ACTUAL AND REAL - Oswald Chambers
THE ACCOUNT WITH PURITY, vv. 21-30. Our Lord in these verses is laying down the principle that if men are going to follow Him and obey His Spirit, they must lay their account with purity. No man can make himself pure by obeying laws. Purity is not a question of doing things rightly, but of the doer on the. inside being right. Purity is difficult to define, it is best thought of as the state of heart just like the heart of our Lord Jesus Christ. Purity is not innocence; innocence is the characteristic of a child, and although, profoundly speaking, a child is not pure, yet his innocence presents us with all that we understand by purity. Innocence is a beautiful thing in a child s life, but men arid women ought not to be innocent, they ought to be tested and tried and pure. No man is born pure, purity is the outcome of conflict.
The pure man is not the man who has never been tried, but the man who knows what evil is and has overcome it. The same with virtue and morality, no one is born virtuous and moral, we are born un-moral. Morality is always the outcome of conflict, not of necessity. Jesus Christ demands that purity be explicit as well as implicit, that is, my actual conduct, the actual chastity of my bodily life, the actual chastity of my mind, is to be beyond the censure of Almighty God not beyond the censure of ray fellow men, that would produce Pharisaism, I can always deceive the other fellow. Jesus Christ has under taken by His Redemption to put in me a heart so pure that God can see nothing to censure in it. That is the marvel of the Redemption that Jesus Christ can give me a new heredity, the unsullied heredity of the Holy Spirit, and if it is there, says Jesus, it will work out in actual history.
In Matthew XV. Our Lord tells His disciples what the human heart is like ” Out of the heart proceed.” and then follows the catalogue. We say ” I never felt any of those things in my heart,” and we prefer to trust our innocent ignorance rather than Jesus Christ s penetration. Either Jesus Christ must be the supreme authority on the human heart or He is not worth listening to. If I make conscious innocence the test, I am likely to come to a place where I will find with a shuddering awakening that what Jesus said is true, and I will be appalled at the possibility of evil in me. If I have never been a blackguard, the reason is a mixture of cowardice and the protection of civilized life; but when I am undressed before God I find that Jesus Christ is right in His diagnosis. So long as I remain under the refuge of innocence, I am living in a fool s paradise. There is always a reason to be found in myself when I try to disprove what Jesus says.
Jesus Christ demands that the heart of a disciple be fathomlessly pure, then unless He can give me His dis position, His teaching is tantalising; if all He came to do was to mock me by telling me to be what I know I never can be, I can afford to ignore Him. But if He can give me His own disposition of holiness, then I begin to see how to lay my account with purity. Jesus Christ is the sternest and the gentlest of Saviour’s.
The Gospel of God is not that Jesus died for my sins only, but that He gave Himself for me that I might give myself to Him. God cannot take from me goodness, He will take from me badness, and will give me for it the solid goodness of the Lord Jesus. (See 2 Cor. V. 21.)
Disposition and Deeds, vv. 21-22.
Our Lord is using an illustration that was familiar to the disciples. If a man disregarded the common judgment, he was in danger of being brought into an inner court, and if he was contemptuous with that court, he was in danger of the final judgment. Jesus uses this illustration of the ordinary exercise of judgment to show what the disposition of a disciple must be like, viz., that my motive, the place I cannot get at myself, must be right the disposition behind the deed, the motive behind the actual occurrence. I may never be angry indeed, but Jesus demands the impossibility of anger in disposition. The motive of my motives, the spring of my dreams, must be so right that right deeds will naturally follow.
In Psalm CXXXIX the Psalmist is realizing that he is too big for himself, and he prays O Lord, explore me, search me out, and see if there be any way of grief in me, trace out the dreams of my dreams, the motives of my motives, make those right, and lead me in the way everlasting. Deliverance from sin is not deliverance from conscious sin only, it is deliverance from sin in God s sight, and He can see down into a region I know nothing about. By the marvelous Atonement of Jesus Christ applied to me by the Holy Spirit, God can purify the springs of my unconscious life until the temper of my mind is unblameable in His sight.
Beware of refining away the radical aspect of Our Lord s teaching by saying that God puts in something to counteract the wrong disposition, that is a compromise. Jesus never teaches us to curb and suppress the wrong disposition; He gives us a totally new disposition, He alters the mainspring of action. Our Lord s teaching can only be interpreted by the new Spirit which He puts in; it can never be taken as a series of rules and regulations.
A man cannot imitate the disposition of Jesus, it is either there or it is not. When the Son of God is formed in me, He is formed in my human nature, and I have to put on the new man in accordance with His life and obey Him, then His disposition will work out all the time. We make our character out of the disposition we have. Char acter is what we make, disposition is what we are born with, and when we are born again we get a new disposition. A man must make his own character, but he cannot make his disposition, that is a gift. Our natural disposition is gifted to us by heredity; by regeneration God gives us the disposition of His Son. Jesus Christ is pure to the depths of His motives, and if His disposition can be formed in me, then I see how I can lay my account with purity. Marvel not that I say unto you, Ye must be born again.” If I will let God alter my heredity, I will become devoted to Him, and Jesus Christ has gained a disciple. Many of us who call ourselves Christians are not devoted to Jesus.
Our Lord goes behind the old law to the disposition. Everything He says is impossible unless He can put into me His Spirit and re-make me from the inside, then I begin to see how it can be done. When a man is born from above, he does not need to pretend he is a saint, he cannot help being one. Am I going to be a spiritually real man or a whitewashed humbug? Am I a pauper in spirit or conceited with my own earnestness? We are so tremendously in earnest that we are blinded by our earnestness and never see that God is more in earnest than we are. Thank God for the absolute poverty of spirit that receives from Him all the time.
There is only one way in which as a disciple you will know that Jesus has altered your disposition, and that is by trying circumstances. When you are brought into trying circumstances, instead of feeling resentment, you will experience a most amazing change on the inside. When circumstances put you to the test you will say “WTiy, bless God, this is an amazing alteration, I know now that God has altered me, because if that had happened before I would have been sour and irritable and sarcastic and spiteful, but now there is a well of sweetness on the inside which I know never came from myself.” The proof that God has altered our disposition is not that we persuade ourselves He has, but that we prove He has when circum stances put us to the test. Instead of the criticism of Christians being wrong, it is absolutely right. When a man says he is born again, he is put under scrutiny, and rightly so. If we are born again of the Holy Ghost and have the life of Jesus in us by means of His Cross, we have, to show it in the way we walk and talk and transact all: our business.
Our Lord in these verses uses another illustration familiar in His day. If a man was taking a paschal lamb to the priest as an offering and remembered he had leaven in his house, he had to go back and take out the leaven before he brought his offering. We do not carry lambs to sacrifice, but the spiritual meaning of the illustration is tremendous, it emphasizes the difference between reality and sincerity. If when you come to the altar, says Jesus, there you remember your brother has ought against you, don t say another word to Me, but go and be reconciled to your brother and then come and offer your gift. Jesus does not mention the other person, He says You go. He does not say Go halfway; first go. There is no question of your rights.
Talk about practical home-coming truth! That hits us where we live. A man cannot stand as a humbug for one second before Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit makes you sensitive to things you never thought of before. Never object to the intense sensitiveness of the Holy Spirit in you when He is educating you down to the scruple; and never discard a conviction. If it is important enough for the Holy Spirit to have brought it to your mind, that is the thing He is detecting.
The test Jesus gives is not the truth of our manner but the temper of our mind. Many of us are wonderfully truthful in manner, but our temper of mind in God s sight is rotten. The thing Jesus alters is the temper of mind. If when you come to the altar, there you remember Jesus does not say There you rake up something in your mind, that is where Satan gets hold of embryo Christians and makes them hyper-conscientious; but if at the altar there you remember. The inference is that the Holy Spirit brings it to your memory, never check it, say Yes, Lord, I recognize it, and obey Him at once no matter what the humiliation is. It is impossible to do it until God has altered your temper of mind; but if you are a saint you find you have no difficulty in doing what otherwise would be an impossible humiliation. The disposition which will not have the Son of God rule is the disposition of my claim to my right to myself ; that, and not immorality, is the essence of sin: I will possess my right to myself in this particular matter. But if my disposition has been altered. I will obey Jesus at all costs.
Watch the thing that makes you morally snort. If you have not had the temper of your mind altered by Jesus, when the Holy Spirit brings something to your memory to be put right, you will say No, indeed, I am not going to make it up when I was in the right and they were in the wrong, they will say I knew I would make you say you were sorry. Unless you are willing to yield absolutely your right to yourself on that point, you need not pray any more, there is a barrier absolutely higher than Calvary between you and God. That is the temper of mind in all of us until it has been altered. When it has been altered, the other temper of mind is there that makes reconciliation as natural as breathing, and to our astonishment we find we can do what we could not do before. Instantly you obey, you find the temper of your mind is real. Jesus makes us real, not only sincere. The people who are sincere without being real are not hypocrites, they are perfectly earnest and honest and desirous of fulfilling what Jesus wants, but they really cannot do it, the reason being that they have not received the One who makes them real, viz., the Holy Spirit.
Jesus brings men to the practical test. It is not that I say I am pure in heart but that I prove I am in my deeds; I am not only sincere in manner but sincere in the attitude of my mind. All through the Sermon on the Mount the same truth is brought out. Except your right eousnes exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees. …” We have to fulfil all the old law and do much more, and the only way it can be done is by letting Jesus alter us on the inside, and by remembering that everything He tells us to do we can do. The whole point of Our Lord s teaching is Obey Me, and you will find you have a wealth of power on the inside.
Lust and License, vv. 27-28.
Our Lord goes to the root of the matter every time with no apology. Sordid? Frantically sordid, but sin is frantically sordid, and there is no excuse in false modesty or in refusing to face the music of the devil s work in this life. Jesus Christ faced it and He will make us face it.
Our natural idea of purity is that it means according to obedience to certain laws and regulations, but that is apt to be prudery. There is nothing prudish in the Bible. The Bible insists on purity, not prudery. There are bald shocking statements in the Bible, but from cover to cover it will do nothing in the shape. of harm to the pure in heart, it is to the impure in heart that these things are corrupting. If Jesus Christ can only make us prudish, we should be horrified if we had to go and work amongst the moral abominations of heathendom, but with the purity Jesus Christ puts in He can take us where He went Himself and make us capable of facing the vilest moral corruption unspotted, kept pure as He is Himself. We are scandalized at social immoralities because our social sense of honor is upset, but are we cut to the heart when we see a man live in pride against God? When the Holy Ghost is at work He puts in a new standard of judgment and proportion.
Remember that every religious sentiment that is not carried out on its right level carries with it a secret immorality, you are privately immoral if not publicly. That is the way human nature is constituted, whenever you allow an emotion that you do not carry out on its legitimate level, then it will react on an illegitimate level; grip it on the threshold of your mind in a vice of blood and allow it no more way. You have no business to harbour an emotion the conclusion of which you can see to be wrong.
God does not give a man a new body when he is saved, he has the same body but a new disposition. God alters the mainspring, He puts love in the place of lust. What is lust? I must have it at once the impatience of desire. Love can wait seven years; lust can’t wait two seconds. Esau and his mess of pottage is a picture of lust; Jacob serving for Rachel is a picture of love. In these verses lust is put on the lowest level, but remember, lust runs from the lowest basis of immorality right up to the very height of spiritual life. Jesus Christ penetrates right straight down to the basis of our desires. If ever a man is going to stand where lust never strikes him, it can only be because Jesus has altered his disposition. It is impossible unless Jesus Christ can do what He says He can. A disciple has to be free from the degradation of lust, and the marvel of the Redemption is that Jesus can free him from it. Jesus Christ s claim is that He can do for a man what he cannot do for himself. Jesus does not alter our human nature, it does not need altering, He alters the mainspring, and the great marvel of the salvation of Jesus is that He alters heredity. Lust Is the impatience of desire; license means I will do what I like and care for no one; liberty means I have the power to do what is right.
Do you see how we are growing? The disciples were being taught by Jesus to lay their account with purity. Purity is too deep down for us to get to naturally. The only exhibition of purity is the purity in the heart of Our Lord, and that is the purity He implants in us, and He says we will know whether the purity is there by the temper of mind we exhibit when we come up against things which before would have awakened in us lust and self -desire. It is not only a question of possibility on the inside, but of a possibility that shows itself in performance. That is the only test there is, ” he that doeth righteousness is righteous.” (1 John III. 7.)
Direction of Discipline, vv. 29-30.
If God has altered the disposition, where is the need for discipline? Yet in these verses Our Lord speaks of very stern discipline, to the parting with the right hand and the eye. The reason for the discipline is that our bodies have been used by the wrong disposition, and when the new disposition is put in, the old physical case is not taken away, it is left there for us to discipline and make it an obedient servant to the new disposition. (Romans VI. 19.)
And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.” What does that mean? It means absolute unflinching sternness in dealing with the right things in yourself that are not the best. The good is the enemy of the best” in every man, the bad never is, but the good that is not good enough. Your right hand is not a bad thing, it is one of the best things you have got, but, says Jesus, if it offends you in developing your spiritual life, if it hinders your following My precepts, cut it off and cast it from you. Jesus Christ talked rugged truth, He was never ambiguous, and He says it is better to be maimed than damned, better that you should enter into life lame in man’s sight and lovely in God s than that you should be lovely in man s sight and lame in God s. It is a maimed life to begin with, such as Jesus describes in these verses; otherwise we may look all right in the sight of our fellow men, but remarkably twisted and wrong in the sight of God.
One of the principles of Our Lord s teaching which we are slow to grasp is that the only basis of the spiritual is the sacrifice of the natural. The natural life is neither moral nor immoral, I make it moral or immoral by my ruling disposition. Jesus teaches that the natural life is meant for sacrifice, we can give it as a gift to God, which is the only way to make it spiritual. (See Romans XII. 1-2.) That is where Adam failed, he refused to sacrifice the natural life and make it spiritual by obeying God’s voice in it, consequently he sinned, the sin of taking his right to himself. Why should God make it that the natural has to be sacrified to the spiritual by me? God did not. God made it that the natural had to be transformed into the spiritual by obedience; sin made it that the natural had to be sacrificed, which is very different. If you are going to be spiritual, you must barter the natural, sacrifice it. If you say, I do not want to sacrifice the natural for the spiritual, then, Jesus says, you must barter the spiritual. It is not a punishment but an eternal principle. This line of discipline is the sternest that ever struck mankind, there is nothing more heroic and grand than the Christian life. Spirituality is not a sweet tendency towards piety in people who have not enough life in them to be bad; spirituality is the possession of the life of God which is masculine in its strength, and He will make the most corrupt, twisted, sin-stained life spiritual if He be obeyed. Chastity is strong and fierce, and the man who is going to be chaste for Jesus Christ s sake has a gloriously sterling job in front of him.
When Jesus has altered your disposition, you have to put your body into harmony with the new disposition, to get the body to exercise the new disposition, and it can only be done by stern discipline, discipline which will mean cutting off a great many things for your own spiritual life’s sake. There are things that are to you as your right hand and your eye, but you dare not use them, and the world that knows you says How absurd you are to cut off that, whatever is there wrong in a ” right hand? “And they will call you a fanatic and a crank. If a man has never been a crank or a fanatic, it is a pretty sure sign that he has never begun seriously to consider life. In the beginning the Holy Spirit will check your doing a great many things that may be perfectly right for everyone else, but not right for you. No one can decide for another what is to be cut off, and you have no right to use your present limitation to criticize someone else.
Be prepared to be a limited fool in the sight of others, says Jesus, in order to further your spiritual character. If I am only willing to give up wrong things for Jesus Christ, never let me talk about being in love with Him. We say Why shouldn’t I? there is no harm in it. For pity’s sake, go and do it, but remember that the construction of a spiritual character is doomed once you take that line. Anyone will give up wrong things if he knows how to, but am I prepared to give up the best I have got for Jesus Christ? The only right a Christian has is the right to give up his rights.