The Greatest Thing in the World

The thief cometh not, but that he may steal, and kill, and destroy: I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.—John 10:10.

Jesus is here contrasting Himself with other teachers; with those who taught the people only in order to win their following, while He, in the spirit of disinterested love, taught them for their own good. Those were more worthy of the title “thieves” than “shepherds,” for their object was a selfish and a sectarian, not a humanitarian one. They wanted men for their church. He wanted men for their salvation. He claimed to be the “Good Shepherd” because He secured for the sheep life at the cost of His own. And not merely that. It was not bare life that He secured for them, but abounding life, life that it is a joy to live.

The sheepfold of the East is an enclosure made of high stakes or palings. As the evening closes in, the shepherd comes from the pasture-land leading his flock of sheep. It is a small flock always, such as he can oversee easily; and he knows every sheep by nature and by name. He leads the flock into the fold. Another shepherd comes with his flock. And when all the flocks are housed, the porter shuts the door (each shepherd having gone home to his cottage in the neighbour village), and stays beside the flocks till morning. In the night a thief comes stealthily, climbs over the palings, and slips down noiselessly into the fold. He lays hold of one of the sheep, but the porter has seen him. There is a struggle. If not the porter himself, at least the sheep the thief has seized is killed, and probably destroyed. He escapes before the shepherds arrive in the morning. With the early dawn the shepherds come. Each shepherd knocks at the door of the sheepfold; the porter opens. He calls his own flock by name, and they follow him away to the pasture-ground for the day.

Jesus is the Shepherd of the sheep. The Pharisees and Sadducees are the thieves. Jesus comes to give: they come to steal. Jesus comes to give life: they come to take life away. Jesus comes to give life in abundance: they come to destroy it altogether. The Pharisees and Sadducees of to-day are the enemies of Christ, be they who they may. They are the world, the flesh, the devil. The sheep are those for whom the choice is waiting. Choose ye this day. We are the sheep of some one’s pasture—His or the Devil’s. We may follow Him to receive, to receive life, to receive life in abundance. We may follow Satan to lose, to lose life, to lose it utterly!

1. The thief takes: the Shepherd gives. “The thief cometh not, but that he may steal: I came that they may have.” This is the ineffaceable distinction between the world and the Saviour. The world cries, “Give me”: the Saviour cries, “I give thee.” The world is selfish: the Saviour is unselfish. The princes of this world exercise lordship: I am among you as He that serveth. Selfishness, they say, is the essence of sin: it is certainly the essence of the world, which is the sphere of sin. The world says—and practises it—that it is more blessed to receive than to give: Jesus says it is more blessed to give than to receive; and He gave His life a ransom.

2. The thief takes life: the Shepherd gives life. “The thief cometh not, but that he may kill: I came that they may have life.” Life and death are the great words of Scripture, and their meaning must be watched. “Death” on the lips of Jesus is not physical, but spiritual. “The maid is not dead, but sleepeth”—and they laughed Him to scorn. As if they did not know when a person was dead! But He spake not of the death of the body. That was not death. “She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth.” So also with “Life.” Life was not physical health and strength, it was fellowship with God, in the language of Jesus. Life, say the men of science, is correspondence with the things around us; death comes when we get out of touch. Spiritual life is correspondence with Him who is a spirit; it is trust, it is truth. Every antagonist of God—the world, the flesh, the devil—seeks to break our fellowship with God. Till Satan came, Adam walked with God; then he hid himself. Jesus comes to the hidden Adam that He may restore the fellowship. “That they all may be one as we are: I in them, and thou in me.” “If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.”

3. The thief comes to destroy: Jesus comes to give life abundantly. Before the thief—be he world, flesh, devil—can destroy, he must get us in his grasp. This is a late stage of the process. We lose when we begin to follow the world; then we are killed, the very conscience becoming blunt and blind; then we are utterly destroyed, generally body and soul, though the body does not always visibly show it. Before Jesus can give us life in abundance, He must give us life. We are first born again, and then we are changed into the same image from glory to glory.

I

Life

1. Suppose we were asked any of the following questions:—Can you tell me in a word the subject of the New Testament? Or, can you explain, just as briefly, the object with which Christ came into the world? Or, can you indicate the final purpose of the multitude of various religious organizations and movements which we find at work all round us, many of them tending, like other kinds of modern machinery, to become more and more complex? Can you say why all the sermons are preached, why all the various services are held, why all our Communions are made?

Will not a single word answer all these questions? Surely the one word “life” is a sufficient reply to them all. Is not life the one subject of all Christian teaching and study? Is not life the one object of every kind of Christian effort?

2. From time to time in the course of His ministry our Lord briefly, yet quite comprehensively expressed, by means of some pregnant phrase, His whole purpose and object. For instance, in the hearing of the Pharisees, He said it was “for judgment” that He came into this world. Then He told Pilate that He came “to bear witness of the truth.” But never more fully or completely did our Lord express the whole purpose of His mission than in these words of the text—“I came that they may have life.”

Sum up the gospel in a single word, and that one word is “life.” Get at the heart of all Christ had to teach, and life is nestling against that heart. One thought determines every other thought; one fact interprets and arranges everything, and that one fact, so dominant and regal, is the deep fact of life. Deeper than faith, for faith is but a name, unless it issue from a heart that lives; deeper than love, though God Himself be love, for without life love would be impossible, life is the compendium of the gospel, the sweet epitome of all its news; it is the word that gathers in itself the music and the ministry of Christ. “The words that I speak unto you,” He said, “they are spirit, and they are life.” “I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.” “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” “I am the resurrection and the life.” All that He came to teach, all that He was, is summed and centred in that little word.1 [Note: G. H. Morrison]

3. There are always two ways of interpreting such a word as “life,” when we find it in Holy Scripture. There is the exclusive or distinctive meaning, in which, e.g., life stands for the “life that is life indeed,” eternal life, the highest life of the soul. And there is the inclusive or general meaning, in which the word gathers up and covers all the meanings of which it is capable, so that in this case life would mean vitality in all its forms, from physical vigour up to the highest energies of man’s spirit inspired by the Spirit of God.

Before all things beware of narrow and unworthy conceptions of life. That which God hath joined, let not man put asunder. The animal life, the social life, and the spiritual life form one organic whole; and though we can have the lower without the higher, we cannot have the higher without the lower. The social life is unsound if the animal life is stunted in the slums or the monasteries, and the life to God is maimed if either the social life or the animal life is counted profane. No doubt it is better to enter into life with one eye than to be cast into outer darkness, but it is better still to enter having two eyes. As the plant feeds on things without life, so the animal life feeds ultimately on plant life, the social life feeds on the animal life, and the life to God feeds on the social life.2 [Note: H. M. Gwatkin, in The Interpreter, January, 1912, p. 146.]

4. Life as we see it is manifested in a succession of rising grades. Lowest, there is the vegetable world or plant life, with no volition or consciousness, tied down by invariable laws. Higher, we witness in the animal world the rise of life from the physical to the psychical; in even the lowest forms of animal life there would seem to be some dawning consciousness and volition. In man, the inner, psychical life shows itself superior to the physical. It is lighted by reason, capable of deliberate choice and self-direction, able to discern the moral ideal, and it is the seat of spiritual aspirations.

We may therefore speak separately (1) of physical or natural life, (2) of intellectual, (3) of moral, and (4) of religious or spiritual life.

(1) Physical Life.—Man is a self-conscious Personality with the power of self-formation. Life is given us, a fresh supply comes to us day by day, given into our hand, as it were, and in a large measure we can shape it as we choose—make it larger and fuller, keep it much the same, or let it dwindle away almost into nothingness. How we shall shape our lives will depend for the most part on what we deem the true good. Each man’s life is governed by that which seems to him, from moment to moment, most desirable for him to attain to and enjoy. We may not deliberately think about it, yet there is always some end which we seek to gain. The greatness of man and his responsibility lie in the fact that he is capable of determining what his end in life shall be. He is thus, so far, his own creator and the “master of his fate.” He may remain largely on the level of the merely vegetative life, dominated unconsciously by moods and circumstances. Except when self-interest becomes so keen as to assert itself, he may be entirely a slave to what is outside himself. This cannot be the true life of man. Or he may suffer himself to be swayed in the main by the appetites and passions and necessities of his physical or animal nature, thus also failing to rise to manhood.

The worship of material well-being, with its unceasing round of distractions and occupations, cannot bring rest to its devotees. Nor, again, can the nobler activities and pleasures which attract others exhaust their capacities or satisfy their nature. These at the best show life under the limitations of time, and, as one of our great poets has said,

Life’s inadequate to joy,

As the soul sees it.

A man can use but a man’s joy

And he sees God’s.

Therefore by the necessity of our being we cry from the depths of our heart for life, not for the instruments of life only or for the means of living; but for life, for more life, fuller, deeper, more certain, more enduring; for the prospect of untroubled calm with fruitful activity; of strenuous labour without weariness; for the pledge of

Some future state

Unlimited in capability

For joy, as this is in desire for joy:

for a life, that is, reaching through the seen into the unseen: a life able to unite and interpret “all objects of all thought”: to satisfy and inspire all effort. So the voice comes to us from the Gospels with a new meaning and a new power: “I came that they may have life.”

(2) Intellectual and emotional Life.—Christ vitalizes the intellect and the emotions. A man does not live until his intellectual nature is truly awake. Is there anything more calculated to quicken the mental faculties and arouse intellectual enthusiasm than a consideration of those lofty and inspiring topics that were the theme of the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth? He made everybody think. Indeed, what is called “conversion” is often as much an intellectual as a spiritual awakening. The Christian life tends to develop the thinking faculty and is a culture by itself. Interest is aroused in questions that can be solved only by thought and reflection, and spiritual awakening appears often to be accompanied by an accession of intelligence. Plain, uneducated people seem suddenly to attain to a much greater fulness of intellectual life. The man who is “born from above” is raised to a higher plane of contemplation. He holds commerce with larger ideas, and is greatened in his whole nature thereby. And what is true of the intellect is true, and generally much more obviously, of the emotions.

(3) Moral Life.—The moral life is higher than the merely intellectual and emotional. “The honest man”—honest all over—“is king o’ men for a’ that,” in spite of all that shines more brightly or that towers above him. The man who can conquer and command himself in loyalty to the visions of justice and duty which shine upon him, who dares to do right though the heavens should fall, who will act honestly whatever the consequences to himself, who seeks always to do justly in relation to himself and his fellows, to respect them as persons equally with himself, whatever their outward position may be, and to serve and help them in whatever way he can, has risen, every man in his inmost self feels and knows, to a far higher conception of life than that which is governed by intellect and emotion merely. He has got, in some measure at least, beyond himself into the larger life of his fellows. The simple fact that he has done so proves that he has reached a higher and truer, richer and fuller life. Christ comes to give moral life.

(4) Spiritual Life.—The moral life may not be the highest, although it is inseparable from it. However perfect in itself, it may still have its limitations. It may be bounded by time and limited to earth. While it has a due regard for others as having equal rights and mutual duties, it may fail to recognize a Will above us all, with which we are meant to be in harmony, which, indeed, seeks to operate through us. It may fail to rise to the Infinite, to expand into the Universal, to ally itself with the Divine, to become as far as possible one with God. To be alive to the world around us and our fellow-men therein, but dead to the Eternal Source of being, to whom we owe our all, is surely to come far short of the true life. The spirit of life that moves within us and seeks expression through us makes us feel and know that there is a still higher, wider, truer life open to us, inviting us, into which we ought to rise. It is in the life of religion, as Jesus Christ set it before us and called us to it, and as God by His Spirit in our heart moves us thereto, that we find the highest and truest life of man. For man is conceived in the image of God Himself, created and called to be His son and heir.

Sometimes the Bible speaks as if the spirit were non-existent in the natural man; but in other places, and perhaps more exactly, it speaks of it as not developed. At all events, it has not attained its position of superiority and supremacy because the spirit ought to stand up above the other faculties of man and command life. And so essential is this to the Divine conception of man, that where this spiritual element is not operative the Bible speaks of human beings as dead, however much they may be alive in the lower ranges of their faculties. For instance, as already quoted, “She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth.” Just look at a woman or a girl who lives in pleasure. Why, is not she the very picture of life? Her body is so glowing with life that her beauty attracts all who see her; her mental life may also be so rich that, wherever she moves in the circles where she seeks her pleasures, she is accompanied by a crowd who admire her wit and cleverness; and her emotional life may be in so healthy a condition that she has a heart rich in love to give to the happy man who is able to win it. She seems to be the very picture of life. Yes! but follow her into another sphere of existence, where a different set of powers comes into operation, and there you will find that she prays not, she thinks not of God, she neither loves nor serves Christ, she is not laying up treasure in heaven; in short, her spirit, the true glory of womanhood, in her is dead; and so, as Scripture says, she “is dead while she liveth.”

It goes without saying that Christ confers upon a man completeness of spiritual life. In most the spiritual principle lies latent, dormant. It is there, but overlaid by the physical instincts, the animal nature. Christ evokes it, kindles it, raises it to a passion; and when the Spirit of Christ has its “perfect work,” all the elements that go to a spiritual life are balanced; faith with love; strength with sympathy; courage and steadfastness with tolerance and tenderness; so that there is produced a noble symmetry of character. Everything is full-grown and yet subordinated to everything else. The whole man comes under the elevating and inspiring influence of Christ’s life-idea.

The spiritual life is too much regarded as something quite distinct and separate from the other expressions of human faculty. This is a matter rightly urged by Eucken in his writings, and it deserves the serious attention of Christians. As the life of God in man—the life represented in Christ and proceeding from Him to the world—ought to be the deepest influence and the dominating power in the entire life of men, giving direction and character to what we term the secular life and its manifestations as well as to that which we mark off as religious—“bringing every thought,” as St. Paul puts it, “into captivity to the obedience of Christ”; as the whole lower life in the world contributes to the human, so should the physical and entire psychical life of man contribute to the spiritual. Ideally, that was first, although last in appearance. It is life in its truth and therefore should embrace all lower manifestations without exception.1 [Note: W. L. Walker, The True Christ, 180.]

5. We are now able to see in some measure what Christ meant when He said, “I came that they may have life.” He meant realization of self, service for others, and fellowship with God.

(1) Life is fellowship with God.—The life which Christ is and which Christ communicates, the life which fills our whole being as we realize its capacities, is active fellowship with God. “This is,” not this shall be in some unimaginable future, “this is,” Christ said, even now, in the light and shadow of our changing days, “life eternal, that they might know,” with ever fuller knowledge, “thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3). For the knowledge by which we live is a knowledge which grows: not truth given and mastered once for all, but truth to be illuminated and interpreted by the ever increasing sum of human experience. Thus the coming of Christ, the Incarnation, binds together two worlds, and makes the earthly with all its workings a sacrament, so to speak, of the heavenly.

A few years ago a famous book called attention to a definition of life, given by an eminent man of science, whose attitude towards Christianity can hardly be regarded as friendly; and then proceeded to make good use of it. Perfect life was defined as perfect correspondence with environment. Working with that definition, the meaning of this verse becomes blessed indeed. For the environment of a man’s soul consists on the one hand in God and in influences from God (always the most important things about a man), and on the other hand in the opportunities for the discipline and perfecting of character, which the ordinary circumstances of life afford. It is Christ alone who can put a man into proper correspondence with the former part of that environment, or enable him to meet the urgent and ceaseless demands of the latter. A profitable, if not altogether necessary, exercise of thought would be the attempt to re-state some of the leading doctrines of Christianity from the same point of view. The Incarnation, for instance, might be regarded as “God opening up to man the possibility of correspondence with Himself through Jesus Christ.” Because Christ thus brings us right conceptions of what God is and of what we may become in relation to Him, and, better still, because He breathes into us the power to become it all, the statement of this verse admits almost of a scientific defence. It is Christ alone who can give men what science itself has to recognize as life; and He gives that with such largesse and abundance that, if we like, it will survive all the dangers of this world, and last on in undecaying vigour and ever richer functions throughout eternity.1 [Note: R. W. Moss, The Discipline of the Soul, 27.]

(2) Life is service for others.—What is the highest duty of life? It is certainly not personal acquisition, but the rendering of the fullest service that lies within our power; it is also bestowing upon others the fullest possible opportunity of rendering that service. To enable men to do this Christ taught and healed; but also, and this was His most important work of all, He transformed their characters from sin to holiness. In the light of Christ’s teaching what is the joy of life? It does not consist in thinking how much we have obtained. Does it not rather consist in inspiring others with life? Is it not found in awakening others to high ideals? Indeed, is it not the highest happiness to struggle, and to encourage others to struggle, after those ideals? What, again, in the light of Christ’s teaching, is the end or purpose of life? Is it not to bestow life upon others, to impart to others that deep, personal, experimental knowledge of God which we have received through our own personal communion with God, which communion is the essence of eternal life?

Many years ago religion became strongly individualistic. We need not underrate the importance, we should rather speak of the necessity, of cultivating individual knowledge and individual holiness, that is, of making individual effort after the closest personal communion with God in Christ; for by these means we largely obtain that supply of life which it is our duty to bestow. But if we study the lives of some so-called religious people, we might imagine that the text read, I am come into the world that I may have life, that I may secure as much life as possible for myself. By these people life here is apparently regarded only as an opportunity of making themselves as sure as possible of heaven hereafter. But that is not the teaching of Christ.

We have now a deepening consciousness of the unity, the solidarity of mankind. The truth lies in the phrase, “The Word became flesh”; He took to Himself not simply a human life but humanity. If the Gospel is necessarily addressed to the individual, it is not to the individual alone and isolated, but to the individual as a member of a body. And more than this: Christians are “a kind of firstfruits of God’s creatures” (Jam 1:18). They are taught to look to an end in which the differences of race and condition and even the fundamental distinctions of sex shall be done away: “There can be,” St. Paul writes, “neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither bond nor free, there can be no male and female; for ye are all one (man) in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

On all sides there is an indefinite desire for closer fellowship among men; a restless, almost impatient, striving to alleviate distress and to remove its causes; a willingness to acknowledge that all wealth, material, intellectual, moral, spiritual, is a trust to be administered for the common good. Numberless lines of reflection constrain us to confess that our life is in no sense our own either in its origin or in its development; that the ideal which in “hours of insight” rises before us is not of our creation, but a Divine disclosure, “the fountain light of all our day, a master light of all our seeing.” Many and unexpected lessons from the interpretation of history and the interpretation of nature press upon us the ennobling duty of taking our part in the fulfilment of a purpose of unimaginable grandeur and infinite hope, at length discernible in its broad outlines, of obeying the call addressed to our age and nation, the call to service of man and fellowship with God in Christ.

One of the most distinguished men in this country once described in a public address what he called his creed. He disclaimed any intention of speaking in the name of religion. “I do not trench,” he said, “on the province of spiritual guides.” None the less, he was led to sum up his faith in what he called the triune formula of the joy, the duty, and the end of life. What is the joy of life? It is to use one’s powers. And what is the duty of life? It is to do with thy might what thy hand finds to do. And what is the end of life? It is nothing else than life itself. So to live as to live more truly, wisely, effectively, abundantly,—that is at once joy, duty, and end. It is most interesting to observe a man who may be properly called, in the best sense, a man of the world, approaching so closely to the language of the Christian religion. Throughout the New Testament the aim of life is to gain more life. “I came,” says Jesus, “that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.” What is the reward of one’s bodily exercise? It is the capacity to use the body more effectively. You train your life, and the result of your training is more life. What is the reward of keeping your temper? It is the capacity to keep your temper better. What is the consequence of doing your duty? It is the ability to do more duties. Out of the duty done opens the strength to do a larger duty. You have been faithful over a few things and become the ruler over many things.

There is, however, one striking difference between the self-cultivating life and the Christian life. The man of the world finds the joy and duty and end of life in its increase of his own resources. The Christian teaching finds that joy and duty and end, not in getting, but in giving life. “I came,” says Jesus, not to secure more life for Myself, but “that they may have life.” “He that findeth his life shall lose it; and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” “Death worketh in us,” says the Apostle Paul, “but life in you.” The triune formula of joy, duty, and end, according to the Christian teaching, is discovered in the communicative and self-propagating nature of spiritual power. What is the joy of life? It is the discovery of the capacity to inspire life. And what is the duty of life? It is not acquisition, but service. And what is the end of life, or, in the language of the New Testament, its crown? It is not a crown of gold, or gems, which one may wear on his own head; it is, as the Book of Revelation says, “a crown of life,”—the increase of capacity, the enrichment of opportunity, the chance to be of use, the power to say with Jesus Christ: “I give unto them eternal life.”1 [Note: F. G. Peabody, Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 107.]

(3) Life is the realization of self.—What a responsibility it is to live at all, to be one link in that great chain of existence which God is ever weaving in the secrets of His providence. Just as in some great carpet factory you see the coloured threads darting in under the swift-gliding machinery—to be lost, as you think, in the intricacies of the meshes—but reappearing, a tuft here, a shade there, a colour there, in a pattern slowly unfolding at your feet, so nations, individuals, lives great and small appear, disappear, reappear in the great secrets of God’s will. It is a wonderful thing to live; even to have opened our eyes on the order, the beauty of this world, with its marvellous history and its glorious possibility, is to merit that burst of approving wonder, if one may venture to say so with reverence, which escaped from the lips of our blessed Lord, “Blessed are the eyes which see the things that; ye see.”

But what is that undertone of sorrow which we see stamped sometimes as the dominant mark of expression on the faces we meet? What is that awful mystery of pain and death and sickness and bereavement? It is the echo of the old wail of the Greek tragedy, “Not to be born is the best thing in the world, and failing that, to die as quickly as possible, and to fade away into nothingness.” A life alone, unilluminated, unspiritualized, unhelped, may be a doubtful blessing after all.

It was just when men had found out this, just when it was bursting upon them in the most bitter anguish of a startling truth, when emperors were offering a reward to any one who could teach them a new pleasure, when Stoics were asserting that death was the end and the only mode of escape from the evils of life—it was then that a new revelation burst upon the world, heralded by the angels who appeared in the heavens on that Christmas Eve; God came to make life a richer blessing, a truer happiness, to make possible that life which alone can be called life. He came in His Incarnation, with His glorious proclamation, to which the suffering world clings with eager tenacity, “I came that they may have life.” Man may now claim something more than existence, something more even than a conscious contribution to the great widening out of the ages; he can claim life in its highest form, supernatural life, by the power and the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ. Supernatural life, what is this? A life which is above nature, above its aches and pains, its failures, its disappointments, above death itself. “I came that they may have life.”

Here, then, lies our duty. It is, first and above all, to realize this life, and then to display it. It is our task not merely so to argue that the world shall listen to us when we ask, “Why do you not believe as we do?” but so to act that the world of its own accord shall ask, “Why cannot we live as you do?”

I believe that the great reason why so much of our toil and giving, our work and self-denial, counts for so much less than it should is because so many of us men and women are living on the wrong side of our power—as somebody has put it—on the wrong side of Pentecost. Chronologically, we are living on the right side. Many of us know Christ, are following Christ, some closer, some further off; but some have not claimed our own Pentecost, and sought at Christ’s hands that equipment without which all other equipment counts for nothing, the Holy Ghost of God in the life, that which is to the Christian more of what genius is to the artist, and without which, whatever his technique, there can be no soul because there is no life. All Christians have the Spirit, but all Christians have not the fulness of the Spirit, and it is the fulness of the Spirit that is the clamant want to-day, as it is the clamant want of every day.1 [Note: A. Shepherd.]

Since most remote times and among the different nations, the great teachers of humanity have revealed to men ever clearer definitions of life, which solve its internal contradiction, and have pointed out to them the true good and the true life that are proper for man. Since the position of men in the world is the same for all men, and, therefore, the contradiction between his striving after his personal good and the consciousness of its impossibility is the same also, all the definitions of the true good and, therefore, of the true life, as revealed to men by the greatest minds of humanity, are by their essence the same.

“Life is the dissemination of that light which came down from heaven for the good of men,” Confucius said, six hundred years before Christ.

“Life is a wandering and perfecting of the souls attaining a greater and ever greater good,” said the Brahmins of about the same time.

“Life is self-renunciation for the sake of attaining blissful Nirvana,” said Buddha, a contemporary of Confucius.

“Life is the path of humility and abasement for the sake of attaining the good,” said Lao-tse, another contemporary of Confucius.

“Life is that which God blew into the nostrils of man, in order that he, fulfilling the law, might attain the good,” says the Jewish wisdom.

“Life is subjection to reason, which gives men the good,” said the Stoics.

“Life is love of God and of our neighbour, which gives man the good,” said Christ, including all the former definitions into His own.2 [Note: Tolstoy, On Life (Complete Works, xvi. 244).]

II

Abundance of Life

“And may have it abundantly.”

What does this mean? It can hardly denote that some further gift will be added to that of life, inasmuch as spiritual life in its processes and issues includes all that even a God can give. It means that the life will be given so plentifully that there will be no need for a devout soul ever to languish, that its life will become buoyant, possessed always of just a little more vital energy than is really needed either for its endurance of pain or for its triumph over sin. One of the greatest of Methodist theologians once expounded the phrase as a pledge of “more spiritual life than Adam lost, more than unfallen man could ever have known, more than eternity itself can contain.”

Holy Scripture is fond of large promises. In one passage, for instance, the writer was unable to find in the language he was using a word that was adequate, and so he coined a new one, and in that way managed to express what the Authorized Version renders, God “is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think.” Even in the Old Testament large words are occasionally met with, especially when there is any reference to the patience or bounty of God. Jeremiah teaches one or two ethical truths more forcibly than they are taught in any other part of Scripture, but he is probably regarded, justly or unjustly, as the dullest and most depressed of inspired writers. Even Jeremiah represents Jehovah once as saying, “I will satiate the soul of the priests with fatness, and my people shall be satisfied with my goodness.” This verse goes beyond that; for, whilst that speaks of satisfaction and satiety, this speaks of superfluity. It sets forth the purpose of Christ’s coming as being to bring to man God’s gift of a life that can never be exhausted, the energies of which may always exceed our duties, and the range of which has no limit.1 [Note: R. W. Moss, The Discipline of the Soul, 27.]

1. The abundant life is a life of great vitality.—In the spiritual world, as in every other sphere of being with which we are acquainted, various degrees of vitality are to be found. The rule obtains among all organisms on the globe that the unknown force which we call “life” exhibits itself with feebler intensity in some species than in others, and in some individuals within each species. Weak vitality in animals is marked by dulness of sensation, by a more restricted range of action, by less sensibility to pain, and by the comparative absence of intelligence. A similar diversity obtains among human beings. In many cases delicacy of constitution may be the index to a low vitality. We speak, too, of the slow understanding, the cold heart, and the feeble will. What we mean is that in such cases the life-power is scanty. On the other hand, individuals are found who seem to be all force and fire. A robust physique and a vigorous personality are far from being always combined in the same individual; but where these do combine, we recognize the conditions of exceptional power. When we meet with a man of quick perception and keen feelings, whose sympathies run swiftly in many directions, who is prompt in his decisions and so energetic in action that he can infuse into others a little of his own ardent temperament, then we all acknowledge the presence of a strong or exuberant vitality. Of him it may be said that he has abundance of life.

The striking words of the text imply that it is just the same in the higher region of Christian experience. They prepare us to find in the Church, as we do, examples of every degree of spiritual animation. This depends partly on natural capacity, partly on the extent to which the Holy Spirit is suffered to operate and rule within the interior life. There are lukewarm believers, and believers aflame with fervour; molluscous Christians, torpid or inert, and Christians full of faith and power. If a low type of religious vitality be unhappily prevalent in most Churches, yet we are now and then taught by illustrious exceptions of what consecration and saintliness a man is capable when he not only has in him the life of Christ, but has that life “abundantly.”

It is deficient vitality more even than ignorance that makes the mischief and misery of the world. “To be weak,” a poet has said, “is to be miserable, doing or suffering”; whereas to be alive is to be strong in faith and hope and love—is to be in tune with all holy and beautiful influences that lift up the soul above sordid aims and mean thoughts. To be alive is to be open to sympathy at every pore, to face life’s ills in a cheerful and resolute spirit, to be full of the moral energy that throws off the poison of evil, as a perfectly healthy body repels the germs of disease.1 [Note: J. W. Shepard, Light and Life, 250.]

If An embankment is to be thrown up, or a cutting to be dug out. You want labourers. Here are your spades, and your picks, and your wheelbarrows, but the men are required. See, a number of persons offer themselves for hire. They are very thin, they have singularly bright eyes, sunken cheeks, and hollow churchyard coughs—they are a choice company from the Consumptive Hospital. Will you hire them? Why do you look so dubious? These men have life. “Oh, yes,” you say, “but I wish they had it more abundantly: they cannot do such work as I have to offer them.”1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]

2. The abundant life is a life of wide interests.—It has come true, even with reference to ordinary secular affairs, that the effect of Christianity has been, not to deaden men to the interests of this life, with its common joys and sorrows, but, on the contrary, to make their experience larger and more intense. This is not the prevalent opinion. Both the injudicious friends of Christianity and its shrewd opponents have represented it as rendering its disciples “dead to the world,” in a quite different sense from that of the New Testament. Perhaps the ancient error of the ascetics is in part responsible for this current view. It is true enough that the gospel does deliver a man from exorbitant and unreasonable concern about affairs which are merely private or personal. It rids us—or it ought to rid us—of excessive longing after temporal good for its own sake; and it makes it impossible for us to indulge in extravagant regret when we forfeit temporal advantages. It teaches us to regard this world mainly as a scene of discipline. But it is a mistaken inference from this that secular pleasure and pain, gain and loss, birth and death, and whatever goes to fill up our daily round, must have lost interest or meaning for the true Christian. On the contrary, everything which happens gains in meaning and in interest by being brought, as the Gospel brings it, into relationship with God and with eternity. This world itself is become a graver and a vaster place to Christians since Jesus Christ died for it. Each trifling incident—say when a sparrow falls—is seen now to be linked to the will of our Heavenly Father and woven into a plan which has man’s spiritual good for its issue. Homes with their births and death-beds, their daily tables and nurseries for Christ’s little ones, are infinitely more sacred spots, so near are they seen to lie to the gate of heaven. Common business rises in importance when by it you have to glorify your Saviour and serve your brother-men. Social and political problems of the hour do not claim less attention from the Christian, but more, because in them is wrapt up the welfare of that humanity for which Jesus suffered and which He calls upon us to seek and save along with Him. Christianity is so far from being a deadening influence, dulling one’s concern in everything which touches the well-being of society, that it is precisely Christianity that has elevated this mean life by letting in upon it the light of eternity. It has brought into relief all its possibilities, and has made every small thing grand and every dull person noble by linking them to the destinies of our race—to the everlasting God and to the solemn cross of His dear Son.

Christ came that we might have life, and life in all its range. He was not like some who have even boasted that they care for nothing but immortal souls. In a far deeper sense than the Roman ever dreamed of, nothing that is human can be foreign to its incarnate Lord. Every creature of God claimed His loving sympathy. He could rejoice in the glory of the lilies and the joy of the birds. The beginning of His mighty signs He did at the marriage feast, and the first of His royal gifts was of the wine that maketh glad the heart of man. He feeds the multitude, and does not forget to command that something be given to the child to eat. He passes through a short and bright career of doing good. To the sick, and even to the dead, He gives the bounding joy of life restored; and yet it is no formal gift, but the natural outflow of the loving spirit of the sinless Man 1:1 [Note: H. M. Gwatkin.]

Richard Le Gallienne, in The Religion of a Literary Man, tells of a friend of his who lost her husband by a sudden and violent death. It was a heart-breaking tragedy, and some of her friends looked to see her sink beneath the shock. But she did not. With courage and self-command she came back from the graveyard to resume her work. And when some of her friends marvelled at it, one who knew her intimately said, “No—she is a woman of many interests.” That sounded strange, “a woman of many interests.” What had that to do with her loss? Simply this: her life was too large to be defeated by any loss death could inflict. It was not that she did not love her husband with “the love that makes the world a temple.” But the power that made her capable of one intense affection, made her capable of inviolable attachments to children, and friends, and mission schools, and charities. So when death left her a widow, instead of withdrawing herself from life’s activities, she enshrined in her heart the memory of the absent one, and gave herself anew to the work of her life.1 [Note: C. C. Albertson, The Gospel According to Christ, 193,]

3. The abundant life is a life of deep enjoyment.—A man is not fully living, who does not enjoy living. It is when we are weak and only half alive that life is a burden and a sigh. Fulness of life is fulness of joy. This Christ came to confer.

Life is gladness, save where Death has touched it in sickness, in sin, or in what the lawyers call the Act of God; and the gladness takes higher forms as we move up the scale of life. Only the higher animals can play, and only man can laugh with gladness. Then come the higher joys of social life, with their chequering of sorrow; and yet again, crowning all and blending with them all, the joy that overcometh sorrow, the joy of peace with God, the peace that passeth understanding, the peace of Christ, the peace our own good Lord has left us.

Nothing is more interesting or more remarkable in the history of Christianity than the radiant joy which filled the hearts of its first disciples. Read how “with gladness and singleness of heart” they “broke their bread,” how they took “joyfully” even “the spoiling of their goods”; how they went singing to their martyrdoms as to a festival. Go into the Catacombs and read the inscriptions inspired by their simple, happy faith. It was because the word and life of Christ “dwelt in them richly” that for very gladness they broke out into incessant “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.” That is the ideal Christian temperament. “Rejoice, and again I say unto you rejoice.” But the joy will come only as the life comes. You have seen the sportive lamb in the meadows in the springtime. He is full of life and consequently full of joy in life. He frisks and gambols all the day long. “He leaps in useless leaps; he leaps with all his legs up at once into the air”; in his abounding life and happiness he cannot help it; “and to the wise man every leap of that little heart is a new note of the heavenly anthem—fulness of life.” And truly those who can accept Christ’s revelation of the Father in Heaven earing for His children, and the “hope full of immortality” which He disclosed, ought to be the happiest of men and to show it.

No wonder the Christian has joy. No wonder the Apostle Peter could exclaim, “Believing, ye rejoice greatly with joy unspeakable and full of glory” (1 Peter 1:8). Believing, we rejoice. In other words, faith produces joy. The relation is that of inseparability, of cause and effect. The believing is the cause of the rejoicing. Faith brings gladness. Trusting brings happiness. Let us not fail to notice also the nature of the joy faith produces. It is “unspeakable.” That is, it is unspeakably great. It is also in its nature not a noisy, but “a deep and silent thing.” In this sense, too, it is “unspeakable.” And that is the reason, we doubt not, why it is so often mistaken for the opposite. Because it is calm and sometimes even grave, the world thinks it severe. But, as has been said, “The gods approve the depth and not the tumult of the soul.” Joy may be a very quiet thing, a “calm rapture,” as Jonathan Edwards once denned it.1 [Note: G. B. F. Hallock, The Christian Lifte, 123.]

Old sorrows that sat at the heart’s sealed gate

Like sentinels grim and sad,

While out in the night damp, weary and late,

The King, with a gift divinely great,

Waited to make me glad;

Old fears that hung like a changing cloud

Over a sunless day;

Old burdens that kept the spirit bowed,

Old wrongs that rankled and clamoured loud—

They have passed like a dream away.

In the world without and the world within

He maketh the old things new;

The touch of sorrow, and stain of sin,

Have fled from the gate where the King came in,

From the chill night’s damp and dew.

Anew in the heavens the sweet stars shine,

On earth new blossoms spring;

The old life lost in the Life divine,

“Thy will be mine, my will is thine,

Is the new song the new hearts sing.2 [Note: Mary Lowe Dickinson]

4. The abundant life is a life of eternal duration.—This is the most familiar aspect of the life which Christ came to give. Its most common title is “eternal life.” Now “eternal” is not the exact equivalent of “everlasting”; it is more than everlasting; but it includes the idea of endlessness. The life in Christ can never cease to be. Here in the body, in whatever degree we possess that life, it must come to an end as far as its continued expression through these bodies of flesh and blood is concerned. But there is something in that life that has never found expression, and that cannot find expression, in and through these bodies. There is something in its depths, not of man merely, but of God, something, not finite only but infinite, not merely temporal but eternal. This is why the true life that Christ called men to is always described as “eternal life.” It is life above and beyond time and sense. It is eternal because it is nothing less than the life of God in us.

You have seen the aged, whose hearts expanded with their years into even wider and more unselfish affections; whose passions seemed to have been filtered away in life’s discipline; over whom the floods of trial had swept only to leave their richness behind; who had passed through struggle into peace; whose serene virtues, as the sun makes bright whatever it shines on, inspired all around with a higher justice and humanity; whose hopeful faith loved to make excursions into that world which they approached; who lived in an atmosphere of beneficent, trusting, and devout thought—you have seen them going down that valley, often so dark, but not dark to them, because there shone into it from above a heavenly light—and here was life. The body might be dying, but the breaking up of the senses only seemed to reveal more and more the soul’s light. I have seen such persons die, and laid in the grave, and yet in a few days the remembrance of that event seemed gone from the mind. I could never think of them except as alive. It seemed as if you might meet them at every turn, so entirely did the spiritual life in them overtop and embrace in its radiance, and keep out of view, all the circumstances of mortality. This is life. And more of it is often seen in the patience and submission and cheerful trust of those who can only wait God’s will than in those who with their grasping and struggling energies shake the world. The true life is not in length of days; that is but an inferior life which beats in the throbbing blood and flames in the whirl and tempest of the passions.1 [Note: E. Peabody.]

We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;

In feelings; not in figures on a dial.

We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives

Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.

Life’s but a means unto an end; that end,

To those who dwell in Him, He most in them,

Beginning, mean and end to all things, God.1 [Note: Bailey, Festus.]

The Greatest Thing in the World

Literature

Abbey (C. J.), The Divine Love, 211.

Albertson (C. C.), The Gospel according to Christ, 187.

Banks (L. A.), Hidden Wells of Comfort, 106.

Brooks (P.), The More Abundant Life, 31.

Chadwick (W. E.), Christ and Everyday Life, 1.

Dykes (J. O.), Plain Words on Great Themes, 199.

Gordon (A. J.), The Twofold Life, 1.

Hague (D.), The Life Worth Living, 75.

Hallock (G. B. F.), The Teaching of Jesus concerning the Christian Life, 107.

Halsey (J.), The Beauty of the Lord, 305.

King (T. S.), Christianity and Humanity, 90.

Magee (W. C.), The Gospel and the Age, 155.

Mellor (E.), In the Footsteps of Heroes, 172.

Moss (R. W.), The Discipline of the Soul, 25.

Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 107.

Potts (A. W.), School Sermons, 71.

Shepard (J. W.), Light and Life, 242.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xx. (1874) No. 1150.

Talbot (E. S.), The Trusteeship of Life for the World, 1.

Walker (W. L.), The True Christ, 169.

Wardell (R. J.), Studies in Homiletics, 40.

Westcott (B. F.), Lessons from Work, 285.

British Congregationalist, June 1, 1911, p. 463 (Adeney).

Christian World Pulpit, xlv. 347 (Stalker); Leviticus 22 (Welldon), 254 (Bliss); lx. 98 (Abbott); lxiv. 376 (Beeby); lxix. 195 (Shepherd); lxxii. 1 (Griffith-Jones), 4 (Horne); lxxiv. 161 (Holland).

Church Times, October 27, 1911, p. 556 (Donaldson).

Churchman’s Pulpit: Whit-Sunday: ix. 246 (Sadler), 250 (Battershall), 253 (Peabody).

Contemporary Pulpit, 2nd Ser., iv. 321 (Newbolt).

Interpreter, January, 1912 (Gwatkin).

Sunday at Home, August, 1910, p. 799 (Morrison).