'The love of Christ constraineth us.'--2 COR. v. 14.
It is a dangerous thing to be unlike other people. It is still more
dangerous to be better than other people. The world has a little heap
of depreciatory terms which it flings, age after age, at all men who
have a higher standard and nobler aims than their fellows. A
favourite term is 'mad.' So, long ago they said, 'The prophet is a
fool; the spiritual man is mad,' and, in His turn, Jesus was said to
be 'beside Himself,' and Festus shouted from the judgment-seat to
Paul that he was mad. A great many people had said the same thing
about him before, as the context shows. For the verse before my text
is: 'Whether we be beside ourselves, it is to God: or whether we be
sober, it is for your cause.' Now the former clause can only refer to
other people's estimate of the Apostle. No doubt there were many
things about him that gave colour to it. He said that a dead Man had
appeared to him and spoken with him. He said that he had been carried
up into the third heaven. He had a very strange creed in the judgment
of the times. He had abandoned a brilliant career for a very poor
one. He was obviously utterly indifferent to the ordinary aims of
men. He had a consuming enthusiasm. And so the world explained him
satisfactorily to itself by the short and easy method of saying,
'Insane.' And Paul explained himself by the great word of my text,
'The love of Christ constraineth us.' Wherever there is a life
adequately under the influence of Christ's love the results will be
such as an unsympathising world may call madness, but which are the
perfection of sober-mindedness. Would there were more such madmen! I
wish to try to make one or two of them now, by getting some of you to
take for your motto, 'The love of Christ constraineth us.'