I. A fulfiller and a destroyer. Let us first clearly understand the difference. (1) Look at it in nature. What is the truly majestic power of the earth? Surely not destruction. There are such forces, but the thought about the world which made those forces seem the venerable and admirable forces, the forces to which men's worship and admiration ought to be given, would be horrible. It is the forces of fulfilment, the forces which are always crowding every process forward to its full activity, crowding every being and structure out to its completest realization of itself the forces of construction and growth: these are the real vital forces of the world. (2) Go farther on, and think of what man does to his fellowmen. Your child, your scholar, your servant: you may fulfil him or you may destroy him. There are some men who call out the best of their brethren everywhere. There are men in history whose whole work has been of this sort. There are other men whose whole mission is to destroy. The things which they destroy are bad and ought to be destroyed, but none the less the issue of the work of such men is for disheartening and not for encouragement. (3) Fulfilment of itself involves destruction. The fulfilment of the good involves the destruction of the bad.
II. Note how the method of fulfilment, as distinct from the method of destruction, is, and always has been, distinctively the method of the Christian faith. Christianity from the beginning adopted the method of fulfilment for its own propagation. Christ comes to give us Divine enthusiasms, celestial love. But it is not as strange unnatural things that He would give them. It is as the legitimate possessions of our human nature, as the possessions which, unconscious, undeveloped, are ours already. The kingliness of nature which the human side of the Incarnation declared to be man's possible life, the Divine side of the Incarnation makes to be the actual life of every man who really enters into its power.
Phillips Brooks, Twenty Sermons,p. 210.
References: Matthew 5:17. J. C. Jones, Studies in St. Matthew,p. 111; C. Morris, Preacher's Lantern,vol. iii., p. 688; R. Lee, Sermons,p. 388; J. M. Wilson, Anglican Pulpit of Today,p. 356; S. A. Brooke, Christ in Modern Life,p. 31; G. S. Barrett, Three Hundred Outlines on the New Testament,p. 8; S. Macnaughten, Real Religion and Real Life,p. 221; H. Wonnacott, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xiv., p. 94.Matthew 5:17-19. Parker, Inner Life of Christ,vol. i., p. 166; J. Oswald Dykes, The Manifesto of the King,p. 52; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxix., p. 280. Matthew 5:17-20. W. Gresley, Parochial Sermons,p. 147; J. Oswald Dykes, The Laws of the Kingdom,p. 3; Ibid., The Manifesto of the King,p. 203.Matthew 5:18. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxviii., No. 1660.