What Next?
What Next?
Matthew 5:45-48
1. Deny Yourself More Than Others
That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven. (Matthew 5:45)
According to the Bible, self-seeking did not begin on earth, it began in heaven and was turned out of heaven because it was unworthy to live there, and it will never get back again. If we are to be Christian after the stamp Our Lord requires, we must deny ourselves more than others. Our Lord never taught us to deny sin: sin must be destroyed, not denied. Nothing sinful can ever be good. “If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself” (Matthew 16:24 rv). Our Lord is referring to the natural self which must be denied in order that it may be made spiritual. Our Lord does not teach “Deeper Death to Self”; He teaches death right out to my self, death right out to self-realisation and self-seeing. Sin and self are not the same thing. Sin does not belong to human nature as God created it. Adam was innocent when God created him, and God intended him to take part in his own moral development, and to transform his natural life into a spiritual life by obedience; but Adam refused to do it. Our Lord continually denied the natural and turned it into the spiritual by obedience. With Our Lord everything was spiritual. His eating and drinking were acts of continual subordination to His Father’s will (cf. Matthew 4:2-4). We have a natural life to be sacrificed and thereby turned into a spiritual, life. The meaning of sacrifice is giving the best we have to God, denying it to ourselves, that He may make it an eternal possession of His and ours.
2. Devote Yourself to Prayer More Than Others
Lord, teach us to pray. (Luke 11:1)
Pray without ceasing. (1 Thessalonians 5:17)
Never say you will pray about a thing; pray about it. Our Lord’s teaching about prayer is so amazingly simple but at the same time so amazingly profound that we are apt to miss His meaning. The danger is to water down what Jesus says about prayer and make it mean something more common sense; if it were only common sense, it was not worth His while to say it. The things Jesus says about prayer are supernatural revelations.
It is not part of the life of a natural man to pray. We hear it said that a man will suffer in his life if he does not pray; I question it. What will suffer is the life of the Son of God in him, which is nourished not by food but by prayer. When a man is born from above (rv mg), the life of the Son of God is born in him, and he can either starve that life or nourish it. Prayer is the way the life of the Son of God is nourished. God has so constituted things that prayer on the basis of Redemption alters the way a man looks at things. Prayer is not a question of altering things externally, but of working wonders in a man’s disposition. One great effect of prayer is that it enables the soul to command the body. By obedience I make my body submissive to my soul, but prayer puts my soul in command of my body. It is one thing to have the body in subjection, but another thing to be able to command it. When I command my body, I make it an ally, the means by which my spiritual life is furthered.
“For your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask Him” (Matthew 6:8). If God sees that my spiritual life will be furthered by giving the things for which I ask, then He will give them, but that is not the end of prayer. The end of prayer is that I come to know God Himself. If I allow my bodily needs to get out of relationship to God, then those needs will keep me morbidly interested in myself all the time, much to the devil’s enjoyment. We have to leave ourselves resolutely in God’s hands and launch out into the work of intercession on the basis of faith in the perfect Redemption of Jesus.
3. Dedicate Yourself to Love More Than Others
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. (Matthew 22:37-38)
If ye love Me, keep My commandments. (John 14:15)
Before we can love God we must have the Lover of God in us, viz., the Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit has shed abroad the love of God in our hearts, then that love requires cultivation. No love on earth will develop without being cultivated. We have to dedicate ourselves to love, which means identifying ourselves with God’s interests in other people, and God is interested in some funny people, viz.; in you and in me! We must beware of letting natural affinities hinder our walking in love. One of the most cruel ways of killing love is by disdain built on natural affinities. To be guided by our affinities is a natural tendency, but spiritually this tendency must be denied, and as we deny it we find that God gives us affinity with those for whom we have no natural affinity. Is there anyone in your life who would not be there if you were not a Christian? The love of God is not mere sentimentality; it is a most practical thing for the saint to love as God loves. The springs of love are in God, not in us. The love of God is only in us when it has been shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, and the evidence that it is there is the spontaneous way in which it is manifested.
4. Dispose Yourself to Believe More Than Others
Said I not unto thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God? (John 11:40)
He that believeth on Me, . . . out of [him] shall flow rivers of living water. (John 7:38)
“I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ,” said Paul, “for it is the power of God to salvation to everyone that believeth.” So as long as we live in a religious compartment, make our own theology, wear doctrinal “blinkers,” and live only amongst those who agree with us, we shall not see where the shame comes in; but let God shift us and bring us into contact with those who are indifferent to what we believe, and we shall realise soon the truth of what our Lord said—“therefore the world hateth you.” If we really believed some phases of our Lord’s teaching it would make us a laughing stock in the eyes of the world. It requires the miracle of God’s grace for us to believe as Jesus taught us to.
“Said I not unto thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God?” Every time our programme of belief is clear to our minds we come across something that contradicts it. Faith, before it is real, must be tried. As we dispose ourselves to believe, we see God all the time, not in spasms. We see His arm behind all the facts in individual life and in history. Are we disposing ourselves to believe more than others?
5. Determine to Know More Than Others
If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of Myself.
If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them. (John 13:17)
If you believe in Jesus, you will not spend all your time in the smooth waters just inside the harbour, full of exhilaration and delight, but always moored; you will have to go out through the harbour bar into the great deeps of God and begin to know for yourself, begin to get spiritual discernment. If you do not cut the moorings, God will have to break them with a storm and send you out. Why not unloosen and launch all on God and go out on the great swelling tide of His purpose?
“If any man will do His will, he shall know. . . .” When you know you should do a thing and you do it, immediately you will know more. If you revise where you are stodgy spiritually, you will find it goes back to the point where there was one thing you knew you should do, but you did not do it because there seemed no immediate call to, and now you have no perception, no discernment. Instead of being spiritually self-possessed at the time of crisis, you are spiritually distracted. It is a dangerous thing to refuse to go on knowing.
When the Spirit of God has opened your mind by His incoming and you are determining to know more, you will find that external circumstances and internal knowledge go together, and by obedience you begin to fulfil your spiritual destiny. The counterfeit of obedience is the state of mind in which you work up occasions to sacrifice yourself, ardour is mistaken for the discernment built on knowledge. “To obey is better than sacrifice.” It is a great deal better to fulfil the purpose of God in your life by discerning His will than it is to perform great acts of self-sacrifice.
Beware of harking back to a past knowledge when God wants to bring you into a new relationship; beware of harking back to what you once were when God wants you to be something you have never been.