In general terms, spiritual blessings can only be given to those who
are in a certain spiritual condition. Always and necessarily the
capacity or organ of reception precedes and determines the bestowment
of blessings. The light falls everywhere, but only the eye drinks it
in. The lower orders of creatures are shut out from all participation
in the gifts which belong to the higher forms of life, simply because
they are so made and organised as that these cannot find entrance
into their nature. They are, as it were, walled up all round; and the
only door they have to communicate with the outer world is the door
of sense. Man has higher gifts simply because he has higher
capacities. All creatures are plunged in the same boundless ocean of
divine beneficence and bestowment, and into each there flows just
that, and no more, which each, by the make and constitution that God
has given it, is capable of receiving. In the man there are more
windows and doors opened out than in the animal He is capable of
receiving intellectual impulses, spiritual emotions; he can think,
and feel, and desire, and will, and resolve: and so he stands on a
higher level than the beast below him.
Not otherwise is it in regard to God's kingdom, 'which is
righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.' The gift and
blessing of salvation is primarily a spiritual gift, and only
involves outward consequences secondarily and subordinately. It
mainly consists in the heart being at peace with God, in the whole
soul being filled with divine affections, in the weight and bondage
of transgression being taken away, and substituted by the impulse and
the life of the new love. Therefore, neither God can give, nor man
can receive, that gift upon any other terms, than just this, that the
heart and nature be fitted and adapted for it. Spiritual blessings
require a spiritual capacity for the reception of them; or, as my
text says, you cannot have the inheritance unless you are sons. If
salvation consisted simply in a change of place; if it were merely
that by some expedient or arrangement, an outward penalty, which was
to fall or not to fall at the will of an arbitrary judge, were
prevented from coming down, why then, it would be open to Him who
held the power of letting the sword fall, to decide on what terms He
might choose to suspend its infliction. But inasmuch as God's
deliverance is not a deliverance from a mere arbitrary and outward
punishment: inasmuch as God's salvation, though it be deliverance
from the penalty as well as from the guilt of sin, is by no means
chiefly a deliverance from outward consequences, but mainly a
removal of the nature and disposition that makes these outward
consequences certain,--therefore a man cannot be saved, God's love
cannot save him, God's justice will not save him, God's power stands
back from saving him, upon any other condition than this that his
soul shall be adapted and prepared for the reception and enjoyment of
the blessing of a spiritual salvation.
But the inheritance which my text speaks about is also that which a
Christian hopes to receive and enter upon in heaven. The same
principle precisely applies there. There is no inheritance of heaven
without sonship; because all the blessings of that future life are of
a spiritual character. The joy and the rapture and the glory of that
higher and better life have, of course, connected with them certain
changes of bodily form, certain changes of local dwelling, certain
changes which could perhaps be granted equally to a man, of whatever
sort he was. But, friends, it is not the golden harps, not the
pavement of 'glass mingled with fire,' not the cessation from work,
not the still composure, and changeless indwelling, not the society
even, that makes the heaven of heaven. All these are but the
embodiments and rendering visible of the inward facts, a soul at
peace with God in the depths of its being, an eye which gazes upon
the Father, and a heart which wraps itself in His arms. Heaven is no
heaven except in so far as it is the possession of God. That saying
of the Psalmist is not an exaggeration, nor even a forgetting of the
other elements of future blessedness, but it is a simple statement of
the literal fact of the case, 'I have none in heaven but Thee!' God
is the heritage of His people. To dwell in His love, and to be filled
with His light, and to walk for ever in the glory of His
sunlit face, to do His will, and to bear His character stamped upon
our foreheads--_that_ is the glory and the perfectness to which
we are aspiring. Do not then rest in the symbols that show us, darkly
and far off, what that future glory is. Do not forget that the
picture is a shadow. Get beneath all these figurative expressions,
and feel that whilst it may be true that for us in our present
earthly state, there can be no higher, no purer, no more spiritual
nor any truer representations of the blessedness which is to come,
than those which couch it in the forms of earthly experience, and
appeal to sense as the minister of delight--yet that all these things
are representations, and not adequate presentations. The inheritance
of the servants of the Lord is the Lord Himself, and they dwell in
Him, and _there_ is their joy.
Well then, if that be even partially true--admitting all that you may
say about circumstances which go to make some portion of the
blessedness of that future life--if it be true that God is the true
blessing given by His Gospel upon earth, that He Himself is the
greatest gift that can be bestowed, and that He is the true Heaven of
heaven--what a flood of light does it cast upon that statement of my
text, 'If children, then heirs'; no inheritance without sonship! For
who can possess God but they who love Him? who can love, but they who
know His love? who can have Him working in their hearts a blessed and
sanctifying change, except the souls that lie thankfully quiet
beneath the forming touch of His invisible hand, and like flowers
drink in the light of His face in their still joy? How can God dwell
in any heart except a heart which has in it a love of purity? Where
can He make His temple except in the 'upright heart and pure'? How
can there be fellowship betwixt Him and any one except the man who is
a son because he hath received of the divine nature, and in whom that
divine nature is growing up into a divine likeness? 'What fellowship
hath Christ with Belial?' is not only applicable as a guide for our
practical life, but points to the principle on which God's
inheritance belongs to God's sons alone. 'Blessed are the pure in
heart, for they shall see God'; and those only who love, and are
children, to them alone does the Father come and does the Father
belong.
So much, then, for the first principle: No inheritance without
sonship.
II. Secondly, the text leads us to the principle that there is no
sonship without a spiritual birth.
The Apostle John in that most wonderful preface to his Gospel, where
all deepest truths concerning the Eternal Being in itself and in the
solemn march of His progressive revelations to the world are set
forth in language simple like the words of a child and inexhaustible
like the voice of a god, draws a broad distinction between the
relation to the manifestations of God which every human soul by
virtue of his humanity sustains, and that into which some, by virtue
of their faith, enter. Every man is lighted by the true light because
he is a man. They who believe in His name receive from Him the
prerogative to become the sons of God. Whatever else may be taught in
John's words, surely they do teach us this, that the sonship of which
he speaks does not belong to man as man, is not a relation into which
we are born by natural birth, that we _become_ sons after we
_are_ men, that those who become sons do not include all those
who are lighted by the Light, but consist of so many of that greater
number as receive Him, and that such become sons by a divine act, the
communication of a spiritual life, whereby they are born of God.
The same Apostle, in his Epistles, where the widest love is conjoined
with the most firmly drawn lines of moral demarcation between the
great opposites--life, light, love--death, darkness, hate--contrasts
in the most unmistakable antithesis the sons of God who are known for
such because they do righteousness, and the world which knew not
Christ, nor knows those who, dimly beholding, partially resemble Him.
Nay, he goes further, and says in strange contradiction to the
popular estimate of his character, but in true imitation of that
Incarnate love which hated iniquity, 'In this the children of God are
manifested and the children of the devil'--echoing thus the words of
Him whose pitying tenderness had sometimes to clothe itself in
sharpest words, even as His hand of powerful love had once to grasp
the scourge of small cords. 'If God were your Father, ye would love
Me: ye are of your father, the devil.'
These are but specimens of a whole cycle of Scripture statements
which in every form of necessary implication, and of direct
statement, set forth the principle that he who is born again of the
Spirit, and he only, is a son of God.
Nothing in all this contradicts the belief that all men are the
children of God, inasmuch as they are shaped by His divine hand and
He has breathed into their nostrils the breath of life. They who hold
that sonship is obtained on the condition which these passages seem
to assert, do also rejoice to believe and to preach that the Father's
love broods over every human heart as the dovelike Spirit over the
primeval chaos. They rejoice to proclaim that Christ has come that
all, that each, may receive the adoption of sons. They do not feel
that their message to, nor their hope for, the world is less blessed,
less wide, because while they call on all to come and take the things
that are freely given to them of God, they believe that those only
who do come and take possess the blessing. Every man may become a son
and heir of God by faith in Jesus Christ.
But notwithstanding all the mercies that belong to us all,
notwithstanding the divine beneficence, which, like the air and the
light, pervades all nature, and underlies all our lives,
notwithstanding the universal adaptation and intention of Christ's
work, notwithstanding the wooing of His tender voice and the
unceasing beckoning of His love, it still remains true that there are
men in the world, created by God, loved and cared for by Him, for
whom Christ died, who might be, but are not, sons of God.
Fatherhood! what does that word itself teach us? It speaks of the
communication of a life, and the reciprocity of love. It rests upon a
divine act, and it involves a human emotion. It involves that the
father and the child shall have kindred life--the father bestowing
and the child possessing a life which is derived; and because
derived, kindred; and because kindred, unfolding itself in likeness
to the father that gave it. And it requires that between the father's
heart and the child's heart there shall pass, in blessed interchange
and quick correspondence, answering love, flashing backwards and
forwards, like the lightning that touches the earth and rises from it
again. A simple appeal to your own consciousness will decide if that
be the condition of all men. Are you, my brother, conscious of
anything within you higher than the common life that belongs to you
because you are an immortal soul? Can you say, 'From God's hand I have
received the granting and implantation of a new and better life?' Is
your claim verified by this, that you are kindred with God in holy
affections, in like purposes, loving what He loves, hating what He
hates, doing what He wills, accepting what He sends, longing for
Himself, and blessed in His presence? Is your sonship proved by the
depth and sincerity, the simplicity and power, of your throbbing
heart of love to your Father in heaven? Or are all these emotions
empty words to you, things that are spoken in pulpits, but to which
you have nothing in your life corresponding? Oh then, my friend, what
am I to say to you? What but this? no sonship except by that
spiritual birth; and if not such sonship, then the spirit of bondage.
If not such sonship, why then, by all the tendencies of your nature,
and by all the affinities of your moral being, if you are not holding
of heaven, you are holding of hell; if you are not drawing your life,
your character, your emotions, your affections, from the sacred well
that lies up yonder, you are drawing them from the black one that
lies down there. There are heaven, hell, and the earth that lies
between, ever influenced either from above or from below. You are
sons because born again, or slaves and 'enemies by wicked works.' It
is a grim alternative, but it is a fact.