June 7, 1857
“And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God.”—Romans xii. 2.
“You preachers tell us that we ought to give up our own wills and to do the Will of God. But how are we to find out what that will is?” A man who asks this question (how many are asking it!) receives various answers. One tells him that the Will of God is fully declared in Holy Scripture. There he will find it set forth in language which the most ignorant can understand. He replies perhaps that he has got the Scriptures, that he has read them from childhood, that he has been urged to do so by his parents and teachers. But each day he hears of new opinions about these Scriptures, of interpretations adopted as indisputable by one man or school or Church, which are rejected as monstrous by another man or school or Church. Who is to tell him which of them is right, which expresses that Will he is to obey? He meets with some who are delighted that he should have experienced this perplexity. “Does it not show you,” they ask, “the need of some authority to pronounce on the meaning of Scripture? Does it not show that the Bible is useless without the Church?” The next question then of necessity is, “And where is that? What is this authority which can tell me and will tell me what I am to believe, and what I am to reject? And suppose I can discover it, how will it enable me to make the explanation which is ascertained to be the right one bear upon the complications of my life? How shall David’s experience about himself, how shall St. Paul’s admonitions to Ephesians or Corinthians show me what I am to be and to do, here in London in the year 1857?” Again there are persons who listen with immense satisfaction to the statement of this difficulty. “It is driving you,” they exclaim, “to seek for a guide who shall pronounce upon present emergencies, who shall not merely speak in generalities. We want an infallible voice to tell the whole Church what it is to believe at all times and in each time. You want a particular director of your conscience, to whom you may render simple and implicit deference in every one of your own embarrassments. With these, the Bible and the Church may be of the greatest avail to you. Without them, the system is broken and imperfect; it stands aloof from you, it does not affect your individual feelings and actions, it does not connect them with those of the whole society.”
My brethren, any one of these three replies appears to him who makes it far more practical and satisfactory than the one which St. Paul gives in the text. To say, “Be not conformed to this world; but be ye transformed, that ye may prove what is that acceptable and perfect Will of God,” strikes the anxious inquirer as much less ready and manageable a solution of his difficulties than the precepts “Read the Bible,” “Attend to the Church,” “Accept a Pope,” “Submit your conscience and reason to a Spiritual Director.”
But when he has tried the efficacy of one or all of these commands, he will discover that something is wanting still; that he has not yet got to the root of the matter. He must begin again from the beginning, and find out what that is; or my Bible, my Church, my Pope, my Spiritual Director will all fail to show him what the Will of God is or how he may obey it.
Whence comes this necessity? It comes from this: the more exactly we are told what we are to do, the more we determine to do it, the more we find that obedience belongs to something within, which has power to say, “The words of no book, of no authority coming from the past, of no mortal teacher, speaking to me with ever so much weight of traditional reverence, can determine me, can bring me into real living subjection. I may use great effort to give up myself, to abdicate all sovereignty, to be a pupil, a child, a slave. But the very effort is an effort of will. I assert my choice in making it. I was never so haughty as when I was stooping to that government. And each new step of apparent deference and self-surrender is in fact a new plea for this self-will and self-assertion. I may at last become a stone; all consciousness, all affection may perish in me. But till I reach that ideal condition, I shall be still a rebel. My lips, my hands, may be obedient; I myself shall be resisting.”
I. Now consider the doctrine of St. Paul, as it is set forth in the passage I have read to you and in all his epistles, and see whether it meets your case better or worse than the prescriptions of these different Protestant and Romish doctors meet it. It is the Will of God you have to obey: they all agree in telling you that. It is the Will of God which is set forth in Scripture; the Will of God which is interpreted by the Church; the Will of God which you are to recognise in a Pope; the Will of God which you are to stoop to in a dictator over your individual conscience. Well, the Bible confesses, the Church confesses that this Will is working, not indirectly, but directly upon you, upon yourself, upon that very thing within you which you had to muzzle, even to kill, before you could arrive even at the semblance of obedience. Do your Pope and your spiritual director not say this? Do they hide this truth from you? Do they tell you that the Spirit of God is not with you, not acting upon you to bring you into conformity with the Will of God? Then be sure they are liars. You are bound to consider them so. You are bound to tell them so. For they are setting themselves against the very truth of which they are sent to testify. They are denying the Creed. They are saying that the Spirit of God has not come into the world to convince men of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment. They are undermining the Church of which they profess to be the champions and guardians. But do they tell you that the Spirit has come, that you have been baptized into His Name, that the Creed has not been mocking you? Believe them then, and act upon the belief. And say to them, “That which you cannot do, in that you are very weak, and can only speak to my outward ear, and can only influence my outward services (for if you do more than this, you do it by the power of God’s
Spirit), that which you cannot do, this Spirit is doing. He is acting upon me, upon myself, upon my will, that I may perceive and know what that perfect and acceptable Will of God is, and that I may be brought into conformity with it.”
II. When first we meet with such expressions as these, “conformed to the world,” “transformed by the renewing of our mind,” we may suppose that St. Paul is speaking of a state of mind which is suitable to us as inhabitants of this present earth, and of some other state which may prepare us for what is to come after death. But this is a very imperfect and slovenly method of explaining his language. The man who is in conformity with this world is not the man who understands this world best, not the man who admires the beauties of it most, not the man even who can adapt himself best to all its various circumstances and conditions. He is too much a slave of the things he sees to reflect upon them or look into the meaning of them; too much devoted to all outward shows and enjoyments to have an apprehension of their secret loveliness and harmony; too much shut up in the habits and customs of the particular class and society into which he chances to be thrown, to have any power of entering into the feelings and circumstances of those who lie beyond it. The word “conformed” is used very strictly; it implies that he takes his form from the things about him, that they are the mould into which his mind is cast. Now this St. Paul will not for an instant admit to be the form which any man is created to bear. He maintains, as all the Bible maintains, that man is created in the image of God; that the form of his mind is to be derived from his unseen Parent, and not from the things which are put in subjection under him. This was true always. The heathen who was bowing to idols of wood and stone was resisting the conscience which told him that he was God’s offspring; God was testifying to him in his heart by the very things which he saw of His invisible power and Godhead; and it was in opposition to this witness, that he worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator. But we, who have been redeemed out of this worship, who have been adopted as God’s children, whom He has sealed with His Spirit, that we may know Him, and live in Him,—we are striving far more directly and consciously against this Spirit; we are choosing a false way when we admit the world to govern and fashion our minds according to its pleasure, when we submit to receive its image and superscription. That image and superscription will vary in each new age, in each new locality; it is the very nature and law of the world to be continually changing, to have no permanent principle. That is the reason why it is so ignominious a thing for a man to be conformed to it: he must abandon all his prerogative of looking before and after; he must become merely a creature of today; he must be fluctuating, capricious, insincere,—a leaf carried about by every gale, floating down every current. How is it possible that such a one can know anything of the Will of God, which is fixed, eternal, capable of no accidents? What signifies it that you give to such a one the Bible, that you teach him to read it, that you persuade him it is a divine book? You may persuade him of that as easily as of anything else; if it is the current opinion of the time and place in which he grows up, of course he receives it, until the fashion alters, and the same maxim which led him to revere the book teaches him to scoff at it. But while he embraces it, and reckons every letter sacred, what does he gather from it respecting the Will of God and his own life? They are only viewed by the rules and maxims of the society about him. That measures and determines the words of Lawgivers and Prophets; that tells him how he shall interpret and apply the sentences of Him who spake as never man spake, how he shall judge the Judge of the whole earth. What signifies it that you help out the Bible with a long series of Church decrees? These decrees are still referred to the same ultimate court of appeal. The opinion of the day, or that opinion of the day—that fraction of the general public judgment to which he has conformed and surrendered himself,—fixes what he shall think of these decrees; he only knows them as they come to him refracted in its definitions and practices. And what is the infallible Dogmatist, what is the Spiritual Guide, but the habits and maxims of the time or the party personified and embodied? He whose mind is conformed to this world, finds in them its authorized spokesman, the utterers of its latest oracle, of its safest rule of conduct, sent by the god of this world to save him from the effort of thought, of belief, from the necessity of being a man.
III. The deliverance from the conformity to the world which is of this nature and has these effects is the transformation which is spoken of in the next clause of the verse. That transformation—we may say it boldly—instead of unfitting a man for the world, is that which alone can enable him to live in it, to appreciate the worth of it, to exercise an influence over it. It was this which enabled the prophet to see the trees and the floods breaking forth into singing; it was this which enabled St. Paul to become all things to all men; it was this which enabled St. John to see the kingdom of God and of His Christ emerging out of the kingdoms of this world. For they beheld all things in God’s light, not in the false lights of this world. They saw the world as He had made it, not as men had made it by rebelling against Him. They had received the true form of men, they could therefore use the forms of the world just as they found them convenient, accommodating themselves readily to Jewish, Greek, Roman customs,—never being brought into bondage by any, never contracting their spirits by the temporary vesture which they wore. They were in communion with the eternal, members of a spiritual eternal fellowship; so they could contemplate the great drama of history, not as a succession of shifting scenes, but as a series of events tending to a divine catastrophe; to the fulfilment of that Will which is seeking good and good only.
IV. The process of this transformation St. Paul describes as the renewing of the mind. Such a phrase at once suggests the change which takes place when the foliage of spring covers the bare boughs of winter. It is not strictly a recovery of that which had been lost. The substance is not altered, but it is quickened. The alteration is the most wonderful that can be conceived of, but it all passes within. It is not sudden, but gradual. The power once given works secretly, probably amidst many obstructions from sharp winds and keen frosts. Still that beginning contains in it the sure prophecy of final accomplishment. The man will be renewed according to the image of his Creator and Father, because the Spirit of his Creator and Father is working in him.
V. That was the lesson of last Sunday. That was the Pentecostal gift and revelation. We have advanced a step further to-day. We have thanked God, Who has enabled us to confess the glory of the Eternal Trinity, and in the power of the Divine Majesty to worship the Unity. How were those who first used this prayer enabled to confess the glory of the Eternal Trinity? Did they discover this doctrine in the Bible by a careful collation of texts? Did they learn it from some dogmatist or spiritual director? Were they led simply to accept certain words which had nothing corresponding to them in their hearts and reasons? Were these crushed under the chariot-wheels of some infallible Juggernaut? Must we attain to our confession by the same means? I believe the men who wrote this prayer were able to confess the glory of the Eternal Trinity, because they sought first of all in the simplest acts of their lives not to be conformed to this world, but to be transformed by the renewing of their minds. So long as they were conformed to the world, they sought God in the multitude of objects which they saw about them. The heavens above, the earth beneath, the waters under the earth, told them what His likeness was. But a voice said to their hearts: “You have a Father, a Father of your spirits. Turn from these things that you see, to Him. Seek Him from whom you have wandered; He is not far from you. He is seeking you.” The voice said to them: “Through Me, through that Word Who is holding converse with your hearts and consciences, you may find this Father. I am the way to Him. I have taken your flesh and dwelt among men, that they may know what I am, and what He is; how distinct We are, how entirely We are one; that they may know the Father through the Son.” The voice said to them: “You cannot know the Father and the Son, unless the Spirit of the Father and the Son be working in you, working in you to transform your will to His Will; to bring your reason into submission to His perfect Reason.” So they were led to confess the glory of the Eternal Trinity. And by the same process, and no other, shall we be led to the same result, shall we be enabled to make the same confession. Not by studying words or repeating words, but by entering into the divine life; not by exalting our wills and reasons to grasp at some difficult conclusion, but by seeking the simplicity and humility of the little child, of the true man of science; not by subjecting our wills and reasons before some human authority, but by embracing that freedom and expansiveness which God promised, do we become sharers of the faith once delivered to the saints. And how did they learn in the power of the Divine Majesty to worship the Unity? They felt how divided, broken, at strife their hearts were, how strifes within led to strifes without; how impossible it was to obtain unity for themselves, or unity for the world. They asked God to make them one. They found it was His Will to make them one. They found His Spirit had taught them the prayer for Unity which they poured forth. They discovered that He must be the Author of all Peace and Unity in their own selves and in the societies of men. They found that it must be in the Unity of the Spirit that the Father and the Son rejoice together for ever. So were they enabled in the power of the Divine Majesty to worship the Unity. May we learn the secret as they learnt it! May we discover and ever hold fast the faith that the Father, the Son, the Spirit, is the God of Everlasting Love and Charity, the One God blessed for ever! May that Everlasting Love and Charity shine forth in us, that we may glorify our Father in Heaven, as He was revealed perfectly in the Only-Begotten Son, as He reveals Himself by His Spirit in the children of His adoption! May they be taught how to enter into that Unity which fills the spirits about the throne with all their wonder, and worship, and joy!