The Habit of Rising to the Occasion
The Habit of Rising to the Occasion
So be the more eager, brothers, to ratify your calling and election, for as you exercise these qualities you will never make a slip. 2 Peter 1:10 (Moffatt)
In natural life our aims shift and alter as we develop; but development in the Christian life is an increasing manifestation of Jesus Christ. Christian faith is nourished on dogma, and all young Christian life is uniform; but in the mature Christian life there are diversities. We must be careful that we do not remain children too long, but see that we “grow up into Him in all things.” We have to assimilate truth until it becomes part of us, and then begin to manifest the individual characteristics of the children of God. The life of God shows itself in different manifestations, but the aim ultimately is the manifestation of Jesus Christ. “Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”
If Jesus Christ is not being manifested in my mortal flesh, I am to blame; it is because I am not eating His flesh and drinking His blood. Just as I take food into my body and assimilate it, so, says Jesus, I must take Him into my soul. “He that eateth Me, even he shall live by Me.” Food is not health, and truth is not holiness. Food has to be assimilated by a properly organised system before the result is health, and truth must be assimilated by the child of God before it can be manifested as holiness. We may be looking at the right doctrines and yet not assimilating the truths which the doctrines reveal. Beware of making a doctrinal statement of truth the truth—“I am . . . the Truth,” said Jesus. Doctrinal statement is our expression of that vital connection with Him. If we divorce what Jesus says from Himself, it leads to secret self-indulgence spiritually; the soul is swayed by a form of doctrine that has never been assimilated and the life is twisted away from the centre, Jesus Christ Himself.
1. The Habit of Ratifying Your Election
Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure . . .
To ratify (Moffatt) is to make sure of. I have to form the habit of assuring myself of my election, to bend the whole energy of my Christian powers to realise my calling, and to do that I must remember what I am saved for, viz.; that the Son of God might be manifested in my mortal flesh. How much attention have I given to the fact that my body is the temple of the Holy Ghost††? When the Son of God is formed in me is He able to exhibit His life in my mortal flesh, or am I a living contradiction of what my mouth professes? Am I working out what God works in or have I become divorced from Jesus Christ? I become divorced from Him immediately I receive anything apart from His indwelling. Have I a testimony to give that is not “me”? If my testimony is only a thrilling experience, it is nothing but a dead, metallic thing; it kills me and those who listen to me. But when I am in contact with Jesus Christ every testimony of mine will reveal Him.
“That ye may know what is the hope of His calling, and what the riches . . . of His inheritance in the saints.” That which is taken for humility before men is blasphemy before God. To say, “Oh I’m no saint; I can’t stand the folks who testify that they are sanctified,” is acceptable with men; they will say it is true humility to talk in that way. But say this before God, and though it may sound humble, it is blasphemy because it means—“God cannot make me a saint.” The one whom men call proud is really unutterably humble before God—“Nothing in my hands I bring.”
2. The Habit of Realising Your Exercises
for if ye do these things . . .
We cannot do anything for our salvation, but we must do something to manifest it; we must work it out. Am I working out my salvation with my tongue, with my brain, and with my nerves? We are all apt to say with Rip Van Winkle —“I won’t count this time.” We put off the realisation that if we are going to grow up into Him in all things, there are things that we must do. “If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them,” said Jesus. Character is the way we have grown to act with our hands and our feet, our eyes and our tongue; and the character we make always reveals the ruling disposition within. “If any man is in Christ, there is a new creation” (rv mg). Where is the new creation? If I am still the same miserable cross-patch, set on my own way, it is a lie to say that I am a new creature in Christ.
Have I learned to submit my will to Jesus? When we are rightly related to God we have uncovered to us for the first time the power of our own wills. Our wills are infirm through sin, but when we are sanctified there is revealed to us the pure pristine will-power with which God created us, and which the Holy Ghost calls into action. Then we have to submit our will to Jesus as He submitted His will to His Father. How was Jesus one with His Father when He was in this human frame? By complete obedience, complete dependence, and complete intercourse with Him all the time.
“If ye do these things”—am I adding resolution to my faith, self-control to my knowledge, steadfastness to my piety? We ought to be infinitely more humble in exercising ourselves in these ways. God’s order for the saint is trusting imperially, and working humbly in the midst of things as they are, not thinking imperially, and contemptuously ignoring things as they are. God knows where we are, and His order comes to us moment by moment. We are not called to manifest Jesus in heaven; we have to be the light in the darkness and the squalor of earth. Our place is in the demon-possessed valley,†† not on the Mount of Transfiguration.†† It is in the valley that we have to exercise these things.
God will never shield us from any requirements of a child of His. “Think it not strange,” says Peter, “concerning the fiery trial which is to try you.” God is the Master Engineer; He allows difficulties to come to see if we can vault over them properly. “By my God have I leaped over a wall.” Do the thing; it does not matter how it hurts so long as it gives God a chance to manifest Himself in our mortal flesh. May God not find the whine in us any more, but may He find us full of spiritual pluck and athleticism, ready to face anything He brings and to exercise ourselves in order that the Son of God may be manifested in our mortal flesh. Remember, we go through nothing that God does not know about.
3. The Habit of Recognising Your Expectations
. . . ye shall never fall.
What do you expect? One way to detect inordinate imagination is to try and locate to yourself what you expect God to do. One expectation you cannot have, and that is the expectation of successful service. When the Lord sent out the disciples on their first evangelical tour, they came back hilarious over their success—“Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through Thy name.” That is all they thought about. Our Lord said, Don’t rejoice in successful service, “but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven.” We are not called to success but to faithfulness.
The life of our Lord is given to us that we may know the way we have to go when we are made sons and daughters of God. We must be careful not to have the idea that we are put into God’s show room. God never has museums. We are to have only one aim in life, and that is that the Son of God may be manifested; then all dictation to God will vanish. Our Lord never dictated to His Father, and we are not to dictate to God; we are to submit our wills to Him so that He works through us what He wants. “I do not know why I should have to go through this”—the moment that thought is produced in us, no matter what our experience may be, we are no longer saints. It is a thought that has neither part nor lot with the life of the Son of God in us, and it must be put away instantly. We are the only ones who should go through these things, though we need not unless we like. If we refuse to, the trample will go back on the Lord, and we will never hear Him complain. We will get off scot free—“That was rather smart of me, that man thought he was going to put on me!” “What is that mark on Thy hand?” “That is the mark of the blow that should have been taken by you, but it came back on Me.” Always go the second mile with God. It is never our duty to do it; but if we make duty our god we cease to be Christians in that particular. It is never our duty to go the second mile, to turn the other cheek,†† but it is what we shall do if we are saints. The Lord is doing it with us just now; we compel Him to go the second mile; we won’t do this and that, and He has to do it for us. Are you saying to God, “I shall not accept these circumstances”? God will not punish you; but you will punish yourself when you realise that He was giving you a glorious opportunity of filling up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ.
It is Peter, the man who denied his Lord and Master,††† who tells us that we “should follow His steps.” Peter had come to a recognition of himself by means of a strange and desperate fall—“Simon, Simon, . . Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat: but I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.” Peter understands these words of Jesus now by the indwelling Spirit bringing them back to his remembrance. Are we following in the steps of His unseen feet? Where did Jesus place His feet? He placed them by the sick and the sorrowful, by the dead, by the bad, by the twisted and by the good. He placed His feet exactly where we have to place ours, either with or without Him, in the ordinary rough and tumble of human life as it is. “I will make the place of My feet glorious.” As we walk in this body according to the new life that has been imparted to us by the Holy Spirit, we shall find it is no longer mounting up in ecstasy, running and not being weary, but walking with an infinite, steady, uncrushable, indescribable patience until men take knowledge that the Son of God is walking through us again.