Thoughts on Christian Sanctity

The following chapters, except the third and the ninth, reproduce nearly word for word a series of addresses delivered to the “Cambridge University Church Society,” in the October term of 1884. They are offered to the reader with entire submission of the contents to the authority of the Holy criptures, and with the earnest prayer that the Eternal Master will mercifully use for His work whatever in them is of His truth.

The Scriptuie quotations are made, as a rule, from the Authorized Version, with an occasional variation where a more literal rendering appeared to add point or force.

“How blest are they who still abide Close shelter’d in Thy bleeding side! Who life and strength from Thee derive, And by Thee move, and in Thee live.

“Firstborn of many brethren Thou! To Thee, lo, all our souls we bow; To Thee our hearts and hands we give; Thine may we die, Thine may we live.”

ZlNEENDORF, (.T. WESLEY,

The subject of these chapters needs little introduction. It has to do with the very life of the life of the individual Christian, and of the Christian Church. It is nothing less than the supreme aim of the Christian Gospel, that we should be holy; that the God of Peace should sanctify us through and through our being; that we should i Thess. “walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing,” “all studious meeting of His will,” as the Greek of Col. i. 10 imports. Col. i. to At the blessed Table ever and again we “present ourselves, soul and body, a living sacrifice,” and ask, in a spiritual attitude of entire receptivity, to “be fulfilled with His grace and heavenly benediction.” In the morning worship of our Church we pray twice over to be “kept this day without sin.”

It is the insatiable desire of the soul, which has truly seen the Lord, to be made fully like Him by His grace. And this desire, as it has never been wholly absent from His congregation, has, in our own day and amidst our own surroundings, in a very marked degree, come again to be a leading and ruling thing. Every where, under widely different circumstances, in many and varied Christian communities, sometimes diverging into fields of error, sometimes moving steadily on lines of eternal truth, there is felt and found in our Christian world of to-day a deep, strong, and growing drift of enquiry and desire after Christian holiness. There is a conspicuous longing to know the whole will of God about it, and the whole offer and resource of His grace; the whole extent to which the divine warrant bids faith go in seeking, expecting, and accepting a divine deliverance from sinning, and a divine enablement to positive holiness of will and walk.

This blessed subject I propose to treat very simply and very practically. Never, I hope, in one solitary sentence, shall I forget the great lines of revealed truth and doctrine. But I do not intend to deal much with technical distinctions and definitions. I reverently accept, with deep personal conviction, at least all that our Church has defined on Original Sin. I bow to the mystery, to the fact, of the abiding “infection of nature” (Art. ix.) in the new born, and so the utter impossibility that their holiest works should “endure the severity of the divine judgment” (Art. xii.). But I shall touch very little upon problems of the flesh and the spirit, and the mysteries of the will. These things are immensely important in their place; but that is not, if I judge rightly, here. My present aim is to bring up in the simplest manner the remembrance of the Lord’s promises, and of Himself, for actual blissful use and experience in the actings of that Life which, beyond all doubt, His people have in Him.

Our first special topic is AIMS, LIMITS, POSSIBILITIES. Let us think of each in turn.

I. AIMS. — Of these, how shall I speak both briefly enough and greatly enough? They are just this — to be like Him “whom not having seen, we love “; to displace accordingly, in grave reality, self from the inner throne, and to enthrone Him; to make not the slightest compromise with the smallest sin. We aim to be entirely willing, nay, definitely to will, to know with ever keener sensibility what is sin in us, and where it is, that it may be dealt with at once by the Holy Spirit. We aim at nothing less than to walk with God all day long; to abide every hour in Christ, and He and His words in us; to Joh. xv. love God with all the heart, and our 7’ neighbour as ourselves; to live, and that Matt.xxii in no conventional sense, “no longer to 37> 39 ourselves, but to Him who died for us,2 Cor. v. and rose again.” We aim to “yield our- IS’ selves to God” as the unregenerate will Rom. vi. yields itself to sin, to self; to have “every thought brought into captivity to the obedience of Christ” — every thought, 2 Cor. x, every movement of the inner world; a ’ strict, comprehensive captivity., an absolute and arbitrary slavery. In the region of outward life our aim is, of course, equally large and pervading. It is to break with all evil, and follow all good. It is never, never more to speak evil of any man; never to lose patience; never to trifle with wrong, whether impurity, untruth, or unkindness; never in any known thing to evade our Master’s will; never to be ashamed of His name. I emphasize again and again this “never,” for there is the point. As believers in our Lord Jesus Christ, as those who are not their own, but bought, and who accordingly, in the strictest sense, belong to Him all through, our aim is, it must be, across any amount of counterthoughts, “never to grieve Him, never to stray”; always in the inner world, always in the i Thess. outer, to “walk and to please Him.” I

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say again, this is our aim, not in any conventional sense, such as to leave us easy and tolerably comfortable when we fail. Not so; God forbid. Failure, when it comes across this aim, will come with the pang of a shame and disappointment which we shall little wish to feel again. It will be a deeply conscious discord and collision. It will be a fall down a rough steep. It will be a joy lost, or, at best, deferred again. It will be the missing of a divine smile, the loss of “the light of the countenance of the King.” Prov. xvi.

Let me repeat it, even to the risk of weariness; the Christian’s aim is bound, absolutely bound, to be nothing less than this — “Let the words of my lips, and the meditation of my heart, be always acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.” We are absolutely bound Ps xix. to put quite aside all secret purposes of moral compromise; all tolerance of besetting sin, for the sad reason that it is besetting. With open face we behold the glory of the Lord, and ask to be changed 2 Cor. iil. at any cost, all round the circle of life, into the same image. We cannot possibly rest short of a daily, hourly, continuous walk with God, in Christ, by the grace of the Holy Ghost.

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