02. Chapter 2: The Total Abstinence Of The Gospel.
Chapter II THE TOTAL ABSTINENCE OF THE GOSPEL.
Eph 4:1-2; Eph 4:31. — I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, with all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love … Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil-speaking, be put away from you, with all malice. At the opening of the previous chapter we recollected in passing, among the facts of the Spiritual Life, the spotless purity of the rule and standard of its exercise. Some reflections on this may fitly follow at once on what we have seen of the way of reception of its power, and the self-discipline that must surround such reception. Our view shall be very simple and practical. Behind it all, above it all, shall be remembered that word of the Apostle, “even as He is pure” (1Jn 3:3). But we will look for application at some of the plainest and homeliest regions of Christian practice. The connexion of the third chapter of the Ephesians with the fourth is in itself a deep and precious spiritual lesson. Up to the end of the third chapter the Apostle has been led from height to height, from strength to strength, of the heavenly truth. The way of the salvation of the saints, in that plan of God which stretches from eternity to eternity, has been his theme. The Father’s choice, the blood of the Son, the work of the regenerating and enlightening Holy Spirit; union with Christ; the indwelling of Christ by the Spirit in the heart; knowledge of the love which passes knowledge; a filling with the fulness of God; contact with a power able to do more than prayer or thought attains; such have been the topics. Now, in the fourth chapter, begins the application of these wonderful principles and resources; and what is it to be?Out of such a rock what mighty flood of overwhelming energy and action is to rush?We look, and lo there is no rush, no commotion; in some respects there is little action. The stream is deep, but still and quiet; as, indeed, it well may be, for its element is life eternal, and eternity is calm. The most immediate, and important, and characteristic result of the full truth and power of the Gospel, of the revealed glories of the believer’s part and life in Christ, is, according to St. Paul, lowliness, meekness, longsuffering, forbearance in love; a cessation of bitterness, and wrath, and clamour, and unkind words. Sacred paradox of the Gospel!The Gospel is a motive power strong beyond all others; but it works in the quiet of the soul, in that living quiet caused and secured by the believer’s discovery of the wonder of his pardon, and of his safety, and of his privilege; of his union with his Lord, of his Lord’s work finished for him, and his Lord’s presence abiding in him. Thus the Christian’s life is primarily a life of blessed submission, abstinence, and cessation, as the basis of all its action in and for the Lord. Its essential spirit is the very opposite to all ideas of self-assertion, noise and bluster about itself, heraldry of its gifts and graces, comparison of one’s own discoveries, attainments, powers and triumphs, with those of others, to their disadvantage. He in whose heart Christ dwelleth, and into whom the fulness of God floweth, must be known, amongst other marks, by “esteeming others better than himself” (Php 2:3), unaffectedly and cordially. In him self has been dethroned as towards God, by sovereign grace; it must be dethroned by the same power as towards men. And this must come out in the practical form of a meek and quiet spirit, pervading all his life.
Such is the general complexion of this delightful passage. And now one leading and most important detail in it is the absoluteness, the totality, which marks its gracious precepts. I venture, in view of this, to entitle this chapter “The Total Abstinence of the Gospel”; total abstinence from allowed sinning, and particularly now from sinning against the law of lowliness, meekness, patience, and kindness, in word, work, and will. The words Total Abstinence have a familiar reference to one form of philanthropic effort in face of a great and terrible need. But I do not speak of this here. I claim the phrase for this yet greater and nobler application, in the light of the word of God. I use it, for myself and for my reader, in regard not of strong drink but of allowed sin. Total Abstinence from this is the very watchword of the true Christian’s daily rule.
It has sometimes been said that we, who firmly believe in the Christian’s need to the very last to confess himself a sinner, to confess his sins, are guilty of “allowing a little sin. ” God forbid that such a thing should be truly said of our principle, and purpose, and aim in the presence of the Lord. It is one thing to hold, in the light of Scripture, and in view of experience, that to the last here below our reception of perfect grace is imperfect; that to the last the light of God has enough to shew us about ourselves to humble us in the dust, now, before Him; that there is sin, and more sin than we can tell, even in one imperfectly reverent thought of Him; to say nothing of cruder forms of ill. It is another thing to “allow a little sin,” even the least; to think it a trifle to lose a moment’s patience, to live half an hour’s selfishness, to speak one unkind sentence, or use one unfair argument, to entertain one envious or repining thought, to wander in wish and fancy while we worship, to neglect plain, simple duties (perhaps) in favour of spiritual luxuries. To “allow” such things is grievous sin. To say that anything whatever that is not in the mathematically straight line of God’s will does not matter, that it is an unimportant detail, that we cannot help it, that “we are delivered to do it” (Jer 7:19); this indeed is sin. Not one of these things “is the will of God in Jesus Christ concerning us” (1Th 5:18). Not one of these things, as we look back upon it, need have taken place. Against them, each and all, lay the rule of spiritual Total Abstinence; and grace was ours in Christ Jesus, for each moment as it came.
Such is the holy burden of this Ephesian passage. The highly privileged and endowed Christian is to walk with all lowliness, and to put aside all bitterness.
True to its divine practicality, the Gospel here presses home its Total Abstinence just where we might be tempted most easily to forget it. It does not speak of “some great thing. ” It says nothing about a total abstinence from murmuring when some great desolation falls upon life, or from resentment when some unusual and phenomenal wrong is inflicted on property or person. It speaks of the little things of the common day, the present day. It touches on our feelings and temper this hour about other people, and the outcome of those feelings in the tiny things which in their millions make up life. The Apostle makes the humiliating and instructive, yet loving, assumption that these supremely privileged believers will yet need, amongst themselves, to “bear and forbear” (See also Col 3:12-15); and he calls upon them, each for himself, alwaysto do so. He draws up for them a very practical, a very plain, prosaic, unimaginative list of sins and their opposite graces; and in these matters, not in things heroic, he calls for Total Abstinence.
Let me deviate for a moment, in illustration, toSt. John. In his First Epistle we read two verses side by side (1Jn 3:16-17). One bids us to stand ready to lay down our lives for the brethren; the other warns us not to shut up our pity from a brother or sister destitute of daily food, if we say we have the love of God in us. The collocation of these verses is significant. A certain poetic glamour surrounds, in imagination, a self-sacrificing dying hour; we think the occasion itself, perhaps, would sustain us by its greatness. But is there no risk of being caught in the very midst of such imaginations by some small trial of our temper, some unwelcome call upon our time and trouble, and of being fairly conquered by this trial, because unready?NowSt. Johnmeans that this is altogether wrong. The two things are of a piece. If we would be really ready for a self-sacrificing death we must be ready for the next humble little action of a self-sacrificing life, in Jesus Christ, in the Holy Spirit, totally abstaining from its opposite. To return toSt. Paul. In his divinely-guided list here of occasions for Total Abstinence, he touches many a point, so it seems to me, which very often proves a weak point in those who really know and love Jesus Christ, and have sincerely surrendered their life and self to Him, and are whole-heartedly on His side, in a deep, true sense, and energetic in His work. Sins are named or implied in this passage which even in inmost circles of Christian life and intercourse are all too often to be seen and mourned. Is there no such thing as “evil speaking” in the form of religious gossip; the willing, easy, worse than useless, talking over of the characters and the work of others?Is there no such thing as “bitterness” in the disguise of that evil sweetness with which a good man can sometimes rejoice in iniquity; hearing, perhaps, with positive satisfaction of inconsistencies of life in one from whom he has differed on questions of doctrinal truth?Be not deceived. It is one thing to be thankful that a pure jealousy for the Gospel is illustrated and vindicated, and to think prayerfully and gravely over the failure of brethren in Christ; it is another thing, and a very much easier and commoner one, to be glad because our own opinion is vindicated as such. Is there no such thing as the very opposite of “meekness,” in the form of a jealousy for our own work and reputation, which make it disagreeable to hear of distinct blessing from God granted to work carried on in other lines than ours, or divided from ours, perhaps, by merely the demarcation that it is — not our own? Is there no such thing as trifling, minute perhaps and subtle, but most real, with entire straightforwardness and truth; a willingness to forget that nothing can possibly be holy that is not quite truthful and quite just; that the least shadow of a “pious fraud” is great iniquity before God; that exaggerations of fact are sin, grievous sin — exaggerations, for instance, of the facts of our spiritual prosperity, or of our success in work? And close akin to this is the sin, the contradiction to holy meekness, which lies in the least reluctance to be “brought to book” about our failures. Few things, surely, can more truly grieve the Spirit of Truth and Holiness than to see a man whom He has regenerated entrenching himself behind some personal excuse, or some theory of sanctification, against the plain duty of confessing, “I have sinned. ”Oh, may He never find us, in such a position again; unwilling, in face perhaps of some failure of loving kindness, of charity in tone and temper, to say, “I see it; I am ashamed of myself. It need not have been, but it has been. And now, I will confess my iniquity unto the Lord, laying it on His sacred Head for pardon, and beneath His feet for victory. ” Shall I touch on other things, not expressly named in this passage (Eph 4:1-2; Eph 4:31), but all too often known in Christian circles?Irreverence about the Name and Presence of the holy and blessed God is one of them; I have alluded to it already (p. 32). In President Edwards’ account of the great revival atNorthampton, inNew England, early last century, there is a remarkable passage to this effect, in the complete edition of the Narrative. That revival approached, or seemed to do so, to what I know not where else to find recorded, the conversion of a whole town; and the manifestations of grace, as testified to by the great Christian thinker who wrote the story, were wonderful indeed. Describing one singularly beautiful case of fully sanctified life, he speaks of the person in question as bowed down in deep penitence under a sense of sin involved in one mention of the name of God without adequate reverence. Such a bowing down was better than an unchastened exaltation. Take a lesson of holy Abstinence from it.
Another familiar inconsistency of our Christian life, I fear, is an unthrifty use of time, that mysterious talent which, unlike other talents, does not grow, but is spent, in the using. Let us not use it with a weary anxiety, but let there be a grave habitual remembrance that it and we are in His hands for whom we exist, to whom we equally belong whether we toil or whether we rest. From useless indolence, small or great, let us totally abstain, through grace. And let us abstain totally henceforth from the neglect of secret communion with the Lord. Nothing can take the place of that; not occasions of Christian conference, larger or more private; not the intercourse of a chosen circle of pious friends; not the holy public rites and worship of theChurchofGod. Sooner or later, the necessity of the personal, the individual, study of the sacred Word, and of the solitary use of the Throne of grace, will assert itself, if it is slighted, in the spiritual losses of the Christian who slights it.
We have thus touched some few points which, in the experience of active and earnest Christians, if I do not mistake the case, call not seldom for a recollection of the law of the Total Abstinence of Jesus Christ. Let us recur in closing to the brief, searching, sentences of the Apostle. They penetrate in their simplicity to the centre of our being. They interdict, with the same totality of intention, not only the expression of ungoverned anger but the least swelling of internal irritation;
Let us look off, then, to the Lord; to the infinity of His supply. “Our sufficiency” (2Co 3:5) for an abstinence total in purpose, and in humble hope, “is of God. ” It is not concocted within; it is derived from above, and it is derived above all in that most wonderful way, the embosoming of Jesus Christ in the very hearts of His people by the power of the Holy Comforter, through faith. With this for our secret, we may even venture to say, in sober reality, and fully alive to the realities of human life; “My Master bids me totally abstain from this or from that besetting sin. I recognize its guilt, its power. Too often have I thought it a thing for indulgence and allowance; but now I think that thought no more. And my secret for obedience, in the light of His truth, is in Himself. I lay myself, in the name of His own redemption, beneath His sacred feet. With no boastful anticipations, I yet know that for the next step He is able to keep me from stumbling (Jude 1:24), as well as hereafter to present me, as He will, faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy, Amen. ”