GOD’S GIFT
‘The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.’
If death—death both temporal and eternal—is the wages of sin, what, we may ask, is the wages of righteousness? Can we earn life by obeying God, even as sinners earn death by obeying the devil? Alas! if this were our only hope of life, we should be of all men the most miserable. Who among us can say, ‘I am holy; I obey all God’s commandments; I look forward to eternal life as the fair wages of my service’? We all know but too well—if, indeed, we have thought at all about it—that we do not obey all God’s commandments, that we are not as holy as we should be. We know that if we get only what we deserve, we too shall earn death, and shall only differ from the abandoned sinner in knowing our future misery. But, thanks be to God, life is not offered to us as the due reward of holiness, as the wages of righteousness.
I. Eternal life is God’s gift.—He gives it to us from the very first. He it was that breathed into Adam the breath of life, whereby he became a living soul. He it is that in our Baptism gives to us His Spirit to purify and sanctify us so that we are joined to the Lord and are ‘one spirit’ with Him. In that holy sacrament He received us into the number of His children and gave us the promise of eternal life. And ever since that time He has continually been fitting us to enjoy it; by every trial and suffering we have undergone, by every holy thought and good desire He has put into our hearts; whenever we have assembled in His house we have heard Him warning and exhorting us by the voice of His Holy Scripture, and of his authorised ministers, setting before us life and death, and bidding us choose life; whenever we have approached His holy table with faith and repentance, He has fed us with the spiritual food of the body and blood of His dear Son, assuring us thereby that we are heirs through hope of His everlasting Kingdom. When He calls us away from this world, He will give us rest and peace with all His holy ones who have gone before us; and in that day, which is steadily drawing on, though we know not when it shall come, He shall raise our bodies from the dust, and we shall really enter on the enjoyment of life, and that a life eternal. Such is the gift of God.
II. Our eternal life is the wages of the righteousness of Christ.—He earned it for us. So that while it is His wages, to us it is a free and undeserved gift. It is God’s gift to us through Christ. But it does not follow that because we cannot do anything to deserve it, that therefore we need do nothing to obtain it. It is the gift of God ‘through Christ.’ To whom, then, will He give it but to the faithful followers of Christ—to those who love their Lord and His appearing? And this shows more clearly the meaning of the Apostle in the text. He says not there one word of righteousness, but it is implied in the expressions he uses: ‘The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ As though he had said, ‘Your sins, if you give way to them, and persevere in them, will at last bring you to death eternal; which is indeed their wages, their well-earned and well-deserved punishment; but if you live a different life, if you strive by the grace of God to overcome your sins, and to conform yourselves to the likeness of your Lord and Saviour, that course of life will bring you to the life eternal; not as a reward, not as something due to you, but it will be given you by God, for the sake of Christ.’
III. The text is an encouragement, because it shows us that life is not the reward of our righteousness, but the gift of God; so that we may hope to receive that gift, even though our righteousness be not quite perfect. What is absolutely necessary is that we should be united to Christ. It is through Him that God gives life; through our union with Him we receive it.
Bishop Lord Alwyne Compton.
Illustration
‘The whole parable of the verse, Romans 6:23, lies in the two words Wages and Gift. Each of these words has a special meaning. The word wages is the word used for a soldier’s pay: not merely a servant’s wages, but the “pay” of a soldier. And the word gift is the word used for the largess of a successful general after a victory: not merely a gift in the ordinary sense of any one making a present or gift to some one else, but that particular gift—or largess—which the commander of an army gives his soldiers when a battle has been won or a city taken. Both words belong to soldiers, and not merely to servants. The first word means the regular stated “pay.” The second word means something over and above “pay”; that largess which, after victory, a general, in the joy of victory, gives bountifully to the soldiers who had shared his labours and fought under his banners.’
(SECOND OUTLINE)
THAT THEY MIGHT HAVE LIFE
Observe how God’s great gift in Christ Jesus gives life to the world and life to each individual soul.
I. God’s gift in Christ of eternal life to the world.—Since sin entered into the world, its end has not only been eternal death, but it frustrates the purpose of God for eternal life, for it separates God from man and increases the weakness in our fallen human nature. But God so eternally loved us that He provided His own remedy for sin in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, who said, ‘I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.’
II. Christ claimed in His own person to meet and correct every individual need of man.—In order to make it quite intelligible to us how our life is sustained by incorporation into His, our Blessed Lord reveals His intimate relation with every soul by that series of claims which declare Him to be:—
(a) The Source of Life—‘The True Vine.’
(b) The Redeemer and Protector of Life—‘The Good Shepherd.’
(c) The Sustainer of Life—‘The Bread of Life.’
(d) The Restorer of Life—‘The Resurrection and the Life.’
Rev. G. Perry-Gore.
Illustrations
(1) ‘There is a great picture by a distinguished French artist, in which in the foreground of the picture he has portrayed the different ages of the world, whilst in the background, right on the horizon, he has placed the cross which forms the focus for his light and colour, and which he spreads with a masterly power in varying shades of vermilion over all the clustered scenes of his picture. And as the picture is studied, two lessons are disclosed. First, that the cross, as it fills the background of the picture, unites, in the person of our Lord, earth with heaven; and, secondly, that the colour which radiates from the cross lights up every age over which it falls, and so tells the story of the universality of Christ’s Incarnate work; and as the painter makes the light from the Christ to fill with warmth and life the whole picture, so, as we contemplate our Lord’s Incarnate work, we see how His great redemption meets the whole world’s needs.’
(2) ‘The story is told of one who had to minister to an old shepherd who could not read, and to help him to realise our Blessed Lord’s care and love for his soul. The clergyman gave him a picture of Christ as the Good Shepherd, with a crown of thorns on His head and carrying on His shoulders a wounded lamb, and some time afterwards, when calling to see him, the old man pointed to the picture and said, “Ah! I want Him to carry me back just like that; but,” added the old shepherd, “what touches me most of all is that”—pointing to the crown of thorns.’
(THIRD OUTLINE)
WHAT IS LIFE?
What is the reward we have set before us? It is said to be Life Eternal. And what is Life Eternal? Observe that this Life Eternal is said to be God’s largess to those who have fought and conquered under Christ their Captain; so that it must be something coming direct from God, as God’s own peculiar, best, gift.
I. Life here.—What then is life! The beasts have a life; but of man only was it said that God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. There is therefore a difference between their life and ours. God created them living creatures. Then God created man with an animal life like the beasts. And then over and above that animal life God gave man a higher life as well, by which he became ‘a living soul.’ That higher life which we now have is God’s gift. And so perhaps this difference may help us to conceive something of the still higher life which is meant by the words Eternal Life, which describe the state to which God will raise those who have spent this life in the service of His Son. That nobler life which He will raise us to will be something as much higher and more exalted than our present life, as our present life is nobler and better than that of the beasts. And what is it that constitutes life? Life is energy, and action, and intelligence and thought, and above all, it is love. How often do we say of the slothful, or the dull, or the inactive, that he does not live, he only exists or vegetates. Even now we hardly think it worth while to call a mere slothful existence by the name of life. A man who never exerts himself, or a man who never thinks, but only goes on in a miserable routine, or the miser who lives only for himself, or the selfish man who seems incapable of loving wife or friend—such men we scarcely think of as truly living. Whereas when, even in the lower animals, we see traces of something like a real, unselfish love and self-devotion, the first thing we say is, we wonder that such a being can really die.
II. Life hereafter.—And all this teaches us, then, to have some kind of imagination what that eternal life which is here spoken of may mean.
(a) Certainly not a state of being in which less activity, less intelligence, less opportunities of showing love and affection, will occur than we have now, but more. More of all of them; and that, too, set free from the burdensomeness which all energy brings with it in this life. Here labour, even in the noblest forms of it, brings fatigue, and it wears us down, and the higher forms of labour wear us down faster than the lower. The mind is nobler than the body, and mental labour wears us down faster than bodily exertion. The heart is nobler than the mind, the power of loving is a higher thing than the power of thinking, and so the anxieties we encounter through our affections wear us down more utterly than all intellectual work. But hereafter this will not be so. There life in all its forms of action will be a delight.
(b) It will never wear down. It will be eternal. Very noticeable are those words of the Apocalypse, ‘there shall be no night there.’ Here we need night for repose and rest, and our rest is but like a daily portion of the death which at last will stop our present lives altogether. There we shall need no rest, for there shall be no fatigue, and there will be no death to stop the eternal life which God will give us.
Such is our glorious prospect. Only let us bear in mind that to win that glorious gift of God, we must be ready to spend this life in the service of the Captain Whom we follow: remembering that it is only the man who is willing to lose his life who has the promise of finding it. It is God’s gift, not our earning.