How to Keep in the Love of God
Jude 20, 21
But ye, beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost, keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal
life.” — JUDE 20, 21.
HE main subject of this singular little letter is the warning against certain teachers whose errors of belief and vice’=^ of conduct seem to have been equally great. After the vehement denunciation of these, which coincides in many particulars with the similar language of the second epistle ascribed to Peter, the writer turns, as with a sudden movement of revulsion, from the false teachers to exhort his readers to conduct contrary to theirs, and sets forth in these words the true way by which individuals and churches can guard themselves against abounding errors.
In the verses which I have taken for my text there is one great central injunction, round which are grouped subsidiary clauses, containing, in regard to those which precede it, the means of obeying the commandment; and in reference to that which follows it, an attendant expectation.
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I. — We consider that central injunction — the very keystone of the arch of a devout Christian life — “Keep yourselves in the love of God.”
Now “the love of God ‘* here obviously means, not ours to Him, but His to us, and the commandment is parallel to, and may be a reminiscence of, our Lord’s great word: “As the Father hath loved Me, so have I loved you. Continue ye in My love.” God’s love to us is regarded as a kind of sphere or region in which the Christian soul lives and moves and has its being. It is the sweet home of our hearts, and a fortress “whereunto we may continually resort,” and our wisdom and security is to keep at home within the strong walls that defend us, compassed by the warmth and protection of the love which God has towards us.
Then my text implies that Christian men may get outside of the love of God. No doubt “His tender mercies are over all His works.” No doubt His love holds in a grasp which never can be loosened every creature that He hath made. But our earnestness in declaring the universality of the love of God ought never to lead us to speak of it so as to suggest that He is indifferent to moral distinctions, or that He so finds the reason for His love, in Himself, and not in us, as that it is all the same to its flow whether we be good or bad. There are gifts of the Divine love which, like the sunshine in the heaven, come equally on the unfaithful and on the good. But all the best and noblest manifestations of that love, and the sweetest, selectest aspects of that love itself, cannot come to men irrespective of their moral character and their relation to Him. God loves all as well as they will let Him, but it is possible for men not only to modify the possibilities of the Divine love in its bestowment upon them, but to make it needful that that very love, when it finds its way to them, should come like the sun through the mist, shorn of its beauty and turned into a hot ball of lurid fire. And it is possible for Christians to be so unfaithful to their position and their calling as that they may get out of the warmth into the cold dank mists. The sun pours down, but you can cross the street from the sunny to the shady side and walk in the shadow. It is possible for Christian people to lose the consciousness of being surrounded and kept within that warm and sunny circle where God’s love falls. And this exhortation puts, as the very centre of the devout life, considered in regard to the man himself and his relations to God, this: Keep yourselves in the charmed circle, and be sure that you walk in the light of His face and in the felt love of His heart.
Then another question is suggested by my text. I asked, Can a man get out of the love of God? And I have to ask now. Can a man, then, keep always in it r The ideal set forth here is that of unbroken continuity in the flow of that Divine love which falls in its gentlest and mightiest beams only upon the heart that aspires towards Him, and also a continual consciousness on my part that I am within the reach of its rays, and that it is well with me because I am. We need not discuss, for the guidance of our own lives and efforts, whether the entire realisation of the ideal is possible for us here. Enough for us to know that we may all come indefinitely near to it, if not absolutely up to it. Enough for us to know that it is possible for Christian people to make their lives one long abiding in the love of God, both in regard of the actual reception of it and of the consciousness of that reception.
Alas! alas! what an awful contrast to the realities of the Christian life, as we see them around us and as we feel them within us, such an exhortation as this is! Instead of one unbroken line of light, what do we find? A dot of light and then a stretch of blackness; and then another little sparkle, scarcely visible, and short lived, followed by another dreary tract of murky midnight. So, alas! most of us have but gleams of sunshine, watery, weak, cloudy, brief, and then the doleful veil is drawn again over the blue, and we walk in the valley of the shadow. You who have felt the assurance that you dwell in the light of God’s face, and that His love falls on you, do you see to it that the highest aim of your lives is to unite the severed points, and to turn them into a continuous and unbroken line. “Keep yourselves in the love of God.”
Is it not strange that we should need the exhort tation? Is it not tragic that we should neglect it? The foolish creatures that stray away from the warm security of the mother-bird’s breast are snapped up by the hawks; and they who have been within the enclosure of that love that specially surrounds those who know it and respond to it, and have wandered out, like worse prodigals,
174 KEEP IN THE LOVE OF GOD.
into a further darkness, can hope for nothing, except they go back again with contrition, but famine and fever and rags and wretchedness.
The secret of all blessedness is to live in the love of God. Our sorrows and difiSculties and trials will change their aspect, if we walk in the peaceful enjoyment and conscious possession of His Divine heart. That is the true anaesthetic. No pain is intolerable when we are sure that God’s loving hand is round about us. There in that fortress we can be quiet. However the storms may be raging without, it is possible for us all to have a secret place into which we may retire, where we hear not the loud winds when they call. We may dwell at rest like the inhabitants of some deep, sunken dell, which is all still, without a breath to move the thick blossoms on the loaded trees, even whilst winds are raving and waves thundering on the ironbound coast. “Keep yourselves in the love of God.”
II. — Further, notice the subsidiary exhortations which point out the means of obeying this central command.
The two clauses in my text which precede that main precept are more minute and particular directions as to the way in which it is to be observed. We might almost read, “By building yourselves on your most holy faith, and by praying in the Holy Ghost, keep yourselves in the love of God.”
The first means of securing our continual abiding in the conscious enjoyment of Grod’s love
BOIV TO KEEP IN THE LOVU OF G6D. 1^5
to US is our continual effort at building up a noble character on the foundation of faith. I need not enter upon the question as to whether here the “faith,” which is the foundation, has its ordinary meaning in Scripture, of the act by which we trust or believe, or whether it has the later ecclesiastical and theological meaning of that on which our trust and belief are fixed. The two interpretations are either of them possible; both of them come substantially to the same thing. For the worth of my faith as the foundation of my life depends wholly on the firmness and steadfastness of that which my faith grasps. The foundation of all that is good and noble in a character is the going out of self to trust in God manifest in Jesus Christ. That is the real basis of everything that is great and lofty; that is the footing on which alone a man may work with certainty of success at the great task of self-culture and development. But the faith which is thus the foundation of all excellence is only the foundation. A great many of you think that it is the house, but it is only the basis on which the house may be built. The notion which is very common amongst Evangelical people is that faith is mainly of use as a means whereby we escape from the consequences of our sins, or whereby we are carried into some future haven of rest and blessedness. But the true conception of Christian faith is that it is the root from which may come, and ought to come, all nobility and excellence of character, “whatsoever things are pure, and lovely, and of good report.’* But it is only the foundation; it is the “potentiality of wealth,” but it is not the wealth. It is the possible root of all goodness, but it is not that goodness. ‘*A11 things are possible to him that believeth,” but they will be actually his in the measure of diligence which he “adds to his faith, virtue,” and all the other beads of the Rosary of Christian graces. So do not make the mistake which such multitudes of stagnant, professing Christians do, of fancying that the foundation is the house. What would you say of a man who had dug his foundations, and got in the first courses, and then left the bricks lying on the ground, and did no more? And that is what many people that call themselves Christians do: they use their faith only as a shield against con* demnation, and forget that, if it is anything at all, it works, and works by love.
Then remember, too, that this building of a noble and godlike and God-pleasing character can be erected on the foundation of faith only by constant effort. Growth is not the whole explanation of the process by which a man becomes what God would have him to be. Struggle has to be included as well as growth, and neither growth nor struggle exhaust the New Testament metaphors for progress. This other one of my text is of constant recurrence. It takes the metaphor of a building, to suggest the slow, continuous, bit-by-bit effort. You do not rear the fabric of a noble character all at a moment. No man reaches the extremity, either of goodness or baseness, per id Hum f by a leap; you must be content with bit-by-bit work. The Christian character is like a mosaic formed of tiny squares in all but infinite numbers, each one of them separately set and bedded in its place. You have to build by a plan; you have to see to it that each day has its task, each day its growth. You have to be content with one brick at a time, It is a life-long task, till the whole be finished. And not until we pass from earth to heaven does our building work cease. Continuous effort is the condition of progress.
How many of us have dropped the idea of progress out of our Christian practice altogether! What an enormous percentage of stagnant Christians there are amongst us, people that are no better to-day than they were ten years ago, because they have never grasped the conception of the Christian duty of endless toil at self-culture! My brother! unless you and I are daily finding more and more power to regulate and purify our lives in the faith that we profess, it becomes us to institute a very close examination as to whether our profession goes any deeper than our tongues. They, and only they, have a right to say, I believe in God the Father and in Jesus Christ His Son,*’ in whom their faith is daily producing growth in the grace as well as in the knowledge which have Him for their object.
Now, look at the second of the conditions laid down here, by which that continual living within the charmed circle of the love of God is made possible. ‘* Praying in the Holy Ghost.” Who that has ever honestly tried to cure himself of a fault, or to make his own some unfamiliar virtue opposed to his natural temperament, but has found that the cry “O God! help me” has come instinctively to his lips? I do not believe in the depth and earnestness of any efforts at self-improvement which have not often driven a man to his knees. Every person that has really closed in resolute serious combat with his own infirmities, and the enemies that beset him, must have felt that, unless he cries to God in the battle, he has little chance of success. Therefore, says Jude, continuous effort at building up a high and noble character will drive a man to, and must necessarily be accompanied with, prayer in the Holy Spirit. The prayer which helps us to keep in the love of God is not the petulant and passionate utterance of our own wishes, but is the yielding of our desires to the impulses divinely breathed upon us. As Michael Angelo says, “The prayers we make will then be sweet, indeed, If Thou the Spirit give by which we pray.” Our own desires may be hot and vehement, but the desires that run parallel with the Divine will, and are breathed into us by God’s own Spirit, are the desires which, in their meek submissiveness, are omnipotent with Him Whose omnipotence is perfected in our weakness.
Such prayer is the true help for the builder. His right attitude is on his knees. When men go out to weed some great field they often kneel at their task. And it is only when kneeling that we can cleanse the soil of our own hearts of the quick-growing and poisonous weeds that are there.
My prayer breaks the bond of many a temptation that holds me. My prayer is the test for many a masked evil that seeks to seduce me. My prayer will be like a drop of poison on a scorpion — it will kill the sin on the instant. We shall conquer when we go into the battle as the Puritans did, with the old Psalm upon their lips: “Let God arise; and let His enemies be scattered.” If we would build a holy character on a holy faith it must be done with the help of prayer in the Holy Ghost.
IIT. — Lastly, notice here the expectation attendant on the obedience to the central commandment, “Looking for the mercy of the Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life.”
After all our efforts, after all our prayers, we all of us build much wood, hay, stubble, in the building which we rear on the true foundation. And the best of us, looking back over our past, will most deeply feel that it is all so poor and stained that all we have to trust to is the forgiving mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ. That mercy will be anticipated for all the future, nearer and more remote, in proportion as we keep ourselves for the present in the love of God. The more we feel in our hearts the experience that God loves us, the more sure we shall be that He will love us ever. The sunshine in which we walk will be reflected upon all the path before us, and will illuminate that else dusky and foreboding sky that lies beyond the dark grave. The consciousness of His present love is the surest ground for the hope in Christ’s future mercy. That mercy will scatter its pardon-I2» r8o HOW TO KEEP IN THE LOVE OF GOD.
ing gifts all along the path of life, and will not reach its highest issue, nor be satisfied in its relation to us, until it has brought us into the full and perfect enjoyment of that super-eminent degree of eternal life which lies beyond the grave. Here we have rills from it by the way; there we shall be taken to the well-head of the Divine love. The gifts of God’s mercy in Christ Jesus which we receive here, great and precious as they are, are but the small change given to us for the expenses of the road as we journey to the inheritance where God keeps boundless stores of uncoined gold for us. The mercy for which we look cannot stop till it has acquitted us at the bar of the great Judge, who is Jesus Christ, and has given to us the full possession of the perfect copy of His own eternal life. If you and I keep ourselves in the love of God by effort founded upon faith, and prospered by prayer, we may then look quietly forward to that solemn future, knowing our sins indeed, but sure of the love of God, and therefore sure of eternal life.