THE CROSS AND SUFFERING
‘Hereby know we love, because He laid down His life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.’
1 John 3:16 (R.V.)
‘Hereby know we love’—hereby, by the Cross of Christ, we know not only that love is, but also what love is; ‘because He laid down His life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.’
I. Hereby we learn that, in an imperfect world, love means self-sacrifice.—The Divine love, entering in the person of Jesus Christ, into this world of sin and sorrow, took on itself the form of suffering, voluntarily submitted to in order to redeem mankind. And Christ’s self-sacrifice demands to the uttermost a responding self-sacrifice on our part. If we appreciate in the remotest degree the love of Christ for us, we must love Him with all our hearts in return, and if we love Him, we must love all His brethren. And true love can be no idle sentiment; if we really love our fellow-men, we must devout ourselves heart and soul to their service. And we cannot serve others without practising in many ways constant self-sacrifice, often very hard and stern self-sacrifice; we must continually give up for their sakes many things which we greatly like, and submit to many things which we greatly dislike.
II. And at times when we truly realise the love of Christ, we surely find ourselves impelled irresistibly to respond unreservedly to the demand which that love makes on us. Then it is true that ‘the love of Christ constraineth us.’ For a time at least we do feel that we could do anything whatever, bear anything whatever, for His sake. In the full sight of the Cross, it seems mean and base to care whether we are happy or not, to want ‘to please ourselves’; ‘Christ pleased not Himself.’ In face of that supreme act of self-sacrifice, we cannot for very shame refuse to give ourselves up to the service of Christ and of our brethren for His sake. We owe ourselves absolutely to Him, body, soul, and intellect, with all our powers and energies and gifts and abilities; ‘we are not our own, for we are bought with a price,’ the price of the life-blood of the Son of God.
III. And so self-sacrifice is the essential principle of the Christian life; it is the very breath of that life. It is not simply a duty which we have to practise sometimes to a certain extent. The Christian life is all self-sacrifice, and that is no true Christian life which does not bear some real mark of the Cross. It is impossible to put the whole gospel into a sentence, or even into a sermon, but if there is any one sentence which, more than another, sums up almost the whole heart and essence of the gospel-message, it is this, just these short and simple words: ‘He laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.’
Rev. N. E. Egerton Swann.
Illustration
‘The Cross of Christ has shed a new light on human sorrow and suffering. Any one who has visited any district of mountain or of rugged coastland may have seen a great grey cliff towering up hundreds of feet, and presenting a stern, harsh, almost forbidding aspect. And then one may have seen the same cliff on a summer evening, when the rays of the setting sun fell full on its face and it was suffused with a glorious crimson glow and its awful sublimity was transformed into a rich, tender beauty. Just so, the light which streams from the Cross of Christ has transfigured the rugged aspect of sorrow and suffering.’