41. The Cleansing of Character
The Cleansing of Character
Third, look at Revelation 7:14 : “And I said unto him, Sir, thou knowest. And he said to me, These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”
You will find that every step leads on to another, and here you have the glory of a cleansed character. That is the necessary result of a delivered life and a new sphere, a cleansed character. Oh, the wondrous work of the cross! It not only frees us from: the old sin and the old man; it not only brings us into a new sphere, where we have a new principle within us, and a new spring for our lives, but, as a necessary result, it deals with the character in order to set the character right.
O beloved, God’s redemption in Christ goes to the depths. There is no place for superficiality in God’s redemption. The cross means death to superficialities, the cross claims death in our lives, the working of the Spirit of God right into the very depths of our beings.
What is character but just the source of everything that relates to us; and we are what our characters are. We are just what our characters are. A character is God’s workshop where divine creations take form, and they go out bearing His mark upon them to witness to the world of His skill and of His power. In my first church in Scotland I had, as one of my members, the head of a great engineering firm. A friend of mine once said of that engineering firm, “We never question their prices. Their name is a guarantee of their work.” I thought it was a magnificent testimony to him. Is His mark on us so clear that the people of the world are compelled to say of us that we are true and accept us as genuine? The glory of a cleansed character is what the cross is to give us. No wonder, as you read this book, that you see this; that before the throne there is to be given the eternal evidence of the value of character as that in which the power of the Lord, of the Lamb, has been in operation to render that character so pure that it can stand in the presence of God. The glory of the cross today is its power to transform our lives. The glory of the cross in eternity will be seen in those translated to the throne, giving forever the proof of the cleansing grace of the blood of the Lamb. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.