December 31 Daily Devotional

All for Jesus

Faith always shows itself in the whole personality. We can summarize it all in the words we find in the first and second chapters of John’s first Epistle, where we read, ‘If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth.’ ‘He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him.’ We can see where those have gone astray who hold that the Sermon on the Mount cannot apply to us, but only to the disciples of our Lord’s own day, and to the Jews of some future kingdom which is yet to come. They say it must be so, otherwise we are put under the law and not under grace. But the words just quoted from the first Epistle of John were written ‘under grace’, and John puts it like that specifically: If any man says, ‘I know him’—that is your faith, believing in the grace of Christ and the free forgiveness of sin—if any man says, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, (he) is a liar.’ That is simply repeating what our Lord says here about those who shall enter the kingdom of heaven: ‘Not every one that saith unto me Lord, Lord ... but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.’ And it is the message of the whole of the New Testament. He ‘gave himself for us’, says Paul to Titus, ‘that he might ... purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works’. We have been saved ‘unto holiness’. He set us apart in order to prepare us for Himself, and ‘every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure’. That is the doctrine of the Bible.

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, ii, pp. 310–11