Getting There
Getting There
Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Matthew 11:28
1. Where the Sin and Sorrow Cease and the Song and the Saint Commence
Come unto Me (Matthew 11:28)
The questions that matter in life are remarkably few, and they are all answered by these words “Come unto Me.” Not—“Do this” and “Don’t do that,” but “Come.” “Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden”—why “labour”? The word “labour” is a picture of the type of mind that realises that longings and ideals are not being worked out, the reality is not there, and there is an encroachment of sorrow which makes these words a description of the soul. You say—“I have thought about sanctification, and of the way God delivers from sin and gives the Holy Spirit, and alters the shadow of death to life”—but are you actually sanctified? Are you actually delivered from sin, from sorrow, from meanness—are you actually delivered from the things that make you un-Christlike? If you are not, you have no Christian experience. “Come unto Me,” says Jesus, and by coming to Him your actual life will be brought into accordance with the reality revealed in Jesus. You will actually cease from sin and from sorrow, and actually find the song of the Lord begin; you will actually find that He has transformed you, the sinner, into a saint. But if you want this actual experience, you must come to Jesus. Our Lord makes Himself the touchstone.
Have you ever come to Jesus? Watch the stubbornness of your heart and mind, you will find you will do anything rather than the one simple, childlike thing—Come. Be stupid enough to come, and commit yourself to what Jesus says. The attitude of coming is that the will resolutely lets go of everything and deliberately commits the whole thing to Jesus. At the most unexpected moments there comes the whisper of the Lord—“Come unto Me,” and we are drawn to Him. Personal contact with Jesus alters everything. He meets our sins, our sorrows, and our difficulties with the one word—“Come.”
“And I will give you rest.” Rest means the perfection of motion. “I will give you rest,” that is, “I will stay you.” Not—“I will put you to bed and hold your hand and sing you to sleep”; but—“I will get you out of bed, out of the languor and exhaustion, out of being half dead while you are alive; I will so imbue you with the spirit of life that you will be stayed by the perfection of vital activity.” It is not a picture of an invalid in a bathchair, but of life at such a pitch of health that everything is at rest, there is no exhaustion without recuperation. Physical health is a delight because it is an exact balance between our physical life and outer circumstances. Disease means that outer circumstances are getting too much for the vital force on the inside. Morally it is the same. No one is virtuous naturally, we may be innocent naturally, but innocence is often a hindrance because it is nothing in the world but ignorance. Virtue can only be the outcome of conflict. Everything that does not partake of the nature of virtue is the enemy of virtue in us. Immediately we fight we become moral in that particular. Spiritually it is the same, everything that is not spiritual will make for our undoing. “In the world ye shall have tribulation,” said Jesus, “but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” Spiritual grit is what we need. We become spiritual whiners and talk pathetically about “suffering the will of the Lord.” Where is the majestic vitality and might of the Son of God about that! “Come unto Me, . . . and I will give you rest,” i.e.; “I will imbue you with the spirit of life so that you will be stayed by the perfection of vital activity.” Jesus will produce in us the actual experience that is exactly like the reality; that means that the very life of Jesus will be manifested in our actual lives if we will face the music in His strength. Faith is not a mathematical problem, the nature of faith is that it must be tried. How many of us are laying up “gold” for a rainy day? When we go through the trial of faith we gain so much wealth in our heavenly banking account, and the more we go through the trial of faith the wealthier we become in the heavenly regions.
2. Where the Self-Interest Sleeps and the Real Interest Awakens
Come with Me (John 1:39)
“They abode with Him that day”—that is about all some of us have ever done, and then we awoke to actualities, self-interest arose, and the abiding was over. There is no condition of life in which we cannot abide in Jesus. We have to learn to abide in Him wherever we are placed.
“Thou art Simon. . . . thou shalt be called Cephas.” Jesus writes the new name in those places in our lives where He has erased our pride and self-sufficiency and self-interest. Some of us have the new name in spots only—like sanctified measles. When we have our best spiritual mood on, you would think we were high-toned saints, but don’t look at us when we are not in that mood! A disciple is one who has nothing but the new name written all over him; self-interest and pride have been erased entirely. Pride is the deification of myself, and that nowadays is not the order of the Pharisee, but of the publican—“Oh, I’m no saint.” To talk like that is acceptable to human pride, but it is unconscious blasphemy against God. It literally means I defy God to make me a saint. The reason I am not a saint is either that I do not want to be a saint or I do not believe God can make me one. “I would be all right,” we say, “if God saved me and took me straight to heaven.” That is exactly what He will do! “We will come unto him, and make Our abode with him”—the Triune God abiding with the saint. Do we believe it? It is a question of will. Make your will let Jesus do everything, make no conditions, and He will take you home with Him not only for a day but for ever; self-interest will be done with, and the only thing left will be the real interest that identifies you with Jesus.
3. Where the Selective Affinity Dies and the Sanctified Abandon Lives
Come after Me (Mark 1:17)
If you do come after Jesus, you will realise that He pays no attention whatever to your natural affinities. One of the greatest hindrances to our coming to Jesus is the talk about temperament. I have never seen the Spirit of God pay any attention to a man’s temperament, but over and over again I have seen people make their temperament and their natural affinities a barrier to coming to Jesus. We have to learn that Our Lord does not heed our selective natural affinities. The idea that He does heed them has grown from the notion that we have to consecrate our gifts to God. We cannot consecrate what is not ours. The only thing I can give to God is “my right to myself” (Romans 12:1). If I will give God that, He will make a holy experiment out of me, and God’s experiments always succeed. The one mark of a disciple is moral originality. The Spirit of God is a well of water in the disciple, perennially fresh. When once the saint begins to realise that God engineers circumstances, there will be no more whine, but only a reckless abandon to Jesus. Never make a principle out of your own experience; let God be as original with other people as He is with you.
“Come unto Me.” Have you come? Will you come now? If you do come and abandon yourself to Jesus, He will continue to say “Come” through you to others.
If you have come to Jesus Christ and to the truth of God through a servant or a handmaid of God, you never think of the one who brought you there, because that one is so completely one with the Lord Jesus that the thought of himself or herself is never obtruded. Other people come to Jesus not through you, but through His word speaking through you.
Is your life producing the echo of Christ’s “come”?