'That we through His poverty might become rich.' Of course, the
antithetical expressions must be taken to be used in the same sense, and
with the same width of application, in both of the clauses. And if so,
just think reverently, wonderingly, thankfully, of the infinite vista
of glorious possibility that is open to us here. Christ was rich in the
possession of that Divine glory which Had had with the Father before the
world was. 'He became poor,' in assuming the weakness of the manhood
that you and I carry, that we, in the human poverty which is like His
poverty, may become rich with wealth that is like His riches, and that
as He stooped to earth veiling the Divine with the human, we may rise to
heaven, clothing the human with the Divine.
For surely there is nothing more plainly taught in Scriptures, and I am
bold to say nothing to which any deep and vital Christian experience
even here gives more surely an anticipatory confirmation, than the fact
that Christ became like unto us, that each of us may become like unto
Him. The divine and the human natures are similar, and the fact of the
Incarnation, on the one hand, and of the man's glorification by
possession of the divine nature on the other, equally rest upon that
fundamental resemblance between the divine nature and the human nature
which God has made in His own image. If that which in each of us is
unlike God is cleared away, as it can be cleared away, through faith in
that dear Lord, then the likeness as a matter of course, comes into
force.
The law of all elevation is that whosoever desires to lift must stoop;
and the end of all stooping is to lift the lowly to the place from which
the love hath bent itself. And this is at once the law for the
Incarnation of the Christ, and for the elevation of the Christian. 'We
shall be like Him for we shall see Him as He is.' And the great love,
the stooping, forgiving, self-communicating love, doth not reach its
ultimate issue, nor effect fully the purposes to which it ever is
tending, unless and until all who have received it are 'changed from
glory to glory even into the image of the Lord.' We do not understand
Jesus, His cradle, or His Cross, unless on the one hand we see in them
His emptying Himself that He might fill us, and, on the other hand, see,
as the only result which warrants them and satisfies Him, our complete
conformity to His image, and our participation in that glory which He
has at the right hand of God. That is the prospect for humanity, and it
is possible for each of us.
I do not dwell upon other aspects of this great self-emptying of our
Lord's, such as the revelation in it to us of the very heart of God, and
of the divinest thing in the divine nature, which is love, or such as
the sympathy which is made possible thereby to Him, and which is not
only the pity of a God, but the compassion of a Brother. Nor do I touch
upon many other aspects which are full of strengthening and teaching.
That grand thought that Jesus has shared our human poverty that we may
share His divine riches is the very apex of the New Testament teaching,
and of the Christian hope. We have within us, notwithstanding all our
transgressions, what the old divines used to call a 'deiform nature,'
capable of being lifted up into the participation of divinity, capable
of being cleansed from all the spots and stains which make us so unlike
Him in whose likeness we were made.
Brethren, let us not forget that this stooping, and pardoning, and
self-imparting love, has for its main instrument to appeal to our
hearts, not the cradle but the Cross. We are being told by many people
to-day that the centre of Christianity lies in the thought of an
Incarnation. Yes. But our Lord Himself has told us what that was for.
'The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to
give His life a ransom for many.' It is only when we look to that Lord
in His death, and see there the very lowest point to which He stooped,
and the supreme manifestation of His grace, that we shall be drawn to
yield our hearts and lives to Him in thankfulness, in trust, and in
imitation: and shall set Him before us as the pattern for our conduct,
as well as the Object of our trust.
Brethren, my text was spoken originally as presenting the motive and the
example for a little piece of pecuniary liability. Do you take the
cradle and the Cross as the law of your lives? For depend upon it, the
same necessity which obliged Jesus to come down to our level, if He
would lift us to His; to live our life and die our death, if He would
make us partakers of His immortal life, and deliver us from death; makes
it absolutely necessary that if we are to live for anything nobler than
our own poor, transitory self-aggrandisement, we too must learn to stoop
to forgive, to impart ourselves, and must die by self-surrender and
sacrifice, if we are ever to communicate any life, or good of life, to
others. He has loved us, and given Himself for us. He has set us therein
an example which He commends to us by His own word when He tells us that
'if a corn of wheat' is to bring forth 'much fruit' it must die, else it
'abideth alone.' Unless we die, we never truly live; unless we die to
ourselves for others, and like Jesus, we live alone in the solitude of a
self-enclosed self-regard. So living, we are dead whilst we live.