2 Corinthians 5:14 For the love of Christ constrains us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: 1. "The love of Christ" — His to man, not man's to Him — yet His in its quickening activity, creating its own image in the breast. To constrain is so to shut in as to compel to a given end. Unconstrained, the river would spread out into a marsh, a dismal waste, fruitful only of pestilence and death. Shut in by its constraining banks, it flows a thing of life and beauty, watering garden and field, purifying and gladdening cities, and broadening into the bay on whose fair bosom ships float as they come and go on their beneficent mission of exchange and distribution. So man, constrained by the love of Christ, is so shut in as to be forbidden to wander and spread into a dismal and pestilent waste; is forced rather to move to a divine end, like a river of life flowing from God, hastening to God, in a channel made and moulded by His hand. 2. Now I wish to take Christian missions — the most manifest example of the constraining love of Christ — as a type of this great truth, that the service of God and of man are made one in the service of Christ. Note — I. THE RELATION BETWEEN THE CHARACTER OF A MAN AND HIS SERVICE OF HIS KIND. A bad man can never be a minister of good. Eminent intellect without character is mischievous. A statesman with genius but without character is a calamity to the State. The creative genius may leave behind imperishable works in literature and art, but if he be mean and unclean he will leave a heritage of evil. It is inevitable that the service of man be the peculiar prerogative of the good. The man, therefore, that would serve men in the way of Christ must have the spirit of Christ. Mere decent, responsible, respectable, conventional formalism will not do. It is not enough to stand aloof from the man that does evil. It is necessary that we take the man's soul into our own and save him, if need be, by our very death. II. BY WHAT MEANS, CONDITIONS, MOTIVES MAY A MAN BE MADE — AS TO CHARACTER, THE BEST POSSIBLE THAT HE MAY BE — AS TO SERVICE, THE MOST FIT AND EFFICIENT. Take — 1. The love of wealth, not of money — the greedy passion of the miser, but love of wealth which treats money as a means of distribution. Look at. the immense factory with its thousands of operatives, filling so many homes with comfort, so many mouths with bread. Look at the great ships as they bear from distant lands to this, or from this to distant lands, commodities enriching, gladdening life. There is wonderful power in wealth used as a means; but mark, to be good, it is necessary — (1) That it be in the hands of a good man. A bad man behind wealth uses it only to the deterioration of the world. (2) That it be distributed. Accumulated wealth is not accumulated weal. A few rich men do not make a rich or a contented people. 2. Love of power — the desire both to make and to be a law that men shall obey. A statesman, patriotic, makes laws that he may secure the greatest blessing to the individual and to the collective people. The statesman, ambitious, makes laws to serve his own ends, sacrifices what was meant for mankind to his own personal good. The merely ambitious soldier looks at the army he commands as an immense machine, only to be used that it may be hurled against a similar machine, so as to break it without itself being broken. The soldier patriotic thinks that every man in that vast army is a conscious spirit, a centre of influence, needing, if possible, to be saved. The one says with Napoleon, "Russian Campaign! what of it? It cost me only three thousand men," careless of the men, careful of himself. The other, like the hero of Sempach, will gather a sheaf of Austrian spears into his breast that the rank of the enemy may be broken and the land saved. Love of power blesses man only when in the presence of a great love it is glorified into patriotism, philanthropy. 3. The love of culture. Its great apostle tells us that its function is criticism of life. What that means we know. A man trained to enjoy the art and literature of past and present, made toward his meaner fellows finical, hypercritical, helping them only by sardonic sarcasm. In culture there may be the training of a character to a nobler, while self-conscious, enjoyment, but not to the large, devoted service that seeks the saving of men. 4. But may you not drill a man into service of his kind by terror? What makes a coward unmakes a man of him; what compels a man to a service which he does not love, makes him impotent for good. In fear there is no power to create the man that can regenerate the world. III. LET US GO ON NOW TO SOME TYPICAL CASES THAT ILLUSTRATE THE ACTION OF THOSE PRINCIPLES AND MOTIVES IMPLIED IN THE LOVE OF CHRIST. 1. Here are three men. Look at them before the love finds them. Peter is a bronzed, hard-handed, brawny fisherman. He knows Jerusalem, has heard of Rome and, perhaps, of Athens; but cannot tell what they mean. He is a man who owns, perhaps, his boat and his nets, and thinks himself happy indeed if he lands a draught of fishes. There he is — familiar figure. Here now is John — more favoured by nature, radiant of face, clear of brow. Still, he is but the fisherman's son, destined fisherman to be — to be a husband, a father; known to his sons and grandsons, then forgotten. And here is Paul, tent-maker, skilled in the law and history of his people. He, left as he is, would become a name with Gamaliel or Hillel. 2. Mark how the love of Christ comes to and acts on these men. It lays hold on that Peter. Suddenly he becomes a leader of men, who stands undismayed before the priests and rulers. And this John becomes a great interpreter, historian, thinker, and ages sit at his feet and dwell on his words. And Paul, converted, made missionary, in prisons oft, stripes many, stoned, afflicted, etc., still snatches moments amid his career to speak over the ages words that live as veritable spirit and power. 3. This love acts in each of the men in its own particular fashion. Peter it makes a legislator and leader of men, and people say, "How great is Peter!" But how different John! The Saviour says, "Son, behold Thy mother." While Peter had charge of the sheep and of the lambs, John had charge of the mother, and that seemed all. But this educated John till, through the mother's love for him and his love to the mother, he came to understand as no other man did the Saviour's love to the world, the Father's love to the Son. Then look at Paul. He, a trained Pharisee, comes and sees all history, all men, all time, in the light of Christ. Law and gospel, first and second man, grace and sin, faith and works, all, as it were, came through him into articulate expression; and he shows the love making the preacher, the missionary, the thinker, all in one. 4. Now these three men are typical men. The love that worked that change in them is a love working still. Other loves lose their presence and potency over men. This love, never. This age has seen no more wonderful discovery than that of the conservation and correlation of the physical forces, no atom ever destroyed, every atom ever in process of change. But think of this grand moral dynamic, one in essence, indestructible in being, infinite in the variety of its forms, which we call the love of Christ. It took shape in the apostles. Since then it has created saints and heroes, who have stood like against the world, or like Knox, who never feared the face of men, and thinkers like , Aquinas, and Calvin. It has entered into the spirit of reformers, and it has made men like Luther and Zwingle stand up to change the destiny of people and introduce a newer and grander day. It has created great preachers, like Howe and Bunyan and Wesley. IV. HOW IS IT THAT THIS LOVE HAS ACCOMPLISHED SO MUCH? 1. Mark. Love is an old thing. Christ did not make it, but found it the most universal and most potent force in the world. But ere He had come one thing love had never done. Lover to lover had been dear. But man as man had not been served through love. And yet without love men cannot be served. It needs not that we hate — it needs only that we be void of affection, to be unable to serve. 2. But look how hard it is to love. See nations, kin, speaking the same speech, under the same institutions, divided by a strip of silver sea, face to face, but disaffected towards each other. Why come wars and fightings? Nations do not love each other. Classes are divided. Here stands culture contemptuous to ignorance, and vice versa. Here is capital looking askance at labour. There is labour making wealth, jealous of the accumulated wealth it has seen made. And see how men, for moral reasons, are unable to love each other. 3. Now mark how Christ accomplished this grand impossibility of love. He came, and He made love to Him become love to all men. Love to persons means the desire to possess the person loved. Love to Christ means a passion to make men possess Him. There is no nation or class in Him. There is humanity. In loving Him you love the very worst as well as the best. 4. But so far we have been only stating fact. We have not yet got the why. Mark, the love that is in Christ is(1) God's love, made real, living love on earth for men. Some men think that they could learn God's love apart from Christ Could they? Did they ere He came? Can they now He has come? "This world is very lovely. O my God, I thank Thee that I live." And 'tis so lovely to stand on mountain peak at break of day, and see from out the east the glorious sunrise bringing light and health and beauty in his beams. But carry to the mountain summit a man who has just left the bed of death, where the dearest of earth to him doth lie. What would the man say? But place him in sight of the love of Christ and you place him in the very heart of God. The Man of Sorrows makes to the man in sorrow God come divinely near. (2) The very love that made and the very end that was purposed for the world. The love that made the world gave the Son. Is not the giver ever greater than the thing given? The love of God gave its dignity to the gift of God. Without the love how ever was the gift possible? (3) Love to God as a person. To God's Son as a person. There cannot be love to aught but persons. Devotion to a cause is not love to Christ, not even if the cause be named a church. The cause must be impersonated. (4) God's love sacrificial, painful, pitiful, redemptive. It lifts us into the nature of God and makes us see God, how He feels pity, suffers sacrifice. (A. M. Fairbairn, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: |
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