James Nisbet Commentary - Romans 5:1 - 5:1

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James Nisbet Commentary - Romans 5:1 - 5:1


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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:

PEACE WITH GOD

‘Being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.’

Rom_5:1

What St. Paul reminds us of in this text is that just as God has a never-failing store of grace and power for the strengthening and reviving of our spiritual life, so also He has an inexhaustible reserve of peace from which we have only to draw in order to be reassured and comforted.

I. God has a process not mechanical, but in the natural order of His providential dealing with the soul by which this peace, this highest consciousness of the spiritual life realising itself in unbroken union with God, is maintained. It is the living Lord, with Whom we may be in daily, in hourly communication, and Who will by His presence and power purify, ennoble, in a word, Christianise all our surroundings in all their manifold relations to our souls. ‘By Him,’ St. Paul says, ‘by Him we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.’ Whatever we have already attained of spiritual stability and security and satisfaction, the secret of maintaining that achievement is ever and immediately to hope for more. And the very trials and disappointments themselves are all only so many mercies of God from heaven if they do but drive us back away from trusting in ourselves to look more earnestly and abidingly to the Cross. However far we may sometimes seem to ourselves to be removed from the ecstasy of perfect peace, we have but to trust to God and to His plan and process for us. We have but to remember that Jesus liveth for evermore. We have but to accept all our experiences with thankfulness, asking God to make the best use of them. We have but to run with patience the race that is set before us. We have but to wait God’s time. Then comes approvedness, then comes a purer and truer and brighter hope, and the deep conviction that the everlasting arms are about us because our spirit is buoyed and calmed and controlled and strengthened and sustained by the spirit which we know to be the living presence of God.

II. God has not left to mere haphazard these opportunities for repairing the breaches which the world makes in the spiritual fortifications of our souls. We should, indeed, be fatally presumptuous if we did not remember that God has left us appointed means of grace, by diligent and humble attendance on which we may hope for continual revival, and for renewed gleams of spiritual light. He has left us the Christian society, the living witness and pillar of the truth. He has granted us the ministry of reconciliation, in raising up generations of humble men to serve their brethren in holy things. He has given us the preaching of the Word, so that some of us may even in foolishness and weakness, yet in loyalty and faith, from time to time put the rest in mind of things which they might forget. He has put into our hands His Holy Word.

III. Peace one with another.—As one practical conclusion I would appeal to all Christian men and women to drop from their minds at that high moment of devotion and spiritual union the spirit of theological and ecclesiastical censure and recrimination. There will always be differences of theory and diversities of ritual; the how and the when, the more and the less. It is right that we should each have our own theory, intelligently analysed and grasped, our own method, properly based and authorised. But we need not at such a moment criticise the traditions and customs of others. It is the same Divine Being Who is worshipped in the Christ Who comes to us in His own covenanted ordinance. It is the same Lord Who is over all, rich in mercy, waiting to bless, ready to pardon all our human misinterpretations and mistakes, so long as we have faith to be healed!

Archdeacon William Sinclair.

Illustration

‘ “Do you not bear away with you,” said Prudence to Christian in our immortal English allegory—“do you not bear away with you some of the things that in your former life you were conversant withal?” “Yes,” was the reply of the pilgrim, “but greatly against my will, especially my inward and carnal cogitations with which all my countrymen as well as myself were delighted. But now all those things are my grief, and might I but choose my own things, I would choose never to think of those things more; but when I would be a-doing of that which is best, then that which is worst is with me.” “Do you not find sometimes,” said Prudence, “as if those things were vanquished which at other times are your perplexity?” “Yes,” answered Christian, “but that is seldom; but they are to me golden hours in which such things happen to me.” “Can you remember,” continued Prudence, “by what means you find your annoyances at times as if they were vanquished?” “Yes,” said Christian; “when I think what I saw at the Cross, that will do it; and when I look upon my broidered coat, the robe of the righteousness that is by the faith of Christ, that will do it; and when I look into the roll that I carry in my bosom, the Word of God, that will do it; and when my thoughts wax warm about whither I am going, that will do it.” “And what makes you so desirous,” asked Prudence, “to go to Mount Zion?” “Why there,” exclaimed the pilgrim, “I hope to see Him alive that I did see hang dead on the Cross, and there I hope to be rid of all those things that to this day in me are an annoyance to me; there they say there is no death, and there I shall dwell with such company as I like best. For, to tell you the truth, I love Him because I was by Him eased of my burden; and I am wearied of my inward sickness, and I would fain be where I shall die no more, and with the company that shall continually cry, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy.’ ” ’