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  THOUGHTS ON THE SPIRITUAL LIFE
  by Handley C.G. Moule
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Moule's reflections on the integration of work and faith in the believer's life,
exploring how faith in Christ forms the foundation for all Christian action and
service. He draws from Galatians and John to illuminate the spiritual life.

  Chapters: 12

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS
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    1. 00.2. Prefatory Note
    2. 01. Chapter 1: Work and Faith
    3. 02. Chapter 2: The Total Abstinence Of The Gospel.
    4. 03. Chapter 3: Christian Moderation
    5. 04. Chapter 4: The Will Of God
    6. 05. Chapter 5: Pleasure In Infirmities
    7. 06. Chapter 6: Conflict And Peace
    8. 07. Chapter 7: Manifoldness
    9. 08. Chapter 8: Grace for Grace
   10. 09. Chapter 9: Living Water
   11. 10. Chapter 10: Christian Service
   12. 11. Chapter 11: Concluding Thoughts

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  CHAPTER 1: 00.2. PREFATORY NOTE
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Prefatory Note The following chapters have been written as a sequel, in some
sort, to two little volumes already published, “Thoughts on Christian Sanctity,”
and “Thoughts on Union with Christ. ” The writer here takes for granted much
which has been spoken of in detail there. On the other hand, as this book may of
course fall into the hands of readers who have not seen those, no over-careful
effort has been made to avoid re-statements altogether. In most cases the
chapters are headed by words of Holy Scripture. Throughout the book the author
has sought to keep in constant view the promises, cautions, and precepts of the
written Word, as the one sure basis and final appeal in all things concerning
the source and action of the regenerate life. Every year brings its fresh
witness to the need of a watchful, loving, and most reverent loyalty to the Holy
Scriptures, for all who would not drift they know not where from “the hope set
before us. ” In writing, the author has had much in his heart and thoughts the
spiritual needs of those engaged in more or less direct work for the kingdom of
our Lord.

Earnestly does he request the prayers of his readers, whatever be their
convictions on the subjects here treated. He asks for the prayer that the Lord
Jesus Christ, the Master, may in some way be magnified in these pages, and that
His bond-servant may know better and better the blessedness of living by Him and
for Him alone. To Him, speaking in His Word, what is written is wholly
submitted.

Ridley Hall, Cambridge, St Luke’s Eve, Oct. 17, 1887.


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  CHAPTER 2: 01. CHAPTER 1: WORK AND FAITH
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Chapter I

WORK AND FAITH.

Gal 2:20 — The life which I live in the flesh I live by the faith of (i.e. , by
faith in) the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.

John 6:29. — This is the work of God, that ye believe in Him whom He hath sent.

We are about to engage in some thoughts on the principles and practice of the
Spiritual Life. That Life, as to its source and secret, is “in the Son of God,”
(1Jn 5:11) the Gift of the Father; in Him who is “the Life,” as well as “the Way
and the Truth”(John 14:6). As to its reception, it is received in receiving Him;
“he that hath the Son hath the life” (1Jn 5:12). As to its issue, exercise, and
manifestation, it is the doing of the Will of God in all things, with a
chastened, penitent, peaceful and loving confidence in Him as He is revealed and
reconciled in Jesus Christ our Lord. As to its standard, it recognizes nothing
lower than His revealed holiness; “even as He is pure” (1Jn 3:3). As to its
purpose and hope, it looks, with a faith reposed upon His promise and power, to
“walk pleasing Him” (1Th 4:1), here and now, under the shelter of the atoning
Cross, and hereafter to be indeed “like Him, seeing Him as He is” (1Jn 3:2). As
to its beginning and its maintenance, both of them are, from the divine side, by
the Holy Spirit, “the Lord, the Giver of Life,” who brings Christ and the soul
together. From the side of human experience, both of them are by faith, by
submissive reliance on the promise and the Promiser. Faith is the hand that
accepts the bread and the water of Life, the mouth that eats and that drinks
them. From first to last the Life of God, like the Righteousness of God, “is
revealed from faith to faith” (Rom 1:17).

First among our detailed thoughts upon this sacred Life I place now this — an
enquiry into the place of Spiritual Effort in a life which is as yet in its
essence everywhere and always a walk by faith, a life of faith. There is such a
place. Work (I speak here of the spiritual and internal kind of work) not only
has a function beside that of the happy quietism of a God-given reliance on the
Lord and reception out of His fulness; it has a deep relation to it and
connexion with it. This connexion is not always recognized in Christian thought
and exposition. Things are sometimes said about the life of holy faith, the life
of rest upon and in the Son of God, which leave, or seem to leave, no place for
spiritual effort and resolve. Yet the Scriptures have very much to say about
these latter things. They speak of “girding up the loins of the mind” (1Pe
1:13), of “working out salvation” (Php 2:12), of “being in earnest” (ourEnglish
Bible renders it “labouring,” Heb 4:11) “to enter into the” heavenly “rest” (2Pe
1:10), of “giving diligence to make our calling and election sure,” of “watching
and being sober” (1Th 5:6), of “keeping under the body and bringing it into
subjection” (1Co 9:27), of “labouring fervently in prayer” (Col 4:12). We may be
very sure, then, that this fact of spiritual effort is no accident of the
Spiritual Life, but a large and vital truth in it. It would be strange if it
were otherwise. All conscious personal life has much to do with exercise and
effort in the course of its healthful development. A life, conscious and
personal, which should be a life of mere and pure quiescence, would hardly be a
life worth living. Could we wish for such a condition of the Spiritual Life? In
the passages quoted at the head of this chapter we find some divine suggestions
of the true connexion between the repose of faith and resolute spiritual
exertion. i. In the words to the Galatians St. Paul puts before us, from his own
experience, that delightful truth, dear to saints of all times and very
specially called to remembrance in our own — the truth that the believer’s life
“in the flesh,” amidst concrete conditions and surroundings in a fallen world,
is to be continuously lived by faith. He is to “act, and grow, and thrive,” to
deny self, and bear the cross, and bring forth fruit, by faith; by repose and
reliance on his Lord and Head, by a perpetual turning to, and looking to, and
receiving from, the Lord Jesus Christ, in all the fulness, and glory, and
beauty, of His Person and Work. The divine method of spiritual victory and
service lies in this, that our life is by faith, by submissive trust. By
submissive trust we entered, at our spiritual new birth, at our true coming to
Christ, beneath the blessed covert of Justification; and there we abide and
remain, never to venture from beneath it for one moment to the end; never to
step out on to the forbidden and fatal ground of acceptance for our works’ sake,
for our state’s sake. And now meantime, by the same way, by submissive trust, we
who dwell beneath that covert are to gather up therethisgreat treasure of power
and peace. He who is our justifying and imputed Righteousness is also, by His
Spirit, our sanctifying and inherent Life; and it is faith, mere and simple
faith, submissive trust, that receives and feeds on Him as such. To His life and
victory, to His holy fulness, we unite ourselves by faith, and by faith only.
When temptation comes, our method is to fall back upon and to stand in our King
who has conquered for us; to join ourselves, we may say, to His victory; to act
upon the fact that we are joined to Him who has overcome, who is the Overcomer.
So trusting, so living, His victory is for me, is mine, is as it were conveyed
to His member, to me.

Here is our answer, for example, to the problem and torture of vain and evil
thoughts, that stir as if uncontrollable in the mind. What are we to do?We
entrust ourselves to the Son of God, who by His Spirit, by the Holy Comforter,
dwells in us and we in Him. By implicit trust we unite our weary selves, in a
special sense for the special need, to Him who in His impeccable and now
glorified Manhood has won the victory over every form of evil, for us His
members, His body. Again and again let us press home that truth upon our souls.
Let nothing becloud it for us. Let no discussion over its details, nay, let no
distortions, exaggerations, or parodies of it, make us doubt the thing itself,
or forget to use it. The life of peace, of patience, of simplicity, of purity,
of hope, of love — the holy lilfe — it is the gift, the ever present gift, of
God; and it is given through faith in His blessed Son. Not long ago I met with a
passage to this purpose in the life of that truly great Christian, Dr. Thomas
Chalmers; a man who certainly was no visionary, no dreamer. It occurs in his
diary, of the year 1813 (Memoir, vol. 1: p. 327): - “Was fatigued by exertion,
and instead of following after God by hard straining of the mind, I gave myself
to quietism, and feel that looking up for the Spirit through Jesus Christ is the
only effectual attitude for obtaining love to God and filial confidence in Him.
” [Note: I observe the following entry three days later, March 24, 1813: -
“Began ‘Marshallon Sanctification,’ and promise myself great enlargement and
solidity from this performance. ”Marshall’s “Gospel Mystery of Sanctification”
is not light reading, but (shall I sayfor?) it is a book of gold. ]

Blessed is the reality of which Chalmers here speaks. Good and fruitful it is to
look for life, love, and power altogether away from the processes and resources
of self, to that fulness of the Spirit which dwells in Christ for us. Writer and
reader, let us unite in making daily proof of this. ii. But where then is the
place for effort?Such a place there is, as we have seen, amply recognized in the
Word of God, and never to be discredited in our teaching or thinking. Perhaps
the word “effort” is not the best; let us rather say “work. ”In the case of the
body it is, I believe, a medical maxim that what wears and kills is not work,
but effort; fitful, acute, abnormal exertion. And the word “work” is sanctioned
by our blessed Lord Himself, in the passage quoted at the head of this chapter;
John 6:29.

What sort of work is indicated there by the divine Teacher?It is the work, the
labour, involved in getting to know, and to remember, what and why to believe.
It is the mental and spiritual work of inquiry, judgment, recollection, applied
to the subject of Jesus Christ, with a view to trust. This, I am persuaded, is
the bearing of our Lord’s words atCapernaum. But even should the reader think
otherwise about that passage, the truth which to my mind those words convey is a
truth conveyed by many another Scripture. It is delightfully impled, for
example, in the words ofSt. Paulquoted also above: “The Son of God, who loved
me, and gave Himself for me. ”For that brief clause is enough to shew us the
Apostle at work in the way of memory, and judgment, and estimate, and
contemplation; gathering up the facts of his Lord’s Person and Work, and of his
own relations to his Lord in consequence. And all this is working, working upon
the grounds of faith. Every deliberate process of recollection is internal work;
every habit of thought so developed is developed by work. The Christian believer
works when he takes earnest pains and uses proper means to gather and to keep
together within him the revealed facts about Jesus Christ and life in Him. He
works when he dwells in soul on Who He is, on what He has done, and is doing
now; on the mystery of His Natures, on the glory of His Person, on His
Atonement, His Exaltation, His Headship, His royal High Priesthood, His
Intercession; on the revealed privileges and resources ofUnionwith Him. He
works, too, when he deliberately and diligently bears in mind his own perpetual
needs, of sinfulness and weakness. All this is work, internal work, not to be
done automatically, or as in a dream; not to be done by “trusting it to be done.
”And great is the need of such work, more than ever great, if possible, in an
age like ours, at once so occupied and, alas, so superficial. The word
“recollectedness” was a favourite word with our Christian fore-fathers, in the
vocabulary of spiritual life. It conveyed well the thought of a deliberately
formed, and steadily maintained, acquaintance with our deep need in ourselves
and our spiritual riches in our Lord, and the temper of mind in which those
riches could best be applied to the needs of life. But recollectedness, if it
implies such things, cannot be found and kept without care, thought, resolve;
without time saved or made; without persevering acts and habits. In order that
we may live indeed by faith on the Son of God, we must, as to the rule and usage
of our lives, set apart time, at whatever sacrifice, to ascertain and weigh what
are those great treasures on which we are to draw. We must make prayer a real
work; we must dig with real toil into our inexhaustible Bible, reverently,
painstakingly, and with method; we must cultivate habits ofworship, public and
private — by many Christians too much neglected; we must use the divinely
appointed ordinances of the Church of God. Nor must we vainly think, as too many
allow themselves to do, that we have “risen above” articulate doctrines, and may
spare ourselves mental pains about them; a thought which leaves many a pious but
indolent mind exposed in a very helpless way to the spell offalsedoctrines, well
and sympathetically stated. “In understanding we must be men” (1Co 14:20); and
that means a development not attainable without exercise. iii. Such work, and
this is my main point in the present chapter, is right, and rightly directed,
when it protects and guides the exercise of faith. On the other hand, and this
must be reiterated with most earnest emphasis, such work is not identical with
faith; it has not the function of faith; it cannot for one moment take the place
of faith. Within the protective circle of such diligence faith is to live and
act in its divine simplicity; submissive trust in the Son of God, personal
reliance upon and reception from Him whose Person and Work we thus diligently
hold in holy “recollection. ” Not work but trust is our organ, so to speak, for
contact with Him, whether as to His righteousness for our acceptance, or as to
His Spirit for our power. Yes, faith, in its simplest definition; that faith of
which almost every miracle in the Gospels supplies a practical description.
Faith, in the view of Jesus Christ, is personal trust. It is no mere condition
which entitles us to touch Him. It is itself the touch. Not by toil of thought
and will, but by that simplest touch, do I receive the Spirit of the Lord, and
life and power of the Head. Toil of thought and will has a large work to do, as
we have seen. But faith, and only faith, is the magnetic contact, if we may call
it so, with Him. Such is His revealed order.

Let us rest, therefore. Let us labour, therefore. The life of faith in Jesus
Christ is indeed a life of liberty, but not an easy-going life. Ease, indeed,
there is in it, a sacred ease of certainty, of an acceptance we have not
precariously won, but possess in Christ; a sense of wealth at our disposal, of
power not our own, power far greater than the enemy’s, and exercised on a
vantage-ground; but nothing casual and careless. There must be spiritual work
that there may be a steady use of spiritual faith.

I would not be mistaken, as if I thought nothing of the most momentary and
unprepared glance of the hard-pressed soul on Him who is our Peace and Victory.
But I am speaking of the normal, habitual aspects of daily Christian life. If in
that life, as to its wont and habit, we would know our Master’s power, we dare
not leave faith to be exercised anyhow, so to speak. We must recollect, in order
to believe, with a deliberate and watchful recollection. We must “grow in the
knowledge of our Lord and Saviour” (2Pe 3:18).

“I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that
which I have committed to Him, against that day. ” The Apostle “believed”; he
had “committed” a great “deposit” to Him in whom his faith rested. And the
exercise of that blessed personal confidence — how much it had to do, alike in
its rise and its progress, with knowledge of the glorious Person in question,
with thought upon His fulness of grace and truth, and with inference, strong and
deep, as to the divine results of trust!

Lord, make us by Thy Spirit every day so to work as to believe with ever simpler
faith; so to recollect as to rest indeed in Thee. Amen.


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  CHAPTER 3: 02. CHAPTER 2: THE TOTAL ABSTINENCE OF THE GOSPEL.
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Chapter II THE TOTAL ABSTINENCE OF THE GOSPEL.

Eph 4:1-2; Eph 4:31. — I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that
ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, with all lowliness and
meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love … Let all
bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil-speaking, be put away
from you, with all malice. At the opening of the previous chapter we recollected
in passing, among the facts of the Spiritual Life, the spotless purity of the
rule and standard of its exercise. Some reflections on this may fitly follow at
once on what we have seen of the way of reception of its power, and the
self-discipline that must surround such reception. Our view shall be very simple
and practical. Behind it all, above it all, shall be remembered that word of the
Apostle, “even as He is pure” (1Jn 3:3). But we will look for application at
some of the plainest and homeliest regions of Christian practice. The connexion
of the third chapter of the Ephesians with the fourth is in itself a deep and
precious spiritual lesson. Up to the end of the third chapter the Apostle has
been led from height to height, from strength to strength, of the heavenly
truth. The way of the salvation of the saints, in that plan of God which
stretches from eternity to eternity, has been his theme. The Father’s choice,
the blood of the Son, the work of the regenerating and enlightening Holy Spirit;
union with Christ; the indwelling of Christ by the Spirit in the heart;
knowledge of the love which passes knowledge; a filling with the fulness of God;
contact with a power able to do more than prayer or thought attains; such have
been the topics. Now, in the fourth chapter, begins the application of these
wonderful principles and resources; and what is it to be?Out of such a rock what
mighty flood of overwhelming energy and action is to rush?We look, and lo there
is no rush, no commotion; in some respects there is little action. The stream is
deep, but still and quiet; as, indeed, it well may be, for its element is life
eternal, and eternity is calm. The most immediate, and important, and
characteristic result of the full truth and power of the Gospel, of the revealed
glories of the believer’s part and life in Christ, is, according to St. Paul,
lowliness, meekness, longsuffering, forbearance in love; a cessation of
bitterness, and wrath, and clamour, and unkind words. Sacred paradox of the
Gospel!The Gospel is a motive power strong beyond all others; but it works in
the quiet of the soul, in that living quiet caused and secured by the believer’s
discovery of the wonder of his pardon, and of his safety, and of his privilege;
of his union with his Lord, of his Lord’s work finished for him, and his Lord’s
presence abiding in him. Thus the Christian’s life is primarily a life of
blessed submission, abstinence, and cessation, as the basis of all its action in
and for the Lord. Its essential spirit is the very opposite to all ideas of
self-assertion, noise and bluster about itself, heraldry of its gifts and
graces, comparison of one’s own discoveries, attainments, powers and triumphs,
with those of others, to their disadvantage. He in whose heart Christ dwelleth,
and into whom the fulness of God floweth, must be known, amongst other marks, by
“esteeming others better than himself” (Php 2:3), unaffectedly and cordially. In
him self has been dethroned as towards God, by sovereign grace; it must be
dethroned by the same power as towards men. And this must come out in the
practical form of a meek and quiet spirit, pervading all his life.

Such is the general complexion of this delightful passage. And now one leading
and most important detail in it is the absoluteness, the totality, which marks
its gracious precepts. I venture, in view of this, to entitle this chapter “The
Total Abstinence of the Gospel”; total abstinence from allowed sinning, and
particularly now from sinning against the law of lowliness, meekness, patience,
and kindness, in word, work, and will. The words Total Abstinence have a
familiar reference to one form of philanthropic effort in face of a great and
terrible need. But I do not speak of this here. I claim the phrase for this yet
greater and nobler application, in the light of the word of God. I use it, for
myself and for my reader, in regard not of strong drink but of allowed sin.
Total Abstinence from this is the very watchword of the true Christian’s daily
rule.

It has sometimes been said that we, who firmly believe in the Christian’s need
to the very last to confess himself a sinner, to confess his sins, are guilty of
“allowing a little sin. ” God forbid that such a thing should be truly said of
our principle, and purpose, and aim in the presence of the Lord. It is one thing
to hold, in the light of Scripture, and in view of experience, that to the last
here below our reception of perfect grace is imperfect; that to the last the
light of God has enough to shew us about ourselves to humble us in the dust,
now, before Him; that there is sin, and more sin than we can tell, even in one
imperfectly reverent thought of Him; to say nothing of cruder forms of ill. It
is another thing to “allow a little sin,” even the least; to think it a trifle
to lose a moment’s patience, to live half an hour’s selfishness, to speak one
unkind sentence, or use one unfair argument, to entertain one envious or
repining thought, to wander in wish and fancy while we worship, to neglect
plain, simple duties (perhaps) in favour of spiritual luxuries. To “allow” such
things is grievous sin. To say that anything whatever that is not in the
mathematically straight line of God’s will does not matter, that it is an
unimportant detail, that we cannot help it, that “we are delivered to do it”
(Jer 7:19); this indeed is sin. Not one of these things “is the will of God in
Jesus Christ concerning us” (1Th 5:18). Not one of these things, as we look back
upon it, need have taken place. Against them, each and all, lay the rule of
spiritual Total Abstinence; and grace was ours in Christ Jesus, for each moment
as it came.

Such is the holy burden of this Ephesian passage. The highly privileged and
endowed Christian is to walk with all lowliness, and to put aside all
bitterness.

True to its divine practicality, the Gospel here presses home its Total
Abstinence just where we might be tempted most easily to forget it. It does not
speak of “some great thing. ” It says nothing about a total abstinence from
murmuring when some great desolation falls upon life, or from resentment when
some unusual and phenomenal wrong is inflicted on property or person. It speaks
of the little things of the common day, the present day. It touches on our
feelings and temper this hour about other people, and the outcome of those
feelings in the tiny things which in their millions make up life. The Apostle
makes the humiliating and instructive, yet loving, assumption that these
supremely privileged believers will yet need, amongst themselves, to “bear and
forbear” (See also Col 3:12-15); and he calls upon them, each for himself,
alwaysto do so. He draws up for them a very practical, a very plain, prosaic,
unimaginative list of sins and their opposite graces; and in these matters, not
in things heroic, he calls for Total Abstinence.

Let me deviate for a moment, in illustration, toSt. John. In his First Epistle
we read two verses side by side (1Jn 3:16-17). One bids us to stand ready to lay
down our lives for the brethren; the other warns us not to shut up our pity from
a brother or sister destitute of daily food, if we say we have the love of God
in us. The collocation of these verses is significant. A certain poetic glamour
surrounds, in imagination, a self-sacrificing dying hour; we think the occasion
itself, perhaps, would sustain us by its greatness. But is there no risk of
being caught in the very midst of such imaginations by some small trial of our
temper, some unwelcome call upon our time and trouble, and of being fairly
conquered by this trial, because unready?NowSt. Johnmeans that this is
altogether wrong. The two things are of a piece. If we would be really ready for
a self-sacrificing death we must be ready for the next humble little action of a
self-sacrificing life, in Jesus Christ, in the Holy Spirit, totally abstaining
from its opposite. To return toSt. Paul. In his divinely-guided list here of
occasions for Total Abstinence, he touches many a point, so it seems to me,
which very often proves a weak point in those who really know and love Jesus
Christ, and have sincerely surrendered their life and self to Him, and are
whole-heartedly on His side, in a deep, true sense, and energetic in His work.
Sins are named or implied in this passage which even in inmost circles of
Christian life and intercourse are all too often to be seen and mourned. Is
there no such thing as “evil speaking” in the form of religious gossip; the
willing, easy, worse than useless, talking over of the characters and the work
of others?Is there no such thing as “bitterness” in the disguise of that evil
sweetness with which a good man can sometimes rejoice in iniquity; hearing,
perhaps, with positive satisfaction of inconsistencies of life in one from whom
he has differed on questions of doctrinal truth?Be not deceived. It is one thing
to be thankful that a pure jealousy for the Gospel is illustrated and
vindicated, and to think prayerfully and gravely over the failure of brethren in
Christ; it is another thing, and a very much easier and commoner one, to be glad
because our own opinion is vindicated as such. Is there no such thing as the
very opposite of “meekness,” in the form of a jealousy for our own work and
reputation, which make it disagreeable to hear of distinct blessing from God
granted to work carried on in other lines than ours, or divided from ours,
perhaps, by merely the demarcation that it is — not our own? Is there no such
thing as trifling, minute perhaps and subtle, but most real, with entire
straightforwardness and truth; a willingness to forget that nothing can possibly
be holy that is not quite truthful and quite just; that the least shadow of a
“pious fraud” is great iniquity before God; that exaggerations of fact are sin,
grievous sin — exaggerations, for instance, of the facts of our spiritual
prosperity, or of our success in work? And close akin to this is the sin, the
contradiction to holy meekness, which lies in the least reluctance to be
“brought to book” about our failures. Few things, surely, can more truly grieve
the Spirit of Truth and Holiness than to see a man whom He has regenerated
entrenching himself behind some personal excuse, or some theory of
sanctification, against the plain duty of confessing, “I have sinned. ”Oh, may
He never find us, in such a position again; unwilling, in face perhaps of some
failure of loving kindness, of charity in tone and temper, to say, “I see it; I
am ashamed of myself. It need not have been, but it has been. And now, I will
confess my iniquity unto the Lord, laying it on His sacred Head for pardon, and
beneath His feet for victory. ” Shall I touch on other things, not expressly
named in this passage (Eph 4:1-2; Eph 4:31), but all too often known in
Christian circles?Irreverence about the Name and Presence of the holy and
blessed God is one of them; I have alluded to it already (p. 32). In President
Edwards’ account of the great revival atNorthampton, inNew England, early last
century, there is a remarkable passage to this effect, in the complete edition
of the Narrative. That revival approached, or seemed to do so, to what I know
not where else to find recorded, the conversion of a whole town; and the
manifestations of grace, as testified to by the great Christian thinker who
wrote the story, were wonderful indeed. Describing one singularly beautiful case
of fully sanctified life, he speaks of the person in question as bowed down in
deep penitence under a sense of sin involved in one mention of the name of God
without adequate reverence. Such a bowing down was better than an unchastened
exaltation. Take a lesson of holy Abstinence from it. [Note: I hardly need say
that this incident is not quoted to sadden or burthen one watchful, reverent
believer, conscious in any true degree of the claims of the divine Majesty. Let
such remember that the Holy One is “very pitiful and of tender mercy,” and let
them readIsa 57:15-16. Very different cases are in view here. ]

Another familiar inconsistency of our Christian life, I fear, is an unthrifty
use of time, that mysterious talent which, unlike other talents, does not grow,
but is spent, in the using. Let us not use it with a weary anxiety, but let
there be a grave habitual remembrance that it and we are in His hands for whom
we exist, to whom we equally belong whether we toil or whether we rest. From
useless indolence, small or great, let us totally abstain, through grace. And
let us abstain totally henceforth from the neglect of secret communion with the
Lord. Nothing can take the place of that; not occasions of Christian conference,
larger or more private; not the intercourse of a chosen circle of pious friends;
not the holy public rites and worship of theChurchofGod. Sooner or later, the
necessity of the personal, the individual, study of the sacred Word, and of the
solitary use of the Throne of grace, will assert itself, if it is slighted, in
the spiritual losses of the Christian who slights it.

We have thus touched some few points which, in the experience of active and
earnest Christians, if I do not mistake the case, call not seldom for a
recollection of the law of the Total Abstinence of Jesus Christ. Let us recur in
closing to the brief, searching, sentences of the Apostle. They penetrate in
their simplicity to the centre of our being. They interdict, with the same
totality of intention, not only the expression of ungoverned anger but the least
swelling of internal irritation; [Note: Most certainly there is such a thing in
Christian life as just and wholesome indignation. The Christian is united to Him
who not only “loveth righteousness” but “hateth wickedness” (Psa 14:7). Only, in
this as in all things let the holy Union be remembered; there will always be
need to do so. ] not only the act of the adulterer, but the faintest movement of
impure ideas. They prescribe an abstinence indeed. And how, oh how, in a
practical sense, shall we totally abstain? There is but one reply: “In Him that
strengtheneth me” (Php 4:13). In Him the feeblest believer is, and He is in him,
in the eternal covenant. Our need is to turn that unalterable fact into the
practice of the ever-varying day and hour.

Let us look off, then, to the Lord; to the infinity of His supply. “Our
sufficiency” (2Co 3:5) for an abstinence total in purpose, and in humble hope,
“is of God. ” It is not concocted within; it is derived from above, and it is
derived above all in that most wonderful way, the embosoming of Jesus Christ in
the very hearts of His people by the power of the Holy Comforter, through faith.
With this for our secret, we may even venture to say, in sober reality, and
fully alive to the realities of human life; “My Master bids me totally abstain
from this or from that besetting sin. I recognize its guilt, its power. Too
often have I thought it a thing for indulgence and allowance; but now I think
that thought no more. And my secret for obedience, in the light of His truth, is
in Himself. I lay myself, in the name of His own redemption, beneath His sacred
feet. With no boastful anticipations, I yet know that for the next step He is
able to keep me from stumbling (Jude 1:24), as well as hereafter to present me,
as He will, faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy, Amen.
”


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  CHAPTER 4: 03. CHAPTER 3: CHRISTIAN MODERATION
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Chapter III CHRISTIAN MODERATION Php 4:5. — Let your moderation be known unto
all m en. The Lord is at hand. The word moderation, in this verse, is not quite
self-explanatory. With “moderation” we now associate ideas, some of them
excellent, some inferior, which are not the idea of the original Greek word
here. Moderation means sometimes the virtue of self-government; the moderate man
is the well-controlled man, whose habits and feelings in common life are his
servants, not his masters. On the other hand, moderation often means what is
scarcely a virtue — an abstinence, constitutional or acquired, from all extremes
in opinion or practice; a “not too much,” apoint de zele, carried into
everything. The man thus moderate shuns and discountenances strong emotions,
profound convictions, unsparing efforts; tends to look on evil with only a cool
dislike, and on good with only a mitigated and philosophic love; is prepared to
deal with great articles of faith, perhaps, as always open questions; certainly
is unprepared to live and die in their defence. He dreads exceptions, and
anomalies, and what is out of the main fashion of action and opinion. He prefers
in everything what is called, rightly or not, “the golden mean. ”

Neither the virtue moderation, nor its counterfeit, is in view in this verse;
most surely not the latter. Not that the Gospel here, or elsewhere, means
therefore to inculcate a hot, untempered, inconsiderate enthusiasm. Indeed,
enthusiasm is not a New Testament word; and no wonder, when we remember that its
old connexion was with the frenzied excitements of the Greek worship of Bacchus.
Enthusiasm is not indeed a word to be discarded. But yet it is a word which too
often suggests hasty and ill-conceived resolutions, a flow of animal excitement
very likely to ebb, a heat that outruns light. And all these things are things
of nature, not of grace; of fallen not of regenerate humanity. The zeal and love
of the Gospel spring from deeper and purer wells, have a serener flow, and are
altogether nobler things than what commonly passes under the name of enthusiasm.
But the Apostle here is looking in quite another direction. The word here
rendered moderation in our Bible is connected by derivation and usage with ideas
not of control, but of yielding. It is renderedLindigkeit, yieldingness, giving
way, in Luther’s German Bible; and I fully believe the interpretation to be
right. “Forbearance,” “gentleness,” are the alternative renderings of our
Revised Version, and both suggest the thought of giving way. “Let your
yieldingness be known unto all men; the Lord is near. ”

St. Paul is dealing throughout this passage with certain holy conditions
necessary to an experience of “the peace of God keeping the heart and thoughts
in Christ Jesus” (Php 4:1-7) Standing fast in the Lord, harmony and mutual
helpfulness in the Lord, rejoicing in the Lord, and prayerful and thankful
communion with the lord, are among these conditions. And with them, in the midst
of them, appears this also; “Let your yieldingness be known unto all men; the
Lord is near. ” This connexion with the deep peace of God throws a glory over
the word and its precept. The yieldingness which is here enjoined is nothing
akin to weakness, indolence, or indifference. It is a positive grace of the
Spirit; it flows with the fullness of Jesus Christ.

What is it? We shall find the answer partly by remembering how, from another
point of view, the Gospel enjoins, and knows how to impart, the most resolute
unyieldingness. If anything can work the great miracle of making a weak
character strong, it is the Gospel. Like nothing else, it can make the victim of
sensual temptation turn his back decisively upon it. It can make the weak spirit
which has habitually “saved itself trouble” by falsehood — and the merest
avoidance of “trouble” is the motive of numberless falsehoods — immoveably loyal
to truth, at all costs to ease. It can make the regenerate say “no” to self on a
hundred points where never anything but “yes” was heard before. Nothing in the
moral world is so immoveable as the will of a living Christian, sustained by the
power of God the Holy Spirit, on some clear case of principle. I lately read of
the uncompromising decision of a Christian man, in high military command in
India, fifty years ago. He had accepted office, and £10,000 a year, being far
from rich meanwhile in private means, on the condition that he should not be
asked to give official countenance to idolatry. The condition was not observed.
He was required to sign a grant of money to an idol temple. The East India
Company would not give way, nor would their distinguished servant. He resigned
his command promptly, and came home without a murmur, and without a
compensation. [Note: See the Church Missionary Intelligencer, August, 1887. ]

Here, in a conspicuous case, was the unyieldingness of the Gospel, a mighty
grace which, thank God, is being daily exemplified in His sight in a thousand
smaller instances.

Yet this very case equally well illustrates from another side the yieldingness
of the Gospel. From the point of view of principle this admirable Christian was
fixed as a rock, as a mountain; from the point of view of self-interest he was
moveable as air. That it was a sacrifice of self’s gain and glory to resign was
as nothing in his path. His interests were his Master’s. Jesus Christ was in him
where by nature self is. He was jealous and sensitive for the Lord; indifferent,
oblivious, for himself. If I understand aright, he did not resign with a
flourish of trumpets, so to speak; he did not do it sullenly or bitterly; he did
not come home in that most unhappy and inglorious character — a man with a
personal grievance. Quietly, and in the way of Christian business, he withdrew
from a post where he could not be loyal to his King and Saviour; this was all.

Yieldingness, in our passage, is in fact SELFLESSNESS. It is meekness, not
weakness; the attitude of a man out of whom the Lord has cast the evil spirit of
self. It is the discovery and practice of the blessed secret how to put Jesus
Christ upon the throne of life, and let that divine fact within work upon the
life without. It is the grace which manifests itself in a calm, bright, willing
superiority of thought and purpose to considerations of self’s comfort, credit,
influence. It is the noble, the blessed readiness to rejoice, for instance, in
the success of others in the field of Christian work, as simply and naturally as
in our own. It is the aim not to get a reputation, but to walk and please God;
not to secure the applause of others, but to compass their good and blessing;
not to vindicate our opinion, but only and purely our Lord’s word and truth; not
to be first, but where He would put us — second, or third, or hundredth, if it
is His will; not to get our rights for our sake, but to be loyal to His claims,
and attentive for His sake, with scrupulous and kindly attention, to the rights
and wants of others. It is a grace passive in form, if I may borrow a phrase of
grammar, but active in meaning (1 Corinthians 13). It is holy Charity, at her
work of suffering long and being kind; envying not, vaunting not herself,
seeking not her own, being not easily provoked, not reckoning up the evil,
rejoicing with the truth, bearing, believing, hoping, enduring all things, in
the path of the will of God, the path of service of His Son.

It is a blessed thing to be a “moderate” in this sense. A living calm pervades
that soul. A thousand anxieties, and a thousand regrets, incident to the life of
self, are spared it. It is at leisure from itself, and therefore free for many a
delightful energy and enterprise when God calls it in that direction, as well as
ready for imprisonment and apparent inutility when that is His will. An example
in point rises before me. I will name no name, for that would severely pain the
“moderate man” I have in view. It is a life overflowingly active of which I am
thinking; a mind and will quick to originate, vigorous to execute; a heart large
in sympathies and in power of influence. But never, during the observation of
years, have I been able to detect in this Christian’s words and works the
presence of selffulness. The enterprises of others for God seem to be as
interesting to him as his own. The success of his own seems to have no interest
apart from that of serviceableness to Christ and His cause. And if failure ever
comes it leaves no bitterness, for the effort was out of relation to self. This
is not a very common characteristic of life and work in Christian circles. Alas,
how often do we see, perhaps how often we ourselves present, the opposite! Let
us put it down plainly before us that this is grievous sin, direct contradiction
to the Gospel in its first principles, a most certain antidote to the peace of
God which passeth understanding, and a stumbling-block, a scandal, disastrous
beyond all our reckoning, in its effects on observers.

Nothing does the world’s microscope discover more keenly than selffulness in a
Christian man or woman. Nothing at once baffles its experience and explanation,
and attracts its notice and respect, like the genuine selflessness, the
yieldingness, of the grace of God. Let ours, then, “be known unto all men”; not
paraded and thrown into an attitude, but kept in practice and use in real life,
where it can be put to real tests. And would we read something, in this same
verse, of its heavenlysecret? It lies before us; “the Lord is near. ” He is
near, not here in the sense of coming soon, but in that of standing by; in the
sense of His presence, and “the secret” (Psa 31:20) of it, around His servant.
The very words used here by St Paul occur in this connexion in the Septuagint
(Greek) translation of the Old Testament, a translation old even in St Paul’s
time; “Thou art near (ἐγγύς), O Lord” (Psa 119:151). The thought is of the calm
and overshadowing of His recollected and realized Presence; that divine
atmosphere in which bitter things, and things narrow with the contractions and
distortions of self, must die, and in which all that is sweet and loving lives.
“From the provoking of all men, from the strife of tongues” (Psa 31:20 — Prayer
Book), there is divine protection and concealment there. Let us watch and pray
over our recollection of that “nearness,” and we too shall learn, not by direct
effort but by derivation through the Holy Spirit from Christ the Fount of Grace,
to be “moderates,” with a “moderation known of all men. ”

St Paul himself beautifully exemplifies his own words, in the same Epistle, in
the first chapter (Php 1:15-18). The “brethren” at Rome who “preached Christ of
envy and strife, supposing to add affliction to his bonds,” certainly took a
very irritating line of action. And their action tried St Paul. But it did not
irritate him. He saw, condemned, and deplored their motives. But he was not
angry, he was not “hurt. ” On the contrary, he rejoiced. And why? Because, in
however circuitous a way, the interests of Jesus Christ were being served.
“Christ is being preached, and I therein do rejoice. ” The Lord was indeed near
to His servant, near in the depths of his soul and will; and “moderation” could
not but fill him in that presence.

Christian teacher, Christian worker, Christian partner, parent, student,
servant, whosoever you are — “see that you abound in this grace also” (2Co 8:7).
Forget it, and there will be a flaw running across your life and work for your
beloved Lord. Remember it, in remembering Him, and you shall glorify Him indeed,
and “sow the fruit of righteousness in peace” (Jas 3:18). So say I to you, so
most of all say I to myself, in the name of Jesus Christ.


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  CHAPTER 5: 04. CHAPTER 4: THE WILL OF GOD
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Chapter IV THE WILL OF GOD Eph 6:6. — Doing the will of God from the heart. This
short sentence, eight words in the English, seven only in the Greek, is a
wonderfully comprehensive account of the action of the Spiritual Life. Take it
word by word, and every detail in it is a great principle, meant to underlie a
most happy experience and practice. “Doing” is its first word; doing, as against
dreaming; doing, in the sense of a genuine obedience, and not merely an
approval, a recognition, of what claims to be obeyed. “Doingthe will of God” is
its next word; reminding the Christian that he is indeed not his own, that he
exists for Another, for his Maker and Redeemer, and that his own being will
never work aright, will never fulfil its true “law,” will never rest, out of the
line of the will of Him who has made him, has re-made him, owns him altogether,
and purposes to use him. “Doing the will of Godfrom the heart,” or more
precisely “from the soul,”is its last word; a word which conveys at once precept
and promise; bids the man seek such a “doing” as shall be not friction and
fatigue but a matter of strong, warm interest and willingness, “not a sigh, but
a song”; and by thus bidding him seek, assures him that he shall find; tells him
that such a doing is divinely possible in the life of grace, no day-dream but a
living and practical reality for “the children of the day” (1Th 5:5).

Before I go further, here let me pause, as in the presence of the King, and
recollect all this for myself, and reverently press it on my reader’s
recollection. Not one word have I written in the previous lines that is not of
the alphabet of the Gospel, or at least of its one-syllable lessons for the
little children of God. But monosyllables, even in an infant’s lesson, can and
often do convey unfathomable and pressingly important truths; and so it is with
these. The simple statements just presented, if they express to me and to my
reader not only a holy theory but in some genuine measure a holy experience, are
the description of a life most blessed, most peaceful, most successful and
fruitful, in the Lord’s own sense of fruit and of success. Let that sentence of
the Apostle, or any part of it, be to us merely theory, and we shall know little
indeed of the peace and joy of God. So be it not with us, not for an hour more,
if it is so now.

Approaching the words in their connexion, we find a most remarkable and
suggestive connexion indeed. Whom is he addressing specially here?It is the
Christian slave; the man who has found Christ, or rather has been found of Him,
while being the absolute property of a human owner, under the then laws of
society and the state. This man had had no voice, not the faintest, in the
choice of his service, of his duties, of his burthens, of his residence, of his
surroundings of any sort. His purchaser might be the best of men, or the worst;
he might be Philemon, he might be Felix, or Nero. He might be a believer, or a
persecutor. He might be just and generous by natural character, or capricious
and unfair to the last degree. The tasks he imposed upon his slave might be well
adapted to the strength and character of the worker, or extremely uncongenial,
trying, and exhausting. Most assuredly the Master in heaven would take account
of the unfairness or cruelty, and deal with the offender in due time. But
meanwhile the slave of man who was also the believing bond-servant of the Lord
Jesus, was to leave that wholly to his own and his human master’s Master, and to
accept the conditions of his servitude, however uneasy, as the conditions under
which he was to do the will of God from the soul. Doubtless occasions for
disobedience might arise; for the earthly master might possibly order him to
sin. But this was a matter by itself; this would be a question not of the
pleasantness or bitterness of his surroundings, the weight or lightness of his
yoke, but of right and wrong, of the will and preferences not of self but of
Jesus Christ. As regarding everything else that fell in his way in slavery, as
regarded caprice and violence, tasks beyond his strength, uncongenial to his
nature, tasks never raised perhaps above the lowest or apparently most useless
level, he was to recognize in it the will of God, and do it from the soul. The
abstract question whether slavery was right or no was never presented by the
Gospel to the slave, though the precepts addressed to the master must often have
suggested the question tohim. No, the Gospel never taught revolution, though its
inmost principles were pregnant with peaceful and just reform. It at once
contented and ennobled the slave-convert by glorifying the actual conditions of
his life with the surprising truth that, as the world stood then, they were for
him the will of God, and that in accepting and fulfilling them he was serving in
blessed truth the eternal Master.

It is plain from the New Testament that in countless cases this was grasped,
welcomed, and lived out by human souls, through grace. Though the Apostles said
not one word about emancipation, they made great multitudes of converts among
the slaves. We infer with wonder and joy, from the Epistles, that the life of
God, the life lived by faith in the Son of God, the life of peace, and purity,
and heavenly love, was lived in the slave-circle of many a household, large and
small, in that corrupted classic world. Not merely in the gaps and
breathing-times of their servile duties, but in the duties and through them,
multitudes of saints supernaturally saw the will of Him who had shone upon their
darkness, and transfigured them into His own children.

Dwelling where an apparent iron Destiny had fixed them, they yet found in it
liberty and choice, for it was to them no longer fate but the will of God.
Moving up and down in their compulsory surroundings, they found themselves
abiding in Jesus Christ. Taking the orders of their Greek or Latin owner, or
those of his underlings, they heard through them the voice of the will of God.
Were they instructions for honourable occupation, and kindly given? This was
well, and welcome. Were the orders vexatious in matter, or manner, or both? Here
indeed was call for the miracle of grace and power; but a call never in vain, if
the heart was indeed given up to God and abiding in His Son. “His grace was
sufficient for them” (2Co 12:9). He shone as the First Cause through the cloud
of the second. The mistakes of man were but the vehicle for the unerring touch
of the love of God. Through man’s unkindness, or positive malevolence, He who
“loveth righteousness and hateth wickedness” (Psa 45:7) was however carrying out
nothing but His will through and on His saint. The soul which, by the Spirit,
recollected and rested upon that truth might tabernacle in the body of the most
oppressed of bondmen, but it was possessed of a peace and liberty undreamed of
by the serene Stoic. For its refuge was not in itself but in Jesus Christ; in
His power, not in his own; in His will, not in its own.

Such blessed lives — were they not blessed indeed then, as they are eternally
blessed now in the life of glory? — St. Paul contemplates, takes for granted,
and writes for, in this passage. He knows that the experience is not visionary,
for he knows these slaves as Christians indeed. That is to say, he knows them as
redeemed, regenerated, sanctified. He knows them as Christ’s purchased ones,
ransomed with the blood of the Lamb, and united by the Holy Spirit to the
plenitude of their Redeemer’s life and power. They were human, mortal, sinful.
Of themselves they could do nothing. But they were in union with Christ by
grace, and by grace they could receive out of Him “all sufficiency” for all
actual demands, for all the will of God expressed in circumstances. Each one of
them was “joined into the Lord, one Spirit” (1Co 6:17; Php 4:13). Therefore, “in
Him that strengtheneth, they could do all things — all things of the will of God
in Christ Jesus concerning them” (Eph 2:10). His commandments were for them no
longer “grievous” (1Jn 5:3), not because of their strength of resolution and
long-practised fortitude, but because their will was most meekly yielded up to
their beloved Possessor and Life. Were they not blessed? Was not their life one
of far more than imperial liberty, wealth and peace?

I have written on, and on, about this case of the slave of old. But it has been
because for myself I feel that every realized detail of that case bears with
wonderful directness, a fortiori, upon that of each Christian in real life now.
It is difficult to imagine the lot and path in which we may not feel that
argument to us from them, those dear elder brethren at Ephesus, is strong and
tender indeed.

Believer in the same Lord who enabled them to do His will from the heart, can He
not enable you, here and now, to do that will from your heart in your
surroundings? Are you sorely tried by those surroundings? Are they in themselves
humiliating to you, or exasperating to you? Are they full of acute heart-pangs,
or heavy with chronic heart-ache? Is your sphere of work and influence seemingly
very narrow? Is the exterior of your daily duties very secular, very earthy? Not
one of these things is forgotten before your Lord. Your slightest pain finds
response in His sympathy. But let that thought be but the stepping stone to
this, that for you as for the slave-saint of Ephesus there lies open in that
same Lord the blessed secret of a life which shall move amidst these same
unwelcome surroundings as a life free, and at leisure, and at peace, full of
love and rest, blessed and blessing; a life hid with Christ in God; a life in
whicheverything, from your rising up to your lying down, private trial and
anxiety, wrong or peril in Church or State, the smallest cross and the largest,
is seen in the light of the holy, the beloved, will of God, and so is met not
with a sigh, or a murmur, but “from the soul. ” “The will of God, done from the
soul,” shall be to you — yes, indeed, it shall be — a whisper of life unto life.
You have “yielded yourself to Him, as one that is alive from the dead” (Rom
6:13); what are these things, while they last, but opportunities, dear
opportunities for His sake and in His peace, of expressing that Holyfait
accompli? Not for one moment are you asked to live thus upon the resources of
nature. “Without Him you can do — nothing”(John 15:5). But it is “God who is”
(Php 2:13) not only who may be, “working in you, both to will, and to do, for
the sake of His good pleasure,” for the sake of His blessed will. Recollect that
fact, and find in it a transfigured life.

“The will of God”!Let us, to animate and endear every thought of it, remind
ourselves often of its blissful purposes. True, it is sovereign; let us bow low
before its sovereignty, its irresponsible and unknown ways. But in all its
infinite range it is the will of Him whom we know in Jesus Christ, and who has
told us such gracious things about it through Jesus Christ. If it wills for us
immediately toil and trial, contradictions, disappointments, tears — as it
sometimes does, as it once did for our Lord and Life — what does it always will
ultimately, and with infinite skill and power to attain its end?It wills, He
wills, “that not one of His little ones should perish” (Mat 18:14). He wills
“that every one that seeth the Son and believeth on Him should have everlasting
life, and be raised up again by Christ Jesus at the last day” (John 6:40). He
wills “our sanctification”(1Th 4:3). He wills, as His Son wills, that they whom
He has “given” to His Son should “be with Him where He is, to behold His glory”
(John 17:24). In belonging to such a God, for every part and detail of our
lives, is there not both peace and glory?In accepting, loving, bearing, doing,
the will of such a God is there not a blissful light upon every step of our road
home?That road, even step by step, was trodden before us by the Son of Man, who
took on Him the form of a bondservant, of a slave — the Apostle boldly uses the
word — the slave of the will of His Father (Php 2:7). As He came down to tread
it, He said, “I delight to do Thy will, O my God” (Psa 40:8). As He trode it, He
said, “My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me, and to finish the work;
Not my will but Thine be done” (John 4:34; Luk 22:42). And it is He who by His
Spirit dwells in us, and we in Him.

Lord Jesus Christ, who thus workest in me, work on and evermore, work now, both
to will and to do; to will now not my choice but Thine; to do now Thy will from
the soul. Amen.


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  CHAPTER 6: 05. CHAPTER 5: PLEASURE IN INFIRMITIES
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Chapter V.

PLEASURE IN INFIRMITIES The subject of our last chapter connects itself with
this, as the whole with the part. We have looked upon “circumstances” in their
entirety as representing, as conveying, to the Christian the will of God. Here
we have before us a special class of circumstances, or of conditions under which
we meet them. In 2Co 12:7-9, we read a passage full of manifold instruction
about the ways of Christ with His people in their life of grace and faith. St.
Paulhas been spiritually privileged to a degree inconceivable without the same
experience. He has been present, it matters not how, in the Third Heaven, in
Paradise, and has heard words there not to be reported by a mere human being;
words, very possibly, expressive of eternal kindness and approval towards
himself and his work. He returns from this more than Tabor to the plain of
common life. And he is put at once under severe discipline; “the thorn in the
flesh,” “the buffeting angel of Satan,” is “given to him. ” Yes, this was the
next “gift on behalf of Christ” (Php 1:29). And, as if to make thorn and
buffeting more unbearable, we might think, it was intimated somehow to him that
this was all done, all assigned by his Master, for a reason most humiliating. It
was “lest he should be exalted above measure”; it was to check personal vanity
in advance, to prevent something coming up in his experience which otherwise
would have come up — self-satisfaction. Such wasSt. Paul, it thus appeared, that
strong measures on Jesus Christ’s part were needed, in an acméof spiritual
experience, if he was not thus to sin.

Such a fact, painfully real for the Apostle then, speaks an abiding word of holy
humiliation to all true believers, since and now. It is manifestly written “for
our learning,” and says to us that “this infection of nature doth remain, yea in
them that are regenerated. ” [Note: Art. IX. of the Church of England. ] True,
it has been argued — I have heard it so argued — that even St. Paul’s experience
is not to be our standard; and we should aim, in Christ, to rise above even it!
And there is thus much truth in this, that most surely the only true standard of
inner principle and outer practice is the Lord. But then, when the Holy Spirit
instructs an Apostle to record his own experience as part of a passage of
instruction, as here, it is obvious that the experience is meant to embody and
illustrate permanent truth. The Lord is, as ever, the unaltered standard. He,
who needed no discipline to keep HIM meek and lowly, is the standard; and we are
in Him. Nevertheless, we gather hence that it is a permanent fact of the life of
grace and faith on earth that, notwithstanding our being in Him, we need His
discipline to keep us low. It is meant to keep us low; it can do so; accepted,
it will do so. But let His hand be taken off, and self will reappear indeed. It
“lusteth,” it tendeth, “against the Spirit” still (Gal 5:17).

Let us not be discouraged. Our souls are touched from above — and from within,
for it is by the Indweller — with that desire, longing, and choice for
conformity to Him which nothing but Himself can satisfy. But let us not be
discouraged by the Holy Spirit’s intimation here that “this infection of nature
doth remain. ” In the very recognition of this humiliating fact on the witness
of the Holy Word, in a meek submission to this condition, mystery that it is,
there can come to the soul a direct gift of sanctifying peace and power.

Even thus, as this passage clearly indicates,St. Paulfound it to be. He thrice
asked the Lord, the Master, to remove the thorn, to forbid the buffets. And He
who knewSt. Paulbetter than he knew himself, though he had been in heaven, said
no. It was to remain. I think we gather that it was lastingly, at least
indefinitely, to remain. Whatever was the pang, the burthen, the restraint, the
hindrance (and doubtless he said much to the Lord about this, for see Php 4:6),
he was to go on with it, and to know all the time why he was to do so; lest he
should be exalted above measure. But now comes in the glorious other side of the
matter. The prayer was never granted. But how fruitful was that prayer!It was
denied, yet answered. The Master’s “no” was not mere peremptory negative,
decisive and perfectly authoritative as it was. It took the form of a positive
assurance inestimably better; the form not only of a promise, let us observe,
but of a present certainty of divine life and love. “My grace is sufficient for
thee; for my strength is made perfect in weakness. ”The weakness, of whatever
special kind, so profoundly, so intensely felt by St Paul, so destructive in
itself of his comfort, so obstructive in his work, was to be no unfavourable
condition from his Master’s point of view. It was rather the true condition
under which the Master’s indwelling strength was to work out its proper issues,
so that “the patient” gave himself up to the process. And so, what was
“sufficient” forSt Paul’s peace, and strength, and growth, was — not the removal
of the humiliating thornandthe grace of Christ, but simply, merely, the grace of
Christ, that is to say Christ, by His Spirit, divinely present and divinely
working inSt Paul. Yes, this was enough for the whole demands of the case. It
was sufficient up to the level of the need. It was adequate to take the whole
circumstances, and fill them all with peace, with power, with love, with God.

“My grace is sufficient for thee” (2Co 12:9). I have heard of a life in which
that sentence was a great spiritual turning point. In the midst of an agonizing
prayer, “Let Thy grace be sufficient for me,” the eye of the overwhelmed
Christian were casually raised towards a text upon the wall, where this sentence
appeared. The word “is” stood out conspicuous in colour. And with the sight of
it came, through the Spirit, the simple but divine intuition that what was
implored was possessed already. Reader, have you read that “is”? Does your
experience this hour include faith that rests as well as seeks? If so, is it not
a sacred, a blessed reality? If not so, why not? Here is the warrant, phrased in
the present tense, and the words are yourMaster’s, your Possessor’s, words.
Believe them now — that is to say, practically, act upon them now.

St Paul did so. It is a delightful “therefore” with which he pursues his story.
“Most gladly therefore,” therefore, because the Lord has said this, just for
that reason, “will I glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest
upon me, may (literally) tabernacle upon me,” as the Shechinah-cloud upon the
camp of Israel. And further, “Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in
reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, for Christ’s sake; for when I am
weak, then am I strong. ”

How far does he stand beyond mere resignation, in its ordinary sense!He does not
merely endure; he does not merely go on with a sigh, which would signify a
longing for other circumstances. Ah, he knows what sighs, what groans are (Rom
8:23). But for him, surely, they have become things not of the inmost depth; not
of the spiritual centre (2Co 5:4). The central consciousness now, in Christ, who
is in him, is a profound and holy pleasure in the Lord’s choice of
circumstances, because they are chosen to serve the Lord’s purposes, and to
develope His power. “I take pleasure in infirmities. ”

Christian reader, is it so with you?Let me not assume that it is not. Thanks be
to God, in all ages of His Church it has been so with many souls, who have
learnt by grace the divine secret, the open secret, of the peace of simplicity,
simplicity of relations with God in Christ as at once Father and Possessor. And
in our own day a growing number of His people are entering with more and more
distinctness into what is meant by this holy simplicity; not craving some new
truth, but applying new trust to the old. So I will assume that I speak to one
who knows something of this chastened and Christian “pleasure. ”Is it not a
holy, a healthy thing, a thing of the daylight?Is it not wonderful in its
elasticity, its solidity, its repose, its freedom?You have read of saints who,
well qualified for active life and extended influence, have been shut up for
long and rigorous imprisonments in days of persecution, such days as may return
to us, and are abundantly possible now in many a distant land. To them, as you
have read, strange and sweet joys have sprung out of their terrible restriction.
Seeing in man’s wrong and cruelty the mere implement in their Lord and Father’s
hand, they have mysteriously but really rejoiced in the cell, in the dungeon.
“The stones of my prison walls,” says one saint, Madame de la Mothe Guyon,
[Note: *Madame Guyon undoubtedly was not exempt from errors, Romanist and other.
But her sorrows and sufferings were due, above all things, to her testimony to
the need and possibility of living a life hid with Christ in God. ] “have often
seemed as rubies in my eyes. ”And this was no illusion on an excited brain, but
the calm inference of a life hidden with Christ, and profoundly content to be a
subject of His will and grace.

Well, the joy and peace of the martyr and confessor is a thing translatable, as
you know, into the experience of very common days. What are your prison walls?
Broken health, failing limbs, while you would chose to be all movement for God?
Aching head, weary nerves, while it is your duty to be surrounded with toil and
bustle? A sphere of service curiously unlike what you would have chosen, in view
of your knowledge of your own capacities or weakness, yet in which you are
to-day, and out of which your Lord does not — at least to-day — lead you? Home
service, where you would prefer to be a missionary pioneer? A parish, when you
would like to evangelize a province? A sick-room to fill with patient service,
when you would like to organize a hospital? Study, when you would like out-door
preaching? Out-door preaching, when you would chose study? A life of entirely
secular conditions, when you would chose the holy ministry? Limited abilities,
difficulty of speech, when you would like to be able, eloquent, for Christ?
Poverty, when your heart aches for riches that you may spend for Him? Riches,
when you would fain have done, for His sake, with their solemn responsibilities,
and be free in the restful simplicity of humbler life? Surroundings marred by
the mistakes and perhaps injustice of others, while you long for co-operation
and intelligent, healthy sympathy?

You know, in all these things, what it is to “take pleasure. ” They are
delightful, not in themselves, but from this point of view. The restraint, the
negative, has become blessed to you, for it is yourLord’s chosen opportunity for
saying to you, “My grace is sufficient for thee. ” Your former fret and “worry”
under circumstances are gone; for circumstances are literally as full as they
can hold of occasions for the acceptance and working of His power. You would
rather be weak, and the subject of His power, than be strong. You would rather
be at uncongenial work, and have it filled with Him, than be at your most daring
occupation, of your own mere will. In the mistakes, in the wrongdoings of man
you yet see and welcome the unmistaking love and wisdom of your Lord. Your deep,
calm, silent desire is that He should be glorified in you. And as this is
manifestly, very often, best done “in your infirmities,” you can, you do, in
Him, take pleasure in them. For infirmities of every scale, for little as for
great, for great as for little, by a blessed inclusion, His grace is sufficient.

It is no exhausting process; so severe an effort to-day that it can scarcely be
expected to be sustained to-morrow. It is not the emission so much as the
reception of spiritual power. It is a profound contact with your Head, your
life; “Jesus, your strength, your hope. ”

It does not make you a visionary, or a fanatic. If trying circumstances change
in some respects, you reasonably welcome the change, and remember that pain is
never for its own sake good. But you have reaped, and reap, such disclosures of
the Lord’s power out of “infirmities,” out of “distresses,” great or little,
that you cannot help a certain love for them, for the sake of what goes with
them. And so, if it is “given to you on behalf of Christ” (Php 1:29) to suffer
special trial, of body, mind, means, work, surroundings of whatever sort, you
meet it with a quiet welcome, and expect His overshadowing.

“’Tis your happiness below Not to live without the Cross; But your Saviour’s
power to know, Sanctifying every loss. ”


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  CHAPTER 7: 06. CHAPTER 6: CONFLICT AND PEACE
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Chapter VI CONFLICT AND PEACE Eph 6:10-18; Php 4:7. The title of this chapter
presents a contrast, but it is a contrast full of harmony. The Peace and the
Conflict of the believing Christian are things intended, in their true idea, not
to take each other by turns, but to be intertwined, to bear habitually upon one
another, to make the secret of one tenor of life, and that a life of chastened
happiness. Let us look into the matter, in a brief study of the conflict and of
the peace in question.

I. THE CHRISTIAN’S CONFLICT

Consider this first, and in the light of the passage quoted at the head of the
chapter; with the recollection that it is a subject not only of importance, but
of vital importance to every disciple. It is indeed “our life” (Deu 32:47).

1. The Ephesians passage asks to be read with full remembrance, first of
itsconnexion. Have you ever remarked that connexion?To many readers, I believe,
this picture of armour and soldier calls up the thought of dark and terrible
eternal strife. It suggests, perhaps, the resolute confessor of Christ bracing
himself to meet Satan in his open wrath; on some day of persecution, with its
tribunal, its prison, its scaffold, or its fire; or at least at some time of
peculiarly vehement and angry temptation of other sorts; amidst which the saint
is solitary and terrified, and almost forcibly overborne. But as a fact the
passage comes in, naturally and in sequence, to close and crown a long series of
directions how to live at home, how to please the redeeming Lord in the sphere
of home duties. Husband, wife, child, parent, master, servant — these are the
words which have led up to the thought of the armour, the conflict, and the dark
foes who press round the believer in the field. Is this unnatural?It is indeed
surprising for the moment, but not unnatural. I appeal to the heart of my
reader, taking it for granted that for most of my readers the lot is cast,
wholly or partly, in the life of an English home, or in some life closely akin
to it; and I ask, is not home too often the scene of our greatest spiritual
failures, our most manifest inconsistencies, our least resistance to the enemy,
and accordingly his greatest successes over us?It is a deep fact, a far-reaching
fact, that just where the path looks most commonplace and easy the enemy of our
spiritual life is likely to set his most subtle ambush. Where we are habitually
least upon our guard he is habitually most upon the watch. And then, on the
other hand, this scene of so much possible failure is therefore capable, through
grace, of being the scene of delightfully frequent and fruitful victory, victory
of that gentle, humble and unobtrusive kind which is the truest and the
strongest after all.

2. Thus much about the connexion. Think next of the enemies presented to our
thought by St. Paul. What are they, who are they? In our Baptism we were
dedicated and sealed to a manful warfare against an unholy triple Alliance —
“the world, the flesh, and the devil;” and we shall have to deal with all the
three even to the end. But the present passage isolates, as it were, the third
member of the alliance, and deals with it alone. It presents us with the fact of
personal spirits of evil, under their great head and chief, actively at work and
at war against us. In one respect, such a view includes within it the
remembrance of the world and the flesh. For the personal evil powers, assuredly,
to a degree greater than we ever realize, organize and energize the attack, from
whatever quarter it comes. Diabolus, in the pages of that wonderful book,
Bunyan’s Holy War, knew how to attack from without, both by assault, and by
parley with weak or treacherous inmates of the Town of Mansoul. But not to
pursue this thought, we have as a fact a host of unseen personal spirits put
here before us as our foes. They are indeed real persons, not figures of speech,
say the contrary who will. True, they are an awful mystery, but a mystery not
greater in kind than is the existence of evil men who live, as many do, to tempt
others to evil. In anywise, to the Lord and to His Apostles they were “a living,
dark reality. ” In the Word of God the Christian’s conflict is seen to be one
not merely “with flesh and blood,” that is to say with frail mortal m en,
withstanding and tempting, but against this dark throng of unseen assailants,
working personally, and working earnestly, in quiet as well as in alarming
hours, for his spiritual loss and woe.

3. Observe next the precise and definite aim of these adversaries. It is to
dislodge you, Christian, from a point on which you stand, on which you are set
and stationed by your Lord. You see yourself here as a soldier, but not as a
soldier on the march through a hostile country, nor as running the errands of
your Captain, but as posted upon a vantage-ground in the field. The strategy of
the enemy aims above all things at getting you to leave it. We all know how the
day of Hastings was lost, and the history of England changed for ever, by a
failure — not to manoeuvre, to march, to charge, but to stand, having done all
to stand, within a vantage-ground. Every day brings for the soul its field of
Hastings. Forewarned, let us secure victory. Let us stand, withstand, having
done all let us stand.

4. Remember next what thepoint of vantageis, from which we are to pray and watch
that He who keeps us “will not suffer our feet to be moved” (Psa 121:3). The
tenth verse of our chapter informs us; all-important information!It is nothing
less than “the Lord. ”“Stand fast in (not only near, but in) the Lord, and in
the power of His might. ”Weigh the words well. Let them not pass as a mere
sacred phrase, a mere formula of the religious dialect. They are concerned with
the central facts of our spiritual life and power. “In the Lord” lies your
secret, our secret, of love, and peace, and joy; of victory and progress; of
heavenly temper in earthly duty; of all we need for life and work in His name.
Unionwith our glorious Redeemer and Head, wrought in us by that Holy Spirit
through whom we were born again; communion with Christ Jesus, wrought in us by
that same Spirit as He leads us on; all this lies hidden “in the Lord. ” The
phrase, in the present connexion, speaks specially of the life of communion with
Him, union realized and put into use; communion not only at His sacred and happy
Table, but in all ways and at all times of definite spiritual contact with Jesus
Christ. This contact, this “keeping in touch” (John 15:4), this abiding in Him
is practically, our strength and vantage-ground; and to draw us from it, into
the plain, into the vale of Siddim full of slime pits, is the strength and
advantage of the enemy. Let him drive us or entice us thence, let him meet us
out of contact with our Lord, and he will have the victory, whether it be on a
day of persecuting terror or on a day of amplest home comfort and charming
surroundings. Let us stand then, and be strong, in the Lord. Let us keep our
communion with Jesus Christ clear and full. Let us, not now and then, but in a
blessed growth of habit, carry all our needs to Him and draw all our power from
Him. Let us remember the power of the little word “now,” and do thisnow. Nothing
is too great for our Maker’s strength; nothing is too small for His attention.

Keep the vantage-ground, and “put on” — what lies always ready upon it — “the
whole armour of God. ” Every piece of that panoply means, in effect, Jesus
Christ believed in and brought to bear upon the foe. Observe this not least in
the case of the soldier’s shoes; “the preparation,” that is, the equipment, “of
the Gospel of peace;” the arming of the Christian’s feet with that strong
appropriation of “peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,” which gives
foothold indeed as we stand upon the Rock. But against every variety of need
array yourself with Jesus Christ. He is both fort and armour. And He has
overcome, and we in Him. The enemy who surges around us is real, is fierce; but
he is only fighting on after defeat; a beaten, a broken, army. Let us stand
where we are already set, and use what we wear, and be calmly confident of
success, with glory for its end.

II. The Christian’s Peace As we turn to this delightful branch of the subject,
let us read again the language of Php 4:7 : “The peace of God, which passeth all
understanding, shall keep (lit. , shall garrison) your hearts and minds, in
Christ Jesus. ”The harmony in contrast, of which I spoke in the first words of
the chapter, is suggested, is explained, by that quotation. We have just been
contemplating a battle-field, and its critical point, held by the Christian,
assailed by his spiritual foes. We look at it, so to speak, from the outside,
and it is a fort, an entrenchment, surrounded by a tide of battle. Here we are
given a view of the interior, and we see its defender, its maintainer, amidst
that angry tide, nevertheless in peace, kept in peace, garrisoned and
sentinelled with peace. Occupying a position in its nature impregnable, and
using weapons in their nature impenetrable and infallible, he stands, he
resists, he engages the foe with the sword, yet in the strong tranquillity of
the possession of advantage and the certainty of victory. Like Elisha inDothan,
he sees the Syrians, and knows that they are no vision of a dream, but
formidable invaders, bent upon his mischief (2Ki 6:17). But he sees also, with
the eye of faith, a living circle of fortification and garrison between him and
them; chariots and horses of fire; the peace of God, the God of peace. To lay
aside the military imagery, suggested probably in both places to St. Paul by the
Roman soldiery with whom he was so long familiar — he was actually chained to a
Pretorian when he wrote these words — the Philippian passage reminds us that the
believer’s triumph in daily life over temptation, over the power of the enemy,
is intended, in the plan of God, to be an experience full of peace. Fluctuations
in success there may be. Nay, in the mysterious fact of our imperfection here,
our imperfection of reception, there not only may but must be a falling “short
of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23), occasions very many for profound and tender
confession of sin. But this is no part of the plan of God. From the point of
view of His provision, there is planned for us and offered to us nothing less
than a continuous deliverance, a calm unbroken standing on the hill of victory,
a long experience of peace passing understanding, keeping the heart and mind in
Christ Jesus. “Change” inthesethings is not “ourportionhere,” in the sense of an
allotment from above. What the external Shepherd prepares, apportions, and
allots, is “a table, in the presence of our enemies” (Psa 23:5).

One of the most tranquil and happy deaths of which I have ever heard was that of
a young English officer in one of the battles of the Soudan. He was struck by an
Arab shot, and expired in the midst of the square, walled in by his men, while
the savage assailants beat upon their ranks in vain; yielding up his soul there
in the deliberate calm of faith to the Lord of Life. Some parable we may see in
this of what may be the quiet intercourse with Jesus Christ enjoyed by the
inmost heart of the Christian while temptation flies thickest around him, so
that he meets it in and with the Lord. This chapter of the Epistle to the
Philippians is full of suggestions in that direction. “In the Lord” is its
key-note also, as well as that of the message to the Ephesians. “Stand fast in
the Lord”; “be of the same mind in the Lord”; “rejoice in the Lord”; “the peace
of God shall keep you in Christ Jesus. ”

Observe, as we pass on, the phraseology of the verse. It is that of promise.
Sweet is the sound of “the peace of God” when uttered at the close of Sabbath
worship; when spoken after the heavenly Communion Feast. But there it is a
benediction, a holy invocation; here it is more, it is a promise; not “may it,”
but “it shall. ” Such a thing then as this peace of God there is, and is meant
to be, in the experience not of some but of all watchful believers, of all who
“stand in the Lord,” their strength. It is guaranteed to them. They are invited
humbly to claim it, and to possess it, under the Covenant of peace.

Yes, remember this, busy and burthened disciple; man or woman tried by uncertain
health; immersed in secular duties; forced to a life of almost ceaseless
publicity, social, ministerial, or however it may be. Here is written an
assurance, a guarantee, that not at holy times and welcome intervals only, not
only in the dust of death, but in the dust of life, there is prepared for you
the peace of God, able to keep your hearts and thoughts in Christ Jesus.

It is no dead calm, no apathy. It is the peace of God; and God is life, and
light, and love. It is found in Him, it is cultivated by intercourse with Him.
It is “the secret of His presence” (Psa 31:20). Amidst the circumstances of your
life, which are the expression, as we have recollected above, of His will, He
can maintain it, He can keep you in it. Nay, it is not passive; it “shall keep”
you, alive, and loving, and practical, and ready at His call.

It can, it shall, keep “the heart” — that word of such wide and inclusive
significance in Scripture; the inner world of will, and affection, and
understanding. It can keep “the thoughts,” sweetly controlling, tempering,
attuning, the actual outcome of the heart in articulate purposes and opinions.
Yes, it can work miracles in these things. In closing, I recur to our Ephesian
chapter, and to that one detail in it touched on already, “the preparation, the
equipment, of the Gospel of peace. ”I have pointed out that this puts before us
the believing combatant in his strong, firm, calm appropriation of peace with
God (Rom 5:1), and, let me now add, of what goes with and springs from peacewith
God — the peaceofGod, keeping the heart. Thus in the very centre of the imagery
of conflict is imbedded the imagery of peace; not only clinging to the eternal
Rock, but rather an untroubled foothold upon it.

Here is peace indeed. “In the world ye shall have tribulation” (John 16:33),
but, coincidently, “in Me ye shall have peace. ”A Buddhist inChina, converted to
the Faith not many years ago, confessed his new-found Lord by saying to his
friends, whenever he could, “Jesus Christ is peace to-day. ”Even so for us now,
in our circumstances of to-day, Jesus Christ is peace. In the conditions of our
actual path, in the things which lie like snares hidden in the grass of a quiet
daytime, amidst our petty but perilous temptations to selfishness, to temper, to
evil speaking, to vanity, to frivolity, to impure thoughts, to unfaithfulness or
untruth in act and word, Jesus Christ and our communion with Him is peace. The
things around are the conditions, the materials, of real assaults, and therefore
of real conflicts. But they may be met from within by “Him who dwells within,”
with the victory of a real, a sacred, an unruffled peace. “We wrestle; therefore
stand fast in the Lord. ” Be on the watch, for it is war-time. Be above all
things on the watch, then, over your peace in Christ. Stand in Him; arm with
Him. Against all circumstances, clothe yourself in Him. All this requires, as we
have seen, [Note: Chapter 1] the blessed diligence of secret prayer, of loving
and adoring converse with the Word of God, of faithful use of all the means of
grace. But it means the using of them in the right direction, for the right end,
so as to keep us “in touch” at all times with that living Lord who is both the
victory and the peace of His people.

Then shall we have peace, and shall manifest it, and diffuse it in the very hour
of conflict. “He shall not suffer our foot to be moved; He that keepeth us shall
not slumber” (Psa 121:3).


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  CHAPTER 8: 07. CHAPTER 7: MANIFOLDNESS
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Chapter VII.

MANIFOLDNESS.

1Pe 1:6. — Manifold temptations.

1Pe 4:10. — Manifold grace.

Eph 3:10. — Manifold wisdom.

Thereis an obvious contrast of subject-matter between the first of these
quotations and the others. But the idea of manifoldness, variety, appears in
all, and this connects them, and suggests important facts regarding the relation
between the Christian’s needs, and his Lord’s supplies, and his Lord’s purposes
towards him. i. ManifoldTemptations. On the word “temptation” I do not dwell at
length, only remarking that the original word lends itself equally to denote the
solicitations of the great Enemy and the tests of the Eternal Friend;
“temptation” and “trial” respectively, in our present parlance. And it is
obvious that these things are very often, perhaps always, in the case of the
believer, two aspects of the one thing. In the history of Job we see Satan
tempting, with resolute and merciless purposes of evil; we see the Lord trying,
so as to shew to his “perfect” (Job 1:8), his thoroughly genuine, servant more
of the plague of his own heart, and very much more of the glory and love of God.
And we see the two processes carried on in great measure by the same events and
experience. The double process is one of the normal facts of the Christian’s
life. The Enemy is unwearied in temptation, the Friend mercifully perseveres
with the touchstone and the probe. And truly to the regenerate soul both
processes have to do with pain, with heaviness. Temptation, whatever be the
victory of grace over it, has this deep pain in it, that it means the presence
of the foe of the soul and of its Lord. Trial, whatever be the secret joy of
knowing who sends it, and why, and of learning more of Him through it, a joy on
which we dwelt above, [Note: Chapter 5] is in its very nature painful. It is
intended to hurt, though not to injure. The Lord does not make His people
Stoics, but Christians. His blessing does not blunt but refine their
sensibilities, while it gives strength to their weakness. They feel the rod,
they feel the Refiner’s fire. Not only in view of temptation, but under sense of
trial, they understand what heaviness means.

Meanwhile let us remember, though but in passing, that heaviness was not the
leading experience of St Peter’s converts. Their characteristic was joy and
love. Read over the golden verses which contain this word about “heaviness.
”They form a picture radiant with the light of the Lord; with living hope,
ardent love, joy unspeakable and full of glory. And St Peter speaks of these
experiences as the present and habitual portion of these beloved “strangers
scattered. ” [Note: I well remember a friend’s telling me that he had lighted
upon two very different comments on this passage, almost at once. In the one, an
expositor maintained that such glowing words must refer to the life to come;
that they could only be anticipations of heaven, not experiences on earth. The
other comment was an entry in the diary of the late Rev. W. H. Hewitson, a saint
who had deep experiences of the Cross: ‘I have been rejoicing all day long with
joy unspeakable, and full of glory. ’] On the other hand, and this is our chief
concern now, this picture of light is crossed by a deep, tender shadow;
“heaviness through manifold temptations. ”It is not easy, perhaps, to dissect
the subject and to explain the theory. Solvitur ambulands; it is explained in
the believing soul by a walk with God.

“Wouldst thou too understand?Behold I show The perfect way:Love God, and thou
shalt know. ” [Note: James Montgomery,TheLotof the Righteous. ] And this
experience of “heaviness” is “manifold. ”It has to do with manifold temptations,
varied trials. Yes, they are varied, indeed. It was so of old. We have but to
name the saints of Hebrews 11 : to see this in its vivid reality. But it is a
fact too close to the human heart of all time to need much illustration. No two
of us are fully alike in character or in surroundings. No one of us is free from
innumerable changes in the incidence of his surroundings on his character. Age
of life, social position, mental and moral education, bodily ease or disease,
relationships and connexions, private and public duties, - I designedly mention
these things without order, - all these differences, and how many others
touching upon the individual spirit within, make up a vast “manifoldness” of
temptation, of trial. And we can go only a very little way in helping one
another in the multiplicity. We are like enough to another to understand the
fact; we are unlike enough to be soon baffled by the details, even when we bring
our best sympathy to bear. Only a little can the Christians whose trial is the
snare and care of wealth enter into the life whose trial is poverty and straits;
and the converse is true also. Only imperfectly can the Christian burthened with
public responsibility enter into the difficulties that are bounded by the humble
home. Not fully, with rare exceptions, can the strong, in health or in will,
appreciate the essence of the temptations of the weak. And, again, such are the
intricacies of life and of the soul, that the same man may often find himself
tried at once from different quarters, on opposite sides of character. It is a
manifold problem. ii. The manifold Grace of God. Here the problem finds a
blessed answer. We have studied an extremely complicated lock, and no key in all
our store will meet it and move it. But the great Artificer of both
circumstances and salvation appears here with His perfect key, His golden key,
cast into the very mould of the labyrinthine wards, intended and able to fit
them all. Need aboundeth, in its many ramifications. But “grace doth much more
abound” (Rom 5:20); it is the manifold grace of God.

True, beneath its multiplicity grace has a divine simplicity and singleness. For
what is grace, when we come to its ultimate description? It is no abstract
thing; no mysterious substance, thrown off as it were by God and injected into
man. It is the Lord Himself in action. Grace of acceptance – what is it but God,
for Christ’s sake, pardoning and welcoming the sinner – “God for us” (Rom 8:31)?
Grace of sanctification, of peace and power and holiness, what is it but “God
working in us to will and to do” (Php 2:13); “the Spirit strengthening us in the
inner man;” “Christ dwelling in the heart by faith” (Eph 3:16-17)? What is human
kindness but a kind man in action? What is divine grace but the Lord Himself,
infinitely kind, acting for, and acting in, the soul?

Thus there is a glorious oneness in the inmost idea of grace. But it is a
oneness out of which springs its infinite manifoldness of fitness and
application. Personal action, in its very nature, is thus manifold; and grace is
divinely personal action. The most refined machine is limited to a rigid
narrowness in line and scope of work; it stands utterly devoid of the power to
feel and meet new circumstances. The humblest Person is capable, as such, of a
boundless versatility, an endless adaptability, compared with the impersonal
machine. Grace is manifold, beyond the variations of out utmost need, just
because it is the action within the soul and will of Him, not it but Him, who
dwells within.

Thus it meets the case, be the case what it may. Never for a moment interfering
with our personality, or suspending the work and office of our conscience, it,
that is to say the Lord thus present, comes self-adjusted to the trial, to the
temptation, of this hour, of this minute. No craft of the enemy is too subtle
for that skill. No force of circumstances is too pressing for that power. There
is “no temptation with” which He cannot “make a way to escape” (1Co 10:13) —
into Himself. There is no labyrinth of so-called conflicting duties out of which
He cannot guide into a straight path.

There is abundant skill and power in grace to bring the anxious and the weak to
the feet of Jesus Christ, be their antecedent obstacles what they may. There is
resource in grace alike for the life of ceaseless energy and intercourse, that
it may be lived in God, and for the life of solitude and forced inaction that it
may be made occasion for new sacrifices to Him. There is a fit provision for the
temptations of the young, buoyant spirit, and for the needs of the melancholy
and fearing. It, that is to say He, can so meet the case, that “the weak shall
say, I am strong” (Joe 3:10). It, that is to say He, “gives what He enjoins. ”
[Note:Da quod jubes, et jube quod vis. St. Augustine. ]

It, that is to say He, is adjusted to every need of life. And when the need of
death comes, when the “next thing” to do is to step into the valley, to touch
the edge of the cold river, grace will be found (ah, let us be sure of it, as
life moves on, and the thought of death only gains in mystery as we approach
it), grace will be found perfectly adjusted to that hour. And our best
preparation for that need will be to welcome this holy manifoldness for the
needs of this present, for this waking moment of active or suffering life. We
yet shall find, through Him that loved us and abideth in us, that it is “a very
simple thing to die. ” So let us thankfully face the multiplicity of
circumstances, and of trials. Let us recognize in “the changing scenes of life”
fresh occasions for the great Artificer to employ His will, His power. Let us
remember that for every one of them there is, somewhere in Him who is with us
and in us, the corresponding gift. The subject is endless indeed in its
development. Its treatment is coextensive with our life. iii. Now we turn from
St Peter toSt Paul, and hear him speak of what is manifold also; “the
manifoldwisdom of God. ” The words have a special reference, as will be seen, of
special and beautiful significance. The Apostle speaks of his manifold wisdom,
not in the abstract, but as illustrated and in action in the true Church, that
is to say in “the blessed company of all faithful people”; [Note: The Communion
Service. ] and in the view of very important spectators. “The principalities and
powers,” the spirits of the heavenly world, “angels and archangels and the
company of heaven,” [Note: The Communion Service. ] are seen in this wonderful
verse studying the wisdom of God as shown in the believing company. To take the
simplest aspects of this disclosure of God’s word; we have it indicated here
that Christians, of every grade, and character, and situation, and age, and
name, are capable of thus being viewed from above, to the glory of the wisdom of
their God. The poorest, humblest, most forgotten and neglected saint of Christ
in whose manifold trials manifold grace is doing its work, may at this moment be
affording to our “elder brethren of the sky” discoveries of what the Lord is and
what He can do, most precious to themselves. In us they see what they cannot see
in their own bright ranks; the victory of grace over the infinitely complicated
problem of the recovery, the acceptance, the sanctification, the glory, of
beings fallen, rebellious, justly condemned, and under all the conditions of the
flesh.

Very different are the specimens they study; the Christian martyr, the Christian
leader and master of men, the Christian thinker and student, the missionary and
evangelist, the Christian mother, the friend of the needy and the outcast, the
little believing child, the lonely aged one, the dying one, sinking into what to
us looks like “utter destruction. ” [Note: See the noble passage,Wis 3:1-4. ]
but what by them is seen as the triumphant issue of divine wisdom, turning death
into the gate of life. Are we part of the subject-matter of God’s lessons to
these heavenly learners in the study of His manifold wisdom?Is there anything in
our lives from which an angel might learn more of God?If there is an ambition
lawful in the life of penitent sinners, can there be a purer aspiration than
that we may be used as illustrations to the minds of the Blessed, not of what
man can be but of what He whom we love can do?


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  CHAPTER 9: 08. CHAPTER 8: GRACE FOR GRACE
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Chapter VIII.

GRACE FOR GRACE.

John 1:16. — Of His fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.

Psa 36:9. — For with Thee is the fountain of life.

Inthe last chapter we have had much to say about the applications of sanctifying
grace, and in the last but one something of its nature. Here is a Scripture
which speaks of it again, and describes a delightful special aspect of our
derivation of grace from its fountain. On the first clause of the quotation
fromSt JohnI say but little. Only observe that it points to Jesus Christ as the
embodiment, the reservoir, the fountain, of all that grace means for us (John
1:12). And it speaks of the vital connexion of us, of His believing followers,
with Him as a definite and accomplished fact. “We have received,” or, somewhat
more literally, “we did receive. ”Of himself and of all believersSt Johnsays
this. They have come into receptive contact with Jesus Christ, with the divine
fulness that is in Him. “The Spirit of faith” has come (2Co 4:13). The work of
submissive trust has been wrought in the soul, the trust which looks not at
itself but at the trusted One alone. Then the soul is not only in the hands of
its blessed Rescuer; it has come into spiritual continuity with His exalted
Life. “Virtue is gone out of Him” (Mark 5:30); His strength into their
impotence, His peace into their nature’s war. Because He lives, they live also
(John 14:19). The last clause of the quotation speaks of a certain mode, or
phase, of our reception of this fulness, this “grace of life” (1Pe 3:7) which
once could not flow into us, but to which now our will, our being, thanks be to
God, has opened wide the door. Let us examine it.

“Grace for grace. ” On the word “grace” I have said a little already, [Note:
Chapter 7] and will not repeat it. I assume the reader’s rememberance of the
truth that sanctifying grace is no mere impersonal “substance,” but “God working
in us”; the Lord in action in our very springs of thought and will. Now observe
the phrase before us here; “grace for grace. ”Quite literally — I know not how
to render more exactly — the words run, “Grace instead of grace. ”

What does it mean? Surely the thought, the image, is of a perpetual succession
of supply; a displacement and replacement ever going on; ceaseless arrivals of
all that is needed for the ceaseless changes of need and demand. The picture
before us is as of a river. Stand on its banks, and contemplate the flow of
waters. A minute passes, and another. Is it the same stream still? Yes,
assuredly, the sameThames, or Wye, that ran ages ago in our forefathers’ sight.
But is it the same water? No. The liquid mass that passed you a few seconds ago
fills now another section of the channel; new water has displaced it, or if you
please, replaced it; water instead of water. And so hour by hour, and year by
year, and century by century, the process holds; one stream, other waters,
living not stagnant, because always in the great identity there is perpetual
change.

Even so in the Christian’s life, and in that derived fulness which is its secret
of plenty and of peace. Hour comes instead of hour, joy instead of joy, snare
instead of snare, trial and pain and loss instead of other like things of
yesterday. But so also with the supply, the successions and exchanges of
strength and blessing that come of the unchanging and unsuccessional presence in
the believing man of Him whom he has received. Grace takes the place of grace;
ever new, ever old, ever the same, ever fresh and young, for hour by hour, for
year by year, through life. Our verse delightfully negatives the thought of
grace as a something to be stored up in our own hands on occasions; a limited
supply, to be economized and managed, and made to last, till it runs dry, or
almost dry, and must be replenished by some new means. Here it flows for us, by
us, in us, for evermore; ever passing, ever abiding, "new every morning, failing
not,” (Lam 3:22)for the soul which is in contact with the eternal source.

Let us go forth in peace, in the peace which is itself a power, in great peace,
while peace most humble, recollecting this truth, into the “changes and chances
of this mortal life. ” No two days and hours are quite alike; no two hearts and
lives. On this we have already dwelt, as we considered [Note: Chapter 7] the
manifoldness of need. But here is the heavenly antidote to the trials of
succession, as we saw it above to the trials ofmultiplicity. For the succession
in us there is this divine succession in our Lord. For the struggles of
yesterday He was present with the needed fulness. That fulness is not attenuated
by the “out-going” of the “virtue” then; for it comes to us in this unwearying
exchange and newness. It is full, in the same channel but a new flood, for the
struggles of to-day. And to-morrow it shall be the same.

What is your special need? Is it some great sorrow of loss — loss of strength,
of wealth, of affection, of beloved ones who lighted up your life? Is it some
great problem of action, duty new and momentous, accumulations of demand upon
your narrow hours? Is it the perplexity of wandering thoughts in the hour of
hearing God’s Word, or of prayer? Is it some other need altogether internal,
defilements in the inmost world of imagination and desire, stirrings of
corruption far within? Is it need markedly external, temptation to principle, to
patience, coming upon you from without? Is it the agonies of perplexity [Note:
How different are such pains from the unhappy complacency of a mind vain of its
doubts, or proud in them! When Asaph (Psalms 73 : ) was brought to rest, by the
simplest looking off to God, he did not say, “How intellectual I am!” but “So
foolish was I, and ignorant. ” But what a dire conflict it was while it lasted,
before he be-thought him of carrying it into “the sanctuary”!] about some
mystery of the Word and Ways of God? Is it the need implied in a life of toil,
or that which comes with leisure, the solemn trust of hours with which you "may
do what you will”? Is it pangs of memory, or of anticipation — present griefs,
though not caused by the present? Of the pangs of memory, is it one of the worst
— recollection of a time when a peace and joy in Jesus Christ were yours which
are not yours to-day? Of the pangs of anticipation is it one of the most wearing
— expectation of future failure in your life and service for your Lord?

It is need for need, weakness for weakness. Yes, but behold also grace for
grace; not for yesterday, but for to-day; and for to-morrow when to-morrow is
to-day. Be sure of this, that your Lord and Life will never, no, not for an
hour, or for a minute, leave you with an inadequate supply of “Himself working
in you, to will and to do” — to begin again, or to go on again, willing and
doing — “for His good pleasure’s sake” (Php 2:13). Do not fear the certainty of
perpetual needs. Do not fear the fact that the Enemy will attempt you to the
last, and that to the last “in your flesh” will “dwell no good thing” (Rom
7:13). Do not be disheartened by the longest retrospect of failures. Look, and
see for this moment the moment’s divine succession of supply in Jesus Christ.
And be perfectly sure that neither for this moment nor any other is there
“fulness” anywhere else.

I have quoted at the head of the chapter those words of the Psalmist which lead
us up the River to its Source. “For with Thee is the fountain of Life”; with
Thee, Jehovah; with Thee, Jehovah-Christ, for “in Thee is Life”; “he that that
Thee hath life. ”

Let that verse just remind us of the duty and the blessing of continual
remembrance of Him as our reason and our rest. There is such a thing as studying
even the “possibilities of grace” more than Him who is “the God of all grace”
(1Pe 5:10).

It is because of what He is that His people are, even for a moment, what He
would have them be. And one deep secret of the development in them of what He
would have there, is the contemplation of Him (2Co 3:18). Our life and walk, in
a sense most practical, need be no intermittent stream of peace and of
obedience. Why?Because He is no intermittent spring. Every winter, in
modernJerusalem, a remarkable phenomenon is observed. The channel of the Kedron,
usually dry as the valley of dry bones, suddenly resounds with the music of
waters. Whatever be the natural cause hidden in the geology of the ravine, for
some for or five days the Kedron suddenly and abundantly springs and flows; or,
to speak more exactly, it begins abundantly, shrinks somewhat on the second day,
and ere long, failing day by day, it has retired into the dry rocks again.
Strange and pathetic intermittency!True picture and parable of too many a
Christian life and experience!But need it be?“For with Him is the fountain of
Life”; “a spring shut up, a fountain sealed” (Song of Solomon 4:12; if we may
borrow words of the Holy Song, though they are spoken directly not of Him but of
His Bride); shut up, and sealed, as to all access outside of Him; but “a
fountain opened” (Zec 13:1), not only for pardon, but for life and power, to all
who are in Him.

Come then, let us come now and ever, to the waters (Isa 55:1). The eternal Rock
is smitten, and is flowing; and where? In the desert, in the drought; to turn
the sands into the oasis; to make “the wilderness and the solitary place glad”
now (Isa 35:1; Isa 35:7).

It is written of the everlasting Canaan that “they shall thirst no more, for the
Lamb shall shepherd them, and lead them to the living fountains of waters”
(Revelation 16-17). But it is also written of the pathway thither, that “they
shall not thirst, for He that hath mercy on them shall lead them (Isa 49:10),
even by the springs of water shall He guide them” (1Jn 5:11). Let us ask Him to
do it indeed. Then we “shall not be careful in the year of drought, nor cease
from yielding fruit” (Jer 17:8).


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  CHAPTER 10: 09. CHAPTER 9: LIVING WATER
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Chapter IX.

LIVING WATER The last chapter was full of thoughts of the River and the Well.
Let us linger a while longer in the same region of Scriptural imagery; it is a
region full “of fountains and depths, that spring out of valleys and hills” (Deu
8:7). The words “living water” occur in two remarkable passages ofSt.
John’sGospel, passages widely separated in time and circumstance, but closely
united in spiritual significance by this phrase, and that, too, in a way which
makes the second passage the true sequel and development of the first. In John
4:14. , the Lord Jesus tells the woman of Sychar that had she known the gift of
God, and known Him who spoke to her, she would have asked, and He would have
given living water; and that this water would have precluded all thirst for
ever; and that it would prove to be, within its recipient, a fountain of water,
of water not stagnant but “springing, leaping, unto eternal life. ” And in John
7:38, we hear the same Voice speak of living water in a far different scene. Not
seated alone with one listener by the rural well, but standing in the midst of
the crowds and movement of the great day of a greatTemplefestival, He invites
all who thirst to “come to Him, and drink. ”And by this He means “to believe on
Him” (John 7:39). And He assures His hearers that as this is done the result
shall be not merely a reception of living water, but such a reception as shall
be an overflow. Out of the drinker, out of the believer, “shall flow rivers of
living water. And this spake He of the Spirit, which they that believed on Him
should receive. ” In the occasions and contexts of each of these utterances
there is indeed much to study. The very contrast, to which I have already
alluded, between the extreme difference of the two sets of circumstances and the
holy sameness of the Lord’s thought and tone amidst them, would alone be matter
for fruitful meditation. It is full of illustration of whatHewas and is. It is
full of example for His followers. And let us never forget that the example of
Christ is, for His followers, the example of Him with whom they are vitally and
indissolubly one. But these thoughts are not my main purpose at present. Nor do
I attempt even a brief comment on all the details of the two utterances
themselves. I ask my reader’s attention now for only two or three main points.
Let us think of the sacred Gift itself; and of its personal possession by the
believer in Christ; and of its conveyance through him to others. i. The Gift;
the Living Water. St John, that is to say, the Holy Spirit by him, explains this
to mean the Holy Spirit. It is the personal Paraclete. And it is the Paraclete
in a mode of presence and action specially conditioned by the soul’s having come
to Christ, having believed on Christ, already. True it is, deeply true, that
when we come and believe it is already because of the Spirit, the Spirit of
Faith (2Co 4:13). But this is not the phase of truth before us in these two
utterances. The Lord takes the case of the man as having, anyhow, come and
believed. Then, in the sense of after-experience, after-life, in manifestation,
unfolding, indwelling, empowering, the man shall “receive the Spirit. ”In a
sense different from that which might have been true before, the Spirit, the
Holy Ghost, shall be in him, and he in the Spirit. He shall be a “spiritual”
man, not in any vague sense (1Co 2:15), not merely as having, somehow, a higher
range of interests and ideas. He shall be, in a sense as literal as it is
divine, actuated by the development of a new Life, the Life Eternal, the Life of
the Head of the newborn Race, the Life imparted, maintained, dilated, by nothing
less than the personal presence in his very being of the Holy Spirit, the divine
Agent alike of the Human Birth of the Head and of the New Birth of each Limb.
The Spirit shall be in that man, in this sense, and therefore “Christ shall
dwell in his heart” (Eph 3:17). I lay stress on this last point, because of its
extreme practical importance in the whole subject of the life of faith and
peace. Let us remember on the one hand that we possess the Lord’s indwelling by
the Holy Spirit only. Let us remember on the other hand that what we possess by
the Holy Spirit is above all things the indwelling Lord. We are not to look for
two separate experiences, so to speak; a presence of the Spirit and a presence
of Christ. The presence of Christ is thanks to the blessing Spirit’s presence.
The Spirit’s presence is to be known — how?By the character of our actual
relations of thought, love, and will with Christ; by our view of His
unsearchable preciousness, by our rest in His dominion, by our peaceful power
over self and sin in Him. To receive the living water is to be filled, or,
however, to be filling, with Him, revealed and applied by the Spirit. This then,
let us remember, is the promised, the guaranteed, gift of God in Christ to all,
to all who come. ii. Now turn to the promise of the Well. Its main concern is
with the personal possession of this Gift; not yet with its liberation, so to
speak, and distribution through the possessor. The Lord undertakes that the man
who drinks that water shall never thirst; obviously in the sense of never
needing to complain of an intermittent supply fromthiswell. He shall find that
he has received the ultimate answer to his entire end. He shall find that he has
so received it that he may, if he will, be always enjoying it, always resting in
it, always living in it. To follow the precise words further, the water which
Christ shall give him, the water which he shall owe to the work and love of
Christ, “shall become (so literally) in him a spring of water, of water leaping
up, unto eternal life. ”

I do not examine minutely those last three words. It is interesting to ask
whether they mean, “until the arrival of the state of glory, the ultimate phase
of eternal life,” or whether they may not rather mean, “unto, resulting evermore
in, the present realities and experiences of eternal life”; in other words, “so
as to underlie, secure, and blessedly convey, the life of “God in Christ
evermore to the needs and longings of the man. ” But it is not material now to
discuss this.

What is material is the assurance that “the water shall become in him a spring
of up-leaping water. ” Here we have, for one thing, the delightful assurance
(let us treat it as an assurance) that the holy Thing shall be in the man. The
context shows that the special point of the thought here is that he shall carry
it about with him, in the depth of his being, always and everywhere. He shall
not need to travel, or to toil, to get it within him. In his travelling and in
his toiling it shall be within him. Go where he may, do, bear, what he may, meet
whatever he may at any time by way of circumstances, he shall not be dependent
for a moment upon circumstances for his water of life. It is his by gift. It is
in him always, in him now. Alone with self and the Tempter, he bears it in him.
Deep in the stress and throng of life, it is in him. In his strongest hour, and
in his weakest, this holy Thing, which is not himself but the Spirit, and Christ
by the Spirit, is in him.

Then further observe the phrase, “it shallbecomea spring of up-leaping water.
”Is it not as much as to say that the Gift as realized, and watched, and used,
shall develop its true character and preciousness?It might be suspected at first
to be but a cup; it shall soon prove to be a source, a spring, a depth
originating in God. It shall be not only always there, but always new there,
while always the same there. The happy possessor of it shall be always
antecedently supplied for all circumstances, in this experience and discovery
that the water is a spring. And thus he shall be independent of circumstances,
in a sense very real and happy. He will be no despiser of “means of grace;” nay,
he will prize them in their right use more than ever. But they will be to him
means of cultivation and advance in the knowledge and the use of grace far
rather than supposed originations of it. His water-spring is within him, always
within him. And it proves to be a spring of water “leaping up. ”The imagery is
beautifully special. The immortal supply is from an ultimate Source so living
that its flow has not motion only but a motion of gentle while vivid life. The
idea conveyed is that of “the Spirit’s calm excess,” in the beautiful words of
an ancient hymn. The soul’s experience shall have about it a chastened life and
brightness through Him who thus divinely dwells within. Joy, in the pure depth
of that word in the spiritual vocabulary, joy shall pervade the being. The
certainties of grace, of the Spirit, of Christ, shall give to the soul a
commentary all their own on the apostolic word, “always rejoicing” (2Co 6:10).
Yes, there shall be that humble but profound pleasure, which we have studied
above, [Note Chapter 5] pleasure even in distresses, in infirmities, “that the
power of Christ may overshadow us” (2Co 12:9).

Such is the matter as it stands in the personal and definite promise of the Lord
at the Well. Let me take it, let me remind my reader to take it, in its holy
simplicity and fulness. And “having this promise, let us cleanse ourselves” (2Co
7:1). Let us do our practical part by seeing to it, in watching and prayer, that
the weeds and rubbish are cleared from the basin of the spring, and that no
stone lies needlessly upon its mouth. iii. Now for a few moments let us pass on
to theTemplecloister, to the Lord’s utterance on the great day of the feast.
Here is the living water again, and the coming, and the receiving. And here is
this development of the promise; there shall be an overflow. I say nothing on
the place of the quotation; “as the Scripture hath said. ”Enough for us now that
Christ, inthisScripture, hath said it.

What does it mean? It means that the man who really drinks of Christ, drinking
of the Spirit, shall assuredly be a conveyer, a conductor, for the Spirit, for
Christ, to others. It means that the really and livingly spiritual man shall be
a spiritual blessing, a spiritual power. The thought requires, of course, a
reverent caution. It cannot mean that he shall be an origin of grace; and indeed
this is guarded by the special imagery, in which the thought is fixed on the
drinking the Spirit from Christ, and no mention is made of the spring within,
which might have seemed possibly to countenance the notion of our becoming
origins, though it would not have done so really. Nor again is there any
assurance here that at our own will or decision we can convey blessing to
others. That is the express prerogative of the Lord Himself. But the assurance
is that we shall be richly fruitful, somehow, of spiritual results; of results
in others in the way of their also tasting of the gift of God. Our work in the
matter is to drink, is to believe; to live by faith on the Son of God (Gal
2:20), who obeyed and died for us and liveth in us. His undertaking is that we
shall be, in proportion, aqueducts for His living water.

More is meant here, surely, than that we shall merely know what to say, and say
it. This is something indeed; this is a great thing. But it is a thing in which
a hypcrite can be a conductor. The truth here is that He will use that man, or
the woman, who is really drinking the heavenly Water from the Rock, who is
really filled for life’s need with the supplies of life eternal, in another, a
more mysterious way, and yet a way all the while profoundly natural. Through
that personality the Spirit shall be pleased to work special blessings, for He
will have made it fit to be so used. It shall livingly reflect something of the
glory of the Lord. It shall be a true channel of persuasion, attraction,
conviction. It “shall be a vessel unto honour, sanctified, serviceable to the
Master” (2Ti 2:21). The believer in question may perhaps know that he is thus
privileged and employed, by manifest results of fact; he may conspicuously be “a
blessing” to very many souls and lives around him. Or he may never know it thus
at all. But that matters, comparatively, little. The concern is with the
Master’s knowledge, the Master’s interests, not the servant’s. For the servant,
for the bondservant, let it be enough to know that the Master meant what He
said, and will be found to have kept His word, to His own glory.


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  CHAPTER 11: 10. CHAPTER 10: CHRISTIAN SERVICE
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Chapter X.

CHRISTIAN SERVICE. This chapter reproduces a written Address prepared for a
public occasion. It has been left on purpose nearly as it originally stood.

Christian Service, in its full idea, is a phrase practically coextensive with
Christian life; and Christian life is, in the intention of the Gospel, nothing
less, nothing narrower, than the whole life of the Christian; morning, noon, and
night; alone, in private, in society, in public; at all times and in all places.
From one point of view, and that a most important point, he not only is a
servant of the Lord, but he is a servant of the Lord in such a way, under such
conditions, that the whole action of his life falls under the description of
service. As he always exists, as a Christian, in and by his Master, so he always
exists for his Master. He has, in the reality of the matter, no dissociated and
independent interest. Not only in preaching and teaching, and bearing articulate
witness to Jesus Christ, does he, if his life is true to its idea and its
secret, “live not unto himself” (Rom 14:7); not with aims which terminate for
one moment in his own credit, for example, or his own comfort. Equally in the
engagements of domestic life, of business life, of public affairs; equally (to
look towards the humbler walks of duty) in the day’s work of the Christian
servant, or peasant, or artizan; “whether he lives, he lives unto the Master, or
whether he dies, he dies unto the Master” (Rom 14:8); whether he wakes or
sleeps, whether he toils or rests, whether it be the term or the vacation of
life, “whether he eats or drinks, or whatsoever he does,” he is the Master’s
property for the Master’s use.

“Teach me, my God and King, In all things Thee to see, And what I do in anything
To do it as to Thee.

“A servant with this clause Makes drudgery divine; Who sweeps a room as for Thy
laws makes that and th’ action fine. ” So wrote Herbert, two centuries and a
half ago. And the Gospel principle is immoveably the same for us to-day. Let us
not content ourselves even for a moment, in view of it, with the all too easy
piety of an abstract assent and indefinite aspiration. Looking afresh, looking
with adoring steadiness, at our beloved Lord, let us embrace in humblest
practicality the all-inclusive conditions of His service. In His name, in His
presence, let us yield to Him ourselves (Rom 6:13), as those who are already
alive from the dead through Him. The probable result in our life will be no
startling exterior revolution, but a happy and wonderful increase, as we go
forward, of quietness, and preparedness, and liberty within. “His service,” in
precise proportion to the simplicity and entirety of our acceptance of its bond
and yoke, “is perfect freedom. ”Illi servire est regnare; and let us remember
thatserviremeans bondservice; the service in which not only certain functions
and acquirements of mine are hired out under conditions to another, but in which
another has taken absolute possession of me.

Such, briefly indicated, is Christian Service. It is for all always. And the
conditions to its true exercise are the same for all; a walk with God in the
secret of the soul; a renunciation of all thought of intermittancy in the
service; a simple and expectant reliance on the heavenly Master’s will to accept
it and power to use it. For our present purpose, however, we will consider
Christian Service under a limitation. We will think of it as meaning the service
rendered by any of the great multitude of “Christian workers” as such. It may be
the service of the commissioned pastor of the flock; it may be that of the
visitor of the sick, of the rescuer of the fallen, of the teacher of the Bible
class or the Sunday School, of the lay worker in mission-room or open air. It
may be any one who seeks definitely to influence others for Christ.

If such is service, what then are the qualifications for it, or more properly,
some of the chief things amongst them?

One word, if but in passing, let me say as to the message which the servant of
Christ carries. There is urgent need for the Christian worker of our day to take
care of his personal hold upon articulate, fundamental truth, as well as over
his spirit of zeal and love. Zeal is not enough, nor energy, nor willingness to
endure much hardness. All these things can, as a matter of experience, go along
with “another Gospel, which is not another” (Gal 1:6-7). There must be humble
and laborious pains about the Scriptural solidity and rightness of the message,
as well as about the energy of the messenger. But I turn now to the personal
rather than to the doctrinal qualifications of the servant of the Lord. And here
first: would the worker be what the Master would have him be as a worker?Then
let him be a consistent man all round. Would he serve in testimony?Then let him
serve in everything. Would he be influential for his Master’s sake, far and
wide, if a broad field of influence is, as a fact, open to him?Then let his
wife, his children, his parents, his whole home circle, his circle of
acquaintance, business, or labour, find him out as a servant of Jesus Christ in
all ways that pratically touch them.

I recently heard, with much interest, a remark on the religion ofEnglish Church
people made to a friend of mine by a member of the Church of the Unitas Fratrum,
commonly called the Moravian Church, in Germany. “Your preachings,” said the
Moravian, “are often admirable, far beyond much that we say or hear. Your
statements of doctrine, your testimonies to Christ, and to His grace and power,
are full and beautiful. But we see, as a rule, a great difference between your
preachings and your lives. We, perhaps, have a humbler aim in the pulpit, but we
seek to live all that we preach. ” And my friend spoke with loving admiration of
what the consistency of Moravian life was; above all, in its being pervaded
everywhere and in all things, to an extent deeply impressive, and strongly
attractive, with humility of heart, and with peace and joy in the Lord.

Let our inference for ourselves, from such a comparison, be in favour not of a
lower doctrine, or a more misgiving testimony, but of a bringing into real
practice what in theory we know so well. Let us settle it in our inmost
convictions that the life of the disciple is intended to be one, and of a piece;
and that his work in detail stands related, certainly from his Lord’s point of
view, in a profound and vital connexion, to his habits, his temper, his manner
of life in general. Consistency is indissolubly bound up with “meetness for the
Master’s use” (2Ti 2:21). To turn to another point, which is, after all, but one
point of special brightness in the bright circle of consistency. I refer to that
great qualification for Christian Service on which we have already dwelt in a
previous chapter — an honest and unaffected self-forgetfulness, let me call it
selflessness, in the worker’s soul, with reference to the work.

Deep in our nature, in the Fall, lies the sin of which this is the blessed
contrary; and alas for the manifestations of that sin in the circles of
Christian service! It appears all too often in just the most energetic, the most
versatile, the most clever, of the servants of Christ those, perhaps, gifted
with most capacity to originate and direct. Their capacities are the Master’s
golden talents, and are certainly meant to be employed, in His time. But then,
as the solemn associations of the misused word talent should of themselves
remind us, they are never, no not for an hour, to be used for self, but for Him.
The eager thought that the work, the enterprise, the organization, the
connexion, is mine, is to be kept in jealous check. The first symptoms of
religious envy are to be by the Lord’s servant as promptly and thoroughly dealt
with as would be those of a formidable bodily disease; or rather, what is far
better, the servant is to remember beforehand the danger of infection, and to
live therefore in that germ-killing air, the presence and the peace of God.

It is a sorrowful sight, but not a very rare one, to see some otherwise
admirable Christian ill of this disease already, and not taking the least action
against it; to see a man manifestly equipped with manifold powers, and skill to
use them, but with whom one fellow-worker after another “finds it very hard to
work. ”For the Christian in question is not content with beingqualifiedto be
first, to lead, to be prominent; he cannot be happy in any second place. And it
is scarcely needful to point out that the exciting causes of this malady can
arise not only from the individual, but from the individual’s circle, whether it
be the circle of personal connexion, or of special line of Christian enterprise,
or of ecclesiastical organization. It is one thing to be loyal to well-loved
associates and colleagues, to be soberly convinced about certain principles of
Church order. It is quite another thing, and, alas, it is far more common and
more easy, I fear, to be simply prejudiced, and filled with the spirit of self,
in regard, for instance, of some marked blessing sent down on work or workers
going upon a different, not to say an alien, line. It has no necessary connexion
whatever with fixity of principle, clearness of conviction, and a discernment of
things that differ. Analyse it, and it will come out as the spirit of self, the
precise antithesis to the spirit of the Gospel. Let us, for our life of service,
live habitually in the holy air in which this cannot live. This leads me to say
a little, in closing, of the all-importance to the servant of Jesus Christ of
the maintenance of his own personal joy and glory in his Master. The sad secret
of the spirit I have just sought to deprecate lies in the subtle substitution,
somewhere and somehow, of self for Jesus Christ. It is calling the work “mine”
instead of “His. ”It is working for my credit rather than for His glory. It is
attracting, or trying to attract, to me, not altogether to Him. And where shall
we go for the remedy?It must be to Him. It must be found in the renewal of our
sight of Him, without one cloud between, even the cloud of our own restless
activities. We must get a new view of “the fair beauty of the Lord” (Psa 27:4,
Prayer Book), and of the blessedness and pleasantness of our lot and part in
Him.

“From the loss of our glory in Thee, preserve and keep us, gracious Lord and
God. ” Such is one response in a solemn Litany of that venerable Moravian Church
to which I referred just now.

I have read of a servant of Christ in the past, a man singularly rich in the
gift of spiritual influence over individuals. He was asked to disclose something
of his secret. His reply, in essence, was that it lay, as far as he knew, in the
sense of profound contentment with his blessed Master in which his soul was kept
through grace. Jesus Christ irradiated him within and for himself. He was, at
the very centre of his soul’s consciousness, deeply happy to belong to “his King
who had saved him,” and to be used by that great and holy Possessor as should
seem best to Him. And this took friction and anxiety out of his life in a very
wonderful way, while it kept that life, so to speak, always directed, peacefully
and unwearily, towards the thought of service, towards the idea, and the
expectation, of being used. And the service was all the happier, because it was
not the source of the man’s happiness. The source and secret was Jesus Christ;
and that secret acted equally whether marked success attended action and speech,
or apparently no success at all; whether the servant was put by the Master into
the front rank of active reapers in the harvest field, or told to “sit down in a
corner and sharpen the sickles of others”; whether he was called to speak in
spiritual power to a multitude, or to lie still on a sick bed. That heaven-given
spirit, in a blessed paradox, was for him the source of at once workfulness and
of repose. And in a very marked degree it preserved the worker from the
infection of the sin of envy, of jealousy, of selfishness. Ah! in the air of a
life so hid with Christ in God, do we not feel instinctively that such sin could
not breathe? “The fruit of righteousness is sown in peace” (Jas 3:18); in the
peace of God. It is one of the deepest and most sacred laws of the life of the
children of God that their activity has its root in passivity; their strength
has profoundly much to do with weakness; their rising up and going on with
giving way and sinking down; with that opposite of positive effort which is yet
so fruitful of work — “Yield youselves unto God” (Rom 6:13).

“From the loss of our glory in Thee, preserve and keep us — us who humbly ask to
serve Thee for ever — gracious Lord and God. ” In immediate conclusion, I would
most earnestly plead, then, in the interests of true Christian service, for what
in these hurrying times we need so specially: a deeper entrance of our souls
into the secret of the presence of the Lord. Work is not food for the spirit any
more than for the body. Amidst a multitude of works the worker’s soul may
wither, and the works will feel the difference in due time. We must, because we
are servants, and not masters, bondservants and not contractors, limbs and not
Head, we must see to it that we are living and serving not only so as to get
through a great deal of action, but so as to be vessels meet for the Master’s
use, in His way and not our own. And for this we must live, so to speak, behind
our service; we must live, in a true and holy sense, independent of it. We must
live upon Jesus Christ, not upon energy, upon success, upon notice, upon praise;
God forbid. And to live upon Him in service, we must, in the rule and habit of
our lives, watch over times of solemn, sacred, blessed intercourse with Him in
secret. We must, despite all the influences of our day, make time for thoughtful
prayer, for reverent search into His Word, for recollection of our treasures in
Him, time to exercise the more deliberate acts of a living faith in His great
promises, and in the unseen realities of the things eternal. So shall we come
forth evermore to serve, and to serve indeed.

Thank God, the picture is not a visionary one — not an ideal of the land of the
clouds. It is the secret of many a life of steadfast, chastened, humble,
Christ-reflecting service in the great Church ofGod to-day. And the Lord, in
whom that open secret lies, can make it for all His servants their own happy
possession. So shall it be for us, by His grace, to His glory. Amen.


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  CHAPTER 12: 11. CHAPTER 11: CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
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Chapter XI.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS In closing these simple pages, let me put before my friend
and reader a few remarks, somewhat detached in form. i. First, an earnest
caution against an overdrawnintrospection. It may be thought that this book
itself looks another way, often suggesting and encouraging a close inward
examination. I do indeed seek to press, on myself first, the duty of
self-examination, a scrutiny within that shall not stop short of motive,
purpose, inmost state of affection and will. Many Christian lives, I am sure,
greatly lose in depth, consistency, and chastened soberness, by failure to
examine within; and the habit and practice of such examination, not without a
certain system, is a duty of Christian life. For most of us it would be well to
make this exercise a regular element, say, in secret evening devotion.

Nevertheless, introspection is a secondary, not primary, duty of the life of
grace; a subsidiary, not direct, means of holiness and strength. “Ten looks at
Christ for one at self” is after all the primary rule. “Look unto Jesus” gives
us, as has been well said, the Gospel in three words (Heb 12:2). Introspection
ceases to do good and begins to do harm the moment it terminates in itself, the
moment it fails to be our reminder of our need of the simplest gaze, every hour,
upon the Son of God, “who is made unto us of God wisdom, and righteousness, and
sanctification, and redemption” (1Co 1:30). Christ is “the Secret of God,” in
the literal rendering of the best attested reading ofCol 2:2. And Christ is not
ourselves. Dwelling in the heart of him who is “strengthened by the Spirit in
the inner man” (Eph 3:16), He is not the inner man, nor the heart. And, asthe
Object of adoring contemplation and humble faith, we must view Him not as He is
in us but as He is in Himself; incarnate, sacrificed, glorified. “Beholding the
glory of the Lord, we are changed into the same image, as by the Lord the
Spirit” (2Co 3:18). ii. As one part of this general subject, I lay it upon
myself and my reader, as we seek to live day by day in the strength of the risen
Jesus Christ, all the more to lean ourexperiencebefore God wholly, solely, upon
the finished Work of our redeeming Sacrifice, “the Lord our Righteousness” (Jer
23:6). The holy thirst and hunger to please God is a radically different thing
from the anxious effort to reconcile God. Blessed be His name, that work is
done, is completed, for us, by the obedience of One. In the deep words of the
Second Article, “Christ, very God and very man, truly suffered, was crucified,
dead, and buried, to reconcile His Father to us, and to be a sacrifice not only
for original guilt but also for all actual sins of men. ”And in the words of the
Eleventh, never to be separated from those others, “We are accounted righteous
before God,onlyfor the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, by faith (per
fidem). ”Such words, technical as they may sound, speak a truth inexpressibly
restful to the fully awakened conscience. Do you see the depth of the demand of
God’s law?Do you believe what His Word says, speaking, remember, in the person
of an inspired saint, “Enter not into judgment with Thy servant, O Lord; for in
Thy sight shall no man living be justified”?Do you see the sin (to speak of
nothing else) of the least inadequacy in your love to God, in your love to
others?Then, in true proportion to the spiritual reality and fulness of such
insight, you will prize, you will adore, you will submit yourself to, you will
learn yourself upon, the finished Satisfaction, the imputed Merit, of your
Redeemer. In the words of a departed saint, to whose soul the truth of saving
love in this aspect was singularly real and sweet, you will rejoice to feel that
“the bed is large enough to lie down upon, the covering ample enough to wrap
around” the awakened soul. iii. In the practice of daily life, in the derivation
from the risen Lord of the power of “new obedience,” let me and my reader
recollect steadily, and weave into one cord - a cord that at once binds and
knits - two sacred facts of our state as believers. First, we BELONG to the
Lord; secondly, we are JOINED to Him.

“Whether we live, we live unto the Master; whether we die, we die unto the
Master” (Rom 14:8). Let the words “I BELONG” be written, in redeeming blood,
across your whole life. Wake up with that fact in recollection; not that feeling
but that fact. Carry it into morning, noon, and night. Lie down upon your bed
with it. We have dwelt on this side of truth already, elsewhere. [Note: In the
author’s "Thoughts on Christian Sanctity," Chapter 4. ] But let it be pressed
home on heart and will once more. Everything else tends to fall abroad and into
pieces without it. Nature fears it, but when by the grace of God a man has
looked it in the face, or far rather has looked in the face THE MASTER who makes
the claim, it is peace and rest to surrender, quite at discretion, to that
Ownership. “To this end” (Rom 14:9), that He might be Master, “He died and rose
again. ” This must be, this is, a very blessed “end” - for Possessor and
possessed!

“I love, I love my Master; I will not go out free; For He is my Redeemer; He
paid the price for me. ”

Happy, happy, the human will that is bound with this chain. It is free indeed.
Make proof, on the Master’s warrant, and “thou shalt know. ” But again, we are
“JOINED to the Lord,” So says the Spirit. The passage and context are full of
the essence of the new Life and its exercise. We gather there, that the believer
belongs to Christ not merely as a man’s watch, for instance, but as his hand,
belongs to him. And observe that this is true for every “limb” of the blessed
Head; not for the highly developed member only, but for the member; yes, as the
whole passage shows, even for the member struggling with the force of the
crudest and basest temptation. For the disheartened, aye, for the falling
Christian, this word is written: “you are joined to the Lord” now; you are “one
Spirit” now. It is not reward of obedience, but gift of God. The word is not
“you ought,” but “you possess. ” It is not “you feel it,” but “thus it is. ”
What have you, thus united, to do with sin? What need temptation do against you,
thus united? The man who recollects his belongingness to Jesus Christ, his
irrevocable lot and state of bond service to Him, and who recollects along with
it his living union with Him, is the man who may humbly, calmly, and with
restful expectation say with St. Paul, “I can do all things in Him that
strengtheneth me” (Php 4:13). “Nothing shall in any wise hurt him” (Luk 10:19).
Shall we take our place, in the name of the Lord Jesus, among these people, and
go forward in this blessed double recollection, not into some imagined path of
duty and patience, but into our own?

Very real, very great, is the power and preciousness of the holy Supper of the
Lord, in the light of this combination of truths. Our redemption to be the
property of our beloved Saviour, and our mystical Union with Him as our Head,
are there, in the same divine act, "visibly signed and sealed” by HIMSELF, the
true Master of the Table, to each true disciple. What certainties of assurance,
what warrants of strength and peace, lie in that fact! iv. And one remark let me
make here on the study of the Scriptures, which are the Word of God (2Ti 3:15;
2Ti 4:2). On the duty, privilege, and method, I am not going to enlarge. It is
in special connexion with the life of Christian Holiness, the life of new
Obedience, that I speak of Scripture study; and specially in view of the fact
that Scripture is the one articulate account, by the Lord Himself, of His “will
in Jesus Christ concerning us. ” For you, believing friend, who long to know and
to do His will, as at once your rest and your goal, let the Bible bear this
aspect of sacredness very specially, that it is the one definite and articulate
utterance of that Will by our Master Himself. From this point of view how
singular is the value of the hundred and nineteenth Psalm! It has been
beautifully said that the essence of the thought of that Psalm is, the
sacredness and sweetness of God’s Will, to be known and done by His bondservant;
so that we may reverently read, as it were, the word “will” into it, as a
synonym of ”law,” “stautues,” “jugments,” “precepts,” &c. Try this holy gloss,
and see how the verses shine with the glory of a loving surrender to the will of
God. But then, on the other hand, beyond all question, the Psalm in its direct
purpose is one long strain of prayer, and praise, and self-consecration, over
the Bible. The saintly soul’s thirst after the will of God leads it not to the
mirage, but to the water-spring of the Word. With every access of love and
longing, with every step in conscience and obedience, he feels new need of the
Book, he bends over it, he bows to it. So be it with you and with me. v. Lastly,
and let this reflection touch and attune every other, let us “walk in love, for
love is of God” (Eph 5:2; 1Jn 4:7). Even the few pages of this little book,
dealing with topics of the inner life, have led me to definite statements of
conviction on many points of truth and doctrine. My whole soul is sure of the
importance of clearness and firmness in such things. Nevertheless, there is no
region of Christian life in which the need is more constant and more strong to
remember how to walk in love, than the doctrinal region. It is easy, very easy,
as we have observed more than once already, to disguise to ourselves a jealousy
for our own views as such under an aspect of jealousy for the revealed truth of
God. There lies the danger; there lies the need. And the remedy, the supply,
lies above all things in a deepening personal acquaintance with “the Son of God,
who loved me and gave Himself for me” (Gal 2:20). In the divine serenity of His
presence we can, so far as our personality and sensibility go, read in peace the
page from which we differ, perhaps the page which takes ourselves severely to
task, and can ask in peace and candour where lies the truth. Walking by the side
of Jesus Christ, we can with joy and love see His image reflected in the life
and labour of the Christian man with whom, perhaps on no unimportant point, we
are at issue. “In the covert of His wings” (Psa 61:4) we can love, as well as
watch. Ambitious and jealous not for ourselves but for Him whose property we
are, we shall find more attraction in the least sign of genuine loyalty to Him
than we can find repulsion in almost anything else. For this also His grace is
sufficient. Our series of thoughts is over. To that Master of Whom we have just
spoken - absolute, merciful, beloved - I now humbly commit the things written.
Whatever among them are indeed "the things of Christ," He can bless, forgiving
the rest. And for us, writer and reader, "the next thing" shall be to step
forward into the realities of to-day, putting thought into practice, seeing in
circumstances God’s will, receiving amidst them His Spirit, living through them
upon Jesus Christ, who is our Life. To Him be glory, now and always. Amen.

“Certainly, the more the Christian is acquainted with himself, the more will he
go out of himself for his perfecting and establishing. . . . Never shall we find
heart peace, sweet peace, and progress in holiness, till we be driven from
natural independency, to make Christ all our strength; till we be brought to do
nothing, to attempt nothing, to hope or expect nothing, but in Him; and then
shall we indeed find His fulness and all-sufficiency, and ’be more than
conquerors through Him who hath loved us. ’” — Archbishop Leighton, on 1Pe 5:10.


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