Expositions of Holy Scripture: Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. JohnMaclaren, Alexander
Religion
Expositions of Holy Scripture: Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John
Maclaren, Alexander
Bible. Ephesians -- Commentaries; Bible. Epistle of John, 1st -- Commentaries; Bible. Peter -- Commentaries
Observe again the beginning of this path of knowledge, which we have
thus traced. There must be, says my text, an indwelling Christ, and so
an experience, deep and stable, of His love, and then we shall know the
love which we thus experience. But how comes that indwelling? That is
the question for us. The knowledge of His love is blessedness, is peace,
is love, is everything; as we shall see in considering the last stage of
this prayer. That knowledge arises from our fellowship with and our
possession of the love of God, which is in Jesus Christ. How does that
fellowship with, and possession of the love of God in Jesus Christ,
come? That is the all-important question. What is the beginning of
everything? 'That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith.' There is
the gate through which you and I may come, and by which we must come if
we are to come at all into the possession and perception of Christ's
great love. Here is the path of knowledge. First of all, there must be
the simple historical knowledge of the facts of Christ's life and death
for us, with the Scripture teaching of their meaning and power. And then
we must turn these truths from mere notions into life. It is not enough
to know the love that God has to us, in that lower sense of the word
'knowledge.' Many of you know that, who never got any blessing out of it
all your days, and never will, unless you change. Besides the 'knowing'
there must be the 'believing' of the love. You must translate the notion
into a living fact in your experience. You must pass from the simple
work of understanding the Gospel to the higher act of faith. You must
not be contented with knowing, you must trust. And if you have done that
all the rest will follow, and the little, narrow, low doorway of humble
self-distrusting faith, through which a man creeps on his knees,
leaving outside all his sin and his burden, opens out into the temple
palace--the large place in which Christ's love is imparted to the soul.
Brethren, this doctrine of my text ought to be for every one of us a joy
and a gospel. There is no royal road into the sweetness and the depth of
Christ's love, for the wise or the prudent. The understanding is no more
the organ for apprehending the love of Christ than the ear is the organ
for perceiving light, or the heart the organ for learning mathematics.
Blessed be God! the highest gifts are not bestowed upon the clever
people, on the men of genius and the gifted ones, the cultivated and the
refined, but they are open for all men; and when we say that love is the
parent of knowledge, and that the condition of knowing the depths of
Christ's heart is simple love which is the child of faith, we are only
saying in other words what the Master embodied in His thanksgiving
prayer, 'I thank Thee, Father! Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou
hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them
unto babes.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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