Part 11 (1/2)
in which faith is got, and it is the same in the religious world as it is in the world of men and women. I learn to trust you, my brother, just as I get to trust me just as you get to know me. I do not trust you as a stranger, but as I come into contact with you, and watch you, and live with you, I find out that you are trustworthy, and I come to trust myself to you, and to lean upon you. But I do not do that to a stranger.
The way to trust Christ is to know Christ. You cannot help trusting Him them. You are changed. By knowing Him faith is begotten in you, as cause and effect. To trust Him without knowing Him as thousands do, is not faith, but credulity. I believe a great deal of prayer for faith is thrown away. What we should pray for is that we may be able to fulfill the condition, and when we have fulfilled the condition, the faith necessarily follows. The way, therefore, to increase our faith is to increase our intimacy with Christ. We trust Him more and more the better we know Him.
And then another immediate effect of this way of sanctifying the character is the tranquility that it brings over the Christian life. How disturbed and distressed and anxious Christian people are about their growth in grace! Now, the moment you give that over into Christ's care--the moment you see that you are BEING changed--that anxiety pa.s.ses away. You see that it must follow by an inevitable process and by a natural law if you fulfill the simple condition; so that peace is the reward of that life and fellows.h.i.+p with Christ.
Many other things follow. A man's usefulness depends to a large extent upon his fellows.h.i.+p with Christ. That is obvious. Only Christ can influence the world; but all that the world sees of Christ is what it sees of you and me. Christ said: ”The world seeth Me no more, but ye see Me.” You see Him, and standing in front of Him reflect Him, and the world sees the reflection. It cannot see Him.
So that a Christian's usefulness depends solely upon that relations.h.i.+p.
Now, I have only pointed out a few of the things that follow from the standing before Christ--from the abiding in Christ. You will find, if you run over the texts about abiding in Christ, many other things will suggest themselves in the same relations. Almost everything in Christian experience and character follows and follows necessarily, from standing before Christ and reflecting his character. But the supreme consummation is that we are changed into THE SAME IMAGE, ”even as by the Lord the Spirit.” That is to say that in some way, unknown to us, but possibly not more mysterious than the doctrine of personal influence, we are changed into the image of Christ.
This method cannot fail. I am not setting before you an opinion or a theory, but this is
A certainly successful means
of sanctification. ”We all, with unveiled face, reflecting in a mirror the glory of Christ (the character of Christ) a.s.suredly--without any miscarriage--without any possibility of miscarriage--are changed into the same image.” It is an immense thing to be anch.o.r.ed in some great principle like that. Emerson says: ”The hero is the man who is immovably centered.” Get immovably centered in that doctrine of sanctification. Do not be carried away by the hundred and one theories of sanctification that are floating about in religious literature of the country at the present time; but go to the bottom of the thing for yourself, and see the RATIONALE of it for yourself, and you will come to see that it is a matter of cause and effect, and that if you will fulfill the condition laid down by Christ, the effect must follow by a natural law.
What a prospect! To be changed into the same image. Think of that! That is what we are here for. That is what we are elected for. Not to be saved, in the common acceptation, but ”whom He did foreknow He also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of His Son.” Not merely to be saved, but TO BE CONFORMED TO THE IMAGE OF HIS SON. Conserve that principle. And as we must spend time in cultivating our earthly friends.h.i.+ps if we are to have their blessings, so we must
Spend time
in cultivating the fellows.h.i.+p and companions.h.i.+p of Christ. And there is nothing so much worth taking into our lives as a profounder sense of what is to be had by living in communion with Christ, and by getting nearer to Him. It will matter much if we take away with us some of the thoughts about theology, and some of the new light that has been shed upon the text of Scripture; it will matter infinitely more if our fellows.h.i.+p with the Lord Jesus become a little closer, and our theory of holy living a little more rational. And then as we go forth, men will take knowledge of us, that we have been with Jesus, and as we reflect Him upon them, they will begin to be changed into the same image.
It seems to me the preaching is of infinitely smaller account than the life which mirrors Christ. That is bound to tell; without speech or language--like the voices of the stars. It throws out its impressions on every side. The one simple thing we have to do is to be there--in the right relation; to go through life hand in hand with Him; to have Him in the room with us, and keeping us company wherever we go; to depend upon Him and lean upon Him, and so have His life reflected in the fullness of its beauty and perfection into ours.
III. The first experiment.
Then you reduce religion to a common Friends.h.i.+p? A common Friends.h.i.+p--who talks of a COMMON Friends.h.i.+p? There is no such thing in the world.
On earth no word is more sublime. Friends.h.i.+p is the nearest thing we know to what religion is. G.o.d is love. And to make religion akin to Friends.h.i.+p is simply to give it the highest expression conceivable by man. But if by demurring to ”a common friends.h.i.+p” is meant a protest against the greatest and the holiest in religion being spoken of in intelligible terms, then I am afraid the objection is all to real. Men always look for a mystery when one talks of sanctification, some mystery apart from that which must ever be mysterious wherever Spirit works. It is thought some peculiar secret lies behind it, some occult experience which only the initiated know. Thousands of persons go to church every Sunday hoping to solve this mystery. At meeting, at conferences, many a time they have reached what they thought was the very brink of it, but somehow no further revelation came. Poring over religious books, how often were they not within a paragraph of it; the next page, the next sentence, would discover all, and they would be borne on a flowing tide forever. But nothing happened. The next sentence and the next page were read, and still it eluded them; and though the promise of its coming kept faithfully up to the end, the last chapter found them still pursuing.
Why did nothing happen? Because there was nothing to happen--nothing of the kind they were looking for. Why did it elude them? Because there was no ”it.” When shall we learn that the pursuit of holiness is simply
The pursuit of Christ?
When shall we subst.i.tute for the ”it” of a fict.i.tious aspiration, the approach to a Living Friend? Sanct.i.ty is in character and not in moods; Divinity in our own plain calm humanity, and in no mystic rapture of the soul.
And yet there are others who, for exactly a contrary reason, will find scant satisfaction here. Their complaint is not that a religion expressed in terms of Friends.h.i.+p is too homely, but that it is still too mystical. To ”abide” in Christ, to ”make Christ our most constant companion,” is to them the purest mysticism. They want something absolutely tangible and absolutely direct. These are not the poetical souls who seek a sign, a mysticism in excess, but the prosaic natures whose want is mathematical definition in details. Yet it is perhaps not possible to reduce this problem to much more rigid elements. The beauty of Friends.h.i.+p is its infinity.
One can never evacuate life of mysticism. Home is full of it, love is full of it, religion is full of it. Why stumble at that in the relation of man to Christ which is natural in the relation of man to man?
If any one cannot conceive or realize a mystical relation with Christ, perhaps all that can be done is to help him to step on to it by still plainer a.n.a.logies from common life. How do I know Shakespere or Dante? By communing with their words and thoughts.
Many men know Dante better than their own fathers. Many men know Dante better than their own fathers. He influences them more. As a spiritual presence he is more near to them, as a spiritual force more real. Is there any reason why a greater than Shakspere or Dante, who also walked this earth, who left great words behind Him, who has greater works everywhere in the world now, should not also instruct, inspire and mould the characters of men? I do not limit Christ's influence to this: it is this, and it is more. But Christ, so far from resenting or discouraging this relation of Friends.h.i.+p, Himself proposed it. ”Abide in me” was almost His last word to the world. And He partly met the difficulty of those who feel its intangibleness by adding the practical clause, ”If ye abide in Me, AND MY WORDS ABIDE IN YOU.”
Begin with His words. Words can scarcely ever be long impersonal.
Christ himself was a Word, a word made Flesh. Make His words flesh; do them, live them, and you must live Christ. ”HE THAT KEEPETH MY COMMANDMENTS, he it is that loveth Me.” Obey Him and you must love Him. Abide in Him, and you must obey Him. CULTIVATE His Friends.h.i.+p. Live after Christ, in His Spirit, as in His Presence, and it is difficult to think what more you can do. Take this at least as a first lesson, as introduction.
If you cannot at once and always feel the play of His life upon yours, watch for it also indirectly. ”The whole earth is full of the character of the Lord.” Christ is the Light of the world, and much of his Light is reflected from things in the world--even from clouds. Sunlight is stored in every leaf, from leaf through coal, and it comforts us thence when days are dark and we cannot see the sun. Christ s.h.i.+nes through men, through books, through history, through nature, music, art. Look for Him there. ”Every day one should either look at a beautiful picture, or hear beautiful music, or read a beautiful poem.” The real danger of mysticism is not making it broad enough.
Do not think that nothing is happening because you do not see yourself grow, or hear the whir of the machinery. All great things grow noiselessly. You can see a mushroom grow, but never a child.