Christian Men God's Workmanship
R. W. Dale, LL. D. Ephesians 2:10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to good works, which God has before ordained that we should walk in them. These words suggest far-reaching speculations about the Divine ideal of humanity, and about how that ideal is suppressed by human folly and sin; they suggest inquiries about the ideal relations of all men to Christ, relations which are only made real and effective by personal faith in Him. But Paul was thinking of those who by their own free consent were in Christ, of those who, as he says, had been "saved by faith." Of these it was actually true that they were "God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus." How are we to get at the gospel which these words contain? Let us try. Most of us, I suppose, who have any moral earnestness, are at times very dissatisfied with ourselves; yes, with ourselves. We think it hard that we should be what we are. We complain not only of the conditions of our life, which may have made us worse than there was any need that we should be, but of our native temperament, of tendencies which seem to belong to the very substance of our moral nature. We have ideals of moral excellence which are out of our reach. We see other men that have a goodness that we envy, but which is not possible to ourselves. There is something wrong in the quality of our blood. The fibre of our nature is coarse, and there is nothing to he made of it. There is a wretched fault in the marble which we are trying to shape into nobleness and beauty, and no skill or strength of ours can remove it, And ours is not an exceptional wretchedness. The special infirmities of men vary. One man finds it hard to be just, another to be generous; one man finds it hard to be quiet and patient under suffering, another to be vigorous in work; one man has to struggle with vanity, another with pride, another with covetousness, another with the grosser passions of his physical nature; one man is suspicious by temperament, another envious, another discontented; one man is so weak that he cannot hate even the worst kinds of wrong-doing, the fires of his indignation against evil never burst into flame; another is so stern that even where there is hearty sorrow for wrong-doing he can hardly force himself to forgive it frankly. The fault of our nature assumes a thousand forms, but no one is free from it. I look back to the ancient moralists, to and to Seneca and to Marcus Antoninus, and I find that they are my brethren in calamity. The circumstances of man have changed, but man remains the same. How are we to escape from the general, the universal doom? We want to remain ourselves, to preserve our personal identity, and yet to live a life which seems impossible unless we can cease to be ourselves. It is a dreadful paradox, but some of us know that this is the exact expression of a dumb discontent which lies at the very heart of our moral being. Is there any solution? Paul tells us what the solution is. Christian men are "God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus." Yes, we were made for this, for something higher than is within our reach, apart from the reception of the life of God. There are vague instincts within us which are at war with the moral limitations which are born with us. Our aspirations are after a perfect righteousness and a diviner order, but we cannot fulfil them. They will die out through disappointment; they will be pronounced impossible unless we discover that they come from the fountains of a Divine inspiration, unless we have the faith and patience of the saints of old who waited, with an invincible confidence in the goodness and power of God, until the words of ancient prophecy were fulfilled, and more than fulfilled, in Christ. The prophets of the earlier centuries prophesied of the grace that was to come to later generations; their prophecies were dark and indistinct, and even to themselves almost unintelligible. They inquired and searched diligently concerning the salvation which they knew was to come, though they could not tell the time or the manner of its coming. And these aspirations of the individual soul are also prophecies; by them the Spirit of Christ is signifying to us the hopes which are our inheritance; they come from the Light which lighteth every man. But their fulfilment is not reserved for others; they may be fulfilled to ourselves. All that we have vaguely desired is now offered us in the glorious gospel of the blessed God; in Christ we become "His workmanship created in Christ Jesus unto good works." The Divine idea is moving towards its crowning perfection. Never let us forget that the life which has come to us is an immortal life, At best we are but seedlings on this side of death. We are not yet planted out under the open heavens and in the soil which is to be our eternal home. Here in this world the life we have received in our new creation has neither time nor space to reveal the infinite wealth of its resources: you must wait for the world to come to see the noble trees of righteousness fling out their mighty branches to the sky and clothe themselves in the glorious beauty of their immortal foliage. And yet the history of Christendom contains the proof that even here a new and alien life has begun to show itself among mankind; a life not alien indeed, for it is the true life of our race, but it is unlike what had been in the world before. The saints of every Church, divided by national differences, divided by their creeds, divided by fierce ecclesiastical rivalries, are still strangely akin. Voice answers to voice across the centuries which separate them; they tell in different tongues of the same wonderful discovery of a Divine kingdom; they translate every man for himself into his own life the same Divine law. We of obscurer rank and narrower powers read their lives, and we know that we and they are akin; we listen to their words, and are thrilled by the accent of home. Their songs are on our lips; they seem to have been written for us by men who knew the secret we wanted to utter better than we knew it ourselves. Their confessions of sin are a fuller expression of our own sorrow and trouble than we ourselves had ever been able to make. Their life is our life. We and they belong to a new race. A new type of character has been created. Christ lives on in those whose life is rooted in Him. (R. W. Dale, LL. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them. WEB: For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared before that we would walk in them.