The Will of God, the Salvation of the Perishing
“Even so it is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish.” — Matt. xviii. 14.
OUR Lord Jesus here uses the words, little ones, both of the children of whom He spoke in verses 2 and 3, and also of the feeble and simple ones among His people:” the little ones who believe in Me ‘’ (verse 6). He says that just as surely as a man rejoices over one lost sheep, that he has found again, so the Father does not will that any one, even of the feeblest and most despised, should perish. When our Lord spoke elsewhere of His doing the Father’s will, it was specially the will of God to save the lost that He meant: ‘’ I am come down from heaven, not to do Mine own will, but the mil of Him that sent Me, And this is the will of Him that sent Me that of all that which He giveth Me I should lose nothing. For this is the will of My Father, that every one that beholdeth the Son, and believeth on
Him, should have eternal life,” The will of the Father is the salvation of men. xlll the leadings of God’s will, down to the minutest details of the life of every hour, have their root in this great fountain of redeeming love: that not even one of the little ones should perish. Christ’s coming down from heaven, all His speaking and doing. His living and suffering and dying, it all had its unity in this — it was the revelation of God’s will to save, and of Christ’s surrender of Himself to do that will in saving all the Father had given Him.
When we yield ourselves to do the Father’s will, must the will of God for the salvation of men be to us, as it was to Christ, the main object of our life, the one thing we do? It must indeed. The life that was in Christ is the same life that is in us. The glory of the Father; the blessedness of being the channels of the Father’s love; the entire surrender to the one work the Father wants done in the world; all these claim our devotion as much as they did that of Christ. There is an infinite difference in the part He took and the part we are to take in carrying out that will: but the will itself is to be as much the joy and the aim of our life as it was of His. The larger our apprehension of God’s will, and the more complete our surrender to it in all its breadth, to be wholly possessed of it the more surely will we grow to the stature of the perfect man in Christ Jesus, and reach our Christian maturity.
It is just here that so many Christians fail. They seek to know the will of God only in its minute details concerning themselves, and so they live practically under a law consisting in commandments and ordinances. Their own personal happiness is the first thing; obedience and sanctification are subordinate to these, as means to an end; the selfish element infects and enfeebles all their religion. They have no conception of the nobility, of the heavenly royalty of spirit, that comes to the man who forgets and loses himself, as he gives himself away to that will of God for the salvation of men. It was that will sent Christ into the world. It was that will animated Him during His whole life. It was for the breathing that will into our hearts and lives that the Holy Spirit came. It is in the being possessed by that will, even as Christ was possessed by it, yielding ourselves to the mastery of Divine Love, that the image of God is restored in us, so that we may live only to love and to bless, even as God does.
‘’ It is not the will of your Father which is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.” What inspiration these words have given to God’s workers on behalf of orphans, of waifs and strays, of children in India perishing from famine, or in Africa from slavery. What courage to thousands of teachers for the little ones of whom they had charge. What patience and strength it has breathed into the hearts of those who have had to deal with the neglected and the outcast in every land. It was their joy and hope that they knew that they were doing the zvill of God. Yea, more, they knew that the mighty will of God was working itself out through them. These all have experienced how blessed it was at times to look away from their own little and limited interests and duties, and to cast themselves into that mighty stream of God’s loving will, which is slowdy but surely working out His blessed purpose. There they found themselves in fellowship with God’s own son, and with the saints of all ages, whose one glory it had been that they had known and fulfilled the redeeming will of God.
What a change it would bring into the life of many a believer to know and love this will of the Father, to lose self, and sacrifice all in order to be mastered and consumed by its blessed fire. If you would thus know it, reader, and be possessed by it, you must make it a definite object of study and desire. Seek in meditation to get some right impression of its glory. Ask for the Holy Spirit’s teaching to give you a spiritual vision of the infinite energy of the Divine Love, as it wills nothing but good to every one of its creatures. It needs time and thought and prayer; it needs the giving up of all our self-satisfaction with our limited views of God’s will; it needs an opened, thirsty heart longing to be filled with the fulness of God and His will, if we are in our measure to have this will of love dwell in us and possess us. It needs above all, the indwelling of the Christ, in whom that will realised and manifested itself, to make us partakers of His own Spirit and disposition. We then can know something of that infinite will of love working itself out through us, filling the little vessel of our will out of its own living stream, and making the will of God indeed our will.
We have seen that it is doing the will of God that is the glory of heaven, the way to heaven, our likeness to the Elder Brother, and the food of our spiritual life. Let us begin doing the will of God in this aspect too, really giving ourselves to Him for this saving of the lost. It will waken within us the capacity of apprehending better the glory of the Divine will that none of the little ones should perish, and the Divine privilege of our being made partakers of it. There is no other way for us to the fellowship of God but to have one will with Him. And there is no way to this but through Christ and the participation of His Spirit. As we apprehend intelHgently who and what the Christ is, and His true life, the Son come and given up to work out the Father’s will and love, and accept none other but this Christ as our Lord and our life, the hope will arise that this redeeming will can master us too as its vessels and channels that we too can go through the world filled with a Divine life, the Divine will inspiring and energising our will, and life passing out from us to those who are perishing.
VI
NOT MINE OWN WILL
“I can of Myself do nothing: as I hear, I judge; and My judgment is righteous; because I seek not Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me/* — John v. 30.
THE Will of God is the power by which the universe exists from moment to moment. It is by the unceasing active exercise of His will that the sun shines, and that every lily is clothed with beauty. There is no goodness, or strength, or beauty, but as He wills it. The glory and blessedness of heaven are nothing but the working of His will. The hosts of heaven live with their wills turned and opened to Him, and find their happiness in allowing His will to do its perfect work in them. When the Blessed Son became man to lead us in the way to God, He told us that the whole secret of His life was, not doing His own will, but yielding Himself so to do the will of the Father, that His will should receive and work out that which the will of the Father worked in Him. He said that He had been sent and that He had delighted to come, for the one pur-
42 pose, with His human will and His human body, to do not His own will, but the will of the Father. He set us the example of a man, a true man, finding His blessedness and His way to God’s glory in the absolute surrender to God’s will. He thus showed us what the destiny was for which man was created, and what the new life He was to bring His people. In such entire dependence on God, as to do nothing of Himself, and to judge nothing but as He heard from the Father He was able always to give a righteous judgment. He could count upon God to give Him all the wisdom and the strength He needed, to work out His own will perfectly in Him. All for the one simple reason: ‘’ Because I seek not Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me.”
“Not Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me!” But had our Lord Jesus an own will, a will different from the Father’s, that He needed to say: Not My will? Had He a will that needed to be denied? Undoubtedly. But was not such a will sin? By no means. Just this was the glory of the creation of man that he had a self-hood, an own will, a power of self-determination, by which he was to decide what he should be. This was not sin, that man had his own desire and thought and will. Without this he could not be a free creature.
He had a will, with which to decide whether he should act according to the will of God or not. Sin only came when man held to his own will as creature in opposition to the will of God. As man, made like unto us in all things, “in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin,” Christ had a human will; for instance, to eat when He was hungry, or to shrink from sufifering when He saw it coming. We know how in the temptation in the wilderness, He kept the former, in the prospect of His death, the latter, in perfect subjection to the Father’s will. (Matt. iv. 4; Luke xii. 50; John xii. 2y,^ It is just this that gives its infinite worth to His sacrifice; it was the unceasing sacrifice of His human will to the Father. ‘’ I seek not Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me.”
These words reveal to us the inmost meaning of Christ’s redemption. They teach us what the life is for which we were created, and out of which we fell in Paradise. They show us wherein the sinfulness of that fallen state consists out of which Christ came to deliver us: He seeks to free us from our self-will. They reveal to us the true creature-life and the true Son-life, perfect oneness of will with God’s will. They open to us the secret power of Christ’s redeeming work — atoning for our self-will by His loyalty at all costs to God’s will; and the true nature of the salvation and the life He gives us — the will and the power to say: I delight to do Thy will, O God. Every spirit seeks a form in which to embody itself: these words give the highest revelation of the life in which the Spirit that was in Christ embodied itself in Him, and embodies itself in all who seek truly and fully to accept His salvation to the uttermost. I seek not My will, but the will of Him that sent Me, is the keynote of the only life that is well-pleasing to the Father on earth, and fits for His fellowship in heaven.
How little God’s children know the Christ He has given them. And how little the true nature of the salvation Christ came to bring. How many there are who have never been taught that salvation out of self-will into doing God’s will is alone true blessedness. And how many who, if they think they know it as a truth, never set themselves to seek this first as the tiue entrance into the kingdom of God and His righteousness. And yet this is in very deed what Christ revealed, and promised, what He secured on Calvary, and bestowed from heaven in the Holy Ghost. How can we become possessed of this blessed life?
I have pointed out previously how great the difference is between the idea of the law of a State, as containeH in a statute book, and the will of a King to whom one stands in a personal relationship. If we would truly, however distantly, follow, in Christ’s footsteps, we must stand with Him in the same close personal relationship to the Father. Without this the most earnest efforts to do the Father’s will must prove a failure. When our Lord ‘so often spoke of “The will of My Father, which is in heaven,” He wanted us to understand that it was the living personality and love that was at once motive and power for the obedience. When He spoke ‘’ of the will of Him that sent Me,’’ He showed that it was not only the consciousness of having a work, but the desire of pleasing the One who sent Him, that was the mainspring of all He did. We need the sense of * the presence and nearness of the God whose will we are to do as much as our Lord did. Separate the thing you have to do from Him whose will it is, and it becomes a burden and an impossibility. Live in the faith that He has sent you, that it is His living loving will, over which He watches, which He Himself even works out, that you are doing — instead of its being a burden you are to carry, it becomes a power that carries you. The will of the Father is such a beautiful, wise, gentle, loving will, that to know it as the breathing out of the heart of God, makes it an infinite attraction and delight.
And how can we enter into this experience of the Father’s nearness, and thus be able to do everything as His will? There is only one way. Jesus Christ must work it in us. And that not as from without, strengthening our faculties or assisting our efiforts. No, this blessed doing of the Father’s will is the mark of His life as Son. He can work it in us, as we yield ourselves wholly and receive Him truly to dwell in us. It is right and needful that we should set ourselves with all earnestness and m.ake the attempt. It is only by its failure that we really learn how entirely He must and wall do all. So inseparably is this ‘’ seeking not Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me,’’ connected with Jesus Christ, that it is only when He comes in and manifests Himself in the heart and dwells there that He can work this full salvation in us. “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled,”
VII
DOING THE WAY TO KNOWING
“If any man willeth to do His will he shall know of the teaching, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of Myself.” — John vii. 17.
THERE was great division among the Jews as to who Christ really was, and the Divine authority of the truth He taught. They wanted some sign as a clear proof that He was really come from God. Christ’s answer tells them that the proof depended upon the state of their heart.
A man who wants the Divine evidence of Christ’s
mission, while he is not ready to do God’s will, seeks
, for it in vain. A man whose will is set upon doing
God’s will, as far as he knows it, is alone in the fit
state for receiving further Divine illumination.
Our Lord says: ‘’ If any man willeth to do His will, he shall know of the teaching whether it be of God.” He speaks of two things: the will of God we are to do, and the teaching about God we are to know. He tells us the second is entirely dependent upon the first. As we will to do, we shall
48 be able to know. It is the contrast and the connection of precept and promise. Will, that is, be ready, be determined to do God’s will, and you shall have Divine light and certainty as to all that Jesus has taught. The commands are simple and easy to be understood: he that seeks honestly to do them in the fear of God will learn to know the mystery of Christ. A will, a disposition set upon doing God’s will, is the only organ for knowing God’s truth.
There are many Christians who complain of their lack of spiritual discernment. The promises of Christ in this very Gospel of St. John appear beyond their reach. They would fain know that “the teaching is of God “; they would like to experience and to feel that it is of Divine origin, and in Divine efficacy; that God Himself confirms and makes the words true as a living power. Take the promise of Christ in this chapter, of streams of living water flowing out of the believer. Or, later on, of the life more abundantly; of his followers not walking in darkness, but having the light of life; of our doing greater works than He had done; of His manifesting Himself to us; of His and the Father’s dwelling in us; of our abiding in Him and He in us; of our asking what we will, and having it given to us. When a man really knows the teaching is from God, has the
)^ truth and power of God in it, it becomes easy to believe it, and receives its fulfilment. To all believers who really long to have these promises shine with Divine light in their hearts, Christ’s message comes to-day: it all depends upon the one thing, that you really will to do the will of God. Let us try and take hold of the lessons we need.
Christ teaches us that in the growth of the Christian life faith depends upon character. Just as, at conversion, there can be no faith without repentance, so on through life faith cannot grow or inherit the promises without a life given up to the doing of God’s will. “Some having thrust from them a good conscience, have made shipwreck of the faith.” The great reason why so many pray for an increase of faith and never get it, is that “the will to do God’s will” has never taken the place it must have. The will rules the life; the will is the index of the heart; the whole man is to be judged by the will; unless there be a fixed resolve, a seeking with the whole will to do the will of God, there can be no growth in faith or the knowledge of the Divine truth to which it gives access. It is only as God’s will is truly and fully taken up into my willing and doing that God can reveal Himself to me.
God judges of our conduct by the will. Our Lord says: “If any man willeth to do His will,” A believer may in his youth, through ignorance or feebleness, fail in doing the will; if He who searches the heart sees that he indeed wills, longs, and thirsts to do it, God will see in this the heart that is ready for spiritual light. ‘’ If there first be a ready mind, it is accepted according to that a man hath, and not according to that he hath not.” A believer, as in Rom. vii., may be able to say before God that he delights in the law of God after the inward man and yet have to mourn his terrible failure. If there be this will really to do, his failure will lead him on to see how Rom. viii. 2-4 is the deliverance from the law of sin in the members by the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, so that the righteousness of the law is fulfilled in them that walk after the Spirit. Christ’s words are not meant for those who content themselves with the idea that they will to do the will while they do not press on to the life in the Spirit in which God works both to will and to do. It is the heart where the will is needed, with its whole strength, set upon God’s will, that the Divine truth and power of Christ’s teaching will be known. To do the will of God, the first step is thus to take it up into our will. The will of God is the heavenly treasure in the earthen vessel of our will that the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us, and we so learn to trust God to work His own will in us and through us. I cannot repeat the message too frequently or too earnestly; the one object for which our will was given us, its true nobility and blessedness, is that with it we might take in and make our own the very will that God has. Ere ever I see all that that will implies, or feel that I have the power to perform it, let me regard it as the one thing God asks from me, the one thing I can do to please Him and become a partaker of His blessedness — day by day to accept, to worship, to will His blessed will, and to do it. He works in us both to will and to do.
“Willing to do the will ‘’ of God is the sure way to all grozvth in spiritual knowledge and experience. Actually doing all that is within the reach of my spiritual stature, and willing with the whole heart to do all that still appears beyond me, is the single eye which ensures the whole body being full of Divine light. The great reason why so much Bible study and prayer for Divine guidance is so fruitless is this — the heart is not in the right state for receiving God’s teaching. Peter writes: ‘’ Ye have purified your souls in obedience to the truth ‘’: it is the actual doing of God’s will, with the entire surrender to God to do it wholly and unceasingly, in the greatest things and in the least, that purifies the soul and inherits the promise, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God,” There is in the will of God such a Divine vitality and energy that to the heart that wills and does it, not merely as a matter of duty or Christian training, but because God has willed it, and even as God wills it, it becomes life and strength. The spiritual knowledge of God, of His presence. His power. His indwelling is given to the obedient: ‘’ If a man love Me, he mill keep My zvord, and My Father will love him, and We will come unto him, and make Our abode with him,”
Here is the way to a strong and joyful spiritual life. Unite thyself to the will of God; it will unite thee to Him, it ln draw Him to thee. Will, with all thy will, what God wills; make this the chief exercise of thy spiritual life; as much as thou truly hast of God’s will thou hast of God. Our Lord said: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” He was this because He came not to do His own will, but the will of the Father. This is the one way in which He will lead thee, the new and living way He opened up in His blood by doing God’s will. This is the one truth He will be to thee, that in the doing of the Father’s will is the union with Him perfected. This is the one fife He will give thee, the life of God given in Christ, revealed and perfected by the will of God, as it is willed and done by us.
vm” Father, if Thou be willing, remove this cup from Me; nevertheless, not My will, but Thine be done.’’ — Luke xxii. 42.
GETHSEMANE! The inmost sanctuary of the life of our Lord and of His great redemption. In some respects more mysterious than even Calvary. Of the visible suflfering and sacrifice on the Cross, the garden opens up the inner meaning and power. And of all the suffering of Gethsemane, “Not my will, but Thine be done” was the key. It shows us what th,£sin was that made the great sacrifice a necessity, ojurself-will; what the disposition was that gave the sacrifice its worth, the surr£nd€r~of-thew:ill iQL receive God’s will; what the redemption was that it effected, the conquest and atonement of our self-will; and what the salvation it actually brings, the impartation of a wull given up to God. Come, my soul, be still, and worship in holy fear, as thou seest what it cost thy Lord to speak the words thou so easily sayest. Learn from Him what fulness of meaning and blessing there IS to be found in them.
The sin Christ dies for. — Why is the Son of God here on His way to the death of the Cross? What is it that costs Him all this agony and suffering? It is sin that needs this sacrifice; it is to take away sin that He is here. And the first part of His work in taking it away is that He Himself resist and conquer it. It is this death-struggle with sin that cost Him the agony. All through His life He had been ‘’ tempted in all things like as we are, yet without sin.’’ In this last hour of the powers of darkness they make one great assault on the very citadel of His being, and seek to tempt Him with the sorest of all temptations — following His own will as His nature shrank back from the awful curse-bearing that was set before Him. The scene reveals to us what is the deepest root of all sin — the assertion of our self-will. It was this was the sin and the fall of Adam, It is this is the source of all evil on earth. It is this is, in the believer, the hidden cause of all failure and disappointment. God’s wilHs the living power through whjch His love communicates itself and its blessings to the creature. Man’s will was meant to be the power by which he was intelligently to yield himself and co-operate with God in receiving and appropriating al! the Divine nature had to impart. Self-will, a will not yielded to God, is, in the whole universe of things, the only thing that hinders God in revealing and communicating His blessedness to the creature. The cross is the proof of man’s self-will in the refusal to bow to God’s Son. Christ’s agony in Gethsemane is the proof that it is this same sin that He came to conquer and cast out.
The victory Christ won. — We often look upon the suffering of Christ, with the endurance of the curse and death of the Cross, as the cause of our salvation. Scripture teaches us to look to what gave that suffering and death its inner value — Christ’s obedience. It was not merely in what He did or suffered, but in the spirit in which He acted that its infinite worth, its atoning merit, is to be found. During His whole life He had spoken of not doing His own will. Here He proves that He will do the will of the Father, even though it cost Him His life. Even unto death He says. Not My will! And so through death, in dying to His own will. He teaches us what God claims as His right, and what alone can bring us to our true place of blessing — the entire losing and giving up of our will and life to God’s will as the way into the life and glory of God.
The atonement Christ accomplished. — And, now tHe victory of Christ over man’s self-will, how does it profit and save us? In two ways, as we regard Him in His substitution or His fellowship, as the Christ for us, as the Christ in us. In the former of these aspects. His victory over sin as self-will. His obedience unto death and His infinite acceptableness in the Father’s sight, become ours the moment we believe in Him. As those who are united to Him by faith. His righteousness and merit, with all the Father’s delight in Him on account of them, are made our very own: ‘’ We are made the righteousness of God in Him.” The sin of our self-will is blotted out. We are dealt with by God as if we never had sinned, counted righteous, and allowed to look up to God in His Beloved Son as altogether well-pleasing to Him. Were there but any due sense of the awfulness of the sin of self-will, especially in God’s redeemed children, with what joy would the assurance of its being blotted out be welcomed. And how fervent would be the longing to know to the full the fruit of the victory Christ has achieved for us in freeing us from its power as well as its guilt.
The salvation Christ bestows. — This is the second aspect of Christ’s victory — He has freed us from the dominion of self-will. The very nature and essence of the salvation He imparts is, what was the very nature and essence of His own life, a delight and power f 0^0 God’s will alone, Gethsemane teaches us the way to receive the full experience of the deliverance. Just as there was in Christ, in His holy sinless nature, a learning of obedience through what He suffered, until it culminated in the surrender of His will unto the death, so there may be in the believer, who seeks to follow his Lord in full conformity, such a growth, both in insight into the absolute necessity of a giving up of all self-will, even in the least things, and also in the Divine certainty of God’s working in us, what Christ has won for us, that he is led to know experimentally what it is that he is crucified with Christ, and dead to self and its will. But there can be no thought of our understanding or attaining this, unjdl the desire, ha,s come to give up all, even unto death to live in the will of God alone.
Believer! is this the very Christ you delight in and seek to be conformed to, and long to know more fully in His indwelling power? In Gethsemane He entered into the very deepest and nearest fellowship with you in surrendering His will to the death: enter you there into the deepest and nearest fellowship with Him in surrendering your will as He did.; Pray for the Holy Spirit to show you how self-will is the root of all sin and temptation and darkness; how the will of God can come in and cast it out and live in you; how faith in Christ who died to conquer our self-will, and now waits to dwell in us, can make you partaker of His death and victory. Learn the lesson that death to self-will just means a quiet bowing before God in utter poverty and helplessness, and a simple trusting in the Blessed Lamb of God, who passed through death as the only way to the perfect surrender of His will to God’s will, to breathe His own Spirit, and with it the very will of God, into us.
To a soul longing to live only and wholly in the will of God, death to all self-will is the one inevitable demand, but also, in the faith of Christ Jesus, the one sure and most blessed deliverance.
IX
LORD! WHAT WILT THOU?
“And Saul, trembling and astonished, said, Lord! what wilt Thou have me to dof — Acts ix. 6.
ON the prayer, Thy will be done in heaven so on earth, there needs to follow the more special one, Lord! what wilt Thou have me to do? Men have often asked what was the secret of the wonderful consecration and power which we see in the life of Paul. At his conversion, his first act, after he knew the Lord who had met him, was the surrender of his will. Lord! what wilt Thou have me to do? That word was the beginning, the root, the strength, the mark of his whole wonderful life. His work was so blessed and fruitful, because he remained faithful to the one thing: he only lived for the will of his Lord.
There are many lessons which these words suggest.... The Lord has a will, a life-plan for each
The R. V. omits these words. We have their substance in PauFs account of his conversion (Acts xxii. lo), “And I said, What shall I do, Lord! ‘’
‘’KX” of us, according to which He wishes us to live.... To each of us the Lord will unfold this will or life-plan.... He expects us to wait on Him for the discovery of His will both in that which is universal, for all His people, as in that which He wills for each one individually.... When this prayer is honest and true, it implies the whole-hearted willingness to yield ourselves and our life to the doing of that will. ‘j... We may count upon an answer to such prayer, because God does not ask of His child more than He makes known as His will.
These and other such-like lessons give abundant occasion for meditation and prayer. In this chapter I desire to ask your attention to another lesson, apparently very simple, and yet of deep significance, including all the others. It is what was suggested in the opening paragraph: True conversion is nothing but a surrender to live only to do the will of God.
Do not say: But is not this a matter of course, that everyone admits? Far from it. Most Christians never have understood it. It may be that you have never yet fully grasped it. True conversion is the turning from my own will, so as never to seek or do it; the surrender of my will, with all its strength and at all times only to seek and do what God wills.
But am I then to have no will of my own? You are indeed to have a will, the stronger the better, and to use it with all your strength for the one great work for which God created and fitted it. That one thing was: to accept and to will what God wills. This is the image and likeness of God for which man was created, the glory and the blessedness of the life of a child of God, that He can say: the holy, heavenly, perfect will of God is my will. I have seen it and accepted it and m.ade it my own. To will and to do with all my strength what Gk)d wills and does, this is the noblest work the will of a creature can be engaged in. In this is the very image and likeness of God: to will ever as He wills. We then learn to say: How wonderful, what an honour; I will always just what God wills. Or as an old saint expressed it: I am always happy, because I always have my own way; God’s will and mine are always one.
This surrender to the will of God, the key of Paul’s conversion and of his life, is the secret of all true conversion and true Christian living. And it is because so many have entered the Christian course without any apprehension of God’s demand that they should now cease from all self-will, and only do His will, that they make so little progress, that it is with them as it is written: ‘* They went backwards and not forwards.” They have never understood what Scripture says of God’s children: they are ‘’ born not of the will of man, but of God “; ‘’ it is not of him that willeth but of God which showeth mercy “; “of His own will begat He us, by the word of truth,” The whole will of man, as his own power, however good and religious it may be, is shut out of the kingdom of heaven; it has to be denied and crucified; how much more the sinful self-will. As God’s will alone brought forth the Divine life in us, its whole growth and strength are to be found in this alone. ‘* My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me.” The great hindrance in the life of God in the soul is this one thing: we have not given up our will. When once a child of God begins to see that here lies the defect of his Christian life, there is no deliverance until he go back upon his conversion and admit and confess the one cause of failure. He did not know how utterly evil his will was, and how entire the renunciation of it to which he was called. When the Lord Jesus said: ‘’ If any man will be My disciple let him deny himself, and take up his cross,” it meant first of all, let him deny his own will, and crucify it. The will of God is our salvation, not only as it is willed by Him, but as it is received into our inmost being, submitted to and wrought out in our life, truly willed by us. Because our salvation rests each moment in the saving will of God, we can have only as much of the salvation as we accept the will. Until this is grasped, the true reason of our failure is not understood. As the error and the sin are heartily acknowledged, the soul is prepared to make a new beginning, and in the redeeming power of the Glorified Lord Jesus to say to God, Lo, I come, as it is written in the volume of the book, not only for Christ, but for each of His disciples: I delight to do Thy will, O my God.
If I am to turn to God in a new and full surrender to His will, it must be in a new and full trust in what Christ can do for me. Saul’s question. Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do? was preceded by another, out of which it was born: Who art Thou, Lord? It was the vision of the Son of God in His glory, it was the personal revelation “I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest,” that wrought the mighty change, and made him yield him.self so readily and so entirely to the will of his new-found Lord. We need something of the same kind. Nothing less than a new revelation of the Divine authority, and the tender love of Him whom we have grieved so long, but who now comes to claim and to make us the faithful servants of His will, can really enable us to say in confidence: Lord! what wilt Thou have me to do? Speak Lord, Thy servant will do it.
Who is ready to enter upon this path of entire devotion to the will of God, the only true Christ-life? The steps are simple.
Remember, the will of God is the revelation of His hidden Divine love and blessedness, and that the only way to know and enjoy God and His love is to do His will. Say therefore boldly: I may, I will do nothing but God’s will.
Believe that in answer to the prayer, Lord! what wilt Thou? Jesus Christ will make known God’s will day by day; and that where He teaches me to know it by His spirit, He gives me strength to do it.
And when I have said, Lord! here am I, ready to do all Thy will, let me wait upon Him to reveal Himself as my Redeeming Lord, who with the command gives the power: His voice, His presence, His love compel a willing obedience. It is the answer to the first prayer, Who art Thou, Lord? that prepares for the answer to the second, Lord! what wilt Thou have me to do? Paul had heard Stephen speak of “the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” It was when, in “a light from heaven above the brightness of the sun,” he had for himself this vision of the Glorified One, that his eyes and heart were for ever darkened to earth, and his life was given up to do the will of his Lord alone. It is so even still. The faith of Christ Triumphant looking upon us and conquering us for Himself, compels and empowers us to do His will alone.
Lord! show Thyself to me; then I can do whatever Thou biddest me. In living communion with Thee, I can do all things.
THE MAN AFTER GOD’S OWN HEART
“I have found David the son of Jesse, a man after Mine own heart, who shall do all My will,” — Acts xiii. 22; i Sam. xiii. 14.
OF the two expressions God uses here of David, ve often hear the former: “a man after Mine own heart.” The use of the latter: “who shall do all My will,” is much less frequent. And yet it is no less important than the other. A man after Mine own heart: that speaks of the deep unseen mystery of the pleasure a man can give to God in heaven. Who shall do all My will: that deals with the life down here on earth which can be seen and judged by men. Let us seek and get full hold of the truth that it is the man iilio does all God’s will who is the man after His own heart. Such men God seeks: when He finds them He rejoices over them with great joy: they are the very men He needs, men He can trust and use. His heart, with its hidden Divine perfections, reveals itself in His will; he that seeks I and loves and does all His will is a man altogether
68 after His own Tieart: the man of absolute surrender. to God’s will.
Such was David in striking contrast with Saul, the type of the half-hearted and sdf-pleasing Christian. We know what remarkable experiences Saul had at the outset of his life. The Spirit of God came upon him, and another heart was given him, and he prophesied. There was not lacking in him a sense of humility; when he was to be presented to the people, he hid himself. And speedily God began to work through him salvation in Israel. But it was not long before self-will began to show itself. When God sent him with the command to destroy Amalek utterly, he did God’s work deceitfully, and under pretence of bringing sacrifices to offer to God, did his own will in the matter of Agag and the best of the spoil. His terrible failure was used of God, by the contrast, to bring out more strikingly the great truth, that the man whom God can use to rule His people and establish His kingdom, that the man after His own heart, who pleases Him, is he of whom He can say: he shall do all My will.
After what we have already learnt of God’s will, with the place it has in the Christian life, and in preparation for a spiritual apprehension of the further teaching of God’s Word, it may be well to use these words for the simplest possible instruction to all who are asking the question: How can I become such a one? What must I do that God can say of me: a man after Mine own heart, who shall do all My will?
First of all, remember, you cannot attain to this by anything you can do. No resolution, no effort, no help you seek in prayer to strengthen your weakness, will effect what you desire. And why not? Because you have in you a nature wholly ruled by self-will, and wholly opposed to God’s will. Nothing can delight in God’s will and actually do it, but a new and Divine nature, born and daily renewed in you by a Divine power from above. “” The carnal mind is enmity against God,’’ and averse from His will. As entire as has been the perversion of the old nature from God and His will, must be the deliverance of the new nature from self and its will. Here is our first lesson. No desire, however honest, no purpose, however fixed, no surrender, however absolute, can make a man after God’s own heart, who shall do all His will. Such a man must be born from above, and must do all he does in the power of that new Divine life. A regenerate man may indeed in some things do God’s will, as the fruit of the first half-unconscious workings of the Holy Spirit within him.
But this is only preparatory to what God really aims at — that His child of his own free will, shall intelligently and heartily choose to do all His will. That little word all is the secret of true consecration, of a life ‘’ worthy of the Lord unto all well-pleasing,” of being a man after God’s own heart.
We all know what a great difference there is between a feeble child, or a sickly man, and one in full health. And so it is not enough that you just have a beginning or small measure of spiritual life; that will not enable you to do all God’s will. The question is ix’hetJier yon are living only, and doing all, under the pozver of the Holy Spirit, as the strength of the nezu life. It is only the Spirit of God Himself that can do the will of God. And the great reason why God’s children do not claim, do not yield themselves by the Spirit of God to work all His will in them, is that they do not know how foolish, how helpless it is, to expect even the regenerate man to do God’s will, Vv’ithout the direct and unceasing operation of God’s Spirit. And then again, because they do not know the subtle and altogether unconquerable power of our corrupt nature, except as God Himself through His Son and Spirit lives and works in the inmost recesses of our being, and inspires all its powers. If you learn the first lesson well — the secret aversion of your nature to God’s will, and your complete inability to overcome or to change it, you are prepared to go on to the second.
It is this. Believe that you have a new and Divine nature, expressly fitted and prepared to do all God’s will, on the one condition that you hold it in close and continual dependence upon the Holy Spirit, through whom God in Christ works in you. Jesus Christ could do nothing of Himself, though He was the Son, without the Father working in Him. Does it displease you to be as absolutely dependent upon God as He was? As part of your faith in Jesus Christ, believe that God works in you as in Him. Believe this, however dark and feeble you feel, just as you believe, in the darkness of midnight, that the sun is shining on the other half of the world, and will in the morning rise upon you. It is this faith, with the humble, patient, dependent surrender to God which it works, that will bring you to an entirely nev, position and power in the doing God’s will.
In this faith, here is our third lesson, humbly but confidently give yourself up to God to do all His will. Give yourself to Him, as a loving Father, so that you do not take His commands as a mere law, but as a loving will — the will of the Father, made known in the loving fellowship by Himself to yourself. Look at God’s will as one great whole — the revelation of His loving purpose with man and with you. Set yourself resolutely, now, in the faith of the Holy Spirit’s working in you, to count it your one business every day to do all God’s will. Then again, bow yourself in the deepest humility and impotence to wait on God to work in you. The humility that bows in deep grief at the enmity of the evil nature against God’s will, in confession of the impotence of the regenerate nature of itself to do that will, in the dependence of a childlike waiting on God for Him to work His will in you, will be a new entrance into the kingdom of heaven. The Christian life will become something quite new to you under the power of these great truths: your utter and ever-abiding impotence to do God’s will, even as a regenerate man, without the unceasing work of the Holy Spirit: your Divine and complete sufficiency in Christ for all that the Father asks of you when He calls you to be a man after His own heart, who shall do all His will.