OUR POSITION

OUR POSITION

God, out of the spontaneous feelings of His own heart, has come in and taken out from among this world certain persons who were devil-possessed, led captive, full of evil passions. God has come in, taken them up, revealed Himself to them, and made them the body of which His Son, seated at His own right hand, is the Head in heaven. The Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth, is now on the throne of the Father, of the Highest; and God has down here on earth an answer to what He is up there. He is making good His name on earth, in spite of all that Satan can do. What grace! God is in heaven, His Son Jesus is set down at His right hand, the Holy Spirit is here; and here, in you and in me, He makes good that which is the answer to the position of His own Son as Head of the body. This is grace passing understanding; grace which for height passes measure, for it reaches to the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ; grace which for depth comes down under all our ruin, and which reached to us when we were rolled round and round by Satan, like withered leaves in autumn. And here in us He makes good this answer. To us He says, ‘You are the proof that my Son is sitting up here as Head’. And this is the position in which we are to “stand”; as it says in Ephesians 6: 14, “Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth”, etc.

Here is our position; and in stating it, grace assumes that the hearts are all right with God. Oh! when one sees how God takes this for granted, how the heart ^[p. 5] must desire to live as constrained by the love of Christ! How ready we are to be taken up with a hundred objects, with any save that One with which the Holy Spirit thrills in us! Our houses are unpurged, ourselves unjudged; but still He sees us as the living members of His own Son, the living Head; and the soul is supposed to have a character suited to the sons of such a Father, to vessels sealed by the Spirit. Oh! how it shames us to see what the church of God was; how single-eyed, esteeming beyond every object that which was dear to God; seeking to be Christ-bearers in the world! God sees how decrepit we are, but He looks at us now as connected with the Son at His right hand. How far have we a single eye? No eye is single but that which sees God continually. How little one finds in souls the knowledge of the true God, and of His Son Jesus Christ, even among those who make a profession of knowing it, having received the truth as to the mercy and grace of God; but the imagination may play with truth which is not in the heart.