'The life which I now live in the flesh I live by
the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and
gave Himself for me.'--GAL. ii. 20.
We have a bundle of paradoxes in this verse. First, 'I am crucified with
Christ, nevertheless I live.' The Christian life is a dying life. If we
are in any real sense joined to Christ, the power of His death makes us
dead to self and sin and the world. In that region, as in the physical,
death is the gate of life; and, inasmuch as what we die to in Christ is
itself only a living death, we live because we die, and in proportion as
we die.
The next paradox is, 'Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.' The Christian
life is a life in which an indwelling Christ casts out, and therefore
quickens, self. We gain ourselves when we lose ourselves. His abiding in
us does not destroy but heightens our individuality. We then most truly
live when we can say, 'Not I, but Christ liveth in me'; the soul of my
soul and the self of myself.
And the last paradox is that of my text, 'The life which I live in the
flesh, I live in' (not 'by') 'the faith of the Son of God.' The true
Christian life moves in two spheres at once. Externally and
superficially it is 'in the flesh,' really it is 'in faith.' It belongs
not to the material nor is dependent upon the physical body in which we
are housed. We are strangers here, and the true region and atmosphere of
the Christian life is that invisible sphere of faith.
So, then, we have in these words of my text a Christian man's frank
avowal of the secret of his own life. It is like a geological cutting,
it goes down from the surface, where the grass and the flowers are,
through the various strata, but it goes deeper than these, to the fiery
heart, the flaming nucleus and centre of all things. Therefore it may do
us all good to make a section of our hearts and see whether the _strata_
there are conformable to those that are here.
I. Let us begin with the centre, and work to the surface. We have,
first, the great central fact named last, but round which all the
Christian life is gathered.
'The Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me.' These two
words, the 'loving' and the 'giving,' both point backwards to some one
definite historical fact, and the only fact which they can have in view
is the great one of the death of Jesus Christ. That is His giving up of
Himself. That is the signal and highest manifestation and proof of His
love.
Notice (though I can but touch in the briefest possible manner upon the
great thoughts that gather round these words) the three aspects of that
transcendent fact, the centre and nucleus of the whole Christian life,
which come into prominence in these words before us. Christ's death is a
great act of self-surrender, of which the one motive is His own pure and
perfect love. No doubt in other places of Scripture we have set forth
the death of Christ as being the result of the Father's purpose, and we
read that in that wondrous surrender there were two givings up The
Father 'freely gave Him up to the death for us all.' That divine
surrender, the Apostle ventures, in another passage, to find dimly
suggested from afar, in the silent but submissive and unreluctant
surrender with which Abraham yielded his only begotten son on the
mountain top. But besides that ineffable giving up by the Father of the
Son, Jesus Christ Himself, moved only by His love, willingly yields
Himself. The whole doctrine of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ has been
marred by one-sided insisting on the truth that God sent the Son, to the
forgetting of the fact that the Son 'came'; and that He was bound to the
Cross neither by cords of man's weaving nor by the will of the Father,
but that He Himself bound Himself to that Cross with the 'cords of love
and the bands of a man,' and died from no natural necessity nor from any
imposition of the divine will upon Him unwilling, but because He would,
and that He would because He loved. 'He loved me, and gave Himself for
me.'
Then note, further, that here, most distinctly, that great act of
self-surrendering love which culminates on the Cross is regarded as
being for man in a special and peculiar sense. I know, of course, that
from the mere wording of my text we cannot argue the atoning and
substitutionary character of the death of Christ, for the preposition
here does not necessarily mean 'instead of,' but 'for the behoof of.'
But admitting that, I have another question. If Christ's death is for
'the behoof of' men, in what conceivable sense does it benefit them,
unless it is in the place of men? The death 'for me' is only for me when
I understand that it is 'instead of' me. And practically you will find
that wherever the full-orbed faith in Christ Jesus as the death for all
the sins of the whole world, bearing the penalty and bearing it away,
has begun to falter and grow pale, men do not know what to do with
Christ's death at all, and stop talking about it to a very large extent.
Unless He died as a sacrifice, I, for one, fail to see in what other
than a mere sentimental sense the death of Christ is a death for men.
And lastly, about this matter, observe how here we have brought into
vivid prominence the great thought that Jesus Christ in His death has
regard to single souls. We preach that He died for all. If we believe in
that august title which is laid here as the vindication of our faith on
the one hand, and as the ground of the possibility of the benefits of
His death being world-wide on the other--viz. the Son of God--then we
shall not stumble at the thought that He died for all, because He died
for each. I know that if you only regard Jesus Christ as human I am
talking utter nonsense; but I know, too, that if we believe in the
divinity of our Lord, there need be nothing to stumble us, but the
contrary, in the thought that it was not an abstraction that He died
for, that it was not a vague mass of unknown beings, clustered together,
but so far away that He could not see any of their faces, for whom He
gave His life on the Cross. That is the way in which, and in which
alone, _we_ can embrace the whole mass of humanity--by losing sight of
the individuals. We generalise, precisely because we do not see the
individual units; but that is not God's way, and that is not Christ's
way, who is divine. For Him the _all_ is broken up into its parts, and
when we say that the divine love loves all, we mean that the divine love
loves each. I believe (and I commend the thought to you) that we do not
fathom the depth of Christ's sufferings unless we recognise that the
sins of each man were consciously adding pressure to the load beneath
which He sank; nor picture the wonders of His love until we believe that
on the Cross it distinguished and embraced each, and, therefore,
comprehended all. Every man may say, 'He loved me, and gave Himself for
me.'
II. So much, then, for the first central fact that is here. Now let me
say a word, in the second place, about the faith which makes that fact
the foundation of my own personal life.
'I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself
for me.' I am not going to plunge into any unnecessary dissertations
about the nature of faith; but may I say that, like all other familiar
conceptions, it has got worn so smooth that it glides over our mental
palate without roughening any of the _papillæ_ or giving any sense or
savour at all? And I do believe that dozens of people like you, who have
come to church and chapel all your lives, and fancy yourselves to be
fully _au fait_ at all the Christian truth that you will ever hear from
my lips, do not grasp with any clearness of apprehension the meaning of
that fundamental word 'faith.'
It is a thousand pities that it is confined by the accidents of language
to our attitude in reference to Jesus Christ. So some of you think that
it is some kind of theological juggle which has nothing to do with, and
never can be seen in operation in, common life. Suppose, instead of the
threadbare, technical 'faith' we took to a new translation for a minute,
and said '_trust_,' do you think that would freshen up the thought to
you at all? It is the very same thing which makes the sweetness of your
relations to wife and husband and friend and parent, which, transferred
to Jesus Christ and glorified in the process, becomes the seed of
immortal life and the opener of the gate of Heaven. Trust Jesus Christ.
That is the living centre of the Christian life; that is the process by
which we draw the general blessing of the Gospel into our own hearts,
and make the world-wide truth, our truth.
I need not insist either, I suppose, on the necessity, if our Christian
life is to be modelled upon the Apostolic lines, of our faith embracing
the Christ in all these aspects in which I have been speaking about His
work. God forbid that I should seem to despise rudimentary and
incomplete feelings after Him in any heart which may be unable to say
'Amen' to Paul's statement here. I want to insist very earnestly, and
with special reference to the young, that the true Christian faith is
not merely the grasp of the person, but it is the grasp of the Person
who is 'declared to be the Son of God,' and whose death is the voluntary
self-surrender motived by His love, for the carrying away of the sins of
every single soul in the whole universe. That is the Christ, the full
Christ, cleaving to whom our faith finds somewhat to grasp worthy of
grasping. And I beseech you, be not contented with a partial grasp of a
partial Saviour; neither shut your eyes to the divinity of His nature,
nor to the efficacy of His death, but remember that the true Gospel
preaches Christ and Him crucified; and that for us, saving faith is the
faith that grasps the Son of God 'Who loved me and gave Himself for me.'
Note, further, that true faith is personal faith, which appropriates,
and, as it were, fences in as my very own, the purpose and benefit of
Christ's giving of Himself. It is always difficult for lazy people (and
most of us are lazy) to transfer into their own personal lives, and to
bring into actual contact with themselves and their own experience,
wide, general truths. To assent to them, when we keep them in their
generality, is very easy and very profitless. It does no man any good to
say 'All men are mortal'; but how different it is when the blunt end of
that generalisation is shaped into a point, and I say 'I have to die!'
It penetrates then, and it sticks. It is easy to say 'All men are
sinners.' That never yet forced anybody down on his knees. But when we
shut out on either side the lateral view and look straight on, on the
narrow line of our own lives, up to the Throne where the Lawgiver sits,
and feel 'I am a sinful man,' that sends us to our prayers for pardon
and purity. And in like manner nobody was ever wholesomely terrified by
the thought of a general judgment. But when you translate it into 'I
must stand there,' the terror of the Lord persuades men.
In like manner that great truth which we all of us say we believe, that
Christ has died for the world, is utterly useless and profitless to us
until we have translated it into Paul's world, 'loved _me_ and gave
Himself for _me_.' I do not say that the essence of faith is the
conversion of the general statement into the particular application, but
I do say that there is no faith which does not realise one's personal
possession of the benefits of the death of Christ, and that until you
turn the wide word into a message for yourself alone, you have not yet
got within sight of the blessedness of the Christian life. The whole
river may flow past me, but only so much of it as I can bring into my
own garden by my own sluices, and lift in my own bucket, and put to my
own lips, is of any use to me. The death of Christ for the world is a
commonplace of superficial Christianity, which is no Christianity; the
death of Christ for myself, as if He and I were the only beings in the
universe, that is the death on which faith fastens and feeds.
And, dear brother, you have the right to exercise it. The Christ loves
each, and therefore He loves all; that is the process in the divine
mind. The converse is the process in the revelation of that mind; the
Bible says to us, Christ loves all, and therefore we have the right to
draw the inference that He loves each. You have as much right to take
every 'whosoever' of the New Testament as your very own, as if on the
page of your Bible that 'whosoever' was struck out, and your name, John,
Thomas, Mary, Elizabeth, or whatever it is, were put in there. 'He loved
_me_.' Can _you_ say that? Have you ever passed from the region of
universality, which is vague and profitless, into the region of personal
appropriation of the person of Jesus Christ and His death?