The Sufficient Grace of God

‘: And he said, My grace is sufficient for thee.” — 2 Cou. xii. 9.

THESE words were spoken to St. Paul but not to him alone. They came to St. Paul out of a mysterious vision. They have come to many and many a Christian out of the experiences of his daily life, which, as he looked at them in the light of God, have seemed to him to be more mysterious and impressive than any vision which could be set before the most astonished eyes. They have come as the total result of life, its spiritual issue and result, to thoughtful men who, tired and dissatisfied in the details of living, have asked themselves and asked God for some great comprehensive meaning of it all. To such men there has come down from God his explanation: “My grace is sufficient for thee.” The meaning of life, of its happinesses and its sorrows, of its successes

1 Trcachcd at St. Mark’s Church, Kcnnington, London, Sunday evening, 3d June 1SS3.

and its disappointments, is this, that man must be fastened close to God and live by the divine life not his own, by the divine life made his own through the close binding of the two together by faith and love.

I want to speak to you about this great Christian conception of human life to-night. And first of all, I want to ask you to remember what a need there is for any true life that it should have some general conception of itself within which all its special activities should move along and do their work. What the skin is to the human body, holding all the parts of the inner machinery compactly to their work; what the simple constitution is to a highly-elaborated state, enveloping all its functions with a few great first principles which none of those functions must violate or transcend, — such to the manifold actions of a man is some great simple conception of what life is and what it means, surrounding all details, giving them unity, simplicity, effectiveness. The degree in which the life, living in its details, is immediately and consciously aware of its enveloping conception may vary very much indeed. Some of the lives around which it is folded most compactly, to which it is giving the noblest unity and effect, are almost unaware of it, and would have to stop and re-collect their consciousness before they could give you a

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clear statement of what was their enveloping idea of life. Often in children, often in the most childlike people, the conception is doing its work, holding the life together, even when it is most entirely unrecognised. The degree of consciousness may vary, but more and more the worth, the dignity, the beauty, the usefulness of human lives seem to depend on the existence of some surrounding purpose or idea which makes each life a unit and a force. Here is a man all quavering and scintillating and palpitating with brightness: every act he docs, every word he says, shines with genius; but every act, every word, shines separate and alone; each is a single, separate point of electricity, shining the more brilliantly just because of its isolation. Here is another man of far less brilliancy, but of a clear and ever-present sense of what life means; his electricity does not sparkle at brilliant points, but it lives unseen and powerful through everything he docs and is, like the electric presence which pervades a healthy human body. My friends, is it not wonderful how strongly we come to feel, how perfectly clear in us in course of time grows the conviction, that to the second man, not to the first, the world must look for good and constant power. Is it not wonderful with what ever-increasing certainty of instinct we ourselves, as life grows more serious and full of exigency, turn away from the first man and turn to the second in our need? I have wanted to speak thus of the need of some great comprehensive conception of life, before I came to the special conception of it which is in the words which God spoke to St. Paul. “My grace is sufficient for thee,” He declared. That man’s life is to have abundant supply for all it needs, to be rich enough, safe enough, strong enough, and yet that all this abundance is not to come by or in itself, but is to be its portion, because the human life itself is part and parcel of the divine life, held closely and constantly upon the bosom of the life of God, — that is the great conception of humanity and its condition which these deep words involve. See how they must exclude these two ideas which are for ever haunting human souls, — the first, that there is no sufficiency for man; the second, that man carries his sufficiency within himself. How these two ideas rule together, dividing among themselves the hearts of men. The timid, tired, hopeless, discouraged men go about saying, “Human life a predestined failure: full of wants for which there is no supply, of questions for which there is no answer. So, whoever made him, wherever he has come from, here on the disappointing earth there is this everlastingly disappointed man.” And then, among u6 THE SUFFICIENT GRACE OF GOD. [vi.

such men, close by their side, the brave self-confident, self-trustful men go about saying, “Man ought to be satisfied; man must be satisfied; nay, man is satisfied in himself. Let him but put forth all his powers and he shall supply all his own needs and answer all his own questions.” And then, among these everlasting wailings and boastings, in the midst of this mingled self-pity and self-conceit, the voice of God comes down declaring, “Nay, both are wrong: you must be satisfied, but you must be satisfied in me; you must have sufficiency, but my grace must be sufficient for you.”

I think, then, that you can see how in these words thus understood, in a conception of life like this there are two propositions which meet directly and directly contradict the two tendencies of human thought with which we arc most familiar in these days of ours. You sec what these two tendencies are. They are very familiar; they meet us everywhere; they arc here in our Sunday evening church. One tendency is to despair of satisfaction; the other tendency is to discover satisfaction in man alone. As I go through the crowds which fill our crowded century I hear these two voices on every side of me. One voice says, “Alas, alas! we want to know, but there is no voice to speak to us and to enlighten our ignorance. We want to love, but every object of love on which we let our affection fasten fails us. We want to work, but there are no instruments and no materials fine enough to give embodiment to these dreams that are in us. Life is hopelessly insufficient for man.” And then out of the same crowd the other voice cries out, “Hurrah, hurrah! man is sufficient for himself! See how he is finding the answers to his questions everywhere; and when his questions prove unanswerable, see how he is continually finding out that his question is a delusion, that such a being as he is ought not to want to ask such questions, that there are no answers to such questions, at least none that it is conceivably possible or really desirable for him to know!” Were ever such despair of man and such triumph in man met before as are met now in these days of ours? Tell me, are not these really the two things that men are saying over to themselves about the problem of existence? Is not the question of mankind’s life, as we hear its ordinary statements, apparently settling down to this, whether it will be possible for man to live with a permanent conviction either that there is in the world about him no true correspondent and answer to the deeper parts of his nature, or else that his nature and the world have in themselves all that his deepest needs require?

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Remember, this is not a question merely of the time at large and its philosophies; it is not a problem which one sees rising like a dark cloud as he looks abroad over the puzzled schoolrooms and the busy workshops of his fellow-men. It is a problem which meets us all whenever our own personal life is deeply stirred. A great change comes in your life, something that rends your whole being down to the bottom as an earthquake opens the rock; your life is torn to its very depths; you can no longer live satisfied with the mere pleasant sight of the green grass and flowers which grow upon the surface; you must look down and see what there is in at the heart of things. And then — oh, my dear friends, do not full many of you know it? — to the human heart all torn, distressed, bewildered, there comes first of all this problem, What shall I do? Shall I make up my mind that there is no rest, no peace, no sufficient object for my trust — that my demand for them is an impertinence? or shall I make myself my own sufficient strength, and find my rest and peace and trust in cultivating and admiring my own life?

To such an alternative what can we say? To the first side of it I think that there can be no doubt what must be said. Man cannot rest in the settled conviction of insufficiency. There is a deep and everlasting and true conviction in man that he has no power or need in his nature for which there is not a correspondent and supply somewhere possibly within his reach. The power of adoring love, of which man is distinctly conscious, brings him assurance that there is a being worthy of such love. The power and need to trust implicitly will not be answered that there is no strength so strong that man may give to it implicit trust. The everlasting questions will everlastingly demand their answers and believe in the possibility of finding them till they are found. This is to me conclusive. I can conceive of man’s dressing up almost any insufficient thing in the pretence of sufficiency and making believe to himself that he is satisfied; but that he should finally and absolutely come to the conclusion that he must content him in everlasting discontent, and cease to ask and cease to struggle out of pure despair, that is something which nothing that I have ever read or seen or felt of human nature gives me the power to believe.

And what, then, is the chance of the other side of the alternative, that man shall find humanity as he discerns it in himself and in his fellow-men sufficient for his powers and needs? There is only one thing which everlastingly makes that impossible, and that is the strange fact to which all the 12o THE SUFFICIENT GRACE OF GOD. [vi.

history of man bears witness, that man, though himself finite, demands infinity to deal with and to rest upon; he claims to have relations with the infinite. That fact is borne testimony to by all the ages; that fact is the perpetual witness of the consciousness in man’s heart that he is the child of God. The child may be reminded evenmoment of his limitations and his youth, and yet he always mounts up to claim the largeness of his father’s life for himself. And so man, the more you make him feel his finitcness, so much the more obstinately will he insist on his right to a potential possession of the infinite. The perpetual witness to this truth is one of the most interesting facts in human history. You never can rule lines around one region in the realm of knowledge and say to man, “Know that. That is the limit of what you possibly can know.” The very demand is a challenge. He will rub out your lines; he will break down your walls; and, with what perhaps seems pure wilfulness, but what is really a conviction that there is no knowledge in the universe from which he is essentially and eternally shut out, he will choose the very things which you have told him he can never know to exercise his knowing faculty upon. What truly enthusiastically human man will tolerate the drawing of any line, however far awav, outside of which he shall be bound to believe that human enterprise shall never go? Who will let any limit mark for him the certain boundary beyond which no yet more wonderful invention shall be devised, and no yet more beautiful miracle of art flower out of the rich ground of man’s exhaustless fancy? What man ever truly loves and sets a limit, consciously and absolutely, to the loveliness of that which he is loving? The love that defines the limits of its idol’s loveliness is not entire love; pure love lives in its power of idealising, and loves the infinite in the finite type to which it gives its homage. So everywhere there comes the testimony of this endless reach of man after the infinite, and of his inability to rest upon anything less. Who that with the best human ambition is seeking after character can fix himself a goal and say, “That is as pure, as good, as true as it is possible for me, a man, to be?” Who does not, must not see the distance stretching far away, past anything that even his imagination can define? There comes no real content to the seeker after goodness until, behind all the patterns which hold themselves up to him with pride and boasting in their practicalness, at last he hears the voice of the sublime impracticable standard far out beyond them all calling to him, “Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.” Then the finite has heard the voice of the infinite to which it belongs, to which it always will respond, and straightway it settles down to its endless journey and goes on content.

These are the views of human life which seem to me to show that it is absolutely impossible that man should finally reconcile himself either to despair or to self-satisfaction. It is in views like these that I find my assurance in such days of doubt about the nature and the destiny of man as these through which we are passing now. It seems to me to be absolutely certain that if there is in man a real essential belonging with God, if in a true and indestructible sense he is God’s child, then the reaching of the child’s soul after the Father’s soul, of the human soul after the divine soul, must be a perpetual fact; it never can be stopped. Agnosticism, Nescience, Pessimism, Secularism must be all temporary phenomena; none of them can be the settled and permanent condition of the human soul if man is the child of God. If he is not, if there is no divine relationship in him, then one is ready to accept whatever comes; for who cares whether a beast that is but a beast dreams that he is an angel or with a bitter wisdom knows his bcasthood. Superstition or despair will matter little in a man who has no God. No! I cannot picture man with a God quieting, stupefying his restless filial heart so that no throb or leap of it, no sudden access of filial consciousness shall ever take him by surprise as he lives in the perpetual presence of his Father’s works and love. Some sudden turn of the worldchild around some unexpected corner of the wondrous house will thrill the soul with its profoundest consciousness. If man is God’s child, then man cannot permanently be atheistic. This poor man or that may be an atheist, perhaps; this child or that may disown or deny his father; but the worldchild, man, to him the sense that he was not made for insufficiency and the sense that he is not sufficient for himself, these two together will always bring him back from his darkest and remotest wanderings, and set him where he will hear the voice which alone can completely and finally satisfy him saying, “My grace is sufficient for thee.”

And now, if this is where the soul of man must rest, we want to turn and see most seriously what is the rest which man’s soul will find here; what will it practically, actually be for a man when the secret and power of his life is that he is resting on the sufficiency of the grace of God? We may say various things about it; and the first and simplest and most important of them all is this, that the grace of God, on which a man relies, must be a perpetual element in which his life abides, and not an occasional assistant and supernumerary called in at special emergencies when it is needed. You see the difference. I say to one man, “Who is your sufficiency? On whom do you rely for help?” and his reply is, “God.” Very confidently and earnestly comes his reply. “God,” he declares. But when he answers “God,” somehow it sounds to me exactly as if he thought that God was a man in the next house, or, if you please, the captain of a garrison in the castle on the hill — some one, some thing, which was at hand, and at his call when it was wanted. I say to another man, “What is your sufficiency? Whom do you trust in?” and he answers, “God;” and then it sounds to me as if the sunlight talked about the sun, as if the stream talked of the spring that fed it, as if the blood talked of the heart that gave it life and movement, as if the plant talked of the ground which it was rooted in, as if the mountain talked of the gravitation that lived in every particle of it and held it in its everlasting seat; nay, shall we not say what is the simplest and the truest thing? as if the child talked of his father whose life lived in every act of his protected life — in whom (what wondrous depth there is in those deep words!), “in whom he lived and moved and had his being.”

Do you not sec the difference? Take special instances. Here is our bewilderment about truth:

God, who knows everything, is our sufficiency in our own insufficiency, we say. But how? One doubter, when his hard question comes, says with a ready confidence, “I will go and ask God,” and carries off his problem to the Bible, to the closet, as if he went to consult an oracle, and as if, when he had asked and got, or failed to get, an answer, he would leave the oracle off in the wood and come back to the town again, and live his worldly life there on his own resources until another question too hard for his poor wisdom should come up. I do not say that that is wholly bad; but surely there is something better. Another doubter meets his puzzling question; and the utterance of his sense of God’s sufficiency is simply, “God knows the explanation and the answer. I do not know that God will tell me what the answer is. Perhaps He will, perhaps He will not; but He knows.” The knowledge that is in the father — so close and constant and real is the identity of life between the two — the knowledge that is in the father is the child’s knowledge, even though the child does not know the special things which the father knows. Not merely there is an open road from the child’s ignorance to the father’s wisdom; the child’s ignorance lies close bosomed upon the father’s wisdom, beats and throbs with its pulses, and lives with its life.

And so it is with regard to activity and efficiency as well as with regard to knowledge. One man says, “Here is a great work to be done; God will give me the strength to do it;” and so when it is done it looks to him most like, and he is most apt to call it, his work. Another man says, “Here is this work to be done; God shall do it, and if He will use me for any part of it, here I am. I shall rejoice as the tool rejoices in the artist’s hand.” When that work is finished, the workman looks with wonder at his own achievement, and cries, “What hath God wrought!”

Everywhere there is this difference. One sufferer cries, “Lord, make me strong;” another sufferer cries, “Lord, let me rest upon thy strength.” Do you say they come to the same thing? Yes, if the doing of the task, the bearing of the pain, is everything. Yes, if the only object is that the ship ma)’ not founder and the back may not break; but if, beyond this, there is hope and purpose that the man who does the task or bears the load shall himself become Godlike in his doing or his suffering, then no mere deposit of the strength of God can do the work — only the ever-open union of his life with God’s, which makes the two lives really one, so that the power that is in God is not made the man’s by being transferred from God’s to him, but is his because it is God’s.

Always there are these two kinds of men. The picture that was seen ages ago in the valley of Elah, and which is written in the second book of Samuel, is always finding its repetition in the world. David and Goliath are perpetual: proud, self-reliant, self-sufficient strength, the big hard muscles, the tremendous bulk, the gigantic armour of the Philistine on the one side; and on the other the slight, weak Judean youth, with nothing but a sling and stone, with his memories of struggles in which he has had no strength but the strength of God, and has conquered, with no boast, nothing but a prayer upon his lips. These two figures, I say, are everywhere; they are confronting each other in every valley of Elah all over the world: the power of confident strength and the power of weakness reliant upon God. Goliath may thank his gods for his great muscles; it is a strength that has been handed over to him by them; but it is a strength which has been so completely handed over to him that he now thinks of it, boasts of it, uses it as his. David’s strength lies back of him in God, and only flows down from God through him as his hand needs it for the twisting of the sling that is to hurl the stone.

Oh, how the multitude stand waiting round every valley of Elah where any David and Goliath meet! how the Philistines shout for the battle as they see their champion step forth! how the Israelites tremble and their hearts sink when they see how weak their shepherd - boy looks! how the Philistines turn and flee when their giant falls! how the Israelites first gaze astonished and then surround him with shoutings as David comes back with the head of the Philistine in his hands! and yet how the same scene is repeated over and over again for ever: the arrogance of the Philistines and the timidity of the Israelites wherever anew power confident in self meets weakness reliant upon God, in any broad field or obscure corner of the world.

It is sad to see even Christian men and times fall into the old delusion. The Christian Church — so reads its history to me — seems to have been far too often asking of God that He should put His power and His wisdom into her, and make it hers; far too seldom that He should draw her life so close to His that His wisdom and power, kept still in Himself, should be hers because it is His. The demand for an infallible Church, for a comprehensive and final statement of all that it is possible for man to know about God, for an authoritative oracle of religious truth — a demand which haunts not merely the hills of Koine, but even the broad open Protestant pastures of our own communion — the fictions of priestly authority for forgiving sin, for putting grace into sacraments, — what are all these but the everlasting craving for a deposit of truth and power instead of a vital union by love and obedience with Him in whom truth and power eternally reside — the everlasting wish to be a reservoir instead of a river? The Church of Christ to-day upon the earth, neither in her individual members nor in any aggregation of her ignorance to make wisdom in any conceivable council or synod, knows the absolute truth with regard, let us say, to the future destiny of men who in this life live wickedly and die rebels against God. Does it seem to you as if it were a dreadful thing that Christ’s Church should be in ignorance about such an important thing as that? Not if you really know how near Christ’s Church is to the heart of Christ; not if you understand that she is joined to Him as part of His own life, so that His knowledge of what are the awful secrets of the future is enough for her, and she may be content with His assurance that, He being what she knows Him to be, it must be a terrible thing, and a thing whose consequences cannot die speedily or easily, for any soul to grieve His heart, which is infinite love, or to disobey His will, which is eternal righteousness. Our Lord’s disciples asked Him to promise them that they should sit on thrones, and He turned them away and said,” Ye know not

K what ye ask.” But they asked Him to teach them to pray, and instantly His teaching came: “After this manner pray ye: Thy kingdom come; thy will be done. Give us this day our daily bread.” He would do nothing that should enthrone their lives in what might for a moment seem to be self-sufficient power; He would do everything that should fasten their life to His Father’s life, with the continual pressure of continual need. Oh, that the Church and the Christian might have learned from the old story of the Lord’s treatment of those first disciples what kind of prayers He always loves to have them pray, and what kind He will always answer.

I find in all the life of Jesus the perfect illustration and elucidation of all I have been saying, of all that I want you to remember and take with you as the fruit of having listened to me this evening. Jesus never treated His life as if it were a temporary deposit of the divine life on the earth, cut off and independent of its source; he always treated it as if it lived by its association with the Father’s life, on which it rested. “Of that day and hour knowcth not the Son, but the Father,” He did not hesitate to say; and the Father’s knowledge was enough for Him. “Now, O Father, glorify thou me,” He cried. I dare not try to unravel the whole mystery, to adjust the whole theology; but this I cannot doubt as I read these infinite pages which are ever new, that Jesus was always full of the child-consciousness; He always kept his life open that the Father’s life might flow through it. When he lay prostrate, tired out, broken down on the mountain or in the garden, it was not that He might re-collect His shattered strength and be Himself; it was that in the silence and the struggle the clogged communication might be broken clear, and God flow freely into Him again. “Not my will but thy will, O my Father;” that was the triumph of the garden. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” that was the agony of the cross.

What Jesus wanted for Himself He wants for you and me who are His disciples. Not self-completeness. When He calls us to be His, He sees no day, even on to the end of eternity, in which, having trained our characters and developed our strength, he shall send us out as you dismiss in the morning from your door the traveller whom you have kept all night, and fed and strengthened and rescued from fatigue, and filled with self-respect. No such day is to come for ever. An everlasting childhood! A perpetual dependence! That is our calling. And with that calling in our minds how much that seemed mysterious grows plain to us. If He is moving our life up close to His, henceforth to be a part of His, so that motive, truth, standards, hopes, everything which is in Him shall freely flow from Him to us, what wonder is it if, in order that that union may be most complete, He has to break down the walls that we have built around ourselves, which would be separations between Him and us. The going down of the walls between our house and our friend’s house would be music to us, for it would be making the two houses one. The going down of the walls between our life and our Lord’s life, though it consisted of the failure of our dearest theories and the disappointment of our dearest plans, that too would be music to us if through the breach we saw the hope that henceforth our life was to be one with His life, and all His was to be ours too.

And how clear, with this truth before us, would appear the duty that we had to do, the help that we had to give to an)- brother’s soul for which we cared. Not to make him believe our doctrine; but to bring him to our God. Not to answer all his hard questions; but to put him where he could see that the answer to them all is in God. Not to make him my convert, my disciple; but to persuade him to let Christ make him God’s child. Oh, my dear friends, if that were what we were seeking concerning one another, friend seeking it for friend, father and mother seeking it for children; if that were what we were seeking, there would be richer harvests for the Lord!

Through all eternity that grace of God, that sufficient grace, shall flow into the open hearts of God’s redeemed, making them strong and brave for all the vast works which they shall have to do for Him and for His kingdom. It seems as if it would be enough for this life, as if this life would be well spent, if, as the result of all of it, by many lessons, many trials, many failures, the soul whose strength is in entire dependence simply learned and carried, perfectly learned, with it across the river the lesson that the soul of man cannot live except in resting on the soul of God, and perpetually gathering into it supplies of His sufficient grace. That lesson may we learn in any way in which Christ sees good to teach it to us.