Thoughts on the Spiritual Life - VII - H. C. G. Moule

Continuing Chapter 2:

Such is the holy burden of this Ephesian passage. The highly privileged and endowed Christian is to walk with all lowliness, and to put aside all bitterness.

True to its divine practicality, the Gospel here presses home its Total Abstinence just where we might be tempted most easily to forget it. It does not speak of “some great thing.” It says nothing about a total abstinence from murmuring when some great desolation falls upon life, or from resentment when some unusual and phenomenal wrong is inflicted on property or person. It speaks of the little things of the common day, the present day. It touches on our feelings and temper this hour about other people, and the outcome of those feelings in the tiny things which in their millions make up life. The Apostle makes the humiliating and instructive, yet loving, assumption that these supremely privileged believers will yet need, amongst themselves, to “bear and forbear”; and he calls upon them, each for himself, always to do so. He draws up for them a very practical, a very plain, prosaic, unimaginative list of sins and their opposite graces; and in these matters, not in things heroic, he calls for Total Abstinence.

Let me deviate for a moment, in illustration, to St. John. In his First Epistle we read two verses side by side. One bids us to stand ready to lay down our lives for the brethren; the other warns us not to shut up our pity from a brother or sister destitute of daily food, if we say we have the love of God in us. The collocation of these verses is significant. A certain poetic glamour surrounds, in imagination, a self-sacrificing dying hour; we think the occasion itself, perhaps, would sustain us by its greatness. But is there no risk of being caught in the very midst of such imaginations by some small trial of our temper, some unwelcome call upon our time and trouble, and of being fairly conquered by this trial, because unready? Now St. John means that this is altogether wrong. The two things are of a piece. If we would be really ready for a self-sacrificing death we must be ready for the next humble little action of a self-sacrificing life, in Jesus Christ, in the Holy Spirit, totally abstaining from its opposite.