BX 6333 .M365 C5 1902 Maclaren, Alexander, 1826 1910. Christ in the heart CHRIST IN THK HKART />> ' Qhrist in the ^^06. HEART ^ ^ ->- AND OTHER SERMONS by Alexander Maclaren d.d. W,,e IJU FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY N E V YORK C O X T E N T S si:rmox I • "^ CHRIST IN THE llEAUr : S I RENCi'I I.'KXKl) AVITH .^^(•.HT . I SERMON II CHRIST IX THE HEART: THE IXUWELLIXC. CHRIST . I3 SERMON III CHRIST IX THE HEART: rXKXOWABEE LOVE KXOWX TO LOVE 25 SERMON I\' CHRIST IX THE HEART : THE PARADOX OF LOVES MEASURE ' • • • 39 SERMON V CHRIST IX THE HEART: THE CLIMAX OF PRAYER. . 53 SER^[ON VI CHRISTS TOUCH 63 SERMON VII THE COMMANDER OF THE FAITHFUL . . . • 7i VI CONTENTS SERMON VIII PAGE THE commander's CONFLICT AND TRIUMPH ... 89 SERMON IX THE CARRION AND THE VULTURES .... IO3 SERMON X THE DEATH OF ABRAHAM I 1 5 SERMON XI THE SILENCE OF SCRIPTURE 1 29 SERMON XII ITTAI OF GATH . . I43 SERMON XIII TWO BUILDERS ON ONE FOUNDATION . , . • 'SB SERMON XIV WHAT CROUCHES AT THE DOOR 1 69 SERMON XV A PURE CHURCH AN INCREASING CHURCH . . . I81 SERMON XVI MAHANAIM : THE TWO CAMPS 193 SERMON XVII THE CONTRASTED AIMS AND PARALLEL METHODS OF THE WORLD AND THE CHRISTIAN .... 203 CONTENTS V 1 SERMON XVIII PAGE CHAMBERS OF IMAGERY 21$ SEKMCJN XIX FOKMS VERSUS CHARACTER 227 SER^ION XX THE THIRST OF THE SOUL AFTER GOD AND ITS SATISFACTION IX GOD 241 SERMON XXI "CAIAPHAS" 255 SERMON XXII "THE GOSPEL OF THE GLORY OF THE HAPPY GOD " . 269 SERMON XXIII "LIKE PRECIOUS FAITH " ...'.. 279 SERMON XXIV SELF-MUTILATIOX FOR SELF-PRESERVATION . . . 29I SERMON XXV IS THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD STRAITENED? . . . 303 SERMON XXVI HFJ^OD A STARTLED CONSCIENCE S'5 STRENGTHENED WITU MIGHT. gEILMON L ■TBENQTHENED WITH MIGHT. "That H« wonld grsnt 70Q, sooordicg to the riches of Hi£ glory, to be (trerftbecei with might by Hia Spirit in the izmer man."— Epgu iii 10. In no part of Paul's letters does he rise to a higher level than in his prayers, and none of his prayers are fuller of fervour than this wonderful series of petitions. They open out one into the other like some majestic suite of apartments in a great palace-temple, each leading into a loftier and more spacious hall, each drawing nearer the presence-chamber, until at last we stand there. Roughly speaking, the prayer is divided into four peti- tions, of which each is the cause of the following and the result of the preceding : — " That He would grant you, ac- cording to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man." That is the first. " In order that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith," •*yo being rooted and grounded in love" — such is the •econd, the result of the first, and the preparation for the third. " That ye may be able to comprehend with all saints . . . and to know the love of Christ which passeth know- ledge." Such is the next, and all lead up at last to that wonderful desire beyond which nothing is possible — "that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God." B 2 4 8TBENGTHBNED WITH MIGHT. I venture to contemplate dealing with these four peti- tions in succesBive serm^^ns, in order, God helping me, that I may hi'ing before you a fairer vision of the possi- bilities of your Christian life than you ordinarily entertain. For PauPs prayer is God's purpose, and what He means xvith all who profess His name is that these exuberant desires may be fulfilled in them. So let us now listen to that petition which is the foundation of all, and consider that great thought of the Divine strength-giving power which may be bestowed upon every Christian soul. I. — First, then, I remark that God means, and wishes, that all Christians should be strong by the possession of the spirit of might. It is a miserably inadequate conception of Christianity, and of the gifts which it bestows, and the blessings which it intends for men, when it is limited, as it practically is, by a large number — I might almost say the majority— of professing Christians to a simple means of alte ing their relation to the past, and to the broken law of God and of righteousness. Thanks be to His name ! His great gift to the world begins in each individual case with the as- surance that all the past is cancelled. He gives that blessed sense of forgiveness, which can never be too highly esti- mated unless it is forced out of its true place as the intro- duction, and made to be the climax and the end of His gifts. I do not know what Christianity means, unless it means that yon and I are forgiven for a purpose ; that the purpose, if I may so say, is something in advance of the means towards the purpose, the purpose being that we should be filled with all the strength and righteousness and supernatural life granted to us by the Spirit of God. It is well that we should enter into the vestibule. There is no other path to the Throne but through the vestibule. But do not let us forget that the good news of forgiveness, though we need it day by day, and perpetually repeated, STREXGTIIE^•ED WITH MIGHT. T) if fent th« introdnction to, and porch of th« Temple, «nd that beyond it there towers, if I cannot say a loftier, yet I may say a further gift, even the gift of a Divine life like His, from Whom it comes, and of which it is in reality an eflBnence and a spark. The trne characteristic blessing of the Gospel is the gift of a new power to a sinful weak world ; a power which makes the feeble strong, and the strongest as an angel of God. Oh, brethren I we who know how, "If any power we have, it is to ill ;" we who understand the weakness, the unaptness of our spirits to any good, and our strength for every vagrant evil that comes upon them to tempt them, should surely recognise as a Gospel in very deed that which proclaims to us that the "everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth,'* Who Himself "fainteth not, neither is weary," hath yet e loftier display of His strength-giving power than that which is visible in the heavens above, where, "because He is strong in might not one faileth." That heaven, the region of calm completeness, of law unbroken and there- fore of power undiminished, affords a lesser and dimmer manifestation of His strength than the work that is done in the hell of a human heart that has wandered and is brought back, that is stricken with the weakness of the fever of sin, and is healed into the strength of obedience and the omnipotence of dependence. It is much to say " for that He is strong in might, not one of these faileth.' It is more to say " He giveth power to them that have failed ; and to them that have no might He increaseth strength." The Gospel is the gift of pardon for holiness, and its inmost and most characteristic bestowment is the bestowment of a new power for obedience and service. And that power, as 1 need not remind you, is given to OS through the gift of the Divine Spirit. The very name \ 6 8TBENQTHBNED WITH MIGHT. of that Spirit is the " Spirit of Might." Christ spoke to us about being " endued with power from on high." The last of His promises that dropped from His lips npon earth was the promise that His followers should receive the power of the Spirit coming npon them. Wheresoever in the early histories we read of a man that was full of the Holy Ghost, we read that he was "full of power." Ac- cording to the teaching of this Apostle. Grod hath given us the " spirit of power," which is also the spirit " of love and of a eonnd mind.*' So the strength that we must have, if we have strength at all, is the strength of a Divine Spirit, not our own, that dwells In ni, and worki through us. And there is nothing in that which need startle or sur- prise any man who believes in a living God at all, and in the possibility, therefore, of a connection between the Great Spirit, and all the human spirits which are His children. I would maintain, in opposition to many modem conceptions, the actual supernatural character of the gift that is bestowed upon every Christian sonl. My reading of the New Testament is that as distinctly above the order of material nature as is any miracle, is the gift that flowf into a believing heart There is a direct passage between God and my spirit. It lies open to His touch ; all the paths of its deep things can be trodden by Him. Yon and I act upon one another from without, He acts upon us within. We wish one another blessings ; He gives the blessings. We try to train, to educate, to incline, and dispose, by the presentation of motives and the urging of reasons ; He can plant in a heart by His own Divine hus- bandry the seed that shall blossom into immortal life. And BO the Christian Church is a great, continuous, super- natural community in the midst of the material world ; and every believing soul, because it possesses something of the life of Jesus Christ, has been the laat of a miracle STRENQTHENBD WITH MIOHT. 1 •a real and true ai when He said " Lazarus, come forth T Precisely this teaching does our Lord Himself present for our acceptance when He sets side by side, as mutually Illustrative, as belonging to the same order of supernatural phenomena, " the hour is coming when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God and they that hear shall live," which is the supernatural resurrection of souls dead in sin, — and " the hour is coming in the which all that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth," which is the future resurrection of the body, in obedience to His will. So, Christian men, and women, do you set clearly before you this : that God's purpose with you is but begun when He has forgiven you, that He forgives you for a design, that it is a means to an end, and that you have not reached the conception of the large things which Ho Intends for you unless you have risen to this great thought — He means and wishes that you should be strong with the strength of His own Divine Spirit. II. — Now notice, next, that this Divine Power has its seat in, and is intended to influence the whole of the Inner life. Afl my text puta It, we may be strengthened with might by His spirit in the inner man. By the " inner man " 1 •uppose, is not meant the new creation through faith in Jesus Christ which this Apostle calls "the new man,'* but •imply what Peter calls the " hidden man of the heart,** the " soul," or unseen self as distinguished from the visible material body which it animates and informs. It Is this inner self, then. In which the Spirit of God is to dwell, and into which it is to breathe strength. Tlie leaven ii hid deep In three measures of meal until the whole be leavened- And the point to mark is that the whole inward region which makes up the true man is the field upon which this Divine Spirit is to work. It is not 9 0TBEKOTH£Jii&D WITH MIGHT. ft bit ef yotir inward life that ii to b« hallowed. It is nol any one aspect of it that ia to be strengthened, bnt it is the -whole intellect, affections, desires, t^^tes, powers of attention, conscience, imagination, memory, will. The whole inner man in all its corners is to be filled, and to come nnder the influence of this power, •* until there be no part dark, as when the bright shining of a candle giveth thee light." There is no part of my being that is not patent to the tread of this Divine Guest. There are no rooms of the house of my spirit, into which He may not go. Let Him come with the master key in His hand into all the dim chambers of your feeble nature ; and as the one life is light in the eye, and colour in the cheek, and deftness in the fingers, and strength in the arm, and pulsation in the heart, so He will come with the manifold results of the one gift to you. He will strengthen your understand- ings, and make you able for loftier tasks of intellect and of reason, than you can face in your unaided power ; He will dwell in your affections and make them vigorous to lay hold upon the holy things that are above their natural inclination, and will make it certain that their reach shall not be beyond their grasp, as, alas \ it so often is in the sadness, and disappointments of human love. He will come into that feeble, vacillating, wayward will of yonra, that is only obstinate in its adherence to the low and the evil, as some foul creature, that one may try to wrench away, digs its claws into corruption and holds on by that. He will lift your will and make it fix upon the good and abominate the evil, and through the whole being He will pour a great tide of strength which shall cover all the weakness. He will be like some subtle elixir which, taken into the lips, steals through a pallid and wasted frame, and brings back a glow to the cheek and a Iwtre U) the eye, and swiftness to the brain, and power to th« •TBBNGTHENBD WITH MIGHT. 9 whole natnre. Or as 0ome plant, drooping and flagging beneath the hot rays of the snn, when it has the scent of water given to it, will, in all its parts, stiffen and erect itself, 80 when the Spirit is poured out on men, their whole nature is invigorated and helped. That indwelling Spirit will be a power for suffering. The parallel passage to this in the twin Epistle to the Colossians is — " strengthened with all might unto all patience and long-suffering with gentleness." Ah I breth- ren, unless this Divine Spirit were a power for patience and endurance it were no power suited to us poor men. So dark at times is every life ; so full at times of discourage- ments, of dreariness, of sadness, of loneliness, of bitter memories, and of fading hopes does the human heart be- come, that if we are to be strong we must have a strength that will manifest itself most chiefly in this, that it teaches us how to bear, how to weep, how to submit - And it will be a power for conflict. We have all of us, in the discharge of duty and the meeting of temptation, to face such tremendous antagonisms that unless we have grace given to us which will enable us to resist, we shall be overcome and swept away. God's power from the Divine Spirit within us, does not absolve us from the fight but it fits us for the fight. It is not given in order that holiness may be won without a struggle, as some people seem to think, but it is given to us in order that in the struggle for holiness we may never lose " one jot of heart or hope," but may be ** able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all to stand.** It is a power for service. " Tarry ye in Jerusalem till ye be endued with power from on high." There is no inch force for the spreading of Christ's Kingdom, and the witness-bearing work of His Church as the possession of this Divine Spirit. Plunged into that fiery baptism, the selfishness and the «loth, which stand in the way of so 10 BTR£NGTHENBD WITH MIGHT. many of ns, are all consumed and annihilated, and we are set free for service because the bonds that bound us are burnt up in the merciful furnace of His fiery power. •* Ye shall be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man "—a power that will fill and flood all your nature if you will let it, and will make you strong to suffer, strong to combat, strong to serve, and to witness for your Lord. III. — And now, lastly, let me point yon still further to the measure of this power. It is limitless with the bound- lessness of God Himself. " That he would grant you," is the daring petition of the Apostle, " according to the riches of His glory to be strengthened." There is the measure. There is no limit except the un- counted wealth of His own self -manifestation, the flashing light of revealed Divinity. Whatsoever there is of splendour in that, whatsoever there is of power there, iK these and in nothing on this side of them, lies the limit of the possibilities of a Christian life. Of course there is a working limit at each moment, and that is our capacity to receive ; but that capacity varies, may vary indefinitely, may become greater and greater beyond our count or measurement. Our hearts may be more and more capable of God ; and in the measure of which they are capable of Him they shall be filled by Him. A limit which is always shifting is no limit at all. A kingdom, the boundaries of which are not the same from one year to another, by reason of its own inherent expansive power, may be said to have no fixed limit. And so we appropriate and en- close, as it were, within our own little fence a tiny portion of the great prairie that rolls boundlessly to the horizon. But to-morrow we may enclose more, if we will, and more and more ; and so ever onwards, for all that is God's is ours, and He has given us His whole self to use and to possess through our faith in His Son. A thimble can oaly take STRBNGTHBNBD WITH MIGHT. 11 up a thimbleful of the ocean, bnt what if the thimble be endowed with a power of expansion which has no term known to men ? May it not, then, be that some time or other it shall be able to hold so much of the infinite depth as now seems a dream too andacious to be realised ? So it is with us and God. He lets us come into the vaults, as it were, where in piles and masses the ingots of uncoined and uncounted gold are stored and stacked ; and He says, " Take as much as you like to carry." There is no limit except the riches of His glory. And now, dear friends, remember that this great gift, offered to each of us, is offered on conditions. To you professing Christians especially I speak. You will never get it unless you want it, and some of you do not want it. There are plenty of people in this chapel at this moment who call themselves Christian men, that would not for the life of them know what to do with this great gift if they had it. You will get it if you desire it. " Ys have not because ye ask not." Oh I when one contrasts the largeness of Qod*8 promises and the miserable contradiction to them which the average Christian life of this generation presents, what can we say ? " Hath His mercy clean gone for ever ? Doth His promise fail for evermore ?'* Ye weak Christian people, bom weakling and weak ever since, as so many of you are, open your mouths wide. Rise to the height of the expectations and the desires which it is our sin not to cherish ; and be sure of this, as we ask so shall we receive. '* Ye are not straitened in God.** Alas 1 alas i *' ye are straitened in yourselves.** And mind, there must be self-suppression if there is to be the triumph of a Divine power in you. You cannot fight with both classes of weapons. The human must die if the Divine is to live. The life of nature, dependence on self, must b« weakened and snbdned if the life of Qod 12 STRENGTHENED WITH MIGHT. is to overcome and to fill yoiu Yon must be able to iay " Not I ! "or you will never be able to say " Christ liveth in me." The patriarch that overcame halted on his thigh ; and all the life of nature was lamed and made impotent that the life of grace might prevail. So crush self by the power and for the sake of the Christ, if you would that the Spirit should bear rule over you. See to it, too, that you use what yon have of that Divine Spirit. *' To him that hath shall be given." What is the use of more water being sent down the mill lade, if the water that does come to it all runs away at the bottom, and none of it goes over the wheel ? Use the power you have, and power will come to the faithful steward of what he possesses. He that is faithful m a little shall get much to be faithful over. Ask and use, and the ancient thanksgiving may still come from our lips. ** In the day when I cried, Thou answeredst me, and itrengthenedit aie with strength in my •ouL'* THE INDWELLING CHRIST. SERMON n. THE INDWELLINO OHBIST. " That Christ may dwell in joxu hearta by faith | • f« being root«d and groandod In l0T«."— Eph. ill. 17. We have here the second step of the great staircase by which Panrs fervent desires for his Ephesian friends climbed towards that wonderful snmmit, of his prayers — which is ever approached, never reached,—** that ye might be filled with all the fnlness of Qod." Two remarks of an expository character, will prepare the way for the lessons of these verses. The first is as to the relation of this clanse to the preceding. It might appear at first sight to be simply parallel with the former, expressing substantially the same ideas under a somewhat different aspect. The operation of the strength-giving Spirit in the inner man might very naturally be supposed to be equivalent to the dwelling of Christ in our hearts by faith. So many commentators do, in fact, take it ; but I think that the two ideas may be distinguished, and that we are to see in the words of our text, as I have said, the second step in this prayer,, which is in some sense a result of the "strengthening with might by the Spirit in the inner man.** I need not enter in detail into the reasons for taking this view of the connection of the «Uiim, 16 TBM INDWELLING CHBI3T. which if obTiously in accordance with the dlmbing-np ■tractnre of the whole rene. It is enongh to point it ool •B the basis of m j further remarks. And now the second obserration with which I will tronble you, before I come to deal with the thoughta of the verse, is as to the connection of the last words of it Yon may observe that in reading the words of my tert I omitted the "that" which stands in the centre of th« Terse. I did so, because the words, **Ye being rooted and grotmded in love," in the original, do stand before the **that," and are distinctly separated by it from the snb- sequent clause. They ought not therefore, to be shifted forward into it, as our translators and the Re\^I-ed Version have, I think, unf ortmiately done, imless there were some absolute necessity either from meaning or from con- striction. 1 do not think that this is the (SLse ; but on the contrary, if they are carried forward into the next clause, which describes the result of Ghrist*s dwelling in our hearts by faith, they break the logical flow of the sentence by mixing together result and occasion. And so I attach ihem to the first part of this verse, and take them to ex- press at once the consequence of Christ's dwelling in the heart by faith, and the preparation or occasion for our being able to comprehend and know the love of Christ which psfiseth knowledge. Now that is all with which I need trouble you in the way of explanation of the mean- ing of the words. Let as come now to deal with their ■nbetanoe. I. — Considei' the Indwelling of Christ, u desired by the Apostle for all Christians. To begin with, let me say in the plainest, simplest, strongest way that I can, that that dwelling of Christ in the believing heart is to be regarded as being i plain literal fact To a man who does not believe in the Divinity of Jesus THB lUDWELhUSQ CHRIST. 17 Chrttt, •< eoTine that U nonsease^ bat to those of oi who do see in Him the manifeited ineamato God, there ought to be no difficulty in accepting this as the simple literal force of the words before us, that in every soul where faith, howsoever feeble, has been exercised, there Jeeus Christ does verily abide. It is not to be weakened down inw any notion of par- ticipation in His likeness, sympathy with His character, submission to His influence, following His example, listening to His instruction, or the like. A dead Plato may so influence his followers, but that is not how a liTlng Christ influences His disciples. What is meant if no mere influence derived but separable from Him, how- ever blessed and gracious that influence might be, but it is the presence of His own self, exercising influences which are inseparable from His presence, and only to be realised when He dwells in us. I think that Christian people as a rule do far too little turn their attention to this aspect of the Gospel teaching, and concentrate their thoughts far too much upon that which is unspeakably precious in itself, but does not ex- haust all that Christ is to us, viz., the work that He wrought for us upon Calvary ; or to take a step funh», the work that He is now carrying on for tis as our Inter- •eesor and Advocate in the Heavens. You who listen to me Sunday after Sunday will not suspect me of seeking to minimise either of th^e two aspects of our Lord*! mission and operation, but I do believe that very largely the glad thought of an indwelling Christ Who actually abides and works in our hearts, and is not only for us in the Heavens, or with us by some kind of impalpable and metaphorical presence, but in simple, that is to say, in ■piritusl reality is in our spirits, has faded away from the consciousnesB of the Christian Church. And so we are called "^ mystics" when we presek 18 THB INDWELLINQ OHBIST. Christ in the heart. Ah ! brother, unless your Christianity be in the good deep sense of the word ** mystical/' it ii mechanical, which is worse. I preach, and rejoice that I have to preach, a " Christ that died, yea ! rather that is risen again ; Who is even at the right hand of Gk>d, Who also maketh intercession for ns.** Nor do I stop there, bat I preach a Christ that is in ns, dwelling in onr hearts if we be His at all. Well, then, farther observe that the special emphasis of the prayer here is that this " indwelling " may be an un- broken and permanent one. Any of you who can consolt the original for yoorselyes will see that the Apostle here uses a compound word which conveys the idea of intensity and continuity. What he desires, then, is not merely that these Ephesian Christians may have occa- sional visits of the indwelling Lord, or that at some lofty moments of spiritual enthusiasm they may be conscious that He is with them, but that always, in an unbroken line of deep, calm receptiveness, they may possess, and know that they possess, an indwelling Saviour. And this, I think, is one of the reasons why we may and must distinguish between the apparently very simi- lar petition in the previous verse, about which we were speaking last Sunday, and the petition which is now occupying us ; for, as I shall have to show you, it is only as " strengthened with His might by His Spirit in the inner man," that we are capable of the continuous abiding of that Lord within us. Oh ! what a contrast to that idea of a perpetual unbroken inhabitation of Jesus in our spirits and to our conscious- ness is presented by our ordinary life ! " Why shouldst thou be as a wayfaring man that turneth aside to tarry for a night ?" may, well be the utterance of the average Christian. We might, with unbroken blessedness, possess Him in our hearts, and instead, we have only *Wisitt THB DTDWELLINO CHRIST. 19 ihort and far between.*^ Alas, alas, how often do w« drive away that indwelling Christ, because onr hearts are " foul with Bin,'* so that He \ "C2an bat listen at the gat* I 4Dd hear the hoasehold Jar wfthln.* Christian men and women! here is the ideal of our lives, capable of being approximated to (if not absolutely In its entirety reached) with far more perfection than it ever has been before by us. There might be a line of light never interrupted running all through our religioui experience. Instead of that there is a light point here, and a great gapof darkness there, like the straggling lamps by the wayside in the half-lighted squalid suburbs of some great city. Is that your Christian life, broken by many interruptions, and having often sounding through it the solemn words of the retreating Divinity which the old profound legend tells us were heard the night before the Temple on Zion was burnt : — " Let us depart ?" " I will arise and return unto My place till they acknowledge their oftences.*' God means and wishes that Christ may continuously dwell in our hearts. Doet He to your own consciousness dwell in yours ? And then the last thought connected with this first part of my subject is that the heart strengthened by the Spirit is fitted to be the Temple of the indwelling Christ. How shall we prepare the chamber for such a guest ? How shall some poor occupant of some wretched hut by the way-side, fit it up for the abode of a prince ? The answer lies in these words that precede my text. You cannot strengthen the rafters and lift the roof and adorn the halls and furnish the floor in a manner befitting the coming of the King ; but you can turn to that Divine Spirit who will expand and embellish and invigorate your whole spirit, and make it capable of receiving the indwelling Christ. Ct 20 THB UfDWBLLINO CHRIST. That these two things which are here considered ai cause and effect may, in another aspect, be considered as but varying phases of the same truth is only part of the depth and felicity of the teaching that is here. For if yo» come to look more deeply into it, the Spirit that strength- eneth with might is the Spirit of Christ ; and He dwells in men's hearts by His own Spirit. So that the apparent confusion, arising from what in other places are regarded as identical being here conceived as cause and effect, is no confusion at all, but is explained and vindicated by the deep truth that nothing but the indwelling of the Christ can fit for the indwelling of the Christ. The lesser gift of His presence prepares for the greater measure of it ; the transitory inhabitation for the more permanent. Where He comes in smaller measure He opens the door and makes the heart capable of His own more entire indwell- ing. "Unto him that hath shall be given.** It is Christ in the heart that makes the hes^ fit for Christ to dwell in the heart. You cannot do it by your own power ; turn to Him and let Him make yon temples meet for Himself. II. — So now, in the second place, notice the open door through which the Christ comes in to dwell — " that He may dwell in your hearts by faith." More accurately we may render •* through faith," and might even venture to suppose that the thought of faith as an open door through which Christ passes into the heart, floated half distinctly before the Apostle's mind. Be that as it may, at all events faith is here represented as the means or condition through which this dwelling takes effect. Yon have but to believe in Him and He ! comes, drawn from Heaven, floating down on a sunbeam, ^as it were, and enters into the heart and abides there. Trust, which is faith, is self -distrust. " I dwell in the \ high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite I and hnmble spirit." Rivers do not ran on the monntaiB THB INDWBIililNG 0HBI8T. SI (ops, bnt down in the yalleys. So the heart that is lifted np and self-complacent has no dew of His blessing resting upon it, but has the curse of Qilboa adhering to its barren- ness ; bnt the low lands, the humble and the lowly hearts, are they in which the waters that go softly, scoop their course, and di£^use their blessings. Faith is self-distrust. Self-distrust brings the Christ " Faith is desire. Never, never in the history of the world has it been or can it be that a longing towards Him shall be a longing thrown back unsatisfied upon itself. Ton have but to trust, and you possess. We open th€ door for the entrance of Christ by the simple act of faith, and blessed be His name ! He can squeeze Himself through s very little chink, and He does not require that the gates / should be flung wide open in order that, with some of / His blessings, He may come in. Mystical Christianity of the false sort has much to say about the indwelling of God in the soul, but it spoils aU its teaching by insisting upon it that the condition on which God dwells in the soul is the soul's purifying itself to receive Him. But you cannot cleanse your hearts so as to bring Christ into them, you must let Him come and cleanse them by the process of His coming, and fit them thereby for His own indwelling. And, asssuredly, He will so eome, purging us from our evil and abiding in onr hearts. But do not forget that the faith which brings Christ in- to the spirit must be a faith which works by love if it is to keep Christ in the spirit. You cannot bring that Lord Into your h<9arts by anything that you do. The man that cleanses his own soul by his own strength, and so expects to draw God into it, has made the mistake which Christ pointed out when He told us that when the unclean spirit is gone out of a man he leaves his house empty ^ though it be swept and garnished. Moral reformation may turn out \ 22 THB INDWELLING CHRIST. 1 the aeTils, it will never bring in God. And in the emptl- * ness of the swept and garnished heart there is an invitation to the seven to come back again and fill it. And whilst that is true, remember, on the other hand, that a Christian man can drive away his Master by evil I works. The sweet song-birds and the honey-making beet \ are said always to desert a neighbourhood before a pesti- \ lence breaks out in it. And if I may so say, similarly I quick to feel the first breath of the pestilence is the • presence of the Christ which cannot dwell with eviL You bring Christ into your heart by faith, without any work at all ; you keep Him there by a faith which pro- duces holiness. III.— And the last point is the gifts of this indwelling Christ, — " ye being," or as the words might more accu- rately be translated, "Ye, having been rooted and grounded in love." Where He comes He comes not empty-handed. He brings His own love, and that, consciously received, pro- duces a corresponding and answering love in our hearts to Him. So there is no need to ask the question here whether '* love " means Christ's love to me, or my love to Christ. From the nature of the case both are included, — the recognition of His and the response by mine are the result of His entering into the heart. This love, the re- cognition of His and the response by mine, is represented in a lovely double metaphor in these words as being at once the soil in which our lives are rooted and grow, and the foundation on which our lives are built and are steadfast. I have not time to dwell upon these two things, but let me just touch them for a moment. Where Christ abides in a man's heart, love will be the very soil in which his life will be rooted and grow. That love will be the mo- tive of all service, it will underlie, as the productive cause, all fruitfulness. All goodness and all beauty will THB INDWELLING GHBIBT. 23 b« its frail The whole life will be as a tree planted in this rich soil. And so the life will grow not by effort only, bnt as by an inherent power drawing its nourish- ment from the soil. This is blessedness. It is Heaven upon earth that love should be the soil in which our obe- dience is rooted, and from which we draw all the nutri- ment that turns to flowers and fruit. Where Christ dwells in the heart, love will be the founda- tion upon which our lives are builded steadfast and sure. The blessed consciousness of His love, and the joyful answer of my heart to it, may become the basis upon which my whole being shall repose, the underlying thought that gives security, serenity, steadfastness to my else fluctuating life. I may so plant myself upon Him, as that In Him I shall be strong, and then my life will not only grow like a tree and have its leaf green and broad, and its fruit the natural outcome of its vitality, but it will rise like some stately building, course by course, pillar by pilLsr, until at last the shining topstone is set there. He that buildeth on that foundation shall never be confounded. For, remember, that, deepest of all, the words of m^ text may mean that the Incarnate Personal Love becomes the very soil in which my life is set and blossoms, on which my life is founded. "Thoa, my Life, let me Im \ looted, grafted, ballt In Thee* Christ is Love, and Love is Christ. He that is rooted and grounded in love has the roots of his being, and the foundation of his life fixed and fastened in that Lord. So, dear brethren, go to Christ like those two on the road to Em mans ; and as Fra Angelico has painted them on his convent wall, put out your hands and lay them on His, and say, " Abide with us. Abide With us !" And the answer will come : — " This is my rest for ever ; here " — myptery of love I — " will I dwell, for I have desired it," even the narrow room of your poor heart UNKNOWABLE LOVE KNOWN TO LOVE. SERMON III. UNKNOW^iBLE LOVE KNOWN TO LOVE. "That ye... may be able to comprelieud with all saints wliat is the breadth and the length and the depth and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge."— Eph. iii. 18, 19. This eonstitnteB th« third of the petition! in thii great prayer of Paars, each of which, as we have had occasion to see in former sermons, rises above, and is a conseqnence of the preceding, and leads on to, and is a cause or occasion of the subsequent one. The two former petitions have been for inward strength communicated by a Divine Spirit, In order that Christ may dwell in our hearts, and so we may be rooted and grounded in love. The result of these desires being real- ised in our hearts is here set forth in two clauses which are iubstantially equivalent in meaning. ** To comprehend ** may be taken as meaning nearly the same as 'Ho know/ only that, perhaps the former expresses an act more purely Intelleetual. And, as we shall see in our next sermon, •the breadth and length and depth and height" are the un- measurable dimensions of the love which in the second clause is described as " passing knowledge." I purpose to deal with these measures in a separate discourse and therefore omit them from consideration now. 28 UNKNOWABLB LOVE KNOWN TO LOTB. We have, then, mainly two thoaghta here, the one, thai only the loving heart in which Christ dwells can know the love of Christ ; and the other that even that heart can not know the love of Christ The paradox is intentional, bnt it is intelligible. Let me deal then, as well at I can, with these two great thoughts. I. — First, we have this thought that only the loving heart can know Christ's love. Now the Bible nses that word know to express two different things ; one which we call mere intellectual per- ception ; or to pnt it into plainer words, mere head know- ledge snch as a man may have abont any subject of study and the other a deep and living experience which is posses- sion before it ia knowledge, and knowledge because it ia possession. Now the former of these two, the knowledge which la merely the work of the understanding, is of course, inde- pendent of love. A man may know all about Christ and His love, without one spark of love in his heart. And there are thousands of people who, as far as the mere intel- lectual understanding is concerned, know as much about Jesus Christ and His love as the saint who is closest to tha Throne, and yet have not one trace of love to Christ in them. That is the kind of people that a widely diffused Christianity and a habit of hearing sermons produce. There are plenty of them here, in this chapel this morning, who, as far as their heads are concerned, know quite as much of Jesus Christ and His love aa any of us do, and could talk about it and argue about it, and draw inf erencea from it, and have got the whole system of evangelical Christianity at their fingers' ends. Ay I It ia at their fingers' ends^ it never gets any nearer them than that There is a knowledge with which love has nothing to do, and it is a knowledge that for many people ia quite aufficient ** Knowledge pnffeth up," says tha Apostla; UKKNOWABLB LOVB KNOWN TO LOVB. 29 Into ftn unwholesome bnbble of self-complacency that will one day be pricked and disappear ; but " love buildeth np " — a steadfast, slowly-rising, solid fabric. There be two kinds of knowledge : the mere rattle of notions in a man's brain, like the seeds of a withered poppy-head ; very many, very dry, very hard ; that will make a noise when yon shake it And there is another kind of knowledge which goes deep down into the heart, and is the only knowledge worth calling by the name ; and that know- ledge is the child, as my text has it, of love. Now let as think about that for a moment. Love, says Paul, is the parent of all knowledge. Well, now, can we find any illustrations from similar facts in other regions ? Yes ! I think so. How do we know, really know, any emotions of any sort whatever? Only by experience. You may talk for ever about feelings, and you teach nothing about them to those who have not experienced them. The poets of the world have been singing about love ever since the world began. But no heart has learned what love is from even the sweetest and deepest songs. Who that is not a father can be taught paternal love by words, or can come to a perception of it by an effort of mind ? And so with all other emotions. Only the lips that have drunk the cup of sweetness or of bitterness can tell how sweet or how bitter it is, and even when they, made wise by experi- ence, speak out their deepest hearts, the listeners are but little the wiser unless they too have been initiated in the same school. Experience is our only teacher in matters of feeling and emotion, as in the lower regions of taste and appetite. A man must be hungry to know what hun- ger is ; he must taste honey or wormwood in order to know the taste of honey or wormwood, and in like man- ner he cannot know sorrow but by feeling its ache, and must love if he would know love. Experience is our only teacher, and her school-fees are heavy. 80 UNKHOWABLfl LOVB KNOWH TO LOYB. Just as a blind man can never be made to nnderstand the glories of sunrise, or the light npon the far-off moun- tains ; just as a deaf man may read books about acoustics, bnt they will not give him a notion of what it is to hear Beethoven, so we must have love to Christ before we know what love to Christ is, and we must consciously experi- ence the love of Christ ere we know what the love of Christ is. We must have love to Christ in order to have a deep and living possession of the love of Christ, though reciprocably it is also true that we must have the love of Christ known and felt by our answering hearts, if we ar« ever to love Him back again. So in all the play and counterplay of love between Christ and us, and in all the reaction of knowledge and love this remains true, that we must be rooted and grounded in love ere we can know love, and must have Christ dwell- ing in our hearts, in order to that deep and living posses- lion which, when it is conscious of itself, is knowledge, and is for ever alien to the loveless heart H« mtui be loTed, er* that to 700 He will seem worthy of yonr I0T& If you want to know the blessedness of the love of Christ, love Him, and open. yonr hearts for the entrance of His love to yon. Love is the parent of the deep, true knowledge. Of course, before we ean lore an unseen person and believe in his love, we must know about him by the ordinary means by which we learn about all persons out- side the circle of our sight. So before the love which is thus the parent of deep, true knowledge, there must be the knowledge by study and credence of the record concerning Christ, which supplies the facts on which alone love can be nourished. The understanding has iti part to play in leading the heart to lore, and then the kMfft becomes the true teacher. He that loTwth, knowetk ITNKNOWABLB LOVK KNOWN TO LOVB. 31 God, for God is love. He that is rooted and grounded In love because Christ dwells in his heart, will be streng- thened to know the love in which he is rooted. The Christ within us will know the love of Christ. We must first "taste," and then we shall "see" that the Lord is good, as the Psalmist puts it with deep truth. First, the appropriation and feeding upon God, then the clear per- ception by the mind of the sweetness in the taste. First the enjoyment ; then the reflection on the enjoyment. First the love ; and then the consciousness of the love of Christ possessed and the love to Christ experienced. The heart must be grounded in love that the man may know the love which passeth knowledge. Then notice that there is also here another condition for this deep and blessed knowledge laid down in these words, "That ye may be able to comprehend with all saints*^ That is to say, our knowledge of the love of Jesus Christ depends largely on our sanctity. If we are pure we shall know. If we were wholly devoted to Him we should wholly know His love to us, and in the measure in which we are pure and holy we shall know it. This heart of ours is like a reflecting telescope, the least breath upon the mirror of which will cause all the starry sublimities that it should shadow forth to fade and be- come dim. The slightest moisture in the atmosphere, though it be quite imperceptible where we stand, will be dense enough to shut out the fair, shining, snowy summits that girdle the horizon and to leave nothing visible but the lowliness and commonplaceness of the prosaic plain. If you want to know the love of Christ, first of all, that love must purify your soiils. But then you must keep your souls pure, assured of this, that only the single eye is full of light, and that they who are not " saints " grope in the dark even at mid-day, and whilst drenched by th« S8 UNKNOWABLB LOVS K190WN TO LOVB. ■onshine of His 1ot«, are nnconscioaa of it altogether. And so "we get that miserable and mysterions tragedy men and women walking through life, as many of you are doing, in the very blaze and focus of Christ's love, and never beholding it nor knowing anything about it. Observe again the beginning of this path of knowledge, which we have thus traced. There must be, says my text, an indwelling Christ, and lo an experience, deep and stable, of His love, and then we shall know the love which we thus experience. But how comes that indwell- ing? That is the question for us. The knowledge of His love is blessedness, is peace, is love, is everything ; as we shall see in considering the last stage of this prayer. That knowledge arises from our fellowship with and our possession of the love of God, which is in Jesus Christ. How does that fellowship with, and possession of the love of God in Jesus Christ, come ? That is the all-im- portant question. What is the beginning of everything? ** That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith.** There is the gate through which you and I may come, and by which we must come if we are to come at all into the possession and perception of Christ's great love. Here is the path of knowledge. First of all there must be the simple historical knowledge of the facts of Christ's life and death for us, with the Scripture teaching of their meaning and power. And then we must turn these truths from mere notions into life. It is not enough to know the love that God has to us, in that lower sense of the word " knowledge." Many of you know that, who never got any blessing out of it all your days, and never will, unless you change. Besides the " knowing " there must be the " believing " of the love. You must translate the notion into a living fact in your experience. Yon must pass from the simple work of understanding th« Gospel to the higher act of faith. You must not be con UKKNOWABLB LOVB KNOWN TO LOT!. 83 UnUd with knowing, you mnst trnst. And if jon have don« that all the rest will follow, and the little, narrow, low doorway of humble Belf-distrnsting faith, through which a man creeps on hii knees, leaving ontside all his ■in and his burden, opens out into the temple palace : — the large place in which Christ's 1ot« is imparted to the lonl. Brethren, this doctrine of my text ought to be for every one of us a joy and a gospel. There is no royal road into the sweetness and the depth of Christ's love, for the wise OP the prudent. The understanding is no more the organ for apprehending the love of Christ than is the ear the organ for perceiving light, or the heart the organ for learn- ing mathematics. Blessed be God 1 the highest gifts are not bestowed upon the clever people, on the men of genius and the gifted ones, the cultivated and the refined, but they are open for all men ; and when we say that love is the parent of knowledge and that the condi. tion of knowing the depths of Christ's heart is simple love which is the child of faith, we are only saying in other words what the Master embodied in His thanksgiving prayer, ** I thank Thee, Father ! Lord of Heaven and earth, because Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes." And that is so, not because Christianity, being a foolish system, can only address itself to fools ; not because Christianity, contradicting wisdom, cannot expect to be received by the wise and the cultured, but because a man's brains have as little to do with his trustful acceptance of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a man's eyes have to do with his capacity of hearing a voice. Therefore, seeing that the wise and prudent, and the cultured, and the clever, and the men of genius are always the minority of the race, let us vulgar folk that are neither wise, nor clever, nor •nltored, nor gemuses, be thankful that all that has noth- D 34 UNKNOWABLE LOVE KNOWN TO LOVfl. ing to do with oicr power of knowing and possessing th« best wisdom and the highest treasures, but that upon thii path the wayfaring man though a fool shall not err, and all narrow foreheads and limited understandings, and poor, simple uneducated people as well as philosophers and geniuses have to learn love by their hearts and not by their heads, and by a sense of need and a humble trust and a daily experience have to appropriate and suck out the blessing that lies in the love of Jesus Christ. Blessed be His name I The end of all aristocracies of culture and superciliousness of intellect, lies in that great truth that we possess the deepest knowledge and highest wis- dom when we love and by our love. II. — Now a word in the next place as to the other thought here, that not even the loving heart can know the love of Christ. " It passeth knowledge," says my text. Now I do not suppose that the paradox here of knowing the love of Christ which " passeth knowledge " is to be explained by taking " know " and " knowledge " in the two different senses which I have already refeiTed to, so as that we may experience, and know by conscious experience, that love which the mere understanding is incapable of grasping. That of course is an explanation which might be defended, but I take it that it is much truer to the 4postle*s mean- ing to suppose that he uses the words "know" and " knowledge " both times in the same sense. And so we get familiar thoughts which I touch upon very briefly. Our knowledge of Christ's love, though real, is in- complete, and must always be so. You and I believe, I hope, that Christ's love is not a man's love ; or at least that it is more than a man's love. We believe that it is the flowing out to us of the love of God, that all the ful- ness of the Divine heart pours itself through that narrow channel of the human nature of our Lord, and therefore ihaX the flow is endless and the Fountain inflnlte. mSTKNOWABLX LOVB KNOWN TO LOVB. 35 I mppose I do not need to show yon that it is possible for people to have, and that in fact we do possess a real, a ▼alid, a reliable knowledge of that which is infinite ; al- though we possess, as a matter of course, no adequate and complete knowledge of it. But I only remind you that we have before us in Christ's love something which, though the understanding is not by itself able to grasp it, yet the understanding led by the heart can lay hold of, and can find in it infinite treasures. We can lay our poor hands on His love as a child might lay its tiny palm upon the base of some great cliff, and hold that love in a real grasp of a real knowledge and certitude, but we cannot put our hands round it and feel that we comprehend as well as apprehend. Let us be thankful that we cannot. His love can only become to us a subject of knowledge M it reveals itself in its manifestations. Yet after even these manifestations, it remains unuttered and unutterable even by the Cross and grave, even by the glory and the throne. ** It is as high as Heaven ; what canst thou do ? deeper than hell ; what canst thou know ? The measure thereof is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea.** We have no measure by which we can translate into the terms of our experience, and so bring within the grasp of our minds, what was the depth of the step which Christ took at the impulse of His love, from the Throne to the Cross. We know not what he forewent ; we know not, nor ever shall know, whet depths of darkness and ioul-agony He passed through at the bidding of His all- enduring love to us. Nor do we know the consequences •f that great work of emptying Himself of His glory. We have no means by which we can estimate the darknesa and the depth of the misery from which we have been delivered, nor the height and the radiance of the glory to which we are to be lifted. And until we can tell and by our compasses both of these two extremeg of D t 36 UNKNOWABLB LOVB KNOWN TO LOVB. possible hnman fate, till we have gone down into the deepest abyss of a bottomless pit of growing alienation and misery, and up above the highest reach of all unending progress into light and glory and God-likeness, we have not stretched our compasses wide enough to touch the two poles of this great sphere, the infinite love of Jesus Christ, So we bow before it, we know that we possess it with a knowledge more sure and certain, more deep and valid, than our knowledge of aught but ourselves ; but yet it is beyond our grasp, and towers above us inaccessible in the altitude of its glory, and deep beneath ni in the pro- fundity of its condescension. And, in like manner, wo may lay that this known love passes knowledge, inasmuch as our experience of it can never exhaust it. We are like the settlers on some great island continent — as, for instance, . on the Australian continent for many years after its first discovery — a thin fringe of population round the sea-board here and there, and all the bosom of the land untraversed and unknown. So after all experiences of and all blessed participation in the love of Jesus Christ which come to each of us by our faith, we have but skimmed the ■nrface, but touched the edges, but received a drop of what if it should come upon us in fulness of flood like • Niagara of love would overwhelm our spirit!. So we have within our reach not only the treasure of creatural affections which bring gladness into life when they come, and darkness over it when they depart ; we have not only human love which, if I may so say, is always lifting its finger to its lips in the act of bidding us adieu ; but we may possess a love which will abide with us for ever. Men die, Christ lives. We can exhaust men, w% cannot exhaust Christ. We can follow other objects of pursuit all of which have limitation to their power of Mtisfying and pall upon the jaded sense sooner or later* UNKNOWABLB LOVS KNOWN TO LOVK. 37 or sooner or later are wrenched away from the aehlng heart. Bnt here la a love into which we can penetrate very deep and fear no exhanstion ; a sea into which we can cast ourflelveg, nor dread that like some rash diver flinging himself into shallow water where he thought there was depth, we may be bruised and wounded. We may find in Christ the endless love that an immortal heart requires. Enter by the low door of faith, and your finite heart will have the joy of an infinite love for its possession, and your mortal life will rise transfigured into an immortal and growing participation in the immortal Lova of Ike iudwalling and tnaxhaoatibU Ohriit THE PARADOX OF LOVERS MEASURE. SERMON IV. THE PARADOX OF L0VF8 MEASUBB, "The breadth, snd leng^th, and depth, and height."— Bph. 111. li. Of what ? There can, I think, be no doubt as to the Bnswer. The next clause is evidently the continuation of the idea beflnin in that of our text, and it runs ; " and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge." It is the immeasurable measure, then ; the boundlesi bounds and dimensions of the love of Christ which fire the Apostle*i thoughts here. Of course, he had no separate idea in his mind attaching to each of these measures of magnitude, but he gathered them together simply to express the one thought of the greatness of OhrisVa love. Depth and height are the same dimension measured from opposite endB. The one begins at the top and goes down, the other begins at the bottom and goes up, but the surface is the same in either case. So we have the three dimen* tions of a solid here-^breadth, length, and depth. I suppose that I may venture to use these expressions with a somewhat different purpose from that for which the Apostle employs them ; and to see in each of them a separate and blessed aapect of the love of Qed in Jeem Ohrift our Lord. IS THB PARADOX OF LOVB*S MBASURI. L What, then, Is the breadth of that love f It is as broad as hnmanity. As all the stars lie in the firmament, so all creatures rest in the Heaven of His love. Mankind has many common characteristics. We all suffer, we all sin, we all hunger, we all aspire, hope, and die ; and, blessed be God ! we all occupy precisely the same relation to the Divine love which lies in Jesus Christ. There are no step-children in God's great family, and none of them receive a more grudging or a less ample share of His love and goodness than every other. Far-stretching as the race, and curtaining it over as some great tent may enclose on a festal day a whole tribe, the breadth of Christ's love is the breadth of humanity. And it is universal because it is Divine. No human mind can be stretched so as to comprehend the whole of the members of mankind, and no human heart can be so emptied of self as to be capable of this absolute univer- •ality and impartiality of affection. But the intellectual difficulties which stand in the way of the width of our affections and the moral difficulties which stand still more frowningly and forbiddingly in the way, have no power over that love of Christ's which is close and tender, and clinging with all the tenderness and closeness and cling- ingness of a human affection and lofty and universal and passionless and perpetual, with all the height and breadth and calmness and eternity of a Divine heart. And this broad love, broad as humanity, is not shallow because it is broad. Our love is too often like the estuary of some great stream which runs deep and mighty as long as it is held within narrow banks, but as soon as it widens becomes slow and powerless and shallow. The intensity of human affection varies inversely as its extension. A universal philanthropy is a passionless sentiment. Bat Christ's love is deep though it is wide, and suffers no dimi- nution because it is shared amongst a multitude. U i§ THl PARADOX OF LOVB'S MBABURB. 48 like the great feast that He Himself spread for &▼• thonsand men, women, and children, all seated at a table, •* and they did all eat and were filled." The whole love is the property of each recipient of it He does not love as we do, who give a part of our heart tfr this one and a part to that one, and share the treasure of our affections amongst a multitude. All this gift belong! to every one, just as all the sunshine comes to every eye, and as every beholder sees the moon's path across the dark waters, stretching from the place where he stands to the centre of light. This broad love, universal as humanity, and deep ai it ii broad, is universal because it is individual. You and I have to generalise, as we say, when we try to extend our affections beyond the limits of household and family and personal friends, and the generalising is a sign of weak* ness and limitation. Nobody can love an abstraction, but God's love and Christ's love do not proceed in that fashion* He individualises, loving each and therefore loving all. It is because every man has a space in his heart singly and separately and conspicuously, that all men have a place there. So our task is to individualise this broad, univer- ial love, and to say, in the simplicity of a glad faith, " He loved me and gave Himself for me." The breadth is world-wide, and the whole breadth is condensed into, if I may so say, a shaft of light which may find its way through the narrowest clink of a single soul. There are two ways of arguing about the love of Christ, both of them Talid, and both of them needing to be employed by us. We have a right to say, " He loves all, therefore He loves me." And we have a right to say, " He loves me, there- fore He loves all." For surely the love that has stooped to me can never pass by any human soul. What is the breadth of the love of Christ ? It it broa4 ae mankind, it is narrow as myself. 44 THE PABADOX OF LOVB'B MBASUBB. II.— Then, in the next place, what is the length of the love of ChriBt ? If we are to think of Him only af a man, however exalted and however perfect, yon and I have nothing in the world to do yMi Hii love. When He was here on earth it may have been sent down through the ages in Bome vagne way, as the shadowy ghost of love may rise in the heart of a great statesman or philanthropist for generations yet nnbom, which he dimly sees will be affected by his sacrifice and service. Bnt we do not call that love. Such a poor, pale, shadowy thing has no right to the warm throbbing name ; has no right to demand from ns any answering thrill of affection. Unless you think of Jesus Christ as something more and other than the purest and the loftiest benevolence that ever dwelt in human form, I know of no intelligible sense in which the length of His love can be stretched to touch you. If we content ourselves with that altogether inadequate and lame conception of Him and of His nature, of course there is no present bond between any man upon earth and Him, and it is absurd to talk about His present love as extending in any way to me. But we have to believe, rising to the full height of the Christian concep- tion of the nature and person of Christ, that when He was here on earth the Divine that dwelt in Him so informed and inspired the human as that the love of His man*s heart was able to grasp the whole, and to separate the individuals that should make up the race till the end of time ; so as that you and I, looking back over all the centuries, and asking ourselves what is the length of the love of Christ, can say, " It stretches over all the years, and it reached then as it reaches now to touch me, upon whom the ends of the earth have come." Its length is conterminous with the duration of humanity hero or yond«r. THH PARADOX OV LOVB'B MBA3URB. 4& Thit ihonght of eternal being, when we refer it to Gk>d, towers ibove ns and repels iw ; and when we turn it to ourselves and think of our own life as unending, there come a strangeness and an awe that is almost shrinking, over the thoughtful spirit. But when we transmute It Into the thought of a love whose length is unending, then over all the shoreless, misty, melancholy sea of eternity, there gleams a light, and every wavelet flashes up into glory. It is a dreadful thing to think, " For ever. Thou art God.** It is a solemn thing to think " For ever I am to bef but It is life to say :—" Christ 1 Thy love endureth from everlasting to everlasting ; and because It lives. I shall live also—" ** Oh I give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good, for His mercy endureth for ever." There is another measure of the length of the love of Christ "Master I How often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him ?— I say not unto thee until seven times, but until seventy times seven."— So said the Christ, multiplying perfection into itself twice— two sevens and a ten— in order to express the idea of bound- lessness. And the law that He laid down for His servant is the law that binds Himselt What is the length of the love of Christ ? Here is one measure of it,— howsoever long drawn out my sin may be, this is longer ; and the white line of His love runs out into infinity, far beyond ,the point where the black line of my sin stops. Any- thing short of eternal patience would have been long ago exhausted by your sins and mine, and our brethren's. But the pitying Christ, the eternal Lover of all wandering souls, looks down from Heaven upon every one of us ; goes with us In all our wanderings, bear with us in all our sina, in all our transgressions still is gracious. His pleadings sound on, like some stop in an organ eontin- uously persistent through all the other notes. And round His throne aro written the Dlvlno words whi«li 4§ THB PARADOX OP LOVfi'8 MBASUBB. hftT» been spoken abont our hnman love modelled aft^r Hia •* Charity suffereth long and is kind ; is not easily provoked, is not soon angry, beareth all things.** The length of the love of Christ is the length of eternity, and OQt-measures all human sin. III. — Then again, what is the depth of that love t Depth and height, as I said at the beginning of these remarks, are but two ways of expressing the same dimen- iion. For the one we begin at the top and measure down, for the other we begin at the bottom and measure up. The top is the Throne ; and the downward measure, how is it to be stated f In what terms of distance are we to express it ? How far is it from the Throne of the Uni- Terse to the manger at Bethlehem, and the Cross at Calvary, Ukd the sepulchre in the garden ? That is the depth of (he love of Christ. Howsoever far may be the distance from that loftiness of co-equal Divinity in the bosom of the Father, and radiant with glory, to the lowliness of the form of a servant, and the sorrows, limitations, rejections, pains and death — that is the measure of the depth of Christ's love. We can estimate the depth of the love of Christ by saying ** He came from above, He tabernacled with ns,** as if some planet were to burst from its track and plunge downwards in amongst the mist and the narrowness of our earthly atmosphere. A well-known modem scientist has hazarded the spee- alation that the origin of life on this planet, has been the falling upon it of the fragment of a meteor, or an aerolite from some other system, with a speck of organic life upon it, from which all has developed. Whatever may be the ease in regard of the physical life, that is absolutely true in the case of spiritual life. It all originates because this Heaven-descended Christ has come down the long stair- case of Incarnation, and has brought with Him into the •loads and oppressions of our terrestrial atmosphere a THB PARADOX OF LOVB*B MBASUBI. 47 germ of life which He has planted in the heart of the race, there to spread for ever. That if the measore of the depth of the love of Christ. And there is another way to measure it. My sins are deep, my helpless miseries are deep, but they are shallow as compared with the love that goes down beneath all sin, that is deeper than all sorrow, that is deeper than all necessity, that shrinks from no degradation, that turns a- way from no squalor, that abhors no wickedness so as to avert its face from it The purest passion of human benevolence cannot but sometimes be aware of disgust mingling with its pity and its efforts, but Christ's love comes down to the most sunken. However far in the abyss of degradation any human soul has descended, beneath it are the everlasting arms, and beneath it is Christ's love. When a coalpit gets blocked up by some explosion no brave rescuing party will venture to descend into the lowest depths of the poisonous darkness until tome ventilation has been restored. But this loving Christ goes down, down, down into the thickest, most pestilential atmosphere, reeking with sin and corruption, and stretches out a rescuing hand to the most abject and undermost of ail the victims. How deep is the love of Christ ? The deep mines of sin and of alienation are all undermined and countermined by His love. Sin is an abyss, a mystery, how deep only they know who have fought against it ; *0 Lots t then bottomlcM ahjm, Ifj lini vn iwallowed up In iSxt^T * I will east all their sins into the depths of the sea.** The depth's of Christ's love go down beneath all human necessity, sorrow, suffering, and sin. lY.— And, lastly, what is the height •f tlM loT« «l Christ? We found that the way to measure the depth was to !>•- fin at the Throne, and go down to the Cross, and to tha 48 THB PARADOX OF LOVB'S MBA8UR1. f onl abysses of OTil. The way to measure the height if to begin at the Cross and the foul abysses of evil, and to go up to the Throne. That is to say, the topmost thing in the Unirerse, the shining apex and pinnacle, glittering away up there in the radiant unsetting light, is the love of God in Jesus Christ. The other conceptions of that Divine nature spring high above us and tower beyond our thoughts, but the summit of them all, the very topmost as it is the very bottom-most, outside of everything, and therefore high above everything, is the love of God which has been revealed to us all, and brought close to OS sinful men in the manhood and paision of our dear Christ. And that love which thus towers above as, and gleams like the shining cross on the top of some lofty cathedral spire, does not flash up there inaccessible, nor lie before us like some pathless precipice, up which nothing that has not wings can ever hope to rise, but the height of the love of Christ is an hospitable height, which can be scaled by us. Nay, rather, that heaven of love which is " higher than our thoughts," bends down, as by a kind of optical delusion the physical heaven seems to do, towards each of us, only with this blessed difference, that in the natural world the place where heaven touches earth is always the furthest point of distance from us ; and in the spiritual world, the place where Heaven stoops to me is always right over my head, and the nearest possible point to me. He has come to lift us to Himself. And this is the height of His love, that it bears us up, if we will, up and up to sit upon that throne where He Himself is enthroned. So, brethren, Christ's love is round about us all, as some sunny tropical sea may embosom in its violet waves a mul- titude of luxuriant and happy islets. So all of us islanded on our little individual lives, lie in that great ocean of love, all the dimensions of which are immeasurable, an4 THB PARADOX Of LOVB'S MEASURB. 49 which stretches aboTe, beneath, around, shoreless, tideless, bottomless, endless. Bat, remember, this ocean of love yon can shnt out of your lives. It is possible to plunge a jar into mid- Atlantic, further than soundings have ever descended, and to bring it up on deck as dry inside as if it had been lying on an oven. It is possible for men and women — and I have them listening to me at this moment — to live and move and have their being in that sea of love, and never to have let one drop of its richest gifts into their hearts or their lives. Open your hearts for Him to come in, by humble faith In His great sacrifice for you. For, if Christ dwell in your heart by faith, then and only then will experience be your guide ; and you will be able to comprehend the boundless greatness, the endless duration, and absolute perfection, and to know the 1ot« of Christ which passeth knowled^«w THE CLIMAX OF ALL PRAYER. SERMON T, TRE OlilKAZ OF ALL P&ATSB. "Tial j9 might b« lU«d with aU th« talxmrn «tf Ood."— Ith. ■.d. 140 THB SILBNOB OV SORIPTUBB. YoQ oan separate yonr wills and your spiiitaal natoM fram Him, and thus separated yon are '*dead In trespasses and in sins.^ And, oh ! brother, the message comes to you : there is life in that great Christ, ** in His name** i that is to say, in that revealed character of His by which He is made known to ns as the Christ and the Son of €k>d. Union with Him in His Sonship, will bring life into dead hearts He is the true Prometheus who has come from Heaven with fire, the fire of the Divine Life in the reed of Hip humanity, and He imparts it to ns all if wo will. He lays Himself upon us, as the prophet laid him- self on the little child in the upper chamber ; and lip to lip, and beating heart to dead heart. He touches our death, and it is quickened into life. The condition on which that great Name will bring (o ns life is simply our faith. Do you believe in Him, and trust yourself to Him, as He who came to fulfil all that prophet, priest, and king, sacrifice, altar, and temple of old times prophesied and looked for ? Do you trust In Him as the Son of God Who comes down to earth that wo in Him might find the immortal life which He is ready to give t If you do, then, dear brethren, the end that God has in view in all His revelation, that Christ had in view in His bitter Passion, has been accomplished for you. If yon do not it has not. You may admire Him, you may think loftily of Him, you may be ready to call Him by many great and appreciative names, but oh I unless you have learned to see in Him the Divine Saviour of ycvir souls, you have not seen what God means yon to see. But if you have, then all other questions about this Book, important as they are in their places, may settle themselves as they will ; you have got the kernel, the thing that it was meant to bring you. Many an erudite scholar, who has studied the Bible all his life, has missed the purpose for which it was given ; and many m poor oM THB 8ILBN0B OF SORIPTURB. 141 woman in her garret has found it. It is not meant to wrangle over, it is not meant to be read as an interesting prodnct of the religions consciousness, it is not to be admired as all that remains of the literature of a nation that had a genius for religion ; but it is to be taken as being God's great Word to the world, the record of the revelation that He has given ns in His Son. The Eternal Word is the theme of all the written Word. Have you made the jewel which is brought us in that casket your own ? Is Jesus to you the Son of the living God, believing on Whom you share His life, and become sons of God by Him ? Can you take on to your thankful lips that triumphant and rapturous confession of the doubting Thomas — the flag flying on the completed roof -tree of this Gospel — " My Lord and my God" f If you can you will receive the blessing which Christ then promised to all of us standing beyond the limits of that little group, ** who have not seen and yet have believed" — even that eternal life which flows into our dead spirits from the Christ, the Son of God- Who is the Light of the world, and the Life of men. ITTAI OF GATE. BERMON XEL ITTAI or OATH. *ABd ItUi wifwered the king, and said : Ai the Lord liTeth, and aimy lorttlM klBg Wfwth, rarely in what place my lord the king ihaU be, whether in death or Uto, wrm there alao wiU thy aerrant be."— 3 Sam. zt. sl It was the darkest hour in David's life. No more pathetic page is found in the Old Testament than that which tells the story of his flight before Absalom. He is emshed by the consciousness that his punishment is deserved—the bitter fruit of the sin that filled all his later life with darkness. His courage and his buoyancy have left him. He has no spirit to make a stand or strike a blow. If Shimei runs along the hillside abreast of him, shrieking curses as he goes, all he says is : ** Let him curse ; for the Lord hath bidden him." So, heartbroken and spiritless, he leaves Jerusalem. And as soon as he has got clear of the city he calls a halt, in order that he may muster his followers and see on whom he may depend. Foremost among the liUie band eome six hundred men from Gath — Philistines — from Goliath's city. These men, singularly enough, the king had chosen as his body-guard ; perhaps he was Bit al- together sure of the loyalty of his own svbjeote, and poMibly felt safer with foreign mercenaries irho h 146 ITTAI OF OATH. have no secret leaningB to the deposed honse of Said. Be that as it may, the narrative tells ns that these men had ** come after him from Gath." He had been there twice in the old days, in his flight from Saul, and the second visit had extended over something more than a year. Probably dm*ing that period his personal attraction, and his reputation as a brilliant leader, had led these rough soldiers to attach themselves to his service, and to be ready to forsake home and kindred in order to fight beside him. At all events here they are, ** faithful among the faith- less" as foreign soldiers surrounding a king often are ; — notably, for instance, the Swiss guard in the French Revolution. Their strong arms might have been of great use to David, but his generosity cannot think of in- volving them in his fall, and so he says to them ; " I am not going to fight ; I have no plan. I am going where I can. You go back and 'worship the rising sun.' Ab- salom will take you and be glad of your help. And as for me, I thank you for your past loyalty. Mercy and peace be with you I" It is a beautiful nature that in the depth of sorrow ihrinks from dragging other people down with itself. Generosity breeds generosity, and this Philistine captain breaks out into a burst of passionate devotion, gar- nished, in soldier-fashion, with an unnecessary oath or two, but ringing very sincere and meaning a great deal. As for himself and his men, they have chosen their side. Whoever goes, they stay. Whatever befalls, they stick by David ; and if the worst come to the worst they can all die together, and their corpses lie in firm ranks round about their dead king. David's heart is touched and warmed by their outspoken loyalty ; he yields and accepts their service. Ittai and his noble six hundred tramp on, out of our sight, and all their households behind them. Now what in there, in all that, to mako a lermon out of ? FTTAI OF OATH. 147 I. — First, look at the picture of that Philistine soldier, as teaching ns what grand passionate self-sacrifice may be evolved out of the roughest natures. Analyse his words, and do you not hear, ringing in them, these three things, which are the seed of all nobility and splendour in human character ? First, a passionate personal attachment ; then, that love, issuing as such love always does, in willing sacrifice that recks not for a moment of personal consequences ; that is ready to accept anything for itself if it can serve the object of its devo- tion, and will count life well expended if it is flung away in such a service. And we see, lastly, in these words a supreme restful delight in the presence of him whom the heart loves. For Ittai and his men, the one thing needful was to be beside him in whose eye they had lived, from whose presence they had caught inspiration ; their trusted leader, before whom their souls bowed down. So then his vehement speech is the pure language of love. Now these three things, — a passionate personal attach- ment, issuing in spontaneous heroism of self-abandon- ment, and in supreme satisfaction in the beloved presence^ —may spring up in the rudest, roughest nature. A Philia- tine soldier was not a very likely man in whom to find refined and lofty emotion. He was hard by nature, hardened by his rough trade ; and unconscious that he was doing anything at all heroic or great. Something had smitten this rock, and out of it there came the pure re- freshing stream. And so I say to you, the weakest and