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So then each one of us shall give account of himself to God.—Rom_14:12
Here is a solemn truth, which must have at once lifted the thoughts of the Apostle’s Roman readers above the controversies in which they were engaged, into a higher and serener atmosphere. Whatever food they ate or did not eat, whatever days they did or did not observe, one thing was certain—they would have to give an account of the act or the omission, as of everything else in their lives. “Each one of us shall give account of himself to God.”
2. The words are more than an assurance that there will be a Day of Judgment, and that at that Day of Judgment each one of us must be present. The Apostle seems to be suggesting that example, education, surroundings of life, holding the principles and opinions we do, and being what we are, must be taken into consideration before an accurate judgment can be arrived at. He, therefore, warns us to judge ourselves, about whom we may know everything, and to refrain from judging others about whom our knowledge must be imperfect. “Why dost thou judge thy brother? or why dost thou set at nought thy brother? for we shall all stand before the judgment-seat of Christ.”
The text tells us four things about our Accountability:—
I. It is Universal. “Each one of us.”
II. It is Inevitable. “Each one of us shall give.”
III. It is Personal. “Account of himself.”
IV. It is Supreme. “To God.”
It is Universal
“Each one of us shall give account.”
1. Peer and peasant must give account. You may argue, “It cannot be a great matter to me what is said in the Bible about the day of account; I am but a poor man, and have but few things committed to my care; I have neither houses nor lands, nor riches, nor worldly goods; I have no great talents to misuse; no opportunities of doing good to neglect; why, then, should I be afraid of the final reckoning? Surely the just God will not look for a harvest where He has sown no seed. Surely He will not require at my hands an account like that which may well be asked of the wealthy and the great.” The argument is out of place and useless. Poor, humble, obscure as you are, you must give account.
“And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the chief captains and the mighty men,” must see the face of Him that sitteth upon the throne. The Apostle Paul himself is “one of us.” Of all men the manliest, among philosophers claiming recognition beyond the multitude, of rhetoricians not the least, in grand revelation the peer of every apostle and of all seers, in character most strong, most confiding, pure, and powerful—the Apostle Paul, standing far above the people in that which constitutes true stature, yet confesses himself to be one of us—“Each one of us.”
Louis xv. had always the kingliest abhorrence of Death.… He would not suffer Death to be spoken of; avoided the sight of churchyards, funereal monuments, and whatsoever could bring it to mind. It is the resource of the Ostrich; who, hard hunted, sticks his foolish head in the ground, and would fain forget that his foolish unseeing body is not unseen too. Or sometimes, with a spasmodic antagonism, significant of the same thing, and of more, he would go; or stopping his court carriages, would send into churchyards, and ask “how many new graves there were to-day,” though it gave his poor Pompadour the disagreeablest qualms. We can figure the thought of Louis that day, when, all royally caparisoned for hunting, he met at some sudden turning in the Wood of Senart, a ragged peasant with a coffin: “For whom?”—It was for a poor brother slave, whom Majesty had sometimes noticed slaving in those quarters. “What did he die of?”—“Of hunger”:—the King gave his steed the spur. But figure his thought, when Death is now clutching at his own heart-strings; unlooked for, inexorable! Yes, poor Louis, Death has found thee. No palace walls or life-guards, gorgeous tapestries or gilt buckram of stiffest ceremonial could keep him out; but he is here, here at thy very life-breath, and will extinguish it. Thou whose whole existence hitherto was a chimera and scenic show, at length becomest a reality; sumptuous Versailles bursts asunder, like a dream, into void Immensity; Time is done, and all the scaffolding of Time falls wrecked with hideous clangour round thy soul; the pale Kingdoms yawn open; there must thou enter, naked, all unking’d, and await what is appointed thee!
And yet let no meanest man lay nattering unction to his soul. Louis was a Ruler; but art not thou also one? His wide France, look at it from the Fixed Stars (themselves not yet Infinitude), is no wider than thy narrow brickfield, where thou too didst faithfully, or didst unfaithfully.1 [Note: Carlyle, French Revolution, i. 17.]
2. The religious and irreligious alike must give account. As Christians we must give account. “The lord of those servants cometh, and reckoneth with them” (Mat_25:19). They have been justified by faith. They have been united to their glorious Head. They “shall be saved” (1Co_3:15), whatever be the fate of their “work.” But what will their Lord say of their work? What have they done for Him, in labour, in witness, and above all in character? He will tell them what He thinks. He will be infinitely kind; but He will not flatter.
The irreligious, the careless, and inconsiderate, must give account—those who say to themselves “To-morrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant.” Too many go on always, nearly all do so at times, as if they were not really accountable. They just take the pleasure or the profit of the moment, and think no more of it; it is to them no more than throwing a stone into the water, which comes together again, and all seems as before.
3. Neither our heredity nor our circumstances will excuse us. The physiologist comes and he tells me that I inherit in my very blood, in the very structure of my brain, in the vigorous or feeble fibre of my nervous organization, the results of the vices and the virtues of a long line of ancestors. No doubt; but what do you mean by vices and virtues, the results of which I inherit? Are these names of honour and of dishonour, names of praise and condemnation? If there was vice in my ancestors, there may be vice in me. If there was virtue in them, there may be virtue in me. But where there is necessity there is neither virtue nor vice. This doctrine of heredity is no new discovery. It is true that the whole conditions of my life have been determined for me by my ancestors. My strength of muscle, the soundness of my heart and lungs, the limits of my intellectual capacity, have all been settled for me by my birth. And as the result of the moral character of my ancestors my moral life is one of comparative ease or of severe difficulty. But though the conditions of life have been determined for me, my life itself is my own, and that has not been determined for me. The material with which I should work has been given; the way in which I should treat it has not been given.
You tell me that there are great masses of men who have never had a chance of moral goodness. They have to give account of themselves without their chance, if that be so. God knows how large their chance was, and how small. Do not resent by anticipation the justice of the Eternal. He will deal with them according to their conditions. “Virtue is impossible to them,” you say. Yes, yours. And there are others who, as they look upon you, say “Virtue is impossible to you.” Their virtue is. And yet you and I, under the hard conditions of our life, can choose the better path, however feebly we may walk in it; and who but God can tell what glimmerings of light reach those who seem to sit in outer darkness?1 [Note: R. W. Dale.]
I suppose it does not altogether depend upon a man whether he will be a skilful workman or a clumsy workman. Some men are born with a flexibility and a strength of muscle, a keenness of eye, a delicacy of taste—or rather, with the possibility of achieving these things—of which other men are naturally destitute, and to which they can never attain. But every man can do his best, whatever that best may be. It does not lie in our choice what language we shall speak, but it does lie in our choice whether we will speak the truth or whether we will be indifferent to the claims of truthfulness; whether our language shall be profane or devout, whether it shall be pure or impure. We had no choice into what kind of family we should be born,—whether our parents, our brothers, our sisters, should be rough or gentle, just or unjust; but it lies with us—whether they are rough or gentle, whether they are just or unjust—to treat them with justice and with kindness. The limits of our physical health and vigour are determined for us by the circumstances in which we were born, but it lies with ourselves to determine whether we will be sober or drunkards, whether we will be gluttonous or temperate.
When William Ellery Channing was a very little boy, his schoolmaster said to one of his school-fellows, “Why are you not a good child like William Channing?” “Oh,” replied the boy, “it is so easy for William Channing to be good.” We, perhaps, have looked round upon friends of ours to whom the conflict we have to maintain is altogether unnecessary. The foes we have to fight with they never meet. The victories which we have to win for ourselves were won for them generations ago by the ancestors whose blood is in their veins. Shall we complain? God forbid. Let us do for posterity what their ancestors have done for them, taking the rough conditions of our actual life, making the best of them, winning no praise from men for what we accomplish—for they know not the difficulty of the work—rejoicing in this humbly and reverently, that we have to give account of ourselves to God.1 [Note: B. W. Dale.]
He fixed thee mid this dance
Of plastic circumstance,
This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest:
Machinery just meant
To give thy soul its bent,
Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.2 [Note: Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra.]
It is Inevitable
“Each one of us shall give account”
From the outside standpoint judgment is the result of conduct: from the inner standpoint it is the result of character. Conduct is character unfolding itself; and character is the way a man thinks. From the one standpoint judgment is the fruit of men’s deeds; from the other it is the fruit of their thoughts. Isaiah puts the same message thus: “Say ye to the righteous, that it shall be well with him; for they shall eat the fruit of their doings. Woe unto the wicked! it shall be ill with him: for the reward of his hands shall be given him.” Jeremiah’s statement is the same, only carried a little deeper to its source. Our destiny is the fruit of our doings and the reward of our hands; and our doing is the fruit of our thoughts. The common feature of both messages is that judgment is not something superimposed on life, a sentence arbitrarily passed on a man. Punishment is not retribution exacted from a man by a superior power outside him; it is the necessary and inevitable consequence flowing from the condition. When will we learn that judgment is not arbitrary or incidental or capricious? It is self-registering, automatic, the harvest of our life. Conduct is the outgrowth of character; and character conditions destiny. The wages of being good is not some recompense added on like a perquisite to a salary. Its highest wages is goodness itself. The recompense of being holy is holiness; the reward of being pure is purity. The punishment of sin is itself, its own loathly, deadly self. The harvest of the flesh is itself, corruption. The penalty of a depraved mind is depravity. The retribution of an impure heart is impurity. Who will deliver us from the body of this death?1 [Note: Hugh Black.]
2. Whatever God’s verdict upon us may be, our consciences will have to affirm its justice. We shall see ourselves by His light, as He sees us, as we have never seen ourselves before. We shall know as never before what He meant us to be, what we might have been, what we are. All the illusions of our present life, all the fabrics of self-satisfaction built up by the kind words of friends or by the insincerities of flatterers, all the atmosphere of twilight which here encompasses our spiritual state, will have rolled away; we shall stand out in the light before the Eternal Judge and before ourselves, and we shall be ready to make full confession.
It is not that God is going to judge us some day. That is not the awful thing. It is that God knows us now. If I stop an instant and know that God knows me through all these misconceptions and blunders of my brethren, that God knows me—that is the awful thing. The future judgment shall but tell it. It is here, here upon my conscience, now.1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Addresses, 19.]
O Great Mercy of God, I beseech Thee deliver me from the Bonds of Satan. I have no Refuge in any Thing, but only in Thy Holy Wounds and Death. Into Thee I sink down in the Anguish of my Conscience, do with me what Thou wilt. In Thee I will now live or die as pleaseth Thee, let me but die and perish in Thy Death; do but bury me into Thy Death, that the Anguish of Hell may not touch me. How can I excuse myself before Thee, that knowest my Heart and Reins, and settest my Sins before mine Eyes? I am guilty of them, and yield myself unto Thy Judgment; accomplish Thy Judgment upon me, through the Death of my Redeemer Jesus Christ.2 [Note: Jacob Behmen.]
3. Confession is inevitable whenever we come into the presence of God. When we draw near to God and behold the light of His countenance the sense of our imperfection must be the instant emotion stirred in the mind, and the first act—the expression of this emotion—must be confession. For confession is not making something known to God. It is God making something known to us; it is God revealing us to ourselves, and our cry of pain at the discovery. It comes from the shock of contrast. To know ourselves we need the help of contrast. To know and see ourselves truly we need a much more searching light than that which comes from moral mediocrity. We need the highest light attainable, and that is the light of God’s countenance. Then the sombre recesses of the soul, and all they contain, reveal themselves; and so do its secret bypaths, where the unclean spirits have left their footprints. Confession must be the instant spontaneous product of the vision of God.
Are you ready with your account which you will have to render to God; have you kept one at all? Sometimes when men appear before a court they plead that they have no books, and it is always a bad sign. You know what the judge thinks of them. Can you dare to examine yourself, and answer questions? Can you give an account of your stewardship? Have you kept it correctly, or have you credited yourself with large things where you ought to have debited yourself? Your fraud will be discovered, for the great Accountant will read it through, and will detect an error in a single moment. Is your account kept correctly, and are you ready to render it at this moment?1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fatal lightning of His terrible swift sword;
His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with My contemners, so with you My grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with His heel!
Since God is marching on.”
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat;
Oh! be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born, across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.2 [Note: Julia Ward Howe, Battle-Hymn of the Republic.]
It is Personal
“Each one of us shall give account. of himself.”
When things go wrong, when others provoke us, then the notion is ready enough at hand that they have sinned, that their account will be heavy; but we are very slow to comprehend the same thing as it concerns ourselves.1 [Note: J. Keble.]
Do not philosophic doctors tell us that we are unable to discern so much as a tree except by an unconscious cunning which combines many past and separate sensations; that no one sense is independent of another, so that in the dark we can hardly taste a fricassee, or tell whether our pipe is alight or not, and the most intelligent boy, if accommodated with claws or hoofs instead of fingers, would be likely to remain on the lowest form? If so, it is easy to understand that our discernment of men’s motives must depend on the completeness of the elements we can bring from our own susceptibility and our own experience. See to it, friend, before you pronounce a too hasty judgment, that your own moral sensibilities are not of a hoofed or clawed character. The keenest eye will not serve, unless you have the delicate fingers, with their subtle nerve filaments, which elude scientific lenses, and lose themselves in the invisible world of human sensations.1 [Note: George Eliot, Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story.]
2. We shall have to give an account each of his own actions, of his own thought, of his own words, of his own intention; and, more than all these, of himself. We shall each of us have to give account of the state of our heart, of the condition of our mind before God, whether we repented, whether we believed, whether we loved God, whether we were zealous, whether we were truthful, whether we were faithful. If it dealt only with actions, words, and thoughts, the account would be solemn enough, but we must each one give an account of himself, of what he was as well as of what he did, of what was in his heart as well as of what came out of it in his deeds.
A mute companion at my side
Paces and plods, the whole day long,
Accepts the measure of my stride,
Yet gives no cheer by word or song.
More close than any doggish friend,
Not ranging far and wide, like him,
He goes where’er my footsteps tend,
Nor shrinks for fear of life or limb.
I do not know when we first met,
But till each day’s bright hours are done
This grave and speechless silhouette
Keeps me betwixt him and the sun.
They say he knew me when a child;
Born with my birth, he dies with me;
Not once from his long task beguiled,
Though sin or shame bid others flee.
What if, when all this world of men
Shall melt and fade and pass away,
This deathless sprite should rise again
And be himself my Judgment Day?1 [Note: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, To my Shadow.]
Daniel Webster was once asked, “What is the most important thought you ever entertained?” He replied, after a moment’s reflection, “The most important thought I ever had was my individual responsibility to God.”
It is Supreme
“Each one of us shall give account of himself to God.”
Frightful to all men is Death; from of old named King of Terrors. Our little compact home of an Existence, where we dwelt complaining, yet as in a home, is passing, in dark agonies, into an Unknown of Separation, Foreignness, unconditioned Possibility. The Heathen Emperor asks of his soul: Into what places art thou now departing? The Catholic King must answer: To the Judgment-bar of the Most High God! Yes, it is a summing-up of Life; a final settling, and giving-in the “account of the deeds done in the body”; they are done now; and lie there unalterable, and do bear their fruits, long as Eternity shall last.1 [Note: Carlyle, French Revolution, i. 17.]
For none a ransom can be paid,
A suretyship be made:
I, bent by mine own burden, must
Enter my house of dust;
I, rated to the full amount,
Must render mine account.
When earth and sea shall empty all
Their graves of great and small;
When earth wrapt in a fiery flood
Shall no more hide her blood;
When mysteries shall be revealed;
All secrets be unsealed;
When things of night, when things of shame,
Shall find at last a name,
Pealed for a hissing and a curse
Throughout the universe:
Then Awful Judge, most Awful God,
Then cause to bud Thy rod,
To bloom with blossoms, and to give
Almonds; yea, bid us live.
I plead Thyself with Thee, I plead
Thee in our utter need:
Jesus, most Merciful of Men,
Show mercy on us then;
Lord God of Mercy and of men,
Show mercy on us then.1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti.]
2. “To God.” We are not under a rigid law. We are under personal authority, acting in harmony with eternal principles of law; and we have to meet a personal judgment, whose decision will be determined by the eternal principles of law. But this is the supreme thing, that only a living person who knows us altogether can appreciate the true conditions under which our moral life has been lived, the heights we ought to have reached, and the grounds on which we may be forgiven for not having reached heights which were easily accessible to others. We have to give account, each one of himself, to God; and it is this conception of the relations between man and God, and this alone, which relieves human life of its awful gloom and confusion, and contains the promise of a Divine order. For to God some of the noblest forms of moral life may be found where to our eyes there is the least dignity and grace. You were born under felicitous circumstances; but to reach the virtue which you attained without effort, another man may have to exert incessant energy. His dearly bought excellence, though inferior to that which you have easily achieved, is to God infinitely nobler and more precious than the goodness which you, without effort, have accomplished. Each man has to “give account of himself to God.”
One man is placed under conditions—conditions not of his own choice, conditions to which he was destined—which make it impossible for him to do very much beyond getting the rough ore of goodness out of the black and gloomy mine. He has got it with the sweat of his brow, with pain, with peril. To him God will say, “Well done!” Another man has the ore at his feet to start with. It is not enough for him to bring that to God. For him there is a different task. In the fires of self-discipline he has to liberate the ore from its dross, and to produce the pure metal. It is enough that one man should bring the rough ore to God; this man must bring pure metal extracted from it. And a third has the metal to begin with. He fails, and fails disastrously unless he works it up into forms of noble usefulness and gracious beauty. Each man will have to “give account of himself to God,” and only God can judge of the worth of each man’s work, because only God knows the conditions under which each man’s work is being carried on.1 [Note: R. W. Dale.]
Not on the vulgar mass
Called “work,” must sentence pass,
Things done, that took the eye and had the price;
O’er which, from level stand,
The low world laid its hand,
Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice:
But all, the world’s coarse thumb
And finger failed to plumb,
So passed in making up the main account;
All instincts immature,
All purposes unsure,
That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man’s amount
Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped;
All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me,
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.2 [Note: Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra.]
Literature
Dale (R. W.), Epistle of James, 245.
Harris (H.), Short Sermons, 217.
Hodgson (A. P.), Thoughts for the King’s Children, 11.
Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year (Advent to Christmas Eve), 164.
Lee (R.), Sermons, 122.
Liddon (H. P.), Advent in St. Paul’s, 282.
Palmer (J. R.), Burden-Bearing, 50.
Rawnsley (R. D. B.), Village Sermons, i. 96.
Roberts (W. P.), Conformity and Conscience, 66.
Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxvii. (1881), No. 1601.
Tyng (S. H.), in Plain Sermons by Contributors to “Tracts for the Times,” viii. 245.
Wordsworth (C.), Christian Boyhood at a Public School, ii.
American Pulpit of the Day, ii. 641.
Christian World Pulpit, xxvi. 4 (Beecher); xxxv. 198 (Dale).
Church Pulpit Year Book, v. (1908), 148.
Homiletic Review, xxxi. 239 (Ireland).