Second Sunday after Trinity
June 13, 1858
“That ye may be sincere and without offence till the day of Christ.”—Philippians i. 10.
The passage: Paul prays that the Philippians may be sincere and without offence until the day of Christ.
These words express the deepest wishes Paul could utter before God for his converts at Philippi, and equally his deepest longings for himself. He could not separate what was good for them from what was good for him. We might think that the veteran of Christ, with so many battles behind him and so many scars, had a right to blessings the raw recruit could not ask. He did not think so. He rejoices in fellowship with them in the Gospel, in their sorrows, conflicts and supports, and he supposes no greater reward than that they and he should enter fully into it. He knows the same enemies are working to rob them of this reward and keep them apart. If they, many of whom had only just renounced their idols and been baptized, did not keep this goal in sight, they were forgetting their calling and not believing in God their Father. And if he, who had received so many revelations and endured so many sufferings, thought there was a higher end, or that he was more secure of this one, less exposed to the principalities and powers with which they and he were wrestling, he would have fallen from Christ while glorifying himself as Christ’s Apostle.
What was the great gift he sought for them and for himself? It was that they might know, by loving them, the things already given to them. It was that they might have judgment, the power to distinguish the true from the counterfeit, what is from what is not. He did not ask that they be lifted to some rare excellence to be admired or to congratulate themselves on, but that they be “sincere and without offence.” These are the saintly qualities he coveted for them, and for us. Let us consider what they are.
I. The word we render “sincere” is expressive and beautiful. It is made from a noun meaning a ray of the sun and the verb “to judge.” Joining a sensible image to a mental act, it means a clearness within all the movements of thought and judgment, like the clearness the sun gives to external things. Language of this kind never grows stale. Anyone in any age or country who notices the plain effects of light, or can see into its hidden influences, has a store of wisdom to apply to the still more wonderful processes in his own heart and in other people’s. The Old Scriptures had made St. Paul familiar with these universal lessons, and he knew how our Lord had claimed them in His parables. He knew that when Christ called Himself “the Light of the World,” He declared Himself as much in contact with human hearts and understandings as the sun is with bodily senses, and as mighty to unfold true human life as the sun is to awaken life in plants and animals. The best thing Paul could say to his disciples was this: “Believe that this Light is with you. Cultivate the habit of recognizing it. All God’s discipline is to remind you of its presence.”
I do not want you to forget the word “sincere,” or think the translators could have found a better. I would rather you consider whether this clearness is the fullest and most reasonable explanation of sincerity, and whether Paul shows how it is possible for you and me to be sincere. Are you surprised I say possible? No Saint, Martyr or Apostle would have been scandalized by the word. They were tempted every day to deal fraudulently with their fellow-men, their consciences and God. Each new event or perplexity showed them some trick the deceitful heart was playing on itself, some web the spirit of lies was weaving. The falsehoods took different shapes for each, according to his time, society, temperament, the particular good God would have him show, and the particular work God had given him. Their only safety was to be awake to the danger. They could not become sincere by talking of sincerity, or by violent efforts to become the models they described. While they lived in themselves and thought about themselves, insincerity was almost inevitable. But they looked out of themselves; they confessed the light that was near; they asked that it would shine into them; they came to it so that their deeds might be shown to be wrought in God. So they gained that clearness of spirit and guilelessness which even bad men hail when they see it, which speaks in unconscious acts and smiles through the open countenance, which must come from God and is His own image.
Is it not well to remind ourselves that this sincerity is possible for us? Do we not often think it impossible? How many little, dark, shameful cheats we detect in ourselves: plotting vanity; false modesty that seeks applause by seeming to shun it; doubling to avoid frankly confessing wrong to others and ourselves; unwillingness to look at acts and states of mind as they are and call them by their right names; compromises with conscience; a readiness to bargain with God to escape punishment and gain happiness. We find this insincerity in ourselves, which is the true way to put it. We readily admit that the age tempts us to insincerity, and rightly. It is a time when religious profession is easy, reputable and advantageous; when feelings and exertions for every subject are labelled in books so that a man knows which to take up on every occasion; when sentences come with fearful facility; when criticism of others’ thoughts and acts has become a profession, and men who circulate Bibles treat “Judge not, that ye be not judged” and “Take first the beam out of thine own eye” as obsolete commands from an authority owed no reverence; when monstrous outrages against morality, said to be done in religion’s name, are met with outrages as gross; when the religious care more for the praise and blame of newspapers than for God’s. Such a time is most perilous to sincerity. But it is perilous because it tempts us to forget that there is another light than any from society or ourselves, that we are meant to walk by it, and that only in it can we walk honestly.
So the bane and the antidote lie, as always in God’s world, close together. The evils of each past age formed the good men who lived in it: through them they learned what to flee from in themselves, and where to flee. As God showed them more of their sinfulness, He showed them more of His redemption. Our age can be such a minister of blessing to us if we use it. If, instead of denouncing the political, commercial or religious world, or succumbing to one of them, we remember that whatever bad we see in them has its counterpart in us, we shall be driven to seek help in Him who desires truth in our inward parts and will make us know wisdom secretly.
II. The next expression, “without offence,” is scarcely less significant. The two are different, but the same idea is hidden in both.
Paul desired for the Philippians a perpetual sunlight in their hearts, and at once the thought comes that in such a light they would not stumble. He knew how many causes of stumbling there were in that day. John, more than a prophet and the messenger who went before our Lord, stumbled for a while at his strange imprisonment. Could Jesus be He that should come? Must they not look for another, who would not leave his faithful servant to Herod? In his own prison hours Paul must have had thoughts that let him understand and pity the Baptist’s doubts. He knew from experience how the persecutions awaiting the less instructed Philippians might shake their faith. They had Christ’s words as a perpetual warning and encouragement: “Fear not them that kill the body… but fear him” who, after he has killed, has power to cast into hell. Fear the spirit of lies and hatred, who seeks to draw you from truth, love and God and rob you of your soul’s life, and who will succeed unless you trust the Father without whom “not a sparrow falls to the ground,” who numbers the hairs of your head and will not let what is so much more precious to Him perish if you commit it to Him. These words proved charms and talismans to many a witness for God in dark, terrible hours. They said then, and have said ever since: “The physical torment that can be inflicted here, or that is threatened hereafter if you forswear the truth your conscience owns, cannot be so terrible as a lie. A lie comes straight from the devil; to yield to it is to yield to him, and to become at home in it is to fall into the second death, the true Gehenna. So hold fast to the God of Truth and Love. Anyone who would tempt you from Him is an incarnation of Satan, though he comes like an angel of light. Fear him more than all outward enemies, and cry to your Father in Heaven not to let him tempt you above what you can bear.” The Christians of Paul’s day had this blessed amulet from their Lord. Yet it would have been useless if their teacher on earth, and another Divine Teacher nearer to them than he, had not continually reminded them how likely they were to stumble even at slight, unexpected troubles.
Paul also knew that if this class of offences were removed, others just as dangerous would remain. He was too wise to idolize adversity or teach that it is free from the sorest temptations, yet he knew better than anyone how sweet its uses are in God’s hand, and how bitter its opposite, though good in itself, can prove to a man or a Church. He did not suppose that when Christ’s name was no longer spoken against but exalted in high places, when the profession of the Cross was desirable and its offence ceased, there would be no more lonely captives sending the sad message, “Art thou He that should come, or do we look for another?” Is this world, so full of misery, pride and cruelty, what Thou hast redeemed with Thy precious blood? Is this Church, which curses, blasphemes and murders for Thy sake, what Thou hast espoused as a chaste virgin and made all glorious within?
Paul may not have been enabled, as his fellow-Apostle was, to look into the future and see the toils and apparent triumphs of the Beast and the false Prophet. But he knew the past of his own chosen people too well not to expect that Christendom might need its Sennacheribs and Nebuchadnezzars, its wars, famines and pestilences, to save it from the effects of its own prosperity, and that while prosperity lasted it might hide the most profound infidelity under the fairest profession. So he did not ask outward sunshine for his converts, as if walking in it would keep them from stumbling. He asked a track of Divine light for their steps through whatever regions, gay or wintry, they must pass. The spiritual illumination he sought would show them that Jesus the Crucified is He that has come, is with us now, and is not to be replaced by another. It would show them that though all are false, He is the Truth; that if His followers plot and deceive, it is not because they believe in His Cross, Passion, Resurrection and Ascension but because they have lost faith in them, putting themselves and their fancies in place of these realities. It would show them that these truths grow fuller and brighter as the inventions fade away, and that the light in which they have believed without seeing, and tried to walk, is brightening into a perfect Day.
III. This is the third part of Paul’s prayer, and it arises naturally from the others: that they may be sincere and without offence till the day of Christ. I spoke to you not long ago of the duty and blessing of hoping for that day. I tried to show that we cannot be still when the earth is shaking unless we expect a full revelation of a perfect Order, a divine Kingdom. We cannot really know the Lord is God unless we believe that the brightness of His glory, the express image of His person, will be manifested and all darkness scattered by His appearing. I have pointed out the confusions that accompany this belief in some who profess it, so that you could receive it and live on it without the distraction that comes from mixing our crude fancies with what is above them. The day of Christ, as the Apostles set it forth, is not a day when a few look for their triumph and their enemies’ defeat. It is the day when the Son of Man is revealed as King of the Universe and His victory for mankind is proved real, not imaginary. It does not proclaim One who has been for ages a stranger to the world He visited for a few years. It asserts that He who sacrificed Himself is, and always has been, the prince of all the kings of the earth, the source of all their power, the One who alone has kept it from destroying them and those they govern, and to whom they must give account. The day of Christ is not a new sun rising in the sky; it is the full noonday splendour of the light that has been lighting every man who comes into the world.
These considerations matter especially for our text, where the thought of light runs through the whole passage. To be sincere is to be in the light; the secret of not stumbling is to walk in it. The Philippians are treated as children of the Day, to live as if it were already as revealed as it can be. They are to refer their daily acts and the thoughts that rise in their hearts to Christ, and desire that He show which have come from Him and can bear His daylight, and which belong to the night. So they would be kept from stumbling themselves and from causing others to stumble. For members of one body cannot let darkness dwell in themselves without spreading it, and cannot fall without causing falls. This is the meaning of “Woe to the world because of offences.” It is another reason to separate the light in us from the darkness trying to comprehend it, and a new motive for keeping ourselves in remembrance and hope of that day which shall bring out whatever is sincerely good and destroy whatever corruption has mixed with it. Brethren, if we walk in the light of sparks we have kindled ourselves, or which the public opinion of the age has kindled, we must stumble and make others stumble; we must tolerate evils in our own hearts that we ought to hate, and be intolerant of those God cares for. It does not matter what professions we make or what reputation we earn; we shall commit acts hateful in God’s sight and bring scandal on His Name.
But if we look to the day of Christ, we shall be every hour more impatient of whatever in us defiles and perverts His truth, and more patient of the confusions in our fellow-men. We shall be less angry that they do not disperse at our bidding. We shall fear to increase them with our feeble instruments, instead of using that penetrating Word which is “sharper than any two-edged sword… discerning the thoughts and intents of the heart.” We shall know that Christ must sever the tares from the wheat, and that we cannot.
May God grant us all the Spirit of Truth, Love and Patience, to prepare us for that day, to make us rejoice in how righteous its judgment will be, and to make us content to leave ourselves and all men in the hands of Him who will then be manifested to quick and dead. May those who teach remember that for every idle word spoken in God’s name they must give account in that day. May those who hear remember that the feeblest words which told them of His love and His desire to renew them in His image were His words, and will be proved true as much by their neglect as by their belief. And may we remember that the highest office of all is not to speak words, even Divine ones, in men’s ears, but to present Christ’s finished Sacrifice to His Father, to offer ourselves as holy and acceptable sacrifices in Him, and to ask that He who alone can see will see if there is any wicked way in us, and that He who alone can guide will guide us in the way everlasting. How can we better gather up all our petitions, for ourselves, for those dear to us, for the whole Church, than in the Apostle’s prayer, “that we may be sincere and without offence till the day of Christ”?