3. The Discipline by Instruction in Apprehending Growth
The “Go” of Sacramental Service
Matthew 5:41
Lord, I have fallen again—a human clod!
Selfish I was, and heedless to offend;
Stood on my rights. Thy own child would not send
Away his shreds of nothing for the whole God!
Wretched, to thee who savest, low I bend:
Give me the power to let my rag-rights go
In the great wind that from thy gulf doth blow.
Keep me from wrath, let it seem ever so right:
My wrath will never work thy righteousness.
Up, up the hill, to the whiter than snow-shine,
Help me to climb, and dwell in pardon’s light.
I must be pure as thou, or ever less
Than the design of me—therefore incline
My heart to take men’s wrongs as thou tak’st mine.
To go the second mile means always do your duty, and a great deal more than your duty, in a spirit of loving devotion that does not even know you have done it. If you are a saint the Lord will tax your walking capacity to the limit. The supreme difficulty is to go the second mile with God, because no one understands why you are being such a fool.
The summing up of Our Lord’s teaching is that it is impossible to carry it out unless He has done a supernatural work in us. The Sermon on the Mount is not an ideal, because an ideal must have as its working power the possibility of its realisation in the disposition obsessed by it. “Love your enemies”†; “Give to him that asketh thee”; these things have no place in the natural disposition of a man. Jesus Christ is the only One Who can fulfil the Sermon on the Mount. We have to face ourselves with the teaching of Jesus, and see that we do not wilt it away. The demands Our Lord makes on His disciples are to be measured by His own character. The Sermon on the Mount is the statement of the working out in actuality of the disposition of Jesus Christ in the life of any man.
Have we really come to the conclusion that if we are ever to be disciples it must be by being made disciples supernaturally? As long as we have the endeavour and the strain and the dead-set purpose of being disciples, it is almost certain we are not. Our Lord’s making of a disciple is supernatural; He does not build on any natural capacity. “Ye did not choose Me, but I chose you” (rv). That is always the way the grace of God begins to work, it is a constraint we cannot get away from. We can disobey it, but we cannot generate it. The drawing power is the supernatural grace of God, and we can never trace where that work begins. We have to choose to obey, and He does all the rest. To face ourselves with the standards of Jesus produces not delight, but despair to begin with; but immediately we get to despair we are willing to come to Jesus as paupers and to receive from Him. Despair is the initial gateway to delight in faith.
1. The Dangers of Intensity on Alien Ground
In Our Lord’s day the class known as Zealots hated the Roman dominance with an intensity of detestation; they would bow their heads and have their necks severed by the Roman sword rather than obey the tyrant. Just as the early disciples of Jesus were on alien ground politically, so as disciples of the Lord we are on alien ground in this world. The intensity of early devotion to Jesus must make for fanaticism to begin with. An intense person sees nothing, feels nothing, and does nothing unless it be violently. There was a difference between the disciples of John the Baptist and the disciples of Jesus. John taught his disciples asceticism, there was no sociability about him. When Jesus came He was not marked by intense religious zeal in the way everyone else was. External intensities marked the religious age in which Jesus lived, but they did not mark Him. Our Lord did not identify Himself with the cause of the Zealots: but He laid down His life as the Servant of Jehovah. We bring an alien atmosphere to the New Testament. Nowadays many would sum up Jesus as an idle man.
(a) The Direction by Impulse
In the training of the early disciples Our Lord persistently checked impulse, and Peter, the most impulsive of them all, got rebuke after rebuke for obeying impulse. Watch how the Spirit of God checks whenever we obey impulse. His checks always bring a rush of self-conscious foolishness, and instantly we want to vindicate ourselves. Impulse must be disciplined into intuition. There was nothing of the nature of impulse about Our Lord, nor of cold-bloodedness, but a calm strength that was never disturbed by panic. Most of us develop our Christianity along the line of our temperament, not along the line of God. To try and develop Christianity along the line of impulse is an impertinence when viewed alongside the strong Son of God. Some of us are like grasshoppers spiritually. Impulse is a natural trait in natural life, but in spiritual things Our Lord absolutely checks it because it always hinders. Discipleship is built not on natural affinities but entirely on the supernatural grace of God. The one characteristic of discipleship is likeness to Jesus Christ.
(b) The Dissipation of Impressions
All human beings have some kind of affinity for everything God has made. Our Lord deliberately reduces the impressions arising from these natural affinities until He gets the heart established in grace. In Luke 14:26 Our Lord mentions the closest affinities, all of which have been created by God, and yet He says there are times when a man must hate them. Notice how your nature reacts when you listen to some of the stern teaching of the Bible. There is a feeling of outrage, and yet at the same time the certainty that it is right. God’s original order was that there should be no sin, therefore every natural affinity could be indulged in; but sin entered in, and consequently when we become disciples the first thing we have to do is to cut off many affinities and live a maimed life. In the Sermon on the Mount Our Lord distinctly teaches the necessity of being maimed (see Matthew 5:29-30†). If you are going to be spiritual, says Jesus, you must barter the natural, i.e., sacrifice it. If you say—I do not want to sacrifice the natural for the spiritual; then, says Jesus, you must barter the spiritual. It is not a punishment, but an eternal principle. Be prepared to be maimed, to be a one-eyed faddist, until your heart gets established. It is this dissipation of impressions that makes many a would-be disciple a deserter. Our Lord’s statements embrace the whole of the spiritual life from beginning to end, and in verse 48 of Matthew 5, He completes the picture He began to give in verses 29-30—“Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (rv).
(c) The Disposition of Interests
The interests of the Son of God and of the disciple are to be identical. How long it takes to manifest that identity depends on the private history of the disciple and his Lord. Our Lord warns His disciples not to cast their pearls before swine. He is inculcating the need to examine carefully what we present of God’s truth to others. If Our Lord reduces our affinities and makes us live a maimed life in the meantime, it is at the peril of our spiritual life we try to explain it to others. A false idea of confessing makes us tell secrets that should never be told, they are between God and the soul. There are affinities of heart and of life that are dealt with by God in secret and we must never say a word about them to others. Other people seeing the limitations of the life say—What can there be wrong in this and in that? There is nothing wrong in it, but we know that it is at the peril of our life with God that we touch it. The maimed life and the misunderstood life must go on. Be prepared to be a limited fool in the sight of others, says Jesus, in order to further your spiritual character. We value the understanding of those we love most so much that Jesus has to take the last place. A disciple in the making may often tell Jesus that his father or his mother or his friend or other interests must be heeded first, and the Lord administers no rebuke. The inevitable lesson is learned presently in a way in which it ought never to have had to be learned.
2. The Delays in Identification
Passionate genuine affection for Jesus will lead to all sorts of vows and promises which it is impossible to fulfil. It is an attitude of mind and heart that sees only the heroic. We are called to be unobtrusive disciples, not heroes. When we are right with God, the tiniest thing done out of love to Him is more precious to Him than any eloquent preaching of a sermon. We have introduced into our conception of Christianity heroic notions that come from paganism and not from the teaching of Our Lord. Jesus warned His disciples that they would be treated as nobodies; He never said they would be brilliant or marvellous. We all have a lurking desire to be exhibitions for God, to be put, as it were, in His show room. Jesus does not want us to be specimens, He wants us to be so taken up with Him that we never think about ourselves, and the only impression left on others by our life is that Jesus Christ is having unhindered way.
“Peter . . . walked upon the waters, to come to Jesus (Matthew 14:29 rv). Walking on water is easy to impulsive pluck, but walking on dry land as a disciple of Jesus Christ is different, Peter walked on the water to go to Jesus, but he followed Him afar off††† on the land. We do not need the grace of God to stand crises; human nature and our pride will do it. We can buck up and face the music of a crisis magnificently, but it does require the supernatural grace of God to live twenty-four hours of the day as a saint, to go through drudgery as a saint, to go through poverty as a saint. to go through an ordinary, unobtrusive, ignored existence as a saint, unnoted and unnoticeable. The “show business,” which is so incorporated into our view of Christian work to-day, has caused us to drift far from Our Lord’s conception of discipleship. It is instilled in us to think that we have to do exceptional things for God; we have not. We have to be exceptional in ordinary things, to be holy in mean streets, among mean people, surrounded by sordid sinners. That is not learned in five minutes.
Jesus took the early disciples in hand to train them, and at the end of three years of intimate companionship with Him, they all forsook Him and fled.† Then they came to the end of themselves and all their self-sufficiency, and realised that if ever they were going to be different, it must be by receiving a new Spirit. After the Resurrection, Jesus “breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost.”
Do we really believe we need another Spirit? Are we basing our religious life on our impulses, on our natural affections, on what other people tell us we are? or are we based on what Jesus wants us to be? Jesus guides us by making us His friends.
“Why cannot I follow Thee even now?” (John 13:37 rv). Determination and devotion, protestations and vows are all born of self-consciousness, and must die out of a disciple. A child never makes vows. We have to be so taken up with Jesus that we are never impudent enough to vow anything. All our vows and resolutions end in denial because we have no power to carry them out. Natural devotion will always deny Jesus Christ somewhere or other. Whenever the grace of God takes hold of a man, he never thinks of vowing anything, he is lost in an amazing devotion which is not conscious.
Since mine eyes have looked on Jesus,
I’ve lost sight of all beside.
The domination of self-consciousness has to be put to death—“I have vowed, I have promised, and I have consecrated.” It all has to go until there is only one “I,” the Lord Jesus Christ.
“What is that to thee?” (John 21:22). A disciple is one who minds neither his own business nor any one else’s business, but looks steadfastly to Jesus and goes on following Him. We read books about the consecration of other men, but it is as so much scaffolding, it all has to go, and the time comes when there is only one thing left—following Jesus. One of the severest lessons we get comes from our stubborn refusal to see that we must not interfere in other people’s lives. It takes a long time to realise the danger of being an amateur providence, i.e., interfering with God’s order for others. We see a certain person suffering and we say, “He shall not suffer; I will see that he does not,” and we put our hand straight in front of God’s permissive will to prevent it, and He has to say, “What is that to thee?”
All these things are elements in our identification with Jesus. How long it takes Him to get us identified with Him depends upon us. We cause delays to God by persistently doing things in our own way. He never gets impatient, He waits until everything has fallen away and there is nothing left but identification with Him. To be absolutely centred in Jesus means that all things and all people are welcome alike to me, because they are all arranged for in their times and seasons by my heavenly Father.
3. The Discipline by Instruction in Apprehending Growth
Beware of continually wanting to be thrilled. In the natural world the one who is always wanting experiences of ecstasy and excitement is disappointingly unreliable, and the same is true in the spiritual world. There are unemployables in the spiritual domain, spiritually decrepit people who refuse to do anything unless they are supernaturally inspired.
(a) His Cross
Him they compelled to . . . bear His cross. (Matthew 27:32)
Simon the Cyrenian, in unwillingly fulfilling the instruction given in the Sermon on the Mount, unconsciously points out the lesson to us that we must be identified with the cross of Christ before ever we can carry our own cross.
(b) His Cup
My cup indeed ye shall drink. (Matthew 20:23† rv)
This is not the cup of martyrdom, for Our Lord was not a martyr. We must be identified with the atoning Death of Our Lord before we can be disciples. Many of us want to be disciples, but we do not want to come by way of His atoning Death; we do not want to be compelled to be orthodox to the Cross of Christ, to drink the cup that He drank. But there is no other way. We must be regenerated, supernaturally made all over again, before we can be His disciples.
(c) His Confession
Behold, we go up to Jerusalem. (Luke 18:31††)
That is the mightiest word on discipleship that Our Lord ever spoke, for Jerusalem was the place where He reached the climax of His Father’s will for Him, and He identifies us with Himself in our going up to our Jerusalem.
We have become so taken up with the idea of being prepared for something in the future that that is the conception we have of discipleship. It is true, but it is also untrue. The attitude of the Christian life is that we must be prepared now, this second; this is the time. What we are in relation to Jesus, not what we do or say for Him, gives His heart satisfaction and furthers His Kingdom. “Every one therefore who shall confess Me before men . . . ,”† said Jesus. The word “confess” means that every particle of our nature says the same thing, not our mouth only, but the very make up of our flesh and blood, confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh (cf. 1 John 4:2). It is easy to talk, easy to have fine thoughts; but none of that means being a disciple. Being a disciple is to be something that is an infinite satisfaction to Jesus every minute, whether in secret or in public.