Readings for such a time as this(4): - from: Paul of Tarsus, by A.W. Tozer _____________ The Life of Obedience As characteristic a sentence of Paul as any we have in his own writings or in Luke, is one in his speech to the King and the Roman governor. Whereupon, O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision. When it pleased god... To reveal his son in me that I might preach the good news of him among the Gentiles, immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood; so he writes to the Galatians. A century and a half later, Tertullian describes converversion no less decisive: Who is not stirred by the contemplation of it [i.e., the death of the martyrs] to find out what there is in the thing within? Every man who witnesses this great endurance, is struck with some misgiving and is set on fire to look into it, to find what is its cause; and when he has learnt the truth, he instantly follows it himself as well. Et ipse statim sequitur. In both cases a martyrdom is a part-cause. To look with open face into the glory of the Lord (i.e., Jesus), as on to a mirror on which the sun is shining, is to be lit up oneself, to be transformed. Why, we are asked, does damascus mean to him a new vocation? Why does the vision of Jehovah enthroned, high and lifted up, while His glory filled the temple, mean first a new sense of sin to Isaiah, and then a call to go on behalf of god, where god shall send him? Why is Jeremiah, if reluctantly, still irresistibly a prophet? Why has Amos to leave his flock in the south? Why must Buddha share his illumination? the instances might be multiplied to great length. Why can a man see truth and not be able to leave it alone? a man who can hold his tongue can hold anything, wrote the wittiest churchman of our day; but in philosophy, and poetry, and religion, to see is to speak. There is no alternative. If I do this thing against my will, a stewardship is committed to me; but Paul did not do it against his will, and by now he could act with an undivided will. He instantly realizes what is involved. All that has been pent up in him, all the instincts crushed by his resolve to be a thoroughgoing Pharisee, everything—love of men, gentile memories, the craving for the largest-hearted god possible—is released at once and joyful. John Bunyan says that he himself under somewhat similar circumstances felt as if he could talk about the love of god to the crows by the roadside, and legend (or perhaps history) says that Francis of assist did. Paul and Bunyan had other game. A man is responsible to men for what he knows, and responsible to god for telling them in full. Much folly is talked to-day about the emphasis laid on personal salvation, on individual conversion. So far as we can learn from our records, it has been gods most effective way of saving communities; and the saved man knows it and gets to work; and Paul did. Without hedging or accommodating, outspoken and definite from the first, he let it be known where he stood— first unto them of damascus, and at Jerusalem and then in tarsus, and so on into widening circles, in regions beyond, not where Christ was named. and, like real converts, like men who make the supreme discoveries, he is prepared to proclaim his message at all costs to himself. For Paul Jesus is Lord; it is the name for Jesus that is peculiarly and pre-eminently Pauls own. If we are told that this was the name given by greek adepts to Serapis, Paul at all events knew more of Jewish religion than he ever did of Egyptian —so much is certain; and he had met the term in the Septuagint, a book with which we know him to have been familiar. To this end, he says, Christ both died, and rose, and revived, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living. Christs lordship is proportionate to his own place and person; and as Paul knows more of Jesus Christ every year, the lordship of Christ is enhanced and emphasized. If Paul escaped from the servitude of the law of moses, with a relief that never died away, he passed under the law of Christ. He says it with a sudden jerk, partly to explain himself to others, partly in happy reminder to himself. a man, writes Professor F. G. Peabody, is set free as he passes from one kind of law to the other. Liberty is allegiance to the higher law; there are laws that broaden and enlarge life. He has a centre now—not one that he is secretly in revolt against, but one to which all life is trued; and it means a steadying of interests, a correction of ideals, an expansion of outlooks—the experience which Wordsworth describes in the ode to duty: I supplicate for thy control, But in the quietness of thought; me this unchartered freedom tires; I feel the weight of chance desires: my hopes no more must change their name, I long for a repose that ever is the same. Paul, too, as we have seen in a passage previously quoted, feels the need of having his thoughts kept; but with him the centre is not the conception of duty, but the living person who (as he repeats) loved me and gave himself for me. If there is truth (as there is) in the old saying, fabri fabricando fimus, a truth expressed in English by apprenticeship, what was it for Paul for years to be a fellow-worker with Christ, hammering the same anvil, handling the same things, and learning how? to live with an artist and to watch his touch, to catch his angle of vision, to learn at last to anticipate how his mind will work, is a supreme opportunity for any man who has an eye for greatness and truth. In no fanciful way, but literally, we may say that Paul lived so with Christ; at least, it was his ideal, and the combination of such an ideal with personal love and gratitude is an incomparable training. There is illumination in the contrast between Marcus Aurelius, with his inheritance of Stoic dogmata, his sense of duty in a loyalty to an impersonal ideal, his solitude and his deepening belief in the ultimate futility of his endeavours, and Paul, happy in daily intercourse with a personal master and convinced to overflowing that there can be no doubt of that masters triumph. The converse of master in that ancient world was slave, and the term is constantly applied to himself by Paul. An attempt has been made to use the Pauline phrase slave of Christ as evidence for some intimate knowledge of the mystery religions on Pauls part. Apuleius represents Isis as saying to the converted Lucius, you will remember clearly and keep laid up in your inmost mind that the remaining course of your life to the very end of your last breath is mortgaged to me. He says further that against those, whose lives the majesty of our goddess has claimed for her service (servitium), unhappy chance has no opportunity. The initiate of Isis is frequently called in greek slave of the goddess (or, vaguely, slave of god). But Apuleius lived a century after Paul, so perhaps Paul did not borrow from him; and while Paul might have borrowed perhaps from those whose views Apuleius reproduced, it is not certain that he knew them, while it is certain that he knew another great branch of the human race and another and greater literature, where such expressions were not unfamiliar. Names like Obadiah, Abdiel, Obed-edom, Abdullah, Abdur Rahman, are reminders enough that the idea of a man being the slave of a god has been all along common to the Semitic race. Even if Paul was ignorant of the elements of Hebrew etymology—and there is nothing the least abstruse in the formation of such names—he could read the Psalter in greek, and in the 116th Psalm, were the words: O Lord, I am thy slave, I am thy slave, and the son of thy handmaid. the very words became Pauline; for Lord the Septuagint gives κύριος, and slave is represented by the ordinary greek δοῦλος. It is hardly necessary to send a modern Christian to the Upanishads—though he might have a better chance of finding them than Paul the documents of the mystery cults—for what he can read in his authorized Version. Mr Farnell at all events is satisfied that the slave of god came into Christian use from Semitic sources. Mr Farnell also gives us a suggestion as to another famous expression of Pauls—I bear in my body the stigmata of the Lord Jesus. A passage is cited from Herodotus to show that a slave in Egypt may secure virtual emancipation by going to a certain temple of Herakles and having branded upon him certain sacred marks (στίγματα ἱρὰ), though we are told that no Egyptian parallel has been found for such a general right of asylum. Mr Farnell says that the practice of marking the body by branding, cutting or tattooing, with some sign that consecrated the man as a slave of a deity, may have been of great antiquity, though the evidence only goes back to the sixth century B.C., but that it is essentially not Hellenic. Paul, once more, had nothing to do with Egypt; most probably he had not read a line of Herodotus. But the branded slave of men was no uncommon sight, and Paul is probably merely extending his general conception of the slave—not an unnatural thing to do, as he looked at his body and saw the scars, records of stripes and stones, and of that dying of the Lord Jesus which he carried about in his person; his body had had a good deal of buffeting. Paul uses the illustration taken from slavery very freely, and it is worth while to note that so did Jesus. Necessity is laid upon me (1 Cor. 9:16); I enslaved myself to all men that I might gain the more (1 Cor. 9:19)—such passages are plain enough. He speaks of his apostolate as a stewardship, and the greek οἰκονόμος like the Latin villicus was a slave. Even thoughts are brought into obedience (2 Cor. 10:5). The heading of several epistles tells the same tale; and the idea is further extended when he speaks of ourselves your slaves because of Jesus (2 Cor. 4:5). This definite and clear relation to Christ, his own complete subjection, is often an immense relief to him. Men criticized him and his gospel; it was foolishness, the resurrection was silly, the cross a great obstacle. Well, if they did criticize him? Who art thou that judgest (dost criticize) another mans servant? he asks; To his own master he stands or falls ; and then, in his sudden way, with the familiar tangent he adds, yes, and he shall be upheld, too. So, in the passage of Galatians, the stigmata are indeed a badge of freedom; henceforth let no man trouble me; I bear in my body the stigmata of the Lord (i.e., proprietor) Jesus. mans judgment—even Corinthian opinion—is a negligible factor; even his opinion of himself, as he points out, is unimportant; indeed, he does not trouble to estimate himself and his services; he is a steward, and he that estimates me is the Lord. so there it rests. In his use of the term saint, or dedicated person, we find implied very much the same ideas —Christs ownership and use of him, Christs responsibility for the message he delivers, Christs protection, his identification with his master and the great joy of being used by Him. With something of the same thought, Paul tells the Galatians, I have been entrusted with the gospel of the gentile world (ii. 7); and it is asked of stewards that they should be faithful. Paul, with a message committed to him, is determined that it shall be delivered exactly. On this point he speaks with emphasis to the Corinthians in more than one letter. Christ sent me to preach the gospel: not with wisdom of words... Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Gentiles foolishness... When I came to you, I came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of god. For I determined not to know anything among you save Jesus Christ—and him crucified... Not with the enticing words of mans wisdom... The natural man receiveth not the things of the spirit of god. In the other letter (we need not now try to discover how many letters, or parts of them, are embodied in our two epistles) he speaks of his endeavour to be sincere. Sincerity is not so easy a task as some people think; it is not always easy to be sure that one is telling the truth, even if one tries, either to others, or to oneself; and simplicity is one of the most difficult things to achieve. But Paul, like many of his followers, and for the same reasons, has tried to be candid with himself, alike in self-criticism and in apprehension of the truth. His conversion had begun in self-criticism and the resolve to have ultimate fact in absolute veracity. Bunyans undertaking to be straightforward and plain in telling his story, illustrates Pauls mind—as an unintended parallel will. I could also have stepped into a stile much higher than this, in which I have here discoursed, and could have adorned all things more than here I have seemed to do; but I dare not: god did not play in tempting of me; neither did I play, when I sunk as into a bottomless Pit, when the Pangs of Hell caught hold upon me; wherefore I may not play in relating of them, but be plain and simple, and lay down the thing as it was. We, says Paul, have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of god deceitfully; but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every mans conscience in the sight of god. the English of the authorized Version is not here very clear in detail, nor is Pauls greek. At least two views may be taken of the first clause. It may be yet another emphasis on that thought, of which the epistle is full, of the awful openness of the life of the Christian. We have been made manifest to god, he says—thrown open, seen through by god; we must one day be thrown open and manifested before the Judgment seat of Christ; and we aim, he suggests, at being open and manifest to men here and now—commending ourselves to every mans conscience in the sight of god, who knows our shameful secrets, if we have any. He draws a picture of a life where all the windows of the soul are thrown open, where the sun searches every corner of the room. In this case—and whether it be Pauls precise meaning in this passage or not, it is certainly his sense—he puts forward a plan of openness of life without secrets; if he, or any one else, is to serve Christ, he must be open for all men to see into him and to see through him; and if there is anything wrong, it seems better that men should know it at once, as they will later on when god judges the secrets of men. On the other hand, Pauls greek may bear another meaning of secret shame. He was evidently conscious in the greek world of the criticism of those who had studied rhetoric and Philosophy. The passage already quoted from first Corinthians shows so much. He, so sensitive to mens feelings and minds, could not escape the unspoken criticism; he read it, and felt it, at once—and, with it, he was conscious of a feeling of shame. He would have liked—something in him would have liked—to step into a stile much higher than this; but he will not attempt it. He uses on the contrary, in this part of his epistle, three very striking words to bring out his endeavour to be plain and simple, and lay down the thing as it was. Not walking in trickery nor vamping the word of god, he says here; and, a chapter or so earlier, he says he will not try the tricks of a retail trader on the word of god. the greek distinguished between the merchant who travelled from city to city, and the retailer who sat in the market, as sorry a figure in person as he was in mind; the unsound kind of Chrêmatistikê (money-making) is so-called (τὸ καπηλικὸν), not because none but κάπηλοι practised it, but because it was exemplified in, and best illustrated by, their way of trading, with which every one was familiar, says Mr W. L. Newman, commenting on Aristotle. no man shall say that Paul has dressed up the gospel, touched it up or toned it down, boomed it, or concealed the sacrifices it involves; he has not attempted fine language or artful presentation (though some said something of this sort ); he does not even try to put the thing in what might be supposed to be the right way. No; in the centre of the story were a stumblingblock and an absurdity; and Paul is content to leave them there, with great plainness of speech and an open-air sincerity. obedience and loyalty on the one hand, and experience on the other, lie behind his procedure. The Cross of Christ has to be faced and thought out; and, as Paul knew, the challenge of the Cross, the offence of the Cross, were potent agents in bringing men face to face with the supreme issue. In the sentence addressed to King Agrippa Paul brought vision and obedience close together, and we have already seen, in the analogy of the craftsman and the apprentice, how naturally the two things belong to each other. Obedience means vision. The records of Luke, confirmed by passages of Pauls own writing, tell of visions which Paul had from time to time, to which we have already referred —visions, dreams, hints, concerns and stops, as Quakers used to say. To emphasize the mode, the form, the shape, in which these things from time to time came to Paul, would be to miss the real issue. Dreams, visions, and strong suggestions, come to temperaments of various makes, but are not necessarily particular revelations of gods will, even if the recipients so suppose, nor need they be always as nugatory as sometimes has been held. Examination is necessary both of the man and of contemporary ideas. Reitzenstein suggests that Paul perhaps had no peculiar Psychology of his own, but speaks the greek of his time. Professor H. A. A. Kennedy, whose acquaintance with Paul seems to be more intimate, says that practically every leading idea of Pauls in these matters has its roots in Jewish soil. The contradiction may not be very great. But the parallel of Socrates daimonion warns us to decide slowly. Whatever the form or shape of the supposed communication, when we survey Pauls career, as when he surveyed it himself, it is hard to imagine a life more full of divine guidance in every field of thought and activity, a life in closer relation with god. The Lord stood by him, he says, and put strength into him; and when we recall how many other men and women since Paul have had the same sense, and have lived with the same mastery over circumstance and accident, even the quickest thinker must pause a little before deciding it is all delusion or co-incidence—both rather loose terms. Co-incidences seem little apt to occur where minds do not quite coincide. At the end, Paul says, I know whom I have believed; and even if we dispute the complete authenticity of the epistles to timothy, that sentence at least is confirmed and supported in every epistle he wrote. Like the salutation, it is in his own hand, the authentication of every letter; so I write. At another point we have to notice the so-called psychological or psychopathic manifestations which Paul mentions—that speaking with tongues which he perplexes us by avowing, —the vision of the third heaven above fourteen years ago, which at least suggests a not excessive frequency of such occasions. For the present our task must be to study the evidence which Paul affords of spiritual guidance in a region where he and all sane men would count it of far higher import. Even the feeblest-minded person, who experiences voice and vision, whether we call him (or her) recipient or patient, will refer them to some theory with an intellectual basis, insecure it may be, but laid by reflexion not by revelation. The vision is always classified, however mistakenly; and the recipient or patient relies in the last resort on tests not of vision but of general experience. Popular Psychology to-day distinguishes between the once-born and the twice-born, with (I think) a temporary preference for the former—a preference which may have its origin in mental inertia. For the twice-born there is this to be said, that to have been baptized with all experiences opens a mans eyes more than to have had one experience, however happy; it stimulates reflexion and intellectual process, and it is more apt to result in action—in that propaganda which for real people is always illuminative. The new life always means more to people who have grown up in the old and have escaped from it. The psalmists experience is true— He took me from a fearful pit, And from the miry clay, And on a rock He set my feet, Establishing my way. He put a new song in my mouth, Our god to magnify: Many shall see it, and shall fear, And on the Lord rely. It is the new song that counts, from Homer downwards, even if it is as old as Homers. The first point here is to notice once more the new peace of heart and mind that we have remarked already. Whatever vagaries manuscripts and their copyists may in certain passages suggest to timid editors, Paul avows the possession of peace with God. How much it means, no man can tell; and no man can know how much, unless he has been conscious of life without that peace. It passes understanding, as Paul said. The striking passage in the central chapter of the Epistle to the Romans illustrates what Paul has in mind. The spirit also helps our weakness, for we know not what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit itself makes intercession for us with groanings that cannot be uttered. And he that searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, which (some verses earlier) cries in us Abba, Father. Luther hits the real meaning here, as a man of similar experience will; all that the man, or the Spirit in him, can manage is a little sound and a feeble groaning, as Ah! Father and the Father understands —a simple vocative without petition, and connexion is established; He knows about it all, He knows, He knows, and the human heart is at peace. Such peace is, if we may use popular jargon, not static but dynamic. Peace, wrote Benjamin Jowett, commenting on Paul, must go before moral growth as well as after; there will be no growth while uneasy with God. We have already noticed Pauls description of what is found in Christ as a new creation. He may mean by κτίσις the act of creating or the creation as it exists after being made. But whether a new-making or a new world, in it is a new man, a more explicit phrase, a man over whom sin no longer has dominion; he is escaped from its paralysing virus. He is finding, in the striking phrase of the Fourth gospel (which was yet to be written) life, and life more overflowingly. In his own phrase, Paul knows now how the law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus sets him free from the law of sin and death —a spirit of power able to effect what the Law of moses, and the whole apparatus of regulation, maxim, caution, and commandment, could never do. Life is given by life, and by nothing else. The parasite sin, as Professor Peabody has put it, is killed by strengthening the organism on which it preyed; evil is overcome not negatively but positively, by good. As we have received mercy, we faint not, Paul says, using the greek word that suggests the cowardly slackening of energy rather than the involuntary fainting, to which the English term is now generally narrowed down. With good hope now within him, Paul can face anything and everything—all the wonderful discoveries of the spiritual life; for a new creation is not quickly exhausted or quickly realized. It is routine that deadens interest, and there his old legalism was weak; he had everlastingly to be doing the same precautionary things, and he was of too large a build, too original. He needed a positive centre, a stimulus, and a freedom; and in Christ he found all these, and he loved Christ for the glorious freedom he found in Him, for the charter of adventure that Christ gave. At a later point we shall have to consider more closely the relations between Christ and the spirit as Paul viewed them. Here we have to do with the new life, the life in the spirit, a life of heightened individuality resulting at once from the release from the old burden, and the freedom to develop the new relation with god. The spiritual man, Paul says, is subject to no mans criticism; he is out of their range; no man can read what he is; his life in a way is hid with Christ in god, centred in the spiritual and in touch with the eternal. One of the effects of sin, as we saw, was to deaden mind and conscience—darken, stain, and cauterize, were Pauls words. The guidance and teaching of the spirit— the spirit of wisdom and revelation, in the knowledge of god —is to enlighten the understanding, to the point of realizing all that Christ means, to give a new faculty of intuition into spiritual things, restoring the lost powers and heightening them. Gods spirit alone can be credited, he suggests, with knowing the things of god, which are only to be spiritually discerned; the man who has that spirit will read them and compare them. The depths of god, in his startling phrase, are searched by the spirit. Now the weakness of much popular religion, inside and outside the Christian Church, is the tacit assumption—never explicitly avowed, for the sense of reverence would forbid—that god is known, known already. The possession of some real knowledge of god is every mans postulate in discussion; he assumes he knows god, and with a minimum of examination. The modern Christian very often does not examine his concept of god and misses its very composite nature; and his assumption results in endless confusion of mind. It is a real gain when we grasp that we do not know god, apart from the study of nature, which confessedly yields imperfect results, until we approach the subject through Jesus, whom we really know better than we know god. Paul had the advantage of being well aware that he had fundamentally misread god, of knowing that he had only begun to have any understanding of god at all, when he caught the meaning, the first meaning, of the Cross; and yet he had been entirely sure of his knowledge of god, when he had quite missed gods real nature. From his conversion onward, he is less of a dogmatist and more of a learner; and knowledge and vision come from obedience. The depths of god it is Pauls life-work and supreme interest to explore; he does not exhaust them. One of the reasons why Paul has been so inadequately studied of late years is that he was for long construed as a final authority, and his writings taken as a compendium of theology, while his own idea was that he was a learner. Who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? he asks, quoting the Septuagint, and using the Lord to represent god; and he concludes, but we have the mind of Christ. The passage is a vindication of the one right way of approach to god, as Luther saw and said with emphasis. One fruitful source of new knowledge was the active practical life which Paul led. The spirit, as he believed, communicated to him what he was required to do, and where he was to go. There were, as Paul indicates, those who criticized him on this score, and suggested that he was apt to change his plans with disconcerting abruptness, and to lay all at the door of the spirit. We need not linger over the criticism at this point; its real value is that it shows that Paul was constantly on the outlook for signals and instructions, and that these uniformly bore upon his work. He was driven into endless preaching, teaching, and argument—constant collision on the deepest planes of thought and feeling with all sorts of men, and always for a practical object. It is not suggested in his own writings, nor in Lukes, but the evidence is set out by both for the fact, that he lived a life not unlike that of Socrates, always in colloquy with some man or other—colloquy that turned, as quickly as he could get it to turn, to what he held central, the mind of god as revealed in the Cross. Every discussion gave him a fresh opportunity of insight into the human mind and its reactions to the idea of god; and thus his obedience to the call to evangelize contributes to his baptism with all experiences. a man so earnest, so apt quickly to reach with men the most serious things of all, so swift to refer all that he saw or divined in mens approaches or departures to what he knew already of Christ—comparing spiritual things with spiritual —was bound inevitably to grow. Such a life has another side; it involves a man who takes it seriously in the instinctive habit of instantaneous prayer; he has to be in momentary communication with his Captain, always ready for the signal, the hint, where to press forward, what to emphasize, and so forth. He is watching god and watching man very closely in every such encounter; and his prayer-life is made by the habit; and something of what his prayer-life was, he lets us see in the eighth of Romans. At the same time Paul was not a natural saint. If he had not lived so long ago, and if his writings had not been included in the canon, he might not have been classed as a saint at all. He has the defects of his qualities, as we shall see or have seen in other chapters; he has his battle with sin after as before his conversion. The principalities and powers showed no sign of allowing a victory without dust, as the ancients put it. Here, too, in the battle with weakness and temptation, with solitude and irritability (too little of men and too much of them), with discomfort, privation, and danger, with restlessness and despair, there was revelation in finding himself more than conqueror through him that loved us; and Paul does not seem to have outgrown the wonder of it. He weighed this fact of constant support, of the steady supply of a strength which he was conscious he had not in himself, and he drew an inference. He grew more and more certain of his Christian position and realized that he was only at the beginning of his experience. The gift of the spirit as he knew it was not finality; it was only the earnest money (ἀρραβών). He tells the Philippians that he is persuaded that he that hath begun a good work in them will perfect it to the day of Christ Jesus; and he believes that god will finish in Paul himself what He has begun, and that the spirit is the earnest of our inheritance. sometimes the figure is varied, and the Holy spirit is the seal with which god marks His own. at a rather later day, though still within the period of what we may call the early church, the metaphor of sealing was applied to baptism; the sealing of the brow was part of the initiation into the rites of Mithras; but to Paul baptism was not what it became to the Church. To a Jew of his day Christian baptism was one of several baptisms, significant indeed—for a man is buried with Christ in baptism, crosses a line and leaves an old life with its associations behind, and is dead to the world and his old friends— but it is not magical in any degree. Paul, as we shall see, never in his extant writings alludes to his own baptism. It seems more reasonable to interpret Paul by Paul rather than by Hermas or by Hermes, and to suppose his meaning to be that the gift of the Holy spirit is gods seal upon the Christian, a stamp of ownership and a promise. this interpretation seems more consonant with the language of the great Hebrew prophets, whom we know to have influenced him, the great interpreters of god whom he had known from boyhood. It is to be noted, if it is not already clear, that the metaphor of earnest money or of seal is insufficient. A seal is essentially a dead thing and inert; earnest-money is in its way useful. Neither exhausts, and hardly either metaphor even suggests, what Paul seems to mean. The Holy spirit is for him above all things life; and in the heightened life, the new spiritual and intellectual energy, the new joy and exercise in freedom, he sees, not unreasonably, the promise of a yet further development of life and energy. This view of the matter brings it more into line with all spiritual and intellectual development, every stage of which is a promise and a guarantee of another, and yet of others still beyond; so that Pauls phrase gains weight from its coincidence with a law of our nature, and the recognition of what the gift actually is (the heightened vitality) and of what it promises (still fuller and deeper life) adds certainty to Pauls interpretation of his experience. Something of the same kind is to be seen in Bunyan; grace abounding tells the story of his religious life; so do both the parts of the Pilgrims Progress, but with what a different note of assurance and gaiety! When acceptance of Christ and obedience to him have actually worked out in a new realization of life, a new power to overcome, a new venturesomeness and general vitality, there must result a new certainty in a mans conviction. To sum up then, and perhaps to anticipate points that must be more fully handled at a later stage, Paul finds that obedience has resulted in vision. A worker as well as a thinker, a man born for intimacy with other men and with a genius for friendship, he begins with the obvious duty of preaching Christ to the men he meets and then to men whom he has to go and seek; from damascus and tarsus he looks on to Rome and to Spain. But preaching Christ is not always what a man expects it to be. He is involved in the effective interpretation of Jesus Christ along the lines of experience—and of all sorts of experience. He finds revelation in work, in the world, among men. More than once, in moments of great crisis—at Corinth, at Jerusalem, on the ship—a quiet hour brings illumination of all the storm and stress in which he is moving—Be not afraid; be of good cheer, Paul; for I am with thee. That the revelation is not to be discounted as subjective or psychopathic or imaginative, or whittled away with any other unreflective adjective, is shown by the mans development. Once more we may remind ourselves that, like Plato, Paul is not a system, or a scheme of ideas, but a man living among men, testing thoughts, and constantly developing his ideas. His growth is traceable in his epistles; those written to the Thessalonians are hardly comparable with the letters to the Romans and to the Philippians, whatever we make of that entitled To the Ephesians. With years—and this is not every mans experience— Pauls sympathies widen, and he grows at once in attractiveness to men, and in liking for them, and understanding of them. The delicate tact of the letter to Philemon is familiar, but we sometimes forget how utterly alien to Paul in race and social standing, in intellectual and religious outlook, nearly everybody mentioned in the letter had originally been. There were other men of yet other types who felt his appeal—a Felix, a Julius. We shall have to return to his friendships, but for the moment the width and multitude and variety of them sustains our point of his spiritual growth; and the impulse that set him to win men, with growing tact, and sympathy ever more real, was his surrender to the ideals and purposes of Christ—his obedience. If he latterly uses vocabulary which suggests to students of other systems than Judaism an intimacy with them that once was not suspected, then, without supposing his original Jewish outlook to have been contaminated with pagan affinities, or his loyalty to clear thinking and to Christ to have become touched with magical hypotheses, one may attribute it to a growing patience, if not perhaps a growing sympathy, with ideas once alien, and with men once alien who thought in terms of those ideas. If Paul will be all things to all men, he will perhaps be ready to use any vocabulary that will bring home to them the real value of Christ. The use of alien vocabularies is always risky; you may borrow the word and use it without fully realizing all its connotation; but Paul was not a man of vocabularies. Whatever he said came with the whole man and his whole experience behind it, and his words meant what he chose them to mean—as is always the way with great personalities. What people who never saw him face to face, never saw the quick hand flung out, and never heard the talk that men could listen to for hours, made of his manuscript letters was bound to be another thing. However, our present point is his enlarging range in friendship. With this went inevitably, as we have seen, a closer reading of human nature, a fuller knowledge of other mens weaknesses and of his own, and a firmer belief in men when fortified by Christ dwelling in them. In spite of that fuller knowledge of his limitations, which years bring to all men—or, perhaps more truly, because of it—he grows more conscious of a power behind him and within him. He realizes more and more from experience the value of the gospel for all sorts and conditions of men, its universality. the proof of this lies in his growing gift for finding his way through the tangles of the nascent church—tangles intellectual, moral, and social. He is abreast of every situation, and if he begins with a face to face encounter, a frontal attack on Peter at Antioch, later on men complain that he captures them by guile. on the claims of Christ he compromised as little at the end as he did at the beginning; but he was always ready to arrange a difficult situation by throwing his own claims and feelings overboard. He takes more and more trouble to understand mens perversities and obscurities, their prejudices and blunders, to conciliate them, and by dint of sheer friendship to bring them to understand how far their ideas were really according to Christ. and this I do for the gospels sake. How much more he progressively found in Christ will require at least another chapter; but here we may close with the suggestion of an American thinker, that the persistent and continuous dedication of the will is more than natural endowment; that capacity grows out of desire much oftener than desire out of capacity. In short, Paul was made by the steady habit, based on affection, of bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. - via WORDsearch10 #readingsforsuchatimeasthis #christjesus #theword #studyscripture #god #biblestudy #bible #jesus #faith #awtozer #vineofchristministries
Posted on: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 22:04:35 +0000
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