'The God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in
believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the
power of the Holy Ghost.'--ROMANS xv. 13.
With this comprehensive and lofty petition the Apostle closes his
exhortation to the factions in the Roman Church to be at unity. The
form of the prayer is moulded by the last words of a quotation which
he has just made, which says that in the coming Messiah 'shall the
Gentiles hope.' But the prayer itself is not an instance of being led
away by a word--in form, indeed, it is shaped by verbal resemblance;
in substance it points to the true remedy for religious controversy.
Fill the contending parties with a fuller spiritual life, and the
ground of their differences will begin to dwindle, and look very
contemptible. When the tide rises, the little pools on the rocks are
all merged into one.
But we may pass beyond the immediate application of these words, and
see in them the wish, which is also a promise, and like the
exhibition of every ideal is a command. This is Paul's conception of
the Christian life as it might and should be, in one aspect. You
notice that there is not a word in it about conduct. It goes far
deeper than action. It deals with the springs of action in the
individual life. It is the depths of spiritual experience here set
forth which will result in actions that become a Christian. And in
these days, when all around us we see a shallow conception of
Christianity, as if it were concerned principally with conduct and
men's relations with one another, it is well to go down into the
depths, and to remember that whilst 'Do, do, do!' is very important,
'Be, be, be!' is the primary commandment. Conduct is a making visible
of personality, and the Scripture teaching which says first faith and
then works is profoundly philosophical as well as Christian. So we
turn away here from externals altogether, and regard the effect of
Christianity on the inward life.
I. I wish to notice man's faith and God's filling as connected, and
as the foundation of everything.
'The God of hope fill you ...'--let us leave out the intervening
words for a moment--'in believing.' Now, you notice that Paul does
not stay to tell us what or whom we are to believe in, or on. He
takes that for granted, and his thought is fastened, for the moment,
not on the object but on the act of faith. And he wishes to drive
home to us this, that the attitude of trust is the necessary
prerequisite condition of God's being able to fill a man's soul, and
that God's being able to fill a man's soul is the necessary
consequence of a man's trust. Ah, brethren, we cannot altogether shut
God out from our spirits. There are loving and gracious gifts that,
as our Lord tells us, He makes to 'fall on the unthankful and the
evil.' His rain is not like the summer showers that we sometimes see,
that fall in one spot and leave another dry; nor like the destructive
thunderstorms, that come down bringing ruin upon one cane-brake and
leave the plants in the next standing upright. But the best, the
highest, the truly divine gifts which He is yearning to give to us
all, cannot be given except there be consent, trust, and desire for
them. You can shut your hearts or you can open them. And just as the
wind will sigh round some hermetically closed chamber in vain search
for a cranny, and the man within may be asphyxiated though the
atmosphere is surging up its waves all round his closed domicile, so
by lack of our faith, which is at once trust, consent, and desire, we
shut out the gift with which God would fain fill our spirits. You can
take a porous pottery vessel, wrap it up in waxcloth, pitch it all
over, and then drop it into mid-Atlantic, and not a drop will find
its way in. And that is what we can do with ourselves, so that
although in Him 'we live and move and have our being,' and are like
the earthen vessel in the ocean, no drop of the blessed moisture will
ever find its way into the heart. There must be man's faith before
there can be God's filling.
Further, this relation of the two things suggests to us that a
consequence of a Christian man's faith is the direct action of God
upon him. Notice how the Apostle puts that truth in a double form
here, in order that he may emphasise it, using one form of
expression, involving the divine, direct activity, at the beginning
of his prayer, and another at the end, and so enclosing, as it were,
within a great casket of the divine action, all the blessings, the
flashing jewels, which he desires his Roman friends to possess. 'The
God of hope fill you ... through the power of the Holy Ghost.' I wish
I could find words by which I could bear in upon the ordinary type of
the Evangelical Christianity of this generation anything like the
depth and earnestness of my own conviction that, for lack of a
proportionate development of that great truth, of the direct action
of the giving God on the believing heart, it is weakened and harmed
in many ways. Surely He that made my spirit can touch my spirit;
surely He who filleth all things according to their capacity can
Himself enter into and fill the spirit which is opened for Him by
simple faith. We do not need wires for the telegraphy between heaven
and the believing soul, but He comes directly to, and speaks in, and
moves upon, and moulds and blesses, the waiting heart. And until you
know, by your own experience rightly interpreted, that there is such
a direct communion between the giving God and the recipient believing
spirit, you have yet to learn the deepest depth, and the most blessed
blessedness, of Christian faith and experience. For lack of it a
hundred evils beset modern Christianity. For lack of it men fix their
faith so exclusively as that the faith is itself harmed thereby, on
the past act of Christ's death on the Cross. You will not suspect me
of minimising that, but I beseech you remember one climax of the
Apostle's which, though not bearing the same message as my text, is
in harmony with it, 'Christ that died, yea, rather, that is risen
again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh
intercession for us.' And remember that Christ Himself bestows the
gift of His Divine Spirit as the result of the humiliation and the
agony of His Cross. Faith brings the direct action of the giving God.
And one more word about this first part of my text: the result of
that direct action is complete--'the God of hope fill you' with no
shrunken stream, no painful trickle out of a narrow rift in the rock,
but a great exuberance which will pass into a man's nature in the
measure of his capacity, which is the measure of his trust and
desire. There are two limits to God's gifts to men: the one is the
limitless limit of God's infinitude, the other is the working
limit--our capacity--and that capacity is precisely measured, as the
capacity of some built-in vessel might be measured by a little gauge
on the outside, by our faith. 'The God of hope' fills you in
'believing,' and 'according to thy faith shall it be unto thee.'
II. Notice the joy and peace which come from the direct action of the
God of hope on the believer's soul.
Now, it is not only towards God that we exercise trust, but wherever
it is exercised, to some extent, and in the measure in which the
object on which it rests is discovered by experience to be worthy, it
produces precisely these results. Whoever trusts is at peace, just as
much as he trusts. His confidence may be mistaken, and there will
come a tremendous awakening if it is, and the peace will be shattered
like some crystal vessel dashed upon an iron pavement, but so long as
a man's mind and heart are in the attitude of dependence upon
another, conceived to be dependable, one knows that there are few
phases of tranquillity and blessedness which are sweeter and deeper
than that. 'The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her'--that
is one illustration, and a hundred more might be given. And if you
will take that attitude of trust which, even when it twines round
some earthly prop, is upheld for a time, and bears bright flowers--if
you take it and twine it round the steadfast foundations of the
Throne of God, what can shake that sure repose? 'Joy and peace' will
come when the Christian heart closes with its trust, which is God in
Christ.
He that believes has found the short, sure road to joy and peace,
because his relations are set right with God. For these relations are
the disturbing elements in all earthly tranquillity, and like the
skeleton at the feast in all earthly joy, and a man can never, down
to the roots of his being, be at rest until he is quite sure that
there is nothing wrong between him and God. And so believing, we come
to that root of all real gladness which is anything better than a
crackling of thorns under a pot, and to that beginning of all true
tranquillity. Joy in the Lord and peace with God are the parents of
all joy and peace that are worthy of the name.
And that same faith will again bring these two bright-winged angels
into the most saddened and troubled lives, because that faith brings
right relations with ourselves. For our inward strifes stuff thorns
into the pillow of our repose, and mingle bitterness with the
sweetest, foaming draughts of our earthly joys. If a man's conscience
and inclinations pull him two different ways, he is torn asunder as
by wild horses. If a man has a hungry heart, for ever yearning after
unattained and impossible blessings, then there is no rest there. If
a man's little kingdom within him is all anarchical, and each passion
and appetite setting up for itself, then there is no tranquillity.
But if by faith we let the God of hope come in, then hungry hearts
are satisfied, and warring dispositions are harmonised, and the
conscience becomes quieted, and fair imaginations fill the chamber of
the spirit, and the man is at rest, because he himself is unified by
the faith and fear of God.
And the same faith brings joy and peace because it sets right our
relations with other people, and with all externals. If I am living
in an atmosphere of trust, then sorrow will never be absolute, nor
have exclusive monopoly and possession of my spirit. But there will
be the paradox, and the blessedness, of Christian experience, 'as
sorrowful yet always rejoicing.' For the joy of the Christian life
has its source far away beyond the swamps from which the sour drops
of sorrow may trickle, and it is possible that, like the fabled fire
that burned under water, the joy of the Lord may be bright in my
heart, even when it is drenched in floods of calamity and distress.
And so, brethren, the joy and peace that come from faith will fill
the heart which trusts. Only remember how emphatically the Apostle
here puts these two things together, 'joy and peace in believing.' As
long as, and not a moment longer than, you are exercising the
Christian act of trust, will you be experiencing the Christian
blessedness of 'joy and peace.' Unscrew the pipe, and in an instant
the water ceases to flow. Touch the button and switch off, and out
goes the light. Some Christian people fancy they can live upon past
faith. You will get no present joy and peace out of past faith. The
rain of this day twelve months will not moisten the parched ground of
to-day. Yesterday's religion was all used up yesterday. And if you
would have a continuous flow of joy and peace through your lives,
keep up a uniform habit and attitude of trust in God. You will get it
then; you will get it in no other way.
III. Lastly, note the hope which springs from this experience of joy
and peace.
'The God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that
ye may abound in hope.' Here, again, the Apostle does not trouble
himself to define the object of the hope. In this, as in the former
clause, his attention is fixed upon the emotion, not upon that
towards which it goes out. And just as there was no need to say in
whom it was that the Christian man was to believe, so there is no
room to define what it is that the Christian man has a right to hope
for. For his hope is intended to cover all the future, the next
moment, or to-morrow, or the dimmest distance where time has ceased
to be, and eternity stands unmoved. The attitude of the Christian
mind ought to be a cheery optimism, an unconquerable hope. 'The best
has yet to be' is the true Christian thought in contemplating the
future for myself, for my dear ones, for God's Church, and for God's
universe.
And the truest basis on which that hope can rest is the experience
granted to us, on condition of our faith, of a present, abundant
possession of the joy and peace which God gives. The gladder you are
to-day, if the gladness comes from the right source, the surer you
may be that that gladness will never end. That is not what befalls
men who live by earthly joys. For the more poignant, precious, and,
as we faithlessly think, indispensable some of these are to us, the
more into their sweetest sweetness creeps the dread thought: 'This is
too good to last; this must pass.' We never need to think that about
the peace and joy that come to us through believing. For they, in
their sweetness, prophesy perpetuity. I need not dwell upon the
thought that the firmest, most personally precious convictions of an
eternity of future blessedness, rise and fall in a Christian
consciousness with the purity and the depth of its own experience of
the peace and joy of the Gospel. The more you have of Jesus Christ in
your lives and hearts to-day, the surer you will be that whatever
death may do, it cannot touch that, and the more ludicrously
impossible it will seem that anything that befalls this poor body can
touch the bond that knits us to Jesus Christ. Death can separate us
from a great deal. Its sharp scythe cuts through all other bonds, but
its edge is turned when it is tried against the golden chain that
binds the believing soul to the Christ in whom he has believed.
So, brethren, there is the ladder--begin at the bottom step, with
faith in Jesus Christ. That will bring God's direct action into your
spirit, through His Holy Spirit, and that one gift will break up into
an endless multiplicity of blessings, just as a beam of light spilt
upon the surface of the ocean breaks into diamonds in every wave, and
that 'joy and peace' will kindle in your hearts a hope fed by the
great words of the Lord: 'Peace I leave with you, my peace I give
unto you,' 'My joy shall remain in you, and your joy shall be full,'
'He that liveth and believeth in Me shall never die.'