Preached at Burnham, Afternoon of the 11th Sunday after Trinity, August 12, 1866.
“So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the law of liberty.” —St. James ii. 12.
My friends, do you think it is liberty for a man to be left to do what he likes? I do not know any slavery so hard as that. A drunkard does what he likes, and so he becomes utterly unable to govern himself. He does the maddest things. He ruins his wife and children. That comes of a man having his own way. He is dragged along into courses that he knows to be utterly vile. He says in his misery “I could not help it; my inclinations had the mastery over me.” That is to say, he did what he liked to do, and his likings were the cruellest tyrants over him. There are none so bad, none that treat a man so unmercifully, that beat him and trample upon him so terribly.
Do you wish to know how we may get the better of these tyrants, let them be ever so savage, even when they have brought us down ever so low? I believe the Gospel which St. Paul preached to us this morning tells us the secret. I believe we may learn it from what is said about the law of liberty by St. James this afternoon.
St. Paul told us that he had a gospel or good news to preach about our Lord’s Resurrection. Christ, he says, has risen from the dead; He won the victory over sin and over death; He won it for us. If we trust in Him, the battle may be a very sharp one, but we shall prevail in it; He will be found mightier than all our enemies, yes, mightier than our own inclinations, mightier than death, mightier than hell and the devil. That was the good news which this apostle proclaimed to the people of Corinth who lived in a very loose corrupt city. That is his good news to all of us.
St. James has good news for us too, though he speaks in a somewhat different way, though he seems as if he were using harsher language. He tells us of a law—a law which God has made for us, a law which it was destruction to disobey. He puts the case very strongly. He says that if we break one part of God’s law, we break it all. We cannot make a bargain that we will keep the sixth commandment if we are only allowed to break the seventh or the eighth. That plea, St. James says, will not answer. The same God who bids us not commit murder, bids us not commit adultery; He will have us submit to Him altogether if we submit at all. But then St. James calls the law which God requires us to obey a law of liberty. How is that? Because the God who commands us not to kill will enable us to overcome the desire to kill, the brutal savage anger that might set us on to plot against a neighbour’s life. Because the God who commands us not to commit adultery or to steal would break the desires that lead us to ruin the character and fame of a neighbour or the goods of a neighbour—that is to say, God will deliver us from the chains that are strongest upon us, and that bind us most closely, and that no man is able to undo; God would make us free. Has not St. James then a right to call this law a law of liberty?
“Now,” he says, “so speak and so do, as those who shall be judged by this law of liberty.” Let us consider how it is possible to follow that precept.
I. What does the apostle mean by saying that we shall be judged by the law of liberty? He means that God will not say this to a man, “Why hadst thou such and such a bad desire,” but this, “Why didst thou not ask Me to set thee free from the desire, to give thee power over it? That is what I promised when I told thee not to do this thing and that thing. I know what evil tempers and inclinations are in thee. I know thou canst not prevail against them by any strength which is in thee. But I wanted thee to trust in Me; to seek My strength when thou wert weakest; to hope in My power of raising thee when thou wert most utterly down. I did not give thee My law to frighten thee away from Me, but to draw thee to Me, that thou mightest find out what need My children have of Me, that thou mightest understand how near I am to them all.” Then thou wilt cry, as David cries in the Psalms, “Judge me, Oh God, and plead my cause against my enemies.” “Thou seest how these bad desires press upon me, how this evil spirit tempts me. Thou understandest my dangers much better than I understand them. But I belong to Thee. Thou hast created me; Thou hast redeemed me by Thy Son; Thou lovest me for His sake. Support me then against those that rise up against me. Be upon my side, Thou Judge of the whole earth, when I am ready to yield to those oppressors of mine. They are not my Lords; Thou art my Lord. Oh, put them down!” If we pray thus, and believe thus, we shall find that we are under a law of liberty; we shall find that it is a great and blessed thing to have one who sees into the depths of our hearts, and judges righteously.
II. Then, secondly, St. James bids us speak as if we were to be judged by this law of liberty. Speak to your own hearts as if that were so. Speak to your neighbour as if that were so. Do not say to your heart “There is no great harm in yielding to this bad habit; in making myself a beast; in saying hard, cruel, blasphemous words; God is so merciful that he will not mind it much.” But say, “God is so merciful, so good to me, that He will not have me make myself a beast; He will not have me use hard and cruel and blasphemous words. He loves me too well not to forbid my doing that—not to punish me for doing it, not to give me help that I may not do it.” And speak to your neighbour and your child in the same way. Do not revile him for the wrong tempers you see in him, for the evil acts which you see him committing. Own to him that there is in you the same evil which there is in him. Own that you might do just as bad things as he does. But say to him “My friend! God wishes you and me to be free from our evil tempers; to prevail against them. He has put us under a law of liberty; He would have us be true men. Let us be true to Him, He will make us true men. He will enable us to hate the things which He hates, and which are for our ruin, and to love the things which He loves, the things which are for our peace and blessing.”
That is speaking as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty. But St. James adds, “So do as those who are to be judged by it.” That he tells us is less easy. We may talk wonderfully well about the goodness of God and our sinfulness, but when the moment comes which shows us how sinful we are, we may not be at all ready for it; we may stumble miserably, just as if there were no good God to hold us up. We do not come here to the church that we may say a great many prayers, but that we may find out what we are to do in those sharp times when no mortal is near to put us in mind what we should do, when it would be little aid to us if any mortal were near. We come to be told of a very present helper in our need; of One who knows our necessities before we ask, and our ignorance in asking; of One who declares His almighty power most chiefly in showing mercy and pity. If there is such an one, if He is the judge of the whole earth and the judge of each of us, we may so do as if there were. When we are not taught that God is our Friend and our Deliverer, we are very apt to think of Him as our enemy and our oppressor; we fancy it would be a good thing to be out of His way; a good thing to be hidden from Him; a good thing that He should not be our judge. We learn in church what kind of Being He is; that He is one in whom we may take refuge; that we have got very cruel enemies, who are bent upon destroying us, but that He is the God of salvation; that always; that to all people. Instead then of turning from Him, our wisdom at every moment is to turn to Him. We may be sure that He does not change, however we may change. We may be sure that we never need a protector against Him; that we need His protection every moment against a spirit of malice and cruelty that is seeking to devour us. St. James in his first chapter—the one before that we read this afternoon—says a very wonderful thing; that we are to count it all joy when we fall into different temptations. And he gives the reason for that strange sentence—that by these temptations we are taught faith or trust in God; we find that He makes a way for us to escape from our temptations. In the lesson we have heard this afternoon, he teaches us that by this faith in God we are enabled to do what is right and good; he teaches us that our faith is not worth anything, that it is not really faith in the living God unless it leads us to do those things which He works in us to do.
So you understand what he means by bidding us do as those who shall be judged by the law of liberty. He bids us believe in a God who is without variableness, or the least shadow of a turning; a God from whom all good and perfect things come; a God who is always ready to be our Deliverer in every dark hour. He bids us ask what we have asked to-day in the Litany, ‘In the hour of death, in the day of judgment, good Lord deliver us.’ Never doubt that when we prayed so we prayed according to the will of our Father in heaven. When we prayed so, we gave up all right to judge other men, we asked God to judge us all; we asked Him to give us grace that we might be delivered from our own darkness and come into His light. If we pray that prayer truly we shall not wish that the Lord should not come forth to judge us, we shall cry as the writer of the ninety-eighth Psalm—which we often use in our afternoon service—cries, “Let the floods clap their hands, and let the hills be joyful together before the Lord; for He cometh to judge the earth. With righteousness shall He judge the world, and the people with equity.”