The Ennobling Power of the Gospel.
I. Externally these kings and priests, these bearers on their heads of the Spirit of glory and of God, are invested with no dignities. Strangers and scattered, pained by ever-varying temptations, many of them slaves in the households of the heathen, all liable to be reproached for the name of Christ such was their actual condition of humiliation and obligation; such, for many of them, was their actual present poverty and meanness of estate. They had been transformed, transfigured. From beings merely of the world around them, from the huge commonalty of character and condition, certainly from no assemblage of genius and culture, they had been refined into the family likeness of the children of God, by faith in Jesus. They had that upon them which, as we well know, made them an awful yet blessed power on the earth: the Spirit of glory and of God.
II. It was the nature of the message of Jesus to give to these peasants and slaves of Asia Minor the title, the aspirations, the courage, the wisdom, of citizens and heirs of heaven. It emancipated them into a Divine freedom. It raised them to a supernatural nobility. It taught them such things as facts about the soul and its future, about eternity, about God, as made them feel a totally new wonder and significance in themselves, their duty and their destiny; and so it led them to act, to live and die, with a purpose and in a manner that answered in some measure to that deep significance. Nothing but the Scripture revelation of redemption in Jesus Christ, with eternal glory, has proved itself to be the bearer of all the fruits of the Spirit. Other things can produce strength without meekness, kindness without holiness, aspirations without repentance, refinement without love. The Gospel is formed to produce them all, as the direct result from its simplest elements, and this not only because it is the message from the throne, but because, being such, it remembers, and provides for, and addresses the whole of man: his misery and his greatness; his greatness and his misery.
H. C. G. Moule, Christ is All,p. 191.
References: 1 Peter 4:17. J. G. Rogers, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxxvi., p. 84. 1 Peter 4:18. J. Natt, Posthumous Sermons,p. 229; Preacher's Monthly,vol. vii., p. 85.