CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 1
Is It Scriptural?
No thoughtful person can question the fact that, for the most part, the Christian life, as it is generally lived, is not entirely a happy life. A keen observer once said, “You Christians seem to have a religion that makes you miserable. You are like a man with a headache. He does not want to get rid of his head, but it hurts him to keep it. You cannot expect outsiders to seek very earnestly for anything so uncomfortable.” For the first time I saw that Christianity ought to make its possessors, not miserable, but happy. I asked the Lord to show me the secret of a happy Christian life. I shall share this secret.
In moments of illumination, God’s children feel that a life of rest and victory is their birthright. Remember the shout of triumph your souls gave when you first met the Lord Jesus and glimpsed His mighty saving power? How easy it seemed to be more than conquerors through Him who loved you! Under the leadership of a captain who had never been foiled in battle, how could you dream of defeat!
And yet, to many of you, how different your real experience has been! Your victories have been few and fleeting, your defeats many and disastrous. Christ is believed in, talked about, and served, but He is not known as the soul’s actual and very life, abiding there forever and revealing Himself there continually in His beauty. You have found Jesus as your Savior from the penalty of sin, but you have not found Him as your Savior from sin’s power. You have carefully studied the holy scriptures and have gathered much precious truth from them, which you hoped would feed and nourish your spiritual life. But in spite of it all, your souls are starving and dying within you, and you cry out in secret, again and again, for that bread and water of life that you see promised in the scriptures to all believers.
Your early visions of triumph have seemed to grow dimmer and dimmer, and you have been forced to settle down to the conviction that the best you can expect from your religion is a life of alternate failure and victory, one hour sinning and the next repenting, and then beginning again, only to fail again, and again to repent.
But is this all? Had the Lord Jesus only this in His mind when He laid down His precious life to deliver you from your difficult and cruel bondage to sin? Was there a hidden reserve in each promise that was meant to deprive it of its complete fulfillment? Can we dream that the Savior, who was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities, could possibly see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied in such Christian lives as fill the Church today? The Bible tells us that “for this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil”; and can we imagine for a moment that this is beyond His power and that He finds Himself unable to accomplish the thing He came to earth to do?
In the very beginning, then, settle down on this one thing, that Jesus came to save you, now, in this life, from the power and dominion of sin and to make you more than conquerors through His power. If you doubt this, search your Bible and collect together every announcement or declaration concerning the purposes and object of His death on the cross. His work is to deliver us from our sins, from our bondage, from our defilement; and not a hint is given anywhere that this deliverance was limited and partial, one with which Christians so continually try to be satisfied.
When the angel of the Lord appeared unto Joseph in a dream and announced the coming birth of the Savior, he said, “And thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins.”
When Zacharias was “filled with the Holy Ghost” at the birth of his son, and “prophesied,” he declared that God had visited His people in order to fulfill the promise and the oath He had made them, “that we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him, all the days of our life.”
When Peter was preaching in the porch of the temple to the wondering Jews, he said, “Unto you first God, having raised up his Son Jesus, sent him to bless you, in turning away every one of you from his iniquities.”
When Paul told the Ephesian church the wondrous truth, that Christ had so loved them as to give Himself for them, he went on to declare that His purpose in doing this was “that he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, that he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.”
When Paul was seeking to instruct Titus, his own son after the common faith, concerning the grace of God, he declared that the object of that grace was to teach us “that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world.” He then added the reason—that Christ “gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.”
When Peter encouraged the Christians, to whom he was writing, to walk holy and Christlike, he tells them that “even hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps: who did not sin, neither was guile found in his mouth.” He added, “Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.”
In Ephesians when Paul contrasted the walk suitable for a Christian with the walk of an unbeliever, he set before them the truth in Jesus as being this: “That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; and be renewed in the spirit of your mind; and that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.”
In Romans 6, Paul brought up the fact of our judicial death and resurrection with Christ as an unanswerable argument for our practical deliverance from sin. For a child of God to continue sinning is utterly foreign to the whole spirit and aim of the salvation of Jesus. He says, “God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein? Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life,” and adds, “Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.”
Sometimes we overlook the fact that there are far more references made of a present salvation from sin than of a future salvation in a heaven beyond.
Can we for a moment suppose that the holy God, who hates sin in the sinner, is willing to tolerate it in the Christian, and that He has even arranged the plan of salvation in such a way as to make it impossible for those who are saved from the guilt of sin to find deliverance from its power?
Dr. Chalmers says, “Sin is that scandal which must be rooted out from the great spiritual household over which the Divinity rejoices. Now that the penalty is taken off, do you think it is possible that the unchangeable God has so given up His antipathy to sin that man, ruined and redeemed, may now indulge in sin, which under the old order destroyed him? Does not the God who loved righteousness and hated iniquity six thousand years ago bear the same love to righteousness and hatred to iniquity still? The cross of Christ, by the same mighty and decisive stroke that moved the curse of sin away from us, also surely moves away the power and the love of it from over us.”
The redemption accomplished for us by our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross at Calvary is a redemption from the power of sin as well as from its guilt. He is able to save to the uttermost all who come unto God by Him.
A quaint old Quaker divine of the seventeenth century says: “There is nothing so contrary to God as sin, and God will not suffer sin always to rule His masterpiece, man. When we consider God’s inexhaustible power for destroying that which is contrary to Him, who can believe that the devil must always stand and prevail?
“It is inconsistent and disagreeable with the true faith for people to be Christians and yet to believe that Christ, the eternal Son of God, to whom all power in heaven and earth is given, will allow sin and the devil to have dominion over them.
“If you say sin is deeply rooted in man, I say so, too. But Christ Jesus has received power to destroy the devil and his works and to recover and redeem man into righteousness and holiness. Or else it is false that ‘He is able to save to the uttermost all that come unto God by Him.’ We must throw away the Bible if we say that it is impossible for God to deliver man out of sin.
“So, then, I do expect the benefit of my redemption and that I shall go out of my captivity. But still they say you must abide in sin as long as you live. What! Must we never be delivered? Must this crooked heart and perverse will always remain? Must I be a believer and yet have no faith that reaches to sanctification and holy living? Is there no mastery to be had, no getting victory over sin? Must it prevail over me as long as I live? What sort of a redeemer is this, or what benefit of my redemption do I have in this life?”
This isn’t a new doctrine in the Church; however, much of it may have been lost sight of by the present generation of believers. It is the same old story that has filled the daily lives of many saints of God with songs of triumph throughout all ages; and it is now being sounded forth again to the unspeakable joy of weary and burdened souls.
Do not reject it until you have prayerfully searched the scriptures to see whether these things be indeed so. Ask God to open the eyes of your understanding by His Spirit that you may know “what is the exceeding greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his mighty power, which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places.” And when you have begun to have some faint glimpses of this power, learn to look away utterly from your own weakness, and, putting your case into His hands, trust Him to deliver you.