ALL EXERCISES SHOULD FIND THEIR ISSUE IN CHRIST

^[p. 282] ALL EXERCISES SHOULD FIND THEIR ISSUE IN CHRIST

I am reading Job. Nature cannot understand God’s discipline, but the inner man, through faith, clings to God in spite of human perverseness and insubjection. The books of Job, the Psalms, Canticles, are the soul, conscience and heart in exercise, reaching unto the fulness of joy in Christ, but not in it. There is delight in the law of God after the inward man, but no sure deliverance from the body of the flesh which makes us “wretched”. It is only in Christ that the soul, the conscience, and the heart all find, not only relief, but resource, and are thus set free from all natural entanglements. You might relieve my heart of great anguish, and yet you might not be a resource to me. The Lord does both. He relieves and then becomes the full resource and object of the heart. The exercises are good and cannot be dispensed with, but they ought to find their issue in Christ, and are always most blessed to us when they issue from our assured place with Him. To see earth and all its prospects fading away from one’s view as the ‘seared leaves of autumn’, is solemn, but for the eternal scene with Christ as the centre to arise before us and fill our vision is most blessed. Would you prefer to die to everything here or to outlive everything — everything to die to you? Hezekiah was offered the first, his life was spared to expect the latter! Are you heavenly expectant or earthly disappointed?

Progress entails exercise and earnestness. Exercise is when you desire to possess a thing. Earnestness is when you seek to turn to account what you do possess.