'By grace have ye been saved through faith; and that not of
yourselves: it is the gift of God.'--Eph. ii. 8 (R.V.).
Here are three of the key-words of the New Testament--'grace,' 'saved,'
'faith.' Once these terms were strange and new; now they are old and
threadbare. Once they were like lava, glowing and cast up from the
central depths; but it is a long while since the eruption, and the
blocks have got cold, and the corners have been rubbed off them. I am
afraid that some people, when they read such a text, will shrug the
shoulder of weariness, and think that they are in for a dreary sermon.
But the more familiar a word is, the more likely are common ideas about
it to be hazy. We substitute acquaintance with the sound for penetration
into the sense. A frond of sea-weed, as long as it is in the ocean,
unfolds its delicate films and glows with its subdued colours. Take it
out, and it is hard and brown and ugly, and you have to plunge it into
the water again before you see its beauty. So with these well-worn
Christian terms; you have to put them back, by meditation and thought,
especially as to their bearing on yourself, in order to understand their
significance and to feel their power. And, although it is very hard, I
want to try and do that for a few moments with this grand thought that
lies in my text.
I. Here we have the Christian view of man's deepest need, and God's
greatest gift.
'Ye have been saved.' Now, as I have said, 'saved,' and 'salvation,' and
'Saviour,' are all threadbare words. Let us try to grasp the whole
throbbing meaning that is in them. Well, to begin with, and in its
original and lowest application, this whole set of expressions is
applied to physical danger from which it delivers, and physical disease
which it heals. So, in the Gospels, for instance, you find 'Thy faith
hath made thee whole'--literally, '_saved thee_' And you hear one of the
Apostles crying, in an excess of terror and collapse of faith, 'Save!
Master! we perish!' The two notions that are conveyed in our familiar
expression 'safe and sound,' both lie in the word--deliverance from
danger, and healing of disease.
Then, when you lift it up into the loftier region, into which
Christianity buoyed it up, the same double meaning attaches to it. The
Christian salvation is, on its negative side, a deliverance from
something impending--peril--and a healing of something infecting us--the
sickness of sin.
It is a deliverance; what from? Take, in the briefest possible language,
three sayings of Scripture to answer that question--what am I to be
saved _from_? 'His name shall be called Jesus, for He shall save His
people from their sins.' He 'delivers'--or saves--'us from the wrath to
come.' He 'saves a soul from death.' Sin, wrath death, death spiritual
as well as physical, these are the dangers which lie in wait; and the
enemies which have laid their grip upon us. And from these, as the
shepherd drags the kid from the claws of the lion or the bear's hug, the
salvation of the Gospel wrenches and rescues men.
The same general conceptions emerge, if we notice, on the other
side--what are the things which the New Testament sets forth as the
opposites of its salvation? Take, again, a brief reference to Scripture
words: 'The Son of Man came _not to condemn_ the world, but that the
world through Him might be saved.' So the antithesis is between judgment
or condemnation on the one hand, and salvation on the other. That
suggests thoughts substantially identical with the preceding but still
more solemn, as bringing in the prospect a tribunal and a judge. The
Gospel then reveals the Mighty Power that lifts itself between us and
judgment, the Mighty Power that intervenes to prevent absolute
destruction, the Power which saves from sin, from wrath, from death.
Along with them we may take the other thought, that salvation, as the
New Testament understands it, is not only the rescue and deliverance of
a man from evils conceived to lie round about him, and to threaten his
being from without, but that it is his healing from evils which have so
wrought themselves into his very being, and infected his whole nature,
as that the emblem for them is a sickness unto death for the healing
from which this mighty Physician comes. These are the negative sides of
this great Christian thought.
But the New Testament salvation is more than a shelter, more than an
escape. It not only trammels up evil possibilities, and prevents them
from falling upon men's heads, but it introduces all good. It not only
strips off the poisoned robe, but it invests with a royal garb. It is
not only negatively the withdrawal from the power, and the setting above
the reach, of all evil, in the widest sense of that word, physical and
moral, but it is the endowment with every good, in the widest sense of
that word, physical and moral, which man is capable of receiving, or God
has wealth to bestow. And this positive significance of the Christian
salvation, which includes not only pardon, and favour, and purity, and
blessedness here in germ, and sure and certain hope of an overwhelming
glory hereafter--this is all suggested to us by the fact that in
Scripture, more than once, to 'have everlasting life,' and to 'enter
into the Kingdom of God,' are employed as equivalent and alternative
expressions for being saved with the salvation of God.
And that leads me to another point--my text, as those of you who have
used the Revised Version will observe, is there slightly modified in
translation, and reads 'Ye _have been saved_,'--a past act, done once,
and with abiding present consequences, which are realised progressively
in the Christian life, and reach forward into infinitude. So the
Scripture sometimes speaks of salvation as past, 'He saved us by His
mercy': sometimes of it as present and progressive, 'The Lord added to
the Church daily those that were (in process of) being saved': sometimes
of it as future, 'now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.' In
that future all that is involved in the word will be evolved from it in
blessed experience onwards through eternity.
I have said that we should try to make an effort to fathom the depth of
meaning in this and other familiar commonplace terms of Scripture. But
no effort prior to experience will ever fathom it. There was in the
papers some time ago an account of some extraordinary deep-sea soundings
that have been made away down in the South Pacific, 29,400 feet and no
bottom, and the wire broke. The highest peak of the Himalayas might be
put into that abyss, and there would be hundreds of feet between it and
the surface. He 'casts all our sins,' mountainous as they are, behind
His back 'into the depths of the sea'; and no plummet that man can drop
will ever reach its profound abyss. 'Thy judgments are a great deep,'
and deeper than the judgments is the depth of Thy salvation.
And now, brethren, before I go further, notice the--I was going to say
theory, but that is a cold word--the facts of man's condition and need
that underlie this great Christian term of salvation--viz. we are all in
deadly peril; we are all sick of a fatal disease. 'Ah!' you say, 'that
is Paul.' Yes! it is Paul. But it is not Paul only; it is Paul's Master,
and, I hope, your Master; for He not only spoke loving, gentle words to
and about men, and not only was grace poured into His lips, but there is
another side to His utterances. No one ever spoke sadder, sterner words
about the real condition of men than Jesus Christ did. Lost sheep, lost
coins, prodigal sons, builders of houses on the sand that are destined
to be blown down and flooded away, men in danger of an undying worm and
unquenchable fire--these are parts of Christ's representations of the
condition of humanity, and these are the conceptions that underlie this
great thought of salvation as being man's deepest need.
It goes far deeper down than any of the superficial constructions of
what humanity requires, which are found among non-Christian, social and
economical, and intellectual and political reformers. It includes all
that is true in the estimate of any of these people, and it supplies all
that they aim at. But it goes far beyond them. And as they stand
pottering round the patient, and administering--what shall I say? 'pills
for the earthquake,' as we once heard--it comes and brushes them aside
and says, 'Physicians of no value! here is _the_ thing that is
wanted--salvation that comes from God.'
Brother! it is what you need. Do not be led away by the notion that
wealth, or culture, or anything less than Christ's gift to men will meet
your necessities. If once we catch a glimpse of what we really are,
there will be no words wanted to enforce the priceless value of the
salvation that the Gospel offers. It is sure to be an uninteresting word
and thing to a man who does not feel himself to be a sinner. It is sure
to be of perennial worth to a man who does. Life-belts lie unnoticed on
the cabin-shelf above the berth as long as the sun is bright, and the
sea calm, and everything goes well; but when the ship gets on the rocks
the passengers fight to get them. If you know yourself, you will know
that salvation is what you need.