CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL NOTES
Jude 1:20.—This gives positive teaching. It answers the question, What can sincere and earnest believers do to guard themselves from the insidious influence of evil men, and imperilling surroundings and influences? The answer in the general is thus given—Faith is strengthened and preserved by growth in the Christian life, prayer of the meditative and fervent type, cherishing the sense of the personal divine love, and keeping up hope of the fulfilment of the promise in Christ Jesus. Most holy faith.—This can only mean, a recognised and accepted set of first principles and truths, on which the apostolic stamp rested. Most holy faith as opposed to the most unholy quicksands of the doctrines condemned in this epistle. By building up is more especially meant, “strengthening the foundations.” Praying in the Holy Ghost.—An expression not found elsewhere. “What is meant is the ecstatic outpouring of prayer in which the words of the worshipper seem to come as from the Spirit who ‘helpeth our infirmities.’ ”
Jude 1:21. Love of God.—In the sense of His love to us. See John 15:9. Looking for.—With a special anticipation of your Lord’s coming.
Jude 1:22. Making a difference.—The A.V. appears to have been taken from the later MSS. The R.V. gives the reading which has earlier and better authority, but its English is somewhat involved: “And on some have mercy, who are in doubt [margin ‘while they dispute with you’]; and some save, snatching them out of the fire; and on some have mercy with fear, hating even the garment spotted by the flesh.” The subject is the discrimination with which it was necessary to treat Christians who were not well established in the faith. There is a wise blending of tenderness and severity. Hating the garment.—That is, avoiding all familiarity with them, as they would avoid touching the garment infected from the flesh of one who had died of pestilence.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Jude 1:20-23
The Believer’s Daily Endeavour.—St. Jude seems to have been almost carried away by the intensity of his feeling as he wrote of the mischievous influence of the false teachers. There was in him much of the spirit of the Jewish Zealot, as there was also in his brother James. The former part of his epistle is full of the fiercest denunciations, but it would have been in every way a mistake if he had carried it on to the end in the same spirit. Warnings may be most necessary and most valuable; but they are not wisely left to stand alone. In moral as well as religious training counsels as to what should be done must always blend with warnings as to what should not be done. “What to do” is even more important than “What to avoid.” Christian teachers need always to keep in mind the lesson of their Lord’s illustration of the house that was “empty, swept, and garnished,” but not filled up with good spirits, and so easily came to be the abode of more and worse spirits than dwelt in it at first. Turning out evil never can suffice. St. Jude therefore closes his epistle with positive advice to the Christian disciples, and suggestive directions concerning their daily life and daily endeavour. First, however, reminding them that the conditions of peril in which they found themselves had been anticipated by the teachings and prophecies of the apostles, who had given them the sure test by which to judge all who claimed to be teachers. The teacher is at once judged and condemned if his life shows licence of sensual indulgence; and the teaching is at once declared to be false, they who offer it “have not the Spirit,” if its practical influence is to relax the strictness of Christian purity, and give believers licence for any forms of sensuous gratification. It must never for one moment be lost from the Christian view, that the holy is the true, and the self-indulgent is the false. No excuse, no disguise, no persuasion, can ever make an unclean, sensual, or sensuous thing Christian. Christ is righteous. Christianity is righteousness. “Without holiness no man shall see the Lord.” It is the absolute and universally applicable test of all claimants to be teachers to-day as truly as in the days of St. Jude. Eloquence is nothing, emotional fervour is nothing; righteousness is everything. A man’s work must stand this test—Does it lift men into a higher plane of Christian restraints, wise mastery of life, and holy living? But St. Jude felt that it was not enough to say this, and to say this firmly. He must also give plain indications concerning that holy living. He must remind them of the things that should be in their daily endeavour, if they were to “walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing.” And the thing that more especially arrests attention is the skilful way in which St. Jude makes his counsels cover all the departments of the Christian life. He has a suggestive word for each, and so in effect intimates that if the whole man is every day brought into the obedience of Christ, fully used in the effort to gain and to maintain the righteousness that Christ requires, the man will be absolutely safeguarded from the subtleties of false teachers, whose offered licence can be no possible attraction, and from the surroundings of evil, which can only be influential on the carnally-minded man. St. Jude has four practical counsels related to the daily Christian endeavours. One concerns the intellectual Christian life—“building up yourselves on the most holy faith”; one concerns the emotional life—“praying in the Holy Ghost”; one concerns the practical Christian life—“keep yourselves in the love of God”; and one concerns the imaginative Christian life—“looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life.” St. Jude’s covering in this way every department of the Christian life reminds us that we have to make an entire sacrifice of ourselves, make of ourselves a whole burnt offering, a living sacrifice; reserving nothing, but laying body, soul, and spirit upon the altar. The absoluteness of our safety from all evil depends on the entireness of our consecration.
I. Our daily endeavour concerns the intellectual Christian life.—“Building up yourselves on your most holy faith.” We are familiar with apostolic advice as to the raising of an edifice of good character on the foundations of a Christian profession; but that is not in the mind of St. Jude. He is advising a continual daily endeavour to strengthen the foundations of faith; to get clearer, fuller, firmer apprehensions of the great Christian verities, the primary Christian principles. There is a necessary Christian knowledge. Growth in knowledge is necessary even to security of Christian living. Our Lord said, in His great prayer, “This is life eternal, to know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.” And St. Peter bids disciples “grow in grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.” St. Jude speaks of “our most holy faith” as if in his day the primary Christian truths had been arranged into some sort of creed, which was well known, and which bore upon it the stamp of apostolic authority. No such creed is given in the New Testament, and no such creed remains among the Church traditions; but it is not difficult to gather from the various apostolic writings those truths which were common subjects of instruction by all the early teachers. It will be found that they mainly concern the person of Christ, and include His claims to Messiahship, His proper humanity, His essential Divinity, His personal sinlessness, His resurrection from the dead, His present claim to service. And perhaps it has not yet been sufficiently apprehended that one of the truths most deeply impressed on the apostolic mind was the absolute demand Christ made that He should be served by righteousness. St. Jude advises the disciples to make daily endeavour to get clearer apprehensions of these primary truths and principles, and a fuller recognition of their practical applications to life and conduct. It is easy to see how directly our security will depend on our systematic growth in Christian intelligence. Let a man be content with what he knows of Christian truths, and he will surely find that what he knows gradually fades down and becomes ineffective, unable to offer any sort of resistance to the subtle forms in which error may assail. The laws of mental life apply to religious truth. Only by enlarging our scientific knowledge can we keep the scientific knowledge we have. If we will not go on, we must inevitably go back. And good truth loosely and ineffectively held can present little or no effective resistance to the insidious attacks of intellectual error. We need to find out how to make a wise daily endeavour to add to the sum of our Christian knowledge; not satisfied with the mere luxury of some religious sentiment, and the satisfaction of having felt some feeling, but determined that we will see some truth more clearly, or grip some truth more firmly—that, and that alone, would be “building ourselves up on our most holy faith.”
II. Our daily endeavour concerns the emotional Christian life.—“Praying in the Holy Ghost.” Many people in these days seem to have made up their minds that the Christian life is nothing but an emotional life, and so their daily endeavour is simply to arouse and increase emotion. And when effort is made to check the extravagance and get the emotional element to keep its fitting proportions, it is readily assumed that injury is being done. The emotional side of human nature is the cause of our gravest anxieties. The history of Christ’s Church reveals the fact that neither heresies nor inconsistencies have ever wrought mischiefs in the Church comparable for one moment to those wrought by the exaggerations and extravagances of religious emotion. For proofs reference may be made to Isaac Taylor’s books, The History of Enthusiasm and the History of Fanaticism. But the exaggeration unto perilous weakness must not prevent our pleading, under the leadership of St. Jude, for a daily culture of Christian emotion. There ought to be a daily glow of feeling, a fervour in our practical piety. That is indicated in the expression, “Praying in the Holy Ghost”; for what is peculiar in that sentence is not “praying,” but this particular kind of praying, “in the Holy Ghost.” No other New Testament writer uses the same term, though St. Paul indicates how we are helped by the Spirit in our prayer. What St. Jude has in mind is this—if the Holy Spirit dwells in us, we shall be subject to His impulses, and especially His impulses to prayer. Let us take care that we respond to those impulses, never resisting or quenching the Spirit. His work is largely a work in Christian emotion. He will inspire it; but He will tone it, and limit it, and keep it in wise bounds. So often men respond to the Spirit’s impulse, but fail to respond to the Spirit’s checks. They start with the Spirit, and then get altogether beyond Him; they, as it were, take the bit in their teeth, and are away on their own line, but are trying to persuade themselves and others that they still have the Holy Ghost. Praying then represents the emotional side of Christian life; we are to make daily endeavour harmoniously to culture and to express religious emotion. We are to pray in the impulse of the Holy Ghost; but we are to pray in the limitations of the Holy Ghost. Our praying, our whole emotional Christian life, is to be absolutely kept in the sphere of the Holy Ghost. And St. Jude intimates that in this will be found our best security from the influence of false teachers. In exaggerated religious emotion the sectarian, and the teacher of moral licence, have always found their most promising seed-beds.
III. Our daily endeavour concerns the practical Christian life.—“Keeping yourselves in the love of God.” That will keep us in the love of God which will keep us in any right human relations. How does the wife keep herself in the love of her husband, the child in the love of the home, the friend in the love of the friend? There is no new condition for the maintenance of our relations with God our Father. The Lord Jesus told us very plainly how He “kept Himself in the love of God.” “I do always the things that please Him.” It is the universal law for all Christ’s disciples. The daily endeavour to live a life of practical obedience and service can alone “keep us in the love of God.” Jesus said, “If a man love Me, he will keep My word: and My Father will love him, and We will come unto him, and make Our abode with him.” This counsel of St. Jude’s is needed in every age, as a caution against the errors into which men readily fall. It is so easy to overpress the intellectual element in Christian life, and become merely doctrinal and sectarian, spending all the force of our regenerate life in contending for opinions, and making particular settings of truth the occasion for separations and wranglings and bitterness. And it is so easy to overpress the emotional element in Christian life, and waste our spiritual strength in sighs and groans and feelings, and imagine that we are unusually pious on the ground of our religious excitements. Therefore our Lord and His apostles so constantly urge upon the disciples that religion is practical. It is the conduct, the tone, the doings, the maintaining of right relations, the putting of good principles into practice. St. John stamps for ever the Christly claim to real, practical, daily, godliness of doing when he says, “He that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as He [Christ] is righteous.” And He was righteous in this, that “He went about doing good.” Never be afraid of doing—that is the expression of your new life in Christ; for it is that alone which can keep you in the love of God. Doing in order to make a claim upon Divine favour is hopelessly wrong. But doing to express our sense of Divine favour is hopefully right. It is what God looks for. It is what the world asks of all professors. You may hear the voice of men around you every day, saying to you—“Have you faith, and new life through faith? Then let us see it; show it in your works.” Righteousness, service, and charity before men; obedience, submission, and holiness before God—these alone can keep us in the acceptance of men or in the love of God.
IV. Our daily endeavour concerns the imaginative Christian life.—“Looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life.” Essential to the completeness of human nature is the imaginative faculty, on which rests the possibility of conceiving the future, and creating an inspiring hope. Only in imagination has the Christian anything before him. Perfect holiness and happy heaven are our hope. No doubt hope well-grounded, but still hope only, the creation of our imaginations. Faith says a hope “that maketh not ashamed.” But how seldom do we put it to ourselves that the culturing of the Christian imagination—and that is done by feeding and exercising it—is part of our daily endeavour. Look down on the book of truth we must. Look in on the moods of the soul we must. Look around on the duties of the hour we must. Look on and away to the “battlements of the Golden City,” and the “markets of the Golden Year,” we must. The man who keeps hope bright, well proportioned in its culture to the other Christian faculties, will be secure against the subtleties of evil. He is satisfied with the substance of things hoped for. Our daily endeavour as Christians—in which lies the assurance of our safety in the midst of the enticing and entrancing evils of the day—concerns our all-round and harmonious daily culture. We are minds—but not minds only—and must grow in apprehension of truth. We are feelings—but not feelings only—and must nourish all hallowing emotions. We are actions—but not actions only—and must sanctify our doings. We are hopes—but not hopes only—and must keep imaginations filled with the visions of the “King in His beauty” and the “home over there.” In a word, we must be “complete in Him.”
SUGGESTIVE NOTES AND SERMON SKETCHES
Jude 1:20-21. The Secret of being kept.—Thus arranged the participles represent the means by which the injunction is followed. Compare 1 Peter 1:13, which is exactly similar in construction and closely akin in sentiment. Jude is the prophet of the apostasy. He sounds the final note of warning. The key-word is “kept.” Those who embrace the faith and contend for the faith are preserved unto the day of presentation; those who reject and oppose the faith are reserved unto the day of retribution. Those who kept not their first estate, and are kept for judgment, are contrasted with those who keep themselves in the love of God, and are kept by His power. There are two sides to this keeping—a divine side (Jude 1:24) and a human side (Jude 1:20-21). The words preserve and persevere are so much alike that one can be spelt from the other; and so if we are to be preserved, it is equally true that we must persevere. How to persevere is the subject of this text. The text itself supplies the divisions:
1. The great duty and privilege—keep yourselves in the love of God.
2. The way to do it—building, praying, looking. We begin with the three means of perseverance:
1. A perseverance of growth. Building up yourselves on your most holy faith means carrying up character and conduct toward perfection. The foundation is laid, which is Jesus Christ. We have simply to add stone to stone and story to story, and use material consistent with the foundation (1 Corinthians 3:10-15). Faith seems to stand here, as it often does, for the truth held in faith; what is believed and the belief of it both being included. And the disciple is to go on adding to faith, virtue, etc., until the whole life is complete (see 2 Peter 1:5-7). Two conditions are essential to this growth:
(1) growing knowledge of the word of God, which supplies the material for faith;
(2) growing obedience of the word, which incorporates the truth in the life. The word is the quarry from which obedience takes the blocks that are built into conduct. To study the Scriptures daily and practise what we learn builds this building up, and nothing else will; it also insures that right material shall be used.
2. A perseverance of prayer. As the word of God supplies the truth to be embraced by faith, so prayer supplies the energy and force to appropriate truth, and incorporate it into our life. If the word of God is the quarry, prayer is the power which turns the stone into building material and puts it in its place. The phrase is peculiar, “praying in the Holy Ghost.” Elsewhere the Holy Ghost is represented as praying in us (Romans 8:26-27). Both representations are true. Here the Spirit of God is represented as an atmosphere necessary to prayer. We can only persevere in prayer as we abide in the Spirit. A worldly atmosphere stifles prayer. We must breathe in the Spirit, and then prayer is the breathing out of the Spirit unto God. Here again is a twofold condition of praying: first there must be daily fellowship with the Spirit, or we shall not have the spirit of prayer; and again there must be daily exercise of prayer itself as communion with God. Such prayer becomes both a protection from temptation and a means of assimilation to God.
3. A perseverance of hope (compare 1 Peter 1:1-13). Hope looks forward into the future. The final consummation of the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ waits to be revealed. We are pilgrims journeying toward a better country, and are passing through an enemy’s territory. Here we are to have only our tent; our permanent home is beyond. Hence the importance of fastening our gaze upon the city which hath foundations. All apostasy comes from looking at the past or at the present. To dwell on past attainments makes progress impossible. To be absorbed in the present is to follow the spirit of the age, always contrary to God. If faith provides the quarry and prayer the energy for building up Christian life, hope presents the ideal of the structure, and teaches us how to build. It becomes to us a perpetual, inspiring, heavenly vision, and the building grows into conformity with it. We are now prepared to appreciate the injunction, “Keep yourselves in the love of God.” This suggests, first, that our only hope is in positive culture of holiness. Negative resistance to evil is not enough; we must overcome evil with good. We must learn the “expulsive power of a new affection” which drives out evil and replaces it by good. Ulysses sought to escape the sirens by being bound to the mast of his vessel. Orpheus drowned their voices with his lyre and sacred songs. Secondly, it is in the love of God; not our love to Him, but His love to us, that we must find keeping power. Archbishop Ussher, when an old man, lacked animal heat, and he used to seek to be constantly bathed in sunshine. When too feeble to go out of doors, he would be wheeled in his chair to an eastern window in the morning, a southerly window at noon, and a western window toward evening, and abide in the sunshine.—A. T. Pierson, D.D.
Jude 1:21. Keeping in the Love.—St. Jude wrote his epistle with an evident and direct purpose. He found, as St. Paul also found, that in Churches formed among the Gentile peoples there was exceeding danger lest the truth should be debased through the self-indulgence, the immoralities, and the false teachings by which such indulgences and moral evils were supported. St. Jude pleads with those on whom he could exert an influence, that they should “earnestly contend for the faith once delivered to the saints”; and, in very vigorous language, he denounces the iniquity of these inconsistent and unworthy professors. Then, in the closing of the epistle, he gives the principle on which alone members can be guarded from surrounding evils. The text is part of a loving and faithful persuasion of the believers.
Our most pressing Christian duty.—It may often be helpful to us to gather up the various claims and requirements of a religious profession into some very simple, but suggestive and inspiring principle. There are, in the New Testament, many, various, and minute injunctions and counsels for the guidance and regulation of a Christian life; and yet we cannot fail to observe that the apostles seem much more anxious to implant, and thoroughly establish, quick, living truths and principles, than to take the mere shaping and moulding of the details of Christian conduct into their control. They would rather make the tree good, and leave the fresh, strong, healthy sap to fashion its own leafage and flowering and fruiting. And it is well that we should follow apostolic models, and seek with much more anxiety to culture into vigour and health godly principles, than merely to fashion into set forms the minute details of Christian relations and Christian conduct. Let us make the tree good, and we need not fear for the fruit. But here we are met by a seriously hindering difficulty. There is not usually among Christian people a proper faith in the quickening, inspiring, controlling, and guiding power of established moral principle. Even good people persist in asking exactly what they ought to do in such and such circumstances; and so we have, again and again, to throw men back on the power of simple first principles. If we really know what the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ is, what the foundation laws of the new spiritual kingdom are, then we cannot fail to be delicately sensitive in all the details of Christian conduct, to that which becometh the gospel. Our Christian duty is here set before us, not in a series of minute and carefully adjusted counsels, but in one simple, comprehensive, searching, yet glorifying principle—“Keep yourselves in the love of God.” Our Saviour pressed this upon His disciples as if it were the very essence of their duty, “Continue ye in My love.” And the apostle Paul states what he had found could be the glorifying principle of a life—of a right noble and heroic life—when he said, “The love of Christ constraineth us.” Our text means in part—
1. Keep yourselves in the full conviction of the truth of God’s love.—That truth is the one special and distinctive revelation of God that was made to us by Christ and in Christ. That is the “life and immortality which He brought to light by His gospel”; for our future can only be properly seen in the light of God’s love. That is the central foundation truth of the Christian religion; it is the thing in which it differs from all other religious systems; it is the one truth concerning which we ought to be unspeakably jealous. Before Christ came men had some weak notions that love was one of the Divine attributes, but it was only one of them, and by no means prominent, certainly not the ruling one. The apostle John clearly marks off the Christian man from all the rest of the world by this as his peculiarity, “We have known and believed the love which God hath to us.” To believe in the love of God, and to come into the forgiving, cleansing, quickening, correcting, sanctifying power of that love, is to become a Christian. And this is but another way of saying it is “coming to Christ,” it is “believing on Christ.” We may have expected to find such a counsel in the sacred word as this—Keep yourselves in the justice of God; or this—Keep yourselves in the holiness of God; or this—Keep yourselves in the commandments of God. But there is nothing of the kind, because for renewed, right-hearted Christian men and women “justice” is quite safe, “holiness” is quite safe, the “commandments” are quite safe, if only they will “believe in the love which God hath unto them.” And yet what a half-fear there is in some of our hearts that this cannot be sufficient, that to state things in this way is to imperil something very vital. But that can only be because we do not fill the word “love” with the fulness of its meaning. We have a half-fear that love is weak and easyful. Thinking of frail human love, we fancy that it may do things that are not absolutely right; it can carry away on its impulses the judgment, the conscience, and the will. Men and women do, too often, make their fond affections excuse unworthy things. And therefore, even when we speak of God’s love, some of us feel as if we must shore the weak thing up, and buttress it with notions—theological notions—of His justice, His moral government, His holiness, and His law. And because our hearts are filled with these unworthy and hindering notions, we cannot receive the fulness of the revelation of God’s love to us in Christ Jesus. We will not let Christ show us how just, how holy, how searching, how inexorable, that love of God is. We should be satisfied if we could see it as Christ saw it, if we could feel it as Christ felt it. What is love as applied to God? What is the love of God as it is shown to us in Christ? The answer is this—You must know what the love of the Man Christ Jesus was, when He tarried among the ignorant and the suffering; and watching Him, correcting, counselling, comforting, you will learn the greatness and the graciousness of the love of God. You will see that love can reprove, can chastise, can say, “Get thee behind me, Satan,” to an erring disciple. You will see that love keeps rods for smiting, and refining fires for cleansing. No law, no judge, is so inexorable as love, which will not take its strong, stern hand off its beloved, until they are “whiter than snow,” cleansed so as no fuller on earth can whiten them. Love is the corner-stone, on which the whole superstructure of the faith rests securely. It underlies the exceeding great mystery of the Incarnation. Love is the very life and strength of the day by day earthly humiliation. Love is the all-satisfying explanation of the great Atonement. Love gives the life-force to the message of grace sent forth from the cross to every creature. We preach Christ. We set Him forth in all His thousand-fold forms of grace, in order that we may bring sinful men to know and believe the love which God hath unto them. Now St. Jude tells us that of this great truth we must be, personally and individually, most anxious. You and I must take care that we keep in the love of God. We must never let any theories, any teachings, any passing excitements of the hour, any exigencies of theological opinion, any class or sectarian sentiments, put in peril, or cast into the shadow of neglect, this first of Christian truths. We must be jealous with a godly jealousy over any aspect of the Divine Being which men may try to press in the front of this. In the sphere of Christian doctrines remember that this is the absolute first of truths—“God is love.” “He that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God.”
2. Keep yourselves in the comforting assurance of God’s love.—We should be able to say, not only, “He loved me, and gave Himself for me,” but also, with an actual, present application, “He loveth me, and giveth Himself for me.” For that love is actually over us and around us now; it wraps us about, as an enfolding and enveloping atmosphere; in it we live, and move, and have our being. If it be indeed so, then we hold the secret key that unlocks the meaning of all our cares, all our trials, all our losses, all our perplexities, and all our fears. We make our mistakes; we come into calamities; we stumble in our waywardness; we walk where the road is rough, and the clouds hang down low and darken; we lift burdens on our own shoulders; we have to carry burdens for others: but in all these things let us “keep ourselves in the love of God.” He rules and overrules. He, just like the holy father, trains His children through their mistakes and follies. Our lots in life may be very suffering ones, very anxious ones; but however dark they may be, let us never doubt God’s love to us. In that assurance we may find unfailing consolation and strength. “The light of that love is our guide through the gloom”; and with fuller, deeper feeling than even the ancient psalmist knew, we may sing and say, “When my father and my mother forsake me”—which, to many of us, is the almost impossible of earthly calamity—“then the Lord will take me up.”
3. That we put ourselves under the daily constrainings of God’s love.—Here in our common earthly relations there is no persuasion urging us to goodness like the daily influence of a true and faithful love. How that dear earthly friend, that beloved companion of our life, moves and sways and inspires us, guards and keeps and purifies us! We feel as if we could not do wrong and disgrace that love. We must be beautiful for the honour of that love. We cannot go where our beloved one would be grieved to find us. We cannot speak what would pain our friend to hear. That earthly love is, in gracious measures, a sweet and sanctifying influence. But how much more should this be upon us the constraining power of the love of God! Surely His love should be the supreme impulse to holy living, the inspiration of all high Christian attainment, the constraint of all holy and earnest labour. The apostle Paul is the great human example of the holy, devoted, self-denying Christian, and he can only explain the Divine beauty and consecrated energy of his life—as we ought to be able to explain ours—by saying, “The love of Christ constraineth us.” That I may be very direct and practical, let me show you that the counsel of the text bears this further persuasion upon you—Beware lest anything should take you from under the shadow of God’s love. I need only suggest what things may do this. Pride of heart will. All forms of subtle self-reliance will. There is a tender gentleness, a gracious humility, a trustful dependence, a self-forgetting love, about everybody who really believes in the love of God, and lives in the sanctifying warmth of it. If you have lost these things, or at least, if you have lost the bloom off these things, if you feel very well satisfied with yourselves, and very confident that you can stand steady in your own strength, then you may be sure that you have come from under the shadow of the love. For it has this for its peculiarity—it always makes men meek, dependent, gentle. Pandering to the appetites and passions of the body, or to the pride of the intellect, will be sure to take you away from the love. That love can only dwell with the temperate, the pure—the saintly ones, who walk in white—the self-restrained, the modest; so that, if any of us are determined to be self-indulgent, or if we will cherish conceit of our intellectual superiority, the love will be sure to remove afar off. All the manifold phases of unbrotherliness put in peril our relations with the Divine love. For if we do not “love our brother whom we have seen, how can we love God whom we have not seen?” Unwatchfulnesses and wilful disobediences also take us away from the love. For the Master Himself said, “If ye love Me, keep My commandments; and My Father will love you.” So it is made quite plain for us all that God’s love is no weak thing. It is, indeed, a most searching thing, a most sensitive thing. It is most quickly grieved. It is wounded with a rough touch. It may be hurt by our commonplace, every-day Christian frailties. If we fear that we have got away from that life-constraining love of God, let us hear the voice of His servant, calling us back under the shadow, and bidding us “keep ourselves in the love of God.”
The Sense of God’s Love.—If you had been born a Jew, it would not have seemed strange to you that you had to hear continually about God’s law. It was daily read. There were times of special rehearsal (Josiah, Nehemiah). As born a Christian, it is not strange that you should continually hear about love. This is the central force of the gospel; it wields the moral power, the “bands of a man.” The love that is characteristic of the gospel gathers round the revelation of the Father. Divine Fatherhood was shadowed over in Judaism; it was there, but it was not made prominent. It takes the first and front place in Christianity. Fatherhood is clearly seen in the patriarchal religion. And that was the universal religion of its day. Fatherhood is in Judaism; and realised at least by the pious and spiritually-minded Jew. But Fatherhood gains a fuller meaning in Christianity. The gospel is really this—the power of God’s love on human souls.
I. The beginning of the Christian life is the revelation to the soul of the love of God.—It seems that a special revelation was needed to teach men God’s love. Nature alone cannot teach it, because of its uniformity; Providence alone cannot, because of its perplexity; Judaism could not, because of the sternness of its law; and heathenism could not, because of its coarse polytheistic and sensual associations. The difficulty of receiving it lies in our own natures, enfeebled and degraded by sin. Our consciousness of sin makes us think God unloving, just as the erring child thinks the father cruel, and the faithless man with the one talent thought his master hard and unjust. As revealed, the love of God is no mere statement; it is an exhibited love, exhibited in a recovering purpose, in a priceless gift, in a mysterious sacrifice. But, as revealed, it needs appropriation by us. When appropriated it becomes a power to change our spirit and our life. It changes our views of God, life, duty, eternity, etc. We see all in the light of “crucified love.”
II. The continuance of Christian life depends on keeping up the sense of God’s love.—That alone can keep us sincere and earnest. Love is more exacting than law, more inexorable than law. Love is jealous lest its object should lose one of the smallest blessings of obedience and goodness. Love is jealous lest its object should find and experience one of the sorrows that attend upon evil. Illustrate by the greater jealousy over a son than over an apprentice. Nothing will keep us so pure, so steadfast, and so humble, as urging upon us, ever afresh, the assurance of God’s love.
III. The one effort of our Christian life should be to keep in the sense of God’s love.—In our earthly life we know the help and the joy of keeping in the love of mother, wife, or friend. It must be more helpful and more blessed to keep in the love of God. To lose the light of God’s love is more—far more—than losing the sunlight off the flowers. How shall we keep in the love?
1. Cherish every loving thought of God that may be suggested to you.
2. Walk in righteousness, and you will ever be in the smiles of the love.
3. Watch over all your opportunities of heart-fellowship with Christ, for friendship needs communion.
4. Cultivate the child-spirit. Illustrate by our Lord putting the child in the midst of the men. No doubting in the child-heart. But can this counsel apply to all, “keep in the love”? Do we all believe the love which God hath unto us? Are any living on in sin, because they do not believe the love? Have you felt how God’s love to sinners shines forth from Calvary? I beseech you then, Come into the love, that we may be able to say also unto you, “Keep yourselves in the love of God.”
Jude 1:22-23. Mercy for the Victims of Evil Influence.—The beautiful turn of these verses exhibits in full force the Christian disposition of St. Jude. The former part of the epistle, taken by itself, conveys the impression that the apostle was a mere declamator and denunciator—a master of withering censure. But now the very men whom he had severely reprimanded are to be sought and reclaimed. We have no room to give the learned criticism of the text supplied by our great scholars. The Revisers have accepted it, with a marginal note, to remind the reader that the first part is doubted. After carefully reading the pros and cons, we see no valid reason for rejecting the portion in dispute, nor is there any difficulty in the rendering. “Those disputing with you, have mercy upon them; and save some, by snatching them as brands from the burning; have mercy on some with caution; hating even the garment spotted by the flesh.” The method of treating the three classes on Christian grounds is laid down here, and is as applicable to-day as it then was.
1. The doubters. They are to be treated with consideration and kindliness. Doubt is sometimes the result of imperfect training, or a misapprehension of the truth. There was a class then who were not able to judge between the teaching of the apostles and that of the false teachers. They needed a tender treatment to bring them to a knowledge of the truth. This is a very large class in our own day. They say, “We do not know what to believe.” Then they will adduce what they have heard against the Church, in opposition to the teaching of the Church. This is not a hopeless class by any means. Patience, perseverance, and compassion, accompanied by lucid teaching, will lead them into the way of truth. Many, who once were disputers, are now firm believers of the truth.
2. Scoffers. There was a class, not the leaders of the schism, that had been led away, to whom warning must be adminstered. To reclaim them terrible earnestness was needed, just as a man plucks the brand from the burning, which he desires to save. The suggestion is that the authority of the truth be used. Not persuasion, but admonition, exhibiting the power of the truth. The scoffer is a man who ridicules tenderness and love, but is a coward before the attacks of the sword of the Spirit. Let him know that there is a God in heaven, and a judgment at whose bar he must soon stand, and his conscience will tremble and make a coward of him. No asperity or bitterness is to be used, but forcibly bring home to him a sense of his guilt by the earnest care for his soul which your manner will manifest. We do not hear of many scoffers converted in our own day, owing to the loving manner which the Church assumes towards everybody. Let the arrow of conviction have its own barb, and let it fly.
3. The sensualists. They must be approached with fear, or with caution. By these the apostle must mean the false teachers themselves, who preached sodomy, and other forms of immoral practices. Although sunk very deep in sin, they were not to be abandoned; yet, inasmuch as their garment was defiled by sin, they were not to be approached too nearly or too tenderly. They were within the bounds of conviction, although very near the circumference. The lesson for the Church to learn is to approach men according to their condition. Somebody in a hurry gave a tract on the sin of dancing to a man with two wooden legs. We fear that worse mistakes, if possible, are committed frequently. When the Saviour preached to publicans and sinners, His method was simple, and His message loving; but when He preached to the Pharisees, Scribes, and Sadducees His manner was more dignified, and His message more authoritative.—W.P.