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Of all the qualities which great books, and especially the Bible, have, few are more remarkable than their power of bringing out the unity of disassociated and apparently contradictory ideas. Take these two words, liberty and law. They stand over against each other. Law is the restraint of liberty. Liberty is the abrogation, the getting rid of law. Each, so far as it is absolute, implies the absence of the other. But the expression of our text suggests that by the highest standards there is no contradiction, but rather a harmony and unity, between the two; that really the highest law is liberty, the highest liberty is law; that there is such a thing as a law of liberty.

I. WHAT DO WE MEAN BY LIBERTY? It is the genuine ability of a living creature to manifest its whole nature, to do and be itself most unrestrainedly. Nothing more, nothing less than that. There is no compulsion, and yet the life, by a tendency of its own educated will, sets itself towards God.

1. What a fundamental and thorough thing this law of liberty must be. It is a law which issues from the qualities of a nature going thence out into external shape and action. It is a law of constraint by which you take a crooked sapling and bend it straight and hold it violently into line. It is a law of liberty by which the inner nature of the oak itself decrees its outward form, draws out the pattern shape of every leaf, and lays the hand of an inevitable necessity on bark and bough and branch.

2. This doctrine of the law of liberty makes clear the whole order and process of Christian conversion. Laws of constraint begin conversion at the outside and work in. Laws of liberty begin their conversion at the inside and work out. Which is the true way?

3. This truth throws very striking light into one of the verses which precede our text, one of the hardest verses in the Bible to a great many people. "Whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, is guilty of all," it is said. Why? Because the consistent, habitual breakage of one point proves that the others were kept under the law of constraint, not under the law of liberty. You see the flame, and you speak of it as a whole: "The house is on fire! There is fire in the house!" Just so you see the bad fiery nature which the law constrains breaking through, and again you speak of it as a whole. What particular shingle is burning is of no consequence. "The law is broken. The one whole law is broken by the one whole bad heart!"

4. The whole truth of the law of liberty starts with the truth that goodness is just as controlling and supreme a power as badness. Virtue is as despotic over the life she really sways as vine can be over her miserable subjects. Free, yet a servant! Free from external compunctions, free from sin; yet a servant to the higher law that issues for ever from the God within him. "A God whose service is perfect freedom." Oh for such a liberty in us! Look at Christ and see it in perfection.

(Bp. Phillips Brooks.)

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KJV: So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the law of liberty.

WEB: So speak, and so do, as men who are to be judged by a law of freedom.