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The current thing today is grace without truth, or what is supposed to be grace. It is a sort of man-made substitute. It's something like this.
Here's a man in the gutter, the moral gutter. It may be the actual gutter. Or, there may be the outer trappings of refinement that easy wealth provides; or, the real refinement that culture and inheritance bring. But morally and in spirit, it's a gutter. The slime of sin and low passion, of selfishness and indulgence and self-ambition, oozes over everything in full sight. The man's in the gutter.
And along comes the modern philosopher of grace, so-called. He looks down compassionately, and says, "Poor fellow, I'm so sorry for you. Too bad you should have gotten down there. Let me help you a bit, my brother. " So he puts some flowering plants down in the slime of the gutter, and he brushes the man's clothes a bit, and his hair, and sprinkles the latest-labelled cologne-water over him, and pats him on the shoulder, and says, "Now, you feel better, my man, don't you ?" And the man sniffs the perfume, and is quite sure he does. But he is still in the gutter.
There's an intense stress on the outside of things. Better sanitation, improved housing, purer milk supply, and segregation of vice which seems to mean putting some of the viler smelling slime of the gutter, the slimer slime, all over in one guttered section by itself. But there can be no health there. It's a change of location that is needed!
The wondrous Jesus-plan is different. It holds things in poise. Grace and truth. Truth is Jesus stretching His hand up high, up to the limit of arm's length, and saying, "Here is the standard, purity, righteousness, utter honesty of heart and rigid purity of motive and life. You must reach this standard. It can't be lowered by the half thickness of a paper-thin shaving. You must come to this standard. The standard never comes down to you."
And the man in the gutter says, '' I'll never reach it." And he is right. He never will—of himself, alone. Yet that's truth, true truth. "A hopeless case" you say. Just wait, that's only half the case, and not the warm half either.
Grace is Jesus going down into the gutter, the gutterest gutter, and taking the man by his out-stretching hand, and lifting him clean up out of the gutter, up, and up, till the man reaches the standard, and is never content till he does. That was a tremendous going down, and a yet more tremendous lifting up. Jesus broke His heart and lost His life in the going down. But out from the broken heart came running the blood that proved both cleansing and a salve. And out of the grave of that lost life came a new life that proved an incentive, and a tremendous dynamic.
The blood cleanseth the inside of the man in the gutter, and heals his sores, restores his sight and hearing and sensitiveness of touch. The new life put inside the man makes him rise up and walk determinedly out of the gutter to a new location. He is a new man, with a new inside, in a new location.
Settlement houses, better environment, improved outer conditions of every sort, are blessed, and only blessed, after the inside is fixed or in helping to get it fixed. If that isn't done, they are simply as a lovely bit of pink-coloured court-plaster skilfully adjusted over an ugly incurable ulcer. The man is befooled while the ulcer eats into his vitals.
It's only the blood-power of Jesus that can fix the inside. He cuts out the ulcer and puts in a new strain of blood. Then the inner includes the outer. And the most grateful of all is the man. This is the Jesus-plan, John says, "full of grace and truth."
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