A Sermon
GOD'S OUTPOURED LOVE: OUR HOLINESS AND OUR HOPE
by
William M. Greathouse[1]
Scripture Lesson-Romans 5:1-5
The distinctive feature of the Christian dispensation-that which distinguishes the Gospel from the Law-is the Pentecostal outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the people of God, bringing to fulfillment the redemptive promises of the Old Testament and ushering in "the last days" of salvation history. This fulfilled promise of God was Simon Peter's announcement on the Day of Pentecost. In the familiar words of the King James Version (Acts 2:16-21):
This is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel;
And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God,
I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh:
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams,
And on my servants and on my handmaidens
I will pour out in those days of my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy.
And I will show wonders in heaven above,
and signs in the earth beneath:
blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke,
The sun shall be turned into darkness,
and the moon into blood, before that great
and notable day of the Lord come:
And it shall come to pass, that whoever shall
call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
"The last days" of which Joel here speaks, says Peter, are the promised days of salvation, the Age of the Spirit which began at Pentecost and shall continue until "that great and notable day of the Lord" when Christ returns to consummate the kingdom and judge the world. The Apostle Paul's version of the New Covenant outpouring of the Spirit is found in Romans 5:5, which I have chosen as my text. This verse has been called "The Pentecost of Romans" and reads: "And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us." God's outpoured Spirit is the outpouring of divine love, the hope of our salvation.
I call your attention to the fact that my text comes at the conclusion of a paragraph that begins, "Therefore being justified by grace, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom also we have access into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God" (5:1, KJV). Justification by faith opens the prospect of finally sharing the glory of God.
God's Spirit-outpoured love upon the apostles in the upper room infused them with a holy passion to burn out their lives for Christ and the gospel, in the confident expectation that God, who had inaugurated His kingly rule of grace by raising the crucified Jesus from the dead, would consummate that kingdom in glory by sending His Son back in the end "to restore all things" and judge the world in righteousness. In the same way, when the Father pours His love out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, we also are inflamed with a holy passion to give our lives for Christ and the gospel, "being persuaded of this very thing, that he who hath begun a good work in [us] will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ" (Phil. 1:6, Wesley); for in the death and resurrection of Jesus "the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever" (Rev. 11:36, NKJV). God 's outpoured love is both our holiness and our hope.
First: God's Spirit-Outpoured Love Is Our Holiness -
The Fulfillment of the Great Commandment
Peter Stuhlmacher speaks of Romans 5:5 as the fulfillment of the Shema. It is also the fulfillment of the neighbor-love command of the Holiness Code, as Jesus said: "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two hang all the Law and the Prophets" (Matt. 22:36-4O, NRSV).
Martin Luther declared that anyone who knows the difference between the Law and the Gospel is a theologian. The Law is what God commands; the Gospel, that which He freely gives.[2] Consider, therefore, that while the Law of God commands perfect love for God and neighbor (Deut. 6:4-5; Lev. 19:18), it cannot instill that love. But listen to the Gospel: "God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, so that the just requirement of the law (love for God and others-Rom. 5:5; 13:8-lO) might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit" (Rom. 8:3-4, NRSV). By pouring out His love in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, God thereby creates within us a loving obedience to His holy will.
Observe how Luther explains the miracle of justification: "Faith alone makes righteous and fulfills the law; for out of Christ's merit it brings the Spirit, and the Spirit makes the heart glad and free as the law requires that it shall be." John Wesley adds, when we permit God's love to "take up [our] whole heart" in sanctifying faith, sin is "excluded" from our inner being and we are enabled thereby, as Paul Bassett puts it, to be and to act in accord with the Great Commandment. Let us therefore pray God with Charles Wesley,
The sanctifying Spirit pour,
To quench my thirst and make me clean;
Now, Saviour, let the gracious shower
Descend, and make me pure within.
Wesley finds the promise of perfect love in First John, chapter 4:
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.... If we love one another (and "obey his word," 2:5), God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.... God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness in the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world" (4:7-8, 12, l5-17. NRSV).
As our heavenly Father loves every human being unconditionally, says Augustine-the evil as well as the good, enemies as well as friends- "so are we in this world" if we love with agape.[3] To love others with God's unconditional love is to "be perfect, as [our] Father in heaven is perfect" (Matt. 5:48). "We know it to be of but not from us," Bonnie Thurston comments here, "when, in our desire to follow after Jesus, we can 'do good to' when we do not 'feel good toward.'"[4] "Pure reigning alone in the heart and life," said Wesley, "this is the whole of scriptural perfection."[5] 'Faith working by love," he believed, "is the length and breadth and height and depth of Christian perfection."[6]
Perfect love, Wesley claimed, is also entire sanctification. "It is love excluding sin; love filling the heart, taking up the whole capacity of the soul. How clearly does this express the being perfected in love! How strongly imply the being saved from all sin! For as long as love takes up the whole heart, what room is there for sin therein?"[7] The crowning promise of the Christian dispensation, therefore, is God's love poured out in our hearts and perfected in us by the infilling of the Spirit. "You can go no higher than this," Wesley insisted, "till you are carried into Abraham's bosom."[8]
Second, God's Spirit-Outpoured Love Is Also Our Hope,
The Guarantee and First Installment of the Glory That
Shall Be Ours When Christ Returns
"The kingdom of God is not food or drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit" (Rom. 14:17, NKJV). To enjoy these fruits of the Spirit, Wesley comments in his Notes Upon the New Testament, is to have "heaven already opened in the soul"! The Holy Spirit "inspires the Christian soul with that even, solid joy which comes from the testimony of the Spirit that he is a child of God; and that gives him to 'rejoice with joy unspeakable, in hope of the glory of God....'" Paul employs three metaphors in this connection. The indwelling Spirit is the seal, the pledge or earnest, and the firstfruits of our final redemption. "For in him every one of God's promises is 'Yes,'" Paul writes in 2 Cor. 1:2O-22. "For this reason it is through him that we say 'Amen,' to the glory of God.... It is God who establishes us with you in Christ and has anointed us, by putting his seal on us and giving us his Spirit in our hearts as a first installment" (NRSV). Again, in Ephesians 1:13-14, he says, "In him. . .when you had. . .believed in him, [you] were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; ...the pledge ("earnest," KJV) of our inheritance toward redemption as God' s own people, to the praise of his glory" (NRSV).
ln these texts we find two of the apostle's metaphors. First, the figure of the seal. Letters of all kinds and official documents were in those days sealed with wax. A warm blob of wax was placed on the letter or document; the sender or signer then pressed his signet into the wax, making an official seal. The Holy Spirit in the believer's life is the divine seal of approval upon that life. In 2 Tim. 2:19-2O Paul writes, "God's solid foundation stands firm, sealed with this inscription, 'The Lord knows those who are His,' and, 'Everyone who confesses the name of the Lord must turn from wickedness'" (NIV). If the submissive heart is the warm and plastic wax, the Holy Spirit is the Seal - and the image of Christ is the visible mark of identification. The seal is at once an assurance to the believer and a sign to the world.
The metaphor of the earnest suggests another precious truth. The earnest is a partial payment that binds the agreement and obliges both the buyer and seller to complete the transaction.
The gift of the Holy Spirit is the first installment, as it were, of the infinite treasure God plans to bestow upon us when Christ returns to complete our salvation. So long as we abide in God, and God abides in us, we have the guarantee, as well as the foretaste, of heaven. "And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God," Paul admonishes, "by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption" (Eph. 4:3O, NKJV). So long as we abide in God's love, and God's love abides in us, and we "turn away from wickedness," the Spirit's seal is ours, and we have the assurance, and the foretaste, of heaven.
In Romans 8 St. Paul uses the third metaphor, speaking of "the firstfruits of the Spirit" that believers enjoy (8:23). Ponder this imagery. Just as the grapes, the milk, and the honey that Caleb and Joshua brought out of Canaan were a foretaste of the Promised Land (if they would but go in and possess it), so the Holy Spirit is the "firstfruits," the foretaste of the glory that will be ours when we see Christ. As C. F. Butler taught us to sing:
Once heaven seemed a far-off place
Till Jesus showed His smiling face,
Now 'tis begun within my soul,
'Twill last while endless ages roll.
Oh, hallelujah, yes, 'tis heaven,
'Tis heaven to know my sins forgiven!
On land or sea, what matters where?
Where Jesus is, 'tis heaven there.
The Holy Spirit dwelling in us is the experiential counterpart, the inward witness to Christ's present heavenly reign and future coming in glory. The indwelling Spirit produces within us the certainty that Christ, by His death and resurrection, has crushed the serpent's head on our behalf, securing our salvation. "When he comes," said Jesus of the promised Paraclete, "he will convince the world. . .of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged" (John 16:8, 11, emphasis added). Satan is a defeated foe! In His Cross, the incarnate Son of God dethroned Satan, destroyed sin, and abolished death. He is Christus Victor! Even though Satan's tail still wriggles and creates chaos (as the early Fathers put it), His final doom is sure! With Luther we therefore sing,
The prince of darkness grim - we tremble not for him.
His rage we can endure. For lo, his doom is sure;
One little word shall fell him.
What if an asteroid should some day come crashing into our planet? We have received "a kingdom that cannot be shaken" (Heb. 12:28, NRSV). "My kingdom is not of this world," says Jesus (John 18:36, KJV). "This hope we have as an anchor of the soul," we read in Hebrews, "both sure and steadfast, and which enters the Presence behind the veil, where the forerunner has entered for us, even Jesus" (6:19, NKJV). Again, "We do not yet see all things put under him, but we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, that He, by the grace of God might taste death for everyone" (2:8-9, NKJV, emphasis added). Paul sums up all this when he writes, "Hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us." The indwelling Spirit, flooding our hearts with agape, translates Christ's victory in His Cross and Resurrection into our personal victory over Satan, sin, and death!
By God's grace and the power of the Holy Spirit we "have overcome" the devil and the forces of evil, "because greater is he who is with [us] than he who is in the world"! (1 John 4:4, NKJV.) And because God in Christ has "condemned sin in the flesh," I can testify, "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death" (Rom. 8:2, RSV). Furthermore, when God's love is perfected in us, "we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear" (1 John 4:17-18, NRSV). "Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ"! (1 Cor. l5:57, NKJV.) In the Holy Spirit, Hebrews tells us, we "have tasted. . .the powers of the age to come" (6:4, NRSV). Charles Wesley has given this glorious truth poetic expression:
Oh, what a blessed hope is ours!
While here on earth we stay;
We more than taste the heavenly powers,
And antedate that day.
We feel the resurrection near,
Our life in Christ concealed;
And with his glorious presence here,
Our earthen vessels filled.
It is an old story. A small boy was flying a kite that was so high it could not be seen. A man observing the lad holding the string to the invisible kite asked him, "What are you doing?" "Flying my kite." "How do you know the kite is up there-you can't see it." "No," the boy responded, "but I know it's up there, because l can feel its pull." The Holy Spirit flooding our hearts with God's agape is the heavenly pull assuring us of our final salvation. "Hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love in our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom he has given us." "We speak the wisdom of God in a mystery," St. Paul writes in First Corinthians. ". . .as it is written: 'Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love him.' But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit!" (2:7, 8-lO, NKJV.)
One last word must be spoken. Our final redemption is no mere private hope; it is, says Paul in Romans 8, inextricably bound up with the redemption of the cosmos, the natural order that has been corrupted by the Fall. Accordingly, "the firstfruits of the Spirit" we believers now enjoy in Christ are simply a token of the Resurrection-for at His appearing Christ's kingdom of grace shall become the kingdom of glory. "For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive. But each one in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, afterward those who are Christ's at His coming. Then comes the end, when He delivers the kingdom to God the Father, when He puts an end to all rule and all authority and power.... Now when all things are made subject to Him, the Son Himself will also be subject to Him who put all things under Him, that God may be all in all"! (1 Cor. 15:22- 16, 28, NKJV, emphasis added.) "In this hope, we were saved" (Rom. 8:23, RSV, emphasis added).
Said Karl Barth, with characteristic vigor: "If Christianity be not altogether restless eschatology, there remains in it no relationship whatever to Christ."[9] James Forbes calls this Spirit-inspired hope of glory "the experience of eschatological epistemology" such as enabled Martin Luther King, Jr., to shout, "I've been to the mountain top. And my eyes have seen the glory of the Lord." "The Spirit sees the future depth implanted in the past and in the present," says Forbes.[10]
The victory over Satan, sin, and death that we now enjoy in Christ is but the prelude to God's final victory. Christian hope is not wishful thinking. No! It is a confident expectation in God, which is born of Christ's resurrection, in the sufferings of "this present time" between Pentecost and the Parousia, while the cosmos groans in the birthpangs of its final redemption. Christian hope, John Henry Newman once said, is the expression of "right faith." "Faith ventures and hazards," he wrote; "Right faith ventures and hazards deliberately, seriously, soberly, piously, and humbly, counting the cost and delighting in the sacrifice." Drawing on Newman's concept of right faith, Al Truesdale and Bonnie Perry conclude in a recent treatment of Wesley's theology, "Christian hope is 'dangerous hope'"[11] - it is a hope-filled faith, or a faith-filled hope, that dares to die with Christ, in the confident expectation of resurrection with Him.
The great gamble on that first Good Friday in Jerusalem was not the soldiers shooting craps for Jesus' garments; it was the dying Jesus betting His life that the Father would raise Him from the dead! That faith-the hope-filled faith of Jesus, that if we die in the cause of the gospel, we shall also live with Him - is, indeed, "a dangerous hope." But, Paul assures us, "hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us." It is in that hope that we live. It is in that hope that we witness and work. It is in that hope that we die. "When Christ calls a man," said Dietrich Bonhoeffer in words he sealed with his own blood, "he bids him come and die.'
As it has always been, Jesus says to us all today, "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake, he shall save it" (Luke 9:23-24).
Endnotes:
