I. Religion in its nature.—It is a worthiness into which we are called and with which we are invested.
II. Religion in its source.—The goodness of God. 1. All present religious views and feelings are the effect of Divine grace. 2. Man has no rightful claim to Divine grace. 3. Religion has its true source in the good pleasure of God.
III. Religion in its principle.—Faith. “The work of faith with power.” The producing and sustaining principle of religion.
IV. Religion in its end.—1. The glory of the Redeemer. “That the name of our Lord Jesus Christ may be glorified in you.” 2. The glory of the redeemed. “And ye in Him.”
V. Religion in its measure or rule of dispensation.—“According to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.”—Zeta.
Ver. 12. Christ glorified in His People.—The bust of Luther was shut out from the Walhalla, or German Westminster Abbey. The people were indignant, but said, “Why need we a bust when he lives in our hearts?” And thus the Christian ever feels when he beholds many around him multiplying pictures and statues of Christ, and he can say, “I need them not, for He is ever with me; He lives perpetually in my heart.”
CHAPTER II.
CRITICAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTES.
Ver. 1. Beseech . . . by the coming of our Lord.—The English reader who consults the similar phrase “to beseech by” in Rom. xii. 1 will be wholly astray. St. Paul begs his readers not to be thrown into consternation or kept in a flutter of excitement over that matter of the Parousia, or “coming.”