Lovest thou Me? (John 21:15-17)

And these are the right lovers of God, who love God with their whole heart. And they who love God with their whole heart give up all bodily things for the sake of God.

Faith, hope, love the three supernatural virtues, have a two-fold aspect in the saint’s life. The first is seen in the early experiences of grace when these virtues are accidental; the second, when grace is worked into us and these virtues are essential and abiding. When the work of God’s grace begins, "the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost," not the power to love God, but the essential nature of God. When we experience what technically we call being born again of the Spirit of God, we have "spurts" of faith, hope, love, they come but we cannot grip them and they go; when we experience what technically we call sanctification those virtues abide, they are not accidental any more. The test of the life "hid with Christ in God" is not the experience of salvation or sanctification, but the relationship into which those experiences have led us. It is only by realizing the love of God in us by His grace that we are led by His entrancing power in us whither we would not.

Love is the sovereign preference of my person for another person, and Jesus says that other Person must be Himself. Ask yourself what sort of conception you have of loving God. The majority of us have a bloodless idea, an impersonal, ethereal, vague abstraction, called "love to God." Read Jesus Christ’s conception; He mentions relationships of the closest, most personal, most passionate order, and says that our love for Him must be closer and more personal than any of those (see Luke 14:26). How is it to be? Only by the work of the sovereign grace of God. If we have not realized the shedding abroad of the essential nature of God in our hearts, the words of Jesus ought to make us realize the necessity of it—"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God from all thy heart. . . ." To love God with all my heart means to be weaned from the dominance of earthly things as a guide; there is only one dominant passion in the deepest center of the personality, and that is the love of God.

Whosoever shall lose his life for My sake shall find it. (Matthew 16:25)

They also love with their whole soul; that is, when they give up their life for the sake of God; for the soul giveth life to the body, and this same life they give entirely to God.

The only way to love God with all our soul is to give up our lives for His sake, not give our lives to God, that is an elemental point, but when that has been done, after our lives have been given to God, we ought to lay them down for God (see 1 John 3:16). Jesus Christ laid down His holy life for His Father’s purposes, then if we are God’s children we have to lay down our lives for His sake, not for the sake of a truth, not for the sake of devotion to a doctrine, but for Jesus Christ’s sake—the personal relationship all through (cf. Luke 6:22-23). Have I ever realized the glorious opportunity I have of laying down my life for Jesus? It does not mean that we lay down our lives in the crisis of death; what God wants is the sacrifice through death, which enables us to do what Jesus did—He sacrificed His life; His death comes in as a totally new revelation. Every morning we wake, and every moment of the day, we have this glorious privilege of sacrificing our holy selves to and for Jesus Christ (see Romans 12:1).

Beware of the subtle danger that gets hold of our spiritual life when we trust in our experience. Experience is absolutely nothing if it is not the gateway only to a relationship. The experience of sanctification is not the slightest atom of use unless it has enabled me to realize that that experience means a totally new relationship. Sanctification may take a few moments of realized transaction, but all the rest of the life goes to prove what that transaction means.

. . . when He shall appear, we shall be like Him. (1 John 3:2)

They also love God with all their mind; that is, when their mind soareth above all created things, and penetrates into the uncreated good, which is God, and then loseth itself in the secret darkness of the unknown God. Therein it loseth itself and escapeth, so that it can no more come out.

To love God with all our mind we have to "soar above created things, and penetrate into the uncreated good," viz. God. When the Spirit of God begins to deal on this side of things we shall feel at sea, if we are not spiritual, as to what is meant; when we are spiritual we feel with our hearts, not with our heads—"Yes, I begin to see what it means." When anything begins to get vague, bring yourself up against the revelation of Jesus Christ, He is a Fact, and He is the Pattern of what we ought to be as Christians (cf. Matthew 5:48). How much of our time are we giving for God to graduate us in the essential life? We know all about the accidental life, about the sudden spurts that come to us, the sudden times of illumination and sweet inspiration from God’s Book; what Our Lord is getting at is not a life of that description at all, but a life that has lost all sense of its own isolation and smallness and is taken up with God. Not only is the life hid with Christ in God, but the heart is blazing with love to God, and the mind is able to begin slowly bit by bit to bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, till we never trouble about ourselves or our conscious life, we are taken up only with thoughts that are worthy of God.

That He would grant you . . . to be strengthened with might . . . ; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith . . . (Ephesians 3:16-17)

They further love God with all their strength; that is, they ordain all their powers according to the highest discretion, and they direct all of them to one end, and with this effort they penetrate into God.

The whole strength of the personal life, the personal spirit, is to be so gripped by the Spirit of God that we begin to comprehend His meaning. It is always risky to use a phrase with a fringe, a phrase that has a definite kernel of meaning but a fringe of something that is not definite. The way we get off on to the fringe is by ecstasy, and ecstasies may mean anything from the devil to God. An ecstasy is something which takes us clean beyond our own control and we do not know what we are doing, whether we are being inspired by God or the devil, whether we are jabbering with angels’ tongues or demons’. When you come to the words of Our Lord or of the Apostle Paul the one great safeguard is the absolute sanity of the whole thing. ". . . that ye . . . may be able to comprehend . . . and to know"—there is no ecstasy there, no being carried out of yourself into a swoon, no danger of what the mystics of the Middle Ages called Quietism, no danger of losing the conditions of morality; but slowly and surely we begin to comprehend the love of Christ, i.e., the essential nature of God which the Holy Ghost has imparted to us, which enables us to live the same kind of life that Jesus lived down here through His marvelous Atonement. Anything that partakes of the nature of swamping our personality out of our control is never of God. Do we ever find a time in the life of the Lord Jesus Christ when He was carried beyond His own control? Never once. Do we ever find Him in a spiritual panic, crediting God with it? Never once; and the one great marvel of the work of the Holy Ghost is that the sanity of Jesus Christ is stamped on every bit of it. Jesus said we should know the work of the Holy Ghost by these signs—"He shall glorify Me"; "He shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said unto you" and, "He will guide you into all truth." The Spirit of God does not dazzle and startle and amaze us into worshipping God; that is why He takes such a long while, it is bit by bit, process by process, with every power slowly realizing and comprehending "with all saints. . . ." We cannot comprehend it alone; the "together" aspect of the New Testament is wonderful. Beware of all those things that run off on a tangent spiritually. They begin by saying, "God gave me an impulse to do this"; God never gave anyone any impulse. Watch Jesus Christ, the first thing He checked in the training of the twelve was impulse. Impulse may be all right morally and physically, but it is never right spiritually. Wherever spiritual impulse has been allowed to have its way it has led the soul astray. We must check all impulses by this test—Does this glorify Jesus, or does it only glorify ourselves? Does it bring to our remembrance something Jesus said, that is, does it connect itself with the word of God, or is it beginning to turn us aside and make us seek great things for ourselves? That is where the snare comes. Nowadays, people seem to have an idea that these ecstatic, visionary, excitable, lunatic moments glorify God; they do not, they give an opportunity to the devil. The one thing Jesus Christ did when He came in contact with lunacy was to heal it, and the greatest work of the devil is that he is producing lunacy in the name of God all over the world in the spiritual realm, making people who did know God go off on tangents. What did Jesus say? ". . . so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect."  Beware of being carried off into any kind of spiritual ecstasy either in private or in public. There is nothing about ecstasy in these verses: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart"—the sovereign preference of our personality for God. Can I say before God, "For in all the world there is none but Thee, my God, there is none but Thee"? Is it true? is there a woman there? is there a man there? is there a child there? is there a friend there? "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart." Do you say, "But that is so stern"? The reason it is stern is that when once God’s mighty grace gets my heart wholly absorbed in Him, every other love of my life is safe; but if my love to God is not dominant, my love may prove to be lust. Nearly all the cruelty in the world springs from not understanding this. Lust in its highest and lowest form simply means I seek for a creature to give me what God alone can give, and I become cruel and vindictive and jealous and spiteful to the one from whom I demand what God alone can give.

". . . and with all thy soul." What are we laying down our lives for? Why do so many Christians go a-slumming? why do so many go to the foreign field? why do so many seek for the salvation of souls? Let us haul ourselves up short and measure ourselves by the standard of Jesus Christ. He said, "The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost." The mainspring of His love for human souls was His love to the Father; then if I go a-slumming for the same reason, I can never do too much of it; but if my desire for the salvation of souls is the evangelical commercial craze, may God blast it out of me by the fire of the Holy Ghost. There is such a thing as commercialism in souls as there is in business. When we testify and speak, why do we?: is it out of the accident of a poor little paltry experience that we have had, or is it because the whole life is blazing with an amazing desire, planted there by the Holy Ghost, for God to glorify Himself?

Arrived here, all the powers keep silence and rest; this also is the highest work that the powers can perform, when they are inactive and let God only work.

It is only when our lives are hid with Christ in God that we learn how to be silent unto God, not silent about Him, but silent with the strong restful certainty that all is well, behind everything stands God, and the strength of the soul is that it knows it. There are no panics intellectual or moral. What a lot of panicky sparrows we are, the majority of us. We chatter and tweet under God’s eaves until we cannot hear His voice at all—until we learn the wonderful life and music of the Lord Jesus telling us that our heavenly Father is the God of the sparrows, and by the marvelous transformation of grace He can turn the sparrows into His nightingales that can sing through every night of sorrow. A sparrow cannot sing through a night of sorrow, and no soul can sing through a night of sorrow unless it has learned to be silent unto God—one look, one thought about my Father in heaven, and it is all right.

But now being made free from sin . . . (Romans 6:22)

. . . Thus is the mind bound by God. To this it might be said, If this is so, the freedom of the will is taken away. I answer, the freedom of the will is not taken away but given to it, for then is the will quite free when it cannot bear anything save what God willeth.

"Thus is the mind bound by God. . . ." The complaint of a person who is not spiritual when one talks like that, is that a man’s free will is destroyed. It is not, it is given to him. The only thing that gives a personality freedom of will is the salvation of Jesus Christ. The will is not a faculty, will is the whole man active—body, soul and spirit. Let a man get right with God through the Atonement and his activity becomes in that manner and measure akin to Jesus Christ. The whole of my will free to do God’s will, that means a holy scorn of putting my neck under any yoke but the yoke of the Lord Jesus Christ. Where are Christians putting their necks nowadays? Why, nine out of every nine and a half of us are absolute cowards, we will only put our necks under the yoke of the set we belong to. It means—"without the camp, bearing His reproach." (See John 14:15; 15:9-10)

If a man love Me, he will keep My words. (John 14:23)

When now man . . . cometh to the third degree of perfection, in which he heareth, in a silent, secret speaking, the everlasting Word which God the Father speaketh in the ground of souls . . .

We all know how certain verses jump out of a page of the Bible and grip us, full of infinite sweetness and inspiration; at other times they do not. That is what people mean when they say God gave them a message—by the way, do not say that unless God does, we use phrases much too glibly. God may give you the kind of message He gave Isaiah, a blistering, burning message of the altar of God. To be able to hear "the silent, secret speaking" of the Father’s voice in the words of the Bible is the essential groundwork of the soul of every saint.

"The words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life" (John 6:63). God makes His own word re-speak in us by His Spirit. He safeguarded that; He uses the words His Son used, and the words those used who He determined should write them (see 2 Peter 1:21). The great insubordination of to-day is, "Who are the apostles? God spake through them, why can’t He speak through me?" He will not unless we let the Spirit of God interpret to us what those men said, then He will talk through us, but in no other way. When once a man has learned to hear with the inner ear the word of God he "discardeth his self-hood," and the natural delight in God’s word is lost in the realization that it is God Who is speaking. Do you want to know how self-hood works out?—"I have such a fine message, it will do for such and such an audience"; "I have got a wonderful exposition of this text." Well, burn it and never think any more about it. Give the best you have every time and everywhere. Learn to get into the quiet place where you can hear God’s voice speak through the words of the Bible, and never be afraid that you will run dry, He will simply pour the word until you have no room to contain it. It won’t be a question of hunting for messages or texts, but of opening the mouth wide and He fills it.

The outcome of Mark 12:29-31 is God four times over—God the King of my heart, God the King of my soul, God the King of my mind, God the King of my strength; nothing other than God; and the working out of it is that we show the same love to our fellow-men as God has shown us. That is the external aspect of this internal relationship, the sovereign preference of my person for God. The love of the heart for Jesus, the life laid down for Jesus, the mind thinking only for Jesus, the strength given over to Jesus, the will working only the will of God, and the ear of the personality hearing only what God has to say.