'And every man that hath this hope in Him purifieth himself, even
as He is pure.'--1 John iii. 3.
That is a very remarkable 'and' with which this verse begins. The
Apostle has just been touching the very heights of devout contemplation,
soaring away up into dim regions where it is very hard to follow,--'We
shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.'
And now, without a pause, and linking his thoughts together by a simple
'and,' he passes from the unimaginable splendours of the Beatific Vision
to the plainest practical talk. Mysticism has often soared so high above
the earth that it has forgotten to preach righteousness, and therein has
been its weak point. But here is the most mystical teacher of the New
Testament insisting on plain morality as vehemently as his friend James
could have done.
The combination is very remarkable. Like the eagle he rises, and like
the eagle, with the impetus gained from his height, he drops right down
on the earth beneath!
And that is not only a characteristic of St. John's teaching, but it is
a characteristic of all the New Testament morality--its highest
revelations are intensely practical. Its light is at once set to work,
like the sunshine that comes ninety millions of miles in order to make
the little daisies open their crimson-tipped petals; so the profoundest
things that the Bible has to say are said to you and me, not that we may
know only, but that knowing we may _do_, and _do_ because we _are_.
So John, here: 'We shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.'
'And'--a simple coupling-iron for two such thoughts--'every man that
hath this hope in Him'--that is, in Christ, not in himself, as we
sometimes read it--'every man that hath this hope,' founded on Christ,
'purifies himself even as He is pure.'
The thought is a very simple one, though sometimes it is somewhat
mistakenly apprehended. Put into its general form it is just this:--If
you expect, and expecting, hope to be like Jesus Christ yonder, you will
be trying your best to be like Him here. It is not the mere purifying
influence of hope that is talked about, but it is the specific influence
of this one hope, the hope of ultimate assimilation to Christ leading to
strenuous efforts, each a partial resemblance of Him, here and now. And
that is the subject I want to say a word or two about now.
I. First, then, notice the principle that is here, which is the main
thing to be insisted upon, namely, If we are to be pure, we must purify
_ourselves_.
There are two ways of getting like Christ, spoken about in the context.
One is the blessed way, that is more appropriate for the higher Heaven,
the way of assimilation and transformation by beholding--'If we see Him'
we shall be 'like Him.' That is the blessed method of the Heavens. Yes,
but even here on earth it may to some extent be realised! Love always
breeds likeness. And there is such a thing, here on earth and now, as
gazing upon Christ with an intensity of affection, and simplicity of
trust, and rapture of aspiration, and ardour of desire which shall
transform us in some measure into His own likeness. John is an example
of that for us. It was a true instinct that made the old painters always
represent him as like the Master that he sat beside, even in face. Where
did John get his style from? He got it by much meditating upon Christ's
words. The disciple caught the method of the Master's speech, and to
some extent the manner of the Master's vision.
And so he himself stands before us as an instance of the possibility,
even on earth, of this calm, almost passive process, and most blessed
and holiest method of getting like the Master, by simple gazing, which
is the gaze of love and longing.
But, dear brethren, the law of our lives forbids that that should be the
only way in which we grow like Christ. 'First the blade, then the ear,
then the full corn in the ear,' was never meant to be the exhaustive,
all-comprehensive statement of the method of Christian progress. You and
I are not vegetables; and the Parable of the Seed is only one side of
the truth about the method of Christian growth. The very word 'purify'
speaks to us of another condition; it implies impurity, it implies a
process which is more than contemplation, it implies the reversal of
existing conditions, and not merely the growth upwards to unattained
conditions.
And so growth is not all that Christian men need; they need excision,
they need casting out of what is in them; they need change as well as
growth. 'Purifying' they need because they are impure, and growth is
only half the secret of Christian progress.
Then there is the other consideration, viz., if there is to be this
purifying it must be done by myself. 'Ah!' you say, 'done by yourself?
That is not evangelical teaching.' Well, let us see. Take two or three
verses out of this Epistle which at first sight seem to be contradictory
of this. Take the very first that bears on the subject:--'The blood of
Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin' (i. 7). 'If we confess
our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse
us from all unrighteousness' (i. 9). 'He that abideth in Him sinneth
not' (iii. 6). 'This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our
faith' (v. 4).
Now if you put all these passages together, and think about the general
effect of them, it comes to this: that our best way of cleansing
ourselves is by keeping firm hold of Jesus Christ and of the cleansing
powers that lie in Him. To take a very homely illustration--soap and
water wash your hands clean, and what you have to do is simply to rub
the soap and water on to the hand, and bring them into contact with the
foulness. You cleanse yourselves. Yes! because without the friction
there would not be the cleansing. But is it you, or is it the soap, that
does the work? Is it you or the water that makes your hands clean? And
so when God comes and says, 'Wash you, make you clean, put away the evil
of your doings, your hands are full of blood,' He says in effect, 'Take
the cleansing that I give you and rub it in, and apply it: and your
flesh will become as the flesh of a little child, and you shall be
clean.'
That is to say, the very deepest word about Christian effort of
self-purifying is this--keep close to Jesus Christ. You cannot sin as
long as you hold His hand. To have Him with you;--I mean by that to have
the thoughts directed to Him, the love turning to Him, the will
submitted to Him, Him consciously with us in the day's work. To have
communion with Jesus Christ is like bringing an atmosphere round about
us in which all evil will die. If you take a fish out of water and bring
it up into the upper air, it writhes and gasps, and is dead presently;
and our evil tendencies and sins, drawn up out of the muddy depths in
which they live, and brought up into that pure atmosphere of communion
with Jesus Christ, are sure to shrivel and to die, and to disappear. We
kill all evil by fellowship with the Master. His presence in our lives,
by our communion with Him, is like the watchfire that the traveller
lights at night--it keeps all the wild beasts of prey away from the
fold.
Christ's fellowship is our cleansing, and the first and main thing that
we have to do in order to make ourselves pure is to keep ourselves in
union with Him, in whom inhere and abide all the energies that cleanse
men's souls. Take the unbleached calico and spread it out on the green
grass, and let the blessed sunshine come down upon it, and sprinkle it
with fair water; and the grass and the moisture and the sunshine will do
all the cleansing, and it will glitter in the light, 'so as no fuller on
earth can white it.'
So cleansing is keeping near Jesus Christ. But it is no use getting the
mill-race from the stream into your works unless you put wheels in its
way to drive. And our holding ourselves in fellowship with the Master in
that fashion is not all that we have to do. There have to be distinct
and specific efforts, constantly repeated, to subdue and suppress
individual acts of transgression. We have to fight against evil, sin by
sin. We have not the thing to do all at once; we have to do it in
detail. It is a war of outposts, like the last agonies of that
Franco-Prussian war, when the Emperor had abdicated, and the country was
really conquered, and Paris had yielded, but yet all over the face of
the land combats had to be carried on.
So it is with us. Holiness is not feeling; it is character. You do not
get rid of your sins by the act of divine amnesty only. You are not
perfect because you say you are, and feel as if you were, and think you
are. God does not make any man pure in his sleep. His cleansing does not
dispense with fighting, but makes victory possible.
Then, dear brethren, lay to heart this, as the upshot of the whole
matter: First of all, let us turn to Him from whom all the cleansing
comes; and then, moment by moment, remember that it is our work to
purify ourselves by the strength and the power that is given to us by
the Master.
II. The second thought here is this: This purifying of ourselves is the
link or bridge between the present and the future.--'Now are we the sons
of God,' says John in the context. That is the pier upon the one side of
the gulf. 'It doth not yet appear what we shall be, but when He is made
manifest we shall be like Him.' That is the pier on the other. How are
the two to be connected? There is only one way by which the present
sonship will blossom and fruit into the future perfect likeness, and
that is,--if we throw across the gulf, by God's help day by day here,
that bridge of our effort after growing likeness to Himself, and purity
therefrom.
That is plain enough, I suppose. To speak in somewhat technical terms,
the 'law of continuity' that we hear so much about, runs on between
earth and Heaven; which, being translated into plain English, is but
this--that the act of passing from the limitations and conditions of
this transitory life into the solemnities and grandeurs of that future
does not alter a man's character, though it may intensify it. It does
not make him different from what he was, though it may make him more of
what he was, whether its direction be good or bad.
You take a stick and thrust it into water; and because the rays of light
pass from one medium to another of a different density, they are
refracted and the stick seems bent; but take the human life out of the
thick, coarse medium of earth and lift it up into the pure rarefied air
of Heaven, and there is no refraction; it runs straight on. Straight on!
The given direction continues; and in whatever direction my face is
turned when I die, thither my face will be turned when I live again.
Do not you fancy that there is any magic in coffins and graves and
shrouds to make men different from their former selves. The continuity
runs clean on, the rail goes without a break, though it goes through the
Mont Cenis tunnel; and on the one side is the cold of the North, and on
the other the sunny South. The man is the same man through death and
beyond.
So the one link between sonship here and likeness to Christ hereafter is
this link of present, strenuous effort to become like Him day by day in
personal purity. For there is another reason, on which I need not dwell,
viz., unless there be this daily effort on our part to become like Jesus
Christ by personal purity, we shall not be able to 'see Him as He is.'
Death will take a great many veils off men's hearts. It will reveal to
them a great deal that they do not know, but it will not give the
faculty of beholding the glorified Christ in such fashion as that the
beholding will mean transformation. 'Every eye shall see Him,' but it is
conceivable that a spirit shall be so immersed in self-love and in
godlessness that the vision of Christ shall be repellent and not
attractive; shall have no transforming and no gladdening power. And I
beseech you to remember that about that vision, as about the vision of
God Himself, the principle stands true; it is 'the pure in heart that
shall see God' in Christ. And the change from life to the life beyond
will not necessarily transform into the image of His dear Son. You make
a link between the present and the future by cleansing your hands and
your hearts, through faith in the cleansing power of Christ, and direct
effort at holiness.
III. Now I must briefly add finally: that this self-cleansing of which I
have been speaking is the offspring and outcome of that 'hope' in my
text. It is the child of hope. Hope is by no means an active faculty
generally. As the poets have it, she may 'smile and wave her golden
hair'; but she is not in the way of doing much work in the world. And it
is not the mere fact of hope that generates this effort; it is, as I
have been trying to show you, a certain kind of hope--the hope of being
like Jesus Christ when 'we see Him as He is.'
I have only two things to say about this matter, and one of them is
this: of course, such strenuous effort of purity will only be the result
of such a hope as that, because such a hope will fight against one of
the greatest of all the enemies of our efforts after purity. There is
nothing that makes a man so down-hearted in his work of self-improvement
as the constant and bitter experience that it seems to be all of no use;
that he is making so little progress; that with immense pains, like a
snail creeping up a wall, he gets up, perhaps, an inch or two, and then
all at once he drops down, and further down than he was before he
started.
Slowly we manage some little, patient self-improvement; gradually, inch
by inch and bit by bit, we may be growing better, and then there comes
some gust and outburst of temptation; and the whole painfully reclaimed
soil gets covered up by an avalanche of mud and stones, that we have to
remove slowly, barrow-load by barrow-load. And then we feel that it is
all of no use to strive, and we let circumstances shape us, and give up
all thoughts of reformation.
To such moods then there comes, like an angel from Heaven, that holy,
blessed message, 'Cheer up, man! "We shall be like Him, for we shall see
Him as He is."' Every inch that you make now will tell then, and it is
not all of no use. Set your heart to the work, it is a work that will be
blessed and will prosper.
Again, here is a test for all you Christian people, who say that you
look to Heaven with hope as to your home and rest.
A great deal of the religious contemplation of a future state is pure
sentimentality, and like all pure sentimentality is either immoral or
non-moral. But here the two things are brought into clear juxtaposition,
the bright hope of Heaven and the hard work done here below. Now is that
what the gleam and expectation of a future life does for you?
This is the only time in John's Epistle that he speaks about hope. The
good man, living so near Christ, finds that the present, with its
'abiding in Him' is enough for his heart. And though he was the Seer of
the Apocalypse, he has scarcely a word to say about the future in this
letter of his, and when he does it is for a simple and intensely
practical purpose, in order that he may enforce on us the teaching of
labouring earnestly in purifying ourselves.
My brother, is that your type of Christianity? Is that the kind of
inspiration that comes to you from the hope that steals in upon you in
your weary hours, when sorrows, and cares, and changes, and loss, and
disappointments, and hard work weigh you down, and you say, 'It would be
blessed to pass hence'? Does it set you harder at work than anything
else can do? Is it all utilised? Or if I might use such an illustration,
is it like the electricity of the Aurora Borealis, that paints your
winter sky with vanishing, useless splendours of crimson and blue? or
have you got it harnessed to your tramcars, lighting your houses,
driving sewing-machines, doing practical work in your daily life? Is the
hope of Heaven, and of being like Christ, a thing that stimulates and
stirs us every moment to heroisms of self-surrender and to strenuous
martyrdom of self-cleansing?
All is gathered up into the one lesson. First, let us go to that dear
Lord whose blood cleanseth from all sin, and let us say to Him, 'Purge
me and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.' And
then, receiving into our hearts the powers that purify, in His love and
His sacrifice and His life, 'having these promises' and these
possessions, 'Dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all
filthiness of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of the
Lord.'