Aims, Limits, Possibilities

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.

2. But I come to speak briefly of the LIMITS. I will not dwell upon them, but I must indicate them. I mean, of course, not limits in our aims, for there must be none, nor limits in divine grace itself, for there are none, but limits, however caused, in the actual attainment by us of Christian holiness. Here I hold, with absolute conviction, alike from the experience of the Church and from the infallible Word, that, in the mystery of things, there will be limits to the last, and very humbling limits, very real fallings short. To the last, it will be a Simier that walks with God. To the last will “abide in the regenerate” (Art. ix.) that,’trange tendency, that “mind of the flesh,” which eternal grace can wonderfully deal with, but which is a tendency still. To the last, the soul’s acceptance before the JUDGE is wholly and only in the righteousness, the merits, of Christ. To the last, if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, i jbh. L In the pure warm sunshine of the Father’s smile shed upon the loving and willing child, that child will yet say, “Enter not into judgment with thy servant” Walking in the light as He isps.cxliii. in the light, having fellowship with Him, 2’ and He with us, we yet need to the lasti joh. i. the blood of Calvary, the blood of 7’ propitiation, to deal with sin.*

I shall scarcely revert to this side of truth as we proceed, for my aim is at present towards the other pole. But let me thus once for all enter a humble warning against the error and danger of explaining away the Word of God when it tells of an ever-abiding need, in the believer’s life, of confession of sin.

3. Then, lastly, come up into view the

* This aspect of truth is discussed more fully in the Author’s Treatise, “Justifying Righteousness.” Loudon: Seeley & Co.

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sacred POSSIBILITIES of the matter. A submissive recognition of limits will only help us to grasp these with the more hope and joy.

It is possible, I dare to say, for those who will indeed draw on their Lord’s power for deliverance and victory, to live a life — how shall I describe it? — a life in which His promises are taken as they stand, and found to be true. It is possible to cast every care on Him, daily, and to be at peace amidst the pressure. It is possible to have affections and imaginations purified through faith, in a profound and practical sense. It is possible to see the will of God in everything, and to find it, as one has said, no longer a sigh, but a song. It is possible, in the world of inner act and motion, to put away, to get put away, all bitterness, and ph. iv. wrath, and anger, and evil speaking, daily and hourly. It is possible, by unreserved resort to divine power, under divine conditions, to become strongest, through and through, at our weakest point; to find the thing which yesterday upset all our obligations to patience, or to purity, or to humility, an occasion to-day, through Him who loveth us, and worketh in us, for a ioyful consent to His will, and a delightful sense of His presence and sin-annul ling power. These are things divinely possible. And, because they are His work, the genuine experience of them will lay us, must lay us, only lower at His feet, and leave us only more athirst for more.

Some of the conditions of such experience we will consider in the next chapter.

Meanwhile, may I ask each reader of these pages to pause here, with the heartquestion, How high goes my own conscious aim, and, what, as to the

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possibilities of grace, are my personal expectations? And will he add a prayer? “Thou, Lord, who knowest my heart, all its desire and all its need, show me what Thou art able to do with it, and do what Thou art able; through Jesus Christ Amen.”