Apostates have martial law, they run away, but into hell-mouth, Runaways are to be received as enemies, and to be killed wherever they be found.
(Jr. Trapp.)
Looking back:
Dr. Donne says that Lot’s wife looked back and God never gave her leave to look forward again. God hath set our eyes in our foreheads to look forward, not backward; not to be proud of that which we have done, but diligent in that which we are to do. (E. P. Thwing.)
Way to heaven:
“I know the way to heaven,” said little Minnie to little Johnny, who stood by her side, looking on a picture-book that Minnie had in her hand. “You do?” said little John. “Well, won’t you tell me how to get there?” “Oh, yes! I’ll tell you. Just commence going up, and keep on going up all the time, and you’ll get there. But, Johnny, you must not turn back.” (New Cyclopcedia of Illustrations.)
Perdition--the state of the lost:
Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” Dante’s “Inferno,” Dore’s cartoons, the weird word-painting of the pulpit, dreadful fancy pictures of hell--all of this cannot make us understand what it is to be lost. It was not to purgatory or hell that Christ went, but it was into this world of ours that He came to seek and to save the lost. They were here. To be lost is to get away from where we belong. The lost sheep, the lost prodigal, were wanderers. They were not dead, they were not in hell; but they were lost. The soul does not belong to sin and the devil; it belongs to God. And if you want to know how lost the soul is, then learn how far it has got away from God. That is the thing to know. Heaven and hell are incidentals. If you take care to be saved from your sins, to be brought back to the image of God from which you have wandered, heaven and hell will take care of themselves. Now, if you would know how lost you are, put your life, with all its selfishness and littleness, beside the life of Jesus; your motives by His, your thoughts by His, your heart by His. Try and see how far you ]lave got away from the perfect image of the God-Man. He is the perfect specimen of man, of which the rest of us are ruins, it matters not how magnificent those ruins may be. He shows us a specimen of man who is not lost. The image of Christ will teach us more about the lost than Dore’s cartoons could ever do. (R. S. Barrett.)
Believe to the saving of the soul
Saving faith
I. THE NATURE OF FAITH.
1. Belief in another’s testimony. We go to places, and attend meetings; we write letters, and maintain intercourse with others; we transact business, and conduct our affairs; we sail for foreign ports; we do ten thousand things, trivial or important, simply on the testimony of others, because we believe in them and what they say.
2. Belief in God’s testimony. His testimony is contained in the Scriptures. In them He reveals His nature, perfections, government and laws; His relations and designs towards us; judgment to come, and future states of being; things unseen and eternal. We accept the testimony--that it is from Him, and, consequently, that what it declares and unfolds, promises and threatens, is true and real. “If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater.”
3. Belief in God’s testimony concerning the Redeemer. He has testified that Jesus Christ is His eternal, only-begotten, well-beloved Son, one with Him in nature and operation; that “in the fulness of the time” He was born of a woman, became partaker of flesh and blood, and was made in our likeness,” &c. We believe the testimony concerning Jesus Christ, because He who testifies cannot deceive.
4. Trust in Christ as our Saviour. Believing the testimony God has given us concerning His Son, concerning His Divine person and mediatorial office--that He came “to seek and to save the lost.” We cast ourselvesunreservedly and wholly on Him; we confidently give up ourselves to Him; we trust in Him.
II. THE ORIGIN OF FAITH.
1. It is of God. The Godhead is the fountain of all blessings, the primary cause of all gracious effects. We have neither the inclination nor the ability to believe unto salvation. The desire and strength must be granted. If we have a true apprehension of our demerit and exposure to perdition, and are disposed to flee to Christ: and if we have a full persuasion of His sufficiency to save, and are able to cast ourselves on Him, it is of Divine favour and operation.
2. God produces faith by the Holy Spirit. Convicted, illumined and made willing by the power of the Holy Ghost, we realise our sinfulness, our awful danger; we see Christ in the beauty and excellency of His Divine person, and in the suitableness and sufficiency of His atoning work; and we surrender every other ground of hope, and rest altogether and only on Him for salvation.
III. THE INSTRUMENT OR MEANS BE WHICH FAITH IS PRODUCED AND MAINTAINED. “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.”
IV. THE DEGREES OF FAITH. The rock on which saved sinners stand is equally stable to all, but the foothold of all is not equally firm. Faith may decline; how far it would be difficult to determine. Even the believer, in a time of desertion and darkness, may question his interest in Christ, and fear coming short of heaven. On the other hand, faith is sometimes strong.
V. THE EFFECTS AND EVIDENCES OF FAITH.
1. It imparts peace. The storm is changed into a calm. The dark night is past, and morning dawns. The fever, the agony, is over. And in proportion as faith is maintained, so is peace. If faith languish, and be temporarily interrupted, distress of soul returns; if it flourish, and be strong and vigorous, tranquillity continues.
2. It produces holiness. “The operation of God,” its tendency is to godliness, A holy principle, it produces holy practice; good seed, it yields good fruit; a pure spring, pure streams flow from it; a latent power, it manifests itself in godly deeds.
3. It purifies the heart. A believing sight of Christ crucified, imparted by the Holy Ghost, reveals the terrible evil of sin, and fills us with repugnance of it. Faith in vigorous exercise, we cannot but loathe sin. The heart purified, sanctified, “holiness to the Lord” shall be inscribed on all pertaining to us.
4. In producing holiness, faith works by love. Believing in Jesus Christ, we are assimilated, though very imperfectly, to His human disposition and conduct. How attractive and effective are words and deeds of love I Faith and love are beautiful graces and potent factors.
5. It overcomes the world. (Alex. McCreery.)
How to own ourselves:
The writer uses a somewhat uncommon word in this clause, which is not altogether adequately represented by the translation “saving.” Its true force will be apparent by comparing one or two of the fear instances in which it occurs in the New Testament. For example, it is twice employed in the Epistles to the Thessalonians; in one case being rendered, “God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain” (or, more correctly, to the obtaining of) “salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ”; and in another, “called to the obtaining of glory, through Jesus Christ.” It is employed twice besides, in two other places of Scripture, and in both of these it means “ possession.” So that, though substantially equivalent to the idea of salvation, there is a very beautiful shade of difference which is well worth noticing. The thought of the text is substantially this--those who believe win their souls; they acquire them for their possession. We talk colloquially about “people that cannot call their souls their own.” That is a very true description of all men who are not lords of themselves through faith in Jesus Christ. “They who believe to the gaining of their own souls” is the meaning of the writer here.
I. First, then, IF WE LOSE OURSELVES WE WIN OURSELVES. All men admit in theory that a self-centred life is a blunder. Jesus Christ has all thoughtful men wholly with Him when He says, “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that loseth his life shall find it.” There is no such way of filling a soul with blessedness and of evolving new capacities as self-oblivion for some great cause, for some great love, for some great enthusiasm. Many a woman has found herself when she held her child in her arms, and in the self-oblivion which comes from maternal affections and cares has sprung into a loftier new life. But whilst all these counterpoises to the love of self are, in their measure, great and blessed, not one of them will so break the fetters from off a prisoned soul and let it out into the large place of glad self-oblivion as the course which our text enjoins when it says: If you wish to forget yourselves, to abandon and lose yourselves, fling yourselves into Christ’s arms, and by faith yield your whole being, will, trust, purposes, aims, everything--yield it all up to Him; and when you can say, “We are not our own,” then first will you belong to yourselves and have won your own souls. Nothing else is comparable to the talismanic power of trust in Jesus Christ. When thus we lose ourselves in Him we find ourselves, and find Him in ourselves. I believe that a life must either spin round on its own axis, self-moved, or else it must be drawn by the mass and weight and mystical attractiveness of the great central sun, and swept clean out of its own little path to become a satellite round Him. Then only will it move in music and beauty, and flash back the lustre of an unfading light. Self or God--one or other will be the centre of every human life. It is well to be touched with lofty enthusiasms; it is well to conquer self in the eager pursuit of some great thought or large subject of study; it is well to conquer self in the sweetness of domestic love; but through all these there may run a perverting and polluting reference to myself. Affection may become but a subtle prolongation of myself, and study and thought may likewise be tainted, and even in the enthusiasm for a great cause there may mingle much of self-regard; and on the whole there is nothing that will sweep out, and keep out, the seven devils of selfishness except to yield yourselves to God, drawn by His mercies, and say, “I am not my own; I am bought with a price.” Then, and only then, will you belong to yourselves.
II. Secondly, IF WE WILL TAKE CHRIST FOR OUR LORD WE SHALL BE LORDS OF OUR OWN SOULS. I have said that self-surrender is self-possession. It is equally true that self-control is self-possession; and it is as true about this application about my text as it was about the former, that Christianity only says more emphatically what all moralists say, and supplies a more efficient means of accomplishing the end which they all recognise as good. For everybody knows that the man who is a slave to his own passions, lusts, or desire--that the man who is the sport of circumstance, and yields to every temptation that comes sweeping round him, as bamboos bend before every blast--is not his own master. He “dare not call his soul his own.” What do we mean by being self-possessed, except this, that we can so rule our more fluctuating and sensitive parts as that, notwithstanding appeals made to them by external circumstances, they do not necessarily yield to these. He possesses himself who, in the face of antagonism, can do what is right. Trust in Jesus Christ, and let Him be your Commander-in-Chief, and you have won your souls Let Him dominate them, and you can dominate them. If you will give your wills into His hands, He will give them back to you and make you able to subdue your passions and desires. What does some little rajah, on the edge of our great Indian Empire, do when troubled with rebels that he cannot subdue? He goes and makes himself a feudatory of the great central Power at Calcutta, and then down comes a regiment or two and makes very short work of the rebellion that the little kinglet could do nothing with. If you go to Christ and say to Him, “Dear Lord, take my crown from my head and lay it at Thy feet. Come Thou to help me to rule this anarchic realm of my own soul,” you will win yourself.
III. Thirdly, IF WE HAVE FAITH IN CHRIST WE ACQUIRE A BETTER SELF. The thing that most thoughtful men and women feel after they have gone a little way into life is not so much that they want to possess themselves, as that they want to get rid of themselves--of all the failures and shame and disappointment and futility of their lives, and that desire may be accomplished. We cannot strip ourselves of ourselves by any effort. The bitter old past keeps living on, and leaves with us seeds of weakness and memories that sometimes corrupt, and always enfeeble; memories that seem to limit the possibilities of the future in a tragic fashion. Ah, we can get rid of ourselves; and, instead of continuing the poor, sin-laden, feeble creatures that we are. The old individuality will remain, but new tastes, new aspirations, aversions, hopes, and capacities to realise them, may all be ours. You can lose yourselves, in a very deep sense, if, trusting in Jesus Christ, you open the door of the heart to the influx of that new life which is His best gift. Faith wins a better self, and we may each experience, in all its blessedness, the paradox of the apostle when he said, “I live “ now, at last, in triumphant possession of this better life: “I live” now, I only existed before; “yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” And with Christ in me I first find myself.
IV. Lastly, IF BY FAITH WE WIN OUR SOULS HERE, WE SAVE THEM FROM DESTRUCTION HEREAFTER. I have said that the word of my text is substantially equivalent to the more frequent and common expression, “salvation”; though with a shade of difference, which I have been trying to bring out. And this substantial equivalence is more obvious if you will note that the text is the second member of an antithesis, of which the first is, “we are not of them which draw back into perdition.” So, then, the writer sets up, as exact opposites of one another, these two ideas, perdition or destruction, on the one hand; and the saving or winning of the soul on the other. Therefore, whilst we must give due weight to the considerations which I have already been suggesting, we shall not grasp the whole of the writer’s meaning unless we admit also the thought of future. So, then, you cannot be said to have won your souls if you are only keeping them for destruction. And such destruction is clearly laid down here as the fate of those who turn away from Jesus Christ. Now it seems to me that no fair interpretation can eject from that word “perdition,” or “destruction,” an element of awe and terror. However you may interpret the ruin, it is ruin utter of which it speaks. Now, remember, the alternative applies to each of us. It is a case of “either--or” in regard to us all. If we have taken Christ for our Saviour, and, as I said, put the reins into His hands and given ourselves to Him by love and submission and confidence, then we own our souls, because we have given them to Him to keep, “and He is able to keep that which is committed to Him against that day.” But I am bound to tell you, in the plainest words I can command, that if you have not thus surrendered yourself to Jesus Christ, His sacrifice, His intercession, His quickening Spirit, then I know not where you find one foothold of hope that upon you there will not come down the overwhelming fate that is darkly portrayed in that one solemn word. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)
Saving faith:
It is not the quantity of thy faith that shall save thee. A drop of water is as true water as the whole ocean. So a little faith is as true faith as the greatest. A child eight days old is as really a man as one of sixty years; a spark of fire is as true fire as a great flame; a sickly man is as true living as a well man. So it is not the measure of thy faith that saves thee--it is the blood that it grips to that saves thee; as the weak hand of a child that leads the spoon to the mouth, will feel as well as the strong arm of a man; for it is not the hand that feeds thee--albeit, it puts the meat into thy mouth, but it is the meat carried into the stomach that feeds thee. So if thou canst grip Christ ever so weakly, He will not let thee perish. (J. Welsh.)
Gripped by the Lord
A convert, at the Golden Lane Mission, in London, said: “I’m a corster and doin’ well, for I’ve got nearly a score o’ barters. Many a time I’ve had a lark at the meeting, and tried to upset ‘era. One day the Lord spoke to my ‘art, an’ it reeled ready to bust in me--an’ I couldn’t sleep until I got down on my knees an’ prayed for forgiveness. Since then I’ve had plenty o’ things tryin’ to pull me back from the Lord, but He’s got such a firm grip that I’m not afeerd.”
What and how to believe:
“Can you tell me,” said an unhappy sceptic to a happy old saint, “just what is the gospel you believe, and how you believe it?” She quietly replied, “God is satisfied with the work of His Son--that is the gospel I believe; and I am satisfied with it--that is how I believe it.” (J. H. Brooks, D. D.)
