A FACT AND A WARNING
‘By the grace of God I am what I am: and His grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain.’
This is the confession of a soul truly devout and humble, because it knew the exact truth about itself—‘by the grace of God I am what I am.’ The duty of each of us is to acknowledge this fact frankly and fully. It will make a vast difference in our actions if we acknowledge that God is ordering and shaping them.
I. It is a great blessing to us that the guardian hand of God is over us at all times; one that we could in no wise do without, though we do not value it as we ought. We are not left to the mercy of our own ignorance and blindness and sin. It is well for us that we are not. The will of God guides and shapes our course from birth to death.
II. It is a great responsibility.—God will expect us to use the degree of grace that He gives us; to use it in glorifying His Name and in becoming holy. He does not give us all wealth; He does not give us all high station; He does not give us all great ability; but His grace He gives to all. He wills that all should be saved, and He gives His grace to all. And the channels of God’s grace are manifold.
III. The grace of God may be in vain—given in vain, received in vain; may be wasted, like water spilt on the sand, and so leave the soul unfertilised and bringing forth no fruit for eternal life. This is a very awful thought for us, because it means that the soul is lost if it has wasted or resisted, or left unprofited by, the grace given by God for its salvation. Since each of us is entrusted with the responsibility of ‘working out our own salvation,’ and because we are unable to do this in our own moral strength and power of acting and resisting, the grace of God is given to each—how grave is the thought, how terrible is the possibility—that this powerful aid may prove ineffectual, and that we, unhappy souls, may through attachment to the evil, may through weakness and instability of purpose, through love of the world, receive this Divine grace and aid, and find it in vain!
And so we must gather from the text before us two things—a fact and a warning. The fact—that of the providential work of the Divine Spirit in and on the soul of man: the warning—that by our own fault the grace may be bestowed in vain.
Illustration
‘We labour and struggle here, and desire hotly, and enjoy eagerly, and lament bitterly, all because we do not sufficiently remember how much the will of God and the Providence of God have to do with all these events of joy or sorrow which happen to us; and that it is not merely our own will or the wills of other people which bring them about. It is indeed so; and so truly that even our great poet could write as a fact, a well-known fact to secular wisdom—
“There’s a Divinity which shapes our ends,
Rough hew them as we will.”
It would be a very incomplete idea of God which considered Him as ordering one or two great events in our lives and forgetting or neglecting all the rest.’