HOW TO WALK IN NEW CIRCUMSTANCES
HOW TO WALK IN NEW CIRCUMSTANCES
You are not only entering on a new year, but the nature of the circumstances you are to move in is entirely new. It is not at once you will perceive that circumstances which appear so extremely like those you were in six months ago, are so extremely different. I need hardly say to you, Start simply and absolutely for the Lord, and let your society be for the Lord. Keep the house for the Lord. If you act wisely, your acts will redound to the glory of Christ; like the wise woman (Proverbs 31), whose husband was known in the gates.
You have a fine field, or service, before you, in which you can be every way useful; not only in receiving the Lord’s people, but, from your light and experience, able to contribute to their lasting blessing. You must be generally impartial. I do not say you are not to have special friends; but your aim must be to treat the Lord’s servants and His people impartially, and as He would have you, so that their blessing may be, after His glory, the object of your life. You will find the service often trying, because you should not merely be ready to serve, but to carry it on in patience. All this would redound greatly to your own blessing. The felt demand on you would so cast you on God that you would be diverted from a scrutiny of your feelings to a self-judgment of your acts.
I believe the more the eye sees Him, and what was the manner of His life here, which is really ours, through grace, the more we are entranced with His excellency.
[p. 281] As in the consecration-offering, not only was the one ram offered up whole - type of our acceptance before God in the acceptance of Christ; but the act of consecration itself began with filling the hands - typically our acts - with the fat, the excellency of Christ; contemplating Him as He was in the sight of God in His walk and ways. This is the practical beginning. Then, like Peter, I walk on the water to go to Him. I see in Him my standard; and if I sink, it is because, the eye having drooped from Him, I have wavered in faith. When His walk is before the eye of my soul, there is consequent self-judgment when I am not in His footsteps; but this is always marked by a deeper assurance of His power and goodness, a greater distrust of myself, and a greater eagerness, as well as confidence of heart, in following Him; whereas dwelling on my own state ends, at best, only in desires.
Self-judgment is like spring-time, casting off the dead leaves of winter. Desires with self-occupation are but winter longing for spring; the one stimulates, the other enervates. “The soul of the sluggard desireth, and hath nothing: but the soul of the diligent shall be made fat” (Proverbs 13: 4).