DIVINE RULE OF LIFE - Oswald Chambers

In these verses Our Lord lays down a Divine rule which we by His Spirit have to apply to every circumstance and condition of our lives. Our Lord does not make state ments which we have to follow literally; if He did, we should not grow in grace. In the realm of God, it is a spiritual following, and we have to rely on His Spirit to teach us to apply His statements to the various circum stances in which we find ourselves.

Our Lord s exhortation here is to be generous in our behavior to all men whether they be good or bad. The marvel of the Divine love is that God exhibits His love not only to good people but to bad people. In Our Lord’s parable of the two sons, we can understand the father loving the prodigal son, but he exhibits his love to the elder brother also, to whom we feel a strong antipathy. Beware of walking in the spiritual life according to your natural affinities. We all have natural affinities, some people we like and others we do not; some people we get on well with and others we do not. Never let those likes and dislikes be the rule of your Christian life. If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another,” i.e., God gives us fellowship with people for whom we have no natural affinity.

Woven into Our Lord s divine rule of life is His reference to our Example, and our Example is not a good man, not even a good Christian man, but God Himself. We do not allow the big surprise of that to lay hold of us sufficiently. Jesus nowhere says Follow the best example you know, follow Christians, watch those who love Me and follow them; He says Follow your Father which is in heaven that you may be good men? That you may be lovable to all men? No, “that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven,” and that implies a strong family likeness to Jesus. The Example of a disciple is God Almighty and no one less, not the best man you know, not the finest saint you ever read about, but God Himself.

That ye may be the children of your Father in heaven.” Our Lord s exhortation is to love our fellow men as God has loved us. The love of God is not like the love of a father or of a mother, it is the love of God. God commended His own love toward us.” (Romans V. 8, R.V.) The love of God is revealed in that He laid down His life for His enemies, now, says Jesus, love your fellow men as God has loved you. As a disciple of Jesus, identify yourself with God s interests in other people, show to the other man what God has shown you, and God will give you ample opportunity in your actual life to prove that you are perfect as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies.” Again, I want to emphasize the fact that the teaching of Jesus does not at first appear to be what it is. At first it appears pious and lukewarm and beautiful, but before long it becomes a ripping and tearing torpedo, it splits to atoms every preconceived notion a man ever had. It takes a long time to get the full force of Our Lord s statements. I say unto you, Love your enemies.” An easy thing to do when you have not got any an impossible thing to do when you have. Bless them that curse you ” easy to do it when no one is cursing you, but impossible when someone is cursing you, ” Do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you.” It is easy to do all this when you have no enemies, when no one is cursing you or persecuting you, but suppose you have an enemy who slanders and annoys and systematically vexes you, and you read Jesus Christ s statement ” I say unto you, Love your enemies ” how is it going to be done? Unless Jesus Christ can re-make me from the inside, His teaching is the biggest mockery human ears ever listened to. Talk about the Sermon on the Mount being an ideal! Why, it would rend a man with despair the very thing Jesus means it to do, for if once we realize that we cannot love our enemies, we cannot bless them that curse us, we cannot come anywhere near the standard revealed in the Sermon on the Mount, then we are in a condition to receive from God the disposition that will enable us to love our enemies, to pray for those that despitefully use us, to do good to those that hate us.

I say unto you, Love your enemies.” Jesus does not say Love everyone. The Bible never talks vaguely, it always talks definitely. People talk about loving ” mankind ” and loving the ” heathen “; Jesus says Love your enemies. Our Lord does not say Bless your enemies, He says Love your enemies. He does not say Love them that curse you, He says Bless them that curse you.

Do good to them that hate you, not bless them. He does not say Do good to them that despitefully use you, He says Pray for them that despitefully use you. Each one of these commands is stamped with sheer impossibility to the natural man. If you reverse the order Jesus puts it in, you can do it with a strain, but keep it in the order He puts it in, and I defy any man on earth to do it unless he has been regenerated by God the Holy Ghost. When a man does love his enemies, he knows, and everyone else knows too, that God has done a tremendous work in him.

The expression of Christian character is not good doing, but God-likeness. It is not sufficient to do good, to do the right thing, you must have your goodness stamped by the image and superscription of God, it is supernatural all through. The secret of a Christian’s life is the super natural made natural by the grace of God. The way it works out in expression is not in having times of communion with God, but in the practical details of life. The proof that we have been regenerated is when we come in contact with the things that create a buzz, we find to our astonishment we have a power to keep wonderfully poised in the center of it all, a power we had not before, a power that is only explained by the Cross of Jesus.

is a re-emphasis of v. 20. The perfection of v. 48 refers to the disposition of God in me ” Ye shall be per fact as your Father in heaven is perfect ” (R.V.) not in a future state, but You shall be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect if you let Me work that perfection in you. If the Holy Spirit has transformed you on the inside, you will exhibit not good human characteristics, but divine characteristics in a human being. There is only one type of holiness and that is God s holiness, and Jesus puts as our example God Almighty. How many of us have measured ourselves by that standard, the standard of a purity of heart in which God can see nothing to blame? May this Divine rule of Our Lord s bring us to the bar of the standard of Jesus. His claim is measured by these tremendous statements of His. He can take you and me, He can take the vilest piece of broken earthenware, and can fit us exactly to the expression of the Divine life in us. It is never a question of putting statements of Our Lord in front of us and trying to live up to them, but of receiving His Spirit and finding that we can live up to them as He brings them to our remembrance and applies them to our circumstances.

God grant we may get on to the courageous range of faith that is required. ” Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect ” and men will take knowledge of me that I am a good man? Never. If ever it is recorded of me “What a good man that is” I have been a betrayer somewhere. If I fix my eyes on my own whiteness, I will soon get dry rot in my spiritual life. All my righteousness is as ” filthy rags ” unless it is the blazing holiness of Jesus in me uniting me with Him until I see nothing but Jesus first, Jesus second and Jesus third. Then men take knowledge of me, not what a good man I am, not what a wonderful whiteness I have, but that Jesus has done something wonderful in me. Keep always at the Source of spiritual blessings Jesus Christ Himself.

Our Lord said “it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell/ i.e., He is referring to a maimed life. In v. 48 He says Be ye therefore perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect. Is my Father in heaven maimed? Has He a right arm cut off; a right eye plucked out? In v. 48 Jesus completes the picture He began to give in v. 30. Our Lord s statements embrace the whole of the spiritual life from beginning to end. In Matt. V. 29-30 He pictures a maimed life; here He pictures a full- orbed life of holiness. Holiness means the perfect balance between my disposition and the laws of God. The maimed life is the characteristic at the beginning, and if you have not had that characteristic, it is questionable whether you have ever received the Holy Spirit. The entrance into Life means what the world calls fanaticism. The swing of the pendulum makes you go to the opposite extreme of what you were in the life of the world, and you have to begin the life with God a maimed soul. We are so afraid of being fanatics: would to God we were as afraid of being ” fusionless.” A thousand times rather be fanatics at the beginning than poor fusionless creatures all our lives, limp and useless. May we get on to the line where we are willing to cut off the right arm, to pluck out the eye, to enter into Life a hirpler, maimed, cutting off whatever it may be, no matter how beautiful. And, blessed be the Name of God, we shall find that He brings to a full-orbed unity every life that will obey Him.

Always make allowances when people first enter into Life, they have to enter it on the fanatical line. The danger is to stay too long in the fanatical stage. If fanaticism steps over the bounds, it becomes spiritual lunacy. At the beginning of the life in grace you have to limit yourself all round, right things as well as wrong; then when God begins to bring you out of the light of your convictions into the light of the Lord and you prefer to remain true to your convictions, you become a spiritual lunatic. Walking in the light of convictions is a necessary stage, but there is a grander, purer, sterner light to walk in, viz., the light of the Lord.

How impatient we are, when we see a life born from above of the Spirit and the necessary limitations and severances and maiming’s going on, we will try and do God s work for Him, and God has to rap us sharply over the knuckles and say Leave that soul in My care. Always allow for the swing of the pendulum in yourself and in others. A pendulum does not swing rightly at first, it begins with a tremendous swing to one extreme and only gradually gets back to the right balance, and that is how the Holy Spirit brings the grace of God to bear in our lives. I do not frustrate the grace of God,” says Paul.