One reason why Christians go so weakly, is that they are not occupied enough with Christ: if we want to be strong we must be full of Christ-going through no service without remembering that we have a living Christ with all power and with all capacity to enter into every feeling of our minds, and every movement of our hearts as we pass along.
The path of sorrow may be yours, but you cannot say that you are "The Man of sorrows. You may be in depths that you cannot lie in-" poured out like water"-but He, the Man of sorrows, has a heart to meet you in everything! He entered Himself into every sorrow-His experience makes all ours beggarly. If one looks at the experience of Abraham and others, we find His infinitely larger. His sorrow was without sin. Sin falsifies it in us in a measure. In trial, I am a sinner, and I shall be sure to give way to the flesh in some point or other; but there was not the smallest particle of dross to mar the perfection of that Man of sorrows; not a particle was there to come out in Him, as it does in us, of the flesh or of fleshly evil.
We could not fully know what the flesh and the world were, save as in contrast to Christ; He is the touchstone of everything, and He filled this scene, as He passed through it, with the beautiful manifestation of the character of God. If I could not go to Him when I find sin working in me, what refuge should I have? Ah, blessed Lord! cannot I count on Thee to come in, if I. find hypocrisy or anything else? Amid all the strange things that come up in this heart of mine, my soul needs to be where (with the sense of everything being against me in connection with the flesh, the devil, and the world) I am yet able to say God is for me, and if He be for me, who against me!
People have often a much clearer view of the work of Christ than they have of what it is to walk with Christ, as a living person ever occupied with them and until they get this, they will not walk with Him. We cannot walk with Christ in that vivacity of joy, and power of the Holy Ghost, which the early Christians had, unless we know Christ as a living person with His eyes ever fixed upon us.
We love Christ because He first loved us. We find that love expressed in John 14; He took us up at the hand of God, and loved us on that ground-" The men which thou gavest me." " Thine they were and thou gavest them me." He puts forth His love to us as a divine thing in Himself, entirely irrespective of what we are. He might have to say to Peter, " You have faith in your own love to me, yet before the cock crow, thou wilt deny me thrice;" nevertheless He could say to him, as to them all, " Let not your heart be troubled, I shall go away [and 1800 years would pass], but I shall come and fetch you, that you may be with me forever." See when He says three times to Peter, " Lovest thou me?" how He is bringing off Peter from resting on his own love, to rest with implicit confidence in the love of Him who knew all things.
Everything is ours in Him. Having given Him to us, how shall God not with Him freely-give us all things? What will He keep back?
The love of God is a love that gathers us into the presence of God Himself; a love that communicates the life of His Son to those dead in trespasses and sins; and they possess a life that is locked up in the Son, never to be touched. Is' it true that you can turn to God and say that is the manner of life you possess? Life hid with Christ in God! If. Christ Himself, up there, is my life, it links me up with Him in whom is the whole bundle of life. If the head could not say to the feeblest member passing through the difficulties and sorrows of the wilderness down here, " I have no need of thee," why is it? Because of being bound up in one bundle of life, that life being communicated by the Father, and being so in us that Christ cannot say He has no need of us. Did you ever look -up in the face of the Lord Jesus Christ, with the consciousness of having one life with Him? If so, you cannot entertain a single question about the place you are in before God. If you have the eternal life that is in the only-begotten Son, you cannot look up without seeing that you are in a new place altogether before God.
Looking round Eden, man might have said, What a large giver God is! But what can we say, as those to whom this life has been given? Truly our fellowship is with the Father and with the Son!
If you possess that life, you have found and will be finding out, till you go to Him, or till He comes to take you to Himself in a glorified body, what a contrast you are to Him; but it is not a question of what you are, but of the portion that has flowed to you from the Father.