Ourselves Received from and Given to Christ
A. Maclaren, D. D. Philemon 1:19 I Paul have written it with my own hand, I will repay it: albeit I do not say to you how you owe to me even your own self besides. I venture to take these words as spoken to each Christian soul by a higher and greater voice than Paul's. "I will repay it; albeit I do not say to thee how thou owest unto Me even thine own self besides." I. OUR TRANSCENDENT DEBT. The Christian teacher may say to the soul which by his ministrations has been brought back to God and to peace in a very real sense: "Thou owest thyself to me." But I pass from that altogether to the consideration of the loftier thought that is here. It is a literal fact that all of you Christian people, if you are Christians in any real sense, do owe your whole selves to Jesus Christ. Does a child owe itself to its parent? And has not Jesus Christ, if you are His, breathed into you, by supernatural and real communication, a better life and a better self, so that you have to say, "I live, yet not I, but Jesus Christ liveth in me." And if that be so, is not your spiritual being, your Christian self, purely and distinctly a gift from Him? Does a man that is lying wrestling with mortal disease, and who is raised up by the skill and tenderness of his physician, owe his life to the doctor? Does a man that is drowning, and is dragged out of the river by some strong hand, owe himself to his rescuer? And is it not true that you and I were struggling with a disease which in its present form was mortal, and would very quickly end in death? Is it not true that all souls separated from God, howsoever they may secrete be living, are dead; and have not you been dragged from that living death by this dear Lord, so as that, if you have not perished, you owe yourselves to Him? Does a mad man who has been restored to self-control and sanity owe himself to the sedulous care of him that has healed him? And is it not true, paradox as it sounds, that the more a man lives to himself the less he possesses him. self; and that you have been delivered, if you are Christian men and women, from the tyranny of lust and passions, and from the abject servitude to the lower parts of your nature, and to all the shabby tyrants, in time and circumstance, that rob a man of himself; and have been set free and made sane and sober, and your own masters and your own owners, by Jesus Christ? To live to self is to lose self, and when we come to ourselves we depart from ourselves; and He that has enabled us to rule our own mutinous and anarchic nature, and to put will above passions, and tastes, and flesh, and conscience above will, and Christ above conscience, has given us the gift which we never had before of an assured possession of our own selves. II. THE ALL-COMPREHENDING OBLIGATION BASED UPON THIS. If it be true that by the sacrifice of Himself Christ has given us ourselves, what then? Why, then, the only adequate response to that gill made ours at such cost to the giver, is to give ourselves back wholly to Him who gave Himself wholly to us. Christ can only buy me at the cost of Himself. Christ only wants myself when He gives Himself. In the sweet commerce of that reciprocal love which is the foundation of all blessedness, the only equivalent for a heart is a heart. As in our daily life, and in our sweet human affections, husband and wife, and parent and children, have nothing that they can barter the one with the other except mutual interchange of self; so Jesus Christ's great gift to me can only be acknowledged, adequately responded to, when I give myself to Him. And if I might for a moment dwell upon the definite particulars into which such an answer will expand itself, I might say this entire surrender of self will be manifested by the occupation of all our nature with Jesus Christ. He is meant to be the food of my mind as truth; He is meant to be the food of my heart as love; He is meant to be the Lord of my will as supreme Commander. Tastes, inclinations, faculties, hopes, memories, desires, aspirations, they are all meant as so many tendrils by which my many fingered spirit can twine itself round Him, and draw from Him nourishment and peace. Again, this entire surrender will manifest itself in the devotion of our whole being to His name and glory. Words easily spoken! words which, if they were truly transmuted into life by any of us, would revolutionise our whole nature and conduct! And further, this entire surrender of self will manifest itself in regard not only of our being and our acting, but of our having. I do not want to dwell upon this point at any length, but let me remind you, that a slave has no possessions of his own. And you and I, if we are our own owners, are so only because we are Christ's slaves. Therefore we have nothing. In the old bad days the slave's cottage, his little bits of chattels, the patch of garden ground with its vegetables, and the few coins that he might have saved by selling these, they all belonged to his master because he belonged to his master. And that is true about you and me, and our balance at our bankers', and our houses and our possessions of all sorts. We say we believe that; do we administer these possessions as if we did believe it? III. THE REPAYMENT. Jesus Christ stops in no man's debt. There is an old story in one of the historical books of the Old Testament about people who, in the middle of a doubtful negotiation, were smitten by conscience and drew back from it. But one of them, with commercial shrewdness, remembered that a portion of their capital was already invested, and he says, "What shall we do for the thousand talents that we have given, and are now sacrificing at the bidding of conscience?" And the answer was: "The Lord is able to give thee much more than these." That is true of all sacrifices for Him. He has given us abundant wages beforehand. What we give is His before it was ours. It remains His when it is called ours. We but give Him back His own. There is really nothing to repay, yet He repays in a hundred ways. He does so by giving us a keen joy in the act of surrender. "It is more blessed to give than to receive." Christ bestows ourselves upon ourselves that we may have some portion of that joy. And with it come other gladnesses. There is not only the joy of surrender and the enhanced possession of all which is surrendered, but there is the larger possession of Himself which comes always as the issue of a surrender of ourselves to Him. When we thus yield He comes into our souls. (A. Maclaren, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: I Paul have written it with mine own hand, I will repay it: albeit I do not say to thee how thou owest unto me even thine own self besides. WEB: I, Paul, write this with my own hand: I will repay it (not to mention to you that you owe to me even your own self besides).