Redemption is not a heavy work for God. God didn’t find Himself in a fix and have o rush off somewhere and try to get “foreign policy” straightened out with the archangels. God did what He did joyfully. He made the heaven and the earth joyfully. That’s why the flowers look up and smile, and the birds sing and the sun shines, and the sky is blue and rivers trickle down to the sea. God made the creation and He loved what He did!
He took pleasure in Himself, in His own perfection and the perfection of His work. And when it comes to redemption, I repeat tat this was not a heavy task laid upon God by moral necessity. God wanted to do this. There was no moral necessity upon God to redeem mankind. He didn’t have to send His Son Jesus Christ to die for mankind. He sent Him, but at the same time Jesus did it voluntarily. If God was willing, it was the happy willingness of God.
A mother doesn’t have to get up and feed her baby at 2 in the morning. There’s no law compelling her to do it. The law probably would compel her to take some care of the little tyke, but she doesn’t have to give him that loving care that she does. She wants to do it. I used to do it for our little fellows, and I enjoyed doing it. A mother and a father do what they do because they love to do it.
The incarnation too, was not something that Jesus Christ did gritting His teeth and saying, “I have this thing – I wish I could get out of it”. One of the dear old hymn writers said, “He abhorred not the virgin’s womb”. The writer thought about this, and said, “What a minute here. The womb of the creature? How could the everlasting, eternal, infinte God, whom space cannot contain, confine Himself inside one of His creatures? Wouldn’t this be a humiliation?” Then he smiled and said “No, He abhorred not the virgin’s womb”, and he wrote it and we’ve been singing it for centuries.
(Pages 8-10)
Chapter 2: God’s Immensity
Why are we not happy?
As lady Julian thought about this she said, “If this is all true, then why be we not all of great ease of heart and soul? Why aren’t Christians the happiest, the most easeful people in all the wide world?”
The she answered her own question: “Because we seek to have our rest in things that are so little…”
What is it that makes you happy? What cheers you up and gives your morale a lift? Is it your job? Is it the fact that you have good clothes? Is it that you’ve married well or have a fine position? Just what is it hat brings you joy?
That’s our trouble. We know that God is so vast that in comparison everything is just the size of a hazelnut. And yet we’re not a happy people because we’ve got our minds set on things. We multiply things, and we increase things and we perfect things. WE beautify things and put our confidence in things and in God.
We have our job and God; we have our husband and God; we have our strong body and God; we have our good job and God; we have our home and God. WE have our ambition for the future and God, and so we put God as a plus sign after something else.
And Julian said, “God showed me that all things are only the size of the hazelnut. Why therefore should I put my confidence in things so little that God has to hold it together? Why should I trust things?”
We multiply, we increase, and still we’re anxious and unsatisfied. Why? Because all that is beneath God will not satisfy us. God made you in His image, and you’re stuck with it.
God made you in His image and you’re stuck with it, sinner and Christian both. You’re made in the image of God, and noting short of God will satisfy you. And even if you happen to be one of those “nickel-in-the-slot, get saved, escape hell and take heaven” Christians … you are not content with “things plus God”. You’ll have to have God minus all things.
We can love it (the things God gave to our lives) for His sake, but it is not necessary to our happiness. If there’s anything necessary to your eternal happiness but God, you’re not yet the kind of Christian that you ought to be. For only God is the true rest.
God takes pleasure in having a helpless soul come to Him simply and plainly and intimately. He takes pleasure in having us come to Him. This kind of Christianity doesn’t draw big crowds. It draws only those who have their hearts et on God, who want God more than they want anything else in the world. These people want the spiritual experience that comes from knowing God for Himself. They could have everything stripped away from them and still have God.
These people are not vastly numerous in any given locality. This kind of Christianity doesn’t draw big crowds, but it is likely to draw the hungriest ones, the thirstiest ones and some of the best ones. And so God takes great pleasure in having helpless people come to Him, simply and plainly and intimately. He wants us to come without all that great overloading of theology. He wants us to come as simply and plainly as a little child. And if the Holy Spirit touches you, you’ll come like that.
(Pages 28-31)
Chapter 3: God’s Immensity
It’s rather a cynical thought, an ironic thought that the richest nation in the world manages to have the most divorces, the most suicides and the most juvenile delinquency. It proves again that no matter how much you give a man, if he misses God he cries, “Ever me wanteth”, and goes out to do some crime. If you give him everything and then add God to it, you have wronged him, and he has wronged his own soull. For God wants to be first and wants to be all
Money won’t do it. If you take the kingdom of God and His righteousness, God will add money to you – as much as you need. If you take the kingdom of God and His righteousness, God may send your way learning and art and music and other legitimate earthly loves. God may send it all to you and let you have it. But it is always with the understanding that He can take it away and you won’t grumble. You still have God, and God is all.
Isaiah wrote, “Thy sun shall no more go down; neither shall thy moon withdraw itself: for the Lord shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended” (60:20)
Chapter 4: God’s Goodness
Why were we created? Was it that we deserved to be created? How can nothing deserve something? There was a time when there was no human race. How therefore could a human race that hadn’t existed deserve something? How could a man that wasn’t yet created earn anything or pile up any merit? It couldn’t be so. God out of His goodness created us. Why we were not destroyed when we sinned? The only answer is that God of His goodness spared us. The cordial, kind-intentioned God spared us.
Nobody ever got anything from God on the grounds that he deserved it. Having fallen, man deserves only punishment and death. So if God answers prayer it’s because God is good. From His goodness, His loving-kindness, His good-natured benevolence, God does it! That’s the source of everything!
These are the only grounds upon which anybody has ever been saved since the beginning of the world. There is an idea abroad that in the Old Testament men were saved by law and that in the New Testament we are saved by grace. The second is right, but the first is wrong. Nobody has ever been saved, from the day that Abel offered his bloody lamb on a homemade altar, down to the latest convert made today, except out of the goodness of God. Because of God’s grace, His mercy, His loving-kindness, His goodness and gracious-ness, His cordiality and approachability, He kindly saved people. We’ve taken the word “grace” and made a technical term out of it.
Everybody is saved by grace. Abel was saved by Grace. Noah was saved by grace – “Noah found grace in the eyes of the lord” (Genesis 6:8). So was Moses and all the rest down to the coming of Jesus and His dying on the cross. All were saved by grace out of the goodness of God. And everybody’s been saved by grace out of the goodness of God ever since.
(Pages 46-48)
God wants to please us
He takes no pleasure in human tears. He came and wept that He might stop up forever the fountain of human tears. He came and bereaved His mother that He might heal all the bereavement. He came and lost everything that He might heal the wounds that we have from losing things. And He wants us to take pleasure in Him. Let us put away our doubts and trust Him.
God wants to please you. He is pleased when you are His child, when you’re surrendered, when your will is His will and His will is yours, when you are not in rebellion and not seeking your own will. God loves to please His people.
The idea that God must always make you miserable is not a biblical idea at all. Jesus Christ knew God and He suffered from the irritations and persecutions of the world, the bitterness of their polluted hearts. They made it hard for Him, but He was pleased with God and God was pleased with Him.
(Page 55)
Chapter 5: God’s Justice
The Unity of God
What does that mean? It means that God is not composed of parts. You are not a unitary being. You are composed of spirit, soul and body. You have memory and forgetfulness. You have attributes which were given you…
God made you and “made” means composed. God put you together. He put the head on top of the torso and legs under the torso and He put in your bloodstream, your blood, ventricles and auricles and veins and arteries and nerves and ligaments. We were put together like that, and you can take an amazing amount of a man away and he is still there. But you can’t think of God like that, because the being of God is unitary.
God is one, God’s attributes never quarrel with each other.
God has no parts anymore than a diamond has parts. God is all one God, and everything that God does harmonizes with everything else God does perfectly because there are no parts to get out of joint and no attributes to face each other and fight it out. All God’s attributes are one, and together.
The Unchanging God
How can God be just and still justify a sinner? There is a third answer. Compassion flows from goodness, and yet goodness without justice is not goodness. You couldn’t be good and not be just, and if God is good He has to be just. When God punishes the wicked, it is a just thing to do, because it is consistent with the wicked man’s deserts. But when God pardons a wicken man it is a just thing to do as well, because it is consistent with God’s nature. So we have God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost always acting like God.
Always God acts according to His attributes of love, justice and mercy.
Aren’t you glad that you’re not going to get in just by being a member of a church? God say, “Well that’s a pretty good church. Let’s let him in”. And so you go in, but later on He finds your rotten spots, and maybe you’ll be thrown out!
There is the parable of the man who appeared without a wedding garment. And after he got in, they said, “What is he doing here?” and they threw him out – bound him hand and foot, lugged him out and threw him into outer darkness (see Matt 22:11-13). There’ll be nothing like that in God’s kingdom, because God the All-Wise One knows all that can be known. He knows everybody – He knows you. And God the All-Just One will never permit the unequal man in there.
(Pages 72-73)
Chapter 6: God’s Mercy
Grace: The Only means of Salvation
The first truth is that no one ever was saved, no one is saved now and no one ever will be saved except by grace. During Moses’ time nobody was ever saved except by grace. After Moses and before the cross and after the cross and since the cross and during all that dispensation, during any dispensation, anywhere, any time since Abel offered his first lamb before God on the smoking altar – nobody was ever saved in any other way than by grace.
The 2nd truth is that grace always comes by Jesus Christ. The law was given by Moses, but grace came by Jesus Christ. This does not mean that before Jesus was born of Mary there was no grace. God dealt in grace with mankind, looking forward to the Incarnation and death of Jesus before Christ came. Now, since He’s come and gone to the Father’s right hand, God looks back upon the cross as we look back upon the cross. Everybody from Abel on was saved by looking forward to the cross. Grace came by Jesus Christ. And everybody that’s been saved since the cross is saved by looking back at the cross.
Grace always comes by Jesus Christ. It didn’t come at His birth, but it came in God’s ancient plan. No grace was ever administered to anybody except by and through and in Jesus Christ.
Chapter 7: God’s Omnipresence
If there were no fire in hell, and no “worm [that] dieth not” (mark 9:48), hell would be hell enough, because moral creatures are cut off forever from the sunshine of God’s face. And if there were no golden streets, no jasper walls, no angels, no harps, no living creatures, no elders and no sea of glass, heaven would be heaven enough, because we shall see His face and His name shall be on our foreheads.
It is the manifest, conscious presence of God that makes heaven heaven. And It is the refusal of God ever to manifest His presence to those who do want to be good that makes hell what it is and makes the world what it is.
(Page 128)
Ah, for some of the old conversions again. I’ve not seen too many of that kind, but I’ve seen a few—conversions where a man would kneel in burst of tears and agony, confess his sins to God, believe on Jesus Christ and get to this feet with a light on his face and walk around shaking hands with everybody, keeping back the tears the best he can smiling through the tears he can’t keep back. What causes that kind of conversion is not on ly the conscious taking away of sin, but the conscious presence of God revealed to the heart inside.
That’s the joy of conversion – not bringing God from some distant star, but knowing God by a change of nature.
No comments:
Post a Comment