There is no disappointment as we contemplate Christ. If you are sometimes disappointed, it is because you are looking at yourself, and reasoning from yourself to God upward, searching into your own heart to find some good reason why He should bless you, and troubled because you cannot find it; instead of gazing upon Christ, and saying, “He is all that God would have Him to be, all that I would have Him to be, and God accepts me in Him.”
I look at Christ, and I say, “SATISFIED.” If I expect from self, that is from what I am in the flesh, I must say, “DISAPPOINTED”; for God has declared that there is no good thing there.
The believer ought to be able to look at the evil nature in himself without either being in bondage about its badness, or exercising the smallest effort to make it one bit better than he finds it. He detests it and distrusts it. He knows that God does not expect him to take up and improve what, at the cross, He Himself has utterly condemned and laid aside forever. He knows that he now stands before God in the life of Another, and that “there is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:11There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. (Romans 8:1)). What a wonderful statement! Let us more closely consider its import.