If it were a matter of our own effort alone, who of us could pretend to
reach to the height of conformity with the great design of the loving
Father in summoning us, or with the mighty powers that are set in motion
by the summons for the purifying of men's lives? But here is the great
characteristic and blessing of God's Gospel, that it not only summons us
to holiness and to heaven, but reaches out a hand to help us thither.
Therein it contrasts with all other voices--and many of them are noble
and pathetic in their insistence and vehemence--which call men to lofty
lives. Whether it be the voice of conscience, or of human ethics, or of
the great ones, the elect of the race, who, in every age, have been as
voices crying in the wilderness, 'Prepare ye the way of the Lord'--all
these call us, but reach no hand out to draw us. They are all as voices
from the heights and are of God, but they are voices only; they summon
us to noble deeds, and leave us floundering in the mire.
But we have not a God who tells us to be good, and then watches to see
if we will obey, but we have a God who, with all His summonses, brings
to us the help to keep His commandments. Our God has more than a voice
to enjoin, He has a hand to lift, 'Give what Thou commandest, and
command what Thou wilt,' said Augustine. There is the blessing and glory
of the Gospel, that its summons has in it an impelling power which makes
men able to be what it enjoins them to become. My text, therefore,
follows the prayer 'that God would count you worthy,' which contemplates
God simply as judging men's correspondence with the ideal revealed in
their calling, and is the cry of faith to the giving God, who works in
us, if we will let Him, that which He enjoins on us. There are two
directions of that divine working specified in the text. Paul asks that
God would fulfil 'every desire of goodness and every work of faith,' as
the Revised Version renders the words. Two things, then, we may hope
that God will do for us--He will fulfil every yearning after
righteousness and purity in our hearts, and will perfect the active
energy which faith puts forth in our lives.
Paul says, in effect, first, that God will fulfil every desire that
longs for goodness. He is scarcely deserving of being called good who
does not desire to be better. Aspiration must always be ahead of
performance in a growing life, such as every Christian life ought to be.
To long for any righteousness and beauty of goodness is, in some
imperfect and incipient measure, to possess the good for which we long.
This is the very signature of a Christian life--yearning after
unaccomplished perfection. If you know nothing of that desire that
stings and impels you onwards; if you do not know what it is to say,
'Oh! wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this
death?' if you do not know what it is to follow the fair ideal realised
in Jesus Christ with infinite longing, what right have you to call
yourself a Christian? The very essence of the Christian life is yearning
for completeness, and restlessness as long as sin has any power over us.
We live not only by admiration, faith, and love, but we live by hope;
and he who does not hunger and thirst after righteousness has yet to
learn what are the first principles of the Gospel of Christ.
If there be not the desire after goodness, the restlessness and
dissatisfaction with every present good, the brave ambition that says,
'Forgetting the things that are behind, I reach forth unto the things
that are before,' there is nothing in a man to which God's grace can
attach itself. God cannot make you better if you do not wish to be
better. There is no point upon which His hallowing and ennobling grace
can lay hold in your hearts without such desire. 'Open thy mouth wide
and I will fill it.' If, as is too often the case with hosts of
professing Christians, you shut your mouths tight and lock your teeth,
how can God put any food between your lips? There must, first of all, be
the aspiration, and then there will be the satisfaction.
I look out upon my congregation, or, better still, I look into my own
heart, and I say, If I, if you, dear brethren, are not worthy of the
vocation wherewith we are called, we have not because we ask not. If
there be no desire after goodness in our hearts, God cannot make us
good. Our wishes are the mould into which the molten metal from the
great furnace of His love will run. If we bring but a little vessel we
cannot get a large supply. The manna lies round our tents; it is for us
to determine how much we will gather.
And in like manner, says Paul, God will fulfil every work of faith. Our
faith in Jesus Christ will naturally tend to influence our lives, and to
manifest itself as a driving power which will set all the wheels of
conduct in motion. Paul is quite sure that if we trust ourselves to God,
all the beneficent and holy work that flows from such confidence will by
Him be fully perfected.
God's fulfilment is to be done _with power_. That is to say, He will fit
us to be worthy of our calling, He will answer our desires, He will give
energy to our faith, and complete in number and in quality its
operations in our lives, by reason of His dwelling with us and in us by
that spirit of power and of love and of a sound mind which works all
righteousness in believing hearts, and sheds divine beauty and goodness
over character and life.