believer is often in danger of aiming at and rejoicing in what one
might call the more human, the manly, virtues, such as boldness, joy,
contempt of the world, zeal, self-sacrifice,--even the old Stoics
taught and practised these,--while the deeper and gentler, the diviner
and more heavenly graces, those which Jesus first taught upon earth,
because He brought them from heaven; those which are more distinctly
connected with His cross and the death of self,--poverty of spirit,
meekness, humility, lowliness,--are scarcely thought of or valued.
Therefore, let us put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility,
meekness, long-suffering; and let us prove our Christlikeness, not
only in our zeal for saving the lost, but before all in our
intercourse with the brethren, forbearing and forgiving one another,
_even as the Lord forgave us._
Fellow-Christians, do let us study the Bible portrait of the humble
man. And let us ask our brethren, and ask the world, whether they
recognise in us the likeness to the original. Let us be content with
nothing less than taking each of these texts as the promise of what
God will work in us, as the revelation in words of what the Spirit of
Jesus will give as a birth within us. And let each failure and
shortcoming simply urge us to turn humbly and meekly to the meek and
lowly Lamb of God, in the assurance that where He is enthroned in the
heart, His humility and gentleness will be one of the streams of
living water that flow from within us. [Footnote: I knew Jesus, and He
was very precious to my soul: but I found something in me that would
not keep sweet and patient and kind. I did what I could to keep it
down, but it was there. I besought Jesus to do something for me, and
when I gave Him my will, He came to my heart, and took out all that
would not be sweet, all that would not be kind, all that would not be
patient, and then He shut the door.'--GEORGE FOXE.]
Once again I repeat what I have said before. I feel deeply that we
have very little conception of what the Church suffers from the lack
of this divine humility,--the nothingness that makes room for God to
prove His power. It is not long since a Christian, of an humble,
loving spirit, acquainted with not a few mission stations of various
societies, expressed his deep sorrow that in some cases the spirit of
love and forbearance was sadly lacking. Men and women, who in Europe
could each choose their own circle of friends, brought close together
with others of uncongenial minds, find it hard to bear, and to love,
and to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. And those
who should have been fellow-helpers of each other's joy, became a
hindrance and a weariness. And all for the one reason, the lack of the
humility which counts itself nothing, which rejoices in becoming and
being counted the least, and only seeks, like Jesus, to be the
servant, the helper and comforter of others, even the lowest and
unworthiest.
And whence comes it that men who have joyfully given up themselves for
Christ, find it so hard to give up themselves for their brethren? Is
not the blame with the Church? It has so little taught its sons that
the humility of Christ is the first of the virtues, the best of all
the graces and powers of the Spirit. It has so little proved that a
Christlike humility is what it, like Christ, places and preaches
first, as what is in very deed needed, and possible too. But let us
not be discouraged. Let the discovery of the lack of this grace stir
us to larger expectation from God. Let us look upon every brother who
tries or vexes us, as God's means of grace, God's instrument for our
purification, for our exercise of the humility Jesus our Life breathes
within us. And let us have such faith in the All of God, and the
nothing of self, that, as nothing in our own eyes, we may, in God's
power, only seek to serve one another in love.
Humility: The Beauty of Holiness
VII.
Humility and Holiness
_'Which say, Stand by thyself; for I am holier than thou.'_
--ISAIAH lxv. 5.
WE speak of the Holiness movement in our times, and praise God for it.
We hear a great deal of seekers after holiness and professors of
holiness, of holiness teaching and holiness meetings. The blessed
truths of holiness in Christ, and holiness by faith, are being
emphasised as never before. The great test of whether the holiness we
profess to seek or to attain, is truth and life, will be _whether it
be manifest in the increasing humility it produces._ In the creature,
humility is the one thing needed to allow God's holiness to dwell in
him and shine through him. In Jesus, the Holy One of God who makes us
holy, a divine humility was the secret of His life and His death and
His exaltation; the one infallible test of our holiness will be the
humility before God and men which marks us. Humility is the bloom and
the beauty of holiness.
The chief mark of counterfeit holiness is its lack of humility. Every
seeker after holiness needs to be on his guard, lest unconsciously
what was begun in the spirit be perfected in the flesh, and pride
creep in where its presence is least expected. Two men went up into
the temple to pray: the one a Pharisee, the other a publican. There is
no place or position so sacred but the Pharisee can enter there. Pride
can lift its head in the very temple of God, and make His worship the
scene of its self exaltation. Since the time Christ so exposed his
pride, the Pharisee has put on the garb of the publican, and the
confessor of deep sinfulness equally with the professor of the highest
holiness, must be on the watch. Just when We are most anxious to have
our heart the temple of God, we shall find the two men coming up to
pray. And the publican will find that his danger is not from the
Pharisee beside him, who despises him, but the Pharisee within who
commends and exalts. In God's temple, when we think we are in the
holiest of all, in the presence of His holiness, let us beware of
pride. 'Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present
themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them.'
'God, I thank thee, I am not as the rest of men, or even as this
publican.' It is in that which is just cause for thanksgiving, it is
in the very thanksgiving which we render to God, it may be in the very
confession that God has done it all, that self finds its cause of
complacency. Yes, even when in the temple the language of penitence
and trust in God's mercy alone is heard, the Pharisee may take up the
note of praise, and in thanking God be congratulating himself. Pride
can clothe itself in the garments of praise or of penitence. Even
though the words, 'I am not as the rest of men' are rejected and
condemned, their spirit may too often be found in our feelings and
language towards our fellow-worshippers and fellow-men. Would you know
if this really is so, just listen to the way in which Churches and
Christians often speak of one another. How little of the meekness and
gentleness of Jesus is to be seen. It is so little remembered that
deep humility must be the keynote of what the servants of Jesus say of
themselves or each other. Is there not many a Church or assembly of
the saints, many a mission or convention, many a society or committee,
even many a mission away in heathendom, where the harmony has been
disturbed and the work of God hindered, because men who are counted
saints have proved in touchiness and haste and impatience, in
self-defence and self-assertion, in sharp judgments and unkind words,
that they did not each reckon others better than themselves, and that
their holiness has but little in it of the meekness of the
saints?[Footnote1: ME is a most exacting personage, requiring the best
seat and the highest place for itself, and feeling grievously wounded
if its claim is not recognised. Most of the quarrels among Christian
workers arise from the clamouring of this gigantic ME. How few of us
understand the true secret of taking our seats in the lowest
rooms.'--MRS SMITH, Everyday Religion.] In their spiritual history men
may have had times of great humbling and brokenness, but what a
different thing this is from being clothed with humility, from having
an humble spirit, from having that lowliness of mind in which each
counts himself the servant of others, and so shows forth the very mind
which was also in Jesus Christ.
_'Stand by; for I am holier than thou!'_ What a parody on holiness!
Jesus the Holy One is the humble One: the holiest will ever be the
humblest. There is none holy but God: we have as much of holiness as
we have of God. And according to what we have of God will be our real
humility, because humility is nothing but the disappearance of self in
the vision that God is all. The holiest will be the humblest. Alas!
though the barefaced boasting Jew of the days of Isaiah is not often
to be found,--even our manners have taught us not to speak thus, how
often his spirit is still seen, whether in the treatment of
fellow-saints or of the children of the world. In the spirit in which
opinions are given, and work is undertaken, and faults are exposed,
how often, though the garb be that of the publican, the voice is still
that of the Pharisee: 'Oh God, I thank Thee that I am not as other
men.'
And is there, then, such humility to be found, that men shall indeed
still count themselves 'less than the least of all saints,' the
servants of all? There is. 'Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed
up, seeketh not its own.' Where the spirit of love is shed abroad in
the heart, where the divine nature comes to a full birth where Christ
the meek and lowly Lamb of God is truly formed within, there is given
the power of a perfect love that forgets itself and finds its
blessedness in blessing others, in bearing with them and honouring
them, however feeble they be. Where this love enters, there God
enters. And where God has entered in His power, and reveals Himself as
All, there the creature becomes nothing. And where the creature
becomes nothing before God; it cannot be anything but humble towards
the fellow-creature. The presence of God becomes not a thing of times
and seasons, but the covering under which the soul ever dwells, and
its deep abasement before God becomes the holy place of His presence
whence all its words and works proceed.
May God teach us that our thoughts and words and feelings concerning
our fellowmen are His test of our humility towards Him, and that our
humility before Him is the only power that can enable us to be always
humble with our fellow-men. Our humility must be the life of Christ,
the Lamb of God, within us.
Let all teachers of holiness, whether in the pulpit or on the
platform, and all seekers after holiness, whether in the closet or the
convention, take warning. There is no pride so dangerous, because none
so subtle and insidious, as the pride of holiness. It is not that a
man ever says, or even thinks, 'Stand by; I am holier than thou.' No,
indeed, the thought would be regarded with abhorrence. But there grows
up, all unconsciously, a hidden habit of soul, which feels complacency
its attainments, and cannot help seeing how far it is in advance of
others. It can be recognised, not always in any special self-assertion
or self-laudation, but simply in the absence of that deep
self-abasement which cannot but be the mark of the soul that has seen
the glory of God (Job xlii. 5, 6; Isa. vi. 5). It reveals itself, not
only in words or thoughts, but in a tone, a way of speaking of others,
in which those who have the gift of spiritual discernment cannot but
recognise the power of self. Even the world with its keen eyes notices
it, and points to it as a proof that the profession of a heavenly life
does not bear any specially heavenly fruits. O brethren! let us
beware. Unless we make, with each advance in what we think holiness,
the increase of humility our study, we may find that we have been
delighting in beautiful thoughts and feelings, in solemn acts of
consecration and faith, while the only sure mark of the presence of
God, the disappearance of self, was all the time wanting. Come and let
us flee to Jesus, and hide ourselves in Him until we be clothed upon
with His humility. That alone is our holiness.
Humility: The Beauty of Holiness
VIII.
Humility and Sin
_'Sinners, of whom I am chief.'_--1 TIM. i. 15
HUMILITY is often identified with penitence and contrition. As a
consequence, there appears to be no way of fostering humility but by
keeping the soul occupied with its sin. We have learned, I think, that
humility is something else and something more. We have seen in the
teaching of our Lord Jesus and the Epistles how often the virtue is
inculcated without any reference to sin. In the very nature of things,
in the whole relation of the creature to the Creator, in the life of
Jesus as He lived it and imparts it to us, humility is the very
essence of holiness as of blessedness. It is the displacement of self
by the enthronement of God. Where God is all, self is nothing.
But though it is this aspect of the truth I have felt it specially
needful to press, I need scarce say what new depth and intensity man's
sin and God's grace give to the humility of the saints. We have only
to look at a man like the Apostle Paul, to see how, through his life
as a ransomed and a holy man, the deep consciousness of having been a
sinner lives inextinguishably. We all know the passages in which he
refers to his life as a persecutor and blasphemer. 'I am _the least of
the apostles_, that am _not worthy to be called an apostle_, because I
persecuted the Church of God. ...I laboured more abundantly than they
all; yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me' (1 Cor. xv.
9,10). 'Unto me, who am _less than the least of all saints,_ was this
grace given, to preach to the heathen' (Eph. iii. 8). 'I was before a
_blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious;_ howbeit I obtained
mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief. ...Christ Jesus came
into the world to save _sinners, of whom I am chief'_ (1 Tim. i. 13,
15). God's grace had saved him; God remembered his sins no more for
ever; but never, never could he forget how terribly he had sinned. The
more he rejoiced in God's salvation, and the more his experience of
God's grace filled him with joy unspeakable, the clearer was his
consciousness that he was a saved sinner, and that salvation had no
meaning or sweetness except as the sense of his being a sinner made it
precious and real to him. Never for a moment could he forget that it
was a sinner God had taken up in His arms and crowned with His love.
The texts we have just quoted are often appealed to as Paul's
confession of daily sinning. One has only to read them carefully in
their connection, to see how little this is the case. They have a far
deeper meaning, they refer to that which lasts throughout eternity,
and which will give its deep undertone of amazement and adoration to
the humility with which the ransomed bow before the throne, as those
who have been washed from their sins in the blood of the Lamb. Never,
never, even in, glory, can they be other than ransomed sinners; never
for a moment in this life can God's child live in the full light of
His love, but as he feels that the sin, out of which he has been
saved, is his one only right and title to all that grace has promised
to do. The humility with which first he came as a sinner, acquires a
new meaning when he learns how it becomes him as a creature. And then
ever again, the humility, in which he was born as a creature, has its
deepest, richest tones of adoration, in the memory of what it is to be
a monument of God's wondrous redeeming love.
The true import of what these expressions of St. Paul teach us comes
out all the more strongly when we notice the remarkable fact that,
through his whole Christian course, we never find from his pen, even
in those epistles in which we have the most intensely personal
unbosomings, anything like confession of sin. Nowhere is there any
mention of shortcoming or defect, nowhere any suggestion to his
readers that he has failed in duty, or sinned against the law of
perfect love. On the contrary, there are passages not a few in which
he vindicates himself in language that means nothing if it does not
appeal to a faultless life before God and men. 'Ye are witnesses, and
God also, how holily, and righteously, and unblameably we behaved
ourselves toward you' (1 Thess. ii. 10). 'Our glorying is this, the
testimony of our conscience, that in holiness and sincerity of God we
behaved ourselves in the world, and more abundantly to you ward' (2
Cor. i. 12). This is not an ideal or an aspiration; it is an appeal to
what his actual life had been. However we may account for this absence
of confession of sin, all will admit that it must point to a life in
the power of the Holy Ghost, such as is but seldom realised or
expected in these our days.
The point which I wish to emphasise is this--that the very fact of the
absence of such confession of sinning only gives the more force to the
truth that it is not in daily sinning that the secret of the deeper
humility will be found, but in the habitual, never for a moment to be
forgotten position, which just the more abundant grace will keep more
distinctly alive, that our only place, the only place of blessing, our
one abiding position before God, must be that of those whose highest
joy it is to confess that they are sinners saved by grace.
With Paul's deep remembrance of having sinned so terribly in the past,
ere grace had met him, and the consciousness of being kept from
present sinning, there was ever coupled the abiding remembrance of the
dark hidden power of sin ever ready to come in, and only kept out by
the presence and power of the indwelling Christ. 'In me, that is, in
my flesh, dwelleth no good thing;'--these words of Rom. vii. describe
the flesh as it is to the end. The glorious deliverance of Rom.
viii.--'The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath now made me
free from the law of sin, which once led me captive'--is neither the
annihilation nor the sanctification of the flesh, but a continuous
victory given by the Spirit as He mortifies the deeds of the body. As
health expels disease, and light swallows up darkness, and life
conquers death, the indwelling of Christ through the Spirit is the
health and light and life of the soul. But with this, the conviction
of helplessness and danger ever tempers the faith in the momentary and
unbroken action of the Holy Spirit into that chastened sense of
dependence which makes the highest faith and joy the handmaids of a
humility that only lives by the grace of God.
The three passages above quoted all show that it was the wonderful
grace bestowed upon Paul, and of which he felt the need every moment,
that humbled him so deeply. The grace of God that was with him, and
enabled him to labor more abundantly than they all; the grace to
preach to the heathen the unsearchable riches of Christ; the grace
that was exceeding abundant with faith and love which is in Christ
Jesus,--it was this grace of which it is the very nature and glory
that it is for sinners, that kept the consciousness of his having once
sinned, and being liable to sin, so intensely alive. 'Where sin
abounded, grace did abound more exceedingly.' This reveals how the
very essence of grace is to deal with and take away sin, and how it
must ever be the more abundant the experience of grace, the more
intense the consciousness of being a sinner. It is not sin, but God's
grace showing a man and ever reminding him what a sinner he was, that,
will keep him truly humble. It is not sin, but grace, that will make
me indeed know myself a sinner, and make the sinner's place of deepest
self-abasement the place I never leave.
I fear that there are not a few who, by strong expressions of
self-condemnation and self-denunciation, have sought to humble
themselves, and have to confess with sorrow that a humble spirit, a
'heart of humility,' with its accompaniments of kindness and
compassion, of meekness and forbearance, is still as far off as ever.
Being occupied with self, even amid the deepest self-abhorrence, can
never free us from self. It is the revelation of God, not only by the
law condemning sin but by His grace delivering from it, that will make
us humble. The law may break the heart with fear; it is only grace
that works that sweet humility which becomes a joy to the soul as its
second nature. It was the revelation of God in His holiness, drawing
nigh to make Himself known in His grace, that made Abraham and Jacob,
Job and Isaiah, bow so low. It is the soul in which God the Creator,
as the All of the creature in its nothingness, God the Redeemer in His
grace, as the All of the sinner in his sinfulness, is waited for and
trusted and worshipped, that will find itself so filled with His
presence, that there will be no place for self. So alone can the
promise be fulfilled: 'The haughtiness of man shall be brought low,
and the Lord alone be exalted in that day.'
It is the sinner dwelling in the full light of God's holy, redeeming
love, in the experience of that full indwelling of divine love, which
comes through Christ and the Holy Spirit, who cannot but be humble.
Not to be occupied with thy sin, but to be occupied with God, brings
deliverance from self.
Humility: The Beauty of Holiness
IX.
Humility and Faith
_'How can ye believe, which receive glory from one another, and the
glory that cometh from the only God ye seek not?'_ JOHN v. 44.
In an address I lately heard, the speaker said that the blessings of
the higher Christian life were often like the objects exposed in a
shop window,--one could see them clearly and yet could not reach them.
If told to stretch out his hand and take, a man would answer, I
cannot; there is a thick pane of plate-glass between me and them. And
even so Christians may see clearly the blessed promises of perfect
peace and rest, of overflowing love and joy, of abiding communion and
fruitfulness, and yet feel that there was something between hindering
the true possession. And what might that be? _Nothing but pride._ The
promises made to faith are so free and sure; the invitations and
encouragements so strong; the mighty power of God on which it may
count is so near and free,--that it can only be something that hinders
faith that hinders the blessing being ours. In our text Jesus
discovers to us that it is indeed pride that makes faith impossible.
'How can ye believe, which receive glory from one another?' As we see
how in their very nature pride and faith are irreconcilably at
variance, we shall learn that faith and humility are at root one, and
that we never can have more of true faith than we have of true
humility; we shall see that we may indeed have strong intellectual
conviction and assurance of the truth while pride is kept in the
heart, but that it makes the living faith, which has power with God,
an impossibility.
We need only think for a moment what faith is. Is it not the
confession of nothingness and helplessness, the surrender and the
waiting to let God work? Is it not in itself the most humbling thing
there can be,--the acceptance of our place as dependents, who can
claim or get or do nothing but what grace bestows? Humility is
'simply the disposition which prepares the soul for living on trust.
And every, even the most secret breathing of pride, in self-seeking,
self-will, self-confidence, or self-exaltation, is just the
strengthening of that self which cannot enter the kingdom, or possess
the things of the kingdom, because it refuses to allow God to be what
He is and must be there--the All in All.
Faith is the organ or sense for the perception and apprehension of the
heavenly world and its blessings. Faith seeks the glory that comes
from God, that only comes where God is All. As long as we take glory
from one another, as long as ever we seek and love and jealously guard
the glory of this life, the honour and reputation that comes from men,
we do not seek, and cannot receive the glory that comes from God.
Pride renders faith impossible. Salvation comes through a cross and a
crucified Christ. Salvation is the fellowship with the crucified
Christ in the Spirit of His cross. Salvation is union with and delight
in, salvation is participation in, the humility of Jesus. Is it wonder
that our faith is so feeble when pride still reigns so much, and we
have scarce learnt even to long or pray for humility as the most
needful and blessed part of salvation?