“Basic Christianity, Part 57” by Romans
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We are continuing in our Series, “Basic Christianity.” Tonight, we are continuing in the review and examination of our Christian walk, as a facet of Basic Christianity. We are going to continue our acrostic review of the phrase, “By Growing in Grace,” in regard to our following in the steps of Christ. We have individually reviewed and examined all of the letters in that phrase. Last week was Part Three for the letter “E” in the word, “Grace.”
So, from Torrey's Bible Dictionary's, from their article: “The Example of Christ.” we covered the Examples Jesus left for us to follow: Holiness, Love and Humility, and Obedience unto death, Meekness, Self-Denial, Taking Up Our Own Cross, and Bearing One Another's Burdens, Ministering to Others. Last week we looked at the Example Jesus left for us that is absolutely critical to Basic Christianity, namely, Forgiving Offenses and Injuries Committed Against Us.
Tonight, we're continuing to review and examine the many Examples Jesus left for us, as listed in Torrey's List, the verses related to them, and I will share some Commentaries on those verses. Tonight's Example is Overcoming the World. We read in John 16:33: “These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”
First, I want to share with you the insights taken from the Sermon Bible: “There is a difficulty in seizing the precise meaning of the word "world." It seems an airy, subtle, impalpable thing, that world of St. John. It refuses to be described, to be precipitated, to be measured, to be defined. It is not the wicked, though they are its victims. It is not Satan, though the Scriptures call him its prince, as presiding over it and rejoicing in it.
It is an atmosphere, a temper, a spirit, a power real and most energetic, but dread and invisible. It has hung for ages—this world—like a dark murky cloud over the heart of humanity. It poisons the very air we breathe. It is that warp in the aim and affections of the soul which makes of each of the objects of this visible creation, and of the circumstances of life, a distinct hindrance to getting to heaven. Let us note the character of its influence.
I. First of all, it works secretly and without being suspected. Observe the language which we use with regard to it in daily life. When we speak of the world, we uniformly assume that it is something outside us. The world disguises itself; it is like Satan showing himself in the character of an angel of light; it seeks to be habitually respectable, it dislikes gross sin, it affects very particularly to cultivate the social virtues. It can be prudent, like the old prophet; it can be wise, like Ahithophel; it can be courageous as was Saul; it can be very pious indeed, like the false apostles of the Church of Corinth.
II. The world has a marvellous versatility, a power of self-adaptation to all ages and races and classes. There may be a difference of form; there is a marvellous and awful unity of spirit. The spirit of the world is contagious; it passes, like an infection, from soul to soul.
III. What was the relation of our Lord to the Jewish world in His day and generation? It could not receive His spirit; it rejoiced at His departure. It rested not, that world, till it had led Him to the Cross. And, therefore, His resurrection was not merely a conquest of death, not merely the crowning proof of His Divinity; it was a triumph over the power that had killed Him. It was the conquest of the world. "Be of good cheer," He said, in full view of His {Resurrection} triumph; "I have overcome the world." H. P. Liddon, Penny Pulpit, No. 3847
The Mystery of Peace: I. The mystery of peace, for the disciples, as for us, could be clearly shown by teaching two truths. (1) First, the Lord brought out to them, as seen in the fact of His conflict, the meaning of the outer life of the Christian. That outer life, so it appeared, was to take its meaning and derive its trial from antagonism with one overwhelming power. In the world ye shall have tribulation.
There lay before the Christian, if he had strength to be a Christian, a long and necessary course of trial.
(2) But the tribulation is turned to excellent uses. Trial is the school of obedience; trial is the means of growth of character; trial is the method of discipline; trial is the training of faith. There is this sad fact of the outer life of the Christian; but the silence of the winter world witnesses to the coming life of spring; the narrow wrapping of the narrow bud witnesses to the opening flower; the dark night witnesses to the morning; the outer struggle of the Christian witnesses to the inner life.
II. Examine some of the conditions of the mystery of peace. (1) First, we plainly need the forgiveness of sin. Resistance; the onward march of a struggling soul; the yearning towards, the crying for, the seeking after forgiveness; these are needed; then—for Christ is unfailing in His promise—it is the peace, the real rest of the weary, not the stillness and lethargy of decay.
(2) "First the kingdom of God and His righteousness" is a condition of peace. When the soul is learning to act in this life on the principles of another—to live, to move, to work, in fact, "in Christ"—then, like the consistent calmness of the sunlight on the quiet summer day, then, like the majesty of stillness in the unfathomed azure of the summer night—then, there is peace.
(3) As a condition of peace we must surrender an attractive principle and adopt one at least apparently severe. To have this treasure of peace, so fair, so needed, we must be freed from a tyrannous and trembling anxiety to please ourselves.
III. We are led to peace (1) by Christ’s example; (2) by faith in His blood; (3) by growth in grace. W. J. Knox-Little, The Mystery of the Passion, p. 137.”
There is clearly a negative rolled up in this sentence. It is this: that there is no peace out of Christ. I. Let us be careful that we understand what the peace of God is. It is the feeling of being forgiven—a quiet conscience—a stilling sense of the love of God. That is the first thing.
Then, growing out of that, it is a certain contemplative habit of mind that deals silently with unseen things, which lives up high enough not to be tossed and anxious much about the matters which concern the present world. For it is the repose of faith, a trust in promises, a sense of a Father’s love, a Father’s nearness, a Father’s care—the hush of a little child leaning on His bosom.
II. It is of immense importance to have that peace, because (1) first, it is the sweetest and the best and the only satisfying of all possessions. It meets the deepest longings of a man’s heart. Pleasure is man’s delight, but peace is man’s necessity. No man is complete till he has peace. No man knows what he can be—the capabilities of his own nature, or what enjoyment is—till he is at peace.
(2) Peace is the root of all holiness. To believe that you are pardoned, to be at leisure from the retrospect, to carry a conscience at ease, to take the unruffled reflection of Christ, even as Christ did of the Father—that is the atmosphere of a daily religious life, and that is the secret of every good thing.
(3) Peace is the fulfilment of the work of Christ. Then the eloquence of the Cross has not been in vain. Then His word has accomplished its grand design. "These things have I spoken unto you, that in Me ye might have peace."
III. Three rules for peace. (1) Be more decided. Decision is the parent of peace. Take some steps at once heavenward, and it may be that one step will land you in peace. (2) Confess Christ; confess Him in the world; do not be ashamed of your better portion; begin to speak of Christ to somebody.
(3) And lastly, go up and down more in Christ—His work, His person, His beauty, His grace. Listen for His still small voice. He will speak. You will hear Him, and you will feel Him—a strange grand reality—a thing that comes and does not go away again, like everything else—peace. J. Vaughan, Sermons, 1868, p. 37.
In the world ye have tribulation! Such is our cry when we think of the thousand pains and miseries which we have endured in the year that is gone, when we remember the labour and trouble that we have passed through, eating our bread in the sweat of our brow, sighing under the burden and heat of the day. These are but our own troubles, and life would be an easy thing if each had only his own
burden to bear, if the manifold grief of others did not also lie heavy on our hearts.
I. What was the tribulation of which the Lord speaks in the words of our text? A new Divine life had sprung up for the disciples in their Redeemer—a life which the world neither possessed nor understood. They were to bring that life to the world. And the world was hostile to them; not only was it unwilling to receive the life of God, but it would not even listen to the story of that life;
it had no heart for the love which God had shown it, no eye for the truth of grace which shone in upon its darkness. So the disciples had tribulation in the world; and their tribulation is ours also. We feel that this is a world of sin. We know the terrible power with which sin rules in the world at large, and in the little world which each man carries within him.
II. "Be of good cheer," says the Lord; "I have overcome the world." He who speaks thus was no idle spectator of our sorrows, but One who Himself fought a battle such as none ever fought before or since. At the very moment when His fiercest conflict was about to begin, He calls to us in these words from the clear joyous heights in which His being had its home.
And was not the battle He fought the fiercest ever engaged in? He bore Himself in the contest as no warrior ever did before. There was not one moment of defeat during all that conflict. He was victor from first to last. The fiercer the battle, the more glorious was His victory. And the glorified Victor calls now to us: "Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." For him who follows, the world is overcome already. This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. R. Rothe, Predigten, p. 70.
The Duty of the Church to the World: I. The world is nothing less than this—any one of God’s works enjoyed or possessed without God, be it what it may—the world contemplated without that counterpoise in the other world that exists, and was meant to exist, to prevent us from being slaves of this.
Without this love of God which lifts a man above this present world, he must, whether pagan or Christian, become necessarily the slave of the world, the subject of its rule, the very servant of its whims and its caprices. He becomes a very man of the world in the very lowest and poorest sense of the word—not daring to be his own master, but the very servant, not even of the world in its largest and best sense, but of that little fragment of the world and of society to which he appears to belong.
II. We live, every one of us, or we are in danger of living, in the most abject slavery to the world to which we belong. And what will set us free? The truth, and the truth alone, makes man free—the truth that teaches each one of us that we are redeemed and immortal spirits, telling us that we belong not to ourselves nor yet to our party, nor yet to our world, but to the God in heaven Who made us and will judge us, and has redeemed us.
This alone gives a man the courage that comes forth from the very depths of self-sacrifice and humiliation before his Lord and Master, to rise up, and in His name, in the name of His law and in the power of His might, to defy the smaller laws—to break through the stringent customs, to brave the hostile opinions of the world in which he lives. And the man who cannot do this is not yet made free with the glorious liberty of a son of God. He is overcome by the world; he has not yet learned to overcome the world.
III. It is not, and never was, the duty of the Church to conform herself to the spirit of the age. It is the duty of the Church to instruct the age, to love the age, and if need be to rebuke the age, but never yet in its whole history has it been her duty to conform to the spirit of the age. And yet, on the other hand, how deeply and intensely it is the duty of the Church to understand and sympathise with her age—to be in very deed a dweller amongst men.
She is to go forth wherever men are, and, in the name of her Divine Master, who died to redeem humanity, whatever men are doing and thinking, she is to say with an infinitely deeper meaning than it had on the lips of Him who first said it: "We are human, and there is nothing in or of our age that we can count estranged from us."
The Church is to be of her day, and yet of all days and of all ages; having truths deeper, and facts greater, and laws and powers mightier to speak of and to reveal, than even the facts and the truths and the laws which science is revealing to us now. In this way only can the Church hope to overcome the world. Bishop Magee, Penny Pulpit, No. 579. References: Joh_16:33.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxii., No. 1327; Ibid., Morning by Morning, p. 124; Contemporary Pulpit, vol. xi., p. 304;
Preacher’s Monthly, vol. iii., p. 278; G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines, p. 361; J. Aldis, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xi., p. 129; J. H. Kitchens, Ibid., vol. xiii., p. 203; E. Johnson, Ibid., vol. xxii., p. 137; New Outlines on the New Testament, p. 67; W. M. Taylor, Three Hundred Outlines on the New Testament, p. 97. Joh_17:1.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxv., No. 1464; Contemporary Pulpit, vol. x., p. 363; J. M. Neale, Sermons in a Religious House, vol. ii., p. 588; F. D. Maurice, Gospel of St. John, p. 411; J. Armstrong, Parochial Sermons, p. 230; W. Braden, Christian. World Pulpit, vol. xiii., p. 168; C. Stanford, Evening of Our Lord’s Ministry, pp. 151, 157; C. Kingsley, Good News of God, p. 12; Homilist, vol. vii., p. 382. Joh_17:1, Joh_17:2.—Homiletic Magazine, vol. viii., p. 72; vol. ix., p. 137.
Alexander MacClaren adds to this: “PEACE AND VICTORY: So end these wonderful discourses, and so ends our Lord’s teaching before His passion. He gathers up in one mighty word the total intention of these sweet and deep sayings which we have so long been pondering together. He sketches in broad outline the continual characteristics of the disciples’ life, and closes all with the strangest shout of victory, even at the moment when He seems most utterly defeated.
We shall, I think, best lay on our hearts and minds the spirit and purpose of these words if we simply follow their course, and look at the three things which Christ emphasises here: the inward peace which is His purpose for us; the outward tribulation which is our certain fate; and the courageous confidence which Christ’s victory for us gives.
I. Note, then, first, the inward peace. ‘These things have I spoken unto you that in Me ye might have peace.’ Peace is not lethargy; and it is very remarkable to notice how, in immediate connection with this great promise, there occur words which suggest its opposite-tribulation and battle. ‘In the world ye have tribulation.’ ‘I have overcome’-that means a fight.
These are to go side by side with the peace that He promises. The two conditions belong to two different spheres. The Christian life bifurcates, as it were, into a double root, and moves in two realms-’in Me’ and ‘in the world’ And the predicates and characteristics of these two lives are, in a large measure, diametrically opposite.
So here, without any contradiction, our Lord brackets together these two opposite conditions as both pertaining to the life of a devout soul. He promises a peace which co-exists with tribulation and disturbance, a peace which is realised in and through conflict and struggle. The tree will stand, with its deep roots and its firm bole, unmoved, though wildest winds may toss its branches and scatter its leaves.
In the fortress, beleaguered by the sternest foes, there may be, right in the very centre of the citadel, a quiet oratory through whose thick walls the noise of battle and the shout of victory or defeat can never penetrate. So we may live in a centre of rest, however wild may be the uproar in the circumference. ‘In Me. . . peace,’ that is the innermost life. ‘In the world. . . tribulation,’ that is only the surface.
But, then, note that this peace, which exists with, and is realised through, tribulation and strife, depends upon certain conditions. Our Lord does not say, ‘Ye have peace,’ but ‘These things I have spoken that you may have it.’ It is a possibility; and He lays down distinctly and plainly here the twofold set of conditions, in fulfilment of which a Christian disciple may dwell secure and still, in the midst of all confusion. Note, then, these two.
It is peace, if we have it at all, in Him. Now you remember how emphatically and loftily, as one of the very key-notes of these discourses, our Lord has spoken to us, in them, of ‘dwelling in Him’ as the prerogative and the duty of every Christian. We are in Him as in an atmosphere. In Him our true lives are rooted as a tree in the soil. We are in Him as a branch in the vine, in Him as the members in a body, in Him as the residents in a house.
We are in Him by simple faith, by the trust that rests all upon Him, by the love that finds all in Him, by the obedience that does all for Him. And it is only when we are ‘in Christ’ that we rest, and realise peace. All else brings distraction. Even delights trouble.
The world may give excitement, the world may give vulgar and fleeting joys, the world may give stimulus to much that is good and true in us, but there is only one thing that gives peace, and that is that our hearts should dwell in the Fortress, and should ever be surrounded by Jesus Christ. Brother! let nothing tempt us down from the heights, and out from the citadel where alone we are at rest;
but in the midst of all the pressing duties, the absorbing cares, the carking anxieties, the seducing temptations of the world, and in the presence of all the necessity for noble conflict which the world brings to every man that is not its slave, let us try to keep the roots of our lives in contact with that soil from which they draw all their nourishment, and to wrap ourselves round with the life of Jesus Christ, which shall make an impenetrable shield between us and ‘the fiery darts of the wicked.’
But there is another condition. Christ speaks the great words which have been occupying us so long, that they may bring to us peace. I need not do more than remind you, in a sentence, of the contents of these wonderful discourses. Think of how they have spoken to us of our Brother’s ascension to Heaven to prepare a place for us; of His coming again to receive us to Himself; of His presence with us in His absence; of His indwelling in us and ours in Him; of His gift to us of a divine Spirit.
If we believed all these things; if we realised them and lived in the faith of them; if we meditated upon them in the midst of our daily duties; and if they were real to us, and not mere words written down in a Book, how should anything be able to disturb us, or to shake our settled confidence?
Cleave to the words of the Master, and let them pour into your hearts the quietness and confidence which nothing else can give. And then, whatsoever storms may be around, the heart will be at rest. We find peace nowhere else but where Mary found her repose, and could shake off care and ‘trouble about many things,’ sitting at the feet of Jesus, wrapt in His love and listening to His word.
II. Then note, secondly, the outward tribulation which is the certain fate of His followers. Of course there is a very sad and true sense in which the warning, ‘In the world ye shall have tribulation,’ applies to all men. Pain and sickness, loss and death, the monotony of hard, continuous, unwelcome toil, hopes blighted or disappointed even in their fruition, and all the other ‘ills that flesh is heir to,’ afflict us all.
But our Lord is not speaking here about the troubles that befall men as men, nor about the chastisement that befalls them as sinners, nor about the evils which dog them because they are mortal or because they are bad, but of the yet more mysterious sorrows which fall upon them because they are good, ‘In the world ye have tribulation,’ is the proper rendering and reading. It had already begun, and it was to be the standing condition and certain fate of all that followed Him.
I have already said that the Christian life moves in two spheres, and hence there must necessarily be antagonism and conflict. Whoever realises the inward life in Christ will more or less, and sooner or later, find himself coming into hostile collision with lives which only move on the surface and belong to the world.
If you and I are Christians after the pattern of Jesus Christ, then we dwell in the midst of an order of things which is not constituted on or for the principles that regulate our lives and the objects at which we aim. And hence, in that fundamental discordance between the Christian life and society as it is constituted, there must always be, if there be honesty and consistency on the side of the Christian man, more or less of collision between him and it.
All that you regard as axiomatic (or, self-evident) the world regards as folly, if you take Christ for your Teacher. All that you labour to secure the world does not care to possess, if you have Him for your aim. All that you live to seek it has abandoned; all that you desire to obey it will not even consult, if you are taking Christ and His law for your rule. And therefore there must come, sooner or later, and more or less intensely in all Christian lives, opposition and tribulation. You cannot get away from the necessity, so it is as well to face it.
No doubt the form of antagonism varies. No doubt the more the world is penetrated by Christian principles divorced from their root and source, the less vehement and painful will the collision be. But there is the gulf, and there it will remain, until the world is a Church. No doubt some portion of the battlements of organised Christianity has tumbled into the ditch, and made it a little less deep.
Christians have dropped their standard far too much, and so the antagonism is not so plain as it ought to be, and as it used to be, and as, some day, it will be. But there it is, and if you are going to live out and out like a Christian man, you will get the old sneers flung at you. You will be ‘crotchety,’ ‘impracticable,’ ‘spoiling sport,’ ‘not to be dealt with,’ ‘a wet blanket,’ ‘pharisaical,’ ‘bigoted,’ and all the rest of the pretty words which have been so frequently used about the men that try to live like Jesus Christ. Never mind!
‘In the world ye have tribulation.’ ‘I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus,’ the branding-iron which tells to whom the slave belongs. And if it is His initials that I carry I may be proud of the marks. But at any rate there will be antagonism... (W)e have all, in our several ways, to bear the cross. Do not let us be ashamed of it, and, above all, do not let us, for the sake of easing our shoulders, be unfaithful to our Master.
‘In the world ye have tribulation’; and the Christian man’s peace has to be like the rainbow that lives above the cataract - still and radiant, whilst it shines above the hell of white waters that are tortured below.
III. Lastly, notice the courageous confidence which comes from the Lord’s victory. ‘Be of good cheer!’ It is the old commandment that rang out to Joshua when, on the departure of Moses, the conduct of the war fell into his less experienced hands: ‘Be strong, and of a good courage; only be thou strong and very courageous.’ So says the Captain of salvation, leaving His soldiers to face the current of the heady fight in the field.
Like some leader who has climbed the ramparts, or hewed his way through the broken ranks of the enemies, and rings out the voice of encouragement and call to his followers, our Captain sets before us His own example: ‘I have overcome the world,’ He said that the day before Calvary. If that was victory, what would defeat have been?
Notice, then, how our Lord’s life was a true battle. The world tried to draw Him away from God by appealing to things desirable to sense, as in the wilderness; or to things dreadful to sense, as on the cross; and both the one and the other form of temptation He faced and conquered. It was no shadow fight which evoked this paean of victory from His lips.
The reality of His conflict is somewhat concealed from us by reason of its calm and the completeness of His conquest. We do not appreciate the force that drives a planet upon its path because it is calm and continuous and silent, but the power that kept Jesus Christ continually faithful to His Father, continually sure of that Father’s presence, continually averse to all self-will and selfish living, was a power mightier then all others that have been manifested in the history of humanity. The Captain of our salvation has really fought the fight before us.
Still further, note our share in the Master’s victory-’I have overcome the world. Be ye of good cheer.’ That seems an irrelevant way of arguing. What does it matter to me though He has overcome? So much the better for Him; but what good is it to me?
It may aid us somewhat to more strenuous fighting, if we know that a brother has fought and conquered, and I do not under-estimate the blessing and the benefit of the life of Jesus Christ, as recorded in these Scriptures, even from that, as I conceive it, miserably inadequate and imperfect point of view.
But the victory of Jesus Christ is of extremely little practical use to me, if all the use of it is to show me how to fight. Ah! you must go a deal deeper than that. ‘I have overcome the world, and I will come and put My overcoming Spirit into your weakness, and fill you with My own victorious life, and make your hands strong to war and your fingers to fight; and be in you the conquering and omnipotent Power.’
My friends! Jesus Christ’s victory is ours, and we are victors in it, because He is more than the pattern of brave warfare, He is even the Son of God, who gave Himself for us, and gives Himself to us, and dwells in us our Strength and our Righteousness.
This concludes this evening's Discussion, “Basic Christianity, Part 57.”
This Discussion was originally presented “live” on November 3rd, 2021
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