Chapter 7: THE BLAMELESS LIFE.
Chapter 7: THE BLAMELESS LIFE.
“Abstain from every form of evil And the God of peace Himself sanctify you wholly; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved entire, without blame at the Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is He that calleth you, who also will do it.” - 1Th 5:23-24.
“Who also will do it.” Will do what? Will present you blameless at the coming of Christ. He also will keep you blameless every day you live, so that yon may be blameless and harmless, the child of God without rebuke in the midst of a crooked and evil world, in which you are called to shine as a bright light. - Phi 2:15.
THERE IS A world of difference between a blameless life and a faultless life. We may be kept blameless day by day, but we shall not be faultless until we are fully perfected in the presence of His glory. But God is able to keep us blameless.
Let me give an explanation of the difference between blamelessness and faultlessness.
We will suppose that a working woman has been all day at work. She goes home at night physically wearied. She has two children, one a little girl, and the other a baby. She rocks the baby to sleep, and takes out some work for her already tired fingers.
But presently the work drops from her hand and she falls into a doze, losing herself in sweet unconsciousness. Then her little girl, eager to help her mother, steals up to her side and takes from her fingers the work at which the mother had been engaged, creeps back to her chair and commences to work. But ah, what stitches!
Presently the mother awakes and feels for the work. Where has it gone? Then the little mother’s-help runs up and says:
“Mother, look! Look what I have done to help you!”
As the mother examines those childish stitches, she knows that they will all have to come out. The work is far from faultless, but the child is blameless. The child did as well as she knew. Her work, judged by the higher standard of perfect needlework, was a great failure. Yet who could say a word against the child herself?
I can imagine the mother putting that work aside in the drawer and keeping it. Some day when that daughter is herself a woman, with rather high notions about her work, the mother says: “Come here, and look at this!” and she takes her to that drawer and shows her that childish work.
“Oh, mother, whoever did that work? Why, what stitches! How ridiculous!” “Ah, daughter, you did it yourself!”
“I did it? Weren’t you very cross with me?”
“No, my child; I was not cross, because you were blameless; you did as well as you knew.”
“Mother, I am ashamed to see it.”
Suppose God should take a transcript of the best day you ever lived on earth, and keep it up in heaven somewhere, and show it to you a thousand years from now. You will find it very far from faultless, and you will say:
“O God, how could you love me when I lived like that?”
But God will say: “It was as good as you knew. You walked with me according to your light; and the blood of Jesus Christ, my Son, cleansed you from your unconscious sin.” Let us always make that distinction. I feel that men do many things which are not faultless, but they are blameless, because they know no better. Hence, a man will not do today what he did five years ago; and five years from today he will not do what he does now. Our light grows, and as our light grows, our knowledge grows; and our walk ought to be more in consonance with our knowledge and grace.
“He will do it.” I hardly know where to make the emphasis. If I say He will do it, there you have the certainty that He will do it. If I lay the emphasis on He, I get the certainty that God Himself will do it. I bring that message to every one who is utterly disheartened and discouraged by perpetual failure. Be assured that the great God of heaven stoops to your mean life. From this moment dare to believe that He will do for you what you cannot do for yourself, and make you live a blameless life. “Faithful is He that calleth you; He will do it.” He, He, HE, HE will do it. He will do it. He will do it. He will do it.
What makes us so sure? Because He has called us to it, and has taught us to hunger and yearn for it.
Does He put the yearning for the summer land in a swallow’s breast, when there is no summer land for it? Does He teach us to yearn for immortality when there is no far land beyond this where we shall be at rest? And does He teach any man or woman here to desire, with a hunger past words, a pure and blameless life, and will He not make it theirs?
But do not be afraid of God. He is the God of Peace, and whatever He does will be done so gently and quietly that it will be as the opening of a summer’s day, the footsteps of spring over the woods, the breathing of a sleeping infant. If you resist and antagonize Him, there may be storm and hurricane-but these need not be, if you yield to His will.
And do not shrink from holiness, as though it were something unnatural, and would divorce you from all that is innocent and right in human life. Spell “holiness” as “wholeness.” The holy man is the whole man. Sanctification is the deliverance of our nature from the blight of sin and the restoration of the image which the Creator stamped on man in its first creation. The Redeemer does not annihilate or resist any natural function implanted by the Creator. The holy man is the best father, brother, son, friend, companion, because the most natural.
Do not dread sanctification, which is not ‘it’ but He, not a thing but a person, not a process but a life. Do you want to be sanctified? Let in the Sanctifier. When God enters a day, it is a holy day; when He enters a bush, the ground around is holy; when He enters a building, it is a holy place or temple; when He enters the heart of a man to fill it, he becomes a holy man. THE METHOD OF THE BLAMELESS LIFE is presented in the words: “Your spirit, soul and body.” The Apostle prays that God would sanctify them wholly, in spirit, soul and body.
You remember that the temple stood on the level of Mount Zion, surrounded by a parapet of white marble, and the colonnades in which our Savior walked and taught. Within this area stood the temple itself. Two-thirds of it was the holy place, and one-third the most holy. The holy place was devoted to the work of the priests; the holy of holies to the indwelling light, the shekinah, between the wings of the cherubim.
Now these three, the outer court, the holy place, and the most holy, where the Shekinah shone, represent our body (which touches the outer world), our soul (which is the seal of our will and mind and personality), and our spirit (in which we come into contact with our heavenly Father.)
I pray God, says the Apostle, that He may sanctify you wholly, not the spirit without the soul, not the soul without the body; but that body. soul, and spirit should be possessed by the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit of God dwelling in the most holy place of the spirit, shining through the whole nature, making darkness and impurity and evil impossible, and at last irradiating the very body with light and beauty.
When a man is born into this world, he is endowed with spirit, soul, and body. But as yet the spirit is untenanted, it is like the holy of holies before the Shekinah, the light of God’s presence, entered it. The spirit’s capacity for God is in the man, but not opened as yet to receive God.
At regeneration, the Spirit brings into our spirit the germ of the new life, which is Jesus Christ Himself. “He that hath the Son hath life”, and he that hath life, hath the Son. So the Apostle could freely say to all his Corinthian converts, “What! Know ye not how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?” (2Co 13:5).
From the moment of our regeneration, then, the Lord Jesus is literally in residence within us. We may not have heard His footfalls as He entered and passed into the inner secret of our nature, but He did enter, never more to leave.
At the moment of regeneration, and often for some time afterward, we may not realize the blessed Inmate of our nature. He is there, but we know Him not. He is veiled from us, until it pleases God to tear the veil asunder from the top to the bottom and to reveal Him. (Gal 1:16).
Softly as morning light the life of Christ entered your heart. It is within, but it is curtained; and if you would only draw the curtain, if only it were rent in twain, as at the crucifixion, the Son of God who is in you would shine through all the dark spaces of your nature, illumining, irradiating, filling, sanctifying and making your life blameless.
I often think of Enoch Arden in what is one of the sweetest things Tennyson ever wrote; how he comes to his home after the?- thought him dead; how he steals around the garden, and in the gloaming looks into the window, and sees his wife another man’s beloved, and his children growing up with their children. So he steals back to a lonely life, and ultimately to a solitary death in the little inn where “the waters break against the wall.” But Tennyson says he was not all unhappy. Firm faith and prayer, like fountains of sweet water in .the sea, kept him a living soul.
I have often thought of those fountains of sweet water. Jesus Himself becomes a fountain of sweet water in the midst of a very desolate and weary life. Now WHAT IS THE VEIL which hangs between you and the presence of Jesus? It is probably some misunderstanding between yourself and another. What veils man from man, also veils man from God. He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. Perhaps you are unwilling to forgive someone who has wronged you; or you will not ask forgiveness from one whom you have wronged. Perhaps you owe restitution money on a debt or a theft of twenty or thirty years ago; oh, the thought of this, the conviction that you ought to make it good, is a thickly-woven veil between your Lord and you. Or perhaps there is some duty, some obedience to a positive command which you ought to perform, but which you have evaded and shirked. Any of these things is enough to curtain off the indwelling of Jesus, and make it a dim uncertainty.
Oh, let God reveal to you the cause of your shadowed experience! Then dare to obey Him at whatever cost. Make right what is wrong, repay what is owing, obey what is incumbent. Do it though it cost you an earthquake and a crucifixion. The peace of God will immediately settle upon you, and the light within will break forth speedily.
This kind of teaching should be as good for business men as a revival of trade, for if people acted up to it, they would pay their bills. Women would pay for their last dresses. The men would go and pay for their last coats. People who have been owing money for the last two or three years would write a check for it. Relatives who have not spoken to one another for the last ten or twelve years would contrive to make up their quarrel. There would be a dragging and tearing down of the veil between man and woman, woman and woman, and then would be disclosed the face of Christ.
Jesus is in you, but waits to fill you. Away with every hindrance, and let Him sanctify you wholly! As He fills, He will drive your sin before Him, as the steam in the radiator drives the cold before it when you turn the valve. The radiator is an ugly piece of cold iron. It is as destitute of heat as you and I of holiness. When you want heat in it, you must let it in from outside, just as, if you want holiness, you must get it from the Holy One. If you turn the valve a little way, just half a turn, a little heat comes in, but the steam makes a terrible noise, which always makes me think of people who have just enough holiness to make them miserable. But when you turn the valve until you can turn no more, and the whole aperture is open toward the supply of hot air or steam, it rushes freely in. Oh that this were a true emblem of the condition of our hearts toward God, when the whole nature lies unveiled before Him, that every part of it may be sanctified, because God-possessed.
You never think of brushing darkness out before letting the light in; you LET IN THE LIGHT, and it drives the darkness before it. You cannot turn out evil, but open your whole heart to Jesus, who is within you, and He will chase the evil before Him and sanctify every part of you by His indwelling and all-pervading presence.
It is a good thing, therefore, to begin every day by saying over, and meditating on the following words:
“I believe in the name of the Son of God. Therefore I am in Him, having redemption and life by His Spirit. And He is in me, and all fitness is in Him. To Him I belong by purchase, conquest, and self-surrender; to me He belongs for all my hourly need. There is no veil or cloud between my Lord and me. There is no obstacle to His indwelling and infilling. I yield my entire being to Him; and what I cannot do He can.”
This is sanctification! The indwelling of Jesus by the Holy Spirit, keeping us from sin, and fulfilling through us the full purpose of His Will.