By the very necessity of things it is so. If the 'teaching' was but a
teaching of abstract truths it would be enough to assent to them. I
believe that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right
angles, and I have done my duty by that proposition when I have said
'Yes! it is so.' But the 'teaching' which Jesus Christ gives and
_is_, needs a good deal more than that. By the very nature of the
teaching, assent drags after it submission. You can please yourself
whether you let Jesus Christ into your minds or not, but if you
do let Him in, He will be Master. There is no such thing as taking
Him in and not obeying.
And so the requirement of the Gospel which we call faith has in it
quite as much of the element of obedience as of the element of trust.
And the presence of that element is just what makes the difference
between a sham and a real faith. 'Faith which has not works is dead,
being alone.' A faith which is all trust and no obedience is neither
trust nor obedience.
And that is why so many of us do not care to yield ourselves to the
faith that is in Jesus Christ. If it simply came to us and said, 'If
you will trust Me you will get pardon,' I fancy there would be a good
many more of us honest Christians than are so. But Christ comes and
says, 'Trust Me, follow Me, and take Me for your Master; and be like
Me,' and one's will kicks, and one's passions recoil, and a thousand
of the devil's servants within us prick their ears up and stiffen
their backs in remonstrance and opposition. 'Submit' is Christ's
first word; submit by faith, submit in love.
That heart obedience, which is the requirement of Christianity, means
freedom. The Apostle draws a wonderful contrast in the context
between the slavery to lust and sin, and the freedom which comes from
obedience to God and to righteousness. Obey the Truth, and the Truth,
in your obeying, shall make you free, for freedom is the willing
submission to the limitations which are best. 'I will walk at liberty
for I keep Thy precepts.' Take Christ for your Master, and, being His
servants, you are your own masters, and the world's to boot. For 'all
things are yours if ye are Christ's.' Refuse to bow your necks to
that yoke which is easy, and to take upon your shoulders that burden
which is light, and you do not buy liberty, though you buy
licentiousness, for you become the slaves and downtrodden vassals of
the world and the flesh and the devil, and while you promise
yourselves liberty, you become the bondsmen of corruption. Oh! then,
let us obey from the heart that mould of teaching to which we are
delivered, and so obeying, we shall be free indeed.
'THY FREE SPIRIT'
'The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made
me free from the law of sin and death.'--ROMANS viii. 2.
We have to distinguish two meanings of law. In the stricter sense, it
signifies the authoritative expressions of the will of a ruler
proposed for the obedience of man; in the wider, almost figurative
sense, it means nothing more than the generalised expression of
constant similar facts. For instance, objects attract one another in
certain circumstances with a force which in the same circumstances is
always the same. When that fact is stated generally, we get the law
of gravitation. Thus the word comes to mean little more than a
regular process. In our text the word is used in a sense much nearer
the latter than the former of these two. 'The law of sin and of
death' cannot mean a series of commandments; it certainly does not
mean the Mosaic law. It must either be entirely figurative, taking
sin and death as two great tyrants who domineer over men; or it must
mean the continuous action of these powers, the process by which they
work. These two come substantially to the same idea. The law of sin
and of death describes a certain constancy of operation, uniform and
fixed, under the dominion of which men are struggling. But there is
another constancy of operation, uniform and fixed too, a mighty
antagonistic power, which frees from the dominion of the former: it
is 'the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.'