Is Life Worth Living?
Today we are to ask the Bible to answer the deep question, “What is the true meaning of life?” I shall not insult your intelligence by one word of argument as to the importance of that question. You and I are conscious that we are living. We know that the mysterious and wonderful thing which we call life is passing rapidly away. What a mystery life is — and one which science has not in the least helped us to solve. It is today the same inscrutable mystery it was centuries ago. That its issues are tremendously important, we know, and we ask what is the meaning, the true meaning, including, of course, the true purpose and object of life.
As a truth about which our thought may crystallize, and which I believe opens essentially the heart of the question, I have chosen for a text:
“For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.” — Romans 14:7
In other words, it is impossible for us to isolate ourselves from humanity and from God. We can not do it. Now, I want to plead, first of all, in considern IN MANY PULPITS
tag this question of the Erue meaning of life, for a frank recognition of this fact. No life has found its true meaning until the fact is frankly recognized that the chief value of that life is due to the investment which others have made in it. Your life is valuable to you, it is precious, in the measure in which others have made investments in it. The problem that is before us is not a problem which can be considered without reference to past, present or future. Think of the tremendous investment that others have made in your life and mine. For us, mothers have suffered and prayed. For us, fathers have toiled. Teachers have patiently invested years of effort to win us from ignorance into knowledge. All this has been done that our lives might have some kind of value; and the first right thought of life is that we recognize that that which gives our lives chiefest worth has been invested in us by others. My friends, you and I are the heirs of the ages. For you and me Moses wrote and David sang and the seers prophesied. For you and me, Homer chanted his deathless lays, and a thousand men of genius have toiled and thought and suffered, that you and I might be what we are today. We boast of our liberty; we are proud of being Americans; proud of having a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.” Did you or I ever do anything much that we might be free today — free to say the thing we believed; free to come and go, free to live out our lives? Columbus crossed the stormy seas, our fathers followed him, and in their toil and pain and self-denial wrought out this new empire for man.
“For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.” — Romans 14:7
Can you dispense with all this increment of the thought and toil and suffering and sacrifice of the ages and go back to savagery? You can not do it if you would, and would not do it if you could. But how lightly you and I have been using this marvelous thing of life, as if it were only our own!
The second proposition is that no life has found its true meaning which does not take account of two worlds. The life that now is and that which is to come. Is it a credit to any one whose head is gray, that he begins to think of the other life? I would like to reach those whose heads are not gray, and plead with them to think while it is time, to redeem life from unbelief and baseness and selfishness and narrowness into faith and Tightness and nobility, to think of life as belonging to two worlds now. Two worlds, this one so brief, the other unending! What may be in store for us yonder? That is the question which lifts the temporary, the transitory, into eternal consequence and moment. What have I done today means something for me through all eternity. I have not begun to face the problem of life until I have seen that.
Then, I want to say that no life has found its true meaning which is not right with God. That is one of the last things we think of. By what strange involution of reason have men come to think that the principal business of life is to do approximately the right thing by our fellow man? Such a life leaves out of the problem its mightiest factor — the final, determining factor of all life — God.
Let us think about this for a moment. We were speaking of investments making life precious and valuable. Dear friends, the investment of the ages in you and in me, the heirship which the poorest child born in civilization has by the very fact of being born, is but the smallest part, after all, of the investment which God Himself has made in your life and mine. In the first place, He gives that wonderful thing which we use lightly and think so ignobly about — life. How can a life be right which is out of harmony with its Creator? Science tells us, — modern science, and so far I agree with it wholly, — that the problem of life is being in harmony with environment. That is right. What is the environment of every human being? God.
“For in him we live, and move, and have our being:”
—Acts 17:28
According to science itself, then, no life can be right, no life can, in the best sense, be happy, no life can have any well-grounded hope of happiness in the future, which is inharmonious with God. How many things should move us to get right with God! We are in His universe, we can not get out of it. For weal or woe, for ever and ever, you and I must live within its utmost rim.
How many motives He has given us to make life right with Himself! Think of gratitude. We rightly call ingratitude the basest act of man. There is something about ingratitude — there is something about the man who can receive kindnesses and favors without being moved to gratitude in return, that marks a kind of incurable baseness of nature. You and I have lived on God’s bounty all our lives and perhaps we have never said with David,
“What shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits toward me? — Psalms 116:13
And remember the answer:
“I will take the cup of salvation, and call upon the name of the Lord.” — Psalms 116:13
It is all we can do. Gratitude should move every one of us to get right with God. Prudence should move us to get right with God. Reason alone tells us, — and with this the Bible is in harmony, as it is everywhere and in everything with the highest reason — that there can be no enduring happiness in a life which is out of harmony with God. And we all want to be happy, do we not?
Now, the very foundation thought concerning the problem of life is the thought of its being linked with all other life. Take, for instance, the matter of influence. I am living, let me say, without Christ in the world. By as much as I am an honorable, a kindly, a worthy man, I am imperilling the eternal welfare of all who look up to me. If my life is a linked life, linked with other lives, what right have I to live one minute when my influence may leave a blot on another life?
And the second thought, remember, is that we must take account of life as belonging to two worlds, this and the next. Can there be any more incredible folly than for us to live perilously on the verge of eternity, as we know every one of us does live, without being able to count tomorrow as ours, and to take all the chances of the unending days of the life beyond? Ought we not to be glad that God has made the issue between Himself and humanity so simple? What must we do to get right with God? What must we — all out of harmony in our selfishness, with His unselfishness, in our hatred, with His love, in our sins, with His holiness — what must we do to come into harmony with Him, to have our life beat in time with the life of the eternal? He makes one simple, definite proposition to us, and it is wrapped up, not in doctrine, but in a person. His one proposition is Jesus Christ.
All life turns, in the last analysis, on the right answer to that question,
“What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ?”
—Matthew 27:22
Pilate’s question. Right with God, we are right with humanity. Right with God, through Jesus Christ, we are right for the next world as well as for this.
All the problems of life, the whole meaning of life, centers on that one thing — what is Christ to me and what am I to Him? I can not go back to the law — it only curses me, for I have broken it. I can not begin today, if it were possible for me to do so, to live so that every act of my life shall be pleasing to a holy God, for first of all I have no power to do it, and secondly, there is my record up to today. What can make me right with God?
To do the thing He has commanded me — believe on Jesus Christ whom he hath sent. Trust Him. Give myself away to Him. Put my whole case into His hands. Let Him take this life, so full of evil, and put the evil out of it. Let Him take this life so full of weakness and fill it with strength. Let Him take this life so selfish and self-centered, and let it flow out in all its breadth to humanity. Let Him make it over. Let Him purify it. Let Him solve all its problems. Let Jesus Christ fill it.
“BY GRACE THROUGH FAITH”
“BY GRACE THROUGH FAITH”
“For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:” — Ephesians 2:8
I PREFER the rendering in the Revised Version. As slight as the change is, it is of very great moment, as a little reflection will show.
“For by grace have ye been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God:” — Ephesians 2:8
There is a vast significance in this change of tense. The Ephesian saints were not being saved, nor to be saved, but they were saved. That was the great message they got in this letter; and if there had been nothing else to give joy to their hearts, that alone should have filled them to overflowing. You see this, I am sure. Suppose you were sailing from one of our eastern seaports, that your destination was the other side of the stormy ocean, and you could be assured upon authority beyond question that your vessel should come into port. What a comfort it would be to you when you encountered the storms! When your ship, tossed here and there and beaten upon by the resistless waves, seemed as if it must surely go to the bottom, you would stay your hearts upon the promise that notwithstanding the storm, you should conn- safely into port.
The apostle did not say what trials they should pass through, nor from what trials they should be spared; he did not say what tears should come to their eyes, nor what joy to their hearts, but he said they were saved. These things might rend them asunder at times, might almost overwhelm them, but they were saved, and, being saved, knew that after the storm of life was over, they were sure to anchor in the port of heaven.
Let us look at the passage itself. We have here, as you see, two wonderful things. First, a wonderful result; secondly, the wonderful means by which that result is accomplished. The wonderful result is salvation.
“By grace have ye been saved.” — Ephesians 2:8
My friends, we have grown so familiar with that thought, that all wonder, strangeness and joy have gone out of it. I stand in amazement at my own apathy, at my own lack of emotion, at my own ability to speak in calm and measured words about so great a thing as salvation, accomplished for a doomed soul. Familiarity has done this for us. We count it a common thing. We are scarcely interested in it. Now and again people wonder why one who preaches does not choose the deeper things of God, why he is always talking about so familiar a thing as salvation.
I remember talking some years ago with a bank teller, and I asked him how it seemed to him to be handling vast sums of money all of the time. “Why,” said he, “I never think of this coin and these notes as money, but only as so many figures upon a piece of paper.” So, familiarity with salvation may make it seem to us as but a plan — words upon a piece of paper.
A friend was telling me, that when visiting the home of a very wealthy man on the New England coast, he saw in one of the most beautiful rooms of the house, displayed among costly things from over the sea — rare pictures and works of art — a common life preserver. “It seems to me,” he ventured to say to his host, “a strange fancy of yours to hang up that ordinary life preserver among all these rare and beautiful things.” “That,” was the reply, “is where you make a mistake. That is not an ordinary life preserver, it is a very extraordinary life preserver; it kept me alive four days at sea.” Dear friends, when we think of salvation not as a place, but as that mighty transaction which gave us life, which keeps us alive and is to keep us alive, we shall get back the joy of it, and the wonder of it, and it will never become a common thing to us.
The fact is, that to many of you, salvation never seemed a very wonderful or joyful thing. Your conversion perhaps was a very listless affair; so much so, that it has hardly left a trace in your memory; you do not know just when you were converted. It was a sort of sauntering out of darkness into light, st IN MANY PULPITS
and done in a very listless kind of way. May God send conviction in these days! David said:
“The pains of hell gal hold upon me:” — Psalms 116:3
And we should not wonder, therefore, when David came out of the pains of hell, that he began to talk about the joy of his salvation. Some one has said that the reason Mr. Moody preached the gospel with such power was that God had permitted him to look into hell and up into heaven.
Salvation is not a common thing. Think what it is to be saved. It means deliverance from an awful doom. I do not know how awful, but I know some things about it because the Bible tells us some things about it. I know it is separation from God. It is separation from the good. I know that the Bible exhausts the resources of language to pen the horrors and woes, condensed into that little word which we spell with four English letters — lost. It is darkness, it is death, it is fire, it is the undying worm — and all these for eternity. Now, it is salvation from that. Is that a light thing? Is that a thing to be indifferent about? Is that a thing to get tired of preaching about?
Then, on the positive side of it, it means pardon full and free; everything forgiven, everything forgotten; the slate wiped clean, not one trace of our sins even in the memory of God; not one transgression left, everything blotted out and gone. You know the promise:
“I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions,”
—Isaiah 44:22
When a thick cloud is blotted out, is there any scar left upon the surface of the sky? Is there any trace showing where the cloud was? No, it is gone completely, and the blue is there just as blue as it ever was, just as clean as it ever was. That is in salvation.
But salvation is more than that. The great thing in salvation is, after all, that it brings us into harmony with God; it sets us right with Him. Did you ever think of it? it is not pardon which saves. The pardon removes penalty and makes salvation possible. It would not be a kindness to set free all the convicts in the penitentiary today. It would merely be giving them an opportunity to commit new crimes, to load their souls with new guilt. But if one should go down to that sad place proclaiming pardon, and then put within each who accepted it a new heart, a heart that naturally and spontaneously of itself and without effort, loved honesty, virtue and right dealing, it would be a grand thing to turn all the convicts out of the penitentiary. That is precisely what salvation does.
Skeptics ask why God does not save them if He wishes to. If God were to bring all unbelievers into heaven at their death, they would not be happy there; they would simply spoil heaven, and make it what this earth is. Salvation is reconciliation to God, loving what God loves, hating what God hates, and
St; IN MANY PULPITS
desiring, even against one’s self, that God’s will may be done. This is the larger part of salvation.
I read a story about two excursions that went out of the harbor of buffalo, New York. One carried a crowd oi men going to a prize fight; the other carried a Sunday School picnic. It happened that one out of each of these crowds got on the wrong boat. A prize fighter got on the boat that carried the Sunday School children, and a deacon got on the boat that carried the prize fighters; and probably the two unhappiest men on Lake Erie that day were those two men, simply because they were out of their right environment. The prize fighter was utterly miserable; and the deacon — you may imagine his feelings as he journeyed over the waters of Lake Erie with that swearing, hoodlum set.
Salvation is not a question of locality; it is not a question of surroundings; it is a question of being made right with God. That salvation does, and that is the larger part of salvation. Think of it,
‘’By grace have ye been saved” — Ephesians 2:8
made right with God, got a new heart. Salvation means becoming a child of God, coming into the family of God, sitting down at the table of God, as an heir of God and a joint heir with Jesus Christ. And it means eternal rest and peace and joy; and the eternal begins now.
We have the wonderful means of salvation set forth in this text and that in two words, “grace” and “faith.” Let us look at these words.
“By grace have ye been saved through faith;”
—Ephesians 2:8
Not by faith through grace. Faith does not save; grace saves through faith. Grace the divine side, faith the human side. These two things must come together to produce salvation. Faith here, grace there. When faith and grace meet the man is saved. He is not being saved, nor to be saved, but he is saved. When his faith meets God’s grace, the deed is done.
“Grace” — what is grace? There have been a great many definitions of grace — some have been helpful, some not. There is a story of a little girl who said, when asked what grace was: “Please, sir, it is getting everything for nothing.” That is very good, but grace is more than that. If the little girl had said: “It is one who deserves everything bad, getting everything good for nothing,” it would have been nearer a definition of grace.
Grace is more than mercy; grace is more than love; grace is the largest word in the Bible. It is the greatest word, the most inclusive word, and holds in its contents more than any other word of human speech. Imagine a criminal guilty of having robbed his best friend. And will you just let me say, dear friends, that the most moral and respectable and decent man and woman in this audience has done that. No unbeliever here or anywhere else ever had so good a friend as God — never. For whatever we may have done or left undone, we have simply lived upon His grace up to this day — we have breathed it, eaten it, slept on it. We would not have been here but lor His grace; and it is He whom we have robbed of the affection that is His right due; robbed of the service that belongs to Him; robbed of fellowship; robbed of all that might give Him joy and requite His kindness. Imagine, I say, a criminal who had robbed his best friend and now stood before his judge. If the friend whom he had injured were to plead with the judge to have mercy on him, that would be wonderful, would it not? That would be marvelous kindness. If the wronged one were to come and plead with the judge for the ingrate standing there in his guilt, that would be wonderful. But grace does more than that. And if the wronged one were to love the wretch who had wronged him, really love him, that would be even more wonderful. But grace is more than that. To get a true illustration of grace, you must have the wronged one coming to the judge and saying, “Let the sentence fall on me; I do not ask that this righteous law shall be set at naught, and treated as a thing to be set at naught; the law is right. But let it sheathe its word in my breast, and let him go free.” That is grace, dear friends, that is grace.
“Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree” — i Peter 2:24
All the waves and billows of God’s wrath went over Him whom we have wronged.
“By grace have ye been saved through faith;”
—Ephesians 2:8
What is faith? Grace reaches the sinner through faith; it is the channel. So much is evident on the very surface of it. It is not saving in itself, but only instrumentally. Some people have tried to make out that there is such a thing in Scripture as a faith character, that God so approves of the faith principle, that for the sake of the Tightness of a heart which is exercising faith, He pardons. The Bible knows nothing of that. The Bible is not a book of dreams. It is not a book of indefinite theologies. The Bible is a plain straightforward book, one that any wayfaring man may read and know; and it never speaks of faith character, or any other character as the ground of salvation. Faith is the channel through which grace comes. But what is faith? A skeptical physician asked that question of a Christian patient. He said: “I could never understand saving faith. I believe in God and I suppose I believe in Jesus Christ — I am not conscious of any doubts. I believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and I believe in the Bible, yet I am not saved. What is the matter with me?” “Well,” said the patient, “a day or two ago I believed in you, I believed in you as a very skillful physician: I believed that you would be able to heal me if I should get sick. Then I realized that I was sick, and I sent for you and put myself in your hands to be healed. In other words I trusted you. For two days now I have been taking some mysterious stuff out of a bottle. I don’t know what it is, I don’t understand it, but I am trusting you.” Now, whenever you turn to the Lord Jesus Christ and say, “Lord Jesus, Christianity seems to me to be full of mysteries. I do not understand them, but I believe Thou art trustworthy and 1 trust Thee; I commit myself to Thee.” That is faith. A very simple thing, is it not? The faith of the patient did not heal him; it was the remedy that healed him; but the faith took the remedy. Saving faith is the faith that takes Christ to save. But does not the text say:
“not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:” — Ephesians 2:8
and are you asking, What is it, this “gift of God?” There are three things, grace, faith, salvation, and these are all the gift of God. But here is the significant fact, dear friends, here begins your responsibility: of this wonderful trio — grace, faith, salvation — you have already received the gift of faith. Now you are saying: “If I have faith, if already God has given me faith, why am I not saved?” Because you have not used it rightly — that is all.
Faith! Why, you do not go an hour of the day without faith; you could not live tomorrow without faith. You have faith in the banks; you have faith in the railroads; faith in your fellow man; faith in the family tie; faith in the honor of your husband or your wife; faith all around; faith in every thing but the Christ who alone is worthy to be trusted. We trust everything that changes, everything that disappoints, everything that fails, and refuse to trust Him who never fails and never disappoints. But we can not stand up before Him and say we have not the power to do it, because we are exercising faith in all kinds of inferior things every day of our lives, and because we have but to take that same faith and lift it up till it is fixed upon Him, and we have formed the bridge over which that marvelous grace comes, and grace brings salvation.
“For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men,” — Titus 2:11
says Paul, and it comes over the bridge of faith.
I remember some years ago when the Southern Hotel in St. Louis was destroyed by fire, there was an inquiry made by the authorities into the cause of the disaster. Some of the servants of the hotel who had been rescued from the topmost story, right under the roof, by the heroism of an Irish fireman, were giving their testimony, and a question was asked of one of these servant girls: “How were you saved from this fire?” “Why,” she said, “Mr. O’Toole, the fireman, broke into the room and said: ‘Maggie, let me take you down the ladder,’ and I let him. That is the way I was saved.”
Dear friends, do not make difficulties about these things where there are no difficulties. Faith is a gift and you have it. Grace is a gift and you may have it; and when you get it you will get salvation with it. That is the simplicity that is in Christ; that is the blessed gospel of God’s free grace. But it is all a gift; it is not for sale. God is not trading in this matter of salvation; He is not giving a little salvation for a little goodness, and a little more salvation for a little more goodness. There is no trading; it is a free gift.
There was a poor woman whose little child was sick. She lived near Windsor Castle and could look over into the palace gardens and see the grapes growing there. She thought how good it would be if she could have a few of those grapes for her little fevered child. So she took a shilling and went into the Queen’s garden and said to the gardener: “I want to buy a shilling’s worth of those grapes.” “Do you know,” he replied, “those grapes belong to the Queen and the Queen does not sell grapes?” It happened that just then one of the Queen’s children was standing by, and he said, “My good woman, my mother does not sell grapes, but she will give you just as many as you need.”
Well, God is not selling salvation. It is a gift or nothing, and it is for you today. What are you going to do with it? In His name, I ask you what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do with the grace of God before the close of this sermon, and it is nearly done? I have no warrant from my Master to give you one hour. You do not need a minute. People talk about “thinking it over;” you have thought it over all your lives. You need to act.
Will you trust Him, this Jesus who offers you eternal salvation through grace?
“not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”
—John 14:27