There are few things in which Satan takes so much advantage of us as in using our failures to keep us from God. The power that he gets over God’s people in this way is wonderful; and how many cases are there that one meets with in which there is no real restoration to communion with God, whilst there is apparent and perhaps real sorrow for failure How many, too, world have to say, if the truth were spoken out, that whilst the language of nearness is used, and that perhaps in an exaggerated way, in order to cover up to ourselves and others the real state of things, yet there is no conscious nearness in the heart to God all the while. It is this leaves us so often under the power of the things and circumstances through which we pass. For if away from Him what strength have we? Our struggles and efforts to maintain ourselves in a path that is suited to our place before God must fail. There is no strength in which we can stand before Satan and escape his wiles, but the power of the Spirit of God; and no path in which we can find that strength available for us, but that of communion with and consequent obedience to Him. Want of confidence in God lies at the root of all this. It was by listening to the suggestion of a doubt as to God’s love that sin came in and gained power over man. It is by that confidence being restored that sin is triumphed over. The Lord Jesus is the Restorer of that confidence, and that by showing to us that, sinners as we are, He loves us, and we may trust Him fully. What blessedness is this for man! All that he could look for from God was judgment; but he finds mercy. God’s triumph over sin is not alone in judging it, but by displaying grace towards those who are involved in it. How full the heart is of praise when that love He has shown us is believed, and how precious does that One become to us. How sweet too to the Father is the melody that rises in the heart of one who, poor and weak and unfit in himself, has tasted that the Lord is gracious.
Now it is through our sins and failures that He teaches us what He is to us, and that we cannot do without Him one moment. Oh! say some, then we may continue in sin, that grace may abound lie who has never known what God is or grace either, may speak thus, but not the Christian. He has a nature that links him with God and makes him delight in holiness and long for deliverance, not alone from guilt and judgment, but from the power of sin, and therefore says, God forbid. But when conscience is awake and the heart exercised to desire right ways, there still is so often manifested the weakness and sinfulness of human nature, that the enemy takes advantage of this to dim the sense of God’s love in our souls.
Supposing I have learned what Christ is to me as a Saviour. Being justified by faith I have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Still I may know but little how to measure and avail myself of the grace that I have been called to enjoy. The very fact of having an exercised conscience and heart, makes me regard my ways and words with jealousy, lest I should offend or grieve Him, and the danger is of letting the legalism so natural to the human heart lay hold of me. Its claims to be heard are very plausible. It takes the side of righteousness and appeals to the very desire after holiness that divine grace has implanted in the child of God. It does not come as law and invite me to take up with it. I should not listen if it did. But it speaks to my conscience and bids me do what I ought to do as a Christian, and perhaps the poor deceived heart seeking power over sin, turns away from God, to find that the strength of sin is the law, and instead of the deliverance that is promised finds all real ability to walk with God is lost, and the sense of grace growing weaker and weaker as the struggle goes on. No intelligence of truth can shield one from this, though it may deepen the conviction of the conscience and intensify the distress of soul. And here is the danger of getting the mind full of abstractions. Truth is light and will do its work in spite of us, but if my knowledge of grace does not in some measure, correspond, what distress is it to know as a truth that I am in Canaan in heavenly places in Christ, and yet in spirit I may be hardly out of Egypt. Is not this a day of special danger in this respect to all of us?
The inconsistency between profession and practice is a burden and weight upon many a heart. How wise and gracious of our blessed Master, “He spake to them as they were able to bear it.” If I am a baby, better to own that I am and seek the food that suits that state. As such I may sit down to a meal for a full-grown man and become morally a dyspeptic of the worst kind, and almost loathe the food that I cannot enjoy, but which distresses me. Conscience will say, you ought to be walking as one who is seated in the heavenlies and looking down upon all on earth. The sad answer I may have to give is perhaps, I know it well, but, alas I am not. How deep and wide-spread is this evil in our day! What a moral wreck is it bringing many to! “Holding faith and a good conscience, which some having put away, concerning faith have made shipwreck,” says the Apostle.
But what security is there for all this? Is there no relief from such a state? Does he abandon to hardness of heart those whom the Father has given to him out of the world, although saving them from the everlasting consequences of their ways? Such thoughts will rise sometimes, but they only show how little grace is realized, when law is taken up with. Did we love Him before He loved us or is it just the other way? Was it for any good He saw in us He left His glory for a servant’s place and the cross and dust of death with all its shame? Or was it just the outflow of the love of God towards us when we were yet sinners that He came to witness to? Surely it was that alone. Then it was no motive outside himself all this display of grace and goodness sprang from. He loves because He is love, and though He found a fitting scene for the display of it in an evil world, yet all is from Himself; and as to us He seeks to make us all we ought to be. And this is just the key to all our trouble, we forget Him. Our proud natures do not like to be indebted to Him for everything. We may have taken the molding of ourselves into our own hands and out of His and it has all failed. Mercy to us indeed that it should be so.
It is just this then, that we need to have Him before us, to meditate upon His love to us, believing all that we may have learned, it may be in an intellectual way, and careful not to undervalue that. But setting the blessed God before us always. Silencing the demands of the law the “ought” and “must” with the confession of our helplessness, and thus practically dying to it, but meditating on His love — love that whilst we know it, passes knowledge, tracing His ways of goodness towards us as His word records them, till the deep reality of it all breaks in upon our souls, and in the living light of what He is, we “joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ by whom we have received the reconciliation.” Fit food this is for babes, young men and fathers too! The dull, dry study of doctrine may choke and starve our souls, but with Christ to feed upon we learn the blessedness of those words, “He that cometh to me shall never hunger, and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.” Thus, and only thus can the deep, quiet judgment of ourselves go on day by day, and whilst we stop to drink, as drink we must, the bitter waters of Marah, we shall find the wood of the tree to sweeten them. To try the crucifixion of the flesh in our own strength is cruel work, and gladly would we be spared, but if Christ and His cross are before us we can glory in it, as that by which we are crucified to the world and the world to us.
R. T. G.