Oh reason of reasons, argument of arguments--the LORD JESUS CHRIST! Nothing in Christianity lies really outside Him. His Person and His Work embody all its dogmatic teaching. His Example, "His Love which passeth knowledge," is the sum and life of all its morality. Well has it been said that the whole Gospel message is conveyed to us sinners in those three words, "Looking unto Jesus." Is it pardon we need, is it acceptance, free as the love of God, holy as His law? We find it, we possess it, "looking unto Jesus" crucified. Is it power we need, victory and triumph over sin, capacity and willingness to witness and to suffer in a world which loves Him not at all? We find it, we possess it, it possesses us, as we "look unto Jesus" risen and reigning, for us on the Throne, with us in the soul. Is it rule and model that we want, not written on the stones of Horeb only, but "on the fleshy tables of the heart"? We find it, we receive it, we yield ourselves up to it, as we "look unto Jesus" in His path of love, from the Throne to the Cross, from the Cross to the Throne, till the Spirit inscribes that law upon our inmost wills.
Be ever more and more to us, Lord Jesus Christ, in all Thy answer, to our boundless needs. Let us "sink to no second cause." Let us come to Thee. Let us yield to Thee. Let us follow Thee. Present Thyself evermore to us as literally our all in all. And so through a blessed fellowship in Thy wonderful humiliation we shall partake for ever hereafter in the exaltations of Thy glory, which is the glory of immortal love.
[1] _Koinunia pneumatos_: "participation in the Spirit"; sharing and sharing alike in the grace and power of the Holy Ghost. I venture to render _pneumatos_ as if it were _tou Pneumatos_, having regard to the great parallel passage, 2 Cor. xiii. 14, _he koinonia tou hagiou Pneumatos_. With a word so great and conspicuous as _pneuma_ it is impossible to decide by the mere absence of the article that the reference is not to _the_ (personal) Spirit. _Kurios_, _Theos_, _Christos_, are continually given without the article where the reference is definite; because they are words whose greatness tends of itself to define the reference, unless context withstands. _Pneuma_ in the N. T. is to some extent a parallel case with these.
[2] _Ina_ . . . _phronute_: my English is obviously a mere paraphrase here. More exactly we may render, "make full my joy, so as to be," etc.; words which come to much the same effect, but are less true to our common idioms.
[3] _To en phronountes_: a difficult phrase to render quite adequately. We may paraphrase it either as above, or, "possessed with the idea, or sentiment, of unity." But the paraphrase above seems most satisfactory in view of the similar phrase just before, _to auto phronete_. This phrase seems to echo that, only in a stronger and less usual form. The thought thus will be not so much of unity as the object of thought or feeling as of unity as (so to speak) the substance or spirit of it.
[4] _Kata eritheian_: my long paraphrase attempts to give the suggestion that the _eritheia_ might be either purely individual self-assertion or the _animus_ of a clique.
[5] _Hegoumenoi_: the participle practically does the work of an imperative. See Rom. xii. for a striking chain of examples of this powerful and intelligible idiom.
[6] _Hekastoi_, not _hekastos_, should probably be read in the first clause here, and certainly in the second. By Greek idiom, the plural gives the thought of a _collective_ unity under "each."
[7] The Greek gives no verb. I have written "was, and is," in the paraphrase, because the _limitation_ of the reference of our blessed Lord's _phronema_ to the pre-incarnate past is not expressed in the Greek.