Saints and Faithful

‘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.

Note how here Paul sets forth the object of our faith
and the blessedness of it. I do not think I am forcing
too much meaning into his words when I ask you to
notice with what distinct emphasis and intentional
fulness he employs the double name of our Lord here
to describe the object upon which our faith fixes,
‘Faithful in Christ Jesus.’ We must lay hold of the
Manhood, and we must lay hold of the office. We
must rest our soul’s salvation on Him as our brother,
Jesus who was incarnate in sinful flesh for us; and we
must also rest it on Him as God’s anointed, who came
in human flesh to fulfil the divine loving-kindness and
purposes, and in that flesh to die. A faith in a Jesus
who was not a Christ would not sanctify; a faith in a
Christ who is not Jesus would be impalpable and
impotent. We must take the two together, believing
and feeling that we lay hold upon a loving Man, ‘bone
of our bone and flesh of our flesh’; and also upon Him
who in His very humanity is the Messenger and Angel
of God’s covenant; the Christ for whom the way has
been being prepared from the beginning, and who has
come to fulfil all the purposes of the divine heart.

And notice, too, how there is suggested here also, the
blessedness of that faith, inasmuch as it is a faith in
Christ. The New Testament speaks in diverse ways
about the relation between the believing soul and
Jesus Christ. It sometimes speaks of faith as being
towards Him, and that suggests the going out of a
hand that, as it were, stretches towards what it would
lay hold of. It sometimes speaks of faith as being on
Him, which suggests the idea of a building on its
foundation, or a hand leaning on a support. And
it sometimes speaks, as here, of faith being ‘in Him,’
which suggests the folded wings of the dove that has
found its nest, the repose of faith, the quiet rest in the
Lord, and ‘waiting patiently for Him.’ Such trust so
directed is the one condition of such tranquillity. Then,
again, note a Christian is all that he is because he is
‘in Christ.’ That phrase ‘in Him’ is in some sense
the keynote of this Epistle to the Ephesians. If you
will look over the letter, and pick out all the connections
in which the expression ‘in Him’ occurs, I think
you will be astonished to see how rich and full are its
uses, and how manifold the blessings of which it is the
condition. But the use which Paul makes of it here is
just this — everything in our Christian life depends
upon our being rooted and grafted in Jesus. Dear
brethren, the main weakness, I believe, of what is
called Evangelical Christianity has been that it has not
always kept true to the proportionate prominence
which the New Testament gives to the two thoughts,
‘Christ for us,’ and ‘Christ in us.’ For one sermon
that you have heard which has dwelt earnestly and
believingly on the thought of the indwelling Christ
and the Christian indwelling in Him, you have heard
a hundred about the Sacrifice on the Cross for sins,
and the great atonement that was made by it. Those
of you, who have listened to me from Sunday to Sunday,
know that I am not to be charged with minimising or
neglecting that truth, but I want to lay upon all your
hearts this earnest conviction, that a gospel which
throws into enormous prominence ‘Christ for us,’ and
into very small prominence ‘Christ in us,’ is lame of
one foot, is lopsided, untrue to the symmetry and
proportion of the Gospel as it is revealed in the New
Testament, and will never avail for the nourishment
and maturity of Christian souls. ‘Christ for us’ by all
means, and for evermore, but ‘Christ in us,’ or else He
will not be ‘for us.’

III. Lastly, a Christian may be a saint, and a believer, and in Christ Jesus, though he is in Ephesus.

Many of you know that probably the words ‘in
Ephesus’ are no part of the original text of this epistle,
which was apparently a circular letter, in which the
designation of the various churches to which it was
sent was left blank, to be filled in with the name of
each little community to which Paul’s messenger from
Rome carried it. The copy from which our text was
taken had probably been delivered at Ephesus; and, at
any rate, one of the copies would go there. What was
Ephesus? Satan’s very headquarters and seat in Asia
Minor, a focus of idolatry, superstition, wealth, luxury
springing from commerce, and moral corruption.
‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians.’ The books of
Ephesus were a synonym for magical books. Many
of us know how rotten to the core the society of that
great city was. And there, on the dunghill, was this
little garden of fragrant and flowering plants. They
were ‘saints in Christ Jesus,’ though they were ‘saints
in Ephesus.’

Never mind about surroundings. It is possible for us
to keep ourselves in the love of God, and in the fellowship
of His Son wherever we are, and whatever may
lie around us. You and I have too to live in a big,
wicked city, and to work out our religion in a society
honeycombed with corruption, because of commerce
and other influences. Do not let us forget that these
people whom Paul called ‘saints’ and ‘faithful’ had a
harder fight to wage than we have, with less to hearten
and strengthen them in it. Only remember if the
‘saints in Ephesus’ are to be ‘in Christ,’ they need to
keep themselves very straight up. The carbonic acid
gas is heavy and goes down to the bottom of the cave,
and if a man will walk bolt upright, he will keep his
nostrils above it; but if he stoops, he will get down
into it. Walk straight up, with your head erect, looking
to the Master, and your respiratory organs will be
above the poison. If we are to be in Christ when we
are in Ephesus, we need to keep ourselves separate and
faithful, and to keep ourselves in Christ. If the diver
comes out of the diving-bell he is drowned. If he
keeps inside its crystal walls he may be on the bottom
of the ocean, but he is dry and safe. Keep in the
fortress by loyal faith, by humble realisation of His
presence, by continual effort, and ‘nothing shall by
any means harm you,’ but ‘your lives shall be holy,
being hid with Christ in God.’