“Ye in Me.”
“I see a Man at God’s right hand,
Upon the throne of God;
And there in sevenfold light I see
The sevenfold sprinkled Blood.
I look upon that glorious Man,
On that blood-sprinkled throne―
I know that He is there for me,
His glory is my own.
The heart of God flows forth in love,
A deep eternal stream;
Through that beloved Son it flows
To me as unto Him.
And looking on His face I know,
Weak, worthless though I be,
How deep, how measureless, how sweet
That love of God to me!”
Titus far do we find three steps in the knowledge of the Lord, shown to us more or less clearly in the inner history of the Abbess Gertrude.
First, the knowledge of forgiveness through the Blood of Jesus, imperfectly understood, yet simply believed. Imperfectly understood, for it seemed to her that it must be a cleansing again and again repeated; yet she was simply trusting to that Blood alone, and therefore she had peace, though scarcely untroubled peace, to her soul.
Secondly, did she learn the love which led the Lord who died for His own, to make His dwelling-place in the hearts that He had cleansed.
And thirdly, there dawned upon her a yet more glorious truth; that the redeemed soul is seen before God in Christ, for with Christ it is made one. Not only that He dwells in us, but also we in Him, because He has given to us of His Spirit. Not only did He come to dwell in the quiet court, the heart that loved Him, but He led His beloved one forth into the goodly land, to find her abiding place in the heart of Christ.
Shall we ever fathom the depths of the simple words repeated to us so often in the writings of the Apostles—the oft-repeated words “in Christ?”
To the Abbess Gertrude these words had become a reality, though, like ourselves, she had, in her consciousness of it, reached but the shore of the infinite ocean of blessedness.
“I know,” says the Apostle, “a man in Christ.” “But this,” writes one in our day, “we must a little explain and open out. It is often very vague in many a Christian’s heart. In Paradise, without law, under the law, and when Christ was presented to him, man had failed. He had sinned in Paradise, he was lawless when without law, a transgressor when under law, and last and worst of all, when Christ came, man proved to be without a cloak for sin, the hater of Him and of His Father.”
Man was lost. The tree had been proved bad, and the more the care, the worse the fruit. The tree was to bear fruit no more forever. Not only had man proved to be a sinner in every way, but he had rejected the remedy. Christ came into an already sinful world, and He was despised and rejected of men.
But now comes God’s work for the sinner. He who knew no sin is made sin for us. He drinks graciously and willingly the cup given Him to drink. He lays down the life in which He bore, the sin, and all is gone with it. He suffered for the sins of every believer, and by the sacrifice of Himself He has perfected them forever. He that is dead is freed from sin.
But Christ died. He then is freed from sin. But whose? Ours, who believe in Him. It is all gone, gone with the life to which it was attached, in which He bore it. In that He died, He died unto sin once; in that He liveth, He liveth unto God.
With us too it is gone, for Christ has died, receiving from God the judgment of the sin which He bore for us. If we are alive, we are alive now on a new footing before God—alive in Christ. The old things are passed away, there is a new creation. We are created again in Christ Jesus.
Our place, our standing before God, is no longer in the flesh. It is in Christ. (“When we were in the flesh,” writes the Apostle, speaking of a past and closed position.) Christ, as man, has taken quite a new place, to which neither Adam innocent, nor Adam guilty, had anything to say. The best robe formed no part of the prodigal’s first inheritance at all. It was in the father’s possession, quite a new thing.
Christ has taken this place consequently on putting away our sins, and finishing the work.
And now when we, once dead in our sins, are made alive, we are made alive with the life in which Christ lives. We are men in Christ, not in Adam. We belong to a new creation, having the life of the Head of this new creation as our life.
The Cross of Christ is for the believer that impassable Red Sea, that Jordan through which he has now gone, delivered from Egypt forever, and having entered into Canaan “in Christ.”
The land so glorious and so blessed known to the Abbess Gertrude in those old times, known to the simplest believer now.
“But if in Christ, the title and privilege of Christ is our title and privilege. Of the full and wondrous fruit of this heavenly standing, Paul was given to enjoy in an extraordinary and blessed manner. Paul was so allowed to know it that there was a time when he could not tell if he were in or out of the body.
“And we, though we may never have been in the third heaven to realize fully the glory of the place which God has given us, we have known enough of that blessing to rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory. The feeblest saint who knows his place in Christ knows this, for this is indeed our proper Christian state, the Spirit filling us, so as to be the only source of actual thought in us, when we are thus abiding in Christ.”
Is it so? Let us travel on six hundred years from that “Sunday before the fast,” and travel also from the old convent of Hellfde to a quiet lane in Hertfordshire, where stands a small farmhouse, plain and unsightly.
There lived there a farmer, respectable and very commonplace, absorbed in his cows and his crops. His stolid, unintelligent face told of a mind into which higher matters had seldom found their way.
He fell into bad health, and a visitor who sometimes called to see him made hopeless attempts to direct his thoughts to the God before whom he was, apparently, so soon to appear.
He did not object or oppose; he seemed too little to understand even the simplest verses of the Bible to find objections.
He smiled in a bewildered manner, and said, “Haven’t no doubt it’s all very nice for them as can take it in, but I’m one of those as can’t.”
God, Christ, Heaven, the Soul, seemed to him words to which no special meaning attached, and it, was a relief to him to take out his large account-book, and describe to his visitor the number and value of the cows he had lost by “that there lung disease.”
Again and again the visits ended thus, and the visitor left the neighborhood sad and discouraged. Six months afterward she received a message from this man. It was thus, “You will be glad to hear that I am saved.” She returned to the neighborhood, and again found herself in the dark little parlor, but like a light in the darkness was the radiant face of the farmer.
“The Lord has healed my body,” he said, “and He has saved my soul.”
And in answer to the question of his visitor, he thus related the history of that which had befallen him.
“You remember,” he said, “how stupid I was when you talked to me last year about the Lord Jesus Christ. It seemed all like Greek to me—couldn’t make out what it was you meant me to understand. But I kept thinking, well, there’s something or other I must do to be saved — I must repent, or pray, or turn over a new leaf—yet I couldn’t make out what. And so I let it alone, and thought there’s some that understands these things, and some that don’t, and so I must let it be.
“It was a fortnight ago I went to bed, just as stupid and dark as ever I was. It seemed to me that in the middle of the night I awoke-but yet it must have been a dream. For when I seemed to wake, strange to say, everything was gone. There was empty space, and nothing else. And stranger still, I was gone! clean gone! It was a wonder to me that words can’t say.
“Then I thought, is there nothing, nothing anywhere? Is there nothing that cannot be gone? And then in one moment it came to me clearly and surely, Christ cannot be gone. Christ is there before His Father; His eyes are upon Christ. Christ is there in my place, and God looks at Christ. I am, gone. It is Christ who has undertaken all that I could not do. Christ has satisfied God. He must be satisfied, for His eyes are upon Christ, and Christ is perfect.
“And I had my heart filled with perfect peace and joy, and I awoke calling out, ‘I am gone, and Christ is there before God!’ And now that I was really awake, I understood it all. I had been thinking before, I must do or be this or that. But God had showed me as it were in a picture that not only He did not want my doings, but He did not want me. He could only be satisfied with Christ. And it was in Christ only that I was there before Him; not a question of what I was, but of what He is; not a question of me at all, but only what Christ is to God.
“It was a joy to me no words can tell, for not only I saw my sin was gone, but the wretched self that did the sin, the sinful stupid self, all gone, and Christ only left!”
By this mysterious means had the Lord revealed Himself to the Hertfordshire grazier, as of old to the Abbess Gertrude. From this time his life work was to seek to win souls for Christ. His joy and peace were not the passing excitement caused by a strange dream, but the eternal blessedness caused by belief in the truth thus taught to his soul.
He lived four years in the faithful service of God, and died saying, “There is nothing, nothing but happiness,” for to him there was nothing but Christ.
“Do you know which side of the Jordan you are? “a friend said to him some time before his death. She did not expect he would know the meaning of the question.
He looked at her in astonishment. “I don’t think,” he said, “that you needed to ask me such a question as that. How can I help knowing that I am in the land that flows with milk and honey?”
He too had been led into the “land of eternal summer,” into the “Paradise of unfading blossoms.” For there is one Body and one Spirit, even as we are called in one hope of our calling, one Jesus, the same yesterday, today, and forever.