IT is a sure sign of the existence of the life of God in a soul that it seeks the light. We see this in a remarkable verse in the third of John: “He that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.”
It is not that our deeds are so perfect, or so satisfactory in our own eyes, that we feel they will bear the light of the divine presence without any defect being found in them. Man is weakness, and his weakness makes him selfish, and there may be motives underlying.
Many things we do. But we think of the judgment-seat of Christ now with satisfaction. The light is exposure, and exposure without grace were intolerable, it would be the day of judgment. Exposure in the case of human friendships would be an end to them, but God has no discoveries to make of us. We make discoveries of ourselves, and think, as some unexpected form of depravity rolls up from that pit of corruption, the human heart, that this will surely affect His feelings towards us. But the work of Christ is the divine answer to everything that we could find in ourselves.
We stand in the satisfactions of God. The nature in us seeks the light.
“Rivers to the ocean run,
Fire ascending seeks the sun,”
and we seek God. Communion with God is happiness. All the enjoyment and happiness that we have comes from Him, but we use it, like a wild horse, to get at a distance from Him. When we begin to decline in our souls, it is in our communion that we decline first, in the nearest circle. Around the table this morning we are rejoicing over our ruins. We think of what we were, our sin, our distance.
To refer to this chapter, what is striking in it is the way God views man. If we look at the details, everything that is of man defiles, “The bone of a man, or a grave.” Man is before God, so to speak, in his putrescence. He had a favored family of man, that He took up to prove if anything could be done with man. “What could have been done more in My vineyard that I have not done in it? Wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?” The wilderness was not God’s purpose, but His schooling for them. They might have come into the land in eleven days, but they wandered in it forty years. “These things are types for us, and are written for our admonition.” But we find the work of Christ is God’s resource, so to speak, from which He draws for all their failure.
Do we not feel that we can draw upon it for everything that may arise? We feel more and more our weakness and vileness as we advance in the divine life. In this chapter the ashes are the death of Christ; and the running water, the Spirit of God applying to the conscience the remembrance of that death, in the case of failure. That we may treat it lightly? Nay, that we may be grieved at it, that we may be shocked at it!
I was thinking of the lines of that hymn we sang:
“That bitter cup, Love drank it up,
Left but the love for me.”
Has He spoken to us while we have been here of what we have been doing all the week? We have met with nothing but love. We come today for a little while, why not every day in the week? Why is He as a stranger in the land, and a wayfaring man that tarries but for a night? “He says, Abide in Me.” May we think of His love while here, that we may say at least, “I’ll come again.”
(Recollections of the late Rochfort Hunt.)
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THE world has cast my Master out altogether; I cannot be “hail fellow well met” with those that murdered Him.
G. V. W.