HOLDING THE HEAD
HOLDING THE HEAD
How graciously the Lord has led you on for so many years, and made you a comfort to many! I find the great mark of growth is “holding the head”. If my knowledge of Christ is limited to knowing Him as my Saviour, I never rise from the earth, the scene of His wondrous work for me. If I only know Him as the One hourly interested about me, touched with the feeling of my infirmities, One necessary to my existence - “because I live, ye shall live also” (John 14: 19) - I am more and more drawn to Him, longing to be with Him. But when I know that I am a member of His body, and that He is the Head, I know that His place is my place, because as He the Head is in heaven, that is the body’s place also. Then I begin to learn Him in that place.
Now a new day opens on the soul when there is any intimacy with Him as the Head. I feel we can hardly estimate the blessed effects of knowing Him as Head. You may for a long time have known Him in His [p. 336] perfect love; in fact, fear disappeared when the glorious light of His perfect love burst in on you. And in all your wilderness journey you could turn to Him as the One ‘whose love is as great as His power, and knows neither measure nor end’. “A friend loveth at all times” (Proverbs 17: 17); but when you come to know Him as Head, you literally suggest nothing; you open out your heart fully; you submit to perfect wisdom every question and thought in your heart. You do not ask anything to be done for you; you submit your case, as you would in ordinary matters, to a great Counsellor. You learn from Him how you are to be, rather than what is to be done. You are the one affected, and not the things you have to do with, which necessitate and call for an arrangement or provision on your part. It is not so much that you learn what you have to do, as that you are divested of your own prepossessions, and entranced with entirely new ones. You will feel the marvellous effect on your returning to the old circumstances, because you have been engrossed with inconceivably superior ones, which you feel are really your own, through your relationship with the Owner; so that the old ones have lost their preponderating influence over you, and you regard them in quite a new way. In a word, they are so diminished in every feature that you wonder how they could have been of so much importance; and while you attend carefully to each of them in every detail, you can say with the apostle, “When I became a man, I put away childish things” (1 Corinthians 13: 11). Now the power of Christ rests upon you, and you bring the strength of the glorified Man to bear upon the disappointments, the fears, and the sorrows of the child, who has had bitter sorrow when the shelter of a loving heart has been removed; whose anguish has been great when a flower of hope has passed away, and to whom the gloomy cloud of impending loss or suffering caused unceasing anxiety. All these, the real misery of the natural man, will be now viewed by you in quite a new way. You [p. 337] will see all your circumstances not merely in the light of His presence; but because a wondrous change has been effected in yourself, they will appear altered in every way, and very diminished, simply because you have been so morally elevated - “strengthened with all power according to the might of his glory” (Colossians 1: 11).
According to your spiritual prepossessions will the natural or carnal dwindle in size and importance; and yet you will attend to each better, because your ability will be greater. There will be no forecasting, no pre-arrangement, which always indicates an absence of resource, but at the same time, a confidence in one’s own plans, very like the hunted ostrich which hides its head in the sand, and because it cannot see itself, it thinks that its pursuers cannot see it.
The Lord bless you much, and may you abide with your Solomon, and there learn how He, in an unsuspected and marvellous way, will fit you for everything.