Fifth Sermon: The Life Of Faith

Fifth Sermon: The Life Of Faith

FIVE SERMONS ON PAULINE TEXTS

FIRST SERMON: 

THE BLOOD OF GOD

 

“. . . the Church of God, which He hath purchased with His own blood.”—Acts 20:28.

1. Now, in the first place, what an unspeakable evil sin must be! We would not have been altogether ignorant of the awful evil of sin, even if it had not gone the length of the blood of God. We could not have shut our eyes to the way that sin has cursed and enslaved the soul of man. Death here, and hell hereafter, would surely have burned something of the diabolical evil of sin into the most sin-seared conscience and into the most stone-hardened heart. But all the sick-beds, and all the death-beds, and all the lazar-houses, and all the mad-houses, and all the battle-fields, and all the desolated homes, and all the broken hearts of men and women, from the fall of man to the day of judgment, would not have proclaimed to earth and heaven and hell the unspeakable malice and wickedness of sin. God’s own blood, shed by sin, and shed for sin; that alone, in all the universe, is the full measure of the infinite evil of sin. “Whatever your thoughts about sin may be; whatever your experience and estimate of sin may be, that is My experience and estimate of sin,” says Almighty God, pointing us to Gethsemane and to Calvary. God the Son, made a curse, that and that alone is the true measure of sin: that and that alone has for ever revealed the true evil of sin: and that and that alone has paid the uttermost farthing for our everlasting redemption and deliverance from sin. “Let it be counted folly, or phrenzy, or fury, or whatsoever,” says Hooker, in what is perhaps the greatest sermon in the English language; “it is our wisdom and our comfort. We care for no other knowledge in the world but this,—that man hath sinned and God hath suffered: that God hath made Himself the sin of men, and that men are made the righteousness of God.”

2. And then, what a glorious seal has been set to the holiness of the law of God by His own blood. No wonder that the holy law of God was proclaimed to be magnified, and made honourable for ever, when the very blood of the Lawgiver Himself was shed in order to vindicate and redress the broken law. The throne of God had been founded in righteousness from everlasting. But after a full satisfaction for sin had been made with His own blood who had sat on that throne from everlasting, that glorious throne was for ever established in righteousness as never before. How surpassingly illustrious has the holiness of the law of God shone out on all earth and heaven ever since that day when He whose holy law it was, shed His own blood in atonement to the holiness and the inviolability of that law!

And not His own blood at its last and completed outpouring only. But, along with that, take all the things of the same kind that led up to His bloodshedding on the tree, and all the things that entered into that last bloodshedding. Take all His holy obedience, and all His holy endurance of all kinds in His body, and in His soul, and in His spirit, from His circumcision to His crucifixion. For all that was paid by Him, first in tribute, and then in atonement, to His own holy law. And it was all paid for us. Is all our daily and hourly sin so much bold rebellion against God, and all done in despite of God’s holy law? Then see, standing over against our rebellion, the complete, and perfect, and most willing subjection and obedience in everything of God the Son. Are we by nature, and on every temptation to it, full of malice towards God and man? Look, over against that, at our Lord’s love to God and man. Look at His unbounded goodness of heart and life. Is there bitter repining, and envying, and grudging in our hearts at the good of our neighbour? Then let us lift our eyes and look at the Son of God, how He made Himself of no reputation, and rejoiced at the prospect of His sharing His glory with us all for ever. Hear Him, O jealous and grudging hearts! “I thank thee, O Father, that Thou hast loved them as Thou hast loved Me.” And so on through the whole of His life of suretyship obedience, and on to the end of His death of atonement, till His own holy law was satisfied and vindicated to its very utmost height and depth and length and breadth, even to its very innermost spirituality, in every thought and word and deed of God the Son as the son of man.

3. But the sinner’s guilty conscience is sometimes, and in some men, far more difficult to satisfy and to silence than even the broken law of God. Long after the broken law of God has been magnified and made honourable, the sinner’s evil conscience will still hold out against all that can be said or done to restore its lost peace, and to re-establish its lost confidence in the goodwill of God and man. There is a divinely delegated sovereignty in the human conscience; and there is a corresponding uncompromisingness and inappeasableness in the guilty conscience.Even after the offended sovereign is satisfied, the viceroy still holds out against the disloyalty and the treachery. The crimen l&æsæ majestatis, the high misdemeanour done against the crown, is far more resented and avenged by the king’s judges than even by the king himself. And sin is such an unpardonable misdemeanour against all law and all authority, and it so gashes the conscience and so horrifies the heart of the truly penitent sinner, that absolutely nothing has ever been discovered to heal and to quiet and to restore the conscience but the blood of Him who is God. There is no physician for the sinner’s exasperated conscience, as Luther is always saying, but the Lord of the conscience Himself. And there is no balm that even He can bring to bear on a thoroughly bad conscience, but His own blood. Your guilty conscience can have nothing better than the blood of your God. And if that does not cleanse, and quiet, and heal your guilty conscience, it must just rage on. Your conscience can be offered nothing on earth or in heaven beyond the blood of God.

4. One of the ways in which the blood of God comes to have such sovereign virtue in the sinner’s conscience is this. When our consciences toward one another are wounded, and are full of remorse and fear, nothing will heal the wound and restore peace between man and mail, nothing but a great uprising of love between the alienated parties. But if a great enough uprising and outgoing of love takes place between them, then not only is the lost peace restored, but those who were once such enemies are henceforth far better friends than ever they were before. And the same noble law of reconciling love holds even more in the world of sin and salvation. The blood of God the Son is such a manifestation of divine love toward the sinner that nothing can resist it. No guilt, no remorse, no terror, no suspicion, can stand out against the love of God in the blood of His only begotten Son. It is not so much our Surety’s payment of the uttermost farthing of our debt that heals our horrified consciences. It is not His atoning blood even that so pacifies, and so conquers, and gives such peace, to the guilty conscience. It is the love of God as seen in the atonement that can alone do all that. And if there are still any of the dregs of remorse, and terror, and irreconcilability, and suspicion, in your conscience toward God, it is not because His blood is not of volume and virtue enough to wash away all your sins; but it is because you do not open your heart wide enough and deep enough to receive His love. For there is no fear in love. But perfect love on God’s part to you, awakening on your part a corresponding love to God, such perfect love on both sides casteth out all possible fear, so much so, that he that feareth is not made perfect in love.

My brethren, I can recommend this great Scripture to every guilty conscience and corrupt heart. For, times and occasions without number, when every other Scripture has threatened to fail myself, this Scripture has been a rock and a refuge to me. The very awfulness of the word used has again and again silenced the almost as awful accusation of my conscience and the almost as awful despair of my heart. I know all that has been said against the above reading in this glorious passage; but once read by me I shall never let it go, though I have to hold it against all the world. The BLOOD OF GOD has an inward, and an experimental, and an all-satisfying evidence to me: and I recommend it to you with all my heart.

SECOND SERMON: 

FAITH IN HIS BLOOD

 

“Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus:

Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God;

To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.”—Romans 3:24-26.

“The happy period was now arrived which was to shake off my fetters. I flung myself into a chair near the window, and seeing a Bible there I ventured once more to apply to it for comfort and instruction. The first verse I saw was the 25th of the third of the Romans: ‘Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood.’ Immediately I received strength to believe, and the full beams of the Sun of Righteousness shone upon me. I saw the sufficiency of the atonement that Christ had made. I saw my pardon sealed in His blood. I saw all the fulness and completeness of His righteousness for me. In a moment I believed and received the atonement.” So writes William Cowper in his Memoirs of his early days.

“Being justified freely by His grace.” The Apostle does not say—being foreknown, or being predestinated, or being adopted, or being sanctified, or being glorified. He will say all these things afterwards; at the proper time and to the proper persons. But not now, and not yet. For the Apostle has before him at this moment an audience of sinful men; an audience of men whose mouths, in the Apostle’s own words, are stopped because of their guilt before God. And Paul speaks to that, and confines himself to that. A guilty and a condemned man may need much to be done for him afterwards. But his immediate need; his first need that makes all his other needs to be forgotten, is his need of pardon. Get his pardon sealed,and his prison door set open—that is the one thing needful for him at the present moment. And thus it is that Paul addresses the whole of this great passage to those men whose mouths are stopped, and his great gospel message to all such men is this: their free and full justification before God, and their acceptance and peace with God.

But what is this justification concerning which so much is said by the Apostle? “Justification is an act of God’s free grace, wherein He pardoneth all our sins, and accepteth us as righteous in His sight, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and received by faith alone.” You cannot have justification better defined than that, unless it is in the Larger Catechism and the Confession of Faith. One of the first death-beds I ever attended in this city had this impressive and memorable fact about it. The dying man had always the Confession of Faith open on his pillow, and open at the chapter on justification. And as his end drew near, he and I often read this rich section together: “Those whom God effectually calleth, He also freely justifieth; not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone; by imputing the obedience and the satisfaction of Christ unto them, they receiving and resting upon Christ, and upon His righteousness by faith; which faith they have not of themselves, it is the gift of God.” “I sink in deep waters,” cried another dying man. “All His waves and His billows go over me.” Then said the other, “Be of good cheer, my brother. I feel the bottom, and it is good.”

“Being justified freely by His grace.” This is an instance of what the rhetoricians call reiteration and tautology. Strictly speaking, and speaking coldly, it would be enough to say either “freely,” or to say—“by His grace.” Both expressions, taken literally and severely, are not needed. But there are some things that cannot be reiterated too often, and free grace is one of them, and is the chiefest of them. You cannot tell me too often, or with too much emphasis, that I am a forgiven sinner, and that not for works of righteousness that I have done, but by the free grace of God. And besides, the style is the man. Paul’s style is Paul and Paul alone. Paul is here preaching his own experience, and his own thoughts and feelings about his own experience deeply colour and warmly enrich his style of writing. He is telling here to all that fear God what God in His free grace has done for his soul. Let this great reiteration therefore stand, if only it helps in any degree to encourage and comfort a single sinner, or to assure a single saint. Let it stand, indeed, in letters of gold a finger deep. For it is “grace dyed in grace,” as Goodwin says.And again, it is “gracious grace.” Let it stand; for too frequent or too emphatic repetition is impossible in this great matter here in hand.

“For the remission of sins that are past through the forbearance of God.” A great preacher of Paul’s gospel, as often as his conscience became untender; as often as his faith and love and holiness threatened to fall asleep; was wont to awaken himself by going back and taking a turn up and down among the sins of his unregenerate state, and that never failed, so he tells us, to bring him to his senses. Now, whether we are regenerate or unregenerate, we should be like that great evangelical preacher. We should, from time to time, and frequently, take a turn up and down among our past sins. It would do us good. It would break our hearts, indeed, but it would be our salvation. Let us therefore, and not seldom, go back upon ourselves and say, “Look, O my soul, at thy past self, and past through the forbearance of God. Look at that place where thou didst once dwell, and in which thou didst live a life of such sin. And look at that person—where is he now?—thy companion in thy sin. And look often at those things in thy past that no one ever saw but God Himself, whose forbearance toward thee and toward thy sins has been so long and so great.” And when your heart turns sick as you go back upon your past, betake yourself again to Cowper’s passage, and to Him whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood, for the remission of sins that are past through the forbearance of God.

“To declare, I say, at this time His righteousness.” “This time” to Paul was just that moment when he sat, pen in hand, over this passage. And then “this time” to the Romans was the first time they read this passage, or again heard it read. But their time is now long past, and our time has this day come to us. This, in Paul’s words in another epistle of his, is our accepted time, and our day of salvation. Now, is it so? Or is it to be so? All our past sins close round us at this time, beseeching us to seek their remission before the time of remission is for ever past. Now what is your answer? What are you intending to do with those sins that are past, but are past only through the forbearance of God? Are you to go on counting on His continued forbearance? Or will you not make His long-suffering your salvation, and at this time cast yourself and all your sins on His free and full forgiveness? Which of the two is it to be at this time? It is for you to say. For neither God nor man can say it for you. Only, as ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us, we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God, that God may in your case also be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.

And then, “him which believeth in Jesus” will be your true and proper name from this time henceforward. And when once you have attained to that great name, hold fast by it. At all times and in all places look on yourself, and give this always as your true and proper name and address, “him which believeth in Jesus.” As often as you join that great gospel preacher, and take a turn with him up and down among the sins that are past, always begin that review and end it as a believer in Jesus. Never, for one moment, dare to face either your past sins or your present sinfulness, but as a believer in Jesus. And if you have been a great transgressor in the past, and still are a great sinner in your heart, then, all the more, be a great believer in Jesus. Whatever other parts you may, or may not, play in life: whatever other characters you may, or may not, sustain: whatever other designations or descriptions you may, or may not, answer to,—be in all, and be above all, a believer in Jesus. All your days, and above everything else, practise believing in Jesus till you become an adept in that most important of all the arts and accomplishments of human life in this world. And then when your believing days on earth come to an end,—What benefits do believers receive from Christ at death? The souls of believers are, at their death, made perfect in holiness, and do immediately pass into glory, and their bodies being still united to Christ, do rest in their graves till the resurrection. And then,—What benefits do believers receive from Christ at the resurrection? At the resurrection, believers being raised up in glory, shall be openly acknowledged and acquitted in the day of judgment, and made perfectly blessed in the full enjoying of God to all eternity. Lord, I believe, help Thou mine unbelief!

THIRD SERMON: 

HIM THAT WORKETH NOT

 

“But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness.”—Romans 4:5.

Every great science, every great art, every great doctrine and discipline, has its own special terminology; its own technical terms, as we call them. Every new discovery, every new invention, every new doctrine and development of doctrine, demands a new name to describe it, to contain it, and to convey it. Now, though it is quite true that this word “ work” is one of our most familiar words, at the same time, when the Apostle takes that word up into his great evangelical vocabulary, he straightway fills that familiar word of ours full with all the fulness of his own inward and spiritual meaning. He fills it full with such new and such deep meanings, that it takes us all our days to get this one word of his well into our so inexperienced and so unspiritual minds.

To work, in the ordinary and everyday sense of that word, is just to do this and that with our hands. It is to dig, and dress, and keep a garden. It is to plough, and sow, and reap a field. It is to found, and build, and furnish a house. As the fourth commandment has it: Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work. But there is a whole world of work that is not comprehended in the fourth commandment. Master, said one in the Gospel, which is the great commandment of the law? Jesus said to him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbour as thyself. Now that is the commandment, and that is the work, which the Apostle is continually treating of, and not the six days’ work of the fourth commandment. The grand commandment of love embraces not only all that we do both Sabbath-day and week-day, but much more all that we think both Sabbath-day and week-day, and all that we feel, and all that we desire, and all that we long after. To work, in the Apostle’s employment of the word, is every beat of our heart, and every tone of our voice, and every glance of our eye; it is every sigh of ours and every smile. All we are, and all we have, and all we do, must be wholly given up to God and our neighbour, just as God gives up Himself and our neighbour to us. For God is love, and love is the fulfilling of all God’s holy law.

Now, that being so, is it not a very starthng thing that the Apostle should say here what he does say? Should say that to him that worketh not: that is to say, to him who loves neither God nor his neighbour aright, such and such great blessings are offered to him, and are indeed pressed upon him? What does the Apostle mean? One thing is certain, he cannot mean what, at first sight, he seems to mean. He cannot mean that the man who does not endeavour with all his might to love and serve both God and his neighbour, can ever stand accepted before God. No. But he has the mind of Christ and the message of God to us when he says authoritatively and conclusively: To him that worketh not: that is to say, to him who cannot work; to him who, as God is his witness, would work if he were only able; to him who agonises day and night to do this work of works, and who has for ever given up agonising after anything else; to him who sets God and his neighbour before him in everything; but the things he would fain do, both to God and his neighbour, he cannot attain to them; with all his sweat, and with all his tears, and with all his prayers, he cannot attain to them so as to come near performing them. He works his fingers to the bone; he bows his back to the burden; but with it all, and after it all, at the end of every day he lays down his day’s work toward God and his neighbour, not only not done, but much further from being done than it was when he took it up. Oh, wretched man that he is! who shall deliver him from the body of this death? For we know that whatsoever the law saith, it saith to them that are under the law, that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God.

But what is this that is here preached from God to every man whose mouth is so stopped? What is this new thing “believing,” to which such great blessings are everywhere promised? Well, the very first step of all believing to everlasting life is to believe what is written in the New Testament concerning Jesus Christ. At the same time, I may believe every word that Matthew and Mark and Luke and John ever write about Jesus of Nazareth, just as I believe what Plutarch and Tacitus write about Julius C&230;sar, and yet be no better. That is to say, I may believe my New Testament with what our divines are wont to call an historic faith. Nay, I might even have actually stood on Calvary, and might have seen with my own eyes Jesus Christ on the Cross, and all the time not gone down to my house justified. To be justified by faith I must go on to believe that God hath set forth His Son to be a propitiation for sin, through faith in His blood, and I must place all my faith in His blood, as if He had come and had died on the Cross for me alone. As Walter Marshall has it: “The former of these acts of believing doth not immediately unite us to Christ, because it termineth only on the gospel. Yet it is a saving act, so far as it goes, because it instructeth and inclineth and disposeth the soul to the latter act, whereby Christ Himself is immediately received into the heart. He that believeth the New Testament with hearty love and liking, as the most excellent truth, will certainly, with the like heartiness, believe on Christ for his salvation.” And thus, true saving faith, once rooted in any man’s heart, will, under the hand of the Holy Ghast, grow up to the full assurance of faith, as we see it in such great examples of full assurance as Abraham, the father of the faithful in the Old Testament, and Paul himself, the great preacher and pattern of faith in the New Testament.

But though Walter Marshall is preaching Paul’s gospel when he makes the saving act of faith to terminate on Christ and in His blood, at the same time, in this text, as so often in other texts, the Apostle carries up our faith beyond even Christ, and beyond even His blood, and rests our faith ultimately and finally on God the Father. In the Apostle’s soteriology our salvation takes its first rise in the love and the grace of the Father, and then both the Son and the Spirit perform each their proper part in carrying out the Father’s will. And thus it is that in this great text Paul runs our faith up to God the Father Himself, and instructs us to make our approach to Him alone as the “justifier of the ungodly.” But we greatly stagger at that name of God, as at so many other of His names. When we first hear this immoral doctrine, the justification of the ungodly, we will not have it. In the interests of truth and righteousness, and for the honour of God, we will not listen to it. That the ungodly should be justified, and the ungodly alone—far be it from us to believe such antinomian teaching! We can understand the godly being justified, or even the partly godly and the partly ungodly; but not the utterly ungodly. But so it is. In the gospel this is one of the many mysteries of godliness, that God justifieth the ungodly, and the ungodly alone; and that as ungodly, and always as ungodly. The more ungodly indeed any man is, the more fit and eligible he is for justification. It was the godliness of the Pharisee that was his ruin. And it was the utter absence of all godliness in the publican that made it possible to send him to his house justified. And so is it in this temple to-day also. Show me the man among you who feels himself to be the most ungodly man in the whole congregation. Show me the man who feels himself to be absolutely made of sin, like David and Paul, and I will show you the man who is the ripest of you all for his free and full justification; and who, if he will only add to his utter ungodliness the faith of the text, will go down to his house established in that peace of conscience which passes all understanding.

This doctrine of justification by faith is like one of the doctrines of the old manuscripts. The more difficult to receive any offered reading of an old manuscript, the more unlikely to be true, the harder the lection, the more the scholars trust it, and take it, and incorporate it. Now there is nothing offered to us in the whole region of salvation so hard to receive, and believe, and hold by, as just the doctrine of the text. The Jews would not have it; they stoned Paul because he preached it. The whole apostleship itself was up in arms against him because of it. They condemned it as an antinomian doctrine, and they denounced him who preached it. But it held the field, and it will more and more hold the field wherever it is preached in faith, and prayer, and alongside of a holy life, as Paul preached it, and as Luther, and Hooker, and Bunyan, and Marshall, and all the Puritans, and Chalmers, and all his sons, preached it in Scotland. “I should be glad to know,” wrote Luther to Spentein, an Augustinian monk, “what is the state of your soul. When you and I were living together we were both in the greatest of all errors: seeking to stand before God on the ground of our own works. I am still struggling against that fatal error, and have not even yet entirely triumphed over it. O, my dear brother, learn to know Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. Beware of pretending to such purity as no longer to confess thyself the chief of sinners. If our labours, and obediences, and afflictions, could have given peace to the conscience, why should Christ have died on the cross? You will never find true peace till you find it and keep it in this: that Christ takes all your sins upon Himself, and bestows all His righteousness on you.” And when the Reformation had brought back the pulpit of England to the Epistle to the Romans, and to the article of a standing or falling Church, Richard Hooker preached thus in his immortal sermon on Justification. I feel as if I could never repeat the passage too often,—“Christ hath merited righteousness for as many as are found in Him. And in Him God findeth us if we be believers. For by believing we are incorporated into Christ. Then, although in ourselves we be altogether sinful and unrighteous, yet even the man who is in himself impious, full of iniquity, full of sin; him being found in Christ through faith, and having his sins in hatred through repentance—him God beholdeth with a gracious eye, and accepteth him in Jesus Christ, as perfectly righteous as if he had fulfilled all that is commanded in the holy law of God—shall I say accepteth him as more perfectly righteous than if himself had fulfilled the whole law? I must take heed what I say; but the Apostle saith, ‘God hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him!’ Let it be counted folly, or phrenzy, or fury, or whatsoever; it is our wisdom and our comfort. We care for no knowledge in the world but this: that man hath sinned and God hath suffered: that God hath made Himself the sin of men, and that men are made the righteousness of God.”

FOURTH SERMON: 

UNDER GRACE

 

“. . . ye are not under the law, but under grace.”—Romans 6:14.

“Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God; speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem.” Now, the Apostle Paul comforted the people of God, as they had never been comforted before. So completely did the Apostle fulfil this command, that there arose a sect of Christians in the early Church who held that Paul could be none other than the promised Comforter Himself. Paul in every epistle of his, and especially in his Epistle to the Romans, had so comforted their hearts that those early heretics began tc hold that the Apostle must surely be the Holy Ghost Himself made flesh, and ministering among sinful men. “And I almost agree with them,” said Origen, in his extraordinary admiration of the Apostle Paul. “That man Paul,” said another, “if he was a man, and no more.”

Now, in order to get at the full comfort of this great scripture, let us ask, What, exactly, is the law? And what, exactly, is grace? And then we shall the better see what it is to be under the law, and what it is to be under grace.

Well: the law is the law. And the law can never be anything else but just the law. God Almighty is a righteous God. God is righteousness itself. God never can be unrighteous in anything He is, or in anything He says, or in anything He does. God is just even in justifying the ungodly. God is perfect and unspotted righteousness, and the law of God is just His perfect and unspotted righteousness righteously administered over angels and men. When it seemed good to Him, Almighty God in His love and power and wisdom, created in knowledge and righteousness and holiness the race of creatures to which we belong. As Paul has it, mankind was made under the law. And as every law, to be a law, must have its own sanctions and securities, its own rewards and punishments, so had that law under which God made man. “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” A law of God, with a sanction and a security, a reward and a punishment, altogether worthy of such a Lawgiver, and of such law-abiding subjects as Adam and Eve had it in their power and their free will to be: they, and their children. And from that primeval law there were drawn out afterwards the ten commandments of the Old Testament, and the two commandments of the New Testament: perfect love to God, and perfect love to all men. Now, we know that whatsoever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law, that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. That is the law, and that is what it is to be under the law.

And then, what is grace? Grace is love. But grace is not love simply, and purely, and alone. Grace and love are, in their innermost essence, one and the same thing. Only, grace is love adapting itself to certain special circumstances. As, for instance, love may exist between equals, or it may rise to those who are above it, or it may flow down to those who are beneath it. But grace has only one direction that it can take. Grace always flows down. And thus it is that sovereigns are said to be gracious to their subjects. But though a subject may loyally and truly and devotedly love his sovereign, yet the most loving of subjects is never said to be gracious to his sovereign. Because grace always flows down. Now, among many other relations that God holds to us, He is our Sovereign, and therefore His love to us is always called His sovereign grace. It is called mercy also, because we are in misery on account of our sin. But it is called grace above all, because we are not only in an estate of sin and misery, but because we are so infinitely beneath God, and are in that and in every other way so utterly unworthy of His love. And thus it is that with its infinite condescension toward us, grace has the most absolute freeness in all its outgoings and down-flowings also. And as grace is free, so is it sure. Nothing can change, or alter, or turn away, sovereign grace. And, with all that, it is unconditional. That is to say, as no merit of mortal man ever drew down on him the grace of God, so no demerit and no ill-desert of any man on whom it has once rested, will ever cause that grace to be withdrawn. It is not of works, lest any man should boast. Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by grace; to the end the promise might be sure to all the seed. If by grace, then it is no more of works; otherwise grace is no more grace. Grace, then, is grace,—that is to say, it is sovereign, it is free, it is sure, it is unconditional, and it is everlasting.

Now from all this, keep it always well in mind, that the law is the law, and that grace is grace. And that the law can never say but this one thing: Do and live. And every day that you try to do the law of God, and to live by doing it, you will be right glad to remember that the law is the law, and that grace is grace. For if the law continually commands what you cannot do, then and there grace comes forward, always true to herself: always promising, and offering, and bestowing. “The gospel,” says John Wesley, “is one great promise.” Just as the law is one great command. Keep that deep and everlasting distinction and difference ever before you, and continually make application of it to all that is within you. And that simple definition and distinction, kept ever in mind, will save you many a hard day and many a dark night. Keep well under grace, as the text has it. Be well taught in grace. Read the books of grace. Sit under the preachers of grace. Offer the prayers of grace. Sing the psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs, of grace. And do the works of grace. For grace has her own works also. Then said they unto Him, What shall we do that we might work the works of God? Jesus answered, and said unto them: This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom God hath sent. And again, this is His commandment, that we should believe on the name of His Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, as He gave us commandment. Learn to say about grace what Paul said on Mars’ hill about the God both of nature and of grace. Learn to say, For in grace we live, and move, and have our being. You cannot say that about the law. Paul, with all his obedience, could not say that about the law. “I was alive without the law once,” says Paul about himself; “but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died.” For the law always kills. It came, indeed, to kill, in order that grace might make alive. If life could have come by the law, then grace had come in vain. No mortal man has ever lived, to be called life, under the law. But grace brings true and everlasting life. Live, then, in grace, and in nothing else. Rise up every morning in grace. Congratulate yourself every morning as you awake, and say, O my soul, we are not under the law, but under grace. Go out to your day’s work under grace. And return home, and lie down on your bed again, ever more and more under grace. Live, and die, and rise again, and go to judgment, and go to heaven itself, and all under grace. The last words of Mr. Honest were, Grace reigns. So he left the world.

FIFTH SERMON: 

THE LIFE OF FAITH

 

“. . . The just shall live by faith.”—Romans 1:17.

The Bible, both Old Testament and New, is full of faith and the life of faith. The Bible may be said to be a book for believers and for believers alone. You need not open the Bible unless you are already a believer, or are willing, by its help, to become a believer. For, from Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is written by believers, about believers, and for believers. The Hebrew prophets preached all their sermons to believers, and the Hebrew psalmists composed all their psalms for the use of believers. And, coming down to New Testament times, Jesus Christ Himself began His life on earth by being nothing else but a believer. All His life on earth he went about looking everywhere for believers. And as often as He found another believer, that gave Him meat to eat that other men knew not of. And open Paul where you please, and you have faith and the life of faith in every epistle of his. If any epistle has not faith and the life of faith in it, you may be sure it is no true epistle of the Apostle Paul. Paul himself, after the Man Jesus Christ, was the greatest believer that ever lived. And he will make you the greatest believer now living, if you will give your days and nights to nothing else but to his epistles. And; if you are well advised, you will do that. For there is no other occupation of the mind for one moment to be compared with the study of Paul on the objects of faith and on the life of faith. It is the most intellectual of all studies, and it is the most spiritual of all studies, and it is the only study that you will take up again in heaven just at the point where you laid it down at the moment of your death on earth. Faith, in all her objects, and in all her exercises, is the very queen of studies. All other arts and sciences, all other literatures and philosophies, all other pursuits and accomplishments are, at their very best, but the companions and the handmaidens of faith.

And then, faith is such a sovereign that she has a whole universe of things under her sole and sovereign sway. As the whole world of things tangible is wholly put under our sense of touch; and as the whole world of things visible is wholly given up to our sense of sight; and as that other world of things audible belongs to our sense of hearing, and to that sense alone: so is the whole unseen world, and all that it contains, absolutely delivered over to our faith. So much is this the case, that the whole spiritual and eternal world has as good as no existence to him who has not faith. In the words of inspiration—they have no substance and no evidence to him who has not faith. Almighty God, His Son Jesus Christ, the atoning blood and the justifying righteousness of Jesus Christ; heaven and its everlasting blessedness; and all the things that are akin to these things, have no existence to him who has not faith. And no man needs Holy Scripture to tell him that. We all know that in ourselves. There are times with us all when to us there is neither God nor Christ, nor heaven nor hell. And again, there are other times when there is nothing in all the world but just these unseen things. All these things come and go to us just according to our faith. Nothing could be a better definition and description of faith than just that famous definition and description, that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

Now, the just shall live by faith, says the Apostle in the text. Yes. But who, exactly, are the just, and where are they to be found among sinful men? My brethren, the only just man is the man who has been justified. He is the same man whose mouth was once stopped and which has never again been opened to justify himself, and who has therefore been taken by God and has been justified and accepted in His Son Jesus Christ. But what exactly is it to be justified? What is justification? Justification is an act of God’s free grace, wherein He pardoneth all our sins, and accepteth us as righteous in His sight, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us and received by faith alone. That, then, is the just man of the text. There is no other just man, nor will ever be. The only just man is the justified man of the Epistle to the Romans and the Shorter Catechism. And he will know, and will be sure, that he is a justified man just according as he lives by faith.

And he lives, for one thing, by his faith in his Bible. The Bible is more to every believer than his necessary food. O how love I Thy law! is his constant ejaculation. It is my meditation all the day. More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold. Sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb. The Psalms are written in letters of gold to the eye of faith, and the Epistle to the Romans is the very marrow of lions to the taste of faith. Show me a believing man, and I will show you a justified man, and, withal, a man who is never out of his Bible. What else would you have him to read? I would like to hear you urging some of your favourite reading on him. I would like you to tell him where else but in his Bible such faith as his could be fed. Where else could he get songs for the house of his pilgrimage? And shoes for his feet, and a staff for his hand? And his whole furniture for his life of faith, and for his death of victory? Yes: depend upon it, the just man will live, and move, and have his whole being, in his Bible, and in books that have been drawn out of his Bible.

But the just man’s Bible is all that to him, because Christ is in his Bible. To me to live is Christ, is Paul’s constant protestation. Christ is everything to Paul: absolutely everything. Christ is made of God to Paul wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption. Name anything to Paul that you think he needs; claim anything from Paul that you think he owes you; put Paul into any position you like, even into prison, even into death and hell itself, and Paul is, that moment, complete in Christ. But, while all fulness dwells in Christ, it is His blood that Paul’s faith is found dealing with oftenest. Never had any man’s faith a bolder scope, or a Taster sweep, than Paul’s faith in Christ. But it is on Christ’s blood that Paul’s faith oftenest gazes, and always puts its trust. “The object of faith,” says Dr. Christian Baur in his great book on Paul, “is narrowed in Paul stage by stage. And in proportion as this is done, Paul’s faith becomes more intense and more inward. From mere theoretical assent Paul’s faith becomes a practical trust, which has for its one object the blood of Christ.” Exactly true, and excellently said. There is no limit to the scope and sweep of Paul’s faith. Everything that Christ is as the God-Man; everything that Christ has done, is doing, or ever will do, is all Paul’s by faith. But, here and now, it is His blood that is the one thing needful to Paul, and compared with which, there is nothing else for one moment to be called needful. Paul preached Christ in all His offices as He has never been preached since. But all the time Paul was such a sinner, and he was preaching to such sinners, that Christ crucified was his one determination as a preacher. They are his own words: “For I am determined not to know anything among you save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.” Paul not only at the gate of Damascus, but even in the apostolic pulpit, was always in himself a condemned man. But who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah? “Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like him that treadeth the winefat? Lo! this is He whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood. This is He on whom the LORD laid the iniquity of us all. Yes: every day, and in every place, Paul’s past sins, and his ever-present sinfulness, would be a millstone about his neck; he would be beside himself; he would be in hell already, but for the blood of Christ. Most true, the just man lives by his faith in his Bible. But that is so because his Bible is so full to him of the blood of Christ.

Be believers, then, my brethren. Practise believing continually, and in connection with everything that happens to you. If you have been great transgressors in the past, and if you are still great sinners in your heart, be correspondingly great believers in Christ. Be much in the believer’s Bible, and be less and less in every other book that does not draw its inspiration out of the believer’s Bible. But, especially, let your faith in the blood of Christ prosper and grow stronger and stronger every day. Go about through life believing in the blood of Christ at all times and in all places. As your sinfulness pours out of your heart upon you continually, never stopping, but running the more the more you try to stop it; so there is over against your sinful heart a fountain filled with blood, and that fountain will flow as long as your sinful heart flows. Have faith in that blood, then. Live by faith in that blood. And when you come to die, die believing in that blood. And, so dying, you will rise again believing for the last time. For at their deaths the souls of believers are made perfect in holiness, and do immediately pass into glory. And then, at the resurrection, believers, being raised up in glory, shall be openly acknowledged and acquitted in the day of judgment, and made perfectly blessed in the full enjoying of God to all eternity. Amen.

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