1 Corinthians 10:31 Whether therefore you eat, or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. It is difficult for us, accustomed to the use of the phrase, "the glory of God," to imagine the fresh interest and the new dignity with which this clear ringing sentence of the apostle must have invested even the humblest lives of those who first listened to it. To some, no doubt, such as the proselyte Titus Justus, or Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, who had found in the Church the true Israel of God, the real goal of Judaism, the idea of the Divine glory being the end of life was not strange. But to the Greek converts the contrast between their present life and a past, from which an interval of at most three years separated them, must have come home with an almost overpowering force. Now they were instinct, unless indeed they were losing it by self-will, with the power of a new life, for "they were washed, they were sanctified, they were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and in the Spirit of their God." Now they were the glad possessors of a revelation from on high, such as gave them the key to understanding the world's history and their own. A little before, the skill and power and beauty of life, regarded as merely human, had thrilled them, but it was satisfaction on the surface with the present world which had been complete. 1. It is, I think, worth while, by strong and true efforts of the imagination to rescue the apostle's magnificent axiom from the insincere conventionality with which we too often drape it, as we strive to realise the power which must have marked the moment of its earliest enunciation. Are some of the younger among us perplexed, are some of the older tempted almost to despair, at the fact of our age being distinguished by efforts, not seldom both earnest and honest, to reconstruct morality, whose basis we had rightly believed to be Divine, on foundations purely of man's making? The explanation is not far to seek. History will tell you that when (as in the thirteenth century, or the sixteenth, or the eighteenth) there is a decay of personal religion in men's relationship to God, to self, to the world, a desire to have morality as our very own, apart from God, is sure to appear. We know what the Church of Corinth had become. And yet, in a centre of luxury and license, face to face with a Church which would have been pronounced by modern objectors to missions as "a total failure," or else as an imposture, the apostle loses neither nerve nor heart. Impurity, conceited folly, untempered feeling, unhallowed rivalry, spiritual decay, these shall all be things of the past; each pulsation of the pure moral enthusiasm of the regenerated life will throw the whole being of those Corinthians upon revealed truth; each new perception of revealed truth will increase the volume of the moral force of their entire being; and, therefore, "whether they eat or drink, or whatsoever they do, they will do all for the glory of God." 2. The principle then was set before men whom, despite whatsoever imperfections, St. Paul could discern an inextinguishable power, such as would enable them to make it the chief among the final aims of their lives. The power which we have striven to realise must not be forgotten, if we would understand the maxim. Apart from the power of which the apostle and the Corinthian converts alike were conceivers, the maxim might indeed have been impressive, but it would have awakened no response. Instead of being, as it has become, the possession of multitudes, it would, like the wonderful saying of , or Seneca, or M. Aurelius, have been nothing more than the word of a solitary thinker. But the Corinthians felt that it was not a mere sentiment. 3. And, certainly, the principle has been tested long enough to make us confident in adopting it as the end which shall determine conduct, especially as no other end has yet been found to be adequate, or other sanctions to be really influential. (1) To St. Paul, as to his Jewish converts, the principle, although now instinct with a vivifying spirit unknown in their earlier days, was not strange. The main instrument in St. Paul's mental education, even while he sat at the feet of the renowned teacher whom his contemporaries fondly named "The Beauty of the Law," had undoubtedly been the creed of Judaism, the fulness of which in its developed form became known to him when an apostle as it had never been known before. "The Lord our God is one Lord." You may have sometimes wondered how it was that a nation which, except at rare intervals, must have seemed to the empires around so paltry and so down-trodden as the Jewish nation, did nevertheless most clearly contain within itself a recuperative force. Where, you may have asked, can we find the secret of its vitality? You may find it, if you will, at every stage of its progress. It is revealed in the Divine charge to Abraham: "I am the Almighty God; walk before Me, and be thou perfect." It prompts the large-hearted prayer of the great Lawgiver: "Show me, I pray Thee, Thy glory." It is the explanation of Elijah's steadfast will; he lives in the consciousness of a Presence higher than any which eye can see: "As the Lord, the God of Israel, liveth, before whom I stand." Isaiah finds in it, as he faces Eastern speculations, the true interpretation of creation. The Divine voice, which "awakened morning by morning " his listening ear, speaks to him of "every one that is called by My name, and whom I have created for My glory." In the manifestation of the God-like character Jeremiah traces a grandeur which no philosophy, no military splendour, no commercial enterprise can supply; "Let him," so ran the Divine message, "that glorifieth God, glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth Me, that I am the Lord, which exercise lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth; for in these things I delight, saith the Lord."(2) If you would begin, still better if you are continuing to live a "godly, righteous, and sober life, to the glory of God's holy name," put honestly and humbly, not shirking some inevitable shame, the life of the Son of God made Man side by side with your own. It is the fault of this restless, often superficial, age to be always adopting new plans, which too often end in a humiliating collapse. Let us be content for once with an old plan, which no one is yet known to have honestly tried and to have found a failure. (3) He has now, in His manhood, thus triumphed through sacrifice, been the one final end which His Body, the Church, representing her unseen Head amid the things of time and sense, has in her truest moods set before herself. (4) The experience of St. Stephen has been the experience of the Church just in proportion as her members "have been filled with faith and the Holy Ghost." If the glory of God has really been the one aim to which every other consideration, whether of ease, or of work, or of policy, or of success, has been honestly and consciously subordinated, then the Church has gained that vivid sense of the splendour and energy of the unseen and eternal, that profound conviction of the present fellowship of the interceding Lord, who in His majesty loves each one still, which is the secret of strength alike to the society and the individual. No one felt it more than St. Paul. "Why," he thinks, "were we received into the Church at all?" There is but one explanation of mercy so undeserved; not to promote our private happiness, but "Christ received us to the glory of God." "Unto Him be the glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus unto all generations for ever and ever." What is the aim of the final consummation? "The Lord" will come "to be glorified in His saints." Nothing lower than the image of Christ in His glory imprinted on the hearts, not only of bishops and confessors, "whose praise is in all the churches," but of lowly and untutored multitudes of slaves, of little children, can possibly account either for the Church's growth or for those first triumphs of the Cross. 4. Certainly, this principle so tested, these powers so clearly recognised, cannot be explained on the supposition of having sprung from what is with some boldness described as "the sacred soil of the human heart." The dominant influence and aim were high indeed in Rome. Reverence for law and the paramount claims of the public interest are alike noble, but they are not conscious of relationship with God nor the sovereignty of His will. The Hellenic mind, at its best, delighted in beauty and in truth, but if these were occasionally identified in poetic imagery with the supreme good, it knew nothing of the will and love of an unseen Person. In the philosophy, if not in the practice of those vast Buddhist systems, which still number among their adherents perhaps four hundred and seventy millions of mankind, there is no doubt an energetic sympathy with many forms of goodness, but the end of human life, in which, indeed, there is held to be no abiding principle, has ever been the purely individual object of perfection of self. No, the spring of this "rushing river of consciousness of God," with all the quickening power enabling those who drink of it to glorify Him more, is not found in the human heart. It flows from beneath the throne of God and of the Lamb, but it meets as nothing else can do the cravings of our being. 5. Each heart here, and perhaps, the hearts of those who are the youngest and appear the lightest, most of all knows as none other can describe its own want, but it asks still to be assured of the blessedness of making the Divine glory its final aim. "The principle," it says, "is no doubt practical; it has well stood the test of time; it is unquestionably unique; but, will it give me what I feel to be so sore a need, will it give me honestly and truly the peace which passeth all understanding?" Note the path by which St. , baffled, tempted, driven by overwhelming passion almost into entire wreck, returned to God. See how his thirst for truth, as keen as that of the most ardent student in this University, was satisfied by the gift of the Divine revelation. See how the undisciplined will, which craved in all its licentiousness for salvation, became the possessor of true freedom by the action of the Divine Redeemer. In mental and moral helplessness, it was not merely or chiefly an example, however beautiful, for which Augustine craved. He needed a Saviour "full of grace and truth," who would enable him to attain the true end of his creation. (2) And yet, with all the experience of history, with all the lives of the saints, with the calm beauty and majestic order of the natural world, with the "gospel of the kingdom and all its marvellous power of appropriating and assimilating everything that is noble and salutary around it," it is as sad as it is strange to note how largely this which is pre-eminently the end of life is set aside and practically forgotten. Even, as we learn from his biography, it was in earlier life almost like a new revelation to one so pure and so true as the late Lord Chancellor Hatherley, who in after years could say, "Enough for me if I may sit in loving adoration of Him in the extremest confines of His courts," to learn that the "glory of God's holy name" is, after all, the object which must determine and sanction the life of devotion, of righteousness, and of self-discipline. 6. Is it not then the ease that a conscious sense of promoting the Divine glory is just, what is needed to reanimate and to control the energies of public worship? And we feel with David, that "the palace is not for man, but for the Lord God"; we begin to discern that public worship is not a matter of sentiment or taste, but of duty. 7. And if from childhood we had only been taught that there is an object in prayer far higher than the supply of our daily needs, there would never have been that stagnation in private devotion which, too often, explains a creeping paralysis of moral effort. 8. And many a home clouded with disappointment, embittered by ill-concealed jealousies, because there is no one common aim, disunited because, in forgetting the Divine will, its organising principle is gone, earthbound by thoughts only of what is material, and therefore temporary, would at once be lit up with new hope, if it were felt that the family too were not for man only, but for the Lord God. 9. Work, now and then, could not be unaffected. These riches of the Eternal Wisdom committed to our stewardship are, as Richard Hooker felt, for Him "to show beneficence and grace in them." "All things have been created through the Son of His love, and unto Him; and He is before all things, and in Him all things consist." How splendid a motive, to throw by grace every energy of will, and heart, and mind into our appointed task. Such is the final end of life — an end which, if desired in early manhood, will at once consecrate and harmonise the discipline of self and the service of men. Already we are the sons of God, and a son must surely reflect in himself and on his brethren his Father's character. (Preb. Worlledge, M.A.) Parallel Verses KJV: Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.WEB: Whether therefore you eat, or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. |
    |