CRITICAL NOTES
Romans 15:5.—Christ is both the example and motive of the Christian mind. God who bestows patience; just as the God of grace is the God who imparts grace.
Romans 15:6.—God of the man Christ Jesus; Father of the divine Word.
Romans 15:7.—The glory of God was the end of all Christ did on earth or does in heaven.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Romans 15:5-7
A prayer that looks for results.—Oftentimes we pray, and do not expect answers. Our prayers are in a great measure purposeless. Modern scepticism creeps into the heart of the modern Christian. What profit shall we have if we pray unto Him? expresses too much the latent feeling of many natures. Let us seek to have more faith in the efficacy of prayer; let us rise up to the position of ancient saints; let us realise our privilege, and believe that God answers prayer.
I. The prayer.—Notice about this prayer that it is:
1. Brief. Most of the prayers of the New Testament are short, and yet powerful. The model prayer is short. This, however, does not preclude long and earnest wrestling in secret. The Master was much in prayer. As the Master, so the servant should be.
2. Comprehensive. Short prayers are sometimes the most comprehensive. How much is comprehended in the Church of England collects! Here in one verse is a collect of large comprehension. A great soul, feeling the burden of its desire, puts much thought in few words. Little thought, many words. Let our words be few, but let our thoughts be many and earnest, as we come to the God of thought.
3. Well planned. God is addressed as the fountain of those qualities which are needful for the desired result. Patience and consolation are needful for Christian harmony. Provocations will arise. The strong will require patience with the infirmities of the weak; while the weak will require patience with the tendency to overbearance in the strong. Mutual forbearance demands patience and consolation from the divine source. Unity of affection will be disturbed if there be not patience. Oneness of sentiment, likemindedness, sameness of heart, must be generated from God through the gracious channel and according to the glorious example of Jesus Christ.
II. The expected result.—In the modern Church we find too often many minds and many mouths, and some of the mouths very large, very noisy, and very difficult to close. One mind and one mouth—the one mind of love, the one mouth of praise to God. What a blessed unity! What divine harmony! Many minds blended by the one mind of love; many mouths so united as if only one mouth were expressing the various sounds. One mind absorbed in the mind of eternal love. What a picture! The many minds and many mouths of the Church militant concentred in one mind and one mouth that glorifies God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The children of earth spring from one Father, and should have one mind of love. The primitive Church is a pattern for the modern Church. It is true that there were discords, but there was such harmony that it was said, “See how these Christians love one another.” St. Paul’s prayer and St. Paul’s example not without blessed results. Let us each pray and act so that one mind and one mouth may be the characteristic of the modern Church.
III. The natural exhortation.—“Wherefore receive ye one another.” The exhortation is founded on the prayer and on the expected results. “Receive ye one another, as Christ also received us to the glory of God.” How graciously wide the receptions of Christ! Our “at homes” are formal receptions occurring at wide intervals; Christ was always at home to the homeless, the sad, and the weary. The King of heaven held court with publicans and sinners. His drawing-room is the wide world, where weary hearts are seeking rest. To be presented at His court, we need neither rank, nor title, nor costly apparel. He welcomes broken hearts and contrite souls; the weak He loves to tend; the bruised reed He does not break. How difficult and how far-reaching the exhortation, “Wherefore receive ye one another, as Christ,” etc.! Let our receptions be loving and hearty. The grace of love is nobler than the pompous dignity of officialism. Let us receive one another. Let Christians exemplify the true solidarity. Let them be brothers, not in name merely, but in deed and in truth.
Romans 15:6. Worship of the unknowable yet lovable God.—That which is perfect cannot be made more glorious. We cannot by our adoration or admiration increase the glory of the sun, the brilliancy of the stars, the majesty of the mountains, the beauty of the landscape, the loveliness of the perfect flower, the melody of the sweet-singing bird. God is perfect, and we cannot by our worship increase His glory. He was glorious before the heavens by their splendours proclaimed His glory, and He will be glorious when they have shrivelled up as a parchment scroll. He was glorious before Adam sang His praises amid the beauties of the primeval Eden, and He will be glorious when this planet in its present form has heard the last chant of praise. But as the heavens declare His glory, as the charming landscape sets forth His divine goodness, so man may “glorify God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” What a pity that man is so often the least vocal amid the many praising voices of God’s world! Let it be ours “with one mind and one mouth to glorify God.”
I. Whom must we worship?—It is like a truism to say that we must not worship ourselves; and yet is there not a vast deal of self-worship in our public exercises of religion? Is not the God we worship the projected ideal of our own creation? Idolatry is supposed to be extinct in these countries, and to have been extinct for a long period. But there are idols of the mind; and if we were gifted with the power of seeing the unseen, we should be astonished at the number of idols being worshipped in the temples set apart to the worship of the one God. Are our pantheons all destroyed? Do we worship ourselves when we ought to worship God—ourselves, by proclaiming our goodness to the world—ourselves, by setting forth our own peculiar creed—ourselves, by listening to our favourite preacher? Let us seek more and more to worship the eternal Spirit “in spirit and in truth.” We must worship:
1. The unknowable God. We have been told in a recent book that God is not wisely trusted when declared unintelligible. The God who cannot be wisely trusted cannot be properly worshipped. But what reason is there to shrink from the idea of a God who is unintelligible? Surely Zophar’s question is pertinent to such objections: “Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection?” If God were fully intelligible, He could not command the admiration of a noble soul and the worship of an aspiring heart. The unknown is all around us. We move amid the unknowables. We ourselves are amongst the number. Take the simple question, What is life? and who is there to answer? What is that subtle force which the anatomist’s skill cannot detect? Does life reside in the pineal gland as on a throne and give orders over the kingdom of man? Is it an all-pervading force? Is it a delicate ether extracted from exquisitely compounded and distilled material substances? Life is, with our present faculties, unknowable. Is it any wonder that the Giver of life is unknowable? God is infinite, and is thus unknowable. We do not know what infinite duration means. The infinite is simply a mysterious something stretching beyond the finite. The moment we think of the infinite we make it finite by our thought. The infinite is unintelligible; but we believe in a duration which can only be described by an unintelligible term. The infinite power, wisdom, and love of God are unintelligible; still we believe in a wisdom that planned and a power which worked out creative designs, and a love which, working by power and wisdom, achieved our redemption. We worship a power, wisdom, and even love which we cannot fully understand. Worship is the adoration of the loving spirit—it is the upward rising of the soul; and how can the soul rise towards that Being who is on the same level? Worship is elicited, not by the little, but by the great. The old church-builders had surely this in view when they reared their grandly vast and solemn temples. We must in our true worship rise to the unknown and see the unseen. The eternal Spirit is unknown; but finite spirits are drawn to worship “in spirit and in truth.”
2. The knowable God. God is unintelligible, but not wholly. We feel after Him and find Him, though not the whole of His divine nature. We touch and are touched by Him on every side, and yet we do but touch the fringe of His garment of inaccessible light. A child does not know his father; and yet what would be the nature of the child’s feelings if told that he did not know his father and should not love him? The child does not know and yet knows his father. The children of the eternal Father do not know and yet know. We worship a knowable God, for we worship the God and Father of Jesus Christ—the God of the human nature and the Father of the divine nature. He that hath seen Christ hath seen the Father, and cannot be said to worship a God who is wholly unintelligible. Christ, by His light, reflects on the world the eternal brightness. Christ, by His superhuman excellencies manifested in this lower sphere, makes known the excellency of God. He rises infinitely above us, but He condescendingly comes forth from the infinitely vast in the person of the incarnated Son of God. He is far away beyond our comprehension, but He stoops to the world’s littleness by a revelation of His greatness in the greatness of the Saviour. Many books have been written and much study has been given about and to the life of Jesus, and still He is beyond our poor knowledge; but shall the loving bride be told that she does not know the divine Bridegroom? We know Jesus, for we live in Him and He in us. We touch His thoughts; we feel the motions of His mighty mind. We know Him sweetly and lovingly, and knowing the Christ we know the God and Father. Our sense of awe is inspired by the unknowable God. Our feeling of blessed union is fostered by the knowable God.
3. The lovable God. God’s love is unknown and yet well known to the loving nature. He comes forth from the vast unknown, and applies to Himself a well-known and familiar human term. He is the Father of Jesus Christ. God is not an unintelligible abstraction, but a father. The divine nature has in it the principle of fatherhood. From the eternal Father spring the many time fathers. He is over one vast family, and Christ Jesus is His firstborn Son. There is fatherliness in the nature and heart of the vast Unknown, and this fatherliness broods over the children of men. We worship a Father unknown as to His vastness, but known as to His love. And yet His love is unknown. Sufficient for us to know that He loves the Son, and that He loves all those who love the Son; and shall we not add that He has a love for all the earthborn? “We love Him because He first loved us.” We worship, we adore, we magnify a lovable God. As the sweet sun shining through the vast spaces of the great cathedral makes its sublimity attractive and cheers the whole edifice, so the sweeter sun of the Father’s love shining through the vast spaces of His profound nature renders the vastness attractive and cheers the heart of every sincere worshipper.
II. How must we worship?—“With one mind and one mouth.” When all hearts are melted by love’s sweet flame and fused into one shining unity, then all mouths will be in blessed unison. Pure and united, harmonious strains issue from a concert of well-tuned instruments; and so from the united spirits of Christian worshippers there results united worship. Love is the true musical director which can keep all the parts going harmoniously better than the baton of the best musical conductor the world has seen. The music of love is richer, vaster, and freer from discords than the music of the best earthly composers. It is difficult to get the best-trained choir to sing as with one mouth, still more difficult to secure oneness of mind; but this can be accomplished by the magical influence of love,—one mouth, not because all the other mouths are closed by law, by custom, or by indifference, but because all mind and speak the same things, because all voices are sweetly blended.
III. What is to be the effect of our worship?—The first great object and effect is plainly that God may be glorified by the aspect of a united worshipping community. The ideal described by the apostle is that of the union of the entire Church, composed of Jews and Gentiles, in the adoration of the God and Father who has redeemed and sanctified it by Jesus Christ. “This union was,” as Godet says, “in a sense Paul’s personal work, and the prize of his apostolic labours. How his heart must have leapt, hearing already, by the anticipation of faith, the hymn of saved humanity! It is the part of every believer, therefore, to make all the advances and all the sacrifices which love demands in order to work for so magnificent a result.” Our hearts glow at the prospect; but, alas! the hymn of saved humanity is far from being a perfected composition. The number of the voices is not being increased, at least not at all in proportion to the increase of the population. In one of our largest towns only a little more than one sixth of the population was found in places of worship on the census Sunday. What shall be done for our modern Babylon, where three millions have no connection at all with religious services? We are told that in a church-going part of the country the good custom is declining. Shall we despair? By no means. But let us ask, Are our hearts right towards God? Do we need repentance and thorough reformation, lest God remove our candlestick out of its place? Have Christians the one mind of love to God and to one another? Is there the one mouth speaking only to the glory of God? Let us not seek to attract by mere outward glitter, though we are far from deprecating any attempts which may be made to render God’s house and services attractive; but let us draw by purifying the inward. Let us earnestly and believingly pray to Him whose arm is not yet shortened, and whose willingness to save is still as vast as when He gave His well-beloved Son.
SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS ON Romans 15:5-7
Paul desires harmony.—Paul desires for the Roman Christians a harmony of spirit which will fill every mouth with one song of praise and exalt God in the eyes of mankind. He knows that this cannot be unless the strong in faith deny themselves for the good of their weaker brethren. He urges this as their bounden duty, and points to the example of Christ. By the use of the word “endurance” he admits the difficulty of the task. But he reminds them that to prompt them to such endurance the ancient Scriptures were written. And knowing that even the divine word is powerless without the presence of the divine Speaker, he prays that God, who enables them to maintain their Christian confidence, will also give them the spirit of harmony. He desires this in order that the weak, instead of losing the little faith they have, may join with the strong in praise to God.—Beet.
The advantage of a Church.—Here and there an unchurched soul may stir the multitudes to lofty deeds; isolated men, strong enough to preserve their souls apart from the Church, but shortsighted enough perhaps to fail to see that others cannot, may set high examples and stimulate to national reforms. But for the rank and file of us, made of such stuff as we are made of, the steady pressures of fixed institutions, the regular diets of a common worship, and the education of public Christian teaching are too obvious safeguards of spiritual culture to be set aside. Even Renan declares his conviction that, “Beyond the family and outside the State, man has need of the Church.… Civil society, whether it calls itself a commune, a canton, or a province, a state or fatherland, has many duties towards the improvement of the individual; but what it does is necessarily limited. The family ought to do much more, but often it is insufficient; sometimes it is wanting altogether. The association created in the name of moral principle can alone give to every man coming into this world a bond which unites him with the past, duties as to the future, examples to follow, a heritage to receive and to transmit, and a tradition of devotion to continue.” Apart altogether from the quality of its contribution to society, in the mere quantity of the work it turns out it stands alone. Even for social purposes the Church is by far the greatest employment bureau in the world. And the man who, seeing where it falls short, withholds on that account his witness to its usefulness is a traitor to history and to fact.—Drummond.
Intellectual young England is against churchgoing.—Intellectual young England is grandly patronising, and condescendingly allows us to attend the public services of religion if we feel so disposed. Its language is, I do not oppose churchgoing, or even say that it is undesirable. My point is merely that it is not necessary. Now necessary things are those which are requisite for a purpose. And in this sense public worship is necessary; for it is requisite for the purpose of fostering religious feeling in the individual, and for the purpose of preserving religion alive in the land. The man who says that private worship is enough, and that it is a waste of time to go to church, is not inspired with the true spirit of Christianity, which is benevolent. It is not necessary to take our meals with the family, or to join the club, or to adhere to a political party; but it is requisite for social well-being and prosperity. So that in this true sense it is necessary; and so also is it necessary “with one mind and one mouth to glorify God” in the hours of prayer. But it is affirmed that the Bible does not require it. St. Paul in this passage seems to regard it as an un questioned duty, and his point is to prepare the earlier believers for its right performance. Young England has a curious exposition of the direct command in Hebrews, where we are told not to forsake the assembling ourselves together. He says it does not apply to churchgoing at all, for the house of God spoken of in Romans 15:21 is clearly not a material one. Certainly not; but it is a house on the earth, for it consists of true believers, over which Christ is the High Priest. The passage relates to a present duty which is to be performed in expectation of the approaching day. Christ, as His custom was, went to the synagogue every Sabbath day. The early Church had frequent meetings for fellowship and Christian worship. Religion must decline if the public ordinances of religion are neglected. Mere external contact with the worship of God fails indeed to secure salvation, but wilful contempt of it is the way to ruin. It is a curious feature in young England that he points to the agnostic leaders as non-churchgoers and yet as good men. Doubtless good men in the sense of being moral, but not good men in the sense of being religious and spiritual. How can an agnostic, a man who professes not to know, who willingly remains ignorant, who practically denies a God, be a good man in the highest sense? Agnosticism is not our creed, but Christianity, and we must follow Christ and His apostles and all the faithful The question arises, How much of the morality of our agnostic leaders is due to the age which has been leavened with the pure leaven of the gospel? It is very sad that too many young Englanders owe themselves to religious parents and to surrounding Christian influences, and yet ungratefully spurn the institution which has done so much for our national well-being. Our love to God and to Christ, our gratitude for saving influences, our social instincts, and our patriotism should induce us “with one mind and one mouth to glorify God” in the earthly house set apart to religious services. It may be difficult to speak definitely as to the reason why a nation has declined; but one of the leading concomitants of a nation’s fall is the decline in morals and manners, and these decline with the downfall of religion. When ancient Israel forsook God, then it became an easy prey to the oppressor. Ephesus was once the metropolis of proconsular Asia; not merely in a political, but also in an ecclesiastical sense. It is placed at the head of the seven Churches. It is reported that St. John was its bishop. But Ephesus fell. Young Ephesus said it was not necessary to go to church. The first love departed; both private and public worship was neglected. At the present day the only remains of this once pleasant city are some ruins and the village of Ajosoluck. If we would not see our great metropolis in ruins, if we would not have the desolating tread of foreign foes over our fair green landscapes, we must seek the favour and protection of the eternal God, we must support the public ordinances of religion, we must work and pray for the spread and the increase of noble Christian men and women.
The God of patience.—When we say God is patient, four things are implied:—
I. Provocation.—Where there is nothing to try the temper, annoy, or irritate, there can be no patience. Humanity provokes God. The provocation is great, universal, constant. Measure His patience by the provocation.
II. Sensibility.—Where there is no tenderness of nature, no susceptibility of feeling, there may be obduracy and stoicism, but no patience. Patience implies feeling. God is infinitely sensitive. He feels the provocation. “Oh, do not this abominable thing,” etc.
III. Knowledge.—Where the provocation is not known, however great and however sensitive the being against whom it is directed, there can be no patience. God knows all the provocations.
IV. Power.—Where a being has not the power to resent an insult or to punish a provocation, though he may feel it and know it, his forbearing is not patience—it is simple weakness. He is bound by the infirmity of his nature to be passive. God is all-powerful.—Homilist.
The God of peace.—Whatever may be the amount of agitation in the universe, there is one Being sublimely pacific, without one ripple upon the clear and fathomless river of His nature. Three things are implied in this:—
I. That there is nothing malign in His nature.—Wherever there is any jealousy, wrath, or malice of any description, there can be no peace. Malevolence in any form or degree is soul-disturbing. In whatever mind it exists it is like a tide in the ocean, producing eternal restlessness. There is nothing malign in the infinite heart. He is love.
II. That there is nothing remorseful in His nature.—Wherever conscience accuses of wrong, there is no peace. All compunctions, self-accusations, are soul-distuibing. Moral self complaisance is essential to spirit peace. God is light. He has never done wrong, and His infinite conscience smiles upon Him and blesses Him with peace.
III. That there is nothing apprehensive in His nature.—Wherever there is a foreboding of evil, there is a mental disturbance. Fear is essentially an agitating principle. The Infinite has no fear. He is the absolute master of His position.—Homilist.
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 15
Romans 15:5-6. Glorify God.—I do not wonder that the men nowadays who do not believe the Bible are so very sad when they are in earnest. A writer in one of our reviews tells that he was studying the poems of Matthew Arnold, who believed, not in a living God, but in a something or other, which somehow or other, at sometime or other, makes for righteousness. The sad and hopeless spirit of the poet passed for the time into the reviewer, and he felt most miserable. He went out for a walk. It was a bleak, wintry day, and he was then at Brodrick, in Arran. The hills were in a winding-sheet of snow, above which arose a ghastly array of clouds. The sky was of a leaden hue, and the sea was making its melancholy moan amid the jagged, dripping rocks. The gloom without joined the gloom within, and made him very wretched. He came upon some boys shouting merrily at play. “Are you at the school?” he asked. “Yes,” was the reply. “And what are you learning?” “I learn,” said one, “what is the chief end of man.” “And what is it?” the reviewer asked. The boy replied, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever.” He at once felt that the boy was taught a religion of grandeur and joy, while the poet’s was a religion of darkness and despair.—J. Wells.