Except
ye be converted, and become as little children . . . Matthew
18:3
These words of Our Lord are
true of our initial conversion, but we have to be continuously converted
all the days of our lives, continually to turn to God as children. If we
trust to our wits instead of to God, we produce consequences for which God
will hold us responsible. Immediately our bodies are brought into new
conditions by the providence of God, we have to see our natural life obeys
the dictates of the Spirit of God. Because we have done it once is no
proof that we shall do it again. The relation of the natural to the
spiritual is one of continuous conversion, and it is the one thing we
object to. In every setting in which we are put, the Spirit of God remains
unchanged and His salvation unaltered but we have to "put on the new
man." God holds us responsible every time we refuse to convert
ourselves, our reason for refusing is willful obstinacy. Our natural life
must not rule, God must rule in us.
The hindrance in our spiritual life is
that we will not be continually converted, there are "wadges" of
obstinacy where our pride spits at the throne of God and says—"I
won’t." We deify independence and willfulness and call them by the
wrong name. What God looks on as obstinate weakness, we call strength.
There are whole tracts of our lives which have not yet been brought into
subjection, and it can only be done by this continuous conversion. Slowly
but surely we can claim the whole territory for the Spirit of God.
Where the
Battle’s Lost and Won
The battle is lost or won in the
secret places of the will before God, never first in the external world. The
Spirit of God apprehends me and I am obliged to get alone with God and fight
the battle out before Him. Until this is done, I lose every time. The battle
may take one minute or a year, that will depend on me, not on God; but it must
be wrestled out alone before God, and I must resolutely go through the hell of
a renunciation before Him. Nothing has any power over the man who has fought
out the battle before God and won there. If I say—"I will wait till I
get into the circumstances and then put God to the test," I shall find I
cannot. I must get the thing settled between myself and God in the secret
places of my soul where no stranger intermeddles, and then I can go forth with
the certainty that the battle is won. Lose it there, and calamity and disaster
and upset are as sure as God’s decree. The reason the battle is not won is
because I try to win it in the external world first. Get alone with God, fight
it out before Him, settle the matter there once and for all.
In dealing with other people, the line to take
is to push them to an issue of will. That is the way abandonment begins. Every
now and again, not often, but sometimes, God brings us to a point of climax.
That is the Great Divide in the life; from that point we either go towards a
more and more dilatory and useless type of Christian life, or we become more
and more ablaze for the glory of God—"My Utmost for His Highest."
Placed in the
Light
If we
walk in the light, as He is in the light, . . . the blood of Jesus Christ His
Son cleanseth us from all sin. 1 John 1:7
To mistake conscious freedom from
sin for deliverance from sin by the Atonement is a great error. No man knows
what sin is until he is born again. Sin is what Jesus Christ faced on Calvary.
The evidence that I am delivered from sin is that I know the real nature of
sin in me. It takes the last reach of the Atonement of Jesus Christ, that is,
the impartation of His absolute perfection, to make a man know what sin is.
The Holy Spirit applies the
Atonement to us in the unconscious realm as well as in the realm of which we
are conscious, and it is only when we get a grasp of the unrivalled power of
the Spirit in us that we understand the meaning of 1 John 1:7, "the
blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin." This does not refer
to conscious sin only, but to the tremendously profound understanding of sin
which only the Holy Ghost in me realizes.
If I walk in the light as God is in the light,
not in the light of my conscience, but in the light of God—if I walk there,
with nothing folded up, then there comes the amazing revelation—the blood of
Jesus Christ cleanses me from all sin so that God Almighty can see nothing to
censure in me. In my consciousness it works with a keen poignant knowledge of
what sin is. The love of God at work in me makes me hate with the hatred of
the Holy Ghost all that is not in keeping with God’s holiness. To walk in
the light means that everything that is of the darkness drives me closer into
the center of the light.
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