A Definition of the Kingdom

For the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.—Romans 14:17.

“The kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.” That is a glorious saying, because it is so strong, so clear, so sweeping. It lays down a principle to which one may always appeal; it is a fundamental law of the Kingdom which can never be abrogated, or shelved, or made of none effect by human explanations.

St. Paul’s readers were scarcely so ignorant and unspiritual as to suppose that the Kingdom of God did consist in eating and drinking. But they were much engrossed just then with questions relating to meat and drink, with warm disputes among themselves as to whether flesh that had formed part of idol sacrifices and had come from heathen altars could consistently be eaten by Christians. They were greatly agitated and exercised about this, some maintaining that it ought not to be eaten, and rigidly refusing to touch it, and others insisting that it might without any inconsistency be eaten; some strenuous for abstinence and urging it as a solemn duty, and others condemning and seeking to draw away from it as a pitiable weakness. St. Paul tells them that this controversy about meat and drink is not furthering the interests of the Kingdom of God. It does not touch the things which belong to the Kingdom, except in the way of hindering them. “For the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.”

The text falls naturally into three divisions:—

The Kingdom of God—What are we to understand by it in this connection?

The negative statement—What the Kingdom of God is not.

  III.  The positive statement—What the Kingdom of God is.

I

The Kingdom of God

1. It is not a little startling in such a connection to find any mention of the Kingdom of God. We should have expected some very different expression—“the right principle of conduct,” or “the true rule of life,” or “the proper bond of brotherhood,” or “the teaching of the Gospel,” or “the Church of Christ.” Any of these phrases would have appeared quite natural. But “the Kingdom of God” seems not a little out of place. It seems so only because we do not realize, as the Apostle realized, that the dispensation of the Gospel, the Church of Christ, is itself the very Kingdom of God. Notwithstanding the warning which stands recorded, we persist in thinking that the Kingdom of God cometh by observation, that it must be a kingdom of pomp and circumstance, that therefore it is something very remote and distant and distinct from anything we see about us. But St. Paul viewed it quite otherwise. This little society of men and women; this motley group of Jews, Greeks, Syrians, immigrants from all parts of the world; gathered together mostly from the middle and lower classes of society, artisans and small shopkeepers, struggling for a livelihood; despised where they were not ignored by mighty Rome, in the heart of which they lived—this little society, with its trials and its sufferings and its dissensions, is the Kingdom of God.

It may almost be said that it is to Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection we are indebted for Bushnell. He began to read it in college, but it seemed “foggy and unintelligible,” and was put aside for “a long time.” He took it up later with this result: “For a whole half-year I was buried under his Aids to Reflection, and trying vainly to look up through. I was quite sure that I saw a star glimmer, but I could not quite see the stars. My habit was only landscape before; but now I saw enough to convince me of a whole other world somewhere overhead, a range of realities in higher tier, that I must climb after, and, if possible, apprehend.” This book stood by him to the end, and in old age he confessed greater indebtedness to it than to any other book save the Bible. We have only to quote one passage, taken almost at random, to show what a fountain of light was unsealed to him in this volume. It was an epoch-making book, but Bushnell was one of the first to turn its light upon the theology of New England.

“Too soon did the Doctors of the Church forget that the heart, the moral nature, was the beginning and the end; and that truth, knowledge, and insight were comprehended in its expansion. This was the true and first apostasy,—when in council and synod the Divine Humanities of the Gospel gave way to speculative Systems, and Religion became a Science of Shadows under the name of Theology, or at best a bare Skeleton of Truth, without life or interest, alike inaccessible and unintelligible to the majority of Christians. For these, therefore, there remained only rites and ceremonies and spectacles, shows and semblances. Thus among the learned the Substance of things hoped for passed off into Notions; and for the unlearned the Surfaces of things became Substance. The Christian world was for centuries divided into the Many that did not think at all, and the Few who did nothing but think,—both alike unreflecting, the one from defect of the act, the other from the absence of an object.”1 [Note: T. Munger, Horace Bushnell, 46.]

2. What are the signs by which the citizens of the Kingdom of God are recognized? Not any uniform which can be laid aside when we enter our secret chamber; not any watchword which we can learn by an easy tradition; but a character which clothes itself in deeds, a creed which is translated into a life. Each citizen of the Kingdom is known by the inner life. There is a Kingdom of God within us. “Behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21). We are known and marked as citizens, not by outward observances, but by character; not by what we profess, but by what we are.

It’s the flesh and blood folks are made on as makes the difference. Some cheeses are made o’ skimmed milk and some o’ new milk, and it’s no matter what you call ’em, you may tell which is which by the look and the smell.2 [Note: Mrs. Poyser, in Adam Bede.]

The throne of the Kingdom of God is not erected in the land of doing, but in the land of being; primarily it is a matter not of clean hands, but of clean hearts.3 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

II

What the Kingdom of God is Not

“The kingdom of God is not eating and drinking.” Who ever thought it was? It seems a strangely inadequate conception. How did it arise? In heathen society every meal was in a manner dedicated to the household gods by laying some portion of it on the family altar. When one member of a heathen family had become a Christian, he would at once be confronted with the question, rising in his own conscience, whether by partaking of such food he might not be countenancing idolatry. And even though his own family was entirely Christian, the difficulty was not removed, for much of the meat offered in worship in the Temple found its way into the common market, so that at every meal the Christian ran the risk of eating things sacrificed to idols. Was a Christian at liberty to eat such food? “Yes,” said one. “No,” said another. Each reproved and condemned the other. Which was right? Possibly both. Possibly neither. Said one, “You can eat, and still be of the Kingdom of God.” Said another, “If you eat, you are not of the Kingdom of God.” And to both of these St. Paul made reply, “The Kingdom of God is not eating and drinking”; it is determined by something that lies further backward and inward, by a man’s personal relationship to the Holy Ghost.

1. The burning question among the Christians in Rome at this time was the question of meats. Some converts—Jews by birth—brought into the fold of Christ the strict observance of the Mosaic prohibitions in which they had been brought up. They were careful not to violate the distinction of animals clean and unclean, as laid down by the law. Others—educated we know not under what influences—went beyond this. They would not touch animal food at all. They were strict vegetarians. Perhaps they had conscientious objections to taking life; perhaps their abstention was a development of asceticism. Others again, Gentiles by birth and education, took the opposite extreme. They ostentatiously vaunted their indifference in these matters. They would eat anything that came in their way. It might be clean or unclean from a Jewish point of view; it might even have been offered for sacrifice on a heathen altar in an idol’s temple. They suffered no scruple to stand in their path.

But they were not content each to follow his own practice, and to leave his neighbours alone. The abstainers denounced the non-abstainers as men of loose principles who brought dishonour on the Church. The non-abstainers despised the abstainers as men of narrow views who were ignorant of the true Gospel of liberty. Thus there was strife and dissension, there was mutual recrimination, there was hatred and division, where there should have been union and peace and brotherly love.

It was a pitiable dispute in the Apostle’s eyes. They needed all the strength which union alone can give; and yet they diminished, they dissipated, they neutralized what force they had by internal quarrels. And quarrels about what? About meats and drinks—things which perish in the using, things mean and transitory, utterly valueless in themselves. It was a pitiable dispute. So the Apostle told them plainly. He pronounced that every creature of God was good. He declared that all things were pure, and nothing was unclean. And, on the other hand, he said that eating and drinking are in themselves so unimportant that every scruple should be respected, and every form of food willingly given up.

2. St. Paul could do no more than bring his own piety and common sense to bear upon the special questions of his day: and even he cannot free us from the obligation to use ours in the questions of our day.

(1) Even to-day we need to remember that “the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking.” As Christians we can never eat or drink without some distinct reference to Christ, and to our position as His servants and soldiers. But, apart from these considerations of the moral effect it may have upon ourselves and others, there is not anything religious about eating and drinking. It is absolutely indifferent; and all the Church regulations or Church censures in the world cannot make it otherwise. In all ages people have had very strong ideas on the subject of eating and drinking, some of them sensible enough, and some very foolish; but from the point of view of the Kingdom they are equally valueless. To put it quite simply (and sometimes it is well to use great plainness of speech) God does not care in the very least what or when or how we eat or drink, so as we do not damage ourselves or others. And He cannot be made to care, and therefore it cannot be made to matter.

To many minds a ceremony or a form comes with all the force of a principle or a fact. Not “what man has done man may do,” but what man has done man must do is their creed, which cramps their limbs and chills their blood and makes them fail of the little good they are seeking. For no man by sheer imitation has yet reached his pattern. Even if in native power he is more than equal to the task, and so in outward deeds even excels his example, the flush and glow of original achievement which made the model a living, warm, breathing thing, is wanting to the copy, which is cold and stiff and dead.1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Life, 51.]

(2) The Kingdom of God is not a particular form of church service or ritual. How inevitable a tendency there is in all forms, even the best, to lose all the spirit which once animated them, and become like lifeless corpses.

I do not believe that the doctrines of sacerdotalism and of sacramentalism which are so much in vogue, and which some people would seem to wish to make the very essence of Christianity, as a power of sanctifying the human soul, are doctrines of a true priesthood, or of a true sacramentalism. There is a sad fact which we can neither hide from others nor ignore ourselves, which destroys all the comforts that would naturally flow from this conviction that all good men are really labouring for what they believe to be the extension of Christ’s Kingdom, the cause of righteousness, and the good of the souls of men—namely, the fact that excessive ceremonialism is often attended by moral torpor and religious decay. Can history point to a single age, from the womb of time, in which an excessive addiction to ceremonialism and the externals of religion was not accompanied by a corresponding and proportionate dulness of the conscience and deadness to the higher forms of duty? It was so emphatically in Isaiah’s day. It was so again, though with a perceptible and instructive difference in outward manifestation—the hypocrisy was more highly organized, the mask more skilfully painted—in the days of Jesus of Nazareth. And with our present-day Epicurean cynicism, cruelly mocking at life, itself secure; abjuring every high aim in the lofty pursuit of personal comfort; checked by no moral considerations whatever in its froward path of pure selfishness; carelessly wrecking woman’s honour, wickedly shattering simple faith; discussing the most solemn verities, at least the most solemn questions, tooth-pick in hand, over olives and wine—with this unhappy, but only too legitimate, offspring of an age that has resolved religion into phrases, and God’s service into a gorgeous ceremonialism, I do not feel disposed to hold either truce or terms. Of course questions of ritual must be settled, and St. Paul is careful indeed to tell us that he recognized a law: he speaks of the duty of conforming to the customs of the Churches; he preaches distinctly that God is not the author of confusion; he would have everything done decently and in order; but the law was a law of liberty, not of bondage; the customs were few and simple, and their aim seems to have been not a mystic symbolism, but practical edification; and an elaborate ceremonial, each part in which has to be rehearsed by its actors that the tableau may be complete with a kind of mechanical completeness, would have been perhaps as far removed from St. Paul’s ideal of “decency and order” as anything conceivably could be.1 [Note: Bishop Fraser.]

Spirit is Eternal—Form is Transient; and when men stereotype the form and call it perpetual, or deny that under other and very different forms the selfsame truths may lie (as the uncovering of Moses’ feet is identically the same as our uncovering our heads—ay, and I will even dare to say, often with the covering of the Quakers, when reverence for God is the cause for each), then I feel repelled at once, whether the form be a form of words or a form of observance.2 [Note: F. W. Robertson, Life and Letters, 427.]

And what are forms?

Fair garments, plain or rich, and fitting close,

Or flying looselier, warm’d but by the heart

Within them, moved but by the living limb,

And cast aside, when old, for newer,—Forms!3 [Note: Tennyson, Akbar’s Dream.]

(3) The Kingdom of God is not identical with any particular Church. This follows necessarily. Yet it is a hard lesson to learn. In every religious communion we find a widespread temper of unrest and dissatisfaction. The man who wishes to take advantage of this unstable temper is always at hand. You must change your sheepfold. But what most people need is not a new Church, a new rite, a new system of doctrine, but a new surrender to the will of God, and a great increase of trust in His redeeming power.

The holy Church of the future, the Church of the free and equal, shall bless every progress of the Spirit of truth, and identify itself with the life of humanity; it shall have neither Pope nor laity, but all shall be believers, all priests with different offices. And on the transformation of the corrupt aristocratic church of to-day into this renewed popular church of the future, depends, I will not say the solution—that is not in the power of man—but the mode, more or less violent, more or less dangerous, of the solution of the religious question.1 [Note: Bishop Stubbs.]

God asks not, “To which sect did he belong?”

But “Did he love the right and hate the wrong?”2 [Note: A Little Book of Eastern Wisdom, 69.]

(4) All rules of conduct for the Christian, all questions as to legitimate amusements and recreations, come under the same category. These things are not the Kingdom of God. A disciplinary rule, as such—that is, a disciplinary rule which begins and ends by being a disciplinary rule—is likely to be a hollow and worthless observance. It would not be untrue to add that a disciplinary rule which begins and ends as a disciplinary rule—a fetter outside and irksome to the heart—may do, and often has done, more harm than good. It does harm to the man himself, because it deceives him, and makes him seem to find holiness, where holiness is not. It does harm to those who are around him, because it does not deceive them: because they recognize, and recoil from, an ideal of Christian service which they know to be unreal.

The Bible has no express teaching on the question of amusements. It furnishes us with no list of duties or pleasures to which its ethics and principles may be applied. This has been a disappointment to those who seek in its pages for rules to guide them in every possible contingency. It is not a directory of moral details. Christianity is a temper, a spirit, a Divine motive and law, which is meant to pervade and inspire every part of our life, and not a code of minute regulations by conformity to which we shall be enabled to keep ourselves safe amid surrounding dangers. It says nothing about the callings we should pursue, except to bid us be faithful in the one we have chosen. It does not declare that one calling is more dignified than another, or that there are duties that are worthy and noble and duties that are common and unclean. It draws no distinction between trades and occupations and engagements, marking some as helpful and others as hurtful. It simply insists that whatever we do we shall do it to the glory of God, and it leaves it to our conscience and common sense to discover whether our conduct and work tend to glorify God or not.1 [Note: W. Watson, A Young Man’s Ideal, 152.]

The simple truth is that all these are matters affecting the outward man, the external life. They concern the man’s hands but may in no manner concern his heart. A man is not necessarily good because he wears a crucifix, and a man is not necessarily good because he abstains from wearing one. I have heard men declaim against the crucifix who did not possess the spirit of the cross, and their declamation was an offence. A man is not necessarily a Christian because he goes to the theatre; and certainly a man is not necessarily a Christian because he keeps away. You feel that these considerations touch only the surface of the life. They are no indication of the quality and substance of the inner and secret being. And so St. Paul declares that the Kingdom of God is not “eating and drinking”; it is not to be determined by one or two external acts, in which you participate or from which you abstain.2 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

She stood before a chosen few,

With modest air and eyes of blue;

A gentle creature in whose face

Were mingled tenderness and grace.

“You wish to join our fold,” they said;

“Do you believe in all that’s read

From ritual and written creed,

Essential to our human need?”

A troubled look was in her eyes;

She answered, as in vague surprise,

As though the sense to her were dim:

“I only strive to follow Him.”

They knew her life; how, oft she stood,

Sweet in her guileless maidenhood,

By dying bed, in hovel lone,

Whose sorrow she had made her own.

Oft had her voice in prayer been heard,

Sweet as the voice of singing bird;

Her hand been open in distress;

Her joy to brighten and to bless.

Yet still she answered when they sought

To know her inmost earnest thought,

With look as of the seraphim,

“I only strive to follow Him.”

Creeds change as ages come and go;

We see by faith, but little know:

Perchance the sense was not so dim

To her who “strove to follow Him.”1 [Note: Sarah Knowles Bolton, Her Creed.]

III

What the Kingdom of God is

“The kingdom of God is righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.”

1. In every life there is a holy of holies. It is an intensely secret place. The dearest friend we have on earth cannot enter it. It is our temple of secrets, of things which cannot be told. It is a place where only two can meet—our spirit and the Spirit of God. It is that inner sanctuary where God and we come face to face. That secret place is the abode of the Kingdom of God. We have to know that secret place, that innermost heart, to know finally whether or not men and women belong to the Kingdom of God. What are they in their most secret being, where only they and the Holy Ghost can meet? We do not eat meat offered to idols! What are we in our innermost self, where no eye but God’s can see us? We do not wear a crucifix! What are we in our heart of hearts, where we meet the Holy Ghost? It is in that utmost privacy of our life that we must look to learn whether we are or are not citizens of the Kingdom of God.

Now the text tells us that when the Kingdom of God is really in the life, there will be three things in that most secret place. There will be “righteousness,” “peace,” and “joy.” When we are of the Kingdom of God we will be “righteous” in the secret place where only God and we meet; we will have “peace” in the secret place where only God and we meet; we will have “joy” in the secret place where only God and we meet.

2. “The kingdom of God is righteousness and peace and joy.” The Kingdom of God, then, is the realization of our human nature’s dream and desire, the fulfilment for us of that which we are universally wishing to experience, and reaching out after. It is the object of universal pursuit attained; the answer to the continual cry of humanity. For what is it that is really sought in our manifold and diverse seekings? What is the real end and aim of all labour but these three things in which St. Paul represents the Kingdom of God to consist—righteousness and peace and joy? Wide asunder as our paths may lie, we are all in quest of a common goal. “Who will show us what is good?” “Where are peace and joy to be found?” is the language of all mortal scheming and toil. And as to righteousness, “Would that I could be made right!” is the frequent sigh of thousands whom folly and error hold captive.

“Righteousness, peace, joy”: the human heart welcomes these three characteristics as marking the society which answers the promise of creation. In these three, that memorable triad, the battle-cry of revolution, which, in spite of every perversion and misuse, has found a wide response in the souls of nations, receives its highest fulfilment. In “righteousness, peace, joy” we can recognize “equality, liberty, fraternity,” interpreted, purified, extended. They tell us that the community and not the individual is the central thought in the life of men. They tell us that the fulfilment of duties and not the assertion of rights is the foundation of the social structure. They tell us that the end of labour is not material well-being, but that larger, deeper, more abiding delight which comes from successfully ministering to the good of others. They tell us that over all that is transitory in the form of the Kingdom, over all the conditions which determine its growth, there rests the light, the power, of an Eternal Presence.1 [Note: Westcott, Social Aspects of Christianity, 90.]

i. Righteousness

1. According to St. Paul, the first thing which characterizes the establishment of the Kingdom of God in human life is that we become righteous, right with God in our innermost self. If I want the structure of the Kingdom of God to be built up in my life, then I must begin at the base, at the foundation; and the fundamental requisite is that in the very depths of my being I must become right with God. This is the fundamental requirement; not that we should get peace or possess joy, but that we should be put right, rejoined to God. Our worship, our churches, our Christian institutions, have for their primary purposes the putting of man right with God. The great purpose of them all is this: to bring our lives into touch with God, to join ourselves to Him, that His life may flow like healing waters into ours, to make righteousness—agreement between ourselves and God our Lord—to make “righteousness in the Holy Ghost.”

2. Righteousness comes first, before peace and joy. How we do try to reverse the order! We want the peace of the Kingdom before its righteousness, and God cannot give it. Suppose I go to a doctor with my arm out of joint, and say to him, “Doctor, I cannot get any rest or peace. I pass through painful days and sleepless nights. I want you to give me a sleeping draught that I may enjoy a little rest.” I think the doctor would smile and say, “My dear sir, it is not a sleeping draught you need to give you a few hours of unnatural peace. You must get your arm into its socket; set that right, and then Nature will give you her own sleep and her own peace.” But is not that somewhat analogous to what we do in the spiritual life? We seek for spiritual peace; we go in for all manner of sleeping draughts which make our consciences sleep but do not refresh us, and we do not find the peace we seek. And this Book, the great Physician’s Book, says to us, “Men and women, your life is out of joint, and you will not get peace until the severance is righted. In your most secret being you must be joined to the Lord.” That is the teaching of this Book, as it is certainly the findings of experience.

Real righteousness—what is it? In one word, it is surrender to the will of God. This is the peculiarity of the righteousness which is evangelical. It is from within: it is life: it is God in the soul of man: it is the life of the spirit. It is not a creed learned by heart; it is not a set of habits acquired; it is not a circle of customs scrupulously observed. It is not a righteousness done, but an infinite yearning after a righteousness which is ever doing. It is not a self-satisfaction which numbers up its performances, but an infinite humility which reckons its best performances as nothing.

This righteousness can set forms at nought, neglecting them. It can afford to make nothing of them. Christ’s disciples neglected the observance of the very honoured custom of washing the hands when they ate bread. Consider what might have been urged: This is an old time-honoured observance. You owe respect to constituted authorities. Who are you that presumptuously set yourselves up against the customs of your Church and country? Such things were said. But the disciples heeded them not, and Christ supported them in their neglect.

Let us understand this. Doubtless it is a duty to comply with customs, social and ecclesiastical. A man who sets them at defiance is a man of presumptuous spirit. But there are periods when the forms of society become thoroughly false. Then the strong man breaks through the cobwebs of etiquette, asserting the real courtesies of the heart. And there are times when priests and parties multiply observances till life is trammelled, and make things essential which are not essential. Then it becomes a duty, if we would imitate Christ, to assert Christian liberty, and to refuse to be bound by the cry of custom, modesty, or constituted authority.1 [Note: F. W. Robertson.]

With eager heart and will on fire,

I fought to win my great desire;

“Peace shall be mine,” I said; but life

Grew bitter in the weary strife.

My soul was tired, and my pride

Was wounded deep: to Heaven I cried,

“God grant me peace or I must die”;

The dumb stars glittered no reply.

Broken at last, I bowed my head,

Forgetting all myself, and said,

“Whatever comes, His will be done”;

And in that moment peace was won.2 [Note: Henry Van Dyke.]

The Kingdom of God within us is rightness with God, and from that rightness with God comes right dealing with our fellowmen. Not carping criticism, not fault-finding and intolerance, but righteousness and just dealing, should be the characteristic of the citizens of the Kingdom.

Righteousness is a term of comprehensive scope. It comprises honesty, truthfulness, sincerity—all the elements which combine to form uprightness and frankness and nobility of character. Righteousness is straightforward in intellectual matters as well as in practical. Righteousness respects the feelings, the affections, the character of others as well as their property. Righteousness is therefore temperate, is pure, is chivalrous. Righteousness pays deference to enemies as well as to friends. It is scrupulously careful not to misrepresent, not to depreciate, not to wrong in any way an antagonist—whether a personal or a religious antagonist.

Can no one stop the din that profanes the grave of Robert Burns? Has no one the heart to hear the “inhabitant below” or to understand his voice? Of all perverse destinies with which earth could perplex his fame, did it ever visit his imagination that crowds of rhetorical men would go about in never-ending floods of eloquence to prove his life a great moral victory and triumph? Did he ever foresee that every after-dinner orator who wished to show what a flexible thing advanced Christianity can be, would harp upon the passages that saddened his own thoughtful hours, as proofs of what may comport with high moral and Christian excellency? Shame upon them that are so destitute of love for Burns, that have so little sympathy with the pathos of his own view of his own life, as not to understand they are to let that alone! Why cannot they let it alone? Let them celebrate his genius, if it needs to be celebrated; let them celebrate his honest manhood—a great deal too straightforward, I will be bold to say, to tolerate the despicable sophistry that is spent on his career—let them dwell on the undying glow he has shed into Scottish minds and hearts and homes and lives and history; and, for the rest, let it alone. But if they will not, on themselves be the shame.

A curse upon the clown and knave

That will not let his ashes rest.1 [Note: Principal Rainy, Church of Scotland, 159.]

ii. Peace

1. Having got right with God, being joined to God, and purified in the most secret place, we shall then discover the second characteristic of the Kingdom, the possession of an abiding peace. The Kingdom of God is peace in the Holy Ghost, peace in that secret place where only God and we meet. There shall be a holy quietude, an unbroken peace in our innermost self. In our hearts there shall be a Sabbath restfulness all the year round. There shall be all the sweet stillness of a June noontide in our souls. We shall be calm there, where we meet with God! That place is for many of us a place of great unrest. The last place into which many of us would go for peace would be into the secret heart where we meet alone with God. It is the place above all others where there rages a storm. We have to be righted with God before we can look upon Him with sweet and calm delight. But when we are united to Him, joined to Him in right relationship, then there comes to us the gift of His peace. “My peace I give unto you”; receiving My life you shall receive My peace, the same serenity in danger, the same equanimity in troublous surroundings, the same freedom from anxious care, “My peace!”

Have you ever spoken to any one who had passed out of storm and turbulence into the possession of Christ’s peace? Ask them what it means, and they will tell you that when Christ gives His peace, He takes the threat out of yesterday, the despondency out of to-day, and the fear out of to-morrow. When God is shut out of the secret place, His voice rings through it like the weird tolling of a funeral bell. But when God comes in and brings His peace, the threatening bell is silenced. As for to-morrow, for him who is perfectly joined to the Lord, anxiety and fear are lost in perfect trust, and perfect trust is the mother of perfect peace.1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

Oh, this is peace! I have no need

Of friend to talk, of book to read:

A dear Companion here abides;

Close to my thrilling heart He hides;

The holy silence is His voice:

I lie and listen and rejoice.2 [Note: John Townsend Trowbridge.]

2. There will be peace in the community where righteousness prevails. Wherever there is any hesitation about lines of action, peace must step in and decide. Not self-assertion, not consistency, not stickling for rights, not punctiliousness about details, but peace must carry the day. “Peace I leave with you,” said Christ, and already the small band of believers is torn into factions quarrelling bitterly over questions of meat and drink.

The herald angels sang “on earth peace.” Nineteen centuries have passed, and Christianity is still a revolutionary and disturbing element wherever it comes, and the promise seems to linger, and the great words that declared “Unto us a child is born … and his name shall be … The Prince of Peace,” seem as far away from fulfilment as ever they were. Yes, because He is first of all King of Righteousness, and must destroy the evil that is in the world before He can manifest Himself as King of Peace, His kingdom of Peace will be set up through confusion and destruction, overturning and overturning until the world has learned to know and love His name. First, King of Righteousness—that, at all hazards; that, though conflict may dog His steps and warfare ever wait upon Him—first, King of Righteousness, and after that, King of Peace. So the sum of the whole thing is, peace is sure; peace with God; peace in my own tranquil and righteous heart; peace for a world from out of which sin shall be scourged; peace is sure because righteousness is ours since it is Christ’s.1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

iii. Joy in the Holy Ghost

1. When our life is righted with God in its most secret depths, when there comes into its secret place an unbroken peace, there also springs in the life a deep and quiet joy. “The kingdom of God is joy.” Is righteousness the pole-star of our lives? Is peace the music of our hearts? If so, then to us, as to the shepherds of old, the message of the Epiphany is addressed, “Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy.” If so, then on us, as true and faithful citizens, loyal to the laws and customs of the Kingdom, our Sovereign will confer His crowning privilege, “joy in the Holy Ghost.” Not joy as men count joy; no earthly passion and no transitory excitement; but the abiding inward satisfaction of a conscious harmony with the will of God.

2. Joy comes after peace. Righteousness is the root; peace the stem; joy the blossom. The disappointment so often experienced in the search for happiness is traceable to the non-observance of this order. Joy is put before righteousness and peace.

Who are thy playmates, boy?

“My favourite is Joy,

Who brings with him his sister Peace, to stay

The livelong day.

I love them both; but he

Is most to me.”

And where thy playmates now,

O man of sober brow?

“Alas! dear Joy, the merriest, is dead.

But I have wed

Peace; and our babe, a boy,

New-born, is Joy.”1 [Note: John Bannister Tabb, The Playmates.]

3. Joy grows out of peace. In growing calm we become more easily gladdened, more alive to gladdening influences. Why is it that we are so much more pleased to-day than we were yesterday; why has the same scene so much more in it to set us singing, except that we are more at ease to-day than we were yesterday? “Wordsworth’s inborn religious placidity,” writes one, “had matured in him a quite unusual sensibility to the sights and sounds of the natural world, to the flower and its shadow on the stone, the cuckoo and its echo, the pliant harebell swinging in the breeze, the sweetness of a common dawn, the dance

Of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees.”

Mental placidity gives sensibility to many joys of life which in its absence would not thrill or touch us at all, opens our ears to the music of the spheres, and causes the spirit of delight to come to us often on very tiny wings.

If sin be in the heart,

The fairest sky is foul, and sad the summer weather,

The eye no longer sees the lambs at play together,

The dull ear cannot hear the birds that sing so sweetly,

And all the joy of God’s good earth is gone completely,

If sin be in the heart.

If peace be in the heart,

The wildest winter storm is full of solemn beauty,

The midnight lightning flash but shows the path of duty,

Each living creature tells some new and joyous story,

The very trees and stones all catch a ray of glory,

If peace be in the heart.1 [Note: Charles Francis Richardson, Peace.]

4. Jesus names to us a striking peculiarity about the joy of the righteous: “Your joy no man taketh from you.” No thief of accident or circumstance can steal it! If we find the joy of our life merely in entertainment or amusement, in the club or in the ball-room, there is many a thief can take it away from us. Poverty may dry up our resources in a day. Sickness may throw us upon ourselves, and make a wide gulf between us and our joys. We are called to a joy compared with which all other joys are very insipid and tame, the joy of being a friend of Christ, joy in the Holy Ghost.

If once such joy had filled thine heart,

Earth’s hatred or earth’s scorn

Would seem but as a moment’s smart,

Forgot as soon as borne.

Nay, thou in pain, or shame, or loss,

Christ’s fellowship wouldst see,

And with thine heart embrace the cross

On which He hung for thee.

Wouldst count it blest to live, to die,

Where He is all in all;

Where rapt, earth unperceived goes by

And from ourselves we fall.

Till, from His secret place below,

To mansions fair above,

He leads thee, there to make thee know

The perfect joys of love.

A Definition of the Kingdom

Literature

Dykes (J. O.), Plain Words on Great Themes, 171.

Fraser (J.), University Sermons, 183.

Hughes (H. P.), The Philanthropy of God, 259.

Lightfoot (J. B.), Ordination Addresses, 194.

Parker (J.), The City Temple (1870), 445.

Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, xi. 177.

Robertson (F. W.), The Human Race, 297.

Sitterly (C. F.), in Drew Sermons on the Golden Texts for 1910, 157.

Tipple (S. A.), The Admiring Guest, 76.

Vallings (J. F.), The Holy Spirit of Promise, 137.

Westcott (B. F.), Social Aspects of Christianity, 85.

Whitefield (G.), in The Great Sermons of the Great Preachers, 253.

Winterbotham (R.), The Kingdom of Heaven, 223.

Christian Age, xxxvi. 114 (M‘Kaig).

Christian World Pulpit, viii. 187 (Beecher); xxvii. 75 (Rogers); lvii. 97 (Douglas); lxv. 265 (Fleming); lxxix. 65 (Ruth).

Examiner, June 18, 1903, 608 (Jowett).

Expositor, 2nd Ser., i. 266 (Matheson).