Chapter 3: A VISION OF THE NEW LIFE
Chapter 3: A VISION OF THE NEW LIFE
“Wherefore. O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient into the heavenly vision.” - Act 26:19.
YOU MIGHT THINK that that vision was the face of Christ; a deeper insight will lead you to see that it was the vision of a new life that suddenly dawned upon the heart of Paul. He had been living a low level life, serving his proud self, and antagonistic to Christ. Suddenly, like the New Jerusalem that came down out of heaven from God, there came to him the vision of a life which was within his reach. It beckoned him, and though that life meant suffering, obloquy, persecution, prisons, stripes, death, he followed it, swerving neither right nor left by a hair’s breadth, until at last he said: “I have finished my course.”
The first conception of that heavenly vision came to him as he looked upon the face of Stephen, illumined with the light of God. From the moment when he saw Stephen die, the humble slave of Christ, the conception followed him that he too might live a life like that, and die such a death. But he put it away, as you and I put away some of God’s fairest visions.
But God loved Paul too much to let him miss that blessed life, and in His mercy pursued him by a goad, and when Paul backed, and said, “I can’t do it,” he backed right upon God’s goad, and God urged him forward. Still he kicked, and-then, since pain would not do it, God painted upon the cloud that hid his future, a vision of a life so fair, so blessed, so radiant, so triumphant, that what the goad could not do the vision accomplished. What the force failed to do, the beckoning of that sweet ideal wrought, and he said:
“I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.” Though my hand is only an apprentice’s hand, and trembles, I should like God to use it to paint before you a vision of the real life, the Christ-life that lies within the reach of every regenerate man. Oh, that I could paint it! I believe that then you would leap to it, and say:
“Ah, when I caught a glimpse of the blessed life I might lead, I who have been such a failure, such a stumbling-block, I who have brought so much shame upon those that loved Christ, then I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, but I took the first step, and the next, and the next, and life has begun to be one long summer day.”
When a heavy morning mist veils the valley and hills, I feel as if half my world was blotted out. But suddenly there comes a breath, or the sun’s rays, and the mist parts, and the landscape stands unveiled. So God often parts the mist that hides the future, and shows what a man may be.
I urge young people especially to seek from God the vision of what your life may be, and then obey it, because when you catch God’s vision you will always find Him responsible for the outworking of His plan. I often meet men worried about money matters, and carrying a heavy weight, and I think, Ten to one that man has lost sight of the vision, because when God gives the plan He always finds the stuff, and when God beckons you forward, He is always responsible for the transport.
If you should come to a place where roads meet, and you do not know which way to take, stand still until you get the heavenly vision, and then follow, come what may.
What is this life, the real life that anyone may live henceforth?
In the first place, it is a life or freedom, we are set free from the curse of the self-life.
We must remember this true life is not an unnatural life, I know men who talk of holiness as if it meant that it was wrong to laugh, be bright, engage in manly sports’, play the piano, read any book but the Bible, or follow certain pursuits for which we have natural aptitudes. I believe that God in His Word will not contradict the nature which He has given, and that which is wrong in us is not our natural aptitudes, but the self-life, around which those aptitudes revolve. The life of which I speak is not a denial of “anything which God has imparted, but the transference of these from the pivot of self to the pivot of not-self, which is Jesus Christ, incarnate Love. The man who enters this life is still a bright companion, a manly athlete, still enters into all that home and friendship and life may mean, but everything is hallowed, elevated, ennobled, because revolving evermore around the will of Jesus Christ.
Look at a child. He has smallpox or fever, but the mother loves him as much as before, and her only desire is to rid him of the fever that now fetters the natural working of the body. The body under the dominion of disease is no longer able freely to live the life that God intended, but when once that disease is swept away, nature reasserts itself, and the child begins to laugh and play, and its merry prattle is heard all through the house.
I believe that THAT GOD WAITS TO DELIVER US from the cursed power of the self-life that blasts everything, that blasted Paradise first, and will blast your life unless you are set free from it.
This life also is a life of deliverance from known sin. A minister asked me if I taught sinlessness. I replied, “I teach deliverance from the power of known sin, that God saves us up to our light”; but our light resembles the growing twilight that precedes the day, and therefore there may be many things in which we hourly offend, and which are sinful in God’s most holy sight, and at the end of every day, though we have lived up to our light, and have been kept from known sin, we still need to pray, “Forgive me my debts,” things in which I have failed, in which there has been an. incompleteness that must always attach to our poor human nature.
Mr. Spurgeon said of a certain man, “I always thought Mr.-- sinless until he said he was.” When a man’s face really shines like Moses’, he wists it not. There is always the presence of a sinful nature, there is always the not-doing what we ought, even where we are kept from doing what we ought not. But we may be kept day by day UP TO THE LIMIT OF THE LIGHT and this blessed deliverance from known sin is within the reach of all.
Thirdly: This a life in which we are kept in time of temptation.
You will be tempted to the end of your life, and the nearer you live to Christ the more you will be tempted. It was after Jesus had seen the open heaven that He was led “into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil, and the man that stands under the open heaven and sees the heavenly vision, is the man whom the devil will tempt to the uttermost. God will permit it because temptation does for us what the storms-do for the oaks, it roots us; and what the fire does for the painting on porcelain,--it makes us-permanent. You never know that you have a grip on Christ, or that He has a grip on you so well as when the devil is using all his force to attract you from Him; then you feel the pull of Christ’s right hand.
As long as the soldier slinks outside the battle, he carries a whole skin, but let him plunge in and follow the captain, and he will soon have the bullets flying about him. Some of you have had a good time, because there was no use in the devil wasting powder and shot upon you, you haven’t been doing him any harm; but directly you begin to wake up and set to work for God, the devil will set a thousand evils to worrying you, or he may come himself to see to you. This life is also one in which you become conscious of new power.
Men often take up new lines of truth because they hope that somehow they will be able to reach and touch larger numbers of their fellows. It is like a man who has been fishing all day with a certain bait in vain, but he suddenly changes it, in the hope that the new bait will vet redeem the wasted day. Now in my judgment it is not these new views you want, but it is new power in presenting the old ones, and in this new life it is perfectly wonderful how new power begins to SWEEP THROUGH A MAN’S LIFE
Up to a certain point in my own life I sought to influence men by mental conceptions, polished sentences, and vivid and striking metaphors; I found it did not keep them. But when I began to try humbly to realize the heavenly vision, I laid my whole being open to the torrent of God’s power, which is always seeking to reach men, and suddenly to my surprise I found that God was pouring through my life river after river, and this began to be realized, “He that-believeth on Me, out of him shall flow rivers.” Oh, how I welcomed that text! I said:
“Lord, from today I am not going to dam up the water, but I am going to be a channel through which the royal power of God Himself may reach men and women.”
O brother ministers, every one of you may suddenly find your power in your pulpit augmented a thousandfold!
Hudson Taylor once said, “I used to ask God if He would come and help me; then I asked God if I might come and help Him; then I ended by asking God to do His own work through me.”
There is this further thought: This is a life of rest. A man said to me, “Aren’t you teaching quietism?’ I do not know much about quietism; I suppose it is being quiet; but the man who has hold of these principles is the man who is quiet about himself, out unquiet about everybody else. You are quiet from anxiety, from fever and haste and hurry. In the midst of the storm your pulse beats quietly, and amid a panic which convulses the whole stock exchange you are kept perfectly still. But he who has left anxiety about his own life begins to tare about the lives of all around him.
See, there is a boat upset, in which there is a good swimmer. He is perfectly at rest about himself. There is a man with a life-buoy around him; he, too, is at rest about himself. But that man who can swim begins at once to do his utmost to rescue the drowning men around him, and he who is within the life-belt is glad enough to reach out his hands on either side for others to grasp.
If you want to live A LIFE OF ALTRUISM, living for others, you would best leave all anxiety, about yourself in the hands of Christ.
Two painters were set to paint a picture of rest, and one painted a placid pool in which the mountains were reflected, an utter “solitude. The other depicted a living cataract, and over it the bough of a tree on which a nest was securely fixed, and a bird was brooding over her young. That picture of the bird at rest in the midst of the foam and rushing of the cataract is the truest conception of rest. There is a life in the will of God, so quiet, so at peace with Him, so at rest in His joy, so perfectly content that He is doing best, that the lines are wiped out of the face, the fever is gone from the restless eye, and the whole nature is still. “Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him,” and then spend the strength that other men waste in fussy anxiety in helping your fellow men.
The life of which I speak is a life of taking in. Many think it is only a giving up. I do not deny that there is a giving up in it, but it is not without the hope of taking; you see something better, and in reaching for that you drop the worse.
Upon the placid waters of a lake everything which is highest in reality is lowest in the reflection. The higher the trees, the lower their shadow. That is a picture of this world: what is highest in this world is lowest in the other, and what is highest in that world is lowest in this. Gold is on top here; they pave the streets with it there. To serve is looked upon as ignoble here; there those that serve reign, and the last are first.
I never saw a girl unwilling to fling away paste diamonds when she could have real stones, and when a man understands what God can be to the soul, he is independent of things he used to care for most.
O friends, no words can tell what eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived of the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. I cannot do it, I do not believe any man can; but there beckons you a life of deliverance from self, of freedom from known sin, of deliverance from the power of the devil, of influence over thousands of men, of rest and peace in the heart, of conscious rightness with God, independent of mood and feeling, in which the will is one with the will of God; a life so blessed, so transcendent, so radiant, that it is like the life of Paradise.
Do you want it? Are you sick and tired of your present life? Women who spend your time, Christians though you are, in reading trashy novels, and in a round of fashion, when all about you are the tragedies of human life that you do not touch! Men who are simply living to make money! Oh, is anything more miserable conceivable than for a man to be put in the trust of tens of thousands or millions of dollars, and then to be using for himself that wonderful trust? Perhaps the most royal power a man may have is speech, but next to that, in all God’s universe there is nothing like the power of money. If a rich man is wise, he will wake up every morning and say, “I am steward of God’s wealth, and I must administer it for Him. How can I best expend it?”
I call you all to this life. Take the first step now. God will show you the next, and the next presently. Give yourself to Christ now, take Him to be absolute monarch. Say, “Lord, from now I am thy slave.” Satan will say, “Take care”; nevertheless say it, and you will find that Jesus Christ will begin to work through you in a most blessed way.