'The Lord that bought them.' You perhaps remember other words which say,
'Ye are bought with a price; be not the servants of men'; also other
words of this Apostle himself, in which he speaks, in his other letter,
of being 'bought with the precious blood of Christ, as of a Lamb without
blemish and without spot.' Now notice, Christ's ownership of us does not
depend on Christ's Divinity, which I suppose most of us believe, but on
Christ's sacrifice for us. It is perfectly true that creation gives
rights to the Creator. It is perfectly true that if we believe, as I
think the New Testament teaches, that He, who before His name was Jesus
was the Eternal Word of God, was the Agent of all Creation, and
therefore has rights. But Christ's heart does not care for rights of
that sort. It wants something far deeper, far tenderer, far closer than
any such. And He comes to us with the language that is the language of
love over all the universe, as between man and woman, as between man and
man, as between man and God, as between God and man, upon His lips, and
says, 'Thou must love Me, for I have died for thee.' Yes, brother; the
only ground upon which absolute possession of a man can be rested is the
ground of prior absolute surrender to Him. Christ must give Himself to
me before He can ask me to give myself to Him. So all that was
apparently harsh in the relationship, as I have been trying to set it
forth to you, melts away and disappears. No owner ever owned a slave as
truly as a loving woman owns her husband, or a loving husband his wife,
because the ownership is the expression of perfect love on both sides.
And that is the golden bond that binds men's souls to Christ in a
submission which, the more abject it is, the more elevating it is, just
because 'He loved me, and gave Himself for me.'
I do not dwell upon any cold theological doctrine of an Atonement, but I
wish you to feel that deep in this great metaphor of our text there lie
the two things; first, the price that was paid, and, second, the bondage
from which the slave was delivered. He belonged to another master before
Christ bought him for Himself. 'He that committeth sin is the slave of
sin.' Some of you are your own despots, your own tyrants. The worse half
of you has got the upper hand. The mutineers that ought to have been
down under hatches, and shackled, have taken possession of the deck and
clapped the captain and the officers, and all the sextants and
log-books, away into a corner, and they are driving the ship--that is,
you--on to the rocks, as hard as they can. A man that is not Christ's
slave has a far worse slavery in submitting to these tyrant sins that
have tempted him with the notion of how fine it is to break through
these old-womanly restraints and conventional fads of a narrow morality,
and to have his fling, and do as he likes and follow nature. Ay, some of
you have been doing that, and could write a far better commentary than
any preacher ever wrote, out of your own experience, on the great words,
'Whilst they promised them liberty, they themselves are the slaves of
corruption!' Young men, is that true about any of you--that you came
here into Manchester to a situation, and lonely lodgings, comparatively
innocent, and that somebody said, 'Oh, do not be a milksop! come along
and see life,' and you thought it was fine to shake off the shackles
that your poor old mother used to try to put upon your limbs? And what
have you made of it? I will tell you what a great many young men have
made of it--I have seen scores of them in the forty years that I have
been preaching here: 'His bones are full of the iniquity of his youth,
which shall lie down with him in the dust.'
There is a slavery which is blessedness, and there is a slavery which at
first is delightsome to the worst part of us, and afterwards becomes
bitter and deadly. And it is the bondage of sin, the bondage to my worst
self, the bondage to my indulged passions, the bondage to other men, the
bondage to the material world. Jesus Christ speaks to each of us in His
great sacrifice, by which He says to us, 'The Son will make you free,
and you shall be free indeed.' The Lord has bought us. Have you let Him
emancipate you from all your bondage? Dear friends, bear with me if I
press again upon you, I pray God that it may ring in your ears till you
can answer that question, Jesus Christ having bought me, do I belong to
Him?