The power of Christian truth in the heart will display itself in devotedness.
Christ is both the life and the object or motive of life in us, giving thus its character to our walk. “To me,” says the Apostle, “to live is Christ.”
Christ was the display, at all cost to Himself, of divine love to men. His Father was His continual delight and object; His display of love and of His Father was constant and perfect. This was His devotedness. Also, He displayed undivided obedience to His Father’s will, having that will for His constant motive.
Love to the Father and obedience to Him gave form and character to His love to us.
“Be ye imitators of God as dear children, and walk in love even as Christ hath loved us and given Himself for us.” Note the fullness of motive and character which is shown for our behavior — imitators of God.
We are followers and imitators of God. We walk in love as Christ loved us. Our life is to be the exercise of divine love as displayed in Christ. It is thus we are called to walk, to imitate God, to follow Him as He displayed Himself in Christ.
The love that descends down from God working in man rises up always towards and to God as its just and necessary object. It can have nothing lower as its spring.
“Hereby,” says John, “know we love, because He laid down His life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.”
We are called upon to display, as having His life, Christ Himself, in us.
The spring and source of all true devotedness is divine love filling and operating in our hearts; as Paul says, “the love of Christ constraineth us.” Its form and character must be drawn from Christ’s character and actions.
The angels learn “the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.” This knits our heart to Christ, bringing us to God in Him, God in Him to us. Nothing separates us from this love. The first effect is to lead the heart up, thus sanctifying it. We bless God, adore God, thus known; our delight, adoring delight, is in Jesus.
As near to God and in communion with Him, as consciously united to Christ by the Holy Spirit, divine love flows into and through our hearts. We become animated by it through our enjoyment of it. It is really “God dwelling in us,” as John expresses it. “His love shed abroad in our hearts,” as Paul does. It flows forth to others as it did in Christ. Its objects and motives are as they are in Christ.
Christ’s death governs the heart. “Hereby know we love because He laid down His life for us.” “The love of Christ constraineth us, because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: and that He died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him which died for them, and rose again.”
The new divine life in us enjoys God. That life alone is capable of delighting, as being of like nature, in the blessedness that is in Him.
The activity of the divine nature in the new man is tested, because Christ has necessarily the first place with this nature and is the motive of its activity.
Our bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit; and God’s love is shed abroad in the heart by the Holy Spirit which is given to us. It springs up like a well in us unto eternal life, and so living waters flow out from us by the Holy Spirit which we have received. All true devotedness, then, is the action of divine love in the redeemed, through the Holy Spirit given to them.
The activity of love does not destroy the sense of obligation in the saint, but alters the whole character of his work. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” In God love is active, but sovereign; in the saint it is active, but a duty, because of grace. It must be free to have the divine character — to be love. Yet we owe it all, and more than all, to Him that loved us.
The Spirit of God which dwells in us is a Spirit which fixes the heart on God’s love in a constraining way. Every right feeling in a creature must have an object, and, to be right, that object must be God, and God revealed in Christ as the Father, for in that way God possesses our souls.
Paul says, “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless, I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” Paul’s life was a divine life. Christ lived in him, but it was a life of faith, a life living wholly by an object, and that object Christ, and known as the Son of God loving and giving Himself for him. Here we get the practical character and motive of Christian devotedness — living to Christ.
We live on account of Christ: He is the object and reason of our life (all outside is the sphere of death). “The love of Christ constraineth us, because we thus judge, if one died for all, then were all dead: and He died for all, that they which live should not live to themselves, but to Him who died for them and rose again.” They live to and for that, and nothing else. It may be a motive for various duties, but it is the motive and end of life. “We are not our own, but bought with a price,” and have to “glorify God in our bodies.”
His constraining love is not a law contending or arresting a will seeking its own pleasure, but the blessed and thankful sense of our owning ourselves to His love, and a heart entering into that love and Himself as its object. Hence the constraining is a law of liberty.
The life constrained by His love can only have objects of service which His life can have, and the Holy Spirit can fix the heart on and that service will be the free service of delight. Flesh may seek to hinder, for its objects cannot be those of the new man and the Holy Spirit. The heart loves all the saints, for Christ does. It seeks the all for whom Christ died, yet knowing that only grace can bring any of them. It endures “all things for the elect’s sake, that they may obtain the salvation which is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory.” It seeks “to present every man perfect in Christ Jesus,” to see the saints grow up to Him who is the Head in all things, and to see them walk worthy of the Lord. It seeks to see the church presented as a chaste virgin unto Christ. It continues in its love, though the more abundantly it loves the less it be loved. It is ready to endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.
The motive which governs our heart characterizes our walk and judges all by it. A man of pleasure flings away money; so does an ambitious man. They judge of the value of things by pleasure and power. The covetous man thinks their path folly, judges of everything by its tendency to enrich. The Christian judges of everything by Christ. If it hinders His glory in oneself or another, it is cast away. It is judged of not as sacrifice, but cast away as a hindrance. All is dross and dung for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus our Lord. To cast away dross is no great sacrifice. How blessedly self is gone here! “Gain to me” has disappeared. What a deliverance that is! Unspeakably precious for ourselves and morally elevating!
Christ gave Himself. We have the privilege of forgetting self and living to Christ. It will be rewarded, our service in grace, but love has its own joys in serving in love. Self likes to be served; love delights to serve.
Living to God inwardly is the only possible means of living to Him outwardly. All outward activity not moved and governed by this is fleshly and even a danger to the soul — tends to make us do without Christ and brings in self.
The external activity of devotedness will be governed by God’s will and God-given competency to serve. Devotedness is a humble, holy thing, doing its Master’s will. We want wisdom: God gives it liberally. Christ is our true wisdom. We want power; we learn it in dependence through Him who strengthens us. Devotedness is a dependent, as it is a humble, spirit. So it was in Christ. It waits on its Lord. It has courage and confidence in the path of God’s will, because it leans on divine strength in Christ. He can do all things. Hence it is patient and does what it has to do according to His will and Word, for then He can work.
We are in a world where doing God’s will will be opposed and rejected, and our hearts would naturally save self. Peter presented to Christ the thought of saving Himself, and Christ treated it as Satan. We shall find the flesh shrink instinctively from the fact and from the effect of devotedness to Christ, because it is giving up self, and brings reproach, neglect, and opposition on us. We have to take up our cross to follow Christ; not to return to bid adieu to them that are at home in the house. It is our home still, if we say so, and we shall at best be “John Marks” in the work. And it will be found it is ever “suffer me first!”
If there be anything but Christ, it will be before Christ, and not devotedness to Him with a single eye. It is difficult to the heart that there should be no self-seeking, no self-sparing, no self-indulgence! Yet none of these things are devotedness to Christ and to others, but the very opposite. Hence, if we are to live to Christ, we must hold ourselves dead, and alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.
If the flesh be practically allowed, it is a continual hindrance. Reproach and opposition are then a burden, not a glory. We have with Paul to “bear about in our body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal bodies,” and so to have the sentence of death made good in ourselves. Here the Lord’s help, through trials and difficulties, comes in. But we are “more than conquerors through Him that loved us.” Nothing separates us from that love.
When we come to the management of our own heart, we shall find that this “always bearing about in our body the dying of the Lord Jesus” is the great difficulty and tests the inward state of the soul. Yet, there is no liberty of service nor power but in the measure of “always bearing ... the dying.” We have this power in the sense of grace. It is the power of the sense we have of His dying and giving Himself for us which, by grace, makes us hold ourselves as dead to all but Him.
Outward service may be comparatively easy when self and Satan’s power are not felt in opposition.
To have Christ’s dying always made good against self, detected by the cross, supposes Christ to be all in the affections. The true power and quality of service is measured by it — the operation of God’s Spirit by us.
The love of Christ in the cross constrains us to give ourselves wholly up to Him who has so loved us, given Himself wholly up for us. The winning Christ and being like Him in glory gives energy and the spring and power of hope to our path. How constraining and mighty is the motive, if we have really felt it! Yet how lowly! It makes us of little esteem to ourselves in the presence of such love. We see we are not our own, but bought with a price.
The sense of the love of Christ takes possession of the heart and constrains us. We desire to live also to Him who gave Himself for us. The perfection of the offering and the absoluteness and perfectness with which it was offered, alike His love to us in it, have power over our souls. “Through the eternal Spirit He offered Himself without spot to God.”
The sense that we are not our own deepens the claim in our hearts, yet takes away all merit in the devotedness. So wise and sanctifying are God’s ways! How does the thought too of winning Him make all around us but dross and dung for the excellency of the knowledge of Him!
What is all compared with pleasing Him, possessing Him, being with Him and like Him forever! It puts the value of Christ, as the motive, on everything we do. It leads to true largeness of heart, for all dear to Him becomes precious to us, yet keeps from all looseness of nature and feelings, for we are shut up to Christ. What is not His glory is impossible. It puts sin practically out of the heart by the power of divine affections, by having the heart filled with Him. Practically the new nature only lives with Christ for its object.
The constraining love of Christ applies to everything, because we have to please Christ in everything. Dress, worldly manners, worldliness in every shape disappears. They cannot be alike or agreeable to Him whom the world rejected, because He testified to it that its works were evil. The tone of the mind is unworldly, does not refer to it, save to do good to it when it can.
The place of the Christian is to be the epistle of Christ. Christ thus possessing the heart has a circumscribing power. The motives, thoughts, relationships of the world do not enter into the heart. But Christ moving all within and all being referred in the heart to Him, it carries His character out into the world. Kept from the evil, it is the active exercise of good that is in Him, the love of God. The heart is shut up to God, but all the blessedness of God goes out in the measure in which the vessel contains it.
Christ has “purified to Himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.” Christ’s love is active, but it is guided by the mind of Christ. It loves the brethren as Christ did; that is, it has its spring in itself, not in the object; it feels all their sorrows and infirmities, yet is above them all so as to bear and forbear, and find in them the occasion of its holy exercises. It is alike tender in spirit and firm in consistency with the divine path, for such is Christ’s love.
Christ’s life, in all its devotedness and activity, is a life of obedience. There cannot be a righteous will in a creature, for righteousness in a creature is obedience. Adam fell, having a will independent of God. Christ came to do the will of Him that sent Him, and in His highest devotedness His path was that of obedience. “The prince of this world cometh and hath nothing in Me, but that the world may know that I love the Father, and as the Father hath given Me commandment, so I do.” This both guides in devotedness and keeps us quiet and humble.
We are called to simple, undivided devotedness to Christ with Christ the only motive of the heart, His love constraining us, in all things caring for what He cares for, with the crucified and risen Christ set before us as our hope, the center round which our whole life turns.
J. N. Darby (adapted from Christian Devotedness)