OUR DUTY
OUR DUTY
One cannot help feeling that there ought to be a chivalry about us now beyond anything ever known in the church of God of later times. Luther did not get beyond justification. Like the woman in Luke 7, there was great true-hearted devotedness, but all to distinguish Christ on earth.
He never got farther; even Melancthon would have reformed the national church. We now profess to know Christ as the One with whom we are quickened (quickened is always used, I believe, for the whole work of life, including the body); and hence we ought to declare, “The world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world”. We should distinguish Christ by renouncing it for His burial, like the woman in John 12 who devoted the most precious thing she had to His [p. 6] burial; or in other words by being dead to it altogether, because He has died out of it. This truth necessarily imposes on us a much more chivalrous and self-renouncing path than that of Luther or Melancthon. We have not merely to contend with indulgences or gross corruptions, but we have to brave the coldness and distance of ‘our own’, the saints who refuse what we seek to enforce — that the one living by Christ now is also crucified as to himself with Christ. If one term of the proposition be true, the other is true also. Weaken or limit the scope of the one, and you must weaken and limit the scope of the other. How many say that they have Christ as their life who, instead of seeking to be as crucified ones here, argue and contend for acknowledgment in the flesh here in position and self-gratification, satisfied so long as there be no degradation of man naturally, which is their standard. Now this is a great and growing evil. The truth as to grace is increasing, and is pressed with such clearness that there is general acceptance of it; but the great testimony which should flow from an acceptance in power is nowhere to be seen. “Whose god is the belly” could be said with too much truth of the mass of the professing people of God. That is to say, their own tastes rule more than God’s mind. The saints have to be warned and preserved against being legal, as we see in Romans and Galatians; but there is another and a worse form of evil, and that is, turning the grace of God into lasciviousness — practically denying that in the flesh we were crucified with Christ, while professing that we live by Him; and this we know will be the final form of evil in and among the people of God on earth.
There are two distinct lines of truth which require to be presented with special distinctness. That first is, What is God’s thought in saving us? This thought He has consummated in His Son, and we require to have the scope of it before our souls. Every priest in Israel did not comprehend the temple and its furniture; but [p. 7] the temple and its furniture presented the mind of God about Israel, and each, at least, saw what he was called to attain to. Now in the present day the truth is lowered to the measure of man’s need; hence if the need be met, which grace does, the convert makes no advance; he rests in the satisfaction of his need, instead of being directed to the scope of God’s thought, which only begins at his need. Where would souls be put if they were simply and definitely instructed in Christ Jesus and Him crucified, connected by faith with the living One, who was here crucified, and whose death terminated man in the flesh?
The second line of truth so needed is, the place and walk incumbent on us who have received Christ here on earth — the nature and character of that place. For it is not in the glory that we shall set forth the power of the risen Christ; it is here where He died, and where we are dead, that we ought to display the properties and virtues of Christ risen from among the dead.