The Constraint of Love

For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that one died for all, therefore all died; and he died for all, that they which live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again.—2 Corinthians 5:14-15.

This is the great Apostle’s triumphant answer to his accusers. The First Epistle to the Corinthians had only fomented the Judaistic elements in the already faction-torn church at Corinth, until, at the date of this Epistle, they were clamorously challenging the authority of St. Paul and the truth of the doctrines he was preaching. More persons than St. Paul have found that it is not easy to maintain one’s equanimity under unjust criticism, especially when the aspersions relate to the fondest attachment and the supreme ambition of life. Such an ordeal reveals the man, and in its fierce light graces or defects stand forth in sharpest outline. If St. Paul never appeared more human, neither was he ever more manifestly great, than when pouring out his mighty heart in these rushing sentences, often made obscure by their very intensity. Is St. Paul ambitious? Does he desire by talking about bonds and imprisonments, or dream and revelations, to exalt himself above his brethren? Does he wish by his unsparing anti-Judaism, by ideal demands on the Christian life, to make himself the judge of conscience and the infallible interpretation of the Divine mind? Or has he gone quite beyond himself and is he mad? All this—and much more—his enemies openly charge. To one and all his answer is: “The love of Christ constraineth us.”

If we connect this assertion with the words which immediately precede it—“Whether we be beside ourselves, it is to God; or whether we be sober, it is for your cause”—we shall see that not only his great heroic deeds, but his common acts and judgments, were moulded by the same power. He had defended himself so vehemently against the great public charges which had been brought against his character that to the refined and self-contained Corinthians he appeared “beside himself”; but he affirms that burning torrent of defence was not for self-interest, but for God; because the love of Christ constrained him. There had been charges too subtle and shadowy for public defences to remove, and these this man of vehemence had calmly lived down; but he declares that this meek endurance sprang not from his self-control, but from the love of Christ which constrained him. If, then, not only his grander deeds but his daily acts and judgments were thus inspired, these words express a power which was acting intensely on Paul’s whole nature, and which made his silence and vehemence, his love and suffering, one living language, by which the constraining love of Christ strove to utter its burning energy.

I

The Test of Life is found in its Motive

1. The life of an intelligent being must be under the sway of some chosen and cherished motive. High degrees of intelligence find their expression in the careful selection of the motive. Where the intelligence is low and untrained, we find men blindly obeying motives which the accident of the hour may have raised up, or to which the bodily passions may excite. We can look into the face of no fellow-man and say, “That man is living without a motive.” The consideration of the motives that actually rule men’s lives gives us very sad thoughts of our humanity. They range between the animal and the Divine, but they belong for the most part to the lower levels. The entire aspect and character of a man’s life may be changed by a change of his motives. A new and nobler motive will soon make a man a better man. No man ever did rise to do noble things while his motive concerned only self and self-interests. All noble lives have been spent in service to others. All the best lives in private spheres have been self-denying lives. All the heroic lives in public spheres have been the lives of patriots, the lives of the generous, the pitying, and the helpful.

Humanity does not need morals, it needs motives; it is sick of speculation, it longs for action. Men see their duty in every land and age with exasperating clearness. We know not how to do it. The religion which inspires men with a genuine passion for holiness and a constraining motive of service will last. It has solved the problem of spiritual motion.1 [Note: John Watson, The Mind of the Master, 180.]

(1) Many people have no higher motive than the hope of reward and the fear of punishment.—Hope and fear are among the most powerful feelings of our nature; and, acting in opposite directions as they generally do, they lead to a behaviour in which the influence of both is to be seen, like those compound motions, the result of equal and opposing mechanical forces. How much do we do from the hope of reward! How much do we not do from the dread of punishment! How steadily are we thus preserved in the straight path of duty from the pressure on the one side and the other of these two powers!

The statute-book does not simply say, like the Decalogue, “Thou shalt not steal”; it says, “If you do steal, the detective will deliver you to the judge, and the judge to the jailer, and he will cast you into prison, and you shall not get out thence till you have paid the forfeit of your crime.” We know that if we rob our neighbour’s house, or assault our neighbour’s person, or slander our neighbour’s good name, or in any other way disturb the peace of society and violate the letter of the law, we must pay the penalty. The fear thus inspired operates like a charm. It pervades the whole mass of society: though unseen it is felt; and even when scarcely consciously felt, its influence is active, like some of those subtle agencies in the atmosphere that surrounds us, which tell upon our happiness, our health, and our life, though we are altogether unaware of their existence. It makes the thief honest, the slanderer silent, the turbulent peaceful. We are virtuous by compulsion. We do good because we dare not do evil.

But even in this motive there lies an element of truth. There is at least the recognition of righteousness in the earth. And when we have done evil we recognize the justice of the punishment which overtakes us.

Mourner that dost deserve thy mournfulness,

Call thyself punished, call the earth thy hell;

Say, “God is angry, and I earned it well—

I would not have Him smile on wickedness”:

Say this, and straightway all thy grief grows less:—

“God rules at least, I find as prophets tell,

And proves it in this prison!”—then thy cell

Smiles with an unsuspected loveliness.

“A prison—and yet from door and window-bar

I catch a thousand breaths of His sweet air!

Even to me His days and nights are fair!

He shows me many a flower and many a star!

And though I mourn and He is very far,

He does not kill the hope that reaches there!”1 [Note: George MacDonald, Poetical Works, ii. 248.]

(2) A higher motive is found in the sense of duty.—There is something in us which recognizes moral obligation, and impels us to take a line of conduct which, perhaps, we have no natural inclination to follow. Now, we can all of us see that, when we come to speak of duty, we have risen into a higher region of thought. And yet the purest motive of life is not conscience. That is what the Puritans built on. There was very little love in the Puritan theology, very little exposition of the love of God, very little manifestation of love in the household (there was love, but it was concealed, not manifested), very little preaching of love in the pulpit. The great power that bound Puritanism together was the power of conscience. That was the power of Judaism. There was love in Judaism, but not much. The real power of Judaism was an awakened conscience. The school of Ethical Culture is a survival of Puritanism, as Puritanism was a survival of Judaism. In them conscience is the key-note. Judaism, Puritanism, and Ethical Culture are incarnate conscience. Christianity is incarnate love. A man may conform to law because it is righteous law; but he cannot love the law. We cannot love an abstraction. We cannot love a thing. There must be some heart, some power to love in return, in that which we love. We can love only a person. Christianity comes, and it shows in the heart of history this Divine Person, and says to us, “Love for Him—that is to be the constraining power, the motive power, the secret of your life.”

There is no disguising it that law, fate, destiny, or commandment may produce an exceedingly noble form of religion; that it may make a nation strong in law, and powerful in all things; but it tends always to produce a character that is hard and cold; noble, but ungenial, ungracious. Yet the result of a clear understanding of law, and a very clear obedience to it, is never in any way to be accounted cheap. For it is better to be ungracious and obedient than to be gracious without obedience. It is better to be moral and undevout than to be devout and immoral. It is better to have your strength, even though clothed in raggedness as to beauty, than to have a sensuous beauty upon inward deformity and untruth.1 [Note: George Dawson.]

In actual practice the theory that lays the emphasis upon duty, as opposed to inclination, contains an important element of truth, which naturalistic theories of the end of action have always tended to overlook. For it is undoubtedly true that at a certain stage in moral development, both in the individual and in the race the negative or ascetic element is the prominent one. All moral progress consists in subordination of lower to higher impulses, and at a certain stage it may be more important to conquer the lower than to give effect to the higher. How far it is possible to effect this conquest without appeal to higher and more positive principles of action—how far, for instance, sensual impulses can be made to yield before the abstract announcements of reason that they are “wrong,” without assignment of further reason or without appeal to the higher interests and affections—is a question for the educator. What is certain is that morality begins in self-restraint and self-denial, and that it is impossible to conceive of circumstances in which this negative element will be totally absent from it. Whatever we are to say of the desire to enjoy pleasure, it is certain that readiness to suffer pain is an element in all virtue, and that there is more danger for the individual in indulging the former than in over-cultivating the latter.2 [Note: J. H. Muirhead, The Elements of Ethics, 128.]

II

The Sovereign Motive is Born at the Cross

1. The Apostle does not mean, as at a first glance we might suppose, his own affection for Christ, his own devotion to Christ. This affection, this devotion, was indeed a constraining power. But it was only second in the chain of causes and consequences. It was not the source and origin of his energy. The source must be sought farther back than this. The source must be sought outside himself. The source must be found in God, not in man. Not his love for Christ, but Christ’s love for him, for others, for all mankind, for a world steeped in ignorance and sin and misery—this was the prime cause of all his moral activity, the paramount motive which started and directed all the energies of this most magnificent of all magnificent lives. His own love for Christ was only the response, only the sequel—as he himself would have confessed, the necessary, the inevitable sequel—to Christ’s love for him once impressed upon his being. Christ first loved him, and he (how could he help himself?) was fain to love Christ. It was not he, St. Paul, that lived any longer; it was Christ that lived in him. It was not he, St. Paul, that planned, that felt, that toiled, that suffered for Christ, that traversed the world with his life in his hand for Christ, that was instant in season and out of season for Christ, that died daily for Christ; but it was Christ’s own love fermenting like leaven in his inmost being, stirring and animating his sluggishness. This unspeakable love rises up before him, as the one great fact which will not be thrust aside, the one clear voice which will not be silenced. It haunts him sleeping and waking. It occupies the whole background of his thoughts. Forget it? How can he forget it? Others may forget, but he can never forget.

Many Christian men endeavour to rouse themselves into energy by the strength of their own devotion. Their glance is perpetually on themselves, and they try to work from their own feelings of consecration to the Lord; hence their energy is fitful, and depends upon excitements. At one time they are filled with ardour, and at another cold in gloom. When their love is deep, then are they strong; when it is feeble, they endeavour to awaken it by spasmodic effort and self-condemnation; and as their vows of devotion fade and fail, they sink either into a morbid gloom that withers their energy, or into a calm self-contentment that lulls them in a spiritual dream. A feeling we possess is ever feeble and liable to change; a feeling possessing us is strong and enduring. This love surrounding and resting on a man, takes him out of himself, and becomes a permanent influence, not diminishing in temptation, or lessening by change of circumstances. It is, then, a love in Christ inspiring man—rendering him its instrument, making his life its language, changing not with his changes, but acting with eternal charm on his spirit—this is the power to which our text refers.

2. The supreme proof of Christ’s love was His death on the cross. “He died for all.” The death of Christ for all—which is equivalent to the death of Christ for each—is the great solvent by which the love of God melts men’s hearts and is the great proof that Jesus Christ loves each one of us. If we strike out that conception we have struck out from Christianity the vindication of the belief that Christ loves the world. The basis of Christ’s authority, and the vital centre of all His power over men’s hearts by which He transforms lives, and lifts those which are embedded in selfishness up to wondrous heights of self-denial, is to be found in the fact that He died on the cross for each of us. As a matter of fact, those types of Christian teaching which have failed to hold the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ as the centre of His work, and have brought Him down to the level of a man, have failed to kindle any warmth of affection for Him. A Christ who did not love me when He was upon earth, and who does not love me now that He is gone up on high, is not a Christ whom I can be called upon to love. And a Christ that did not die for me on the cross is not a Christ who has either the right or the power to rule my life.

We must accept that full-toned teaching if we are to solve the riddle of the power which the Man of Nazareth has over the world. Unless He was the Son of God, and therefore loving us each, as only a Divine heart can love; unless He was the Sacrifice for sin, and therefore rendering up Himself unto the death for each of us, there is nothing in Him that will absolutely sway hearts and perfectly ennoble lives. The cross, interpreted as St. Paul interpreted it, is the secret of all His power, and if once Christian teachers and Christian churches fail to grasp it as St. Paul did their strength is departed.

“Few men in these days,” he once said to me, “have done so much for the religious life of Scotland as James Morison. The pendulum of human thought is ever swinging to the extreme points: he found it at the extreme point of God’s sovereignty, and brought it to the other extreme—man’s responsibility; but the truth lies where these two meet”; and, crossing his arms, he made the sacred sign, as, in a voice of singular depth and persuasiveness, he said—“All truth centres in the Cross of Christ.”1 [Note: A. Guthrie, Robertson of Irvinc, 63.]

3. The love of Christ manifested on the cross stirs love in us. The Redeemer’s love is a fire of live coals, which ever burns on the altar of His own compassionate heart. But the human heart is as an unkindled piece of coal, hard, cold and dark. It never can of itself either kindle itself or catch the fire of Divine love to do so. It can never, therefore, change its coldness and darkness into warmth and brightness; nevertheless, if a live coal from the altar of celestial love touch and catch hold of it, it is speedily transformed, its blackness into brightness, its coldness into radiating heat, and its hardness into yielding softness. It is similar, when the love of Christ catches and kindles with its heavenly flame the human heart. It transforms the soul into which it enters, so that its spiritual darkness is replaced by spiritual brightness, its hardness becomes softness and sensibility, its coldness a fountain of warmth, glowing and scintillating with true Christian feeling. In fact the heart and life is transformed by the entrance of the love of Christ, and becomes instinct with His love. A new energy or force has been created in it which is similar to, but feebler than, the love which kindled it.

It was about three weeks before his end, whilst confined to his room for a few days by an attack of feverish illness, to which, especially when in anxiety, he had always from time to time been liable, that he called Mrs. Arnold to his bed-side, and expressed to her how, within the last few days, he seemed to have “felt quite a rush of love in his heart towards God and Christ”; and how he hoped that all this might make him more gentle and tender, and that he might not soon lose the impression thus made upon him; adding that, as a help to keeping it alive, he intended to write something in the evenings before he retired to rest.2 [Note: A. P. Stanley, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, ii. 321.]

Lord, hast Thou so loved us, and will not we

Love Thee with heart and mind and strength and soul,

Desiring Thee beyond our glorious goal,

Beyond the heaven of heavens desiring Thee?

Each saint, all saints cry out: Yea me, yea me,

Thou hast desired beyond an aureole,

Beyond Thy many Crowns, beyond the whole

Ninety and nine unwandering family.

Souls in green pastures of the watered land,

Faint pilgrim souls wayfaring thro’ the sand,

Abide with Thee and in Thee are at rest:

Yet evermore, kind Lord, renew Thy quest

After new wanderers; such as once Thy Hand

Gathered, Thy Shoulders bore, Thy Heart caressed.1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Verses, 34.]

4. The impulse that comes from the cross is sustained by the convictions of an enlightened judgment. “The love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that one died for all.” The love of Christ is a principle which operates, and can operate, only for reasons shown. It calls into exercise our judging faculty. So far from dealing exclusively with the feelings, it requires us to think. In this manner is its motive power maintained, just as in the case of the engine by whose nice and measured play the huge vessel is propelled against wind and tide. To one who has never witnessed the results of steam-power, such a sight is quite a marvel. “How can it be?” he asks. “How such power?” You tell him of the expansive power of steam. “But what is steam?” he asks; “and where is it generated?” You take him on board, and descend with him into the vessel. You show him the huge boilers, and the great furnaces beneath, and the heaps of fuel with which the fires are fed. Only then his wonder ceases. And what constitutes the fuel of the fire which underlies, so to speak, the visible play of the Christian propelling power? The Holy Spirit, it must always be allowed, is the source of all spiritual processes. He is the Inspirer of Christian love. He fans the hidden flame, and keeps up the glow. At the same time, He employs means; and the means which the Spirit usually employs for maintaining the influence of the love of Christ up to the constraining point is this—judging concerning the grand comprehensive fact that “Christ died for us.” The facts of Calvary constitute, as it were, the fuel which feeds the sacred fire, whereby is maintained the power of spiritual propulsion; and by the earnest, prayerful, and persistent exercise of all our faculties—our thinking, reasoning, judging, determining faculty—upon these Calvary-facts, we bring, as it were, fresh supplies of fuel in order that with them we may feed the fire of Christian exercise and action.

My apprehension of the love of Christ must come in between its manifestation and its power to grip, to restrain, to impel me. If I may use such a figure, He stands, as it were, bugle in hand, and blows the sweet strains that are meant to set the echoes flying. But the rock must receive the impact of the vibrations ere it can throw back the thinned echo of the music. Love, in like manner, must be believed and known ere it can be responded to.1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

In the convent of San Marco in Florence, in cell after cell there are depicted upon the walls the scenes of the crucifixion of Jesus by the brush of that poet-painter-preacher, Fra Angelico. The painter has seemed to feel that the figure of Jesus crucified was more than he could compass; he has left it most conventionally treated. All the depth of his power he has put into the figure of St. Dominic, who stands at the cross representing the Christian soul in all the various phases of feeling which pass over it, as it contemplates the spectacle of Jesus crucified. First, there is the mere bewilderment, as of one who contemplates a sight shocking and horrible, and he hides his face in horror, as from something disgraceful. You pass into another cell, and the scene is changed. Now he is looking up in questioning bewilderment; he has not yet taken in the meaning of the scene, but he is sure that there are hidden there depths of misery and truth. You pass to another cell, and now he has understood what it is. He has seen in Jesus One who is suffering for human sin; he is determined that he will not share those sins, he feels there a penitence which is represented by the scourge at the foot of the cross. You pass into another, and now he has found the joy and repose of that forgiveness which passeth out of the loving heart of Christ. He kneels there, he contemplates in ecstasy Jesus who has forgiven him. Once more. Alone he is standing, with his arms outstretched, as one who simply contemplates in admiration the glory of that great love for all the world which beams from the cross. Once more, he is kneeling there, kneeling on one knee, as one who had prepared to start up; he is there half in homage, half in recognition that this cross lays upon his life the allegiance of a great service; he is grasping it as one who is just leaving for his mission.2 [Note: Bishop Gore.]

III

The Power of the Cross Constrains to Unselfish Service

“The love of Christ,” says the Apostle, using a highly forcible expression, “constraineth us.” The corresponding word in the original primarily signifies to “shut up” or to “compress,” as by some coercive power which cannot be withstood; and in its secondary sense it means to “impel,” to “bear away,” or to “hurry onwards,” as if by the force of some rapid and impetuous torrent. As employed in the text, it intimates that the love of Christ exerts somewhat of this mighty and well-nigh irresistible influence on His people as often as it takes full possession of their souls, captivating their every thought, engaging their every affection, shutting them closely up, or hemming them completely in, so that only one line of conduct can be adopted by them—urging all their energies into action, bearing them on in the face of every obstacle, and leaving them no alternative but to obey its dictates.

1. The first great effect of Christ’s love is to change the centre of life.—All love derives its power to elevate, refine, beautify, ennoble, conquer, from the fact that, in a lower degree, all love makes the beloved and not the self the centre. Hence the mother’s self-sacrifice, hence the sweet reciprocity of wedded life, hence everything in humanity that is noble and good. Love is the antagonist of selfishness and the highest type of love should be, and in the measure in which we are under the influence of Christ’s love will be, the self-surrendering life of a Christian man. The one power that rescues a man from the tyranny of living for self, which is the mother of all sin and ignobleness, is when a man can say, “Christ is my aim,” “Christ is my object.” There is no secret of self-annihilation, which is self-transfiguration and, I was going to say, deification, like that of loving Christ with all my heart because He has loved me so.

Keith Falconer, that noble young man who died in Arabia in starting a mission among the Mahommedans, said, “Let people call you eccentric. Eccentric means nothing more than out of centre, and if you have got a new centre in God of course you are out of the old centre of the world. Let the world’s machinery move round the old centre. You have begun to move by that eccentric movement about quite another pivot than that around which the world moves.”1 [Note: J. K. Maclean, Dr. Pierson and his Message, 278.]

A comet—these vagrants of the skies—has liberty to roam, and what does it make of it? It plunges away out into depths of darkness and infernos of ice and cold. But if it came within the attraction of some great blazing sun, and subsided into a planet, it would have lost nothing of its true liberty, and would move in music and light around the source of blessedness and life. And so you and I, as long as we make ourselves the “sinful centres of our rebel powers,” so long do we subject ourselves to alterations of temperature almost too great to bear. Let us come back to the light, and move round the Christ; satellites of that Sun, and therefore illumined by His light and warmed by His life-producing heat.2 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

2. Next, the dynamic of the cross becomes the inspiration of a sacrificial life.—“One died for all, therefore all died; and he died for all, that they which live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again.” The idea here expressed is a favourite one with the Apostle. Often he speaks of Christians as “dead with Christ,” as “made conformable to his death,” as “planted together in the likeness of his death.” And in one very striking passage in particular, which occurs in the second chapter of the Epistle to the Galatians, at the twentieth verse, he thus writes: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” In this striking passage the very same idea is expressed in nearly the same language as in the text, namely, that, in the practical judgment of the faithful Christian, his own life, as to all selfish purposes, is held by him to have expired upon his Saviour’s cross, so that in his prevailing disposition he is now dead to everything that interferes with his devotedness to the Son of God, who gave Himself for him. So closely does his fate unite him to the Saviour that he views himself as having fellowship with that Saviour alike in His crucifixion and in His resurrection, and “reckons himself” to be “dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ.” He lives no more himself, but Christ liveth in him; the whole life which he now leads, as a Christian, being one of conformity to the example, and subserviency to the will of Christ.

He dwelt within the wilderness

Disdaining Mammon’s lure:

He walked among the thorns of pain,

And yet His step was sure.

He saw the vine-deck’t homes of men,

And gazed with quiet eyes;

He turned away: “Not here,” He said,

“Is found My Paradise.”

He saw the gilded chariots pass,

The conqueror’s array:

They held to Him a laurel crown,

And still He turned away.

Back to the wilderness He went

Without a thought of loss:

He hewed out of the wood two beams

And made Himself a Cross.

“If I would save them I must die!”

(This was the thing He said);

“Perchance the hearts that hate Me now

Will learn to love Me dead.”

He died upon the Cross He made,

Without a lip to bless:

He rose into a million hearts,

And this was His success.1 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Book of Courage, 26.]

3. It is a glad ministry.—For the yoke of Christ is not a despotic constraint, like the law with its “shalt” and “shalt not,” spoken in thunder from Sinai: not an unreasonable constraint, like that of self and Satan, chaining men to compliances which they know to be unlawful and fatal to truth and peace; not an arbitrary constraint, like the shifting fashions of this vain world, which men follow blindly about, not knowing whither they may lead them. It is none of these; its law is generated in the soul itself, and in its best and highest portion. Its cord that binds men is woven out of the noblest of human motives—faith, gratitude, adoration. “The Son of God loved me”—this is its first principle, graven deeply on the heart. This is no vague admiration of His love; this goes beyond the orator and the poet; this is the guilty sinner grasping his Saviour, the drowning mariner reaching at his plank; a fact not only consented to by the understanding, not only uttered by the lips, not only overflowing at the fountain of tears, but fixed in the central depths of the personal being, resident, and paramount, in the council chamber of the heart. “The Son of God loved me.” Am I convinced of this? Then He is bound to me, and I to Him; wherever He is, there am I; wherever I am, there is He.

When the long absent sun once more revisits the Polar seas, and the weary adventurer, close captive of the cold, with his bark anchored to an ice-floe, becomes conscious of the universal thaw, and feels himself borne outward by the resistless pressure of the liberated waters; right joyously does he loose his moorings and commit himself to the gladsome flush, and steers full gallantly through the melting masses which are speeding southward with himself. Thus eagerly does the soul, long frozen up in selfishness, obey the mighty influence of the Sun of Righteousness, and surrender itself to the onflow of the love of Christ. “For the love of Christ constraineth us.”1 [Note: B. Gregory, Sermons, Addresses and Pastoral Letters, 198.]

The Constraint of Love

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