John 1:16
THE PREACHER:
Charles S. Duthie has been since 1944 Principal and Professor of Systematic Theology, Scottish Congregational College, Edinburgh. After a distinguished career at Aberdeen University, where he graduated in Arts and Divinity, he was ordained in 1936. Army chaplain during most of World War II, he is a leading supporter of the Tell Scotland movement and was the First President of the Scottish Pastoral Association. Dr. Duthie has written God in His World, on the theology of evangelism.
THE TEXT:
And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace (KJV).
And from his fullness have we all received, grace upon grace (RSV).
THE SERIES
This is the sixth sermon in our 1962 series in which CHRISTIANITY TODAY presents messages from preachers in Great Britain and the Continent. Future issues will include sermons by Dr. A. Skevington Wood, Minister of Southlands Methodist Church, York; the Rev. William R. Mackay, Hospital Chaplain in Scotland; and President Jean Cadier, of the Reformed Faculty at Montpellier, France.
This might be called an old text with a new meaning-thanks to our recent translations of the New Testament. It is true that the rendering of the King James Version can still be made to yield its measure of truth. “Grace for grace” or “grace in exchange for grace” would refer to the fact that the life of the Christian is rooted in God’s grace from its beginning to its end, one grace being exchanged for another as that life continues. But the original word translated “for” can quite legitimately be rendered “upon” or “after” to give this significant alternative: “From his fullness have we all received, grace upon grace, grace after grace—grace succeeding grace, grace heaped on grace, grace without end.” God’s grace is both superabundant and unfailing.
Let us put the thought of the apostle into a simple picture. In summer many of us go to the seaside to find renewal of body and spirit. However active we may be, there are moments when we desire nothing better than to sit or lie still and watch the tide move in upon the shore, magic moments when the rolling waters hold us fast as in a spell. As we gaze, we see the waves thrusting forward to the beach, wave surmounting and succeeding wave, endlessly. So John seems to say, from the boundless ocean fullness of God’s grace in Christ we have all received and we now receive and we shall go on receiving wave after wave of grace. The source from which this grace streams is inexhaustible.
The Wonder Of Grace
Grace is a lovely and indispensable Christian word because it describes something very wonderful. It is a decisive event in any man’s life when he discovers for himself what the word means. I recall being present once at a committee where candidates for the Christian ministry were being examined. One man who had done well in the written work and who was known to be rather shy was making heavy weather of the oral. We put the usual questions to him but he appeared to be confused and overwhelmed by the occasion. Then Dr. J. D. Jones, the celebrated Bournemouth preacher, who was in the chair, leaned forward and said, “My boy, what we really want to know is this: do you know anything about what the New Testament calls the grace of God?” A hush came over the committee. Then the young man lifted up his head, looked Dr. Jones in the eye and said with quiet confidence, “Yes, sir, I do and I know it from my own experience.” We knew then that he had the “root of the matter” in him. He had broken through to the living heart of New Testament faith. He had discovered grace.
What a wealth and world of meaning there is in this word grace! The goodness of God and the power of God and the holiness of God are all in it. And to that we must add the loveliness and the love of God. P. T. Forsyth who has been called “a theologian of grace” puts it like this: “By grace is not here meant either God’s general benignity, or His particular kindness to our failure or pity for our pain. I mean his undeserved and unbought pardon and redemption of us in the face of our sin, in the face of the world-sin, under such moral conditions as are prescribed by His revelation of His holy love in Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” Grace is the free, unmerited, uncalculating, outflowing and overflowing love of God in Christ meeting and matching our indifference and defiance. Grace is the first word in the Christian vocabulary for Christianity in distinction from all other religions is preeminently the religion of grace, with God the great giver and man the humble receiver. This is what makes “the Christian message” a “Gospel,” the power of God issuing in salvation for all who believe. For this reason the Christian is essentially a man who lives by the assurance of grace.
Strange how long it takes some men to grasp the fact that God is the God of grace, giving himself in Christ to the limit, accepting us as we are, pardoning us freely and pouring his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit! Spurgeon had a favorite story about an old woman who was so poor that she often lay in bed for a large part of the day in order to keep warm. One day her minister called with a gift of money for her. He knocked several times at the door but received no answer. Several days later he met her in the street and told her of his visit. “Ah!” she said, “I was in bed. The door was locked. I did not get up to open the door. You see, I had no money and I thought it was the landlord come to collect his rent.” It is possible to go through life thinking that God is at the other end of a heavy demand that we cannot possibly meet. And indeed God makes the greatest of all demands: He asks for ourselves, because he knows that there can be no enduring satisfaction for us apart from fellowship with him. But he asks everything of us because he has already given everything for us in his Son. The demand presupposes the gift: the gift makes it possible for us to answer the demand. God is indeed the “God of all grace” (1 Pet. 5:10).
Endless Resources
Our text makes the direct suggestion that this astonishing grace of God comes to us from a source which can never be exhausted. That source is God himself whose limitless “fullness” has been made available to us in his beloved Son.
What new dimensions are added to our Christian discipleship when we realize that God’s resources cannot come to an end! One Christian thinker speaks of the “stupendously rich reality of God.” That is but an echo of Paul’s great phrase “the exceeding riches of his grace” (Eph. 2:7). This is a recurring theme of the hymns of the Wesley brothers:
Its streams the whole creation reach
So plenteous is the store
Enough for all, enough for each
Enough for evermore.
In every age Christians bear witness to the fact that when they go to God he never turns them empty away and that however much they may have received, he has still more to give.
Is it possible that our Christian lives are so deficient in power to attract and heal because we do not pause often enough to realize that God’s grace is inexhaustible? As a boy in the twenties I recall vividly the grey days of depression and unemployment. I remember seeing a paragraph in a newspaper describing how an undernourished urchin from the slums was taken into one of our large hospitals. They gave him a big glass of milk to drink. He gazed at it as if he had never seen the like before. Then he turned to the nurse and asked: “How far down may I drink, miss?” The spectre of insufficient supplies still haunted him. This is the kind of fear we never need to entertain with regard to God’s resources. They are always adequate because they are more than adequate. When we are grappling with a temptation that threatens to squeeze the life out of us, when we are faced with a sudden emergency that almost unmans us, when we have to carry for years a burden we did not deserve or when life tumbles in upon us, crushing our hopes into the ground we can open our ears to hear and appropriate the assurance given to Paul—“My grace is sufficient for thee” (2 Cor. 12:9). Here, too, lies the way of hope for the Church. She needs constantly to lift her eyes beyond the paralyzing bigness of the Christian task and the frailty of her own faith to the God whose renewing energies cannot fail. In an age of revolution, war and threatening destruction a Church constrained and made compassionate by grace can tell men everywhere that in God a limitless power to build up the world is available as they repent and return to him, their Heavenly Father.
While our text tells us that the grace of God comes from an inexhaustible source, it implies that this grace is only given to us as we need it, for the day, the hour, the moment. Because God is a God who gives and goes on giving “grace upon grace, grace after grace,” we must go on receiving, again and again and again.
One of the perils of the Christian life is that we may come to think that we have a spiritual capital of our own, from which we can draw at will when we require it. Perhaps our parents started it for us and we have added to it by years of Christian faithfulness. Certainly we do receive from the Christian past and from our own previous Christian experience. If we have genuinely striven to follow Christ throughout the years, recognizing our own weakness and pressing that weakness close to his strength, we stand a better chance of riding out the storm than the man who has only paid lip service to Christ and his Church. But which of us, however long we have been on the Christian road, will dare to say that he has spiritual resources of his own and in himself on which he can fall back? Samuel Rutherford put it vividly in his quaint way in his famous Letters: “Every man thinketh that he is rich enough in grace till he take out his purse and tell his money, and then he findeth his pack but poor and light in the day of a heavy trial. I found I had not (enough) to bear my expenses, and should have fainted if want and penury had not chased me to the storehouse of all.” Samuel Rutherford was right. The spiritual capital is not in us, not even in our acquired Christian wisdom, but in God. We can only draw from that capital by renewing our personal relationship with him through Christ, in trust and dependence. God gives. We must always be ready to receive.
Our openness to God’s grace and our utter dependence upon it is vital in every area of the Christian life. We need God’s grace for the inner life of the spirit. We are such fickle people that we can tell ourselves that because we prayed yesterday and will pray tomorrow we do not require to pray today. We need God’s grace for our personal relationships—at home, in the Church, in our work. We cannot be good parents, good sons or daughters, good employers or workers, good students or teachers without grace. It is grace that prevents us from using others for our own ends and enables us to accept people anew each day with a sense of wonder. We need grace if we are to play our part in the world, if we are to help rather than hinder, heal rather than hurt. The human heart is so perverse that we can make personal faith and the enjoyment of God’s gifts a form of self-preoccupation. We can grow callous to the needs of others, shutting our ears to the cries of the hungry and the dispossessed, avoiding the troublesome, missing the Christ who comes to be served by us in the least of his brothers and sisters. Grace and grace alone can thrust us out from our stagnant backwater to the wide ocean of human need until our deepest concern is for the salvation of a world and not simply for our own.
If we are truly open to this grace, God gives it to us in the fullest measure. The hymn often sung in missions and crusades
Just as I am, without one plea
But that Thy blood was shed for me
applies not only to the beginning of the Christian life. It is valid for that life in its continuance. We live by grace. And living by grace means coming to God again and again just as we are, presenting ourselves to him with our sins, our doubts, our fears and our disloyalties and relying on his willingness to accept us in that condition. The wonder is that he not only accepts us—he unites us with himself by his Spirit, he enters into us, he changes us into the likeness of his Son.
Grace For Every Christian
Let us notice too that this grace which is inexhaustible and which we must humbly receive from God as we need for it is for every Christian without exception.
It is not without reason that John writes: “From his fullness have we all received, grace upon grace.” At the time when these words were written it is probable that a sect was springing up within the Church which distinguished Christians into various classes—the beginners, the more advanced, and the spiritual élite. John goes out of his way to make it clear that all who have received Christ may draw from the fullness of his grace—the rich and the poor, the educated and the illiterate, the freeman and the slave. There may be differing levels of spiritual apprehension, but it is dangerous to think that we are on the higher levels. Every Christian ought to be able to say
It reaches me, it reaches me
Wondrous grace, it reaches me
Pure, exhaustless, ever-flowing
Wondrous grace, it reaches me.
That verse puts the truth of our text in a simple and graphic form. “From his fullness have we all received”—that refers to something that has happened in the past in virtue of which we are Christians now. “Grace upon grace”—that indicates that we are in living touch with God the source of our new life. “It reaches me”—that bears witness to the fact that God’s grand initiative continues, that at this very instant I am linked with the God of grace, that I have the assurance of grace and am depending on grace alone.
But what is the grace of God? It is God himself in his gracious presence in Jesus Christ pardoning, reconciling, renewing, transforming. Grace is inexhaustible because God is inexhaustible. Grace is to be received again and again because God is to be so received. Grace in full measure is for every Christian because God is for every Christian.
“Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ” wrote Paul to the Corinthians, “that, although he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich” (2 Cor. 8:9). As we look at our Lord throughout his whole life spending himself for all sorts of men and women and giving himself supremely on the Cross we know that such self-giving is the costliest thing in the world. The wonder of grace is the wonder of a God who suffers for us and with us.
We cannot die for the world as Christ died; but we can be caught up by him through the Spirit into the passion of his “dying love” and work that love out in saving and serving men. The “power of his resurrection” is not given apart from the “fellowship of his sufferings.” And as we are privileged to enter into this fellowship in the duties and demands of every day, in our work, in our relationships with others and perhaps in some special task which God has assigned to us, God’s grace becomes more real and more wonderful. So may we live “to the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved” (Eph. 1:6)! Amen.
