ADMIRATION AND APPROPRIATION

ADMIRATION AND APPROPRIATION

I believe we have admired the thoughts and counsels of God too much as simply His, as communications from Him, rather than as the revelation of Himself to us. We have seen them as beautiful pictures which we were permitted to look at, rather than as what we have to appropriate and adopt, and the reason of this is that we have not realised our identification with Christ when surveying ^[p. 143] these divine treasures. If I am of Christ, I see and admire everything that is of Him, not as it were apart from myself; I admire it with all the consciousness that it is mine, because I am of Him and that I have to adopt and appropriate it. Hence everything which ministers to my divine taste announces to me what belongs to me as of Christ and what I have to take possession of. The beautiful thing that I see is mine. What I admire I acquire, where my foot rests that is my possession for ever. You must not rest satisfied with having the taste, however accurate, you must see that you acquire practically what you admire. It is yours if you see yourself in Christ in that new and divine order in which God in His grace has set you before Himself. But to appropriate it involves and demands the refusal and renunciation of that old state in which we were at a distance from God, and where we could never find it possible to appropriate anything divine, though glad to receive mercies from God’s hand. There never can be appropriation unless the distance and that which caused it, are consciously gone, because when they are gone we are consciously in Christ and therefore near Him. Without the sense of nearness to Christ, and according to God’s mind, there never can be appropriation or the sense of having a right to appropriate. You may admire truth like little children who are taken into a museum, but not allowed to touch anything, much less to take anything away. How different when we are introduced to the treasures that are in Christ, as heirs, with the full assurance that they are ours. We can admire truth, but it is in appropriating and adopting it that we really possess it. You will say — how is one to begin? By seeking sedulously — breaking your heart over it — to appropriate what you admire. I find I have to do so, but it is always with the deep and blessed assurance of my right and title to it, and the more I acquire the more I deepen in my desires, and in my taste for what is revealed to me.