Consider how the gentleness of a loving correction makes God's children great. For we ought, all of us, to wish to be great great in the school of Christ, great in the Divine life, great in holiness, great in usefulness. There could not be a worse mistake than telling any Christian to crush or to curb his ambition. It is one of those natural passions which are virtues or vices according to their end. As an end, ambition is self, and therefore sin. As a means to God's glory, ambition is the highest grace. Point your ambition right, and then push it to the utmost.
I. We all have felt how we are always getting under the power of the little, everyday circumstances in which we live, and how, whatever may be our exceptional elevations, we are drawn down habitually to the lowness of the level of our common life. A real sorrow is a great liberator: it takes us out of the old groove of triviality; it restores things to their right proportion, making the little great, and the great little. Correction, whatever else it does, sets a man free, and puts him in a position that he may become great.
II. A time of sorrow is, and must be, a time of thought. And what most of us want is to be brought really to think. It is not too much to say that every one who is at the pains to think, and to think truly, will become great. But it specially leads us to think about our own state before God, for as soon as ever we are in sorrow it is in the gentleness of God that He wishes to comfort us.
III. Loving correction brings us into contact with the greatness of God. If a mind is conversant with what is great, it must become greater. There is a dignity in grief, and God only matches with that dignity.
IV. It is the great humiliation of sorrow which makes it magnifying. For what is greatness? Humility. And there is no humbler like a great sorrow.
V. But, above all, it is because it unites us to the Lord Jesus Christ that correction makes us great. There is nothing great before God but Christ; and every other thing is great before God as He sees it in Christ, as it is identified with Christ.
J. Vaughan, Sermons,4th series, p. 245.
I. We find rising out of these words the question, What is the greatness which in the Christian is produced by God's gentleness? It is excellence in that for which especially man was originally created. Now, as we learn from Scripture that man was made in the image of God, it follows that men are great in the proportion in which they are like Him. The greatness of manhood is greatness in holiness. It is a moral thing, for the truest manliness and the highest Godlikeness are convertible terms.
II. Consider how God's gentleness can be said to make us great. The human heart is always more deeply affected by tenderness than by sternness. If you wish to drag a man by force, his nature is to resist you; but if you attempt to attract him by love, it is equally his nature to follow you. God, who has given us this nature, seeks to save us in accordance with it. (1) God has manifested His gentleness in the mission and work of Jesus Christ, and makes proclamation of pardon and regeneration to every one who will accept them through His Son. (2) The words of the text are verified in the manner in which God receives individuals into His love, and so begins in them the greatness of holiness. (3) The truth of the text is made apparent also in the manner in which God in Christ Jesus trains His people after they have come to Him. He teaches them more and more of His grace; yet, in truest tenderness, He teaches them as they are able to bear it.
This subject has a twofold application. (1) It presents Jehovah to the sinner in a very affectionate attitude. (2) It shows the Christian how he should seek to bring others to Jesus. The gentleness of God should be repeated and reproduced in us.
W. M. Taylor, Limitations of Life, and Other Sermons,p. 344.
I. The longsuffering of God declares His power. What He does not punish now, He can punish by-and-bye; what He does not punish here, He can punish there; what not in this world, in the next. He is, in the words of the Psalmist, "strong and patient," patient because He is strong, because all power belongeth unto Him.
II. The longsuffering of God is a declaration of His love, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. He sees the saint in the sinner, the saint that shall be in the sinner that is, the wheat in the tare, the shepherd feeding the sheep in the wolf tearing the sheep.
III. This tardiness of vengeance, this lame foot with which it seems to lag and halt after successful wickedness, is no pledge of safety to the sinner. It argues no listlessness, no moral indifference to the eternal distinctions between good and evil, on the part of Him who is the Judge of the whole earth, and by whom actions are weighed. It means (1) that Christ has died for sinners, and (2) that God can afford to wait. Flee fromHim thou canst not. To flee toHim is thy only way of deliverance.
R. C. Trench, Sermons in Westminster Abbey,p. 339.
I. Greatness is always a work of time. This is true even of apparent greatness, mere elevation of state. Emphatically is it true that moral greatness is a work of time. Character is a growth, generally a very slow growth. We must not give up our assurance of Christian excellence; that were to abandon our hope of heaven. Neither must we suppose that so great an achievement can only be accomplished by stormy and violent ways. The "hidings of power" are the mark of God. His "gentleness" makes us great.
II. God must be gentle; for gentleness is a sign of perfection.
III. The idea of God's gentleness comes out of our knowledge of His unchangeableness.
IV. Consider the influence of God's gentleness on Christian character: it makes us great. (1) Two of the prime elements of personal greatness nobility of purpose and purity of motive are directly stimulated by the gentleness of God. (2) Wisdom is another element of greatness; and we need time that we may be wise. (3) Steadfastness in its two forms perseverance in good resolve and patience under difficulty is given us by the gentle dealing of our God.
V. This subject throws light on our perplexities (1) about conversion; (2) about Christian perfection.
A. Mackennal, Life of Christian Consecration,p. 67.
God's gentleness lies in His consenting to the use of indirection as a way of gaining His adversaries. Force and cruel absolutism are put by; the irritations of a jealous littleness have no place; and the great God and Father, intent on making His children great, follows them and plies them with the gracious indirections of a faithful and patient love.
I. Observe how far off this gentleness is from the practice, and even capacity generally, of mankind. True greatness is a character too lofty for any but the greatest and most Divinely tempered souls.
II. Some evidence will be demanded that God pursues any such method of indirection, or of rectorial gentleness, with us. See then (1) how openly He takes this attitude in the Scriptures. (2) It is the very genius of Christianity to prevail with man, or to bring him back to obedience and life, by a course of loving indirection. When a soul is really born of God, it will be the result of what the Spirit has wrought, by a long, and various, and subtle, and beautiful process, too delicate for human thought to trace. (3) We see this gentleness in God's management of our experience. Doing everything to work on our feeling, temperament, thought, will, and so on our eternal character, He still does nothing by direct impulsion.
III. The end God has in view is to make us great. He has a much higher respect for the capabilities of our human nature, and much higher designs concerning it, than we have ourselves. While God is ever engaged in bringing down our loftiness in evil and perversity, He is just as constantly engaged in making us loftier and stronger in everything desirable in capacity, and power, and all personal majesty. He wants to make us great in will, in intellect, in courage, enthusiasm, self-respect, firmness, superiority to things and matters of condition, great in sonship with Himself.
IV. Holding such a view of God's ends and the careful indirections by which He pursues them, we cannot fail to note (1) the softened aspect given to what are often called the unaccountable severities of human experience. (2) How strangely weak and low is the perversity of many when they require it of God to convert them by force, or drive them heavenward by storm. (3) Let us adjust our conceptions to that which is the true pitch and scale of our magnanimity and worth as Christian men. Be it ours to live with a sense of our high calling upon us; abiding in all the holy magnanimities of love, honour, sacrifice, and truth; sincere, exact, faithful, bountiful, and free; showing thus to others, and knowing always in ourselves, that we do steadily aspire to just that height of good into which our God Himself has undertaken to exalt us.
H. Bushnell, Christ and His Salvation,p. 18.
References: Psalms 18:35. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xii., No. 683; Ibid., Evening by Evening,p. 100; E. Leach, Christian World Pulpit,vol. iv., p. 232; Bishop Woodford, Sermons on Subjects from the Old Testament,p. 105; C. J. Vaughan, Voices of the Prophets,p. 215.