeness and
union between our Lord and the living dead, so close as that He is, as it
were, the atmosphere in which they move, or the house in which they dwell
But, tender and wonderful as the thought is, it is not exactly the
Apostle’s idea here. For, accurately rendered — and accuracy in regard to
Scripture language is not pedantry — the words run, ‘Them which sleep
through Jesus.’
Now, that is a strange phrase, and, I suppose, its strangeness is the
reason why our translators have softened it down to the more familiar and
obvious ‘in Jesus.’ We can understand living through Christ, on being
sacred through Christ, ‘but what can sleeping through Christ mean? I shall
hope to answer the question presently, but, in the meantime, I only wish
to point out what the Apostle does say, and to plead for letting him say
it, strange though it sounds. For the strange and the difficult phrases of
Scripture are like the hard quartz reefs in which gold is, and if we slur
them over we are likely to loose the treasure. Let us try if we can find
what the gold here may be.
Now, there are only two thoughts that I wish to dwell upon as suggested by
these words. One is the softened aspect of death, and of the state of the
Christian dead; and the other is the ground or cause of that softened
aspect.
I. First, then, the softened aspect of death, and of the state of the
Christian dead.
It is to Jesus primarily that the New Testament writers owe their use of
this gracious emblem of sleep. For, as you remember, the word was twice
upon our Lord’s tips; once when, over the twelve-years-old maid from whom
life had barely ebbed away, He said, ‘She is not dead, but sleepeth’; and
once when in regard of the man Lazarus, from whom life had removed
further, He said, ‘Our friend sleepeth, but I go that I may awake him out
of sleep.’ But Jesus was not the originator of the expression. You find it
in the Old Testament, where the prophet Daniel, speaking of the end of the
days and the bodily Resurrection, designates those who share in it as
‘them that sleep in the dust of the earth.’ And the Old Testament was not
the sole origin of the phrase. For it is too natural, too much in
accordance with the visibilities of death, not to have suggested itself to
many hearts, and been shrined in many languages. Many an inscription of
Greek and Roman date speaks of death under this figure; but almost always
it is with the added, deepened note of despair, that it is a sleep which
knows no waking, but lasts through eternal night.
Now, the Christian thought associated with this emblem is the precise
opposite of the pagan one. The pagan heart shrank from naming the ugly
thing because it was so ugly. So dark and deep a dread coiled round the
man, as he contemplated it, that he sought to drape the dreadfulness in
some kind of thin, transparent veil, and to put the buffer of a word
between him and its hideousness. But the Christian’s motive for the use of
the word is the precise opposite. He uses the gentler expression because
the thing has become gentler.
It is profoundly significant that
throughout the whole of the New Testament the plain, naked word ‘death’ is
usually applied, not to the physical fact which we ordinarily designate by
the name, but to the grim thing of which that physical fact is only the
emblem and the parable, viz., the true death which lies in the separation
of the soul from God; whilst predominately the New Testament usage calls
the physical fact by some other gentler form of expression, because, as I
say, the gentleness has enfolded the thing to be designated.
For instance, you find one class of representations which speak of death
as being a departing and a being with Christ; or which call it, as one of
the apostles does, an ‘exodus,’ where it is softened down to be merely a
change of environment, a change of locality. Then another class of
representations speak of it as ‘putting off this my tabernacle,’ or, the
dissolution of the ‘earthly house’ — where there is a broad, firm line of
demarcation drawn between the inhabitant and the habitation, and the thing
is softened down to be a mere change of dwelling. Again, another class of
expressions speak of it as being an ‘offering,’ where the main idea is
that of a voluntary surrender, a sacrifice or libation of myself, and my
life poured out upon the altar of God. But sweetest, deepest, most
appealing to all our hearts, is that emblem of my text, ‘them that sleep.’
It is used, if I count rightly, some fourteen times in the New Testament,
and it carries with it large and plain lessons, on which I touch but for a
moment. What, then, does this metaphor say to us?
Well, it speaks first of rest. That is not altogether an attractive
conception to some of us. If it be taken exclusively it is by no means
wholesome. I suppose that the young, and the strong, and the eager, and
the ambitious, and the prosperous rather shrink from the notion of their
activities being stiffened into slumber. But, dear friends, there are some
of us like tired children in a fair, who would fain have done with the
weariness, who have made experience of the distractions and bewildering
changes, whose backs are stiffened with toil, whose hearts are heavy with
loss. And to all of us, in some moods, the prospect of shuffling off this
weary coil of responsibilities and duties and tasks and sorrows, and of
passing into indisturbance and repose, appeals. I believe, for my part,
that, after all, the deepest longing of men — though they search for it
through toil and effort — is for repose. As the poet has taught us, ‘there
is no joy but calm.’ Every heart is weary enough, and heavy laden, and
labouring enough, to feel the sweetness of a promise of rest:
‘Sleep, full of rest from head to foot, Lie still, dry dust, secure of
change.’
Yes! but the rest of which our
emblem speaks is, as I believe, only applicable to the bodily frame. The
word ‘sleep’ is a transcript of what sense enlightened by faith sees in
that still form, with the folded hands and the quiet face and the closed
eyes. But let us remember that this repose, deep and blessed as it is, is
not, as some would say, the repose of unconsciousness. I do not believe,
and I would have you not believe, that this emblem refers to the vigorous,
spiritual life, or that the passage from out of the toll and moil of earth
into the calm of the darkness beyond has any power in limiting or
suspending the vital force of the man.
Why, the very metaphor itself tells us that the sleeper is not
unconscious. He is parted from the outer world, he is unaware of
externals. When Stephen knelt below the old wall, and was surrounded by
howling fanatics that slew him, one moment he was gashed with stones and
tortured, and the next ‘he fell on sleep.’ They might howl, and the stones
fly as they would, and he was all unaware of it. Like Jonah sleeping in
the hold, what mattered the roaring of the storm to him? But separation
from externals does not mean suspense of life or of consciousness, and the
slumberer often dreams, and is aware of himself persistently throughout
his slumber.
Nay! some of his faculties are set at liberty to work more energetically,
because his connection with the outer world is for the time suspended.
And so I say that what on the hither side is sleep, on the further side is
awaking, and that the complex whole of the condition of the sainted dead
may be described with equal truth by either metaphor; ‘they sleep in
Jesus’; or, ‘when I awake I shall be satisfied with Thy likeness.’
Scripture, as it seems to me, distinctly carries this limitation of the
emblem. For what does it mean when the Apostle says that to depart and to
be with Christ is far better? Surely he who thus spoke conceived that
these two things were contemporaneous, the departing and the being with
Him. And surely he who thus spoke could not have conceived that a
millennium-long parenthesis of slumberous unconsciousness was to intervene
between the moment of his decease and the moment of his fellowship with
Jesus. How could a man prefer that dormant state to the state here, of
working for and living with the Lord? Surely, being with Him must mean
that we know where we are, and who is our companion.
And what does that text mean: ‘Ye are come unto the spirits of just men
made perfect,’ unless it means that of these two classes of persons who
are thus regarded as brought into living fellowship, each is aware of the
other? Does perfecting of the spirit mean the smiting of the spirit into
unconsciousness? Surely not, and surely in view of such words as these, we
must recognise the fact that, however limited and imperfect may be the
present connection of the disembodied dead, who sleep in Christ, with
external things, they know themselves, they know their home and their
companion, and they know the blessedness in which they are lapped.
But another thought which is suggested by this emblem is, as I have
already said, most certainly the idea of awaking. The pagans said, as
indeed one of their poets has it, ‘Suns can sink and return, but for us,
when our brief light sinks, there is but one perpetual night of slumber.’
The Christian idea of death is, that it is transitory as a sleep in the
morning, and sure to end. As St. Augustine says somewhere, ‘Wherefore are
they called sleepers, but because in the day of the Lord they will be
reawakened?’
And so these are the thoughts, very imperfectly spoken, I know, which
spring like flowers from this gracious metaphor ‘them that sleep ‘ — rest
and awaking; rest and consciousness.
II. Note the ground of this softened aspect.
They ‘sleep through Him.’ It is by reason of Christ and His work, and by
reason of that alone, that death’s darkness is made beautiful, and death’s
grimness is softened down to this. Now, in order to grasp the full meaning
of such words as these of the Apostle, we must draw a broad distinction
between the physical fact o£ the ending of corporeal life and the mental
condition which is associated with it by us. What we call death, if I may
so say, is a complex thing — a bodily phenomenon plus conscience, the
sense of sin, the certainty of retribution in the dim beyond. And you have
to take these elements apart. The former remains, but if the others are
removed, the whole has changed its character and is become another thing,
and a very little thing.
The mere physical fact is a trifle. Look at it as you see it in the
animals; look at it as you see it in men when they actually come to it. In
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it is painless and easy, and men sink
into slumber. Strange, is it not, that so small a reality should have
power to cast over human life so immense and obscuring a shadow! Why?
Because, as the Apostle says, ‘the sting of death is sin,’ and if you can
take the sting out of it, then there is very little to fear, and it comes
down to be an insignificant and transient element in our experience.
Now, the death of Jesus Christ takes away, if I may so say, the nimbus of
apprehension and dread arising from conscience and sin, and the forecast
of retribution. There is nothing left for us to face except the physical
fact, and any rough soldier, with a coarse, red coat upon him, will face
that for eighteenpence a day, and think himself well paid. Jesus Christ
has abolished death, leaving the mere shell, but taking all the substance
out of it. It has become a different thing to men, because in that death
of His He has exhausted the bitterness, and has made it possible that we
should pass into the shadow, and not fear either conscience or sin or
judgment.
In this connection I cannot but notice with what a profound meaning the
Apostle, in this very verse, uses the bare, naked word in reference to
Him, and the softened one in reference to us. ‘If we believe that Jesus
Christ died and rose again, even so them also which sleep.’ Ah! yes! He
died indeed, bearing all that terror with which men’s consciences have
invested death. He died indeed, bearing on Himself the sins of the world.
He died that no man henceforward need ever die in that same fashion, His
death makes our deaths sleep, and His Resurrection makes our sleep calmly
certain of a waking.
So, dear ‘brethren, I would not have you ignorant concerning them which
are asleep, that ye sorrow not even as others which have no hope.’ And I
would have you to remember that, whilst Christ by His work has made it
possible that the terror may pass away, and death may be softened and
minimised into slumber, it will not be so with you — unless you are joined
to Him, and by trust in the power of His death and the overflowing might
of His Resurrection, have made sure that what He has passed through, you
will pass through, and where He is, and what He is, you will be also.
Two men die by one railway accident, sitting side by side upon one seat,
smashed in one collision. But though the outward fact is the same about
each, the reality of their deaths is infinitely different. The one falls
asleep through Jesus, in Jesus; the other dies indeed, and the death of
his body is only a feeble shadow of the death of his spirit. Do you knit
yourself to the Life, which is Christ, and then ‘he that believeth on Me
shall never die,’
><> ><> ><>
THE WORK AND
ARMOR OF THE CHILDREN OF THE DAY
Let us, who are of the day, be
sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love; and for a helmet the
hope of salvation.’ — 1 Thessalonians 5:3.
This letter to the Thessalonians is the oldest book of the New Testament.
It was probably written within something like twenty years of the
Crucifixion; long, therefore, before any of the Gospels were in existence.
It is, therefore, exceedingly interesting and instructive to notice how
this whole context is saturated with allusions to our Lord’s teaching, as
it is preserved in these Gospels; and how it takes for granted that the
Thessalonian Christians were familiar with the very words.
For instance: ‘Yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so
cometh as a thief in the night’ (ver. 2). How did these people in
Thessalonica know that? They had been Christians for a year or so only;
they had been taught by Paul for a few weeks only, or a month or two at
the most. How did they know it? Because they had Been told what the Master
had said: ‘If the goodman of the house had known at what hour the thief
would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house
to be broken up’
And there are other allusions in the context almost as obvious’ ‘The
children of file light.’ Who said that? Christ, in His words: ‘The
children of this world are wiser than the children of light.’ ‘They that
sleep, sleep in the night, and if they be drunken, are drunken in the
night.’ Where does that metaphor come from? ‘Take heed lest at any time ye
be overcharged with surfeiting and drunkenness, and the cares of this
life, and so that day come upon you unawares.’ ‘Watch, lest coming
suddenly He find you sleeping!’
So you see all the context reposes upon, and presupposes the very words,
which you find in our present existing Gospels, as the words of the Lord
Jesus. And this is all But contemporaneous, and quite independent,
evidence of the existence in the Church, from the Beginning, of a
traditional teaching which is now preserved for us in that fourfold record
of His life.
Take that remark for what it is worth; and now turn to the text itself
with which I have to deal in this sermon. The whole of the context may Be
said to be a little dissertation upon the moral and religious uses of the
doctrine of our Lord’s second coming. In my text these are summed up in
one central injunction which has preceding it a motive that enforces it,
and following it a method that ensures it. ‘Let us be sober’; that is the
centre thought; and it is buttressed upon either side by a motive and a
means. ‘Let us who are of the day,’ or ‘since we are of the day, — be
sober.’ And let us be it by ‘putting on the breastplate and helmet of
faith, love, and hope.’ These, then, are the three points which we have to
consider.
I. First, this central injunction, into which all the moral teaching drawn
from the second coming of Christ is gathered — ‘Let us be sober.’
Now, I do not suppose we are altogether to omit any reference to the
literal meaning of this word. The context seems to show that, by its
reference to night as the season for drunken orgies. Temperance is
moderation in regard not only to the evil and swinish sin of drunkenness,
which is so manifestly contrary to all Christian integrity and nobility of
character, but in regard to the far more subtle temptation of another form
of sensual indulgence — gluttony. The Christian Church needed to be warned
of that, and if these people in Thessalonica needed the warning I am quite
sure that we need it. There is not a nation on earth which needs it more
than Englishmen. I am no ascetic, I do not want to glorify any outward
observance, but any doctor in England will tell you that the average
Englishman eats and drinks a great deal more than is good for him. It is
melancholy to think how many professing Christians have the edge and
keenness of their intellectual and spiritual life blunted by the luxurious
and senseless table-abundance in which they habitually indulge. I am quite
sure that water from the spring and barley-bread would be a great deal
better for their souls, and for their bodies too, in the case of many
people who call themselves Christians. Suffer a word of exhortation, and
do not let it be neglected because it is brief and general. Sparta, after
all, is the best place for a man to live in, next to Jerusalem.
But, passing from that, let us turn to the higher subject with which the
Apostle is here evidently mainly concerned. What is the meaning of the
exhortation ‘Be sober’? Well, first let me tell you what I think is not
.the meaning of it. It does not mean an unemotional absence of fervour in
your Christian character.
There is a kind of religious teachers who are always preaching down
enthusiasm, and preaching up what they call a ‘sober standard of feeling’
in matters of religion. By which, in nine eases out of ten, they mean
precisely such a tepid condition as is described in much less polite
language, when the voice from heaven says, ‘Because thou art neither cold
nor hot I will spue thee out of My mouth.’ That is the real meaning of the
‘obriety’ that some people are always desiring you to cultivate. I should
have thought that the last piece of furniture which any Christian Church
in the twentieth century needed was a refrigerator! A poker and a pair of
bellows would be very much more needful for them. For, dear brethren, the
truths that you and I profess to believe are of such a nature, so
tremendous either in their joyfulness and beauty, or in their solemnity
and awfulness, that one would think that if they once got into a man’s
head and heart, nothing but the most fervid and continuous glow of a
radiant enthusiasm would correspond to their majesty and overwhelming
importance. I venture to say that the only consistent Christian is the
enthusiastic Christian; and that the only man who will ever do anything in
this world for God or man worth doing is the man who is not sober,
according to that coldblooded definition which I have been speaking about,
but who is all ablaze with an enkindled earnestness that knows no
diminution and no cessation.
Paul, the very man that is exhorting here to sobriety, was the very type
of an enthusiast all his life. So Festus thought him mad, and even in the
Church at Corinth there were some to whom in his fervour, he seemed to be
‘beside himself’ (2 Corinthians 5:13).
Oh! for more of that insanity! You may make up your minds to this; that
any men or women that are in thorough earnest, either about Christianity
or about any other great, noble, lofty, self-forgetting purpose, will have
to be content to have the old Pentecostal charge flung at them: — ‘These
men are full of new wine!’ Well for the Church, and well for the men who
deserve the taunt; for it means that they have learned something of the
emotion that corresponds to such magnificent and awful verities as
Christian faith converses with.
I did not intend to say so much about that; I turn now for a moment to the
consideration of what this exhortation really means. It means, as I take
it, mainly this: the prime Christian duty of self-restraint in the use and
the love of all earthly treasures and pleasures.
I need not do more than remind you how, in the very make of a man’s soul,
it is clear that unless there be exercised rigid self-control he will go
all to pieces. The make of human nature, if I may say so, shows that it is
not meant for a democracy but a monarchy.
Here are within us many passions, tastes, desires, most of them rooted in
the flesh, which are as blind as hunger and thirst are. If a man is
hungry, the bread will satisfy him all the same whether he steals it or
not; and it will not necessarily be distasteful oven if it be poisoned.
And there are other blind impulses and appetites in our nature which ask
nothing except this: — ‘Give me my appropriate gratification, though all
the laws of God and man be broken in order to get it.’
And so there has to be something like an eye given to these blind beasts,
and something like a directing hand laid upon these instinctive impulses.
The true temple of the human spirit must be built in stages, the broad
base laid in these animal instincts; above them, and controlling them, the
directing and restraining will; above it the understanding which
enlightens it and them; and supreme over all the conscience with nothing
between it and heaven. Where that is not the order of the inner man you
get wild work. You have set ‘beggars on horseback,’ and we all know where
they go! The man who lets passion and ‘inclination guide is like a
steam-boat with all the furnaces banked up, with the engines going full
speed, and nobody at the wheel. It will drive on to the rocks, or wherever
the bow happens to point, no matter though death and destruction lie
Beyond the next turn of the screw. That is what you will come to unless
you live in the habitual exercise of rigid self-control.
And that self-control is to be exercised mainly, or at least as one very
important form of it, in regard to our use-and estimate of the pleasures
of this present life. Yes! it is not only from the study of a man’s make
that the necessity for a very rigid self-government appears, but the
observation of the conditions and circumstances in which he is placed
points the same lesson. All round about ,him are hands reaching out to him
drugged cups. The world with all its fading sweet comes tempting him, and
the old fable fulfils itself — Whoever takes that Circe’s cup and puts it
to his lips and quaffs deep, turns into a swine, and sits there imprisoned
at the feet of the sorceress for evermore!
There is only one thing that will deliver you from that fate, my brother.
‘Be sober,’ and in regard to the world and all that it offers to us-all
joy, possession, gratification — ‘set a knife to thy throat if thou be a
man given to appetite.’ There is no noble life possible on any other
terms-not to say there is no Christian life possible on any other terms —
but suppression and mortification of the desires of the flesh and of the
spirit. You cannot look upwards and downwards at the same moment. Your
heart is only a tiny room after all, and if you cram it full of the world,
you relegate your Master to the stable outside. ‘Ye cannot serve God and
Mammon.’ ‘Be sober,’ says Paul, then, and cultivate the habit of rigid
self-control in regard to this present. Oh! what a melancholy, solemn
thought it is that hundreds of professing Christians in England, like
vultures after a full meal, have so gorged themselves with the garbage of
this present life that they cannot fly, and have to be content with moving
along the ground, heavy and languid. Christian men and women, are you
keeping yourselves in spiritual health by a very sparing use of the
dainties and delights of earth? Answer the question to your own souls and
to your Judge.
II. And now let me turn to the other thoughts that He here.
There is, secondly, a motive which backs up and Buttresses this
exhortation. ‘Let us who are of the day’ — or as the Revised Version has
it a little more emphatically and correctly, ‘Let us, since we are of the
day, be sober.’ ‘The day’; what day? The temptation is to answer the
question by saying — ‘of course the specific day which was spoken about in
the Beginning of the section, "the day of the Lord," that coming judgment
by the coming Christ.’ But I think that although, perhaps, there may be
some allusion here to that specific day, still, if you will look at the
verses which immediately precede my text, you will see that in them the
Apostle has passed from the thought of ‘the day of the Lord’ to that of
day in general. That is obvious, I think, from the contrast he draws
between the ‘day’ and the ‘night,’ the darkness and the light. If so,
then, when he says’ the children of the day’ he does not so much mean —
though that is quite true — that we are, as it were, akin to that day of
judgment, and may therefore look forward to it without fear, and in quiet
confidence, lifting up our heads because our redemption draws nigh; But
rather he means that Christians are the children of that which expresses
knowledge, and joy, and activity. Of these things the day is the emblem,
in every language and in every poetry. The day is the time when men see
and hear, the symbol of gladness and cheer all the world over.
And so, says Paul, you Christian men and women belong to a joyous realm, a
realm of light and knowledge, a realm of purity and righteousness. You are
children of the light; a glad condition which involves many glad and noble
issues. Children of the light should be brave, children of the light
should not Be afraid of the light, children of the light should be
cheerful, children of the light should be buoyant, children of the light
should be transparent, children of the light should be hopeful, children
of the light should be pure, and children of the light should walk in this
darkened world, bearing their radiance with them; and making things, else
unseen, visible to many a dim eye.
But while these emblems of cheerfulness, hope, purity, and illumination
are gathered together in that grand name — ‘Ye are the children of the
day,’ there is one direction especially in which the Apostle thinks that
that consideration ought to tell, and that is the direction of
self-restraint. ‘Noblesse oblige!’ — the aristocracy are bound to do
nothing low or dishonourable. The children of the light are not to stain
their hands with anything foul. Chambering and wantonness, slumber and
drunkenness, the indulgence in the appetites of the flesh, — all that may
be fitting for the night, it is clean incongruous with the day.
Well, if you want that turned into pedestrian prose — which is no more
clear, but a little less emotional — it is just this: You Christian men
and women belong — if you are Christians — to another state of things from
that which is lying round about you; and, therefore, you ought to live in
rigid abstinence from these things that are round about you.
That is plain enough surely, nor do I suppose that I need to dwell on that
thought at any length. We belong to another order of things, says Paul; we
carry a day with us in the midst of the night. What follows from that? Do
not let us pursue the wandering lights and treacherous will-o’-the-wisps
that lure men into bottomless bogs where they are lost. If we have light
in our dwellings whilst Egypt lies in darkness, let it teach us to eat our
meat with our loins girded, and our staves in our hands, not without
hitter herbs, and ready to go forth into the wilderness. You do not belong
to the world in which you live, if you are Christian men and women; you
are only camped here. Your purposes, thoughts, hopes, aspirations,
treasures, desires, delights, go up higher. And so, if you are children of
the day, be self-restrained in your dealings with the darkness.
III. And, last of all, my text points out for us a method by which this
great precept may be fulfilled: ‘Putting on the breastplate of faith and
love, and for an helmet the hope of salvation.’
That, of course, is the first rough draft occurring in Paul’s earliest
Epistle, of an image which recurs at intervals, and in more or less
expanded form in other of his letters, and is so splendidly worked out in
detail in the grand picture of the Christian armour in the Epistle to the
Ephesians.
I need not do more than just remind you of the difference between that
finished picture and this outline sketch. Here we have only defensive and
not offensive armour, here the Christian graces are somewhat differently
allocated to the different parts of the armour. Here we have only the
great triad of Christian graces, so familiar on our lips — faith, hope,
charity. Here we have faith and love in the closest possible
juxtaposition, and hope somewhat more apart. The breastplate, like some of
the ancient hauberks, made of steel and gold, is framed and forged out. of
faith and love blended together, and faith and love are more closely
identified in fact than faith and hope, or than love and hope. For faith
and love have the same object — and are all but contemporaneous. Wherever
a man lays hold of Jesus Christ by faith, there cannot but spring up in
his heart love to Christ; and there is no love without faith. So that we
may almost say that faith and love are but the two throws of the shuttle,
the one in the one direction and the other in the other; whereas hope
comes somewhat lair in a somewhat remoter connection with faith, and has a
somewhat different object from these other two. Therefore it is here
| |