CRITICAL NOTES
Romans 14:7.—We are not to follow our own pleasure, nor obey our own inclinations. In life and death we, Christians, are the Lord’s.
Romans 14:8.—Christians are Christ’s property, and they must live, not to themselves, but to one another.
Romans 14:9.—Christ having died and risen again to make believers His property, will He not take care of His own?
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Romans 14:7-9
Life and death harmonised.—In the opinion of most life and death are antagonistic. Death is the privation of life. The one is a something to be desired and cherished, while the other is to be dreaded and shunned. Life is the sphere of activities, while death is regarded as their cessation. We mourn when the good workman dies, as if work for him were over. But St. Paul teaches a larger view. Life and death are raised to one great level; they are spheres for a noble ministry. Both life and death are for the Lord, and it is in that light that we get to understand the greater importance of life and the sweet significance of death.
I. Christ by His life and death lifts death out of its darkness and gives a new meaning to life.—What a meaningless, monotonous round are the life days which are lived by the majority! Their souls are moved by no great purposes; their spirits are not touched by ennobling motives. To such life is hardly worth living. Christ gives to life a new meaning, a fresh force and vigour. Christ died and rose again that He might make life noble. Christ is the light of life, illuminating with glory, lifting out of its dulness, and showing the pathway to true greatness. Death is the shadow feared by man; its very approach casts darkness over the frame. Death loses much of its darkness and its terror when we view it in the light of Christ’s claim. Death introduces to new and wider spheres. Death and life belong unto Him who by death conquered death.
II. Christ by His death and risen life made both spheres His own.—He made this earthly life His own by entering into all its trials, joys, and perplexities. He made the risen life His own by rising from the tomb. Life belonged unto Christ before His incarnation. Shall we be wrong in asserting that life in fuller measure belonged unto Christ after His resurrection? The keys of all life were delivered into His hands. In Him was a largeness of life not embraced in the prophetic vision. Death in all its solemn mystery belongs unto Him who has the keys of Hades and of death. Christ is sovereign over life and over death. If life and death belong unto Christ and the Christian be joined to Christ, then the Christian’s life and the Christian’s death belong unto the Lord. Life with all its possibilities, death with all its mysteries, are the Lord’s. Let us so act as to show that whether living or dying we are the Lord’s.
III. Christ by His death and life leads His people out of death into life.—This is specially true of the period which we call conversion. The believer is at this crisis led out of the death of sin, ignorance, and guilt into the life of holiness, knowledge, forgiveness, and the peace of God which passeth understanding. But here we contemplate a still higher leading—a leading which is progressive and continuous. Christ leads His people out of the death of selfishness into the life of love. Selfishness makes self the centre of life, the object and aim of existence; love makes Christ the centre of life, the alpha and omega of existence and of that which we regard as non-existence. But there is not such a thing as non-existence in the estimation of a Christ-loving nature. Life and death are crowned and glorified by love. And Christ will lead His people through death to the life of perfect love and of undying service.
Learn:
1. The dignity of the Christian life. It may be passed in lowly spheres as earth spirits estimate, but it acquires dignity as it is a Christ-owned life. Ownership imparts dignity. Royalty seems to overshadow with its greatness all its surroundings. The royalty of heaven’s eternal King imparts dignity to the life of him who moves as in the loving taskmaster’s sight.
2. The sublimity of the Christian service. It is one of love. It is one for life and for death. It is one in an ever-widening sphere. Self-service is contracting; love-service is expanding. The Christian lives for God, for Christ, for the promotion of all good and true ends.
3. The interminable nature of the Christian’s view. Death does not bound his prophetic vision. The narrow tomb does not form a barrier to his wide-looking soul. He sees the unseen. Death opens up a larger life and shows divine service. Whether living or dying he is the Lord’s.
Romans 14:7. Loving self-abnegation.—These words would come with a startling sound to the ears of the world to which St. Paul wrote. There might be a time when none were for a party and all for the state; but the time had passed, if it evertruly existed, and the decline of the nation had begun, and national decline is marked by the increase of selfishness. But the words may come to us likewise with startling emphasis. This is a so-called Christian country. Our Christian preachers and teachers are multitudinous. Christianity has had a fairly long reign and a fairly successful course in our island; and yet have we reached the ideal set forth in the words, “None of us liveth to himself”? As we look at society in some of its aspects and in certain of our moods, the words sound to us like an ironical utterance. “None of us liveth to himself.” Is not the modern doctrine, “Every man for himself”? Is it not the ripe conclusion of our modern evolutionary philosophy that the weakest must go to the wall? The man with a weak will, without push and tact, without iron nerves, must be crushed, and is often crushed, by his stronger fellow. Alas that we will not look facts in the face! We are closed up in selfishness, we pamper our selfish fancies, we foster our selfish likings and prejudices, and we are very much shocked if any plain preacher tells us that we are selfish. We require still to be told that the true theory of life is that we must not live to ourselves, but unto Christ, to His Church, and for the good of humanity.
I. In the world self strives for prominence.—This statement requires no proof; it is almost axiomatic and self-evident. The poet sings, “Love rules the camp, the court, the grove.” If the poet mean self-love, he is not far from the truth. But Jove in the higher and diviner sense does not rule. Do the strikes of the present day speak of loving forbearance between men and masters? What does the interest of capital mean but the interest of self? What do the claim and rights of labour mean but the claim and rights of self? What do the ten thousand wrongs, anomalies, oppressions, and in too many cases cruelties of our social system declare? They proclaim that self is striving for the prominence. This strife is everywhere,—in the remote hamlet and on the crowded exchange flags; in some of our syndicates, in our cotton corners, in our many fraudulent bubble schemes, and in our lying advertisements. Ah, self! thou unholy and rapacious monster: thou dost obtrude thy ungainly form in all departments of life; thou hast been known to wear the guise of philanthropy, to assume the garb of sanctity; thou hast not scrupled to profane the priest’s sacred vestments and to sully a bishop’s lawn!
II. This self-strife leads to individual dissatisfaction and to social undoing.—This is evident to every casual observer of society. Where self is thought about more than society and the general welfare, there is sure to be social undoing. Revolutions may have been necessary, and may have done good; but some revolutions have been influenced by a selfish spirit and have been fraught with evil. All revolutions promoted by selfishness are injurious, and can only become beneficial as the great Worker educes good out of evil. Certainly most harmful to the individual is the effort to make self prominent and supreme. The more we give to self, the more it craves; the more it gets, the more it wants. Its riches may increase, but they tend only to greater poverty. The most discontented of mortals have been those who have had ample means for the pampering of self.
III. Self-hood, however, is subjected.—So that it becomes true in a wider sense than we sometimes think that none of us liveth to himself. In will and purpose we live to ourselves, but in tendency and effect we live for others. The idler and the pleasure-seeker may find themselves conquered in the conflict. If they do nothing better, they serve as warnings and beacon lights to the sensible. They live to themselves, but their wasted lives tell us to shun the shifting sands of folly in which they were engulfed. It is plain that the worker cannot altogether live to himself. According to the political economists he is a productive labourer, and thus while increasing his own wealth he increa the wealth of the nation. Society cannot allow us to live for ourselves; for ourselves are firmly bound to and with other selves. The nation is made up of individual selves, as a building is erected by means of separate stones. As stone is bound by and to its fellow-stone, so my self is bound by and to the other self. The not-self is essential to the welfare of the self; the not-self and the self are bound together and have interests in common.
I. In the Church there is loving self-abnegation.—The objector says that he cannot see it. We go into the Church, and find that modern Christians are essentially selfish. Of course we cannot see it; for it is not to be seen, and a man does not see that which he does not want to see, and which is outside his range of things. He does not see that self-will is dethroned and bowing in loving submission to the divine will. In the Christian self-hood rises against the Christlike spirit. Self-hood rises, but it falls conquered by the Christian manhood. The general aim, purpose, and desire of the Christian is upward to Christ. The Christlike soul dethrones selfishness and exalts the Prince of life. Christ and not self is the centre of the Christian nature. He loves himself, but he loves himself in and for Christ, the beloved of all true men. A mere observer cannot see that which is going on in the nature of another, The conquest over self is gained in secret; the battle is bloodless and without noise. Christ-love conquers self-love; but we cannot see Christ-love riding in any triumphal car or wielding any sceptre of authority. The Christian does not live to himself. There is in him a motive power which the world does not see. And this inward life works outwardly in many beneficial ways. He must be blind indeed who does not see that many Christians have shown that they live to and for Christ, and thus in the highest sense live to and for the good of their kind. Christianity has been the most beneficial agency which has found a home and a sphere in this planet.
II. The Christian finds in self-abnegation the widest contentment.—When self is allowed to gain the upper hand, then there is the reign of misrule, then there is dissatisfaction. But when the life stream flows with Christ treading the waters every storm is hushed, and the course of the waters produces sweetest music. Contentment in the soul is the effect of the Christ presence and supremacy.
III. The Christian in loving consecration obtains truest riches.—Not that which is of any account at the bankers; but shall we still esteem soul wealth as of no avail? Self works for riches, but is crushed by the weight. If he would confess it, the man is oft richer in poverty than in wealth. Love works for Christ and obtains soul wealth—riches here and riches hereafter.
IV. The Christian in loving consecration secures extensive productiveness.—Life is regarded by many as the only sphere for production. Wo believe in annihilation to a much larger extent than may be supposed. However, there is no annihilation. We live when we are dead. Tombs have a voice. “The memory of the just is blessed.” We die to the Lord, and He is the good husbandman who will not allow the dying grain to be wasted. Over the graves of His beloved He makes the golden harvest to wave. Let us seek to show that we live unto the Lord. If we have the inward life of consecration, the blessed fruits will appear. The light of love within will shine on the world’s dark pathway. Let us be comforted in seeming life failure that we live unto the Lord, for He can turn the seeming failure into success. Let us not fear death, for in the dark valley we are Christ’s. He will guide safely through to the tearless, deathless land of infinite love and blessedness.
Romans 14:7-8. Living and dying unto the Lord.—Let us investigate the principle here laid down: that both the life of the Christian and the death of the Christian have a special place and use in the divine purposes; that there is something which every man is sent into this world for, and which it were to contravene the ends of his creation if he were to leave unfulfilled.
I. Let us consider first the negative statement of the apostle in relation to this great principle.—“None of us liveth to himself.” None of us. Who are the “us” here spoken of? Manifestly they are the true Christians, as opposed to men of the world; those who place themselves at the disposal of Christ, as opposed to those who care only to live to their own selfish ends; in a word, those who have made a voluntary choice of the divine service and are urged onward in the path of godliness by the power of a new affection and a new hope. The text, however, may be taken in the largest sense, as the expression of a general fact in the divine government, and plainly implying that, living as we do under an economy of mutually dependent ministries—man linked with man, and class bound up with class—not only none of us ought to live to himself, but none of us can five to himself if we would. I say none of us ought to live to himself; for it is clear that God has an original and antecedent claim upon the service of every one of us—upon our time, upon our substance, upon our talents, upon our affection. We are His by every consideration which could be binding on an intelligent spirit—by the right of creation, by the mercy of continued being, by the mystery of redemption, by the derivation from Him of a spiritual nature, by gifts and covenants and revelations and hopes of heaven. “What have we that we have not received?” And what have we received which in strict justice might not have been withheld? Surely we must all feel that “every good gift is from above,”—our table, if it be spread; our cup, if it be full; the medicine, if it heal our sickness; the voice of joy and health, if it be heard in our dwellings; the sweet sense of security, if there be none to make us afraid. All secondary agencies—chance, skill, judgment, friends, influence—are but the servants of the great Benefactor bringing our blessings to us. They are the bearers of the cup, not the fillers of the cup. The Lord stands by the well, giving to every man as it pleaseth Him. Hast thou riches? “The Lord thy God, it is He that giveth thee power to get wealth.” Hast thou understanding and gifts? It is the Lord that “maketh thee to differ from another,” and endued thee with “a wise, understanding heart.” Reputation and credit had not been thine if the Lord had not “hidden thee from the scourge of tongues”; and if the tranquillities of domestic life are thine, “He maketh peace in thy borders, strengthening the bars of thy gates, and blessing thy children within thee.” What, then, follows from this but that we live to Him who gives us all the means to live; that we lay upon the altar of our obedience a living and loving sacrifice—our heart’s cheerfulest, our mind’s noblest, our soul’s best?
II. But there is an affirmative view of our principle to be taken.—Besides saying our life cannot be inoperative, cannot be resultless, cannot be barren both of good and evil, the text specifies a positive designation of this life to a place among great agencies, intimates that out of it God would get honours to Himself, and so teaches us that there is no man so useless and helpless in the world as not to be able to do some good if he would. “For whether we live, we live unto the Lord.” This expression may be taken first as implying the possession of a principle of internal and spiritual religion—a life derived from Christ, centred in Christ, devoted to Christ. A man must live before he acts—must be in a state of reconciliation to God before he devotes himself to His service. Religion is a choice—the choice of Christ as a Saviour, of God as a portion, of the ways of wisdom as the ways of pleasantness, of the hope of heaven as our exceeding great reward. All this supposes activity, energy, devotedness—body, soul, and spirit consecrated and given up to God; and nothing dead about us but the love of the world and self and sin. “Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” But, again, there is in this part of the text the assertion of a great rule of duty—a declaration that our life is to be consecrated to the great ends of moral usefulness. We “live unto the Lord” when we live for the good of His people, for the honour of His cause, for the extension of His Church, for the glory of His name. And the consciousness that we are so living, and must so live, is one of the first indications of a renewed mind.
III. But to this declaration the text adds another, that “when he dies, he dies unto the Lord.”—He who does not live to himself shall not die to himself. Christians can neither live useless lives nor die useless deaths. God has a purpose in both and a property in both; “so that, whether they live or die, they are the Lord’s.”—D. Moore.
Romans 14:7-8. Christian devotedness.—This sentiment is strikingly characteristic of Christianity, and marks it with features so noble and benevolent that, whilst it is a key to its design, it offers one of the greatest motives by which its discipline and influence are recommended.
I. No man liveth to himself.—This is not only characteristic of the true Christian, but is essentially so; for a man who liveth to himself, by the sentence of the text, is not a Christian. It indicates:
1. That the Christian regards the great end of his being. Human existence must have an object. God acts not in anything without design. Nature is full of this. Every star, animal, plant, has some object. That this atom of the rock is in this place rather than that is determined by some purpose. Is man, then, exempt from this law? There is an end of life, a purpose of creation and preservation, and of the still more wondrous dispensation of redemption. It becomes us to inquire what that end is, and steadily to pursue it.
2. No Christian man liveth to himself: this indicates the respect which he habitually has to the approbation of God. Here, again, appears the distinction between the Christian and the man who lives to himself. The man who lives to himself cultivates that principle and this passion, does this and avoids the other; but the motive is not God, but his own self. The Christian sets God at his right hand, seeks His approbation, and to Him his heart is always open.
3. No Christian liveth to himself: this indicates the interest he feels in the cause of Christ. To live unto the Lord by living for His cause and to live for ourselves is impossible. The extension of the work of Christ in every age goes upon the same principle. The principle of selfishness and that of usefulness are distinct and contrary. The principle of one is contraction; of the other, expansion.
4. No Christian liveth to himself: this indicates a benevolent concern to alleviate the temporal miseries of his suffering fellow-men. Spiritual charities are the most important, but they are not our duties exclusively. He who lives to the Lord will have His example in view; and in that he is seen going about doing good.
II. No Christian man dieth to himself; he dieth to the Lord.—As a reward for not living to himself, he is not suffered to die unto himself.
1. It may be in judgment to others. It may be in judgment to families who have refused admonition and to unfaithful Churches when a Barnabas or an Apollos or a Boanerges is called away.
2. It may be hastened in mercy to him. Good men are often removed to heaven before scenes of wretchedness and misery are presented.
3. It is prolonged in mercy to others. He is not always taken away from the evil to come. He is sometimes to endure it, and private feelings give way to public good. (Jeremiah and St. Paul.)
4. No Christian man dieth to himself, for his death is that by which Christ may be glorified. Let us not be extreme in our anxieties about death, let us be anxious to glorify God in our death, and He will take care of all the rest.
III. The man who lives and dies, not to himself, but to the Lord, is the Lord’s in life and death.—To be bound to Him, but to yield ourselves to His service and glory. The Christian is the Lord’s in life. Life includes our earthly blessings; life includes our afflictions; life is the period in which we are trained for the maturity of holiness. And the Christian is the Lord’s in death. The body is laid down in hope; the grave has been sanctified by the body of Christ, and the key is in His hands.
1. It is founded on justice. To live to ourselves is unjust. Our obligations to God are absolute.
2. It is founded on benevolence. God might have rendered men much less dependent on others than they are.
3. This is a principle founded on the ministerial character. A minister living to himself is the most pitiable object on which the eye can fall. To him was committed the cause of Christ, and he has been indifferent to the general movement, if his department has been enough to grind him his daily bread.
4. Let us see the great end of life. It is to live to please God; to live as Christ lived on earth—soberly, righteously, godly, benevolently. As Christians we employ talents which will be rewarded in another state. We thus prepare for death; and in that awful moment what a heaven it will be to know that, we die to Him, and that, “whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s”!—R. Watson.
SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS ON Romans 14:7-9
Is the Lord our Lord?—Is the Lord of dead and living in any real sense our Lord? Has He that conquered the grave conquered the worldly part in me? Are covetousness, ambition, impurity, indolence, thoroughly put down? Questions such as these are painful to propose, and hard to answer. If we are immersed wholly in the present world, the fashion of which passeth away, if Christ be dead in vain so far as we are concerned, the thoughts that belong to this day may help to awaken us. The mountain on the horizon seems small and dim, but towards it we are travelling, and it grows daily bigger: it is the mountain of heaven that we must scale, and there is a dark and silent valley, invisible at present, through which we must pass before we reach it. Compare the great realities that we have been looking at to-day with the all-engrossing business that draws our attention off them. The subtlest tongue will be silent before long; the most eager strife will cease; the wisest decision will be quoted no longer at most than the kind of right it relates to shall subsist. But we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; and at that bar the issue that is decided is for eternity. May He that judges us plead our cause also! And because we shall have acknowledged from our hearts that He is the Lord of the dead and the living, may He wash out our sins with His blood, and say, “Thou hast been faithful unto death; I will give thee a crown of life”!—Archbishop Thomson.
The Redeemer’s dominion.—The Redeemer’s dominion over men is forcibly declared to have been the end of His ministry on earth. The apostle’s words are very express and emphatic. “To this end that” signifies, in language as strong as could be used to note design, that the purpose of the Passion was the attainment of universal dominion over the human race in time and in eternity. To this end, and no other; for this purpose, and nothing short of it; with this design, embracing and consummating all other designs. But we must view it under two aspects: it was a purpose aimed at before the death; in the Resurrection it was a purpose reached. He died that He might have the dominion; He lived that He might exercise. Now, of this mighty realm of the risen Christ, the dead constitute the vast majority. “What, in comparison of the uncounted hosts, numbered only by the infinite Mind, are the few hundreds of millions that any moment are called the living? It is in the realm of the shades that we contemplate our great family in its vastest dimensions, as it has from the first generation been gaining on the numbers of the living and swelling onwards to the stupendous whole bound up in the federal headship of the first and second Adam.” Now, in all this vast domain, there is but one rightful Lord of the conscience; there may be other lords with dominion, and they may be many, but in the realm of conscience there is only one Lord, and He is the risen Saviour!—Pope and Saurin.
Christ our Master.—As he always exists, as a Christian, in and by his Master, so he always exists for his Master. He has, in the reality of the matter, no dissociated and independent interest. Not only in preaching and teaching, and bearing articulate witness to Jesus Christ, does he, if his life is true to its ideal and its secret, “live not unto himself”; not with aims which terminate for one moment in his own credit, for example, or his own comfort. Equally in the engagements of domestic life, of business life, of public affairs; equally (to look towards the humbler walks of duty) in the day’s work of the Christian servant or peasant or artisan; “whether he lives, he lives unto the Master, or whether he dies, he dies unto the Master”; whether he wakes or sleeps, whether he toils or rests, whether it be the term or the vacation of life, “whether he eats or drinks, or whatsoever he does,” he is the Master’s property for the Master’s use.
“Teach me, my God and King,
In all things Thee to see;
And what I do in anything
To do it as to Thee.
“A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine;
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws
Makes that and th’ action fine.”
Moule.
A threefold cord binds to Christ.—Christ’s death, Christ’s resurrection, and Christ’s intercession—a threefold cord, which cannot be broken—bind you indissolubly in the “bundle of life” with Him. I may be faint and weary, but my God cannot. I may fluctuate and alter as to my frames and feelings, but, my Redeemer is unchangeably the same. I should utterly fail and come to nothing if left to myself; but I cannot be left to myself, for the Spirit of truth has said, “I will never leave thee nor forsake thee.” He will renew my strength by enduing me with His own power. He is wise to foresee and provide for all my dangers. He is rich to relieve and succour me in all my wants. He is faithful to perfect and perform all His promises. He is blessed and immortal to enrich my poor desponding soul with blessedness and immortality. Oh, what a great and glorious Saviour for such a mean and worthless sinner! Oh, what a bountiful and indulgent Friend for such a base and insignificant rebel! What, what am I, when I compare myself, and all I am myself, with what I can conceive of my God, and of what He hath kindly promised to me? What a mystery I am to myself and to men! A denizen of earth to become a star of heaven! A corruptible sinner made an incorruptible saint! A rebel made a child! an outlaw an heir! A deserver of hell made an inheritor of heaven! A stronghold of the devil changed into a temple of the living God! An enemy and a beggar exalted to a throne, united in friendship with Jehovah, made one with Christ, a possessor of His Spirit, and a sharer of all this honour, happiness, and glory for evermore! Oh! what manner, what matter of love is this? Lord, take my heart, my soul, my all. I can render Thee no more; I could render Thee no less. It is indeed a poor return. My body and my soul are but as “two mites”; end yet—glory to Thy great name!—Thou who didst esteem those of the poor widow wilt not despise these of mine. Lord, they are Thine own, and I can only give Thee what is Thine. I melt with gratitude; and even this gratitude is Thy gift. Oh, take it, and accept both it and me in Thyself, who art all my salvation and all my desire, for ever and for ever.—Ambrose Serle.
Christ and the Christian.—Have I overdrawn the claims of Jesus Christ upon the Christian? I cannot present them in all the amplitude and depth, and at the same time the minuteness and precision, with which you will find them set forth in the New Testament as a whole. There Christ is indeed all things in all His followers. There the Christian is a being whose true reason and true life is altogether and always in Jesus Christ. He is slave, and his Redeemer is absolute owner. He is branch, and his Redeemer is root. He is limb, and his Redeemer is head. He is vessel, and the great Master of the house is always to have full and free use of Him for any purposes of His own. He has no rights and can set up no claims as against his Lord: “If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?”—H. C. G. Moule.
Surrender to Christ.—To surrender at discretion to Jesus Christ, who is not a code but a master, is so far forth to put your being into right relations with itself through right relations with Him. It is to gravitate at last upon your centre, and to be in gear. It is to be possessed, spiritually possessed; but by whom? By the Lord of archetypal order; by the Prince of peace; by the Prince of life; by Him in whom, according to one profound scripture, all this complex universe itself “consists,” is held together, holds together. The more of His presence and dominion, the less of fret and friction. The less resistance to Him, the more genuine and glad and fruitful action—as it were a sphere-music of the moving microcosmos of the soul.—H. C. G. Moule.
Christ’s threefold right.—Now, if we examine, we shall find that Christ has every kind of claim and right to us. He has a right derived from His creative power. If “all things were made by Him,” He made us, and not we ourselves. In consequence of this He has a propriety in us, not only such as no man can have in a fellow-creature, but such as even no father has in his own children. They are his in a subordinate and limited degree; but we are the Lord’s absolutely and entirely. Suppose we were to return to Him all that we received from Him, what would be left as our own? He has a right derived from His providential care. He has not only given us life and favour, but His visitation hath preserved our spirits. Whose are we but His in whom we live, move, and have our being? How mean to enjoy the light of His sun, to breathe His air, to eat constantly at His table, to be clothed from His wardrobe, and not own and acknowledge our obligations to Him! He has a right derived from His redeeming mercy. We are not our own, but bought with a price, and He paid it. To feel the force of this claim it will be necessary for us to weigh three things:
1. The mighty evils from which He has delivered us: sin, the power of darkness, the present evil world, death, and the wrath to come.
2. The state to which He has advanced us. Even the beginnings of it here, its earnests and foretastes, are indescribable and inconceivable; even now the joy is unspeakable and full of glory, and the peace passeth all understanding.
3. The way in which He has thus ransomed us. All comes free to us; but what did it cost Him? Owing to our slight views of the evil of sin and the holiness of God, we are too little struck with the greatness of redemption and the difficulties attending it. It was easy to destroy man; but to restore him, in a way that should magnify the law which had been broken, and display God as the just as well as the justifier, was a work to which the Lord Jesus only was adequate; and what does it require even of Him? Not a mere volition, not a mere exertion, as when He delivered the Jews from Egypt, and spake the world into being. He must assume flesh and blood. He dwelt among us. For thirty-three years He was “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” Let us go over His history; let us survey His sufferings; let us meditate on His agony in the garden, His shame on the cross, His abasement in the lowest parts of the earth; and all this for enemies, and all not only without our desert, but without our desire—till we feel we are drawn and bound with the cords of a man and the bands of love—a love that passeth knowledge. Hence He has a right, derived, not only from what He has done, but from what we have done—a right derived from our dedication. If Christians, we have ratified His claims, and have actually surrendered ourselves to Him, renouncing every other owner, and saying, Lord, I am Thine; save me. Other lords beside Thee have had dominion over me; but henceforth by Thee only will I make mention of Thy name. And having opened your mouth unto the Lord, you cannot go back.—W. Jay.
Christian citizenship.—It is scarcely surprising that men sometimes charge Christianity with having enfeebled the civic virtues. Patriotism, they tell us, and public spirit, burned with a deeper, steadier glow in ancient Athens or Rome than in any modern city. And yet there is something of paradox in the thought that such a result can be spoken of as following upon the teaching of Jesus; for the spirit of His teaching is, as some of our modern writers would phrase it, essentially altruistic: it is inherently and fundamentally social; its starting-point is self-abandonment, its root principles are love and sacrifice, and its natural fruits in every Christian character should have been social enthusiasm. While the apparatus of social life was still pagan, the Christian was of course bound to think of himself as a member of a separate community; but the thought of citizenship or membership of a community was none the less his guiding and inspiring thought, as it should be ours, if our life is to be worthy of the privileges we inherit and the hope that is set before us in Christ Jesus. In this matter, as in all else that concerns our social and religious life, we derive useful and clear guidance from the language and the spirit of St. Paul. See how his mind was filled with thoughts of citizenship. To the Philippians he writes, “Do your duty worthily as citizens of the gospel kingdom.” The Ephesians are addressed by him as “fellow-citizens with the saints.” In describing his own life the thought is still the same. “In all good conscience,” he says, “I have lived as a good citizen unto God.” Everywhere, in fact, his language implies this fundamental thought, as the inspiring purpose of his life, that no man liveth to himself, but that we are members one of another, because we are Christ’s and our life is hid with Christ in God. And if we turn from his language to the plan and conduct of his life, we see in him the very type and pattern of a true Christian patriot, working at his trade, self-supporting, independent, not forgetting his position or his rights as a Roman citizen, devoted to his own people with a devotion surpassing the power of words to express, and yet never engrossed with any earthly occupation or by any earthly ambition, and absolutely free from that enervating spirit of self-indulgence which makes such havoc of all higher purposes in the life of men. It is good for us thus to think of him for a moment apart from his great name as an inspired apostle, for thus we may hope to catch the infection of his keen and fervid interest in all the relations of our common life, and to be ourselves uplifted as we see how he uplifts and purifies all he touches with the fire of his spiritual earnestness. See how he takes these phrases about citizenship, shaming by his use of them those who care nothing for the thing itself—how he takes them up and enlists them in the service of the new kingdom; thus consecrating, so to speak, and transfiguring the citizen spirit. As we linger over all this—Paul, the Roman citizen—Paul, the Jewish patriot—Paul, the apostle of a new citizenship in the New Jerusalem, where there is neither bond nor free, neither Jew nor Gentile, no national antipathies, no class antagonisms, no party bitterness, no mean and petty rivalries, where all are brethren in Christ, and called to mutual service—the question must come up in our thoughts, What do we make of our citizenship? We live in crowded communities. What is our life in regard to this citizen spirit? Is the spirit strong in us? or is it weak? Does it inspire and direct our life? and is it of the Pauline type? Does it save us from the canker of pride and prejudice, and the spirit of isolation? Does it destroy the root of selfishness in us? and does it make us revolt from all forms of self-indulgence, sensuality, animalism? Or does it somehow leave these things to grow in all their strength in our community, and to propagate themselves after their kind, as if it were no concern of ours? If so, it has to be confessed that the Holy Spirit has not yet enfranchised us, and our citizenship is not such as becometh the gospel of Christ.—J. Percival.
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 14
Romans 14:7. Erasmus and Bilney.—Thousands of men are influenced by persons whom they never saw. The Reformation began at Cambridge University very early in the sixteenth century by Bilney, a solitary student, reading a Greek Testament with Latin translations and notes which Erasmus had published. Bilney had never seen Erasmus, but the quiet work of Erasmus was the means of bringing Bilney to the knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus. Bilney, again, influenced Latimer, who was one of the fathers of the English Reformation, and who suffered martyrdom for the truth. Thus the Reformation in England may be largely traced to the quiet work of Erasmus as he sat at his desk, and used his vast learning and intellect to make the word of God more familiar to the people of his time. Buchanan and Judson.—A young American student more than seventy years ago happened to read a printed sermon which had fallen into his hands. The sermon was entitled “The Star in the East,” by Dr. Claudius Buchanan, and described the progress of the gospel in India and the evidence there afforded of the divine power. That sermon, by a man whom he had never seen, fell into the young student’s soul like a spark into tinder, and in six months Adoniram Judson resolved to become a missionary to the heathen. That little printed sermon, preached in England perhaps with no apparent fruit, became through God’s blessing the beginning of the great work of American foreign missions. You may not be an Erasmus or a Claudius Buchanan; but God may have as great a work for you to do as He had for them. What an influence for good Christian parents may exercise upon their children with far-reaching results to the world! The faithful Sabbath-school teacher may leaven with gospel truth young minds that may yet control the destinies of a nation. Young women, by the power of their own Christian character, may change for the better the muddy current of many a godless life. The great matter is for every one of us to live near to God, to cultivate a Christ-like character, and then our life is sure to be a blessing. You must walk with God if you would have weight with men. Personal holiness is the key to personal influence for good.—C. H. J., in “Pulpit Commentary.”
Romans 14:8. Death in the Lord is sweet.—Balaam exclaimed, “Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his.” Life in the Lord is the bright way to death in the Lord, and death in the Lord is the pleasant cypress avenue to eternal glory.
“So live that, when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan that moves
To that mysterious realm where each shall take
His character in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not like the quarry slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him and lies down to pleasant dreams.”
Bryant.