Romans viii. 12, 13. Brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to
live after the flesh. For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die:
but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye
shall live.
Does it seem strange to you that St. Paul should warn you, that you
are not debtors to your own flesh? It is not strange, when you come
to understand him; certainly not unnecessary: for as in his time,
so now, most people do live as if they were debtors to their own
flesh, as if their great duty, their one duty in life, was to please
their own bodies, and brains, and tempers, and fancies, and
feelings. Poor people have not much time to indulge their brains;
and no time at all, happily for them, to indulge their fancies and
feelings, as rich people do when they grow idle, and dainty, and
luxurious. But still, too many of them live as if they were debtors
to their own flesh; as if their own bodies and their own tempers
were the masters of them, and ought to be their masters. Young men,
for instance, how often they do things in secret of which it is a
shame even to speak, just because it is pleasant. Young women, how
often do they sell themselves and their own modesty, just for the
pleasure of being flattered and courted, and of getting a few fine
clothes. How often do men, just for the pleasure of drink, besot
their souls and bodies, madden their tempers, neglect their
families, make themselves every Saturday night, and often half the
week, too, lower than the beasts which perish. And then, when a
clergyman complains of them, they think him unreasonable; and by so
thinking, show that he is right, and St. Paul right: for if I say
to you, My dear young people (and I do say it), if you give way to
filthy living and filthy talking, and to drunkenness, and to vanity
about fine clothes, you will surely die--do you not say in your
hearts, 'How unreasonable: how hard on us! If we can enjoy
ourselves a little, why should we not? It is our right, and do it
we will; and if it is wrong, it ought not to be wrong.' Why, what
is that but saying, that you ought to do just what your body likes:
that you are debtors to your flesh; and that your flesh, and not
God's law, is your master. So again, when people grow older,
perhaps they are more prudent about bad living, and more careful of
their money: but still they live after the flesh. One man sets his
heart on making money, and cares for nothing but that; breaks God's
law for that, as if that was the thing to which he was a debtor,
bound by some law which he could not avoid to scrape and scrape
money together for ever. Another (and how often we see that) is a
slave to his own pride and temper, which are just as much bred in
his flesh: if he has been injured by any one, if he has taken a
dislike against any one, he cannot forget and forgive: the man may
be upright and kindly on many other points; prudent, too, and sober,
and thoroughly master of himself on most matters; and yet you will
find that when he gets on that one point, he is not master of
himself; for his flesh is master of him: he may be a strong-minded,
shrewd man upon most matters but just that one point: some old
quarrel, or grudge, or suspicion, is, as we say, his weak point:
and if you touch on that, the man's eye will kindle, and his face
redden, and his lip tremble, and he will show that he is not master
of himself: but that he is over-mastered by his fleshly passion, by
the suspiciousness, or revengefulness, or touchiness, which every
dumb animal has as well as he, which is not part of his man's
nature, not part of God's image in him, but which is like the beasts
which perish.
Now, my friends, suppose I said to you, 'If you give way to such
tempers; if you give way to pride, suspicion, sullen spite, settled
dislike of any human being, you will surely die;' should you not,
some of you, be inclined to think me very unreasonable, and to say
in your hearts, 'Have I not a right to be angry? Have I not a right
to give a man as good as he brings?' so confessing that I am right,
after all, and that some of you think that you are debtors to your
flesh, and its tempers, and do not see that you are meant to be
masters, and not slaves, of your tempers and feelings.
Again. Among poor women, as well as among rich ones, as they grow
older, how much gossiping, tale-bearing, slandering, there is, and
that too among people who call themselves religious. Yes, I say
slandering; I put that in too; for I am certain that where the first
two grow, the third is not far off. If gossiping is the root, tale-
bearing and harsh judgment is the stem, and plain lying and
slandering, and bearing false witness against one's neighbour, is
the fruit.
Now I say, because St. Paul says it, 'that those who do such things
shall surely die.' And do not some of you think me unreasonable in
that, and say in your heart, 'What! are we to be tongue-tied? Shall
we not speak our minds?' Be it so, my good women, only remember
this: that as long as you say that, you confess that you are not
masters of your tongues, but your tongues are masters of you, and
that you freely confess you owe service to your tongue, and not to
God. Do not therefore complain of me for saying the very same
thing, namely, that you think you are debtors to your flesh--to the
tongues in your mouths, and must needs do what those same little
unruly members choose, of which St James has said, 'The tongue is a
fire, a world of iniquity, and it sets on fire the whole course of
nature, and is set on fire of hell.' And again: 'If any person
among you seem to be religious, and bridles not his tongue, but
deceives himself, that person's religion is vain.'
Again:--and, my good women, you must not think me hard on you, for
you know in your hearts that I am not hard on you; but I must speak
a word on a sin which I am afraid is growing in this parish, and in
too many parishes in England; and that is deceiving kind and
charitable persons, in order to get more help from them. God knows
the temptation must be sore to poor people at times. And yet you
will surely find in the long run, that 'honesty is the best policy.'
Deceit is always a losing game. A lie is sure to be found out; as
the Lord Jesus Himself says, 'There is nothing hid which shall not
be made manifest;' and what we do in secret, is sure, unless we
repent and amend it, to be proclaimed on the housetop: and many a
poor soul, in her haste and greediness to get much, ends by getting
nothing at all. And if it were not so;--if you were able to deceive
any human being out of the riches of the world: yet know, that a
man's life does _not_ consist in the abundance of the things which
he possesses. And know that if you will not believe that,--if you
will fancy that your business is to get all you can for your mortal
bodies, by fair means or foul,--if you will fancy that you are thus
debtors to your own flesh, you will surely die: but if you, through
the Spirit, do mortify the deeds of the body, you shall live.
And by this time some of you are asking, 'Live? Die? What does all
this mean? When we die we shall die, good or bad; and in the
meantime we shall live till we die. And you do not mean to tell us
that we shall shorten our lives by our own tempers, or our tale-
bearing, though we might, perhaps, by drunkenness?'
My friends, if such a question rises in your mind, be sure that it,
too, is a hint that you think yourself a debtor to the flesh--to
live according to the flesh. For tell me, tell yourselves fairly,
is your flesh, your body, the part of yourself which you can see and
handle, _You_?--You know that it is not. When a neighbour's body
dies, you say, perhaps, '_He_ is dead,' but you say it carelessly;
and when one whom you know well, and love, dies,--when a parent, a
wife, a child, dies, you feel very differently about them, even if
you do not speak differently. You feel and know that he, the person
whom you loved and understood, and felt with, and felt for, here on
earth, is not dead at all; you feel (and in proportion as the friend
you have lost was loving, and good, and full of feeling for you, you
feel it all the more strongly) that your friend, or your child, or
the wife of your bosom, is alive still--where you know not, but you
feel they are alive; that they are very near you;--that they are
thinking of you, watching you, caring for you,--perhaps grieving
over you when you go wrong--perhaps rejoicing over you when you go
right,--perhaps helping you, though you cannot see them, in some
wonderful way. You know that only their mortal flesh is dead. That
their mortal flesh was all you put into the grave; but that _they_
themselves, their souls and spirits, which were their very and real
selves, are alive for evermore; and you trust and hope to meet them
when you die;--ay, to meet them body and soul too, at the last day,
the very same persons whom you knew here on earth, though the flesh
which they wore here in this life has crumbled into dust years and
ages before.
Is not this true? Is not this a blessed life-giving thought--I had
almost said the most blessed and life-giving thought man can have--
that those whom we have loved and lost are not dead, but only gone
before; that they live still to God and with God; that only their
flesh has perished, and they themselves are alive for evermore?
Now believe me, my friends, as surely as a man's flesh can die and
be buried, while he himself, his soul, lives for ever, just so a
man's self, his soul, can die, while his flesh lives on upon earth.
You do not think so, but the Bible thinks so. The Bible talks of
men being _dead_ in trespasses and sins, while their flesh and body
is alive and walking this earth. It talks, too, of a worse state,
of men twice dead; of men, who, after God has brought their souls to
life, let those souls of theirs die down again within them, and rot
away, as far as we can see, hopelessly and for ever. And what is it
which kills a man's soul within him on this side the grave, and
makes him dead while he has a name to live? _Sin_, evil-doing, the
disease of the soul, the death of the soul, yea, the death of the
man himself. And what is sin but living according to the flesh, and
not according to the spirit? What is sin but living as the dumb
animals do, as if we were debtors to our own flesh, to fulfil its
lusts, and to please our own appetites, fancies, and tempers,
instead of remembering that we are debtors to God, who made us, and
blesses us all day long;--debtors to our Lord Jesus Christ, who
bought us with His own blood, that we might please Him and obey
Him;--debtors to God's Holy Spirit, who puts into our minds good
desires;--debtors to our baptism vows, in which we were consecrated
to God, that He, and not this flesh of ours, might be our Master for
ever?
This is sin; to give way to those selfish and evil tempers, against
which I warned you in the beginning of my sermon, and which, if any
man indulges in them, will surely and steadily, bit by bit, kill
that man's soul within him, and leave the man dead in trespasses and
sins, while his body walks this earth.
My friends, do not fancy these are merely farfetched words out of a
book, made to sound difficult and terrible in order to frighten you.
God forbid! When Scripture says this, it speaks a plain and simple
truth, and one which I know to be a truth from experience. I speak
that which I know, and testify that which I have seen. I have seen
(and what sadder or more fearful sight?) dead men and dying walk
this earth in flesh and blood; men busy enough, shrewd enough upon
some points, priding themselves, perhaps, upon their cleverness and
knowledge of the world, of whom all one could say was, The man is
dead; the man is lost, unless God brings him to life again by His
quickening Spirit: for goodness is dead in him; the powers of his
soul are dead in him; the hope of being a better man is dead in him;
all that God wishes to see him be and do, is dead; God's likeness
and glory in him is dead: he thinks himself wise, and he is a fool
in God's sight; for he sees not God's law, which is the only wisdom:
he thinks himself strong, but he is utterly weak and helpless; for
he is the slave of his own tempers, the slave of his own foul lust,
the slave of his own pride and vanity, the slave of his own
covetousness. Oh, my friends, people are apt to be afraid of what
they call seeing a ghost--that is, a spirit without a body: they
fancy that it would be a very shocking thing to meet one; but as for
me, I know a far more dreadful sight; and that is, a careless and a
hardened sinner--a body without a spirit. Which is uglier and
ghastlier--a spirit without a body, or a body without a spirit? And
yet such one meets, I dare not think how often.
What sadder sight, if you recollect that men need not be thus; that
God hates seeing them thus; that they become thus, and die down in
sin, in spite of God, with all heaven above, and God the Lord
thereof, crying to them, Why wilt thou die? What sadder sight? How
many have I seen, living, to all intents and purposes, as if they
had no souls; as if there were no God, no Law of God, no Right, no
Wrong; caring for nothing, perhaps, but drink and bad women; or
caring for nothing but scraping together a little more money than
their neighbours; or caring for nothing but dress, and vanity, and
gossiping, and tale-bearing; and yet, when one came to know them,
one saw that _that_ was not what God intended them to be; that He
had given them hearts which they had hardened, good feelings which
they had crushed, sound brains which they had left idle, till one
was ready to weep over them, as over something beautiful and noble
ruined and lost; and looked on them as one would on a grand tree
struck by lightning, decayed and dead, useless, and only fit to be
burned, with just enough of its proper shape to show what a tree it
ought to have been. And so it is with men and women: hardly a day
passes but one sees some one of whom one says, with a sigh, 'What a
worthy, loveable, useful person, that might have been! what a
blessing to himself and all around him! and now, by following his
fallen nature, and indulging it, he is neither worthy, nor loveable,
nor useful; neither a blessing to himself nor to any human being:
he might have been good for so much, and now he is good for nothing;
for the spirit, the immortal soul which God gave him, is dead within
him.'
My friends, I would not say this, unless I could say more. I would
not say sad words, if I could not follow them up by joyful and
hopeful ones. It is written, 'If ye live after the flesh, ye shall
die;' but it is written also, 'If ye, through the Spirit, do mortify
the deeds of the body, ye shall live.' It is promised--promised, my
friends, 'Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and
Christ shall give thee light.'
Through the Spirit, through God's Spirit, every soul here can live,
now and for ever. Through God's Spirit, Christ not only can, but
will, give you light. And that Spirit is near you, with you. Your
baptism is the blessed sign, the everlasting pledge, that God's
Spirit is with you. Oh, believe that, and take heart. I will not
say, you do not know how much good there is in you; for in us dwells
no good thing, and every good thought and feeling comes only from
the Spirit of God: but I will say boldly to every one of you, you
do not know how much good there may be in you, if you will listen to
those good thoughts of God's Spirit; you do not know how wise, how
right, how strong, how happy, how useful, you may become; you do not
know what a blessing each of you may become to yourselves, and to
all around you. Only make up your mind to live by God's law; only
make up your mind, in all things, small and great, to go God's way,
and not your own. Only make up your mind to listen, not to your own
flesh, temper, and brain, which say this and that is pleasant, but
to listen to God's Spirit, which says this is right, and that is
wrong: this is your duty, do it. Search out your own besetting
sins; and if you cannot find them out for yourself, ask God to show
you them; ask Him to give you truth in the inward parts, and make
you to understand wisdom in the secret places of your heart. Pray
God's Spirit to quicken your soul, and bring it to life, that it may
see and love what is good, and see and hate what is wrong; and
instead of being most hard on your neighbour's sin, to which you are
not tempted, be most hard on your own sin, on the sin to which you
are most tempted, whatsoever that may be. You have your besetting
sin, doubt it not; every one has. I know that I have. I know that
I have inclinations, tempers, longings, to which if I gave way, my
soul would rot and die within me, and make me a curse to myself, and
you, and every one I came near; and all I can do is to pray God's
Spirit to help me to fight those besetting sins of mine, and crush
them, and stamp them down, whenever they rise and try to master me,
and make me live after the flesh. It is a hard fight; and may God
forgive me, for I fight it ill enough: but it is my only hope for
my soul's life, my only hope of remaining a man worth being called a
man, or doing my duty at all by myself and you, and all mankind.
And it is your only hope, too. Pray for God's Spirit, God's
strength, God's life, to give your souls life, day by day, that you
may fight against your sins, whatsoever they are, lest they kill
your souls, long before disease and old age kill your bodies. Make
up your minds to it. Make up your minds to mortify the deeds of the
body; to say to your own bodies, tempers, longings, fancies, 'I will
not go your way: you shall go God's way. I am not your debtor; I
owe you nothing; I am God's debtor, and owe Him everything, and I
will pay Him honestly with the service of my body, soul, and spirit.
I will do my duty, and you, my flesh, must and shall do it also,
whether it is pleasant at first, or not:' and be sure it will be
pleasant at last, if not at first. Keep God always before your
eyes. Ask yourself in every action, 'What is right, what is my
duty, what would God have me do?' And so far from finding it
unpleasant, you will find that you are saving yourself a thousand
troubles, and sorrows, and petty anxieties which now torment you;
you will find that in God's presence is life, the only life worth
having, and that at His right hand are pleasures for evermore. Oh,
be sure, my friends, that in real happiness you will not lose, but
gain without end. If to have a clear conscience, and a quiet mind;
if to be free from anxiety and discontent, free from fear and shame;
if to be loved, respected, looked up to, by all whose good word is
worth having, and to know that God approves of you, that all day
long God is with you, and you with God, that His loving and mighty
arms are under you, that He has promised to keep you in all your
ways, to prosper all you do, and reward you for ever,--if this be
not happiness, my friends, what is?