'Walk worthy of God.'--1 THESS. ii. 12.
Here we have the whole law of Christian conduct in a nutshell. There may
be many detailed commandments, but they can all be deduced from this
one. We are lifted up above the region of petty prescriptions, and
breathe a bracing mountain air. Instead of regulations, very many and
very dry, we have a principle which needs thought and sympathy in order
to apply it, and is to be carried out by the free action of our own
judgments.
Now it is to be noticed that there are a good many other passages in the
New Testament in which, in similar fashion, the whole sum of Christian
conduct is reduced to a 'walking worthy' of some certain thing or other,
and I have thought that it might aid in appreciating the many-sidedness
and all-sufficiency of the great principles into which Christianity
crystallises the law of our life, if we just gather these together and
set them before you consecutively.
They are these: we are told in our text to 'walk worthy of God.' Then
again, we are enjoined, in other places, to 'walk worthy of the Lord,'
who is Christ. Or again, 'of the Gospel of Christ.' Or again, 'of the
calling wherewith we were called.' Or again, of the name of 'saints.'
And if you put all these together, you will get many sides of one
thought, the rule of Christian life as gathered into a single
expression--correspondence with, and conformity to, a certain standard.
I. And first of all, we have this passage of my text, and the other one
to which I have referred, 'Walking worthy of the Lord,' by whom we are
to understand Christ. We may put these together and say that the whole
sum of Christian duty lies in conformity to the character of a Divine
Person with whom we have loving relations.
The Old Testament says: 'Be ye holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.'
The New Testament says: 'Be ye imitators of God, and walk in love.' So
then, whatever of flashing brightness and infinite profundity in that
divine nature is far beyond our apprehension and grasp, there are in
that divine nature elements--and those the best and divinest in
it--which it is perfectly within the power of every man to copy.
Is there anything in God that is more Godlike than righteousness and
love? And is there any difference in essence between a man's
righteousness and God's;--between a man's love and God's? The same gases
make combustion in the sun and on the earth, and the spectroscope tells
you that it is so. The same radiant brightness that flames burning in
the love, and flashes white in the purity of God, even that may be
reproduced in man.
Love is one thing, all the universe over. Other elements of the bond
that unites us to God are rather correspondent in us to what we find in
Him. Our concavity, so to speak, answers to His convexity; our
hollowness to His fulness; our emptiness to His all-sufficiency. So our
faith, for instance, lays hold upon His faithfulness, and our obedience
grasps, and bows before, His commanding will. But the love with which I
lay hold of Him is like the love with which He lays hold on me; and
righteousness and purity, howsoever different may be their
accompaniments in an Infinite and uncreated Nature from what they have
in our limited and bounded and progressive being, in essence are one.
So, 'Be ye holy, for I am holy'; 'Walk in the light as He is in the
light,' is the law available for all conduct; and the highest divine
perfections, if I may speak of pre-eminence among them, are the imitable
ones, whereby He becomes our Example and our Pattern.
Let no man say that such an injunction is vague or hopeless. You must
have a perfect ideal if you are to live at all by an ideal. There cannot
be any flaws in your pattern if the pattern is to be of any use. You aim
at the stars, and if you do not hit them you may progressively approach
them. We need absolute perfection to strain after, and one day--blessed
be His name--we shall attain it. Try to walk worthy of God and you will
find out how tight that precept grips, and how close it fits.
The love and the righteousness which are to become the law of our lives,
are revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Whatever may sound impracticable in
the injunction to imitate God assumes a more homely and possible shape
when it becomes an injunction to follow Jesus. And just as that form of
the precept tends to make the law of conformity to the divine nature
more blessed and less hopelessly above us, so it makes the law of
conformity to the ideal of goodness less cold and unsympathetic. It
makes all the difference to our joyfulness and freedom whether we are
trying to obey a law of duty, seen only too clearly to be binding, but
also above our reach, or whether we have the law in a living Person whom
we have learned to love. In the one case there stands upon a pedestal
above us a cold perfection, white, complete, marble; in the other case
there stands beside us a living law in pattern, a Brother, bone of our
bone and flesh of our flesh; whose hand we can grasp; whose heart we can
trust, and of whose help we can be sure. To say to me: 'Follow the ideal
of perfect righteousness,' is to relegate me to a dreary, endless
struggling; to say to me, 'Follow your Brother, and be like your
Father,' is to bring warmth and hope and liberty into all my effort.
The word that says, 'Walk worthy of God,' is a royal law, the perfect
law of perfect freedom.
Again, when we say, 'Walk worthy of God,' we mean two things--one, 'Do
after His example,' and the other, 'Render back to Him what He deserves
for what He has done to you.' And so this law bids us measure, by the
side of that great love that died on the Cross for us all, our poor
imperfect returns of gratitude and of service. He has lavished all His
treasure on you; what have you brought him back? He has given you the
whole wealth of His tender pity, of His forgiving mercy, of His infinite
goodness. Do you adequately repay such lavish love? Has He not 'sown
much and reaped little' in all our hearts? Has He not poured out the
fulness of His affection, and have we not answered Him with a few
grudging drops squeezed from our hearts? Oh! brethren! 'Walk worthy of
the Lord,' and neither dishonour Him by your conduct as professing
children of His, nor affront Him by the wretched refuse and remnants of
your devotion and service that you bring back to Him in response to His
love to you.
II. Now a word about the next form of this all-embracing precept. The
whole law of our Christian life may be gathered up in another
correspondence, 'Walk worthy of the Gospel' (Phil. i. 27), in a manner
conformed to that great message of God's love to us.
That covers substantially the same ground as we have already been going
over, but it presents the same ideas in a different light. It presents
the Gospel as a rule of conduct. Now people have always been apt to
think of it more as a message of deliverance than as a practical guide,
as we all need to make an effort to prevent our natural indolence and
selfishness from making us forget that the Gospel is quite as much a
rule of conduct as a message of pardon.
It is both by the same act. In the very facts on which our redemption
depends lies the law of our lives.
What was Paul's Gospel? According to Paul's own definition of it, it was
this: 'How that Jesus Christ died for our sins, according to the
Scriptures.' And the message that I desire now to bring to all you
professing Christians is this: Do not always be looking at Christ's
Cross only as your means of acceptance. Do not only be thinking of
Christ's Passion as that which has barred for you the gates of
punishment, and has opened for you the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven.
It has done all that; but if you are going to stop there you have only
got hold of a very maimed and imperfect edition of the Gospel. The Cross
is your _pattern_, as well as the anchor of your hope and the ground of
your salvation, if it is anything at all to you. And it is not the
ground of your salvation and the anchor of your hope unless it is your
pattern. It is the one in exactly the same degree in which it is the
other.
So all self-pleasing, all harsh insistence on your own claims, all
neglect of suffering and sorrow and sin around you, comes under the lash
of this condemnation: 'They are not worthy of the Gospel.' And all
unforgivingness of spirit and of temper in individuals and in nations,
in public and in private matters, that, too, is in flagrant
contradiction to the principles that are taught on the Cross to which
you say you look for your salvation. Have you got forgiveness, and are
you going out from the presence-chamber of the King to take your brother
by the throat for the beggarly coppers that he owes you, and say: 'Pay
me what thou owest!' when the Master has forgiven you all that great
mountain of indebtedness which you owe Him? Oh, my brother! if Christian
men and women would only learn to take away the scales from their eyes
and souls; not looking at Christ's Cross with less absolute
trustfulness, as that by which all their salvation comes, but also
learning to look at it as closely and habitually as yielding the pattern
to which their lives should be conformed, and would let the
heart-melting thankfulness which it evokes when gazed at as the ground
of our hope prove itself true by its leading them to an effort at
imitating that great love, and so walking worthy of the Gospel, how
their lives would be transformed! It is far easier to fetter your life
with yards of red-tape prescriptions--do this, do not do that--far
easier to out-pharisee the Pharisees in punctilious scrupulosities, than
it is honestly, and for one hour, to take the Cross of Christ as the
pattern of your lives, and to shape yourselves by that.
One looks round upon a lethargic, a luxurious, a self-indulgent, a
self-seeking, a world-besotted professing Church, and asks: 'Are these
the people on whose hearts a cross is stamped?' Do these men--or rather
let us say, do _we_ live as becometh the Gospel which proclaims the
divinity of self-sacrifice, and that the law of a perfect human life is
perfect self-forgetfulness, even as the secret of the divine nature is
perfect love? 'Walk worthy of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.'
III. Then again, there is another form of this same general prescription
which suggests to us a kindred and yet somewhat different standard. We
are also bidden to bring our lives into conformity to, and
correspondence with, or, as the Bible has it, 'to walk worthy of the
calling wherewith we are called' (Eph. iv. 1).
God summons or invites us, and summons us to what? The words which
follow our text answer, 'Who calleth you into His own kingdom and
glory.' All you Christian people have been invited, and if you are
Christians you have accepted the invitation; and all you men and women,
whether you are Christians or not, have been and are being invited and
summoned into a state and a world (for the reference is to the future
life), in which God's will is supreme, and all wills are moulded into
conformity with that, and into a state and a world in which all
shall--because they submit to His will--partake of His glory, the
fulness of His uncreated light.
That being the aim of the summons, that being the destiny that is held
out before us all, ought not that destiny and the prospect of what we
may be in the future, to fling some beams of guiding brightness on to
the present?
Men that are called to high functions prepare themselves therefor. If
you knew that you were going away to Australia in six months, would you
not be beginning to get your outfit ready? You Christian men profess to
believe that you have been called to a condition in which you will
absolutely obey God's will, and be the loyal subjects of His kingdom,
and in which you will partake of God's glory. Well then, obey His will
here, and let some scattered sparklets of that uncreated light that is
one day going to flood your soul lie upon your face to-day. Do not go
and cut your lives into two halves, one of them all contradictory to
that which you expect in the other, but bring a harmony between the
present, in all its weakness and sinfulness, and that great hope and
certain destiny that blazes on the horizon of your hope, as the joyful
state to which you have been invited. 'Walk worthy of the calling to
which you are called.'
And again, that same thought of the destiny should feed our hope, and
make us live under its continual inspiration. A walk worthy of such a
calling and such a caller should know no despondency, nor any weary,
heartless lingering, as with tired feet on a hard road. Brave good
cheer, undimmed energy, a noble contempt of obstacles, a confidence in
our final attainment of that purity and glory which is not depressed by
consciousness of present failure--these are plainly the characteristics
which ought to mark the advance of the men in whose ears such a summons
from such lips rings as their marching orders.
And a walk worthy of our calling will turn away from earthly things. If
you believe that God has summoned you to His kingdom and glory, surely,
surely, that should deaden in your heart the love and the care for the
trifles that lie by the wayside. Surely, surely, if that great voice is
inviting, and that merciful hand is beckoning you into the light, and
showing you what you may possess there, it is not walking according to
that summons if you go with your eyes fixed upon the trifles at your
feet, and your whole heart absorbed in this present fleeting world.
Unworldliness, in its best and purest fashion--by which I mean not only
a contempt for material wealth and all that it brings, but the sitting
loose by everything that is beneath the stars--unworldliness is the only
walk that is 'worthy of the calling wherewith ye are called.'
And if you hear that voice ringing like a trumpet call, or a commander's
shout on the battlefield, into your ears, ever to stimulate you, to
rebuke your lagging indifference; if you are ever conscious in your
inmost hearts of the summons to His kingdom and glory, then, no doubt,
by a walk worthy of it, you will make your calling sure; and there shall
'an entrance be ministered unto you abundantly into the everlasting
kingdom.'
IV. And the last of the phases of this prescription which I have to deal
with is this. The whole Christian duty is further crystallised into the
one command, to walk in a manner conformed to, and corresponding with,
the character which is impressed upon us.
In the last chapter of the Epistle to the Romans (verse 2), we read
about a very small matter, that it is to be done 'worthily of the
saints.' It is only about the receiving of a good woman who was
travelling from Corinth to Rome, and extending hospitality to her in
such a manner as became professing Christians; but the very minuteness
of the details to which the great principle is applied points a lesson.
The biggest principle is not too big to be brought down to the narrowest
details, and that is the beauty of principles as distinguished from
regulations. Regulations try to be minute, and, however minute you make
them, some case always starts up that is not exactly provided for in
them, and so the regulations come to nothing. A principle does not try
to be minute, but it casts its net wide and it gathers various cases
into its meshes. Like the fabled tent in the old legend that could
contract so as to have room for but one man, or expand wide enough to
hold an army, so this great principle of Christian conduct can be
brought down to giving 'Phoebe our sister, who is a servant of the
church at Cenchrea,' good food and a comfortable lodging, and any other
little kindnesses, when she comes to Rome. And the same principle may be
widened out to embrace and direct us in the largest tasks and most
difficult circumstances.
'Worthily of saints'--the name is an omen, and carries in it rules of
conduct. The root idea of 'saint' is 'one separated to God,' and the
secondary idea which flows from that is 'one who is pure.'
All Christians are 'saints.' They are consecrated and set apart for
God's service, and in the degree in which they are conscious of and live
out that consecration, they are pure.
So their name, or rather the great fact which their name implies, should
be ever before them, a stimulus and a law. We are bound to remember that
we are consecrated, separated as God's possession, and that therefore
purity is indispensable. The continual consciousness of this relation
and its resulting obligations would make us recoil from impurity as
instinctively as the sensitive plant shuts up its little green fingers
when anything touches it; or as the wearer of a white robe will draw it
up high above the mud on a filthy pavement. Walk 'worthily of saints' is
another way of saying, Be true to your own best selves. Work up to the
highest ideal of your character. That is far more wholesome than to be
always looking at our faults and failures, which depress and tempt us to
think that the actual is the measure of the possible, and the past or
present of the future. There is no fear of self-conceit or of a mistaken
estimate of ourselves. The more clearly we keep our best and deepest
self before our consciousness, the more shall we learn a rigid judgment
of the miserable contradictions to it in our daily outward life, and
even in our thoughts and desires. It is a wholesome exhortation, when it
follows these others of which we have been speaking (and not else),
which bids Christians remember that they are saints and live up to their
name.
A Christian's inward and deepest self is better than his outward life.
We have all convictions in our inmost hearts which we do not work out,
and beliefs that do not influence us as we know they ought to do, and
sometimes wish that they did. By our own fault our lives but imperfectly
show their real inmost principle. Friction always wastes power before
motion is produced.
So then, we may well gather together all our duties in this final form
of the all-comprehensive law, and say to ourselves, 'Walk worthily of
saints.' Be true to your name, to your best selves, to your deepest
selves. Be true to your separation for God's service, and to the purity
which comes from it. Be true to the life which God has implanted in you.
That life may be very feeble and covered by a great deal of rubbish, but
it is divine. Let it work, let it out. Do not disgrace your name.
These are the phases of the law of Christian conduct. They reach far,
they fit close, they penetrate deeper than the needle points of minute
regulations. If you will live in a manner corresponding to the
character, and worthy of the love of God, as revealed in Christ, and in
conformity with the principles that are enthroned upon His Cross, and in
obedience to the destiny held forth in your high calling, and in
faithfulness to the name that He Himself has impressed upon you, then
your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the painful and
punctilious pharisaical obedience to outward commands, and all things
lovely and of good report will spring to life in your hearts and bear
fruit in your lives.
One last word--all these exhortations go on the understanding that you
are a Christian, that you have taken Christ for your Saviour, and are
resting upon Him, and recognising in Him the revelation of God, and in
His Cross the foundation of your hope; that you have listened to, and
yielded to, the divine summons, and that you have a right to be called a
saint. Is that presumption true about you, my friend? If it is not,
Christianity thinks that it is of no use wasting time talking to you
about conduct.
It has another word to speak to you first, and after you have heard and
accepted it, there will be time enough to talk to you about rules for
living. The first message which Christ sends to you by my lips is, Trust
your sinful selves to Him as your only all-sufficient Saviour. When you
have accepted Him, and are leaning on Him with all your weight of sin
and suffering, and loving Him with your ransomed heart, then, and not
till then, will you be in a position to hear His law for your life, and
to obey it. Then, and not till then, will you appreciate the divine
simplicity and breadth of the great command to walk worthy of God, and
the divine tenderness and power of the motive which enforces it, and
prints it on yielding and obedient hearts, even the dying love and Cross
of His Son. Then, and not till then, will you know how the voice from
heaven that calls you to His kingdom stirs the heart like the sound of a
trumpet, and how the name which you bear is a perpetual spur to heroic
service and priestly purity. Till then, the word which we would plead
with you to listen to and accept is that great answer of our Lord's to
those who came to Him for a rule of conduct, instead of for the gift of
life: 'This is the work of God, that ye should believe on Him whom He
hath sent.'