START FROM GOD'S SIDE

START FROM GOD’S SIDE

Your letter was a great cheer to me, not so much the fact, grateful in itself, that we are more likeminded, more perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment, but rather the way in which you have learned the truth. I feel I ought to be even more grateful than I am at the grace conferred on you, that even at the very meeting where there was more good than at any of the others, there your conscience was not sheltering itself under the increased good, but enabled to follow the leading of the Spirit of God, and to judge that no amount of good ^[p. 19] could neutralise the smallest amount of bad in principle (Haggai 2: 12, 13). Where and how the Lord led you is without question the only true path. You have begun with God, and not with man. Why should not God’s principles always govern us? or at least indicate to us our course? Is it not an admission that the Lord is not with us if we overlook the bad because of the good? With God I start, as you truly say, with truth and holiness; and though I may not be able to check every contrary rising, I cannot admit, even under protest, that it may continue. If the Lord is with us, I start from the opposite point that man does. I start from the fountain of all good; and I cannot suffer anything contrary to Him. If I start from man’s side, it is one that is evil continually.

With the Lord it is the natural flow of His own nature, welling out without check until it encounters some of man’s evil. Am I to suffer this evil to remain? Whom am I compromising? It is evident that I have little idea of the power of God in His goodness, if I am afraid to check the evil because of the amount of human support which I may forfeit by so doing.

I am rejoiced for another reason that you have been led by a path that you knew not; because you will start on the basis which you have been taught for yourself, and therefore you will not be discouraged or driven back when you see many who, though professedly on the same principles, are not practically maintaining them.

I feel I need often to say to myself — If all were to desert the principles which I have learned from God, could I remain in a solitary path and adhere to them? I encourage my heart to reply in the affirmative.... What saints in general require to learn is, that it is from Christ, the new Man, that we start. It is good overcoming and exterminating the bad — not the bad gradually yielding to or gaining the good. We begin with good, and in the good we resist and refuse the bad. The bad is not acknowledged as in possession.

The porter was the lowest official in the temple service, and if he were enjoined not to allow any unclean thing to enter, how much more the higher officials! Phinehas properly had no right to a sword, an ephod was his official ^[p. 20] power, but the necessity of the time sanctioned his adopting a more vigorous line.