GOD'S GRACE AND MORAL CORRESPONDENCE WITH IT

GOD’S GRACE AND MORAL CORRESPONDENCE WITH IT

I believe the root of the present defection is the theory, that the acceptance of our standing through grace, to the exclusion of state, or any moral effect, is the whole truth of God. The effect of this teaching has been most disastrous. The greatness of the position in which grace has set the believer has been set forth intelligently without demand for it to be entered on in moral power. It is almost incredible the laxity which this theory tolerated. Surely, nothing can be plainer in scripture than that there is a divine state conferred by God, even a moral correspondence to the position in which He in His grace sets us. When you are justified by faith you have peace with God. You are in justification before God, while peace is your state with God. Both are given of God. Again, “Raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2: 6) is our place; but Christ dwelling in your hearts by faith is the state conferred by God in correspondence with it. If the state is ignored personal intercourse with the Lord is ignored. Communion is said to be only over the word. Transformation only by the word and that it is not only common to all, but known to all. Self-judgment is ^[p. 95] said to be introspection. Guidance is by a text. You are through grace seated in the heavenlies in Christ, and this is to be your ‘through ticket’, without any exercise of soul as to the way by which in grace you have been “compelled” to come from the “highways and hedges” up to the top. In fact, no experimental journey from earth to heaven, no deliverance, no liberty, no approach, no Jordan, no knowledge of eternal life beyond that the scripture says you have it on believing. I admit the ‘through ticket’, but you cannot travel from earth to heaven (except you die, or the Lord comes) unless you pass through all the stations I have named. There is no other line, and God must have reality.

The first epistle of John was written that you should have “conscious knowledge of eternal life”, and there are three witnesses — the Spirit, the water, and the blood — to prove to yourself that you know — have the consciousness of it, and I am afraid that not one out of ten could explain the second witness, much less have the testimony of it in his or her soul. There has been a wilful determination for years to refuse any teaching which sets forth the Spirit’s formative work in the believer, which is really state. I fully admit that occupation with state without faith in the standing is most pernicious. But on the other hand, God has not in His grace given me any standing without giving me the state morally corresponding to it, and having the state is the proof that I have in faith entered on the standing.

The greater the position God has set me in, the greater morally am I according to grace in every detail of my duties here. There is nothing about family duties in Romans. In Colossians where you are over Jordan, you are enabled to come out in your home circle in a new light; and in Ephesians, where you are seated in heaven, still more so. Nay, so much so, that I have rarely seen any one who was up to the Ephesian measure in his home circle.

I need not add more except that I see the leaven of Laodicea in the theory that ‘standing is everything’. A boastfulness of one’s acquisitions, but Christ outside. The highest truths taught and accepted, but only insisted on as “standing”, so that souls have become satisfied with an intelligent acceptation of the truths without any sense of ^[p. 96] the state morally corresponding to them, which is Christ dwelling in my heart by faith, imparting to me His own feelings, tastes and ways; in short, all that He is morally. The marvel of divine grace is that not only has everything according to the heart of God been secured for me through the death and resurrection of Christ, but that I, a child of Adam, should be, not only in peace with God, where I was under His judgment, but that I am transferred from Adam to Christ, and I am to have Christ formed in me now, and the life that I now live in the flesh I am to live “by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2: 20). I am born of God — of new and divine origin — a new vessel to hold the new wine, and to be here on the earth now where I was a child of Adam, in the grace and beauty of Christ, led by His own power to stand for Him, “and having done all to stand”; daily more and more transformed into the same image from glory to glory even as by the Spirit of the Lord.

And thus Thy deep perfections,
Much better should I know;
And with adoring fervour,
In this Thy nature grow. (51:5)