“Basic Christianity, Part 26” by Romans
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We are continuing in our Series, “Basic Christianity.” Tonight, in Part 26 of that Series, we are going to continue in our review and examination of our Christian walk in general, and in particular, our walking in Light. We are going to begin our examination by going to the longest chapter in the Book of Psalms. Does anyone know what chapter that might be?
It is Psalm 119, containing 176 verses, is the longest Psalm. There are almost as many verses in Psalm 119 as there are in the first 17 Psalms, which contain 179 verses. We're going to open with the first three verses: Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the LORD. Blessed are they that keep his testimonies, and that seek him with the whole heart. They also do no iniquity: they walk in his ways.”
Of this Albert Barnes writes, ““Blessed are those who in the journey of life - in their religious course - are pure, Sincere, uncontaminated.” … Luther renders it, “Who live without blemish” or stain. The idea is, “Blessed are they who are upright, sincere, perfect, in their course.” The whole psalm is designed to illustrate this thought, by showing what the influence of a sincere and conscientious attachment to the principles of the law or word of God in the various circumstances of life must be... Who habitually obey his law. This constitutes sincerity, uprightness, perfection in a man’s life, for the law of the Lord is the only just rule of human conduct.”
Matthew Henry adds, “The psalmist here shows that godly people are happy people; they are, and shall be, blessed indeed. Felicity is the thing we all pretend to aim at and pursue. He does not say here wherein it consists; it is enough for us to know what we must do and be that we may attain to it, and that we are here told. All men would be happy, but few take the right way; God has here laid before us the right way, which we may be sure will end in happiness, though it be strait and narrow.
Blessednesses are to the righteous; all manner of blessedness. Now observe the characters of the happy people. Those are happy, 1. Who make the will of God the rule of all their actions, and govern themselves, in their whole conversation, by that rule: They walk in the law of the Lord. God's word is a law to them, not only in this or that instance, but in the whole course of their conversation; they walk within the hedges of that law, which they dare not break through by doing any thing it forbids;
and they walk in the paths of that law, which they will not trifle in, but press forward in them towards the mark, taking every step by rule and never walking at all adventures. This is walking in God's ways, the ways which he has marked out to us and has appointed us to walk in. It will not serve us to make religion the subject of our discourse, but we must make it the rule of our walk; we must walk in his ways, not in the way of the world, or of our own hearts.”
Throughout Psalm 119, we see repeated declarations of the wonder and merit and power of the Word of God. We read in verse 9: “How can a young man keep his way pure? By guarding it according to your word.” Verse 11 tells us, “I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you.” God is petitioned to give us understanding in verse 18: “Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law.” We read, “Your testimonies are my delight; they are my counselors” in verse 24.
There is an appeal to God for instruction in verses 33 and 34: “Teach me, O LORD, the way of your statutes; and I will keep it to the end. Give me understanding, that I may keep your law and observe it with my whole heart.” The unnamed Psalmist declares his love and delight in the Word of God in verses 47 and 48: “I find my delight in your commandments, which I love. I will lift up my hands toward your commandments, which I love, and I will meditate on your statutes.”
In verses 98 through 101, the Psalmist proclaims the merits of wisdom and understanding provided by the Word of God: “Your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies, for it is ever with me. I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation. I understand more than the aged, for I keep your precepts. I hold back my feet from every evil way, in order to keep your word.” But I want to zoom in on how God's Word helps us to safely make our way in this dark world.
We read in Psalm 119:105, we read: “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” Of this, the Sermon Bible tells us: “The two parts of this verse are not two different ways of saying the same thing. The word of God is a lamp or lantern to the feet at night; it is a light like that of the sun by day. It makes provision in this way for the whole of life. It is the secret of life’s true sunshine; it is the guide when all around is dark.
Now here we are met by the fact that in an age and country like ours the Bible is everywhere to be met with; and yet of the millions who possess, and now and then read, it how many can say at all seriously, "Thy word is a lantern unto my feet and a light unto my path"? What is the reason? The answer must be that certain conditions are attached to this guiding and illuminating function of the Bible, and that when it fails to guide and to lighten these conditions cannot be complied with. It is important to ask, What are they?
I. The first condition is that the Bible should be diligently searched for those truths, those precepts, those examples, which will directly guide us through life to our eternal home. II. Again, in order to succeed in the search for the true import of Scripture, we need method, order, regularity, purpose—above all, purpose in reading it. III. If the Bible is to light us on the road to eternity, we should surely welcome the guidance of the Church of Christ when we read it.
IV. If the Bible is to do its work, we must be careful to act upon each truth it teaches us as we learn it. While ordinary knowledge, as a rule, is remembered until the memory decays, moral and religious knowledge is soon forgotten if it is not acted out. The reason for this is that in the one case the will is interested and in the other it is not interested. Just so far as the will is exerted in order to make truth practically our own, just so far does it become to us present and real, not merely a light without, but a light within, us. ~ H. P. Liddon, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxiv., p. 369.
What a lamp is to us in the night or in darkness, the word of God is said to be to us in the journey of life; it is a lamp to the feet and a light to the path. This implies that life is like a journey in the dark or a sojourn in some place of gloom, and that it is the Bible which is to supply to us the illumination that is needful for us in such circumstances.
I. Whether we view man in relation to the great end of his existence as a free agent, subject to the law and responsible to the judgment of God, or as a moral being, capable of appreciating the right and finding his true felicity and dignity in choosing and following it, or as a creature capable of happiness, yet exposed to many accidents, by which he is sorely tried and his peace is apt to be utterly disturbed, we shall alike arrive at the conclusion that without such a guide as the Bible supplies his path through life would indeed be dark, hopeless, disastrous.
II. Think of the certainty of this light. In it there is no wavering, no ambiguity, no indefiniteness. It is a pure light, a dear light, a steady light, an unfailing light. It burns with a lustre that never grows feeble, and casts a radiance from which nothing is hid.
III. Think of its sufficiency. It is not only a light to lighten the eyes, not only a lamp to throw its lustre over our path; it is also a light to the feet, discovering to us all even the minutest features of the path we have to tread—all its roughnesses, all its breaks and hollows, all on it that would impede our progress or cause us to stumble if unobserved, but which observed we can avoid.
IV. And what a marvellous vitality there is in this light! Other lights have flashed and faded; other guides have offered themselves and been followed, and the blind has led the blind into the ditch, and both have perished. But this light abides as clear, and bright, and beneficent as ever." ~ W. Lindsay Alexander, Christian Thought and Work, p. 39. References: Psa_119:105.—J. Keble, Sermons from Advent to Christmas Eve, p. 257; G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons, p. 199; T. Champness, Homiletic Quarterly, vol. ii., p. 424; Sermons for Boys and Girls, p. 336.
Matthew Henry adds, “Observe here, 1. The nature of the word of God, and the great intention of giving it to the world; it is a lamp and a light. It discovers to us, concerning God and ourselves, that which otherwise we could not have known; it shows us what is amiss, and will be dangerous; it directs us in our work and way, and a dark place indeed the world would be without it. It is a lamp which we may set up by us, and take into our hands for our own particular use. The commandment is a lamp kept burning with the oil of the Spirit; it is like the lamps in the sanctuary, and the pillar of fire to Israel.
2. The use we should make of it. It must be not only a light to out eyes, to gratify them, and fill our heads with speculations, but a light to our feet and to our path, to direct us in the right ordering of our conversation, both in the choice of our way in general and in the particular steps we take in that way, that we may not take a false way nor a false step in the right way. We are then truly sensible of God's goodness to us in giving us such a lamp and light when we make it a guide to our feet, our path.”
All of that is the power of the written Word of God. But our Creator, before His human incarnation, was also called the Word of God, where we read,”In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” ( John 1:1-3).
Before our conversion, before the Father calls us to see and recognize and embrace His Son Jesus Christ as the Saviour of the world, and before we accept His death to be applied to our sins, no matter how many degrees or scholastic accomplishments we might obtain, God's Word describes us as walking in darkness... spiritual darkness. Jesus said, “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12).
Of this, the Sermon Bible tells us, “There is no figure more common in Scripture, and none more beautiful, than that by which Christ is likened unto light. Incomprehensible in its nature, itself the first visible, and that by which all things are seen, light represents to us Christ, Whose generation none can declare, but Who must shine upon us ere we can know aught aright, whether of things Divine or human.
Itself pure and uncontaminated, though visiting the lowest parts of the earth, and penetrating its most noisome recesses, what does light image, if not that undefiled Mediator who contracted no stain, though born of a woman in the likeness of sinful flesh? Who can question that the rising of Jesus Christ, was to the moral world what the sun is to the natural?
Without pleading that the state of the world, before Christ came, was a state of total darkness, we may yet affirm that Christ emphatically came as the light of the world. In no district of the earth—not even in Judæa, though privileged with revelation—was there anything that could be called more than the dawning of the day...
Such was the state of the whole Gentile world when He appeared, whom the prophecy announced as "a light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death." Was the testimony exaggerated, or has it been justified by events? Wheresoever the Gospel has been published and received as a communication from God, the darkness has fled as night flies before the sun. It hath hung the very grave with bright lamps, and rekindled the spirit of an almost quenched immortality.
The pardon of sin, justification through the Mediator’s righteousness, the gradual overcoming of the corruptions of nature, guidance in difficulty, guardianship in danger, comfort in affliction, triumph in death—all these are in the portion of him who follows Christ—followeth Him in faith as his surety, in obedience as his pattern. And are not these the light—yea, the light of life?”
It's not just that we walked in darkness. The Apostle Paul tells us in Ephesians 5:8: “For ye WERE sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light.” We WERE darkness, but now, because of God's intervention in our lives, sending His Son to save us, and giving His Holy Spirit to indwell us, we ARE light, and we are to walk in that light.
Of this, Alexander MacCLaren writes, What Children of Light Should Be: It was our Lord who coined this great name for His disciples. Paul’s use of it is probably a reminiscence of the Master’s, and so is a hint of the existence of the same teachings as we now find in the existing Gospels, long before their day. Jesus Christ said, ‘Believe in the light, that ye may be the children of light’;
and Paul gives substantially the same account of the way by which a man becomes a Son of the Light when he says, in the words preceding my text, ‘Ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord.’ Union with Him makes light, just as the bit of carbon will glow as long as it is in contact with the electric force, and subsides again into darkness when that is switched off. To be in Christ is to be a child of light, and to believe in Christ is to be in Him.
But the intense moral earnestness of our Apostle is indicated by the fact that on both occasions in which he uses this designation he does so, not for the purpose of heightening the sense of the honour and prerogative attached to it, but for the sake of deducing from it plain and stringent moral duties, and heightening the sense of obligation to holy living.
‘Walk as children of light.’ Be true to your truest, deepest self. Manifest what you are. Let the sweet, sacred secrets of inward communion come out in the trivialities of ordinary conduct; make of your every thought a deed, and see to it that every deed be vitalised and purified by its contact with the great truths and thoughts that lie in this name. These are various ways of putting this one all-sufficient directory of conduct. In the context, the Apostle expands this concentrated exhortation in three or four different directions...
The true reading is, ‘Walk as children of light, for the fruit of the light’ (not spirit, as the Authorised Version reads it) ‘is in all goodness and righteousness and truth.’ Now, it is obvious that the alteration of ‘light’ instead of ‘spirit’ brings the words into connection with the preceding and the following. The reference to the ‘fruits of the spirit’ would be entirely irrelevant in this place; a reference to the ‘fruit of the light,’ as being every form of goodness and righteousness and truth, is altogether in place.
There is, then, a natural tendency in the light to blossom out into all forms and types of goodness. ‘Fruit’ suggests the idea of natural, silent, spontaneous, effortless growth. And, although that is by no means a sufficient account of the process by which bad men become good men, it is an inseparable element, in all true moral renovation, that it be the natural outcome and manifestation of an inward principle; otherwise it is mere hypocritical adornment, or superficial appearance. If we are to do good we must first of all be good.
If from us there are to come righteousness and truth, and all other graces of character, there must, first of all, be the radical change which is involved in passing from separateness in the darkness to union with Jesus Christ in the light. The Apostle’s theory of moral renovation is that you must begin with the implantation in the spirit of the source of all moral goodness-viz. Jesus Christ - brought into the heart by the uniting power of humble faith. And then there will be lodged in our being a vital power, of which the natural outcome will be all manner of fair and pure things. Effort is needed, as I shall have to say; but prior to effort there must be union with Jesus Christ.
This wide, general commandment of our text is sufficiently definite, thinks Paul; for if the light be in you it will naturally {blossom} into all forms of beauty. Light is the condition of fruitfulness. Everywhere the vital germ is only acted upon by the light. No sunshine, no flowers; darkness produces thin, etiolated, whitened, and feeble shoots at the best. Let the light blaze in, and the blanched feebleness becomes vigorous and unfolds itself. How much more will light be the condition of fruitfulness when the very light itself is the seed from which all fruit is developed?
But, still further, mark how there must be an all-round completeness in order that we shall fairly set forth the glory and power of the light of which our faith makes us children and partakers. The fruit ‘is in all goodness and righteousness and truth.’ These three aspects-the good, the right, the true-may not be a scientific, ethical classification, but they give a sufficiently plain and practical distinction.
Goodness, in which the prevailing idea is beneficence and the kindlier virtues; righteousness, which refers to the sterner graces of justice; truth, in which the prevalent idea is conformity in action with facts and the conditions of man’s life and entire sincerity-these three do cover, with sufficient completeness, the whole ground of possible human excellence. But the Apostle widens them still further by that little word all.
We all tend to cultivate those virtues which are in accordance with our natural dispositions, or are made most easy to us by our circumstances. And there is nothing in which we more need to seek comprehensiveness than in the effort to educate ourselves into, and to educe from ourselves, kinds of goodness and forms of excellence which are not naturally in accordance with our dispositions, or facilitated by our circumstances.
Jesus Christ would have us to be all-round men, and would that we should seek to aim after and possess the kinds of excellence that are least cognate to our characters. Are you strong, and do you pride yourself upon your firmness? Cultivate gentleness. Are you amiable, and pride yourself, perhaps, upon your sympathetic tenderness? Try to get a little iron and quinine into your constitution. Seek to be the man that you are least likely to be, and aim at a comprehensive development of ‘all righteousness and goodness and truth.’
Further, remember that this all-round completeness is not attained as the result of an effortless growth. True, these things are the fruits of the light, but also true, they are the prizes of struggle and the trophies of warfare. No man will ever attain to the comprehensive moral excellence which it is in his own power to win; no Christian will ever be as all-round a good man as he has the opportunities of being, unless he makes it his business, day by day, to aim after the conscious increase of gifts that he possesses, and the conscious appropriation and possession of those of which he is still lacking.
‘Nothing of itself will come,’ or very little. True, the light will shine out in variously tinted ray if it be in a man, as surely as from the seed come the blade and the ear and the full corn in the ear, but you will not have nor keep the light which thus will unfold itself unless you put forth appropriate effort. Christ comes into our hearts, but we have to bring Him there. Christ dwells in our hearts, but we have to work into our nature, and work out in action, the gifts that He bestows.
‘Walk as children of the light.’ There is your duty, for ‘the fruit of the light is all righteousness.’ One might have supposed that the commandments would be, ‘Be passive as children of the light, for the light will grow.’ But the Apostle binds together, as always, the two things, the divine working and the human effort at reception, retention, and application of that divine work, just as he does in the great classical passage, ‘Work out your own salvation, for it is God that worketh in you.’
II. Secondly, the general exhortation of my text widens out itself into this-test all things by Christ’s approval of them. ‘Proving what is well pleasing unto the Lord.’ That, according to the natural construction of the Greek, is the main way by which the Apostle conceives that his general commandment of ‘walking as children of the light’ is to be carried out. You do it if, step by step, and moment by moment, and to every action of life, you apply this standard: Does Christ like it? Does it please Him? When that test is rigidly applied, then, and only then, will you walk as becomes the children of the light.
So, then, there is a standard - not what men approve, not what my conscience, partially illuminated, may say is permissible, not what is recognised as allowable by the common maxims of the world round about us, but Christ’s approval. How different the hard, stern, and often unwelcome prescriptions of law and rigidity of some standards of right become when they are changed into that which pleases the Divine Lord and Lover!
Surely it is something blessed that the hard, cold, and to such a large extent powerless conceptions of duty or obligation shall be changed into pleasing Jesus Christ; and that so our hearts shall be enlisted in the service of our consciences, and love shall be glad to do the Beloved’s will. There are many ways by which the burden of life’s obligations is lightened to the Christian. I do not know that any of them is more precious than the fact that law is changed into His will, and that we seek to do what is right because it pleases the Master. There is the standard.
III. Thirdly, we have here another expansion of the general command, and that is-keep well separate from the darkness. Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.’ Now, your time will not allow me to dwell, as I had hoped to do, upon the considerations to be suggested here. The very briefest possible mention of them is all that I can afford.
‘The unfruitful works of darkness’;-well, then, the darkness has its works, but though they be works they are not worth calling fruit. That is to say, nothing except the conduct which flows from union with Jesus Christ so corresponds to the man’s nature and relations, or has any such permanence about it as to entitle it to be called fruit. Other acts may be ‘works’ but Paul will not dishonour the great word ‘fruit’ by applying it to such rubbish as these, and so he brands them as ‘unfruitful works of darkness.’
Keep well clear of them, says the Apostle. He is not talking here about the relations between Christians and others, but about the relations between Christian men and the works of darkness. Only, of course, in order to avoid fellowship with the works you will sometimes have to keep yourselves well separate from their doers. Much association with such men is forced upon us by circumstances, and much is the imperative duty of Christian beneficence and charity.
It will be easy for us to come to the right appreciation of individual actions when we are living in the light. Union with Jesus Christ will make us quick to discern His will. We have a conscience;-well, that needs educating and enlightening, and very often correcting. We have the Word of God;-well, that needs explanation, and needs to be brought close to our hearts.
If we have Christ dwelling in us, in the measure in which we are in sympathy with Him, we shall be gifted with clear eyes, not indeed to discern the expedient-that belongs to another region altogether-but we shall be gifted with very clear eyes to discern right from wrong, and there will be an instinctive recoil from the evil, and an instinctive attachment of ourselves to the good. If we are in the Lord we shall easily be able to prove what is acceptable and well-pleasing to Him.
We shall never walk as the children of the light, unless we have the habit of referring everything, trifles and great things, to His {judicial decision}, and seeking in them all to do what is pleasing in His sight. The smallest deed may be brought under the operation of the largest principles. Gravitation influences the microscopic grain of sand as well as planets and sun. There is nothing so small but you can bring it into this category - it either pleases or displeases Jesus Christ. See to it that everything vindicates its right to enter because it is pleasing to Jesus Christ.”
This concludes this evening's Discussion, “Basic Christianity, Part 26.”
This Discussion was originally presented “live” on March 24th, 2021.
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