'I beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are
called.' Now, that thought recurs in other places in the Apostle's
writings, somewhat modified in expression. For instance, in one passage
he speaks of 'walking worthily of the God who has called us to His
kingdom and glory,' and in another of the Christian man's duty to 'walk
worthily of the Lord unto all pleasing.' There is a certain vocation to
which a Christian man is bound to make his life correspond, and his
conduct should be in some measure worthy of the ideal that is set before
it. Now, we shall best understand what is involved in such worthiness if
we make clear to ourselves what the Apostle means by this 'calling' to
which he appeals as containing in itself a standard to which our lives
are to be conformed.
Suppose we try to put away the technical word 'calling' and instead of
'calling' say 'summons,' which is nearer the idea, because it conveys
the notions more fully of the urgency of the voice, and of the
authority of the voice, which speaks to us. And what is that summons?
How do we hear it? One of the other Apostles speaks of God as calling us
'by His own glory and virtue,' that is to say, wherever God reveals
Himself in any fashion, and by any medium, to a man, the man fails to
understand the deepest meaning of the revelation unless his purged ear
hears in it the great voice saying, 'Come up hither.' For all God's
self-manifestation, in the creatures around us, in the deep voice of our
own souls, in the mysteries of our own personal lives, and in the slow
evolution of His purpose through the history of the world, all these
revelations of God bear in them the summons to us that hear and see them
to draw near to Him, and to mould ourselves into His likeness. And thus,
just as the sun by the effluence of its beams gathers all the
ministering planets, as it were, round its feet, and draws them to
itself, so God, raying Himself out into the waste, fills the waste with
magnetic influences which are meant to draw men to nobleness, goodness,
God-pleasingness, and God-likeness.
But in another place in this Apostle's writings we read of 'the high
calling of God in Christ Jesus.' Yes, there, as focussed into one strong
voice, all the summonses are concentrated and gathered. For in Jesus
Christ we see the possibilities of humanity realised, and we have the
pattern of what we ought to be, and are called thereby to be. And in
Christ we get the great motives which make this summons, as it comes
mended from His lips, no longer the mere harsh voice of an authoritative
legislator, but the gentle invitation, 'Come unto Me, ... and ye shall
find rest unto your souls.' The summons is honeyed, sweetened, and made
infinitely mightier when we hear it from His gracious lips. It is the
blessed peculiarity of the Christian ideal, that the manifestation of
the ideal carries with it the power to realise it. And just as the
increasing strength of the spring sunshine summons the buds from out of
their folds, and the snowdrops hear the call and force themselves
through the frozen soil, so when Christ summons He inclines the ears
that hear, and enables the men that own them to obey the summons, and to
be what they are commanded. And thus we have 'the high calling of God in
Christ Jesus.'
Now, if that is the call, if the life of Christ is that to which we are
summoned, and the death of Christ is that by which we are inclined to
obey the summons, and the Spirit of Christ is that by which we are
enabled to do so, what sort of a life will be worthy of these? Well, the
context supplies part of the answer. 'I beseech you that ye walk worthy
of the vocation ... with all meekness and lowliness, with
long-suffering, forbearing one another in love.' That is one side of the
vocation, and the life that is worthy of it will be a life emancipated
from the meanness of selfishness, and delivered from the tumidities of
pride and arrogance, and changed into the sweetness of gentleness and
the royalties of love.
And then, on the other side, in one of the other texts where the same
general set of ideas is involved, we get a yet more wondrous exhibition
of the life which the Apostle considered to be worthy. I simply
signalise its points of detail without venturing to dwell upon them.
'Unto all pleasing'; the first characteristic of life that is 'worthy of
our calling' and to which, therefore, every one of us Christian people
is imperatively bound, is that it shall, in all its parts, please God,
and that is a large demand. Then follow details: 'Fruitful in every good
work'--a many-sided fruitfulness, an encyclopædiacal beneficent
activity, covering all the ground of possible excellence; and that is
not all; 'increasing in the knowledge of God,'--a life of progressive
acquaintance with Him; and that is not all:--'strengthened with all
might unto all patience and long-suffering'; nor is that all, for the
crown of the whole is 'giving thanks unto the Father.' So, then, 'ye see
your calling, brethren.' A life that is 'worthy of the vocation
wherewith ye are called' is a life that conforms to the divine will,
that is 'fruitful in all good,' that is progressive in its acquaintance
with God, that is strengthened for all patience and long-suffering, and
that in everything is thankful to Him. That is what we are summoned to
be, and unless we are in some measure obeying the summons, and bringing
out such a life in our conduct, then, notwithstanding all that we have
to say about unmerited mercy, and free grace, and undeserved love, and
salvation being not by works but by faith, we have no right to claim the
mercy to which we say we trust.
Now, this necessity of a worthy life is perfectly harmonious with the
great truth that, after all, every man owes all to the undeserved mercy
of God. The more nearly we come to realise the purpose of our calling,
the more 'worthy' of it we are, the deeper will be our consciousness of
our unworthiness. The more we approximate to the ideal, and come closer
up to it, and so see its features the better, the more we shall feel how
unlike we are to it. The law for Christian progress is that the sense of
unworthiness increases in the precise degree in which the worthiness
increases. The same man that said, 'Of whom (sinners) I am chief,' said
to the same reader, 'I have kept the faith, henceforth there is laid up
for me a crown of righteousness.' And so the two things are not
contradictory but complementary. On the one side 'worthy' has nothing to
do with the outflow of Christ's love to us; on the other side we are to
'walk worthy of the vocation wherewith we are called.'
II. And now, let us turn to the other thought, the Christian heaven and
the life that is worthy of it.
Some of you, I have no doubt, would think that that was a tremendous
heresy if there were not Scriptural words to buttress it. Let us see
what it means. My text out of the Revelation says, 'They shall walk with
Me in white, for they are worthy.' And the same voice that spake these,
to some of us, astounding, words, said, when He was here on earth, 'They
which shall be counted worthy to attain to the life of the resurrection
from the dead,' etc. The text brings out very clearly the continuity and
congruity between the life on earth and the life in heaven. Who is it of
whom it is said that 'they are worthy' to 'walk in white'? It is the
'few names even in Sardis which have not defiled their garments.' You
see the connection; clean robes here and shining robes hereafter; the
two go together, and you cannot separate them. And no belief that
salvation, in its incipient germ here, and salvation in its fulness
hereafter, are the results 'not of works of righteousness which we have
done, but of His mercy,' is to be allowed to interfere with that other
truth that they who are worthy attain to the Kingdom.
I must not be diverted from my main purpose, tempting as the theme would
be, to say more than just a sentence about what is included in that
great promise, 'They shall walk with Me in white' And if I do touch
upon it at all, it is only in order to bring out more clearly that the
very nature of the heavenly reward demands this worthiness which the
text lays down as the condition of possessing it. 'They shall
walk'--activity on an external world. That opens a great door, but
perhaps we had better be contented just with looking in. 'They shall
walk'--progress; 'with me'--union with Jesus Christ; 'in
white'--resplendent purity of character. Now take these four
things--activity on an outward universe, progress, union with Christ,
resplendent purity of character, and you have almost all that we know of
the future; the rest is partly doubtful and is mostly symbolical or
negative, and in any case subordinate. Never mind about 'physical
theories of another life'; never mind about all the questions--to some
of us how torturing they sometimes are!--concerning that future life.
The more we keep ourselves within the broad limits of these promises
that are intertwined and folded up together in that one saying, 'They
shall walk with Me in white,' the better, I think, for the sanity and
the spirituality of our conception of a future life.
That being understood, the next thing clearly follows, that only those
who in the sense of the word as it is used here, are 'worthy,' can enter
upon the possession of such a heaven. From the nature of the gift it is
clear that there must be a moral and religious congruity between the
gift and the recipient, or, to put it into plainer words, you cannot get
heaven unless your nature is capable of receiving these great gifts
which constitute heaven. People talk about the future state as being 'a
state of retribution.' Well! that is not altogether a satisfactory form
of expression, for retribution may convey the idea, such as is
presented in earthly rewards and punishments, of there being no natural
correspondence between the crime and its punishment, or the virtue and
its reward. A bit of bronze shaped into the form of a cross may be the
retribution 'For Valour,' and a prison cell may be the retribution by
legal appointment for a certain crime. But that is not the way that God
deals out rewards and punishments in the life which is to come. It is
not a case of retribution, meaning thereby the arbitrary bestowment of a
certain fixed gift in response to certain virtues, but it is a case of
_outcome_, and the old metaphor of sowing and reaping is the true one.
We sow here and we reap yonder. We pass into that future, 'bringing our
sheaves with us,' and we have to grind the corn and make bread of it,
and we have to eat the work of our own hands. They drink as they have
brewed. 'Their works do follow them,' or they go before them and
'receive them into everlasting habitations.' Outcome, the necessary
result, and not a mere arbitrary retribution, is the relation which
heaven bears to earth.
That is plain, too, from our own nature. We carry ourselves with us
wherever we go. The persistence of character, the continuity of personal
being, the continuity of memory, the _unobliterable_--if I may coin a
word--results upon ourselves of our actions, all these things make it
certain that what looks to us a cleft, deep and broad, between the
present life and the next, is to those that have passed it, and see it
from the other side, but a little crack in the soil scarcely observable,
and that we carry on into another world the selves that we have made
here. Whatever death does--and it does a great deal that we do not know
of--it does not alter, it only brings out, and, as I suppose,
intensifies, the main drift and set of a character. And so they who
'have not defiled their garments shall walk with Me in white, for they
are worthy.'
Ah, brethren! how solemn that makes life; the fleeting moment carries
Eternity in its bosom. It passes, and the works pass, but nothing human
ever dies, and we bear with us the net results of all the yesterdays
into that eternal to-day. You write upon a thin film of paper and there
is a black leaf below it. Yes, and below the black leaf there is another
sheet, and all that you write on the top one goes through the dark
interposed page, and is recorded on the third, and one day that will be
taken out of the book, and you will have to read it and say, 'What I
have written I have written.'
So, dear friends, whilst we begin with that unmerited love, and that
same unmerited love is the sole ground on which the gates of the kingdom
of heaven are by the Death and Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus
Christ opened to believers, their place there depends not only on faith
but on the work which is the fruit of faith. There is such a thing as
being 'saved yet so as by fire,' and there is such a thing as 'having an
entrance ministered abundantly unto us'; we have to make the choice.
There is such a thing as the sore punishment of which they are thought
worthy who have rejected the Son of God, and counted the blood of the
Covenant an unholy thing; and there is such a thing as a man saying, 'I
am not worthy that Thou shouldest come unto me,' and Christ answering,
'He shall walk with Me in white, for he is worthy' and we have to make
that choice also.