'According to the riches of His grace.' Another angle at which the same
thought is viewed appears in another part of the letter, where we have
this variation in the expression, 'According to the riches of His
glory.' 'Grace' and 'Glory' are generally opposed antithetically; in
this epistle they are united, for in the verse before my text I read:
'To the praise of the glory of His grace.' So the first thought is, the
whole wealth of God is available for every Christian soul.
Now it seems to me that there are very few things that the popular
Christianity of this day needs more than a furnishing up of the familiar
old Christian terminology, which has largely lost the freshness and the
power that it once had. They tell us that these incandescent burners,
that we are using nowadays, are very much more bright when they are
first fixed than after the mantle gets a little worn. So it is with the
terminology of Christianity. It needs to be re-stated, not in such a way
as to take the pith out of it, which is what a great deal of the modern
craze for re-statement means, but in such a way as to brighten it up
again, and to invest it with something of the 'celestial light' with
which it was 'apparelled' when it first came. Now that word 'grace,' I
have no doubt, sounds to you hard, theological, remote. But what does it
mean? It gathers into one burning point the whole of the rays of that
conception of God, with which it is the glory of Christianity to have
flooded and drenched the world. It tells us that at the heart of the
universe there is a heart; that God is Love, that that love is the
motive-spring of His activity, that it comes and bends over the lowliest
with a smile of amity on its lips, with healing and help in its hands,
with forgiveness for all sins against itself, with boundless wealth for
the poorest, and that the wealth of His self-communicating love is the
measure of the wealth that each of us may possess.
God gives 'according to the riches of His grace.' You do not expect a
millionaire to give half-a-crown to a subscription fund; and God gives
royally, divinely, measuring His bestowments by the abundance of His
treasures, and handing over with an open palm large gifts of coined
money, because there are infinite chests of uncirculated bullion in the
deep storehouses. 'How great is Thy goodness which Thou hast manifested
before the sons of men for them that fear Thee. How much greater is Thy
goodness which Thou hast laid up in store.' But whilst He gives all, the
question comes to be: What do I receive? The measure of His gift is His
measureless grace; the measure of my reception is my--alas!
easily-measured faith. What about the unearned increment? What about the
unrealised wealth? Too many of us are like some man who has a great
estate in another land. He knows nothing about it, and is living in
grimy poverty in a back street. For you have all God's riches waiting
for you, and 'the potentiality of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice'
at your beck and call, and yet you are but poorly realising your
possible riches. Alas, that when we might have so much we do have so
little. 'According to the riches of His grace' He gives. But another
'according to' comes in. 'According to thy faith be it unto thee.' So we
have to take these two measures together, and the working limit of our
possession of God's riches comes out of the combination of them both.
Let me remind you, before I pass on, of what I have already suggested is
but another phase of this same thought, Paul says in this epistle that
God gives not only 'according to the riches of His grace,' but
'according to the riches of His glory,' and that the latter expression
is substantially identical with the former, is plain from the
combination of the two in an earlier verse of this chapter: 'To the
praise of the glory of His grace.' Thus we come to the blessed thought
that the glory of God is essentially the revelation of that stooping,
pitying, pardoning, enriching love. Not in the physical attributes, not
in the characteristics of the divine nature which part Him off from men,
and make Him remote, both from their conceptions and their affections,
but in the love that bends to them is the true glory of God. All these
other things are but the fringes; the centre of glory is the Love, which
is the mightiest and the divinest thing in the Might Divine. The
sunshine is far stronger than the lightning, and there is more force
developed in the rain than in an earthquake. That truth is what
Christianity has made the common possession of the world. It has thereby
broken the chains of dread; it has bridged over the infinite distance.
It has given us a God that can love and be loved, can stoop and can
lift, can pardon and can purify. 'According to the good pleasure of His
goodness,'--there is the foundation of our salvation. 'According to the
riches of His grace,'--there is the measure of our salvation.
II. We have another form of the same measure in another set of verses
which speak of the present working of God's power.
The Apostle speaks in regard to his own apostolic commission of its
being given 'according to the working of His power'; and he speaks of
all Christian men as receiving gifts 'according to the power that
worketh in us.' So there we have a standard that comes, as it were, a
little closer to ourselves. We do not need to travel up into the dim
abysses above, or think of the sanctities and the secrecies of that
divine heart in the light which is inaccessible, but we have the measure
in ourselves.
The standards of length are kept at Greenwich, the standards of capacity
are kept in the Tower; but there are local standards distributed
throughout the land to which men may go and have their measures
corrected. And so besides all these lofty thoughts about the grace and
the glory which measures His gift, we can turn within, if we are
Christian people, and say, 'According to the power that worketh in us.'
Ah, brethren! there are few things that we want more than to revive and
deepen the conviction that in every Christian man, by virtue of his
faith, and in proportion to his faith, there is in operation an actual,
superhuman, divine power moulding his nature, guiding, quickening,
ennobling, lifting, confirming, and hallowing and shaping him into
conformity with Jesus Christ. I would that we all believed not as a
dogma, but realised as a personal experience, that irrefragable truth,
'Know ye not that the Spirit of Christ dwelleth in you, except ye be
reprobate?' The life of self is evil; the life of Christ in self is
good, and only good. And if you are Christian men, and in the
proportion, as I have said, in which you are living by faith, you have
working in your spirits the very Spirit of Christ Himself.
And that power is the measure of your possibilities. Obviously 'the
power that worketh in us' is able to do a great deal more than it is
doing in any of us. And so with deep significance the Apostle, side by
side with his adducing of this power as being the measure of our
possible attainments, speaks about God as being 'able to do for us,
exceeding abundantly above all that we can ask or think.' 'The power
that works in us' transcends in its possibilities our present
experience, it transcends our conceptions, it transcends our desires. It
is able to do everything; it actually does--well, you know what it does
in you. And the responsibility of hampering and hindering that power
from working out its only adequately corresponding results lies at our
own doors. 'A rushing, mighty wind'--yes; and in myself a scarcely
perceptible breathing, and often a dead calm, stagnant as in the
latitudes on either side of the Equator, where, for long, dreary days,
no freshening motion in the atmosphere is perceptible. 'A fire?'--yes;
then why is my grate full of grey, cold ashes, and one little spark in
the corner? 'A fountain springing into everlasting life?'--yes; then why
in my basin is there so much scum and ooze, mud and defilement, and so
little of the flashing and brilliant water? 'The power that works in us'
is sorely hindered by the weakness in which it works.
III. In the third place another form of this measure is stated by the
Apostle, 'According to the measure of the gift of Christ.'
That means, of course, the gift which Christ bestows. It is
substantially the same idea as I have just been dealing with, only
looked at from rather a different point of view. Therefore, I need not
dwell upon its parallelism with what has just been occupying our
attention, but rather ask you simply to consider one point in reference
to it, and that is that, side by side with the reference to the gift of
Christ as being the measure of our possible attainments, the Apostle
enlarges on the Infinite variety of the shapes which that one gift
takes in different people. 'He gave some apostles, some prophets,' etc.;
one man receiving according to this fashion, and another according to
that, and to each of us the distribution is made 'according to the
measure of the gift of Christ.' That is to say, it takes us all, the
collective goodness and beauty of the whole community of saints, to
approximate to the fulness of that gift, and all are needed in their
different types and forms of excellence, sanctity and beauty, in order
to set forth, even imperfectly, the richness and the manifoldness of His
great gift. And so 'we all come'--there is a multiplicity--'unto the
perfect man, the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ'--there
is a unity in which the multiplicity inheres.
So try to get a little more of some different type of excellence than
that to which you are naturally inclined. Seek, and consciously
endeavour, to appropriate into your character uncongenial excellences,
and be very charitable in your judgments of the different types of
Christian conformity to Christ our Lord. The crystals that are set round
a light do not quarrel with each other as to whether green, or yellow,
or blue, or red, or violet is the true colour to reflect. We need all
the seven prismatic tints to make the perfect white light. The gift of
Christ is many-sided; try not to be one-sided in your reception of it.
IV. And now the last form of this measure is 'according to the energy of
the might of His power, which He wrought in Christ when He raised Him
from the dead.'
When we gazed upon the riches of God's grace, they were high above us,
when we looked upon 'the power that worketh in us,' we saw it working
amidst many hindrances and hamperings, but here there is presented to
us in a concrete example, close beside us, of what God can make of a man
when the man is wholly pliable to His will, and the recipient of His
influences. And so there stands before us the guarantee and the pattern
of immortal life, the Christ whose Manhood died and lives, who is
clothed with a spiritual body, who wields royal authority in the Kingdom
of the Most High. And that is the measure of what God can do with me,
and wishes to do with me, if I will let Him. Christ is my pattern, and
the measure of my own possibilities.
To be with Him, where and what He is, is the only adequate result of the
power that works in us, and of the process that is already begun in us,
if we are Christian people. You are sometimes--there is one eminent
example of it in that great Medicean Chapel at Florence--a statue
exquisitely finished in all its limbs, but one part left in the rough.
That is the best that Christian people come to here. Shall it always be
so? Do not the very imperfections prophesy completion, and is it not
certain that the half-finished torso will be carried to the upper
workshop, and be there disengaged from the dead marble and made to stand
out in perfect beauty and fullest completeness? Christ is the object of
our hopes, and no hopes of the Christian life are adequate to the power
that works in us, or to the progress already made, which do not see in
the 'energy of the might of the power' which wrought in Christ, the
example and the guarantee of the exceeding greatness of 'His power which
is to usward.'
And now, one last word. Besides all these passages which have been
occupying us, there is another use of this same phrase in this letter
which presents a very solemn and grim contrast. I can do no better with
it than simply read it: 'Ye were dead in trespasses and sins; wherein
in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according
to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now
worketh'--mark the allusion to the other words that we have been
referring to--'in the children of disobedience.' So there you have the
alternative, either 'dead in trespasses and sins,' whilst living the
physical and the intellectual life, or partaking of the life of Him 'who
was dead, and is alive for ever more'; either 'walking according to the
course of this world,' which is 'disobedience' and 'wrath,' or walking
'according to the power that worketh in us'; either 'putting on,' or
rather continuing to wear, 'the old man which is corrupt according to
the lusts which deceive,' or 'putting on the new man, which according to
God is created in righteousness and holiness and truth.' The choice is
before us. May God help us to choose aright!