Bible Commentaries

OPEN DOORS AND ADVERSARIES

‘A great door and effectual is opened unto me, and there are many adversaries.’

1 Corinthians 16:9

St. Paul’s ‘great and effectual door’ was at Ephesus (see Acts 18, 19). How was the opposition met? St. Paul changed his tactics, but he never changed his message. He was a man who believed in adaptation. Thus, when he found that opposition was growing, he withdrew from the synagogue and went into the school of one Tyrannus. The work was done gradually and slowly, but still most effectually, and there was, in consequence, a large gathering into the Church.

The Christian Church of to-day has to contend with ‘adversaries.’ Here are some of them:—

I. Unspiritual workers.—Acts 19:14 shows that there was a great deal of sorcery and false teaching going on, but St. Paul left these false teachers alone, and God dealt with them. Let us take great care that our ministry, our work, is genuine, and that we preach and teach a personal Saviour—One of Whom we know in our own personal experience.

II. Spiritual depression.—St. Paul does not expressly mention this, but he may have been tempted to despond, in the face of open hostility. Do not despair, but rather persevere in good work, and the blessing will come.

III. Mechanicalism.—There is not a little connection between depression and mechanicalism. As soon as we get depressed the fire and life seem to go out of our work, and when we get mechanical we sink into a dull and sluggish condition.

IV. Pride.—This is doing a great deal of harm in the Church of God. If God is blessing us with success, we may see how pride steps in. As long as the spirit of soreness and jealousy is there, it will do much to darken our lives and cripple our usefulness. If we can conquer pride we shall be better able to cope with other temptations.

‘Open doors’ and ‘adversaries’ will come, but we may conquer difficulties by a close walk with God and confidence in our message.

Rev. W. H. Hewett.

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‘To Ephesus, as the capital of the Roman province, and the centre of provincial life, there poured multitudes daily from every quarter of Asia. Hither Gentiles and Jews alike hastened continually on errands of business, religion, and pleasure. And the lecture-room of Tyrannus welcomed all who came, whether attracted by curiosity or by love of the truth. By degrees St. Paul had gathered round him a band of evangelists who carried the Gospel back to their own Asian towns. Thus, to those seven cities of Asia, and to others not numbered in the mystical seven, the faith was first brought; churches were planted and organised, or (to use the Apocalyptic figure) the Divine candlestick was set up, ministering the oil of grace through the golden channels of apostolic order, and burning brightly amid pagan darkness. Thus, St. Paul’s figure of a great door set open exactly describes his joy at finding the Gospel penetrate so soon from Ephesus through Asia.’

STRENGTH OF SPIRIT

‘Be strong.’

1 Corinthians 16:13

Over and over again in Holy Writ we find this short, stirring text. We find it in the mouth of Moses, when, handing over his leadership to Joshua, he bid him more than once ‘be strong.’ It was echoed by the people of Israel, when they vowed to follow their new leader as they had followed the old, if only he would ‘be strong.’ The Lord Himself declared that the Divine power and presence which had been with Moses should be with Joshua, so long as he kept to the command, thrice repeated, to ‘be strong.’ David’s last charge to Solomon urges the same sure method of ruling men.

The appeal is not to the body, nor to the intellect, but to the spirit.

I. Be strong to take the right side.—That is seldom an easy thing. When St. Peter feared to be known as a disciple of the Lord Jesus, and thrice denied Him, it was because he dared not be strong for right. When Pilate gave over the innocent Jesus to be scourged and crucified, it was because he feared the people. And when we know we ought to take our stand openly and bravely for the right, but hold back because we are afraid of the sneers and laughter of our companions, or of the loss of their good opinion, or of our place in the world, wherein are we better? ‘Be strong,’ and take the side of Christ, cost you what it may, unpopular though it be.

II. Be strong in your repentance.—For men are often sadly weak in their dealing with their own souls. They will not dare to look at their sins as God looks at them. They deceive themselves, and try to bury their faults out of their sight. It was said by a master of the spiritual life that most men had a dark room in their hearts where they dare not go with a light. Be strong to be candid with yourself and with God. Be strong to repent of the past. Be strong to believe in the forgiveness won for every earnest penitent by the strength of the sacrifice of Calvary.

III. ‘Be strong’ to fight the battle of a Christian’s life.—When the cross of baptism glittered in shining drops upon your young brow, words were said over each one of you which solemnly dedicated you ‘manfully to fight under His banner against sin, the world, and the devil, and to continue Christ’s faithful soldier and servant unto your life’s end.’ That battlefield is in your own heart, and there you will find your foe. Every temptation to tell a lie, to be dishonourable, to overreach another; every desire to be lazy and careless, selfish and slovenly; every time you are moved to be gluttonous, sulky, unkind, vain, impure, is a challenge from the enemy of your soul. Then, in the name of God, ‘be strong.’ Strong to drive away the foul thought which is brooding, like some hideous night-bird over its prey, over your heart. Strong to control a hasty temper; strong to speak the simple truth; strong to do your plain duty. I know of no better motto for a young man’s life than that furnished by these two words. Kingsley wrote them down when once asked for his favourite text. Let each of us take them and write them over all our life, to be uttered each morning on our knees, ere we go forth to our work and to our labours. ‘Be strong’ against the temptations of the coming day. ‘Be strong’ faithfully to do its duties, bravely to bear its trials, humbly to accept its joys.

Rev. Professor H. C. Shuttleworth.

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‘When the martyrs died a cruel death rather than risk their loyalty to Jesus Christ, they were strong in spirit. Weak women and children were among them, simple and unlearned men were among them. But all knew what it meant to “be strong.” Many will recall the beautiful Academy picture “Diana or Christ,” which proclaims better than words how a weak maiden could “be strong.” Many will have read, in our most popular tale of school life, the true chapter which tells how a young, weak boy knelt down to pray in the midst of a crowd of jeering, bullying schoolfellows, and taught them and us to “be strong.”’

THE CHURCH’S POSITION

‘Quit you like men, be strong. Let all your things be done with charity.’

1 Corinthians 16:13-14

It is with these words of exhortation that St. Paul practically closes the first famous letter to the Church of Corinth. He had dealt in the course of it with many difficulties. He had reproved it for divisions and party spirit. He had spoken sternly against moral disorders. He had reasoned against grave doctrinal errors. He had expostulated with the lack of discipline and decorum. And now, before the last personal salutations are penned, he gives these last few closing sentences of practical advice.

I. Here, as it were, are maxims of Church life and discipline; here is the epitome of the principles requisite for the true health of the corporate body. ‘Quit you like men, be strong. Let all that ye do be done in love.’ Strength and love, manliness and tenderness—that is the Apostolic injunction. And whether for the Church of Corinth in the first century, or for the Church of England in the beginning of the twentieth century, there is the same need for St. Paul’s words. Troubles and difficulties have a knack of reproducing themselves in every age. The causes lie deep-seated in a region which is strangely unaltered. Civilisation wears a different aspect. Men and women are wholly changed in all that concerns the externals of society. But their hearts are the same; their follies are the same; their temptations are the same. This exhortation to robust and courageous vigour, coupled with personal forbearance and gentleness, is at all times deserving of the faithful Churchman’s observation; yet, above all, at periods of strong feeling and varied activity.

II. The appeal to sentiment is a continual menace to our robustness; the call to persistent activity a continual menace to our gentleness. There has been no epoch in the history of the Church at which there have not been apparent very different currents of thought and policy, which have never wholly amalgamated. They are inherent in the differences of character and of education which no processes of argument or persuasion, no discipline of study or learning, will ever eradicate. Unity would be purchased at a fatal cost to the life of the Church by the obliteration of these differences. Men identify themselves with causes; they cluster round leaders; they unite in promoting changes and reforms. This very process furnishes a security for freedom and tends to comprehensiveness. Liberty of thought, variety of expression, faithfulness of utterance—these are the safeguards of Church life. It would be a disastrous day for the Church if it ever became identified with one party or with one shade of opinion. Uniformity could be won, but things more precious would be lost; and the Church cannot afford to lose them. You cannot afford to strike off from the roll of the teachers of your Church either Cranmer or Andrewes, either Hooker or Cosin, either Jeremy Taylor or Butler or William Law, either Simeon or Keble or Maurice. No; we want them all. Nevertheless at any moment and at any juncture, to say as much and to act in that spirit may make its demand upon the true courage and the loving generosity of the members of our Church. ‘Quit you like men, be strong. Let all that ye do be done in love.’

III. There is in the present day a subtle form of temptation which presents itself to kind-hearted and uninstructed members of our Church.—Why preserve the barriers of old time? Why not discard the old furniture and start afresh with more modern philosophy and on more scientific lines? Or, again, why retain the national restrictions of your faith when you can make terms with a Catholicity which admits no variableness and is prepared to welcome all? Cosmopolitanism is a fine-sounding name. But mankind has not yet attained to it. Distinctions of nationality go down to the very roots of life. History cannot be torn up by impulses of amiability. Irresponsible rhetoric can disregard the teaching of centuries. The strong stream of 1900 years of Church life requires high banks. Destroy the banks, and the mighty river spreads over the country—shallow, sluggish, and self-destructive. The cry for a creedless religion and for Christianity without doctrine may be popular with the ignorant, but teaching when it becomes systematic is doctrine; and the epitome of the objects of our belief is creed. Religion without doctrine is superficial sentiment, fed on phrases and ending in Atheism. ‘Quit you like men, and be strong.’ There is nothing to be ashamed of in the historic substance of your faith, if only it be commended by a spirit of love.

IV. It is the nation that needs the Church’s strength and courage.—Let all be done in love. It is the nation that needs the tenderness and loving-kindness of a devoted Church. It is the heart of the nation that yearns for the Spirit of Christ, for the power of His Gospel. ‘We of the Church of England,’ said Bishop Creighton on a memorable occasion, ‘are in close touch with the vigorous life of a free people. The great work which God has assigned to us is to labour for, and with, and through the people. To wish to abandon such a work seems to me little short of treachery; to hope to replace it by a cosmopolitan mission seems to me to be more than folly.’ In love to the people, in devotion to their life, the Church spends its best strength. Beauty of worship, gifts of art, glory of music, riches of offerings, splendour of architecture—yes, these have their place while they are part of the Church’s manliness and strength. They must be no substitute for the offering of life, or the ministration to the living souls. Æstheticism is the terrible test of a rising or a falling faith. As the dedication of the high gifts of beauty and art, it may be a sign of strength; as a demonstration of ecclesiastical splendour or parade of personal vanity, it may be a sign of decay and corruption. ‘Let all that ye do be done in love.’ And if the wealth that is poured out in marble and in flowers be not doubled by the stream that goes forth to spread the Gospel to the poor, there is a lack in that strength and robustness which should guide the common sense and direct the charity of our day and hallow the responsibility for earthly possession and power. For the people—for the brethren’s sake—there is the sphere of the great Church’s work, and with every year the task becomes more tremendous, more heroic.

V. There is more to be done for Christ and for His people than denounce Romanism and hunt for heresy.—There is more to be done than to cry here on this side, and there on that, ‘We alone have the whole Gospel’; ‘We alone represent the sound Church.’ The whole Gospel is not in any one human hand; nor does any one particular shade contain the brightness of the glory of the Body of Christ. Our very zeal may become exclusiveness; the intensity of devotion may make us ignorant of the presence of fellow-worshippers who kneel by our side. Knowledge grows, and with it love; the work widens, and with it love. And as we look round and see the multitudes of our great cities unshepherded and unfed, we discern the true object of the Church’s energy. We hear the anxious questionings of inquirers, who amid the upheaval of old-world science and the inrush of new thoughts, new philosophies, ask whether the Church has still a message for the poor and the destitute; whether the Christ is still the Saviour of the people; whether the mind of the Church still keeps pace with the mind of the country. For manly strength, for fearless courage, let us pray in the unceasing endeavour to unfold the widening truths of the Christian Church. But in zeal and fearless courage, in conflict with half-truths and dull indifference, in answer to sharp criticism and fierce reproach, let all that we do be done in love.

Bishop H. E. Ryle.

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‘Work harmonises many who by their words are unable to come together. “Quit you like men and be strong”—strong in maintaining the historic continuity of our Church from the days of the Apostles, strong in contending for its absolute independence. We take our own line. It is one of robust common sense; it is one of charity. “In these our days,” says the Prayer Book Preface, “we condemn no other nations, nor prescribe anything but for our own people only. For we think it convenient that every country should use such ceremonies as they shall think best to the setting forth of God’s honour and glory, and to the reducing of the people to a most perfect and godly living, without error or superstition; and that they should put away other things, which from time to time they perceive to be most abused, as in men’s ordinances it often chanceth diversely in divers countries.” It is this spirit of resolute independence, on behalf both of truth of doctrine and of the service of the people, which I pray God we shall maintain unto the end and in the very temper of our Prayer Book, with tolerance, dignity, and consideration.’

(SECOND OUTLINE)

STRENGTH AND TENDERNESS

The stability of confidence is necessary to good action. Confidence is the father of success.

I. ‘Quit you like men.’—In which expression I understand two meanings.

(a) That your religion be a sensible, practical, manly religion. Do not let it be a sentimental, morbid thing.

(b) Let all turn to service and usefulness. You are in a world of sorrows; you too are in the body, therefore ‘quit’ you like a brother, or like a sister, to all who suffer.

II. ‘Be strong.’—There are two things which make a strong character. One is, a special impulse, a strong motive. That motive must be the love of God. The love of God always gives strength to a character. But beyond this, there is another and a greater secret of strength—union with the Strong One. Let His strength flow into your weakness, as the sap flows into the feeble tendril. The ivy which clings to the rock is stronger than the oaks which stand in the forest.

III. Strength and tenderness.—There are some who think that strength and tenderness do not often combine. It is a mistake. The arrangement again here is a designed arrangement, and a true one—‘Be strong. Let all your things be done with love.’ ‘Be strong that all your things may be done with love.’

(a) There is great eloquence in the simplicity. ‘Let all your things be done with charity’; exactly show what there is—the atmosphere we live and move and breathe in, an accompaniment of the whole nature, a habit of the heart, shown and felt in the largest and smallest things alike—in all things: ‘let all your things be’—the word ‘done’ is not in the original—‘let all your things be with love.’

CHRISTIAN UNITY

‘If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maran=atha.’

1 Corinthians 16:22

It is not against men who labour under a theological mistake that St. Paul launched his threat, but ‘If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maran-atha.’ That is the one unpardonable heresy—to know what the Lord Jesus Christ has done and is, and not to love Him. With that man no communion may be held, however exact his creed may be.

I. It is not that the English Church thinks little of orthodoxy; nothing can be more alien to her temper than laxity concerning the truth; she considers accurate doctrine as important as a holy life and dogmatic study to be the strong meat of living souls. And yet the acceptance of orthodoxy is not the main teaching of the Church. After telling us that none can be saved without keeping undefined the Catholic faith, she goes on to tell us what the Christian faith consists of—that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in unity. The most faultless set of propositions on the relations of the Divine Persons do not constitute a Catholic creed; but dogma must hush us into worship. And so the English Church writes out a summum Theologiæ, and throws out all who do not accept it; she teaches all to love and rejoice in Christ.

II. We begin then at the right end when we persuade men first and foremost to love God, and to bear patiently with them until they come, under the power of this love, to the treasures of wisdom and knowledge which the Church sees in Him. Men have tried too long to unite men on the basis of the identity of thought first and foremost. The time is surely come to unite them on the ground of a common worship. Who is there who with all his heart and unfeignedly worships the Lord Jesus Christ, bursting out with that cry, ‘Master, Thou art the Son of God; Thou art the King of Israel’? Who is there who, when he feels Christ near, falls prostrate in body and spirit, because he knows himself unworthy of the presence, and is yet rooted to the spot, because his love is the master of his fear, though his satisfaction and desire and love is mingled with alarm and fear and sense of unworthiness? Who is there feels his heart swell within him with joy and hope at the name of Jesus? Who is there that looks for the least motion of the finger of Christ to guide him, and who, when he sees the way whence his beloved Lord has pointed him, would pass all obstacles rather than disobey Christ by turning back? That is the man to whom every Churchman’s heart will go out as St. Paul’s did when he said, ‘Grace be with all them that love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity.’ Oh, why should there be a barricade to sunder such a man from us because he believes a few things more or a few things less than we do, or uses practices which we should not feel at liberty to use, or fears to use some which we think it right and necessary for us to use? Is not our Christian love, our love to Jesus Christ Himself, and therefore to each other, strong enough yet to bear down all these barriers and sweep them away? Dogmas we must have; but Christ died for unity, and that unity can never be promoted except through recognising one another’s devotion, and bearing with one another’s opinions, and best of all by kneeling together, living memorials of His death and passion, knowing that He is alive and among us, and that we are fed on earth with the healthy robustness of the Spirit, eating side by side, and without defilement.

III. Oh, for more love of Christ—how soon would our sins disappear! ‘Oh, to love Him,’ as À Kempis says, ‘as well as any creature can love Him. To be without Him is punishment enough.’ ‘If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maran-atha,’ St. Paul says. Blessed Apostle, I cannot imagine that Gospel spirit could prompt him to deliver these words as a wish or prayer, or as a curse even, on any enemy of Christ. ‘May not this form of curse be an Apostolic rhetoric?’ asks another saint. Is not the truest interpretation of this: ‘If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, he is Anathema Maran-atha—cursed creature’? The chilling of that blessed passion within his breast is the saddest curse, the ‘death of deaths.’ And saintly Herbert, casting about for some terrible imprecation upon himself if he ceased to love Christ, bursts out: ‘Oh, my dear God, let me not love Thee if I love Thee not.’

—Rev. Professor A. J. Mason.

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‘“If these persons be Christians in their lives, and Christians in their practices,” cries holy Jeremy Taylor in his greatest work; “if they acknowledge the Eternal Son of God for their Master and their Lord, and live in all relations as becomes persons making such professions—why should we slight these persons who love God, whom God loves, who are partakers of Christ, who dwell in Christ and Christ in them, because their understandings have not been brought up like ours? They have not met the same books or the same company, or are not so wise, or are wiser—that is, for some reason or other for which I do not understand or blame, they do not believe as I do.”’