The Law of the Spirit of Life

“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death” — Romans viii. 2.

This is Paul’s cry of triumph over the great emancipation of his life. It is very interesting to see the remarkable variety of ways in which the great apostle describes his conversion. It was so real to him that it was new every morning. As his life shifted and advanced the relation to that critical event of his life when he became the disciple of Jesus Christ was always changing. There could be no better study, I think, of the real nature of conversion and regeneration than a collection and comparison of the various aspects in which the change of his own life presented itself to St. Paul, and the different descriptions that he gave of it. It would at least impress us with the idea of the largeness and the life which that experience possessed in his eyes, so that no one description could comprehend it all. I do not propose any such great study to-day; I only want to take one of the richest of his accounts of his new life, and see how far we can get at and appropriate its meaning. Hear it again: “The law of the spirit of life in Jesus Christ has made me free from the law of sin and death.”

The statement is not theological, except in the best and broadest sense. It is not technical or abstract. It is the real story of a real man’s experience told in what to him was the simplest way. And it is universal. It is the story of something that is going on here in our midst, of something that has come or may come in the life of every soul I speak to. I wish we could all feel this at the beginning. Unless Paul’s life was such as yours and mine might be, if all this slavery and freedom that he tells about was special and exceptional in Paul, all our best interest in Paul evaporates. If he is a curiosity and not a type, why should we preach about him? But he is a type. This experience of his is the possible experience of everybody, has been the actual experience of thousands. It has in it the deepest secret of human life. Let us see if we can find it out and understand it.

“The law of the spirit of life has set me free from the law of death.” Those are great words. They touch this truth first: That only a law can really set a man free from a law. Only a better law can deliver a man out of the power of a worse law. See how true that is. A law is simply a power in orderly and continuous action. We use the word most competently, as if we understood all about it, but really that is all we know. The law of gravitation is simply the orderly and continuous working of that unknown force that draws every atom to every other. The law of the sunrise is only the orderly and continuous operation of those powers which, combining, send the glory daily up the east. A single falling apple, a single sunrise is not a law. It is a miracle. The power must repeat itself with steady and orderly continuance. Then comes the law.

And the same is true of moral laws. We say that industry is the law of a man’s life. That does not mean that once or twice, here and there, he has yielded to the necessity of work, or even labored with enthusiasm, but it suggests the constant obedience to the continual impulse, the steady pressure on his life of a well-regulated, unremitting power. If a man’s law is sensuality we have in his life the ever-present power of lust working its terrible results according to its nature. If a man is under the law, in the dominion, of theft or drink, he is not the man whose life, ordinarily sober and honest, occasionally gives way, breaks down before a shining piece of booty or a tempting glass of liquor; he is the man in whom the power of dishonesty or intemperance works orderly and continuously, crushing him under its never intermitted weight. This whole impression of steady, unbroken pressure from a force behind is the impression of law. It is not fitful; it is fateful. The man is not simply vexed by it; he is held by it; he is its slave. And now what can release a man from such a pressure? Evidently only something as steady and continuous as the pressure itself. A mere temporary resistance cannot do it. A mere check in the order does not destroy the order. You do not free the stream from the great law which is forcing it down to the sea by merely throwing a dam across it, which only hinders it and chafes it. By and by the water that you tried to fence away has broken through, and, all the more violently because you tried to stop it, the stream is tumbling and foaming along the old channel. You must make a new channel. You must slope the ground with steeper declivity another way. You must bring a new power as orderly and as continuous as the old; in other words, you must make a new law before your stream is really free from the old law and runs a new way as freely as it ran the old.

I dwell upon this because it seems to me important. Only a new law can give a man freedom from an old law. And yet every day we see men ignoring this truth. Every day we see men trying to get loose from the old despotic laws of their life, not by the establishment of any new law but by some one spasmodic struggle which is a mere log thrown across the stream, and had no real power over the current. You see a man whose law of life is idleness, any one of the men of wasted faculties who are sown along all through our society and weaken our social structure from top to bottom. There is hardly one of them who once in his life at least has not had a burst of energy, scarcely one who in some moment of shame has not determined that he would be free and gone and thrown himself headlong into some hard work in a way that startled and amazed his friends. Almost all the idle men who are really good for anything have done this once in their lives. How is it that they come back again into the ranks of idleness and live again in the weary bondage of doing nothing? It was because they set up no new law, no law of industry. No orderly scheme, made up of motive, method, and anticipated result, no reasonable habit of industry was taken and fastened on their lives. One violent struggle was made, but a settled law laughs at a violent struggle. Any settled government makes little of mere furious ebullition, and is only afraid of consistent and organized purpose. This is the reason of these failures. Before you can get free from the law of falsehood that rules you, you must adopt and submit yourself to the law of truth. Before you can shake off the law of lust you must be willing to accept the law of purity with all its hard denials and severe disciplines. No struggle sets a man free more than a struggle can set a nation free. For both, nothing but a law can break the bondage of a law.

And this seems to me almost as important on the other side. There are good laws of life against which the evil parts of us are always trying to rebel. It is good for us to know — it is often just what we need to help and encourage us — that no outbreak of evil sets us free from the dominion which the good has been establishing over us. Not till the evil becomes a law does it really break up the law of goodness to which we have been trying to submit ourselves. The distinction between the spasmodic outbreak of evil passion, however violent, and the deliberate acceptance of evil principle is a distinction that every system of morality must draw and every soul must recognize. The Bible, that wonderful book of human life, is full of the distinction. This last, the deliberate acceptance of an evil principle, is what it calls the sin against the Holy Ghost, so deep as to be almost unforgivable, almost irrecoverable.

Suppose some one of you has come here this morning with just this burden on his soul. You have been trying to be good. Not merely to do certain good things, but to have goodness established itself as the law in your soul. You have felt that your trial was succeeding. More and more that strong and gentle power was working in orderly and continuous action upon you, more and more the sweet and pure dominion of holiness was treating you as its servant, — but yesterday, perhaps, it all broke down. You did some flagrant deed, you spoke some brutal word that seems to you to have undone everything. You seem to have wrenched yourself out of the gracious law that has been ruling you. Alas, if such be any man’s history it is very sad, it is very bad, but do not fail to see just how bad it is. No sudden volcanic eruption, however it may interrupt, can break and cast away the law. If only you have not deliberately chosen the evil and are not choosing it now, if only there is no new law of wickedness set up in your heart, my dear friend, the old law is not broken and you need not despair. You may come back penitent and humbled, less confident and perhaps, therefore, all the more strong, to put yourself anew under the great sway of the law of righteousness from which you are not cast out, for only a new law can really break an old law off.

And now with this understanding of the terms which he uses we come back to St. Paul’s statement. He is accounting for his own life, and he says that a new law has set him free from an old law, the law of life had released him from the law of sin and death. He had been living away back then under the law of sin and death. Remember what we said that a law was — a power in steady and continuous operation. It need not be violent. It need not make a noise. How silently the laws of nature work day after day, year after year, in building up or gnawing down the mighty structure of the planet. Power in steady and continuous operation, that is all. And so the law of sin and death under which Paul has lived, what was it? Nothing flagrant certainly. It does not describe the life of any outrageous ill-doer whose outbursts of iniquity had shocked and scared his brother men. Only the steady, unremitted, continuous pressure of a downward force upon the life, only the slow but certain disintegration of its nobler parts, the unseen and uninterrupted crumbling away of the truth, the purity, the lovingness, the religiousness of the nature, wickedness in not unpleasing shapes, selfishness and self-deception like disease eating out the moral healthiness, — only this is the picture of his life as he looks back upon it, the steady continuous work of evil passions killing out the noblest capacities, — the law of sin and death. How the statement stops short with the simple fact. It is terrible in its simplicity. It does not philosophize nor explain. It does not say where the law came from nor who made it. It only remembers the simple fact. The soul of the apostle seems to shudder as he looks back and describes it. Men might explain it as they would. He only told the fact and seemed, as he told it, to feel still the hard, cold, fatal pressure of that law of sin in which he had been held so long. It was as if one of the people who went down in the sinking steamer last winter and came up again, and was saved, should tell you of the moments when he felt himself grasped tight in the terrible embrace of the ocean, fast held in the law of the water. He would not philosophize. He would use no vehement or excited words. He would not explain. Only once more it would seem to him, and he would make you feel as if the terrible, close, solid, quiet pressure of the water was on the heart and the head, the world shut out, the sky lost forever, and the man sinking deeper and deeper into the endless depths. That is the way in which Paul talks about the time when he was a slave to the law of sin and death.

You must think, as I speak, who the man is who said this about himself. It is St. Paul, and he is speaking of a time in his life when there was no young man in Jerusalem more highly considered, more respectable than he. He is speaking of the time when he was Gamaliel’s disciple and first among the young students of the law. The higher inspiration had not yet entered into his life, but he was earnest, ambitious, devoted, and personally pure. This is the young man who afterwards, looking back upon his early life, knew that in all these well-seeming years he had been the subject of a steady process of moral and spiritual deterioration.

Does it not startle us when we hear such a man say such things about himself? Does it not make us in imagination lay our life down by his and ask, If that is his account of himself, what ought we to be thinking of ourselves? May it not be that we are in the same terrible grasp that was holding him? May it not be that he is simply the clearest-sighted and most serious-minded among a company of light-hearted slaves, — or rather he is a slave who has escaped, and comes back, and stands outside the walls inside of which we have lived so long and so contentedly that we have forgotten they are a prison, and tells us there how the old slavery seems to him now, and what the new liberty is like. May it not be that we are still under the law of sin and death, and that this is the real explanation, the dissatisfaction and restlessness which we have tried to I soothe with games and cure with sweetmeats? My ’ dear friends, it is not for men like us to say that a man like St. Paul was exaggerating when he de- scribed our human life. It is rather for us to see if his be not the only true description of it, whether these calm and commonplace lives of ours have not in them really all the tragedy that was so terrible to him!

We may look at this more in detail. And I beg you to set your conscience free to act upon it freely 1 as I speak. Every bad law under which we live has; its three kinds of bad effects: it tells upon the char-! acter, and upon the standards, and upon the destinies of those who live under it. It is impossible for a state to live under a bad law without being demoralized in its character and perverted in its judgments and injured in its prosperity — all three. And now, if we are really living under a power of selfishness which is really, however silently and placidly, getting us more and more into its power and crumbling out our moral life, it will tell in all these three ways: we shall be its slaves in our characters, in our judgments, and in our destinies. Let me take the average man of perfect respectability. To charge that man with flagrant vice would be absurd. His hands are pure of other men’s money. His word may be trusted and his thoughts are pure; but if we could talk quietly and without prejudice and very freely together — talk as hardly any man living has a right to talk to any other, but as one may speak to a company of his fellow-men together, as earnestly as if he spoke to them singly — if we could talk thus, I would try to get that man to look at his own life calmly.

Consider yourself. How has it fared, first, with your character? Are you a better man or a worse than you were away back, ten, twenty, years ago? Is your moral fibre firmer or feebler? Are you more or less likely to do an unselfish, self-sacrificing thing? Are you as purely, simply true, as truly simply pure as you were when you were a boy? Do not tell me that you are just the same. That cannot be. You must be moved by some influence. You must be subject to some law. If you know that you are growing weaker and not stronger, narrower and not broader, worse and not better, there can be no doubt you are under the law of sin and death.

And then think of your judgments. How is it? Can you speak up boldly and pronounce upon the moral character of the actions that are done about you with a fearless and unhesitating voice? Is there nothing, no power of venerable tradition, no fear of biting ridicule, to make you disguise and pervert and color the straight, clear standards of your soul? Can you call the bad man bad, the mean man mean, the hypocrite a hypocrite, and the unpopular saint a saint? If not, if the false standards all around you distort your judgments and frighten your courage, what can you say about yourself in your weak conformity? Are you not a slave to the law of sin and death, to the evil tendency that is working in the world? And then think of your destiny. Is it not true that you are suffering mow the consequences of sins that you did long ago? Your past sin as well as your present has you in its power. What means that ache in your body, what means that foul association in your mind? Are you the same that you would be if you had begun to live and sin this morning, and had not lived and sinned for years, with fathers and mothers who have lived and sinned before you? Ah, my dear friends, do you not see that it needs no violent, excited words. Every time we look into our characters, our judgments, or our conditions, — every time we rise and try to stir into a better life we find the law of sin holding us back So long as the drop flows with the current it seems to be free; so long as we arc satisfied with our life it seems as if there were no slavery about it. The moment one drop tries to breast the current it finds its helplessness. The moment we try to escape out of our worldliness and selfishness, there tightens about us the hard, close grasp of the law of sin and death.

And now we must pass on. This is the law of death which Paul remembered. But from this law he had been set free, and in these triumphant words he tells us what had delivered him. The law of the spirit of life hath set me free from the law of death. See, in the first place, how true what we said before is: only a law can set the man free from a law. Nothing less radical, less persuasive, less continuous than the power that enslaves can be the power to free. No mere shock of galvanic movement can stop the law of death that is working in the moral nature. What can stop death? What can go underneath the tyranny and universality of decay and undermine and conquer it? Nothing but that which is the old and triumphant and beautiful enemy of death everywhere! Nothing but the spirit of life! O that eternal struggle that pervades a universe which is always dying and yet ever living anew! The struggle of the spirit of life with death! In every growing tree, in every constantly decaying, constantly renewing body, in every strange vitality of nations and of institutions, everywhere there is the struggle of the spirit of life with death. It is a positive, strong power everywhere grappling with the monster that tries and sometimes seems to rule the world.

And if there be any consistent power of goodness able to cope with and conquer the ever-present power of wickedness — that in the moral world will be what this mysterious vitality is in the world of physical things, the law of the spirit of life which can set men free from the law of death. Then take St. Paul again. O my friends, read with your hearts as well as with your eyes, hear with your hearts as well as with your ears, as he goes on to tell us where he found this ‘Law of the spirit of life.” “The law of the spirit of life in Jesus Christ,” he says,” has set me free. ‘Ah! he is back now where he belongs, and we are back, out of all abstractions and speculations, in the very mention of the name of Him of whom it is the joy of the Christian minister to preach. It was in the example and the redemption of Jesus Christ that St. Paul found the power which alone was able to meet and master this force of moral degradation and deterioration which he saw in the world and which he felt in himself. He had felt in himself and he was looking to see in the world, the power of a personal Christ, everywhere believed in, everywhere loved, become the power of a new freedom, become a spring-time for the winter-bound humanity.

It is the old story, as you see. How old, how ever new it is — Christ the freedom, Christ the life! Paul says that Christ has set him free. History, if we bade her open her solemn mouth, would tell us how largely the world has been set free by Christ, and how He will yet break all the fetters that are left. But most important for us, if any of us realize the slavery that I tried to describe a while ago, will be one question, — Can Christ set us free? Can He, and will He, and how? Indeed He can and He will, and so simply! We must go back to the three forms of the slavery that I described. First of all, what does Christ do to free the character from the power of sin? That, of course, is the deepest, hardest, most essential thing. Unless He can do that, of what avail is anything else that He can do? What benefit would it be to have every consequence of sin taken off, and every false standard about us rectified, if all the while the heart stayed bad and bred new badness out of its own unchanged nature? That is the superficialness of many half-forms of Christianity. But Christ comes and says: “No! a new heart you must have, and a new heart I will give you,” It sounds mysterious, but with all its mystery it is inspiring. It suggests and prophesies just what we want. ‘’ You must be born again. You must have a new life,” He says; and then He says, “I am that new life “; and still again, when we ask how we are to get hold of Him, the new life, and make Him ours. He says, “If any man love me he will keep my commandments, and I will come to him.” That is the old story, so old and yet so always new. It is love for Christ that is to be the regenerating power. From love through obedience into communion, — that is to be the course of the regenerated life. Here I am held in the law of sin and death, — held, that is, by the steady and continuous power of moral evil, slowly, steadily, degenerating, pressed down away from goodness into sin. No sudden struggle, no spurt of rebellious repentance, is going to save me. Again and again, indignant with myself, impatient with the growing earthliness of my life, I have leaped up and broken loose, but it was useless. I could not get free so. It was a law that held me. As well might some bold wave that had flung its spray up against the clouds think that it had escaped from the universal law of the tides. Another law must come in, another power just as positive and steady and persistent as the power from which I want to get free. Then Christ comes — He puts Himself before the heart. There is something in that heart that is made to love Him. Superficial, on the top of the heart, lie those passions with which it loves wickedness. Deeper down, unstirred as yet, lies the diviner faculty of loving Him, the perfect goodness. By and by as He stands there, patient, expectant, those powers that were made for Him begin to feel Him, buried as they are, just as the little buried seed feels the sun which has come and is standing in the heaven over it, waiting for it to rise. Then there must come a great upheaval, a great reversal in the soul. That which was undermost must become uppermost. The heart in its own way becomes changed. There is more or less of conscious tumult. That does not matter. But the result is something definite and positive. The old law of selfishness has given place to another power, just as positive, just as persistent, and the soul is obedient to the new law of the love of Christ. The life which it now lives in the flesh it lives by the faith of the Son of God, a faith that works by love. This is the freedom of the character, the law of sin and death broken through, broken to pieces by the law of the spirit of life in Jesus Christ.

And with this freedom once established the other freedoms follow easily. When the character is really free in Christ the mere bondage of the standards and circumstances about us cannot long imprison us. Many a Christian, becoming gradually, strongly certain of the love of Christ, has looked about with fear and said, O if I could only take this sweet new life off into a wilderness and live it there! O if I could only carry my new heart into a new world that was not full of the traditions and conventionalities of sin! But here! what can I do? What chance has my poor piety among the venerable habitudes of worldliness in the midst of which it has got to live? What possibility is there that it can stay pure and unperverted? “Many a Christian has asked the question anxiously, almost despairingly; and the answer has come to many a Christian with unexpected convincingness as his new life went on. He found the power of the new law of righteousness. He found that when he once was free in himself it was a wonderfully easy thing to tread across the prejudices and conventionalities which outwardly tried to bind his freedom. The new law of the new life was stronger than the old law of sin and death. Law had met law and conquered. I think there is nothing that one would say with more entire confidence to the young Christian, whose soul was really growing full of the love of Christ, but whose first new joy in the Saviour was clouded with anxiety as to the fate of this new experience in the midst of the worldly world in which it would have to live, than just this. — “Do not fear, you need not fear for that. You have really no idea how weak to a man whose heart is full of manly love for Christ appear the temptations that seemed before so terrible. The outward tyranny of sin breaks easily when once its inward power is gone. It seems to you as if it would be a terrible thing to be ridiculed, terrible to have men point the finger at you and say, * There goes the Christian.’ Be a Christian, and the terror, is all gone. The only sting that will be left in the ridicule will be shame that you deserve it so little.” This one might say with perfect confidence. There will be struggles of the world still to retain its slave, and very often it will seem to have got him, but it never can really hold him and bind him and crush him so long as he is really, inwardly, the servant of Christ. If the Son has made him free, he shall be free indeed.

And then there remains only one other part of the bondage of sin — namely, its consequences. However free I am now, there is the past, there are the sins of my youth and the transgressions that have filled my riper years. What shall I do with them? I need not tell you out of what deep instincts of justice in the human soul that question rises to the human conscience. It is no artificial fear. It comes out of no mere fiction or religious terrorism. The human soul feels the sin of its own past binding it, without one word of revelation save that which is written in its own nature. And from that sin of its past what can deliver it, except the clear free forgiveness of Him against whom the sin was committed, — the opening of the great hand in which that past is held so that it is dropped down, down into the gulf of oblivion to be seen no more forever. “Forgiveness “is the golden word of this last liberty. ‘Your sins and iniquities will I remember no more!” The liberating work of Christ is perfect when having filled the heart with the new love of Himself, He says to it, ‘” Go, and forget the past except for gratitude and warning.” “I forgive you.” These words, simple and deep with all the majesty of His nature, reach back and sweep a mighty hand across the blotted record of the past, reach in and spread a peace over and through the troubled conscience, and the man is free. No past sin holds him any longer; no consequences terrify him. Not merely the obstacles before him and the reluctance within him are broken; the chains behind him are broken too; he is regenerated and he is forgiven. It is the perfect liberty of the child of God. I know that I have not justly described the new life that the Saviour gives. No man can tell it worthily, for it is infinite; but just as one man may say to another, “Do you see the ocean or the sunset?” and the words may open before that other’s eyes a glory that no words can tell, so to souls which stand close to it, which perhaps are within its light already, the feeblest word may open the richness of the new life of Christ. I am only anxious that you should know how real it is, — no fancy, no theory, but the true story of human life. Is it mysterious? Who dares look at the mysterious life of man and feel that anything but an account that is full of mystery can satisfy that life? Is it sad? What can be sadder than this life, divided between hopeless apathy and hopeless struggle, which millions of men are living. O how sad it is! Does it break into a bewildering splendor of promise? What promise can be too splendid for the child of God to whom His Father promises Himself!

Only believe that this is the possible story of your life, and then take it up and realize it. Only see the possibility of freedom as clearly as you feel the present slavery. Then, in the Lord’s impartial love, there is no reason why your voice should not join in with Paul’s and all the rest whom we hear singing their freedom in the New Jerusalem on which the Bible opens, — “Worthy the Lamb who hath redeemed us.” “The law of the spirit of life in Jesus Christ has made us free from the law of sin and death.”