^ A man found in Christ is as a bird is found in the air — his native element. Watch the little songster, as it wings its way
» J. H. Jowett.
^ Mrs. Hamilton King, "The Sermon in the Hospital."
326 THE EXCELLENT EXCHANGE
through the ether far up towards the clouds, and then sends down to earth its shower of melody. It is at liberty because it is in its element. And the believer in Christ lives, moves, and has his being filled with the gladness of the life that is inspired by the love of his Lord.
Thy service, Lord, is freedom; yet it binds With strongest chains ; the heart around it winds A self-imposed restraint; Thy freedmen, we Still wear Thy badge, and joy that all should see Our will, by firmest bands, in thrall to Thee.
So is our freedom perfect; or will grow
Such in Thy heaven; lacking some part below
Through earth's remaining gyves, — if once there be A will with Thine in all things to agree. Then, wholly bound, we shall be wholly free.^
5. Paul sought a righteousness that would be acceptable to God.
(1) Eighteousness we must have. We need to be right with God. Paul takes this for granted — that, by one way or another, God and we must be on terms of peace, if not even of friendship. If we ourselves were truly right, we should be right with God. God desires all to be right between us and Him. It is not from His side that any disturbance of peace and friendship has come. Therefore, to be wrong with God is monstrous and criminal, as well as disastrous and terrible.
(2) There is a righteousness which has to be renounced — the righteousness which "is of the law." Paul had set himself to make his position right with God by strictly obeying those laws which Moses delivered, and which men of later times had multi- plied. And he had believed himself largely successful in this bold endeavour. If any man ever deserved to win along this line of mortal effort it was Saul, the young and earnest Pharisee. He accepted those precepts as the utterance of the whole that God wanted at men's hands ; he knew the great ten commandments to be the sum of the moral law of God ; and he girded himself to the fulfilment of it all with an energy and a constancy that have never been surpassed. The task was no pastime; it was a matter of increasing earnestness with him as his young manhood ripened.
^ Lord Kinloch.
PHILIPPIANS III. 7-9 327
But the light one day broke upou his heart, and lo ! with all his proud and strenuous labour, he saw he had been failing all the while ; his own righteousness, his righteousness of single-handed obedience to law, was but a toilsome mockery of a righteousness for sinful men. From that hour one of the mottoes of his great life was this: "Not having a righteousness of mine own, even that which is of the law."
(3) We can secure a satisfying righteousness through faith in Christ. For He has in Himself a righteousness for us that abounds above all our need. That " law " which we cannot fulfil. He fulfilled. During all that human life of His among the men and women of Galilee and Judsea, He was flooding it with fulfilment. Only one perfect life has been lived in our world, and it was a life in which infinite holiness itself found nothing but the purest, and loftiest, and truest human excellence. That life was the life of Jesus the Man, the Son of God, the Eedeemer of men. Our faith in Him receives the merit of that life, which thereby takes the royal place of all our bootless strivings. And what of the past, with its already gathered guilt and doom ? He died as well as lived, He suffered as well as obeyed, and all in our stead. Thus He bore away our curse, and cleared the whole length and breadth of our history from every atom of doom, and " opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers." " Through faith in Christ " — " the righteousness which is of God by faith."
^ Paul's disownment of every rag of his own righteousness was like the man and the Christian that he was. He had never moved a ship's-length nearer to everlasting good while he had this for his canvas, and himself in command ; now, with Christ commanding, and all refitted aloft, he has begun making rapid way. The discarded righteousness is deck cargo there as the vessel glides on. His glance falls upon it, and he feels it is threatening to tamper with his heart. He drags it to the ship's rail ; his arms ache as he piles its many folds over the ship's side ; it now hangs by the rope that fastened it on deck, and trails heavily about on the sea. It must go. He lifts a hatchet ; the rope is severed ; the mass sinks out of sight ; and ere it has soaked its way to the bottom, the ship has sped miles upon its course — lighter, swifter, cheerier, as it wings onward in the growing lustre of the eternal harbour-land.^