'That ye ... may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the
breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of
Christ, which passeth knowledge.'--Eph. iii. 18, 19.
This constitutes the third of the petitions in this great prayer of
Paul's, each of which, as we have had occasion to see in former sermons,
rises above, and is a consequence of the preceding, and leads on to,
and is a cause or occasion of the subsequent one.
The two former petitions have been for inward strength communicated by a
Divine Spirit, in order that Christ may dwell in our hearts, and so we
may be rooted and grounded in love. The result of these desires being
realised in our hearts is here set forth in two clauses which are
substantially equivalent in meaning. 'To comprehend' may be taken as
meaning nearly the same as 'to know,' only that perhaps the former
expresses an act more purely intellectual. And, as we shall see in our
next sermon, 'the breadth and length and depth and height' are the
unmeasurable dimensions of the love which in the second clause is
described as 'passing knowledge.' I purpose to deal with these measures
in a separate discourse, and, therefore, omit them from consideration
now.
We have, then, mainly two thoughts here, the one, that only the loving
heart in which Christ dwells can know the love of Christ; and the other
that even that heart can _not_ know the love of Christ. The paradox is
intentional, but it is intelligible. Let me deal then, as well as I can,
with these two great thoughts.
I. First, we have this thought that only the loving heart can know
Christ's love.
Now the Bible uses that word _know_ to express two different things; one
which we call mere intellectual perception; or to put it into plainer
words, mere head knowledge such as a man may have about any subject of
study, and the other a deep and living experience which is possession
before it is knowledge, and knowledge because it is possession.
Now the former of these two, the knowledge which is merely the work of
the understanding, is, of course, independent of love. A man may know
all about Christ and His love without one spark of love in his heart.
And there are thousands of people who, as far as the mere intellectual
understanding is concerned, know as much about Jesus Christ and His love
as the saint who is closest to the Throne, and yet have not one trace of
love to Christ in them. That is the kind of people that a widely
diffused Christianity and a habit of hearing sermons produce. There are
plenty of them, and some of us among them, who, as far as their heads
are concerned, know quite as much of Jesus Christ and His love as any of
us do, and could talk about it and argue about it, and draw inferences
from it, and have the whole system of evangelical Christianity at their
fingers' ends. Ay! It is at their fingers' _ends_, it never gets any
nearer them than that.
There is a knowledge with which love has nothing to do, and it is a
knowledge that for many people is quite sufficient. 'Knowledge puffeth
up,' says the Apostle; into an unwholesome bubble of self-complacency
that will one day be pricked and disappear, but 'love buildeth up'--a
steadfast, slowly-rising, solid fabric. There be two kinds of knowledge:
the mere rattle of notions in a man's brain, like the seeds of a
withered poppy-head; very many, very dry, very hard; that will make a
noise when you shake them. And there is another kind of knowledge which
goes deep down into the heart, and is the only knowledge worth calling
by the name; and that knowledge is the child, as my text has it, of
love.
Now let us think about that for a moment. Love, says Paul, is the parent
of all knowledge. Well, now, can we find any illustrations from similar
facts in other regions? Yes! I think so. How do we know, really know,
any emotions of any sort whatever? Only by experience. You may talk for
ever about feelings, and you teach nothing about them to those who have
not experienced them. The poets of the world have been singing about
love ever since the world began. But no heart has learned what love is
from even the sweetest and deepest songs. Who that is not a father can
be taught paternal love by words, or can come to a perception of it by
an effort of mind? And so with all other emotions. Only the lips that
have drunk the cup of sweetness or of bitterness can tell how sweet or
how bitter it is, and even when they, made wise by experience, speak out
their deepest hearts, the listeners are but little the wiser, unless
they too have been scholars in the same school. Experience is our only
teacher in matters of feeling and emotion, as in the lower regions of
taste and appetite. A man must be hungry to know what hunger is; he must
taste honey or wormwood in order to know the taste of honey or wormwood,
and in like manner he cannot know sorrow but by feeling its ache, and
must love if he would know love. Experience is our only teacher, and her
school-fees are heavy.
Just as a blind man can never be made to understand the glories of
sunrise, or the light upon the far-off mountains; just as a deaf man may
read books about acoustics, but they will not give him a notion of what
it is to hear Beethoven, so we must have love to Christ before we know
what love to Christ is, and we must consciously experience the love of
Christ ere we know what the love of Christ is. We must have love to
Christ in order to have a deep and living possession of love of Christ,
though reciprocally it is also true that we must have the love of Christ
known and felt by our answering hearts, if we are ever to love Him back
again.
So in all the play and counterplay of love between Christ and us, and in
all the reaction of knowledge and love this remains true, that we must
be rooted and grounded in love ere we can know love, and must have
Christ dwelling in our hearts, in order to that deep and living
possession which, when it is conscious of itself, is knowledge, and is
for ever alien to the loveless heart.
'He must be loved, ere that to you
He will seem worthy of your love.'
If you want to know the blessedness of the love of Christ, love Him, and
open your hearts for the entrance of His love to you. Love is the parent
of deep, true knowledge.
Of course, before we can love an unseen person and believe in his love,
we must know about him by the ordinary means by which we learn about all
persons outside the circle of our sight. So before the love which is
thus the parent of deep, true knowledge, there must be the knowledge by
study and credence of the record concerning Christ, which supplies the
facts on which alone love can be nourished. The understanding has its
part to play in leading the heart to love, and then the heart becomes
the true teacher. He that loveth, knoweth God, for God is love. He that
is rooted and grounded in love because Christ dwells in his heart, will
be strengthened to know the love in which he is rooted. The Christ
within us will know the love of Christ. We must first 'taste,' and then
we shall 'see' that the Lord is good, as the Psalmist puts it with deep
truth. First, the appropriation and feeding upon God, then the clear
perception by the mind of the sweetness in the taste. First the
enjoyment; then the reflection on the enjoyment. First the love; and
then the consciousness of the love of Christ possessed and the love to
Christ experienced. The heart must be grounded in love that the man may
know the love which passeth knowledge.
Then notice that there is also here another condition for this deep and
blessed knowledge laid down in these words, 'That ye may be able to
comprehend _with all saints_.' That is to say, our knowledge of the love
of Jesus Christ depends largely on our sanctity. If we are pure we shall
know. If we were wholly devoted to Him we should wholly know His love to
us, and in the measure in which we are pure and holy we shall know it.
This heart of ours is like a reflecting telescope, the least breath upon
the mirror of which will cause all the starry sublimities that it should
shadow forth to fade and become dim. The slightest moisture in the
atmosphere, though it be quite imperceptible where we stand, will be
dense enough to shut out the fair, shining, snowy summits that girdle
the horizon and to leave nothing visible but the lowliness and
commonplaceness of the prosaic plain.
If you want to know the love of Christ, first of all, that love must
purify your souls. But then you must keep your souls pure, assured of
this, that only the single eye is full of light, and that they who are
not 'saints' grope in the dark even at midday, and whilst drenched by
the sunshine of His love, are unconscious of it altogether. And so we
get that miserable and mysterious tragedy of men and women walking
through life, as many of you are doing, in the very blaze and focus of
Christ's love, and never beholding it nor knowing anything about it.
Observe again the beginning of this path of knowledge, which we have
thus traced. There must be, says my text, an indwelling Christ, and so
an experience, deep and stable, of His love, and then we shall know the
love which we thus experience. But how comes that indwelling? That is
the question for us. The knowledge of His love is blessedness, is peace,
is love, is everything; as we shall see in considering the last stage of
this prayer. That knowledge arises from our fellowship with and our
possession of the love of God, which is in Jesus Christ. How does that
fellowship with, and possession of the love of God in Jesus Christ,
come? That is the all-important question. What is the beginning of
everything? 'That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith.' There is
the gate through which you and I may come, and by which we must come if
we are to come at all into the possession and perception of Christ's
great love. Here is the path of knowledge. First of all, there must be
the simple historical knowledge of the facts of Christ's life and death
for us, with the Scripture teaching of their meaning and power. And then
we must turn these truths from mere notions into life. It is not enough
to know the love that God has to us, in that lower sense of the word
'knowledge.' Many of you know that, who never got any blessing out of it
all your days, and never will, unless you change. Besides the 'knowing'
there must be the 'believing' of the love. You must translate the notion
into a living fact in your experience. You must pass from the simple
work of understanding the Gospel to the higher act of faith. You must
not be contented with knowing, you must trust. And if you have done that
all the rest will follow, and the little, narrow, low doorway of humble
self-distrusting faith, through which a man creeps on his knees,
leaving outside all his sin and his burden, opens out into the temple
palace--the large place in which Christ's love is imparted to the soul.
Brethren, this doctrine of my text ought to be for every one of us a joy
and a gospel. There is no royal road into the sweetness and the depth of
Christ's love, for the wise or the prudent. The understanding is no more
the organ for apprehending the love of Christ than the ear is the organ
for perceiving light, or the heart the organ for learning mathematics.
Blessed be God! the highest gifts are not bestowed upon the clever
people, on the men of genius and the gifted ones, the cultivated and the
refined, but they are open for all men; and when we say that love is the
parent of knowledge, and that the condition of knowing the depths of
Christ's heart is simple love which is the child of faith, we are only
saying in other words what the Master embodied in His thanksgiving
prayer, 'I thank Thee, Father! Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou
hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them
unto babes.'
And that is so, not because Christianity, being a foolish system, can
only address itself to fools; not because Christianity, contradicting
wisdom, cannot expect to be received by the wise and the cultured, but
because a man's brains have as little to do with his trustful acceptance
of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a man's eyes have to do with his
capacity of hearing a voice. Therefore, seeing that the wise and
prudent, and the cultured, and the clever, and the men of genius are
always the minority of the race, let us vulgar folk that are neither
wise, nor clever, nor cultured, nor geniuses, be thankful that all that
has nothing to do with our power of knowing and possessing the best
wisdom and the highest treasures, but that upon this path the wayfaring
man though a fool shall not err, and all narrow foreheads and limited
understandings, and poor, simple uneducated people as well as
philosophers and geniuses have to learn love by their hearts and not by
their heads, and by a sense of need and a humble trust and a daily
experience have to appropriate and suck out the blessing that lies in
the love of Jesus Christ. Blessed be His name! The end of all
aristocracies of culture and superciliousness of intellect lies in that
great truth that we possess the deepest knowledge and highest wisdom
when we love and by our love.
II. Now a word in the next place as to the other thought here, that not
even the loving heart can know the love of Christ.
'It passeth knowledge,' says my text. Now I do not suppose that the
paradox here of knowing the love of Christ which 'passeth knowledge' is
to be explained by taking 'know' and 'knowledge' in the two different
senses which I have already referred to, so as that we may experience,
and know by conscious experience, that love which the mere understanding
is incapable of grasping. That of course is an explanation which might
be defended, but I take it that it is much truer to the Apostle's
meaning to suppose that he uses the words 'know' and 'knowledge' both
times in the same sense. And so we get familiar thoughts which I touch
upon very briefly.
Our knowledge of Christ's love, though real, is incomplete, and must
always be so. You and I believe, I hope, that Christ's love is not a
man's love, or at least that it is more than a man's love. We believe
that it is the flowing out to us of the love of God, that all the
fulness of the divine heart pours itself through that narrow channel of
the human nature of our Lord, and therefore that the flow is endless and
the Fountain infinite.
I suppose I do not need to show you that it is possible for people to
have, and that in fact we do possess a real, a valid, a reliable
knowledge of that which is infinite; although we possess, as a matter of
course, no adequate and complete knowledge of it. But I only remind you
that we have before us in Christ's love something which, though the
understanding is not by itself able to grasp it, yet the understanding
led by the heart can lay hold of, and can find in it infinite treasures.
We can lay our poor hands on His love as a child might lay its tiny palm
upon the base of some great cliff, and hold that love in a real grasp of
a real knowledge and certitude, but we cannot put our hands round it and
feel that we _com_prehend as well as _ap_prehend. Let us be thankful
that we cannot.
His love can only become to us a subject of knowledge as it reveals
itself in its manifestations. Yet after even these manifestations it
remains unuttered and unutterable even by the Cross and grave, even by
the glory and the throne. 'It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do?
deeper than hell; what canst thou know? The measure thereof is longer
than the earth, and broader than the sea.'
We have no measure by which we can translate into the terms of our
experience, and so bring within the grasp of our minds, what was the
depth of the step, which Christ took at the impulse of His love, from
the Throne to the Cross. We know not what He forewent; we know not, nor
ever shall know, what depths of darkness and soul-agony He passed
through at the bidding of His all-enduring love to us. Nor do we know
the consequences of that great work of emptying Himself of His glory. We
have no means by which we can estimate the darkness and the depth of the
misery from which we have been delivered, nor the height and the
radiance of the glory to which we are to be lifted. And until we can
tell and measure by our compasses both of these two extremes of possible
human fate, till we have gone down into the deepest abyss of a
bottomless pit of growing alienation and misery, and up above the
highest reach of all unending progress into light and glory and
God-likeness, we have not stretched our compasses wide enough to touch
the two poles of this great sphere, the infinite love of Jesus Christ.
So we bow before it, we know that we possess it with a knowledge more
sure and certain, more deep and valid, than our knowledge of ought but
ourselves; but yet it is beyond our grasp, and towers above us
inaccessible in the altitude of its glory, and stretches deep beneath us
in the profundity of its condescension.
And, in like manner, we may say that this known love passes knowledge,
inasmuch as our experience of it can never exhaust it. We are like the
settlers on some great island continent--as, for instance, on the
Australian continent for many years after its first discovery--a thin
fringe of population round the seaboard here and there, and all the
bosom of the land untraversed and unknown. So after all experiences of
and all blessed participation in the love of Jesus Christ which come to
each of us by our faith, we have but skimmed the surface, but touched
the edges, but received a drop of what, if it should come upon us in
fulness of flood like a Niagara of love, would overwhelm our spirits.
So we have within our reach not only the treasure of creatural
affections which bring gladness into life when they come, and darkness
over it when they depart; we have not only human love which, if I may so
say, is always lifting its finger to its lips in the act of bidding us
adieu; but we may possess a love which will abide with us for ever. Men
die, Christ lives. We can exhaust men, we cannot exhaust Christ. We can
follow other objects of pursuit, all of which have limitation to their
power of satisfying and pall upon the jaded sense sooner or later, or
sooner or later are wrenched away from the aching heart. But here is a
love into which we can penetrate very deep and fear no exhaustion; a sea
into which we can cast ourselves, nor dread that like some rash diver
flinging himself into shallow water where he thought there was depth, we
may be bruised and wounded. We may find in Christ the endless love that
an immortal heart requires. Enter by the low door of faith, and your
finite heart will have the joy of an infinite love for its possession,
and your mortal life will rise transfigured into an immortal and growing
participation in the immortal Love of the indwelling and inexhaustible
Christ.