WHAT GRACE EFFECTS FOR EVERY BELIEVER IN CHRIST
[p. 314] WHAT GRACE EFFECTS FOR EVERY BELIEVER IN CHRIST
This psalm gives us the prophetic history of grace, and the passage in Acts an actual example of what grace effects for every believer in Christ. This is the gospel — the good tidings of what God’s love is to a ruined world. The question is, what does God propose, what does He offer? I believe many children of God could not tell. They have some idea of it no doubt, but, to use a figure, they are like a man who has ordered a coat, but it is not made yet, and he has not got it on. I am at liberty to use this figure, because of what the Lord did to Adam and Eve before turning them out of the garden. He made them coats of skin, but not only so. He clothed them — they had the coats on. They had to leave the garden, but before they did so they bore upon them a mark of God’s intention to set man up in a new style in the very place where man had disgraced himself. So with the prodigal; not only was the robe made for him, but it was brought forth and put on him. This is the great lack in many souls; they have not got the coat on; they are not in the enjoyment of the completed thing. With God all is finished and perfected — “Himself hath done it” — but many believers in Christ have not apprehended the completeness of what has been done, and therefore do not take a new course here.
The great distinction between Christianity and all false religions is that while all can hold out a prospect of something good in the future, Christianity proposes something magnificent at this moment, on the spot. If you are merely thinking of what there will be by and by, then you have not the [p. 315] coat on. No, I am made suitable to God down here in the place of my ruin and misery and shame. There is nothing extraordinary in my being in God’s favour in heaven. Where everything will be according to Himself; but the gospel sets the man who departed from God and ruined himself in the favour of God and the conscious enjoyment of what God has provided for him on this earth — the place of his ruin. The gospel does not stop with extricating a man from the misery of the position he was in, but sets him up in a new style in the same place. But you may say, ‘We don’t see those who have received the gospel in this new style’. Very likely, and that is just why I have given you an example from scripture — Saul of Tarsus — of what the grace of God does for a man now.
I divide the first seven verses of this psalm into three parts. Verses 1 and 2 are the first part: “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile”. (Psalm 32:1 - 2) Here is a blessed ray of divine light coming down into this world, and what it announces is blessing to the man who is forgiven, not to the man who works. (See Romans 4:6 - 8) If you have got that ray you find you are forgiven. The wonderful truth from God at this moment is that if the greatest sinner on this earth were brought into the glory of God, instead of being consumed, he would find a Saviour there. “There is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared”. (Psalm 130:4) But there are two things in the portion of Psalm 32 quoted in Romans 4. It says not only that God forgives your sins, but also that He will not impute sin to you. He forgives you what you have done, and He does not impute to you what you are. Many a person might be able to say, ‘I believe my sins are forgiven’, but if I ask him, ‘Is sin imputed to you?’ [p. 316] he would hesitate to say it is not. Such a one has not the coat on; it is only being made. But through the work of Christ, God can be “just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus”. (Romans 3:26) He sent His own Son, who came to do His will and to remove every hindrance out of the way, so that God might righteously receive you and me. Hence, when we get a figure of the gospel in Luke 15, we have it expressed by three parables — the shepherd going away after the sheep that was lost, the light shining on the piece of silver, and the father coming forth and taking the prodigal in his arms. If Christ had not come and cleared the ground the father could not have received the prodigal.
Turn now to Acts 9, to compare the example with the prophetic history. Here we have a very remarkable man — Saul of Tarsus — one of the most religious and best conducted men that ever lived, a man who could say, “I have lived in all good conscience before God until this day”;(Acts 23:1) and what is he doing? He is so full of hatred to the name of Christ, and so determinedly opposed to the church of God, that he persecutes it even outside Jewish territory, and is now on his way to Damascus seeking to destroy the Lord’s people. Look at God’s action towards this man, who was afterwards to be the greatest evangelist as well as the greatest servant of the church (he combined the two, which was a remarkable thing.) Suddenly there shines round about him a light from heaven — what for? To confound him, to announce the terrible guilt of his condition, to destroy him? No, but to announce that his iniquity is forgiven and his sin covered. Think of the light of God’s own glory shining round this ruthless persecutor, and he prostrate before it; but instead of hearing the denunciation of a holy God for the course he was pursuing, the words he hears are, “I am Jesus” (Acts 9:5) — it was the Saviour who [p. 317] spoke to him. There was not a word of the wickedness of what he had been doing — only this, that the One he had been persecuting was his greatest Friend. He is so touched by it that, trembling and astonished, he asks, “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?” (Acts 9:6) Is there one in this room who has not yet turned to the Lord and said, ‘”Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?” (Acts 9:6) I see that, instead of confounding me in the midst of all my folly and thoughtlessness of Thee, Thou art my Saviour’.
Let us look now at the second part of the psalm, which refers to a matter of great importance. “When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long ... I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord, and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin”. (Psalm 32:3 - 5) This tests whether you have really believed the first part. If you really believe, you are cleared of everything by God; you can confess to Him. Nothing is concealed; but you have such a sense of His perfect grace that you wish to have every single thing out before Him. If you have any reserve, it proves you do not believe in the first thing — the forgiveness. You are like a young man whose father offered to pay all his debts, but the young man is ashamed of some of the debts incurred by gambling, or other disgraceful ways, and he has not sufficient confidence in his father’s grace to confess them. He suffers a double loss; he is not perfectly clear of the debt, and he has a reserve with his father. If there is a lurking fear on account of some secret thing in the bottom of your heart, you have never yet fully seen that wave of divine light which tells you, ‘I will forgive you what you have done and I will not impute to you what you are’.
Turn again to Acts 9, to see the example of this second part. Saul of Tarsus goes into the city,
according to the Lord’s word, and there for three days he neither eats nor drinks. What is he doing? Mark this particularly. Here is a man who could not charge himself with any misconduct, who had lived a blameless life, who had nothing that he was ashamed of at all, and yet for three days he was so absorbed with the sense of what he was in the sight of God, and that nothing could free him but the blood and work of the Lord Jesus Christ, that he can think of nothing else. He had to learn how he could be cleared of everything, though he had done nothing! What was behind all? A bad will — not bad conduct. A man who considered himself spotless was confounded before God to find out that “in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing”. (Romans 7:18) It was not his conduct that so astonished him, but that spring of wilfulness and insubordination and contrariety to God which is in the heart of man. I believe I have seen it in amiable souls who had not much of the nauseousness and evil that is in this wretched world, but who have been brought to the brink of despair when they discovered the dreadful root of enmity and opposition to God that was in their heart. These three days of Paul’s fasting answer very much, I believe, to the three days that transpired between Exodus 12 and Exodus 15. A man has, practically speaking, to go through three processes in his history with God: he is first cleared — forgiveness, then broken, and then polished. What is broken? His will. His conduct is changed, but his will is broken. Nothing brings a man so low as this, and with many it takes a long course of years. Moses was forty years having his will broken; Paul’s was broken in those three days and three nights. His heart was broken afterwards when he saw the end of everything desirable here; Jerusalem refusing the gospel, the nation given up, etc.
We turn again to the psalm to look at the third [p. 319] and last part of the history of grace, and I would to God that every eye in this room were anointed with eye-salve to see the wonderful way in which a poor soul is started afresh in the very scene of his former misery. “For this shall every one that is godly pray unto thee in a time when thou mayest be found: surely in the floods of great waters .they shall not come nigh unto him”. (Psalm 32:6) When we come to the example we find that this is the very thing said of Saul — “Behold, he prayeth”. The soul has confidence in God and can turn to Him when one believes that God has cleared him from everything.
A person may say, ‘I see what you say of that grace, and that it is immense, but how am I to get it?’ I believe there is nothing more marvellously grand than the simplicity of the way in which a soul gets grace. It is by a look. I will explain what I mean. You all know the history of Eve; how she turned her back upon God and His word, and thought she would try what she could do for herself. People have a habit of talking slightingly of her, but the fact is, many a woman would be very proud to be like her, and such a woman would be greatly praised in our day. She had everything to commend her in the eyes of men. She saw that the tree was good for food — she was a good housekeeper; that it was pleasant to the eye — she was a woman of taste; that it would make one wise — she was an extremely intellectual woman. What more could be desired in the eyes of men? Every one will speak well of you when you do well to yourself. But, all the while she was disobeying God and turning her back upon Him. So Saul was in the highest repute among men, a man of unblemished character in the eyes of his fellows; but in the sight of God he was the chief of sinners: God takes him up as a pattern man, to show us what grace can effect. Saul is found praying. Prayer is looking to God, and this is the [p. 320] way a man gets grace — by a look. How did the prodigal find grace? By going the opposite way his mother (Eve) went. Eve, in the midst of everything to indicate the greatest consideration on the part of God for His creature, went away from God; the prodigal, surrounded by ruin and want, without any one to care for him, says, “I will arise and go to my father”. (Luke 15:18) He was converted; one ray of divine light had shone in upon his soul. Then he made a blunder; he composed a prayer, and would tell his father what to do — “make me as one of thy hired servants”. (Luke 15:19) When he really got to his father, only half the prayer was said. Nothing shows more perfect confidence in God’s goodness than that I do not tell Him what to do, but leave it to Himself. I lay all my case before Him, I would not dictate to Him, but, like Hezekiah l leave Him entirely to do what pleases Him. Grace originates in the mind of Him who confers it, and no one forms a conception of what grace will do touching anything. Peter (Acts 12) could not have told anyone how God would get him out of prison, but he went to sleep quite satisfied that God would do something. Paul and Silas (Acts 16,) could not have told how God would deliver them, but they were quite happy about it. If I have a sick child I can go to God in my grief, tell Him all about it, and leave it with Him. If I have not perfect confidence in His goodness, I shall likely tell Him what to do. “He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?” (Romans 8:32)
“Surely in the floods of great waters they shall not come nigh unto him”. (Psalm 32:6) This is what I may call the completion of the spiritual coat. It is not that there will be no trials, and troubles, and difficulties here, but that he will be placed in such a position and in such power as to be always superior to them. This is prophetic, no doubt, but we have the example to [p. 321] corroborate it. We find Ananias saying to Saul, “ ... receive thy sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit”. (Acts 9:17) What sort of man is he now? I leave it to you to describe what sort of man he is — I could not. His moral stature is so great — it, is gigantic. Who can touch a man filled with the Holy Spirit? They may maltreat him as they did Stephen, but he is above all their rage and violence, the floods do not come nigh to him. So Paul could say, “.The Lord shall deliver me from every evil work”. (2 Timothy 4:18) I feel ashamed when preaching the gospel that I can so little describe the magnificence of the position in which grace sets a man on this earth. I am sorry I cannot show you brighter examples of it among men, but I can show you one from Scripture. If all the force and enmity of this world were to come in one great accumulation and bear upon a single person, as it did upon Stephen, he can still rise above it. If you believed this, would you think so much of the petty pleasures, amusements, and advantages of this poor world? Nothing so demonstrates the thorough insignificance and vanity of man in himself as that he can turn away from the greatness of what the gospel confers to trifles of a day.
I would enlarge, for a moment, on this. Turn to John 4. Here we find the Lord speaking to the woman of Samaria - a woman in a very degraded position, afraid of her fellows. The Lord met her where she never expected Him, and what does He say to her? “Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst” (John 4:13) - never, either here or hereafter; it does not begin when you go to heaven, but now. The poor woman, though she only understood the Lord in a natural way, saw what a great thing this would be and what a position it would put her in even naturally. “Sir, give me this water”, she says, “that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw”. (John 4:15) I have often stood in the street and asked myself if I really believed that 14th verse of John 4 - it “shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life”. (John 4:14) In Eden the blessing was outside; in Palestine it was outside; but the great difference and superiority of the grace now is that it is in you, in the small compass of a man. The Lord not only removes every pressure that was upon men, but He changes the man himself, gives him a new start. Do I mean that you will never have troubles and temptations? No, you will have plenty of temptations, but through grace the temptations, coming from without, will only establish the greatness of what is within. A man might like a piece of land, or a yoke of oxen, etc., but when he learns that the spring is in him, he does not need those things, he can be quite happy without them. People speak of superiority over trials, but I say, have you got superiority over yourself, over the things that naturally affect you? You can never know what it is to have power to deal with circumstances till the power has acted in yourself.
I ask you to look at what God offers, the table which He provides and garnishes. There is no happiness here but may cease, no friendship but may be altered, but there is one thing that abides and with which the Spirit of God feeds the soul - Christ Himself, at God’s right hand. In the world you have the enjoyment of that blessed One who relieved you from all your misery and who now feeds your soul with the joy which sustained Himself down here. Before that you were trying to warm yourself with sparks of your own kindling, do not turn your back upon the wonderful position in which God can place a man. I am sorry I cannot show you more examples of it; I am sorry that I am not a better example of it myself. But there was a time when I was quite sure of heaven, and yet so miserable in [p. 323] this world that I should have been glad to die and get away to heaven. Now I think of the streams of blessing coming down from above, that makes me happy in spite of this wretched world.
Do you think that being “filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 13:9) was confined to Paul? Not at all. I believe you do not get a case in the Acts of a man who was converted who was not set up in a new power. Would that every soul here knew this. People would wonder at you. They would see in you a new kind of man altogether, whose happiness is not derived merely from the things he sees around him, but who has in him inexhaustible resources.