Philippians 2:17, 18 Yes, and if I be offered on the sacrifice and service of your faith, I joy, and rejoice with you all.… Yea, and if I be offered upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, I joy, and rejoice with you all. For the same cause also do ye joy, and rejoice with me. There are different kinds of love. Christly love is love in the highest form, the love which is the inspiration of all human activities, approved of God, and spiritually useful to man. Two remarks are here suggested concerning this love. I. IT IS SELF-CONSECRATING. It was so: 1. In the conduct of the Philippian Christians. Paul speaks of their religion as the "sacrifice" and "service" of their "faith." The life of a genuine Christian is the life of a true priest; he is at once the offering and the offerer. It is a self-dedication to God. In this priesthood of personal Christianity two things are to be observed. (1) Every man is his own sacrifice. The sacrifice of anything short of his own self will not do. The wealth of the world would not be a substitute for this. He must lay himself on the altar. It is not until he has done this that anything else that he can do has aught of virtue in it. What does this offering of self imply? (a) Not the loss of personality. Man does not lose himself by consecrating his existence to the Eternal. He will never be absorbed in the Infinite; a man once, a man for ever. (b) Not the loss of Free agency. In the consecration man does not become the mere limb or machine of Omnipotence. In truth he only secures his highest liberty by yielding up himself to God. What does it mean, then? It includes two things - yielding to his love as the inspiration of his being, and adopting his will as the rule of his activities. (2) Every man is his own minister. He must offer the sacrifice himself; no one can do it for him. Could my being be offered to the Almighty by another, it would be a crime in the offerer and no virtue to me. I must do it fully, devoutly, manfully. 2. In the life of the apostle. "Yea, and if I be offered [or, 'poured forth'] upon the sacrifice." The allusion is to the practice of pouring ont libations or drink offerings over sacrifices both Jewish and heathen. Paul regards his own possible martyrdom in the sense of a libation. He felt that his possible death was to serve that practical Christianity which the Philippians were exemplifying in their "sacrifice" and "service." He had consecrated his existence to the furtherance of the gospel. II. IT IS JOY-INSPIRING. "I joy, and rejoice with you all. For the same cause also do ye joy, and rejoice with me." This self-consecrating love to the cause of Divine benevolence, the cause of Christ and humanity, is "joy." Such disinterested love is happiness, nothing else, is heaven and nothing else. Just as the individual man loses himself, his ego, in the love of God and the interests of his universe, all personal anxieties and sorrows sink into the depths of oblivion, the soul gets filled with all the fullness of God. Genuine religion is joy; it is not the means to heaven, it is heaven itself. Such is Christly love, and such alone is true religion. Selfish love, sectarian love, and theological love are not constituents, but antipathies, to this love. - D.T. Parallel Verses KJV: Yea, and if I be offered upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, I joy, and rejoice with you all. |
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