PUBLIC-DOMAIN CHRISTIAN BOOK
Expositions of Holy Scripture
Alexander Maclaren, 1826-1910 · 247,864 words · 346 reading sections
Philippians
Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D. D., Litt. D. * * * * * SECOND CORINTHIANS, GALATIANS, AND PHILIPPIANS COLOSSIANS, THESSALONIANS, AND FIRST TIMOTHY NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY _EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE_ ALEXANDER…
444 wordsSECTION 2Hope And Holiness
Having therefore these promises . . . let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.'--2 COR. vii. 1. It is often made a charge against professing Christians that their religion has very little to do with common morality. The taunt has sharpened multitu…
735 wordsSECTION 3Hope And Holiness
Yet another paradox attaches to the Christian life, inasmuch as God cleanses us, but we have to cleanse ourselves. The great truth that the spirit of God in a man is the fontal source of all his goodness, and that Christ's righteousness is given to us, is no pillow on which to rest an idle head, but should rather be a …
690 wordsSECTION 4Hope And Holiness
II. The Christian life is to be not merely a continual getting rid of evil, but a continual becoming good. Paul here draws a distinction between cleansing ourselves from filthiness and perfecting holiness, and these two, though closely connected and capable of being regarded as being but the positive and negative side…
748 wordsSECTION 5Sorrow According To God
In Paul's experience there was no contrariety between hope set on Jesus and fear directed towards God. It is in the fear of God that holiness is to be perfected. There is a fear which has no torment. Yet more, there is no love in sons or daughters without fear. The reverential awe with which God's children draw near to…
653 wordsSECTION 6Sorrow According To God
We have no right to ask--and much harm has been done by asking--for an impossible uniformity of religious experience, any more than we have a right to expect that all voices shall be pitched in one key, or all plants flower in the same month, or after the same fashion. You can print off as many copies as you like, for …
822 wordsSECTION 7Sorrow According To God
Again, men are often sorry for their conduct without thinking of it as sin against God. Crime means the transgression of man's law, wrong means the transgression of conscience's law, sin is the transgression of God's law. Some of us would perhaps have to say--'I have done crime.' We are all of us quite ready to say: 'I…
743 wordsSECTION 8Sorrow According To God
We find passages, some of which ascribe and some deny repentance to the Divine nature. But if there be a repentance which is possible for the Divine nature, it obviously cannot mean sorrow for sin, but must signify a change of purpose. In the Epistle to the Romans we read, 'The gifts and calling of God are without repe…
651 wordsSECTION 9Sorrow According To God
III. We come to the last stage here. Salvation is the issue of repentance. 'Godly sorrow worketh repentance unto salvation not to be repented of.' What is the connection between repentance and salvation? Two sentences will answer the question. You cannot get salvation without repentance. You do not get salvation by re…
806 wordsSECTION 10Giving And Asking
'The sorrow of the world works death.' There are men and women listening to me now who are half conscious of their sin, and are resisting the pleading voice that comes to them, who at the last will open their eyes upon the realities of their lives, and in a wild passion of remorse, exclaim: 'I have played the fool, and…
798 wordsSECTION 11Giving And Asking
Note, further, the lovely picture of these Macedonian givers. They were plunged in sorrows and troubles, but these did not dry their fountains of sympathy. Nothing is apt to be more selfish than grief; and if we have tears to spare for others, when they are flowing bitterly for ourselves, we have graduated well in Chri…
689 wordsSECTION 12Giving And Asking
First, Christian liberality is essential to the completeness of Christian character. Paul's praise in verse 7 is not mere flattery, nor meant to put the Corinthians into good humour. He will have enough to say hereafter about scandals and faults, but now he gives them credit for all the good he knew to be in them. Fait…
763 wordsSECTION 13Rich Yet Poor
But the gracious saying of our passage has a solemn side; for if only gifts 'according as a man hath' are accepted, what becomes of the many which fall far short of our ability, and are really given, not because we have the willing mind, but because we could not get out of the unwelcome necessity to part with a miserab…
751 wordsSECTION 14Rich Yet Poor
But there is another word in our text that may well be here taken into consideration. 'For your sakes,' says the Apostle to that Corinthian church, made up of people, not one of whom had ever seen or been seen by Jesus. And yet the regard to them was part of the motive that moved the Lord to His life, and His death. Th…
810 wordsSECTION 15Rich Yet Poor
So much, then, lies in the one of these two antitheses of my text; and the other is no less profound and significant. 'He was rich; He became poor.' In this connection 'rich' can only mean possessed of the Divine fulness and independence; and 'poor' can only mean possessed of human infirmity, dependence, and emptiness.…
809 wordsSECTION 16Rich Yet Poor
I do not dwell upon other aspects of this great self-emptying of our Lord's, such as the revelation in it to us of the very heart of God, and of the divinest thing in the divine nature, which is love, or such as the sympathy which is made possible thereby to Him, and which is not only the pity of a God, but the compass…
531 wordsSECTION 17Willing And Not Doing
'Now therefore perform the doing of it; that as there was a readiness to will so there may be a performance also.'--2 COR. viii. 11. The Revised Version reads: 'But now complete the doing also; that as there was the readiness to will, so there may be the completion also out of your ability.' A collection of money fo…
779 wordsSECTION 18Willing And Not Doing
Then, again, let me remind you how this injunction is borne in upon us by the consideration of the strength of the opposition with which we have always to contend, in every honest attempt to bring to act our best resolutions. Did you ever try to cure some little habit, some mere trifle, a trick of manner or twist of th…
650 wordsSECTION 19Willing And Not Doing
Note, too, how rapidly the habit of substituting lightly-made resolutions for seriously-endeavoured acts grows. And mark, further, how miserable and debilitating it is to carry the dead weight of such unaccomplished intentions. Nothing so certainly weakens a man as a multitude of resolves that he knows he has never f…
696 wordsSECTION 20All Grace Abounding
'God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye, always having all-sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work.'--2 COR. ix. 8. In addition to all his other qualities the Apostle was an extremely good man of business; and he had a field for the exercise of that quality in the collection for t…
849 wordsSECTION 21All Grace Abounding
But this grace is not only many-sided, but abounding. It is not congruous with God's wealth, nor with His love, that He should give scantily, or, as it were, should open but a finger of the hand that is full of His gifts, and let out a little at a time. There are no sluices on that great stream so as to regulate its fl…
674 wordsSECTION 22All Grace Abounding
One more word: this sufficiency _should be_ more uniform, _is_ uniform in the divine intention, and in so far as the flow of the fountain is concerned. Always having had I may be sure that I always shall have. Of course I know that, in so far as our physical nature conditions our spiritual experience, there will be ups…
710 wordsSECTION 23God'S Unspeakable Gift
'Thanks be unto God for His unspeakable gift.'--2 COR. ix. 15. It seems strange that there should ever have been any doubt as to what gift it is which evokes this burst of thanksgiving. There is but one of God's many mercies which is worthy of being thus singled out. There is one blazing central sun which shines out …
1,016 wordsSECTION 24God'S Unspeakable Gift
But whatever may be true about the love of the Father who sent, there can be no doubt about the love of the Son who came. No man helps his fellows in suffering but at the cost of his own suffering. Sympathy means _fellow-feeling_, and the one indispensable condition of all rescue work of any sort is that the rescuer mu…
742 wordsSECTION 25God'S Unspeakable Gift
He who has sounded the depths of Jesus most completely is ever the first to acknowledge that he has been but as a child 'gathering pebbles on the beach while the great ocean lies unsounded before him.' No single soul, and no multitude of souls, can exhaust Jesus; neither our individual experiences, nor the experiences …
456 wordsSECTION 26A Militant Message
'Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ; and being in readiness to avenge all disobedience, when your obedience shall be fulfilled.'--2 COR. x. 5 and 6 (R.V.). None of Paul's letters are so …
866 wordsSECTION 27A Militant Message
There is the fortress of culture and the pride of it in which many of us are to-day entrenched against the Gospel. The attitude of mind into which persons of culture tend to fall is distinctly adverse to their reception of the Gospel, and that is not because the Gospel is adverse to culture, but because cultured people…
939 wordsSECTION 28A Militant Message
For a Christianity that does not begin with the deep consciousness of sin has neither depth nor warmth and has scarcely vitality. The Gospel is no Gospel, and we had almost said, 'The Christ is no Christ' to one who does not feel himself, if parted from Christ, 'dead in trespasses and sins.' Our religion depends for al…
710 wordsSECTION 29Simplicity Towards Christ
But the love which is obliged to smite gives warning that it is ready to avenge, long before it lets the blow fall, and does so in order that it may never need to fall. As long as it is possible that the disobedient shall become obedient to Christ, He holds back the vengeance that is ready to fall and will one day fall…
952 wordsSECTION 30Simplicity Towards Christ
Now that metaphor carries in its implication all that anybody can say about the exclusiveness, the depth, the purity, the all-pervasiveness of the dependent love which should knit us to Jesus Christ. The same thought of whole-hearted, single, absolute devotion is conveyed by other Scripture metaphors, the _slave_ and t…
686 wordsSECTION 31Simplicity Towards Christ
And in like manner He is the sole light and teacher of men as to God, themselves, their duty, their destinies and prospects. He, and He alone, brings these things to light. His word, whether it comes from His lips or from the deeds which are part of His revelation, or from the voice of the Spirit which takes of His and…
650 wordsSECTION 32Simplicity Towards Christ
These brief outlines are but the poorest attempt to draw out what the words of my text imply. But such as they are, let us remember that they do set forth the only proper response of the saved man to the saving Christ. 'Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.' Anything short of a faith that rests on Him alone, of a love that k…
772 wordsSECTION 33Strength In Weakness
'One foot in sea, and one on shore; To one thing constant never!' That is the type of thousands of professing Christians. 'I fear lest by any means your minds be corrupted from the simplicity that is towards Christ.' 'For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And He said unto me, My …
695 wordsSECTION 34Strength In Weakness
Notice how this thought of prayer directed to the Master Himself helps to lead us deep into the sacredest and most blessed characteristics of prayer. It is only telling Christ what is in our hearts. Oh, if we lived in the true understanding of what prayer really is--the emptying out of our inmost desire and thoughts be…
719 wordsSECTION 35Strength In Weakness
Now mark that the answer which this faithful prayer receives is no communication of anything fresh, but it is the opening of the man's eyes to see that already he has all that he needs. The reply is not, 'I _will_ give thee grace sufficient,' but 'My grace' (which thou hast now) 'is sufficient for thee.' That grace is …
864 wordsSECTION 36Strength In Weakness
III. Lastly, mark the calm final acquiescence in the loving necessity of continued sorrow. 'Most gladly, therefore, will I rather glory in my infirmity that the power of Christ may rest upon me.' The will is entirely harmonised with Christ's. The Apostle begins with instinctive shrinking, he passes onwards to a percept…
524 wordsSECTION 37Not Yours But You
'I seek not yours, but you.'--2 COR. xii. 14. Men are usually quick to suspect others of the vices to which they themselves are prone. It is very hard for one who never does anything but with an eye to what he can make out of it, to believe that there are other people actuated by higher motives. So Paul had, over and …
736 wordsSECTION 38Not Yours But You
And that is the only kind of life that is blessed; our only true nobleness and beauty and power and sweetness are measured by, and accurately correspond with, the completeness of our surrender of ourselves to Jesus Christ. As long as the earth was thought to be the centre of the planetary system there was nothing but c…
724 wordsSECTION 39Not Yours But You
This surrender of ourselves for direct Christian service is the only solution of the problem of how to win the world for Jesus Christ. Professionals cannot do it. Men of my class cannot do it. We are clogged very largely by the fact that, being necessarily dependent on our congregations for a living, we cannot, with as…
678 wordsSECTION 40From Centre To Circumference
Again, the law of self-surrender, in its application to all that we have, involves our continual reference to Jesus Christ in our disposition of these our possessions. I draw no line of distinction, in this respect, between what a man spends upon himself, and what he spends upon 'charity,' and what he spends upon relig…
717 wordsSECTION 41From Centre To Circumference
Notice (though I can but touch in the briefest possible manner upon the great thoughts that gather round these words) the three aspects of that transcendent fact, the centre and nucleus of the whole Christian life, which come into prominence in these words before us. Christ's death is a great act of self-surrender, of …
822 wordsSECTION 42From Centre To Circumference
II. So much, then, for the first central fact that is here. Now let me say a word, in the second place, about the faith which makes that fact the foundation of my own personal life. 'I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me.' I am not going to plunge into any unnecessary dissertatio…
772 wordsSECTION 43From Centre To Circumference
In like manner that great truth which we all of us say we believe, that Christ has died for the world, is utterly useless and profitless to us until we have translated it into Paul's world, 'loved _me_ and gave Himself for _me_.' I do not say that the essence of faith is the conversion of the general statement into the…
713 wordsSECTION 44The Evil Eye And The Charm
The life that I live in the flesh is poor, limited, tortured with anxiety, weighed upon by sore distress, becomes dark and gray and dreary often as we travel nearer the end, and is always full of miseries and of pains. But if within that life in the flesh there be a life in faith, which is the life of Christ Himself br…
776 wordsSECTION 45The Evil Eye And The Charm
Ah! if we ministers universally acted up to the implications of this metaphor, do you not think the pulpit would be more frequently a centre of power than it is to-day? And if, instead of presenting our own ingenuities and speculations, we were to realise the fact that we have to hide ourselves behind the broad sheet t…
765 wordsSECTION 46The Evil Eye And The Charm
Now, is there anybody to-day who is saying the same things, with variations consequent upon change of external conditions? Are there no people within the limits of the Christian Church who are reiterating the old Jewish notion that external ceremonies--baptism and the Lord's Supper--are necessary to salvation and to co…
711 wordsSECTION 47The Evil Eye And The Charm
So it has always been, and so it is with us individually, as we too well know. Ah, brethren! the seductions are omnipresent, and our poor eyes are very weak, and we turn away from the Lord to look on these misshapen monsters that are seeking by their gaze to draw us into destruction. I wonder how many professing Christ…
683 wordsSECTION 48Lessons Of Experience
Help us, O Lord! we beseech Thee, to live near Thee. Turn away our eyes from beholding vanity, and enable us to set the Lord always before us that we be not moved. 'Have ye suffered so many things in vain?'--GAL. iii 4. Preached on the last Sunday of the year. This vehement question is usually taken to be a reminde…
700 wordsSECTION 49Lessons Of Experience
II. The true test for the past. The question of our text implies, as we have already suggested, that our whole lives, with all their various and often opposite experiences, are yet an ordered whole, having a definite end. There is some purpose beyond the moment to be served. Our joys and our sorrows, our gains and our…
683 wordsSECTION 50Lessons Of Experience
There is no sadder waste than the waste of sorrow, and alas! we all know how impotent our afflictions have been to make us better. But not afflictions only have failed in their appeal to us, our joys have as often been in vain as our sorrows, and memory, when it turns its lamp on the long past, sees so few points at wh…
655 wordsSECTION 51Lessons Of Experience
The world says, 'What I have written I have written,' and there is a very solemn and terrible reality in the thought of the irrevocable past. Whether life has achieved the ends for which it was given or no, it has achieved some ends. It may have made us into characters the very opposite of God's intention for us, but i…
331 wordsSECTION 52The Universal Prison
'But the Scripture hath concluded all under sin, that the promise by faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them that believe.'--GAL. iii. 22. The Apostle uses here a striking and solemn figure, which is much veiled for the English reader by the ambiguity attaching to the word 'concluded.' It literally means 'shut …
699 wordsSECTION 53The Universal Prison
Insane people are sometimes tempted into a house of detention by being made to believe that it is a grand mansion, where they are just going to pay a flying visit, and can come away when they like. But once inside the walls, they never get past the lodge gates any more. The foolish birds do not know that there is lime …
667 wordsSECTION 54The Universal Prison
Oh, brethren, if we realise how intimately and inseparably we are knit to God, and how everything that we do, and do not do, but should have done, has an aspect in reference to Him, I think we should be less unwilling to admit, and less tinged with levity and carelessness in admitting, that all our faults are transgres…
776 wordsSECTION 55The Universal Prison
I wish to urge in a few words, yet with much earnestness, this thought, that until we have laid to heart God's message about our own personal sinfulness we have not got to the place where we can in the least understand the true meaning of His Gospel, or the true work of His Son. May I say that I, for one, am old-fashio…
723 wordsSECTION 56The Son Sent
Oh, dear friend, if you want to get to the heart of the sweetness and the blessedness and power of the Gospel, you must begin here, with the clear and penitent consciousness that you are a sinful man in God's sight, and can do nothing to cleanse, help, or liberate yourself. Is Jesus Christ the breaker of the bond for y…
784 wordsSECTION 57The Son Sent
There have been many men specially sent forth from God, whose personal existence began with their birth, and so far as the words are concerned, Jesus might have been one of these. There was a man sent from God whose name was John, and all through the ages he has had many companions in his mission, but there has been on…
753 wordsSECTION 58The Son Sent
II. The miracle of lowliness that came. The Apostle goes on from describing the great fact which took place in heaven to set forth the great fact which completed it on earth. The sending of the Son took effect in the birth of Jesus, and the Apostle puts it under two forms, both of which are plainly designed to present…
827 wordsSECTION 59The Son Sent
III. The marvel of exaltation that results. Our Lord's lowliness is described in the two clauses which we have just been considering. They express His identification with us from a double point of view, and that double point of view is continued in the final clauses of our text which state the double purpose of God in…
679 wordsSECTION 60The Son Sent
The slaves bought into freedom are received into the great family. The Son has become flesh that they who dwell in the flesh may rise to be sons, but the Son stands alone even in the midst of His identification with us, and of the great results which follow for us from it. He is the Son by nature; we are sons by adopti…
304 wordsSource & rights
Public domain in the USA; original historical text digitized by Project Gutenberg.
Project Gutenberg source record →
Historical Christian writing; not Scripture.