'We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works,
which God hath before ordained that we should walk in
them.'--Eph. ii. 10.
The metal is molten as it runs out of the blast furnace, but it soon
cools and hardens. Paul's teaching about salvation by grace and by faith
came in a hot stream from his heart, but to this generation his words
are apt to sound coldly, and hardly theological. But they only need to
be reflected upon in connection with our own experience, to become vivid
and vital again. The belief that a man may work towards salvation is a
universal heresy. And the Apostle, in the context, summons all his force
to destroy that error, and to substitute the great truth that we have to
begin with an act of God's, and only after that can think about our
acts. To work up towards salvation is, in the strict sense of the words,
_preposterous_; it is inverting the order of things. It is beginning at
the wrong end. It is saying X Y Z before you have learnt to say A B C.
We are to work downwards from salvation because we have it, not that we
may get it. And whatever 'good works' may mean, they are the
consequences, not the causes, of 'salvation,' whatever that may mean.
But they are consequences, and they are the very purpose of it. So says
Paul in the archaic language of my text--which only wants a little
steadfast looking at to be turned into up-to-date gospel--'We are His
workmanship, created unto good works'; and the fact that we are is one
great reason for the assertion which he brings it in to buttress, that
we are saved by grace, not by works. Now, I wish, in the simplest
possible way, to deal with these great words, and take them as they lie
before us.
I. We have, first, then, this as the root of everything, the divine
creation.
Now, you will find that in this profound letter of the Apostle there are
two ideas cropping up over and over again, both of them representing the
facts of the Christian life and of the transition from the unchristian
to the Christian; and the one is Resurrection and the other is Creation.
They have this in common, that they suggest the idea that the great gift
which Christianity brings to men--no, do not let me use the abstract
word 'Christianity'--the great gift which _Christ_ brings to men--is a
new life. The low popular notion that salvation means mainly and
primarily immunity from the ultimate, most lasting future consequences
of transgression, a change of place or of condition, infects us all, and
is far too dominant in our popular notions of Christianity and of
salvation. And it is because people have such an unworthy, narrow,
selfish idea of what 'salvation' is that they fall into the bog of
misconception as to how it is to be attained. The ordinary man's way of
looking at the whole matter is summed up in a sentence which I heard not
long since about a recently deceased friend of the speaker's, and the
like of which you have no doubt often heard and perhaps said, 'He is
sure to be saved because he has lived so straight.' And at the
foundation of that confident epitaph lay a tragical, profound
misapprehension of what salvation was.
For it is something done in you; it is _not_ something that you get, but
it is something that you become. The teaching of this letter, and of the
whole New Testament, is that the profoundest and most precious of all
the gifts which come to us in Jesus Christ, and which in their totality
are summed up in the one word that has so little power over us, because
we understand it so little, and know it so well--'salvation'--is a
change in a man's nature so deep, radical, vital, as that it may fairly
be paralleled with a resurrection from the dead.
Now, I venture to believe that it is something more than a strong
rhetorical figure when that change is described as being the creation of
a new man within us. The resurrection symbol for the same fact may be
treated as but a symbol. You cannot treat the teaching of a new life in
Christ as being a mere figure. It is something a great deal more than
that, and when once a man's eye is opened to look for it in the New
Testament it is wonderful how it flashes out from every page and
underlies the whole teaching. The Gospel of John, for example, is but
one long symphony which has for its dominant theme 'I am come that they
might have life.' And that great teaching--which has been so vulgarised,
narrowed, and mishandled by sacerdotal pretensions and sacramentarian
superstitions--that great teaching of Regeneration, or the new birth,
rests upon this as its very basis, that what takes place when a man
turns to Jesus Christ, and is saved by Him, is that there is
communicated to him not in symbol but in spiritual fact (and spiritual
facts are far more true than external ones which are called real) a
spark of Christ's own life, something of 'that spirit of life which was
in Christ Jesus,' and by which, and by which alone, being transfused
into us, we become 'free from the law of sin and death.' I beseech you,
brethren, see that, in your perspective of Christian truth, the thought
of a new life imparted to us has as prominent and as dominant a place as
it obviously has in the teaching of the New Testament. It is not so
dominant in the current notions of Christianity that prevail amongst
average people, but it is so in all men who let themselves be guided by
the plain teaching of Christ Himself and of all His servants. Salvation?
Yes! And the very essence of the salvation is the breathing into me of a
divine life, so that I become partaker of 'the divine nature.'
Now, there is another step to be taken, and that is that this new life
is realised in Christ Jesus. Now, this letter of the Apostle is
distinguished even amongst his letters by the extraordinary frequency
and emphasis with which he uses that expression 'in Christ Jesus.' If
you will take up the epistle, and run your eye over it at your leisure,
I think you will be surprised to find how, in all connections, and
linked with every sort of blessing and good as its condition, there
recurs that phrase. It is 'in Christ' that we obtain the inheritance; it
is 'in Christ' that we receive 'redemption, even the forgiveness of
sins'; it is in Him that we are 'builded together for a habitation of
God'; it is in Him that all fulness of divine gifts, and all blessedness
of spiritual capacities, is communicated to us; and unless, in our
perspective of the Christian life, that expression has the same
prominence as it has in this letter, we have yet to learn the sweetest
sweetness, and have yet to receive the most mighty power, of the Gospel
that we profess. 'In Christ'--a union which leaves the individuality of
the Saviour and of the saint unimpaired, because without such
individuality sweet love were slain, and there were no communion
possible, but which is so close, so real, so vital, as that only the
separating wall of personality and individual consciousness comes in
between--that is the New Testament teaching of the relation of the
Christian to Christ. Is it your experience, dear brother? Do not be
frightened by talking about mysticism. If a Christianity has no
mysticism it has no life. There is a wholesome mysticism and there is a
morbid one, and the wholesome one is the very nerve of the Gospel as it
is presented by Jesus Himself: 'I am the Vine, ye are the branches.
Abide in Me, and I in you.' If our nineteenth century busy Christianity
could only get hold of that truth as firmly as it grasps the
representative and sacrificial character of Christ's work, I believe it
would come like a breath of spring over 'the winter of our discontent,'
and would change profoundly and blessedly the whole contexture of modern
Christianity.
And now there is another step to take, and that is that this union with
Christ, which results in the communication of a new life, or, as my text
puts it, a new creation, depends upon our faith. We are not passive in
the matter. There is the condition on which the entrance of the life
into our spirits is made possible. You must open the door, you must
fling wide the casement, and the blessed warm morning air of the sun of
righteousness, with healing in its beams, will rush in, scatter the
darkness and raise the temperature. 'Faith' by which we simply mean the
act of the mind in accepting and of the will and heart in casting one's
self upon Christ as the Saviour--that act is the condition of this new
life. And so each Christian is 'God's workmanship, created in Christ
Jesus.'
And now, says Paul--and here some of us will hesitate to follow
him--that new creation has to go before what you call 'good works.' Now,
do not let us exaggerate. There has seldom been a more disastrous and
untrue thing said than what one of the Fathers dared to say, that the
virtues of godless men were 'splendid vices.' That is not so, and that
is not the New Testament teaching. Good is good, whoever does it. But,
then, no man will say that actions, however they may meet the human
conception of excellence, however bright, pure, lofty in motive and in
aim they may be, reach their highest possible radiance and are as good
as they ought to be, if they are done without any reference to God and
His love. Dear brethren, we surely do not need to have the alphabet of
morality repeated to us, that the worth of an action depends upon its
motive, that no motive is correspondent to our capacities and our
relation to God and our consequent responsibilities, except the motive
of loving obedience to Him. Unless that be present, the brightest of
human acts must be convicted of having dark shadows in it, and all the
darker because of the brightness that may stream from it. And so I
venture to assert that since the noblest systems of morality, apart from
religion, will all coincide in saying that to be is more than to do, and
that the worth of an action depends upon its motive, we are brought
straight up to the 'narrow, bigoted' teaching of the New Testament, that
unless a man is swayed by the love of God in what he does, you cannot,
in the most searching analysis, say that his deed is as good as it ought
to be, and as it might be. To be good is the first thing, to do good is
the second. Make the tree good and its fruit good. And since, as we have
made ourselves we are evil, there must come a re-creation before we can
do the good deeds which our relation to God requires at our hands.
II. I ask you to look at the purpose of this new creation brought out in
our text.
'Created in Christ Jesus unto good works.' That is what life is given to
you for. That is why you are saved, says Paul. Instead of working
upwards from works to salvation, take your stand at the received
salvation, and understand what it is for, and work downwards from it.
Now, do not let us take that phrase, 'good works,' which I have already
said came hot from the Apostle's heart, and is now cold as a bar of
iron, in the limited sense which it has come to bear in modern religious
phraseology. It means something a great deal more than that. It covers
the whole ground of what the Apostle, in another of his letters, speaks
of when he says, 'Whatsoever things are lovely and of good report, if
there be any virtue'--to use for a moment the world's word, which has
such power to conjure in Greek ethics--'or if there be any praise'--to
use for a moment the world's low motive, which has such power to sway
men--'think of these things,' and these things do. That is the width of
the conception of 'good works'; everything that is 'lovely and of good
report.' That is what you receive the new life for.
Contrast that with other notions of the purpose of revelation and
redemption. Contrast it with what I have already referred to, and so
need not enlarge upon now, the miserably inadequate and low notions of
the essentials of salvation which one hears perpetually, and which many
of us cherish. It is no mere immunity from a future hell. It is no mere
entrance into a vague heaven. It is not escaping the penalty of the
inexorable law, 'Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap,' that
is meant by 'salvation,' any more than it is putting away the rod, which
the child would be all the better for having administered to him, that
is meant by 'forgiveness.' But just as forgiveness, in its essence,
means not suspension nor abolition of penalty, but the uninterrupted
flow of the Father's love, so salvation in its essence means, not the
deliverance from any external evil or the alteration of anything in the
external position, but the revolution and the re-creation of the man's
nature. And the purpose of it is that the saved man may live in
conformity with the will of God, and that on his character there may be
embroidered all the fair things which God desires to see on His child's
vesture.
Contrast it with the notion that an orthodox belief is the purpose of
revelation. I remember hearing once of a man that 'he was a very shady
character, but sound on the Atonement.' What is the use of being 'sound
on the Atonement' if the Atonement does not make you live the Christ
life? And what is the good of all your orthodoxy unless the orthodoxy of
creed issues in orthopraxy of conduct? There are far too many of us who
half-consciously do still hold by the notion that if a man believes
rightly then that makes him a Christian. My text shatters to pieces any
such conception. You are saved that you may be good, and do good
continually; and unless you are so doing you may be steeped to the
eyebrows in the correctest of creeds, and it will only drown you.
Contrast this conception of the purpose of Christianity with the far too
common notion that we are saved, mainly in order that we may indulge in
devout emotions, and in the outgoing of affection and confidence to
Jesus Christ. Emotional Christianity is necessary, but Christianity,
which is mainly or exclusively emotional, lives next door to hypocrisy,
and there is a door of communication between them. For there is nothing
more certain and more often illustrated in experience than that there is
a strange underground connection between a Christianity which is mainly
fervid and a very shady life. One sees it over and over again. And the
cure of that is to apprehend the great truth of my text, that we are
saved, not in order that we may know aright, nor in order that we may
feel aright, but in order that we may be good and do 'good works.' In
the order of things, right thought touches the springs of right feeling,
and right feeling sets going the wheels of right action. Do not let the
steam all go roaring out of the waste-pipe in however sacred and blessed
emotions. See that it is guided so as to drive the spindles and the
shuttles and make the web.
III. And now, lastly, and only a word--here we have the field provided
for the exercise of the 'good works.'
'Created unto good works which God has before prepared'--before the
re-creation--'that we should walk in them.' That is to say, the true way
to look at the life is to regard it as the exercising-ground which God
has prepared for the development of the life that, through Christ, is
implanted in us. He cuts the channels that the stream may flow. That is
the way to look at tasks, at difficulties. Difficulty is the parent of
power, and God arranges our circumstances in order that, by wrestling
with obstacles, we may gain the 'thews that throw the world,' and in
order that in sorrows and in joys, in the rough places and the smooth,
we may find occasions for the exercise of the goodness which is lodged
potentially in us, when He creates us in Christ Jesus. So be sure that
the path and the power will always correspond. God does not lead us on
roads that are too steep for our weakness, and too long for our
strength. What He bids us do He fits us for; what He fits us for He
thereby bids us do.
And so, dear brother, take heed that you are fulfilling the purpose for
which you receive this new life. And let us all remember the order in
which being and doing come. We must _be_ good first, and then, and only
then, shall we _do_ good. We must have Christ for us first, our
sacrifice and our means of receiving that new life, and then, Christ in
us, the soul of our souls, the Life of our lives, the source of all our
goodness.
'If any power we have, it is to ill,
And all the power is Thine to do and eke to will.'
'THE CHIEF CORNER-STONE'
'Built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ
Jesus Himself being the chief corner-stone.'--Eph. ii. 20 (R.V.).
The Roman Empire had in Paul's time gathered into a great unity the
Asiatics of Ephesus, the Greeks of Corinth, the Jews of Palestine, and
men of many another race, but grand and imposing as that great unity
was, it was to Paul a poor thing compared with the oneness of the
Kingdom of Jesus Christ. Asiatics of Ephesus, Greeks of Corinth, Jews of
Palestine and members of many another race could say, 'Our citizenship
is in heaven.' The Roman Eagle swept over wide regions in her flight,
but the Dove of Peace, sent forth from Christ's hand, travelled further
than she. As Paul says in the context, the Ephesians had been strangers,
'aliens from the commonwealth of Israel,' wandering like the remnants of
some 'broken clans,' but now they are gathered in. That narrow community
of the Jewish nation has expanded its bounds and become the
mother-country of believing souls, the true 'island of saints.' It was
not Rome which really made all peoples one, but it was the weakest and
most despised of her subject races. 'Of Zion it shall be said,' 'Lo!
this and that man was born in her.'
To emphasise the thought of the great unity of the Church, the Apostle
uses here his often-repeated metaphor of a temple, of which the Ephesian
Christians are the stones, apostles and prophets the builders, and
Christ Himself the chief corner-stone. Of course the representation of
the foundation, as being laid by apostles and prophets, refers to them
as proclaiming the Gospel. The real laying of the foundation is the
work of the divine power and love which gave us Christ, and it is the
Divine Voice which proclaims, 'Behold _I_ lay in Zion a foundation!' But
that divine work has to be made known among men, and it is by the making
of it known that the building rises course by course. There is no
contradiction between the two statements, 'I have laid the foundation'
and Paul's 'As a wise master-builder I have laid the foundation.'
A question may here rise as to the meaning of 'prophets.' Unquestionably
the expression in other places of the Epistle does mean New Testament
prophets, but seeing that here Jesus is designated as the foundation
stone which, standing beneath two walls, has a face into each, and binds
them strongly together, it is more natural to see in the prophets the
representatives of the great teachers of the old dispensation as the
apostles were of the new. The remarkable order in which these two
classes are named, the apostles being first, and the prophets who were
first in time being last in order of mention, confirms this explanation,
for the two co-operating classes are named in the order in which they
lie in the foundation. Digging down you come to the more recent first,
to the earlier second, and deep and massive, beneath all, to the
corner-stone on whom all rests, in whom all are united together.
Following the Apostle's order we may note the process of building;
beneath that, the foundation on which the building rests; and beneath
it, the corner-stone which underlies and unites the whole.