The Discipline of the Christian Character.
I. The Christian character is set before us in manifold and diversified ways in the Bible. The Christian character in its completeness is the result and outgrowth of all that series of events of which the Bible is in part, but in the most important part, the record, which begins in ages back beyond our ken and which comes down even to the day which is passing. This form of human character, tending from the first to the mind of Christ and at last culminating in it in His person, and less completely in His saints after the day of Pentecost, is the character put before us in the Bible and given us to study, to learn from according to our measure, to assimilate and reproduce.
II. The foundation of the religious character of the Old and New Testaments was laid in a great idea which is brought into clear and strong distinctness in the age of the Patriarchs, in God's dealings with Abraham, in what is shown to us of the discipline and guidance under which he became the father of the faithful, the first example, that is in detail, that is of feeling and action, of the religious idea. And that idea is the singleness and individuality of the soul in its relation to the God who called it into being. If the feeling of the individual being, merged and swallowed up in the aggregate, is strong and even irresistible at times now, how much more so in the infancy of the world, when that discipline of man began which was to lead at last to the mind of Christ. And so the first work of that discipline was to enforce and impress deeply another great and paramount aspect of man and life, another great side of the truth which should balance, correct, and complete the other. It was to teach and leave firmly planted the faith that God had His eye on each separable unit in these innumerable crowds; that each separate soul in them had its direct relations to its Maker, its course to follow for itself, its destiny to fulfil or to fail in, its special calls and gifts, according to its Master's purpose, to account for, its own separate hopes, its own separate responsibilities. In the history of Abraham, from his call to the last trial of his faith, we see that great and, as far as we are allowed to see at least in its greatness and depth, that new, lesson.
III. We live alone as much as we die alone, and we, "whose spirits live in awful singleness, each in his self-formed sphere of light or gloom," need to know that great conviction before we die. It may indeed come at any moment; in the hurry of business, in the hour of joy, in the misery of bereavement, in the flash and revelation of the beauty or the awfulness of the world, oh even in the very moment of temptation and the hour of sin, we may learn and feel the startling and essential singleness of the soul. But it will be well for us not to wait for its coming, but to seek it as the Psalmist long ago taught men to seek it: "O God, Thou art my God; early will I seek Thee."
Dean Church, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxviii., p. 104.
I. There are two ways of doing even the best work: through strife and through love. This was seen in the first chapter, where two classes of preachers are described.
II. Entire sympathy with Christ will always heighten man's appreciation of man.
III. Christianity is thus the only humanising and fraternising religion.
IV. Self-seeking is in utter antagonism to the spirit of Christianity.
V. Christianity never encourages a degrading view of human nature. Man is to be esteemed by man. Christians are to recognise each other's excellencies. Love's eye is quick to detect virtue in another. Up to this point Paul continues his appeal for unanimity. The spirit of this appeal is most suggestive; it is the spirit of profound and tender sympathy with Christ. Absence of union is a reflection upon the uniting force. What is the uniting force of a Christian Church? The love of Christ. Where, then, there is disunion, it is plainly to be inferred that there is either not sufficient of this love, or that this love is unequal to the exigencies of the case. The world has a right to compare the deeds of the servant with the deeds of the Master, because the connection is moral, and consequently involves responsibility. All the practices of the Church are carried back to Christ, and He is magnified or crucified afresh according to their nature.
Parker, City Temple,vol. ii., p. 212.