Bible Commentaries
Romans 14

Verses 7-9

Eternally the Lord’s

None of us liveth to himself, and none dieth to himself. For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; or whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died, and lived again, that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.— Romans 14:7-9.

1. This text is interpreted for us by the section of the Epistle to the Romans in which it is found. That section is devoted to the elucidation of the principles by which the early Christians were to be guided as to their observance or non-observance of particular festival days, and as to their abstinence or non-abstinence from certain kinds of meats and drinks. To understand the matter fully we must have a clear perception of the difficulty with which the Apostle was seeking to deal.

Living as they were in the midst of paganism, the Gentile Christians were frequently invited to feasts at which meat was served which had been offered to an idol. Some partook of it without any hesitation, believing, as St. Paul himself did, that an idol was nothing in the world and that nothing was unclean of itself. Others, having less enlightened consciences, refused to touch it, believing that if they did eat it they would be guilty of countenancing idolatry. The Jewish converts, again, were divided on the question of the observance of their national feasts. Some of them maintained their old habits in the matter of those Mosaic appointments, and others contented themselves with the simple keeping of the Lord’s Day. All of them relied upon the sacrifice of Christ for justification, and therefore are to be carefully distinguished from those against whom the Epistle to the Galatians was written, and who insisted on circumcision as essential to salvation. No vital principle was at stake in this instance. The error of the scrupulous was that of asceticism, not that of legalism; and so the Apostle here counsels mutual forbearance. He condemns everything like intolerance and recrimination. Those who had attained to such breadth of view that they felt no difficulty about eating anything that was set before them, were not to arrogate to themselves superiority over those who felt no such liberty; and on the other hand, those whose consciences would not allow them to partake of every sort of food were not to condemn such as had no scruples on the matter. The Jewish believer who kept all the festivals of his nation was not to look upon himself as better than he who observed only the Christian festival of the first day of the week; and neither were they whose strength of mind had raised them above such things to despise those who still considered that they were important. There was to be an agreement between them to differ in love; and if in any case the exercise of his undoubted liberty by one should seriously imperil the spiritual welfare of another by leading him to commit sin, then that liberty was to be cheerfully sacrificed in order that a brother should not be destroyed, for “the kingdom of God” was not a thing of “meats and drinks,” but of “righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.”

Now the truth which has been affirmed in regard to the use of food, and observance or non-observance of days, is here based on a large truth of which it is a part. The whole life of the Christian belongs not to himself, but to his Lord. “None of us liveth to himself,” means that no Christian is his own end in life; what is always present to his mind, as the rule of his conduct, is the will and the interest of his Lord. The same holds of his dying. He does not choose either the time or the mode of it, like a Roman Stoic, to please himself. He dies when the Lord will, as the Lord will, and even by his death glorifies God. In Romans 14:14 ff. St. Paul comes to speak of the influence of conduct upon others; but here there is no such thing in view; the prominence given to “the Lord,” three times named in Romans 14:8, shows that the one truth present to his mind is the all-determining significance, for Christian conduct, of the relation to Christ. This (ideally) determines everything, alike in life and in death; and all that is determined by it is right.

The following verses indicate that St. Paul has at heart the truth that we live for ever related to one another, but he reaches it through the greater, deeper, antecedent truth of our relation to the Lord. The Christian is related to his brother-Christian through Christ, not to Christ through his brother, or through the common organism in which the brethren are “each other’s limbs.” “To the Lord” with absolute directness, with a perfect and wonderful immediateness, each individual Christian is first related. His life and death are “to others,” but through Him. The Master’s claim is eternally first; for it is based directly upon the redeeming work in which He bought us for Himself.

I

In Life

“None of us liveth to himself … we live unto the Lord.”

1. What is meant by this strange phraseology translated “unto” or “to”? We live “unto” the Lord. It seems to impart at once to the phrase an air of unfamiliarity, if not of actual unreality. Shall we try to understand this? The right and full understanding of it, indeed, would make any one a master of St. Paul’s philosophy, but some understanding of it we may all win.

We have very close relations with one another. Each one of us has duties to his friends, his society, his country. No one saw more clearly than St. Paul that religion was bound to take all these duties into account, to illuminate and sanctify them. Christ’s religion is above all others the religion of humanity. And on this aspect of religious duty—our duty to one another, and to the society of which we form a part—St. Paul spoke and wrote often and urgently. These duties are so exhaustive in their sphere, so far-reaching, so varied, that they make almost a religion of themselves.

But St. Paul knew very well that the religion which is based only on men’s relations to one another would be a very imperfect one. There is a third element in religion which must never be absent, and that is God. If we wish to grasp the significance of religion we must keep in view the thought of God, the thought of the world, and the thought of our own individual soul, and assign to each its proper place. If we leave out the thought of the world we may sink into a morbid, unpractical life of superstition and seclusion; if we leave out the thought of God we shall certainly fall into a somewhat fashionable philosophy, which is, however, one-sided, incomplete, not profound or final.

Now St. Paul, by this word “unto”—live “unto” the Lord—embodies the relation between these three great elements; not consciously, but all the more instructively because the expression arose unconsciously out of his natural and habitual modes of thought. “Live,” he says (and the context shows that he is speaking of the complicated life in a society), “live, and perform all your duties to society and to one another; and the way to do so is to live unto the Lord.” St. Paul might tell us to live with men, for men, by men; but it is impossible that St. Paul should tell us to live unto men. Here comes in the third element. We are to live with men, for men, but with our thoughts reaching out unto God. These real personal relations between our individual soul and God are not to be sacrificed to our duties to one another; nay, more; we cannot live as St. Paul bids us live until we live unto God, with our eyes, and thoughts, and prayers turned to Him.

2. The “Lord” here spoken of is at once Christ and God. This is manifest from the ninth verse, where Christ is identified with the “Lord of both the dead and the living”; from the tenth verse, where He is declared to be the supreme Judge of the world; and from the eleventh, where the Apostle, to establish that title, directly applies to Christ the solemn declaration of the forty-fifth chapter of Isaiah,—“I am God, and there is none else. Unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.” The God, then, to whom we must make this utter and unreserved surrender of the heart, is the God who was revealed in Christ Jesus, and who, by the mystery of the Incarnation, has for ever united in Himself the Divine and human natures, and has consecrated the one by the other. Unto Him, as Christians, we are called upon to live; He who is the principle of our spiritual life is also made the object of it; as the vapours of the ocean supply the rivers that return into the ocean itself.

I quite appreciate your difficulty in accepting the term “the Lordship of Christ,” and I would not for a moment assert that “to know God as Spirit” may not be a more advanced perception or apprehension. But the Personality of the term “Lord” helps me; the Lord Jesus is my Personal God, and for the awakening, sustaining, and developing of my affections I seem to need that “individualized” presentation of Deity. “Spirit” is too abstract at present for me. I find in the apprehension of God, which “the Lord” represents to me, the Comforter or Helper. I quite agree with you that “Lord” seems an individualized word, and gives the thought of limitations, while “Spirit” is free and diffused; but do we not, through the knowledge of the individualized “Lord,” get really to the knowledge of “Spirit” universal and diffused? 1 [Note: R. W. Corbet, Letters from a Mystic of the Present Day, 208.]

3. Let us consider, then, how a real, living obedience to the command to live “unto the Lord” would affect our lives here, in our present society.

(1) To live means with us all, to work. Work in one form or another occupies a large part of our lives. Would it not make a great difference to any man if he felt that all his work was done “unto the Lord,” not unto men? It would not so much increase his diligence, but it would make it uniform, trustworthy; he would not be influenced so much by lower and temporary motives; vanity would have no place; consciously superficial work would be impossible, the work being done for the eye of the Master in heaven.

(2) And what dignity it adds to labour. Much the greatest part of any man’s work is a sort of drudgery, or what in some moments of weariness we are tempted to call so. Certainly much is monotonous, almost mechanical, attention to endless details. We are apt to grow impatient of this, to think that we have a soul above such petty details, to do our work, whatever it may be, badly and superficially, and to find some excuse for ourselves in the triviality of the things we neglect. But the thought that we are living “unto the Lord,” with our eyes on Him, and His on us, dignifies all the most trivial details of duty, and removes impatience. We are working under our Master’s eye; and no work that He gives us is petty or uninteresting.

All true Work is sacred; in all true Work, were it but true hand-labour, there is something of divineness. Labour, wide as the Earth, has its summits in Heaven. Sweat of the brow; and up from that to sweat of the brain, sweat of the heart; which includes all Kepler calculations, Newton meditations, all Sciences, all spoken Epics, all acted Heroisms, Martyrdoms,—up to that “Agony of bloody sweat,” which all men have called divine! O brother, if this is not “worship,” then I say, the more pity for worship; for this is the noblest thing yet discovered under God’s sky. Who art thou that complainest of thy life of toil? Complain not. Look up, my wearied brother; see thy fellow-Workmen there, in God’s Eternity; surviving there, they alone surviving; sacred Band of the Immortals, celestial Bodyguard of the Empire of Mankind. 1 [Note: Carlyle, Past and Present, ch. xii.]

They said, “The carpenter’s son.” To me,

No dearer thing in the Book I see,

For He must have risen with the light,

And patiently toiled until the night.

He too was weary when evening came,

For well He knoweth our mortal frame,

And He remembers the weight of dust,

So His frail children may Bing and trust.

We often toil till our eyes grow dim,

Yet our hearts faint not because of Him.

The workers are striving everywhere,

Some with a pitiful load of care;

Many in peril upon the sea,

Or deep in the mine’s dark mystery,

While mothers nor day nor night can rest;

I fancy the Master loves them best.

For many a little head has lain

On the heart pierced by redemption’s pain.

He was so tender with fragile things,

He saw the sparrow with broken wings.

His mother, loveliest woman born,

Had humble tasks in her home each morn,

And He thought of her the cross above,

So burdened woman must have His love.

For labour, the common lot of man,

Is part of a kind Creator’s plan,

And he is a king whose brow is wet

With the pearl-gemmed crown of honest sweat.

Some glorious day, this understood,

All toilers will be a brotherhood.

With brain or hand the purpose is one,

And the master workman, God’s own Son.

4. Then there is another consequence of the thought that we are living “unto the Lord,” an instantaneous and most important consequence. If we can bring the thought of God as a factor into our relations with the world, it will prevent us, as nothing else will, from making, more or less consciously, our own happiness our aim. Now if we aim at happiness, a thousand things occur to disappoint us; either we do not get what we want, or, quite as often, we get what we want and then do not enjoy it; it is different from what we expected, or there comes with it a little bitter sting of conscience which destroys all the pleasure. But if in our life and work we think of God, if we do our work “unto the Lord,” we escape the personal element in disappointment; our failures will chasten us without making us sullen or morose. For such a thought leaves no room for vanity, from which most of our disappointments spring. Such a thought transplants us into a region above vanity.

Though now thou hast failed and art fallen, despair not because of defeat,

Though lost for a while be thy heaven and weary of earth be thy feet,

For all will be beauty about thee hereafter through sorrowful years,

And lovely the dews for thy chilling, and ruby thy heart-drip of tears.

The eyes that had gazed from afar on a beauty that blinded the eyes,

Shall call forth its image for ever, its shadow in alien skies.

The heart that had striven to beat in the heart of the Mighty too soon

Shall still of that beating remember some errant and faltering tune.

For thou hast but fallen to gather the last of the secrets of power;

The beauty that breathes in thy spirit shall shape of thy sorrow a flower,

The pale bud of pity shall open the bloom of its tenderest rays,

The heart of whose shining is bright with the light of the

Ancient of Days. 1 [Note: A. E., The Divine Vision, 73.]

5. And thus we come back to the first part of the text: “None of us liveth unto himself.” For a man cannot live unto the Lord, and live to himself. There will be no room for selfishness in a life that is really devoted to the Lord. “None of us liveth to himself”—this alone is a sublime text for the socialist. But it was not the text of St. Paul, and we only need to turn over the pages of experience to find out where it breaks down. If we make the right beginning and remember that we live unto the Lord, an unselfish attitude to our fellow-men will follow as a natural consequence. “To love is the perfect of the verb to live.”

Few men in his generation sought to live so much for Christ and his people as did Thomas Guthrie, the Scottish pulpit orator and philanthropist, and the secret of all was that he had learned at the foot of the cross to sacrifice self and to love all for whom the Master died. I have heard him often, and always with delight, but never, I think, with such quivering emotion tingling through my frame, as when, at the close of a glowing appeal for his ragged children, he repeated with the deepest fervour, these lines, which were peculiarly appropriate on lips like his—

I live for those who love me,

For those who know me true;

For the heaven that smiles above me,

And awaits my spirit, too;

For the cause that lacks assistance,

For the wrongs that need resistance,

For the future in the distance,

For the good that I can do.

That was his motto, because he had learned the meaning of the love of Christ to his own soul. 2 [Note: W. M. Taylor.]

II

In Death

“And none dieth to himself … we die unto the Lord.”

1. “None dieth to himself.” The expression is striking, but it is practically meaningless if separated from the rest of the passage. It is the thought which follows that we must emphasize. We die unto the Lord. So then, it results that if we live to the Lord and die to the Lord we are eternally the Lord’s. Once grasp that thought firmly, and we shall hold a weapon strong to disarm the grim fear of death.

Death is the withdrawal of all human support from around the soul, of its vesture and home, of the very body which is its second self, that it may be alone with Christ, and feel Him to be enough for it, more to it than any created thing. He invites the soul and constrains it to put all its confidence into that last act of surrender; to cast itself, bare of every aid but His, into the mysterious infinite, feeling that underneath it are the everlasting arms. For a man to learn this perfect confidence in Christ, he must die. 1 [Note: John Ker.]

Once when I was visiting a dear child whose death-bed was a very happy one, she told me she had been dreaming that she was in the act of departing, and she felt not the slightest alarm. It reminded her of a day long previously, when she was being bathed in the sea, and her big brother suddenly caught her up and carried her out far beyond her depth. It gave her only a sensation of delight, for she knew she was safe in his arms. 2 [Note: J. Gibson.]

2. The Apostle four times over in this short paragraph makes mention of death, and of the dead. “None of us dieth to himself”; “whether we die, we die unto the Lord”; “whether we die, we are the Lord’s”; “that he might be Lord of the dead.” And this last sentence, with its mention not of the dying but of the dead, reminds us that the reference in them all is to the Christian’s relation to his Lord, not only in the hour of death, but in the state after death; it is not only that Jesus Christ, as the slain One risen, is absolute Disposer of the time and manner of our dying; it is not only that when our death comes we are to accept it as an opportunity for the “glorifying of God” ( John 21:19; Php_1:20 ) in the sight and in the memory of those who know of it. It is that when we have “passed through death,” and come out upon the other side,

When we enter yonder regions,

When we touch the sacred shore,

our relation to the slain One risen, to Him who, as such, “hath the keys of death and of Hades,” is perfectly continuous and the same. He is our absolute Master, there as well as here. And we, by consequence and correlation, are vassals, servants, bondservants to Him, there as well as here.

For doubt not but that in the worlds above

There must be other offices of love;

That other tasks and ministries there are,

Since it is written that His servants there

Shall serve Him still. 1 [Note: R. C. Trench.]

3. “Eternally the Lord’s.” Let us welcome the assurance from His own teaching. “To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise”—wherever that mysterious spot may be in space, at least somewhere where He is living a continuous life. The death of Jesus Christ is no ceasing, no ending of His personal existence. This is as clear as anything can be. Put to death in the flesh, He was quickened in the Spirit, and He went in that Spirit and preached to the spirits in prison. Death was to Him no ending of existence; it was an incident in the endless life; not an incident that came to Him as other incidents had come and were to come, of His Father’s will, and in the time of His Father’s ordaining. It has never touched for a single moment the continuity of His personal existence. And as with Him, so with us. He died, He rose, He revived in order that He might make manifest to us what our death is. Death, then, to us as to Him, does not touch personal existence at all. Whether we live we live unto the Lord; whether we die we die unto the Lord; living or dying, we are the Lord’s. It is not surviving death. Death is only the inevitable incident that comes to us in a life which is of endless continuance.

Death is another life. We bow our heads,

At going out, we think, and enter straight

Another golden chamber of the King’s,

Larger than this we leave, and lovelier. 2 [Note: P. J. Bailey, Festus.]

III

The Lord’s

“Whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died, and lived again, that He might be Lord of both the dead and the living.” In these words, as so often in general statements of this kind in St. Paul, there seems to be a universal reference, and a particular one also. For while it is obvious that the great assertion of the text has a sense in which it is true of the whole race of man, in which every man, whatever he may be doing or suffering, is Christ’s, it is equally obvious that there is also another sense, and that the only blessed and full one, in which they and they alone are His who are consciously united to Him in His death unto sin and His life unto righteousness; who shall reign and walk with Him in light, where He is in the glory of the Father.

1. Let us take first the general fact announced in the words: “To this end Christ died, and lived again, that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.” The Apostle is speaking of the duty of all Christians to judge one another charitably, and grounding it on this fact that it is not to himself, but to the Lord, that every Christian man lives and dies and performs all his actions. We therefore, in judging another, are judging the servant of a far higher master, to whom, and to whom alone, he standeth or falleth. And the proof of this is the fact that we are not our own. And how is it that we are not our own? It is because with His most precious blood, shed in our humanity, Christ purchased us to Himself—purchased, that is to say, this universal race of man, to be His in a peculiar manner, in which it was not and could not be His without the shedding of that blood, and the triumph which He achieved through death. Moreover, the Apostle declares that to become possessor and Lord of both the dead and the living was the very object and end which the Son of God set before Himself in His sufferings and His triumphs.

(1) The death of Christ is usually and rightly looked upon as the great atonement for our sin—for the sin of the world. But in so regarding it, men not only stop here when they should go very much further, but they do not understand even this much aright. As long as they have an idea of Christ the Son of God, as merely one living man substituted for other men in God’s sight as their atonement, they can give no account whatever of the fact that by so doing He intended to become Lord of our nature.

If A pays a penalty on behalf of B, there may exist a claim of gratitude, but there results no fact of lordship or ownership whatever. And it is characteristic enough that those who regard the death of our Lord as the mere substitution of one person for another, commonly forget, or even deny, the fact of His universal lordship and headship over our race. Here is one of the reasons why evangelical preaching often fails to work social changes and renew men’s souls. Preachers allow to pass out of sight the one truth of God, that He who was stricken thus as our substitute, was not merely a personal man, but the personal Son of God with our whole nature upon Him; bearing in His own Divine Person our flesh, the flesh of all the many thousand millions of mankind, as certainly and as actually as Adam bore us all in himself when he stood alone in God’s world. 1 [Note: Dean Alford.]

(2) Now in order that Christ may be Head and King of the race, it is not necessary that we should first believe it. We are not the measure of this fact; it exists irrespective of us and our belief; it is God’s eternal truth; it is God’s One eternal truth, by which He will save the world. But when we apprehend this truth that Christ is our Head and King, that He lives in us and through us, that His death is our death, His victory our victory, His crown our crown, His spirit our spirit—then, and not till then, can we lift up ourselves, and shake off the dust of death, and stand up in God’s sight pardoned and justified men, with God’s work before us and God’s help to do it with.

Christ is the universal head, and man’s belief is just the lighting up of this fact in reference to the individual man, and making it to be to him the fact of his own individual life. Well then, you say, you come to faith after all. Come to faith? Yes, certainly. Do you suppose this wonderful being of ours, body animated by life and lighted by spirit, can be rescued, can be saved, can be glorified, without and in the abeyance of its higher powers? If you are to benefit the body by medicine, must not the body take it in? If you are to turn a man’s course for good, must you not persuade him? And if this inclusion in Christ, this fact and potentiality of God which He has brought about in the mystery of redemption, is in its turn to bring about in you holiness, and joy, and fruit for God, and future glory, do you suppose it can do so without your apprehending it, without your applying it as a reality to your whole life and thoughts? Of course we come to faith, and always must come to faith, in every spiritual matter. 1 [Note: Dean Alford.]

2. Now we come to the more proper and more close application of the words—that in which the terms “we” and “us” are referred to those who have apprehended, who do feel, who are living in, and making their own, this glorious truth. And the difference between them and others is that they are consciously realizing to its fullest extent the fact of Christ’s Lordship. They are one with Christ. He is their King, as He is King of all, but they are His willing and devoted bondmen.

Speaking of Phillips Brooks in early manhood, his biographer says: To be true to himself, to renounce nothing which he knew to be good and yet bring all things captive to the obedience of Christ, was the problem before him. He hesitated long before he could believe that such a solution was possible. His heart was with this rich attractive world of human life, in the multiplicity and wealth of its illustrations, until it was revealed to him that it assumed a richer but a holier aspect when seen in the light of God. But to this end, he must submit his will to the Divine will in the spirit of absolute obedience. Here the struggle was deep and prolonged. It was a moral struggle mainly, not primarily intellectual or emotional. He feared that he should lose something in sacrificing his own will to God’s will. How the gulf was bridged he could not tell. He wrote down as one of the first of the texts on which he should preach, “Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power,” with the comment that “willingness is the first Christian step.” Thus the conversion of Phillips Brooks becomes a representative process of his age. So far as the age has been great, through science or through literature, its greatness passed into his soul. The weakness of his age, its sentimentalism, its fatalism, he overcame in himself when he made the absolute surrender of his will to God. All that he had hitherto loved and cherished as the highest, instead of being lost, was given back to him in fuller measure. To the standard he had now raised there rallied great convictions and blessed experiences, the sense of the unity of life, the harmony of the whole creation, the consciousness of joy in being alive, the conviction that heaven is the goal of earth. 2 [Note: Phillips Brooks, 82.]

3. Now it follows with every man who thus apprehends the Gospel of Christ and Christ Himself, that his life and thoughts must be changed and purified and sanctified by Christ’s Spirit. For if I, with my inner man, have laid hold on this truth as my truth of life, that Christ is my Lord and Head, that it is Christ who lives in me, not I myself merely, and that I am the partaker of Christ’s victory and Christ’s glory, just so far as His holy and sin-hating and godly life is carried on and carried out in me, is it not totally impossible that I should live in sin or to sin?

Writing to the Corinthian Christians St. Paul does not endeavour to persuade them into the belief that they are living a new life in Christ; he speaks of it in the simplest language of fact—“I thank my God always on your behalf, for the grace of God which is given you by Jesus Christ; that in every thing ye are enriched by him, in all utterance and in all knowledge; even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you: so that ye come behind in no gift; waiting for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” ( 1 Corinthians 1:4-7). This is the strain in which men write to their friends about assured facts; thus would a man express thankfulness for his friend’s health or his prosperity, or the advancement of his children, or any of those matters of fact which admit least doubt, and require least argument. More than one of the apologists of Christianity, as Justin Martyr and Tertullian, appeal to the existence of conspicuous Christian virtues amongst them, which even their enemies are expected to admit. Their patience of wrong and of suffering, their strict morality, their unselfishness, their mutual love, contrasted so strongly with the tone of pagan society, that they were like water-springs in a dry and barren ground. “Christ,” says Augustine, “appeared to the men of an old and expiring world, that whilst all around them was fading away, they might receive through Him a new life and youth.” It was the evidence of good works, rather than of miracles, that attracted new inquirers to the Christian ranks, even whilst persecutions were thinning them. Young lads and tender women, common workmen and slaves, showed that a new spring moved all their actions; and those who came into contact with them, if they had in their hearts any germ of good at all, must have felt the influence of this moral superiority. And can we find any other solution of this change than the simplest of all, that Christ was keeping His promise of being ever with His disciples? It was God who wrought in them; it was the promised Spirit of God who guided them; it was the Lord of the dead and the living who was sitting at the right hand of God, and helping and communing with those whom the Father had given Him. 1 [Note: Archbishop Thomson.]

They whose hearts are whole and strong,

Loving holiness,

Living clean from soil of wrong,

Wearing truth’s white dress,—

They unto no far-off height

Wearily need climb;

Heaven to them is close in sight

From these shores of time.

Only the anointed eye

Sees in common things,—

Gleam of wave, and tint of sky,—

Heavenly blossomings.

To the hearts where light has birth

Nothing can be drear;

Budding through the bloom of earth,

Heaven is always near. 1 [Note: Lucy Larcom.]

4. It was precisely this that was in St. Paul’s view when he affirmed that “none of us liveth to himself,” and that “none dieth to himself.” He was not speaking of any persons who had attained to this perfection, but of the law of spiritual life under which we all have passed. God is our Law; Christ is our Rule; and while we are no longer free to follow inclinations that would draw us out of accord with Christ’s rule, we are liberated from all lower authority. God’s service is then perfect freedom; we are no longer free to live to ourselves, because our will has passed into a higher life. How can he, says St. Paul, who is dead to sin, live any longer therein? We are determined, even as God is determined, by the highest life that is in us. And in the Apostle’s words,—for we might fear to use such words from ourselves—we become joint rulers with God as we become His servants from our hearts. We rule through willing submission: accord with the Highest is command over all that is lower than He. We obey natural law, and it obeys us; we obey the laws of labour, and it yields us its returns; we obey God, and He is the strength of our souls and our portion for evermore. This is the great law of life which delivers us from ourselves and our own blindness, so that, living or dying, life and death are freed from the colours of earthly accident, and centred in God. This is the only true liberty, to know that we are not our own masters.

“We are the Lord’s,” and they amongst whom we work are the Lord’s. Miserable some of them are and disappointing, and unsatisfactory; but they are the Lord’s. There are some who repel us, and make us feel inclined to turn away in despair, squalid and half-human as they seem to be; but they are the Lord’s. Living or dead, wretched and mean though they be, they belong to Him. He has not finished with them yet. “It doth not yet appear what they shall be “; but it will help us to value the souls of our fellow-men, and to discover something better than the sordid and the unlovely, if we remember that Christ Jesus is their Lord. There are forces at work to frustrate His designs, and He sends us forth to grapple with “the wrongs that need resistance” and to help “the cause that lacks assistance.” In all social service, Jesus works with His disciples, for all men are His. 1 [Note: J. S. Corlett.]

Me this unchartered freedom tires;

I feel the weight of chance-desires:

My hopes no more must change their name,

I long for a repose that ever is the same.

Oh, let my weakness have an end!

Give unto me, made lowly wise,

The spirit of self-sacrifice;

The confidence of reason give;

And in the light of truth thy Bondman let me live! 2 [Note: Wordsworth, “Ode to Duty.”]

Eternally the Lord’s

Literature

Alford (H.), Quebec Chapel Sermons, vi. 260.

Barry (A.), First Words in Australia, 161.

Bourdillon (F.), Our Possessions, 62.

Boyd (A. K. H.), The Graver Thoughts of a Country Parson, 2nd Ser., 234.

Bruce (J.), Sermons, 197.

Bruce (W. S.), Our Heritage, 93.

Chapman (H. B.), Sin Symbols, 20.

Chapman (J. W.), Pocket Sermons, i. 35.

Corlett (J. S.), Christ and the Churches, 193.

Davidson (R. T.), Christian Opportunity, 77.

Davidson (R. T.) Captains and Comrades in the Faith, 276.

Fuller (M.), The Lord’s Day, 376.

Gibson (J.), The Lord of Life and Death, 1.

Hort (F. J. A.), Village Sermons in Outline, 92.

Huntington (F. D.), Christ in the Christian Year (Advent to Trinity), 280.

Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year (Easter to Ascension), 44.

King (E.), The Love and Wisdom of God, 155.

Kuegele (F.), Country Sermons, i. 282.

Lewis (E. W.), Some Views of Modern Theology, 200.

M‘Intyre (D. M.), Life in His Name, 271.

Macmillan (H.), Ministry of Nature, 191.

Moule (H. C. G.), Christ is All, 17.

Neville (W. G.), Sermons, 22.

Norton (J.), Short Sermons, 69.

Paget (F. E.), The Living and the Dead, 19.

Perry (C. H.), Studies in the Psalms , 90.

Taylor (W. M.), Contrary Winds, 341.

Thomson (W.), Sermons Preached in Lincoln’s Inn Chapel, 109.

Vaughan (C. J.), The Book and the Life, 139.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons, v. (1867), 555.

Wilson (J. M.), Sermons Preached in Clifton College Chapel, 52.

Cambridge Review, xii., No. 289 (Moule).

Christian World Pulpit, xxiv. 169 (Beecher); xliii. 104 (Munger); xliv. 212 (Rawnsley); lxxix. 154 (Ward).

Verse 12

Our Accountability

So then each one of us shall give account of himself to God.— Romans 14:12

1. When St. Paul says that “each one of us shall give account of himself to God,” he makes one of the most solemn statements that are to be found even in his Epistles. He is led into making it quite incidentally. He wants to lay down a principle, which would check the rash judgments that were common among Christians at Rome in his day regarding the private religious observances of their Christian neighbours. Some of the Roman Christians, it seems, were vegetarians; others ate anything that came in their way. Some of them observed private anniversaries; to others all days were pretty much alike. As yet the Church had not laid down any rule about these matters for Christians; and no individual Christian might challenge another’s liberty or judge another’s conduct. “Why,” asks the Apostle, “dost thou judge thy brother? for we shall all stand before the judgment-seat of Christ. For it is written, As I live, saith the Lord, to me every knee shall bow, and every tongue shall confess to God. So then each one of us shall give account of himself to God.”

Here is a solemn truth, which must have at once lifted the thoughts of the Apostle’s Roman readers above the controversies in which they were engaged, into a higher and serener atmosphere. Whatever food they ate or did not eat, whatever days they did or did not observe, one thing was certain—they would have to give an account of the act or the omission, as of everything else in their lives. “Each one of us shall give account of himself to God.”

2. The words are more than an assurance that there will be a Day of Judgment, and that at that Day of Judgment each one of us must be present. The Apostle seems to be suggesting that example, education, surroundings of life, holding the principles and opinions we do, and being what we are, must be taken into consideration before an accurate judgment can be arrived at. He, therefore, warns us to judge ourselves, about whom we may know everything, and to refrain from judging others about whom our knowledge must be imperfect. “Why dost thou judge thy brother? or why dost thou set at nought thy brother? for we shall all stand before the judgment-seat of Christ.”

The text tells us four things about our Accountability:—

I. It is Universal. “ Each one of us.”

II. It is Inevitable. “Each one of us shall give.”

III. It is Personal. “Account of himself.”

IV. It is Supreme. “ To God.”

I

It is Universal

“ Each one of us shall give account.”

There will come a judgment for all classes of persons, there will be a judgment for the strong brother who with his knowledge of Christian liberty went perhaps further than he ought to have gone. He judged himself to be right in the matter, but he must stand before the judgment-seat of Christ about it. There will also be a judgment for the weak brother. He who was so scrupulous and precise ought not to be censuring the other man who felt free in his conscience, for he will himself stand before the judgment-seat of God. No elevation in piety will exclude us from that last solemn test, and no weakness will serve as an excuse. What a motley throng will gather at that assize, of all nations and peoples and tongues! Kings and princes will be there to give in their weighty account, and senators and judges to answer to their Judge; and then the multitude of the poor and needy, and those that live neglecting God, and forgetful of their souls,—they must all be there. It is a universal judgment.

1. Peer and peasant must give account. You may argue, “It cannot be a great matter to me what is said in the Bible about the day of account; I am but a poor man, and have but few things committed to my care; I have neither houses nor lands, nor riches, nor worldly goods; I have no great talents to misuse; no opportunities of doing good to neglect; why, then, should I be afraid of the final reckoning? Surely the just God will not look for a harvest where He has sown no seed. Surely He will not require at my hands an account like that which may well be asked of the wealthy and the great.” The argument is out of place and useless. Poor, humble, obscure as you are, you must give account.

“And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the chief captains and the mighty men,” must see the face of Him that sitteth upon the throne. The Apostle Paul himself is “one of us.” Of all men the manliest, among philosophers claiming recognition beyond the multitude, of rhetoricians not the least, in grand revelation the peer of every apostle and of all seers, in character most strong, most confiding, pure, and powerful—the Apostle Paul, standing far above the people in that which constitutes true stature, yet confesses himself to be one of us—“Each one of us.”

Louis xv. had always the kingliest abhorrence of Death.… He would not suffer Death to be spoken of; avoided the sight of churchyards, funereal monuments, and whatsoever could bring it to mind. It is the resource of the Ostrich; who, hard hunted, sticks his foolish head in the ground, and would fain forget that his foolish unseeing body is not unseen too. Or sometimes, with a spasmodic antagonism, significant of the same thing, and of more, he would go; or stopping his court carriages, would send into churchyards, and ask “how many new graves there were to-day,” though it gave his poor Pompadour the disagreeablest qualms. We can figure the thought of Louis that day, when, all royally caparisoned for hunting, he met at some sudden turning in the Wood of Senart, a ragged peasant with a coffin: “For whom?”—It was for a poor brother slave, whom Majesty had sometimes noticed slaving in those quarters. “What did he die of?”—“Of hunger”:—the King gave his steed the spur. But figure his thought, when Death is now clutching at his own heart-strings; unlooked for, inexorable! Yes, poor Louis, Death has found thee. No palace walls or life-guards, gorgeous tapestries or gilt buckram of stiffest ceremonial could keep him out; but he is here, here at thy very life-breath, and will extinguish it. Thou whose whole existence hitherto was a chimera and scenic show, at length becomest a reality; sumptuous Versailles bursts asunder, like a dream, into void Immensity; Time is done, and all the scaffolding of Time falls wrecked with hideous clangour round thy soul; the pale Kingdoms yawn open; there must thou enter, naked, all unking’d, and await what is appointed thee!

And yet let no meanest man lay nattering unction to his soul. Louis was a Ruler; but art not thou also one? His wide France, look at it from the Fixed Stars (themselves not yet Infinitude), is no wider than thy narrow brickfield, where thou too didst faithfully, or didst unfaithfully. 1 [Note: Carlyle, French Revolution, i. 17.]

2. The religious and irreligious alike must give account. As Christians we must give account. “The lord of those servants cometh, and reckoneth with them” ( Matthew 25:19). They have been justified by faith. They have been united to their glorious Head. They “shall be saved” ( 1 Corinthians 3:15), whatever be the fate of their “work.” But what will their Lord say of their work? What have they done for Him, in labour, in witness, and above all in character? He will tell them what He thinks. He will be infinitely kind; but He will not flatter.

The irreligious, the careless, and inconsiderate, must give account—those who say to themselves “To-morrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant.” Too many go on always, nearly all do so at times, as if they were not really accountable. They just take the pleasure or the profit of the moment, and think no more of it; it is to them no more than throwing a stone into the water, which comes together again, and all seems as before.

3. Neither our heredity nor our circumstances will excuse us. The physiologist comes and he tells me that I inherit in my very blood, in the very structure of my brain, in the vigorous or feeble fibre of my nervous organization, the results of the vices and the virtues of a long line of ancestors. No doubt; but what do you mean by vices and virtues, the results of which I inherit? Are these names of honour and of dishonour, names of praise and condemnation? If there was vice in my ancestors, there may be vice in me. If there was virtue in them, there may be virtue in me. But where there is necessity there is neither virtue nor vice. This doctrine of heredity is no new discovery. It is true that the whole conditions of my life have been determined for me by my ancestors. My strength of muscle, the soundness of my heart and lungs, the limits of my intellectual capacity, have all been settled for me by my birth. And as the result of the moral character of my ancestors my moral life is one of comparative ease or of severe difficulty. But though the conditions of life have been determined for me, my life itself is my own, and that has not been determined for me. The material with which I should work has been given; the way in which I should treat it has not been given.

You tell me that there are great masses of men who have never had a chance of moral goodness. They have to give account of themselves without their chance, if that be so. God knows how large their chance was, and how small. Do not resent by anticipation the justice of the Eternal. He will deal with them according to their conditions. “Virtue is impossible to them,” you say. Yes, yours. And there are others who, as they look upon you, say “Virtue is impossible to you.” Their virtue is. And yet you and I, under the hard conditions of our life, can choose the better path, however feebly we may walk in it; and who but God can tell what glimmerings of light reach those who seem to sit in outer darkness? 1 [Note: R. W. Dale.]

I suppose it does not altogether depend upon a man whether he will be a skilful workman or a clumsy workman. Some men are born with a flexibility and a strength of muscle, a keenness of eye, a delicacy of taste—or rather, with the possibility of achieving these things—of which other men are naturally destitute, and to which they can never attain. But every man can do his best, whatever that best may be. It does not lie in our choice what language we shall speak, but it does lie in our choice whether we will speak the truth or whether we will be indifferent to the claims of truthfulness; whether our language shall be profane or devout, whether it shall be pure or impure. We had no choice into what kind of family we should be born,—whether our parents, our brothers, our sisters, should be rough or gentle, just or unjust; but it lies with us—whether they are rough or gentle, whether they are just or unjust—to treat them with justice and with kindness. The limits of our physical health and vigour are determined for us by the circumstances in which we were born, but it lies with ourselves to determine whether we will be sober or drunkards, whether we will be gluttonous or temperate.

When William Ellery Channing was a very little boy, his schoolmaster said to one of his school-fellows, “Why are you not a good child like William Channing?” “Oh,” replied the boy, “it is so easy for William Channing to be good.” We, perhaps, have looked round upon friends of ours to whom the conflict we have to maintain is altogether unnecessary. The foes we have to fight with they never meet. The victories which we have to win for ourselves were won for them generations ago by the ancestors whose blood is in their veins. Shall we complain? God forbid. Let us do for posterity what their ancestors have done for them, taking the rough conditions of our actual life, making the best of them, winning no praise from men for what we accomplish—for they know not the difficulty of the work—rejoicing in this humbly and reverently, that we have to give account of ourselves to God. 1 [Note: B. W. Dale.]

He fixed thee mid this dance

Of plastic circumstance,

This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest:

Machinery just meant

To give thy soul its bent,

Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed. 2 [Note: Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra.]

II

It is Inevitable

“Each one of us shall give account”

1. Every man must give account of himself to God. We will not render our account by our fears, or our sensitiveness, or our bad memories, or our dulness of conscience, or our false and artificial views of truth and duty. We shall give it; and yet He will receive or exact it in utter independence of us, He will read us off as being what we are, as being all that already He knows us to be. All the veils which hide us from each other, or from ourselves, will drop away before the glance of His eye. Even now “there is no creature that is not manifest in his sight; but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do.” Even now, all that each of us owes to God—what graces He has given to us, what dangers and sufferings He has spared us—He knows, and as yet He alone knows. But when we come to give in our account, we shall know too. A flood of light will be poured from His throne across the whole course of our lives, and into every crevice of our souls and characters.

From the outside standpoint judgment is the result of conduct: from the inner standpoint it is the result of character. Conduct is character unfolding itself; and character is the way a man thinks. From the one standpoint judgment is the fruit of men’s deeds; from the other it is the fruit of their thoughts. Isaiah puts the same message thus: “Say ye to the righteous, that it shall be well with him; for they shall eat the fruit of their doings. Woe unto the wicked! it shall be ill with him: for the reward of his hands shall be given him.” Jeremiah’s statement is the same, only carried a little deeper to its source. Our destiny is the fruit of our doings and the reward of our hands; and our doing is the fruit of our thoughts. The common feature of both messages is that judgment is not something superimposed on life, a sentence arbitrarily passed on a man. Punishment is not retribution exacted from a man by a superior power outside him; it is the necessary and inevitable consequence flowing from the condition. When will we learn that judgment is not arbitrary or incidental or capricious? It is self-registering, automatic, the harvest of our life. Conduct is the outgrowth of character; and character conditions destiny. The wages of being good is not some recompense added on like a perquisite to a salary. Its highest wages is goodness itself. The recompense of being holy is holiness; the reward of being pure is purity. The punishment of sin is itself, its own loathly, deadly self. The harvest of the flesh is itself, corruption. The penalty of a depraved mind is depravity. The retribution of an impure heart is impurity. Who will deliver us from the body of this death? 1 [Note: Hugh Black.]

2. Whatever God’s verdict upon us may be, our consciences will have to affirm its justice. We shall see ourselves by His light, as He sees us, as we have never seen ourselves before. We shall know as never before what He meant us to be, what we might have been, what we are. All the illusions of our present life, all the fabrics of self-satisfaction built up by the kind words of friends or by the insincerities of flatterers, all the atmosphere of twilight which here encompasses our spiritual state, will have rolled away; we shall stand out in the light before the Eternal Judge and before ourselves, and we shall be ready to make full confession.

It is not that God is going to judge us some day. That is not the awful thing. It is that God knows us now. If I stop an instant and know that God knows me through all these misconceptions and blunders of my brethren, that God knows me—that is the awful thing. The future judgment shall but tell it. It is here, here upon my conscience, now. 1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Addresses, 19.]

O Great Mercy of God, I beseech Thee deliver me from the Bonds of Satan. I have no Refuge in any Thing, but only in Thy Holy Wounds and Death. Into Thee I sink down in the Anguish of my Conscience, do with me what Thou wilt. In Thee I will now live or die as pleaseth Thee, let me but die and perish in Thy Death; do but bury me into Thy Death, that the Anguish of Hell may not touch me. How can I excuse myself before Thee, that knowest my Heart and Reins, and settest my Sins before mine Eyes? I am guilty of them, and yield myself unto Thy Judgment; accomplish Thy Judgment upon me, through the Death of my Redeemer Jesus Christ. 2 [Note: Jacob Behmen.]

3. Confession is inevitable whenever we come into the presence of God. When we draw near to God and behold the light of His countenance the sense of our imperfection must be the instant emotion stirred in the mind, and the first act—the expression of this emotion—must be confession. For confession is not making something known to God. It is God making something known to us; it is God revealing us to ourselves, and our cry of pain at the discovery. It comes from the shock of contrast. To know ourselves we need the help of contrast. To know and see ourselves truly we need a much more searching light than that which comes from moral mediocrity. We need the highest light attainable, and that is the light of God’s countenance. Then the sombre recesses of the soul, and all they contain, reveal themselves; and so do its secret bypaths, where the unclean spirits have left their footprints. Confession must be the instant spontaneous product of the vision of God.

Are you ready with your account which you will have to render to God; have you kept one at all? Sometimes when men appear before a court they plead that they have no books, and it is always a bad sign. You know what the judge thinks of them. Can you dare to examine yourself, and answer questions? Can you give an account of your stewardship? Have you kept it correctly, or have you credited yourself with large things where you ought to have debited yourself? Your fraud will be discovered, for the great Accountant will read it through, and will detect an error in a single moment. Is your account kept correctly, and are you ready to render it at this moment? 1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fatal lightning of His terrible swift sword;

His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;

They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;

I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:

His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel:

“As ye deal with My contemners, so with you My grace shall deal;

Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with His heel!

Since God is marching on.”

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;

He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat;

Oh! be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!

Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born, across the sea,

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

While God is marching on. 2 [Note: Julia Ward Howe, Battle-Hymn of the Republic.]

III

It is Personal

“Each one of us shall give account. of himself.”

1. It would not be difficult for many of us to give an account, more or less exhaustive, of others. We spend our time in thinking them over, talking them over, discussing them. We know, it may be, some true things about them; we suspect a great deal which is not true but utterly false. To some of us, it may be, this discussion of others presents itself as at once an amusement and a relief. It is an amusement, for it costs us nothing to dwell on their failings; and human nature, when we have no immediate stake in it, is always amusing. And it is a relief. To talk about others keeps us at the circumference of our own life; far, very far away from the centre; we do not wish to be with ourselves, within ourselves, alone with ourselves. There are wounds beneath the surface which we would not or dare not probe; there are memories from which we fly, if we can manage it, to something outside and beyond them. Yet, after all, it is of ourselves that we shall have to give account. Others will come into that account only so far as they depend on us; so far as we may have wronged or injured or otherwise affected them. Their shortcomings may now take that place in our thoughts which ought to be given to our own. But a day will come when this will be impracticable. We shall be isolated before the Eternal Judge. We shall form part of a countless multitude, but He will deal with each one of us as if we stood alone before Him and all the rays of His Infinite Wisdom and Justice were concentrated on our case.

When things go wrong, when others provoke us, then the notion is ready enough at hand that they have sinned, that their account will be heavy; but we are very slow to comprehend the same thing as it concerns ourselves. 1 [Note: J. Keble.]

Do not philosophic doctors tell us that we are unable to discern so much as a tree except by an unconscious cunning which combines many past and separate sensations; that no one sense is independent of another, so that in the dark we can hardly taste a fricassee, or tell whether our pipe is alight or not, and the most intelligent boy, if accommodated with claws or hoofs instead of fingers, would be likely to remain on the lowest form? If so, it is easy to understand that our discernment of men’s motives must depend on the completeness of the elements we can bring from our own susceptibility and our own experience. See to it, friend, before you pronounce a too hasty judgment, that your own moral sensibilities are not of a hoofed or clawed character. The keenest eye will not serve, unless you have the delicate fingers, with their subtle nerve filaments, which elude scientific lenses, and lose themselves in the invisible world of human sensations. 1 [Note: George Eliot, Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story.]

2. We shall have to give an account each of his own actions, of his own thought, of his own words, of his own intention; and, more than all these, of himself. We shall each of us have to give account of the state of our heart, of the condition of our mind before God, whether we repented, whether we believed, whether we loved God, whether we were zealous, whether we were truthful, whether we were faithful. If it dealt only with actions, words, and thoughts, the account would be solemn enough, but we must each one give an account of himself, of what he was as well as of what he did, of what was in his heart as well as of what came out of it in his deeds.

A mute companion at my side

Paces and plods, the whole day long,

Accepts the measure of my stride,

Yet gives no cheer by word or song.

More close than any doggish friend,

Not ranging far and wide, like him,

He goes where’er my footsteps tend,

Nor shrinks for fear of life or limb.

I do not know when we first met,

But till each day’s bright hours are done

This grave and speechless silhouette

Keeps me betwixt him and the sun.

They say he knew me when a child;

Born with my birth, he dies with me;

Not once from his long task beguiled,

Though sin or shame bid others flee.

What if, when all this world of men

Shall melt and fade and pass away,

This deathless sprite should rise again

And be himself my Judgment Day? 1 [Note: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, To my Shadow.]

Daniel Webster was once asked, “What is the most important thought you ever entertained?” He replied, after a moment’s reflection, “The most important thought I ever had was my individual responsibility to God.”

IV

It is Supreme

“Each one of us shall give account of himself to God.”

1. Responsibility implies a person, to whom the responsible man is responsible. All human society is based on and kept together by this law of responsibility to persons. We all know that servants are responsible to their masters, and children to their parents and teachers, and soldiers to their commanding officers, and the clerks in a great business house to the partners, and those who are dependent on others to those on whom they depend. The higher you mount the greater the responsibility, because responsibility implies power and grows with power, so that where there is most power there is most responsibility. In reality masters are more responsible than servants, and parents than children, and officers than the soldiers whom they command, and the heads of a great firm than the clerks in their employment, and employers and superiors generally than those whom they employ and who depend on them. But to whom do those highly placed people, more responsible because invested with more power, owe their debt of responsibility? Responsibility is the law of human society; and yet there are always certain members of society who seem to escape it, to be somehow responsible to no one. Wealthy people, with no relations, who as they say, “can do as they like” with their money; idle people, with no duties or engagements, who have, as they put it, to kill time; clever writers or speakers, with no clear sense of truth or duty, who think that they may write or say, without let or hindrance, just what occurs to them;—if these men are really responsible, to whom are they responsible? So far as this world is concerned, they seem to go through it without having to answer to anybody. To whom is the highest of all, the king, or head of the government, responsible? Assuredly there is One Being to whom all must give account of themselves, sooner or later—both those who have to give account to their fellow-men, and those who seem in this life to escape all real responsibility whatever. One such Being there is to whom we are all responsible—the Holy and Eternal God.

Frightful to all men is Death; from of old named King of Terrors. Our little compact home of an Existence, where we dwelt complaining, yet as in a home, is passing, in dark agonies, into an Unknown of Separation, Foreignness, unconditioned Possibility. The Heathen Emperor asks of his soul: Into what places art thou now departing? The Catholic King must answer: To the Judgment-bar of the Most High God! Yes, it is a summing-up of Life; a final settling, and giving-in the “account of the deeds done in the body”; they are done now; and lie there unalterable, and do bear their fruits, long as Eternity shall last. 1 [Note: Carlyle, French Revolution, i. 17.]

For none a ransom can be paid,

A suretyship be made:

I, bent by mine own burden, must

Enter my house of dust;

I, rated to the full amount,

Must render mine account.

When earth and sea shall empty all

Their graves of great and small;

When earth wrapt in a fiery flood

Shall no more hide her blood;

When mysteries shall be revealed;

All secrets be unsealed;

When things of night, when things of shame,

Shall find at last a name,

Pealed for a hissing and a curse

Throughout the universe:

Then Awful Judge, most Awful God,

Then cause to bud Thy rod,

To bloom with blossoms, and to give

Almonds; yea, bid us live.

I plead Thyself with Thee, I plead

Thee in our utter need:

Jesus, most Merciful of Men,

Show mercy on us then;

Lord God of Mercy and of men,

Show mercy on us then. 1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti.]

2. “To God.” We are not under a rigid law. We are under personal authority, acting in harmony with eternal principles of law; and we have to meet a personal judgment, whose decision will be determined by the eternal principles of law. But this is the supreme thing, that only a living person who knows us altogether can appreciate the true conditions under which our moral life has been lived, the heights we ought to have reached, and the grounds on which we may be forgiven for not having reached heights which were easily accessible to others. We have to give account, each one of himself, to God; and it is this conception of the relations between man and God, and this alone, which relieves human life of its awful gloom and confusion, and contains the promise of a Divine order. For to God some of the noblest forms of moral life may be found where to our eyes there is the least dignity and grace. You were born under felicitous circumstances; but to reach the virtue which you attained without effort, another man may have to exert incessant energy. His dearly bought excellence, though inferior to that which you have easily achieved, is to God infinitely nobler and more precious than the goodness which you, without effort, have accomplished. Each man has to “give account of himself to God.”

One man is placed under conditions—conditions not of his own choice, conditions to which he was destined—which make it impossible for him to do very much beyond getting the rough ore of goodness out of the black and gloomy mine. He has got it with the sweat of his brow, with pain, with peril. To him God will say, “Well done!” Another man has the ore at his feet to start with. It is not enough for him to bring that to God. For him there is a different task. In the fires of self-discipline he has to liberate the ore from its dross, and to produce the pure metal. It is enough that one man should bring the rough ore to God; this man must bring pure metal extracted from it. And a third has the metal to begin with. He fails, and fails disastrously unless he works it up into forms of noble usefulness and gracious beauty. Each man will have to “give account of himself to God,” and only God can judge of the worth of each man’s work, because only God knows the conditions under which each man’s work is being carried on. 1 [Note: R. W. Dale.]

Not on the vulgar mass

Called “work,” must sentence pass,

Things done, that took the eye and had the price;

O’er which, from level stand,

The low world laid its hand,

Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice:

But all, the world’s coarse thumb

And finger failed to plumb,

So passed in making up the main account;

All instincts immature,

All purposes unsure,

That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man’s amount

Thoughts hardly to be packed

Into a narrow act,

Fancies that broke through language and escaped;

All I could never be,

All, men ignored in me,

This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped. 2 [Note: Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra.]

Our Accountability

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Christian World Pulpit, xxvi. 4 (Beecher); xxxv. 198 (Dale).

Church Pulpit Year Book, v. (1908), 148.

Homiletic Review, xxxi. 239 (Ireland).

Verse 17

A Definition of the Kingdom

For the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.— Romans 14:17.

“The kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.” That is a glorious saying, because it is so strong, so clear, so sweeping. It lays down a principle to which one may always appeal; it is a fundamental law of the Kingdom which can never be abrogated, or shelved, or made of none effect by human explanations.

St. Paul’s readers were scarcely so ignorant and unspiritual as to suppose that the Kingdom of God did consist in eating and drinking. But they were much engrossed just then with questions relating to meat and drink, with warm disputes among themselves as to whether flesh that had formed part of idol sacrifices and had come from heathen altars could consistently be eaten by Christians. They were greatly agitated and exercised about this, some maintaining that it ought not to be eaten, and rigidly refusing to touch it, and others insisting that it might without any inconsistency be eaten; some strenuous for abstinence and urging it as a solemn duty, and others condemning and seeking to draw away from it as a pitiable weakness. St. Paul tells them that this controversy about meat and drink is not furthering the interests of the Kingdom of God. It does not touch the things which belong to the Kingdom, except in the way of hindering them. “For the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.”

The text falls naturally into three divisions:—

I. The Kingdom of God—What are we to understand by it in this connection?

II. The negative statement—What the Kingdom of God is not.

III. The positive statement—What the Kingdom of God is.

I

The Kingdom of God

1. It is not a little startling in such a connection to find any mention of the Kingdom of God. We should have expected some very different expression—“the right principle of conduct,” or “the true rule of life,” or “the proper bond of brotherhood,” or “the teaching of the Gospel,” or “the Church of Christ.” Any of these phrases would have appeared quite natural. But “the Kingdom of God” seems not a little out of place. It seems so only because we do not realize, as the Apostle realized, that the dispensation of the Gospel, the Church of Christ, is itself the very Kingdom of God. Notwithstanding the warning which stands recorded, we persist in thinking that the Kingdom of God cometh by observation, that it must be a kingdom of pomp and circumstance, that therefore it is something very remote and distant and distinct from anything we see about us. But St. Paul viewed it quite otherwise. This little society of men and women; this motley group of Jews, Greeks, Syrians, immigrants from all parts of the world; gathered together mostly from the middle and lower classes of society, artisans and small shopkeepers, struggling for a livelihood; despised where they were not ignored by mighty Rome, in the heart of which they lived—this little society, with its trials and its sufferings and its dissensions, is the Kingdom of God.

It may almost be said that it is to Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection we are indebted for Bushnell. He began to read it in college, but it seemed “foggy and unintelligible,” and was put aside for “a long time.” He took it up later with this result: “For a whole half-year I was buried under his Aids to Reflection, and trying vainly to look up through. I was quite sure that I saw a star glimmer, but I could not quite see the stars. My habit was only landscape before; but now I saw enough to convince me of a whole other world somewhere overhead, a range of realities in higher tier, that I must climb after, and, if possible, apprehend.” This book stood by him to the end, and in old age he confessed greater indebtedness to it than to any other book save the Bible. We have only to quote one passage, taken almost at random, to show what a fountain of light was unsealed to him in this volume. It was an epoch-making book, but Bushnell was one of the first to turn its light upon the theology of New England.

“Too soon did the Doctors of the Church forget that the heart, the moral nature, was the beginning and the end; and that truth, knowledge, and insight were comprehended in its expansion. This was the true and first apostasy,—when in council and synod the Divine Humanities of the Gospel gave way to speculative Systems, and Religion became a Science of Shadows under the name of Theology, or at best a bare Skeleton of Truth, without life or interest, alike inaccessible and unintelligible to the majority of Christians. For these, therefore, there remained only rites and ceremonies and spectacles, shows and semblances. Thus among the learned the Substance of things hoped for passed off into Notions; and for the unlearned the Surfaces of things became Substance. The Christian world was for centuries divided into the Many that did not think at all, and the Few who did nothing but think,—both alike unreflecting, the one from defect of the act, the other from the absence of an object.” 1 [Note: T. Munger, Horace Bushnell, 46.]

2. What are the signs by which the citizens of the Kingdom of God are recognized? Not any uniform which can be laid aside when we enter our secret chamber; not any watchword which we can learn by an easy tradition; but a character which clothes itself in deeds, a creed which is translated into a life. Each citizen of the Kingdom is known by the inner life. There is a Kingdom of God within us. “Behold, the kingdom of God is within you” ( Luke 17:21). We are known and marked as citizens, not by outward observances, but by character; not by what we profess, but by what we are.

It’s the flesh and blood folks are made on as makes the difference. Some cheeses are made o’ skimmed milk and some o’ new milk, and it’s no matter what you call ’em, you may tell which is which by the look and the smell. 2 [Note: Mrs. Poyser, in Adam Bede.]

The throne of the Kingdom of God is not erected in the land of doing, but in the land of being; primarily it is a matter not of clean hands, but of clean hearts. 3 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

II

What the Kingdom of God is Not

“The kingdom of God is not eating and drinking.” Who ever thought it was? It seems a strangely inadequate conception. How did it arise? In heathen society every meal was in a manner dedicated to the household gods by laying some portion of it on the family altar. When one member of a heathen family had become a Christian, he would at once be confronted with the question, rising in his own conscience, whether by partaking of such food he might not be countenancing idolatry. And even though his own family was entirely Christian, the difficulty was not removed, for much of the meat offered in worship in the Temple found its way into the common market, so that at every meal the Christian ran the risk of eating things sacrificed to idols. Was a Christian at liberty to eat such food? “Yes,” said one. “No,” said another. Each reproved and condemned the other. Which was right? Possibly both. Possibly neither. Said one, “You can eat, and still be of the Kingdom of God.” Said another, “If you eat, you are not of the Kingdom of God.” And to both of these St. Paul made reply, “The Kingdom of God is not eating and drinking”; it is determined by something that lies further backward and inward, by a man’s personal relationship to the Holy Ghost.

1. The burning question among the Christians in Rome at this time was the question of meats. Some converts—Jews by birth—brought into the fold of Christ the strict observance of the Mosaic prohibitions in which they had been brought up. They were careful not to violate the distinction of animals clean and unclean, as laid down by the law. Others—educated we know not under what influences—went beyond this. They would not touch animal food at all. They were strict vegetarians. Perhaps they had conscientious objections to taking life; perhaps their abstention was a development of asceticism. Others again, Gentiles by birth and education, took the opposite extreme. They ostentatiously vaunted their indifference in these matters. They would eat anything that came in their way. It might be clean or unclean from a Jewish point of view; it might even have been offered for sacrifice on a heathen altar in an idol’s temple. They suffered no scruple to stand in their path.

But they were not content each to follow his own practice, and to leave his neighbours alone. The abstainers denounced the non-abstainers as men of loose principles who brought dishonour on the Church. The non-abstainers despised the abstainers as men of narrow views who were ignorant of the true Gospel of liberty. Thus there was strife and dissension, there was mutual recrimination, there was hatred and division, where there should have been union and peace and brotherly love.

It was a pitiable dispute in the Apostle’s eyes. They needed all the strength which union alone can give; and yet they diminished, they dissipated, they neutralized what force they had by internal quarrels. And quarrels about what? About meats and drinks—things which perish in the using, things mean and transitory, utterly valueless in themselves. It was a pitiable dispute. So the Apostle told them plainly. He pronounced that every creature of God was good. He declared that all things were pure, and nothing was unclean. And, on the other hand, he said that eating and drinking are in themselves so unimportant that every scruple should be respected, and every form of food willingly given up.

2. St. Paul could do no more than bring his own piety and common sense to bear upon the special questions of his day: and even he cannot free us from the obligation to use ours in the questions of our day.

(1) Even to-day we need to remember that “the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking.” As Christians we can never eat or drink without some distinct reference to Christ, and to our position as His servants and soldiers. But, apart from these considerations of the moral effect it may have upon ourselves and others, there is not anything religious about eating and drinking. It is absolutely indifferent; and all the Church regulations or Church censures in the world cannot make it otherwise. In all ages people have had very strong ideas on the subject of eating and drinking, some of them sensible enough, and some very foolish; but from the point of view of the Kingdom they are equally valueless. To put it quite simply (and sometimes it is well to use great plainness of speech) God does not care in the very least what or when or how we eat or drink, so as we do not damage ourselves or others. And He cannot be made to care, and therefore it cannot be made to matter.

To many minds a ceremony or a form comes with all the force of a principle or a fact. Not “what man has done man may do,” but what man has done man must do is their creed, which cramps their limbs and chills their blood and makes them fail of the little good they are seeking. For no man by sheer imitation has yet reached his pattern. Even if in native power he is more than equal to the task, and so in outward deeds even excels his example, the flush and glow of original achievement which made the model a living, warm, breathing thing, is wanting to the copy, which is cold and stiff and dead. 1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Life, 51.]

(2) The Kingdom of God is not a particular form of church service or ritual. How inevitable a tendency there is in all forms, even the best, to lose all the spirit which once animated them, and become like lifeless corpses.

I do not believe that the doctrines of sacerdotalism and of sacramentalism which are so much in vogue, and which some people would seem to wish to make the very essence of Christianity, as a power of sanctifying the human soul, are doctrines of a true priesthood, or of a true sacramentalism. There is a sad fact which we can neither hide from others nor ignore ourselves, which destroys all the comforts that would naturally flow from this conviction that all good men are really labouring for what they believe to be the extension of Christ’s Kingdom, the cause of righteousness, and the good of the souls of men—namely, the fact that excessive ceremonialism is often attended by moral torpor and religious decay. Can history point to a single age, from the womb of time, in which an excessive addiction to ceremonialism and the externals of religion was not accompanied by a corresponding and proportionate dulness of the conscience and deadness to the higher forms of duty? It was so emphatically in Isaiah’s day. It was so again, though with a perceptible and instructive difference in outward manifestation—the hypocrisy was more highly organized, the mask more skilfully painted—in the days of Jesus of Nazareth. And with our present-day Epicurean cynicism, cruelly mocking at life, itself secure; abjuring every high aim in the lofty pursuit of personal comfort; checked by no moral considerations whatever in its froward path of pure selfishness; carelessly wrecking woman’s honour, wickedly shattering simple faith; discussing the most solemn verities, at least the most solemn questions, tooth-pick in hand, over olives and wine—with this unhappy, but only too legitimate, offspring of an age that has resolved religion into phrases, and God’s service into a gorgeous ceremonialism, I do not feel disposed to hold either truce or terms. Of course questions of ritual must be settled, and St. Paul is careful indeed to tell us that he recognized a law: he speaks of the duty of conforming to the customs of the Churches; he preaches distinctly that God is not the author of confusion; he would have everything done decently and in order; but the law was a law of liberty, not of bondage; the customs were few and simple, and their aim seems to have been not a mystic symbolism, but practical edification; and an elaborate ceremonial, each part in which has to be rehearsed by its actors that the tableau may be complete with a kind of mechanical completeness, would have been perhaps as far removed from St. Paul’s ideal of “decency and order” as anything conceivably could be. 1 [Note: Bishop Fraser.]

Spirit is Eternal—Form is Transient; and when men stereotype the form and call it perpetual, or deny that under other and very different forms the selfsame truths may lie (as the uncovering of Moses’ feet is identically the same as our uncovering our heads—ay, and I will even dare to say, often with the covering of the Quakers, when reverence for God is the cause for each), then I feel repelled at once, whether the form be a form of words or a form of observance. 2 [Note: F. W. Robertson, Life and Letters, 427.]

And what are forms?

Fair garments, plain or rich, and fitting close,

Or flying looselier, warm’d but by the heart

Within them, moved but by the living limb,

And cast aside, when old, for newer,—Forms! 3 [Note: Tennyson, Akbar’s Dream.]

(3) The Kingdom of God is not identical with any particular Church. This follows necessarily. Yet it is a hard lesson to learn. In every religious communion we find a widespread temper of unrest and dissatisfaction. The man who wishes to take advantage of this unstable temper is always at hand. You must change your sheepfold. But what most people need is not a new Church, a new rite, a new system of doctrine, but a new surrender to the will of God, and a great increase of trust in His redeeming power.

The holy Church of the future, the Church of the free and equal, shall bless every progress of the Spirit of truth, and identify itself with the life of humanity; it shall have neither Pope nor laity, but all shall be believers, all priests with different offices. And on the transformation of the corrupt aristocratic church of to-day into this renewed popular church of the future, depends, I will not say the solution—that is not in the power of man—but the mode, more or less violent, more or less dangerous, of the solution of the religious question. 1 [Note: Bishop Stubbs.]

God asks not, “To which sect did he belong?”

But “Did he love the right and hate the wrong?” 2 [Note: A Little Book of Eastern Wisdom, 69.]

(4) All rules of conduct for the Christian, all questions as to legitimate amusements and recreations, come under the same category. These things are not the Kingdom of God. A disciplinary rule, as such—that is, a disciplinary rule which begins and ends by being a disciplinary rule—is likely to be a hollow and worthless observance. It would not be untrue to add that a disciplinary rule which begins and ends as a disciplinary rule—a fetter outside and irksome to the heart—may do, and often has done, more harm than good. It does harm to the man himself, because it deceives him, and makes him seem to find holiness, where holiness is not. It does harm to those who are around him, because it does not deceive them: because they recognize, and recoil from, an ideal of Christian service which they know to be unreal.

The Bible has no express teaching on the question of amusements. It furnishes us with no list of duties or pleasures to which its ethics and principles may be applied. This has been a disappointment to those who seek in its pages for rules to guide them in every possible contingency. It is not a directory of moral details. Christianity is a temper, a spirit, a Divine motive and law, which is meant to pervade and inspire every part of our life, and not a code of minute regulations by conformity to which we shall be enabled to keep ourselves safe amid surrounding dangers. It says nothing about the callings we should pursue, except to bid us be faithful in the one we have chosen. It does not declare that one calling is more dignified than another, or that there are duties that are worthy and noble and duties that are common and unclean. It draws no distinction between trades and occupations and engagements, marking some as helpful and others as hurtful. It simply insists that whatever we do we shall do it to the glory of God, and it leaves it to our conscience and common sense to discover whether our conduct and work tend to glorify God or not. 1 [Note: W. Watson, A Young Man’s Ideal, 152.]

The simple truth is that all these are matters affecting the outward man, the external life. They concern the man’s hands but may in no manner concern his heart. A man is not necessarily good because he wears a crucifix, and a man is not necessarily good because he abstains from wearing one. I have heard men declaim against the crucifix who did not possess the spirit of the cross, and their declamation was an offence. A man is not necessarily a Christian because he goes to the theatre; and certainly a man is not necessarily a Christian because he keeps away. You feel that these considerations touch only the surface of the life. They are no indication of the quality and substance of the inner and secret being. And so St. Paul declares that the Kingdom of God is not “eating and drinking”; it is not to be determined by one or two external acts, in which you participate or from which you abstain. 2 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

She stood before a chosen few,

With modest air and eyes of blue;

A gentle creature in whose face

Were mingled tenderness and grace.

“You wish to join our fold,” they said;

“Do you believe in all that’s read

From ritual and written creed,

Essential to our human need?”

A troubled look was in her eyes;

She answered, as in vague surprise,

As though the sense to her were dim:

“ I only strive to follow Him.”

They knew her life; how, oft she stood,

Sweet in her guileless maidenhood,

By dying bed, in hovel lone,

Whose sorrow she had made her own.

Oft had her voice in prayer been heard,

Sweet as the voice of singing bird;

Her hand been open in distress;

Her joy to brighten and to bless.

Yet still she answered when they sought

To know her inmost earnest thought,

With look as of the seraphim,

“ I only strive to follow Him.”

Creeds change as ages come and go;

We see by faith, but little know:

Perchance the sense was not so dim

To her who “strove to follow Him.” 1 [Note: Sarah Knowles Bolton, Her Creed.]

III

What the Kingdom of God is

“The kingdom of God is righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.”

1. In every life there is a holy of holies. It is an intensely secret place. The dearest friend we have on earth cannot enter it. It is our temple of secrets, of things which cannot be told. It is a place where only two can meet—our spirit and the Spirit of God. It is that inner sanctuary where God and we come face to face. That secret place is the abode of the Kingdom of God. We have to know that secret place, that innermost heart, to know finally whether or not men and women belong to the Kingdom of God. What are they in their most secret being, where only they and the Holy Ghost can meet? We do not eat meat offered to idols! What are we in our innermost self, where no eye but God’s can see us? We do not wear a crucifix! What are we in our heart of hearts, where we meet the Holy Ghost? It is in that utmost privacy of our life that we must look to learn whether we are or are not citizens of the Kingdom of God.

Now the text tells us that when the Kingdom of God is really in the life, there will be three things in that most secret place. There will be “righteousness,” “peace,” and “joy.” When we are of the Kingdom of God we will be “righteous” in the secret place where only God and we meet; we will have “peace” in the secret place where only God and we meet; we will have “joy” in the secret place where only God and we meet.

2. “The kingdom of God is righteousness and peace and joy.” The Kingdom of God, then, is the realization of our human nature’s dream and desire, the fulfilment for us of that which we are universally wishing to experience, and reaching out after. It is the object of universal pursuit attained; the answer to the continual cry of humanity. For what is it that is really sought in our manifold and diverse seekings? What is the real end and aim of all labour but these three things in which St. Paul represents the Kingdom of God to consist—righteousness and peace and joy? Wide asunder as our paths may lie, we are all in quest of a common goal. “Who will show us what is good?” “Where are peace and joy to be found?” is the language of all mortal scheming and toil. And as to righteousness, “Would that I could be made right!” is the frequent sigh of thousands whom folly and error hold captive.

“Righteousness, peace, joy”: the human heart welcomes these three characteristics as marking the society which answers the promise of creation. In these three, that memorable triad, the battle-cry of revolution, which, in spite of every perversion and misuse, has found a wide response in the souls of nations, receives its highest fulfilment. In “righteousness, peace, joy” we can recognize “equality, liberty, fraternity,” interpreted, purified, extended. They tell us that the community and not the individual is the central thought in the life of men. They tell us that the fulfilment of duties and not the assertion of rights is the foundation of the social structure. They tell us that the end of labour is not material well-being, but that larger, deeper, more abiding delight which comes from successfully ministering to the good of others. They tell us that over all that is transitory in the form of the Kingdom, over all the conditions which determine its growth, there rests the light, the power, of an Eternal Presence. 1 [Note: Westcott, Social Aspects of Christianity, 90.]

i. Righteousness

1. According to St. Paul, the first thing which characterizes the establishment of the Kingdom of God in human life is that we become righteous, right with God in our innermost self. If I want the structure of the Kingdom of God to be built up in my life, then I must begin at the base, at the foundation; and the fundamental requisite is that in the very depths of my being I must become right with God. This is the fundamental requirement; not that we should get peace or possess joy, but that we should be put right, rejoined to God. Our worship, our churches, our Christian institutions, have for their primary purposes the putting of man right with God. The great purpose of them all is this: to bring our lives into touch with God, to join ourselves to Him, that His life may flow like healing waters into ours, to make righteousness—agreement between ourselves and God our Lord—to make “righteousness in the Holy Ghost.”

2. Righteousness comes first, before peace and joy. How we do try to reverse the order! We want the peace of the Kingdom before its righteousness, and God cannot give it. Suppose I go to a doctor with my arm out of joint, and say to him, “Doctor, I cannot get any rest or peace. I pass through painful days and sleepless nights. I want you to give me a sleeping draught that I may enjoy a little rest.” I think the doctor would smile and say, “My dear sir, it is not a sleeping draught you need to give you a few hours of unnatural peace. You must get your arm into its socket; set that right, and then Nature will give you her own sleep and her own peace.” But is not that somewhat analogous to what we do in the spiritual life? We seek for spiritual peace; we go in for all manner of sleeping draughts which make our consciences sleep but do not refresh us, and we do not find the peace we seek. And this Book, the great Physician’s Book, says to us, “Men and women, your life is out of joint, and you will not get peace until the severance is righted. In your most secret being you must be joined to the Lord.” That is the teaching of this Book, as it is certainly the findings of experience.

Real righteousness—what is it? In one word, it is surrender to the will of God. This is the peculiarity of the righteousness which is evangelical. It is from within: it is life: it is God in the soul of man: it is the life of the spirit. It is not a creed learned by heart; it is not a set of habits acquired; it is not a circle of customs scrupulously observed. It is not a righteousness done, but an infinite yearning after a righteousness which is ever doing. It is not a self-satisfaction which numbers up its performances, but an infinite humility which reckons its best performances as nothing.

This righteousness can set forms at nought, neglecting them. It can afford to make nothing of them. Christ’s disciples neglected the observance of the very honoured custom of washing the hands when they ate bread. Consider what might have been urged: This is an old time-honoured observance. You owe respect to constituted authorities. Who are you that presumptuously set yourselves up against the customs of your Church and country? Such things were said. But the disciples heeded them not, and Christ supported them in their neglect.

Let us understand this. Doubtless it is a duty to comply with customs, social and ecclesiastical. A man who sets them at defiance is a man of presumptuous spirit. But there are periods when the forms of society become thoroughly false. Then the strong man breaks through the cobwebs of etiquette, asserting the real courtesies of the heart. And there are times when priests and parties multiply observances till life is trammelled, and make things essential which are not essential. Then it becomes a duty, if we would imitate Christ, to assert Christian liberty, and to refuse to be bound by the cry of custom, modesty, or constituted authority. 1 [Note: F. W. Robertson.]

With eager heart and will on fire,

I fought to win my great desire;

“Peace shall be mine,” I said; but life

Grew bitter in the weary strife.

My soul was tired, and my pride

Was wounded deep: to Heaven I cried,

“God grant me peace or I must die”;

The dumb stars glittered no reply.

Broken at last, I bowed my head,

Forgetting all myself, and said,

“Whatever comes, His will be done”;

And in that moment peace was won. 2 [Note: Henry Van Dyke.]

The Kingdom of God within us is rightness with God, and from that rightness with God comes right dealing with our fellowmen. Not carping criticism, not fault-finding and intolerance, but righteousness and just dealing, should be the characteristic of the citizens of the Kingdom.

Righteousness is a term of comprehensive scope. It comprises honesty, truthfulness, sincerity—all the elements which combine to form uprightness and frankness and nobility of character. Righteousness is straightforward in intellectual matters as well as in practical. Righteousness respects the feelings, the affections, the character of others as well as their property. Righteousness is therefore temperate, is pure, is chivalrous. Righteousness pays deference to enemies as well as to friends. It is scrupulously careful not to misrepresent, not to depreciate, not to wrong in any way an antagonist—whether a personal or a religious antagonist.

Can no one stop the din that profanes the grave of Robert Burns? Has no one the heart to hear the “inhabitant below” or to understand his voice? Of all perverse destinies with which earth could perplex his fame, did it ever visit his imagination that crowds of rhetorical men would go about in never-ending floods of eloquence to prove his life a great moral victory and triumph? Did he ever foresee that every after-dinner orator who wished to show what a flexible thing advanced Christianity can be, would harp upon the passages that saddened his own thoughtful hours, as proofs of what may comport with high moral and Christian excellency? Shame upon them that are so destitute of love for Burns, that have so little sympathy with the pathos of his own view of his own life, as not to understand they are to let that alone! Why cannot they let it alone? Let them celebrate his genius, if it needs to be celebrated; let them celebrate his honest manhood—a great deal too straightforward, I will be bold to say, to tolerate the despicable sophistry that is spent on his career—let them dwell on the undying glow he has shed into Scottish minds and hearts and homes and lives and history; and, for the rest, let it alone. But if they will not, on themselves be the shame.

A curse upon the clown and knave

That will not let his ashes rest. 1 [Note: Principal Rainy, Church of Scotland, 159.]

ii. Peace

1. Having got right with God, being joined to God, and purified in the most secret place, we shall then discover the second characteristic of the Kingdom, the possession of an abiding peace. The Kingdom of God is peace in the Holy Ghost, peace in that secret place where only God and we meet. There shall be a holy quietude, an unbroken peace in our innermost self. In our hearts there shall be a Sabbath restfulness all the year round. There shall be all the sweet stillness of a June noontide in our souls. We shall be calm there, where we meet with God! That place is for many of us a place of great unrest. The last place into which many of us would go for peace would be into the secret heart where we meet alone with God. It is the place above all others where there rages a storm. We have to be righted with God before we can look upon Him with sweet and calm delight. But when we are united to Him, joined to Him in right relationship, then there comes to us the gift of His peace. “My peace I give unto you”; receiving My life you shall receive My peace, the same serenity in danger, the same equanimity in troublous surroundings, the same freedom from anxious care, “My peace!”

Have you ever spoken to any one who had passed out of storm and turbulence into the possession of Christ’s peace? Ask them what it means, and they will tell you that when Christ gives His peace, He takes the threat out of yesterday, the despondency out of to-day, and the fear out of to-morrow. When God is shut out of the secret place, His voice rings through it like the weird tolling of a funeral bell. But when God comes in and brings His peace, the threatening bell is silenced. As for to-morrow, for him who is perfectly joined to the Lord, anxiety and fear are lost in perfect trust, and perfect trust is the mother of perfect peace. 1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

Oh, this is peace! I have no need

Of friend to talk, of book to read:

A dear Companion here abides;

Close to my thrilling heart He hides;

The holy silence is His voice:

I lie and listen and rejoice. 2 [Note: John Townsend Trowbridge.]

2. There will be peace in the community where righteousness prevails. Wherever there is any hesitation about lines of action, peace must step in and decide. Not self-assertion, not consistency, not stickling for rights, not punctiliousness about details, but peace must carry the day. “Peace I leave with you,” said Christ, and already the small band of believers is torn into factions quarrelling bitterly over questions of meat and drink.

The herald angels sang “on earth peace.” Nineteen centuries have passed, and Christianity is still a revolutionary and disturbing element wherever it comes, and the promise seems to linger, and the great words that declared “Unto us a child is born … and his name shall be … The Prince of Peace,” seem as far away from fulfilment as ever they were. Yes, because He is first of all King of Righteousness, and must destroy the evil that is in the world before He can manifest Himself as King of Peace, His kingdom of Peace will be set up through confusion and destruction, overturning and overturning until the world has learned to know and love His name. First, King of Righteousness—that, at all hazards; that, though conflict may dog His steps and warfare ever wait upon Him—first, King of Righteousness, and after that, King of Peace. So the sum of the whole thing is, peace is sure; peace with God; peace in my own tranquil and righteous heart; peace for a world from out of which sin shall be scourged; peace is sure because righteousness is ours since it is Christ’s. 1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

iii. Joy in the Holy Ghost

1. When our life is righted with God in its most secret depths, when there comes into its secret place an unbroken peace, there also springs in the life a deep and quiet joy. “The kingdom of God is joy.” Is righteousness the pole-star of our lives? Is peace the music of our hearts? If so, then to us, as to the shepherds of old, the message of the Epiphany is addressed, “Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy.” If so, then on us, as true and faithful citizens, loyal to the laws and customs of the Kingdom, our Sovereign will confer His crowning privilege, “joy in the Holy Ghost.” Not joy as men count joy; no earthly passion and no transitory excitement; but the abiding inward satisfaction of a conscious harmony with the will of God.

2. Joy comes after peace. Righteousness is the root; peace the stem; joy the blossom. The disappointment so often experienced in the search for happiness is traceable to the non-observance of this order. Joy is put before righteousness and peace.

Who are thy playmates, boy?

“My favourite is Joy,

Who brings with him his sister Peace, to stay

The livelong day.

I love them both; but he

Is most to me.”

And where thy playmates now,

O man of sober brow?

“Alas! dear Joy, the merriest, is dead.

But I have wed

Peace; and our babe, a boy,

New-born, is Joy.” 1 [Note: John Bannister Tabb, The Playmates.]

3. Joy grows out of peace. In growing calm we become more easily gladdened, more alive to gladdening influences. Why is it that we are so much more pleased to-day than we were yesterday; why has the same scene so much more in it to set us singing, except that we are more at ease to-day than we were yesterday? “Wordsworth’s inborn religious placidity,” writes one, “had matured in him a quite unusual sensibility to the sights and sounds of the natural world, to the flower and its shadow on the stone, the cuckoo and its echo, the pliant harebell swinging in the breeze, the sweetness of a common dawn, the dance

Of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees.”

Mental placidity gives sensibility to many joys of life which in its absence would not thrill or touch us at all, opens our ears to the music of the spheres, and causes the spirit of delight to come to us often on very tiny wings.

If sin be in the heart,

The fairest sky is foul, and sad the summer weather,

The eye no longer sees the lambs at play together,

The dull ear cannot hear the birds that sing so sweetly,

And all the joy of God’s good earth is gone completely,

If sin be in the heart.

If peace be in the heart,

The wildest winter storm is full of solemn beauty,

The midnight lightning flash but shows the path of duty,

Each living creature tells some new and joyous story,

The very trees and stones all catch a ray of glory,

If peace be in the heart. 1 [Note: Charles Francis Richardson, Peace.]

4. Jesus names to us a striking peculiarity about the joy of the righteous: “Your joy no man taketh from you.” No thief of accident or circumstance can steal it! If we find the joy of our life merely in entertainment or amusement, in the club or in the ball-room, there is many a thief can take it away from us. Poverty may dry up our resources in a day. Sickness may throw us upon ourselves, and make a wide gulf between us and our joys. We are called to a joy compared with which all other joys are very insipid and tame, the joy of being a friend of Christ, joy in the Holy Ghost.

If once such joy had filled thine heart,

Earth’s hatred or earth’s scorn

Would seem but as a moment’s smart,

Forgot as soon as borne.

Nay, thou in pain, or shame, or loss,

Christ’s fellowship wouldst see,

And with thine heart embrace the cross

On which He hung for thee.

Wouldst count it blest to live, to die,

Where He is all in all;

Where rapt, earth unperceived goes by

And from ourselves we fall.

Till, from His secret place below,

To mansions fair above,

He leads thee, there to make thee know

The perfect joys of love.

A Definition of the Kingdom

Literature

Dykes (J. O.), Plain Words on Great Themes, 171.

Fraser (J.), University Sermons, 183.

Hughes (H. P.), The Philanthropy of God, 259.

Lightfoot (J. B.), Ordination Addresses, 194.

Parker (J.), The City Temple (1870), 445.

Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, xi. 177.

Robertson (F. W.), The Human Race, 297.

Sitterly (C. F.), in Drew Sermons on the Golden Texts for 1910, 157.

Tipple (S. A.), The Admiring Guest, 76.

Vallings (J. F.), The Holy Spirit of Promise, 137.

Westcott (B. F.), Social Aspects of Christianity, 85.

Whitefield (G.), in The Great Sermons of the Great Preachers, 253.

Winterbotham (R.), The Kingdom of Heaven, 223.

Christian Age, xxxvi. 114 (M‘Kaig).

Christian World Pulpit, viii. 187 (Beecher); xxvii. 75 (Rogers); lvii. 97 (Douglas); lxv. 265 (Fleming); lxxix. 65 (Ruth).

Examiner, June 18, 1903, 608 (Jowett).

Expositor, 2nd Ser., i. 266 (Matheson).