There is clearly a metaphor here, both in the word 'access' and in
that other one 'stand.' 'The grace' is supposed as some ample space
into which a man is led, and where he can continue, stand, and
expatiate. Or, we may say, it is regarded as a palace or
treasure-house into which we can enter. Now, if we take that great
New Testament word 'grace,' and ponder its meanings, we find that
they run something in this fashion. The central thought, grand and
marvellous, which is enshrined in it, and which often is buried for
careless ears, is that of the active love of God poured out upon
inferiors who deserve something very different. Then there follows a
second meaning, which covers a great part of the ground of the use of
the phrase in the New Testament, and that is the communication of
that love to men, the specific and individualised gifts which come
out of that great reservoir of patient, pardoning, condescending, and
bestowing love. Then there may be taken into view a meaning which is
less prominent in Scripture but not absent, namely, the resulting
beauty of character. A gracious soul ought to be, and is, a graceful
soul; a supreme loveliness is imparted to human nature by the
communication to it of the gifts which are the results of the
undeserved, free, and infinite love of God.
Now if we take all these three thoughts as blended together in the
grand metaphor of the Apostle, of the ample space into which the
Christian man passes, we get such lessons as this. A Christian life
may, and therefore should, be suffused with a continual consciousness
of the love of God. That would change everything in it. Here is some
great sweep of rolling country, perhaps a Highland moor: the little
tarns on it are grey and cold, the vegetation is gloomy and dark,
dreariness is over all the scene, because there is a great pall of
cloud drawn beneath the blue. But the sun pierces with his lances
through the grey, and crumples up the mists, and sends them flying
beneath the horizon. Then what a change in the landscape! All the
tarns that looked black and wicked are now infantile in their
innocent blue and sunny gladness, and every dimple in the heights
shows, and all the heather burns with the sunshine that falls upon
it. So my lonely doleful life, if that light from God, the beam of
His love, shines down upon it, rises into nobility, and flashes into
beauty, and is calm and fair and great, as nothing else can make it.
You may dwell in love by dwelling in God, and then your lives will be
fair. You have access into the grace; see that you go there. They
tell us that nightingales sing by the wayside by preference, and we
may have in our lives, singing a quiet tune, the continual thought of
the love of God, even whilst life's highway is dusty and rough, and
our feet are often weary in treading it. A Christian life may be, and
therefore should be, suffused with the sense of the abiding love of
God.
Take the other meaning of the word, the secondary and derived
meaning, the communication of that love to us, and that leads us to
say that a Christian life may, and therefore should, be enriched with
continual gifts from God's fullness. I said that the Apostle was
using a metaphor here, regarding the grace as being an ample
space into which a man was admitted, or we may say that he is
thinking of it as a great treasure-house. We have the right of
entrance there, where on every side, as it were, lie ingots of
uncoined gold, and masses of treasure, and we may have just as much
or as little as we choose. It is entirely in our own determination
how much of the wealth of God we shall possess. We have access to the
treasure-house; and this permit is put into our hands: 'Be it unto
thee even as thou wilt.' The size of the sack that the man brings, in
the old story, determined the amount of wealth that he carried away.
Some of you bring very tiny baskets and expect little and desire
little; you get no more than you desired and expected.
That wealth, the fullness of God, takes the shape of, as well as is
determined in its measure by the magnitude of, the vessel into which
it is put. It is multiform, and we get whatever we desire, and
whatever either our characters or our circumstances require. The one
gift assumes all forms, just as water poured into a vase takes the
shape of the vase into which it is poured. The same gift unfolds
itself in an infinite variety of manners, according to the needs of
the man to whom it is given; just as the writer's pen, the
carpenter's hammer, the farmer's ploughshare, are all made out of the
same metal. So God's grace comes to you in a different shape from
that in which it comes to me, according to our different callings and
needs, as fixed by our circumstances, our duties, our sorrows, our
temptations.
So, brethren, how shameful it is that, having the possibility of so
much, we should have the actuality of so little. There is an old
story about one of our generals in India long ago, who, when he came
home, was accused of rapacity because he had brought away so much
treasure from the Rajahs whom he had conquered, and his answer to the
charge was, 'I was surprised at my own moderation.' Ah! there are a
great many Christian people who ought to be ashamed of their
moderation. They have gone into the treasure-house; stacks of jewels,
jars of gold on all sides of them--and they have been content to come
away with some one poor little coin, when they might have been 'rich
beyond the dreams of avarice.' Brethren, you have 'access' to the
fullness of God. Whose fault is it if you are empty?
Then, further, I said there was another meaning in these great words.
The love which may suffuse our lives, the gifts, the consequence of
that love, which may enrich our lives, should, and in the measure in
which they are received will, adorn and make beautiful our lives. For
'grace' means loveliness as well as goodness, and the God who is the
fountain of it all is the fountain of 'whatsoever things are fair,'
as well as of whatsoever things are good. That suggests two
considerations on which I have no time to dwell. One is that the
highest beauty is goodness, and unless the art of a nation learns
that, its art will become filthy and a minister of sin. They talk
about 'Art for Art's sake.' Would that all these poets and painters
who are trying to find beauty in corruption--and there is a
phosphorescent glimmer in rotting wood, and a prismatic colouring on
the scum of a stagnant pond--would that all those men who are seeking
to find beauty apart from goodness, and so are turning a divine
instinct into a servant of evil, would learn that the true
gracefulness comes from the grace which is the fullness of God given
unto men.
But there is another lesson, and that is that Christian people who
say that they have their lives irradiated by the love of God, and who
profess to be receiving gifts from His full hand, are bound to take
care that their goodness is not 'harsh and crabbed,' as not only
'dull fools suppose' it to be, but as it sometimes is, but is musical
and fair. You are bound to make your goodness attractive, and to show
that the things that are 'of good report' are likewise the 'things
that are lovely.'
II. And so, now, turn to the second point here, viz. the Christian
attitude.
'The grace wherein ye _stand_'; that word is very emphatic here,
and does not merely mean 'continue,' but it suggests what I have put
into that phrase, the Christian attitude.
Two things are implied. One is that a life thus suffused by the love,
and enriched by the gifts, and adorned by the loveliness that come
from God, will be stable and steadfast. Resistance and stability are
implied in the words. One very important item in determining a man's
power of resistance, and of standing firm against whatever assaults
may be hurled against him, is the sort of footing that he has. If you
stand on slippery mud, or on the ice of a glacier, you will find it
hard to stand firm; but if you plant your foot on the grace of God,
then you will be able to 'withstand in the evil day, and having done
all to stand.' And how does a man plant his foot on the grace of God?
simply by trusting in God, and not in himself. So that the secret of
all steadfastness of life, and of all successful resistance to the
whirling onrush of temptations and of difficulties, is to set your
foot upon that rock, and then your 'goings' will be established.
Jesus Christ brings to us, in the gift of life in Him, stability
which will check the vacillations of our own hearts. We go up and
down, we yield when pressure is brought to bear against us, we are
carried off our feet often by the sudden swirl of the stream, and the
fitful blast of the wind. But His grace comes in, and will make us
able to stand against all assaults. Our poor natures, necessarily
changeable, and sinfully vacillating and weak, will be uniform, in
the measure in which the grace of God comes into our hearts. Just as
in these so-called petrifying wells, they take a bit of cloth, a
bird's nest, a billet of wood, and plunge it into the water, and the
mineral held in solution there infiltrates into the substance of the
thing plunged in, and makes it firm and inflexible: so let us plunge
our poor, changeful, vacillating resolutions, our wayward, wandering
hearts, our passions, so easily excited by temptation, into that
great fountain, and there will filter into our flexibility what will
make it firm, and into our changefulness what will give in us some
faint copy of the divine immutability, and we shall stand fast in the
Lord and in the power of His might.
Further, in regard to this attitude, which is the result of the
possession of grace, we may say that it indicates not only stability
and steadfastness, but erectness, as in opposition to crouching or
bowing. A man's independence is guaranteed by his dependence upon,
and his possession of, that communicated grace of God. And so you
have the fact that the phase of the Christian teaching which has laid
most stress on the decrees and sovereign will of God, on divine grace
in fact, and too little upon the human side--the phase which is
roughly described as Calvinism--has underlain the liberties of
Europe, and has stiffened men into the rejection of all priestly and
civic domination. 'Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is
liberty,' and if a man has in his heart the grace of God, then he
stands erect as a man. 'Ye are bought with a price; be ye not the
servants of men.' The Christian democracy, the Christian rejection of
all sacerdotal and other domination, flows from the access of each
individual Christian to the fountain of all wisdom, the only source
of law and command, the inspirer of all strength, the giver of all
grace. By faith ye stand. 'Stand fast therefore in the liberty
wherewith Christ has made you free.'
III. Lastly, and only a word; we have here the Christian way of
entrance into grace.
I have already remarked on the emphasis with which, both in my text
and in the preceding clause, there are laid down the two conditions
of possessing this grace, or the peace which precedes it: 'By
Christ--through faith.' Notice, too, that Jesus Christ gives us
'access.' Now that expression is but an imperfect rendering of the
original. If it were not for its trivial associations, one might read
instead of 'access,' introduction, 'by whom we have introduction into
this grace wherein we stand.' The thought is that Jesus Christ
secures us entry into this ample space, this treasure-house, as some
court officer might take by the hand a poor rustic, standing on the
threshold of the palace, and lead him through all the glittering
series of unfamiliar splendour, and present him at last in the
central ring around the king. The reality that underlies the metaphor
is plain. We sinners can never pass into that central glory, nor ever
possess those gifts of grace, unless the barrier that stands between
us and God, between us and His highest gifts of love, is swept away.
I recall an old legend where two knights are represented as seeking
to enter a palace, where there is a mysterious fire burning in the
middle of the portal. One of them tries to pass through, and recoils
scorched; but when the other essays an entrance the fierce fire
sinks, and the path is cleared. Jesus Christ has died, and I say it
with all reverence, as His blood touches the fire it flickers down
and the way is opened 'into the holiest of all, whither the
Forerunner is for us entered.' He both brings the grace and makes it
possible that we should go in where the grace is.
But Jesus Christ's work is nothing to you unless your personal faith
comes in, and so that is pointed to in the second of the clauses
here: '_By faith_ we have access.' That is no arbitrary appointment.
It lies in the very nature of the gift and of the recipient. How can
God give access into that grace to a man who shrinks from being near
Him; who does not want 'access,' and who could not use the grace if
he had it? How can God bestow inward and spiritual gifts upon any man
who closes his heart against them, and will not have them? My faith
is the condition; Christ is the Giver. If I ally myself to Him by my
faith, He gives to me. If I do not, with all the will to do it, He
cannot bestow His best gifts any more than a man who stretches out
his hand to another sinking in the flood can lift him out, and set
him on the safe shore, if the drowning man's hand is not stretched
out to grasp the rescuer's outstretched hand.
Brethren, God is infinitely willing to give the choicest gifts of His
love to us all, to gladden, to enrich, to adorn, to make stable and
erect. But He cannot give them unless you will trust Him. 'It pleased
the Father that in Him should all fullness dwell.' That alabaster box
is brought to earth. It was broken on the Cross that 'the house'
might be 'filled with the odour of the ointment.' Our faith is the
only condition; it is only the condition, but it is the indispensable
condition, of our being anointed with that fragrant anointing. He,
and He only, can give us the fullness of God.