'The end of the commandment is love.'
Now, I take it that the word 'commandment' here means, not this or that
specific precept, but the whole body of Christian revelation, considered
as containing laws for life. And to begin with, and only to mention, it
is something to get that point of view, that all which God says, be it
promise, be it self-manifestation, be it threatening, or be it anything
else, has a preceptive bearing, and is meant to influence life and
conduct. I shall have a word or two more to say about that presently,
but note, just as we go on, how remarkable it is, and how full of
lessons, if we will ponder it, that one name for the Gospel on the lips
of the man who had most to say about the contrast between Gospel and
Law is 'commandment.' Try to feel the stringency of that aspect of
evangelical truth and of Christian revelation.
Then I need not remind you how here the indefinite expression 'love'
must be taken, as I think is generally the case in the New Testament,
when the object on which the love rests is not defined, as including
both of the twin commandments, of which the second, our Master says, is
like unto the first, love to God and love to man. In the Christian idea
these two are one. They are shoots from the one root. The only
difference is that the one climbs and the other grows along the levels
of earth. There is no gulf set in the New Testament teaching, and there
ought to be none in the practice and life of a Christian man, between
the love of God and the love of man. They are two aspects of one thing.
Then, if so, mark how, according to the Apostle's teaching here, in this
one thought of a dual-sided love, one turned upwards, one turned
earthwards, there lies the whole perfection of a human soul. You want
nothing more if you are 'rooted and grounded in love.' That will secure
all goodness, all morality, all religion, everything that is beautiful,
and everything that is noble. And all this is meant to be the result of
God's speech to us.
So, then, two very plain practical principles may be deduced and
enforced from this first thought. First, the purpose of all revelation
and the test of all religion is--character and conduct.
It is all very well to know about God, to have our minds filled with
true thoughts about Him, His nature, and dealings with us. Orthodoxy is
good, but orthodoxy is a means to an end. There should be nothing in a
man's creed which does not act upon his life. Or, if I may put it into
technical words, all a man's _credenda_ should be his _agenda_; and
whatsoever he believes should come straight into his life to influence
it, and to shape character. Here, then, is the warning against a mere
notional orthodoxy, and against regarding Christian truth as being
intended mainly to illuminate the understanding, or to be a subject of
speculation and discussion. There are people in all generations, and
there are plenty of them to-day, who seem to think that the great
verities of the Gospel are mainly meant to provide material for
controversy--
'As if religion were intended
For nothing else but to be mended';
and that they have done all that can be expected when they have tried to
apprehend the true bearing of this revelation, and to contend against
misinterpretations. This is the curse of religious controversy, that it
blinds men to the practical importance of the truths for which they are
fighting. It is as if one were to take some fertile wheat-land, and sand
it all over, and roll it down, and make it smooth for a gymnasium, where
nothing would grow. So the temper which finds in Christian truth simply
a 'ministration of questions,' as my text says, mars its purpose, and
robs itself of all the power and nourishment that it might find there.
No less to be guarded against is the other misconception which the clear
grasp of our text would dismiss at once, that the great purpose for
which God speaks to us men, in the revelation of Jesus Christ, is that
we may, as we say, be 'forgiven,' and escape any of the temporal or
eternal consequences of our wrongdoing. That _is_ a purpose, no doubt,
and men will never rise to the apprehension of the loftiest purposes,
nor penetrate to a sympathetic perception of the inmost sweetness of the
Gospel, unless they begin with its redemptive aspect, even in the
narrowest sense of that word. But there are a miserable number of
so-called and of real Christians in this world, and in our churches
to-day, who have little conception that God has spoken to them for
anything else than to deliver them from the fear of death, and from the
incidence on them of future condemnation. He _has_ spoken for this
purpose, but the ultimate end of all is that we may be helped to love
Him, and so to be like Him. The aim of the commandment is love, and if
you ever are tempted to rest in intellectual apprehensions, or to
pervert the truth of God into a mere arena on which you can display your
skill of fence and your intellectual agility, or if ever you are tempted
to think that all is done when the sweet message of forgiveness is
sealed upon a man's heart, remember the solemn and plain words of my
text--the final purpose of all is that we may love God and man.
But then, on the other side, note that no less distinctly is the sole
foundation of this love laid in God's speech. My text, in its elevation
of sentiment and character and conduct above doctrine, falls in with the
prevailing tendencies of this day; but it provides the safeguards which
these tendencies neglect. Notice that this favourite saying of the most
advanced school of broad thinkers, who are always talking about the
decay of dogma, and the unimportance of doctrine as compared with love,
is here uttered by a man who was no sentimentalist, but to whom the
Christian system was a most distinct and definite thing, bristling all
over with the obnoxious doctrines which are by some of us so summarily
dismissed as of no importance. My very text protests against the modern
attempt to wrench away the sentiments and emotions produced in men, by
the reception of Christian truth, from the truth which it recognises as
the only basis on which they can be produced. It declares that the
'commandment' must come first, before love can follow; and the rest of
the letter, although, as I say, it decisively places the end of
revelation as being the moral and religious perfecting of men into
assimilation with the divine love, no less decisively demands that for
such a perfecting there shall be laid the foundation of the truth as it
is revealed in Jesus Christ.
And that is what we want to-day in order to make breadth wholesome, and
if only we will carry with us the two thoughts, the commandment and
love, we shall not go far wrong. But what would you think of a man that
said, 'I do not want any foundations. I want a house to live in'? And
pray how are you going to get your house without the foundations? Or
would he be a wise man who said, 'Oh, never mind about putting grapes
into the vine vat, and producing fermentation; give me the wine!' Yes!
But you must have the fermentation first. The process is not the result,
of course, but there is no result without the process. And according to
New Testament teaching, which, I am bold to say, is verified by
experience, there is no deep, all-swaying, sovereign, heart-uniting love
to God which is not drawn from the acceptance of the truth as it is in
Jesus Christ.
II. And so I come, secondly, to note the purifying which is needed prior
to such love.
Our text, as I said, divides the process into stages; or, if I may go
back to a former illustration, into levels. And on the level
immediately above the love, down into which the waters of the twin lakes
glide, are a pure heart and a good conscience. These are the requisites
for all real and operative love. Now they are closely connected, as it
seems to me, more closely so than with either the stage which precedes
or that which follows. They are, in fact, two twin thoughts, very
closely identified, though not quite identical.
A pure heart is one that has been defecated and cleansed from the
impurities which naturally attach to human affections. A 'good
conscience' is one which is void of offence towards God and man, and
registers the emotions of a pure heart. It is like a sheet of sensitive
paper that, with a broken line, indicates how many hours of sunshine in
the day there have been. We need not discuss the question as to which of
these two great gifts and blessings which sweeten a whole life come
first. In the initial stages of the Christian life I suppose the good
conscience precedes the pure heart. For forgiveness which calms the
conscience and purges it of the perilous stuff which has been injected
into it by our corruptions--forgiveness comes before cleansing, and the
conscience is calm before the heart is purified. But in the later stages
of the Christian life the order seems to be reversed, and there cannot
be in a man a conscience that is good unless there is a heart that is
pure.
But however that may be--and it does not affect the general question
before us--mark how distinctly Paul lays down here the principle that
you will get no real love of God or man out of men whose hearts are
foul, and whose consciences are either torpid or stinging them. I need
not dwell upon that, for it is plain to anybody that will think for a
moment that all sin separates between a man and God; and that from a
heart all seething and bubbling, like the crater of a volcano, with foul
liquids, and giving forth foul odours, there can come no love worth
calling so to God, nor any benevolence worth calling so to man. Wherever
there is sin, unrecognised, unconfessed, unpardoned, there there is a
black barrier built up between a man's heart and the yearning heart of
God on the other side. And until that barrier is swept away, until the
whole nature receives a new set, until it is delivered from the love of
evil, and from its self-centred absorption, and until conscience has
taken into grateful hands, if I might so say, the greatest of all gifts,
the assurance of the divine forgiveness, I, for one, do not believe that
deep, vital, and life-transforming love to God is possible. I know that
it is very unfashionable, I know it is exceedingly narrow teaching, but
it seems to me that it is Scriptural teaching; and it seems to me that
if we will strip it of the exaggerations with which it has often been
surrounded, and recognise that there may be a kind of instinctive and
occasional recognition of a divine love, there may be a yearning after a
clear light, and fuller knowledge of it, and yet all the while no real
love to God, rooted in and lording over and moulding the life, we shall
not find much in the history of the world, or in the experience of
ourselves or of others, to contradict the affirmation that you need the
cleansing of forgiveness, and the recognition of God's love in Jesus
Christ, before you can get love worth calling so in return to Him in
men's hearts.
Brethren, there is much to-day to shame Christian men in the singular
fact which is becoming more obvious daily, of a divorce between human
benevolence and godliness. It is a scandal that there should be so many
men in the world who make no pretensions to any sympathy with your
Christianity, and who set you an example of benevolence, self-sacrifice,
enthusiasm for humanity, as it is called. I believe that the one basis
upon which there can be solidly built benevolence to men is devotion to
God, because of God's great love to us in Jesus Christ. But I want to
stir, if I might not say sting, you and myself into a recognition of our
obligations to mankind, more stringent and compelling than we have ever
felt it, by this phenomenon of modern life, that a divorce has been
proclaimed between philanthropy and religion. The end of the commandment
is love, out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience.