"And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God
is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, which is given unto
us." You are already, we trust, enough familiarized to the
distinction that has been offered between the hope of faith and the hope of
experience. God promises to all who trust in Him, that He will give them an
inheritance on the other side of death; and that He will also give them, in the
shape of certain personal graces and endowments, an earnest of the inheritance
on this side of it. On the very first moment that you hear these promises, if
you believe in the honesty of both, you will hope for the fulfilment of both;
and this is the hope of faith. Should the promise that is of earlier fulfilment
come to pass at its proper time, this will be to you a satisfactory
confirmation of your first belief, and of the hope that comes out of it; and
you will look forward with surer anticipation than ever, to the latter of the
two fulfllments. This is the hope of experience - a hope that brightens with
the growth of grace on the person of the believer; and with every new finding
within himself of the working of that Spirit of holiness, by which he is made
meet for the everlasting abodes of holiness. In this way, there is formed a
distinct and subsequent ground of hope, additional to the original one. The
original ground was your faith in the honesty of the promiser, that He would
fulfil all His engagements. The additional ground is your actual experience of
His punctuality, in having liquidated those of His engagements which had become
due. It operates like a first instalment, which, when paid with perfect
readiness and sufficiency, certainly brightens all the hope of a thorough
fulfilment of the various articles of agreement, which you had when it was
first entered upon. And thus it is that, though there is a hope in the second
verse that is appended immediately to your faith in God - there is also a hope
in the fourth verse, that has been wrought in you by experience.
You
must also be sensible what the effect would have been, had there been a failure
instead of a fulfilment of that promise, which falls to be accomplished first.
It would have darkened and overthrown, not merely your hope of the near, but
also your hope of all the ulterior good things that you had been led to depend
upon. There is nothing which brings the feeling of shame more directly into the
mind, than the failure of some confident or too fondly indulged expectation. "
They shall be greatly ashamed that trust in graven images." "They shall not be
ashamed that wait for me." And lest," says the apostle, " we should be ashamed
in this same confident boasting."
"Because the love of God is shed
abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us". The love of God
may signify either our love to God, as in the passage - " this is the Love of
God that ye keep his commandments;" or it may signify God's love to us, as in
the passage - " In this was manifested the love of God towards us, bccause that
God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that. we might live through
him." In the verse under consideration, we apprehend that the love of God must
be taken according to the latter signification. It is thus that, speaking
strictly and literally, one being when kind to another, sheds upon him the
fruits of that kindness, rather than the kindness itself. But the use of
language has been so far extended, as to admit of the latter expression. It is
quite according to established usage to say, "I have received much kindness
from another, though I have properly received nothing but his money or his
attentions or his patronage. And in like manner, do I receive love from God
when I receive the Holy Ghost. And as a beneficent proprietor is said to shed
abroad of his liberality among the habitations of the poor, when he causes food
or raiment or fuel to enter into their houses - so does God shed abroad of His
love in our hearts, when He sends the Holy Ghost to take up His residence, and
there to rule by His influences.
It is through the Spirit of God, that
the spirit of man is borne up in the midst of adversities. It is He who upholds
the perseverance of a disciple, when all that is around him lowrs and looks
disrnal. It is He who causes a luminousness to rest on those eternal prospects,
which are seen afar, through the dark vista of a pilgrimage which is lined on
the right hand and on the left, with sorrows innumerable. It is when a
bitterness comes upon man which is only known to his own heart, that a secret
balm is often infused along with it, with the joy of which a stranger does not
intermeddle. There is a history of the soul that is unseen I by every eye, but
intimately known and felt by its conscious proprietor; and often can he testify
of a tribulation that would have overwhelmed him to the death, had not a
powerful influence from on high supported him under it. And when the season of
it at length passes over his agitated spirit, and leaves the fruit of a solid
peace, and an augmented righteousness behind it - you perceive, how in him the
process is exemplified, of tribulation working. in him a more strenuous
perseverance in all the habits and principles of Christianity; and of
perseverance working in him such an experience of himself, as argues his state
of discipline and preparation for another world; and of this experience working
in him the hope that He who thus fulfils upon him, the guidance in time that He
has promised, will finally bestow upon him the glory He has promised in
eternity.
He, says the apostle, who hath wrought us for immortality is
God, who hath also given to us the earnest of the Spirit, and therefore we are
confident.
It is very true, that an early fulfilment is often the
satisfying token of some later fulfilment; and that grace imparted to us on
this side of death, is a pledge of glory being conferred upon us on the other
side of death; and, in particular, that the Holy Ghost, bestowed upon us so as
to work a meetness for the inheritance, is symptomatic of our future
transhation into the inheritance itself, and thus superadds the hope of
experience to the hope of faith. But you must remark, that the very hope of
faith, the hope which you conceive at the outset of your belief in the gospel,
is wrought in you by the same Holy Ghost. It is not of yourself - it is the
gift of God. It was by demonstration of the Spirit, that your eyes were opened
at the first to perceive the truth of the promises; and by a fuller
demonstration He can make you see this still more clearly, and rejoice in it
still more confidently than before.
The effect then of an additional
and subsequent supply of this divine influence, is, not merely to furnish you
with a pledge upon earth of the preferment that awaits you in heaven, and so to
furnish you with a new ground of hope upon the subject, even the ground of
experience; but it is also to brighten the ground upon which all your hope
rested originally, even the ground of faith. It is to give you a more full and
satisfying manifestation of the direct truth of God in the gospel than before.
The Holy Ghost does not merely put into your hand another and a distinct hold,
by giving you in the performance of an earlier promise, a proof of the sureness
with which the later promise shall be performed also; but He strengthens the
hold which you had by faith upon the promises, prior to all experimental
confirmation of them in your own personal history. He does not merely supply
that evidence for the truth of the gospel promise which is seen by the eye of
experience; but He also casts an additional light on the evidence that you had
at the first, and which is only be seen by the eye of faith. Never, in the
course of the believer's pilgrimage, never does the hope of experience
supersede the hope of faith. So far from this, in the very proportion that
experience grows in breadth, does faith grow in brightness. And it is this last
which still constitutes the sheet-anchor of his soul, and forms the main
aliment of its peace and joy and righteousness. It is well, that, on looking
inwardly to himself, he sees the growing lineaments of such a grace and such a
character forming upon his person, as vouch him to be ripening for eternity.
But, along wilh this process, will he also look outwardly upon God in Christ;
and there see, in constantly increasing manifestation, the truth and the mercy
and the unchangeableness of his reconciled Father, as by far the firmest and
stablest guarantees of his future destiny. The same agent, in fact, who brings
about the one effect, brings about the other. He causes you not merely to see
yourself to be an epistle of the Spirit of God, and to read thereon the marks
of your personal interest in the promises; but He also causes you to see these
promises as standing in the outward record, invested with a light and an
honesty and a freeness, which you did not see at the first revelation of them -
so that it is not only the hope of experience which is furnished you anew, as
you proceed on the career of actual Christianity; but, in proportion to your
advancement on this career, are you also made to abound more and more in the
hope of faith, through the power of the Holy Ghost.
Thus we trust, you
perceive, that the good works and the graces of personal religion, not merely
supply you with fresh evidences for your hope, but also brighten your original
ones. They cast backwards as it were a good reflex influence on the faith from
which they emanated. It is said of the Holy Ghost, that He is given to those
who obey him. Follow out the impulse of a conscience which He hath enlightened
in every practical business that you have on hand; and you will find, as the
result of it, a larger supply of that light which makes clearer than before,
all those truths and promises of Christianity, on which a firm dependence may
be laid by an act of believing. It is thus too that, if you keep the sayings of
Christ, He will manifest Himself; and though works are of no value unless they
are wrought in faith, yet the very doing of them is followed up by such larger
revelations of the truth and doctrine of God, that by works is your faith made
perfect.
Give us a man walking in darkness, and having no light, from whose
mind the comfort of the promises is fading away, and whose fits of thought and
pensiveness speak him to be on the borders of some deep approaching melancholy.
It is sin in all probability that has conducted him onwards to this mental
dejection; and that not merely by its having obliterated those traces of
personal character, the observation of which, had at one time wrought the hope
of experience in his bosom - but by its having grieved and exiled the Holy
Spirit for a season, whose office as a Revealer and as a Remernbrancer of all
truth, is therefore suspended, and who has therefore left the tenement of his
heart desolate and uncheered by that hope of faith, which shone in a beam of
gladness on the very outset of his Christianity. For the treatment of such a
spiritual patient, we are often bidden tell him of the fulness that there is in
Christ; and tell him of the power which lies in His blood, for turning guilt of
the most crimson dye into the snow-white of purest innocence; and to tell him
of the perfect willingness that there is in God, to hold out to him over the
mercy-seat the sceptre of forgiveness by the touching of which it is, that he
enters anew into reconciliation before Him.
And it is right, it is
indispensably right, to tell him of all this; but we would tell him more. The
voice of man, if the visitations of the Spirit do not go along with it, will
not force an entrance, even for these welcome accents of mercy, into the heart
that lie had so recently abandoned. And, to win the return of this gracious and
all-powerful monitor, we would bid him work for it. We would tell him, that it
is by toiling and striving and pains- taking, he must recover the distance
which he has lost, and call the departed light and departed influence back
again. If there be a remaining sense of duty in his heart, we bid him work with
all his might to prosecute its suggestions; and never cease to ply his labours
of obedience till He, who still it appears is whispering through the organ of
conscience what he ought to do, shall be so far satisfied with the probation,
as again to shed a sufficient manifestation on the doctrines which he must
never cease to contemplate. And this not merely to restore to him the hope of
experience, but to revive in him the hope of faith; and, full of penitential
labour as well as of penitential rneditation, to make his light break forth
again as in the morning, and his health to spring forth speedily.
This
holds out to us another view of the indissoluble alliance, that obtains between
the faith of Christianity and the obedience of Christianity. It is not saying
all for this, to say that the former originates the latter. It is saying still
more to say that the latter strengthens and irradiates the former. The genuine
faith of the gospel never can encourage sin; for sin expels that Spirit from
our hearts, who perpetuates and keeps alive faith in them. And by every act of
disobedience, there is a wound inflicted on the peace and joy, which a belief
in the gospel ministers to the soul. It is by practically walking up to the
suggestions of this heavenly monitor, that we brighten within us all His
influences; and thus, as the result of a strict and holy practice, is there a
clearer and fuller light reflected back again, on the very first principles
from which it emanated - so that Antinomianism, after all, is very much an
affair of theory, and can only be exemplified in the lives of those who either
profess the faith; or imagine that they possess it, when they are utter
strangers to it. The real faith which is unto salvation, not only originates
all the virtues of the gospel; but, should these virtues decay into
annihilation, it also would fall back again to non-existence along with them;
and, on the other hand, does it uniformly grow with the growth, and strengthen
with the strength of a man's practical Christianity.
On two distinct
grounds therefore, do we urge on every believer, a most persevering
strenuousness, under every temptation and difficulty, in all the ways of
righteousness. The first is, that he may brighten his personal evidences, of
being indeed one of those whom God is enriching and beautifying with grace in
time; and thus will he strengthen that basis on which the hope of experience
rests, when it looks forward to a preferment of glory in eternity. The second
is, that he may strengthen that very faith, by which he relied at the first on
the promises both of grace here, and of glory hereafter, for, after all, it is
by faith he stands; and the whole of his spiritual life will forthwith go into
decay, should he only look to the hope reflected from himself, instead of
drawing it direct and in chief abundance from the Saviour. An exuberance of
fresh and healthy blossom upon a tree, affords a cheering promise of the fruit
that may be expected from it. But what should we think of the soundness of that
man's anticipations, who should cut across the stem because he thought it
independent of the root, which both sent forth this beauteous effiorescence and
can alone conduct it to full and finished maturity? And the same of spiritual
as of natural husbandry. Were there no foliage, no fruit could be looked for-
yet still it is union with the root, which produced the one and will bring on
the other. And, in like manner, if there be no foliage of grace in time, there
will be no fruit of glory in eternity. But still it is by abiding in Christ,
that the whole process is begun, and carried forward, and will at length be
perfected. Give up the hope of faith, because you have now the hope of
experience; and you imitate precisely the man, whom the leaves had made so
sanguine of his drest and supported vine which he had trained along the wall,
that he cut asunder the stem and trusted to the abundance of his foliage. And
therefore we reiterate in your hearing, that the hold of faith is never to be
let go; and that from Christ, who ministers all the nourishment which comes to
the branches, you are never to sever yourselves; and that the habit of
believing prayer, which is the great and perpetual ahiment of all virtuous
practice, is never to be given up; and thus it is, that, let the hope of the
4th verse brighten to any conceivable extent upon you, from the light which is
reflected by your person - yet still it is the faith by which you are
justified, and the hope of the 2nd verse directly emanating therefrom, that
form the radical elements of your sanctification here, and your meetness for
the inhentance hereafter.
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