The Next Best Thing to Do
The Next Best Thing to Do
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. Matthew 7:7
Experience is not what a man thinks through, but what he lives through. The Bible is like life and deals with facts, not with principles, and life is not logical. Logic is simply a method of working the facts we know; but if we push the logical method to the facts we do not know and try to make God logical and other people logical, we shall find that the experience of life brings us to other conclusions. God sees that we are put to the test in the whole of life. We have to beware of selecting the portions of life only where we imagine we can live as saints and of cutting off any part of life because of the difficulty of being a Christian there. Christian experience means that we go to the whole of life open-eyed, wearing no doctrinal or denominational “blinkers” which shut off whole areas of unwelcome fact. Our faith has to be applied in every domain of our lives.
Our Lord’s teaching is so simple that the natural mind pays no attention to it, it is only moral perplexity that heeds. For instance, Our Lord said: “Ask, and it shall be given you.” These words have no meaning for us if we are wearing any kind of ecclesiastical “blinkers,” and are refusing to see what we do not wish to see. “I can live beautifully in my own little religious bandbox.” That is not Christian experience. We have to face the whole of life as it is, and to face it fearlessly.
The difficulty of Christian experience is never in the initial stages. Experience is a gateway, not an end.
There are definite stages of conscious experience, but never pin your faith to any experience; look to the Lord Who gave you the experience. Be ruthless with yourself if you are given to talking about the experiences you have had. Your experiences are not worth anything unless they keep you at the Source, viz., Jesus Christ. It is tremendously strengthening to meet a mature saint, a man or woman with a full-orbed experience, whose faith is built in strong emphatic confidence in the One from Whom their experience springs.
The next best thing to do is to ask, if you have not received; to seek, if you have not found; to knock, if the door is not opened to you.
1. “Ask, and It Shall Be Given You”
Nothing is more difficult than to ask. We long, and desire, and crave, and suffer, but not until we are at the extreme limit will we ask. A sense of unreality makes us ask. We cannot bring ourselves up against spiritual reality when we like—all at once the staggering realisation dawns that we are destitute of the Holy Spirit, ignorant of all that the Lord Jesus stands for. The first result of being brought up against reality is this realisation of poverty, of the lack of wisdom, lack of the Holy Spirit, lack of power, lack of a grip of God. “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, . . .” but be sure you do lack wisdom. Have you ever asked out of the depths of moral and spiritual poverty?
If you realise you are lacking, it is because you have come in contact with spiritual reality. Don’t put your reasonable “blinkers” on again—“Preach us the simple gospel”; “Don’t tell me I have to be holy; that produces a sense of abject poverty, and it is not nice to feel abjectly poor.” Some people are poor enough to be interested in their poverty, and some of us are like that spiritually. “Ask” means beg. A pauper does not ask from any desire save the abject, panging condition of his poverty.
Never deceive yourself by saying that if you do not ask you will not receive (cf. Matthew 5:45), although you’ll never receive from God until you have come to the stage of asking. Asking means that you have come into the relationship of a child of God, and you now realise with moral appreciation and spiritual understanding that “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights.”
“Ye ask, and receive not,” says the Apostle James, “because ye ask amiss.” We ask amiss when we ask simply with the determination to outdo the patience of God until He gives us permission to do what we want to do. Such asking is mere sentimental unreality. And we ask amiss when we ask things from life and not from God, we are asking from the desire of self-realisation, which is the antipodes of Christian experience. The more we realise ourselves the less will we ask of God. Are we asking things of God or of life? We shall never receive if we ask with an end in view, we are asking not out of our poverty, but out of our lust.
2. “Seek, and Ye Shall Find”
Get to work and seek, narrow your interests to this one thing. Have you ever really sought God, or have you only given a languid cry to Him after a twinge of moral neuralgia? “Seek,” concentrate, and you will find. To concentrate is to fast from every other thing. “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters”—are you thirsty, or are you smugly indifferent, so satisfied with your experience that you want nothing more of God? If you build your faith on your experience, the censorious, metallic note comes in at once.
You can never give other people what you have found, but you can make them homesick for the same thing. That is the meaning of these words of Our Lord—“Ye shall be My witnesses”—you will exhibit a oneness with Jesus Christ whilst He carries out His will in your life in every detail.
3. “Knock, and It Shall Be Opened unto You”
“Draw nigh to God”—the door is closed, and you suffer from palpitation as you knock. “Cleanse your hands”—knock a bit louder, you begin to discover where you are dirty. “Purify your heart, ye double-minded”—this is more personal and interior still, you are desperately in earnest now, you will do anything. “Be afflicted and mourn and weep”—have you ever been afflicted before God at the state of your inner life? When you get there, there is no strand of self-pity left, only a heart-breaking affliction and amazement at finding the kind of man you are. “Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord.” It is a humbling thing to knock at God’s door, you have to knock with the crucified thief, with the cunning crafty publican, but—“to him that knocketh, it shall be opened.”