Romans 14:7-9

For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. Whether we live or die we belong to the Lord. It was for this purpose that Christ died and rose to life again--that he might be the Lord of the dead and of the living.

Paul lays down the great fact that it is impossible in the nature of things to live an isolated life. There is no such thing in this world as a completely detached individual. That, in fact, is doubly true. "Man, said Macneile Dixon, "has an affair with the gods and an affair with the mortals." No man can disentangle himself either from his fellow men or from God.

In three directions a man cannot disentangle himself from his fellow men.

(i) He cannot isolate himself from the past. No man is self-made. "I am a part, said Ulysses, "of all that I have met." A man is a receiver of a tradition. He is an amalgam of all that his ancestors made him. True, he himself does something to that amalgam; but he does not start from nothing. For weal or for woe, he starts with what all the past has made him. The unseen cloud of witnesses do not only compass him about; they dwell within him. He cannot dissociate himself from the stock from which he springs and from the rock from which he is hewn.

(ii) He cannot isolate himself from the present. We live in a civilization which is daily binding men more and more closely together. Nothing a man does affects only himself. He has the terrible power of making others happy or sad by his conduct; he has the still more terrible power of making others good or bad. From every man goes out an influence which makes it easier for others to take the high way or the low way. From every man's deeds come consequences which affect others more or less closely. A man is bound up in the bundle of life, and from that bundle he cannot escape.

(iii) He cannot isolate himself from the future. As a man receives life so he hands life on. He hands on to his children a heritage of physical life and of spiritual character. He is not a self-contained individual unit; he is a link in a chain. Someone tells of a youth, who lived carelessly, who began to study biology. Through a microscope he was watching certain of these living things that you can actually see living and dying and begetting others in a moment of time. He rose from the microscope. "Now I see it, he said. "I am a link in the chain, and I will not be a weak link any more." It is our terrible responsibility that we leave something of ourselves in the world by leaving something of ourselves in others. Sin would be a far less terrible thing if it affected only a man himself. The terror of every sin is that it starts a new train of evil in the world.

Still less can a man disentangle himself from Jesus Christ.

(i) In this life Christ is forever a living presence. We do not need to speak of living as if Christ saw us; he does see us. All life is lived in his eye. A man can no more escape from the risen Christ than he can from his shadow. There is no place where he can leave Christ behind, and there is nothing which he can do unseen.

(ii) Not even death breaks that presence. In this world we live in the unseen presence of Christ; in the next we shall see him in his visible presence. Death is not the chasm that ends in obliteration; it is the gateway that leads to Christ.

No human being can follow a policy of isolation. He is bound to his fellow men and to Christ by ties that neither time nor eternity can break. He can neither live nor die to himself.

MEN UNDER JUDGMENT (Romans 14:10-12)