James 2:12 So speak you, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the law of liberty. Go to a cripples' hospital and see the poor creatures all about you with legs or arms tightly bound up with splints, bandages, and irons, cramped and well-nigh useless. We know well enough why their liberty is restrained like this, why they are made so uncomfortable; it is that the limbs may be brought into the proper position to be healed or straightened, so that the patients may have the free use of them when they leave the hospital. It would be a useless and stupid thing to deprive them of what little use they could make of their limbs unless there was some higher end in view. But in order to attain that higher end, the restraint, the bandages, the irons, &c., are indispensable. So it is in our religious life. The sense of duty, moral obligations, self-denial, with their constraining and restraining influence, are like the bandages, invaluable as means to the higher end of free, loving, loyal service of God. But if we rest there, if we do not try to rise above this, we lose all the brightness and joy and peace of life; we defeat the whole purpose of God towards us, which is, that we should serve Him with the free obedience of sons, and not with the forced service of slaves. We need to see that law fails in its object, unless it leads us to Christ, unless it ends in the service of Christ. The love of Christ transforms the hard "you must" of law into the glad "I will" of liberty, and so law and liberty are reconciled. (G. H. Fowler.) Parallel Verses 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. |
    |