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Title: The Pursuit of God
Author: A. W. Tozer
Release Date: April 23, 2008 [EBook #25141]
Language: English
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The Pursuit of God
"Then shall we know,
if we follow on to know the Lord:
his going forth is prepared as the morning."
HOSEA 6:3
by A. W. Tozer
introduction by
Dr. Samuel M. Zwemer
CHRISTIAN PUBLICATIONS, INC. HARRISBURG, PA.
COPYRIGHT MCMXLVIII BY CHRISTIAN PUBLICATIONS, INC.
_Printed in United States_
Contents
Introduction 5
Preface 7
I Following Hard after God 11
II The Blessedness of Possessing Nothing 21
III Removing the Veil 33
IV Apprehending God 49
V The Universal Presence 61
VI The Speaking Voice 73
VII The Gaze of the Soul 85
VIII Restoring the Creator-creature Relation 99
IX Meekness and Rest 109
X The Sacrament of Living 117
Introduction
Here is a masterly study of the inner life by a heart thirsting after
God, eager to grasp at least the outskirts of His ways, the abyss of His
love for sinners, and the height of His unapproachable majesty--and it
was written by a busy pastor in Chicago!
Who could imagine David writing the twenty-third Psalm on South Halsted
Street, or a medieval mystic finding inspiration in a small study on the
second floor of a frame house on that vast, flat checker-board of
endless streets
Where cross the crowded ways of life
Where sound the cries of race and clan,
In haunts of wretchedness and need,
On shadowed threshold dark with fears,
And paths where hide the lures of greed ...
But even as Dr. Frank Mason North, of New York, says in his immortal
poem, so Mr. Tozer says in this book:
Above the noise of selfish strife
We hear Thy voice, O Son of Man.
My acquaintance with the author is limited to brief visits and loving
fellowship in his church. There I discovered a self-made scholar, an
omnivorous reader with a remarkable library of theological and
devotional books, and one who seemed to burn the midnight oil in pursuit
of God. His book is the result of long meditation and much prayer. It is
not a collection of sermons. It does not deal with the pulpit and the
pew but with the soul athirst for God. The chapters could be summarized
in Moses' prayer, "Show me thy glory," or Paul's exclamation, "O the
depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!" It is
theology not of the head but of the heart.
There is deep insight, sobriety of style, and a catholicity of outlook
that is refreshing. The author has few quotations but he knows the
saints and mystics of the centuries--Augustine, Nicholas of Cusa, Thomas
à Kempis, von Hügel, Finney, Wesley and many more. The ten chapters are
heart searching and the prayers at the close of each are for closet, not
pulpit. _I felt the nearness of God while reading them._
Here is a book for every pastor, missionary, and devout Christian. It
deals with the deep things of God and the riches of His grace. Above
all, it has the keynote of sincerity and humility.
_Samuel M. Zwemer_
New York City
Preface
In this hour of all-but-universal darkness one cheering gleam appears:
within the fold of conservative Christianity there are to be found
increasing numbers of persons whose religious lives are marked by a
growing hunger after God Himself. They are eager for spiritual realities
and will not be put off with words, nor will they be content with
correct "interpretations" of truth. They are athirst for God, and they
will not be satisfied till they have drunk deep at the Fountain of
Living Water.
This is the only real harbinger of revival which I have been able to
detect anywhere on the religious horizon. It may be the cloud the size
of a man's hand for which a few saints here and there have been looking.
It can result in a resurrection of life for many souls and a recapture
of that radiant wonder which should accompany faith in Christ, that
wonder which has all but fled the Church of God in our day.
But this hunger must be recognized by our religious leaders. Current
evangelicalism has (to change the figure) laid the altar and divided the
sacrifice into parts, but now seems satisfied to count the stones and
rearrange the pieces with never a care that there is not a sign of fire
upon the top of lofty Carmel. But God be thanked that there are a few
who care. They are those who, while they love the altar and delight in
the sacrifice, are yet unable to reconcile themselves to the continued
absence of fire. They desire God above all. They are athirst to taste
for themselves the "piercing sweetness" of the love of Christ about Whom
all the holy prophets did write and the psalmists did sing.
There is today no lack of Bible teachers to set forth correctly the
principles of the doctrines of Christ, but too many of these seem
satisfied to teach the fundamentals of the faith year after year,
strangely unaware that there is in their ministry no manifest Presence,
nor anything unusual in their personal lives. They minister constantly
to believers who feel within their breasts a longing which their
teaching simply does not satisfy.
I trust I speak in charity, but the lack in our pulpits is real.
Milton's terrible sentence applies to our day as accurately as it did to
his: "The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed." It is a solemn thing,
and no small scandal in the Kingdom, to see God's children starving
while actually seated at the Father's table. The truth of Wesley's words
is established before our eyes: "Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at
best, a very slender part of religion. Though right tempers cannot
subsist without right opinions, yet right opinions may subsist without
right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God without either love
or one right temper toward Him. Satan is a proof of this."
Thanks to our splendid Bible societies and to other effective agencies
for the dissemination of the Word, there are today many millions of
people who hold "right opinions," probably more than ever before in the
history of the Church. Yet I wonder if there was ever a time when true
spiritual worship was at a lower ebb. To great sections of the Church
the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come
that strange and foreign thing called the "program." This word has been
borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of
public service which now passes for worship among us.
Sound Bible exposition is an imperative _must_ in the Church of the
Living God. Without it no church can be a New Testament church in any
strict meaning of that term. But exposition may be carried on in such
way as to leave the hearers devoid of any true spiritual nourishment
whatever. For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God
Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal
experience they are not the better for having heard the truth. The Bible
is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and
satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may
delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the
very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts.
This book is a modest attempt to aid God's hungry children so to find
Him. Nothing here is new except in the sense that it is a discovery
which my own heart has made of spiritual realities most delightful and
wonderful to me. Others before me have gone much farther into these holy
mysteries than I have done, but if my fire is not large it is yet real,
and there may be those who can light their candle at its flame.
A. W. Tozer Chicago, Ill. June 16, 1948
I
_Following Hard after God_
My soul followeth hard after thee: thy right hand upholdeth
me.--Psa. 63:8
Christian theology teaches the doctrine of prevenient grace, which
briefly stated means this, that before a man can seek God, God must
first have sought the man.
Before a sinful man can think a right thought of God, there must have
been a work of enlightenment done within him; imperfect it may be, but a
true work nonetheless, and the secret cause of all desiring and seeking
and praying which may follow.
We pursue God because, and only because, He has first put an urge within
us that spurs us to the pursuit. "No man can come to me," said our Lord,
"except the Father which hath sent me draw him," and it is by this very
prevenient _drawing_ that God takes from us every vestige of credit for
the act of coming. The impulse to pursue God originates with God, but
the outworking of that impulse is our following hard after Him; and all
the time we are pursuing Him we are already in His hand: "Thy right hand
upholdeth me."
In this divine "upholding" and human "following" there is no
contradiction. All is of God, for as von Hügel teaches, _God is always
previous_. In practice, however, (that is, where God's previous working
meets man's present response) man must pursue God. On our part there
must be positive reciprocation if this secret drawing of God is to
eventuate in identifiable experience of the Divine. In the warm language
of personal feeling this is stated in the Forty-second Psalm: "As the
hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O
God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come
and appear before God?" This is deep calling unto deep, and the longing
heart will understand it.
The doctrine of justification by faith--a Biblical truth, and a blessed
relief from sterile legalism and unavailing self-effort--has in our time
fallen into evil company and been interpreted by many in such manner as
actually to bar men from the knowledge of God. The whole transaction of
religious conversion has been made mechanical and spiritless. Faith may
now be exercised without a jar to the moral life and without
embarrassment to the Adamic ego. Christ may be "received" without
creating any special love for Him in the soul of the receiver. The man
is "saved," but he is not hungry nor thirsty after God. In fact he is
specifically taught to be satisfied and encouraged to be content with
little.
The modern scientist has lost God amid the wonders of His world; we
Christians are in real danger of losing God amid the wonders of His
Word. We have almost forgotten that God is a Person and, as such, can be
cultivated as any person can. It is inherent in personality to be able
to know other personalities, but full knowledge of one personality by
another cannot be achieved in one encounter. It is only after long and
loving mental intercourse that the full possibilities of both can be
explored.
All social intercourse between human beings is a response of personality
to personality, grading upward from the most casual brush between man
and man to the fullest, most intimate communion of which the human soul
is capable. Religion, so far as it is genuine, is in essence the
response of created personalities to the Creating Personality, God.
"This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and
Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent."
God is a Person, and in the deep of His mighty nature He thinks, wills,
enjoys, feels, loves, desires and suffers as any other person may. In
making Himself known to us He stays by the familiar pattern of
personality. He communicates with us through the avenues of our minds,
our wills and our emotions. The continuous and unembarrassed
interchange of love and thought between God and the soul of the redeemed
man is the throbbing heart of New Testament religion.
This intercourse between God and the soul is known to us in conscious
personal awareness. It is personal: that is, it does not come through
the body of believers, as such, but is known to the individual, and to
the body through the individuals which compose it. And it is conscious:
that is, it does not stay below the threshold of consciousness and work
there unknown to the soul (as, for instance, infant baptism is thought
by some to do), but comes within the field of awareness where the man
can "know" it as he knows any other fact of experience.
You and I are in little (our sins excepted) what God is in large. Being
made in His image we have within us the capacity to know Him. In our
sins we lack only the power. The moment the Spirit has quickened us to
life in regeneration our whole being senses its kinship to God and leaps
up in joyous recognition. That is the heavenly birth without which we
cannot see the Kingdom of God. It is, however, not an end but an
inception, for now begins the glorious pursuit, the heart's happy
exploration of the infinite riches of the Godhead. That is where we
begin, I say, but where we stop no man has yet discovered, for there is
in the awful and mysterious depths of the Triune God neither limit nor
end.
Shoreless Ocean, who can sound Thee?
Thine own eternity is round Thee,
Majesty divine!
To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul's paradox of love,
scorned indeed by the too-easily-satisfied religionist, but justified in
happy experience by the children of the burning heart. St. Bernard
stated this holy paradox in a musical quatrain that will be instantly
understood by every worshipping soul:
We taste Thee, O Thou Living Bread,
And long to feast upon Thee still:
We drink of Thee, the Fountainhead
And thirst our souls from Thee to fill.
Come near to the holy men and women of the past and you will soon feel
the heat of their desire after God. They mourned for Him, they prayed
and wrestled and sought for Him day and night, in season and out, and
when they had found Him the finding was all the sweeter for the long
seeking. Moses used the fact that he knew God as an argument for knowing
Him better. "Now, therefore, I pray thee, if I have found grace in thy
sight, show me now thy way, that I may know thee, that I may find grace
in thy sight"; and from there he rose to make the daring request, "I
beseech thee, show me thy glory." God was frankly pleased by this
display of ardor, and the next day called Moses into the mount, and
there in solemn procession made all His glory pass before him.
David's life was a torrent of spiritual desire, and his psalms ring with
the cry of the seeker and the glad shout of the finder. Paul confessed
the mainspring of his life to be his burning desire after Christ. "That
I may know Him," was the goal of his heart, and to this he sacrificed
everything. "Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the
excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have
suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but refuse, that I
may win Christ."
Hymnody is sweet with the longing after God, the God whom, while the
singer seeks, he knows he has already found. "His track I see and I'll
pursue," sang our fathers only a short generation ago, but that song is
heard no more in the great congregation. How tragic that we in this dark
day have had our seeking done for us by our teachers. Everything is made
to center upon the initial act of "accepting" Christ (a term,
incidentally, which is not found in the Bible) and we are not expected
thereafter to crave any further revelation of God to our souls. We have
been snared in the coils of a spurious logic which insists that if we
have found Him we need no more seek Him. This is set before us as the
last word in orthodoxy, and it is taken for granted that no Bible-taught
Christian ever believed otherwise. Thus the whole testimony of the
worshipping, seeking, singing Church on that subject is crisply set
aside. The experiential heart-theology of a grand army of fragrant
saints is rejected in favor of a smug interpretation of Scripture which
would certainly have sounded strange to an Augustine, a Rutherford or a
Brainerd.
In the midst of this great chill there are some, I rejoice to
acknowledge, who will not be content with shallow logic. They will admit
the force of the argument, and then turn away with tears to hunt some
lonely place and pray, "O God, show me thy glory." They want to taste,
to touch with their hearts, to see with their inner eyes the wonder that
is God.
I want deliberately to encourage this mighty longing after God. The lack
of it has brought us to our present low estate. The stiff and wooden
quality about our religious lives is a result of our lack of holy
desire. Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute
desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to
His people. He waits to be wanted. Too bad that with many of us He waits
so long, so very long, in vain.
Every age has its own characteristics. Right now we are in an age of
religious complexity. The simplicity which is in Christ is rarely found
among us. In its stead are programs, methods, organizations and a world
of nervous activities which occupy time and attention but can never
satisfy the longing of the heart. The shallowness of our inner
experience, the hollowness of our worship, and that servile imitation of
the world which marks our promotional methods all testify that we, in
this day, know God only imperfectly, and the peace of God scarcely at
all.
If we would find God amid all the religious externals we must first
determine to find Him, and then proceed in the way of simplicity. Now as
always God discovers Himself to "babes" and hides Himself in thick
darkness from the wise and the prudent. We must simplify our approach to
Him. We must strip down to essentials (and they will be found to be
blessedly few). We must put away all effort to impress, and come with
the guileless candor of childhood. If we do this, without doubt God will
quickly respond.
When religion has said its last word, there is little that we need other
than God Himself. The evil habit of seeking _God-and_ effectively
prevents us from finding God in full revelation. In the "and" lies our
great woe. If we omit the "and" we shall soon find God, and in Him we
shall find that for which we have all our lives been secretly longing.
We need not fear that in seeking God only we may narrow our lives or
restrict the motions of our expanding hearts. The opposite is true. We
can well afford to make God our All, to concentrate, to sacrifice the
many for the One.
The author of the quaint old English classic, _The Cloud of Unknowing_,
teaches us how to do this. "Lift up thine heart unto God with a meek
stirring of love; and mean Himself, and none of His goods. And thereto,
look thee loath to think on aught but God Himself. So that nought work
in thy wit, nor in thy will, but only God Himself. This is the work of
the soul that most pleaseth God."
Again, he recommends that in prayer we practice a further stripping down
of everything, even of our theology. "For it sufficeth enough, a naked
intent direct unto God without any other cause than Himself." Yet
underneath all his thinking lay the broad foundation of New Testament
truth, for he explains that by "Himself" he means "God that made thee,
and bought thee, and that graciously called thee to thy degree." And he
is all for simplicity: If we would have religion "lapped and folden in
one word, for that thou shouldst have better hold thereupon, take thee
but a little word of one syllable: for so it is better than of two, for
even the shorter it is the better it accordeth with the work of the
Spirit. And such a word is this word GOD or this word LOVE."
When the Lord divided Canaan among the tribes of Israel Levi received no
share of the land. God said to him simply, "I am thy part and thine
inheritance," and by those words made him richer than all his brethren,
richer than all the kings and rajas who have ever lived in the world.
And there is a spiritual principle here, a principle still valid for
every priest of the Most High God.
The man who has God for his treasure has all things in One. Many
ordinary treasures may be denied him, or if he is allowed to have them,
the enjoyment of them will be so tempered that they will never be
necessary to his happiness. Or if he must see them go, one after one, he
will scarcely feel a sense of loss, for having the Source of all things
he has in One all satisfaction, all pleasure, all delight. Whatever he
may lose he has actually lost nothing, for he now has it all in One, and
he has it purely, legitimately and forever.
_O God, I have tasted Thy goodness, and it has both satisfied me and
made me thirsty for more. I am painfully conscious of my need of further
grace. I am ashamed of my lack of desire. O God, the Triune God, I want
to want Thee; I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more
thirsty still. Show me Thy glory, I pray Thee, that so I may know Thee
indeed. Begin in mercy a new work of love within me. Say to my soul,
"Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away." Then give me grace to
rise and follow Thee up from this misty lowland where I have wandered so
long. In Jesus' Name, Amen._
II
_The Blessedness of Possessing Nothing_
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven.--Matt. 5:3
Before the Lord God made man upon the earth He first prepared for him by
creating a world of useful and pleasant things for his sustenance and
delight. In the Genesis account of the creation these are called simply
"things." They were made for man's uses, but they were meant always to
be external to the man and subservient to him. In the deep heart of the
man was a shrine where none but God was worthy to come. Within him was
God; without, a thousand gifts which God had showered upon him.
But sin has introduced complications and has made those very gifts of
God a potential source of ruin to the soul.
Our woes began when God was forced out of His central shrine and
"things" were allowed to enter. Within the human heart "things" have
taken over. Men have now by nature no peace within their hearts, for God
is crowned there no longer, but there in the moral dusk stubborn and
aggressive usurpers fight among themselves for first place on the
throne.
This is not a mere metaphor, but an accurate analysis of our real
spiritual trouble. There is within the human heart a tough fibrous root
of fallen life whose nature is to possess, always to possess. It covets
"things" with a deep and fierce passion. The pronouns "my" and "mine"
look innocent enough in print, but their constant and universal use is
significant. They express the real nature of the old Adamic man better
than a thousand volumes of theology could do. They are verbal symptoms
of our deep disease. The roots of our hearts have grown down into
_things_, and we dare not pull up one rootlet lest we die. Things have
become necessary to us, a development never originally intended. God's
gifts now take the place of God, and the whole course of nature is upset
by the monstrous substitution.
Our Lord referred to this tyranny of _things_ when He said to His
disciples, "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and
take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall
lose it: and whosoever shall lose his life for my sake shall find it."
Breaking this truth into fragments for our better understanding, it
would seem that there is within each of us an enemy which we tolerate at
our peril. Jesus called it "life" and "self," or as we would say, the
_self-life_. Its chief characteristic is its possessiveness: the words
"gain" and "profit" suggest this. To allow this enemy to live is in the
end to lose everything. To repudiate it and give up all for Christ's
sake is to lose nothing at last, but to preserve everything unto life
eternal. And possibly also a hint is given here as to the only effective
way to destroy this foe: it is by the Cross. "Let him take up his cross
and follow me."
The way to deeper knowledge of God is through the lonely valleys of soul
poverty and abnegation of all things. The blessed ones who possess the
Kingdom are they who have repudiated every external thing and have
rooted from their hearts all sense of possessing. These are the "poor in
spirit." They have reached an inward state paralleling the outward
circumstances of the common beggar in the streets of Jerusalem; that is
what the word "poor" as Christ used it actually means. These blessed
poor are no longer slaves to the tyranny of _things_. They have broken
the yoke of the oppressor; and this they have done not by fighting but
by surrendering. Though free from all sense of possessing, they yet
possess all things. "Theirs is the kingdom of heaven."
Let me exhort you to take this seriously. It is not to be understood as
mere Bible teaching to be stored away in the mind along with an inert
mass of other doctrines. It is a marker on the road to greener pastures,
a path chiseled against the steep sides of the mount of God. We dare not
try to by-pass it if we would follow on in this holy pursuit. We must
ascend a step at a time. If we refuse one step we bring our progress to
an end.
As is frequently true, this New Testament principle of spiritual life
finds its best illustration in the Old Testament. In the story of
Abraham and Isaac we have a dramatic picture of the surrendered life as
well as an excellent commentary on the first Beatitude.
Abraham was old when Isaac was born, old enough indeed to have been his
grandfather, and the child became at once the delight and idol of his
heart. From that moment when he first stooped to take the tiny form
awkwardly in his arms he was an eager love slave of his son. God went
out of His way to comment on the strength of this affection. And it is
not hard to understand. The baby represented everything sacred to his
father's heart: the promises of God, the covenants, the hopes of the
years and the long messianic dream. As he watched him grow from babyhood
to young manhood the heart of the old man was knit closer and closer
with the life of his son, till at last the relationship bordered upon
the perilous. It was then that God stepped in to save both father and
son from the consequences of an uncleansed love.
"Take now thy son," said God to Abraham, "thine only son Isaac, whom
thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there
for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee
of." The sacred writer spares us a close-up of the agony that night on
the slopes near Beersheba when the aged man had it out with his God, but
respectful imagination may view in awe the bent form and convulsive
wrestling alone under the stars. Possibly not again until a Greater than
Abraham wrestled in the Garden of Gethsemane did such mortal pain visit
a human soul. If only the man himself might have been allowed to die.
That would have been easier a thousand times, for he was old now, and to
die would have been no great ordeal for one who had walked so long with
God. Besides, it would have been a last sweet pleasure to let his
dimming vision rest upon the figure of his stalwart son who would live
to carry on the Abrahamic line and fulfill in himself the promises of
God made long before in Ur of the Chaldees.
How should he slay the lad! Even if he could get the consent of his
wounded and protesting heart, how could he reconcile the act with the
promise, "In Isaac shall thy seed be called"? This was Abraham's trial
by fire, and he did not fail in the crucible. While the stars still
shone like sharp white points above the tent where the sleeping Isaac
lay, and long before the gray dawn had begun to lighten the east, the
old saint had made up his mind. He would offer his son as God had
directed him to do, and _then trust God to raise him from the dead_.
This, says the writer to the Hebrews, was the solution his aching heart
found sometime in the dark night, and he rose "early in the morning" to
carry out the plan. It is beautiful to see that, while he erred as to
God's method, he had correctly sensed the secret of His great heart. And
the solution accords well with the New Testament Scripture, "Whosoever
will lose for my sake shall find."
God let the suffering old man go through with it up to the point where
He knew there would be no retreat, and then forbade him to lay a hand
upon the boy. To the wondering patriarch He now says in effect, "It's
all right, Abraham. I never intended that you should actually slay the
lad. I only wanted to remove him from the temple of your heart that I
might reign unchallenged there. I wanted to correct the perversion that
existed in your love. Now you may have the boy, sound and well. Take him
and go back to your tent. Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that
thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from me."
Then heaven opened and a voice was heard saying to him, "By myself have
I sworn, saith the Lord, for because thou hast done this thing, and hast
not withheld thy son, thine only son: that in blessing I will bless
thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the
heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall
possess the gate of his enemies; and in thy seed shall all the nations
of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice."
The old man of God lifted his head to respond to the Voice, and stood
there on the mount strong and pure and grand, a man marked out by the
Lord for special treatment, a friend and favorite of the Most High. Now
he was a man wholly surrendered, a man utterly obedient, a man who
possessed nothing. He had concentrated his all in the person of his dear
son, and God had taken it from him. God could have begun out on the
margin of Abraham's life and worked inward to the center; He chose
rather to cut quickly to the heart and have it over in one sharp act of
separation. In dealing thus He practiced an economy of means and time.
It hurt cruelly, but it was effective.
I have said that Abraham possessed nothing. Yet was not this poor man
rich? Everything he had owned before was his still to enjoy: sheep,
camels, herds, and goods of every sort. He had also his wife and his
friends, and best of all he had his son Isaac safe by his side. He had
everything, but _he possessed nothing_. There is the spiritual secret.
There is the sweet theology of the heart which can be learned only in
the school of renunciation. The books on systematic theology overlook
this, but the wise will understand.
After that bitter and blessed experience I think the words "my" and
"mine" never had again the same meaning for Abraham. The sense of
possession which they connote was gone from his heart. _Things_ had been
cast out forever. They had now become external to the man. His inner
heart was free from them. The world said, "Abraham is rich," but the
aged patriarch only smiled. He could not explain it to them, but he knew
that he owned nothing, that his real treasures were inward and eternal.
There can be no doubt that this possessive clinging to things is one of
the most harmful habits in the life. Because it is so natural it is
rarely recognized for the evil that it is; but its outworkings are
tragic.
We are often hindered from giving up our treasures to the Lord out of
fear for their safety; this is especially true when those treasures are
loved relatives and friends. But we need have no such fears. Our Lord
came not to destroy but to save. Everything is safe which we commit to
Him, and nothing is really safe which is not so committed.
Our gifts and talents should also be turned over to Him. They should be
recognized for what they are, God's loan to us, and should never be
considered in any sense our own. We have no more right to claim credit
for special abilities than for blue eyes or strong muscles. "For who
maketh thee to differ from another? and what hast thou that thou didst
not receive?"
The Christian who is alive enough to know himself even slightly will
recognize the symptoms of this possession malady, and will grieve to
find them in his own heart. If the longing after God is strong enough
within him he will want to do something about the matter. Now, what
should he do?
First of all he should put away all defense and make no attempt to
excuse himself either in his own eyes or before the Lord. Whoever
defends himself will have himself for his defense, and he will have no
other; but let him come defenseless before the Lord and he will have for
his defender no less than God Himself. Let the inquiring Christian
trample under foot every slippery trick of his deceitful heart and
insist upon frank and open relations with the Lord.
Then he should remember that this is holy business. No careless or
casual dealings will suffice. Let him come to God in full determination
to be heard. Let him insist that God accept his all, that He take
_things_ out of his heart and Himself reign there in power. It may be he
will need to become specific, to name things and people by their names
one by one. If he will become drastic enough he can shorten the time of
his travail from years to minutes and enter the good land long before
his slower brethren who coddle their feelings and insist upon caution in
their dealings with God.
Let us never forget that such a truth as this cannot be learned by rote
as one would learn the facts of physical science. They must be
_experienced_ before we can really know them. We must in our hearts live
through Abraham's harsh and bitter experiences if we would know the
blessedness which follows them. The ancient curse will not go out
painlessly; the tough old miser within us will not lie down and die
obedient to our command. He must be torn out of our heart like a plant
from the soil; he must be extracted in agony and blood like a tooth from
the jaw. He must be expelled from our soul by violence as Christ
expelled the money changers from the temple. And we shall need to steel
ourselves against his piteous begging, and to recognize it as springing
out of self-pity, one of the most reprehensible sins of the human heart.
If we would indeed know God in growing intimacy we must go this way of
renunciation. And if we are set upon the pursuit of God He will sooner
or later bring us to this test. Abraham's testing was, at the time, not
known to him as such, yet if he had taken some course other than the one
he did, the whole history of the Old Testament would have been
different. God would have found His man, no doubt, but the loss to
Abraham would have been tragic beyond the telling. So we will be brought
one by one to the testing place, and we may never know when we are
there. At that testing place there will be no dozen possible choices
for us; just one and an alternative, but our whole future will be
conditioned by the choice we make.
_Father, I want to know Thee, but my coward heart fears to give up its
toys. I cannot part with them without inward bleeding, and I do not try
to hide from Thee the terror of the parting. I come trembling, but I do
come. Please root from my heart all those things which I have cherished
so long and which have become a very part of my living self, so that
Thou mayest enter and dwell there without a rival. Then shalt Thou make
the place of Thy feet glorious. Then shall my heart have no need of the
sun to shine in it, for Thyself wilt be the light of it, and there shall
be no night there. In Jesus' Name, Amen._
III
_Removing the Veil_
Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by
the blood of Jesus.--Heb. 10:19
Among the famous sayings of the Church fathers none is better known than
Augustine's, "Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are
restless till they find rest in Thee."
The great saint states here in few words the origin and interior history
of the human race. God made us for Himself: that is the only explanation
that satisfies the _heart_ of a thinking man, whatever his wild reason
may say. Should faulty education and perverse reasoning lead a man to
conclude otherwise, there is little that any Christian can do for him.
For such a man I have no message. My appeal is addressed to those who
have been previously taught in secret by the wisdom of God; I speak to
thirsty hearts whose longings have been wakened by the touch of God
within them, and such as they need no reasoned proof. Their restless
hearts furnish all the proof they need.
God formed us for Himself. The _Shorter Catechism_, "Agreed upon by the
Reverend Assembly of Divines at Westminster," as the old _New-England
Primer_ has it, asks the ancient questions _what_ and _why_ and answers
them in one short sentence hardly matched in any uninspired work.
"_Question_: What is the chief End of Man? _Answer_: Man's chief End is
to glorify God and enjoy Him forever." With this agree the four and
twenty elders who fall on their faces to worship Him that liveth for
ever and ever, saying, "Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and
honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure
they are and were created."
God formed us for His pleasure, and so formed us that we as well as He
can in divine communion enjoy the sweet and mysterious mingling of
kindred personalities. He meant us to see Him and live with Him and draw
our life from His smile. But we have been guilty of that "foul revolt"
of which Milton speaks when describing the rebellion of Satan and his
hosts. We have broken with God. We have ceased to obey Him or love Him
and in guilt and fear have fled as far as possible from His Presence.
Yet who can flee from His Presence when the heaven and the heaven of
heavens cannot contain Him? when as the wisdom of Solomon testifies,
"the Spirit of the Lord filleth the world?" The omnipresence of the Lord
is one thing, and is a solemn fact necessary to His perfection; the
_manifest_ Presence is another thing altogether, and from that Presence
we have fled, like Adam, to hide among the trees of the garden, or like
Peter to shrink away crying, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O
Lord."
So the life of man upon the earth is a life away from the Presence,
wrenched loose from that "blissful center" which is our right and proper
dwelling place, our first estate which we kept not, the loss of which is
the cause of our unceasing restlessness.
The whole work of God in redemption is to undo the tragic effects of
that foul revolt, and to bring us back again into right and eternal
relationship with Himself. This required that our sins be disposed of
satisfactorily, that a full reconciliation be effected and the way
opened for us to return again into conscious communion with God and to
live again in the Presence as before. Then by His prevenient working
within us He moves us to return. This first comes to our notice when our
restless hearts feel a yearning for the Presence of God and we say
within ourselves, "I will arise and go to my Father." That is the first
step, and as the Chinese sage Lao-tze has said, "The journey of a
thousand miles begins with a first step."
The interior journey of the soul from the wilds of sin into the enjoyed
Presence of God is beautifully illustrated in the Old Testament
tabernacle. The returning sinner first entered the outer court where he
offered a blood sacrifice on the brazen altar and washed himself in the
laver that stood near it. Then through a veil he passed into the holy
place where no natural light could come, but the golden candlestick
which spoke of Jesus the Light of the World threw its soft glow over
all. There also was the shewbread to tell of Jesus, the Bread of Life,
and the altar of incense, a figure of unceasing prayer.
Though the worshipper had enjoyed so much, still he had not yet entered
the Presence of God. Another veil separated from the Holy of Holies
where above the mercy seat dwelt the very God Himself in awful and
glorious manifestation. While the tabernacle stood, only the high priest
could enter there, and that but once a year, with blood which he offered
for his sins and the sins of the people. It was this last veil which was
rent when our Lord gave up the ghost on Calvary, and the sacred writer
explains that this rending of the veil opened the way for every
worshipper in the world to come by the new and living way straight into
the divine Presence.
Everything in the New Testament accords with this Old Testament picture.
Ransomed men need no longer pause in fear to enter the Holy of Holies.
_God wills that we should push on into His Presence and live our whole
life there._ This is to be known to us in conscious experience. It is
more than a doctrine to be held, it is a life to be enjoyed every moment
of every day.
This Flame of the Presence was the beating heart of the Levitical order.
Without it all the appointments of the tabernacle were characters of
some unknown language; they had no meaning for Israel or for us. The
greatest fact of the tabernacle was that _Jehovah was there_; a Presence
was waiting within the veil. Similarly the Presence of God is the
central fact of Christianity. At the heart of the Christian message is
God Himself waiting for His redeemed children to push in to conscious
awareness of His Presence. That type of Christianity which happens now
to be the vogue knows this Presence only in theory. It fails to stress
the Christian's privilege of present realization. According to its
teachings we are in the Presence of God positionally, and nothing is
said about the need to experience that Presence actually. The fiery urge
that drove men like McCheyne is wholly missing. And the present
generation of Christians measures itself by this imperfect rule. Ignoble
contentment takes the place of burning zeal. We are satisfied to rest in
our _judicial_ possessions and for the most part we bother ourselves
very little about the absence of personal experience.
Who is this within the veil who dwells in fiery manifestations? It is
none other than God Himself, "One God the Father Almighty, Maker of
heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible," and "One
Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God; begotten of His Father
before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God;
begotten, not made; being of one substance with the Father," and "the
Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life, Who proceedeth from the Father
and the Son, Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and
glorified." Yet this holy Trinity is One God, for "we worship one God in
Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; neither confounding the Persons, nor
dividing the Substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another
of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the
Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one: the glory equal
and the majesty co-eternal." So in part run the ancient creeds, and so
the inspired Word declares.
Behind the veil is God, that God after Whom the world, with strange
inconsistency, has felt, "if haply they might find Him." He has
discovered Himself to some extent in nature, but more perfectly in the
Incarnation; now He waits to show Himself in ravishing fulness to the
humble of soul and the pure in heart.
The world is perishing for lack of the knowledge of God and the Church
is famishing for want of His Presence. The instant cure of most of our
religious ills would be to enter the Presence in spiritual experience,
to become suddenly aware that we are in God and that God is in us. This
would lift us out of our pitiful narrowness and cause our hearts to be
enlarged. This would burn away the impurities from our lives as the bugs
and fungi were burned away by the fire that dwelt in the bush.
What a broad world to roam in, what a sea to swim in is this God and
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He is _eternal_, which means that He
antedates time and is wholly independent of it. Time began in Him and
will end in Him. To it He pays no tribute and from it He suffers no
change. He is _immutable_, which means that He has never changed and can
never change in any smallest measure. To change He would need to go from
better to worse or from worse to better. He cannot do either, for being
perfect He cannot become more perfect, and if He were to become less
perfect He would be less than God. He is _omniscient_, which means that
He knows in one free and effortless act all matter, all spirit, all
relationships, all events. He has no past and He has no future. He _is_,
and none of the limiting and qualifying terms used of creatures can
apply to Him. _Love_ and _mercy_ and _righteousness_ are His, and
_holiness_ so ineffable that no comparisons or figures will avail to
express it. Only fire can give even a remote conception of it. In fire
He appeared at the burning bush; in the pillar of fire He dwelt through
all the long wilderness journey. The fire that glowed between the wings
of the cherubim in the holy place was called the "shekinah," the
Presence, through the years of Israel's glory, and when the Old had
given place to the New, He came at Pentecost as a fiery flame and rested
upon each disciple.
Spinoza wrote of the intellectual love of God, and he had a measure of
truth there; but the highest love of God is not intellectual, it is
spiritual. God is spirit and only the spirit of man can know Him really.
In the deep spirit of a man the fire must glow or his love is not the
true love of God. The great of the Kingdom have been those who loved God
more than others did. We all know who they have been and gladly pay
tribute to the depths and sincerity of their devotion. We have but to
pause for a moment and their names come trooping past us smelling of
myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory palaces.
Frederick Faber was one whose soul panted after God as the roe pants
after the water brook, and the measure in which God revealed Himself to
his seeking heart set the good man's whole life afire with a burning
adoration rivaling that of the seraphim before the throne. His love for
God extended to the three Persons of the Godhead equally, yet he seemed
to feel for each One a special kind of love reserved for Him alone. Of
God the Father he sings:
Only to sit and think of God,
Oh what a joy it is!
To think the thought, to breathe the Name;
Earth has no higher bliss.
Father of Jesus, love's reward!
What rapture will it be,
Prostrate before Thy throne to lie,
And gaze and gaze on Thee!
His love for the Person of Christ was so intense that it threatened to
consume him; it burned within him as a sweet and holy madness and flowed
from his lips like molten gold. In one of his sermons he says, "Wherever
we turn in the church of God, there is Jesus. He is the beginning,
middle and end of everything to us.... There is nothing good, nothing
holy, nothing beautiful, nothing joyous which He is not to His servants.
No one need be poor, because, if he chooses, he can have Jesus for his
own property and possession. No one need be downcast, for Jesus is the
joy of heaven, and it is His joy to enter into sorrowful hearts. We can
exaggerate about many things; but we can never exaggerate our obligation
to Jesus, or the compassionate abundance of the love of Jesus to us. All
our lives long we might talk of Jesus, and yet we should never come to
an end of the sweet things that might be said of Him. Eternity will not
be long enough to learn all He is, or to praise Him for all He has done,
but then, that matters not; for we shall be always with Him, and we
desire nothing more." And addressing our Lord directly he says to Him:
I love Thee so, I know not how
My transports to control;
Thy love is like a burning fire
Within my very soul.
Faber's blazing love extended also to the Holy Spirit. Not only in his
theology did he acknowledge His deity and full equality with the Father
and the Son, but he celebrated it constantly in his songs and in his
prayers. He literally pressed his forehead to the ground in his eager
fervid worship of the Third Person of the Godhead. In one of his great
hymns to the Holy Spirit he sums up his burning devotion thus:
O Spirit, beautiful and dread!
My heart is fit to break
With love of all Thy tenderness
For us poor sinners' sake.
I have risked the tedium of quotation that I might show by pointed
example what I have set out to say, viz., that God is so vastly
wonderful, so utterly and completely delightful that He can, without
anything other than Himself, meet and overflow the deepest demands of
our total nature, mysterious and deep as that nature is. Such worship as
Faber knew (and he is but one of a great company which no man can
number) can never come from a mere doctrinal knowledge of God. Hearts
that are "fit to break" with love for the Godhead are those who have
been in the Presence and have looked with opened eye upon the majesty
of Deity. Men of the breaking hearts had a quality about them not known
to or understood by common men. They habitually spoke with spiritual
authority. They had been in the Presence of God and they reported what
they saw there. They were prophets, not scribes, for the scribe tells us
what he has read, and the prophet tells what he has seen.
The distinction is not an imaginary one. Between the scribe who has read
and the prophet who has seen there is a difference as wide as the sea.
We are today overrun with orthodox scribes, but the prophets, where are
they? The hard voice of the scribe sounds over evangelicalism, but the
Church waits for the tender voice of the saint who has penetrated the
veil and has gazed with inward eye upon the Wonder that is God. And yet,
thus to penetrate, to push in sensitive living experience into the holy
Presence, is a privilege open to every child of God.
With the veil removed by the rending of Jesus' flesh, with nothing on
God's side to prevent us from entering, why do we tarry without? Why do
we consent to abide all our days just outside the Holy of Holies and
never enter at all to look upon God? We hear the Bridegroom say, "Let me
see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice and
thy countenance is comely." We sense that the call is for us, but still
we fail to draw near, and the years pass and we grow old and tired in
the outer courts of the tabernacle. What doth hinder us?
The answer usually given, simply that we are "cold," will not explain
all the facts. There is something more serious than coldness of heart,
something that may be back of that coldness and be the cause of its
existence. What is it? What but the presence of _a veil in our hearts_?
a veil not taken away as the first veil was, but which remains there
still shutting out the light and hiding the face of God from us. It is
the veil of our fleshly fallen nature living on, unjudged within us,
uncrucified and unrepudiated. It is the close-woven veil of the
self-life which we have never truly acknowledged, of which we have been
secretly ashamed, and which for these reasons we have never brought to
the judgment of the cross. It is not too mysterious, this opaque veil,
nor is it hard to identify. We have but to look in our own hearts and we
shall see it there, sewn and patched and repaired it may be, but there
nevertheless, an enemy to our lives and an effective block to our
spiritual progress.
This veil is not a beautiful thing and it is not a thing about which we
commonly care to talk, but I am addressing the thirsting souls who are
determined to follow God, and I know they will not turn back because the
way leads temporarily through the blackened hills. The urge of God
within them will assure their continuing the pursuit. They will face the
facts however unpleasant and endure the cross for the joy set before
them. So I am bold to name the threads out of which this inner veil is
woven.
It is woven of the fine threads of the self-life, the hyphenated sins of
the human spirit. They are not something we do, they are something we
_are_, and therein lies both their subtlety and their power.
To be specific, the self-sins are these: self-righteousness, self-pity,
self-confidence, self-sufficiency, self-admiration, self-love and a host
of others like them. They dwell too deep within us and are too much a
part of our natures to come to our attention till the light of God is
focused upon them. The grosser manifestations of these sins, egotism,
exhibitionism, self-promotion, are strangely tolerated in Christian
leaders even in circles of impeccable orthodoxy. They are so much in
evidence as actually, for many people, to become identified with the
gospel. I trust it is not a cynical observation to say that they appear
these days to be a requisite for popularity in some sections of the
Church visible. Promoting self under the guise of promoting Christ is
currently so common as to excite little notice.
One should suppose that proper instruction in the doctrines of man's
depravity and the necessity for justification through the righteousness
of Christ alone would deliver us from the power of the self-sins; but it
does not work out that way. Self can live unrebuked at the very altar.
It can watch the bleeding Victim die and not be in the least affected by
what it sees. It can fight for the faith of the Reformers and preach
eloquently the creed of salvation by grace, and gain strength by its
efforts. To tell all the truth, it seems actually to feed upon orthodoxy
and is more at home in a Bible Conference than in a tavern. Our very
state of longing after God may afford it an excellent condition under
which to thrive and grow.
Self is the opaque veil that hides the Face of God from us. It can be
removed only in spiritual experience, never by mere instruction. As well
try to instruct leprosy out of our system. There must be a work of God
in destruction before we are free. We must invite the cross to do its
deadly work within us. We must bring our self-sins to the cross for
judgment. We must prepare ourselves for an ordeal of suffering in some
measure like that through which our Saviour passed when He suffered
under Pontius Pilate.
Let us remember: when we talk of the rending of the veil we are speaking
in a figure, and the thought of it is poetical, almost pleasant; but in
actuality there is nothing pleasant about it. In human experience that
veil is made of living spiritual tissue; it is composed of the sentient,
quivering stuff of which our whole beings consist, and to touch it is to
touch us where we feel pain. To tear it away is to injure us, to hurt us
and make us bleed. To say otherwise is to make the cross no cross and
death no death at all. It is never fun to die. To rip through the dear
and tender stuff of which life is made can never be anything but deeply
painful. Yet that is what the cross did to Jesus and it is what the
cross would do to every man to set him free.
Let us beware of tinkering with our inner life in hope ourselves to rend
the veil. God must do everything for us. Our part is to yield and trust.
We must confess, forsake, repudiate the self-life, and then reckon it
crucified. But we must be careful to distinguish lazy "acceptance" from
the real work of God. We must insist upon the work being done. We dare
not rest content with a neat doctrine of self-crucifixion. That is to
imitate Saul and spare the best of the sheep and the oxen.
Insist that the work be done in very truth and it will be done. The
cross is rough, and it is deadly, but it is effective. It does not keep
its victim hanging there forever. There comes a moment when its work is
finished and the suffering victim dies. After that is resurrection glory
and power, and the pain is forgotten for joy that the veil is taken away
and we have entered in actual spiritual experience the Presence of the
living God.
_Lord, how excellent are Thy ways, and how devious and dark are the ways
of man. Show us how to die, that we may rise again to newness of life.
Rend the veil of our self-life from the top down as Thou didst rend the
veil of the Temple. We would draw near in full assurance of faith. We
would dwell with Thee in daily experience here on this earth so that we
may be accustomed to the glory when we enter Thy heaven to dwell with
Thee there. In Jesus' name, Amen._
IV
_Apprehending God_
O taste and see.--Psa. 34:8
It was Canon Holmes, of India, who more than twenty-five years ago
called attention to the inferential character of the average man's faith
in God. To most people God is an inference, not a reality. He is a
deduction from evidence which they consider adequate; but He remains
personally unknown to the individual. "He _must_ be," they say,
"therefore we believe He is." Others do not go even so far as this; they
know of Him only by hearsay. They have never bothered to think the
matter out for themselves, but have heard about Him from others, and
have put belief in Him into the back of their minds along with the
various odds and ends that make up their total creed. To many others God
is but an ideal, another name for goodness, or beauty, or truth; or He
is law, or life, or the creative impulse back of the phenomena of
existence.
These notions about God are many and varied, but they who hold them have
one thing in common: they do not know God in personal experience. The
possibility of intimate acquaintance with Him has not entered their
minds. While admitting His existence they do not think of Him as
knowable in the sense that we know things or people.
Christians, to be sure, go further than this, at least in theory. Their
creed requires them to believe in the personality of God, and they have
been taught to pray, "Our Father, which art in heaven." Now personality
and fatherhood carry with them the idea of the possibility of personal
acquaintance. This is admitted, I say, in theory, but for millions of
Christians, nevertheless, God is no more real than He is to the
non-Christian. They go through life trying to love an ideal and be loyal
to a mere principle.
Over against all this cloudy vagueness stands the clear scriptural
doctrine that God can be known in personal experience. A loving
Personality dominates the Bible, walking among the trees of the garden
and breathing fragrance over every scene. Always a living Person is
present, speaking, pleading, loving, working, and manifesting Himself
whenever and wherever His people have the receptivity necessary to
receive the manifestation.
The Bible assumes as a self-evident fact that men can know God with at
least the same degree of immediacy as they know any other person or
thing that comes within the field of their experience. The same terms
are used to express the knowledge of God as are used to express
knowledge of physical things. "O _taste_ and see that the Lord is good."
"All thy garments _smell_ of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the
ivory palaces." "My sheep _hear_ my voice." "Blessed are the pure in
heart, for they shall _see_ God." These are but four of countless such
passages from the Word of God. And more important than any proof text is
the fact that the whole import of the Scripture is toward this belief.
What can all this mean except that we have in our hearts organs by means
of which we can know God as certainly as we know material things through
our familiar five senses? We apprehend the physical world by exercising
the faculties given us for the purpose, and we possess spiritual
faculties by means of which we can know God and the spiritual world if
we will obey the Spirit's urge and begin to use them.
That a saving work must first be done in the heart is taken for granted
here. The spiritual faculties of the unregenerate man lie asleep in his
nature, unused and for every purpose dead; that is the stroke which has
fallen upon us by sin. They may be quickened to active life again by the
operation of the Holy Spirit in regeneration; that is one of the
immeasurable benefits which come to us through Christ's atoning work on
the cross.
But the very ransomed children of God themselves: why do they know so
little of that habitual conscious communion with God which the
Scriptures seem to offer? The answer is our chronic unbelief. Faith
enables our spiritual sense to function. Where faith is defective the
result will be inward insensibility and numbness toward spiritual
things. This is the condition of vast numbers of Christians today. No
proof is necessary to support that statement. We have but to converse
with the first Christian we meet or enter the first church we find open
to acquire all the proof we need.
A spiritual kingdom lies all about us, enclosing us, embracing us,
altogether within reach of our inner selves, waiting for us to recognize
it. God Himself is here waiting our response to His Presence. This
eternal world will come alive to us the moment we begin to reckon upon
its reality.
I have just now used two words which demand definition; or if definition
is impossible, I must at least make clear what I mean when I use them.
They are "reckon" and "reality."
What do I mean by _reality_? I mean that which has existence apart from
any idea any mind may have of it, and which would exist if there were no
mind anywhere to entertain a thought of it. That which is real has being
in itself. It does not depend upon the observer for its validity.
I am aware that there are those who love to poke fun at the plain man's
idea of reality. They are the idealists who spin endless proofs that
nothing is real outside of the mind. They are the relativists who like
to show that there are no fixed points in the universe from which we can
measure anything. They smile down upon us from their lofty intellectual
peaks and settle us to their own satisfaction by fastening upon us the
reproachful term "absolutist." The Christian is not put out of
countenance by this show of contempt. He can smile right back at them,
for he knows that there is only One who is Absolute, that is God. But he
knows also that the Absolute One has made this world for man's uses,
and, while there is nothing fixed or real in the last meaning of the
words (the meaning as applied to God) _for every purpose of human life
we are permitted to act as if there were_. And every man does act thus
except the mentally sick. These unfortunates also have trouble with
reality, but they are consistent; they insist upon living in accordance
with their ideas of things. They are honest, and it is their very
honesty that constitutes them a social problem.
The idealists and relativists are not mentally sick. They prove their
soundness by living their lives according to the very notions of reality
which they in theory repudiate and by counting upon the very fixed
points which they prove are not there. They could earn a lot more
respect for their notions if they were willing to live by them; but
this they are careful not to do. Their ideas are brain-deep, not
life-deep. Wherever life touches them they repudiate their theories and
live like other men.
The Christian is too sincere to play with ideas for their own sake. He
takes no pleasure in the mere spinning of gossamer webs for display. All
his beliefs are practical. They are geared into his life. By them he
lives or dies, stands or falls for this world and for all time to come.
From the insincere man he turns away.
The sincere plain man knows that the world is real. He finds it here
when he wakes to consciousness, and he knows that he did not think it
into being. It was here waiting for him when he came, and he knows that
when he prepares to leave this earthly scene it will be here still to
bid him good-bye as he departs. By the deep wisdom of life he is wiser
than a thousand men who doubt. He stands upon the earth and feels the
wind and rain in his face and he knows that they are real. He sees the
sun by day and the stars by night. He sees the hot lightning play out of
the dark thundercloud. He hears the sounds of nature and the cries of
human joy and pain. These he knows are real. He lies down on the cool
earth at night and has no fear that it will prove illusory or fail him
while he sleeps. In the morning the firm ground will be under him, the
blue sky above him and the rocks and trees around him as when he closed
his eyes the night before. So he lives and rejoices in a world of
reality.
With his five senses he engages this real world. All things necessary to
his physical existence he apprehends by the faculties with which he has
been equipped by the God who created him and placed him in such a world
as this.
Now, by our definition also God is real. He is real in the absolute and
final sense that nothing else is. All other reality is contingent upon
His. The great Reality is God who is the Author of that lower and
dependent reality which makes up the sum of created things, including
ourselves. God has objective existence independent of and apart from any
notions which we may have concerning Him. The worshipping heart does not
create its Object. It finds Him here when it wakes from its moral
slumber in the morning of its regeneration.
Another word that must be cleared up is the word _reckon_. This does not
mean to visualize or imagine. Imagination is not faith. The two are not
only different from, but stand in sharp opposition to, each other.
Imagination projects unreal images out of the mind and seeks to attach
reality to them. Faith creates nothing; it simply reckons upon that
which is already _there_.
God and the spiritual world are real. We can reckon upon them with as
much assurance as we reckon upon the familiar world around us.
Spiritual things are there (or rather we should say _here_) inviting
our attention and challenging our trust.
Our trouble is that we have established bad thought habits. We
habitually think of the visible world as real and doubt the reality of
any other. We do not deny the existence of the spiritual world but we
doubt that it is real in the accepted meaning of the word.
The world of sense intrudes upon our attention day and night for the
whole of our lifetime. It is clamorous, insistent and
self-demonstrating. It does not appeal to our faith; it is here,
assaulting our five senses, demanding to be accepted as real and final.
But sin has so clouded the lenses of our hearts that we cannot see that
other reality, the City of God, shining around us. The world of sense
triumphs. The visible becomes the enemy of the invisible; the temporal,
of the eternal. That is the curse inherited by every member of Adam's
tragic race.
At the root of the Christian life lies belief in the invisible. The
object of the Christian's faith is unseen reality.
Our uncorrected thinking, influenced by the blindness of our natural
hearts and the intrusive ubiquity of visible things, tends to draw a
contrast between the spiritual and the real; but actually no such
contrast exists. The antithesis lies elsewhere: between the real and the
imaginary, between the spiritual and the material, between the temporal
and the eternal; but between the spiritual and the real, never. The
spiritual _is_ real.
If we would rise into that region of light and power plainly beckoning
us through the Scriptures of truth we must break the evil habit of
ignoring the spiritual. We must shift our interest from the seen to the
unseen. For the great unseen Reality is God. "He that cometh to God must
believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently
seek him." This is basic in the life of faith. From there we can rise to
unlimited heights. "Ye believe in God," said our Lord Jesus Christ,
"believe also in me." Without the first there can be no second.
If we truly want to follow God we must seek to be other-worldly. This I
say knowing well that that word has been used with scorn by the sons of
this world and applied to the Christian as a badge of reproach. So be
it. Every man must choose his world. If we who follow Christ, with all
the facts before us and knowing what we are about, deliberately choose
the Kingdom of God as our sphere of interest I see no reason why anyone
should object. If we lose by it, the loss is our own; if we gain, we rob
no one by so doing. The "other world," which is the object of this
world's disdain and the subject of the drunkard's mocking song, is our
carefully chosen goal and the object of our holiest longing.
But we must avoid the common fault of pushing the "other world" into the
future. It is not future, but present. It parallels our familiar
physical world, and the doors between the two worlds are open. "Ye are
come," says the writer to the Hebrews (and the tense is plainly
present), "unto Mount Zion, and unto the city of the living God, the
heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the
general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in
heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made
perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood
of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel." All these
things are contrasted with "the mount that might be touched" and "the
sound of a trumpet and the voice of words" that might be heard. May we
not safely conclude that, as the realities of Mount Sinai were
apprehended by the senses, so the realities of Mount Zion are to be
grasped by the soul? And this not by any trick of the imagination, but
in downright actuality. The soul has eyes with which to see and ears
with which to hear. Feeble they may be from long disuse, but by the
life-giving touch of Christ alive now and capable of sharpest sight and
most sensitive hearing.
As we begin to focus upon God the things of the spirit will take shape
before our inner eyes. Obedience to the word of Christ will bring an
inward revelation of the Godhead (John 14:21-23). It will give acute
perception enabling us to see God even as is promised to the pure in
heart. A new God consciousness will seize upon us and we shall begin to
taste and hear and inwardly feel the God who is our life and our all.
There will be seen the constant shining of the light that lighteth every
man that cometh into the world. More and more, as our faculties grow
sharper and more sure, God will become to us the great All, and His
Presence the glory and wonder of our lives.
_O God, quicken to life every power within me, that I may lay hold on
eternal things. Open my eyes that I may see; give me acute spiritual
perception; enable me to taste Thee and know that Thou art good. Make
heaven more real to me than any earthly thing has ever been. Amen._
V
_The Universal Presence_
Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from
thy presence?--Psa. 139:7
In all Christian teaching certain basic truths are found, hidden at
times, and rather assumed than asserted, but necessary to all truth as
the primary colors are found in and necessary to the finished painting.
Such a truth is the divine immanence.
God dwells in His creation and is everywhere indivisibly present in all
His works. This is boldly taught by prophet and apostle and is accepted
by Christian theology generally. That is, it appears in the books, but
for some reason it has not sunk into the average Christian's heart so as
to become a part of his believing self. Christian teachers shy away from
its full implications, and, if they mention it at all, mute it down till
it has little meaning. I would guess the reason for this to be the fear
of being charged with pantheism; but the doctrine of the divine Presence
is definitely not pantheism.
Pantheism's error is too palpable to deceive anyone. It is that God is
the sum of all created things. Nature and God are one, so that whoever
touches a leaf or a stone touches God. That is of course to degrade the
glory of the incorruptible Deity and, in an effort to make all things
divine, banish all divinity from the world entirely.
The truth is that while God dwells in His world He is separated from it
by a gulf forever impassable. However closely He may be identified with
the work of His hands _they_ are and must eternally be _other than He_,
and He is and must be antecedent to and independent of them. He is
transcendent above all His works even while He is immanent within them.
What now does the divine immanence mean in direct Christian experience?
It means simply that _God is here_. Wherever we are, God is here. There
is no place, there can be no place, where He is not. Ten million
intelligences standing at as many points in space and separated by
incomprehensible distances can each one say with equal truth, God is
here. No point is nearer to God than any other point. It is exactly as
near to God from any place as it is from any other place. No one is in
mere distance any further from or any nearer to God than any other
person is.
These are truths believed by every instructed Christian. It remains for
us to think on them and pray over them until they begin to glow within
us.
"In the beginning God." Not _matter_, for matter is not self-causing. It
requires an antecedent cause, and God is that Cause. Not _law_, for law
is but a name for the course which all creation follows. That course had
to be planned, and the Planner is God. Not _mind_, for mind also is a
created thing and must have a Creator back of it. In the beginning God,
the uncaused Cause of matter, mind and law. There we must begin.
Adam sinned and, in his panic, frantically tried to do the impossible:
he tried to hide from the Presence of God. David also must have had wild
thoughts of trying to escape from the Presence, for he wrote, "Whither
shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?"
Then he proceeded through one of his most beautiful psalms to celebrate
the glory of the divine immanence. "If I ascend up into heaven, thou art
there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the
wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even
there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me." And he
knew that God's _being_ and God's _seeing_ are the same, that the seeing
Presence had been with him even before he was born, watching the mystery
of unfolding life. Solomon exclaimed, "But will God indeed dwell on the
earth? behold the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee:
how much less this house which I have builded." Paul assured the
Athenians that "God is not far from any one of us: for in him we live,
and move, and have our being."
If God is present at every point in space, if we cannot go where He is
not, cannot even conceive of a place where He is not, why then has not
that Presence become the one universally celebrated fact of the world?
The patriarch Jacob, "in the waste howling wilderness," gave the answer
to that question. He saw a vision of God and cried out in wonder,
"Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not." Jacob had never
been for one small division of a moment outside the circle of that
all-pervading Presence. But he knew it not. That was his trouble, and it
is ours. Men do not know that God is here. What a difference it would
make if they knew.
The Presence and the manifestation of the Presence are not the same.
There can be the one without the other. God is here when we are wholly
unaware of it. He is _manifest_ only when and as we are aware of His
Presence. On our part there must be surrender to the Spirit of God, for
His work it is to show us the Father and the Son. If we co-operate with
Him in loving obedience God will manifest Himself to us, and that
manifestation will be the difference between a nominal Christian life
and a life radiant with the light of His face.
Always, everywhere God is present, and always He seeks to discover
Himself. To each one he would reveal not only that He is, but _what_ He
is as well. He did not have to be persuaded to discover Himself to
Moses. "And the Lord descended in the cloud, and stood with him there,
and proclaimed the name of the Lord." He not only made a verbal
proclamation of His nature but He revealed His very Self to Moses so
that the skin of Moses' face shone with the supernatural light. It will
be a great moment for some of us when we begin to believe that God's
promise of self-revelation is literally true: that He promised much, but
promised no more than He intends to fulfill.
Our pursuit of God is successful just because He is forever seeking to
manifest Himself to us. The revelation of God to any man is not God
coming from a distance upon a time to pay a brief and momentous visit to
the man's soul. Thus to think of it is to misunderstand it all. The
approach of God to the soul or of the soul to God is not to be thought
of in spatial terms at all. There is no idea of physical distance
involved in the concept. It is not a matter of miles but of experience.
To speak of being near to or far from God is to use language in a sense
always understood when applied to our ordinary human relationships. A
man may say, "I feel that my son is coming nearer to me as he gets
older," and yet that son has lived by his father's side since he was
born and has never been away from home more than a day or so in his
entire life. What then can the father mean? Obviously he is speaking of
_experience_. He means that the boy is coming to know him more
intimately and with deeper understanding, that the barriers of thought
and feeling between the two are disappearing, that father and son are
becoming more closely united in mind and heart.
So when we sing, "Draw me nearer, nearer, blessed Lord," we are not
thinking of the nearness of place, but of the nearness of relationship.
It is for increasing degrees of awareness that we pray, for a more
perfect consciousness of the divine Presence. We need never shout across
the spaces to an absent God. He is nearer than our own soul, closer than
our most secret thoughts.
Why do some persons "find" God in a way that others do not? Why does God
manifest His Presence to some and let multitudes of others struggle
along in the half-light of imperfect Christian experience? Of course the
will of God is the same for all. He has no favorites within His
household. All He has ever done for any of His children He will do for
all of His children. The difference lies not with God but with us.
Pick at random a score of great saints whose lives and testimonies are
widely known. Let them be Bible characters or well known Christians of
post-Biblical times. You will be struck instantly with the fact that
the saints were not alike. Sometimes the unlikenesses were so great as
to be positively glaring. How different for example was Moses from
Isaiah; how different was Elijah from David; how unlike each other were
John and Paul, St. Francis and Luther, Finney and Thomas à Kempis. The
differences are as wide as human life itself: differences of race,
nationality, education, temperament, habit and personal qualities. Yet
they all walked, each in his day, upon a high road of spiritual living
far above the common way.
Their differences must have been incidental and in the eyes of God of no
significance. In some vital quality they must have been alike. What was
it?
I venture to suggest that the one vital quality which they had in common
was _spiritual receptivity_. Something in them was open to heaven,
something which urged them Godward. Without attempting anything like a
profound analysis I shall say simply that they had spiritual awareness
and that they went on to cultivate it until it became the biggest thing
in their lives. They differed from the average person in that when they
felt the inward longing they _did something about it_. They acquired the
lifelong habit of spiritual response. They were not disobedient to the
heavenly vision. As David put it neatly, "When thou saidst, Seek ye my
face; my heart said unto thee, Thy face, Lord, will I seek."
As with everything good in human life, back of this receptivity is God.
The sovereignty of God is here, and is felt even by those who have not
placed particular stress upon it theologically. The pious Michael Angelo
confessed this in a sonnet:
My unassisted heart is barren clay,
That of its native self can nothing feed:
Of good and pious works Thou art the seed,
That quickens only where Thou sayest it may:
Unless Thou show to us Thine own true way
No man can find it: Father! Thou must lead.
These words will repay study as the deep and serious testimony of a
great Christian.
Important as it is that we recognize God working in us, I would yet warn
against a too-great preoccupation with the thought. It is a sure road to
sterile passivity. God will not hold us responsible to understand the
mysteries of election, predestination and the divine sovereignty. The
best and safest way to deal with these truths is to raise our eyes to
God and in deepest reverence say, "O Lord, Thou knowest." Those things
belong to the deep and mysterious Profound of God's omniscience. Prying
into them may make theologians, but it will never make saints.
Receptivity is not a single thing; it is a compound rather, a blending
of several elements within the soul. It is an affinity for, a bent
toward, a sympathetic response to, a desire to have. From this it may be
gathered that it can be present in degrees, that we may have little or
more or less, depending upon the individual. It may be increased by
exercise or destroyed by neglect. It is not a sovereign and irresistible
force which comes upon us as a seizure from above. It is a gift of God,
indeed, but one which must be recognized and cultivated as any other
gift if it is to realize the purpose for which it was given.
Failure to see this is the cause of a very serious breakdown in modern
evangelicalism. The idea of cultivation and exercise, so dear to the
saints of old, has now no place in our total religious picture. It is
too slow, too common. We now demand glamour and fast flowing dramatic
action. A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and
automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of
reaching their goals. We have been trying to apply machine-age methods
to our relations with God. We read our chapter, have our short devotions
and rush away, hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by
attending another gospel meeting or listening to another thrilling story
told by a religious adventurer lately returned from afar.
The tragic results of this spirit are all about us. Shallow lives,
hollow religious philosophies, the preponderance of the element of fun
in gospel meetings, the glorification of men, trust in religious
externalities, quasi-religious fellowships, salesmanship methods, the
mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit: these and
such as these are the symptoms of an evil disease, a deep and serious
malady of the soul.
For this great sickness that is upon us no one person is responsible,
and no Christian is wholly free from blame. We have all contributed,
directly or indirectly, to this sad state of affairs. We have been too
blind to see, or too timid to speak out, or too self-satisfied to desire
anything better than the poor average diet with which others appear
satisfied. To put it differently, we have accepted one another's
notions, copied one another's lives and made one another's experiences
the model for our own. And for a generation the trend has been downward.
Now we have reached a low place of sand and burnt wire grass and, worst
of all, we have made the Word of Truth conform to our experience and
accepted this low plane as the very pasture of the blessed.
It will require a determined heart and more than a little courage to
wrench ourselves loose from the grip of our times and return to Biblical
ways. But it can be done. Every now and then in the past Christians have
had to do it. History has recorded several large-scale returns led by
such men as St. Francis, Martin Luther and George Fox. Unfortunately
there seems to be no Luther or Fox on the horizon at present. Whether or
not another such return may be expected before the coming of Christ is a
question upon which Christians are not fully agreed, but that is not of
too great importance to us now.
What God in His sovereignty may yet do on a world-scale I do not claim
to know: but what He will do for the plain man or woman who seeks His
face I believe I do know and can tell others. Let any man turn to God in
earnest, let him begin to exercise himself unto godliness, let him seek
to develop his powers of spiritual receptivity by trust and obedience
and humility, and the results will exceed anything he may have hoped in
his leaner and weaker days.
Any man who by repentance and a sincere return to God will break himself
out of the mold in which he has been held, and will go to the Bible
itself for his spiritual standards, will be delighted with what he finds
there.
Let us say it again: The Universal Presence is a fact. God is here. The
whole universe is alive with His life. And He is no strange or foreign
God, but the familiar Father of our Lord Jesus Christ whose love has for
these thousands of years enfolded the sinful race of men. And always He
is trying to get our attention, to reveal Himself to us, to communicate
with us. We have within us the ability to know Him if we will but
respond to His overtures. (And this we call pursuing God!) We will know
Him in increasing degree as our receptivity becomes more perfect by
faith and love and practice.
_O God and Father, I repent of my sinful preoccupation with visible
things. The world has been too much with me. Thou hast been here and I
knew it not. I have been blind to Thy Presence. Open my eyes that I may
behold Thee in and around me. For Christ's sake, Amen._
VI
_The Speaking Voice_
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God.--John 1:1
An intelligent plain man, untaught in the truths of Christianity, coming
upon this text, would likely conclude that John meant to teach that it
is the nature of God to speak, to communicate His thoughts to others.
And he would be right. A word is a medium by which thoughts are
expressed, and the application of term to the Eternal Son leads us to
believe that self-expression is inherent in the Godhead, that God is
forever seeking to speak Himself out to His creation. The whole Bible
supports the idea. God is speaking. Not God spoke, but _God is
speaking_. He is by His nature continuously articulate. He fills the
world with His speaking Voice.
One of the great realities with which we have to deal is the Voice of
God in His world. The briefest and only satisfying cosmogony is this:
"He spake and it was done." The _why_ of natural law is the living Voice
of God immanent in His creation. And this word of God which brought all
worlds into being cannot be understood to mean the Bible, for it is not
a written or printed word at all, but the expression of the will of God
spoken into the structure of all things. This word of God is the breath
of God filling the world with living potentiality. The Voice of God is
the most powerful force in nature, indeed the only force in nature, for
all energy is here only because the power-filled Word is being spoken.
The Bible is the written word of God, and because it is written it is
confined and limited by the necessities of ink and paper and leather.
The Voice of God, however, is alive and free as the sovereign God is
free. "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are
life." The life is in the speaking words. God's word in the Bible can
have power only because it corresponds to God's word in the universe. It
is the present Voice which makes the written Word all-powerful.
Otherwise it would lie locked in slumber within the covers of a book.
We take a low and primitive view of things when we conceive of God at
the creation coming into physical contact with things, shaping and
fitting and building like a carpenter. The Bible teaches otherwise: "By
the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by
the breath of his mouth.... For he spake, and it was done; he commanded,
and it stood fast." "Through faith we understand that the worlds were
framed by the word of God." Again we must remember that God is referring
here not to His written Word, but to His speaking Voice. His
world-filling Voice is meant, that Voice which antedates the Bible by
uncounted centuries, that Voice which has not been silent since the dawn
of creation, but is sounding still throughout the full far reaches of
the universe.
The Word of God is quick and powerful. In the beginning He spoke to
nothing, and it became _something_. Chaos heard it and became order,
darkness heard it and became light. "And God said--and it was so." These
twin phrases, as cause and effect, occur throughout the Genesis story of
the creation. The _said_ accounts for the _so_. The _so_ is the _said_
put into the continuous present.
That God is here and that He is speaking--these truths are back of all
other Bible truths; without them there could be no revelation at all.
God did not write a book and send it by messenger to be read at a
distance by unaided minds. He spoke a Book and lives in His spoken
words, constantly speaking His words and causing the power of them to
persist across the years. God breathed on clay and it became a man; He
breathes on men and they become clay. "Return ye children of men" was
the word spoken at the Fall by which God decreed the death of every man,
and no added word has He needed to speak. The sad procession of mankind
across the face of the earth from birth to the grave is proof that His
original Word was enough.
We have not given sufficient attention to that deep utterance in the
Book of John, "That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that
cometh into the world." Shift the punctuation around as we will and the
truth is still there: the Word of God affects the hearts of all men as
light in the soul. In the hearts of all men the light shines, the Word
sounds, and there is no escaping them. Something like this would of
necessity be so if God is alive and in His world. And John says that it
is so. Even those persons who have never heard of the Bible have still
been preached to with sufficient clarity to remove every excuse from
their hearts forever. "Which show the work of the law written in their
hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the
mean while either accusing or else excusing one another." "For the
invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen,
being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and
Godhead; so that they are without excuse."
This universal Voice of God was by the ancient Hebrews often called
Wisdom, and was said to be everywhere sounding and searching throughout
the earth, seeking some response from the sons of men. The eighth
chapter of the Book of Proverbs begins, "Doth not wisdom cry? and
understanding put forth her voice?" The writer then pictures wisdom as a
beautiful woman standing "in the top of the high places, by the way in
the places of the paths." She sounds her voice from every quarter so
that no one may miss hearing it. "Unto you, O men, I call; and my voice
is to the sons of men." Then she pleads for the simple and the foolish
to give ear to her words. It is spiritual response for which this Wisdom
of God is pleading, a response which she has always sought and is but
rarely able to secure. The tragedy is that our eternal welfare depends
upon our hearing, and we have trained our ears not to hear.
This universal Voice has ever sounded, and it has often troubled men
even when they did not understand the source of their fears. Could it be
that this Voice distilling like a living mist upon the hearts of men has
been the undiscovered cause of the troubled conscience and the longing
for immortality confessed by millions since the dawn of recorded
history? We need not fear to face up to this. The speaking Voice is a
fact. How men have reacted to it is for any observer to note.
When God spoke out of heaven to our Lord, self-centered men who heard it
explained it by natural causes: they said, "It thundered." This habit
of explaining the Voice by appeals to natural law is at the very root of
modern science. In the living breathing cosmos there is a mysterious
Something, too wonderful, too awful for any mind to understand. The
believing man does not claim to understand. He falls to his knees and
whispers, "God." The man of earth kneels also, but not to worship. He
kneels to examine, to search, to find the cause and the how of things.
Just now we happen to be living in a secular age. Our thought habits are
those of the scientist, not those of the worshipper. We are more likely
to explain than to adore. "It thundered," we exclaim, and go our earthly
way. But still the Voice sounds and searches. The order and life of the
world depend upon that Voice, but men are mostly too busy or too
stubborn to give attention.
Everyone of us has had experiences which we have not been able to
explain: a sudden sense of loneliness, or a feeling of wonder or awe in
the face of the universal vastness. Or we have had a fleeting visitation
of light like an illumination from some other sun, giving us in a quick
flash an assurance that we are from another world, that our origins are
divine. What we saw there, or felt, or heard, may have been contrary to
all that we had been taught in the schools and at wide variance with all
our former beliefs and opinions. We were forced to suspend our acquired
doubts while, for a moment, the clouds were rolled back and we saw and
heard for ourselves. Explain such things as we will, I think we have not
been fair to the facts until we allow at least the possibility that such
experiences may arise from the Presence of God in the world and His
persistent effort to communicate with mankind. Let us not dismiss such
an hypothesis too flippantly.
It is my own belief (and here I shall not feel bad if no one follows me)
that every good and beautiful thing which man has produced in the world
has been the result of his faulty and sin-blocked response to the
creative Voice sounding over the earth. The moral philosophers who
dreamed their high dreams of virtue, the religious thinkers who
speculated about God and immortality, the poets and artists who created
out of common stuff pure and lasting beauty: how can we explain them? It
is not enough to say simply, "It was genius." What then is genius? Could
it be that a genius is a man haunted by the speaking Voice, laboring and
striving like one possessed to achieve ends which he only vaguely
understands? That the great man may have missed God in his labors, that
he may even have spoken or written against God does not destroy the idea
I am advancing. God's redemptive revelation in the Holy Scriptures is
necessary to saving faith and peace with God. Faith in a risen Saviour
is necessary if the vague stirrings toward immortality are to bring us
to restful and satisfying communion with God. To me this is a plausible
explanation of all that is best out of Christ. But you can be a good
Christian and not accept my thesis.
The Voice of God is a friendly Voice. No one need fear to listen to it
unless he has already made up his mind to resist it. The blood of Jesus
has covered not only the human race but all creation as well. "And
having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile
all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth,
or things in heaven." We may safely preach a friendly Heaven. The
heavens as well as the earth are filled with the good will of Him that
dwelt in the bush. The perfect blood of atonement secures this forever.
Whoever will listen will hear the speaking Heaven. This is definitely
not the hour when men take kindly to an exhortation to _listen_, for
listening is not today a part of popular religion. We are at the
opposite end of the pole from there. Religion has accepted the monstrous
heresy that noise, size, activity and bluster make a man dear to God.
But we may take heart. To a people caught in the tempest of the last
great conflict God says, "Be still, and know that I am God," and still
He says it, as if He means to tell us that our strength and safety lie
not in noise but in silence.
It is important that we get still to wait on God. And it is best that we
get alone, preferably with our Bible outspread before us. Then if we
will we may draw near to God and begin to hear Him speak to us in our
hearts. I think for the average person the progression will be something
like this: First a sound as of a Presence walking in the garden. Then a
voice, more intelligible, but still far from clear. Then the happy
moment when the Spirit begins to illuminate the Scriptures, and that
which had been only a sound, or at best a voice, now becomes an
intelligible word, warm and intimate and clear as the word of a dear
friend. Then will come life and light, and best of all, ability to see
and rest in and embrace Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord and All.
The Bible will never be a living Book to us until we are convinced that
God is articulate in His universe. To jump from a dead, impersonal world
to a dogmatic Bible is too much for most people. They may admit that
they _should_ accept the Bible as the Word of God, and they may try to
think of it as such, but they find it impossible to believe that the
words there on the page are actually for them. A man may _say_, "These
words are addressed to me," and yet in his heart not feel and know that
they are. He is the victim of a divided psychology. He tries to think of
God as mute everywhere else and vocal only in a book.
I believe that much of our religious unbelief is due to a wrong
conception of and a wrong feeling for the Scriptures of Truth. A silent
God suddenly began to speak in a book and when the book was finished
lapsed back into silence again forever. Now we read the book as the
record of what God said when He was for a brief time in a speaking mood.
With notions like that in our heads how can we believe? The facts are
that God is not silent, has never been silent. It is the nature of God
to speak. The second Person of the Holy Trinity is called the _Word_.
The Bible is the inevitable outcome of God's continuous speech. It is
the infallible declaration of His mind for us put into our familiar
human words.
I think a new world will arise out of the religious mists when we
approach our Bible with the idea that it is not only a book which was
once spoken, but a book which is _now speaking_. The prophets habitually
said, "Thus _saith_ the Lord." They meant their hearers to understand
that God's speaking is in the continuous present. We may use the past
tense properly to indicate that at a certain time a certain word of God
was spoken, but a word of God once spoken continues to be spoken, as a
child once born continues to be alive, or a world once created continues
to exist. And those are but imperfect illustrations, for children die
and worlds burn out, but the Word of our God endureth forever.
If you would follow on to know the Lord, come at once to the open Bible
expecting it to speak to you. Do not come with the notion that it is a
_thing_ which you may push around at your convenience. It is more than
a thing, it is a voice, a word, the very Word of the living God.
_Lord, teach me to listen. The times are noisy and my ears are weary
with the thousand raucous sounds which continuously assault them. Give
me the spirit of the boy Samuel when he said to Thee, "Speak, for thy
servant heareth." Let me hear Thee speaking in my heart. Let me get used
to the sound of Thy Voice, that its tones may be familiar when the
sounds of earth die away and the only sound will be the music of Thy
speaking Voice. Amen._
VII
_The Gaze of the Soul_
Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.--Heb. 12:2
Let us think of our intelligent plain man mentioned in chapter six
coming for the first time to the reading of the Scriptures. He
approaches the Bible without any previous knowledge of what it contains.
He is wholly without prejudice; he has nothing to prove and nothing to
defend.
Such a man will not have read long until his mind begins to observe
certain truths standing out from the page. They are the spiritual
principles behind the record of God's dealings with men, and woven into
the writings of holy men as they "were moved by the Holy Ghost." As he
reads on he might want to number these truths as they become clear to
him and make a brief summary under each number. These summaries will be
the tenets of his Biblical creed. Further reading will not affect these
points except to enlarge and strengthen them. Our man is finding out
what the Bible actually teaches.
High up on the list of things which the Bible teaches will be the
doctrine of _faith_. The place of weighty importance which the Bible
gives to faith will be too plain for him to miss. He will very likely
conclude: Faith is all-important in the life of the soul. Without faith
it is impossible to please God. Faith will get me anything, take me
anywhere in the Kingdom of God, but without faith there can be no
approach to God, no forgiveness, no deliverance, no salvation, no
communion, no spiritual life at all.
By the time our friend has reached the eleventh chapter of Hebrews the
eloquent encomium which is there pronounced upon faith will not seem
strange to him. He will have read Paul's powerful defense of faith in
his Roman and Galatian epistles. Later if he goes on to study church
history he will understand the amazing power in the teachings of the
Reformers as they showed the central place of faith in the Christian
religion.
Now if faith is so vitally important, if it is an indispensable _must_
in our pursuit of God, it is perfectly natural that we should be deeply
concerned over whether or not we possess this most precious gift. And
our minds being what they are, it is inevitable that sooner or later we
should get around to inquiring after the nature of faith. What _is_
faith? would lie close to the question, Do I _have_ faith? and would
demand an answer if it were anywhere to be found.
Almost all who preach or write on the subject of faith have much the
same things to say concerning it. They tell us that it is believing a
promise, that it is taking God at His word, that it is reckoning the
Bible to be true and stepping out upon it. The rest of the book or
sermon is usually taken up with stories of persons who have had their
prayers answered as a result of their faith. These answers are mostly
direct gifts of a practical and temporal nature such as health, money,
physical protection or success in business. Or if the teacher is of a
philosophic turn of mind he may take another course and lose us in a
welter of metaphysics or snow us under with psychological jargon as he
defines and re-defines, paring the slender hair of faith thinner and
thinner till it disappears in gossamer shavings at last. When he is
finished we get up disappointed and go out "by that same door where in
we went." Surely there must be something better than this.
In the Scriptures there is practically no effort made to define faith.
Outside of a brief fourteen-word definition in Hebrews 11:1, I know of
no Biblical definition, and even there faith is defined functionally,
not philosophically; that is, it is a statement of what faith is _in
operation_, _not_ what it is _in essence_. It assumes the presence of
faith and shows what it results in, rather than what it is. We will be
wise to go just that far and attempt to go no further. We are told from
whence it comes and by what means: "Faith is a gift of God," and "Faith
cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God." This much is clear,
and, to paraphrase Thomas à Kempis, "I had rather exercise faith than
know the definition thereof."
From here on, when the words "faith is" or their equivalent occur in
this chapter I ask that they be understood to refer to what faith is in
operation as exercised by a believing man. Right here we drop the notion
of definition and think about faith as it may be experienced in action.
The complexion of our thoughts will be practical, not theoretical.
In a dramatic story in the Book of Numbers faith is seen in action.
Israel became discouraged and spoke against God, and the Lord sent fiery
serpents among them. "And they bit the people; and much people of Israel
died." Then Moses sought the Lord for them and He heard and gave them a
remedy against the bite of the serpents. He commanded Moses to make a
serpent of brass and put it upon a pole in sight of all the people, "and
it shall come to pass, that everyone that is bitten, when he looketh
upon it, shall live." Moses obeyed, "and it came to pass, that if a
serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he
lived" (Num. 21:4-9).
In the New Testament this important bit of history is interpreted for us
by no less an authority than our Lord Jesus Christ Himself. He is
explaining to His hearers how they may be saved. He tells them that it
is by believing. Then to make it clear He refers to this incident in the
Book of Numbers. "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even
so must the Son of man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in him
should not perish, but have eternal life" (John 3:14-15).
Our plain man in reading this would make an important discovery. He
would notice that "look" and "believe" were synonymous terms. "Looking"
on the Old Testament serpent is identical with "believing" on the New
Testament Christ. That is, the _looking_ and the _believing_ are the
same thing. And he would understand that while Israel looked with their
external eyes, believing is done with the heart. I think he would
conclude that _faith is the gaze of a soul upon a saving God_.
When he had seen this he would remember passages he had read before, and
their meaning would come flooding over him. "They looked unto him, and
were lightened: and their faces were not ashamed" (Psa. 34:5). "Unto
thee lift I up mine eyes, O thou that dwellest in the heavens. Behold,
as the eyes of servants look unto the hand of their masters, and as the
eyes of a maiden unto the hand of her mistress; so our eyes wait upon
the Lord our God, until that he have mercy upon us" (Psa. 123:1-2). Here
the man seeking mercy looks straight at the God of mercy and never takes
his eyes away from Him till mercy is granted. And our Lord Himself
looked always at God. "Looking up to heaven, he blessed, and brake, and
gave the bread to his disciples" (Matt. 14:19). Indeed Jesus taught that
He wrought His works by always keeping His inward eyes upon His Father.
His power lay in His continuous look at God (John 5:19-21).
In full accord with the few texts we have quoted is the whole tenor of
the inspired Word. It is summed up for us in the Hebrew epistle when we
are instructed to run life's race "looking unto Jesus the author and
finisher of our faith." From all this we learn that faith is not a
once-done act, but a continuous gaze of the heart at the Triune God.
Believing, then, is directing the heart's attention to Jesus. It is
lifting the mind to "behold the Lamb of God," and never ceasing that
beholding for the rest of our lives. At first this may be difficult, but
it becomes easier as we look steadily at His wondrous Person, quietly
and without strain. Distractions may hinder, but once the heart is
committed to Him, after each brief excursion away from Him the attention
will return again and rest upon Him like a wandering bird coming back to
its window.
I would emphasize this one committal, this one great volitional act
which establishes the heart's intention to gaze forever upon Jesus. God
takes this intention for our choice and makes what allowances He must
for the thousand distractions which beset us in this evil world. He
knows that we have set the direction of our hearts toward Jesus, and we
can know it too, and comfort ourselves with the knowledge that a habit
of soul is forming which will become after a while a sort of spiritual
reflex requiring no more conscious effort on our part.
Faith is the least self-regarding of the virtues. It is by its very
nature scarcely conscious of its own existence. Like the eye which sees
everything in front of it and never sees itself, faith is occupied with
the Object upon which it rests and pays no attention to itself at all.
While we are looking at God we do not see ourselves--blessed riddance.
The man who has struggled to purify himself and has had nothing but
repeated failures will experience real relief when he stops tinkering
with his soul and looks away to the perfect One. While he looks at
Christ the very things he has so long been trying to do will be getting
done within him. It will be God working in him to will and to do.
Faith is not in itself a meritorious act; the merit is in the One toward
Whom it is directed. Faith is a redirecting of our sight, a getting out
of the focus of our own vision and getting God into focus. Sin has
twisted our vision inward and made it self-regarding. Unbelief has put
self where God should be, and is perilously close to the sin of Lucifer
who said, "I will set my throne above the throne of God." Faith looks
_out_ instead of _in_ and the whole life falls into line.
All this may seem too simple. But we have no apology to make. To those
who would seek to climb into heaven after help or descend into hell God
says, "The word is nigh thee, even the word of faith." The word induces
us to lift up our eyes unto the Lord and the blessed work of faith
begins.
When we lift our inward eyes to gaze upon God we are sure to meet
friendly eyes gazing back at us, for it is written that the eyes of the
Lord run to and fro throughout all the earth. The sweet language of
experience is "Thou God seest me." When the eyes of the soul looking out
meet the eyes of God looking in, heaven has begun right here on this
earth.
"When all my endeavour is turned toward Thee because all Thy endeavour
is turned toward me; when I look unto Thee alone with all my attention,
nor ever turn aside the eyes of my mind, because Thou dost enfold me
with Thy constant regard; when I direct my love toward Thee alone
because Thou, who art Love's self hast turned Thee toward me alone. And
what, Lord, is my life, save that embrace wherein Thy delightsome
sweetness doth so lovingly enfold me?"[1] So wrote Nicholas of Cusa four
hundred years ago.
I should like to say more about this old man of God. He is not much
known today anywhere among Christian believers, and among current
Fundamentalists he is known not at all. I feel that we could gain much
from a little acquaintance with men of his spiritual flavor and the
school of Christian thought which they represent. Christian literature,
to be accepted and approved by the evangelical leaders of our times,
must follow very closely the same train of thought, a kind of "party
line" from which it is scarcely safe to depart. A half-century of this
in America has made us smug and content. We imitate each other with
slavish devotion and our most strenuous efforts are put forth to try to
say the same thing that everyone around us is saying--and yet to find an
excuse for saying it, some little safe variation on the approved theme
or, if no more, at least a new illustration.
Nicholas was a true follower of Christ, a lover of the Lord, radiant and
shining in his devotion to the Person of Jesus. His theology was
orthodox, but fragrant and sweet as everything about Jesus might
properly be expected to be. His conception of eternal life, for
instance, is beautiful in itself and, if I mistake not, is nearer in
spirit to John 17:3 than that which is current among us today. Life
eternal, says Nicholas, is "nought other than that blessed regard
wherewith Thou never ceasest to behold me, yea, even the secret places
of my soul. With Thee, to behold is to give life; 'tis unceasingly to
impart sweetest love of Thee; 'tis to inflame me to love of Thee by
love's imparting, and to feed me by inflaming, and by feeding to kindle
my yearning, and by kindling to make me drink of the dew of gladness,
and by drinking to infuse in me a fountain of life, and by infusing to
make it increase and endure."[2]
Now, if faith is the gaze of the heart at God, and if this gaze is but
the raising of the inward eyes to meet the all-seeing eyes of God, then
it follows that it is one of the easiest things possible to do. It would
be like God to make the most vital thing easy and place it within the
range of possibility for the weakest and poorest of us.
Several conclusions may fairly be drawn from all this. The simplicity of
it, for instance. Since believing is looking, it can be done without
special equipment or religious paraphernalia. God has seen to it that
the one life-and-death essential can never be subject to the caprice of
accident. Equipment can break down or get lost, water can leak away,
records can be destroyed by fire, the minister can be delayed or the
church burn down. All these are external to the soul and are subject to
accident or mechanical failure: but _looking_ is of the heart and can be
done successfully by any man standing up or kneeling down or lying in
his last agony a thousand miles from any church.
Since believing is looking it can be done _any time_. No season is
superior to another season for this sweetest of all acts. God never made
salvation depend upon new moons nor holy days or sabbaths. A man is not
nearer to Christ on Easter Sunday than he is, say, on Saturday, August
3, or Monday, October 4. As long as Christ sits on the mediatorial
throne every day is a good day and all days are days of salvation.
Neither does _place_ matter in this blessed work of believing God. Lift
your heart and let it rest upon Jesus and you are instantly in a
sanctuary though it be a Pullman berth or a factory or a kitchen. You
can see God from anywhere if your mind is set to love and obey Him.
Now, someone may ask, "Is not this of which you speak for special
persons such as monks or ministers who have by the nature of their
calling more time to devote to quiet meditation? I am a busy worker and
have little time to spend alone." I am happy to say that the life I
describe is for everyone of God's children regardless of calling. It is,
in fact, happily practiced every day by many hard working persons and is
beyond the reach of none.
Many have found the secret of which I speak and, without giving much
thought to what is going on within them, constantly practice this habit
of inwardly gazing upon God. They know that something inside their
hearts sees God. Even when they are compelled to withdraw their
conscious attention in order to engage in earthly affairs there is
within them a secret communion always going on. Let their attention but
be released for a moment from necessary business and it flies at once to
God again. This has been the testimony of many Christians, so many that
even as I state it thus I have a feeling that I am quoting, though from
whom or from how many I cannot possibly know.
I do not want to leave the impression that the ordinary means of grace
have no value. They most assuredly have. Private prayer should be
practiced by every Christian. Long periods of Bible meditation will
purify our gaze and direct it; church attendance will enlarge our
outlook and increase our love for others. Service and work and activity;
all are good and should be engaged in by every Christian. But at the
bottom of all these things, giving meaning to them, will be the inward
habit of beholding God. A new set of eyes (so to speak) will develop
within us enabling us to be looking at God while our outward eyes are
seeing the scenes of this passing world.
Someone may fear that we are magnifying private religion out of all
proportion, that the "us" of the New Testament is being displaced by a
selfish "I." Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all
tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other? They are
of one accord by being tuned, not to each other, but to another standard
to which each one must individually bow. So one hundred worshippers met
together, each one looking away to Christ, are in heart nearer to each
other than they could possibly be were they to become "unity" conscious
and turn their eyes away from God to strive for closer fellowship.
Social religion is perfected when private religion is purified. The body
becomes stronger as its members become healthier. The whole Church of
God gains when the members that compose it begin to seek a better and a
higher life.
All the foregoing presupposes true repentance and a full committal of
the life to God. It is hardly necessary to mention this, for only
persons who have made such a committal will have read this far.
When the habit of inwardly gazing Godward becomes fixed within us we
shall be ushered onto a new level of spiritual life more in keeping with
the promises of God and the mood of the New Testament. The Triune God
will be our dwelling place even while our feet walk the low road of
simple duty here among men. We will have found life's _summum bonum_
indeed. "There is the source of all delights that can be desired; not
only can nought better be thought out by men and angels, but nought
better can exist in mode of being! For it is the absolute maximum of
every rational desire, than which a greater cannot be."[3]
_O Lord, I have heard a good word inviting me to look away to Thee and
be satisfied. My heart longs to respond, but sin has clouded my vision
till I see Thee but dimly. Be pleased to cleanse me in Thine own
precious blood, and make me inwardly pure, so that I may with unveiled
eyes gaze upon Thee all the days of my earthly pilgrimage. Then shall I
be prepared to behold Thee in full splendor in the day when Thou shalt
appear to be glorified in Thy saints and admired in all them that
believe. Amen._
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Nicholas of Cusa, _The Vision of God_, E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New
York, 1928. This and the following quotations used by kind permission of
the publishers.
[2] _The Vision of God_
[3] _The Vision of God_
VIII
_Restoring the Creator-creature Relation_
Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens; let thy glory be above
all the earth.--Psa. 57:5
It is a truism to say that order in nature depends upon right
relationships; to achieve harmony each thing must be in its proper
position relative to each other thing. In human life it is not
otherwise.
I have hinted before in these chapters that the cause of all our human
miseries is a radical moral dislocation, an upset in our relation to God
and to each other. For whatever else the Fall may have been, it was most
certainly a sharp change in man's relation to his Creator. He adopted
toward God an altered attitude, and by so doing destroyed the proper
Creator-creature relation in which, unknown to him, his true happiness
lay. Essentially salvation is the restoration of a right relation
between man and his Creator, a bringing back to normal of the
Creator-creature relation.
A satisfactory spiritual life will begin with a complete change in
relation between God and the sinner; not a judicial change merely, but a
conscious and experienced change affecting the sinner's whole nature.
The atonement in Jesus' blood makes such a change judicially possible
and the working of the Holy Spirit makes it emotionally satisfying. The
story of the prodigal son perfectly illustrates this latter phase. He
had brought a world of trouble upon himself by forsaking the position
which he had properly held as son of his father. At bottom his
restoration was nothing more than a re-establishing of the father-son
relation which had existed from his birth and had been altered
temporarily by his act of sinful rebellion. This story overlooks the
legal aspects of redemption, but it makes beautifully clear the
experiential aspects of salvation.
In determining relationships we must begin somewhere. There must be
somewhere a fixed center against which everything else is measured,
where the law of relativity does not enter and we can say "IS" and make
no allowances. Such a center is God. When God would make His Name known
to mankind He could find no better word than "I AM." When He speaks in
the first person He says, "I AM"; when we speak of Him we say, "He is";
when we speak to Him we say, "Thou art." Everyone and everything else
measures from that fixed point. "I am that I am," says God, "I change not."
As the sailor locates his position on the sea by "shooting" the sun, so
we may get our moral bearings by looking at God. We must begin with God.
We are right when and only when we stand in a right position relative to
God, and we are wrong so far and so long as we stand in any other
position.
Much of our difficulty as seeking Christians stems from our
unwillingness to take God as He is and adjust our lives accordingly. We
insist upon trying to modify Him and to bring Him nearer to our own
image. The flesh whimpers against the rigor of God's inexorable sentence
and begs like Agag for a little mercy, a little indulgence of its carnal
ways. It is no use. We can get a right start only by accepting God as He
is and learning to love Him for what He is. As we go on to know Him
better we shall find it a source of unspeakable joy that God is just
what He is. Some of the most rapturous moments we know will be those we
spend in reverent admiration of the Godhead. In those holy moments the
very thought of change in Him will be too painful to endure.
So let us begin with God. Back of all, above all, before all is God;
first in sequential order, above in rank and station, exalted in dignity
and honor. As the self-existent One He gave being to all things, and all
things exist out of Him and for Him. "Thou art worthy, O Lord, to
receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things,
and for thy pleasure they are and were created."
Every soul belongs to God and exists by His pleasure. God being Who and
What He is, and we being who and what we are, the only thinkable
relation between us is one of full lordship on His part and complete
submission on ours. We owe Him every honor that it is in our power to
give Him. Our everlasting grief lies in giving Him anything less.
The pursuit of God will embrace the labor of bringing our total
personality into conformity to His. And this not judicially, but
actually. I do not here refer to the act of justification by faith in
Christ. I speak of a voluntary exalting of God to His proper station
over us and a willing surrender of our whole being to the place of
worshipful submission which the Creator-creature circumstance makes
proper.
The moment we make up our minds that we are going on with this
determination to exalt God over all we step out of the world's parade.
We shall find ourselves out of adjustment to the ways of the world, and
increasingly so as we make progress in the holy way. We shall acquire a
new viewpoint; a new and different psychology will be formed within us;
a new power will begin to surprise us by its upsurgings and its
outgoings.
Our break with the world will be the direct outcome of our changed
relation to God. For the world of fallen men does not honor God.
Millions call themselves by His Name, it is true, and pay some token
respect to Him, but a simple test will show how little He is really
honored among them. Let the average man be put to the proof on the
question of who is _above_, and his true position will be exposed. Let
him be forced into making a choice between God and money, between God
and men, between God and personal ambition, God and self, God and human
love, and God will take second place every time. Those other things will
be exalted above. However the man may protest, the proof is in the
choices he makes day after day throughout his life.
"Be thou exalted" is the language of victorious spiritual experience. It
is a little key to unlock the door to great treasures of grace. It is
central in the life of God in the soul. Let the seeking man reach a
place where life and lips join to say continually "Be thou exalted," and
a thousand minor problems will be solved at once. His Christian life
ceases to be the complicated thing it had been before and becomes the
very essence of simplicity. By the exercise of his will he has set his
course, and on that course he will stay as if guided by an automatic
pilot. If blown off course for a moment by some adverse wind he will
surely return again as by a secret bent of the soul. The hidden motions
of the Spirit are working in his favor, and "the stars in their courses"
fight for him. He has met his life problem at its center, and
everything else must follow along.
Let no one imagine that he will lose anything of human dignity by this
voluntary sell-out of his all to his God. He does not by this degrade
himself as a man; rather he finds his right place of high honor as one
made in the image of his Creator. His deep disgrace lay in his moral
derangement, his unnatural usurpation of the place of God. His honor
will be proved by restoring again that stolen throne. In exalting God
over all he finds his own highest honor upheld.
Anyone who might feel reluctant to surrender his will to the will of
another should remember Jesus' words, "Whosoever committeth sin is the
servant of sin." We must of necessity be servant to someone, either to
God or to sin. The sinner prides himself on his independence, completely
overlooking the fact that he is the weak slave of the sins that rule his
members. The man who surrenders to Christ exchanges a cruel slave driver
for a kind and gentle Master whose yoke is easy and whose burden is
light.
Made as we were in the image of God we scarcely find it strange to take
again our God as our All. God was our original habitat and our hearts
cannot but feel at home when they enter again that ancient and beautiful
abode.
I hope it is clear that there is a logic behind God's claim to
pre-eminence. That place is His by every right in earth or heaven. While
we take to ourselves the place that is His the whole course of our
lives is out of joint. Nothing will or can restore order till our hearts
make the great decision: God shall be exalted above.
"Them that honour me I will honour," said God once to a priest of
Israel, and that ancient law of the Kingdom stands today unchanged by
the passing of time or the changes of dispensation. The whole Bible and
every page of history proclaim the perpetuation of that law. "If any man
serve me, him will my Father honour," said our Lord Jesus, tying in the
old with the new and revealing the essential unity of His ways with men.
Sometimes the best way to see a thing is to look at its opposite. Eli
and his sons are placed in the priesthood with the stipulation that they
honor God in their lives and ministrations. This they fail to do, and
God sends Samuel to announce the consequences. Unknown to Eli this law
of reciprocal honor has been all the while secretly working, and now the
time has come for judgment to fall. Hophni and Phineas, the degenerate
priests, fall in battle, the wife of Hophni dies in childbirth, Israel
flees before her enemies, the ark of God is captured by the Philistines
and the old man Eli falls backward and dies of a broken neck. Thus stark
utter tragedy followed upon Eli's failure to honor God.
Now set over against this almost any Bible character who honestly tried
to glorify God in his earthly walk. See how God winked at weaknesses
and overlooked failures as He poured upon His servants grace and
blessing untold. Let it be Abraham, Jacob, David, Daniel, Elijah or whom
you will; honor followed honor as harvest the seed. The man of God set
his heart to exalt God above all; God accepted his intention as fact and
acted accordingly. Not perfection, but holy intention made the
difference.
In our Lord Jesus Christ this law was seen in simple perfection. In His
lowly manhood He humbled Himself and gladly gave all glory to His Father
in heaven. He sought not His own honor, but the honor of God who sent
Him. "If I honour myself," He said on one occasion, "my honour is
nothing; it is my Father that honoureth me." So far had the proud
Pharisees departed from this law that they could not understand one who
honored God at his own expense. "I honour my Father," said Jesus to
them, "and ye do dishonour me."
Another saying of Jesus, and a most disturbing one, was put in the form
of a question, "How can ye believe, which receive honour one of another,
and seek not the honour that cometh from God alone?" If I understand
this correctly Christ taught here the alarming doctrine that the desire
for honor among men made belief impossible. Is this sin at the root of
religious unbelief? Could it be that those "intellectual difficulties"
which men blame for their inability to believe are but smoke screens to
conceal the real cause that lies behind them? Was it this greedy desire
for honor from man that made men into Pharisees and Pharisees into
Deicides? Is this the secret back of religious self-righteousness and
empty worship? I believe it may be. The whole course of the life is
upset by failure to put God where He belongs. We exalt ourselves instead
of God and the curse follows.
In our desire after God let us keep always in mind that God also hath
desire, and His desire is toward the sons of men, and more particularly
toward those sons of men who will make the once-for-all decision to
exalt Him over all. Such as these are precious to God above all
treasures of earth or sea. In them God finds a theater where He can
display His exceeding kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. With them God
can walk unhindered, toward them He can act like the God He is.
In speaking thus I have one fear; it is that I may convince the mind
before God can win the heart. For this God-above-all position is one not
easy to take. The mind may approve it while not having the consent of
the will to put it into effect. While the imagination races ahead to
honor God, the will may lag behind and the man never guess how divided
his heart is. The whole man must make the decision before the heart can
know any real satisfaction. God wants us all, and He will not rest till
He gets us all. No part of the man will do.
Let us pray over this in detail, throwing ourselves at God's feet and
meaning everything we say. No one who prays thus in sincerity need wait
long for tokens of divine acceptance. God will unveil His glory before
His servant's eyes, and He will place all His treasures at the disposal
of such a one, for He knows that His honor is safe in such consecrated
hands.
_O God, be Thou exalted over my possessions. Nothing of earth's
treasures shall seem dear unto me if only Thou art glorified in my life.
Be Thou exalted over my friendships. I am determined that Thou shalt be
above all, though I must stand deserted and alone in the midst of the
earth. Be Thou exalted above my comforts. Though it mean the loss of
bodily comforts and the carrying of heavy crosses I shall keep my vow
made this day before Thee. Be Thou exalted over my reputation. Make me
ambitious to please Thee even if as a result I must sink into obscurity
and my name be forgotten as a dream. Rise, O Lord, into Thy proper place
of honor, above my ambitions, above my likes and dislikes, above my
family, my health and even my life itself. Let me decrease that Thou
mayest increase, let me sink that Thou mayest rise above. Ride forth
upon me as Thou didst ride into Jerusalem mounted upon the humble little
beast, a colt, the foal of an ass, and let me hear the children cry to
Thee, "Hosanna in the highest."_
IX
_Meekness and Rest_
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.--Matt. 5:5
A fairly accurate description of the human race might be furnished one
unacquainted with it by taking the Beatitudes, turning them wrong side
out and saying, "Here is your human race." For the exact opposite of the
virtues in the Beatitudes are the very qualities which distinguish human
life and conduct.
In the world of men we find nothing approaching the virtues of which
Jesus spoke in the opening words of the famous Sermon on the Mount.
Instead of poverty of spirit we find the rankest kind of pride; instead
of mourners we find pleasure seekers; instead of meekness, arrogance;
instead of hunger after righteousness we hear men saying, "I am rich and
increased with goods and have need of nothing"; instead of mercy we find
cruelty; instead of purity of heart, corrupt imaginings; instead of
peacemakers we find men quarrelsome and resentful; instead of rejoicing
in mistreatment we find them fighting back with every weapon at their
command.
Of this kind of moral stuff civilized society is composed. The
atmosphere is charged with it; we breathe it with every breath and drink
it with our mother's milk. Culture and education refine these things
slightly but leave them basically untouched. A whole world of literature
has been created to justify this kind of life as the only normal one.
And this is the more to be wondered at seeing that these are the evils
which make life the bitter struggle it is for all of us. All our
heartaches and a great many of our physical ills spring directly out of
our sins. Pride, arrogance, resentfulness, evil imaginings, malice,
greed: these are the sources of more human pain than all the diseases
that ever afflicted mortal flesh.
Into a world like this the sound of Jesus' words comes wonderful and
strange, a visitation from above. It is well that He spoke, for no one
else could have done it as well; and it is good that we listen. His
words are the essence of truth. He is not offering an opinion; Jesus
never uttered opinions. He never guessed; He knew, and He knows. His
words are not as Solomon's were, the sum of sound wisdom or the results
of keen observation. He spoke out of the fulness of His Godhead, and His
words are very Truth itself. He is the only one who could say "blessed"
with complete authority, for He is the Blessed One come from the world
above to confer blessedness upon mankind. And His words were supported
by deeds mightier than any performed on this earth by any other man. It
is wisdom for us to listen.
As was often so with Jesus, He used this word "meek" in a brief crisp
sentence, and not till some time later did He go on to explain it. In
the same book of Matthew He tells us more about it and applies it to our
lives. "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will
give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and
lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is
easy, and my burden is light." Here we have two things standing in
contrast to each other, a burden and a rest. The burden is not a local
one, peculiar to those first hearers, but one which is borne by the
whole human race. It consists not of political oppression or poverty or
hard work. It is far deeper than that. It is felt by the rich as well as
the poor for it is something from which wealth and idleness can never
deliver us.
The burden borne by mankind is a heavy and a crushing thing. The word
Jesus used means a load carried or toil borne to the point of
exhaustion. Rest is simply release from that burden. It is not
something we do, it is what comes to us when we cease to do. His own
meekness, that is the rest.
Let us examine our burden. It is altogether an interior one. It attacks
the heart and the mind and reaches the body only from within. First,
there is the burden of _pride_. The labor of self-love is a heavy one
indeed. Think for yourself whether much of your sorrow has not arisen
from someone speaking slightingly of you. As long as you set yourself up
as a little god to which you must be loyal there will be those who will
delight to offer affront to your idol. How then can you hope to have
inward peace? The heart's fierce effort to protect itself from every
slight, to shield its touchy honor from the bad opinion of friend and
enemy, will never let the mind have rest. Continue this fight through
the years and the burden will become intolerable. Yet the sons of earth
are carrying this burden continually, challenging every word spoken
against them, cringing under every criticism, smarting under each
fancied slight, tossing sleepless if another is preferred before them.
Such a burden as this is not necessary to bear. Jesus calls us to His
rest, and meekness is His method. The meek man cares not at all who is
greater than he, for he has long ago decided that the esteem of the
world is not worth the effort. He develops toward himself a kindly sense
of humor and learns to say, "Oh, so you have been overlooked? They have
placed someone else before you? They have whispered that you are pretty
small stuff after all? And now you feel hurt because the world is saying
about you the very things you have been saying about yourself? Only
yesterday you were telling God that you were nothing, a mere worm of the
dust. Where is your consistency? Come on, humble yourself, and cease to
care what men think."
The meek man is not a human mouse afflicted with a sense of his own
inferiority. Rather he may be in his moral life as bold as a lion and as
strong as Samson; but he has stopped being fooled about himself. He has
accepted God's estimate of his own life. He knows he is as weak and
helpless as God has declared him to be, but paradoxically, he knows at
the same time that he is in the sight of God of more importance than
angels. In himself, nothing; in God, everything. That is his motto. He
knows well that the world will never see him as God sees him and he has
stopped caring. He rests perfectly content to allow God to place His own
values. He will be patient to wait for the day when everything will get
its own price tag and real worth will come into its own. Then the
righteous shall shine forth in the Kingdom of their Father. He is
willing to wait for that day.
In the meantime he will have attained a place of soul rest. As he walks
on in meekness he will be happy to let God defend him. The old struggle
to defend himself is over. He has found the peace which meekness
brings.
Then also he will get deliverance from the burden of _pretense_. By this
I mean not hypocrisy, but the common human desire to put the best foot
forward and hide from the world our real inward poverty. For sin has
played many evil tricks upon us, and one has been the infusing into us a
false sense of shame. There is hardly a man or woman who dares to be
just what he or she is without doctoring up the impression. The fear of
being found out gnaws like rodents within their hearts. The man of
culture is haunted by the fear that he will some day come upon a man
more cultured than himself. The learned man fears to meet a man more
learned than he. The rich man sweats under the fear that his clothes or
his car or his house will sometime be made to look cheap by comparison
with those of another rich man. So-called "society" runs by a motivation
not higher than this, and the poorer classes on their level are little
better.
Let no one smile this off. These burdens are real, and little by little
they kill the victims of this evil and unnatural way of life. And the
psychology created by years of this kind of thing makes true meekness
seem as unreal as a dream, as aloof as a star. To all the victims of the
gnawing disease Jesus says, "Ye must become as little children." For
little children do not compare; they receive direct enjoyment from what
they have without relating it to something else or someone else. Only
as they get older and sin begins to stir within their hearts do jealousy
and envy appear. Then they are unable to enjoy what they have if someone
else has something larger or better. At that early age does the galling
burden come down upon their tender souls, and it never leaves them till
Jesus sets them free.
Another source of burden is _artificiality_. I am sure that most people
live in secret fear that some day they will be careless and by chance an
enemy or friend will be allowed to peep into their poor empty souls. So
they are never relaxed. Bright people are tense and alert in fear that
they may be trapped into saying something common or stupid. Traveled
people are afraid that they may meet some Marco Polo who is able to
describe some remote place where they have never been.
This unnatural condition is part of our sad heritage of sin, but in our
day it is aggravated by our whole way of life. Advertising is largely
based upon this habit of pretense. "Courses" are offered in this or that
field of human learning frankly appealing to the victim's desire to
shine at a party. Books are sold, clothes and cosmetics are peddled, by
playing continually upon this desire to appear what we are not.
Artificiality is one curse that will drop away the moment we kneel at
Jesus' feet and surrender ourselves to His meekness. Then we will not
care what people think of us so long as God is pleased. Then _what we
are_ will be everything; what we appear will take its place far down
the scale of interest for us. Apart from sin we have nothing of which to
be ashamed. Only an evil desire to shine makes us want to appear other
than we are.
The heart of the world is breaking under this load of pride and
pretense. There is no release from our burden apart from the meekness of
Christ. Good keen reasoning may help slightly, but so strong is this
vice that if we push it down one place it will come up somewhere else.
To men and women everywhere Jesus says, "Come unto me, and I will give
you rest." The rest He offers is the rest of meekness, the blessed
relief which comes when we accept ourselves for what we are and cease to
pretend. It will take some courage at first, but the needed grace will
come as we learn that we are sharing this new and easy yoke with the
strong Son of God Himself. He calls it "my yoke," and He walks at one
end while we walk at the other.
_Lord, make me childlike. Deliver me from the urge to compete with
another for place or prestige or position. I would be simple and artless
as a little child. Deliver me from pose and pretense. Forgive me for
thinking of myself. Help me to forget myself and find my true peace in
beholding Thee. That Thou mayest answer this prayer I humble myself
before Thee. Lay upon me Thy easy yoke of self-forgetfulness that
through it I may find rest. Amen._
X
_The Sacrament of Living_
Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to
the glory of God.--I Cor. 10:31
One of the greatest hindrances to internal peace which the Christian
encounters is the common habit of dividing our lives into two areas, the
sacred and the secular. As these areas are conceived to exist apart from
each other and to be morally and spiritually incompatible, and as we are
compelled by the necessities of living to be always crossing back and
forth from the one to the other, our inner lives tend to break up so
that we live a divided instead of a unified life.
Our trouble springs from the fact that we who follow Christ inhabit at
once two worlds, the spiritual and the natural. As children of Adam we
live our lives on earth subject to the limitations of the flesh and the
weaknesses and ills to which human nature is heir. Merely to live among
men requires of us years of hard toil and much care and attention to the
things of this world. In sharp contrast to this is our life in the
Spirit. There we enjoy another and higher kind of life; we are children
of God; we possess heavenly status and enjoy intimate fellowship with
Christ.
This tends to divide our total life into two departments. We come
unconsciously to recognize two sets of actions. The first are performed
with a feeling of satisfaction and a firm assurance that they are
pleasing to God. These are the sacred acts and they are usually thought
to be prayer, Bible reading, hymn singing, church attendance and such
other acts as spring directly from faith. They may be known by the fact
that they have no direct relation to this world, and would have no
meaning whatever except as faith shows us another world, "an house not
made with hands, eternal in the heavens."
Over against these sacred acts are the secular ones. They include all of
the ordinary activities of life which we share with the sons and
daughters of Adam: eating, sleeping, working, looking after the needs of
the body and performing our dull and prosaic duties here on earth. These
we often do reluctantly and with many misgivings, often apologizing to
God for what we consider a waste of time and strength. The upshot of
this is that we are uneasy most of the time. We go about our common
tasks with a feeling of deep frustration, telling ourselves pensively
that there's a better day coming when we shall slough off this earthly
shell and be bothered no more with the affairs of this world.
This is the old sacred-secular antithesis. Most Christians are caught in
its trap. They cannot get a satisfactory adjustment between the claims
of the two worlds. They try to walk the tight rope between two kingdoms
and they find no peace in either. Their strength is reduced, their
outlook confused and their joy taken from them.
I believe this state of affairs to be wholly unnecessary. We have gotten
ourselves on the horns of a dilemma, true enough, but the dilemma is not
real. It is a creature of misunderstanding. The sacred-secular
antithesis has no foundation in the New Testament. Without doubt a more
perfect understanding of Christian truth will deliver us from it.
The Lord Jesus Christ Himself is our perfect example, and He knew no
divided life. In the Presence of His Father He lived on earth without
strain from babyhood to His death on the cross. God accepted the
offering of His total life, and made no distinction between act and act.
"I do always the things that please him," was His brief summary of His
own life as it related to the Father. As He moved among men He was
poised and restful. What pressure and suffering He endured grew out of
His position as the world's sin bearer; they were never the result of
moral uncertainty or spiritual maladjustment.
Paul's exhortation to "do all to the glory of God" is more than pious
idealism. It is an integral part of the sacred revelation and is to be
accepted as the very Word of Truth. It opens before us the possibility
of making every act of our lives contribute to the glory of God. Lest we
should be too timid to include everything, Paul mentions specifically
eating and drinking. This humble privilege we share with the beasts that
perish. If these lowly animal acts can be so performed as to honor God,
then it becomes difficult to conceive of one that cannot.
That monkish hatred of the body which figures so prominently in the
works of certain early devotional writers is wholly without support in
the Word of God. Common modesty is found in the Sacred Scriptures, it is
true, but never prudery or a false sense of shame. The New Testament
accepts as a matter of course that in His incarnation our Lord took upon
Him a real human body, and no effort is made to steer around the
downright implications of such a fact. He lived in that body here among
men and never once performed a non-sacred act. His presence in human
flesh sweeps away forever the evil notion that there is about the human
body something innately offensive to the Deity. God created our bodies,
and we do not offend Him by placing the responsibility where it
belongs. He is not ashamed of the work of His own hands.
Perversion, misuse and abuse of our human powers should give us cause
enough to be ashamed. Bodily acts done in sin and contrary to nature can
never honor God. Wherever the human will introduces moral evil we have
no longer our innocent and harmless powers as God made them; we have
instead an abused and twisted thing which can never bring glory to its
Creator.
Let us, however, assume that perversion and abuse are not present. Let
us think of a Christian believer in whose life the twin wonders of
repentance and the new birth have been wrought. He is now living
according to the will of God as he understands it from the written Word.
Of such a one it may be said that every act of his life is or can be as
truly sacred as prayer or baptism or the Lord's Supper. To say this is
not to bring all acts down to one dead level; it is rather to lift every
act up into a living kingdom and turn the whole life into a sacrament.
If a sacrament is an external expression of an inward grace than we need
not hesitate to accept the above thesis. By one act of consecration of
our total selves to God we can make every subsequent act express that
consecration. We need no more be ashamed of our body--the fleshly
servant that carries us through life--than Jesus was of the humble beast
upon which He rode into Jerusalem. "The Lord hath need of him" may well
apply to our mortal bodies. If Christ dwells in us we may bear about the
Lord of glory as the little beast did of old and give occasion to the
multitudes to cry, "Hosanna in the highest."
That we _see_ this truth is not enough. If we would escape from the
toils of the sacred-secular dilemma the truth must "run in our blood"
and condition the complexion of our thoughts. We must practice living to
the glory of God, actually and determinedly. By meditation upon this
truth, by talking it over with God often in our prayers, by recalling it
to our minds frequently as we move about among men, a _sense_ of its
wondrous meaning will begin to take hold of us. The old painful duality
will go down before a restful unity of life. The knowledge that we are
all God's, that He has received all and rejected nothing, will unify our
inner lives and make everything sacred to us.
This is not quite all. Long-held habits do not die easily. It will take
intelligent thought and a great deal of reverent prayer to escape
completely from the sacred-secular psychology. For instance it may be
difficult for the average Christian to get hold of the idea that his
daily labors can be performed as acts of worship acceptable to God by
Jesus Christ. The old antithesis will crop up in the back of his head
sometimes to disturb his peace of mind. Nor will that old serpent the
devil take all this lying down. He will be there in the cab or at the
desk or in the field to remind the Christian that he is giving the
better part of his day to the things of this world and allotting to his
religious duties only a trifling portion of his time. And unless great
care is taken this will create confusion and bring discouragement and
heaviness of heart.
We can meet this successfully only by the exercise of an aggressive
faith. We must offer all our acts to God and believe that He accepts
them. Then hold firmly to that position and keep insisting that every
act of every hour of the day and night be included in the transaction.
Keep reminding God in our times of private prayer that we mean every act
for His glory; then supplement those times by a thousand thought-prayers
as we go about the job of living. Let us practice the fine art of making
every work a priestly ministration. Let us believe that God is in all
our simple deeds and learn to find Him there.
A concomitant of the error which we have been discussing is the
sacred-secular antithesis as applied to places. It is little short of
astonishing that we can read the New Testament and still believe in the
inherent sacredness of places as distinguished from other places. This
error is so widespread that one feels all alone when he tries to combat
it. It has acted as a kind of dye to color the thinking of religious
persons and has colored the eyes as well so that it is all but
impossible to detect its fallacy. In the face of every New Testament
teaching to the contrary it has been said and sung throughout the
centuries and accepted as a part of the Christian message, the which it
most surely is not. Only the Quakers, so far as my knowledge goes, have
had the perception to see the error and the courage to expose it.
Here are the facts as I see them. For four hundred years Israel had
dwelt in Egypt, surrounded by the crassest idolatry. By the hand of
Moses they were brought out at last and started toward the land of
promise. The very idea of holiness had been lost to them. To correct
this, God began at the bottom. He localized Himself in the cloud and
fire and later when the tabernacle had been built He dwelt in fiery
manifestation in the Holy of Holies. By innumerable distinctions God
taught Israel the difference between holy and unholy. There were holy
days, holy vessels, holy garments. There were washings, sacrifices,
offerings of many kinds. By these means Israel learned that _God is
holy_. It was this that He was teaching them. Not the holiness of things
or places, but the holiness of Jehovah was the lesson they must learn.
Then came the great day when Christ appeared. Immediately He began to
say, "Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time--but _I_ say
unto you." The Old Testament schooling was over. When Christ died on the
cross the veil of the temple was rent from top to bottom. The Holy of
Holies was opened to everyone who would enter in faith. Christ's words
were remembered, "The hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this
mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father.... But the hour
cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father
in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship Him. God
is Spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in
truth."
Shortly after, Paul took up the cry of liberty and declared all meats
clean, every day holy, all places sacred and every act acceptable to
God. The sacredness of times and places, a half-light necessary to the
education of the race, passed away before the full sun of spiritual
worship.
The essential spirituality of worship remained the possession of the
Church until it was slowly lost with the passing of the years. Then the
natural _legality_ of the fallen hearts of men began to introduce the
old distinctions. The Church came to observe again days and seasons and
times. Certain places were chosen and marked out as holy in a special
sense. Differences were observed between one and another day or place or
person, "The sacraments" were first two, then three, then four until
with the triumph of Romanism they were fixed at seven.
In all charity, and with no desire to reflect unkindly upon any
Christian, however misled, I would point out that the Roman Catholic
church represents today the sacred-secular heresy carried to its
logical conclusion. Its deadliest effect is the complete cleavage it
introduces between religion and life. Its teachers attempt to avoid this
snare by many footnotes and multitudinous explanations, but the mind's
instinct for logic is too strong. In practical living the cleavage is a
fact.
From this bondage reformers and puritans and mystics have labored to
free us. Today the trend in conservative circles is back toward that
bondage again. It is said that a horse after it has been led out of a
burning building will sometimes by a strange obstinacy break loose from
its rescuer and dash back into the building again to perish in the
flame. By some such stubborn tendency toward error Fundamentalism in our
day is moving back toward spiritual slavery. The observation of days and
times is becoming more and more prominent among us. "Lent" and "holy
week" and "good" Friday are words heard more and more frequently upon
the lips of gospel Christians. We do not know when we are well off.
In order that I may be understood and not be misunderstood I would throw
into relief the practical implications of the teaching for which I have
been arguing, i.e., the sacramental quality of every day living. Over
against its positive meanings I should like to point out a few things it
does not mean.
It does not mean, for instance, that everything we do is of equal
importance with everything else we do or may do. One act of a good
man's life may differ widely from another in importance. Paul's sewing
of tents was not equal to his writing of an Epistle to the Romans, but
both were accepted of God and both were true acts of worship. Certainly
it is more important to lead a soul to Christ than to plant a garden,
but the planting of the garden _can_ be as holy an act as the winning of
a soul.
Again, it does not mean that every man is as useful as every other man.
Gifts differ in the body of Christ. A Billy Bray is not to be compared
with a Luther or a Wesley for sheer usefulness to the Church and to the
world; but the service of the less gifted brother is as pure as that of
the more gifted, and God accepts both with equal pleasure.
The "layman" need never think of his humbler task as being inferior to
that of his minister. Let every man abide in the calling wherein he is
called and his work will be as sacred as the work of the ministry. It is
not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or
secular, it is _why_ he does it. The motive is everything. Let a man
sanctify the Lord God in his heart and he can thereafter do no common
act. All he does is good and acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For
such a man, living itself will be sacramental and the whole world a
sanctuary. His entire life will be a priestly ministration. As he
performs his never so simple task he will hear the voice of the seraphim
saying, "Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is
full of his glory."
_Lord, I would trust Thee completely; I would be altogether Thine; I
would exalt Thee above all. I desire that I may feel no sense of
possessing anything outside of Thee. I want constantly to be aware of
Thy overshadowing Presence and to hear Thy speaking Voice. I long to
live in restful sincerity of heart. I want to live so fully in the
Spirit that all my thought may be as sweet incense ascending to Thee and
every act of my life may be an act of worship. Therefore I pray in the
words of Thy great servant of old, "I beseech Thee so for to cleanse the
intent of mine heart with the unspeakable gift of Thy grace, that I may
perfectly love Thee and worthily praise Thee." And all this I
confidently believe Thou wilt grant me through the merits of Jesus
Christ Thy Son. Amen._
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