3. Godliness and Humanness
3. Godliness and Humanness
The vision of life that I am spelling out has religion built into it, and not in any superficial way either. There is an important point here. Most people seem to think of religion—the worship of God, the acknowledging of his law, the pursuit of personal holiness and the service of others for God's sake as well as theirs—as if it were an extra to be added to behavior patterns which have found their basic shape already: icing on the cake of life, so to speak, one more enriching interest to add to the many one already has.
This view fits in with—indeed, grows out of—the modem secular view of religion as a private and personal hobby, and no doubt the invitation to accept Christ and become a Christian is sometimes understood in this way, but we ought not to think in such terms, for they falsify the whole situation. All our life at every point is being lived unnaturally if God is not at the center, and if his praise and glory (“hallowed be thy name") is not the supreme concern throughout. Do let us be clear on that.
I said a moment ago that a great dehumanizing infection has attacked all our lives, the motivational twist called sin, a hidden force working away in the human heart much as the beetles work away under the bark of trees with Dutch Elm disease, and with comparable killing effect. Sin perverts instincts not only in our bodies but also, more fundamentally, in our natures, and leads us to turn our backs on God, go our own way, do our own thing, live for ourselves, realize Satan's image in our life style instead of God's, and then turn around and challenge Christian ideals as antihuman, bigoted and pathetic.
I know, indeed, that some who take this line are the embittered victims of insensitive and loveless treatment which has claimed, in a manner reminiscent of Dickens's more nauseous hypocrites, to be Christianly motivated, and I hope you will believe me when I say I grieve for these folk and am heartily ashamed of what professed Christians have said and done to them. But you will have observed, as I have, that the thinking of a sensitive person who has been deeply hurt will thereafter be shaped by reaction against that which damaged him, and he will not therefore be free at that point to think straight.
But the deeper truth is that sin within us allures us all into anti-God ways of behavior, feeling and thought, of which skepticism about God's teaching given us in the Bible is one sign. If you find yourself incredulous when I tell you that the life I have pictured is the good life for us all, and that God tells us so and Christian experience over and over again has proved it so, I can well understand it: your attitude reveals that sin has got at your mind, as part of its assault on your heart, and I can only implore you to fight sin in your mind, and think again, and challenge your own unbelief, and be skeptical about your skepticism. God knows, we live in days when it is hard to fight the invading flood of unbelief, but I challenge anyone to produce better reasons for regarding the anti-God way, rather than the way of godliness, as the good life for you and me.
I hope that by saying these things I help you to see the law of God in its true light. That law is not a straightjacket, imposing on us arbitrary and unnatural limitations and so making life poor, but the liberating and enriching directive for integrated and joyous human fulfilment. What blossoms from the seeds of self-discipline which God's law seeks to plant within us is, quite simply, a deeper delight than otherwise we shall ever know. Can you believe it? I hope you can, for tens of thousands of folk today could stand up and assure you from personal experience that it is so. And I hope that our line of thought will help you to understand the gospel in its true light also, as you see how it subserves God's beneficent law.
You ask me: what is the gospel? I reply: it is Jesus Christ, the crucified Savior and risen Lord. It is not just the truth about him; it is Jesus himself, who comes to us and speaks to us in person through the truth that Scripture and Christians tell us about him. Really and truly, though of course invisibly, he draws near to us in the power of his deity, his atoning death, his risen life and his present heavenly reign, and says to us what he has always said to sinners: "Come to me, all you who are under strain and find life burdensome, and I will give you rest. I'll give you peace for your guilty conscience, the peace of pardon and a restored relationship with God, and where your life is muddled and twisted and astray, I'll sort you out and set you on the right track. Learn from me; my yoke is easy, and the demands of discipleship that I shall lay upon you, which now perhaps scare you stiff in prospect, will not crush you as you fear."4 If you hear his word and turn to him in sincerity, that is precisely what will happen, and how you will find things to be.
But how does the Savior sort us out and set us straight? What he does in effect is to take us to the law, and then say: "Now look at me. The law spells out true humanness verbally; I have lived it out practically. See me, if you will, as the law incarnate, just as I am God's grace incarnate, and understand that law keeping in imitation of me is the pattern of life into which I am now leading you." "But it's too hard for me," you object. "All right," says the Savior in effect, "so it is; I knew that, and have made provision for it. I send upon you the Holy Spirit. What you cannot do in your own strength you will be able to do in his. Now let me lead you in the power of the Spirit to adopt, for the first time in your life, a fully human way of living, and let me prove to you that the joy and contentment which the self-denying Christian knows is far beyond anything that the self-indulgent pagan has ever conceived."
What we have to appreciate is that Christ saves us from the guilt and alienation of sin in order then to free us from its dominion on a day-to-day basis, so that we actually keep the law. We were made to keep it, and we are redeemed to keep it. This is the way of godliness, which is also the way of humanness. I hope you can see it, and that your heart tells you even now that by God's grace you are actually on it.