Bible Commentaries

Apostolic Admonitions

Romans 14:12

Not, we shall give account of ourselves as congregations, councils, committees, boards of direction, organisations; but, as individual souls. We must be very careful, therefore, how we deal lightly or loosely with the doctrine and practice of individualism. Many men would be only too glad to pluralise themselves, and leave the responsibility with the other people. That is the danger of all combinations. A man who is really a Romans 14:16-17

"Let not then your good be evil spoken of: for the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking [R.V.]; but righteousness, and peace [lit, peaceableness], and joy in the Holy Ghost."

Proportionate Character

Here we have an exhortation, and here, secondly, we have a reason for it. "Let not then your good be evil spoken of,"—do not fritter yourselves away; do not let the one thing that is good about you be mistaken or discredited, because of several little things in you that are unworthy of your profession and status in Christ. There is something good in you, take care if it; you are not without quality, do not debase it; be jealous about yourselves, about your character, about its proportion, about its perspective, about all its relations and energies. It is not enough to be good; we may be good, and yet spoil the good. Men thus injure themselves, and no man can injure himself alone: who injures himself injures Christ, crucifies the Son of God afresh, misrepresents the Divine kingdom. It is not enough to say that, with all his eccentricity and peculiarity, he is at the heart of him a good man. It is always a pity when a man so conducts himself that he has to be explained and apologised for in that way, as who should say, After taking oft a hundred wrappings you will come to something that is really not inferior, something that is indeed more or less excellent. That is a poor representation of the Divine kingdom; that is a miserable way of representing the living, loving, pure, beautiful Christ, that he has to be dug out of the grave of our eccentricities and follies.

Let not then your good be discredited. Distinguish between the essential and the incidental. Some people seem to be quite unable to accomplish that little arrangement. Nothing is important to them, because all things are equally important. Where we see nothing but mountains there seem to be no mountains. We may run even great things into monotony and wearisome-ness. The Apostle Paul says, Do make a distinction between one thing and another. God has not painted the universe black and white; observe the fine gradation of shade and colour and mystery of light that there is about everything that God has done. Study proportion. Some men have no idea of the term proportion as applied to Christ's character. They do one thing as intensely as another. That may not be earnestness; it may be mere exaggeration or miscalculation. Why waste yourselves on littles, on frivolities, or trivialities, or mechanisms? Why not get at the root and heart of things? In this way only, by going to the core, can you correctly comprehend God's kingdom and Christ's Cross, and represent the same to men beauteously and persuasively.

Look at the consequences of your being wanting in proportion. Your good will be evil spoken of. Even your greatest beliefs will go for less than they are really worth. People will fasten upon your pedantries, and ritualisms, and ceremonies, and mechanisms, and they will roughly say, What can you expect from people who pay so much attention to pin-points, to trifles? How can they be really great or truly good? If where we really do understand them they are trivial, frivolous, pedantic; if we could understand them still more thoroughly in their souls, we should find that they were true to their own littleness all through and through. Your prayers will be despised; all your best actions will be discounted. Why do you not pay attention to proportion? Why fight about days, and feasts, and fasts, and observances, as if they had anything to do with the kingdom of God? Within their own little limits they may have their significance and their importance, but, when viewed in relation to God's uppermost thought and purpose in the constitution and destiny of the universe, they are comparatively unworthy of attention. The people who hinder the kingdom of God are the people who do not understand it and yet pretend to do so. They are full of what they call habits; they are well-informed in the matter of religious stipulations and maxims; their life is all scheduled out from the rising of the sun to the going down of the same; they live pedantically, puristically, mechanically: but their whole life can be represented adequately on a printed schedule. The Apostle tears down all your little schedules, and says, The kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, getting up at such an hour in the morning, visiting brotherhoods through a part of the day, going out in the evening to see friends and neighbours; that is not the kingdom of God: down with your schedules and your mechanisms! the kingdom of God is righteousness, peaceableness, joy in the Holy Ghost the highest eating and drinking, divinest festival; men at this feast are drunk with the Spirit of God.

That is the exhortation.—"Let not your good be evil spoken of." What is the reason? The reason is given in the seventeenth verse:—"For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost." How penetrating, how profound! We are in the grasp of a great reasoner. Paul always vindicates himself as a majestic philosopher. No matter what the subject is, he discusses it with the ease of mastery. This man Paul has got a sound, thorough grip of his subject. He cannot fail. He knows the question through and through; you can suggest nothing to him. He is full of suggestion, apology, exposition, and defence. How good it is to feel one's soul in the keeping of a strong man! That is what we want at home, in the sick-chamber. There are some persons so healthy that they make others healthy as they draw near, that is to say, they bring a kind of contagion of health with them. Theirs is not that rude boisterous health which is self-trusting, but that complete health of soul and of body which breathes itself into those who are weak and ailing, and in great pain; they say of such visitors, They bring with them morning and youth and summer; they are not overpowering, they are inspiring. It is precisely so we feel towards the Apostle Paul when he preaches, teaches, or expounds. He always seems to be so full of his subject, and to have such grip and mastery of it, that he can make us partakers of his riches if we be right-hearted towards him and towards his subject. Paul had a kingdom, where has that kingdom gone to? Who are these that nibble and mumble and hesitate and apologise in God's pulpit? Who sent them? We have forgotten that God has a kingdom upon the earth, a great conception of rule and sovereignty and majesty; a great scheme of spiritual law and impulse, and incessant and ever-increasing inspiration. The Church is almost anything but a kingdom; in some respects it is about the poorest mendicant that goes about cap in hand soliciting broken bread that it may keep its life within it. The Church has given up the idea of domination—not outward, nominal, formal domination, but the domination which comes of spiritual health and spiritual treasure, and spiritual sympathy. The voice that should make itself heard through all the thunder and tempest and wrath of the ages should be the still, small voice, so still because so majestic, and small because so all-sufficient. Its whisper is more than all other thunder. Let us see if we do not degrade the idea of the kingdom.

What is Paul's conception? It is not eating and drinking; it is not socialism, it is not routine, it is not conviviality. The Church is not an exchange of visits in which men conceal their deepest conviction and suppress their holiest emotions. The Church is not a programme, it is a revelation. We are great in programmes; we can draw out schedules a week long, and we can so draw them out that on the eighth day we forget that we ever conceived them. The Church is in danger of becoming a programme, a series of little things to be done, a succession of amusements, a series of entertainments, a concatenation of interchanges, so that we are here to-day, and there tomorrow: and that we call the brotherhood. Is there anything wrong in these things? Not necessarily; they may be good; but they may also be set out of right perspective and proportion, they may become so exaggerated as really to inflict indignity upon the idea of the Divine kingdom. The men who have hurt the Church a good deal are men who have had some rude or cultured skill in getting up plans and schemes and entertainments. They have not been mischievous in their purpose; on the other hand they have been zealous for what they believed to be the Christian life: but if they have been devoting themselves to the wrong things, and disturbing God's proportion as to the set and significance of his kingdom, then they have unwittingly been doing mischief, and the mischief is not the less that it has been unwittingly done. I can hardly conceive anything less like the Acts of the Apostles than a correct and literal transcript of what many Churches are doing this very day. I am willing to risk the issue upon parallel columns; in the one column shall stand the Acts of the Apostles, and in the other column shall stand the programmes and entertainments and observances of to-day: then tell me, thou blind fool, which is apostolic and which is modern Christianity. If I do want to match the Acts of the Apostles I can do so, but then I shall have to bring in the chronicles of our missionary societies, what we are doing amongst the heathen, and the chronicles of our home missionary societies, what we are doing amongst the home heathen and the home poor. But I do not know that I could honestly go to the ordinary Church life of to-day, especially where it is most respectable, if I really wanted to balance in some humble degree the heroic, the tragic, the appalling record of apostolic life.

What then is the kingdom of God? It is "righteousness." Who wrote that word so often as Paul wrote it? He must surely sometimes have abbreviated it if he wrote much with his own hand, because he was so familiar with it, and used it so frequently that some symbol alone would indicate his meaning. Paul would have no compromises about anything; he would have it settled squarely and rightly; if it was of the nature of compromise, he would not give up the element of right; if he were going to abstain from eating and drinking, he would say, I have a right both to eat and drink, but if you are so constituted that you will be injured by my eating and drinking, then I will overrule that right by a still larger right—the right of charity, the right of self-sacrifice. Still, amid all concessions, and arrangements about Sabbath days, and eating flesh, and drinking wine, Paul would insist upon having the line of right set up, and he would have every concession understood to be a concession and not an acknowledgment of his being wrong, or of the claimants being wise above the revelation which he had received from God. Are social habits then to be neglected? Nay: social habits are to be cultivated, but they are first to be rightly originated. If your habit is a mechanical arrangement, it will go down under pressure: if your habits express your righteousness, peaceableness, and joy in the Holy Ghost, then they are no longer mechanical habits, they express that which is within you of Divine idea, Divine thought, and Divine fire. Habits ought to be incarnations. If a man cannot begin at any point but the point of habit, we must accommodate his weakness; he must, however, be trained to see that the kingdom of God is not external, something to be gazed upon, and measured as if it were a figure in geometry. Little by little some men may have to be trained to see that the whole idea of the Divine kingdom is internal, spiritual, metaphysical, and that even a habit, which seems to be a thing of the hand, goes right back into eternity; it finds in God its origin, its motive, its impulse, and its sanctification. Thus many of our mere habits would have to be torn down and to be publicly discredited. It is easier to cultivate a habit than to enter into the mystery of the life of God. It is easier to go to church than to be in it. Many a man is in the sanctuary, who is a thousand miles away from it at the time of his bodily presence there. Habits are either good or bad, but all depends not so much upon themselves as upon their motive.

Out of all this line of reasoning there will come a great evangelistic and social policy. Now we are prepared for our work. The Apostle has exhorted—"Let not then your good be evil spoken of"; he has told us that "the kingdom of God is not meat and drink," or eating and drinking; "but righteousness, and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost"; if this be so, see what a practical policy comes out of the exhortation and the reason on which it is founded. Here is our missionary policy. We go amongst the heathen to reveal an invisible kingdom. That will take a long time; in proportion to the intensity of the spirituality of the kingdom will time be required to reveal it. They are the wise missionaries who do not begin by upsetting the whole scheme of life in which they find the heathen, but who say, Let us get a right idea into the mind first; as to habits that are grotesque and ludicrous, we must let them go on for a while; if we began our reform at these external points we might do more harm than good; let us therefore live with the people; for a considerable time there need not even be much preaching, let us breathe out our souls in this heathen atmosphere. Let us so act that the heathen will begin to wonder about us; we shall be to them mysteries, enigmas, great wonders: they will not know that we have bread to eat that the world knoweth not of, and yet they will by-and-by begin to suspect this hoarded bread, then they will ask us questions; when an opportunity comes we will drop a word, give a hint, offer a service: but instead of rudely attacking the whole system of habit in the heathen world, let us begin at a comparatively remoter point, yea, a very remote point, and come down gradually upon the whole sphere of life; let our missionary success be an atmosphere, and let it mean a spiritual ministry and influence. It could easily be conceived that many a man would get himself killed by beginning at the wrong end of missionary work. Many a man has been doing more harm than good through not knowing it, through not beginning at the right point. What wisdom we require! We need to be taught everything we do, and we need to say, Father, I will not lift a hand until I am sure I must lift it, nor will I cross the threshold until thou dost send a messenger to go before my face. Thus we need Divine skill, Divine wisdom, as well as Divine sympathy and Divine support. Here we have the great law of action amongst our own home population. If you are going down into what you call the lowest places of your social life with a sort of aggressive, rude, and overpowering reform, you may do more harm than good in the first instance; or you may go down otherwise, with a larger conception of God's kingdom and God's purpose. At first sight you may appear to be doing nothing, but every life is doing something; there cannot breathe an honest healthy soul anywhere without doing good. Sometimes we do more good by wisely-calculated abstention than by that onrush and overpowering energy which often defeats its own purpose. What is it that you are going to reveal to the people? Is it mere eating and drinking? Then take your tables, and your vessels, and all your appurtenances and appointments. But is it a Divine kingdom, a spiritual idea, a newness of soul; are you going to make new habits, or new souls, new workers? you will operate accordingly. You can only embody your own conception: if you have a poor and low conception, you will incarnate it; if you have a lofty, pure, and true conception, you may require more space and more time to work in than others require; but in the long run he who is most spiritual will be most useful.

Here is also a law which will operate in your own family. There are many fathers who ought to be turned out of their own households. I have known fathers who were so impiously pious that they have ruined the lives of their own children by their purisms, pedantic arrangements, mechanical stipulations about rising, and sleeping, and eating, and going out, and coming in;—things that in themselves have a definite importance, but being pressed out of their proper proportion, being exaggerated, they become mischievous. If this were an argument upon paper one man might vex another by cross-examination, and hinder him by mere verbiage; but when it is a question of Christian life, actual, positive, accessible experience, then we must depend upon facts, not upon any man's surmisings and speculations. I have known families in which no honest soul could live. The whole household was a set of programmes and plans and stipulations, all originating with one foolish brain, and all controlled by one tyrannous but feeble hand. We must have a wise home policy, if we are to train the children aright. "Let not your good be spoken evil of." What do your children do when they know that you are little miserable tyrants, mere purists, and not great apostles of the kingdom? This—sneer at your prayers, and when you are pouring out your family supplication they are looking at each other over the shoulder and making grimaces at their foolish father. "Let not then your good be evil spoken of." It is right for you to read the Divine Word, and to offer holy prayer in the family; but if you have been living such a trivial and mechanical life, and if you have been bringing your children into such literal bondage, you cannot expect them to pray; they do not want to pray, and they do not want to go with you to church; your being in church with them destroys the church idea. What then are we to have? Liberty run to seed, mere licentiousness? Nothing of the kind; no wise man could ask such a question or make such a suggestion: what we want is proportion. Children, we would reveal (the father should say) a kingdom of right and peace and joy; not temporary right, not superficial peace, not transient gladness: I tell you, boys and girls, children of mine, we want to reveal a kingdom that is solid, grand, useful, beautiful, that rises all the way up from the rock of righteousness into the gladness of heaven's own rapture and music. Get that idea into the family life, or into the social lite on a larger scale, and all the habits will come, all the rest will fall into its right place. If you have exceptional instances you must treat them exceptionally; I am now speaking upon the broad general ground-plan of life, and I insist that many men in the family are working mischief, who think they are working good, and are paying more attention to discipline than to inspiration.

Here then is. the kingdom with which we are associated. This kingdom cannot be successfully assailed. The kingdom of programmes, and schedules, and ecclesiasticisms, and ritualism, can be assaulted, wounded, shattered: but this kingdom of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost, stands beyond the storm of war, and comes down below it, touching all that is highest in heaven, and all that is deepest in the tragedy of human experience. This is the kingdom we must defend. The critic cannot get at it: the fool cannot understand it: the pedant cannot measure it. If we drag it down to mere documents and dates and signatures, then it is no longer a kingdom, it is an affidavit, it is something for magisterial inquiry. Documents and dates and signatures have their importance, no wise man will doubt that for a moment; but the book is not God's book because it is dated and signed; it is God's book because it has in it a kingdom that can be found nowhere else, speciality of experience and force which cannot be discovered in all the literature of the world. This is a question of experience, this is a question of sublime experience; and the Apostle tells us for our joy that if we take the right view and operate on the right policy, this sublime experience will become a social conquest; it shall not only be "acceptable to God," but "approved of men." There is the social issue; that is the final outcome of things. It is not approved of men at first. Men cannot understand the spiritual, they cannot penetrate the invisible; you may easily be too profound for men: but you can live so, you can live on such a scale, and in such a spirit, as to become a mystery to your fellow creatures. You can be so righteous, so generous, so strong, so tender, so useful, always most present when most needed, that at last they will begin to say, Truly this man also is a son of God!