M a n y Chr istians h ave been con ten ted to liv e a de fea ted life w ith th e ir sp ir itu a l en ergy a t a fr igh tfu lly low ebb . God n e v e r m ean t it to be th is w a y . H e re is a sou l s tir r in g a r t ic le tha t can give y o u r h e a r t p ow e r fo r d e liv e ran c e and v ic to ry
B y H . C. G. M ou le
¥ t is nothing less than the supreme I aim of the Christian gospel that we M should be holy; that the God of peace should sanctify us through and through our being; that we should “ walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing.” It is the insatiable desire of the soul, which has truly seen the Lord, to be made fully like Him by His grace. And this desire, as it has never been wholly absent from His congre gation, has, in our own day and amidst our own surroundings, in a very marked degree, come again to be a leading and ruling thing. Every where, under widely different cir cumstances, in many and varied Christian communities, sometimes di verging into fields of error, sometimes moving steadily on lines of eternal truth, there is felt and found in our Christian world of today a deep, strong and growing drift of inquiry and desire after Christian holiness. There is a conspicuous longing to know the whole will of God about it, and the whole offer and resource of His grace; the whole extent to which the divine warrant bids faith go in seeking, expecting, and accepting a divine deliverance from sinning, and a divine enablement to positive holi ness of will and walk. Our Aims ■ Of our aims, how shall I speak both briefly enough and greatly enough? They are just this—to be like Him whom not having seen, we love; to displace accordingly, in grace, self from the inner throne, and to enthrone Him; to make not the slightest compromise with the small est sin. We aim at being entirely willing, nay, definitely to will, to know with ever keener sensibility what is sin in us, and where it is, From "Christ and Sanctification," Pickering & Inglis Ltd. Fleming H. Revell Co., American agents. 12
that it may be dealt with at once by the Holy Spirit. We aim at nothing less than to walk with God all day long; to abide every hour in Christ, and He and His words in us; to love God with all the heart, and our neighbor as ourselves; to live, and that in no conventional sense, no longer to ourselves, but to Him who died for us, and rose again. We aim at yielding ourselves to God as the unregenerate will yields itself to sin, to self; at having every thought brought into captivity to the obedi ence of Christ—every thought, every movement of the inner world; a strict, comprehensive captivity, an absolute and arbitrary slavery. In the region of outward life our aim is, of course, equally large and pervading. It is to break with all evil, and follow all good. It is never, never more to speak evil of any man; never to lose patience; never to trifle with wrong, whether impurity, untruth, or unkindness; never in any known thing to evade our Master’s w ill; nev er to be ashamed of His name. I em phasize again and again this never, for there is the point. As believers in our Lord Jesus Christ, as those who are not their own, but bought, and who accordingly, in the strictest sense, belong to Him all through, our aim is, it must be, across any amount of counterthoughts, never to grieve Him, never to stray; always in the inner world, always in the outer, to walk and please Him. I say again, this is our aim, not in any conventional sense, such as to leave us easy and tolerably comfortable when we fail. Not so; God forbid. Failure, when it comes across this aim, will come with the pang of a shame and disap pointment which we shall little wish to feel again. It will be a deeply con scious discord and collision. It will be a fall down a rough steep. It will be a joy lost* or, at best, deferred
again. It will be the missing of a divine smile, the loss of the light of the countenance of the King. Divine Possibilities It is possible, I dare to say, for those who will indeed draw on their Lord’s power for deliverance and victory, to live a life—how shall I describe it?— a life in which His promises are taken, as they stand, and found to be true. It is possible to cast every care on Him, daily, and to be at peace amidst the pressure. It is possible to have affections and imaginations purified through faith, in a profound and practical sense. It is possible to see the will of God in everything, and to find it, as one has said, no longer a sigh, but a song. It is possible, in the world of inner act and motion, to put away, to cause to be put away, all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and evil speaking daily and hourly. It is possible, by unreserved resort to divine power, un der divine conditions, to become strongest, through and through at our weakest point; to find the thing which yesterday upset all our obligations to patience, or to purity, or to humility, an occasion today, through Him who loveth us, and worketh in us, for a joyful consent to His sin-annulling power. These are things divinely pos sible. And, because they are His work, the genuine experience of them will lay us, must lay us, only lower at His feet, and leave us only more athirst for more. Some Views of Christ, Our Sanctification We shall now as we proceed bend our thoughts more directly upon the Lord Himself, in some of those glori ous characters in which He is made to us sanctification. We must look far more at Him than at our attitude towards Him. In Baxter’s well-known words, we must take ten looks at Christ for one at self. But none the less it is well to look early in the TH E KING'S BUSINESS
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