It is the principle of moral perfection to enjoy things instead of accrediting one’s self with them in the eyes of others. Active Christian life is a common life of service, in contact with human passions, faults and weaknesses — in a word, in contact with the flesh. But to act in it, to introduce God into it (and this is what Christ was), there must be power. We must be really in communion with Him — participating thus in that nature that nothing encroaches on and which shines in its own perfection in the midst of all. We must seek to be above all that we meet with.
Divine philosophy, supposing it to be real and to meet with no opposition when displayed before others, is an easy enjoyment, and, as I have said, one clothes one’s self with it; one displays it to admiring eyes. To walk in Christian life, we must be what we admire; that is another thing. We must be divine, in the sense of the communion of His nature. And this is why Jesus was the most isolated of men and, at the same time, the most accessible, the most affable: the most isolated, because He lived in absolute communion with His Father and found no echo, no sympathy with the perfect love which was in Him; the most accessible, the most affable, because He was that love for others.
How many needs, hidden even in the most degraded souls, would confess themselves, would come to light, if a love, a goodness which could give them confidence, were presented to them: But for this, one must be content often to find one’s self in the midst of such degradation, being preserved from it only by what is within, and this was the life of the Lord. How many souls are whirling in pleasure, in order to silence the moral griefs which torment them! Divine love not only answers needs; it makes them speak. It is delightful to see the opening out of a soul and, at the same time, to see the entrance of spiritual intelligence. One may not exactly seek the degradation I speak of, but we find it in the world, knowing that is the truth as to what is found there, and its external forms do not rebuff the soul.
But it is a life of labor, of patience and of happiness, the like of which cannot be found. Christ could say through all, “That they might have My joy fulfilled in themselves” (John 17:1313And now come I to thee; and these things I speak in the world, that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves. (John 17:13)). Without doubt, there are diversities of gifts, but even when God opens this path before us in His grace, how slow we are to follow the track of the One who draws us there!
Adapted from J. N. Darby