Pull Yourself Together
Pull Yourself Together
If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you. John 15:7
In all Christian experience there must be the presupposition of the Atonement; we have to build in faith on the great work which God has performed through Christ. We cannot save ourselves, or sanctify ourselves; we cannot atone for sin; we cannot redeem the world; we cannot make right what is wrong, pure what is impure, holy what is unholy—all that is the sovereign work of God. God has made a perfect Atonement, are we in the habit of realising it? We must never put character in the place of faith, there is a great danger of doing so. Our character can never be meritorious before God: we stand before God on the basis of His grace. Character is the evidence that we are built on the right foundation. What we need is the perfect realisation of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. The need is not to do things, but to believe. “What must I do to be saved? . . . Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.”
1. By the Habit of Constantly Realising
If ye abide in Me . . .
If we continue to act and think and work from the centre of abiding in Jesus, then Jesus says that other things will happen, viz., we shall bring forth fruit. Are we abiding in Jesus? Do we take time to abide? What is the dominating factor of power in our lives? Is it work, service, sacrifice for others? The thing that ought to exert the greatest power in our lives is the Atonement. Do we give one minute out of every sixty to make ourselves realise it? We must get into the habit of constantly realising the Atonement, of centralising everything there. To concentrate causes consciousness of effort to begin with. “Abide in Me,” says Jesus. It is imperative on our part that we abide in Jesus. It is a responsibility for us to continually realise the Eternal Fact of the Atonement.
2. By the Habit of Constantly Remembering
and My words abide in you . . .
We maintain our relationship to Jesus by the use of the means which He gives us, viz., His words. Some of us can only hear God in the thunder of revivals or in public worship; we have to learn to listen to God’s voice in the ordinary circumstances of life. It is not the length of time we give to a thing that matters, but whether the time we give opens the door to the greatest power in our life. The greatest factor in life is that which exerts most power, not the element which takes most time. The five minutes we give to the words of Jesus the first thing in the morning are worth more than all the rest of the day.
Beware of any experience that does not wed itself to the words of Jesus. Experience is simply the doorway into the great revelation of Jesus Christ. “The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.” Read the Bible, whether you understand it or not, and the Holy Spirit will bring back some word of Jesus to you in a particular set of circumstances and make it living; the point is—will you be loyal to that word? Never ask anyone else what the word means, go direct to God about it. Are we in the habit of listening to the words of Jesus? Do we realise that Jesus knows more about our business than we do ourselves? Do we take His word for our clothes, our money, our domestic work; or do we think we can manage these things for ourselves? The Spirit of God has the habit of taking the words of Jesus out of their scriptural setting and putting them into the setting of our personal lives.
3. By the Habit of Constantly Requesting
ye shall ask what ye will . . .
This solves the mystery of what we should pray for. If we are abiding in Jesus, we shall ask what He wants us to ask whether we are conscious of doing so or not. “Ye shall ask what ye will,” i.e., what your will is in. The meaning of prayer is that we recognise we are in the relationship of a child to his father. “Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask Him.” When once we realise that we can never think of anything our Father will forget, worry becomes impossible. Beware of getting into a panic. Panic is bad for the natural heart, and it is destructive to the spiritual life. “Let not your heart be troubled”—it is a command. Are we in the habit of constantly requesting, of continually talking to Jesus about everything? Where we go in the time of trial proves what the great underlying power of our lives is.
4. By the Habit of Constantly Recognising
. . . and it shall be done unto you.
If we are abiding in Jesus and His words are abiding in us, then Jesus says God will answer our prayers. Do we recognise that? “But,” you say, “suppose I ask for something not according to God’s will?” I defy you to, if you are fulfilling the abiding in Jesus. The disciple who is in the condition of abiding in Jesus is the will of God, and his apparent free choices are God’s foreordained decrees. Mysterious? Logically absurd? But a glorious truth to a saint.
“And whatsoever ye shall ask in My Name, that will I do.” Are we performing this ministry of the interior?
Do we pray for those in prominent places, for the “Pauls”? There is no snare or danger of infatuation or pride or the “show business” in prayer. Prayer is a hidden, obscure ministry which brings forth fruit that glorifies the Father. “Severed from Me you can do nothing,” i.e., “you will not bear My fruit, you will bear something that did not come from Me at all”; but—“Abide in Me,” and you will bring forth fruit that testifies to the nature of the vine, fruit whereby the Father is glorified. “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man,” one who is abiding, “availeth much.” Are we constantly recognising that God does answer prayer if we are abiding in Jesus? Are we building in faith on the presupposition of the Atonement and bringing everything to that one centre, or are we allowing our lives to be frittered away? Is Jesus Christ dominating every interest of our lives more and more? This does not mean that we are to be thinking about God always and giving all our time to so-called religious work, but it does mean that we are to concentrate on the great fact of the Atonement with the greatest amount of our time even to the ordinary things of life as they are engineered for us by God.
Those who use the jargon of “abiding in Christ,” if not really abiding are an annoyance and an irritation. If we make the Atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ the great exerting influence of our life, every phase of our life will bear fruit for God. Take time and get to know whether the Atonement is the central point of all power for you, and remember that Satan’s aim is to keep you away from that point of power. Jesus said that the cares of this world and the lust of other things would choke His word. We can choke God’s word with a yawn; we can hinder the time that should be spent with God by remembering we have other things to do. “I haven’t time!” Of course you have not time! Take time, strangle some other interests and make time to realise that the centre of power in your life is the Lord Jesus Christ and His Atonement. Paul limited his knowledge to that one thing—“I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.” We have to learn to concentrate our affinities, to determine to be limited.