Here that is briefly but sufficiently expressed by the one commandment,
'take,' or perhaps more accurately, 'receive.' Of course, properly
speaking, that exhortation does not refer to our manner of fighting with
the sword, but to the previous act by which our hand grasps it. But it
is profoundly true that if we take it in the deepest sense, the
possession of it will teach the use of it. No instruction will impart
the last, and little instruction is needed for the first. What is needed
is the simple act of yielding ourselves to Jesus Christ, and looking to
Him only, as our guide and strength. Before all Christian warfare must
come the possession of the Christian armour, and the commandment that
here lies at the beginning of all Paul's description of it is '_Take_.'
Our fitness for the conflict all depends on our receiving God's gift,
and that reception is no mere passive thing, as if God's grace could be
poured into a human spirit as water is into a bucket. Hence, the
translation of this commandment of Paul's by 'take' is better than that
by 'receive,' inasmuch as it brings into prominence man's activity,
though it gives too exclusive importance to that, to the detriment of
the far deeper and more essential element of the divine action. The two
words are, in fact, both needed to cover the whole ground of what takes
place when the giving God and the taking man concur in the great act by
which the Spirit of God takes up its abode in a human spirit. God's gift
is to be received as purely His gift, undeserved, unearned by us. But
undeserved and unearned as it is, and given 'without money and without
price,' it is not ours unless our hand is stretched out to take, and our
fingers closed tightly over the free gift of God. There is a dead lift
of effort in the reception; there is a still greater effort needed for
the continued possession, and there is a life-long discipline and effort
needed for the effective use in the struggle of daily life of the sword
of the Spirit.
If that engrafted word is ever to become sovereign in our lives, there
must be a life-long attempt to bring the tremendous truths as to God's
will for human conduct which it plants in our minds into practice, and
to bring all our practice under their influence. The motives which it
brings to bear on our evils will be powerless to smite them, unless
these motives are made sovereign in us by many an hour of patient
meditation and of submission to their sweet and strong constraint. One
sometimes sees on a wild briar a graft which has been carefully inserted
and bandaged up, but which has failed to strike, and so the strain of
the briar goes on and no rosebuds come. Are there not some of us who
profess to have received the engrafted word and whose daily experience
has proved, by our own continual sinfulness, that it is unable to 'save
our souls'?
There are in the Christian ranks some soldiers whose hands are too
nerveless or too full of worldly trash to grasp the sword which they
have received, much less to strike home with it at any of the evils that
are devastating their own lives or darkening the world. The feebleness
of the Christian conflict with evil, in all its forms, whether
individual or social, whether intellectual or moral, whether heretical
or grossly and frankly sensual, is mainly due to the feebleness with
which the average professing Christians grasp the sword of the Spirit.
When David asked the priests for weapons, and they told him that
Goliath's sword was lying wrapt in a cloth behind the ephod, and that
they had none other, he said, 'There is none like that, give it me.' If
we are wise, we will take the sword that lies in the secret place, and,
armed with it, we shall not need to fear in any day of battle.
We do well that we take heed to the word of God, 'as unto a lamp shining
in a dark place until the day dawn,' when swords will be no more needed,
and the Word will no longer shine in darkness but be the Light that
makes the Sun needless for the brightness of the New Jerusalem.