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THE TREASURE TO BE FOUND IN THE LOVE OF CHRIST

R. Taylor

We sang in our hymn,

‘Tis the treasure we’ve found in His love

That has made us now pilgrims below’ (Hymn 139).

I wonder how much we have entered into and appreciated the treasure we have found in His love. That is what will make us better pilgrims; not only that we have a sense that our sins are forgiven, but it is a sense of how much we are loved that causes us to seek to be pleasing to the One who has loved us. We try to work things very much the other way, but Ephesians 1 is how God was operating before the world’s foundation. Mr Raven said that he enjoyed that he was a saint in purpose before he was a sinner in practice; that is a very blessed thing. In our practice we feel how feeble, frail and failing we are, but the treasure we have found in His love is how deeply God loves us, that He has “chosen us in him”. That was before we were converted, before ever we had a thought about Christ. God chose us in Him. It says too He has—“blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies”. Not down here, we look for so much down here; we are Jewish in that sense, they look for everything down here, but that is not what God has done; He loved us far more than that. What is down here will fade away, but God has placed our blessings where they will never fade. The Lord says to the disciples—“rejoice that your names are written in the heavens”, Luke 10: 20. That could never be eradicated; Peter failed, he denied Him, but that never altered the fact that his name was written in heaven. What a difference it makes to our lives if that could lay hold of us; it preserves us from the disappointments that we all have so often. It would preserve us from the discontent and the murmurings.

I have often thought about Moses, Caleb and Joshua, the three men that went through the wilderness. Moses says, “Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place”, Psalm 90: 1. There it was, a wilderness and trials that nobody else has ever had, bearing all those people, all their sorrows and all their burdens, day by day, but he says, “thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations”. I have often thought of Moses at the end of a day, retiring to his tent, there God was his dwelling place. He would hear what all these men had said, how they criticised him, he heard what Miriam and Aaron said, how that must have hurt him, but God was his dwelling place. Their speaking against him did not cause any hatred on his part, he dwelt in God. It says, “he that abides in love, abides in God, and God in him” (1 John 4: 16); His love is perfected in him—dwelling in God, dwelling in love.

Then Caleb, when all these tribes were against him and they said, What you say is right enough, but we are not able for it. Caleb says, “we are well able to do it”, Numbers 13: 30. That is how he went through, as he listened to those people, he says, “If Jehovah delight in us, he will bring us into this land” (Numbers 14: 8); he had a sense in the wilderness, in all the confusion, that God delighted in His people. May our hearts, dear brethren, embrace that, that He “has blessed us with every spiritual blessing”. Caleb said that the manna was not all their blessing, grateful as he was for it. ‘Garments fresh and foot unweary’ (Hymn 76), that was in God’s ways; but here is God’s purpose, and Caleb shows that is what he lived in, and he says that is what is going to bring us in. There was Joshua too, a man that was able to bring them into the land because he himself was already dwelling there. It has been said about Caleb that the land was in him before he was in it. I wonder if that is true about us, dear brethren. Are we already touching and enjoying our heavenly portion, that he “has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ”? Do you ever go over how blessed and precious they are, the things you will have eternally that will never fail? The joy of sonship; new bodies; seeing Christ in all His glory, these are the spiritual blessings that Paul is bringing to these Ephesians for their present joy.

What I wanted to come to was that He has chosen us, and “has taken us into favour in the Beloved”. I think Paul uses that term “Beloved”, trying to tell us how precious Christ is to God. If He had said ‘He has taken us into favour in Jesus’, that would have been fine; we would have thought about that Man, but it says, “he has taken us into favour in the Beloved”—it gives us some impression of what God thinks about Christ; the only One, the Beloved. It is like Isaac; God said to Abraham, “Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest”, Genesis 22: 2. That is how God has placed us; not in Paul or in any of the apostles, but “he has taken us into favour in the Beloved”. Dear brethren, what greater grace, what greater love could God bestow upon us! Well, may it lay hold of us, our heavenly portion, never to be altered! Not only has God done all that, but see how He has effectuated it. The next verse goes on, “in whom we have redemption”, the question of our state, and our guilt, and all that we are has been met to effectuate His purpose, redemption by the blood of Jesus according to the riches of His grace. It is already done in God’s sight; the question is, Is it done in my heart that I have been brought into this place of favour?

Now all this is to help us in the pathway. It has often been said, but we do not take much notice of it perhaps, that Paul wrote to the Corinthians from Ephesus. There is a lot in that statement if you think about it. It means that Paul was writing to persons about their state and their conditions, but all the time he was enjoying what we are reading here, his heart was full of the treasure he had found in His love. If you were writing to someone to try to correct them you may point out their defects; but Paul, in writing to the Corinthians, begins with what they were in Christ, “to the assembly of God which is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus”, 1 Corinthians 1: 2. You might have said, ‘Paul, do you know them?’ Well, he says, There they are. It has been said that you have to be an Ephesian to live in Corinth. You need to have some sense of how much you are loved before ever you will be a pilgrim below. Well may it be, dear brethren, what we sang,

‘‘Tis the treasure we’ve found in His love

That has made us now pilgrims below’ (Hymn 139).

It means the things here do not overcome us. The Lord said to His own, “I go to prepare you a place”, John 14: 2. These chapters in John are so instructive, the Lord is leaving them and He is drawing their hearts to their heavenly portion. They were going to face distresses; martyrdom, I suppose most, if not all of them, and He says, “I go to prepare you a place ...

and shall receive you to myself”, John 14: 2, 3. Nothing could alter that, but the sense of it in their hearts enabled them to be pilgrims below. May it be, dear brethren, that our steps are quickened, that our heavenly portion in our hearts causes us to rightly fill out our responsibilities here as a heavenly people, destined for glory, soon to be with Him and to be like Him for ever. May it be so, for His name’s sake.

Word in meeting for ministry, Kirkcaldy
5 September 2006

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