The Shadow of an Agony -

The Shadow of an Agony

Through the Shadow of an
Agony Cometh Redemption
Oswald Chambers

Copyright Oswald Chambers Publications Association, First Edition 1918;
Third Edition 1933; Fourth Edition 1942
Scripture versions quoted: kjv; rv.

Introduction

Source

The Shadow of an Agony is from talks on redemption given by Oswald Chambers to soldiers at the YMCA camp, Zeitoun, Egypt,1 August 14 through 27, 1917.

Publication History

• As a book: The Shadow of an Agony was first pub lished in 1918; the date of the second edition is unknown, but there was a third edition in 1933 and a fourth edition in 1942.

The title comes from the words of Ugo Bassi, central character in Harriet Eleanor Hamilton King’s 2 The Disciples (1873), an epic poem much loved and quoted by Chambers.

And Ugo answered, still as in a dream:
“Yea, through the Shadow of an Agony
Cometh Redemption—if we may but pass
In the same footprints where our master went,
With Him beside us;—and for me, I fear
No evil, since He has not failed me yet,
Nor will for ever!”

The Disciples

During the sweltering Egyptian summer of 1918, Mrs. Chambers divided her time between caring for five year old Kathleen,3 serving soldiers in the can teen at Zeitoun, and writing letters and typing ser mons of her late husband in the underground dugout designed by Oswald as a refuge from the heat. On August 31, she wrote to her sister in England:

I feel as if I will never come to an end of my wealth of notes. The Sermon on the Mount [1915] is in hand being reprinted, and I have got the calendar of sayings [Seed Thoughts Calendar] all ready, and shall send Gertrude [Oswald’s sister] a copy of it next week so that she can have them printed in England also. I feel as if that is going to mean a lot to many, I know you will like the idea. Then the next book will be Shadow of an Agony that is in the process of retyping just now. I find how much benefit I have got still from my old legal days, I mean getting into the habit of perfecting a thing by typing and retyping it, and I am glad to have had all the experience of those other days.

Nine months after her husband’s death, the pat tern of Biddy Chambers’ life’s work was beginning to emerge.

Contents

Preface (to the First Edition) …………………………………………………… 1156
Comment by P. T. Forsyth ………………………………………………………. 1157
Foreword to Fourth Edition ……………………………………………………. 1157
The Agony of Redemption ……………………………………………………1158
The Conscience of God ………………………………………………………..1161
The Conscience of Christ ……………………………………………………..1164
The Christian Conscience ……………………………………………………..1167
In Thought ………………………………………………………………………….1171
The Dance of Circumstances …………………………………………………1174
The Pressure of the Present …………………………………………………..1178
The Psychological Phase—I …………………………………………………..1181
The Psychological Phase—II …………………………………………………1184
Humanity and Holiness ………………………………………………………..1187

Preface (to the First edition)

Two classes of readers will take up this little book of Bible studies on vital questions relating to Christian character and conduct and the mystery of suffering. The one class will find in it, as did even Peter in Paul’s epistles, things hard to be understood, and sentences that lull the stolid mind to sleep; the other class will read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest its contents because they challenge mind and conscience, and will do their “utmost for the Highest. The author is a lover of men’s souls: he sees into the heart of things, rises above the commonplace, and goes below the surface. The war, “4 he says, “has upset every man’s nest; we are face to face with a terrific upheaval in life; there is no civilised security anywhere on the globe. We have seen that there is no such thing as a Christian nation, we have seen the unutterable futility of the organised Christian Church, and many a man who has had no tension in his life has been suddenly obliged to face things he never intended to look at. These very things Oswald Chambers shows us in the light of the Cross. He points out that because Jesus Christ is so like unto His brethren we can face this turmoil and stress, and stand with Him in the shadow of a great agony, un-discouraged and unafraid. There is really only one mystery in the universe; it is the mystery of Redemption. The way we approach this holy ground is nearly always through suffering. Those that carry the cross after Jesus best understand why and how He first carried it, and how the nails pierced not His hands only but His heart. To the careless and superficial this book will only appeal when they gird up the loins of their minds and are sober. Once they put on the girdle which Paul calls “sincerity” and Peter “humility, ” its message will grip, convince, and appeal, as it did when first delivered to the men of all ranks in the Y. M. C. A. camps and huts of Egypt.

Great truths are greatly won,
Not found by chance,
Nor wafted on the breath of summer dream,
But buffeting with adverse winds and tides.
Samuel M. Zwemer5
Cairo, 1918

Comment By P. t. Forsyth

From the BTC Monthly Journal,6 September 1933, page 47

In the Shadow of an Agony (Third Edition, ready in October)

Dr. P. T. Forsyth7 wrote of this book: The writer has no pitalk, nor is he but a rouser. Not only is his manner direct and searching, but he has a real educated grasp of the moral nature of the spiritual soul and its psychology. He has a happy combination of the familiar style and the competent stuff. His is the kind of address of which we have too little—the union of moral incision and spiritual power. I am glad to commend such teaching, and I hope the stringency of the times will develop more preachers who have this gift—not of talking about the spiritual life but of penetrating the conscience of it with some moral psychology in the name of a positive gospel. It is the kind of evangelism we deeply need, the sound modernising of Redemption. We are too familiar with ways of bringing peace to a man’s mind which are not true to the fundament of things.

Foreword to Fourth edition

It is some years ago since a copy of “The Shadow of an Agony” came into my hands. How it did so I do not now remember. I know, however, that I started to read it with no great expectation of profit. But I soon found I had made a real discovery. The little book was a truly great book; its author a truly great man. Since then I have read and pondered every published utterance by the Rev. Oswald Chambers, and am grateful for the intellectual stimulus and spiritual quickening that have come to me from his writings. His “passing hence” was a great loss to the Christian Church. For the times in which we live I know of no work more fitting for republication than “The Shadow of an Agony. ” It deals with root or rock principles. It comes, not from the surface, but “out of the depths. ” It is the work of a great brain and a great heart. It does not shirk the problems of life, but looks them straight in the face. Over against the tragedy of sin and suffering it brings us to the tragedy of the Cross of Christ. In the hope that the book will prove to be as great a discovery and as great an inspiration to others as it has been to me, I write this Foreword.

Walter H. Armstrong
First Moderator of the Free Church
Federal Council of England and Wales
Ex President of Methodist Conference
Norwich, September, 1942

The agony of redemption

Oh, to have watched Thee through the vineyards wander,
Pluck the ripe ears and into evening roam,
Followed and known that in the twilight yonder
Legions of angels shone about Thy home.
Ah, with what bitter triumph had I seen them,
Drops of Redemption bleeding from Thy brow,
Thieves and a culprit crucified between them,
All men forsaking Him, and that was Thou.
F. W. H. Myers

1. Approaching the Holy Ground (Exodus 3:5; Joshua 5:15; Psalm 119:67, 71, 75; Jeremiah 31:15–19; Hebrews 12:5–11) The truth of Christianity cannot be proved to the man in the street till he comes off the street owning its power.

2. Apprehending the Holy Grace (Romans 5:7–9; Hebrews 5:7–9) Christianity is concerned with God’s holiness before all else, which issues to men as love, acts upon sin as grace, and exercises grace through judgement.

3. Atonement by the Holy God (Matthew 1:21; Acts 20:28; 2 Corinthians 5:14–21)

By centrality is meant finality for human history and destiny. . . . It is meant, first, that in the atonement we have primarily an act of God and an act of God’s holiness; second, that it alone makes any repentance or expiation of ours satisfactory to God; third, that as regards man it is—a revolutionary act and not a mere stage in evolution.

Dr. Forsyth

If we estimate things from the standpoint of a man’s life, Redemption will seem “much ado about nothing. But when we come to a big Judgement Day like a European war, when individual lives apparently amount to nothing, and human lives are being swept away by the thousand, the “bottom board” is knocked out of our ignorance, and we begin to see that the basis of things is not rational, but wild and tragic. It is through these glimpses that we understand why the New Testament was written, and why there needed to be a Redemption made by Jesus Christ, and how it is that the basis of life is redemptive. If Jesus Christ were only a martyr, His cross would be of no significance; but if the cross of Jesus Christ is the expression of the secret heart of God, the lever by which God lifts back the human race to what it was designed to be, then there is a new attitude to things.

1. Approaching the Holy Ground

And he said, Draw not nigh hither; put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground. (Exodus 3:5)

There is a moral preparation necessary to face the truth of God. These words of God to Moses mean literally, “Stand further off and you will see better. ” Sometimes our moods are mean and ignoble; at other times they are lofty and good. To a large extent a man’s moods are not in his own power.

We cannot kindle when we will
The fire that in the heart resides;
The spirit bloweth and is still,
In mystery our soul abides.
But tasks in hours of insight will’d
Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled.
Matthew Arnold

Strip off your commonplace moods, ” God says; “if you are going to see into this thing, you must put on the right mood for discerning it. The agony of a man’s affliction is often necessary to put him into the right mood to face the fundamental things of life. The Psalmist says, “Before I was afflicted I went astray: but now have I kept Thy word. The Bible is full of the fact that there has to be an approach to the holy ground. If I am not willing to be lifted up, it is no use talking about the higher heights. In putting John the Baptist to death, Herod committed moral suicide. He ordered the voice of God to be silent in his life, and when Jesus Christ stood before him, “he questioned with Him in many words, ” for “he hoped to have seen some miracle done by Him”; but we read that Jesus “answered him nothing. It is quite possible for any man amongst us to get to a place where there is no such thing as truth or purity, and no man gets there without himself being to blame. Every man ought to be intellectually sceptical, but that is different from moral doubt which springs from a moral twist. No man can do wrong in his heart and see right afterwards. If I am going to approach the holy ground, I must get into the right frame of mind—the excellency of a broken heart.

The war has upset every man’s nest, and we are face to face with a terrific upheaval in life; there is no civilised security anywhere on the globe. We have seen that there is no such thing as a Christian nation,

and we have seen the unutterable futility of the organ ised Christian Church: and many a man who has had no tension in his life has been suddenly dumped “into the soup” and been obliged to face things that he never intended to look at. Consequently, there are any number of amateur sceptics, and men who are seeing the difference between “believing their beliefs, ” and “believing God, ” men, who, through the turmoil and the stress, are seeing that rationalism is not the basis of things. According to the Bible, the basis of things is tragedy, and the way out is the way made by God in Redemption. The New Testament does not say that the human race is evolving, but that the human race is a magnificent ruin of what it was designed to be. God Himself has taken the responsibility of sin, and the proof that He did so is the Cross; God holds me responsible if I refuse to let Him deliver me from sin. No man can redeem the world; God has done it; Redemption is complete. That is a revelation, not something we get at by thinking; and unless we grant that Redemption is the basis of human life, we will come up against problems for which we can find no way out. The thing that will need to be re stated after the war, theologically, is Redemption; at present “Redemption” is not in the vocabulary of the average earnest man. Through the turmoil and agony that nations and men are in, men who think are beginning to see that rationalism is not the basis of things. The basis of things is not reasonable; reason is our guide among things as they are, but it never can account for things as they are. No man ever chose his own father and mother, or his own heredity; such things go clean through the “bottom board” of rationalism; they are illogical; there is a deep, real problem at the basis of them. The basis of things, according to the Bible, is tragic, and the way out is the way made by God in Redemption, not by intellect or by reason. The revelation of New Testament Christianity deals with the basis of human life. Every one of us is shaken into the turmoil of things, caught by the last eddy, and we have to get some kind of foothold. In the meantime, don’t be distressed at what men say, or at the tags they wear. “Talk to my meaning, not to my words. ” Don’t be a debating logician and make a man mean what you mean; try and get at his mind behind the thing; and when you hear a man talk in agony, remember he is hurt. Be patient and reverent with what you don’t understand.

2. Apprehending the Holy Grace

(Romans 5:7–9; Hebrews 5:7–9)

“Grace”—the overflowing favour of God. The way of approach to the holy ground of God is nearly always through suffering; we are not always in the natural mood for it, but when we have been ploughed into by suffering or sorrow, we are able to approach the moral frontiers where God works. To apprehend the holy grace of God, I must remember that accord ing to the New Testament, Jesus Christ is God manifest in the flesh. This fundamental revelation of the Christian faith seems to be overlooked among Christians. There is only one God for the Christian, and He is Jesus Christ.

The Bible only mentions two men—Adam and Jesus Christ, and it is the last Adam Who rehabilitates the human race. During the war the stab has come to every one of us, and we are in an attitude to understand what the New Testament is talking about. Before the war it did not matter to the majority of us whether Jesus Christ lived or died, because our thinking was only within the circumference of our own lives. Now, through the war, we are seeing the need for Redemption. The grace of God which comes through Jesus Christ is revealed in that God laid down His life for His enemies. The statement that a man who gives his life for his king and country thereby redeems his soul, is a misapprehension of New Testament revelation. Redemption is not a man’s bit. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends, ” has nothing to do with Christianity; an atheist will do this, or a blackguard, or a Christian; there is nothing divine about it, it is the great stuff that human nature is made of. The love of God is manifested in that He laid down His life for His enemies, something no man can do. Paul says the fundamental revelation of the New Testament is that God redeemed the whole human race when they were spitting in His face, as it were.

If you have had no tension in your life, never been screwed up by problems, your morality well within your own grasp, and someone tells you that God so loved you that He gave His Son to die for you, nothing but good manners will keep you from being amused. The majority of people who have never been touched by affliction see Jesus Christ’s death as a thing beside the mark. When a man gets to his wits’ end and things go hard with him, his thick hide is pierced and he is stabbed wide awake, then for the first time he begins to see something else—”At last I see; I thought that He was stricken, smitten of God and afflicted; but now I see He was wounded for my transgressions. The great fundamental revelation regarding the human race is that God has redeemed us; and Redemption enters into our lives when we are upset enough to see we need it. There is too much common sense used, “pills to cure an earthquake” given; and “the gospel of temperament” preached.

It is an insult to day to tell some men and women to cheer up. One of the most shallow petty things that can be said is that “every cloud has a silver lining. ” There are some clouds that are black all through. At the wall of the world stands God with His arms outstretched; and when a man or woman is driven there, the consolations of Jesus Christ are given. Through the agonies in human life we do not make Redemption, but we see why it was necessary for God to make it. It is not necessary for every man to go through these agonies, but it takes a time of agony to get the shallow scepticism knocked out of us. It is a good thing to be reverent with what we do not understand. A moral agony gives a man “a second wind, ” and he runs better after it, and is a good deal more likely to win.

3. Atonement by the Holy God

(Matthew 1:21; Acts 20:28; 2 Corinthians 5:14–21)

The Church is the new Spirit baptised Humanity based on the Redemption of Jesus Christ. Intellectual rationalism is based on a volcano, and at any second it may be blown to pieces; but there is nothing below Redemption; it is as eternal as God’s throne. Redemption is a moral thing, Jesus Christ does not merely save from hell; “He shall save his people from their sins, ” i. e. , make totally new moral men. Jesus Christ did not come to give us pretty ideas of God, or sympathy with ourselves; He came from a holy God to enable men, by the sheer power of His Redemption, to become holy.

In the Christian faith the basis of human life is Redemption, and on that basis God can perform His miracles in any man. So long as we live in the “tenth story” we remain indifferent to the fact of forgiveness; but when we “strike bottom” morally, we begin to realise the New Testament meaning of forgiveness. Immediately a man turns to God, Redemption is such that his for giveness is complete. Forgiveness means not merely that I am saved from sin and made right for heaven (no man would accept forgiveness on such a level); forgiveness means that I am forgiven into a recreated relationship, into identification with God in Christ. The background of God’s forgiveness is holiness.

If God were not holy there would be nothing in His forgiveness. There is no such thing as God overlooking sin; therefore if God does forgive there must be a reason that justifies His doing so. If I am forgiven without being altered by the forgiveness, forgiveness is a damage to me and a sign of the unmitigated weakness of God. When a man is convicted of sin he knows God dare not forgive him; if He did it would mean that man has a bigger sense of justice than God. God, in forgiving a man, gives him the heredity of His own Son, i. e. , He turns him into the standard of the Forgiver. Forgiveness is a revelation—hope for the hopeless; that is the message of the Gospel. A man may say, “I don’t deny that God will for give me, but what about the folks I have put wrong? Can God give me a clearing house for my con science? ” (Hebrews 9:14).

It is because these things are neglected in the presentation of Redemption that men are kept away from Jesus Christ. Men are kept away by honesty more than by dishonesty. Jesus Christ’s revelation is the forgiveness of God, and the tremendous miracle of Redemption is that God turns me, the unholy one, into the standard of Himself, the Forgiver, by the miracle of putting into me a new disposition. The question up to me is—”Do I want Him to do it? ” God’s forgiveness is a bigger miracle than we are apt to think. He will not only restore to us the years the cankerworm hath eaten; not only deliver us from hell; not only make a clearing house for conscience; but He will give a totally new heredity; and many a man who has shut himself down in despair need not despair any more. God can forgive a man anything but despair that He can forgive him. These are the fundamentals of human life.

We have not been taught to think as Christians, and when an agony reaches us we are knocked to pieces, and only hang on by the skin of our teeth. We may have faith enough to keep us going, but we do not know where to put our feet or to tell anyone else where to put theirs. We have been taught to think as pagans, and in a crisis we act as pagans. It is a great thing to have a spiritual experience, but another thing to think on the basis of it. The great fundamental point of view in the Bible is neither rationalism nor common sense. Either it is a revelation, or it is unmitigated blether.

The basis of life is not mathematical or rational; if it were we could calculate our ends, and make absolutely sure of certain things on clear, rational, logical lines. We have to take into account the fact that there is an incalculable element in every child and in every man. There is always “one fact more, ” and we get at it by agony.

He conscience of God

Hebrews 6:13

Thou with strong prayer and very much entreating
Willest be asked, and Thou shalt answer then,
Show the hid heart beneath creation beating,
Smile with kind eyes and be a man with men.
Were it not thus, O King of my salvation,
Many would curse to Thee and I for one;
Fling Thee Thy bliss and snatch at Thy damnation,
Scorn and abhor the shining of the sun.
F. W. H. Myers

1. The Creator Aspect (Genesis 1:27; Psalm 132:6; John 10:34–35; Luke 3:38) GOD (Intellectual): Because God is Creator and we are His creatures, nothing else matters

2. The Cosmic Aspect (Genesis 1:1; Job 38:4–7; Isaiah 42:5; Acts 17:24) GOD (Emotional): The emotions produced by natural actualities are no end all.

3. The Culture Aspect (Psalm 1:21; Isaiah 44:14–17; Colossians 2:18–23) GOD (Educational): The refined findings of intellect and emotions; all else to be disdained.

4. The Christian Aspect ( John 3:16; 2 Corinthians 5:18–21) GOD (Evangelical): Complete forgiveness and final Redemption.

It is not necessary for a man to understand things before he can be a Christian. The understanding of the mystery of life is a secondary thing; the main thing is to be alive. Science is an understanding of life and the universe. If a man said he had no use for science, we should reckon him to be a fool. It is the same with regard to the Christian religion. The important thing is to be a born again man. Theology is the science of religion, an intellectual attempt to systematise the consciousness of God. Intellect systematises things to a man’s mind, but we do not reach reality through intellect. Theology comes second, not first, and ought always to be open to dispute. Because science and theology have been put in the wrong place, it is foolish to say we will have nothing to do with them. Redemption is not a thing we are consciously experiencing, it is a revelation given by the Christian religion of the basis of human life, and it takes some thinking about. We don’t think on Christian lines at all. For when God made promise to Abraham, because he could swear by no greater, he swear by himself ” (Hebrews 6:13). Conscience is not the voice of God; conscience is that faculty in me which appeals to the highest I know; it may or may not be religious. God has a conscience towards man and towards Him self, i. e. , He has a standard to keep, and the problem He is up against is not to wipe the muddle off the slate, but to resolve it back again, and Redemption is His way of doing it. To try and explain Redemption in the span of a man’s life is nonsense. Men may not feel the need of Redemption, but that does not mean it is not there. The Christian revelation is the revelation of why Redemption was necessary. God’s standard is to make of man the counterpart of Himself; man has to be brought into perfect communion with God. At present there is an enormous hiatus between God and man, and God’s conscience in Redemption puts man back again into the purpose for which He designed him, instead of wiping him out and saying it is all a muddle. The highest standard God has is Himself, and it is up to God to make a man as good as He is Himself; and it is up to me to let Him do it. If God is not just, the only honourable thing for a man to be is a blatant atheist. Agony means severe suffering in which some thing dies—either the base thing, or the good. No man is the same after an agony; he is either better or worse, and the agony of a man’s experience is nearly always the first thing that opens his mind to under stand the need of Redemption worked out by Jesus Christ.

1. The Creator Aspect (Genesis 1:27)

God created man, the Federal Head of the human race, in His own image; we are procreated through generations of the human race; Adam was created in the image of God. The male and female together, as they were created, were in the image of God, in perfect union with God, “Adam and Eve” are both needed before the image of God can be perfectly presented.

The Creator aspect appeals to a man’s intellect as long as he has no memory of the Fall and the ruin that followed when the connecting link with Deity was snapped. If you develop yourself in your brain, and say “That is ‘myself, ‘” you have to shut yourself off from life as it actually is, and on that line you can manipulate anything, and construct the most extraordinary things. An intellectual God does not amount to “a row of old beans. The Creator aspect of God ignores everything else; it forgets that the Bible gives revelations of God on other lines. The Bible says that God created the Federal Head of the race in His own image; that means that God accepts the responsibility for the human race being put on the wrong track, and the Cross is the proof that He does so. I seal myself with damnation when I see the Light, Jesus Christ, and prefer my own standpoint. The Creator aspect of God does not amount to much. If the only aspect of God is that of Creator, to talk about a moral or spiritual life is nonsense; but the Creator aspect is not the complete Christian aspect; it is only one ingredient in it.

2. The Cosmic Aspect (Genesis 1:1)

Cosmic means the order of the material universe produced by actualities. The Creator aspect is a fact; the Cosmic aspect is also a fact; but there are other aspects. If I build my thinking on the Creator or the Cosmic aspect only, I have to miss some factors out. If I take an intellectual view of life only, I shall come to the conclusion that Thomas Carlyle 8 came to; he judged men by brains, and came to the conclusion that half the human race were fools. If the intellectual valuation of man be the right one, when he is insane he should be killed. The brain is the thing that makes a man express himself; but a man is more than his consciousness. The intellect says “I will have nothing to do with what I cannot explain intellectually. ” A man’s intellect is his instrument, his guide among things as they are; but it never gave him things as they are. There is more to be taken into consideration before you get the right view of God and man.

3. The Culture Aspect (Isaiah 44:14–17)

This aspect says that God is the result of an educated mind, and that we get at God by abnormal means— by education, by mysticism, and aestheticism; if so, then atheism is saner. Isaiah says that a man takes a tree and cuts it in two, uses part to cook his food, and the other part he carves into an idol to worship. “None of us do that! ” we say; but we do. There are other things which are wooden besides trees, viz. , our heads! We use one half of our heads to earn our liv ing, and the other half to worship God. These three aspects of God amount to nothing more than a man produces by his own nature, and have not nearly so much power over him as he has over himself. If I want to get at reality my conscience must witness as well as my emotions. I may talk like an archangel and live like a pig; I may write magnificent stuff and have fine conceptions, and people may be thrilled, but that does not prove that I have touched reality. A man’s intellect may give him noble ideas, and power to express them through his soul in language, but it gives him no power to carry them out in action. When a man has touched reality, he is changed into its image. Intellect has never changed a man as yet; it may have made him look different, but it will not have altered him. If intellect is the way to get to God, what about the men who have no intellect! There would be whole streaks of man’s life and experience to blot out. Or if I can get at God by a fine sense of beauty only what about the men who have no sense of beauty? Some men have a magnificent heredity, while others are practically damned into existence. Rationalism is not the basis; my reason and my intellect are instruments, but there is something deeper about every human life than can be fathomed by intellect. The God constructed out of the Culture aspect does not amount to anything. Thinking is an abstraction whereby man locates the things he sees. The laws of nature have no existence outside the intellect of the scientist, and to talk about Jesus Christ transcending the laws of nature is nonsense. A law is a method of explaining things in an ordered intellect. You can dispute a man’s reasoning, but you cannot dispute facts; they must be accepted. If you deal only with these three aspects, you remain out of touch with reality, because each aspect does only for the view it presents. If the aspect of God is to be coloured by refined intellect, some of us will never get there. If everybody were refined it would be all right, but everybody is not, and the Culture aspect treats the rest of the human race with disdain.

4. The Christian Aspect (2 Corinthians 5:18–21)

In the Christian aspect we have these three other aspects worked in with another view, viz. , the Con science of God, and the New Testament insistence on the Cross of Jesus Christ. The attitude of the Bible to the human race is not a commonsense one. The Christian aspect deals with man as a specimen of a human race which is a magnificent ruin of what it was designed to be. Supposing the view of the Bible to be right, to whom is it “up to” to right the wrong? The Creator. Has He done it? He has, and He has done it absolutely single handed. The tremendous revelation of Christianity is not the Fatherhood of God, but the Babyhood of God—God became the weakest thing in His own creation, and in flesh and blood He levered it back to where it was intended to be. No one helped Him; it was done absolutely by God manifest in human flesh. God has undertaken not only to repair the damage, but in Jesus Christ the human race is put in a better condition than when it was originally designed. It is necessary to under stand these things if you are to be able to battle for your faith. “The deity of the Christian religion is evidenced by the variety of fools who tackle it. ” Today we are erecting a man of straw, and then taking it for granted that the Author of salvation was a fool. Jesus Christ’s view is that the Christian religion has been tried and abandoned, but never been tried and failed. It is not a question of whether we agree with the Bible revelation or not, but of whether we take it for what it reveals before we tackle it. God’s conscience means He has to forgive completely and finally redeem the human race. The point about Christian forgiveness is not that God puts snow over a dungheap, but that He turns a man into the standard of the Forgiver. The great thing up to God is that in forgiving me He has to give me the heredity of His Son. God Himself has answered the problem of sin and there is no man on earth but can be presented “perfect in Christ Jesus. Redemption does not amount to anything to a man until he meets an agony; until that time he may have been indifferent; but knock the bottom board out of his wits, bring him to the limit of his moral life, produce the supreme suffering worthy of the name of agony, and he will begin to realise that there is more in Redemption than he had ever dreamed, and it is at that phase that he is prepared to hear Jesus Christ say, “Come unto Me. Our Lord said, “I did not come to call the man who is all right; I came to call the man who is at his wits’ end, the man who has reached the moral frontier.

Oh could I tell, ye surely would believe it!
Oh could I only say what I have seen!
How should I tell or how can ye receive it,
How, till He bringeth you where I have been?
Frederick W. Myers

A man will know sooner or later; it will depend upon the pride of his intellect or the crass obstinacy of his nature how soon he gets there; but when he does he will have reached the frontier where God works. Never keep your moral nature sceptical. Never doubt that justice and truth and love and honour are at the back of everything, and that God must be all these or nothing. The Christian aspect is that God will make a man as holy as He is Himself, and this He has undertaken to do. If a man is terrified by the vastness of creation, he has never been touched by the moral problem. When he has, he knows that God created the universe for him. God created man to be master of the life in the earth and sea and sky, and the reason he is not is because he took the law into his own hands, and became master of himself, but of nothing else. Man is a remnant of a former design. In the Conscience of God that design is restored. The “Creator” and the “Cosmic” and the “Culture” aspects are all etceteras to the main thing, we enter into touch with God on the frail, human experience, moral line. The Christian aspect of God represents the one Who has been in the very thick of it; and whenever a man through Nature or through conviction of sin touches the moral frontiers, then the work of Jesus Christ begins. If any man is in Christ, there is a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17 rv mg). I see the universe as a mirror of my ruling disposition. I see in sunsets and sunrises and in the whole cosmic force an exaggerated expression of the ruling disposition in myself; I do not see God, I see myself. When I am born from above (rv mg), I see the reflection of God. The disposition ruling within me determines the way I interpret out side things. A man convicted of sin and a man in love may live in the same external world, but in totally different creations. Both may be in the desert, but the disposition of the one makes him interpret the desert as a desolating piece of God’s territory; while to the other the desert literally blossoms as the rose. The disposition of the one is mad; there is no light in the sun, no sweetness in anything, his ruling disposition is one of misery; while to the other:

Heaven above is brighter blue,
Earth around is sweeter green;
Something lives in every hue
Christless eyes have never seen;
Birds with gladder songs o’erflow,
Flowers with deeper beauties shine
Since I know, as now I know,
I am His and He is mine.
George Wade Robinson

When you are identified with Jesus Christ you become a new creation in the same surroundings. You see life differently because of the moral trans figuration of the regeneration of the Son of God. The Conscience of God means that it is up to Him to make this possible, and any man can go through the transfiguration the second he realises his need. There are moments when you see the way you should go; don’t dally with yourself then. The moments come and go, but always with a further space between. If you play the fool with yourself when they come, they get fainter; but if you heed them, they are intimations that you are stepping over into another frontier, and beginning to experience a relationship to God based on the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The conscience of Christ

Christ! I am Christ’s! and let the name suffice you,
Ay, for me too He greatly hath sufficed;
Lo! with no winning words I would entice you—
Paul has no honour and no friend but Christ.
Yea thro’ life, death, thro’ sorrow and thro’ sinning
He shall suffice me, for He hath sufficed:
Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning,
Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ.
Frederick W. H. Myers

1. The Character of Christ (Matthew 11:19; Acts 2:22–24)

The New Testament never thinks that the place which Jesus has in its faith is anything else than the place which belongs to Him and truly was His.
Dr. Denney9

2. The Consciousness of Christ (Matthew 5:21–22, 27–28, 38–39, 43–44; 11:27; John 8:46; 14:6–9)

Jesus revealed Himself as what He was in life and works; He had to be discovered as what He was by men who associated with Him in obedience, trust, and love.
Dr. Denney

3. The Cross of Christ (Matthew 16:24; 20:22;
26:12–13, 26–28; Romans 5:11)

The Christ that we trust all to is One in whom God died for His own witness and His own work in us. God was in Christ reconciling. The prime doer in Christ’s Cross was God; He was God doing the very best for man, and not man doing his very best for God.
Dr. Forsyth

It is in times of intense suffering that we begin to see the reason for Redemption, and realise that Redemp tion is worth what it cost the original Designer. According to the New Testament, Redemption cost God everything, and that is the reason why salvation is so easy for us. The same thing happens in an agony as happens when you suddenly open your door and window during a hurricane: the wind disarranges everything.

It plays havoc, and knocks things into confusion, but also brings a totally new circulation of air; and very often the man who has been knocked around by an agony begins to form a new mind, and is better able to appreciate the New Testament view of the Cross of Jesus Christ. The basis of God’s action is that it is up to Him to turn out men like Himself, and the Conscience of Christ also means just that. To say that reason is the basis of human life is absurd, but to say that the basis of human life is tragedy and that the main purpose of it as far as Jesus Christ is concerned, is holiness, is much nearer the point of view given in the Bible.

1. The Character of Christ (Matthew 11:19; Acts 2:22–24)

These verses portray the character of Jesus Christ as recorded in the New Testament. The New Testament is not written to prove that Jesus Christ is God Incarnate; the New Testament does not prove anything; it simply confirms the faith of those who believe beforehand. Christian evidences don’t amount to anything; you can’t convince a man against his will. The

New Testament never thinks that the place which Jesus had in its faith is anything else than the place which belongs to Him and truly was His. Dr. Denney

The New Testament does not say of Jesus Christ, “This man was God Incarnate, and if you don’t believe it you will be damned. ” The New Testament was written for the confirmation of those who believed He was God Incarnate. The man who does not believe is apt at any minute to discover by the swinging open of the door of agony, that the thing he ignored may be the way into a life he has never seen. It is quite likely that a trick of disease or war or bereavement may suddenly open the possibility of there being other things in a man’s story than those he saw when he was a commonsense, robust man.

“The Son of Man came eating and drinking. ” One of the most staggering things in the New Testament is just this commonplace aspect. The curious differ ence between Jesus Christ’s idea of holiness and that of other religions lies here. The one says holiness is not compatible with ordinary food and married life, but Jesus Christ represents a character lived straight down in the ordinary amalgam of human life, and His claim is that the character He manifested is possible for any man, if he will come in by the door provided for him.

There are religions in which holiness involves unusual conditions and special diet. Some forms of mysticism seem to be incompatible with married life. But the type of holiness which Jesus teaches can be achieved with an ordinary diet and a wife and five children.

The Jesus of History T. R. Glover10

We must estimate the character of Jesus Christ by the New Testament, and not by our standards. Look at the ordinary commonplace things of His life—from twelve to thirty years of age He lived with brothers and sisters who did not believe in Him ( John 7:5). If you had lived in His day and someone had pointed Him out and said to you, “That carpenter is God mani fest in the flesh, ” you would have thought him mad. The New Testament is either unmitigated blether or it conveys a revelation. The majority of us make the character of God out of our own heads; therefore He does not amount to anything at all. That God is called an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent Being who rules the universe does not matter one iota to me. But the New Testament reveals the essential nature of God to be not omnipotence, omnipresence and omni science, but holiness. God became the weakest thing in His own creation, viz. , a Baby; He entered human history on that line. He was so ordinary that the folks of His day paid no attention to Him, and the religious people said He was making a farce of religion.

Jesus Christ is, beyond all reasonable question, the greatest Man who ever lived. The greatness of a man is to be estimated by two things; first, by the extent of his influence upon mankind, and secondly—for no one is altogether great who is not also good—by the purity and dignity of his character. Tried by both these tests, Jesus is supreme among men. He is at once the most influential and the best of Mankind.

. The Fact of Christ P. Carnegie Simpson

To refuse to try a line Jesus Christ points out because I do not like it, shuts my mouth as an honest doubter. I must try it and see if it works. As long as I am unwilling to act by any way of getting at the truth, I can say nothing. The basis of Christ’s character appeals to us all.

One of the dangers of denominational teaching is that we are told that before we can be Christians we must believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and that the Bible is the Word of God from Genesis to Revelation. Creeds are the effect of our belief, not the cause of it. I do not have to believe all that before I can be a Christian; but after I have become a Christian I begin to try and expound to myself Who Jesus Christ is, and to do that I must first of all take into con sideration the New Testament explanation. Blessed art thou, Simon Bar Jona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father which is in heaven.

The character of Jesus Christ was lived on an ordinary plane, and exhibits one side only. To ten men who talk about the character of Jesus there is only one who will talk about His Cross. I like the story of Jesus Christ’s life, I like the things He said. The Sermon on the Mount is beautiful, and I like to read of the things Jesus did; but immediately you begin to talk about the Cross, about forgiveness of sins, about being born from above (rv mg), it is out of it. The New Testament reveals that Jesus Christ is God manifest in the flesh, not a Being with two personalities; He is Son of God (the exact expression of Almighty God) and Son of Man (the presentation of God’s normal man). As Son of God He reveals what God is like ( John 14:9); as Son of Man He mirrors what the human race will be like on the basis of Redemption—a perfect oneness between God and man (Ephesians 4:13). But when we come to the Cross of Jesus Christ, that is outside our domain. If Jesus Christ was only a martyr, the New Testament teaching is stupid.

2. The Consciousness of Christ (Matthew 5:21–22, 27–28, 38–39, 43–44; 11:27; John 8:46; 14:6–9)

These verses express what Jesus Christ thought about Himself. He deliberately said “Before I came, Moses said: now I have come I say: up till now it has been soandso; but I interpret in a new way. If He was not God manifest in the flesh, to speak like that would have been an intoxication of conceit. Let Plato or Socrates, for instance, say, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, ” and we see what it involves. Jesus Christ is either mad or what He claims to be, viz. : the only revelation of God Almighty that there is. Our Lord did not say, “No man cometh unto God, but by Me, ” but, “No man cometh unto the Father,

but by Me. ” Fatherhood and Creatorship are two different things. Fatherhood refers to the moral likeness of a man’s disposition. In the Conscience of God and in the Conscience of Christ we see God accepting the responsibility for sin; He never asks man to accept it. No man is damned because he is a sinner. Jesus said, “This is the judgement” (i. e. , the critical moment) “that the Light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light; because [kjv] their works were evil” ( John 3:19 rv). If I see better than I act on, I am sealing my soul with damnation. The consciousness of Jesus Christ in the New Testament is that He and the Father are one; He did not say that the human race and God were one. The doctrine of the Trinity is not a revelation, it is an attempt to put into scientific language the fact of God. There is only one God to the Christian, and His name is Jesus Christ; any other idea of God is a matter of temperament or of refinement. The Christian is an avowed agnostic; all he knows about God has been accepted through the revelation of Jesus Christ, and to him there is only one name for the God he worships, viz. , Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ manifests, on the scale we see and know, the life that makes Him say—”Almighty God is nothing that contradicts what I am; if you have seen Me you have seen the Father. ” Have we seen Him? We may look at a person for a long time without “seeing” him. How long did it take the men who knew Jesus Christ to perceive Who He was? (See Luke 24:16, 31. ) Both these themes, the Character and the Consciousness of Christ, are in the nature of speculation—interesting, but they do not amount to anything when a man is in agony. When we were plunged into the agony of the war modern Christian ity was dealing with speculations, or else proclaiming a pseudo evangelism which made salvation a moral “lavatory. Jesus Christ did not come primarily to teach; He came to make it possible for us to receive His heredity, to have put into us a new disposition whereby we can live totally new lives. Any man who uses his reason in the things he sees, and who has taken a cross section of himself, and had the conceit knocked out of him, knows he is not a strayed angel nor a noble hero; he is neither angel nor devil; he is a mixture of dust and Deity. The Sermon on the Mount is impossible to man, and yet it is what our Lord taught. Jesus Christ did not come to teach man to be what he cannot be, but to reveal that He can put into him a totally new heredity; and all He requires a man to say is—”I need it”—no shibboleth, but a recognition of his need. Jesus Christ cannot begin to do anything for a man until he knows his need; but immediately he is at his wits’ end through sin or limitation or agony and cannot go any further, Jesus Christ says to him, Blessed are you; if you ask God for the Holy Spirit, He will give Him to you. God does not give us the Holy Spirit until we come to the place of seeing that we cannot do without Him (Luke 11:13).

3. The Cross of Christ (Matthew 16:24; 20:22; 26:12–13, 26–28; Romans 5:11)

There are two views of Jesus Christ’s death. One is that He was a martyr—that is not the New Testa ment view; the other is that the Cross of Jesus Christ was the Cross of God, not of a man at all—not a man doing his level best for God, but “God doing the very best for man. The Cross of Jesus Christ is the point where God and sinful man merge with a crash, and the way to life is opened; but the crash is on the heart of God.

The Cross is the presentation of God having done His “bit, ” that which man could never do. The New Testament reveals that the basis of human life is not Rationalism, but Redemption. Just as Rationalism does not depend on individual people but on a conception of the fundamental of human life, so the New Testament represents that the basis of human life is Redemption, and Christian faith and Christian thinking are to be based on that. There is much teaching abroad today that is veneered over as Christianity.

Men preach, and undermine the very ground they stand on while they preach. The foundation of the Christian faith is that the basis of human life is Redemptive, and on that basis God performs His miracles. Jesus Christ told His disciples that He came here on purpose to die. The death of Jesus Christ is God’s verdict on self realisation and every form of sin there is. If self realisation is to be the goal and end of the human race, then damned be God; if Jesus Christ was to be God, then damned be self realisation —the two cannot exist together. “If you would be My disciple, give up your right to yourself. ” Why should we play at being Christians?

We are told that to be an experimental Christian means we understand the plan of salvation; the devil understands that, but he is not a saint. A saint is one who, on the basis of the Redemption of Jesus Christ, has had the centre of his life radically altered, and has deliberately given up his right to himself. This is the point where the moral issue comes, the frontier whereby we get in contact with God. Intellect will not bring us there, but moral obedience only, and an agony opens the door to it. To those who have had no agony Jesus says, “I have nothing for you; stand on your own feet, square your own shoulders. I have come for the man who knows he has a bigger handful than he can cope with, who knows there are forces he cannot touch; I will do everything for him if he will let Me. Only let a man grant he needs it, and I will do it for him. “

This is the basis of what Jesus Christ did in Redemption, and we enter into the life of Christ by His death, not by His birth. When Jesus Christ taught His disciples these things, and when He talked about His Cross, they misunderstood Him, just as natural minded Christians do to day; consequently we are up against the problem already mentioned. The teaching of Jesus Christ is very fine and delightful, but it is all up in the clouds; how are we to come up to it with our heredity, with what we are with our past, with our present and with the outlook we have? How are we going to begin to do it, if all He came to do was to teach? All attempts at imitation will end in despair, in fanaticism, and in all kinds of religious nonsense.

But when once we see that the New Testament empha sises Jesus Christ’s death, not His life, that it is by virtue of His death we enter into His life, then we find that His teaching is for the life He puts in. We also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement” (Romans 5:11). As long as we are intellectual ists and forget that we are men, our intellect tells us that God and man ought to be one, that there should be no gap between. Exactly so! But they are not one, and there is a gap, and a tragedy. Our intellect tells us that the universe ought to be the “garment of God. ” It ought to be, but it is not. We may hold any number of deistic and monistic theories, and theories about being one with God, but every man knows he is not God. Jesus Christ says we can only receive the at onement with God on His basis, viz. : “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” ( John 3:3).

We can enter into His Kingdom when ever the time comes for us to see it. We cannot see a thing until we do see it, but we must not be blind and say we don’t see it when we do, and if we are enthusiastic saints we must not be too much disturbed about the fellow who does not see. At any second he may turn the corner of an agony and say, “I thought those other fellows were mad, but now I am prepared to see as they do. ” We have been taken up with creeds and doctrines, and when a man is hit we do not know what to give him; we have no Jesus Christ, we have only theology. For one man who can introduce another to Jesus Christ by the way he lives and by the atmosphere of his life, there are a thousand who can only talk jargon about Him. Whenever you come across a man or woman who in your time of distress introduces you to Jesus Christ, you know you have struck the best friend you ever had, one who has opened up the way of life to you. The basis of human life according to Jesus Christ is His Cross, and it is by His Cross that His con science is manifested. He has undertaken to take the vilest piece of stuff that humanity and the devil have put together, and to transform this into a son of God.

If I receive forgiveness and continue to be bad, I prove that God is immoral in forgiving me, and make a travesty of Redemption. When I accept Jesus Christ’s way He transfigures me from within. “Jesus did it all, ” refers to Redemption; the thing is done; and if I step into it I will find the moral magic of the Redemption at work in me.

The christian conscience

Great were his fate who on the earth should linger,
Sleep for an age and stir himself again,
Watching Thy terrible and fiery finger
Shrivel the falsehood from the souls of men.
Oh that Thy steps among the stars would quicken!
Oh that Thine ears would hear when we are dumb!
Many the hearts from which the hope shall sicken,
Many shall faint before Thy kingdom come.
F. W. H. Myers

N.b.—the intuition in my Nature whereby i know that i am known.
the intuition in my Nature which i regard as the highest. the “ innocence of Sight” as an illustration of conscience.
1. Conscience before the Racial Degeneration
(Genesis 2:7–17)
(a) Implicit Certainty of Self (v. 7)
(b) Implicit Certainty of the World (vv. 8–15)
(c) Implicit Certainty of God (vv. 16–17)

“Virtuous in order to secure one’s self if God should be awkward.”

3. Conscience in the Racial Regeneration
( John 3:16–21)
(a) Character of the Saint ( John 17:22; Romans 9:1)
(b) Conduct of the Saint (2 Corinthians 1:12)
(c) Communion of the Saints (1 John 1:7)

The race was required to take part in its own development by a series of moral choices till transfiguration.

2. Conscience after the Racial Degeneration (Romans 1:18–27)
(a) Standard of the Ordinary Person (Romans 2:14–16)
(b) Standard of the Ordinary Pagan (Matthew 25:31–46)
(c) Standard of the Ordinary Piety ( John 16:2; Acts 26:9)

Personal relation with God is to be maintained in actual experience by the spontaneous originality of the indwelling Spirit of God, interpreting the words of Christ as we obey. “Intuition” means perception at sight; it is implicit, something I cannot express, and conscience is of the implicit order of things. Conscience is the innate law in human nature whereby man knows he is known. ” Conscience is that faculty in me which fixes on what I regard as the highest; consequently conscience records differently in different people. I may be a Christian and a conscientious man, or I may be an atheist and a conscientious man. So it never can be true to call conscience the voice of God; if it were, it would be the most contradictory voice man ever heard.

Conscience is best thought of as the eye of the soul recording what it looks at; it will always record exactly what it is turned towards. We soon lose what Ruskin called “the innocence of sight. ” An artist does not use his logical faculties in recording what he sees; he records from the innocence of sight. A beginner sketches not what he sees, but what he knows he sees, while the artist gives the presentation of what he sees. Conscience is the eye of the soul, and how my conscience records will depend on the light that is thrown on God. Saul of Tarsus was conscientious in putting to death the followers of Jesus Christ (Acts 26:9); when he became a Christian, his conscience was not altered, but it recorded differently (Acts 24:16).

When a man gets rightly adjusted to God his conscience staggers him, and his reason condemns him from all standpoints. The phrase “Conscience can be educated” is a truth that is half an error. Strictly speaking, conscience cannot be educated; what is altered and educated is a man’s reasoning on what his conscience records. A man reasons not only on what his senses bring him, but on what his con science brings him; and immediately he is faced by the white light of Jesus Christ, his conscience recording exactly, his reason is startled and amazed.

1. Conscience before the Racial Degeneration (Genesis 2:7–17)

In this aspect we have to consider the three facts of a man’s personal life, viz. , consciousness of self, consciousness of the world, and consciousness of God; they are all brought out in the way God con stituted the human race. Adam had no affinity with the brutes, and this instantly distinguished him from the brute creation around him, “but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. ” There is no evidence that a brute is conscious of itself, but man is ostensibly conscious of himself. We are conscious of ourselves and conscious of outside things only by means of a nervous system.

When a man is altered inwardly by the grace of God, his nervous system is altered, and he instantly begins to see things differently. The external world around him begins to take on a new guise because he has a new disposition. If any man is in Christ Jesus, ” his nervous system will prove that he is “a new creature, ” and the material world will appear to him as a new creation because he is now seeing it as the mirror of God’s thought. The God consciousness in Adam was quite different from our natural consciousness; it was just like the God consciousness shown by our Lord. In us the consciousness of God is obliterated, because that consciousness became most conspicuously blurred by the Fall; consequently, men miscall all kinds of things “God. A man is apt to call any system of things he considers highest “God. There are three facts of our personal life that are restored by Jesus Christ to their pristine vigour.

We get into real definite communion with God through Jesus Christ; we get to right relationship with our fellow men and with the world outside; and we get into a right relationship with ourselves. We become Christcentred instead of selfcentred. If Adam had not sinned and thereby introduced the heredity of sin into the human race, there is every reason to suppose that the human race would have been transfigured into the real presence of God; but Adam disobeyed, and sin entered in. Sin is a relation ship between two of God’s creations. God did not create sin; but He took the responsibility for it; and that He did so is proved in the Cross of Jesus Christ.

The essential nature of sin is my right to myself. Jesus Christ, the second Adam, the second Federal Head of the race, entered into this order of things as Adam did, straight from the hand of God; and He took part in His own development until it reached its climax, and He was transfigured. Earth lost its hold on Him, and He was back in the glory which He had with the Father before the world was.

But He did not go to heaven from the Mount of Transfiguration because He had Redemption to fulfill. He emptied Himself (rv ) of His glory a second time, and came down into the world again to identify Himself with the sin of man (2 Corinthians 5:21). Adam was intended by God to take part in his own development by a series of moral choices, to sacrifice

his natural life to God by moral obedience and thus transform it into a spiritual thing. Instead, he took dominion over himself, and instantly lost control over the earth and air and sea, and lost also this peculiar con sciousness of himself and the world and God. Poetic and intellectual types of mind recognise these factors in Adam’s creation, but they ignore the fact that we have degenerated. A poet or an artist has vision and insight, but he does not see the actual. It is delightful to talk about man being in perfect accord with God and with the world about him; but we are not in that accord, and the guidance God gave to Adam is of no use to us. We can change the world without when we change the recording instrument within. Commit sin, and I defy you to see anything beautiful without; fall in love, and you will see beauty in everything. We only know the world by a nervous system, and we infer that everyone else knows it in the same way as we do. The man who accepts things on the evidence of his senses is as wise as I am when I accept the rev elation of the Bible. To accept the evidence of your senses is wise, but to say it is infallible is nonsense. It is never wise to be cocksure.

2. Conscience after the Racial Degeneration (Romans 1:18–27)

Everyone is to blame but me; I am a strayed babe in the wood! This attitude indicates the twist in man’s nature that has come in through the Fall. A moral squint always leads to a wrong intellectual view.

(a) Standard of the Ordinary Person (Romans 2:14–16)

Every man has, implicit within himself, a standard of conduct which he accepts for life. There is an intuitive certainty in every man that there are some things that he ought not to do, and the talk about innocence is nonsense. The Bible says that a man is born with this knowledge, and that he will be judged according to his obedience to, or rejection of, the ordinance of God which is written in his spirit. The natural idea of virtue is to make a man quits with the Day of Judgement.

(b) Standard of the Ordinary Pagan (Matthew 25:31–46)

The standard for the nations is conscience, i. e. , con science attaching itself to the system of things which man regards as highest, no matter how degraded he may be. Conscience is the standard for men and women to be judged by until they have been brought into contact with the Lord Jesus Christ. The stan dard for Christians is not the 25th Chapter of Mat thew; the standard for Christians is our Lord Jesus Christ. It is not sufficient for a Christian to walk in the light of his conscience; he must walk in a sterner light, in the light of the Lord.

(c) Standard of the Ordinary Piety ( John 16:2; Acts 26:9)

Paul says, “I verily thought within myself “—i. e. , according to his conscience—”I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth. ” This is the length an ordinary pious conscience may take a man. Saul was the acme of conscientiousness. It is extraordinary to what an extent men may corrupt themselves if they have no real light on what they regard as the highest. There needs to be a standard for the guidance of conscience. It does not matter whether a person is religious or not, conscience attaches itself to the highest he or she knows, and reasoning according to that standard is the guide for life. Conscience will always record God whenever it has been faced by God.

3. Conscience in the Racial Regeneration ( John 3:16–21)

I am not judged by the light I have, but by the light I have refused to accept. There is no man but can have the knowledge, perfectly clearly obtainable, of the standard of Jesus Christ. Whether I am a Christian or not, or whether I am conscientious or not, is not the question; it is whether I have refused the light of the finest moral character who ever lived, Jesus Christ. This is the condemnation, that the Light, Jesus Christ, has come into the world, and I prefer darkness, i. e. , my own point of view. The characteristic of a man who begins to walk in the light is that he drags himself into the light all the time. He does not make excuses for things done in the dark, he brings everything to the light, and says, “This is to be condemned; this does not belong to Jesus Christ, ” and so keeps in the light. The popular view of a saint is an anaemic young man with one foot in the grave, or an old woman, or an innocent, sweet young lady—anyone who has not enough original sin to be bad. The New Testament view of a saint is a more rugged type. You and I are a mixture of dust and Deity, and God takes that sordid human stuff and turns it into a saint by Regeneration.

A saint does not mean a man who has not enough sin to be bad, but a man who has received from Jesus Christ a new hered ity that turns him into another man.

(a) Character of the Saint ( John 17:22; Romans 9:1) The Christian disposition keeps its balance with the law of God, which is holiness. A man’s character is what he habitually is. What “glory” did Jesus Christ have? A glory that everyone could see and admit that He was a marvellous Being? No, He was so ordinary that they said He was a glutton and a winebibber; so ordinary that fishermen walked with Him, and the common people asked Him to dinner. There was no glory externally; He was not manifestly God walking in the flesh. Jesus Christ effaced the God head in

Himself so effectually that men without the Spirit of God despised Him. The glory our Lord had here on earth was the glory of a holy disposition; that is, He worked out His life in accordance with the highest He knew—His Father; and He said “I can give men that faculty in regeneration; I can put My Holy Spirit in them, and He will keep them in contact with God as I have revealed Him. Conscience and character in the saint, then, means the disposition of Jesus Christ persistently manifested.

(b) Conduct of the Saint (2 Corinthians 1:12)

Paul always riddled himself like that; he did not talk to people who did not know him. He said, “The evidence of my life proves that what Jesus Christ said He could do, He has done” (see Galatians 2:20). Our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our con science, that in simplicity and godly sincerity . . . we have had our conversation in the world. ” The point there is a very important one, viz. , that the knowledge of evil that came through the Fall gives a man a broad mind, but paralyses his action. The restora tion of a man by our Lord gives him simplicity.

Paul says, “I fear, lest by any means . . . your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. There are men and women of the world who know evil, whose minds are poisoned by all kinds of things; they are marvellously generous in regard to their notions of other people, but they can do nothing, their broadsightedness paralyses their action. There are some things a man is a criminal for knowing; he has no right to know them. The knowledge of evil, instead of instigating to action, paralyses; whereas the essence of the Gospel of Jesus Christ working in conscience and conduct is that it shows itself at once in action. God can turn cunning, crafty people into simple, guileless people. The marvel of His grace is such that He can take out the strands of evil and twistedness from a person’s mind and imagination, and make him single minded and simple towards God so that his life becomes radiantly beautiful by the miracle of His grace.

(c) Communion of the Saints (1 John 1:7)

“But if we walk in the light, as He is in the light . . . “— that is, don’t have anything folded up, don’t juggle things, don’t pretend you have not done anything shady. John says, if you have committed sin, confess it; walk in the light, and you will have fellowship with everyone else who is there. Natural affinity does not count here at all.

Watch how God has altered your affinities since you were filled with the Spirit; you have fellowship with people you have no natural affinity for at all; you have fellowship with everybody who is in the light. Light is the description of clear, beautiful, moral character from God’s standpoint, and if we walk in the light, “the blood of Jesus Christ . . . cleanses us from all sin”; God Almighty can find nothing to censure. We usually think of conscience as an individual thing; the individual aspect has to be recognised, but it is not the only aspect. The individual exercise of conscience is never the Christian standard. The Christian standard is the personal relationship of the conscience in direct accord with God on the basis of the revelation given by Jesus Christ. I do not live the Christian life by adherence to principles; I live the Christian life as a child lives its life. You never can calculate what a child will do, neither can you calcu late what the Spirit of God will do in you. When you are born from above (rv mg), the Spirit of God in you works in spontaneous moral originality. Our Lord said, “the Holy Ghost . . . shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatso ever I have said unto you. I do not rake around and discover some word; the Holy Spirit brings back with the greatest of ease the word I need in a particular cir cumstance. Am I going to obey that word? If we keep our individual consciences open towards God as He is revealed in Jesus Christ, God will bring hundreds of other souls into oneness with Himself through us. This is the way the new racial regenerated con science is to come about. Racial conscience is not the conscience of the individual person, but the con science of a whole community of people who are in touch with God.

In thought

Be near me when my light is low
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.
Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is rack’d with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.
Tennyson

1. In the Whirlwind of Things That Are
(a) Quarrels of Nations (Luke 21:10–11)
(b) Quarrels of Churches (1 Corinthians 3:1–5)
(c) Questions of the Way On (Matthew 24:23–26)

2. Internationals of Socialism, Sacerdotalism and Spirituality

3. Federations Most Hopeful Amid the quarrels of nations is it not wonderful that many minds, untutored either in history or in ethic, should seek to find it in some form like socialism which is indifferent to Nationality, and which over- rides the concrete divisions of mankind by abstract ideas and artificial associations, while others, only too historic, find it in a Church unity over their heads.
Dr. Forsyth

If we are faced with a problem, we cannot be indifferent. The greatest help we can give to another is not a positive line of things, but this warning: Don’t seal up your mind too quickly.

1. In the Whirlwind of Things

That Are And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars; see that ye be not troubled. (Matthew 24:6)

That is either the statement of a madman or of a Being who has power to put something into a man and keep him free from panic, even in the midst of the awful terror of war. The basis of panic is always cowardice. Our Lord teaches us to look things full in the face. He says—”When you hear of wars, don’t be scared. It is the most natural thing in the world to be scared, and the clearest evidence that God’s grace is at work in our hearts is when we do not get into panics. Our Lord insists on the inevitableness of peril. He says “You must lay your account with war, with hatred, and with death. Men may have lived undisturbed over a volcano for a long while, when suddenly an eruption occurs. Jesus Christ did not say—”You will understand why war has come, ” but—”Don’t be scared when it does come, do not be in a panic. It is astonishing how we ignore Jesus Christ’s words. He said that nations would end in war and bloodshed and havoc. We ignore His warnings; and when war comes we lose our wits and exhibit panic.

(a) Quarrels of Nations (Luke 21:10–11)

This question is on the lips of people today: “Is war of the devil or of God? ” It is of neither. It is of man, though both God and the devil are behind it. War is a conflict of wills, either of individuals or of nations. National quarrels are everywhere to day and it is these quarrels which make men say—”Well, blot out nations altogether; the only thing to do is to ignore the fact that there are nations; let us look forward to a time when there will be none. ” This attitude is a revolt which is a mere safety valve. The vision of a time when there will be no nations is right, but ignoring the fact that there are nations just now is not the way to establish the vision. After the war the elemental will take its place again, and we shall recover what we had lost in over civilisation. Civilised life will be all the better for the clearing out of some things, and there are some things we shall regret losing. We shall be driven back to the elemental; we shall be a good deal less refined, more rugged; more like our own country five hundred years ago. In the final issue some things belonging to civilisation will be found to be fine, and some disastrous. The preaching of the “gospel of temperament” and all such shallow optimism has been hit on the head by the war; there are some clouds with no “silver lining, ” and the injunction to “cheer up” is an insult.

(b) Quarrels of Churches (1 Corinthians 3:1–5)

It is easy to see the defects in churches. I may criticise my own church, but let me remember that her defects are those of immaturity. A person may be full of defects, but we must remember that there is a difference between the vices of a man and the failings of a boy. When we see the powerlessness and ineffectiveness of the churches, we are apt to revolt to sacerdotalism, which is priestcraft being used as an exotic over human nature. Frequently, religious peace has been brought about in this way, but it has not been a desirable peace. When men are compelled to submit to superstition, they are apt to say, “Let us have no churches at all, or else let us have a democratic church. “

(c) Questions of the Way On (Matthew 24:23–26)

If any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not. ” To day we have all kinds of Christs in our midst, the Christ of Labour and of Socialism; the Mind cure Christ and the Christ of Christian Science and of Theosophy; but they are all abstract Christs. The one great sign of Christ is not with them—there are no marks of the Atonement about these Christs. Jesus Christ is the only one with the marks of atonement on Him, the wounded hands and feet, a symbol of the Redeemer Who is to come again. There will be signs and wonders wrought by these other Christs, and great problems may be solved, but the greatest problem of all, the problem of sin, will not be touched. The majority of us are blind on certain lines, we see only in the light of our prejudices. A searchlight lights up only what it does and no more, but the daylight reveals a hundred and one facts that the searchlight had not taken into account.

An idea acts like a searchlight and becomes tyrannous. Take a man with an idea of evolution; as you listen to him the way seems perfectly clear, life is not difficult at all; but let the daylight of actual experience come across his path, and there are a thousand and one facts which the idea cannot account for, because they do not come into the simple line laid down by the evolutionist. When I am up against prob lems, I am apt to shut myself up in my own mind and refuse to pay any attention to what anyone says. There are many things which are neither black nor white, but grey. There is nothing simple under heaven sav ing a man’s relationship to God on the ground of the Redemption of Jesus Christ. When Jesus Christ came on the scene, His disciples became impatient and said, “Why don’t You tell us plainly who You are? Jesus Christ could not, because He could only be discerned through moral obedience. A man who talks like a shell makes the path of a shell, that is, he makes the way straight, but destroys a good deal in doing it.

There is another way of reaching the solution of a problem— the long, patient way of solving things. Jesus Christ deliberately took the “long, long trail. The temptation of Satan was that He should take the “short cut. The temptations of Satan centre round this point: “You are the Son of God, then do God’s work in Your own way”; and at the heart of all our Lord’s answers was this: “I came to do My Father’s work in His way, not in My own way, although I am the Son of God. A fanatic sees God’s point of view but not man’s. He says God ought not to allow the devil, or war, or sin. We are in the whirlwind of things that are, what is the use of wasting time and saying things ought not to be? They are! In the midst of the prob lems, what is the way out? The line of solution is not to apply the plaster of a philosophical statement or the principles of teetotalism, or of vegetarianism, but something more fundamental than these, viz. , a personal relationship to God and Man as one—Jesus Christ. Don’t make principles your aim, but get rightly related to Me, ” Jesus Christ says.

The revelation of Christianity is that God, in order to be of use in human affairs, had to become a typical Man. That is the great revelation of Chris tianity, that God Himself became human; became incarnate in the weakest side of His own creation. If one can put it reverently, unless God Almighty can become concrete and actual, He is nothing to me but a mental abstraction, because an ideal has no power unless it can be realised. The doctrine of the Incarnation is that God did become actual, and that He manifested Himself on the plane of human flesh. Jesus Christ is not only the name of the personal Saviour Who made the way for every man to get back into that personal relationship, but He is the name for God and Man one. “Son of Man” means the whole human race centred in one personality. Jesus Christ declares He is the exclusive way to the Father (Matthew 11:27; John 14:6). A religious fanatic says: “I will work from the Divine standpoint and ignore the human. ” You can not do it; God Himself could not do it. He had to take upon Himself “the likeness of sinful flesh. ” There must be the right alloy. You cannot use pure gold as coin, it is too soft to be serviceable, and the pure gold of the Divine is no good in human affairs; there must be the alloy mixed with it, and the alloy is not sin. Sin, according to the Bible, is something that has no right in human nature at all, it is abnormal and wrong. Human nature is earthly, it is sordid, but it is not bad.

The thing in human nature that is bad is the result of a wrong relationship set up between the man God created and the being God created who became the devil, and the wrong relationship whereby a man becomes absolute “boss” over himself is called sin. Sin is a wrong element, an element that has to be dealt with by God in Redemption through man’s conscience. The fanatical person is certain that human beings can live a pure Divine life on earth. But we are not so constituted, we are constituted to live the human life presenced with Divinity on earth, on the ground of Redemption. We are to have the right alloy—God and humanity one, as in our Lord Jesus Christ. That is the miracle of the Redemption when it works actually in human flesh. The way out is to remember that the alloy must be discovered in you and me, viz. , the pure Divine working on the basis of my pure human. I may have the most beautiful sentiments in prayer and visions in preaching, but unless I have learned how God can mix the human and the Divine and make them a flesh and blood epistle of His grace, I have missed the point of Jesus Christ’s revelation.

2. Internationals of Socialism,Sacerdotalism and Spirituality

Socialism at present is immensely vague, it is the name for something which is all right in vision, but the point is how is the vision to get legs and walk? How are we going to establish the peace of the world so that nations will not go to war any more, or grab at each other? How are we going to arrive at an equality that will work? How is it to be done? These are the last days of a dispensation from God’s standpoint. (The Bible dispensations are not things we note, they are marked off by the Spirit of God. To day militarism has gone into hell before the eyes of the whole world. ) “And it shall come to pass in the last days, ” saith God, “I will pour out of My Spirit upon all flesh” (irrespective of goodness or badness) . . . and on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit. ” What is the difference between “your sons and your daughters” and “my servants and my handmaidens? ” “Your sons and your daughters” refer to the men and women who have no concern about the Redemptive point of view: “We have the vision and we are going to do the thing in our own way. ” Peter says God is long suffering, and He is giving us ample opportunity to try what ever line we like in both individual and national life. God is leaving us to prove to the hilt that it cannot be done in any other than Jesus Christ’s way, or the human race will not be satisfied. The atheist, or socialist, or Christian—all who look to the future and express a view of what ought to be, see the same vision. They see the brotherhood of man, a time of peace on earth when there will be no more war, but a state of goodwill and perfect liberty, at present inconceivable. There is nothing wrong with the vision, and there is no difference in the vision because its source is the Spirit of God; the difference is in the way it is to be reached. The vision is of the nature of a castle in the air.

That is where a castle should be; who ever heard of a castle underground! The problem is how to put the foundation under your castle in the air so that it can stand upon the earth. The New Testament says that the only foundation is not Rationalism but the absolute efficacy of the Redemption of Jesus Christ. We are not prepared to see that yet; there may be individuals who are, but no nation under heaven is. It is a long process for an individual to centralise his mind on Jesus Christ’s stand point, and it must take nations a long while too. The socialist in his domain is like the fanatic in the Christian domain; he is apt to see the vision and forget the problem—forget that in the meantime we are not there! After the war we shall have to be down among the demon possessed, and then will be the time to prove whether we can give legs to our vision.

Locusts, in their flight, will tumble down in the streams and drown by the million, but others keep coming on until they bank the stream right up, and the live ones crawl over the piled up dead. Hundreds of men in the past twenty centuries have had the vision, and given their lives for it. No one thinks anything about them now, but it is over the lives of these men that the rest of us are beginning to crawl and find a footing. Sacerdotalism has proved a quick way out of a good many difficulties. It says: “Put the incubus of a Church rule on the nations and say, ‘You shall do this’; unite temporal and Divine power under an infallible head. ” It is one way of holding peace for a time, but it is a peace that does not grow from the inside of solving the problems of men; it comes from the outside, like an extinguisher, on to the problems and says, “I am the infallible Church in the line of the Apostolic Succession; you shall not doubt, I will solve all your problems. ” In every period when the nations have been held in peace, it has been by an external authority, such as a Church, acting like an exotic, spreading its roots over the mass of humanity and holding it together. The Roman Catholic Church is a proof of this. There is only one thing as futile as the Roman Catholic Church and that is Protestantism.

In Roman Catholicism the great dominating authority is Churchianity, the Church is vested with all authority. In Protestantism it is what the Book says that is the supreme authority, and a man gets rest when he decides for either. “I am going to give up all the turmoil and let my Church do my thinking for me. If you put your faith in a Church, it will solve your problems for you. Or you may stake your faith in Bibliolatry with the same result. Ye search the scriptures, because ye think in them ye have eternal life; and these are they which bear witness of Me, and ye will not come to Me that ye may have life” ( John 5:39–40 rv). Jesus Christ says neither the Church nor the Bible is the authority, but “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life”; the Church and the Bible are secondary. The context of the Bible is Jesus Christ, and a personal relationship with Him interprets the Bible in a man’s life. There are ways of bringing peace to a man’s mind which are not true to the fundament of things, and one of the most significant things during the war is the change of mental front on the part of men as they face these things.

3. Federations Most Hopeful

Another man says, “Federation is the most hope fulsolution there is; not necessarily denominational union, but federations in spirit; let us look forward to the time when nations and denominations will be federated out of independent existence. ” This is, again, only a mental safety valve. Another man may say: “I believe in quiet mysticism, cutting myself off from everything around and getting at things by a spiritual life of my own. The monks in the Middle Ages refused to take the responsibilities of life by shutting themselves away from the world, and people to day seek to do the same by cutting themselves off from this and that relationship. Paul says: “Beware of those who ignore the basis of human life. If I refuse to accept nations or churches or human beings as facts, I shall find I have nothing to help solve the problems that arise. We have to make the first footing clear. Is it possible, on the basis of Redemption, to regenerate commerce? for Jesus Christ not to ignore the fact of men and women, but to regenerate them? for nations not to be ignored, but regenerated? Jesus Christ’s claim is that it is possible. Jesus Christ was not deluded, nor was He a deceiver. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life; and the only way out is by a personal relationship to Him. We are never exonerated from thinking on the basis on which Jesus Christ has put things by Redemption.

The dance of circumstances

Nay but Thou knewest us, Lord Christ, Thou
knowest
Well Thou rememberest our feeble frame,
Thou canst conceive our highest and our lowest,
Pulses of nobleness and aches of shame.
Therefore have pity! not that we accuse Thee,
Curse Thee and die and charge Thee with our woe;
Not thro’ Thy fault, O Holy One, we lose Thee,
Nay, but our own—yet hast Thou made us so!
F. W. H. Myers

1. Personal Decisions for Christians
(a) Sin—destroyed (1 John 3:8)
(b) Sensuality—denied (Romans 8:13; Colossians 3:3–6)
(c) Sentimentality—ignored (Luke 6:46)
(d) Sensibilities—controlled ( John 17:15; Romans 14:20–23)

2. Providential Discretions for Christians
(a) The Mischief of Absorption (Galatians 4:16–20)
(b) The Mistiness of Abstractions (1 Corinthians 5:9–13)
(c) The Meaning of Affiliation (1 Peter 2:13–17)

Without a country ye are bastards of humanity; without a country ye have neither name, token, voice, nor, rights; no admission as brothers into the fellowship of peoples.
Mazzini

“Through the shadow of an agony cometh Redemption. “11 In a supreme agony something dies, no man is the same after it. The majority of us live our lives untouched by an agony; but in war, the chances are that all are hit somewhere, and it is through a personal agony that a man is likely to begin to understand what the New Testament reveals.

As long as we have our morality well within our own grasp, to talk about Jesus Christ and His Redemption is “much ado about nothing”; but when a man’s thick hide is pierced, or he comes to his wits’ end and enters the confines of an agony, he is apt to find that there is a great deal from which he has been shut away, and in his condition of suffering he discovers there is more in the Cross of Christ than intellectually he had thought possible. Beware of believing that the human soul is simple; look at yourself, or read the 139th Psalm, and you will soon find the human soul is much too complex to touch. When an intellectualist says that life is simple, you may be sure he is sufficiently removed from facts to have no attention paid to him. Things look simple as he writes about them, but let him get “into the soup, ” and he will find they are complicated. The only simple thing in human life is our relationship to God in Christ. Circumstances are the things that twist a man’s thinking into contortions.

1. Personal Decisions for Christians

One of the first things we discover in dealing with the big universal problem is that it is mirrored in each individual life. When we are young we are all meta-physicians, we don’t deal with physical things, but with things behind the physical.

The young mind seems more competent than the middleaged mind, because the latter has come the length of dealing with facts. The meta-physician and the philosopher deal only with abstractions which are supposed to explain facts. It is always the young mind that attempts to deal with the big universal problems; but when the young mind has had a dose of the plague of its own heart, the problem of the universe is obliterated by another, viz. , that of its own personal life, and if a solution can be found for that, it has a solution for the problems which lie further afield. The problem of the universe is not mine but the Almighty’s; the problem I am up against is the muddle inside.

Can I see a way out there? Is the God I have only an abstraction? If so, don’t let me treat Him as anything else. Or is He one with whom I can get into a personal relationship, one who will enable me to solve my problems? A Christian is a disciple of Jesus Christ’s by the possession of a new heredity ( John 3:3), one who has been brought into personal relationship with Jesus Christ by the indwelling Spirit of God, not one with certain forms of creed or doctrine; these are the effects of his relationship, not the ground of it. The man who brings with him any conception of God (especially if he is a Scotsman), will bring a conception based on Calvinism, a God described by the “Omnis. ” That God does not amount to anything to me.

If I start out and say that the essential nature of God can be defined as omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence, I shall end by proving that Jesus Christ is a liar, for He was not omnipotent and omniscient and omnipresent when He was on earth; yet He claimed to be the complete revelation of God— “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father. Either my theology is wrong or Jesus Christ is. If Jesus Christ is right, I must be prepared to revise my theology and say that those terms simply express certain manifestations which I called God. But if the essential nature of God is holiness, then I can see how it is possible for Jesus Christ to be God manifest in the flesh. The doctrine of the Incarnation means that God became the weakest thing in His own creation, a Baby. The doctrine of the Trinity is not a Christian revelation, it is an attempt on the part of the mind of man to expound the Christian revelation, which is that there is only one God to the Christian, and His name is Jesus Christ. A Christian is an avowed agnostic because he has accepted what he knows about God on the ground of revelation; he has not found it out for himself.

(a) Sin (1 John 3:8)

According to Jesus Christ, the first decision is that sin has to be destroyed. The first great moral effect of Jesus Christ’s coming into the world is that He saves His people from their sins; not simply that He saves them from hell and puts them right for heaven; that is the finding of a Protestant evangel, not the New Testament view, and is only one phase of salvation. The great purpose of Jesus Christ’s coming is that He might put man on a line where sin in him can be destroyed (1 John 2:1). The test of a Christian, according to the New Testament, is not that a man believes aright, but that he lives as he believes, i. e. , he is able to manifest that he has a power which, apart from his personal relationship to Jesus Christ, he would not have. We all know about the power that spoils our sin, but does not take away our appetite for it. The first great decision to be made is that the only thing to do with sin is to destroy it, and the incoming of Jesus Christ enables a man to destroy the wrong relationship in himself.

(b) Sensuality (Romans 8:13; Colossians 3:3–6)

Sensuality is not sin, it is the way my body works in connection with external circumstances whereby I begin to satisfy myself. Sensuality will work in a man who is delivered from sin by Jesus Christ as well as in a man who is not. I do not care what your experience may be as a Christian, you may be trapped by sensual ity at any time. Paul says, “Mortify the deeds of the body, ” mortify means to destroy by neglect. One of the first big moral lessons a man has to learn is that he cannot destroy sin by neglect; sin has to be handled by the Redemption of Jesus Christ, it cannot be handled by me.

Heredity is a bigger problem than I can cope with; but if I will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit on the basis of Christ’s Redemption, He enables me to work out that Redemption in my experience. With regard to sensuality, that is my business; I have to mortify it, and if I don’t, it will never be mortified. If I take any part of my natural life and use it to satisfy myself, that is sensuality. A Christian has to learn that his body is not his own. “What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost . . . and ye are not your own? ” Watch that you learn to mortify. If I have an intellectual puzzle, I must see that I run it correspondingly with moral obedience. If I am perplexed about God’s real universe, have I begun to make personal decisions about sin and sensuality? Every religious sentiment that is not worked out in obedience, carries with it a secret immorality; it is the way human nature is constituted.

Whenever I utilise myself for my own ends, I am giving way to sensuality, and it is done not only physically, but mentally also, and one of the most humiliating things for a Christian is to realise how he does it. The impertinence of mental sensuality lies in the refusal to deny the right of an undisciplined intelligence that is contrary to Jesus Christ. If I am going to find out a thing scientifically, I must find it out by curiosity; but if I want to find out anything on the moral line, I can only do it by obedience. God put man in a garden with the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and said, “Thou shalt not eat of it. God did not say they were not to know good and evil, but that they were not to know good and evil by eating of the tree. They were intended to know evil in the way Jesus Christ knew it, viz. , by contrast with good. They did eat of the tree, consequently the human race knows good by contrast with evil. Adam knew evil positively and good negatively, and none of us knows the order God intended. No man who has eaten of the fruit of the tree knows evil by contrast with good. The curiosity of the human heart finds out the bad things first. The fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil gives the bias of insatiable curiosity on the bad line, and it is only by the readjustment through Jesus Christ that the bias on the other line enters in—a tremendous thirst after God. Jesus Christ knew evil negatively by positively knowing good; He never ate of the tree, and when a man is reborn of the Spirit of God that is the order.

(c) Sentimentality (Luke 6:46)

Sentimentality is produced by watching things we are not in. We are all capable of being sentimental, i. e. , of living in a state of mind which produces emotions we do not intend to carry out. A hundred and one things will produce sentimentality—a cup of tea, a concert; a letter or a novel will do it. “I like to have my emotions stirred, but don’t ask me to carry them out on their own level. ” If I allow an emotion and refuse to act it out on its right level, it will react on a lower level. The higher the emotion, the deeper the reaction; consequently, the higher the religious emotion, unless worked out on its own level, the more debased and appalling the reaction. That is why Paul connects sanctification with immorality, and why religious men fall much more bestially. Our guide as to what emotions we are going to allow is this—What will be the logical outcome of this emotion? If it has to do with sin and Satan, then grip it on the threshold of your mind and allow it no more way. You have no business to harbour an emotion the outcome of which you can see to be bad; if it is an emotion to be generous, then be generous, or the emotion will react and make you a selfish brute. Sentimentality has to be ignored. Jesus Christ said—”You call Me Master and Lord, but you don’t do what I say. ” That is the gist of the failure of Christianity; it has been tried and abandoned because it has been found difficult; but it has never failed when it has been tried and gone on with honourably. There is no problem or difficulty that stretches before a man for which adherence to Jesus Christ will not give him the line of solution.

(d) Sensibilities ( John 17:15; Romans 14:20–23)

Sensibilities” means the things at the basis of life, the way we are naturally related to life. The three main sensibilities in a man’s life are sex, money and food. What has he to do with them? They are not sinful, they are plain facts which can be either devilish or sublime. Whenever Jesus Christ brought His teaching to a focus it was on two points, viz. , Marriage and Money. In ordaining sex God took the big ger risk and made either the most gigantic blunder or the most sublime thing. Sex has to be controlled, so have money and food. By what? By the highest. When God created the Federal Head of the race He required him to take part in his own development by a series of moral choices, whereby he was to sacrifice his natural sensibilities to the will of God and trans form them. Our Lord says He does not pray that His disciples shall be taken out of the world, but that they shall be kept from the evil one, kept from being over whelmed. Paul, in Romans 14, beats out into gold foil what Jesus Christ gives in nugget form. He warns all through—Beware of those who teach abstinence from marriage and from meats, they are true neither to God nor man as God made him. A false religion grew up in the Middle Ages which taught, “You must get out of the world, deny sex, and cut your self off from everything around. The stamp of false religion is that it denies that these sensibilities have any nobility in them. It is spiritual cowardice to deny these things because they have been made sordid and bestial; if they cannot be controlled for the glory of God, Jesus Christ has misled us. Remember that we have to live a Christian life in these bodies, to get the right alloy which will produce the thing Jesus Christ stood for. The Incarnation reveals the amalgam of the Divine and the human, the right alloy, i. e. , that which makes the Divine serviceable for current use. One of the first ingredients for a man’s thinking is that the Incarnation is a picture of what takes place in every man who is touched by the Spirit of God, i. e. , the Son of God is formed in him by regeneration. Jesus Christ’s holiness has to do with human life as it is. It is not a mystical, aesthetic thing that cannot work in the ordinary things of life, it is a holiness which “can be achieved with an ordinary diet and a wife and five children.

” 2. Provident Discretions for Christians

The great danger of Socialism is that it is vague, it has the right vision, but it ignores the margins and expects to come to a bigger understanding of things whilst ignoring the facts that are. Or take Sacerdotalism, which says the only way to build a governing peace over the human race is by an ecclesiastical system, such as the domination of the Pope. We can see to day how much mischief and uselessness underlies this teaching. These things do not seem to be a way out, but remember they are. They give rest and sustaining and peace, but not on the best line.

They crush instead of developing. Another “way out” is the ultra holiness line. There are those who go to the opposite extreme and say we must live a pure Divine life, ignoring all the claims of the natural. Jesus Christ taught that the natural must be sacrificed through obedience, and turned into the spiritual. If it is not, it will produce a tremendous divorce in the life.

(a) The Mischief of Absorption (Galatians 4:16–20)

This teaching says: There are defects in the churches, but they are not to be swept away on that account, the defects must be corrected; form the churches into an imperial Church which will dominate everything. That is what happened when Paul began to plant the Christian faith, the Judaisers came after him and said—”Now we must absorb this, ” and the same spirit is at work in ecclesiastical minds to day. The only way to get peace, they say, is by a big Church that will absorb everything; an imperial power to dominate. If you do, divisions will be quieted and a peace produced such as was produced by the Roman Empire, a peace that dominates by absorption. The divisions of the churches are to be deplored, and denominationalism is to be deplored, but we must not forget that denominations have reared up the best men we know. The defects are clear and they have to be remedied; something will have to be done, and one suggested way out is this idea of absorption which has been proved in history to be a way out.

(b) The Mistiness of Abstractions (1 Corinthians 5:9–13)

Socialism and false Christianity are both misty, they deal with the idea of absorption, that you have to run the purist line where it cannot be run, denying the fact of nations and of families as they really are. Paul says—In your own spiritual relationships you have to be “dead nuts” against sensuality, but don’t be fanatical. You have to maintain your personal relationship in purity amongst those who are not pure, and see that no inter mixture of impurity gets in. In your own spiritual community these things must not be. Our Lord takes the same line in Matthew 18:15–17. Never attempt to solve outside problems first. If sin is to be destroyed in my personal life on the basis of Redemption, it is to be destroyed outside me also; if sensuality is to be mortified in my personal life, it is to be mortified outside me also.

The majority of us begin with the bigger problems outside and forget the one inside. A man has to learn the “plague of his own heart” before his own problems can be solved, then he will be free to help solve the problems outside. The mistake is that we want to take the path of a shell. Jesus Christ says—No, I have taken the long trail, and “in your patience possess ye your souls, ” i. e. , acquire the new way of looking at things. There are problems not easy of solution, they need patient deal ing with day in and day out.

Take, for instance, the way some missionaries train converts with regard to marriage laws; they have tried the “hustling” dodge, and found it to be no good. It takes a long time to lift people to a cleaner “sty”; it is absurd to rush in a fine ethic of Christianity on people who have been living in polygamy, their education takes time. The danger of the visionaries is that they do not seem to know how to get their visions to walk, and they never will unless they remember and take into account these big facts of sex and money and food. Are you going to judge with the same standards, a well brought up man with generations of good, clean blood in his veins, and a man who has generations of wrong and evil in his heredity? How are you going to judge the man who boils up with bestiality? It is with him not a matter of escaping from conventions, or of taking on the colour of those he is with; there is the great fact underneath. You cannot judge him, you have to be immensely patient with him.

(c) The Meaning of Affiliation (1 Peter 2:13–17)

In the present crisis another “way out” is not to ignore facts as they are, but to affiliate them; the ultimate end is that demarcations must go. It is the affiliation of churches, not the absorption of them, that will solve the problems, and the same with nations. But, remember, we are on crutches just now and there are things to be taken into account. Every man is up against these things to day— socialist or imperialist, he cannot think without being touched by problems.

It is not that we can offer solutions for these problems, but that the line on which personal problems are solved by Jesus Christ is the line on which the bigger problems will be solved also. But it will take a long time, and we have need of patience. Answer the problem in yourself first: How long did it take you to get your ideals actual? to stand where you are now? There are those in the national life who are visionaries and are apt to forget that at present we are not there, just as there are visionaries in the Christian life who are apt to forget the facts of human life—I like the vision, but don’t ask me how I am to make it real. I like orchids, but don’t ask me to look at the miasmic swamp in which they grow; I like the fine flower of virtue, but don’t show me how it was produced. No man is born virtuous, virtue and purity are the outcome of fight; innocence is natural. Man has to have enough moral muscle in him to fight against the thing that wants to make him immoral; immediately he fights, he becomes virtuous in that particular. It is a difficult thing to fight for virtue. Virtue for a man, purity for a woman, and innocence for a child, is God’s order.

In all our views we must get back to facts as they are. Keep your vision, but take facts as they are; make a clean sweep of the old rubbish, the creeds and notions, and then begin to build bit by bit. You will find that the personal problems are the ones that call first for solution, and when you have solved those, you can begin to help solve the others. If the men who get back after this war will remain true to what they saw in the agonies, they ought to begin to make the new impression felt along every line.

The Pressure of the Present

The index to moral failure is to care more for a religious society than for the Church, more for a trade union than for the nation.
Dr. Forsyth

1. Findings from the Historic Christ (Luke 11:17–26)
(a) The Kingdom of God (v. 20)
(b) The Kingdom of Satan (v. 18)
(c) The Kingdom of Man (vv. 21–26)

Christ ruined many careers and brought sorrow and death to many souls.

2. Findings from Hysteric Christianity (Mark 9)
(a) The Vision of God (v. 5)
(b) The Valley of Godlessness (vv. 17–19)
(c) The Verity of Gumption (v. 29)

Don’t throw on God the dirty work you are called to do.

A point of view is tyrannous, consequently when a man gets knocked about by circumstances and acquires other points of view, his findings are con fused for a time. We mean by “The pressure of the present” the things that crowd a man out from thinking on his own line. If he could only cut out the fact that he is a man, or that things are as they are, he could get on all right. We all have the trick of saying—If only I were not where I am! —If only I had not got the kind of people I have to live with! If our faith or our religion does not help us in the conditions we are in, we have either a further struggle to go through, or we had better abandon that faith and religion.

We have seen that there are ways out—the visionary way, the socialist way, or the mystical Christian way, each tending towards the brotherhood of man. The vision is all right, but how is it going to be made actual? It is easy to talk about God and holiness; humanity and love for one another; but present things must be taken into account. Jesus Christ’s vision was unmistakable, and His demands from human beings were terrific, but He always took “things as they are” into account, and He insisted that in order to carry out His demands men must have the right “alloy. ” The Incarnation means the right alloy. For God to be of any use to human beings He must become incar nate; that means dust and Deity mixed in one.

If you have merely an abstraction, the vision without the dust of the actual, you will never make the vision real. As Dr. Forsyth points out, if in dealing with religious societies, you ignore the barriers and simply look for ward to the time when there will be no barriers, you are making a mistake and you will end in failure. The vision is right, but you must take things as they are into account. Our life as disciples is not a dream, but a discipline which calls for the use of all our powers. There are two worlds—the Actual and the Real. My personal consciousness is at home in the actual world, but not in the real; it just touches the real, it touches God. There is an inference that there is a world other than the actual, but I am not at home in it; all I can get at by my personal consciousness is a fictitious reality. Neither the actual nor the ideal is the real; according to Jesus Christ the real can only be worked out on the line of personal experience.

Our Lord was at home in the ideal as well as in the actual, and consequently everything in His personal life was real. We are apt to forget that in order to get at real ity we have not only to use our heads, but our con sciences. No man as yet has ever reached reality by his intellect. A man may have sublime views of life and at the same time be a moral tadpole in regard to actual life. The same with emotions; a man may have any number of aesthetic susceptibilities, the finest appre ciation of colour and feeling and sound, but in actual life prove that none of it touches the sordid actualities of life. There is only one thing in a man that brings him to reality, and that is his conscience. Conscience is the faculty in me that fixes on the highest I know; and it is through conscience that man touches the reality of things and becomes transformed. It is then the intellect and the emotions can come together.

1. Findings from the Historic Christ (Luke 11:17–26)

Christianity is not adherence to a set of principles— righteousness, goodness, uprightness—all these things are secondary. The first great fundamental thing about Christianity is a personal relationship to Jesus Christ which enables a man to work out the ideal and actual as one in his own personal life.

No man thinks so clearly at any time or is ever so thrilled as in his “teens. ” The tragedy begins when he finds his actual life cannot be brought up to the standard of the ideal, and he closes with an agony of his own. Then he goes to preachers who talk about the ideal, or to books, thinking he will find the real thing; but too often he does not. He finds the vision there, but not working out in actual practice; and his agony deepens. The ideal presented by Jesus Christ fascinates some men right away; there is something enthralling about Him; but inevitably, sooner or later, they come to the experience of the early disciples recorded in Mark 14:50: “They all forsook him and fled. “I gave all I had to the ideal presented by Jesus Christ, I honestly tried my best to serve Him, but I cannot go on; the New Testament presents ideals beyond my attainment. I won’t lower my ideals, although I realise that I can never hope to make them actual. ” No man is so laboured or crushed as the man who, with the religion of ideals, finds he cannot carry them out.

There are many more men in that attitude than is supposed. Men are kept away from Jesus Christ by a sense of honesty as much as by dishonesty. I don’t deny that Jesus Christ saves—but if you only knew me! —the mistakes I have made, the wrong things I have done, the blundering things—I should be a perfect disgrace to Him. Our Lord says to such a one, “Come unto Me . . . , and I will give you rest. When a man comes, he will realise that Jesus Christ does not tell him to do his best, but—Surrender to Me, and I will put into you that which will make the ideal and the actual one, and you will be able to work out in actual life what you see by the power of vision. Without Jesus Christ there is an unbridgeable gap between the ideal and the actual. The only way out is through a personal relationship to Him, a relationship with Himself whereby a man can transform the ideal and the actual into one and slowly work it out in his own experience, and then help other folks. The thing you find to be the solution in your per sonal life is also the line of solution for other things.

If Jesus Christ is the way for a man to make things real in his own life, He is also the way for things outside a man’s personal life to be made real. It is easy to keep our intellects busy with the ideal, but the problem is how to bring the ideal and the actual together, how to make our actual life in accordance with our ideal. Jesus Christ says, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. ” He is not talking about deliverance from hell, but about being born into a new realm. The religion of Jesus Christ means that a man is delivered from sin into something which makes him forget all about himself. The trick of pseudo evangelism is that it drives a man into concentrated interest in himself. The curse of much modern religion is that it makes us desperately interested in ourselves, overweeningly concerned about our own whiteness.

These findings are not part and parcel of the aver age Christian conception of Jesus Christ, because we do not take our findings from the New Testament, we take them from what we have been taught about Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ said, “If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin; but now they have no cloke for their sin” ( John 15:22). Then why did He come? Why should He come with an ideal that knocks the bottom out of my self realisation? Why tell me to love my enemies when I hate them? Why tell me to be pure in heart when I am impure? Why should He taunt me with ideals? If Jesus Christ is only a Teacher, then all He can do is to tantalise us, to erect a standard we cannot attain to; but when we are born again of the Spirit of God, we know that He did not come only to teach us, He came to make us what He teaches we should be. These are some of the things which ought to be deduced from reading the New Testament.

(a) The Kingdom of God (Luke 11:20)

We know about the kingdom of man, but not about the other two kingdoms which belong to the domain Jesus Christ lived in. The “strong man” is Satan; the stronger than he, ” Jesus Christ. The result of Jesus Christ’s com ing is disturbance. Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). When Satan rules, his goods, i. e. , the souls of men, are in peace; there is no breaking out into sin and wrongdoing, and before God can rule man’s kingdom He must first over throw this false rule.

The coming of Jesus Christ is not a peaceful thing; it is overwhelming and frantically disturbing, because the first thing He does is to destroy every peace that is not based on a personal relationship to Himself. Am I willing to be born into the realm Jesus Christ is in? If I am, I must be pre pared for chaos straight away in the realm I am in. The rule which has come in between God and man has to be eclipsed. Jesus Christ’s entering into me means absolute chaos in the way I have been looking at things, a turning of everything upside down. Just as Jesus Christ produces havoc in personal lives, so He will produce it all through on every line. For instance, if Jesus Christ had not obeyed the call of His Father, His own nation would not have blasphemed against the Holy Ghost. He ruined the career of a handful of fishermen, He disappointed and crushed the hopes of many and perturbed their peace. He continually produced havoc in people’s lives.

(b) The Kingdom of Satan (Luke 11:18)

There is a difference between the Devil and Satan. The Bible holds man responsible for the introduction of Satan. Adam started a communication with another of God’s creations, and the result was Satan. Jesus Christ calls the self realisation point of view, “Satan, ” anti Christ (Matthew 16:23). When our Lord comes face to face with Satan, He deals with him as representing the attitude man takes up in organising his life apart from any consideration of God. For a thing to be satanic does not mean that it is an abominable and immoral thing. The satanically managed man is moral, upright, proud, and individual; he is absolutely self governed and has no need of God. Jesus Christ says “that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God” (Luke 16:15).

(c) The Kingdom of Man (Luke 11:21–26)

Jesus Christ always said, “If any man will be My dis ciple”—He did not clamour for him, or button hole him. He never took a man off his guard, or used a revivalistic meeting to get a man out of his wits and then say, “Believe in Me, ” but, “Take time and con sider what you are doing; if you would be My disciple, you must lose your ‘soul, ‘ i. e. , your way of reasoning about things. ” When I am born from above (rv mg), I have to reconstruct another soul, I have to look at things from a different standpoint, viz. , the standpoint of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ taught non resistance on the physical line in order that men might resist more on the moral line. When He was brought face to face with evil, His attitude was “Get! “—no compromise. When Jesus Christ comes in with His standards, a man’s way of looking at things is upset, and he begins to see the point of view of Jesus Christ when he strikes his own personal agony. He is brought face to face with the possibility that after all Jesus Christ knows what He is talking about, and that Rational ism may be a fools’ paradise, and he himself an intel lectual ostrich. We never blame our fundamental conception until we get deep enough down. Ratio nalism at the basis is wrong; it goes to pieces just where we expect it to prove right.

2. Findings from Hysteric Christianity (Mark 9)

That is, Christianity based on sentimentality.

(a) The Vision of God (Mark 9:5)

We are not built for mountains and dawns and artis tic affinities; they are for moments of inspiration, that is all. We are built for the valley, for the ordinary stuff of life, and this is where we have to prove our mettle. A false Christianity takes us up on the mount and we want to stay there. But what about the devil possessed world? Oh, let it go to hell! We are having a great time up here.

(b) The Valley of Godlessness (Mark 9:17–19)

The intellectualist or dreamer who by his dreams or isolation is not made fitter to deal with actual life, proves that his dreams are mere hysterical drivel. If his dreams only succeed in making him hold aloof from his fellow men, a visionary who deals only with things belonging to the mountaintop, he is self indulgent to a degree. No man has any right to be a spectator of his fellow men; he ceases to be in touch with reality. It is a great thing to be on the mount with God, and the mountains are meant for inspiration and meditation; but a man is taken there only in order that he may go down afterwards among the devil possessed and lift them up. Our Christianity has been as powerless as dish water with regard to things as they are; consequently the net result of Christianity is judged to be a failure. But Christianity, according to Jesus Christ, has never been tried and failed; it has been tried and abandoned in individual cases because it has been found a bit too hard, too definite and emphatic, and for the same reason it has been aban doned in nations and in Churches; but Christianity has never been tried and gone through with honour ably and found to fail. The same thing with regard to the socialistic vision; it is a great thing to have the vision, but those who have it are apt to forget the limitation of actual things as they are. Jesus Christ gives the vision of God, God’s order; but He also gives us God’s per missive will. God’s order, according to Jesus Christ, is no sin, no sickness, no limitation, no evil, and no wrong: His permissive will allows these things, and I have to get at God’s order through His permissive will by an effort of my own.

(c) The Verity of Gumption (Mark 9:29)

The disciples had the stamp of all false hysteric reli gion. “You work a miracle; we don’t want to accept the moral responsibility. ” Jesus Christ said: “You cannot do these things by magic, it must be done by concentration. ” Peter thought it would be a fine thing to remain on the Mount, but Jesus Christ took them down from the mount and put them into the valley, i. e. , the place that explains the meaning of the vision. There are times when my false religion makes me want to throw my dirty work on God. Supposing I am a slovenly workman and get saved, and I say—”Well, I will ask God to make my work fine and clean”; He won’t do it, it is not His job. God’s job is to alter my heredity, I cannot alter that; but when my heredity is altered, I have to manifest my altered heredity in actual circumstances.

This is not only true in personal life, but in every domain. For instance, God won’t clear up our social conditions; Jesus Christ is not a social Reformer, He came to alter us first, and if there is any social reform done on earth, we will have to do it.

We are not to ask God to do what He has created us to do, any more than we are to attempt to do what He alone can do. Prayer is often a temptation to bank on a miracle of God instead of on a moral issue, i. e. , it is much easier to ask God to do my work than it is to do it myself. Until we are disciplined properly, we will always be inclined to bank on God’s miracles and refuse to do the moral thing ourselves. It is our job, and it will never be done unless we do it.Visions are great things, but it is useless to tell a man about the vision of God on earth unless you can get down into the mire he is in and lift him up; and the marvel is that if you have got hold of the vision of God and are working it out by moral obedience in your own life, you can do the lifting. Moral insight is gained only by obedience.

The second I disobey in personal bodily chastity, I hinder everyone with whom I come in contact; if in moral integrity I dis obey for one second, I hinder everyone; and if as a Christian I disobey in spiritual integrity, others will suffer too. The vision must be worked out or there is no grip in it. The majority of us who are called Christians could do nothing when the war struck us. We had our visions of God, our notions of prayer, etc. , but we had no grip, we could not touch the demon possessed. We have to deal with men who actually have done the wrong thing; can we lift them up into the place where they will become changed men? or can we only preach in a way that is equivalent to putting a snowdrift over a dung heap? If we cannot live in the demon possessed valley, with the hold of God on us, lifting up those who are down, by the power of the thing that is in us, our Christianity is only an abstraction. We need to remember that the vision must be worked out in our own personal experience first. If the vision is real, the biggest test of it is that it makes God easier to believe in. Think of the men and women you know who have made it easier for you to believe in God.

You go to them with your problems, and things get different, the atmosphere of your mind alters; you have come in contact with a man or woman who in his actual life is working out his vision. The best way you and I can help our fellow men is to work out the thing in our own lives first. Unless it is backed up by our life, talking is of no use. We may talk a donkey’s hind leg off, but we are powerless to do any lifting. If we look after the vision in our own life, we shall be a benediction to other people.

The Psychological Phase—I

But I, amid the torture and the taunting,
I have had Thee!
Thy hand was holding my hand fast and faster,
Thy voice was close to me;
And glorious eyes said, “Follow Me, thy Master,
Smile as I smile thy faithfulness to see.”

Divergent Ffundamental points
1. Health
A perfect balance between our organism and the outer world (Psalm 73:3–14)
(a) Socialism (Revelation 13:11–18)
(b) Spirituality (2 Corinthians 4:16–18)

2. Happiness
A perfect balance between our inclination and environment (Philippians 3:17–20)
(a) Superman (2 Thessalonians 2:3–12)
(b) Sanctification (1 Thessalonians 4:3; 5:23– 24; 1 John 3:3)

3. Holiness
A perfect balance between our disposition and the law of God (John 14:27)
(a) Sin (1 John 3:8)
(b) Sacrament

The rationalist says—”I can explain the conscious by reason, therefore all the rest is reasonable. ” There are chaotic elements which burst up into a man’s conscious life and make him know that there are things beyond reason; not that they contradict reason, but that they are different from it. The basis of things in a man’s personal life is tragedy; at any second there may come a terrific upheaval from underneath that may knock all his calculations to smithereens. Men may be good at dealing with problems on the outside but never have faced one inside their own breast bone. The thing that knocks the conceit out of a man is to get what Solomon talked about, a dose of “the plague of his own heart, ” he becomes a little less certain that he can rule himself. When I receive the Spirit of God, I am lifted not out of reason, but into touch with the infinite Reason of God. Health, Happiness, and Holiness are all diver gent views as to what is the main aim of a man’s life.

1. Health (Psalm 73:3–14)

Health means the balance between my physical life and external nature, and is maintained purely by a sufficient fighting vitality within against things out side. Health is equilibrium maintained through a terrific power of fight. Disease means that the harmony of health is gone, and a sign that the fighting corpuscles are getting weak. The things which keep you going when you are alive, disintegrate you when you are dead. Everything that is not my physical life is designed to put me to death, but if I have enough fighting power I produce the balance of health. The same is true in my moral life; everything that does not partake of the nature of virtue is the enemy of virtue in me, and it depends on what moral calibre I have as to whether I overcome and produce virtue.

I am only moral if I have sufficient moral power in me to fight; immediately I fight, I am moral in that particular. Disinclination to sin is not virtue, any more than innocence is purity. Innocence has always to be shielded, purity is something that has been tested and tried and has triumphed, something that has character at the back of it, that can overcome, and has over come. Virtue is acquired, and so is purity. Everything that is not virtuous tries to make me immoral. Always do something you don’t need to do for the sake of doing it—it keeps you in moral fighting trim. The same thing spiritually, everything that is not my spiritual life makes for its undoing. Holiness is the balance between my disposition and the laws of God as expressed in Jesus Christ, and if I have enough spiritual fighting capacity I shall produce a character that is like Jesus Christ’s. Character must be attained, it is never given to us.

The basis of physical, moral, and spiritual life is antagonism. A healthy mind in a healthy body, ” is not always true, for some of the finest minds are in diseased bodies. On the other hand the Psalmist talks about the “wicked”—”there are no bands in their death. . . . They are not in trouble as other men; neither are they plagued like other men. . . . Their eyes stand out with fatness: they have more than heart could wish. ” The healthy minded cult evades anything that would be likely to upset the health of the body. A man can make certain forms of vice or drugs necessary to himself, and the moralist who ignores the fact that a man will suffer for a time by giving them up, is nothing short of a fool.

Every appetite I create demands its satisfaction; and the harmony of my body depends on its being satisfied; but not the health of my moral life. If the moral life is allowed its way, the man who has maintained his bodily health by other means has to go to rack and ruin before he gets another balance. No wonder men will do any thing to avoid conviction of sin! No man can have his state of mind altered without suffering for it in his body, and that is why men will do anything rather than be upset. “I like to listen to this talk about Jesus Christ, but don’t put your finger on the thing that upsets my mind. Why should I bother with a standard of things that upsets me? ” The healthy minded cult runs through every thing. If certain types of health are to be maintained, all social life will have to be re faced, marriage will go by the board, and all the higher amenities of friend ship—all the best and noblest moral relationships. Sin is a thing that puts man’s self out of centre altogether, making it excentric; and when the Spirit of God convicts him, the man knows he is wrongly related to God, to his own body, and to everything around him, and he is in a state of abject misery.

The health of the body is upset, the balance pushed right out, by conviction of sin. Conviction of sin makes a man’s beauty “to consume away like a moth. ” “Beauty” means the perfectly ordered completeness of man’s whole nature. When once a man’s mind is upset, that beauty begins to go, the equilibrium is upset. This accounts for the characteristic tendency abroad to day: ignore sin, deny it ever was; if you make mistakes, for get them, live the healthy minded, open hearted, sun shiny life, don’t allow yourself to be convicted of sin. To say “Camp life has made men worse” is not true; nothing can! Camp life strips the veneer of civilised life from a man, and he comes out with what he is, he has to reveal himself, but nothing can make a man either better or worse than he is.

In producing a splendid soldier you produce a splendid animal; then to be horrified because the animal gets its way is absurd. Is it our idea of a man’s life, that he should be a splendid healthy animal? If so, there are several things you will have to cut out; you will have to cut out Jesus Christ, never read the New Testament, don’t let the standards of Jesus Christ—never hate, never lust, always do more than your duty—come in, or you will upset your health. Health seems to be the basis of people’s outlook, but it can never account for the problems.

(a) Socialism (Revelation 13:11–18)

Numbers are used as symbols for great big generalities, and the Book of Revelation takes the number 666 to be the symbol of humanity sufficient for itself, it does not need God.

The description given is of a great system in which humanity is its own god. (See Genesis 3:5, 22. ) When the Bible talks of Man, it refers to the Federal Head of the race. The remarkable point of the vision is that it says the beast (in the spiritual, the self realising, sense) looks like a lamb, but talks like a dragon; that is, he looks like Jesus Christ, but when he talks, he talks like the old imperial dragon; when the crisis comes, he has tooth and claw exactly like the beast. The vision of Socialism is magnificent; there are benedictions and blessings for mankind on the line of Socialism which have never been yet; but if once the root is cut from Redemption, it will be one of the most frantic forms of despotic tyranny the human race has ever known. It looks like the lamb, but when the big crisis comes, it gives life to the beast. It is in the wake of Socialism that the resuscitation of Plato’s ideas will come. Trace your ideas back to their roots, and you will find the root of Socialism is in Plato’s teaching. You will produce healthy organisms, but will you produce noble minded men and women after the stamp of Jesus Christ?

2. Happiness (Philippians 3:17–21)

There is a difference between environment and cir cumstances. Every man has his own environment; it is that element in his circumstances which fits his disposition. We each make our own environment, our personality does it for us. Happiness means we select only those things out of our circumstances that will keep us happy. It is the great basis of false Christianity. The Bible nowhere speaks about a “happy” Christian; it talks plentifully of joy. Happiness depends on things that happen, and may sometimes be an insult; joyfulness is never touched by external conditions, and a joyful heart is never an insult. Who could be happy these days? It would be the outcome of the most miserable selfishness to be happy under such conditions as are everywhere to day, the sign of a shallowminded, selfish individual. Happiness is the characteristic of a child’s life, and God condemns us for taking happiness out of a child’s life; but we should have done with happiness long ago, we should be men and women facing the stern issues of life, knowing that the grace of God is sufficient for every problem the devil can present. We start with the idea that prosperity or happiness or morality is the end of a man’s existence; according to God, it is something other than any of these, viz. , “to glorify God and enjoy Him for ever. Happiness would be all right if things were reason able; it would be ideal if there were no selfinterest, but everyone of us is cunning enough to take advan tage somewhere, and after a while my inclination is to get my happiness at your cost.

(a) Superman (2 Thessalonians 2:3–12)

In Socialism there are things which look like Jesus Christ, but in the end they are more dragon like than anything else, because one thing is evaded. The same with happiness, when once happiness and self indulgence are allowed to rule and have their way, the end is the “Superman. If I believe I have the finest idea of happiness for my child, my child will have to come my way, and “damn the consequences. The same thing is true with a class or a nation or a state if it believes it is God. Each one of us in his own domain exhibits the tendency: in the state it is on a gigantic scale because the state is bigger than a man’s individual life. The standard of happiness ends in the upset of happiness, in a tyranny and despotism of the most appalling order.

3. Holiness ( John 14:27)

Holiness is the balance between our disposition and the law of God as expressed in Jesus Christ, and it is such a stern thing that the majority of us have either not begun it, or we have begun it and left it alone. What kind of peace had Jesus Christ? A peace that kept Him for thirty years at home with brothers and sisters who did not believe in Him; a peace that kept Him through three years of popularity, hatred, and scandal; and He says, “My peace I give unto you”; “let not your heart be troubled, ” i. e. , see that your heart does not get disturbed out of its relation ship to Me. But remember Jesus Christ has to upset the old equilibrium first. When a man is probed into by the Spirit of God, the waters of his conscious life get troubled and other ideas emerge.

If I am going to follow the dictates of the Spirit of God and take up the attitude of Jesus Christ to things, it will produce an earthquake in my outlook. It will begin with the bodily life—”Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost? If you would be My disciple, says Jesus, that is the cost. No man can shift the centre of his life with out being upset. Men of good taste are averse to the teaching of Jesus Christ, ” because if He is right, they are wrong. Take up any attitude of Jesus Christ’s and let it work, and the first thing that happens is that the old order and the old peace go. You can not get back peace on the same level. If once you have allowed Jesus Christ to upset the equilibrium, holiness is the inevitable result, or no peace for ever (Matthew 10:34).

If happiness or health is a man’s main idea, let him keep away from Jesus Christ’s, for if he has any conscience at all, he will lose that health and happiness. Jesus Christ stands for holiness. At all costs a man must be rightly related to God. Redemption is the basis. When you take a point of view, watch the things it does not cover, and if you are going to think, think clean through, playing the man on every line.

The Psychological Phase—II

Man Becomes What He Is

or the glory and the passion of this midnight
I praise Thy name—I give Thee thanks, O Christ!
Thou that hast neither failed me nor forsaken
Through these hard hours with victory overpriced;
Now that I too of Thy passion have partaken,
For the world’s sake—called—elected—sacrificed!
H. E. Hamilton King

N.b.—o N personality and
individuality; ddisposition and
character
1. Bias of Degeneration (Romans 5:12)
(a) Disposition of Defiance (Romans 8:7)
(b) Destiny of Death (Romans 6:23; 7:24; 8:6;

2 Corinthians 4:4)
(c) Battle of the Margins (Hebrews 12:14–17)

2. Bent of Regeneration (Galatians 1:15–16; 2:20)
(a) Donation of Deity (1 Corinthians 1:30; Ephesians 2:5–6)
(b) Disposition of Divinity ( John 17:22; Philippians 2:5–8)
(c) Borderland of the Mastery (Galatians  5:16–22)

Circumstances make a man reveal what spirit he is of. Crises reveal character more quickly than anything else.

Personality is of the nature of light, it can be merged; individuality is like a lamp which cannot merge. There may be many lamps, but only one light. Individuality cannot mix; it is all “elbows, ” it separates and isolates; it is the thing that characterises us naturally, in our elementary condition we are all individual. Individuality is the shell, as it were, holding some thing more valuable than itself—the kernel, which is personality. The shell of individuality is God’s created natural coating for the protection of the personal life. It preserves the personality, and is the characteristic of the child; but if I stick to my individuality and mistake it for the personal life, I shall remain isolated, a dis integrating force ending in destruction. Individuality counterfeits personality as lust counterfeits love. God designed human nature for Himself; individuality debases human nature for itself. Personality merges, and you only get your real identity when you are merged with another person. A man has his individuality transfigured when he falls in love. When love or the Spirit of God strikes a man or woman, they are transformed, they no longer insist on their separate individuality.

Christianity is per sonal, therefore it is unindividual. Personality is the characteristic of the spiritual man as individuality is the characteristic of the natural man. Our Lord never spoke in terms of individuality, of a man’s “elbows” or isolated position, but in terms of personality, “that they all may be one. Our Lord can never be defined in terms of individuality or independence, but only in terms of personality. He was the antipodes of the individual; there was nothing independent or wilful or self assertive about Him. Jesus Christ emancipates the personality; the individuality is transfigured in the mastership of God’s purpose in Christ Jesus, and the transfiguring element is love; personal, passionate devotion to Himself, and to others Disposition is the set of my mind; character is the whole trend of my life, not what I do occasionally. Character is what we make; disposition is what we are born with. We make our characters out of the dis position we have, and when we are born again we get a new disposition, the disposition of the Son of God.

We cannot imitate the disposition of Jesus Christ; it is either there or it isn’t. Our destiny is determined by our disposition; preordination in regard to individual life depends entirely on the disposition of the individual. If the disposition of the Son of God is in me, then heaven and God are my destination; if the disposition in me is not the disposition of God, my home is as obviously certain with the devil. Ourdes tiny is as eternal and as certain as God’s throne; it is an unalterable decree of God; but I am free to choose by what disposition I am to be ruled. I cannot alter my disposition, but I can choose to let God alter it, and Redemption means that in my practical experience Jesus Christ can give me a new heredity, a new disposition. Our destiny is something fixed by God, but determined by our disposition.

We are all born with a disposition, i. e. , the peculiar bent of our personal life, and it is that which determines our destiny. Praying won’t alter it, nor science, nor reasoning; if the destiny of a man is going to be altered it must be altered by the Creator ( John 3:3). We are much more than we are conscious of being. Our Lord said the Holy Spirit would bring back into our conscious mind the things He had said. We never forget a thing although often we cannot recall it; we hear it and it goes into the unconscious mind. Things go on in our unconscious minds that we know nothing about, and at any second they may burst up into our conscious life and perturb us. The Spirit of God enters into a man below the thresh old of his consciousness. When He will emerge into the man’s conscious mind no one can say; but when He does, there is an earthquake, and the man has to readjust his life in every particular. The Spirit of God entering into the spirit of a man brings a totally new relationship to things.

1. Bias of Degeneration (Romans 5:12)

There are only two men according to the Bible, Adam and Jesus Christ. They are the representatives of the human race. The “image of God” was male and female together in the way God created them (Genesis 5:1–2), and sin entered into the world by that “Man. The Bible does not say that God punished the human race for one man’s sin, but that the dis position of sin, i. e. , my claim to my right to myself, entered into the human race by one man. The disposition of sin is not morality or wrongdoing, but my claim to my right to myself. When Jesus Christ faced men with all the forces of evil in them and men who were clean living, and moral, and upright, He did not pay any attention to the moral degradation of the one or to the moral attainment of the other; He was looking at something we do not see, viz. , at the dis position in both, not at the immorality or the moral ity, but at the disposition—my claim to my right to myself, self realisation, and He said: “If you would be My disciple, that must go. “

(a) Disposition of Defiance (Romans 8:7)

To say that “sin is nothing but the shadow of good” is not true. Evil, according to the Bible, is the shadow of good, but sin is positive defiance. You can be edu cated by evil, but not by sin. Sin is the positive dis position in me that has to be removed; evil is the negative thing outside me. There is no such thing as sin outside the Bible; sin is a revelation fact, and it is the one fact that accounts for the curious twist we find in things. We must take into account that there is a bias in human nature, viz. , self interest, self realisation; it may be refined or low, but it is there. Common sense says, what a wonderful being man is in the making! The New Testament says, what a magnificent ruin of what man was once! Which view covers the biggest number of facts? The great element in sin is defiance against God. There is a difference between sin and sins; sin is a disposition and is never spoken of as being forgiven; sins are acts for which we are responsible. Sin is a thing we are born with, and we cannot touch sin; God touches sin in Redemption. God never laid the sin of the human race on anybody but Himself, and in Redemption He has dealt with the disposition of sin. A man cannot be forgiven for what he is not to blame, but God holds a man responsible for refusing to receive a new heredity when he sees that Jesus Christ can give it to him. In the Cross of Jesus Christ, God redeemed the whole human race from the possibility of damnation through the heredity of sin. If, when we realise that Jesus Christ came to deliver us from the wrong disposition by putting in a right one, we refuse to allow Him to do it, that is the moment when condemnation begins ( John 3:19).

(b) The Destiny of Death (Romans 6:23; 7:24; 8:6; 2 Corinthians 4:4)

Many a clean living man is in the condition these verses describe. The domain Jesus Christ represents does not awaken a tremor of sympathy, something has to stab him wide awake, rouse him to other issues and bring him to his wits’ end before the things Jesus Christ stands for are even interesting. You can not make Jesus Christ mean anything to a man; He may be nothing to him one minute and everything the next; it depends on what happens. A man may go on well contented until something pierces his hide, or brings him up against the things which profoundly alter life; then suddenly he is within another frontier and it begins to be possible for him to see the king dom in which Jesus Christ moves.

(c) Battle of the Margins (Hebrews 12:14–17)

There is no effort about Esau, he is content with being once born; Jacob could not be satisfied with anything less than God. Jacob tried in a hundred and one ways, cunningly to satisfy himself, but it was of no use. Esau was a man who had no battles at all, or if he had any, he fought them all on the wrong side of the margins. A man is not brought up to the margins in an ordinary way, but only through an agony. We do not come near the margins until we are hit by a form of supreme suffering, and then we see we have been shutting our lives away from a great domain. If Jesus Christ is going to regenerate us, what is the problem He is up against? We have an heredity we had no say in, we are not holy, nor likely to be; Jesus Christ had the disposition of Deity, and He says we have to be fathomlessly pure in heart. If all He can do is to tell me that I must be holy, be what I never can be, present me with an ideal I cannot come anywhere near, His teaching plants despair; He is nothing more than a tantaliser and I wish He had never come. But if He is a Regenerator, one who first of all can put into me His own heredity, then I see what He is driving at in the Sermon on the Mount—that the disposition He puts in is like His own. There is not one characteristic in the Sermon on the Mount that fits in with a man’s natural disposition; we may give our mental assent to it, but our actual life won’t walk that road; Jesus Christ is the only one who can carry it out. Redemption means that Jesus Christ can put into any man the hereditary disposition that was in Himself, and all the standards He gives are based on that disposition. Jesus Christ teaches that when His Spirit is in us, we shall manifest a likeness to Himself if we allow His disposition to react in us.

2. Bent of Regeneration (Galatians 1:15–16; 2:20)

The heredity of the Son of God is planted in me by God, a moral miracle. Pseudo evangelism has gone wildly off the track in that it has made salvation a bag of tricks whereby if I believe a certain shibboleth, I am tricked out of hell and made right for heaven— a travesty of the most tremendous revelation of the Redemption of the human race by Jesus Christ. The New Testament’s teaching about Christianity is that the Son of God is formed in me on the basis of His marvellous regeneration until, as Paul says, “the life which I now live in the flesh”—not the life I am going to live when I get to heaven, but the life I now live in this flesh, the life that all see and know—”I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me, and gave Himself for me. ” What has happened to Paul? He has gone through his battle of the margins, he has gone through a moral decision with Jesus Christ, not an intellectual one; he has said—I agree with God in the things that He condemns in the Cross, self inter est, selfrealisation, though these have been dearer to me than my life; “I count all these things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord. It may take four minutes or forty years to be identified with Jesus Christ; it depends on whether I am willing to face the music, i. e. , forgo my hereditary right to my claim to myself and let Him take His claim to me. “Holy Spirit” is the name of the new disposition, and if Jesus Christ can put that into me (Luke 11:13), I see how things can happen.

(a) Donation of Deity (1 Corinthians 1:30; Ephesians 2:5–6)

“The kingdom of God is within you, ” Jesus said, i. e. , without observation Spirituality is a kingdom within, a new way of looking at things. The moral miracle of Christianity is that when I know my limitations, when I reach the frontiers by weakness not by will, Jesus Christ says, Blessed are you, I will do the rest. But I have to get there; it is not that God will not do anything for me until I do, but that He cannot. God cannot put into me, a moral being, the disposition that is in Jesus Christ unless I am conscious I need it. I cannot receive that which I do not believe I need; but when I am struck by an agony, or the sense of helplessness with regard to Jesus Christ’s teaching, I am ready then to receive the donation of Deity. In the natural world I am born with an heredity for which I am not responsible, and I have a disposition through that heredity; but I have not a character through heredity. God gives disposition, but never character. Habits are not transmitted by heredity, only tendencies and qualities; habits are formed by imitation. Heredity means that the qualities or defects of the parents are manifested in the children. If I receive the Spirit of God and become a son of God by right of regeneration, God does not give me my Christian character, I have to make that. He gives me the disposition of His Son; He puts Holy Spirit into me, then He says—Now, breast and back as they should be, and work it out. My disposition tells through my body on to outward circumstances, and as I obey the Spirit of God and the word of God, I slowly form the Christian character.

(b) Disposition of Divinity ( John 17:22; Philippians 2:5–8)

The Spirit of Christ is given us, but not the mind of Christ. Every man is born with a human spirit, but he forms his own mind by the way his human spirit reacts in the circumstances he is in, and education gives power to a man to express his personal spirit better and better. The Spirit of Christ comes into me by regeneration, then I have to begin to form the mind of Christ, begin to look at things from a different standpoint, viz. , the standpoint of Jesus Christ, and to do that I must lose my soul. Soul is not a thing I have got, soul is the way a man’s personal spirit manifests itself in his body, the way he reasons about things, the rational expression of his personal spirit. If my soul has been formed on the belief that rationalism is the basis of things, that things are cal culable, then when the Spirit of God enters into my spirit and the principles of Jesus burst up into my life, the former foundations quake; I discover that tragedy, and not rationalism, is the basis of things, and I have to readjust my mind. When a man is saved by God’s grace, it is the beginning of the end. Some are con tent to be dragged into salvation by the sheer mercy of God, but Jesus Christ’s conception is that a man should become His disciple and begin to mould his thinking on the basis of the Spirit of God that comes into him. That takes time; when the crisis comes, am I going to obey the word the Spirit of God recalls to me?

(c) Borderland of Mastery (Galatians 5:16–22)

The Holy Spirit in a Christian wars against the old heredity; the new heredity and the old war one against another. Is that all God can do for me? destroy unity in my life, make me a divided personality, and make me sick with conviction of sin? If that is all God can do, I would rather be an atheist; but if it is only a stage towards the borderland of mastery, that is a different matter.

Paul says if I obey the Spirit of God, I must crucify the other mind. God cannot do that, I must do it myself. Yes, I will agree with the Spirit of God and go to the death of my old disposition (Romans 6:6). If I do not put to death the things in me that are not of God, they will put to death the things that are of God. There are things in a man’s natural life that are fine and beautiful, but when a man comes to Jesus Christ, he has to forgo them, and go to their “white funeral. “12 This is a phrase Tennyson uses in speaking of the “white funeral” of the single life; and that aspect is the only one that suits the spiritual life. Think of it in reference to babyhood, there comes a time when that phase dies and child life begins; there is a “white funeral” of the baby; and then a “white funeral” of the child and girlhood begins.

Apply that spiritually. There is any amount in paganism that is good and virtuous, but if I am going on with Jesus Christ, I have to give those things a “white funeral, ” make a termination of them, and we very often get there through disen chantment. It is not true that everything in life apart from Christ is bad; there are many virtues that are good and moral, pride and self interest are remarkably fine things in some aspects, “highly esteemed among men, ” but when I see Jesus Christ I have to go to their moral death. Any fool will give up wrongdoing and the devil, if he knows how to do it; but it takes a man in love with Jesus Christ to give up the best he has for Him. Jesus Christ does not demand that I give up the wrong, but the right, the best I have for Him, viz. , my right to myself. Will I agree to go through my “white funeral” and say I deliberately cut out my claim to my right to myself, deliberately go to the death of my self will? If I will, instantly the Spirit of God begins to work, and slowly the new mind is formed.

These crises are reached in personal life, and we find the same thing in the life outside, and the only line of solution is this one. If we find a line of emancipation and solution for ourselves, we have also found a line of solution for problems outside ourselves. Moral problems are only solved by obedience. We cannot see what we see until we see it. Intellectually things can be worked out, but morally the solution is only reached by obedience.

One step in obedience is worth years of study, and will take us into the centre of God’s will for us. All our darkness comes because we will try to get into the thing head first. We must be born into the kingdom of God, Jesus says, before we can begin to think about it ( John 3:3; 7:17), and when the life is there, we begin to form the masteries. We must take into account the bias of degeneration and the bent of regeneration, and our agreement with both is the only line on which we can solve the problems.

Humanity and holiness

Past error : a Christianity that
utilized humanity
Present error : a humanity that
utilities Christianity
 Bible point of view: God and
man in union.
We are not suffering to-day from dogmatic theologians, but dogmatic scientists, socialists and evolutionists. To-day’s cant is the cant of UN-spirituality.
Dr. Forsyth

If your religion injures your intelligence, it is bad.
If your religion injures your character, it is bad.
If your religion injures your conscience, it is criminal.
Amiel13

1. Body of Man—Solidarity of Sin
(2 Thessalonians 2:3–4)
(a) Adam (Genesis 5:1–2)
(b) Anarchy (Genesis 11:1–9)
(c) Antichrist (1 John 4:3)

2. Body of Christ—Solidarity of Saints
(1 Corinthians 12:12–27)
(a) Reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:18–21)
(b) Repentance (Acts 2:37–40)
(c) Regeneration (1 Corinthians 12:12–27)

In the past the error of the Christian faith was that it paid no attention to a man’s actual life; it simply used human beings and made them catspaws for a religious line of things. The present error is that humanity utilises Christianity; if Jesus Christ does not coincide with our line of things, we toss Him overboard;

Humanity is on the throne. In the New Testament the point of view is God and Man in union.

1. Body of Man—Solidarity of Sin (2 Thessalonians 2:3–4)

The New Testament way of looking at humanity is not the modern way. In the New Testament men and women exist, there is no such thing as “Humanity, ” the human race as a whole. A materialist says—Because my religious beliefs do for me, therefore they are satisfactory. Not in the tiniest degree. The test of a man’s religious faith is not that it does for him, but that it will do for the worst wreck he ever knew. If every one were well brought up and had a fine heredity, then there are any num ber of intellectual forms of belief that would do. The materialistic line works like a searchlight, lighting up that it does and no more, but the daylight of actual experience reveals a hundred and one other facts. It does not show a clear simple path, but brings to light a multitude of facts never seen before. The evolution ist looks at man and says, What a glorious promise of what he is going to be! The New Testament looks at man’s body and moral life and intelligence and says, What a ruin of what God designed him to be!

(a) Adam (Genesis 5:1–2)

Adam was created to be the friend and companion of God; he was to have dominion over all the life in the air and earth and sea, but one thing he was not to have dominion over, and that was himself. Sin, according to the Bible, is man taking his right to himself, and thereby he lost his lordship over the air and earth and sea. The only Being who ever walked this earth and was Lord of earth and air and sea as God designed man to be, was Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ and Adam, as he was first created, are the normal men, the represen tatives of the human race. Jesus Christ mirrors what the human race will be like on the basis of Redemp tion, a perfect oneness between God and man.

(b) Anarchy (Genesis 11:1–9)

This is the result in civilisation of Adam’s sin. Sin is red handed anarchy against God. Not one in a thou sand understands sin; we understand only about sins on the physical line, which are external weaknesses. In the common sense domain sin does not amount to much; sin belongs to the real domain. The sin the Bible refers to is a terrific and powerful thing, a deliberate and emphatic independence of God and His claim to me, self-realisation. Anarchy is the very nature of sin as the Bible reveals it. Other religions deal with sins; the Bible alone deals with sin. The first thing Jesus Christ faced in men was this heredity of sin, and it is because we have ignored it in our presentation of the Gospel that the message of the Gospel has lost its sting, its blasting power; we have drivelled it into insurance tickets for heaven, and made it deal only with the wastrel element of mankind. The aver age preaching of Redemption deals mainly with the “scenic” cases. The message of Jesus Christ is different; He went straight to the disposition, and always said, “IF—you need not unless you like, but—IF any man will follow Me, let him give up his right to himself. The Christian religion founds everything on the radical, positive nature of sin. Sin is self realisation, self sufficiency, entire and complete master ship of myself—gain that, and you lose control of everything over which God intended you to have dominion. Sin is not an act, but an hereditary disposition. Sin must be cleansed, and the revelation of Redemption is that God through Jesus Christ has power to cleanse us from the heredity of sin. The curious thing is that we are blind to the fact of sin, and deal only with the effects of sin.

(c) Antichrist (1 John 4:3)

Every spirit that dissolves Jesus by analysis is anti christ (rv mg). What is the spirit that dissolves Him? My claim to my right to myself does it. Is Jesus Christ “boss” or am I? God’s order is that He is to be absolute sovereign over me, and I am to be absolute sovereign over everything that is not God, and sin is the switch off, for the time being, that makes me my own “boss” and consequently “boss” of nothing else.

I only gain the absolute control God intended me to have when I am brought back into perfect union with God. If I want to know what the human race will be like on the basis of Redemption, I shall find it mirrored in Jesus Christ, a perfect oneness between God and man, with no gap. In the meantime there is a gap. Sin, suffering, and the Book of God all bring a man to this realisation, that there is something wrong at the basis of life, and that it cannot be put right by reason. If we make Rationalism the basis of things, we shall find some great big tragedy will spit up and knock our theories to the winds.

For instance, this war has taken our breath away and given all our findings a severe shaking. Before we seal up our mind on any of these matters, Jesus Christ says, “Believe also in Me. Anything that puts selfrealisation on top is part of the solidarity of sin, which the Bible says will head up until it gets to the terrific and marvellous figure head Paul refers to in 2 Thessalonians, revered and respected of every race and religion and nationality.

The spirit in man, however religious, however sweet and delightful it may appear to men, if it is not the Spirit of God, must be “scattering” away from Jesus. “He that gathereth not with Me scattereth. Christianity is based on another universe of facts than the universe we get at by our common sense; it is based on the Universe of revelation facts which we only get at by faith born of the Spirit of God. The revelation which Christianity makes is that the essential nature of Deity is holiness, and the might of God is shown in that He became the weakest thing in His own creation. Jesus Christ claims that, on the basis of Redemption, He has put the whole of the human race back to where God designed it to be, and individuals begin to see this when they are awakened by their own agony.

2. Body of Christ—Solidarity of Saints (1 Corinthians 12:12–27)

The Church of Jesus Christ is an organism; we are built up into Him, baptised by one Spirit into one body. Churchianity is an organisation; Christianity is an organism. Organisation is an enormous benefit until it is mistaken for the life. God has no concern about our organisations. When their purpose is fin ished He allows them to be swept aside, and if we are attached to the organisation, we shall go with it. Organisation is a great necessity, but not an end in itself, and to live for any organisation is a spiritual disaster. Today we are hearing the crash of civilisation and the crash of organisations everywhere. Our word “Church” is connected with civilised organisations of religious people; our Lord’s attitude to the Church is different. He says it is composed of those who have had a personal revelation from God as to Who Jesus Christ is, and have made a public declaration of the same (Matthew 16:13–20). The great conception to day is not our being merged into God, but God being merged into us. The Christian line of things is that we are brought into union with God by love, not that we are absorbed into God. Jesus Christ maintains that this is to be brought about on the basis of His Redemption alone.

Mysticism says it can be brought about by a higher refinement of nature. The stupendous difference between the religion of Jesus Christ and every other religion under heaven is that His religion is one which brings help to the bottom of hell, not a religion that can deal only with what is fine and pure.

(a) Reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:18–21)

Sin is a fundamental relationship underneath: sin is not wrongdoing, it is wrong being, deliberate and emphatic independence of God. God, on the ground of Redemption, has undertaken the responsibility for sin and for the removal of it, and Jesus Christ claims that He can plant in any of us His own heredity, which will re make us into the new order of humanity. If the human race apart from Jesus Christ is all right, then the Redemption of Jesus Christ is a useless waste. The revelation is not that Jesus Christ was pun ished for our sins, but that He was made to be sin. Him who knew no sin” was made to be sin, that by His identification with it and removal of it, we might become what He was. Jesus Christ became identi fied not only with the disposition of sin, but with the very “body” of sin. He had not the disposition of sin in Himself, and no connection with the body of sin, but, “Him who knew no sin, He made to be sin. ” Jesus Christ went straight through identification with sin so that every man and woman on earth might be freed from sin by His atonement. He went through the depths of damnation and came out more than con queror; consequently every one of us who is willing to be identified with Him is freed from the disposition of sin, freed from the connection with the body of sin, and can come out more than conqueror too because of what Jesus Christ has done. The revelation is not that Jesus Christ took on Him our fleshly sins—a man stands or falls by his own silly weaknesses—but that He took on Him the heredity of sin. God Him self became sin, and removed sin; no man can touch that. God made His own Son to be sin that He might make the sinner a saint. God Almighty took the prob lem of the sin of the world on His own shoulders, and it made Him stoop; He rehabilitated the whole human race; that is, He put the human race back to where He designed it to be, and any one of us in our actual conditions can enter into union with God on the ground of Jesus Christ’s Redemption. God has put the whole human race on the basis of Redemp tion. A man cannot redeem himself; Redemption is absolutely finished and complete; its reference to indi vidual men is a question of their individual action.

(b) Repentance (Acts 2:37–40)

There is a difference between a man altering his life, and repenting. A man may have lived a bad life and suddenly stop being bad, not because he has repented, but because he is like an exhausted volcano; the fact that he has become good is no sign that he is a Christian. The bedrock of Christianity is repen tance. Repentance means that I estimate exactly what I am in God’s sight, and I am sorry for it, and on the basis of Redemption I become the opposite. The only repentant man is the holy man. Any man who knows himself knows that he cannot be holy, therefore if ever he is holy, it will be because God has “shipped” something into him, and he begins to bring forth the fruits of repentance. The disposition of the Son of God can only enter my life by the road of repentance. Strictly speaking, repentance is a gift of God; no man can repent when he chooses. A man can be remorse ful when he chooses, but remorse is something less than repentance. When God handles the wrong in a man it makes him turn to God and his life becomes a sacrament of experimental repentance.

(c) Regeneration (1 Corinthians 12:12–27)

When I come to the end of myself and my self sufficiency, in my destitution I can hear Jesus Christ say, Ask, and I will give you Holy Spirit. “Holy Spirit” is the experimental name for eternal life working in human beings here and now. Jesus Christ said, You have not that life in yourselves, and you cannot have it unless you get it through Me. He is referring to “Holy Spirit” life which by His resurrection He can impart. The Holy Spirit will take my spirit, soul and body and bring them back into communion with God, and lead me into identification with the death of Jesus Christ, until I know experimentally that my old disposition, my right to myself, is crucified with Him, and my human nature is now free to obey the commands of God. The doctrine of substitution is twofold. Not only is Jesus Christ identified with my sin, but I am identified with Him so that His ruling disposition is in me, and the moral transaction on my part is agreement with God’s verdict on sin in the Cross of Jesus Christ. Redemption means that God through Jesus Christ can take the most miserable wreck and turn him into a son of God. As long as a man has his morality well within his own grasp, Jesus Christ does not amount to anything to him, but when a man gets to his wits’ end by agony and says involuntarily, “My God, what am I up against? there is something underneath I never knew was there, ” he begins to pay attention to what Jesus Christ says. A moral preparation is necessary before we can believe; truth is a moral vision, and does not exist for a man until he sees it. There is a frontier outside which Jesus Christ does not tell; but when once we get over that frontier, He becomes all in all. God takes us through circumstances until we enter the moral frontiers where Jesus Christ tells. When you come to your wits’ end, remember there is a way out, viz. , personal relationship to God through the Redemption of Jesus Christ.

Oh—we’re sunk enough here, God knows!
But not quite so sunk that moments,
Sure, though seldom, are denied us,
When the spirit’s true endowments
Stand out plainly from its false ones,
And apprise it if pursuing
Or the right way or the wrong way,
To its triumph or undoing.
There are flashes struck from midnights,
There are fire-flames noondays kindle,
Whereby piled-up honours perish
Whereby swollen ambitions dwindle;
While just this or that poor impulse,
Which for once had play unstifled,
Seems the sole work of a lifetime,
That away the rest had trifled!
Robert Browning