The Purity of the Soul's Intention Attained Through the Cross

We have already touched on the soul’s anguish when it is torn between the attractions of the spiritual on the one hand, and of the sensuous and physical on the other. That anguish may be described as soulsickness, and the nobler the constitution of the soul the more agonising its consciousness of failure.

Let us recite one or two confessions, which set forth the bitterness of this soulsickness.

“JT will say nothing,” wrote the great German philosopher, Goethe, in 1824, “against the course of my existence. But at the bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that, during the whole of my seventy-five years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being.”

Bunyan describes his feelings before conversion thus: “I was sorry that God had made me a man. The birds, beasts, fishes, &c., I blessed their condition, for they had not a sinful nature; they were not obnoxious to the wrath of God; they were not to go to hell-fire after death. I could, therefore, have rejoiced, had my condition been as any of theirs. How I blessed the condition of the dog or horse, for I knew they had no soul to perish under the everlasting weight

of sin or hell, as mine was like to do!

Nay, and though I saw this, felt this, and

was broken to pieces with it, yet that which added to my sorrow was, that I could not find in my soul that I desired deliverance. My heart was exceedingly hard. If I would have given a thousand pounds for a tear, I could not shed one; no, nor sometimes scarce desire to shed one.”

Henry Alline was a devoted evangelist, who worked in Nova Scotia a hundred years ago, and he thus vividly describes his soulsickness and sorrow: “Everything I saw seemed to be a burden to me; the earth seemed accursed for my sake; all trees, plants, rocks, hills, and vales seemed to be dressed in mourning, and groaning under the weight of that curse; and everything around me seemed to be conspiring for my ruin.”

Outside Christian circles, this same misery is felt. I notice that Count Tolstoi tells his

own story under the veil of an Eastern parable, which I heard when in the East. He says: “Seeking to save himself from a wild beast, a traveller jumped into a well with no water in it; but at the bottom of the well he espied, to his horror, a dragon waiting with open mouth to devour him. So the unhappy man, not daring to go out lest he should be the prey of the wild beast, and not daring to jump to the bottom lest he should be devoured of the dragon, clings to the branches of a wild bush, which grows out of the cracks of the well. His hands weaken, and he feels that he must soon give way to a certain fate; but still he clings, and finally sees two mice, one white (the days), the other black (the nights), evenly

moving round the bush where he clings, and gnawing off its roots. The traveller sees this, and knows that he must inevitably perish; but while thus hanging, he looks about him, and finds on the leaves of the bush some drops of honey. These he reaches with his tongue, and licks them off with rapture. Thus,” continues Tolstoi, “I hang upon the boughs of life, knowing that the inevitable dragon of death is waiting to tear me, and I cannot comprehend why I am thus made a martyr. I try to suck the honey which formerly consoled me, but the honey pleases me no longer, and day and night the white mouse and the black mouse gnaw the branch to which I cling. I can see but one thing: the inevitable dragon and the mice — I cannot turn my gaze away from them. This is no fable, but the literal, incontestable truth. What will be the outcome of my life? Why should I live? Why should I do anything?”

These extracts remind us of some older words still: “What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit.”

From every quarter, then, comes the same complaint, that sin is sickness, and that the sickness is hard to bear. You may not have felt like this because you have never caught a glimpse of what God means the soul to enjoy; but if your eyes were opened to see the possibilities of soul-health, you would also come to know that you are poor and miserable, blind and naked — that the whole soul is sick, and the whole heart faint.

The cure of this condition, as already indicated, comes through the Cross. It was when Jesus ded that the veil, which divided between the Most Holy Place and the Holy, was rent in twain, and the two apartments became one; and it is when the soul enters into the inner meaning of the Cross that it becomes united and single, its eye single, and its being flooded with the ray of a holy light, which is its pure intention.

In other words, Calvary has two aspects, the one towards pardon and the other towards peace. This for justification, and that for sanctification. /%vst, we come to the Cross, and see in it the consummation of God’s self-giving love, that in the Person of Christ He took upon Himself our nature with its failure and sin, bore our sins in His own Body on the tree, reconciled us unto Himself, and did away sin with such absolute

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oblivion that infinite space is the only emblem that can set forth the distance of its removal. ‘The Blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, cleanseth from all sin;” “In Him we have redemption through His Blood, the forgiveness of sins;” “Their sins and iniquities I will remember no more.” Beholding the Cross, like Bunyan’s Pilgrim, we give three leaps for joy, the burden rolls from our back into the sepulchre, and is lost for ever in its depths.

But there is a second view of the Cross, which is quite as important, though it is too often lost sight of. Approaching it “tora second time, the soul discovers itself in the Person of the dying Lord, it realises that it was crucified with Him, it becomes conscious that through the nails and spear, the anguish

of death, and the crucifixion of the Saviour’s

Body, it was freed from the dominion of the old nature, and that it is now wedded to Him who was raised from the dead. As soon as this fact is accepted, we cry with the Apostle, “I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live: and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself up for me” (Gal. ii. 20, R.V.), or, appropriating other words from the same Epistle, we recognise that “They that are of Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with the passions and the lusts thereof” (v. 24). Thus it becomes clear that what was ours in the purpose of God when our Lord died, becomes ours in actual experience by the appropriating act of faith.

The Cross is thus not simply a dogma or doctrine, but an experience. It is the bridge by which we pass from the prison of misery, which we have described, into the palace of Delight; it is the instrument by which we are delivered from the power of our selfish nature and transferred into the glorious liberty of the sons of God. Whenever the strong passions of our lower nature, working through the physical appetites, assert themselves, we turn to the Cross, realise that the “old man” has been crucified with Him, that the power of sin might be rendered inoperative, and we claim that the Holy Spirit should enable us to mortify the deeds of the body, so that we may live the life of the sons of God. We cannot too distinctly emphasise the process of experience through which the soul passes on its way to complete emancipation.

Take one who has been dominated by passionate desire, by furious outbreaks of evil appetite, by jealousy, envy, anger. Let such an one, when the storm begins to rise, repair instantly to the Cross, and realise that there in the purpose of God the old nature was crucified, that there a break was made between the dominion of bodily appetite and the rule of the Divine Spirit; let this be affirmed and repeated, accentuated and appropriated; let the soul dare to stand by the act of the Redeemer as being final and irrevocable; and immediately an amazing and incredible revolution will take place, the rising storm will be quelled, and a voice will be heard from the tossing bark, hushing the waves, and causing a great calm of peace and blessedness. In that calm the Holy Spirit will continue His blessed ministry of

perfecting the life of the indwelling Christ which is the loftiest realisation of the pure

intention of the soul.

Here is an account of how the need of one penitent was met: ‘Oh, help me, help me!’ cried I, ‘Thou Redeemer of souls, and save me, or I] am gone for ever; Thou canst this night, if Thou pleasest, with one drop of Thy blood, atone for my sins, and appease the wrath of an angry God.’ At that instant of time, when I gave up all to Him to do with me as He pleased, and when I became willing that God should rule over me at His pleasure, redeeming love broke into my soul with such power that my whole being seemed to be melted down with love; the burden of guilt and condemnation was gone, darkness was expelled, my heart filled with gratitude,

and my whole soul, that was a few minutes ago groaning under mountains of death, and crying to an unknown God for help, was now filled with immortal love, soaring on the wings of faith, and crying out, ‘My Lord, O my God!’”

The late marvellous work of God in Wales has been a wonderful tribute to the power of the Cross in human lives, The one characteristic of that work has been focussed and expressed in the words so often on the lips of Evan Roberts, “Bend to God.” The people have bent before the will of God; as the love of the Crucified has been made known to them, they have wept to see the awful chasm between the spirit of their lives and of His, and in the energy of the Holy Spirit, they have yielded themselves to be crucified with Him,

In a recent article, written by one who

has entered deeply into the heart of the movement, we have been told that “Its heart has been the unveiling of the Crucified.” As one has travelled through the Principality during these wonderful months, one has heard, on the mountains and in the valleys, in the coal-mines and the trains,

the same quaint old chorus —

“O the Lamb, the gentle Lamb,
The Lamb of Calvary.”

And it is this spirit which has revived the religious life of the community.

We must not be content with viewing the death of the cross as a substitute for ourselves, or a way of escape from suffering even unto death. We must enter into the sufferings of our Lord, must be crucified with Him, must be baptized into His death, in the utter renunciation of self-will, that

we may rise to the newness of His life.