Expositions of Holy Scripture: Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John

‘The saints which are at Ephesus and the faithful in Christ Jesus.’ — Eph. i. 1.

That is Paul’s way of describing a church. There were
plenty of very imperfect Christians in the community
at Ephesus and in the other Asiatic churches to which
this letter went. As we know, there were heretics
amongst them, and many others to whom the designation
of ‘holy’ seemed inapplicable. But Paul classes
them all under one category, and describes the whole
body of believing people by these two words, which
must always go together if either of them is truly
applied, ‘saints’ and ‘faithful.’

Now I think that from this simple designation we
may gather two or three very obvious indeed, and very
familiar and old-fashioned, but also very important,
thoughts.

I. A Christian is a saint.

We are accustomed to confine the word to persons
who tower above their brethren in holiness and manifest
godliness and devoutness. The New Testament
never does anything like that. Some people fancy that
nobody can be a saint unless he wears a special uniform
of certain conventional sanctities. The New Testament
does not take that point of view at all, but regards all
true believers in Jesus Christ as being, therein and
thereby, saints.

Now, what does it mean by that? The word at
bottom simply signifies separation. Whatever is told
off from a mass for a specific purpose would be called,
if it were a thing, ‘holy.’ But there is one special kind
of separation which makes a person a saint, and that
is separation to God, for His uses, in obedience to His
commandment, that He may employ the man as He
will. So in the Old Testament the designation ‘holy’
was applied quite as much to the high priest’s mitre or
to the sacrificial vessels of the Temple as it was to the
people who used them. It did not imply originally,
and in the first place, moral qualities at all, but simply
that this person or that thing belonged to God. But
then you cannot belong to God unless you are like
Him. There can be no consecration to God except the
heart is being purified. So the ordinary meaning of
holiness, as moral purity and cleanness from sin,
necessarily comes from the original meaning, separation
and devotion to the service of God.

Thus we get the whole significance of Christian
holiness. We are to belong to God, and to know that
we do belong to Him. We are to be separated from
the mass of people and things that have no consciousness
of ownership and do not yield themselves up to
Him for His use. But we cannot belong to Him, and
be devoted to His service, unless we are being made day
by day pure in heart, and like Him to whom we say that
we belong. A human being can only be God’s by the
surrender of heart and will, and through the continual
appropriation into his own character and life, of
righteousness and purity like that which belongs to
God. Holiness is God’s stamp upon a man, His ‘mark,’
by which He says — This man belongs to Me. As you
write your name in a book, so God writes His name on
His property, and the name that He writes is the
likeness of His own character.

Note, again, that in God’s church there is no aristocracy
of sanctity, nor does the name of saint belong
only to those who live high above the ordinary tumults
of life and the secularities of daily duty. You may be
as true a saint in a factory — ay! and a far truer one — than
in a hermitage. You do not need to cultivate a
mediæval or Roman Catholic type of ascetic piety in
order to be called saints. You do not need to be
amongst the select few to whom it is given here upon
earth, but not given without their own effort, to rise
to the highest summits of holy conformity with the
divine will. But down amongst all the troubles and
difficulties and engrossing occupations of our secular
work, you may be living saintly lives; for the one
condition of being holy is that we should know whose
we are and whom we serve, and we can carry the consciousness
of belonging to Him into every corner of the
poorest, most crowded, and most distracted life, recognising
His presence and seeking to do His will. The
saint is the man who says, ‘O Lord, truly I am Thy
servant; Thou hast loosed my bonds.’ Because He has
loosed my bonds, the bonds that held me to my sins,
He has therein fastened me with far more stringent
bonds of love to the sweet and free service of His
redeeming love. All His children are His saints.

The Old Testament ritual had one sacrifice which
carried this truth in it. It is the first prescribed in
the Book of Leviticus, the ceremonial book — namely,
the burnt offering. Its especial meaning was this, that
the whole man is to be laid upon God’s altar and there
consumed in the fire of a divine love. It began with
expiation, as all sacrifices must, and on the footing of
expiation there followed the transformation, by the
fire of God, from gross earthliness into vapour and
odour which went up in wreaths of fragrance acceptable
to God. So we are to be laid upon the divine
altar. So, because we have been accepted in the
Beloved, and have received the atonement for our
sins through His great sacrifice, we are to be consecrated
to His service and, touched by the fire which
He sends down, we are to be changed into a sweet
odour acceptable to Him as were ‘the saints which are
in Ephesus.’

II. Further, Christian men are saints because they
are believers.

‘The saints’ and ‘the faithful’ are not two sets of
people, but one. The Apostle starts, as it were, on the
surface, and goes down; takes off the uppermost layer
and lets us see what is below it; begins with the
flowers or the fruit, and then carries us to the root.
The saints are saints because they are first of all
faithful. ‘Faithful’ here, of course, does not mean, as
it usually does in our ordinary language, ‘true’ and
‘trusty,’ ‘reliable’ and ‘keeping our word,’ but it means
simply ‘believing’; having faith, not in the sense of
fidelity, but in the sense of trust.

So, then, here is Paul’s notion — and it is not only Paul’s
notion, it is God’s truth — that the only way by which
a man ever comes to realise that he belongs to God,
and to yield himself in glad surrender to His uses, and
so to become pure and holy like Him whom He loves
and aspires to, is by humble faith in Jesus Christ. If
you want to talk in theological terminology, sanctification
follows upon faith. It is when we believe and
trust in Jesus Christ that all the great motives begin
to tell upon life and heart, which deliver us from our
selfishness, which bind us to God, which make it a joy
to do anything for His service, which kindle in our
hearts the flame of fructifying and consecrating and
transforming love. Faith, the simple reliance of a
desperate and therefore trusting heart upon Jesus
Christ for all that it needs, is the foundation of the
loftiest elevation and attainment of the Christian
character. We begin down there that we may set the
shining topstone of ‘Holiness to the Lord’ upon the
heaven-pointing summit of our lives.

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