2 Corinthiens 6:6-9

By pureness.

Pureness

The Greek word--like the cognate form, “holiness”--seems to come from a root denoting reverence. It suggests the thought of the awe with which nature herself regards the presence of purity. All kinds of purity carry an awe with them. Whether it be the purity of aim and motive in all things--the singleness, disinterestedness, unselfishness, which we see rarely but certainly manifested in social, political, ecclesiastical life--that high and noble principle which carries a man straight to the mark of truth and duty, without one side-look to the convenient, the remunerative, or the popular; or whether it be--and probably this is the thing more directly in view--that chastity of the heart and of the soul, which alone can see God, and alone move unscathed and unscathing on an earth rife with temptation--in either case we have here the primary condition of a blameless ministry, lay or clerical; in either case we have here the quality which wins reverence--which makes men feel, and the more closely they approach it, that here is a Divine presence--that here, in this man of like passions as they are, there is, moving and working, a Spirit not of man but of God--a Spirit which has a further message for them, whether they will hear it or whether they will forbear. (Dean Vaughan.)

By knowledge.--

By knowledge

A remarkable, yet most just, transition. St. Paul anticipates here a coming abuse and distortion. Pureness cannot be over-estimated. But there is a pursuit of pureness which is not according to knowledge. Witness the monastery and the confessional; witness the narrow, the enthralling, the degrading processes by which “ministers of God” have “given offence” in this matter--making purity the whole of grace, and debasing purity itself--as St. Paul saw some would debase charity--into a negative and a self-neutralising virtue. I read here the Divine warrant for the expansion of the human intellect; the assurance that the gospel is the friend and the nurse of enlightenment; that the true gospel never runs into corners, or hides its head in the sand, by reason of a fear of knowledge. I read here the benediction of God upon education--upon all that braces and adorns the intellect; upon all that enables a young man to judge of truth by truth, to exercise a sound mind upon doctrine presented to him, to try the very “spirits of the prophets,” whether they are of God, by ascertaining the vigour, and the consistency, and the satisfactoriness to conscience, of the language they speak. Above all, I read here the solemn, the awful duty of each minister and of each Christian to gain a clear and a piercing insight into the gospel as a whole, into the Bible as the Book of Books. The knowledge of which St. Paul wrote was pre-eminently a gospel knowledge. He lived in days when that title, so honourable, so easily assumed, was beginning to be fraught with mischief and ruin to the Church of God. He himself said elsewhere, “Knowledge puffeth up; it is love which edifieth.” And therefore we may be quite sure that the “knowledge” by which he “approved himself,” was distinctly a knowledge of revelation--yet a knowledge no less checked and tempered by other knowledge, than prompted and inspired by a Spirit not of the world. In these days the importance of knowledge, side by side with pureness, is asserting itself as perhaps never before. The necessity of Christian people being also an educated people. That they should be able to hold their own against all comers. That they should be able to refute--and not to be frightened at--the gainsayers. The timidity of conscious ignorance is the cause of half our compromises and our cowardices. We Christians flee where no man pursueth, because we have not taken the measure of the possible capacities of the imagined pursuer. But not less is it necessary that Christian men should “know” their own gospel. We snatch up, here and there, a text or a word, a phrase or a clause, detach it from its context, never define, never balance, and then, following some party leader, fight for the name and never “know” the thing. And so it may happen that, under the banner of the name, we may even be fighting against the thing. We may have a zeal for God Himself--and “not according to knowledge.” I speak fearlessly the praises of knowledge. Only let us take heed, first, that we be not bringing a “science falsely so called” into antagonism with Him who is “the truth”; and secondly, that we be quite sure that our Divine truth is the whole of truth--in other words, is Christ Himself--in His Deity, and in His Humanity--in His holiness, and His wisdom, and His love! (Dean Vaughan.)

By kindness.--

Kindness

If there be one virtue which most commends Christians, it is that of kindness: it is to love the people of God, to love the Church, to love poor sinners, to love all. But how many have we in our churches of crab-tree Christians, who have mixed such a vast amount of vinegar, and such a tremendous quantity of gall in their constitutions, that they can scarcely speak one good word to you. They imagine it impossible to defend religion except by passionate ebullitions; they cannot speak for their dishonoured Master without being angry with their opponent; and if anything is awry, whether it be in the house, the church, or anywhere else, they conceive it to be their duty to set their faces like flint, and to defy everybody. They are like isolated icebergs, no one cares to go near them. Imitate Christ in your loving spirits; speak kindly, act kindly, and think kindly, that men may say of you, “He has been with Jesus.” (C. H. Spurgeon.)

By the Holy Ghost.--

Power

This clause might be so interpreted as to include the rest. Pureness, knowledge, and love, are all gifts of the One Spirit. This reflection shows that when St. Paul wrote, “By the Holy Ghost,” amongst a number of particulars, he must have meant something more precise and less comprehensive. A man might have pureness and knowledge, and yet lack two things. We have known men of clean hands and a pure heart, of extensive knowledge and well-defined doctrine, who were singularly deficient in power. That elevating, transforming, re-creating influence, which brings a glow, and a force, and a rush into the whole being, and turns the commonplace into the original, and the natural into the spiritual, and the earthly into the heavenly, has not yet passed over them. They are clean and sound, but they are not illuminated and transfigured. Their life is not a motive life. It does not kindle, because it is not alight. No one catches fire at sleeping embers. These men are like a fire laid, to which the match has not yet brought the life-giving spark. Something of this kind is often made the special office of the Holy Ghost. The cleansing water is one of His emblems; but the rushing wind is another, and the enkindling fire is a third. And though the miraculous gifts are gone--gone because their work is done, and they would but impede the gospel progress in this nineteenth century--still power remains, as one of the proofs, and not one of the meanest or least convincing proofs, of the Divine origin of the gospel. Only let your mind receive into it, in answer to prayer, the real presence of God Himself in the Holy Spirit--and you are a man of power at once. The energy communicated to your soul must act and influence. The grace of pureness, the grace of knowledge, pass on into the grace of power. Multitudes,. even of sincere Christians, stop short of this; and, though safety may be theirs, it is a half-selfish safety--they go for next to nothing in the real battle-field of the gospel. Let us be Christians through and through. (Dean Vaughan.)

By love unfeigned.--

Love unfeigned

Pureness, and knowledge, and power--not even in this combination is the Christian character perfected. There might be a hardness, coldness, self-complacency, censoriousness, still--showing some lamentable deficiency in the presentation of the mind that was in Christ. Love, as the Greek says, unhypocritical, is an indispensable part of the “approving,” of the “not offending,” of the minister, of the Christian. What is purity without love? Cold, stern, how Unlike the holiness of Jesus! What is knowledge without love? Self-engrossing, contemptuous--how opposite to that Divine insight of which St. Paul says, “If Shy man love, the same knoweth,” or “is known”! What is power without love? Imperious, exacting, perhaps cruel--how, how incongruous with the position of a creature, of a sinner! Nature herself is witness that there is yet a more excellent way. Love--love unfeigned. Yes, that love which at the altar of God’s own love has kindled alike the love of God and the love of man. That love which is the handing on of love; the transmission, the transfusion--as of course, as that which must be, which could not be coerced or cabined--of a forgiveness, of a peace, of a joy, felt first, and felt as a gift, within. That love which has no stint and no limit, because it is the reflection of a love infinite, inexhaustible. Who does not know, who does not feel as he but listens, that the man who has this love in him is indeed “approved as God’s minister”? And without this love unhypocritical, what are gifts of intellect, of eloquence, of insight into truth, of scrupulosity in duty? Where is the attestation, in all these, of the ministry, or of the gospel? “He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God”--men feel that God is in him, as a light, as a strength, as a love, as a consolation. (Dean Vaughan.)