"And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment;

"That ye may approve things that are excellent; that ye may be sincere and without offense till the day of Christ;

"Being filled with the fruits of righteousness, which are by Jesus Christ, unto the glory and praise of God." — Phil. 1: 9-11.

WE can understand these words better, according to their true import, by rendering them thus: — This I pray, that the love of God in you may overflow your whole nature more and more, perfecting your spiritual knowledge, and all your spiritual senses, making you able to discriminate the things that differ; that ye may be clear as a sunbeam, and be no stumbling-block till the day of Christ, filling you with the fruits of righteousness which are by Jesus Christ unto the glory and praise of God.

In this closet prayer of Paul for the Philippians, we have one of those panoramic views of the elements of a complete Christian. Let us notice a plain exegesis of these words, and see how they fit our experience and correspond with the reason of things. This word "love" is emphatically the love of God. In the New Testament there are two words for love. One is philos, which is the word for a natural human affection, which exists in greater or less degrees throughout the entire animal kingdom, including all the natural affections of human nature apart from special divine grace. The word agape is invariably used to express a divine affection imparted to the soul by the Holy Ghost; this is the love referred to in the text. Previous to regeneration the soul may have various feelings toward God and Christ, — of reverence, respect, admiration of His grandure and works, a poetical taste for His natural attributes, an attachment and regard to the ordinances of religion; but every such affection can be accounted for on the basis of natural love. When we are born of the Spirit there is shed abroad in our hearts, by the Holy Ghost, a peculiar and hitherto unknown love for God and His Son Jesus. It is an exotic transplanted from a celestial clime by the hand of God; it is a personal attachment to our Heavenly Father, a heart passion toward the Lord Jesus, an ineffable yearning for the Divine, an instinctive and dominant regard for the things of God which is utterly beyond the products of nature. No fine heredity, no degree of culture, no drilling in religious ceremonials, no rigid discipline of law, no literary sentimentalism, no study of the material works of God, no poetical genius, no mere influence of Christianity, can ever produce that heavenly, seraphic affection designated in the word agape. It is a river whose head waters are in a better world; it is a spring from the heart of God; it is poured like a cataract upon the world through the atonement. It is opened up in our hearts in regeneration; and under the Pentecostal baptism of the Holy Ghost it rises to high tide, filling the banks of our being till the heart, the speech, the intellectual faculties, and all the inner senses are deluged with its holy energy, according to the prayer of the text.

The next word to be explained is "more and more." I pray that your love may overflow more and more. This expression "more and more" is greatly misunderstood as applied to religion. We hear people speak of getting more religion, more pardon, more cleansing, etc. Such a use of the term results from a lack of spiritual enlightenment. In this passage it refers to the increase of love, knowledge, discernment, and the positive side of grace in the soul, and not to the negative side of eliminating evil.

There is a negative and a positive side to the spiritual life, both in the new birth and sanctification. In conversion the negative side is pardon, removing of guilt; the positive side is regeneration, an imparting of the love and life of God to the soul. There are no degrees in pardon, — it is full, perfect, complete; but on the positive side there may be an increase in the intensity and evidence of regeneration. In like manner the negative side of holiness is the purging out from the heart the native carnal mind; the positive side is filling the purified heart with the life and grace of the Spirit. The Scriptures do not. teach any degrees of cleansing the heart from original sin; in every passage where this work of purification is referred to, it is spoken of as a complete, full, entire work, without degrees or gradualism. But the filling of the purified soul with certainty, light, love, unction, energy, and all the positive forms of grace, is characterized by the terms "growth," "increase," "built up," "abound," "enlarge," and "more and more." When a farmer clears his land, the removal of stones and stumps and all obstructions to culture is the negative work, and can be so perfectly finished that he would never find another old root or rock in the field, but the positive side of deepening the soil, fertilizing it, irrigating it, rendering it more productive, can be increased "more and more" without a special limit. So it is with the work of grace in the soul; hence the long and beautiful vista which is opened, tip in this expression of " more and more " must be understood just as the apostle designates  it, —to the positive forms of grace, the limitless enlargement of love.

The next word is "knowledge." I pray that the love of God in you may overflow in all knowledge, or, in giving you perfect knowledge of spiritual things. The word for knowledge is epignosis, which means perfect or full knowledge. It does not simply mean intellectual information gathered from external sources, but the inward conviction and certainty of the matter involved.

It is the shedding abroad of God's love in us that brings the positive knowledge of divine things. The faculty of spiritual knowledge is in the heart and not the head, and divine, love is the only thing that can revitalize this interior faculty so that it will be able to gather up spiritual knowledge from the fields of revelation with the same facility that the senses gather knowledge from the fields of creation; and in proportion to the fullness of love will be the fullness and intensity of knowledge. Some things we must know in order to love, but with God and spiritual truth we must love in order to know. Love is the alchemy that transmutes revealed truth into experience. The great doctrines of religious life pervading the Word of God are to many but fleshless skeletons, like the dry bones of Ezekiel's vision; but the love of God raises them from the mere "letter," and turns them into an exceeding great army of living, moving forms of blessed experience and certainty. The fatherhood of God, the divinity of Jesus, the efficacy of Christ's blood, God's special providential care over the minutest affairs of His children, the fellowship of holy souls, the reality of things to come, — all these and many more are rendered by this abounding love, brilliant and unquestioned certainties to the soul.

Perfect love is the only panacea for skepticism and doubt, There are three forms of knowledge, — instinctive, rational, and intuitive. Instinctive knowledge predominates mostly in the lower animals. Rational. knowledge predominates mostly in the human race. The intuitive form of knowledge is divine; it prevails among the angels and spiritually enlightened beings; hence, perfect love, bringing us into the realm of the intuitive knowledge of divine things, opens to us the highest and most certain forms of knowledge in the universe.

The next word is "judgment," or, more properly, spiritual sense or perception. The word implies the exercise of the five senses of the soul. I pray that love may abound to the filling of your spiritual senses, rendering them strong, keen, quick to perceive the facts of the spiritual world, just as the physical senses perceive the facts of the material world. The Bible is full of allusions and incidents respecting the inner five senses of the soul. The apostle prays that we might be strengthened with might by the Spirit in the "inner man." The senses of touch, taste, smell, hearing and seeing in the body, are no more real than the same corresponding senses in the soul. Sin renders these senses dead and inactive. Having the spiritual organ of vision, they see not; having ears, they hear not. In regeneration these senses are restored to life, and under the full baptism of the Spirit they are purified, clarified, and rendered keen and vigorous.

Divine love is to our spiritual nature what blood is to our physical being, — the essence of life, the source of health and strength, the very elixir of being. As the health and vigor of our bodily senses depend on the blood (except from external wounds), so the health and vigor of our spiritual senses are reached by the inundation of the love of Jesus.

When God spoke to Samuel it was to the inner organ of the soul, and not to the outward, physical ear, for in that case Eli could have heard it as well as Samuel. The fiery horses and chariots in the mountains of Samaria were not seen by the physical eyes of Elisha, for in that case his servant could have seen them as well as he; but it required a special act of divine grace opening the interior organ of vision to enable him to perceive the heavenly guardianship about the prophet. The Psalmist says, "O taste and see that the Lord is good": which cannot mean a physical but a spiritual tasting. Perfect love floods the inner senses with such vigor, vivacity and keenness that the soul moves in a kingdom utterly unknown to others. It gathers honey from what, to others, seems only a carcass; it perceives the path of duty where others see only confusion; it can detect the presence of good or evil where others do not; it can feel the warmth or the ice in the midst of a congregation of worshipers; it can hear God-s voice sounding over land and sea; it can feel the temperature of the social current in which it moves, as readily as a sailor can detect the warmth of the gulf stream or the chill of icebergs; it intuitively knows things, without being told, which others are oblivious to. No one can describe the subtle, ethereal, rapid movement of the inner senses when acting under the fullness of God's love. Not only in the hour of death, but in many seasons and ways, —

The world recedes, it disappears;

Heaven opens on the eyes; the ears

With sound seraphic ring.

Not only the sinners, but the great mass of nominal Christians, walk the earth with their souls encoffined, with their spiritual senses locked in death; or if brought to life, are so choked and diseased with carnality as to be unable to perceive the thousands of things that are transpiring in the spiritual realm. Nothing less than pure love controlling the soul can bring the spiritual faculties to their proper normal function.

The next phrase is, "That ye may approve things that are excellent"; more properly it should be, That ye may "discriminate the things which differ." When the spiritual senses are purified and strengthened, the soul is then able to discriminate the differences in the moral realm, corresponding to the physical senses discriminating the sights and sounds, the colors and magnitudes, the bitters and sweets of the physical world.

We are living in a world where everything is mixed, where good and evil, truth and error, love and hatred, questions of conscience and casuistry, in a thousand forms and shades, are so blended that we can never make our way through such a tangled forest of moral problems unless we are endowed with a spiritual instinct or intuitive perception of the difference between the one and the other. We need a mighty divine love-sense, by which we can detect the difference between things which to the outward would seem alike but in reality are opposite to each other.

To cite only sample instances. There is a difference between temptation and sin, the one being an appeal or persuasion to evil, the other being the consent of the will to evil. The pure heart, like the pure Jesus, may be tempted and even suffer under it, and yet maintain perfect loyalty and love. There. is a difference between evil thoughts and thoughts of evil. An evil thought is a guest in the heart: a thought of evil is a tramp knocking at the door of the mind. There is a difference between cheerfulness and frivolity; cheerfulness may be a fruit of grace, and even combined with innocent wit or holy satire may be harmless and useful; but frivolity and foolish jesting are evil. Yet there are many, even professing Christians, who cannot detect the difference. Frugality and stinginess seem to many about the same, yet in reality are entirely different. There is a great difference between souls bound together by the love of God and souls bound to each other by mere human societies or a partisan spirit. There is a difference between liberality and extravagance; the one is a virtue, the other a vice. There is a great distinction between being sober-minded or self-denying, and being of a sour, caustic, severe sort of religion.

The work of Christian holiness has been greatly damaged in many places by its teachers insisting upon a rigid, severe, butcher-knife type of religion, not knowing the difference between severity and Christian soberness.

There is a great difference between keeping the "law of love" and being in bondage to the old law of righteousness by works. There are some professing holiness who have fallen from the Christian liberty of perfect love into the bondage of merciless law. The fullness of divine love has been dethroned by a cast-iron severity, which sways a merciless scepter through all their life. Religion has run into some external, physical legalism. They keep the Sabbath in such a way as to make the Sabbath day a despot. Salvation is reduced to a question of eating meat, wearing neckties, drinking tea and coffee, not kissing your wife on Sunday, and the penalties of hell are suspended on such trifling things as bound the old Pharisees hand and foot.

Instead of being filled with the law of love they are filled with the love of legality, by which they insist on measuring other people, whether they be rich or poor, old people, youth or little children, the learned and unlearned, people of refinement and those of coarse manners, by their iron bedstead, and either cutting them off or pulling them out, to make them fit. I know of some who have bound themselves to secret forms of severe asceticism, which are utterly unwarranted by reason or revelation. In every instance such persons lose the fullness of love before they get in bondage to such fanaticisms.

There is an infinite difference between the law of love commanded in the Scriptures, and the mere love of law, which Christ so thoroughly condemned in the Pharisees. Oh, how we need a God-given, intuitive sense to discriminate the difference between these and a thousand other things, which outwardly seem alike but in reality are at antipodes! So many professing Christians go around asking what is the harm of this and that, — what is the harm in tobacco, Sunday newspapers, novels, or card playing, or a social dance, etc. They run to human teachers for merely human opinions. A cow in a meadow has such an instinctive sense of the difference between weed and weed that she will eat the one and reject the other. If Christians had the same kind of sense in the meadows of the moral world they would know what was food and what was poison without waiting for some mortal to decide the question. It takes the abounding love of Jesus to fill our inner senses, in order that we may make these quick and accurate discriminations.

The next word is "sincere"; more properly, "That ye may be pure as a sunbeam." The Greek word, eilikrineis, from eili, a sunbeam, and krineis, to judge; implying that a soul perfectly cleansed and filled with love will be clear as a sunbeam, in which the- Searcher of hearts finds no evil or guile. According to this word, Jesus, who is the Judge, can cleanse the human heart to His own satisfaction, so that when He gazes into its depths He will find no depravity, but a beam of light and love like the great Orb of infinite light, and a similarity of nature with His own.

"And without offense until the day of Christ." This word "offense " means a stumbling-block. Abounding love saves us from being stumbling-blocks to others. If we are merely nominal Christians or ceremonial Christians or spasmodic Christians, we will certainly be an offense or a cause of stumbling to some souls. The abounding love of Jesus will lead us steadily and earnestly in the way to heaven. And while steadily going in the way of righteousness, souls cannot stumble over us, any more than the hinder wheel of a wagon can stumble over the front wheel.

"Being filled with the fruits of righteousness which are by Jesus Christ." "Righteousness" refers to the expression of salvation in the outer life, as the term "holiness" refers to the state of the inner being and life. To be filled with the fruits of righteousness implies that every fruit of grace is to be expressed in our life, in our words, our labors, our liberality, our zeal, our study, our prayers, our tempers; and that we are to be in sympathy with every enterprise for doing good to the bodies and souls of mankind, or the doing away with cruelty toward the lower animals. It does not necessarily imply that we be specially devoted to every branch of good work or philanthropy, but that in heart we are in agreement with every good work in the world, and ready, as occasion offers, to lend a helping hand or a helping word. Many ignorantly criticise the revival of holiness as being a specialty, whereas the fullness of perfect love is in reality the absolute qualification for every other good specialty in the world. If your special Christian work is in the line of Sabbath schools or missions or temperance or education or publishing books or evangelism or the ministry or nursing the sick or the care of children, or any other good work, it is impossible for you to be thoroughly fitted for every good work unless you are made perfect in love; for Paul declares that the special purpose for which all Scripture was given, was that the man of God might be perfect and thereby thoroughly furnished unto all good works. (2 Tim. 3:16, 17.) Just as summer sunshine is essential to every variety of fruit that grows in the earth, so the summer of pure love is essential to the production of every fruit of righteousness in the highest degree.

We are filled with these fruits of righteousness by Jesus Christ; that is, by our union with Him, by being filled with His Word, cleansed by His blood, baptized with His Spirit, united by faith to Him, and ever drawing from Him the hidden sap which produces the fruit, as the branch incessantly draws from the vine the sap which produces the clusters.

"Unto the glory and praise of God." The wonderful sentence of the text would be incomplete without the doxology in these last words. All came from God; and when the harvest of grace is produced in the soil of human hearts, the gathering of the harvest is to the glory and praise of the divine Husbandman. The fullness of grace in the soul is the best advertisement of the u God of all grace." I know a man in Canada who has a plum orchard so remarkable for its fruitfulness and quality it has become an advertisement for him for thousands of miles. But no one ever thinks of praising the orchard; but they laud the consummate skill and industry which has produced it. A neighbor of mine in Florida has an orange tree which has yielded fifty boxes of oranges in one season, and it was the theme of conversation among fruit growers for miles around, and the owner of the tree got all the praise. Do you not think that God enjoys showing a full-fruited saint to the admiration of men and angels? Our full salvation gladdens the beatific circles of heaven, where samples of fine spiritual fruit are duly appreciated. When Jesus beholds our hearts in their natural state, they are like stony, sterile, frozen fields of the frigid zone; but when they have been broken by repentance, thawed by regeneration, and every stump and rock removed by sanctifying power; when they have been planted with the seed of His Word, enriched and watered with the crystal streams of His Spirit, and cultured by His hand, and ripened in the summer of His love till every inch of the soil waves with the golden fruits of righteousness, — who can tell the unutterable Spy that thrills His blessed being when He sees the travail of His soul and is satisfied.