DEATH WITH CHRIST

DEATH WITH CHRIST

My subject was ‘Brought to God’. I dwelt much on the height to which we are brought. Our highest thought is that which characterises us. If we are bent on pleasure, or honour, or gain, our aim affects us in every detail. Thus if we were occupied with this great fact, that we are brought to God, we should be sensibly distanced from the depths out of which we have been brought. My first point is that this has been accomplished, and the second is: How are we to enjoy it now? By dying with Christ.

I sometimes wonder if the defect is in me or in my way of setting it forth, that the truth on which I have insisted over and over again is not more divinely received. You say that portions of truth come to your mind long after you have heard it; I have found this in a very remarkable way from having been so much with —— in my youth. Things that I had no idea of when they were uttered by him have come to me since like revelations, only that I remember that I had heard it before.

I have long pressed that at the Lord’s supper He should be simply before the heart - and not one’s own state, that His work has placed us without a cloud in His presence, so that we can give ourselves absolutely to the remembrance of Him in His death. I do not recall His death to assure myself of the benefit flowing from it to me. Impossible to forget that, but I remember His death as it was to Him. If it were only the former I could go through the world rejoicing that I am relieved from the burden of my sins; but when it is the latter,

^[p. 433] everything here bears to me the shadow of His death. I cannot seek life where He died. Now how many souls have entered into this elementary truth?