The name is that of Paul's first convert. He takes it, as I suppose,
because it seemed to him such a blessed thing that at the very moment
when he began to sow, God helped him to reap. He had gone out to his
work, no doubt, with much trembling, with weakness and fear. And lo!
here, at once, the fields were white already to the harvest,
Great conquerors have been named from their victories; Africanus,
Germanicus, Nelson of the Nile, Napier of Magdala, and the like. Paul
names himself from the first victory that God gives him to win; and so,
as it were, carries ever on his breast a memorial of the wonder that
through him it had been given to preach, and that not without success,
amongst the Gentiles 'the unsearchable riches of Christ.'
That is to say, this man thought of it as his highest honour, and the
thing best worthy to be remembered about his life, that God had helped
him to help his brethren to know the common Master. Is that your idea
of the best thing about a life? What would you, a professing Christian,
like to have for an epitaph on your grave? 'He was rich; he made a big
business in Manchester'; 'He was famous, he wrote books'; 'He was happy
and fortunate'; or, 'He turned many to righteousness'? This man flung
away his literary tastes, his home joys, and his personal ambition, and
chose as that for which he would live, and by which he would fain be
remembered, that he should bring dark hearts to the light in which he
and they together walked.
His name, in its commemoration of his first success, would act as a
stimulus to service and to hope. No doubt the Apostle, like the rest of
us, had his times of indolence and languor, and his times of
despondency when he seemed to have laboured in vain, and spent his
strength for nought. He had but to say 'Paul' to find the antidote to
both the one and the other, and in the remembrance of the past to find
a stimulus for service for the future, and a stimulus for hope for the
time to come. His first convert was to him the first drop that predicts
the shower, the first primrose that prophesies the wealth of yellow
blossoms and downy green leaves that will fill the woods in a day or
two. The first convert 'bears in his hand a glass which showeth many
more.' Look at the workmen in the streets trying to get up a piece of
the roadway. How difficult it is to lever out the first paving stone
from the compacted mass! But when once it has been withdrawn, the rest
is comparatively easy. We can understand Paul's triumph and joy over
the first stone which he had worked out of the strongly cemented wall
and barrier of heathenism; and his conviction that having thus made a
breach, if it were but wide enough to let the end of his lever in, the
fall of the whole was only a question of time. I suppose that if the
old alchemists had turned but one grain of base metal into gold they
might have turned tons, if only they had had the retorts and the
appliances with which to do it. And so, what has brought one man's soul
into harmony with God, and given one man the true life, can do the same
for all men. In the first fruits we may see the fields whitening to the
harvest. Let us rejoice then, in any little work that God helps us to
do, and be sure that if so great be the joy of the first fruits, great
beyond speech will be the joy of the ingathering.
IV. And now last of all, this change of name is an index of the spirit
of a life's work.
'Paul' means 'little'; 'Saul' means 'desired.' He abandons the name
that prophesied of favour and honour, to adopt a name that bears upon
its very front a profession of humility. His very name is the
condensation into a word of his abiding conviction: 'I am less than the
least of all saints.' Perhaps even there may be an allusion to his low
stature, which may be pointed at in the sarcasm of his enemies that his
letters were strong, though his bodily presence was 'weak.' If he was,
as Renan calls him, 'an ugly little Jew,' the name has a double
appropriateness.
But, at all events, it is an expression of the spirit in which he
sought to do his work. The more lofty the consciousness of his vocation
the more lowly will a true man's estimate of himself be. The higher my
thought of what God has given me grace to do, the more shall I feel
weighed down by the consciousness of my unfitness to do it. And the
more grateful my remembrance of what He has enabled me to do, the more
shall I wonder that I have been enabled, and the more profoundly shall
I feel that it is not my strength but His that has won the victories.
So, dear brethren, for all hope, for all success in our work, for all
growth in Christian grace and character, this disposition of lowly
self-abasement and recognised unworthiness and infirmity is absolutely
indispensable. The mountain-tops that lift themselves to the stars are
barren, and few springs find their rise there. It is in the lowly
valleys that the flowers grow and the rivers run. And it is they who
are humble and lowly in heart to whom God gives strength to serve Him,
and the joy of accepted service.
I beseech you, then, learn your true life's task. Learn how to do it by
identifying yourselves with the humbler brethren whom you would help.
Learn the spirit in which it must be done; the spirit of lowly
self-abasement. And oh! above all, learn this, that unless you have the
new life, the life of God in your hearts, you have no life at all.
Have you, my brother, that faith by which we receive into our spirits
Christ's own Spirit, to be our life? If you have, then you are a new
creature, with a new name, perhaps but dimly visible and faintly
audible, amidst the imperfections of earth, but sure to shine out on
the pages of the Lamb's Book of Life; and to be read 'with tumults of
acclaim' before the angels of Heaven. 'I will give him a white stone,
and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth save he that
receiveth it.'