“In the Image and Likeness of God, Part 8” by Romans
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Tonight, we are continuing in the Series I began seven weeks ago on our being, “In the Image and Likeness of God.” When we left off last week, we were reviewing and examining love as a major aspect of the image that we, as believers in God and Christ and His Word, that we should bear. We broke off last week talking about the love that we, as believers, need to live and express to each other, to our neighbors and to our enemies.
Our first stop, tonight, is statement made by Jesus that I am inclined to believe that everyone hearing me or reading my Notes in the Forum are familiar with. He made this statement as He was giving His disciples His last minute instructions and directions on the night before His crucifixion: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).
Of this, first let's review what the Sermon Bible says of this: “The Death of Christ, our only Stay. If the thoughts of sin, death, and judgment be so terrible, as in truth they are to every soul of man, on what shall we stay ourselves when our time is at hand?
I. First, upon the love of God, in giving His Son to die for us. This is our first foundation, that God loves the world; that He looks upon the works of His hands with an eternal and stedfast love, with a tender, yearning compassion. Whatever is doubtful, this is sure. Light does not pour forth from the sun with a fuller and directer ray, than does perfect and eternal love overflow from the bosom of God upon all the works that He has made.
God’s creative love alone would be enough to still our fears, and to show us that, if any perish, it is not because He is austere, but because they are evil. The whole will and Kingdom of God is love; and to Him, in that Kingdom, we may come with boldness of hope and trust.
II. We have, as a second foundation on which to build our trust, the love of the Son in giving Himself for us. Being in the form of God, He emptied Himself of His glory. His Godhead He could not lay aside for us; but He took to Himself something—the dearest and most precious to the soul of man.
He took our nature, and therein a life, the most loved and priceless of all the gifts of God.
There is nothing to be compared with life. We cherish it as our very self; it is the centre of every care; the end of all our labours. Such He took unto Himself, and thereby He possessed Himself of something He might give for us.
III. In Christ’s death were united the oblation of a Divine person, and the sanctity of a sinless man; the perfection of a holy will, and the fulfilment of a spotless life; the willing sacrifice of the sinless for the sinful, of the shepherd for the sheep that was lost, of life for the dead. How this wrought atonement for the sin of the world, we cannot say further than is revealed.
How the guiltless could take the place of the guilty—how the penalty, due to our sin, could be laid on any but ourselves, above all, on One who was sinless—must, at least in this our wayfaring on earth, be a mystery unsearchable, and a depth past finding out. In this life it is enough for us to know that He hath "tasted death for every man"; that "there is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus."
H. E. Manning, Sermons, vol. iii., p. 331.
References: Joh_15:13.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xix., No. 1128; H. R. Haweis, Church Sermons, vol. i., p. 81.
Friendship with Christ Observe: — I. That the overtures of this friendship came first from Christ Himself, had their spring in considerations which could have originated with the Divine mind alone, whilst the proof of His own earnest desire to bring about such friendship is the very strongest that could be given.
"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." Who are Christ’s friends? And the answer returned by our text is significant—"Ye are My friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you."
Friends, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, do not give commands at all. The relation commonly supposes something of equality, with no allowed subjection on either side, but maintained chiefly by offices of reciprocated kindness.
But Christ had towards His disciples a prior relationship of Lord and Master, and therefore He is anxious to show that in receiving them into His friendship He does not thereby cancel their previous obligation to obedience and service. The friendship, then, which Christ has towards His disciples is manifestly only that of a sovereign towards certain subjects whom He admits to approach Him on some footing of condescending intimacy and confidence.
II. Assuming that we understand the nature of friendship with Christ, and in heart and purpose desire to comply with the required terms of it, let us see, in the next place, how this friendship is reciprocated by Christ, by considering some of the ways in which He shows Himself friendly to us.
(1) He will be a counsellor to us in difficulties. "His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor."
(2) He is a friend that giveth gifts; enhancing the value of His advice by supplying the means to follow it. Two things always go together in the Gospel—Repentance and Faith. These are Christ’s gifts to His chosen ones.
(3) The Lord shows Himself friendly in the methods and extent of His forgiveness. His forgiveness is as full as it is free, and as free as it is full.
(4) It is a part of true friendship to be with us in the hour when health and strength are failing, when body and soul are parting, when the dust is returning to the earth as it was, and the spirit is returning to God who gave it. The proofs of the power of the friendship of our Divine Master increase with the exigency of the occasion, are most comforting when all other friendships fail.
D. Moore, Penny Pulpit, No. 3141.
References: Joh_15:14.—W. Anderson, Discourses, p. 214; Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxvi., No. 1552; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. ix., p. 132; E. Johnson, Ibid., vol. xv., p. 357. Joh_15:14, Joh_15:15.—Ibid., vol. xxv., p. 299; H. W. Beecher, Ibid., vol. xxvi., p. 251. Joh_15:15.—E. L. Hull, Sermons, 3rd series, p. 141; Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. i., p. 111; vol. xv., p. 26; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. x., pp. 123, 376; J. Ker, Ibid., vol. xxviii., p. 220; H. W. Beecher, Ibid., p. 339; vol. xxx., p. 372; Bishop Thorold, The Yoke of Christ, p. 103; E. Paxton Hood, Dark Sayings on a Harp, p. 295; T. M. Herbert, Sketches of Sermons, p. 306. Joh_15:16.—Preacher’s Monthly, vol. iv., p. 61; A. Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer, p. 172; W. P. Lockhart, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxvii., p. 136.
The Expositor's Bible adds not only to the above comment, but expands the verses to verse 17 to give us a fuller picture not only of what Jesus is teaching us, but a deeper understanding of our being in the image and likeness of God:
“"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are My friends, if ye do the things which I command you. No longer do I call you servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known unto you...”
Jesus continues: “Ye did not choose Me, but I chose you, and appointed you, that ye should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should abide: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in My name, He may give it you. These things I command you, that ye may love one another."-- John 15:13-17.
The Expositor's Bible comments, “These words of our Lord are the charter of our emancipation. They give us entrance into true freedom. They set us in the same attitude towards life and towards God as Christ Himself occupied. Without this proclamation of freedom and all it covers we are the mere drudges of this world,--doing its work, but without any great and far-reaching aim that makes it worth doing; accepting the tasks allotted to us because we must, not because we will; living on because we happen to be here, but without any part in that great future towards which all things are running on.
But this is of the very essence of slavery. For our Lord here lays His finger on the sorest part of this deepest of human sores when He says, "The slave knows not what his master does." It is not that his back is torn with the lash, it is not that he is underfed and overworked, it is not that he is poor and despised; all this would be cheerfully undergone to serve a cherished purpose and accomplish ends a man had chosen for himself.
But when all this must be endured to work out the purposes of another, purposes never hinted to him, and with which, were they hinted, he might have no sympathy, this is slavery, this is to be treated as a tool for accomplishing aims chosen by another, and to be robbed of all that constitutes manhood. Sailors and soldiers have sometimes mutinied when subjected to similar treatment, when no inkling has been given them of the port to which they are shipped or the nature of the expedition on which they are led.
Men do not feel degraded by any amount of hardship, by going for months on short rations or lying in frost without tents; but they do feel degraded when they are used as weapons of offence, as if they had no intelligence to appreciate a worthy aim, no power of sympathising with a great design, no need of an interest in life and a worthy object on which to spend it, no share in the common cause.
Yet such is the life with which, apart from Christ, we must perforce be content, doing the tasks appointed us with no sustaining consciousness that our work is part of a great whole working out the purposes of the Highest. Even such a spirit as Carlyle is driven to say: "Here on earth we are soldiers, fighting in a foreign land, that understand not the plan of campaign and have no need to understand it, seeing what is at our hand to be done,"--excellent counsel for slaves, but not descriptive of the life we are meant for, nor of the life our Lord would be content to give us.
To give us true freedom, to make this life a thing we choose with the clearest perception of its uses and with the utmost ardour, our Lord makes known to us all that He heard of the Father. What He had heard of the Father, all that the Spirit of the Father had taught Him of the need of human effort and of human righteousness, all that as He grew up to manhood He recognised of the deep-seated woes of humanity, and all that He was prompted to do for the relief of these woes, He made known to His disciples.
The irresistible call to self-sacrifice and labour for the relief of men which He heard and obeyed, He made known and He makes known to all who follow Him. He did not allot clearly defined tasks to His followers; He did not treat them as slaves, appointing one to this and another to that: He showed them His own aim and His own motive, and left them as His friends to be attracted by the aim that had drawn Him, and to be ever animated with the motive that sufficed for Him.
What had made His life so glorious, so full of joy, so rich in constant reward, He knew would fill their lives also; and He leaves them free to choose it for themselves, to stand before life as independent, unfettered, undriven men, and choose without compulsion what their own deepest convictions prompted them to choose.
The "friend" is not compelled blindly to go through with a task whose result he does not understand or does not sympathise with; the friend is invited to share in a work in which he has a direct personal interest and to which he can give himself cordially. All life should be the forwarding of purposes we approve, the bringing about of ends we earnestly desire: all life, if we are free men, must be matter of choice, not of compulsion.
And therefore Christ, having heard of the Father that which made Him feel straitened until the great aim of His life could be accomplished, which made Him press forward through life attracted and impelled by the consciousness of its infinite value as achieving endless good, imparts to us what moved and animated Him, that we may freely choose as He chose and enter into the joy of our Lord.
This, then, is the point of this great utterance: Jesus takes our lives up into partnership with His own. He sets before us the same views and hopes which animated Himself, and gives us a prospect of being useful to Him and in His work. If we engage in the work of life with a dull and heartless feeling of its weariness, or merely for the sake of gaining a livelihood, if we are not drawn to labour by the prospect of result, then we have scarcely entered into the condition our Lord opens to us.
It is for the merest slaves to view their labour with indifference or repugnance. Out of this state our Lord calls us, by making known to us what the Father made known to Him, by giving us the whole means of a free, rational, and fruitful life. He gives us the fullest satisfaction moral beings can have, because He fills our life with intelligent purpose. He lifts us into a position in which we see that we are not the slaves of fate or of this world.
[We see] that all things are ours, that we, through and with Him, are masters of the position, and that so far from thinking it almost a hardship to have been born into so melancholy and hopeless a world, we have really the best reason and the highest possible object for living. He comes among us and says, "Let us all work together. Something can be made of this world. Let us with heart and hope strive to make of it something worthy. Let unity of aim and of work bind us together." This is indeed to redeem life from its vanity.”
Finally, Alexander MacClaren also comments on these verses, and he also expands on the original verse, but he expands to include the previous introductory verse to set the tone for us. Both verses together read, “This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 13:12-13).
Alexander MacClaren writes, “THE ONENESS OF THE BRANCHES: The union between Christ and His disciples has been tenderly set forth in the parable of the Vine and the branches. The branches, being many, are one Vine, for they are all partakers of that one Vine. Of this union amongst the branches, which results from their common inherence in the Vine, the natural expression and manifestation is the mutual love, which Christ here gives as the commandment, and commends to us all by His own solemn example.
There are four things suggested to me by the words of our text-the Obligation, the Sufficiency, the Pattern, and the Motive, of Christian love. I. First, the Obligation of love. The two ideas of commandment and love do not go well together. You cannot pump up love to order, and if you try you generally produce, what we see in abundance in the world and in the Church, sentimental hypocrisy, hollow and unreal.
But whilst that is true, and whilst it seems strange to say that we are commanded to love, still we can do a great deal, directly and indirectly, for the cultivation and strengthening of any emotion. We can either cast ourselves into the attitude which is favourable or unfavourable to it. We can either look at the facts which will create it or at those who will check it. We can go about with a sharp eye for the lovable or for the unlovable in man.
We can either consciously war against or lazily acquiesce in our own predominant self-absorption and selfishness. And in these and in a number of other ways, our feelings towards other Christian people are very largely under our own control, and therefore are fitting subjects for commandment.
Our Lord lays down the obligation which devolves upon all Christian people, of cherishing a kindly and loving regard to all others who find their place within the charmed circle of His Church. It is an obligation because He commands it.
He puts Himself here in the position of the absolute Lawgiver, who has the right of entire and authoritative control over men’s affections and hearts. And it is further obligatory because such an attitude is the only fitting expression of the mutual relation of Christian men, through their common relation to the Vine.
We need far more to realise the fact that our emotions towards our brother Christians are not matters in which our own inclinations may have their way, but that there is a simple commandment given to us, and that we are bound to cherish love to every man who loves Jesus Christ.
Never mind though he does not hold your theology; never mind though he be very ignorant and narrow as compared with you; never mind though your outlook on the world may be entirely unlike his. Never mind though you be a rich man and he a poor one, or you a poor one and he rich, which is just as hard to get over.
Let all these secondary grounds of union and of separation be relegated to their proper subordinate place; and let us recognise this, that the children of one Father are brethren. And do not let it be possible that it shall be said, as so often has been said, and said truly, that ‘brethren’ in the Church means a great deal less than brothers in the world.
Lift your eyes beyond the walls of the little sheepfold in which you live, and hearken to the bleating of the flocks away out yonder, and feel-’Other sheep He has which are not of this fold’; and recognise the solemn obligation of the commandment of love.
II. Note, secondly, the Sufficiency of love. Our Lord has been speaking in a former verse about the keeping of His commandments. Now He gathers them all up into one. ‘This is my commandment, that ye love one another’ All duties to our fellows, and all duties to our brethren, are summed up in, or resolved into, this one germinal, encyclopaediacal, all-comprehensive simplification of duty, into the one word ‘love.’
Where the heart is right the conduct will be right. Love will soften the tones, will instinctively teach what we ought to be and do; will take the bitterness out of opposition and diversity, will make even rebuke, when needful, only a form of expressing itself. If the heart be right all else will be right; and if there be a deficiency of love nothing will be right. You cannot help anybody except on condition of having an honest, beneficent, and benevolent regard towards him.
You cannot do any man in the world any good unless there is a shoot of love in your heart towards him. You may pitch him benefits, and you will neither get nor deserve thanks for them; you may try to teach him, and your words will be hopeless and profitless. The one thing that is required to bind Christian men together is this common affection. That being there, everything will come.
It is the germ out of which all is developed. As we read in that great chapter to the Corinthians-the lyric praise of Charity,-all kinds of blessing and sweetness and gladness come out of this, It is the central force which, being present, secures that all shall be right, which, being absent, ensures that all shall be wrong.
And is it not beautiful to see how Jesus Christ, leaving the little flock of His followers in the world, gave them no other instruction for their mutual relationship? He did not instruct them about institutions and organisations, about orders of the ministry and sacraments, or Church polity and the like. He knew that all these would come. His one commandment was, ‘Love one another,’ and that will make you wise.
Love one another, and you will shape yourselves into the right forms. He knew that they needed no exhortations such as ecclesiastics would have put in the foreground. It was not worth while to talk to them about organisations and officers. These would come to them at the right time and in the right way. The ‘one thing needful’ was that they should be knit together as true participators of His life. Love was sufficient as their law and as their guide.
III. Note, further, the Pattern of love. ‘As I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’ Christ sets Himself forward then, here and in this aspect, as He does in all aspects of human conduct and character, as being the realised Ideal of them all.
And although the thought is a digression from my present purpose, I cannot but pause for a moment to reflect upon the strangeness of a man thus calmly saying to the whole world, ‘I am the embodiment of all that love ought to be. You cannot get beyond Me, nor have anything more pure, more deep, more self-sacrificing, more perfect, than the love which I have borne to you.’
But passing that, the pattern that He proposes for us is even more august than appears at first sight. For, if you remember, a verse or two before our Lord had said, ‘As the Father hath loved Me so I have loved you.’ Now He says, ‘Love one another as I have loved you.’ There stand the three, as it were, the Father, the Son, the disciple. The Son in the midst receives and transmits the Father’s love to the disciple, and the disciple is to love his fellows, in some deep and august sense, as the Father loved the Son.
The divinest thing in God, and that in which men can be like God, is love. In all our other attitudes to Him we rather correspond than copy. His fullness is met by our emptiness, His giving by our recipiency, His faithfulness by our faith, His command by our obedience, His light by our eye.
But here it is not a case of correspondence only, but of similarity. My faith answers God’s gift to me, but my love is like God’s love. ‘Be ye, therefore, imitators of God as beloved children’; and having received that love into your hearts, ray it out, ‘and walk in love as God also hath loved us.’...
The expression of Christian life is not to be found in honeyed words, or the indolent indulgence in benevolent emotion, but in self-sacrifice, modelled after that of Christ’s sacrificial death, which is imitable by us. Brethren, it is a solemn obligation, which may well make us tremble, that is laid on us in these words, ‘As I have loved you.’ Calvary was less than twenty-four hours off, and He says to us, ‘That is your pattern!’
Contrast our love at its height with His --- a drop to an ocean, a poor little flickering rushlight held up
beside the sun. My love, at its best, has so far conquered my selfishness that now and then I am ready to suffer a little inconvenience, to sacrifice a little leisure, to give away a little money, to spend a little dribble of sympathy upon the people who are its objects.
Christ’s love nailed Him to the Cross, and led Him down from the throne, and shut for a time the gates of the glory behind Him. And He says, ‘That is your pattern!’... Christ’s death is the pattern for our lives as well as the hope of our hearts.
IV. Lastly, we have here by implication, though not by direct statement, the Motive of the love. Surely that, too, is contained in the words, ‘As I have loved you.’ Christ’s commandment of love is a new commandment, not so much because it is a revelation of a new duty, though it is the casting of an old duty into new prominence, as because it is not merely a revelation of an obligation, but the communication of power to fulfil it. The novelty of Christian morality lies here, that in its law there is a self-fulfilling force.
We have not to look to one place for the knowledge of our duty, and somewhere else for the strength to do it, but both are given to us in the one thing, the gift of the dying Christ and His immortal love. That love, received into our hearts, will conquer, and it alone will conquer, our selfishness.
That love, received into our hearts, will mould, and it alone will mould, them into its own likeness. That love, received into our hearts, will knit, and it alone will knit, all those who participate in it into a common bond, sweet, deep, sacred, and all-victorious.
And so, brethren, if we would know the blessedness and the sweetness of victory over these miserable, selfish hearts of ours, and to walk in the liberty of love, we can only get it by keeping close to Jesus Christ. In any circle, the nearer the points of the circumference are to the centre, the closer they will necessarily be to one another.
As we draw nearer, each for himself, to our Centre, we shall feel that we have approximated to all those who stand round the same centre, and draw from it the same life. In the early spring, when the wheat is green and young, and scarcely appears above the ground, it comes up in the lines in which it was sown, parted from one another and distinctly showing their separation and the furrows.
But when the full corn in the ear waves on the autumn plain, all the lines and separations have disappeared, and there is one unbroken tract of sunny fruitfulness. And so when the life in Christ is low and feeble, His servants may be separated and drawn up in rigid lines of denominations, and churches, and sects; but as they grow the lines disappear. If to the churches of England to-day there came a sudden accession of knowledge of Christ, and of union with Him, the first thing that would go would be the wretched barriers that separate us from one another.
For if we have the life of Christ in any adequate measure in ourselves, we shall certainly have grown up above the fences behind which we began to grow, and shall be able to reach out to all that love the Lord Jesus Christ, and feel with thankfulness that we are one in Him.”
This concludes this evening's Discussion, “In the Image and Likeness of God, Part 8.”
This Discussion was presented “live” on March 9th, 2022
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