Our True Orbit.
I. History tells us for how many thousand years men believed that the sun went round the earth. History tells us how men went on century after century inventing new theories to account for the different new facts which this belief had to account for as their knowledge grew. And for how many centuries have men practically set aside the similar truth we are now looking at, the truth that we must not make ourselves the central point of our life, must not look to self first, and make life and the works of life circle round our hopes and fears, but look out into God's great world of life and make others the centre round which we circle, and doing good to them our power of gravitation, by which all things move by secret heavenly attraction, binding us by an unseen mystery to heaven. Self-seeking or self-goodness is no more life than the earth is the centre of the universe. Look on yourself as less than the meanest life you help, not greater; for lo, it is Christ and His life you help. Go out of self; fasten on by cords of love to all those others who have been to you as yet either unthought of, or thought of as helps or hindrances to you, instead of worlds of life in Christ, by being fastened on to which you live. Revolve round others in loving-kindness and faith, instead of making others and your dealings with them revolve round you. "Because ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me." Your life circles round Him the moment being kind to others becomes the sole aim in all you do.
E. Thring, Uppingham Sermons,vol. ii., p. 155.
Brotherly Love.
There are many kinds of knowledge, but the most difficult is self-knowledge. Now in spiritual self-knowledge it is not so requisite that we be able to say in any given time whereabouts we stand in the Divine life, as it is that we be able to tell at all times whether we do really live unto God or not. This is the only self-examination commanded in the Bible. But we long for some simple, infallible test whereby we may try and determine our own state before God. Such a test we have here: "We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren."
I. Look at the thing which is to be known. The idea conveyed in the words is of two states, two lands, separated as by a gulf; and there is now, what one day there will not be, a transit from one to the other. The one side is a land of death. There everything that is done is short and uncertain. Its lights blaze for a moment, then they go out, and when they are gone the night seems darker than if they had never been. It is a country of graves, and the joys of pleasure have no resurrection. On the opposite shore everything is in essential light, because there is a new principle there. That principle is one which works for ever and ever. That light, springing from invisible sources, nourished by hidden nourishments, reaching on to unknown passages, is still gaining more.
II. The sign by which we know it: "We love the brethren." The brethren are those who have the love of the Lord Jesus Christ in their hearts, even though there be much clinging to them that is unrefined, and unintellectual, and unpleasing. We must love all the brethren. And this very comprehensiveness of a catholic spirit is the mark of a mind that has had to do with the largeness of an almighty God.
J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,2nd series, p. 59.
References: 1 John 3:14. H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, The Life of Duty,vol. ii., p. 17; S. Minton, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xvii., p. 312.