Bible Commentaries
Ephesians 3

Verses 14-15

The Father and the Families

For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.— Ephesians 3:14-15.

1. There are two great prayers in this Epistle. The first is in the first chapter. It seemed to Paul that the gospel was so wonderful that it was impossible for men to See the glory of it unless they were taught of God, and therefore after his lofty account of God’s purpose to bring the heavens and the earth into an eternal unity in Christ, he tells the Christians at Ephesus that he was continually praying that God would give them “a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him,” and that the eyes of their heart might be enlightened that they might know the hope to which God had called them, and “the glory of his inheritance in the saints.” Spiritual illumination is necessary if we are to know the contents of the Christian gospel; for the gospel reveals invisible and eternal things lying far beyond the frontiers of the common thoughts of men.

The second prayer takes another form. Its central idea is strength. Strength is necessary as well as light. We cannot know the gospel unless its glories are divinely revealed to us; and the spiritual energy necessary to receive it and to hold it fast must also come from God.

2. The prayer which he offers here is no less remarkable and unique in his Epistles than the act of praise in chapter 1. Addressing himself to God as the Father of angels and of men, the Apostle asks that He will endow the readers in a manner corresponding to “the riches of his glory”—in other words, that the gifts He bestows may be worthy of the universal Father, worthy of the august character in which God has now revealed Himself to mankind. According to this measure, St. Paul beseeches for the Church, in the first instance, two gifts, which after all are one,—viz., the inward strength of the Holy Spirit ( Ephesians 3:16), and the permanent indwelling of Christ ( Ephesians 3:17). These gifts he asks on his readers’ behalf with a view to their gaining two further blessings, which are also one,—viz., the power to understand the Divine plan ( Ephesians 3:18) as it has been expounded in this letter, and so to know the love of Christ ( Ephesians 3:19). Still, beyond these there rises in the distance a further end for man and the Church: the reception of the entire fulness of God. Human desire and thought thus reach their limit; they grasp at the infinite.

Few of us can fail to have been struck with the solemnity and high tone of this prayer. It may be that some of us have thought that it contained a higher standard of feeling and life than we could hope to reach, and therefore have been tempted to abandon the consideration of it in silence; whilst others, striving to force the feelings which it recommends, have been betrayed into false excitement and unreality. The remedy for both these common cases is a careful consideration of the Apostle’s petition as a whole. Almost every word is a rich mine of thought, but there is a lesson contained in its general scope which we must carefully observe. It is indeed very spiritual; but it is not the less practical. It is a pattern for the most advanced Christian; but it is a lesson for the weakest believer. We are not to regard it only as an Apostle’s prayer for the early saints, who lived in days far different from our times. It is a prayer suitable for all ministers of the Gospel, for all times. It shows us what is the object of Church teaching, and therefore points out the state to which all Christians ought to be advancing. The Apostle did not pray for any blessing which his people could not receive; and therefore all he prayed for they were bound to seek. Hence this petition came to the Ephesians not only as an evidence of their pastor’s love and devotion, but with an implied command.

And so it is now: the prayers of the Church are exhortations to the faithful. For example: when the earnest petition arises from the altar, “that this congregation here present may with meek heart and due reverence hear and receive Thy holy word,” it is a solemn admonition to cultivate that very meekness and reverence for which we pray. And when the Apostle tells us: “For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father that he would grant you according to the riches of his exceeding glory, to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man”; when he prays “that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith,” and that we may be skilled in the heavenly wisdom of the “love of Christ,” as the members of His mystical body should be—are not these several petitions so many loving exhortations to us to seek after spiritual strength, to acquire a constant faith, to study God’s attributes, especially His love in the Cross, that love which exceeds all other mysteries and surpasses all other knowledge; and to strive after all the perfection which God requires? The Apostle opens the door of his “closet” to show all Christian pastors how they should pray for their people; and all Christian people what they should seek for themselves. As in church solemn lessons are conveyed in the services, so here we are admitted into the awful privacy of an Apostle, to learn our duty whilst we catch his fervour. So beautifully is edification always mingled with devotion. 1 [Note: J. Armstrong.]

3. The prayer is conveniently divided into four petitions: “That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, that ye may be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man”—that is the first. “That Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith”—that is the second, the result of the first, and the preparation for the third. “That ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be strong to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge”—that is the third. And all lead up at last to that wonderful desire beyond which nothing is possible—“that ye may be filled unto all the fulness of God.”

I

The Occasion of this Prayer

“For this cause.”

1. “For this cause,” says St. Paul, “I bow my knees,”—what is the cause on account of which he bows his knees? In order to ascertain this cause we must look back, first of all, to the beginning of the chapter. The chapter begins with the same words, “For this cause I, Paul, the prisoner of Jesus Christ, for you Gentiles.” Then there comes a parenthesis, which continues until the verse immediately preceding our text. Therefore, if we want to find the connexion, we must look at the close of the preceding chapter, where the cause is set forth in language beautifully and expressively instructive. There the Apostle has been speaking of those who were “builded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit,” of those who, having been previously afar off, had been made nigh by the blood of Christ, who were “no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God”; he had been speaking of those who were saved “by grace through faith,” who had been brought into covenant with God through Christ, through whom they had “access by one Spirit to the Father”; and then he says, “for this cause I bow my knees,” that is, as if he had said: God hath blessed my ministry to you—Ephesians; there was a time when you were “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of the promise, having no hope and without God in the world”; but the God of all grace has reversed all this, and has now “created you anew in Christ Jesus”; and “for this cause I bow my knees to the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.”

2. There is, however, an immediate and pressing necessity for this prayer, but it is rather implied than expressed. When he wrote this letter and offered this prayer, Paul was a prisoner in Rome, a circumstance which appears to have had a very depressing, if not a staggering effect on the newly-converted brethren at Ephesus. Retaining some of the follies of their former heathenism, they looked upon this calamity as an evil omen, and drew from it strange inferences. A prisoner in Rome, and an ambassador of the King of kings! A favourite of heaven and shut up in gaol! Can it be? Is Christianity of God? Is Paul true? So thought and so reasoned these novices in the Christian faith, as is evidently implied in the words immediately preceding our text—“Wherefore I ask that ye faint not at my tribulations for you, which are your glory.” To save them from “fainting,” and to keep them steadfast in the faith, notwithstanding his imprisonment, he prayed for them. It is occasions that make prayer. We never pray as we ought without having definite cases before our minds, and seeking the Divine help, either for ourselves or others, according to the actual circumstances and the special needs of the time.

These Ephesian Christians have passed away, their city lies in ruins; the heron and the stork wander where once the multitude stood. The hand that wrote these lines has long since mouldered into dust; and yet to-day these words are as fresh and appropriate as when first penned. For the fundamental facts of human need and Divine grace remain through all generations, and are true of all nations. To the English Christians of the twentieth century, who represent the same Gentile Church as the Ephesians of the first, the message of the Apostle is suitable: “I bow my knees unto the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, that ye may be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man.” 1 [Note: J. W. Ewing, The Undying Christ, 69.]

II

The Apostle’s Attitude in Prayer

“I bow my knees.”

1. “I bow my knees.” Why is that mentioned? Is not posture a small thing compared with spirit? Why does the Apostle refer to the attitude? It is because of what that attitude meant to him and means to every sincere worshipper. Kneeling is the attitude of humility, of confession, of entreaty, of worship. Some have gone further, and thought that kneeling in prayer is a symbol of man’s fallen state, that he can no longer stand erect before God, but is broken and crushed in the presence of Jehovah. Certainly, kneeling is the natural position of man before the Almighty and All-Holy Creator. The holiest and highest of men have approached God thus. Solomon, the greatest, except David, of all Jewish kings, upon the day of the dedication of the Temple, knelt down before all his people and presented his prayer to God. Ezra, the priest, on receiving news of the people’s sin tells us: “I fell upon my knees, and spread out my hands unto the Lord my God.” Daniel, the prophet, when, in the city of idolatry, he heard of the decree forbidding prayer, except to the king, for thirty days, went into his house and “kneeled upon his knees” as before.

But we have still higher authority; for did not Jesus, in the Garden of Gethsemane, withdraw Himself from His disciples a stone’s throw and kneel down and pray? And, after Jesus, what a line of men—the greatest, the purest, the tenderest—we see kneeling in prayer. Stephen, with that stony rain beating out his life, kneels down and cries with a loud voice: “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.” Peter, when Dorcas is dead, kneels down and prays for her restoration. And Paul, when bidding farewell to the elders of this very Church, knelt down on the seashore and poured out his heart to God for those he was leaving. Evidently it was the habit of his life.

I was touched by reading yesterday morning of Bishop Latimer, the martyr, that towards the end of his life he used to spend so much time kneeling in prayer that he had to be assisted to rise. He forgot his troubles when pouring out his soul before God. Robert McCheyne spent a large part of his time in prayer. As he said: “Prayer is the link between earth and Heaven.” These men stooped to conquer, knelt to prevail, humbled themselves that Christ might be exalted. I pity the man or the nation that knows not how to kneel in prayer to God. 1 [Note: J. W. Ewing, The Undying Christ, 71.]

2. Yet no one could be less inclined than Paul to place any emphasis on any possible amount or variety of genuflexion. He knelt, but in assuming that attitude, and in mentioning it, he only gave expression to the humility, the reverence, the earnestness, the concentration of his spirit in devotion. Prayer lies in the heart only, but the words, the attitude, the place, the time, have all their influences directly or indirectly on our heart. We all kneel in private, and no doubt find the attitude helpful, at least to the fixedness of our attention on the work professedly in hand. Would not kneeling in public be equally helpful, and would not its general practice be as seemly as it would be helpful? But, whatever the attitude, let us not forget that the spirit fairly indicated by the Apostle’s expression, “I bow my knees,” is essential to the validity of prayer.

The old customary, seemly attitude in prayer was standing. So Jesus said when He described the penitent publican, “He stood afar off and prayed”; so when He commanded His disciples and said: “When ye stand praying, forgive!” So in the godly fear of our fathers I still remember the awe that seized me as a boy when the whole great congregation rose to its feet in prayer, when the feeble old man and the frail man lifted their worn faces uncovered in speechless reverence to the eternal light which descended and suffused them with a glory which makes the burnished nimbus with which the painter ever loved to decorate his saint seem tame and tawdry. So when the subject enters the presence of his sovereign he stands, and in the very act and attitude of his homage shows that he is a free-born citizen conscious of his dignity.

But prayer is too large and masterful a thing to be capable of being expressed in any single attitude. There are moments when collective worship is beautiful and seemly, and there are moments when a man is overpowered with a transcendent need and is forced to his knees. The man who is dazzled with excess of light finds that he lives and looks through a medium of vision too perfect for his dim eyes. So the man who for a moment is possessed by a great vision, or is conscious of a great need, may as it were be swept from his feet into the attitude of a suppliant before God. The year when I first entered the University was a year when the most learned of all Scottish thinkers died and passed away. As I saw him he was a frail and shrinking shadow, scarcely equal to the humblest act of articulation, yet round the benches the whisper passed that in strong manhood, when first he came to his Chair and wrestled with the problems of metaphysics, and seemed now and then to wrestle in vain, there would come such a torrent of passion and of intellectual conflict in him, that he would leap from his desk and away from his papers and fall prone before God, that light might come and he might, see. 1 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn.]

Brother Lawrence told me that it was a great delusion to think that the times of prayer ought to differ from other times: that we were as strictly obliged to adhere to God by action in the time of action as by prayer in its season. His view of prayer was nothing else but a sense of the Presence of God, his soul being at that time insensible to everything but Divine Love. When the appointed time of prayer was past, he found no difference, because he still continued with God, praising and blessing Him with all his might, so he passed his life in continual joy; yet hoped that God would give him somewhat to suffer, when he should have grown stronger. 2 [Note: Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, 21.]

III

The Father

“I bow my knees unto the Father.”

1. St. Paul says that he offered his prayer to “the Father.” He did not address a material image, a creation of his own fancy, a power, or even “the Divine totality of being.” He prayed to a Person. With St. Paul prayer was mind addressing mind; heart pleading with heart.

Madame Blavatsky, the founder of modern Theosophy, was asked: “Do you pray?” “No,” she replied, “we do not pray; the only Deity we know is an abstraction. We have no time to kneel to an abstraction.” 1 [Note: J. W. Ewing, The Undying Christ, 71.]

2. The Authorized Version has an addition which we may well wish we could retain. “Unto the Father of our lord Jesus Christ.” There is something peculiarly tender and winning about this title of God. God is brought very near to us as the Father of Jesus. And we can still cherish that beautiful title, for it is used in several other places.

All nations, all men, who have cultivated religion, have given names and titles to God, in which they have expressed and embodied as well as they could their most exalted ideas concerning God. So the Jew called upon the God of his fathers by the name of Yahveh (“Jehovah”); and in that name called to mind a whole world of plighted troth, of faithfulness and tenderness. So the Moslem, as he tells his beads, recites the names of God, and passes into a kind of ecstasy as he recalls one by one the lofty titles of the beneficence and power of Allah. St. Paul, like all other Christians since, had no personal name for the God whom he adored, no long string of loud-sounding titles. You will not find in the New Testament any mention made of the Supreme Being, of the First Great Cause, of the Architect of the Universe, or anything else in that line. For St. Paul, and for us, God is simply and for ever “the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” It is hardly too much to say, “that is all we know, and all we want to know, of Him.”

(1) The Father of our Lord Jesus Christ means “the Father” of our Lord’s teaching, of those good tidings which He came to bring home to our minds and hearts. That is quite good grammar, and quite good theology. It is (most emphatically) “the Father” of our Lord’s discourses and parables; it is the Father of the Prodigal Son, who went forth to meet him while he was yet a long way off, and fell on his neck and kissed him; it is the Father of whom our Lord testified, “I say not unto you that I will pray for you, for the Father himself loveth you”; it is He alone to whom we bow our knees, because we cannot help it, because His goodness and patience and amazing love are too much for us, because they have tamed our pride and broken down our obstinacy, and shamed us out of our indifference; and now we bow our knees to Him in adoring love, even if we have to add, “Father, I have sinned, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.”

There are many people nowadays who claim to know “the Father,” and in the strength of that knowledge they reject the Saviour, reject the Bible, reject Christianity. Yet it remains absolutely true that the New Testament is the one and only book that ever told them anything worth knowing about “the Father”; it is a fact that “the Father” to whom they bow their knees (if, indeed, they ever bow them at all) belongs exclusively to our Lord Jesus Christ. He alone knew Him; He alone revealed Him. Even they have to come to the Father by Christ: as a matter of history, as a matter of fact; there is no other way. And so their position is this: they embrace with effusion the one great and glorious revelation of the Book, and then they throw the Book aside with contempt; they acknowledge with enthusiasm “the Father” whom Christ (and only Christ) declared unto them, and then they dismiss Christ with scant courtesy. 1 [Note: R. Winterbotham.]

(2) In the second place, it is impossible to doubt (if we believe Himself) that “the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” means more than “the Father” of His discourses, of His gospel. There was an ineffable relationship, a mysterious unity, between our Lord Jesus Christ and the Father, which is as strongly marked in His own words as in any creeds which have been made since. Whatever fault may be found with those creeds, they do not assert more strongly than He did Himself a oneness with the Father which passes man’s understanding; which, assuredly, it had been impossible for any other, and intolerable in any other to assert.

If we understand that He is indeed the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in such wise that there is absolutely no difference or inequality; that such as the Son is in the Gospels, such is the Father also above us, and such the Holy Spirit within us; even so good, so loving, so pitiful, so faithful and true, so unyielding in the face of wrong, so careful for His own, so just and right in all His ways, so compassionate to error, so grieved for sufferers, so sorrowful for sin even unto death; if we understand this, I say, then we believe our Lord’s saying, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (and cannot possibly be mistaken concerning Him), and we bow our knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ with the most joyful and complete assurance. 1 [Note: R. Winterbotham.]

Trust My Father, saith the Eldest-born;

I did trust Him ere the earth began;

Not to know Him is to be forlorn;

Not to love Him is—not to be man.

He that knows Him loves Him altogether;

With My Father I am so content

That through all this dreary human weather

I am working, waiting, confident.

He is with Me; I am not alone;

Life is bliss, because I am His child;

Down in Hades will I lay the stone

Whence shall rise to Heaven His city piled.

Hearken, brothers, pray you, to my story!

Hear Me, sister; hearken, child, to Me:

Our one Father is a perfect glory;

He is light, and there is none but He.

Come then with Me; I will lead the way;

All of you, sore-hearted, heavy-shod,

Come to Father, yours and mine, I pray;

Little ones, I pray you, come to God! 2 [Note: George MacDonald.]

3. When St. Paul said, “I call upon the Father,” he was not saying a truism; he was striking the note that was distinctive of Christianity. He was saying the very central thing which Christ, our Master, came into the world to say. “I call upon the Father.” What does it mean, this belief that God is our Father? We are in the hands of a great power. No one can be such a fool as to think that man is independent. We are in the hands of a vast and universal power on which moment by moment we depend, as for our life originally, so, moment by moment, for the breath we breathe. What is this power? Is it blind force? The Jew alone of all the races was taught to believe that the power which lay behind him was righteousness, and that God was just and righteous; so it was that he set to work to build up the foundations of human society—because he believed that God was righteous, and all this our Lord maintained and deepened. He deepened it into the belief that God was a Father.

(1) That means, first of all, that God is love, that behind all the suffering, the misery, the inequality, and the injustice which confront us in this wild and irregular scene of human life, there beats always and everywhere the heart of a Father, the heart of a personal and impartial love. You ask how it was that Christ persuaded men of this truth. It was because of what He was. It was because He was a “man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” If some bright angel had come down from heaven with all the glory of miracles, and had flown to the earth and had proclaimed in a voice of thunder and with works of wonder that God was love, we might have shaken our heads and said, “It is all very curious and mysterious, and it is a very nice thing to listen to, but I know better.” Our Lord persuaded men that God was love because He came a man among men, hiding not Himself from His own flesh, moving among men in free and open contact, bearing men’s sicknesses and carrying their infirmities; because He went down Himself into the dark valley of failure and suffering; because He bore all the pains of body, all the racking agonies of mind, all the mysterious sense of failure and desolation, that, generation after generation, have turned philanthropists into cynics and made them mad; all the human history that has lain behind that bitter cry of righteous men forsaken—that cry which we hear in the Psalm, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”—those words which rang out of the lips of Christ on the Cross.

In our great cities we seem as if we were lost in a crowd. What am I but a tiny little element in some vast human machine that sweeps along in the sway of great forces which move from one end of the industrial world to another and seem to annihilate any sense of the individuality of a single life? It is crushed under the great forces which rush along. So even the old Jew could feel years ago in the Book of Ecclesiasticus, where the writer says: “Say not thou, I shall be hidden from the Lord; and who shall remember me from on high? I shall not be known among so many people; for what is my soul in a boundless creation?” We feel it even more in our modern time, but the assurance of Christ is that it is not true; that there is no one of us lost in the crowd; that there is no one of us created by accident; that we were not turned out in hundreds or in thousands or in nations, that we were created individuals, that God is the Father of each and all; and that behind all the seeming inequalities of position and comfort there is the perfect rectifying justice and equality of God. I believe that God is my Father. That means that He knows all my circumstances, that He values me, not in proportion to my performance, but in proportion to how much I am tried; because, to keep my temper, if I am naturally an angry man, is worth in His sight ten thousand times more than to keep my temper if I am naturally an amiable person without a bad temper to contend with. He knows my circumstances. He knows me and cares about me with the infinite knowledge of the Creator and the Father of everything that goes to make the individuality of my lot, which means the individual love of God. 1 [Note: Bishop Gore.]

(2) And then, the Fatherhood of God, St. Paul says, is the pattern and source of every fatherhood in heaven, and on earth. It means that God rules by a method of fatherhood. Men are set in groups and societies, and each group and society has one at the head of it, and the model of government is to be fatherhood. So it is in the family, and Christian civilization depends upon maintaining the sanctity and the dignity of the family. To believe in the Fatherhood of God is to set to work to be a good father, a good head of a household in our own families.

The other day I had occasion to find out, in very large works, about a great mass of very intelligent men who were workers there, that they were very unwilling that their wives should know how much money they were getting. I thought that was a very bad sign. There can be no sound and healthy married life where the wife does not know what money the husband is getting, because there can be no confidence; there can be nothing of that confidence of heart to heart, that real unity of life, that real fellowship and co-operation which means complete trust; and you know we have a great job to-day if we are to restore home life to its proper sanctity and dignity. 1 [Note: Bishop Gore.]

Now, look for a moment how the small families of the earth are all made after the fashion of the heavenly family. Did it ever occur to you—surely it must—that God’s invention of the family in this world is just to compel our thoughts to rise up to the great Father, and to recognize the great family? Love is the secret of God; love is the creative power. It is symbolized in birth. See how the child comes into the world, dependent on the mother. See how the child has no notion of bliss but in the mother’s arms, surrounded with the protection of those arms, looking up into the heaven of her face, reading the infinite in her eyes. The child, I say, is compelled to love the mother. He cannot help himself. Of course, there is the faculty of loving in the child, or else he could not love. It is his Divine nature; he is born of love, and he is love; but it can be brought out only in this way—that he shall, through helplessness, passivity in bliss, feeding on the very body of the mother that bare him, seeking the shelter of her bosom at every dread or anxiety or fear that comes upon him, learn that there is an overshadowing, an upholding love, and that love is his very servant, and, I had almost said, Slave. Surely there is no servant in His house like God Himself, for He does everything for His little ones. 2 [Note: George MacDonald.]

IV

The Families

“Every family, in heaven and on earth.”

1. “I bow my knees unto the Father, from whom [not the whole family, but] every family in heaven and on earth is named.” The point of St. Paul’s original phrase is somewhat lost in translation. The Greek word for family ( patria) is based on that for father ( pater). A distinguished father anciently gave his name to his descendants; and this paternal name became the bond of family or tribal union, and the title which ennobled the race. So we have “the sons of Israel,” the “sons of Aaron” or “of Korah”; and in Greek history, the Atridae, the Alcaemonidae, who form a family of many kindred households—a clan, or gens, designated by their ancestral head. Thus Joseph (in Luke 2:4) is described as being “of the house and family [ patria ] of David”; and Jesus is “the Son of David.” Now Scripture speaks also of sons of God, and these of two chief orders. There are those “in heaven,” who form a race distinct from ourselves in origin—divided, it may be, amongst themselves into various orders and dwelling in their several homes in the heavenly places, and there are those “on earth.”

The various classes of men on earth, Jewish and Gentile, and the various orders of angels in heaven, are all related to God, the common Father, and only in virtue of that relation has any of them the name of family. The father makes the family; God is the Father of all; and if any community of intelligent beings, human or angelic, bears the great name of family, the reason for that lies in this relation of God to it. The significant name has its origin in the spiritual relationship.

This great and noble conception of the unity of heaven and earth in God is characteristic of that form of Christian theology which is illustrated in this Epistle and in the Epistle to the Colossians. It appears elsewhere; but in these two Epistles, which were written about the same time, it is developed with extraordinary boldness and with a vehement and glorious eloquence. As yet, according to Paul’s conception, the Divine idea is unfulfilled. Its orderly development has been troubled, thwarted, and delayed by sin, by sin in this world and in other worlds. But it will be fulfilled at last. In Christ “were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through him, and unto him”; and in union with Christ, the eternal Son of God, heaven and earth will be restored to the eternal Father.

During this tour in England (in 1894) Dr. Paton was invited by the Bishop of Durham—the late Bishop Westcott—to visit him at Auckland Castle. Both of the men of God who then met are gone, and we can speak more freely of the event. The Bishop received his Presbyterian brother as whole-heartedly as if he had been one of his own clergy. The missionary on his part was profoundly moved by the visit, and told his friend subsequently how the Bishop had led him away to his study, and there discussed, with evident eagerness of soul, the progress and hopes of the evangelization of the heathen in the South Sea Islands and in the world. Then they knelt together before God—those two warriors who, in such different fields and circumstances, had fought their great fight and well-nigh finished their course. They recognized that they were one in heart and purpose, and each poured out his soul in fervent petition for the other, and for the bringing in of the Kingdom of God. 1 [Note: John G. Paton, iii. 52.]

Painful as it is to witness the ineffectual yearnings after unity on all hands of which you speak, still it is hopeful also. We may hope that our good God has not put it into the hearts of religious men to raise a prayer for unity without intending in His own time to fulfil the prayer. And since the bar against unity is a conscientious feeling, and a reverence for which each party holds itself to be the truth, and a desire to maintain the faith, we may humbly hope that in our day, and till He discloses to the hearts of men what the true faith is, He will, where hearts are honest, take the will for the deed. 2 [Note: Cardinal Newman, in Life of David Brown, 239.]

2. The Greek words can grammatically mean only “every family” not “the whole family.” All such ideas, therefore, as that angels and men, or the blessed in heaven and the believing on earth, are in view as now making one great family, are excluded. The sense is “the Father, from whom all the related orders of intelligent beings, human and angelic, each by itself, get the significant name of family.”

In the Epistle to the Ephesians, St. Paul lays open a vision of the spiritual origins and influences and issues of things temporal and confirms the truth which lies in the bold surmise of the poet that earth is in some sense a shadow of heaven. Now he sees in the future of the material Temple with its “wall of partition” a figure of the state of the world before the Advent, and then passes to the contemplation of its living antitype, built on the foundation of apostles and prophets with Christ for its head corner-stone. Now he traces in the organization of the natural body the pattern of a glorious society fitly framed together by the ministries of every part, and guided by the animating energy of a Divine Head. Now he shows how through the experience of the Church on earth the manifold wisdom of God is made known to the heavenly hierarchy. Now he declares that marriage, in which the distinctive gifts and graces of divided humanity are brought together in harmonious fellowship, is a sign, a sacrament, in his own language, of that perfect union in which the Incarnate Word takes to Himself His Bride, the first-fruits of creation. And so in the paragraph where the text occurs he touches with thankful exultation on the universality of the Gospel, by which the many races of men, Jews and Gentiles—the people and the nations—are reunited, and the purpose of God in the education of the world is at last made clear.

Not in one line but in many; not through a calm, uninterrupted growth but in sorrow and tribulation men were trained in the past—this is his thought—to receive the crowning truth, and justified their training by their faith. By the help of that most signal example we can see how every ordered commonwealth, every bond of kinsmanship, owes its strength to a Divine presence. From the one Father, every fatherhood, every family through which the grace of fatherhood is embodied, derives its essential virtue. 1 [Note: B. F. Westcott, The Incarnation and Common Life, 161.]

3. Family relationship is therefore a very sacred thing, its root being not in the creation, but in God. And though we shall not find on earth any development worthy of its holy root, nevertheless the flower which fills the world with choicest fragrance is family affection. It is capable of becoming most heavenly, since the Eternal Father is Himself the spring of parental as His Eternal Son is of filial love. Therefore, also, family affections are capable of ceaseless cultivation. There is nothing to hinder family love from becoming evermore deeper, stronger, and lovelier. If it is so strong and so precious among fallen creatures, what must it be among the perfect? If family life on the earth gives rise, as it often does, to a very paradise of courtesies and tender sanctities, what must family life be in the immediate Presence, and under the direct influence, of the Infinite Father and His only begotten Son? Christian parents and their children should know, therefore, that in their families they have not a little world, but a little heaven, to cultivate. Their families derive their distinctions and peculiarities from relations in the Godhead. Their families have names not only in time, but in eternity. Every family in Christ is named according to its distinction, as a manifestation of a corresponding variety in the Divine Nature.

(1) The family is a kingdom.—It is not of our design. It is not of our making. It is not of our choosing. It is not dependent on our pleasure for its continuance. When complete it includes each typical relation of society, the relation of command, of obedience, of fellowship. The members of a family in simple intercourse learn, however imperfectly, the duty of service. The feeling of the family conquers self. It is enough to appeal to the experience of home to refute the cynical assertion that personal interest is man’s single or strongest motive. In the family the tenderest affection, the most watchful care, the largest forethought, are lavished, not on the strongest or the most helpful, but rather on the most helpless and weak, who can make no measureable return to their comforters. In the family, need is taken as the measure of help, and a principle is spontaneously acknowledged which in its widest application would be adequate to deal with the sorrows of the world.

On no subject has human thought more centred than upon the family. There is nothing more important in our entire social life. For a nation will not be better than its homes. Christianity did not invent the family or marriage, but it has been probably the greatest agency in giving ideals to the home. This is all the more remarkable when one recalls that Jesus was not married, and that so much of the New Testament literature was written by Paul who, like his Master, had no home. But how incomplete would the gospel be without the figures drawn from fatherhood, sonship, marriage, and childhood! The more one reads the New Testament the more does one feel how sacred the family is, because it so often serves as a symbol of the relations of the Church with Christ. When the New Testament writers wish to express the very closest and holiest union of believers with their Lord it is to the family that they turn for symbols. 1 [Note: Shailer Mathews, The Social Gospel, 35.]

(2) The family is also a school, a school of character. The outer school cannot mould the whole of man’s nature. Character is shaped by action and not by words. What has been learnt by memory must be tested and embodied by experience. Under one aspect the outer school stimulates new and importunate wants, while the home is fitted to bring that social discipline which checks the selfish endeavour to satisfy them. At the same time the school offers new interests which may brighten home. Out of the home, too, must spring the spirit of purity. For home has its own proper warnings when the occasion comes. The knowledge of the elder may guard the innocent from falling; and the young have no better earthly safeguard than to carry with them the thought of mother or sister as the witness of all they do or say or think.

In September I saw a tree bearing roses, whilst others of the same kind, round about it, were barren; demanding the cause of the gardener, why that tree was an exception from the rule of the rest, this reason was rendered: because that alone being clipped close in May, was then hindered to spring and sprout, and therefore took this advantage by itself to bud in autumn. Lord, if I were curbed and snipped in my younger years by fear of my parents, from those vicious excrescences to which that age was subject, give me to have a godly jealousy over my heart, suspecting an autumn-spring, lest corrupt nature (which without Thy restraining grace will have a vent) break forth in my reduced years into youthful vanities. 1 [Note: Thomas Fuller, Good Thoughts in Worse Times.]

Ah! not to be happy alone,

Are men sent, or to be glad.

Oft-times the sweetest music is made

By the voices of the sad.

The thinker oft is bent

By a too-great load of thought;

The discoverer’s soul grows sick

With the secret vainly sought:

Lonely may be the home,

No breath of fame may come,

Yet through their lives doth shine

A purple light Divine,

And a nobler pain they prove

Than the bloom of lower pleasures, or the fleeting spell of love. 2 [Note: Sir Lewis Morris, “Songs of Two Worlds” (Works, 68).]

(3) The family becomes also a sanctuary.—The splendour of palaces does not secure innocence and holiness within their walls, but a sense of the presence of God does. Where God is welcomed as a guest there an atmosphere of sanctity is diffused around. A witness whose experience is unsurpassed writes: “I know numbers of the prettiest, happiest little homes which consist of a single room.” We ask then that His hallowing Presence should be habitually sought. We ask that “daily bread” should be received with some simple words of blessing; that work and rest should be consecrated by some simple words of prayer and praise. In these observances there is nothing forced or unnatural; nothing which is not possible under the commonest outward circumstances; nothing which does not answer to the promptings of the human heart. And for the fulfilment of this desire we claim woman’s help. There is a message even for the present age in the fact emphatically recorded by St. John, that a woman was divinely charged to be the first herald of the Resurrection, the herald of the new life.

The need of England, the need of every land, is “good mothers.” If they fail, it is not for lack of womanly endowments in those who are called to fulfil the duty. Poor and desolate outcasts, whom we are tempted to place lowest, are capable of every sacrifice to shield their children from bodily suffering or loss. Let them only feel, and let mothers of every class feel, that there are sicknesses of the soul which require the ministries of wise and tender affection, spiritual perils which need to be guarded against by watchful forethought, desires of the heart which crave the fullness of more than human love, and we shall be brought near to the consummation of our daily prayer in the advent of the Kingdom of God. 1 [Note: B. F. Westcott, The Incarnation and Common Life, 168.]

“Father Endeavour Clark,” as the founder of the Christian Endeavour movement is sometimes called, tells the story of a mother, whose family is as remarkable in its influence as that of the Crossleys of Halifax. This is the Murray family of Graaf Reinet, in South Africa. The father of the family, Andrew Murray the first, was a young Scotch missionary. He wooed and won a Dutch girl of Huguenot extraction, and carried her off, a bride of sixteen years, to his parsonage at Graaf Reinet. She became the mother of seventeen children, twelve of whom lived to grow up to bless the world. From them three hundred and four descendants have sprung (including those who have married into the family). The total number of ministers in the family, either directly or by marriage, is forty-two. Three are now studying for the ministry, six are missionaries in Central Africa, four others are in Mashonaland and the Transvaal, and three in Nyassaland. Three grandsons are in the South African Parliament. Of the original family, five sons were ministers, and the daughters wives of pastors and heads of educational establishments; the most well known, outside of South Africa, by his writings, being the beloved Andrew Murray, his father’s namesake. The influence of the whole family in South Africa is incalculable. Never, says Dr. Clark, were children more fortunate in their mother. Hers was one of those sweet, persuasive natures which mould and guide and bless, without seeming to know it themselves, certainly without conscious effort. When asked, “How did you bring up such a wonderful family?” she replied, “Oh, I do not know; I didn’t do anything.” But every one else knew if she did not. She just lived herself the life she wanted her boys and girls to live. Her life was hid with Christ in God; and they, through her, saw the beauty of holiness. “Her chief characteristic,” said one of her children, “was a happy contentment with her lot. She was always exactly where she wished to be, because she was where her Father in heaven had placed her.” She outlived her husband by many years. It was felt that her serenity and gentleness and loveliness of character came not a little from the hours of long communion when she looked into the Face of the Invisible, and thus learned to endure as seeing Him. 1 [Note: H. S. Dyer, The Ideal Christian Home, 77.]

No clever, brilliant thinker she,

With college record and degree;

She has not known the paths of fame;

The world has never heard her name;

She walks in old long-trodden ways,

The valleys of the yesterdays.

Home is her kingdom, love her dower;

She seeks no other wand of power

To make home sweet, bring heaven near,

To win a smile and wipe a tear

And do her duty day by day,

In her own quiet place and way.

Around her childish hearts are twined,

As round some reverend saint enshrined,

And following hers the childish feet

Are led to ideals true and sweet,

And find all purity and good

In her divinest motherhood.

She keeps her faith unshadowed still;

God rules the world in good and ill;

Men in her creed are brave and true

And women pure as pearls of dew,

And life for her is high and grand

By work and glad endeavour spanned.

This sad old earth’s a brighter place

All for the sunshine of her face;

Her very smile a blessing throws,

And hearts are happier where she goes;

A gentle, clear-eyed messenger,

To whisper love—thank God for her! 1 [Note: L. M. Montgomery.]

4. What a solace to our hearts is the assurance that we shall never cease to be members of a family! The perfection of the great heavenly Household is that it is a Household of households. We are born into a family, we grow up in a family, we die in a family, and after death, we shall not simply go into the great heaven, but to our own family, in our Father’s House. “Abraham gave up the ghost, and was gathered to his people.” “Thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace,” God had said to him. All in heaven will not know us, but our own people will know us. We shall go to them.

We are but babes in the household of God; and, moreover, we are in a very humble part of His House, rather in an adjoining house than in the very House. But we are loved as babes, by our numerous kindred; and quite as much by our own in heaven as by our own on earth. The sweet affections of our heavenly kindred are ever seeking to reveal themselves in our hearts. What are our family altars but means of communication between families on earth and families in heaven? They unite with us in saying, “Our Father.” And in the joy of our fellowship with Him, and with His Son Jesus Christ, they joy with us. 2 [Note: J. Pulsford, Christ and His Seed, 110.]

The two communities of earth and heaven are united. They, as we, live by derivation of the one life; they, as we, are fed and Messed by the one Lord. The occupations and thoughts of Christian life on earth and of the perfect life of saints above are one. They look to Christ as we do, when we live as Christians, though the sun, which is the light of both regions, shows there a broader disc, and pours forth more fervid rays, and is never obscured by clouds, nor ever sets in night. Whether conscious of us or not, they are doing there, in perfect fashion, what we imperfectly attempt, and partially accomplish. 1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

5. But the members of families on the earth should see to it that they are members of the Household of God. Let there be no doubt touching their union with Christ, the First-born Son. Let them have clear evidence that they are born again, and partakers of the Divine Nature. Members of Christian families who are not personally in Christ should lay it to heart that they are not as yet members of any heavenly household, and that they will be separated from their own families, unless they enter in at the door of grace, while they may. Has the door been opened in vain? We have been resting in the affections of our parents and enjoying the comforts of their house; but are we with them in Christ, and members with them of their eternal family?

In one sense, and that a very important one, every family with all its members has God for its Father, for He made all and upholds all; and the thought should be a welcome one, that we share His love with all the world, and yet our own share in His love and His care is none the less, and that the family of God is made up of those who are loved by Him. But there is more than this—the admission into His family implies for us the recovery of a lost privilege. Sin separated and banished us, made us as though we were not God’s children, and unwilling to accept the love and the care and the will of God; we needed to be made the Sons of God again, and here came a provision of the Fatherly care which made the limits of the Family as wide as ever; the barrier of enmity was broken down by the great Sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Since He died, it is now, not indeed, every one upon earth, but “whosoever will”—every one who feels that he would be a child of God. “As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God.”

That we might know Him, Thou didst come and live;

That we might find Him, Thou didst come and die;

The son-heart, Brother, Thy son-being give—

We too would love the Father perfectly,

And to His bosom go back with the cry,

Father, into Thy hands I give the heart

Which left Thee but to learn how good Thou art!

There are but two in all the universe—

The Father and His children—not a third;

Nor, all the weary time, fell any curse!

Not once dropped from its nest an unfledged bird

But Thou wast with it! Never sorrow stirred

But a love-pull it was upon the chain

That draws the children to the Father again!

O Jesus Christ, babe, man, eternal Son,

Take pity! we are poor where Thou art rich:

Our hearts are small; and yet there is not one

In all Thy Father’s noisy nursery which,

Merry, or mourning in its narrow niche,

Needs not Thy Father’s heart, this very now,

With all his being’s being, even as Thou! 1 [Note: George MacDonald, Poetical Works, ii. 335.]

The Father and the Families

Literature

Baring-Gould (S.), Our Parish Church, 129.

Boyd (A. K. H.), Sunday Afternoons in a University City, 279.

Brown (J. B.), The Home, 217.

Brown (J. B.), The Home Life, 288.

Chadwick (W. E.), Social Relationships in the Light of Christianity, 173.

Clarke (J. E.), Common-Life Sermons, 29, 52.

Ewing (J. W.), The Undying Christ, 68.

Harris (H.), Short Sermons, 268.

Hull (E. L.), Sermons, i. 121.

Laird (J.), Memorials, 167.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Epistle to the Ephesians, 128.

Magee (W. C.), Sermons (Contemporary Pulpit Library), i. 73.

Pulsford (J.), Christ and His Seed, 106.

Ridgeway (C. J.), Social Life, 103.

Robertson (F. W.), Sermons, iii. 181.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxii. No. 1309.

Spurgeon (C. H.), My Sermon Notes, iv. 272.

Vaughan (C. J.), Authorized or Revised? 315.

Westcott (B. F.), Social Aspects of Christianity, 19.

Westcott (B. F.), The Incarnation and Common Life, 161.

Christian World Pulpit, xl. 233 (MacDonald); lviii. 19 (Fairbairn); lxxiv. 241 (Gore).

Churchman’s Pulpit: Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, xii. 201 (Armstrong), 214 (Kempthorne), 216 (Heber).

Verse 16

Power in the Inward Man

I bow my knees unto the Father, … that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, that ye may be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man.— Ephesians 3:16.

In every sphere of life to-day there is an urgent demand for strength or efficiency. The apostles of physical culture denounce, in large letters, the “crime” of not being strong. Their laudable endeavour is to persuade us to develop our powers by exercise; but they have no gospel for the weak. There are strong-minded men who agree with John Stuart Mill that, notwithstanding all the talk about brain-fag, it would do most people good to use their minds more than they do. And if worry be distinguished from work, it is probably true that increased mental effort would mean, for the majority of people, increased mental power. There is a corresponding truth in the spiritual life, as every Christian knows. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews refers to the harmful effects which are the inevitable result of neglecting to exercise the higher faculties of the soul (v. 11, 14). Though our ears have been opened and we have heard the whisper of His love, we shall become “dull of hearing” unless we listen often and listen long for the still and small and inward voice of His Spirit. Therefore, let us “exercise” ourselves “unto godliness” ( 1 Timothy 2:7), but withal let us remember that the central truth of the Christian gospel is not that we are to become strong merely by development of our own powers, by exercise of our own faculties, by conservation of our own energies; if we are to become strong, we must be strengthened by a “power that is not ourselves,” and St. Paul can name that power and bear witness to its energizing—it is the power of the Holy Spirit. 1 [Note: J. G. Tasker.]

I

The Desire

“That ye may be strengthened with power.”

1. What shall the universal Father be asked to give to His needy children upon earth? They have newly learnt His name; they are barely recovered from the malady of their sin, fearful of trial, weak to meet temptation. Strength is their first necessity: “I bow my knees unto the Father … that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, that ye may be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man.” The Apostle asked them in Ephesians 3:13, in view of the greatness of his own calling, to be of good courage on his account; now he entreats God so to reveal to them His glory and to pour into their hearts His Spirit, that no weakness or fear may remain in them. The strengthening of which he speaks is the opposite of the faintness of heart, the failure of courage deprecated in Ephesians 3:13.

In Paul’s opinion a Christian had no right to be weak. To Timothy, his spiritual son, he wrote, “Thou therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.” To the Colossians, “We desire that ye might be strengthened with all might, according to his glorious power, unto all patience and long-suffering with joyfulness.” To the Corinthians, “Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong.” And again, to the Ephesians, “Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might.” To be strong is a duty; therefore to be weak is a sin. “Why art thou lean, being the king’s son?” 1 [Note: D. J. Burrell, The Religion of the Future, 14.]

2. “Strengthened with power.” The word for “power” is familiar to-day in the forms “dynamite,” electric “dynamos,” etc. It signifies force or energy in an intense degree. We have it in the 19th and 20th verses of the 1st chapter: “And what is the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe, according to the working of his mighty power, which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead”; and then in the 20th verse of this third chapter: “Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us.”

I confess that power, the possession of power, is one of the ideas I am trying to master. It seems to be greater every day I live; I am only just beginning to understand it, but Paul says that the power working in us is the power that raised Christ up from the dead. I cling to that thought, because I find that in my weakness and unworthiness I am like Christ in the tomb, and I pray that I may be raised up, out of weakness into strength, out of selfishness into sympathy, out of earth into Heaven. The power is the great power of God, the power of resurrection, the power of “endless life.” 1 [Note: J. W. Ewing, The Undying Christ, 77.]

3. It was when we were “without strength” that Christ died for the ungodly, and the work of new creation is to restore strength to our thoughts, to our volitions, to our speech, and to our action. He “worketh in us to will, and to do.” He kindles within us a flame of spiritual passion, a force of resolution, before which even bars of iron must give way, and which makes us “mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds.” One man in real earnest is a match for a thousand who do not know either their own minds or their Maker’s; and while others are putting it to the vote, or seeking authority for reform, or graciously holding that a balance of argument is in favour of the truth of Christianity, he who knows Almighty God, and with whom God dwells, knows the great secret of truth beyond all doubt, speaks not as the scribes, but pushes on the work of God as a soldier who sees victory before him and the Kingdom nigh at hand.

There are important cases in which the difference between half a heart and a whole heart makes just the difference between signal defeat and a splendid victory. 2 [Note: A. K. H. Boyd.]

When Palmerston was trying to get Cobden into the Government, and meeting all his objections in a light and airy way, Cobden at length said: “But, my Lord, I am in earnest.” That closed the conversation. Palmerston, I should think, would look on earnestness in politics as the one unpardonable sin, as it is often looked upon now. 3 [Note: G. W. E. Russell, Sir Wilfrid Lawson, 29.]

Take me out of the langour, the irritability, the sensitiveness, the incapability, the anarchy, in which my soul lies, and fill it with Thy fullness. Breathe on me, that the dead bones may live. Breathe on me with that Breath which infuses energy and kindles fervour. In asking for fervour, I ask for all that I can need, and all that Thou canst give; for it is the crown of all gifts and all virtues. It cannot really and fully be, except where all are present. It is the beauty and the glory, as it is also the continual safeguard and purifier of them all. In asking for fervour, I am asking for effectual strength, consistency, and perseverance; I am asking for deadness to every human motive and simplicity of intention to please Thee; I am asking for faith, hope, and charity in their most heavenly exercise. In asking for fervour, I am asking to be rid of the fear of man, and the desire of his praise; I am asking for the gift of prayer, because it will be so sweet; I am asking for that loyal perception of duty which follows on yearning affection; I am asking for sanctity, peace, and joy all at once. In asking for fervour, I am asking for the brightness of the Cherubim and the fire of the Seraphim, and the whiteness of all Saints. In asking for fervour I am asking for that which, while it implies all gifts, is that in which I signally fail. Nothing would be a trouble to me, nothing a difficulty, had I but fervour of soul.

Lord, in asking for fervour, I am asking for Thyself, for nothing short of Thee, O my God, who hast given Thyself wholly to us. Enter my heart substantially and personally, and fill it with fervour by filling it with Thee. Thou alone canst fill the soul of man, and Thou hast promised to do so. Thou art the living Flame, and ever burnest with love of man: enter into me and set me on fire after Thy pattern and likeness. 1 [Note: Newman’s Meditations and Devotions, in Ward’s Life of Cardinal Newman, ii. 367.]

II

The Sphere

“In the inward man.”

1. By the “inward man” is meant, not the new creation through faith in Jesus Christ which this Apostle calls “the new man,” but simply what Peter calls the “hidden man of the heart,” the “soul,” or unseen self, as distinguished from the visible material body, which it animates and informs. It is this inward self, then, in which the Spirit of God is to dwell, and into which it is to breathe strength. The leaven is hid deep in three measures of meal until the whole is leavened. And the point to note is that the whole inward region which makes up the true man is the field upon which this Divine Spirit is to work. It is not a bit of our inward life that is to be hallowed. It is not any one aspect of it that is to be strengthened; it is the whole intellect, affections, desires, tastes, powers of attention, conscience, imagination, memory, will. The whole inward man in all its corners is to be filled, and to come under the influence of this power, until there be “no part dark, as when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee light.”

The inward man, of which St. Paul speaks as delighting in the law of God, is the moral personality. When the inward man is regenerated, it becomes “the new man”; but before this renewal in the spirit of our mind ( Ephesians 4:23), the inward man can recognize the goodness of Him whose holy law is the expression of an ideal, which wins the admiration of him whose failures compel him to cry, “It is high, it is high; I cannot attain unto it.” To be “strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man” means therefore the invigoration of our noblest powers, the enriching of the higher self, the imparting of new energy to our whole conscious personal being. The result of the Holy Spirit’s energizing is neither the gradual extinction of desire nor the enfeeblement of the will; on the contrary, the Spirit-filled personality desires more ardently and wills more strongly. The difference is that the inward man is no longer “infirm of purpose.” All, and more than all, that the wisest ethical teachers intend, when they extol the virtue of self-control, is a gift of grace to those who “walk in the flesh,” but “do not war according to the flesh.” Those who “walk in the Spirit” also war according to the Spirit, and in the Spirit’s strength they are enabled to “bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ” ( 2 Corinthians 10:5). 1 [Note: J. G. Tasker.]

The day came when Paul was led out along the road towards Ostia to his execution. There were priests and beggars and Arab merchants and sailors and camel-drivers who turned to look. What they saw was an armed guard with a Jewish culprit in chains; a man of “mean presence” outwardly, but destined to walk through history like a giant. The place was reached; there was the flash of a heavy sword; a head fell from the block. “There’s an end of this zealot,” said the executioner to his men. Little they knew! The real Paul cannot be slain. He is destined to be heard from. The “inner man” will walk up and down in Church councils, a participant in all great theological controversies, until the end of time. His death is but the widening of his parish.

Out of sight sinks the stone

In the deep sea of time, but the circles sweep on! 1 [Note: D. J. Burrell, The Religion of the Future, 15.]

2. Every one has an inward man, a better self, a potential perfection within him, which will awake and begin to flower when he feels in his soul the touch of God. There is laid down in the being of each man, or deposited there in germ, an ideal, a Divine ideal, which ought to become, under the nourishing powers of redemption and providence, the real. The man is not “himself” truly, until he has at least begun to translate the ideal into the real in his daily life. So we read that the prodigal “ came to himself”; he had been beside himself until then, a kind of lunatic. For madness—so saith the Wise Man—is in the heart of the sons of men while they live; he means in sin, and away from God. When they come to God they come to sanity, to self. In fact, coming to one’s self in discovery, idea, desire, deep-grasping consciousness, is the first step in the way of return to God and happiness. That hour of full awakening is the supreme season of a man’s life. How very far some men seem to be from it! But there is this consolation—that they are not always so far from it as they seem.

Mr. Macgregor’s nature presented a union, difficult for those who did not know him to understand, of feeling, of intellect, and strength of will. If feeling “overpowered” him for the moment, it was not suffered to carry him away. No impulse was allowed to master him for which he could not find intellectual justification; and then what he felt and experienced his resolute will turned into a force of life. That these days at Keswick were a turning-point in his life, there is not the smallest doubt. That they made his later ministry what it was, is equally certain. To say that he sometimes appeared to claim for this experience and its effects more than the facts altogether warranted, is only to say that, though remarkably enlightened and strengthened by God’s Spirit, he remained a fallible human being. But no one who knew George Macgregor, either as a man or a minister, before that crisis and after it, could question that he found then a new secret of strength both for his own life, and for his work. 1 [Note: Life of George H. C. Macgregor, M.A., 110.]

Paul’s great solicitude is for the inner man; if he can only get that strengthened he feels that his work is done. And he is right. The inner man is the metropolis, the capital, the chief city; all the provinces take their tone from there. No man must begin with the provinces if he wants to make his fortune. In vain you adorn the body, in vain you amass the gold, in vain you seek the sights and sounds of beauty; the capital is the heart, and if the fashion of the heart be sombre, the whole is sad. But if the fashion of the heart be bright, I have no fear for the provinces; these will soon follow. The body may be meanly clad, the gold may be scarce and dim, the sights and sounds of beauty may be shut out by lane and alley, but if in the heart there be voices of laughter, they will fill all the land. If there be songs in the metropolis, I shall not be able to keep down my singing. I shall sing through all the provinces; I shall sing in the cold and in the snow; I shall sing in the dark and in the rain; I shall sing amid my struggles for daily bread. The life of joy is everywhere when there is gladness in the inner Man_1:2 [Note: G. Matheson, Voices of the Spirit, 219.]

3. How then is the discovery made? How does a man reach the centre and fountain of his own being? find himself? recover himself? bring himself home again to God? There are very great varieties of experience. But perhaps these things, or something like them, will be found in all.

(1) First, there is what may be called a soul consciousness—a consciousness of having, or being, a soul; not merely an animated something, to be covered with dress and beautified with manners; not merely a thinking something, to be informed by knowledge and guided by morals; but a something spiritual, vast, deep, related to eternity, related to God.

(2) The next thing is the conscious relation to God. No sooner does a man become conscious of his true self than he in that very act becomes cognizant and sensible of God. Some philosophic thinkers say that the deep and true self-consciousness is also, in a sense, consciousness of God—that we are so related to the Infinite that we cannot become conscious of our truest selves without touching and feeling it, without touching and feeling God.

(3) The third thing, or the thing which goes along with this very often, is the consciousness of sin—“I will say unto him, Father, I have sinned.” When the inward man is found, sin is found in it, or cleaving to it very closely. Yes, real sin, deep, soul-humbling sin. Not merely infirmity, mistake, and misadventure; but sin, which makes the sinner guilty, which makes him unworthy of kindness, worthy of wrath.

(4) Then, further, he becomes conscious of goodness as well as of sin. Not the old formal goodness; but goodness that is fresh and new and living; with love in the heart of it, gratitude lending it a glow and a lustre, faith building it up. This new life of goodness begins just with the other things we have named. Not after them, but with and in them. We are too apt to conceive of the religious life as consisting in a series of consecutive exercises, the beginning of the one waiting for the completion of the other. First repentance, then cleansing and forgiveness, then gratitude, then filial love, then active goodness. Not so. The moment a man comes to himself, all these things begin together, and go on together.

Some trees in early spring are yet covered with last year’s leaves; all withered now and begrimed. What says the new vegetation to these? “I must wait until God sends winds strong enough to sweep them away; rains heavy enough to wash the tree clean in every branch”? Not at all. That new vegetation, that fresh leafage, comes out and pushes them off, and clothes the tree with virgin green, drawing food and beauty from the mould of the earth, from the wandering wind, from the passing cloud. So goodness throws off sin, and dresses and adorns the soul in the beauties of God’s holiness. 1 [Note: A. Raleigh, The Way to the City, 9.]

III

The Agent

“Through his Spirit.”

1. In comparing the characters of Greek and Roman story described in Plutarch’s “Lives” with those depicted in unfading colours in the Old and New Testaments, one feels that both of these great picture galleries are filled with portraits of men of immense strength and resolution. But there is this difference, that in Plutarch’s heroes the human element of strength is supreme, while in the Scripture biographies there is added a Divine element of spiritual and moral power arising from vital contact with the Infinite and Eternal God—a spiritual power almost unknown to the Greeks and Romans, and producing types of men and women who seem to belong to another species through their union with the spiritual realms. This contrast is seen at a glance when we compare the heroes of Homer and of the Greek tragedians with those of the historical books of the Bible, or the poems of Greece and Rome with the remains of Hebrew song collected in the Book of Psalms. Aristotle himself says, when speaking of men’s relation to the gods, that all Greece would laugh if any man were to say that he loved Jupiter. How different the tone of David! “I will love thee, O Lord, my strength”; “I will sing praise to my God while I have any being.”

The expression in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, chosen as the text of this sermon, describes the quality of such souls. They were “strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man.” It is by no merely natural decision or force of character that men and women are made conquerors of death and time. Such new force, exhibiting itself in unfashionable faith, in thought, in purpose, in action, in speech, in Suffering, in sacrifice, in love, is the work of that Almighty Spirit from which all forms of energy proceed, but whose chief work in the universe is the creation of inspired character.

Every month seems to reveal to us more fully, in the progress of scientific discovery, the wonderful nature of the invisible energies which pervade and animate the material universe, until we look almost with speechless astonishment at the men whose experimental gifts, and mysterious insight, and mathematical grasp of thought, have unveiled the action of these interior energies of heat, and light, and electricity, and magnetism, and chemical affinity, and subdued them in practical forms to the service of man in the modern world. Hear the words of Dr. Crooke, spoken to his Company on opening the electric light for Ladbroke Square last week: “Before finishing I just want to draw your attention to a little bit of philosophy. We ought to have some philosophy in an electric light installation. Millions of years ago the sun shone upon the earth; plants grew; they died, and were converted in the course of time into coal. The light of the sun which was shining then was transformed into the latent energy of the coal. That coal has been dug up millions of years afterwards, and is forming the fire under the boiler. The heat of the coal is raising the steam, which, thus produced, passes through the engine and is being converted into motion. That motion is being communicated to the armature of the dynamo, which produces magnetism, and this, in its turn, produces electricity. The electricity is conducted into the secondary batteries and is there changed into chemical action. This chemical action is reconverted into electric current in the mains, and when human brains and energy are employed to direct the current in the right direction, the ultimate result is evident to you in the form of light. This light is the identical energy of the sun, bottled up in the coal measures countless ages ago, and now reproduced after having undergone more strange transformations than were ever dreamed of in fairyland.”

But we live in the midst of still sublimer manifestations of one and the self-same Spirit, in His dealings, not with matter, but with souls—in the work of renewing them in the image of God, to an endless life, a life as indestructible as the Divine. For it is never to be forgotten that it is one and the self-same Spirit who has governed the geological and zoological development of this globe with its physical forces in the past eternities, in whose hand have been the deep places of the earth, and who has directed the gradual evolution of all living things. It is the same almighty Spirit who is now occupied in the work of saving men by “creating them anew” in the image of God for life everlasting; and whose far more mysterious and glorious energies are employed in “strengthening with might the inner man” for an endless life of power, obedience, and love. “Now if any man have not this Spirit of Christ he is none of his.” 1 [Note: Edward White.]

2. Nothing is more familiar in Scripture than the conception of the indwelling Spirit of God as the source of moral strength. The special power that belongs to the gospel Christ ascribes altogether to this cause. “Ye shall receive power,” He said to His disciples, “after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you.” Hence is derived the vigour of a strong faith, the valour of the good soldier of Christ Jesus, the courage of the martyrs, the cheerful and indomitable patience of multitudes of obscure sufferers for righteousness’ sake.

God will show him—if a man wishes to be like Christ, and to work like Christ, at doing good; God will teach him and guide him in all puzzling matters. And do not be afraid of being called cowards and milksops for bearing injuries patiently; those who call you so will be likely to be the greatest themselves. Patience is the truest sign of courage. Ask old soldiers who have seen real war, and they will tell you that the bravest men, the men who endured best, not in mere fighting, but in standing still for hours to be mowed down by cannon shot; who were most cheerful and patient in shipwreck, and starvation, and defeat—all things ten times worse than fighting—ask old soldiers, I say, and they will tell you that the men who showed best in such miseries, were generally the weakest men in the whole regiment; that is true fortitude; that is Christ’s image—the meekest of men, and the bravest too. 1 [Note: Charles Kingsley.]

There is a great truth expressed when we describe a brave and enterprising man as a man of spirit. All high and commanding qualities of soul come from this invisible source. They are inspirations. In the human will, with its vis vivida, its elasticity and buoyancy, its steadfastness and resolved purpose, is the highest type of force and the image of the almighty Will. When that will is animated and filled with “the Spirit,” the man so possessed is the embodiment of an inconceivable power. Firm principle, hope and constancy, self-mastery, superiority to pleasure and pain—all the elements of a noble courage are proper to the man of the Spirit. Such power is not neutralized by our infirmities; it asserts itself under their limiting conditions and makes them its contributories. “My grace is sufficient for thee,” said Christ to His disabled servant; “for power is perfected in weakness.” 2 [Note: G. G. Findlay, The Epistle to the Ephesians, 187.]

If we say that a man is remarkable for his intellectual energy, we think of him as having in the very centre of his intellectual life a free and inexhaustible fountain of force and activity. It is the same in the spiritual life. There is a certain imperfection in many of us which I do not know how to describe except by saying that, though at times particular spiritual faculties may appear to be vigorous, the central life is weak. There are men whose zeal for the evangelization of the world is often very real and very fervent, but who give us no impression of spiritual strength. There are others who are often inspired with a passion for Christian perfection, but in them too there appears to be no real vigour. There are others who seem spiritually weak, though their vision of spiritual truth is very keen and penetrating. There are others who seem capable of very lofty devotion,—of awe, of vehement religious emotion, of rapture in the Divine love and in the hope of glory, honour, and immortality—and who yet give us the impression that they are wanting in those elements of life which constitute spiritual energy. In every one of these cases, to use language which suggests rather than expresses the truth, the vigour is derived not from the central fountains of life, but from springs that are more or less distant from the centre. The man himself is wanting in force though there are spiritual forces at work in him. Those of us who are conscious that this is our condition should pray to God that we “may be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man.” 1 [Note: R. W. Dale, Lectures on the Ephesians, 246.]

Robertson Smith returned to Cambridge for the decisive consultation of his doctors, and the story of what passed may be given here in the words of the Master of Christ’s. “Half the members of the Conference [of Orientalists] had been invited to spend the Saturday and Sunday at Cambridge, and as usual Smith was the centre around which they all moved. From the bustle and confusion of tongues he withdrew to meet the doctors, and as usual he insisted on knowing the whole truth. When he left the room he turned to me and said, ‘I know what that means. My brother died of it.’ He then returned to his guests, and that evening presided at a banquet given in their honour in the Hall of Christ’s, but never by a word or a sign did he let any one suspect what he had learned but an hour or two before from the doctors, and it was with the same magnificent courage that he bore the ceaseless suffering and gradually increasing weakness of the next eighteen months.”

What Smith had learned from the doctors was indeed sufficient to try his heroism. It was now ascertained with as much clearness as is possible in such matters that the real cause of the discomfort and illness which had crippled him for so long was deep-seated tuberculosis. 2 [Note: The Life of William Robertson Smith, 543.]

3. The very name of the Spirit is the “Spirit of might.” Christ spoke to us about being “endued with power from on high.” The last of His promises that dropped from His lips upon earth was the promise that His followers should receive the power of the Spirit coming upon them. Wheresoever in the early histories we read of a man that was full of the Holy Ghost, we read that he was “full of power.” According to the teaching of this Apostle, God hath given us the “spirit of power,” which is also the spirit “of love and of a sound mind.” So the strength that we must have, if we have strength at all, is the strength of a Divine Spirit, not our own, that dwells in us, and works through us.

There is in the human heart an inextinguishable instinct, the love of power, which, rightly directed, maintains all the majesty of law and life, and misdirected, wrecks them.

Deep rooted in the innermost life of the heart of man, and of the heart of woman, God set it there, and God keeps it there.—Vainly, as falsely, you blame or rebuke the desire of power!—For Heaven’s sake, and for man’s sake, desire it all you can. But what power? That is all the question. Power to destroy? the lion’s limb, and the dragon’s breath? Not so. Power to heal, to redeem, to guide and to guard. Power of the sceptre and shield; the power of the royal hand that heals in touching,—that binds the fiend, and looses the captive; the throne that is founded on the rock of Justice, and descended from only by steps of Mercy. 1 [Note: Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, ii. §§ 86, 87 (Works, xviii. 137).]

(1) That indwelling Spirit will be a power for suffering.—The parallel passage to this in the twin Epistle to the Colossians is—“strengthened with all might unto all patience and long-suffering with joyfulness.” Unless this Divine Spirit were a power for patience and endurance it were no power suited to us poor men. So dark at times is every life—so full at times of discouragements, of dreariness, of sadness, of loneliness, of bitter memories, and of fading hopes does the human heart become—that if we are to be strong we must have a strength that will manifest itself chiefly in this, that it teaches us how to bear, how to weep, how to submit.

Ill-health was Stevenson’s always, but what he accomplished in the way of letters surpasses in amount and scope that which many a stronger man has done. It amounted to “nearly four hundred pages a year for twenty years,” and of the conditions under which most of it was done he wrote to Mr. George Meredith in 1893:

“For fourteen years I have not had a day’s real health; I have wakened sick and gone to bed weary; and I have done my day unflinchingly. I have written in bed and written out of it; written in hæmorrhages, written in sickness, written torn by coughing, written when my head swam for weakness; and for so long it seems to me I have won my wager and recovered my glove. I am better now, have been, rightly speaking, since first I came to the Pacific; and still few are the days when I am not in some physical distress. And the battle goes on—ill or well is a trifle, so as it goes. I was made for a contest, and the Powers have so willed that my battlefield should be this dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the physic bottle.” 1 [Note: J. A. Hammerton, Stevensoniana, 313.]

(2) And it will be a power for conflict.—We have all of us, in the discharge of duty and the meeting of temptation, to face such tremendous antagonisms that unless we have grace given to us which will enable us to resist, we shall be overcome and swept away. God’s power from the Divine Spirit within us does not absolve us from, it fits us for, the fight. It is not given in order that holiness may be won without a struggle; it is given to us in order that in the struggle for holiness we may never lose “one jot of heart or hope,” but may be “able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.”

The battle of life is a common phrase which, as generally used, means the struggle for bare existence in which the lives of so many are spent, or the effort to get on in the world by making money or attaining positions of eminence in society. The Apostle Paul’s idea of the life battle is very different, it is higher, nobler, in every way better; because it is no selfish conflict, it is a fighting for God and for the cause of God. The world’s battle of life is little better than a war of plunder, a fighting amongst beasts of prey, in which the strong endeavour to crush the weak, and the weak make desperate efforts against the strong—for the most part a mean and miserable contention on both sides, and one in which falsehood and trickery and cruelty and all other base stratagems are, without scruple, resorted to; so that, as a rule, those who win have more reason to be ashamed of themselves than those who lose. St. Paul’s battle of life is waged in the interests of humanity, the laws of the warfare being strictly honourable, and its aim the establishment throughout the world of that Kingdom which is “righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.” 2 [Note: Hugh Stowell Brown, in Life, by W. S. Caine, 305.]

(3) It is a power for service.—“Tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem until ye be endued with power from on high.” There is no such force for the spreading of Christ’s Kingdom, and the witness-bearing work of His Church, as the possession of this Divine Spirit. Plunged into that fiery baptism, the selfishness and the sloth which stand in the way of so many of us are all consumed and annihilated, and we are set free for service because the bonds that bound us are burnt up in the merciful furnace of His fiery power.

If we allow the record of St. Paul’s experience in Christian service to cast light upon his prayer, we see that to be “strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man” means the supply of energy which enables us to toil for Christ without spiritual exhaustion, and to bear one another’s burdens, for His sake, without so soon becoming faint and weary. “Wherefore, we faint not,” exclaims St. Paul. Christian workers need, in hours of disappointment, to remember his secret. Discouragement in the Master’s service cannot always be cured by greater diligence. To labour hard, even for Him, is no guarantee of happiness. Indeed, the higher the service, the deeper will be our dejection if we fail to lay hold of the hope set before us in our glorious calling, because the task assigned proved to be beyond our strength.

Happy we live, when God doth fill

Our hands with work.

If that were the only condition, most Christians could be happy every day and happy all the day. But our realization of the Beatitude depends, not upon the filling of our hands with work, but upon the filling of our hearts with zeal.

Happy we live, when God doth fill

Our hands with work, our hearts with zeal.

Significantly we speak of being “disheartened” in our work for Christ; our use of the word should warn us against allowing the inward altar-fires to die down, or even to burn low. Without the Holy Spirit’s strengthening with power in the inward man, it is impossible for the heart to be always as full of zeal as the hands are full of work.

The sum of all is—Yes, my duty is great:

My faith’s still greater; then my faith’s enough. 1 [Note: J. G. Tasker.]

John MacNeil had always watched himself with considerable jealousy lest the fire within him should burn less brightly as he grew older. It distressed him to see many men, who in their youth had been ardent spirits, gradually cool off into a prudent moderatism. “Shall I ever get like that?” he would ask. “Is it necessary for a man’s ardour to decrease as his years increase?” and then, answering his own question, would reply emphatically—“ No! by God’s grace, I will not alter if I live to be eighty; people will be as glad to come and hear me when I preach leaning on a staff, as they are now.” It was a great comfort to him to run over the long list of honourable names of white-haired old men who are serving God as enthusiastically now as when their blood ran faster in their veins. It was one great charm in John MacNeil that he never did alter. He was the same at forty as at twenty. In him “zeal” never “curdled into ambition,” nor did his enthusiasm ever abate. He was the same eager, hopeful, courageous soul from beginning to end. 1 [Note: John MacNeil, Evangelist in Australia, 207.]

IV

The Measure

“According to the riches of his glory.”

1. “According to the riches of his glory”—that is the measure. There is no limit except the uncounted wealth of His own self-manifestation, the flashing light of revealed Divinity. Whatsoever there is of splendour in that, whatsoever there is of power there, in these and in nothing on this side of them lies the limit of the possibilities of a Christian life.

“The riches of his glory”! How sublime a conception! We are not to ask according to the strength of our faith, the largeness of our hearts, or the breadth of our thoughts, but “according to the riches of his glory”! Paul wants us to take time and think of the glory, and of its inconceivable riches, and then in faith to expect that God will do nothing less to us than according to the riches of that glory. What is to be done in our inward man is to be in very deed the glory of God shining into our heart, and manifesting the riches of His power in what He does there within us. Our faith dare not expect the fulfilment of the prayer until it enters into and claims to the full that God will do in us “according to the riches of his glory.” Let us take time and see that nothing less than this is to be the measure of our faith.

2. And what are the riches of God’s glory? Who of us can conceive them? Think of the riches of God’s material glory. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof.” The gold mines and the forests, the gardens and the prairies, the mountains and the seas are all God’s. The stars in the heavens, the Milky Way, the Southern Cross, are a part of His glory, for the material universe reveals the wisdom of His handiwork. But that is only the threshold of God’s glory. Think of the glory of God’s providence, of God’s word, of God’s grace, of God’s Son! Who can conceive the power, and the majesty, and the love, and the compassion of God? And all these are included in “the riches of his glory.”

I seem to stand beside a great sea, a sunlit sea, with wave upon wave, wave upon wave of glory rolling in upon my soul. The resources of God are infinite, and in Christ they are all open to us. Truly, when we pray we may say:

We are coming to a King,

Large petitions let us bring. 1 [Note: J. W. Ewing, The Undying Christ, 75.]

3. We may speak of the riches of God under three aspects—first, the riches of His power; second, the riches of His wisdom; and third, the riches of His goodness; and, as it is the blended and harmonious attributes of God that make up His highest glory, the view of His riches under these three aspects may enable us to see something of the riches of His glory.

(1) His Power.—We see the riches of His power in creation. If a man could create in the highest sense of the word, how rich he would soon become! For his own wants he would have an immediate supply. When he was hungry he could create bread. When he was thirsty he could make the pure fountain spring up by his side. When he wanted money he could turn everything he touched into gold. It is in the ability to produce that the source of wealth is found.

The riches of God are seen in the preservation of all things in existence as well as in their creation. The sublime act of creation did not exhaust or weary God. From day to day, from year to year, and from century to century, the whole universe is upheld in its primeval freshness and power. The sky is still the “unworn sky,” and time writes no wrinkles on the azure brow of the sea. The seasons revolve, and the earth teems every year with beauty and plenty.

And the riches of the Divine power are seen not only in creation and preservation, but in re-creation. We are taught in Scripture that a wondrous transformation must pass over the present world—that forms of being now around us will be dissolved in a deluge of fire, and that from this second deluge will emerge a new heaven and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness. We are also taught that the bodies of men will be raised from the dust of the ground in a new and higher form. What marvellous exhibitions, then, has the future still in store of the riches of the power of God!

I have read Carlyle’s “Reminiscences.” They remind me of an apple I have just been trying to eat—very sound on the one side, on the other bruised and black. What a pity Froude persisted in thrusting it in the public face, and that he did not help to let the dead bury its dead! Carlyle had certainly a morbid nature, partly, I suppose, from dyspepsia, and partly from having set himself to expose wrong as the exclusive business of his life, and weakness and incapacity were in his philosophy forms of wrong. We may be thankful that we have a better standard in the Infinite Strength that stooped to weakness to pity and to raise it. I should be far from saying that Carlyle had not the Christian in him, but he wanted one part of it, and it is proof of an entirely original and Divine Being, that the Reminiscences of the Fishermen of Galilee give us One who had the most perfect purity, with the most tender pity—an unbending strength that never despised weakness.

One of the false things of the day is to exalt power (including intellect as a form of power) at the expense of the moral and spiritual. It belongs to materialism and in a degree to pantheism, and it is the direct opposite of Christianity, which makes Christ lay power aside, in order to make the centre of the universe self-sacrifice and love; and that then power should gravitate to this centre because it is the only safe one. “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power.” When we begin to see this, we feel in our deepest nature that it is Divine—that this must be true if the universe has any meaning, and the soul a worthy end. It gets obscured sometimes, but it will come out again. 1 [Note: Letters of John Ker, 330.]

A ship was rounding Cape Horn, where, as you may know, on account of the fogs and storms, the sun may not appear in view for many days together. The ship of which I am speaking had encountered violent storms; the weather was intensely cold, so that icicles were hanging from the mast and yard-arms. A sailor boy was ordered out upon one of the yard-arms to reef a sail; but as he was out there, hanging over the dark and stormy sea, he raised a cry that his hands were getting benumbed and that he was about to fall. The captain, a relative of his own, shouted to him to hold on, and seizing a piece of rope lying on the deck ran up the rigging, went out on the yard and lashed the boy to it until he could be rescued. When the captain was tying the rope round the body of the lad, he said: “If you ever prayed in your life, pray now.” “I cannot pray,” said the boy, “but I can sing.” And there, over that wild sea, the boy sang this verse of the paraphrase—

His voice commands the tempest forth,

And stills the stormy wave;

And though His arm be strong to smite,

’Tis also strong to save.

That sea captain is a member of this congregation, and that sailor boy was taught in our own Sabbath school. 1 [Note: Robertson of Irvine (by A. Guthrie), 90.]

A close, attentive study of Watts’s picture of “The All-pervading” will throw some light upon its meaning. All the immeasurable expanse of space is pervaded by a Divine Element, which Watts depicts as a figure with great encircling wings, seated and holding in its lap a globe, representing the stellar universe. Nothing could be more impressive and awe-inspiring than the sense of the overwhelming vastness and ubiquity of this Divine Element throughout the world which is given in this picture. It penetrates to the essence of everything; it holds everything from the largest to the smallest within its mighty grasp. It is a sublime conception that a Personality is seated on the throne of universal empire. We must postulate Spirit and not a thing as the first formative causation. The universe is not self-created and self-upheld. A thing cannot originate a thing. Law is a necessity of things, but law is an expression of will. It is not eternal, self-enacting, self-executing. The laws of the universe presuppose an agent, since they are only the modes in which the agent operates. They cannot be the cause of their own observance. The All-Pervading is Spirit which includes, but is not limited to Personality. The Creator and Upholder of all things is not a mere metaphor for force. And thus we are brought back to the magnificent generalization of the artist in his most original picture. 1 [Note: Hugh Macmillan, G. F. Watts, 191.]

(2) His Wisdom.—How manifest are the traces of God’s wisdom in the way in which the earth has been fitted to develop and support man, and in the manifold provision made for man’s education and comfort! But what we have to notice more particularly here is, not merely the wisdom of God, but the riches of His wisdom; and these are seen not only in the original adaptation of means to ends, but in the way by which God can bring good out of evil. The mechanist would be wise who could invent and construct a machine which by the simplest movements could produce mighty results; but he would be rich in wisdom, who, out of that same machine, when marred and broken, could produce still mightier results.

God’s wisdom is seen in making all things work together for good; and what a wealth of wisdom is implied in bringing out of the most contradictory and deleterious elements a vast, harmonious and unspeakably valuable result!

We are broken on the wheel; torn by tribulation; beaten and shaken and purified by sorrow; emptied from vessel to vessel; passed from process to process;—the design of the whole being to bring us forth at last like the snowy sheet of paper; and not only so, but to impress upon us also the very thoughts of God, that we may thereafter circulate through the universe, “living epistles of Christ, known and read of all men.” “O the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!”

While the adaptations of natural life are comprehended under the term “Sophia,” or the wisdom of God, the adjustments of the spiritual life and its laws and development are what is called by the apostles the all-varied wisdom of God. I am sorry that I cannot translate the Greek word better—I know what it means, and what it does not mean. It does not mean that the manifestation of God which we call His wisdom is variegated like a Joseph’s coat of many colours, patched up out of many fabrics, both old and new, and often self-discordant, because the new agreeth not with the old. It does mean that there is an ever-changing diversity in the Divine wisdom and work which glows and gleams like a fine opal in the light, or like an ancient glass vessel from Cyprus or Phoenicia, when all the finer harmonies of the solar spectrum are unceasingly at play. And it is true of the Church as well as of the world that the Never-Changing One is to be sought in the Ever-Changing Many. That His wisdom should baffle our knowledge is what we have a right, a priori, to expect, and especially when we are contemplating it on the side where it seems to be many and not one. 1 [Note: J. Rendel Harris, The Guiding Hand of God, 17.]

The God of Hegel is not the Big Man of the nursery imagination, making the Universe with His hands, as the child makes its mud-pies or its sand-castles. “We cannot suppose God making the world like a mason.”

“ God is spirit, and the life of spirit is thought. Creation, then, is thought also; it is the thought of God. God’s thought of the Creation is evidently the prius of the creation; but with God, to think must be to create, for He can require no wood-carpentry or stone-masonry for this purpose; or even should we suppose Him to use such, they must represent thought, and be disposed on thought.” 2 [Note: James Hutchison Stirling, His Life and Work, 160.]

(3) His Goodness.—We may use the term goodness as a general expression to embrace the mercy, the compassion, the benignity, and the love of God. All the attributes of God culminate in love. God is first and last a God of love. The whole universe and the plan of redemption are summed up in love. It is the want of love, it is selfishness and hatred, that are the curse and woe of the world. God comes to fill up the sorrowful void with His own rich heart.

Pre-eminently in the work of redemption do we see the riches of His goodness. There we behold God not only working and waiting, but making a great sacrifice for the salvation of man. We can never understand what it cost God to save the world. We read that “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”; but how little do we know of all that lies in that declaration! How little do we know of the greatness of that gift and of the depth of that sacrifice! How little do we know of that mystery of sorrow which seems to enter into the very Godhead!

“Despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance? but after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up unto thyself wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God.”

Salvation is not forgiveness of sin: it is not the remission of a penalty: it is not a safety. No, it is the blessed and holy purpose of God’s love accomplished in the poor fallen creature’s restoration to the Divine image. And to this end is the news of God’s love in this great work declared to men, that they hearing it may have confidence in Him who hath thus loved them, and so open their hearts to let in His Spirit. So we have no need now to go out of our nature to meet God, and to get the eternal life, for God is in our own flesh, and the eternal life is in our own flesh, and we have but to know this loving God, and the longings of His heart over us, and to give Him our confidence in order to receive His Spirit into us. 1 [Note: Erskine of Linlathen.]

O Slain for love of me, canst Thou be cold,

Be cold and far away in my distress?

Is Thy love also changed, growing less and less,

That carried me through all the days of old?

O Slain for love of me, O Love untold,

See how I flag and fail through weariness:

I flag, while sleepless foes dog me and press

On me: behold, O Lord, O Love, behold!

I am sick for home, the home of love indeed—

I am sick for Love, that dearest name for Thee:

Thou who hast bled, see how my heart doth bleed:

Open thy bleeding Side and let me in:

O hide me in Thy Heart from doubt and sin,

O take me to Thyself and comfort me. 2 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti.]

Power in the Inward Man

Literature

Burrell (D. J.), The Religion of the Future, 13.

Campbell (R. J.), Thursday Mornings at the City Temple, 210.

Ewing (J. W.), The Undying Christ, 68.

Ferguson (F.), Sermons, 190.

Gibbon (J. M.), The Children’s Year, 230.

Kuegele (F.), Country Sermons, iii. 182.

Maclaren (A.), Christ in the Heart, 1.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Ephesians, 132.

Matheson (G.), Voices of the Spirit, 199.

Murray (A.), The Full Blessing of Pentecost, 121.

Murray (A.), Aids to Devotion, 62.

Muspratt (W.), The Work and Power of the Holy Spirit, 24.

Pulsford (J.), Christ and His Seed, 106.

Raleigh (A.), The Way to the City, 1, 46.

Ridding (G.), The Revel and the Battle, 151.

Smith (H. A.), Things New and Old, 160.

Spurgeon (C. H.), My Sermon-Notes, iv. 275.

Tasker (J. G.), in Great Texts of the New Testament, 219.

Vallings (J. F.), The Holy Spirit of Promise, 148.

Winterbotham (R.), Sermons, 270.

Christian World Pulpit, xiii. 88 (Gallaway); xxxii. 339 (White); xxxix. 379 (White).

Church of England Pulpit, 1. 182 (Rainsford).

Churchman’s Pulpit: Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, xii. 188 (Jobson), 192 (Cotton), 195 (Wright), 197 (Davies), 201 (Armstrong), 214 (Kempthorne), 216 (Heber).

Keswick Week, 1905, p. 49 (Moore).

Verse 17

Christ in the Heart

I bow my knees unto the Father, … that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.— Ephesians 3:17.

1. This is the central petition of the Apostle’s prayer—“that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.” We may be inspired by the memory of Christ, to determine that we will be more lowly, more earnest, more faithful, more fervent in spirit; that we will strive to be more like Him, kind and forgiving to others, trying to bless and do them good, and we may succeed and get a great deal of happiness from our resolve and endeavour. But we have not reached the centre of Christian joy and hope and strength until Christ dwells in our hearts by faith; that is, until He becomes a living reality to us, and not only a living reality but a close reality; until we can say in our measure, what the writer of this letter says in another place, “Christ liveth in me”; until our rejoicing is not over One who was born and lived and died, and the influence of whose life and work has blessed mankind beyond all measure, not over One who triumphed over His enemies and is raised to a throne of glory, but over One who, in addition to all these, lives near us and in us, sharing our burdens and joys, and ruling our lives with His living will.

The indwelling Christ was a far greater and more wonderful thing to Paul than the birth at Bethlehem. He is never lost in wonder at that, he says very little about it. He seems to be lost in the far greater wonder that the Babe of Bethlehem and the Man of Nazareth lives and speaks to men and rules their spirit with His, and is so near to them that His person is more real than their own, and they are more conscious of Christ than of themselves. So this man said, “I no longer live, Christ liveth in me, my will is merged in His, and my whole being is enveloped in His.” 1 [Note: C. Brown, God and Man, 55.]

Let us examine our faith in Christ by this text. Does He dwell in us by our faith? If He does not, our faith is vain. It will not benefit us to call Him Lord, Lord, if He does not rule as Lord over the inward man. He is truly the Saviour of men; but He has no other way of saving men than by acquiring whole and sole dominion in the house of the soul. If another spirit of life than His reigns within us, we may call Him Saviour, but He is not our Saviour. The only salvation which we want is salvation from the spirit of our own life, for we are exposed to hell, only because another spirit than that of God’s only Son prevails in us, and no one can live in Heaven, unless the Son of God be his life. “He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life.” 1 [Note: John Pulsford, Christ and His Seed, 116.]

If thou couldst empty all thyself of self,

Like to a shell dishabited,

Then might He find thee on the Ocean shelf,

And say—“This is not dead,”

And fill thee with Himself instead.

But thou art all replete with very thou,

And hast such shrewd activity,

That, when He comes, He says—“This is enow

Unto itself—’Twere better let it be:

It is so small and full, there is no room for Me.” 2 [Note: T. E. Brown, Old John and Other Poems, 151.]

2. In these central words of his great prayer, the Apostle teaches his Ephesian converts that the Gospel is to be found not in outward observances, but in the purity and Christlike holiness of the inward spiritual life. In every age this spiritual life has been in danger of extinction through the pressure of material influences swathing and crushing it with the coarse sensual bonds of outward forms; sometimes in the shape of superstition, sometimes in that of gross carnality, sometimes—and more especially in days like ours—in the shape of mere personal self-indulgence and comfort. It is always the tendency of ordinary men to turn away from the more refined and subtle beauty of the spiritual life and seek refuge in the tangible, the visible, the material, too often adopting, as the outward form, the product of some false extraneous idolatry, borrowed from a world that could no longer retain God in its thoughts. The Jews were in constant danger of yielding to idolatry and sensuality through the pressure and bad example of surrounding nations, against which they were not firm enough to maintain the pure faith of their father Abraham. Pass into Church history, and you will find that the Christian Church has been constantly exposed to the full force of the same temptations. At this very day there are old pagan superstitions which linger in many parts of Christendom, and veil their real heathen character under the pretext of some Christian sense or application. Too often the historians of the Church have found it almost impossible to trace out the hidden stream of spiritual life, overshadowed as it was by the oppressive influence of a vast external system, which occupied the eye and filled the attention, yet destroyed religion by its fatal combination of an elaborate ceremonial with lamentable sensuality, amidst which purity of life and the spirit of self-sacrifice were blotted out and forgotten. When such times were at the worst God sent the reformer; and the message of all reformers who are worthy of the name has always been to proclaim that the spirit is incomparably more important than the framework, that it is a fatal mistake to sacrifice the end to the means, and that faith and holiness are the proper objects and the true characteristics of the Christian. Such declarations have in darker ages seemed like fresh epiphanies of Christ, bringing men back from the oppressive weight of an immoral religion to a new and keen sense of those eternal realities—faith in Christ, trust in His mercy, purity of heart, and righteousness of conduct.

There are at least three kinds of external or material influences by which the life of the spirit may be stifled and destroyed; superstition, sensuality, and worldly self-indulgence. These three causes of mischief may mix and intertwine with a wonderful complexity. It is one of the favourite devices of sensuality to try to silence the voice of conscience by the use of superstitious observances. Superstition cannot save its votaries from carnal tendencies. There is a dangerous attractiveness in easy lives of calm enjoyment and self-satisfied comfort which is most injurious to the religious character, and may destroy any good resolutions we have formed to serve God faithfully at all costs and hazards, and to be tempted aside by nothing whatever that would interfere with the service of God.

(1) Superstition.—Superstition is a vice of many forms, and may be found where its presence is least suspected. For instance, what shall we call the watchwords and shibboleths of parties? Idolatry means the substitution of the image for the reality. It denotes worship rendered to the creature instead of the Creator. Is it not idolatry, then, to put such trust as amounts to a kind of worship in mere forms of words of man’s devising, the dead phrases which were once the war-cries of great contests, but are now mere excuses for a self-delusion which substitutes the worthless profession of the lips for the living faith of Christ dwelling in our hearts? But the error goes beyond the words of man’s devising. We may turn the inspired words of Scripture itself into idols, if we use them as the symbols of a party, like the colours of a regiment, or the white and red rose of the old English wars. This very word faith, to which the Apostle rightly gives such pre-eminent importance, has been often so treated as to be an instance of superstition. The word itself is Divine and sacred; the habit which it describes is the blessed result of the Divine grace received in the obedient heart. But sometimes people turn faith itself into a work of man; they treat it as something which they are to do, and which shows a kind of merit in the doing. The word then ceases to describe the habit and the attitude of humble trust, whereby Christ will dwell in our hearts, through the willing welcome of our own submission; and it denotes a supposed meritorious form of human exertion, so that faith itself becomes an idol, and its worship is a form of superstition.

People, in their struggle with lies and superstitions, frequently find consolation in the number of superstitions which they have destroyed. That is not correct. It is impossible to find consolation until everything is destroyed which contradicts reason and demands faith. Superstition is like cancer—everything must be cleaned out, if an operation is to be undertaken. Leave a small particle, and everything will grow out again. 1 [Note: Tolstoy, Miscellaneous Letters and Essays, 525.]

It were better to have no opinion of God at all; than such an opinion, as is unworthy of Him; for the one is unbelief, the other is contumely: and certainly superstition is the reproach of the Deity.… Atheism leaves a man to sense; to philosophy; to natural piety; to laws; to reputation—all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy, in the minds of men. Superstition, without a veil, is a deformed thing; for, as it addeth deformity to an ape, to be so like a man; so the similitude of superstition to religion, makes it the more deformed. And as wholesome meat corrupteth to little worms; so good forms and orders, corrupt into a number of petty observances. There is a superstition, in avoiding superstition; when men think to do best, if they go furthest from the superstition formerly received. Therefore care would be had, that (as it fareth in ill purgings), the good be not taken away, with the bad; which commonly is done, when the people is the reformer. 1 [Note: Bacon, Essays, “Of Superstition.”]

(2) Sensuality.—Perhaps we boast of our freedom from the coarser vices. It is a most blessed thing if we can do so. Let us thank God heartily, if we can, for His most precious gift of a pure heart and unstained conscience. But the world is very near us, and its temptations are abundant; and we shall never be quite safe till our bodies have passed through the grave, and we have been raised again to put on the pure likeness of Christ. And there are too many who will scarcely venture to boast of their freedom from compliance with sensual temptations. If there is nothing worse, men will too often read books of doubtful morality, or perhaps of very undoubted immorality. They will gaze with interest on spectacles of very doubtful purity. They will indulge in pursuits which will bring them very close into the neighbourhood of open sin. In such cases it is very hard indeed to assure ourselves that Christ is dwelling in our hearts by faith.

Samson, who fell a victim to his own licentiousness, is a type of the sensualist. Physically strong, but morally weak, woefully deficient in self-restraint, he stands for ever as a warning beacon to young men. Our sensual nature we share with the brutes. Our measure as a man is the height of our moral and spiritual nature. There is something unspeakably pathetic in the record of the strong man going out, as he was wont, to shake himself, and knowing not that his strength had departed. 2 [Note: David Watson, The Heritage of Youth, 90.]

(3) Self-indulgence.—Those who think too much of their mere comfort are exposed to the subtle temptation of forgetting the law of duty, the law of self-sacrifice, obedience to which is the proof and token that Christ is dwelling in our hearts by faith. Now, of all the idols men can worship, there is scarcely a meaner than the idol of mere ease and comfort; there is scarcely a tendency that is more destructive of lofty aims and worthy efforts; there is scarcely one that is more unlike the Gospel image of our Saviour, who had not where to lay His head, or more at variance with the spirit that would pray, with the Apostle, that Christ may dwell in our hearts by faith.

Oh I could go through all life’s troubles singing,

Turning earth’s night to day,

If self were not so fast around me, clinging

To all I do or say.

My very thoughts are selfish, always building

Mean castles in the air;

I use my love of others for a gilding

To make myself look fair.

I fancy all the world engrossed with judging

My merit or my blame;

Its warmest praise seems an ungracious grudging

Of praise which I might claim.

In youth, or age, by city, wood, or mountain,

Self is forgotten never;

Where’er we tread, it gushes like a fountain,

And its waters flow for ever.

Alas! no speed in life can snatch us wholly

Out of self’s hateful sight;

And it keeps step, whene’er we travel slowly,

And sleeps with us at night.

O miserable omnipresence, stretching

Over all time and space,

How have I run from thee, yet found thee reaching

The goal in every race.

The opiate balms of grace may haply still thee,

Deep in my nature lying;

For I may hardly hope, alas! to kill thee,

Save by the act of dying.

O Lord! that I could waste my life for others,

With no ends of my own,

That I could pour myself into my brothers,

And live for them alone!

Such was the life Thou livedst; self abjuring,

Thine own pains never easing,

Our burdens bearing, our just doom enduring,

A life without self-pleasing! 1 [Note: F. W. Faber.]

I

The Indwelling

1. During the days of His ministry on earth our Lord promised, “If a man love me, he will keep my word; and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him” ( John 14:23). Again, it is said in Revelation 3:20, in that affecting invitation given by the “Amen, the faithful and true witness”—“Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” This is the invitation and this the promise of the Lord Jesus Christ; and we find Him fulfilling this engagement in various portions of His history. When He came to the city of Jericho for the conversion of Zacchæus, we find Him saying, “Zacchæus, make haste, and come down; for to-day I must abide at thy house” ( Luke 19:5). We are informed also that, in the journey of the two disciples to Emmaus, they constrained the Lord to come into their house, saying, “Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent”: and He was prevailed on by their entreating fervency, and “he went in to tarry with them.” Now, it is a fact, that when the soul comes to the true knowledge of God, through the teaching of His Holy Spirit, and is enabled to lay hold on the Divine promises, which are all yea and amen in Christ Jesus, the Saviour enters into this soul and dwells there.

Go not, my soul, in search of Him,

Thou wilt not find Him there,—

Or in the depths of shadow dim,

Or heights of upper air.

For not in far-off realms of space

The Spirit hath its throne;

In every heart it findeth place

And waiteth to be known.

Thought answereth alone to thought,

And Soul with soul hath kin;

The outward God he findeth not,

Who finds not God within.

And if the vision come to thee

Revealed by inward sign,

Earth will be full of Deity

And with His glory shine!

Thou shalt not want for company,

Nor pitch thy tent alone;

The indwelling God will go with thee,

And show thee of His own.

O gift of gifts, O grace of grace

That God should condescend

To make thy heart His dwelling-place,

And be thy daily Friend!

Then go not thou in search of Him,

But to thyself repair;

Wait thou within the silence dim,

And thou shalt find Him there. 1 [Note: F. L. Hosmer.]

2. The dwelling of Christ in the heart is to be regarded as being a plain literal fact. To a man who does not believe in the Divinity of Jesus Christ, that is, of course, nonsense; but to those who see in Him the manifested incarnate God, there ought to be no difficulty in accepting this as the simple literal force of the words before us, that in every soul where faith, however feeble, has been exercised, there Jesus Christ does verily abide. It is not to be weakened down into any notion of participation in His likeness, sympathy with His character, submission to His influence, following His example, listening to His instruction, or the like. A dead Plato may so influence his followers, but that is not how a living Christ influences His disciples. What is meant is no mere influence derived but separable from Him, however blessed and gracious that influence might be; it is the presence of His own self, exercising influences which are inseparable from His presence, and to be realized only when He dwells in us.

We are called “mystics” when we preach Christ in the heart. Ah! brother, unless your Christianity be in the good deep sense of the word “mystical,” it is mechanical, which is worse. I preach, and rejoice that I have to preach, a “Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again; who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us.” Nor do I stop there; I preach a Christ that is in us, dwelling in our hearts if we be His at all. 1 [Note: A. Maclaren, Christ in the Heart, 17.]

3. When Paul prayed that Christ might “ dwell” in the hearts of the Christians at Ephesus he was thinking of something far greater than that kind of union with Christ which is the condition of even the lowest forms of spiritual life. The whole emphasis of the clause is thrown on the word “dwell.” There is an abiding presence of Christ in the heart which is a perpetual manifestation of the infinite love of God, and brings with it the very righteousness and blessedness of heaven, a presence which fills the whole life with a glory unbroken by clouds, and which does not change with rising and setting suns, but is like the glory of the city of God of which it is said that “there is no night there.” This presence is possible only where there is a great faith, and for a great faith there must be a great strength, a strength which is given to the inward man through the power of the Divine Spirit.

St. Paul asks that “the Christ may take up his abode,—may settle in your hearts.” The word signifies to set up one’s house or make one’s home in a place, by way of contrast with a temporary and uncertain sojourn (comp. Ephesians 2:19). The same verb in Colossians 2:9 asserts that in Christ “dwells all the fulness of the Godhead”; and in Colossians 1:19 it declares, used in the same tense as here, that it was God’s “pleasure that all the fulness should make its dwelling in him” now raised from the dead, who had emptied and humbled Himself to fulfil the purpose of the Father’s love. So it is desired that Christ should take His seat within us. He is never again to stand at the door and knock, nor to have a doubtful and disputed footing in the house. Let the Master come in, and claim His own. Let Him become the heart’s fixed tenant and full occupier. 1 [Note: G. G. Findlay, The Epistle to the Ephesians, 189.]

We all know how having certain persons with us changes the spirit-atmosphere by which we are surrounded and affected. Certain things you might do when alone you would not think of doing in the presence of these friends. Your speech is restrained by the presence of some; it is made to flow more freely by the presence of others.

The presence of Christ may become in a very real and practical sense the atmosphere of the life. He is with us. He is unseen by these outer eyes. That is true. But He is far more real than these outer things which I can touch and see and smell. The sense of His presence can be cultivated. It should not be thought of as a day-dreamy, visionary sort of thing, a using of certain religious phraseology constantly. It may be a real, practical, sane, sensible living as in His presence, in such a way as to give a wholesome sweetness and sanity to all of one’s life.

That wondrous presence of His so recognized, and in growing degree realized, will change all the life subtly but tremendously. He will become a Host in the home, reshaping its usage and life, until by and by it will be permeated by His spirit, and take on the shape of His personality. He will affect one’s social intercourse, the conversation, and the prevailing spirit and motive under the conversation. He will shape one’s business transactions, shutting some things wholly out, bringing other considerations in to guide and decide, and making a new standard by which all will be measured and controlled.

He will control the whole life. There will be sacrifice of a real cutting sort. It need not be sought for. It comes of itself in the path of obedience. It is sin that makes sacrifice. Sin put a cross in the Saviour’s path, and will see to it that a cross is as surely put in the path of every follower of the Saviour.

And there is yet more, so much more that all this seems scarcely like a beginning. He reveals Himself. There is a peace, a gladness, a joy that must sing; there is a fragrance in the spirit air, the fragrance of His presence. There is fighting, sometimes thick and hard, with moist brow, clenched hand and tight breathing. But there is victory. It is victory through fighting. It is all the sweeter for that. 2 [Note: S. D. Gordon, The Crowded Inn, 59.]

II

In the Heart

1. “The heart,” in the language of the Bible, never denotes the emotional nature by itself. The antithesis of “heart and head,” the divorce of feeling and understanding in our modern speech, is foreign to Scripture. The heart is our interior, conscious self, thought, feeling, will, in their personal unity. It needs the whole Christ to fill and rule the whole heart, a Christ who is the Lord of the intellect, the Light of the reason, no less than the Master of the feelings and desires.

That He may dwell in your hearts, that best room of the house of manhood; not in your thoughts alone, but in your affections; not merely have Him in your minds, but have Him in your loves. Paul wants you to have a love to Christ of a most abiding character, not a love that flames up under an earnest sermon, and then dies out into the darkness of a few embers, but a constant flame, the abiding love of Jesus in your hearts, both day and night, like the flame upon the altar which never went out. 1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]

I was reading lately Montalembert’s Memoir of Lacordaire, and could not but feel that there was, and I hope is, high, principle among some of the Roman Catholics of France. Here are one or two sayings of Lacordaire:—

“ I will never believe that the heart can wear out, and I feel every day that it becomes stronger, more tender, more detached from the ties of the body, in proportion as life and reflection neutralize the covering in which it is stifled.”

“ I am sad betimes; but who is there that is not so? It is a dart which we must always carry in the soul; we must try not to lean on the side where it is. It is the javelin of Mantinea in the breast of Epaminondas; it is extracted only by death and entrance into eternity.”

“ I desire, like Mary Magdalene, the day but one before the Passion, to break at the feet of Jesus Christ this frail vessel of my thought.”

Among his last words were, “I am unable to pray to Him, but I look upon Him”; his very last, “My God! open to me, open to me!” 2 [Note: Letters of John Ker, 147.]

2. The indwelling of Christ in us is not like that of a man who, abiding in a house, is nevertheless in no sense identified with it. No; His indwelling is a possession of our hearts that is truly Divine, quickening and penetrating their inmost being with His life. The Father strengthens us inwardly with might by His Spirit, so that the Spirit animates our will and brings it, like the will of Jesus, into entire sympathy with His own. The result is that our heart then, like the heart of Jesus, bows before Him in humility and surrender; our life seeks only His honour; and our whole soul thrills with desire and love for Jesus. This inward renewal makes the heart fit to be a dwelling-place of the Lord. By the Spirit He is revealed within us and we come to know that He is actually in us as our life, in a deep, Divine unity, One with us.

Be good at the depths of you, and you will discover that those who surround you will be good even to the same depths. Nothing responds more infallibly to the secret cry of goodness than the secret cry of goodness that is near. While you are actively good in the invisible, all those who approach you will unconsciously do things that they could not do by the side of any other man. Therein lies a force that has no name; a spiritual rivalry that knows no resistance. It is as though this were the actual place where is the sensitive spot of our soul; for there are souls that seem to have forgotten their existence and to have renounced everything that enables the being to rise; but, once touched here, they all draw themselves erect; and in the Divine plains of the secret goodness, the most humble of souls cannot endure defeat. 1 [Note: Maeterlinck, The Treasure of the Humble, 166.]

But if we remain wholly in ourselves, separated from God, we shall be miserable and unsaved; and so we ought to feel ourselves living wholly in God and wholly in ourselves, and between these two sensations we shall find nothing but the grace of God and the exercises of our love. For from the height of our highest sensation, the splendour of God shines upon us, and it teaches us truth and impels us towards all virtues into the eternal love of God. Without interruption we follow this splendour on to the source from which it flows, and there we feel that our spirits are stripped of all things and bathed beyond thought of rising in the pure and infinite ocean of love. 2 [Note: Maeterlinck, Ruysbroeck and the Mystics, 91.]

Speak to me, my God;

And let me know the living Father cares

For me, even me; for this one of His children,—

Hast Thou no word for me? I am Thy thought.

God, let Thy mighty heart beat into mine,

And let mine answer as a pulse to Thine.

See, I am low; yea, very low; but Thou

Art high, and Thou canst lift me up to Thee.

I am a child, a fool before Thee, God;

But Thou hast made my weakness as my strength.

I am an emptiness for Thee to fill;

My soul, a cavern for Thy sea. 1 [Note: George MacDonald, “Within and Without” (Poetical Works, i. 10).]

III

Through Faith

1. All Bible students are aware of the prominence given to faith in Holy Scripture. Indeed, it is frequently alleged that this prominence is unwholesome and mischievous, that it attaches a false and exaggerated importance to belief, since “what really matters is not a man’s creed, but his character and conduct.” And students are familiar with the simple and effective answer to this objection, viz., that creed forms conduct, and so builds up character, and that “as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” But whether men approve of it or not, this is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Gospel of Christ, that it proclaims “salvation by grace, through faith”; not by merit, through character. So we read that the gospel is “the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth,” “Whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins,” “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life.” The seed is snatched away from the hearts of the wayside hearers, “lest they should believe, and be saved.” The whole Gospel can be summed up in the one sentence, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.”

2. And this is equally true of all the later stages of the Christian life. All growth and progress, all perfection of character, all victory and fruitfulness, are by faith. The promise of the Spirit is received by faith. Christ dwells “in our hearts by faith.” Christ is not an object of sight or sense to us. We know Him only by believing in Him. From first to last, faith is the instrument and medium of all our union and fellowship with Him. Faith alone brings Him into the soul; and faith alone keeps Him there. By faith alone we find His presence, and by faith alone we continue to realize it. By faith we make Him ours, by faith love Him, and by faith live unto Him. “Whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.” We have no eye but that of faith whereby to see, no ear but that of faith whereby to hear, no hand but that of faith whereby to apprehend, and no heart but that of faith whereby to embrace Christ. Thus faith lies at the very foundation of all personal religion, and must be the pervading element of all. We are true Christians in so far as we have true faith. We walk to heaven by faith, and live in God by faith.

3. But what is faith? It is a certain state and condition of the whole inward man, a certain aspect of the whole mind, and heart, and soul towards God in Christ. Christ Himself, and not merely a particular set of facts, or events, or propositions, is the object of it. We believe in Him, we trust Him, we apprehend His presence, we have confidence in His word of promise, we rely on His love, His goodness, His power, we cleave in spirit to Him, we rejoice in Him, and commune with Him. This is faith, and by this Christ dwells in our heart. It is peculiar to Christians who are such not in name only, but in deed and in truth; it is peculiar to those who are partakers of the Spirit, who have the life of religion within them. As soon as ever a soul has this faith, Christ is in him. As long as ever he has it, Christ dwells in him.

Is it paradoxical, this mighty power of faith? Not more so than the mighty power of lips and throat when the strong meat, or reviving cordial, is taken into the exhausted body. The “mighty power” is not really in lips and throat, but in what they, and only they, can receive and do receive. The “mighty power” is not properly in the faith, but in Him whom it lets into the weary being, that He may do there a work which He, not faith, does; Himself making our weakness strength and our pollution purity. 1 [Note: H. C. G. Moule, The Pledges of His Love, 70.]

My enemies (at Tanna) seldom slackened their hateful designs against my life, however calmed or baffled for the moment. Life in such circumstances led me to cling very near to the Lord Jesus; I knew not, for one brief hour, when or how attack might be made; and yet, with my trembling hand clasped in the hand once nailed on Calvary, and now swaying the sceptre of the Universe, calmness and peace and resignation abode in my soul. Next day, a wild chief followed me about for four hours with his loaded musket, and, though often directed towards me, God restrained his hand. I spoke kindly to him, and attended to my work as if he had not been there, fully persuaded that my God had placed me there, and would protect me till my allotted task was finished. Looking up in unceasing prayer to our dear Lord Jesus, I left all in His hands, and felt immortal till my work was done. Trials and hairbreadth escapes strengthened my faith, and seemed only to nerve me for more to follow; and they did tread swiftly upon each other’s heels. Without that abiding consciousness of the presence and power of my dear Lord and Saviour, nothing else in all the world could have preserved me from losing my reason and perishing miserably. His words, “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world,” became to me so real that it would not have startled me to behold Him, as Stephen did, gazing down upon the scene. I felt His supporting power, as did St. Paul, when he cried, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.” It is the sober truth, and it comes back to me sweetly after twenty years, that I had my nearest and dearest glimpses of the face and smile of my blessed Lord in those dread moments when musket, club, or spear was being levelled at my life. Oh the bliss of living and enduring, as seeing Him who is invisible! 1 [Note: John G. Paton, i. 119.]

(1) Faith is trust.—And trust which is faith is self-distrust. “I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit.” Rivers do not run on the mountain tops, but down in the valleys. So the heart that is lifted up and self-complacent has no dew of His blessing resting upon it, but has the curse of Gilboa adhering to its barrenness; but the low lands, the humble and the lowly hearts, are they in which the waters that go softly, scoop their course, and diffuse their blessings. Faith is self-distrust. Self-distrust brings the Christ.

My own idea of trust is as illimitable as the word indicates. Whatever happens, to believe it is a part of the Divine plan. However unpleasant, however painful, however disagreeable may be that happening or circumstance, to determine upon finding its good meaning, and to turn it to the soul’s account and make it a means of character building. Trust does not, in my interpretation of the word, include placid acceptance of conditions or events. It means using these things as stepping-stones to deliverance. When our environment is not to our liking, when we are annoyed and hurt by events, the first thing to do is to discover if we ourselves have not been the cause of these troubles. If we realize on careful analysis that we are the cause, then trust the Divine forces to show us the way out. If we find we are blameless, and the troubles come through what we call Fate, then again trust in Divine power, within ourselves and beyond ourselves, to deliver us. Meanwhile let us go upon our way doing the duty which lies nearest, with absolute trust in the heart that we are treading the path to power. 1 [Note: Ella Wheeler Wilcox, New Thought Common Sense, 233.]

(2) Faith is desire.—Never in the history of the world has it been or can it be that a longing towards Him shall be a longing thrown back unsatisfied upon itself. We have but to trust, and we possess. We open the door for the entrance of Christ by the simple act of faith, and, blessed be His name! He can squeeze Himself through a very little chink, and He does not require that the gates should be flung wide open in order that, with some of His blessings, He may come in.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them. How can we ever be satisfied without them until our feelings are deadened? 2 [Note: George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss.]

The soul possesses a native yearning for intercourse and companionship, which takes it to God as naturally as the home instinct of the pigeon takes it to the place of its birth. There is in every normal soul a spontaneous outreach, a free play of spirit which gives it onward yearning of unstilled desire. It is no mere subjective instinct. If it met no response it would soon be weeded out of the race. It would shrivel like the functionless organ. We could not long continue to pray in faith, if we lost the assurance that there is a Person who cares, and who actually corresponds with us. In fact, the very desire to pray is in itself prophetic of a Heavenly Friend—a Divine Companion. 3 [Note: Rufus Jones.]

With Thee a moment! Then what dreams have play!

Traditions of eternal toil arise,

Search for the high, austere, and lonely way

The Spirit moves in through Eternities.

Ah, in the soul what memories arise!

And with what yearning inexpressible,

Rising from long forgetfulness, I turn

To Thee invisible, unrumoured, still:

White for Thy whiteness all desires burn.

Ah, with what longing once again I turn. 1 [Note: “A. E.”]

4. What do we gain by the indwelling of Christ in the heart through faith?

(1) Constancy.—We are ready to say again and again: “Oh, that I were always what I am sometimes!” Is not one of the greatest needs of our spiritual life constancy—strength to enable us to continue?—“Patient continuance in well doing.” There is no such token of strength or proof of power as being able to continue. That quality is lacking in us to-day. How is the defect to be met? Christ is “the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever”; and if He dwell in us He will impart to us that element of stability, He will make us strong by His indwelling presence that never fails.

When Mr. Browning wrote to Miss Haworth, in 1861, he had said: “I shall still grow, I hope; but my root is taken, and remains.” He was then alluding to a special offshoot of feeling and association, on the permanence of which it is not now necessary to dwell; but it is certain that he continued growing up to a late age, and that the development was limited only by those general roots, those fixed conditions of his being, which had predetermined its form. This progressive intellectual vitality is amply represented in his works; it also reveals itself in his letters in so far as they remain and are accessible. I only refer to it to give emphasis to a contrasted or corresponding characteristic: his aversion to every thought of change. I have spoken of his constancy to all degrees of friendship and love. What he loved once he loved always, from the dearest man or woman to whom his allegiance had been given to the humblest piece of furniture which had served him. 2 [Note: Mrs. Sutherland Orr, Life and Letters of Robert Browning, 349.]

It is strange that of all the pieces of the Bible which my mother thus taught me, that which cost me most to learn, and which was, to my child’s mind, chiefly repulsive—the 119th Psalm—has now become of all the most precious to me, in its overflowing and glorious passion of love for the Law of God, in opposition to the abuse of it by modern preachers of what they imagine to be His gospel.

But it is only by deliberate effort that I recall the long morning hours of toil, as regular as sunrise—toil on both sides equal—by which, year after year, my mother forced me to learn these fine old Scottish Paraphrases, and chapters (the eighth of 1st Kings being one—try it, good reader, in a leisure hour!), allowing not so much as a syllable to be missed or misplaced; while every sentence was required to be said over and over again till she was satisfied with the accent of it. I recollect a struggle between us of about three weeks, concerning the accent of the “of” in the lines

Shall any following spring revive

The ashes of the urn?—

I insisting, partly in childish obstinacy, and partly in true instinct for rhythm (being wholly careless on the subject both of urns and their contents), on reciting it with an accented of. It was not, I say, till after three weeks’ labour, that my mother got the accent lightened on the “of” and laid on the ashes, to her mind. But had it taken three years, she would have done it, having once undertaken to do it. And, assuredly, had she not done it,—well, there’s no knowing what would have happened; but I’m very thankful she did. 1 [Note: Ruskin, Praeterita, i. 54.]

(2) Cleansing.—The thoughts of the heart are a trouble to every Christian; the secret springs of action—they are the trouble. The secret tastes and the sympathies—these are the things that go to make the essence of Christian life.

Rivers to the ocean run,

Nor stay in all their course;

Fire, ascending, seeks the sun;

Both speed them to their source;

So a soul, new-born of God,

Pants to know His glorious face,

Upwards tends to His abode,

To rest in His embrace.

(3) Catholicity.—What do we read in the Apostle’s prayer? That we “may be able to comprehend with all saints.” If Christ is in the heart, barriers and divisions melt away. We are one with our brothers. The “hand” is not going to fight with the “foot.” We all belong to the same body and we know it; we each have a secret vital link with every other member of the mystical body of Christ. Whatever differences there are on minor points we say: “Grace be with all them that love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity.”

What profound and broad contrasts divide men from men; what gulfs separate one race from another, earlier from later ages, any one state of thought and social progress from what went before it and what follows it: and within narrower limits, what endless variety, baffling all imagination to follow, of circumstance and fortune, of capacity and character, of wealth or poverty, of strength or weakness, of inclinations and employments, of a kindly or unkindly lot. Yet for all, one life is the guiding light, and the words which express it speak to all. A life the highest conceivable, on almost the lowest conceivable stage, and recorded in the simplest form, with indifference to all outward accompaniments, attractive whether to the few or to the many, is set before us as the final and unalterable ideal of human nature. Amid all its continual and astonishing changes, differing widely as men do, Christ calls them all alike to follow Him: unspeakably great as His example is, it is for the many and the average as much as for the few; homely as is its expression, there is no other lesson for the deepest and most refined. The least were called to its high goodness: the greatest had nothing offered them but its brief-spoken plainness. 1 [Note: Dean Church.]

That mystic word of Thine, O sovereign Lord,

Is all too pure, too high, too deep for me;

Weary of striving, and with longing faint,

I breathe it back again in prayer to Thee.

Abide in me, I pray, and I in Thee;

From this good hour, O, leave me never more;

Then shall the discord cease, the wound be healed,

The lifelong bleeding of the soul be o’er.

Abide in me; o’ershadow by Thy love

Each half-formed purpose and dark thought of sin;

Quench, ere it rise, each selfish, low desire,

And keep my soul as Thine, calm and divine.

As some rare perfume in a vase of clay

Pervades it with a fragrance not its own,

So, when Thou dwellest in a mortal soul,

All heaven’s own sweetness seems around it thrown.

Abide in me; there have been moments blest

When I have heard Thy voice and felt Thy power,

Then evil lost its grasp, and passion hushed,

Owned the divine enchantment of the hour.

These were but seasons, beautiful and rare;

Abide in me, and they shall ever be;

Fulfil at once Thy precept and my prayer—

Come, and abide in me, and I in Thee! 1 [Note: H. B. Stowe.]

Christ in the Heart

Literature

Brown (C.), God and Man, 54.

Burrell (D. J.), The Religion of the Future, 13.

Chapin (E. H.), The Church of the Living God, 28.

Dale (R. W.), Lectures on the Ephesians, 242.

Heywood (B. O. F.), in Sermons for the People, New Ser., vi. 162.

Holland (H. S.), God’s City, 86.

Maclaren (A.), Christ in the Heart, 15.

Maclaren (A.), Creed and Conduct, 243.

Moule (H. C. G.), The Pledges of His Love, 68.

Murray (A.), The Full Blessing of Pentecost, 126.

Webster (F. S.), In Remembrance of Me, 49.

Christian World Pulpit, xiii. 88 (Gallaway); lviii. 19 (Fairbairn).

Church Pulpit Year Book, 1905, p. 249.

Churchman’s Pulpit: Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, xii. 188 (Jobson), 201 (Armstrong), 221 (Hannah), 224 (Edmondstone).

Keswick Week, 1905, p. 49 (Moore).

Literary Churchman, xxv. (1879), 380.

Verses 17-19

The Love of Christ

I bow my knees unto the Father … to the end that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be strong to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge.— Ephesians 3:17-19.

1. These words, and the remarkable passage to which they belong, supply us with the keynote of the Apostle Paul’s life and letters and ministry. They show us how intensely he was permeated with and dominated by the love of Christ. It was not an idea that possessed him; neither was it a system. It was a Person, and that Person was Christ. It was not the life of Christ or the character of Christ that fascinated him; it was Christ Himself. Jesus Christ was the charm of his whole life: “To me to live is Christ.” St. Paul’s life was interpenetrated with Christ, so much so that he lost himself in Him: “I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”

I hardly know anything more disheartening than to read such a passage as this, and to feel while we read it how little our own hearts and thoughts answer to it. We see how St. Paul felt and thought. The words come glowing from his soul; he is lifted up above himself with the greatness, the inconceivable greatness, of the things he is talking of. His inward eye is fixed on the love of Christ to the world—on the wonderfulness of God’s counsels to men—on the height and depth, and length and breadth, which no one can measure, of what had just been made known of God’s feelings about them, and of His purposes towards them. And from the fullness of his heart his mouth speaks. We see that he is overflowing with the feelings produced by the contemplation of what Christ is and has done. His whole mind is alive to it. He speaks not by custom, or because it is right to magnify the Lord’s greatness, but because he cannot help it—he cannot restrain what he feels and thinks.

And how differently do we read the words! There they are before us—words of fire and life, words which show that to him who spoke them the love of Christ was the most real, the nearest, the most absorbing thought in the world. Christ is not less to us than he was to St. Paul. But how often must we confess to ourselves that we have no feelings which answer to the Apostle’s manner of speaking; we cannot repeat them as the natural and unforced expression of our own feelings. There seems such a gulf between what we ought to feel and what we do fee, such a difference between the way in which the Gospel appeared to St. Paul and the way in which it appears to us. He found no difficulty in speaking worthily of his Master’s love; he passed from the outer scenes of ordinary life to the contemplation of Christ, and straightway his heart began to kindle and his tongue to speak. But we seem only able to touch, as it were, the outside shell of his words. We see, but do not feel, how excellent they are. They are such a contrast to the common thoughts of our life, they are so far above us, that we cannot enter into them. 1 [Note: R. W. Church, Village Sermons, ii. 287.]

2. This constitutes the third of the petitions in this great prayer of St. Paul’s, each of which rises above, and is a consequence of, the preceding, and leads on to, and is a cause or occasion of, the subsequent one.

There are two thoughts in the petition: he prays that the Ephesians may be able to apprehend the love of Christ in its vast dimensions, and that they may have an experimental knowledge of it, though it passes knowledge. But the exposition of each clause by itself will be the best exposition of the whole text.

I

Rooted and Grounded in Love

These two distinct conceptions “rooted” and “grounded” are frequently united in the Scriptures (as in Psalms 144:12, and 1 Corinthians 3:9). Two cognate conceptions—one borrowed from the processes of nature, and the other from human art—are employed to indicate at once the life, the growth, the strength, and the stability of a Christian’s hope. A tree and a tower are the material objects which are used here as alphabetic letters to express a spiritual thought. More particularly, as a tree depends for life and growth upon its roots being embedded in a genial soil, and a tower depends for strength and stability upon its foundation, the Apostle desires, by means of these conceptions, to express and illustrate the corresponding features of the Christian life. If disciples are compared to living trees, love is the soil they grow in; if they are compared to a building, love is the foundation on which it stands secure.

The root is taken from the field of nature, the grounding or founding from the world of art. The root is laid in the soil to imbibe its virtues, the foundation is placed on its base to sustain the edifice. The root grows, and produces fruit, the foundation stands, and gives strength. The root needs continual supply, the foundation rests in its completeness, and abides always. 1 [Note: J. Vaughan.]

1. Rooted.—We cast our affections down into the character and the Being of God; we wind them about His attributes; we strike them into His promises; we drive them deep into His faithfulness. There the roots of our affection lie. They take up, they drink in, the nature of the love they live in; they are always assimilating themselves to it, and they send up its sweet savour by little, silent threads, which are always running to the fountain of life. Our words, our actions, our whole outer being, cannot choose but mould itself to them, and take that love. Because of those secret processes of the roots which are in Christ, we love. We love simply because we are rooted in love.

Most men, when they wish to be religious, begin by trying to give up certain things, and to do certain other actions. But there must be something that goes before that, else it is just as if you planted leaves without stems, or flowers without roots. The springs of life must be in their right places. The roots must be really in God. True religion does not consist so much in this thing, or that thing, as being always in a certain tone and atmosphere. The plant takes its character from the ground; the soul, from its inmost, deepest associations. There must be that behind whereby we are always making inspirations of love. 2 [Note: Ibid.]

In descending by one of the passes of the Alps into the lovely valley of the Saarnen, the traveller may notice on the right hand of the path a pine tree, growing in extraordinary circumstances. Enormous masses of hoary rock lie scattered in the bottom of the ravine. They have fallen from the crags which form its stupendous walls, and it is on the top of one of these, a bare, naked block, that the pine tree stands. No dwarf, misshapen thing, like the birch or mountain ash on an old castle wall, where the wind or passing bird had dropped the seed; it is a forest giant, with rugged trunk, and top that shoots a green pyramid to the skies. At first sight one wonders how a tree seated on the summit of a huge stone, raised above the soil, with no apparent means of living, could live at all, still more grow with such vigour as to defy the storms that sweep the pass, and the severe and long winters that reign over these solitudes. A nearer approach explains the mystery. Finding soil enough on the summit, where lichens had grown and decayed, to sustain its early age, it had thrown out roots which, while the top stretched itself to the light, lowered themselves down to the naked stone, feeling for earth and food. Touching the ground at length, they buried themselves in it to draw nourishment from its unseen but inexhaustible supplies, to feed the sapling into a giant tree. 1 [Note: Thomas Guthrie.]

2. Grounded.—More than once in this Epistle to the Ephesians St. Paul uses the imagery of the foundations of a building to describe the foundations of a Christian life. Perhaps the reason was this. To any one entering Ephesus, the first object that would strike his eyes would be the splendid temple of Diana. There it stood, with its one hundred and seven pillars, each sixty feet high. All Asia had contributed to the building of it. Though its foundations were laid on marshy ground, years and years of patient labour had overcome all the natural difficulties of the place. So St. Paul, coming to Ephesus to supplant this false form of worship, felt that the Christian’s life must rest on a foundation as hidden, but as firm, as that of this heathen temple. That foundation-stone, he says, must be love.

The grand foundation or ground of everything is love, God’s love. Because “God is love,” therefore His love goes forth to sinners. Because His love went forth to sinners, He provided a way by which He could restore sinners again to happiness and to Himself; and so Jesus died for them. And since Jesus died for sinners, therefore God chose us, drew us, pardoned us, spoke peace to us. And having loved us enough to do this, what will not the same love do, what prayer will He not hear, what good thing can He withhold, what undertaking will He not make for us, for time and for eternity? That is a foundation. It will support anything—any comfort, any work, any hope we ever choose to build upon it. It is like some mathematical proposition, which cannot be assailed, and the whole problem is actually contained within it, and only wants to be worked out. It stands to the soul like solid adamant to the whole temple—a foundation. 1 [Note: J. Vaughan.]

3. In love.—The soil in which the living tree is planted is love. What is the love in which the trees of righteousness are rooted? Whether is it God’s love to man, or man’s love to God and to his brother? The question admits of an answer at once easily intelligible and demonstrably true. The love in which the roots of faith strike down for nourishment is not human but Divine. It is not even that grace which is sovereign and Divine in its origin but residing and acting in a renewed human heart; it is the attribute, and even the nature, of Deity, for “God is love.” The soil which bears and nourishes the new life of man is the love of God in the gift of His Son.

It introduces an inextricable confusion of ideas to think of believers as trees rooted in their own love—an emotion that has its abode and its exercise within their own hearts. The roots of a man’s faith and hope must penetrate, not inward into the love he exercises, but outward into the love which is exercised towards him. The roots of a tree grow, not into the tree itself, but into an independent soil, which at once supports its weight and nourishes its life. In like manner a Christian’s faith does not lean and live upon anything within himself; it goes out and draws all its support from God’s love to sinners in the Gospel of His Son.

According to the Catechism of the Westminster Assembly, “God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.” A very comprehensive and noble definition, no doubt! Yet did it never strike you as strange that there is no mention of love here? This appears a very remarkable omission—an omission as remarkable as if an orator who undertook to describe the firmament left out the sun; or an artist, in painting the human face, made it sightless, and gave no place on the canvas to those beaming eyes which impart to the countenance its life and expression. Why did an Assembly, for piety, learning, and talents, the greatest, perhaps, that ever met in England, or anywhere else, in that catalogue of the Divine attributes assign no place to love? Unless we are to understand the term “goodness” as comprehending love, the omission may be thus explained and illustrated: Take a globe and, observing their natural order, lay upon its surface the different hues of the rainbow; give it a rapid motion round its axis; and now the blue, red, yellow, and other colours vanish. As if by magic, the whirling sphere instantly changes into purest white, presenting to our eyes a visible, and to our understanding a palpable, proof that the sunbeam is not a simple but a compound body: thread spun of various rays, which, when blended into one, form what we call light. And may it not be that these divines make no distinct mention of love, just because they held that as all the separate colours blended together form light, so all the attributes acting together make love; and that thus, because God is just, wise, powerful, holy, good, and true, of necessity, therefore, and in the express words of John, “God is love”? 1 [Note: Thomas Guthrie.]

All vigorous life is a correspondence between organism and environment. If a tree is to be “rooted and grounded,” it must find, deep hidden in the soil, the materials it requires for its own substance. Otherwise, poverty in the soil will be reflected in its stunted branches, yellow leaves, and imperfect roots. Just so, if we are to be “rooted and grounded in love,” love must be the deepest ingredient in the soil in which our spiritual nature grows. The fact that men and women have become thus “rooted and grounded” that, by the exercise of faith, their characters have been “made perfect in love,” is thus the evidence of something more; it implies the presence of love in their spiritual environment. 2 [Note: E. Grubb, The Personality of God, 124.]

It was manifest from her childhood, as almost invariably with those heroes and heroines of history who have been the lovers and leaders of mankind, that Florence Nightingale had special gifts and sympathies, and that she was inspired by a sacred ambition to use them for the alleviation of pain and sorrow. I remember a row of young palm-trees in Dr. Bennett’s garden at Mentone, and one of them was thrice the height of the rest. There was a tank of water five yards below, but the tree had reached it with its roots. So Florence, rooted and grounded in love, rose above her fellows. 3 [Note: Dean Hole, Then and Now, 93.]

II

Strong to Apprehend

1. It requires strength, says Paul, to lay hold of the love of God. Some of us might, perhaps, fancy that it would have been more appropriate had he said, “ weak enough to lay hold.” For faith, we have come to imagine, is a characteristic of weak rather than of strong souls—a quality by which we forgo the strength of our reason, and passively accept that which mere authority lays upon us. But we shall look in vain for any sanction in St. Paul’s thoughts for the opposition we fancy to exist between faith and reason. Their operation he never brings into contrast. What he does contrast is faith and sight. The spiritual realities, he tells us, are those that “eye saw not, and ear heard not, and which entered not into the heart of man” ( 1 Corinthians 2:9). The exercise of faith is for him of similar quality to the vigorous use of the mind, when we are striving with all our force to master some difficult problem that confronts us. He recognizes that the love of God is hidden and elusive, that it can be “laid hold of” only by strenuous effort.

2. The word translated “ye may be strong” is found scarcely anywhere else; Paul found it hard to discover a word to express his meaning; it implies the putting forth of our best powers to do something that is extremely difficult, or almost impossible,—and doing it successfully. But, while Paul is as far as possible from suggesting that the love of God can be “laid hold of” by weak and passive acceptance of a dogma, he does, it is clear, maintain that the faith which “lays hold” is not simply identical with the use of our reasoning faculty. What is the condition of its effective exercise? He does not say, “that ye, being furnished with complete knowledge,” or “that ye, having your intelligence sharpened to the utmost,” may be strong enough to apprehend; but “that ye, being rooted and grounded in love.” The condition of the vigorous exercise of faith is, for him, not intellectual mainly, but ethical. He knew, like his Master before him, that it is the pure in heart who see; the eye that is single that is full of light; the doing of the will of God that yields knowledge about the teaching. If we are to know the love that is above us, it will be through the experience of love within us.

3. Thus there are certain conditions to be observed that we may be strong to apprehend the love of Christ in its vastness.

(1) There must be the reception of Christ into the heart by faith.—He that is rooted and grounded in love because Christ dwells in his heart will be strengthened to know the love in which he is rooted. The Christ within us will know the love of Christ. We must first “taste,” and then we shall “see” that the Lord is good, as the Psalmist puts it with deep truth. First the appropriation and feeding upon God, then the clear perception by the mind of the sweetness in the taste. First the enjoyment; then the reflection on the enjoyment. First the love; then the consciousness of the love of Christ possessed and the love to Christ experienced. The heart must be grounded in love that the man may know the love which passeth knowledge.

What is the beginning of everything? “That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith.” There is the gate through which you and I may come, and by which we must come, if we are to come at all, into the possession and perception of Christ’s great love. Here is the path of knowledge. First of all there must be the simple historical knowledge of the facts of Christ’s life and death for us, with the Scripture teaching of their meaning and power. And then we must turn these truths from mere notions into life. It is not enough to know the love that God has to us, in that lower sense of the word “knowledge.” Many of you know that, who never got any blessing out of it all your days, and never will unless you change. Besides the “knowing” there must be the “believing” of the love. You must translate the notion into a living fact in your experience. You must pass from the simple work of understanding the Gospel to the higher act of faith. You must not be contented with knowing, you must trust. And if you have done that all the rest will follow, and the little, narrow, low doorway of humble self-distrusting faith, through which a man creeps on his knees, leaving outside all his sin and his burden, opens out into the temple palace: the large place in which Christ’s love is imparted to the soul. 1 [Note: A. Maclaren, Christ in the Heart, 32.]

(2) There must be meditation on the love of Christ.—We have the same knowledge that St. Paul had of the love of Christ which passeth knowledge. And yet what a different thing was this love to him and to us. Is it possible for us ever to realize it as he did; ever to have the feelings towards it which in him stirred up the depths of his soul, and burst out as naturally from his lips as water does from a spring? And if it is possible—and who can doubt it?—why is it that St. Paul’s strong words seem to us so strange, so hopelessly above us? One reason is that we think so little about it. We hear, and read, and talk, but we do not think. When we hear of our Lord’s wonderful doings, we do not take the thought away with us and consider it, consider what it means and what it comes to. We never turn it about in our minds as we do the ways and doings of men among whom we live.

Love is not a thing of enthusiastic emotion. It is a rich, strong, manly, vigorous expression of the whole round Christian character,—the Christlike nature in its fullest development. To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and to love for ever is to live for ever. 1 [Note: Henry Drummond.]

The joy of heaven is the joy of love. The key to it is in Christ, who for the joy that was set before Him endured all. Christ’s was the joy of self-sacrifice, of loving, of saving, of giving up His life to another. But this is no joy save to those who love. 2 [Note: James Hinton.]

(3) But above everything, if we would understand and feel our Master’s love, we must have something of His Spirit.—Most truly is it said that love is the key and interpreter of love. It is difficult to sympathize with and to enter into it if we are unlike it in our heart and mind. We may for a while be charmed and overcome by some great display of nobleness and unselfishness; we may for a moment be lifted up by the admiration of it, and the wish to be like it, when we read of a man clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, tending the sick, risking his life in pestilence or shipwreck for his fellow-men. But these feelings will pass away, unless we are in reality, and not only in the moment of excitement, like those we admire. They will pass away and leave us dull, and dry, and cold, to what calls upon our love. The story of Christ’s love is too old, and too well known, and too familiar, ever to make an impression on us now, unless we have it in our hearts to wish to have something of His love in us.

If “Christ dwell in your hearts by faith,” you will be “rooted and grounded in love,” and as a consequence you will be able to comprehend spiritual things. A noble passage from the Philippians should be quoted here: “God is my witness, how greatly I long after you all in the [motherly] affections of Christ Jesus. And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in full knowledge and in all perception; that you may distinguish the things which transcend.” Love, then, according to the Apostle, is the ground and mother of the perceptive faculty. Without fire there can be no effulgence or radiance. As is the fire, will be the radiance. The source of mental illumination is the Son of God in the heart. It was surely inspiration which moved Paul to pray that his friends might be rooted and grounded in love in order that they might be able to comprehend the mysteries of their faith; but it was also pure philosophy. This I pray, that more and yet more you may abound in the spirit of love; that you may advance unto the full recognition and discernment of Heavenly things. “Love is the key which opens all the secrets of faith.” 1 [Note: John Pulsford, Christ and His Seed, 117.]

When the American civil war was going on, a mother received the news that her boy had been wounded in the battle of the Wilderness. She took the first train, and started for her boy; although an order had gone forth from the War Department that no more women should be admitted within the lines. But a mother’s love knows nothing about orders; so she managed by tears and entreaties to get through the lines to the Wilderness. At last she found the hospital where her boy was. Then she went to the doctor and she said: “Will you let me go to the ward and nurse my boy?”

The doctor said: “I have just got your boy to sleep: he is in a very critical state; and I am afraid if you wake him up the excitement will be so great that it will carry him off. You had better wait awhile, and remain without until I tell him that you have come, and break the news gradually to him.” The mother looked into the doctor’s face and said: “Doctor, supposing my boy does not wake up, and I should never see him alive! Let me go and sit down by his side: I won’t speak to him.” “If you will not speak to him you may do so.”

She crept to the cot and looked into the face of her boy. How she had longed to look at him. How her eyes seemed to be feasting as she gazed upon his countenance! When she got near enough she could not keep her hand off; she laid that tender, loving hand upon his brow. The moment the hand touched the forehead of her boy, he, without opening his eyes, cried out: “Mother, you have come!” He knew the touch of that loving hand. There was love and sympathy in it. 2 [Note: D. L. Moody, The Way to God, 19.]

III

With All the Saints

1. The definition of a saint here implied is that it is one who has apprehended something, rather than one who has attained a great reputation for sanctity by asceticism or noble deeds; one whose mental conception, whose capacity for thought, has become so quickened and enlarged as to enable him to realize a great idea, which so possesses him that holiness follows naturally. And St. Paul’s prayer for his converts is that they too may in a measure possess this widened apprehension, which will link them to all saints.

2. Of what advantage is it to apprehend the extent of Christ’s love with all the saints? There are several advantages.

(1) It encourages sanctity in us.—For our knowledge of the love of Jesus Christ depends largely on our sanctity. If we are pure we shall know. If we were wholly devoted to Him we should wholly know His love to us, and in the measure in which we are pure and holy we shall know it. This heart of ours is like a reflecting telescope, the least breath upon the mirror of which will cause all the starry sublimities that it should shadow forth to fade and become dim. The slightest moisture in the atmosphere, though it be quite imperceptible where we stand, will be dense enough to shut out the fair, shining, snowy summits that girdle the horizon and to leave nothing visible but the lowliness and commonplaces of the prosaic plain.

Those who desire to walk with Christ must try to wear the white robes of a purity that goes down to the depths of the heart, must seek to bring into captivity every thought to His obedience. How can this be done? We aim at a perfect mark, and always fail to reach it. But God will not allow us to be satisfied with anything lower than perfect holiness, so we continue our efforts in spite of failure. The Word of God is severe in its demands; but, though it is a sharp sword, that cuts down and lays bare the deepest motives hidden in the heart, it is with the “merciless severity of merciful love.” 1 [Note: Dora Farncomb, The Vision of His Face, 21.]

Personal holiness is the first and foremost tribute which we owe to the Holy Spirit, for the Master’s use, and we are to offer Him no other service until this be paid. Pharnaces, says the Roman historian, sent to Cæsar the present of a diadem, while he was yet rebelling against his throne. Cæsar returned it with this sententious and admonitory message, “First of all yield obedience, and then make presents.” The truth of this message is addressed by the Holy Spirit to every Christian and to every church. 2 [Note: T. W. Jenkyn.]

(2) It brings us the joy of fellowship.—In two ways does Christ give man his true place. He sets him alone beside God, as a son beside his Father, and shows him the indefeasible worth of his own soul, worth potential if not actual; for do not the angels of God sing for joy over even one sinner that repenteth? But He also sets him in a fellowship. For with cords of love He has been drawing after Him, throughout the long centuries, a great multitude which no man can number; and all who are drawn of Him should have fellowship one with another. As I am bound by the tenderest ties to the God who created me for His service, and the Saviour who redeemed me, so I am bound by bonds as strong as they are invisible to all who have ever loved the Lord and shared the redemption which He wrought. It is not good, it is not possible, for man to be alone. To be alone is to die. We are born for fellowship; and our religion satisfies this deep need of our nature by bringing us into a society, a kingdom, a church. We look into the friendly faces of those who worship with us, and we are strong.

In the highest utterances of each man’s faith, or in the best moments of his life, Stanley rejoiced to find the common ground of religious feeling or spiritual aspiration. He delighted to collect instances of such expressions from the most varied quarters. It was a Spanish Roman Catholic who said, “Many are the roads by which God carries His own to heaven.” It was the venerable patriarch of German Catholic theology, Dr. Döllinger, who said that theology must “transform her mission from a mission of polemics into a mission of irenics; which, if it be worthy of the name, must become a science, not, as heretofore, for making war, but for making peace, and thus bring about that reconciliation of Churches for which the whole civilized world is longing.”

In their loftiest moods of inspiration, the Catholic Thomas à Kempis, the Puritan Milton, the Anglican Keble, rose above their peculiar tenets, and “above the limits that divide denominations, into the higher regions of a common Christianity.” It was the Baptist Bunyan who taught the world that there was “a common ground of communion, which no difference of external rites could efface.” It was the Moravian Gambold who wrote:

The man

That could surround the sum of things, and spy

The heart of God and secrets of His empire,

Would speak but love. With love the bright result

Would change the hue of intermediate things,

And make one thing of all theology.

It was “the Bloody Advocate, Mackenzie,” who, whatever his illiberality of action, rose to true liberality of thought when he said, “I am none of those who acknowledge no temples but in their own heads. To chalk out the bordering lines of the Church militant is beyond the geography of my religion.” It was Dr. Chalmers who, in the very heat of the great Disruption of the Scottish Church in 1843, asked the question, “Who cares about any Church, but as an instrument of Christian good?” It was the Scotch Episcopalian, Archbishop Leighton, who declared that “the mode of Church government is unconstrained; but peace and concord, kindness and good-will, are indispensable.” It was the founder of Irish Presbyterianism (Edward Bryce) who insisted most on “the life of Christ in the heart, and the light of His Word and Spirit on the mind.” It was Zwinglius who loved to dwell on “the meeting in the presence of God of every blessed spirit, every holy character, every faithful soul that has existed from the beginning of the world even to the consummation thereof.” It was the “main, fundamental, overpowering principle” of Wesley’s life, not to promote particular doctrines, but to “elevate the whole Christian world in the great principles of Christian holiness and morality.” It was the solemn proclamation of a message of “unity and comprehension”—“in necessary things unity, in doubtful things liberty, in all things charity”—which Richard Baxter carried to “a stormy and divided age,” that gave the great Non-conformist leader his pre-eminence.

This was the spirit in which Stanley delighted to see men rise above the spirit of parties. 1 [Note: R. E. Prothero, The Life of Dean Stanley, ii. 242.]

(3) It secures completeness of apprehension.—St. Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians is that they may apprehend the whole extent of the love of Christ. Individually they might see one or more aspects of that love: what they needed, what he wanted, was to see Christ as all the saints saw Him. He wanted to see with this saint the righteousness of Christ, with that saint His mercy. He wanted to see with this other saint the crucified Christ, with that other the glorified Christ. Here was a saint who saw Christ as the reformer of social things—Paul wanted to know that Christ; here was another who saw Him as the King of Glory and the Lord of heaven—Paul wished to see Christ as this. His desire for these Ephesians was that they should not have a partial Christ, but the whole Christ, What Paul seems to say is that no individual saint has apprehended the whole Christ. No single individual has been large enough to apprehend Him: else were that saint greater than Christ. No; to know what Christ is we must seek to apprehend what all the saints have known. This saint has seen this in Him, that saint has seen another aspect. To apprehend Him we must strive to know what all the saints know.

The richest individual life is poor in comparison with the manifold experience of “all the saints.” Of the Churches which call themselves catholic, what can compare in catholicity with that which includes all the saints, and places at the disposal of every struggling soul, for its guidance and inspiration, all the wise thoughts with which they have ever been visited, all the heroic endurance, even unto death, with which they have sealed their testimony, all their love, hope, faith, joy, triumph, all their vision of eternal things unseen? 1 [Note: J. E. McFadyen, The Divine Pursuit, 123.]

One mighty intellect of Newton may sketch the plan of the solar system; one Laplace may demonstrate its permanent equilibrium; one Herschel map out the nebulæ of the southern sky; one Dalton unfold the laws of atomic combination; one Darwin assign the clue to the partial unfolding of the mystery of successive lives in nature. But no single soul is capable of comprehending the love of Christ, for the vision and experience of each is limited, and in morals we are members one of another. God has gifts which He bestows on the solitary students of Divine truth, and gifts which He bestows on His solitary petitioners in the closet or under the fig-tree. But, in general, the law of understanding the love of Christ is united study, united work, united conference, united prayer. 2 [Note: Edward White.]

In considering Christ, His character and work, men in various ways grasp special aspects of it. They are fascinated by Him in various fashions; and when they see Christ, they often see Him in one particular way. We cannot discuss fully these various ways; all we can do is just to notify a few of them; you can add to their number. One man looks at Jesus Christ and what he especially sees is His tenderness, the sympathy He extends to sinners; his neighbour looks at Christ and what he especially sees is His righteousness; but another looks at Jesus Christ and he sees Him as a social reformer; thousands to-day see Christ especially as the Lamb of God slain from the foundation of the world. Christians meet at the Cross; it is the centre of the Church. Christ dying for men that they might be free from the thraldom of sin and be reconciled to God fascinates them. Then there are others who, while seeing the Cross and glorying in it, pass beyond Golgotha and Olivet to the throne of God, and see Christ as the reigning Lord of heaven and earth under the Father, who has subjected all things to Him, and they see Him especially as the King who shall come again to rule the earth. They say: “You must not look alone upon Calvary. The Christ who hung there has ascended on high and will come again; you must see the coming as well as the dying Christ.” The future to them explains the past; and they are wondrously drawn by the vision of the returning Christ. So do men in various ways fix and fasten their attention on various aspects of Jesus Christ, of what He was and is; and to the superficial they may seem to contradict and deny each other. The one may seem to believe in a different Christ from the Christ the other believes in; but, nevertheless, it is one Christ in whom they believe. 1 [Note: J. A. Davies, Seven Words of Love, 141.]

IV

The Breadth and Length and Height and Depth

1. “The breadth and length and height and depth”—of what? Paul does not say; but the words that follow make it practically certain that what he is thinking of is the Divine personality, the Divine character, the Divine love. His thought seems to run parallel with that in the Fourth Gospel: “This is life eternal, that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ” ( John 17:3).

2. The Apostle, then, in his prayer not only seeks that the spiritual building may be strong, divinely possessed and firmly grounded; but in his enlarged vision of what the believer may have, he teaches us to pray for an all-comprehending and experimental knowledge of the love of Christ, that ye “may be strong to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth; and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge.” The temple is made strong by the almighty power of the Spirit; Christ dwells in it; the foundation is settled and sure, and now he proceeds to its geometrical proportions of breadth and length, height and depth.

3. It has been said that Paul’s thought was something like this. From that old captivity of his in Rome, his mind went away, carried him to the Ægean Sea, whose blue waters lay in beauty about the yellow sands of the Ephesian shore; and, looking in thought upon the land, he seemed to see a mighty castle, a splendid fortress. It stood out above the landscape as if with conscious pride, as if it knew it was the master of the coast and country. There it was, beautiful, strong, capacious, majestic. But would all men look at it alike? Paul thought that every one looking upon it would not give the same judgment about it; not that they would disagree about any part of it, but each would be so struck by one part of it as almost to neglect the rest.

Let us imagine ourselves on board of a ship on that Ægean Sea; then, as we mix with those on board, let us go to some of them and ask them: “What do you see in that castle? What is your vision of it?” It is true that it is one castle, but, yet, what do men see in it? We go to one and we look at his mind, and we ask: “What do you see in that castle?” And he in reply says: “What magnificent breadth it has! Just look what a grand space of soil it covers! I cannot loose my mind from thinking how vast it is.” We go to another and he says: “See the length of it! Look at the front it presents to this sea! What magnificent shelter and defence against inroad from the sea!” And we go to another and he says: “See the height of its walls! Who can scale those? The houses of yonder city, compared with it, are as pigmies beside a giant!” And if you go to another, he sees the unseen. He feels the majesty of the height, but if those walls are high, they must also be deep, he thinks. Ere that castle could stand, he knows there must be firm foundations; the walls must be going down deep. It is the mystery of their depth that he is thinking of. 1 [Note: J. A. Davies, Seven Words of Love, 138.]

How many men and women have sung about this temple, and have revelled in its strength and glory. Let us listen to one or two:—

O love how deep, how broad, how high!

It fills the heart with ecstasy

That Christ, the Son of God, should take

Our mortal form, for mortals’ sake.

And here is another singer:—

Jesus, Thy love unbounded,

So full, so sweet, so free,

Leaves all our thoughts confounded

Whene’er we think of Thee.

And here is a word of Samuel Rutherford which he wrote to Matthew Mowat when Mowat was in great distress: “I would not wish a better stock, while salvation be my stock, than to live upon credit at Christ’s hands, daily borrowing. Surely running-over love—that vast, huge, boundless love of Christ which will try the skill of men and angels to tell—is the only thing I most fain would be in hands with. He knoweth that I have little of love beyond that love; and that I shall be happy, suppose I never get another heaven but only an eternal lasting feast on that love. Christ, all the seasons of the year, is dropping sweetness. If I had vessels I might fill them; but my old, riven and running-out dish, even when I am at the well, can bring little away.… How little of the sea can a child carry in his hand! As little do I take away of my great sea, my boundless and running-over Christ Jesus.” 1 [Note: J. H. Jowett, in The British Congregationalist, Jan. 28, 1909.]

(1) The Breadth.—Think of the love of Christ in its breadth. It is broad as the necessities of the world and as the expanse of the nations of the earth. It embraces all men—both Jews and Gentiles, the inhabitants of the Old World and those of the New, and men of all ages and generations. The Lord Jesus Christ, “by the grace of God, tasted death for every man,” and His gospel is to be preached to “every creature.” The great salvation is free as the air or the sunlight. Jesus unfolded the breadth and comprehensiveness of His love when He told His townsmen in His first sermon at Nazareth what He had come into the world to do. He came to pity and help the poor, and they are the world’s sad majority in every age; He came to succour the broken-hearted, the captives, the blind, the bruised, and such-like. And does not every Gospel invitation bear upon the face of it the evidence of the boundless breadth of Jesus’ love? “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else.” “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” “Let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.”

The conception of Christ by the Church is larger than that of any specific Church. He is in each, but is fuller and finer than any one of them represents Him to be. It is the Church universal which bodies forth the Christ, which reincarnates Him. Churches have their “family-likeness.” We mean by family-likeness, that each face in a family has much in common with the others, yet its own individual character. Galton made interesting experiments with the portraits of the members of a family who had family-likeness, and found that when the portraits were cast one upon the other, so as to get a kind of “composite photograph,” the result was not a blur and a blotch, but a new face, which was like each, but different from all. Churches have their family-likeness; put them all together and you get a new face, the face of Christ, which is like each, yet finer and grander than any one of them shows Him to be. I must know what all the saints see Him to be ere I know Him. 1 [Note: J. A. Davies, Seven Words of Love, 144.]

So long as I have a good conscience towards God, and have His sun to shine on me, and can hear the birds singing, I can walk across the earth with a joyful and free heart. Let them call me “broad.” I desire to be broad as the charity of Almighty God, who maketh His sun to shine on the evil and the good; who hateth no man, and who loveth the poorest Hindoo more than all their committees or all their Churches. But while I long for that breadth of charity, I desire to be narrow—narrow as God’s righteousness, which as a sharp sword can separate between eternal right and eternal wrong. 2 [Note: Norman MacLeod, D.D., ii. 373.]

At Pretoria the town council has passed regulations forbidding the natives riding with white people on the trams; they must confine themselves to the occasional car which runs for coloured people only. They must not walk in the general park, or buy stamps in the general hall of the post office, or walk on the side pavements of the streets. So, you see, ordinary love has very severe limitations, and is apt to be very exclusive. Racial barriers impede it. Social barriers can check its flow. Ecclesiastical barriers can imprison it. But not so with the love of the Lord. It is not a little barricaded pool, but is like a tide, rolling in and obliterating the petty bulwarks of isolation built along the shore. 3 [Note: J. H. Jowett, in The British Congregationalist, Jan. 28, 1909.]

There’s a wideness in God’s mercy,

Like the wideness of the sea;

There’s a kindness in His justice,

Which is more than liberty.

There is no place where earth’s sorrows

Are more felt than up in heaven;

There is no place where earth’s failings

Have such kindly judgment given.…

For the love of God is broader

Than the measures of man’s mind;

And the Heart of the Eternal

Is most wonderfully kind.

If our love were but more simple,

We should take Him at His word;

And our lives would be all sunshine

In the sweetness of our Lord. 1 [Note: F. W. Faber.]

(2) The Length.—To what length will the love of Christ go? There is many a runner who is good for a hundred yards, but who fails at the mile. There is many a soldier who is good at a battle, but who fails at the campaign. There is many an oarsman who is fine at a spurt, but faints at the long spin. “Ye did run well; what did hinder you?” They failed at the length. To what length can we go in our loving? When we begin to help a man, how far can we go with him? If we take up a bit of hard social service what is our staying power? It is well to ask questions like these before we turn to the Lord. For here is the way in which “the length” is described in the Word of God: “Having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end.” “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” “Having begun a good work in you, he will perfect it.” Whenever the love of the Lord Jesus begins a ministry He never lays it down until He can say “It is finished.”

“Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?—I say not unto thee, Until seven times; but, Until seventy times seven.”—So said the Christ, multiplying perfection into itself twice—two sevens and a ten—in order to express the idea of boundlessness. And the law that He laid down for His servant is the law that binds Himself. What is the length of the love of Christ? Here is one measure of it,—howsoever long drawn out my sin may be, this is longer; and the white line of His love runs out into infinity, far beyond the point where the black line of my sin stops. 2 [Note: A. Maclaren, Christ in the Heart, 45.]

The strength of affection is a proof not of the worthiness of the object, but of the largeness of the soul which loves. Love descends, not ascends. The might of a river depends not on the quality of the soil through which it passes, but on the inexhaustibleness and depth of the spring from which it proceeds. The greater mind cleaves to the smaller with more force than the other to it. A parent loves the child more than the child loves the parent; and partly because the parent’s heart is larger, not because the child is worthier. The Saviour loved His disciples infinitely more than His disciples loved Him, because His heart was infinitely larger. 1 [Note: F. W. Robertson.]

(3) The Height.—What is the height of His love? For love can have very small ambitions. A mother’s love for her boy may soar no higher than wealth, or power, or distinction. And her love for her girl may be nothing but a desire that she be graceful, beautiful, admired, and that she may marry well and get a comfortable home. Love’s aim always determines its height. You remember that word of Macaulay’s mother: “I must have the wisdom of my child acknowledged by the angels before an assembled world.” There is height. But turn to the height of the Lord’s love: “I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am.” It was the goal of His love that we should share His glory, and become “heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ.” It is the supreme quest of His love that we should sit with Him “in heavenly places,” and partake with Him in all the fullness of grace.

What we here can know or conceive of the heights of God may be to us like an infinite mountain-peak, eternally ascending above the highest-winged flight of created holiness and power—so that angel and archangel to Him are but like eagle or bright-winged insect which behold the snowy heights, still fixedly soaring, where their pinions and their very atmosphere fail. And yet if such a parable must be dwarfed into nothingness when once our parted spirits have caught one glimpse of God as He is; then, again, St. Paul may well pray that even here we may be able to grasp something for ourselves of what that height of God is, lest we should never exclaim—“He is beyond my utmost conception; and so I ever can know Him, never can love what is so separate from me. He is to me unknowable, unthinkable. He is to me as if He were not.” Lest height should thus separate our souls from Him, He makes us know that His high Eternity is summed up, and shortly rendered in His love; and that love, though it be only ours, has a right to know love, though it be God’s; a right to appropriate it, a right to dwell in Him, and in Him to advance for ever. 1 [Note: E. W. Benson, Living Theology, 7.]

(4) The Depth.—The love of Christ is profound as the uttermost abyss of human sin and wretchedness. We begin to see “the depth of the riches” of it when we reflect on the marvel that the Lord should have loved us at all. His love was not caused by anything in us, otherwise He could never have loved us. The natural condition of His people is unlovely and even loathsome in His sight. We recognize this when we look unto the rock whence we are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence we are digged. But that vast, measureless love of His has gone away down far deeper than the lowest depths of human sin, “and underneath are the everlasting arms.”

Our love is so often only a narrow sentiment; we can so easily touch the bottom. It shines and shimmers like a white shore, but we can sail nothing in it. It is wanting in depth and therefore is lacking in deepness of ministry. Now turn to the Lord:

O love of God how deep and great,

Far deeper than man’s deepest hate.

Let us lay hold of that most tremendous line. Let us grip it, or, better still, let it grip us. Take our own deepest hate, or the hate of any fiercely hating man whom we have known—deep, black, secretive and malignant as hell! And God’s love is deeper than that! “He descended into hell.” Yes, and He is still doing it! Some of us would never have been found unless He had found us there. We sometimes say of a man who has lost his heritage, and who would fain fill himself with the husks that the swine do eat, “He’s got very low!” Yes, but the love of the Lord can go lower and deeper still. The vilest wretch who crawls the earth to-day may have the everlasting arms beneath him.

He came from on high to suffer and die,

To save a poor sinner like me. 2 [Note: J. H. Jowett, in The British Congregationalist, Jan. 28, 1909.]

The puzzle which baffles faith is, How can Christ understand and sympathize with man when He has never sinned? The monumental pile of righteousness that pillars the church and maintains social respectability may tell me what I ought to be. He may quote all the maxims and mottoes of virtue, and repeat the commandments and denounce the “exceeding sinfulness of sin,” and thank God that he is “not as other men are,” but what does he know about my conflict? His ravings about virtue do not help me; they depress and discourage and enrage me.

’Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for! My flesh, that

I seek

In the Godhead!

I seek a Saviour who knows my road, not from His study of geography, but because He has travelled it. How can Christ do this when He has never sinned? He does it by the power of love. This is the miracle love works. It enables us to enter fully into all the struggles and aspirations of those we love. It so thoroughly puts our life into accord with another’s that we are not only able to sympathize with what he suffers and enjoys, but we find it impossible not to do so. Love cannot escape this vicarious participation. 1 [Note: J. I. Vance, Tendency, 71.]

V

To Know the Love of Christ

1. The true man desires to know, to understand, to apprehend. He is one who feels that the world is full of an attraction to his mind, to which he must yield, or forfeit his name of man. And there is nowhere a sweeter, more charming picture than that of a man who is a humble, eager student, filled with high thoughts and earnest ambitions; a man who can live “laborious days” and despise the common pleasures of the crowd; he is one who has kinship with the skies, and lives on the high places of the world.

Browning, in one of his poems, “A Grammarian’s Funeral,” gives us a wonderful picture of a man eager and heroic in his quest after knowledge, and determined to strive to the last hour of his earthly life. They are now going to bury him—where? The appropriate country for such a man is not the “unlettered plain,” but “a tall mountain, citied to the top, crowded with culture!” He belonged to the morning: his body must rest near the stars. And as the funeral cortege winds up the heights, we are given the picture of the man and his majestic quest. Men did not know him for a long time: “long he lived nameless.” We leave work for play, but he was a man who “left play for work, and grappled with the world, bent on escaping,” and when he was pitied, he “stepped on with pride over men’s pity.” Many of us begin a book, but do not read it from cover to cover; but when this man got the scroll of a bard or sage, he “straight got by heart that book to its last page.” But some one would be ready to say: “Why trouble thus over books? Why burden the soul? This is the time to taste life! Up with the curtain!” “No,” he would say; “even though I have read the crabbed text, still there is the comment. Most or least, painful or easy, these are not to be thought of by me. I must know all that books can give me.” But men said: “Time passes! Live now or never!” And yet this was his grand intent—

That before living he’d learn how to live—

No end to learning;

Earn the means first—God surely will contrive

Use for our earning.

But is not life passing? Is it not very brief? No, “Man has Forever.” And so he laboured lovingly on, his mind dragging the body after it, and in that dragging the body suffered. He was fierce as a dragon for knowledge, and believed great undertakings have slow profits. Life is too brief to see them. As the poet says:—

That low man seeks a little thing to do,

Sees it and does it;

This high man, with a great thing to pursue,

Dies ere he knows it.

And this man struggled on, was struggling at the last. When the rattle was in his throat,—

So, with the throttling hands of death at strife,

Ground he at grammar;

Still, thro’ the rattle, parts of speech were rife:

While he could stammer.

He was struggling with the unsolved problems of grammar, even though, as Browning vividly tells us, he was

Dead from the waist down.

What a zeal for knowledge had that man! What an unquenchable thirst! What an imperious hunger for knowledge! Where ought such a man to be buried? Why, on the top of the mountain; the top peak! And so Browning sings, “Here”—on the mountain top—

Here’s his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,

Lightnings are loosened,

Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm,

Peace let the dew send!

Lofty designs must close in like effects:

Loftily lying,

Leave him—still loftier than the world suspects,

Living and dying. 1 [Note: J. A. Davies, Seven Words of Love, 134.]

2. Paul was a man who wanted to know—to know the highest things. His soul was athirst for the highest, purest knowledge, even the knowledge of Christ and His love. And, like the true scholar, he wanted others to know and to know from others. He made it his business in life, next to knowing for himself, to make others know, to be their teacher,

Some years ago—it is a good many years now—there was a lady, with a little girl of some three summers, travelling by coach in England from one town to another, and a young man got into the coach who was exceedingly clever; in fact, he thought himself so clever that he might dispense with all belief in the Bible and in God; and young as he was, he was the head of an infidel club in a certain city, whither he was then going to preside over their annual dinner that night. As the coach rolled on, the little girl became talkative, and soon she climbed up on the young man’s knee, when to amuse her he showed her his penknife, and she liked that, and became quite at home. A few minutes before the coach stopped, she looked up in his face, and in a loud, clear voice she said to him, so that every one in the coach heard it, “Does ’oo love God? Does ‘oo?” She was only three years old, remember. “Does ’oo love God?” 2 [Note: G. C. Grubb, The Light of His Countenance, 32.]

3. What is this love of Christ?

(1) It is a forgiving love.—St. Paul in all his Epistles evinces extreme sensitiveness with regard to sin, and his own personal sin. He had felt its galling bondage, its crushing burden, its withering curse. He had been “a blasphemer, a persecutor, and injurious.” He had felt himself to be “carnal, sold under sin.” He calls himself the “chief” of sinners. But now for a long time Christ had been revealed to him as his personal Saviour. His faith rested upon the “obedience unto death” of the Son of God in his stead. His conscience reposed on the righteousness of Christ, and his heart was drawn by the magnet of Christ’s love. St. Paul’s attachment to Christ was enthusiasm for a personal Redeemer. It was a sense of redemption that made the Apostle what he now was. He never forgot that he was a poor sinner saved by Divine grace, and the thought bound his heart to his Saviour. He felt that it was a wonderful love that had redeemed him, and all the currents of his soul kept flowing with tremendous energy towards his Redeemer.

I am reminded of the incident of a boy who had been tried by court-martial and ordered to be shot. The hearts of the father and mother were broken when they heard the news. In that home was a little girl. She had read the life of Abraham Lincoln, and she said: “Now, if Abraham Lincoln knew how my father and mother loved their boy, he would not let my brother be shot.” She wanted her father to go to Washington to plead for his boy. But the father said: “No; there is no use; the law must take its course. They have refused to pardon one or two who have been sentenced by that court-martial, and an order has gone forth that the President is not going to interfere again; if a man has been sentenced by court-martial he must suffer the consequences.” That father and mother had not faith to believe that their boy might be pardoned.

But the little girl was strong in hope; she got on the train away up in Vermont, and started off to Washington. When she reached the White House the soldiers refused to let her in; but she told her pitiful story, and they allowed her to pass. When she got to the Secretary’s room, where the President’s private secretary was, he refused to allow her to enter the room where the President was. But the little girl told her story, and it touched the heart of the private secretary; so he passed her in. As she went into Abraham Lincoln’s room, there were United States senators, generals, governors, and leading politicians, who were there upon important business about the war; but the President happened to see that child standing at the door. He wanted to know what she wanted, and she went right to him and told her story in her own language. He was a father, and the great tears trickled down Abraham Lincoln’s cheeks. He wrote a dispatch and sent it to the army to have that boy sent to Washington at once. When he arrived, the President pardoned him, gave him thirty days’ furlough, and sent him home with the little girl to cheer the hearts of the father and mother. 1 [Note: D. L. Moody, The Way to God, 20.]

(2) It is a transforming love.—It is a love that makes all things new, for St. Paul says, “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. And all things are of God.” God wants to transform us. Transformation gives a man a new character, a new life, a new nature, and the Gospel is a gospel of transformation, not a gospel of reformation.

At one of the missions last December there was a young man with whom the Spirit of God had been striving. Three times in one day he came up to the rectory drunk, and then we had prayer with him, and he gave himself to the Lord Jesus Christ. The next day he came up to the house in order to get a Bible, and one of the ladies who had seen him the day before came up to me and said, “Mr. Grubb, are you quite sure that that is the same man who was here yesterday?” And I said, “Yes, the same man, only he is a new creature in Christ Jesus to-day.” 2 [Note: G. C. Grubb, The Light of His Countenance, 27.]

(3) It is a restoring love.—The most sorrowful condition of soul in the world is that of a backslider, for a backslider can be satisfied with nothing; he cannot be satisfied with the world; he cannot be satisfied with sin; and he is not satisfied with Jesus. He knows what Christ was once to him; he knows that at one time in his life he used to love to pray; he knows that at one time in his life the society of Jesus was a reality to him; he knows that at one time in his life the Word of God used to speak to his heart; but all that has passed; Christ is a misty shadow to him now, if, indeed, there be such a person at all. Yet God is near, watching all the while over His wayward one, yearning for his return and using means to bring him back.

Love for all! and can it be?

Can I hope it is for me?

I, who strayed so long ago,

Strayed so far, and fell so low?

I, the disobedient child,

Wayward, passionate, and wild;

I, who left my Father’s home

In forbidden ways to roam!

I, who spurned His loving hold;

I, who would not be controlled;

I, who would not hear His call;

I, the wilful prodigal.

To my Father can I go?—

At His feet myself I’ll throw:

In His house there yet may be

Place, a servant’s place, for me.

See, my Father waiting stands;

See, He reaches out His hands:

God is love! I know, I see,

There is love for me,—even me 1 [Note: Samuel Longfellow,]

VI

A Love that Passes Knowledge

1. What is it that so raises the Apostle’s soul and gives him a tongue of fire? It is nothing that is beyond the feelings and sympathy of man. It is no mystery which only a few can penetrate, and which is not for the many. It is the “love of Christ which passeth knowledge.” We can understand what love means. All can understand being touched and melted by love. True, he calls the “love of Christ” a love that passeth knowledge—a love so great and astonishing that no thought of man can embrace it in its fullness, or sound it in its depths. But though its unsearchableness adds to its wonder, it does not prevent us from understanding that it is love, love shown to us and felt for us in a way that it was never shown or felt before. This is what St. Paul is talking of, this is what sets his soul on fire.

And we have the same knowledge that he had of that “love of Christ which passeth knowledge.” We have before us continually, in one form after another, that picture of Christ loving man which moved St. Paul so deeply. We have that history of love ever open before us, to which nothing done by man for man can compare. There have been men like ourselves, who have lived—as far as man can live—only for their fellow-men; who have spent their lives in ministering to their good; who have taught them, and fed them, and healed them, and comforted them; who have spent this world’s riches in providing, not for their own pleasure, but for the welfare of numbers who would never know or thank them; men who have left home and kindred to toil in the hardest and weariest way among the lost and the unthankful. And there have been women who have left ease and comfort, and all the tenderness in which they were nurtured, to attend on the sick, to minister to the forsaken and friendless sinner, to spend days of labour and sleepless nights in hospitals. We know what love means in these. But there was One, greater than they, who did more than any of them; who fed the hungry, and healed the sick, and taught the ignorant, and called back the wanderers, and was gentle and merciful to the sinners and the forsaken, who came not to be ministered unto but to minister; whose whole life was one endless display of love without stint, love careless of self, love doing its heavenly work without thanks, without return, without comfort. We hear sometimes of men, in their generous love to others, giving up what was their own, contenting themselves with a lower place, throwing up advantages, and coming down from a worldly position, in order to do more good to their fellows. But who among men came down as Christ did? Who among men gave up what He did, that He might cast in His lot with us? Who among men has that to throw away, for the good of his fellows, which Christ surrendered, when the Lord of the worlds became for us a little child, born in the lowest rank of life, born to poverty and neglect, without even where to lay His head?

I could tell you, says one who himself was a great kinsman of the Lord, of friends who have been fifty years in Christ, and though they hold a constant jubilee in the sense of His love, yet they will tell you that they are only scholars in the lowest form, beginning to spell out the alphabet of the grace of our Lord Jesus. After fifty years in Christ, only just beginning to know, only just matriculated in the Academy of Love! 1 [Note: J. H. Jowett, in The British Congregationalist, Jan. 28, 1909.]

2. Why does the love of Christ surpass knowledge?

(1) Because our experience of it is incomplete.—We are like the settlers on some great island continent—as, for instance, on the Australian continent for many years after its first discovery—a thin fringe of population round the seaboard here and there, and all the bosom of the land untraversed and unknown. So after all experiences of and all blessed participation in the love of Jesus Christ which come to each of us by our faith, we have but skimmed the surface, but touched the edges, but received a drop of what, if it should come upon us in fullness of flood like a Niagara of love, would overwhelm our spirits.

When St. Paul prays for the Ephesians that they may be able “to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge,” he means, not that he desires they should ever come to think that they have explored all “the unsearchable riches of Christ,” or are able to pronounce with confidence on all the reasons and modes of God’s dealings with men; but that they should, through the indwelling spirit of Christ’s own love in them, be led on to a deeper and ever deeper sense of the love with which He has loved them, to a firmer conviction that that love lies at the root of all their disciplines in life no less than of all their blessings, to a more perfect faith in it as the constant feeling, with which God’s heart is moved towards them.

They only miss

The winning of that final bliss,

Who will not count it true that love,

Blessing, not cursing, rules above,

And that in it we live and move. 1 [Note: R. H. Story, Creed and Conduct, 152.]

Columbus discovered America; but what did he know about its great lakes, rivers, forests, and the Mississippi valley? He died without knowing much about what he had discovered. So, many of us have discovered something of the love of God; but there are heights, depths, and lengths of it we do not know. That Love is a great ocean; and we require to plunge into it before we really know anything of it. 2 [Note: D. L. Moody, The Way to God, 9.]

(2) Because after all experience it will still be beyond our range.—It is possible for people to have, and in fact we do possess, a real, a valid, a reliable knowledge of that which is infinite, although we possess, as a matter of course, no adequate and complete knowledge of it. But we have before us in Christ’s love something which, though the understanding is not by itself able to grasp it, yet the understanding led by the heart can lay hold of, and can find in it infinite treasures. We can lay our poor hands on His love as a child might lay its tiny palm upon the base of some great cliff, and hold that love in a real grasp of a real knowledge and certitude, but we cannot put our hands round it and feel that we com prehend as well as ap prehend.

The love of God is the glory of love, the most orient pearl in the crown of it. It is not mercenary, nor self-ended, nor deserved; but as a spring or fountain it freely vents or pours out itself upon its own account. And what ingenuous, truly noble, heavenly-descended heart can hold out against the power of this love? Its constancy and unchangeableness is a star of eminent magnitude in the heaven of love. It is not a fading, a wavering, an altering thing, but abides for ever. It may be eclipsed and obscured, as to its beams and influence, for a season; but changed, turned away, it cannot be. And this consideration of it renders it to the souls of the saints inestimably precious. The very thought of it is marrow to their bones and health to their souls, and makes them cry out to all that is within them to love the Lord and to live unto Him. 1 [Note: John Owen, The Perseverance of the Saints.]

It passeth knowledge, that dear love of Thine,

My Saviour, Jesus: yet this soul of mine

Would of Thy love, in all its breadth and length,

Its height and depth, its everlasting strength,

Know more and more. 2 [Note: Mary Shekleton.]

The Love of Christ

Literature

Aglionby (F. K.), The Better Choice, 118.

Arnot (W.), The Lesser Parables, 200.

Benson (E. W.), Living Theology, 1.

Church (R. W.), Village Sermons, ii. 287.

Davies (J. A.), Seven Words of Love, 134.

Grubb (E.), The Personality of God, 122.

Grubb (G. C.), The Light of His Countenance, 19.

Jerdan (C.), For the Lord’s Table, 21.

Lushington (F. de W.), Sermons to Young Boys, 63.

McFadyen (J. E.), The Divine Pursuit, 121.

Maclaren (A.), Christ in the Heart, 27, 41.

Manning (H. E.), Sermons, iii. 217.

Mason (A. J.), Length, 1.

Moody (D. L.), The Way to God, 1.

Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, v. 1, 9.

Purchase (E. J.), The Pathway of the Tempted, 118.

Ridding (G.), The Revel and the Battle, 93.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), v. No. 577.

Whitworth (W. A.), Christian Thought on Present-Day Questions, 1.

Wilberforce (B.), Following on to Know the Lord, 131.

Wray (J. J.), Honey in the Comb, 278.

Wright (D.), The Power of an Endless Life, 170.

British Congregationalist, Jan. 28, 1899 (Jowett).

Cambridge Review, viii. No. 203 (Barry).

Christian World Pulpit, lxv. 77 (Robinson).

Churchman’s Pulpit: Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, xii. 226 (Huntington), 229 (Lloyd), 231 (Dix), 237 (Williams), 238 (Silvester).

Literary Churchman, xiv. 394.

Verse 19

Our High Calling

I bow my knees unto the Father … that ye may be filled unto all the fulness of God.— Ephesians 3:19.

1. In no part of St. Paul’s letters does he rise to a higher level than in his prayers, and none of his prayers is fuller of fervour than this wonderful series of petitions. They open out one into the other like some majestic suite of apartments in a great palace-temple, each leading into a loftier and more spacious hall, each drawing nearer the presence-chamber, until at last we stand there.

Meditating on this prayer is something like ascending an Alpine peak. The first hour or so is comparatively easy work. The giant flanks of the mountain are steep, but still their ascent is not over difficult; but, the higher you go, the steeper it becomes, until at last there is just that one glittering pinnacle towering above your head, and it seems to say, “Thus far, but no farther! Scale me if you can.” But with the aid of a trusty guide, who cuts steps in the very ice for us, and who lends us the strength of his arm, we are able to gain the summit, and drink in with our eyes the grandeur of the scene. 1 [Note: A. G. Brown.]

2. There can be nothing above or beyond this wonderful petition. Rather, it might seem as if it were too much to ask, and as if, in the ecstasy of prayer, Paul had forgotten the limits that separate the creature from the Creator, as well as the experience of sinful and imperfect men, and had sought to “wind himself too high for mortal life beneath the sky.” And yet Paul’s prayers are God’s promises; and we are justified in taking these rapturous petitions as being distinct declarations of God’s desire and purpose for each of us; as being the end which He had in view in the unspeakable gift of His Son; and as being the certain outcome of His gracious working on all believing hearts.

Filled unto all the fulness of God: who shall ever unfold the meaning of this expression to us? How shall we ever reach any definite idea of what it signifies? God has made provision for our enlightenment. In Christ Jesus we see a Man full of God, a man who was perfected by suffering and obedience, filled unto all the fulness of God: yea, a Man who, in the solitariness and poverty of an ordinary human life, with all its needs and infirmities, has nevertheless let us see on earth the life enjoyed by the inhabitants of heaven, as they are there filled unto all the fulness of God. 1 [Note: A. Murray, The Full Blessing of Pentecost, 132.]

The main theme common to both the Colossian and Ephesian Epistles is the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the relation of believers to Him. Isolated from the bustling activities of life, debarred from aggressive missionary work, limited to the few friends that visited him in his hired room, the Apostle is driven to contemplate the innermost realities of life, and to dwell upon the cardinal truths of revealed religion. His thoughts at such a time found centre in one truth—the Person of Christ, as the one mediating agent in both the natural and the spiritual world ( Colossians 1:13-23, Ephesians 1:7-14). It was this that he came to feel was the rock on which alone his own feet could safely rest; it was this that he could boldly put forward as the antidote to the erroneous teaching at Colossæ; it was this alone that could enable those to whom he wrote in the Churches of Asia to become “full-grown men,” and to attain to “the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”

The two Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians must therefore be studied side by side. The central truth is the same in both; the point of view, and therefore the range of vision, is slightly different. Dealing with the Colossian danger, the Apostle meets it with the great doctrine of the fulness of Christ. That was the answer to all their questionings as to the relation between God and man, and between God and this material world. “In him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.” In the Epistle to the Ephesians this fact is presupposed, and the Apostle goes on to argue from it the Church’s fulness in Christ. “He put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head over all things to the Church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.” Mark, again, the climax of his prayer—“that ye may be filled unto all the fulness of God.” And thus the lessons of the two letters seem to be summed up in the simple but fully reasoned argument of Colossians 2:9; Colossians 2:19: “In Christ is all the fulness: ye are in Him: in Him—complete—made full.” 2 [Note: T. W. Drury, The Prison-Ministry of St. Paul, 154.]

I

Filled

“That ye may be filled.” That is to say, Paul’s prayer and God’s purpose and desire concerning us is, that our whole being may be so saturated and charged with an indwelling Divinity that there shall be no room in our present stature and capacity for more, and no sense of want or aching emptiness.

1. What is it to be filled with God? It is to have as much of God within us as our nature can contain. How this truth is overlooked. There is a natural tendency on the part of us all to dwell with exquisite delight on the other side of the question, namely, how we are accepted in the Beloved—how we are in Christ; and, perhaps, we dwell on that thought to the exclusion of this, that not only are we in God, but God is in us; that, whilst we are accepted in the Beloved, He is pleased to make our heart His abiding rest, His chamber, and His temple. Not only can the believer shout,” Emmanuel, God, with us,” he can also say, “Christ, the Lord, within us.” We think that a low experience spiritually is a necessity. If you talk to them, there are many who will say, “Well, but is it not rather utopian to expect, whilst we are on earth, to be full of joy, and to be full of peace, and to be full of triumph? Do not we carry about with us this body of sin and death, and ought we not to expect much darkness and sorrow of soul, and be very thankful if occasionally we get a few gleams of light?” This is not in the Word. The teaching of this Book is for us to expect to walk in the light, and when we are not in the light to ask the reason why.

We see the river Nile flowing through Egypt in the times of drought, a river indeed, but the bed is not covered or the banks reached, nor is there fertilizing richness deposited in the fields. But later we see the Nile, when the sources are sending abundant supply, and the stream is spreading over all the channel, and the water is even with the banks, and the fields are rejoicing on every side. The Nile is “filled.” A heart “filled”; not merely having here and there a few experiences of the richness of God’s grace, but filled, every part of it, with that grace! 1 [Note: J. G. K. McClure, Loyalty the Soul of Religion, 232.]

In his address to Cornelius and his household Peter tells us that “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth” “with the Holy Ghost and with power,” that is, with the power of the Holy Ghost. And what next? What would we expect to follow such a statement but the words we find?—“Who went about doing good.” Filled with this fulness, we cannot do other, it is then our very nature, our very life to go about doing good. 1 [Note: T. Waugh, Twenty-Three Years a Missioner, 109.]

My Father, can it be

That Thou hast willed

Such an inheritance for me?

That I with all Thy fulness should be filled—

That Thine own Life with all its glorious light,

And love, and purity, and wondrous might,

And depth of grace,

In me should find a dwelling-place?

Is this the hidden thing—

The mystery which long hath slept,

In Thine eternal counsels kept—

That from the source, the everlasting spring,

Thyself, should flow,

Through Thine own Son,

To me, the Life which makes the Head and Body One?

Yea, Thou hast said it, and I know

It is Thy will

Thy temple thus to fill—

To give no less

Than all! I may possess

The fulness! I may be

Complete in Him by whom I live—

Who comes again to give

Himself—the Life that fills my soul with Thee! 2 [Note: Edith Hickman Divall, A Believer’s Songs, 108.]

2. To be filled with God we must first be emptied. Such emptying we fear. What will God wish of us if He has entire occupancy of our desires and purposes? It may be that He will ask us to change our desires, to give up present ambitions, to enter upon entirely new courses of business, and study, and pleasure. Perfect surrender to the infilling of God may mean a sacrifice as great on our part as was Abraham’s when he was called to go out he knew not where; it may necessitate the subversion of all our past and the adoption of a wholly new standard of procedure. Many a man is unwilling to face such a situation. We wish some standing ground, some reservation somewhere, for ourselves. We are ready to let God have a portion of our heart, that portion where honesty, gentlemanly conduct, purity, and even benevolence are; but we dare not let Him “fill” us, for then not one inch would be left for anything of our own.

Yet it is absurd for any of us to think of being filled with God’s fulness so long as we are under the dominion of any purely earthly or temporal wishes, or desires, or ambitions, or passions, or tastes. The words imply a totality of self-surrender to God. In praying to be filled with God the Father’s fulness, we pray that all our powers and faculties and desires and energies and likes and dislikes may be just what they would be if all our merely earthly desires were taken out of us, all that is selfish and mean and bad were emptied out of us, and the vacant space filled up by a pouring in of the character of God our Father. It is the same as praying that we may be just what God would be if we could imagine God to be put in our place.

If we say that religion is the absolute surrender of the soul to God, the surrender derives its meaning and value from this, that it is a conscious self-surrender—that it is not the meaningless rapture of the mystic striving after an impossible self-annihilation, but the “joy in God” of the spirit which, in the inmost depths of its being, thrills with the consciousness of unimpeded union with the life of the Infinite. 1 [Note: John Caird.]

The evil seed sown in me when a child—a relative having thoughtlessly taken me to the pantomime in London—grew into an overshadowing passion for the theatre. The good seed of my godly old schoolmaster was not altogether expelled by it, sometimes I experienced searching heart questionings on this matter which would not be silenced, and gradually so worked within me that, as a young man, I have sat in the pit, seeing not, hearing not, save the stirring Spirit of God bringing me into condemnation for refusing to yield up my darling pleasure, whilst I trembled with fear for disobedience. At last I yielded partially, making a compromise that I would cease regular attendance, and be present only on those occasions when Helen Faucit, that supremely gifted actress, came to Manchester. But the voice would not be silenced, and at last I utterly broke from the toils, and resolved to visit the theatre no more, no matter what temptation it held out. Then peace flowed into my soul. Few of this age will read this with any understanding, but I know this passion for theatrical entertainments was gradually eating away all spiritual desires, and that, “If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him,” and that indulgence in it would have made me unfit for the labour God purposed for His servant eventually. 1 [Note: The Life and Letters of Frederic Shields, 30.]

This is the supreme necessity—a definite self-surrender. You remember the story of John Newton’s conversion. In early manhood he was a profligate sailor on board an African slaver. “I was,” he says, “a wild beast on the coast of Africa, but the Lord caught and tamed me.” The Holy Spirit had long dealings with him, and one night he had a dream. He dreamed that he was handling a rope on deck and a ring which he prized slipped off his finger and sank in the sea. He was greatly distressed, when he felt a hand on his shoulder, and, turning round, he saw a stranger with the ring in his hand. “You have lost it,” said the stranger, “and you will lose it again. Let me keep it for you.” He understood the parable when he awoke, and gave his precious soul into the keeping of Jesus and left it with Him. This is the way of peace: Commit yourself to Christ, and keep on renewing the deposit day by day. 2 [Note: David Smith.]

3. But we must remember how St. Paul leads up to these words. We shall then better understand their meaning. The Apostle prays God for his disciples at Ephesus that they may be “strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man; that Christ may dwell in their hearts by faith”; and that they, “being rooted and grounded in love, may be strong to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge”; that they may “be filled unto all the fulness of God.” Now the whole of this prayer helps to explain these last words.

(1) First, the Apostle prays that the Ephesians may be “strengthened with power through “God’s “ Spirit in the inward man.” And how can we be “filled unto all the fulness of God” except by His Spirit filling us? We believe, with the whole Church, that the Holy Spirit is God. If then the Holy Spirit dwells in the inward man, God dwells there. “To be filled with the Spirit” is to be filled with God.

The Spirit is the Spirit of power—“strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man.” This means that the whole moral nature must be in touch with God, and so strengthened by that contact as to be the expression of God’s power. 1 [Note: E. Trumbull Lee.]

(2) But if God’s Holy Spirit does dwell within us, then we shall have faith; then Christ will dwell in our hearts by faith. This is the second blessing asked for in the Apostle’s prayer. Faith, like every other grace, is the fruit of the Spirit. It is not of ourselves, “it is the gift of God.” And behold then how by faith we are “filled unto all the fulness of God.” For Christ, who is God, dwells in our hearts by faith. Faith is the faculty within us which receives the Saviour. He cannot come where there is no faith. The door is, as it were, shut against Him. And the greater our faith, the more fully and constantly will Christ abide with us. True faith sets the door wide open for the Saviour to pass in. But how do we speak of Christ dwelling in our hearts by faith? In two ways: Both because He really visits and abides in the heart which has faith to receive Him, and because that faith feels and realizes His presence.

Perhaps we are venturing where God means us not to enter, when we seek to understand the manner of Christ’s indwelling presence. It is a Divine mystery; and we believe it, because it is revealed to us. Yet we may perhaps say this much, that, when in one place we read of Christ dwelling in our hearts, and in another place of having the Spirit of Christ, these two expressions declare the same thing, and that to have Christ dwelling in us is, in truth, to be filled with the Spirit of Christ. It is this that St. John speaks of when he says, “Of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.” Yet to have Christ dwelling in us must mean, after all, something more than to be filled with the Holy Ghost,—the Spirit, which proceedeth from the Father and the Son. It must at least mean to be so filled with that Holy Spirit as to be fashioned like unto Christ,—to have Christ formed in us,—to have in us that mind which was also in Christ Jesus. And I think it must also mean to possess the priceless blessing of Christ’s special love and favouring presence. And this we both possess and know by faith. Faith receives the Saviour. And Faith realizes the Saviour’s presence. By Faith we feel His love, His nearness, His ever-present help. By Faith we contemplate His purity, and holiness, and perfect example. By Faith we trust in His merits, His sacrifice, His prevailing intercessions. And thus Christ dwells in our hearts by Faith; and we are “filled unto all the fulness of God.” 1 [Note: W. W. How, Plain Words, ii. 214.]

(3) There is a third way in which we may be “filled with all the fulness of God.” It is by being “rooted and grounded in love.” Surely we can see that unless we are filled with love we can in no wise think that we are filled with God. For “God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.” Faith receives the fulness of God. Love is the fulness of God.

Strange as it may seem, it is undeniably true that the sovereign method for the deepest, fullest spiritual life is constant and appreciative remembrance of the love of God—its length, its breadth, its height, its depth. There is nothing a soul is to do but try to comprehend that love, in all its features and in all its expressions, and then make it the permanent, continuous, and controlling power of all its thought and feeling. To study God’s love, to get the fact of it, the greatness of it, the sweetness of it, the constancy of it, the comfort of it into one’s heart is to feel the nearness, dearness, and blessedness of God Himself. The mind that with each opportunity for leisure turns to the consideration of God’s love, that believes in that love for itself, that sees life in the light of that love, and that lets that love flow in upon it with ocean-fulness, will have such a sense of the presence, beauty, and power of God as will make that heart a holy of holies; God Himself will be in it, and His glory will fill it.

The love of God is as various as the world which God hath made, and there is no state of mind and no circumstances of life to which that love will not fit its gift. The Christian, the longer he lives, the more sure he becomes that God has loved him from the very first; that not even his own many sins have quenched that unquenchable fire; that not even when his own heart was coldest and his thoughts most far from heaven, did God forget the creature that He had made; that even into grievous sin and even into strange hardness of heart did God’s unwearied love pursue him and will pursue him yet. And so, when the Christian thinks of himself, he knows that he may fall; but when he thinks of God it seems impossible that God should let him. And in this thought he lives a more heavenly life, he cherishes a surer hope, he is more cheerful, he is more joyous every day. For he knows that God loves him, and while this is present to his mind, he cannot go wilfully away. He is God’s son; how can he quit his own Father?

Our human sight is short and dim. We cannot always look on beyond the present to God’s sure purpose to give us His blessing. But all the more ought we to write it down as with a pen of iron on our own souls, that whatever else we read in the life of Christ, we read first of all, and above all, and through all, the assurance of the all-searching love of God. If the life be careless, bring back the mind to that; if the heart be unhappy or discontented, compel the thoughts to that; if the habits of our daily walk cause us many a conflict between conscience and inclination, anchor the will on that. For most certainly it cannot fail. God’s love never can, and never did, and never will. 1 [Note: Archbishop Temple.]

II

The Fulness of God

1. “Filled unto (R.V., not with, as in A.V.) all the fulness of God.” This suggests the idea not of a completed work but of a process, and of a growing process, as if more and more of that great fulness might pass into a man. Suppose a number of vessels, according to the old illustration about degrees of glory in Heaven; they are each full, but the quantity that one contains is much less than that which the other may hold. Add to the illustration that the vessels can grow, and that filling makes them grow; as a shrunken bladder when you pass gas into it will expand and round itself out, and all the creases will be smoothed away. So the Apostle’s idea here is that a process of filling goes on which may satisfy the desires of the moment, because it fills us up to the then capacities of our spirits, but which, in the very process of so filling and satisfying, makes those spirits capable of containing larger measures of His fulness, which therefore flow into it.

Is this wide world not large enough to fill thee,

Nor Nature, nor that deep man’s Nature, Art?

Are they too thin, too weak and poor to still thee,

Thou little heart?

Dust art thou, and to dust again returnest,

A spark of fire within a beating clod,

Should that be infinite for which thou burnest?

Must it be God? 1 [Note: Mary E. Coleridge.]

There are plants which we sometimes see in our northern latitudes, but which are native to the more generous soil and the warmer skies of southern lands. In their true home they grow to a greater height, their leaves are larger, their blossoms more luxuriant and of a colour more intense; the power of the life of the plant is more fully expressed. And as the visible plant is the more or less adequate translation into stem and leaf and flower of its invisible life, so the whole created universe is the more or less adequate translation of the invisible thought and power and goodness of God. He stands apart from it. His personal life is not involved in its immense processes of development; but the forces by which it moves through pain and conflict and tempest towards its consummate perfection are a revelation of His “eternal power and Godhead.” For the Divine idea to reach its complete expression, an expression adequate to the energy of the Divine life, we ourselves must reach a large and harmonious perfection. As yet we are like plants growing in an alien soil and under alien skies. And the measures of strength and grace which are possible to us even in this mortal life are not attained. The Divine power which is working in us is obstructed. But a larger knowledge of the love of Christ will increase the fervour of every devout and generous affection; it will exalt every form of spiritual energy; it will deepen our spiritual joy; it will add strength to every element of righteousness; and will thus advance us towards that ideal perfection which will be the complete expression of the Divine power and grace, and which Paul describes as the “fulness of God.” 2 [Note: R. W. Dale, Lectures on the Ephesians, 257.]

2. We have, then, as the promise that gleams from these great words, this wonderful prospect, that the Divine love, truth, holiness, joy, in all their rich plenitude of all-sufficient abundance, may be showered upon us. The whole Godhead is our possession. For the fulness of God is no far-off remote treasure that lies beyond human grasp and outside of human experience. Do not we believe that, to use the words of this Apostle in another letter, “it pleased the Father that in him should all the fulness dwell”? Do we not believe that, to use the words of the same Epistle, “In Christ dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily”? Is not that abundance of the resources of the whole Deity insphered and incarnated in Jesus Christ our Lord, that it may be near us, and that we may put out our hand and touch it? This may be a paradox for the understanding, full of metaphysical puzzles and cobwebs, but, for the heart that knows Christ, most true and precious. God is gathered into Jesus Christ, and all the fulness of God, whatever that may mean, is embodied in the Man Christ Jesus, that from Him it may be communicated to every one that is willing. For, to quote words of another of the New Testament teachers, “Of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.” And to quote words in another part of this Epistle, we may all come “unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.” High above us, then, and inaccessible though that awful thought, “the fulness of God,” may seem, as the zenith of the unscaleable heavens seems to us poor creatures creeping here upon the flat earth, it comes near, near, near, ever nearer, and at last tabernacles among us, when we think that in Him all the fulness dwells; and it comes nearer yet and enters into our heart when we think that “of his fulness have all we received.”

The doubting question of all time is, “Will God dwell with men?” That God will actually enter a human heart and fill it with His fulness seems too good to be true. As a reviewer of Drummond’s Ascent of Man puts it, “And so the author’s purpose is to prove scientifically that God is love, a teaching that seems to many too good to be true.” But it is not too good to be true. The God who makes the cup to overflow, who scatters flowers over prairies in profusion, who sets not twenty, nor hundreds, but thousands upon thousands of stars in the heavens—that God can and will enter the soul with His spiritual fulness. 1 [Note: J. G. K. McClure, Loyalty the Soul of Religion, 235.]

(1) The constitution of man admits this fulness. “God created man in his own image; in the image of God created he him.” Fulness and God are inseparable, and equally united are fulness and the image of God. There is a natural capacity for “fulness” in man, which has not been destroyed by the entrance of the foreign element of sin.

(2) The redemption that is in Christ Jesus specially provides for this fulness. It restores lost truths and lost objects of hope and love and joy, and directly aims at filling us with all possible good.

The experience of every Christian is that of having supplied to him, by the Saviour, that which, being essential, has nevertheless been lacking. The Saviour of men appears to those who come to Him, as the morning star and the rising sun after the darkest of winter nights. He appears as a rock of foundation to a builder who has utterly despaired of finding any foundation better than sand. He appears as bread to one dying of hunger, and as water to one perishing of thirst. He appears as a robe of righteousness to one whose attire is filthy rags. He appears as the friend that sticketh closer than a brother to one who is outcast and desolate. He comes as wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption, and those who receive Him are complete in Him.

(3) The exceeding great and precious promises of God show that those who lack fulness or completeness are straitened, not in God, but through themselves. All that is needful for a true Christian they can have. “He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?”

I think there is something implanted in man’s heart, fallen creature as he is, which defies him to be content with anything but God alone. It is a trace of original majesty, which leaves a mark of what he was before the fall. He is always panting for something fresh; and that is no sooner attained than it palls upon his taste. And this strong necessity of loving something makes a man form idols for himself, which he invests with fancied perfections, and when all these fade away in his grasp, and he finds their unsubstantiality, he must either become a misanthrope or a Christian. When a man has learned to know the infinite love of God in Christ to him, then he discovers something which will not elude his hold, and an affection which will not grow cold; for the comparison of God’s long-suffering and repeated pardon with his own heartless ingratitude convinces him that it is an unchangeable love. 1 [Note: Lift and Letters of F. W. Robertson, 57.]

When all the over-work of life

Is finished once, and fast asleep

We swerve no more beneath the knife

But taste that silence cool and deep;

Forgetful of the highways rough,

Forgetful of the thorny scourge,

Forgetful of the tossing surge,

Then shall we find it is enough?

How can we say “enough” on earth—

“Enough” with such a craving heart?

I have not found it since my birth,

But still have bartered part for part.

I have not held and hugged the whole,

But paid the old to gain the new:

Much have I paid, yet much is due,

Till I am beggared sense and soul.

Not in this world of hope deferred,

This world of perishable stuff:—

Eye hath not seen nor ear hath heard

Nor heart conceived that full “enough”:

Here moans the separating sea,

Here harvests fail, here breaks the heart:

There God shall join and no man part,

I full of Christ and Christ of me. 1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Poems, 192.]

III

All the Fulness of God

When he asks for “ all the fulness,” St. Paul thinks of other elements of revelation in which we are to participate. God’s wisdom, His truth, His righteousness, along with His love in its manifold forms—all the qualities that, in one word, go to make up His holiness—are communicable and belong to the image stamped by the Holy Spirit on the nature of God’s children. “Ye shall be holy, for I am holy” is God’s standing command to His sons. So Jesus bids His disciples, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.”

While the holiness of God gathers up into one stream of white radiance the revelation of His character, “the fulness of God” spreads it abroad in its many-coloured richness and variety. The term accords with the affluence of thought that marks this supplication. The might of the Spirit that strengthens weak human hearts, the greatness of the Christ who is the guest of our faith, His wide-spreading Kingdom and the vast interests it embraces and His own love surpassing all—these objects of the soul’s desire issue from the fulness of God; and they lead us in pursuing them, like streams pouring into the ocean, back to the eternal Godhead. The mediatorial kingdom has its end: Christ, when He has “put down all rule and authority,” will at last “yield it up to his God and Father”: and “the Son himself will be subjected to him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all” ( 1 Corinthians 15:24-28). This is the crown of the Redeemer’s mission, the end which His love to the Father seeks. But when that end is reached, and the soul with immediate vision beholds the Father’s glory, the plenitude will be still new and unexhausted; the soul will then begin its deepest lessons in the knowledge of God which is life eternal. 1 [Note: G. G. Findlay, The Epistle to the Ephesians, 202.]

(1) To have all the fulness of God is to be full of joy.—“These things have I spoken unto you that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full” ( John 15:11). In the following chapter and the 24th verse, “Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name; ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full.” And in the following chapter and the 13th verse, our Lord prays, “And now I come to thee; and these things I speak in the world, that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves,” or, in other words, “that they may be filled full with my joy.”

Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. 2 [Note: G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 296.]

She really cared for nothing but the life of the spirit. The sources of joy were very far removed from the surface of things for her. They were in the inner recesses and not subject to sudden changes of weather like a brawling mountain torrent. To some extent this belief that God was in all creation made her a little self-centred. She was like one who sits at a warm fireside in the winter time heedless of storms and tempests outside. She did what her own heart asked her to do. She liked to quote: “I must be filled with joy if my feet are on the right road and my face set towards ‘the gate that is called Beautiful,’ though I may fall many times in the mire and often in the mist go astray.” 3 [Note: J. Ramsay MacDonald, Margaret Ethel MacDonald, 60.]

(2) It is to be full of peace.—“Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope.” Joy is peace singing; peace is joy reposing.

If peace means satisfaction, acceptance of the whole of an experience as good, and if even we, in our weakness, can frequently find rest in the very presence of conflict and of tension, in the very endurance of ill in a good cause, in the hero’s triumph over temptation, or in the mourner’s tearless refusal to accept the lower comforts of forgetfulness, or to wish that the lost one’s preciousness had been less painfully revealed by death—well, if even we know our little share of this harmony in the midst of the wrecks and disorders of life, what limit shall we set to the Divine power to face this world of His own sorrows, and to find peace in the victory over all its ills? 1 [Note: Josiah Royce.]

Take a water-bottle, and if that water-bottle be only half full, every time you move the bottle, the water in it washes to and fro. Why? How is it that it feels every motion? Because it is not full. But if you fill that water-bottle right up till it cannot hold another drop, and then cork it in, you may turn the bottle which way you like, and the water within it will not move. There is no movement, no washing about. Why? Because it is too full to be agitated. The reason why you and I live such poor restless lives is that we are not filled up with the fulness of God. 2 [Note: A. G. Brown.]

When she knew that she was close by the opening gateway of death, I asked her if she desired to see any one who would speak to her of what was to come. “That would be but a waste of time,” she replied, “I have always been ready. Let us praise God together for what has been. He has been very good to me in giving me my work, my friends, and my faith. At the end of the day I go gladly to Him for rest and shelter.” She was convinced that life and time were not the sum and substance of experience, and went away as though but starting upon a journey which, beginning in darkness, would proceed through light. She would hold my hand, she said, till those who had gone before gave her greetings. 3 [Note: J. Ramsay MacDonald, Margaret Ethel MacDonald, 62.]

(3) It is to be full of righteousness.—In Php_1:11 we read, “Pilled with the fruits of righteousness”—not just a stray fruit here and there upon our boughs, but all our boughs filled with fruit until, through the very weight of their load, they bend down and kiss the ground. The more fruitful the branch the lower it will hang. The more fruit there is upon a believer, the less conceit and pride there will be about him. The branch, heavily laden, bends beneath the weight of its own fruitfulness.

What an aspiration for a band of fishermen, peasants, slaves! It was an aspiration after more than Roman dominion, after more than Judaic empire. The proudest dreams of Pantheism never dared to soar so high. The Brahman had aspired to be lost in God, to have the little spark of his individual being absorbed in the mighty fire of the universe; that was rather humility than pride. Here was a company of men aspiring to reach God yet not to be lost in God, aiming to touch the brightness of the Infinite Glory without losing the spark of their own individual being. Was not this presumption, was not this impiety, was not this fitted to destroy all the tender graces of the Christian life—the poverty of spirit which had been promised the Kingdom, the meekness of heart which was to inherit the earth?

Nay, but who was this God with whose fulness they desired to be filled? His name was Love. If His name had been aught else than Love the desire of these men would have been indeed presumption. But to be filled with the fulness of love is not pride; it is the deepest, the most intense humility. He that is filled with love is thereby made the servant of all; he repeats the life of the Divine Man, and becomes heir to His burden. To him belong sorrows not his own. He labours in the labour of humanity, he suffers in the tears of affliction, he is wounded in the battle of the weak. His glory is his pain. That which fills him with God is that which fills him with sadness, which bows him down with the sense of nothingness; the love that makes him great is the power that makes him gentle. 1 [Note: George Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 129.]

They speak of ideals. But they cannot separate man’s ideals from the Man Christ Jesus. They speak of truth. Questions about truth involve the question, What about Christ? They speak to us of goodness. And—more faintly or more vividly, more lightly or more seriously—does there not rise on their memory a Face, marred more than any man’s, that carries an image and message of goodness, leaving all else of goodness behind it and below it? 2 [Note: The Life of Principal Rainy, ii. 174.]

Our High Calling

Literature

Brown (A. G.), Sermons from the Penny Pulpit, No. 63.

Drury (T. W.), The Prison-Ministry of St. Paul, 139.

How (W. W.), Plain Words, ii. 213.

Maclaren (A.), Christ in the Heart, 53.

McClure (J. G. K.), Loyalty the Soul of Religion, 229.

Martin (S.), Rain upon the Mown Grass, 304.

Matheson (G.), Moments on the Mount, 129.

Matheson (G.), Times of Retirement, 155.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxix. (1883), No. 1755.

De Teissier (G. F.), Village Sermons, iv. 30.

Williams (I.), Sermons on the Epistles and Gospels, ii. 241.

Wilmot-Buxton (H. J.), The Life of Duty, ii. 137.

Cambridge Review, xiii. Supplement, No. 327.

Christian World Pulpit, xxxii. 339 (White).

Church Pulpit Year-Book, vii. (1910), 223.

Examiner, Feb. 18, 1904 (Jowett).

Keswick Week, 1900, p. 183 (Inwood).