God's Self-revelation through Life.
I. This Scripture opens to us God's living way of making Himself known on earth. The Bible is the record and interpretation of a way of creation and of life which leads from the promise of the beginning on and on, with a purpose never given up, and a goal never lost from sight, and against all human gravitation downward from its high intent, until it completes its course in that one sinless life through which God shines the true Light, the Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. God has been present as a living power in man's life, as the educating and redemptive power in Israel, as the grace and truth of life in Jesus Christ who has declared Him. Such is God's real self-revelation; His life in men's life, His life in the Christ for our life. The written Gospel is, indeed, worthy of the God-Man. His spirit is in it. Nevertheless, our faith in the real and original revelation, in the Christ of the Gospels, does not depend upon absolute flawlessness in the reflecting glass. That is a question, in fact, for the critics. Let them examine and scrutinise every point in the whole Bible to their hearts' content. We are not anxious to dispute concerning the composition of the mirrors; we are content to receive the light which, by its own radiance, proclaims its celestial source. In this light of life we can walk, rejoicing as children of the day.
II. This Scripture discloses God's way of illuminating our lives. Christ entering into human life is its light. The Christ from God alone is equal to all human needs. He only touches human nature in all its chords; beats all life's music out; lights up all our history. Christianity alone is the truth sufficient for the life of the whole world. Christ renews man at the centre, and then throughout the whole circumference of his powers and possibilities.
III. Only through lives in real sympathy with God in Christ are we to receive the light of the world. You cannot, by any possibility, know God in Christ simply by argument and much reasoning. Through life to knowledge is the Christian way. Go and follow Jesus in His way of ministry among men, if you would know His Father and your Father. As God has come home to man through the life of Christ, so we are to draw near unto God through the Christian life.
N. Smyth, The Reality of Faith,p. 17.
The Joy of Living.
I. All lives created of God are happy lives, for His own life, of which they are offspring, is happy, and the children are as the Parent. The "new birth," of which Christ made such frequent and solemn mention, is the waking up of dormant faculties. It is the resurrection of buried powers. That part of the nature which the Spirit quickens is the highest part. Now, when the soul which was dead is made alive, what follows? Growth, strength, power. Power, then, begins to come to the man power like the faculty which has been revived spiritual power, soul power. The man's life becomes divine in its harmonies. A thousand notes in him sound to one key; discordance has gone out of him, as it goes out of an instrument when it is retuned by a skilful hand. God knows no age, and the life which comes out of Him is for ever youthful. The soul which is urged outward and upward by the germinating pressures of Divine moods never reaches its prime. For the life that we have, through our imitation of Christ, is eternal life; that is, its great central characteristic is everlastingness. The leaf of this growth shall never wither; for there is no frost in all the heavens to smite it. Even as Jesus said, "He that believeth in Me shall never die."
II. The joy of living is found in the pure and proper government of the life. Only that which is clean is sweet. The life of Christ, therefore, or growth into a life like to the life that Christ lived, is growth into joy. Heaven comes as harvests come; because the root-life and the stalk-life were perfect after their kind, and being perfect made the perfect consummation possible. Joy is the fruiting of long and patient waiting. We carry the bloom concealed in the sap of our lives, nor shall we flower out till we get just so tall, and have lived just so long. We carry all our heaven within us, before its expression breaks out of us, as a tree carries all its leaves and blossoms under its bark, until the sun coaxes it to let man see the beauty.
W. H. Murray, The Fruits of the Spirit,p. 386.