Becoming Imitators of the Crucified One
by Horatius Bonar
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and its power
B efore I can live a Christian life, I must be a Christian man. Am I such? I ought to know this. Do I know it and, in knowing it, know whose I am and whom I serve? Or is my title to the name still questionable, still a matter of anxious debate and search? If I am to live as a son of God, I must be a son and I must know it; otherwise my life will be an artificial imitation, a pi,ece of barren mechanism, performing certain excellent movements but destitute of vital heat and force. Here many fail. They try to live like sons in order to make themselves sons, forgetting God’s simple plan for attaining sonship at once, “ . . . as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God . . .” (John 1:12). The faith of many amongst us is, after all, but a trying to believe, their repentance but a trying to repent; and in so doing they but use the words which they have learned from others. It is not the love of holiness that actuates them but (at best) the love of the love of holiness; it is not the love of God that fills them but the love of the love of God. God’s description of a Christian man is clear and well-defined. It has about it so little of the vague and wide that one wonders how any mistake should have arisen on this point and so many dubious, so many false claims put in. A Christian is one who has “ . . . tasted that the Lord is gracious” (1 Pet. 2 :3 ); who has been be gotten “ . . . again unto a lively hope” (1 Pet. 1:3); who has been quickened together with Christ (Eph. 2 :5 ); made partaker of Christ (Heb. 3:14); partaker “ of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4); who has been delivered from this present evil world (Gal. 1:4). Such is God’s description of one who has found his way to the cross and is warranted in taking to him self the Antiochian name of “Christian” or the apos tolic name of “ saint.” Of good about himself previous to his receiving the record of the free forgiveness, he cannot speak. He remembers nothing lovable that could have recommended him to God; nothing fit that could have qualified him for the divine favor,
save that he needed life. All that he can say for himself is that he has “ . . . known and believed the love that God hath to us . . .” (1 John 4:16); and in believing has found that which makes him not merely a happy but a holy man. He has discovered the fountainhead of a holy life. Have I then found my way to the cross? If so, I am safe. I have the everlasting life. The first true touch of that cross has secured for me the eternal blessing. I am in the hands of Christ and none shall pluck me thence (John 10:28). The cross makes us whole; not all at once indeed, but it does the work effectually. Before we reached it we were not “whole” but broken and scattered, nay, without a center toward which to gravitate. The cross forms that center and in doing so it draws to gether the disordered fragments of our being; it unites our heart (Ps. 86:11), producing a wholeness or unity which, beginning with the individual, repro duces itself on a larger scale, but with the same center of gravitation, in the Church of God. O f spiritual health, the cross is the source. From it there goes forth the “ virtue” (du- namis, the power, Luke 6:19) that heals all maladies, be they slight or deadly. For “ . . . with his stripes we are healed” (Isa. 5,3:5); and in Him we find “ the tree of life,” with its healing leaves (Rev. 22:2). Golgotha has become Gilead with its skillful physician and its “ bruised” balm (Jer. 8:22; Isa. 53:5). Old Latimer says well regard ing the woman whom Christ cured, “ she believed that Christ was such a healthful man that she should be sound as soon as she might touch Him.” The “ . . . whole head was sick, and the whole heart faint” (Isa. 1:5); but now the sickness is gone and the vigor comes again to the fainting heart. The look, or rather the object looked at, has done its work (Isa. 45:22); the serpent of brass has accomplished that which no earthly medicines could effect. Not to us can it now be said, “ . . . thou has no healing medicines” (Jer. 30:13), for the word of the great
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THE KING'S BUSINESS
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