PLAISTOW. — I love the Lord Jesus, and desire to walk well-pleasing to him. I read His precious word, and hooks that will help, yet I make no spiritual progress and I feel there is something lacking in my life. My prayers do not seem to be answered and I am so constantly falling, which makes my testimony before the unconverted a failure.
READ the seventh chapter of the epistle to the Romans, particularly noticing verses 7 to 24, and you will find an inspired description of the kind of experience through which you are passing. The apostle Paul could say “I delight in the law of God after the inward man” (verse 22) just as you can say “I love the Lord Jesus and desire to walk well-pleasing to Him.” Yet Paul had to say, “The good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do” (verse 19) just as you tell us that your prayers do not seem to be answered, your Bible reading is apparently fruitless, and you constantly fall. Here then is the Scripture that will help in your case. We want you to notice two things: — the remedy and the reason why.
1. THR REMEDY. This may be seen in the last verse of chapter 7 and the first four verses of chapter 8. It is, in few words, to find in the energy of the indwelling Spirit your heart’s object and delight in the risen Lord Jesus Christ. What is troubling you is the terrible inward power of sin in your flesh. But “sin in the flesh” has been condemned by God in the death of His own Son who came and offered Himself as a Sacrifice for sin. The believer now has his life in Christ Jesus and, possesses the Holy Ghost as the Spirit of that life, so that Christ Himself may be made a living bright Reality to him. God’s plan is to lift the believer out of himself and out of the old way of living by the attractive power of Christ.
Millions of tons of gray. Atlantic water fling themselves against the rock-bound cliffs of our western coasts and get no nearer to the heavens in spite of all their restless efforts. Three thousand miles to the southward they lie quiet and still under the warm rays of the tropical sun and millions of tons rise as vapor into the blue dome of heaven to float as fleecy clouds and presently pour down their water as a blessing to the thirsty earth.
Do you see the point of this little illustration? Are you not striving and breaking yourself to no effect like the Atlantic billows, when the remedy would be to give up your fruitless efforts for holiness and settle yourself to enjoy the divine warmth of the love and glory of Christ? Do we then mean that you should stop reading your Bible and helpful books and cease to pray? By no means. You will do well to read and pray, more rather than less. Only you will do both not as a kind of struggle towards holiness, not as turning them into levers wherewith to lift yourself out of the slough into which you have sunk, but rather as putting you into touch with the Lord that by them you may the more effectually know Him and be conscious of His love.
2. THE REASON WHY. The trouble and exercise through which you are passing is not needless and fruitless. There are very definite reasons for it, as there were in the case of Paul. Romans 7:1818For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. (Romans 7:18) reveals one of the main reasons. Each of us has to learn the lesson “that in me (that is, in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing.”
Now this is not an easy thing to learn and it is only really learned by experience. We may believe it just because Scripture says it in the verse quoted—and it is good and right to believe it like this. You probably quite believe it but do you really know it? The apostle says in verse 18, not “I believe” but “I know.” He knew it by bitter experience and thus it is that we all have to know it in our turn.
Now the almost certain reason why you are still in the sad plight you have described is that you have as yet not properly learned this lesson. You may know that you are a sinner and bad, but you have not yet really learned that in your flesh there is not one particle of good. Thank God, if you are learning it. When you have learned it with all its humbling discoveries you will learn to condemn your flesh as utterly worthless, even as God has condemned it (8:3) and you will turn away to Christ to find your all in Him.
Then if we inquire of you: — and who delivered you from this body of death? — you will joyfully be able to say “I thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”