My Utmost for His Highest, "I have sinned."

     For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation.

 Corinthians 7:10

     

Conviction of sin is best portrayed in the words -

"My sins, my sins, my Saviour,

How sad on Thee they fall."

Conviction of sin is one of the rarest things that ever strikes a man. 

It is the threshold of an understanding of God. 

Jesus Christ said that when the Holy Spirit came He would convict of sin, and when the Holy Spirit rouses a man's conscience and brings him into the presence of God, it is not his relationship with men that bothers him, but his relationship with God - "against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Thy sight." 

The marvels of conviction of sin, forgiveness, and holiness are so interwoven that it is only the forgiven man who is the holy man, he proves he is forgiven by being the opposite to what he was, by God's grace. 

Repentance always brings a man to this point: I have sinned. 

The surest sign that God is at work is when a man says that and means it. Anything less than this is remorse for having made blunders, the reflex action of disgust at himself.

The entrance into the Kingdom is through the panging pains of repentance crashing into a man's respectable goodness; then the Holy Ghost, Who produces these agonies, begins the formation of the Son of God in the life. 

The new life will manifest itself in conscious repentance and unconscious holiness, never the other way about. 

The bedrock of Christianity is repentance. 

Strictly speaking, a man cannot repent when he chooses; repentance is a gift of God. The old Puritans used to pray for "the gift of tears." 

If ever you cease to know the virtue of repentance, you are in darkness. 

Examine yourself and see if you have forgotten how to be sorry.

My Utmost for His Highest "God's purpose is to make us one with Himself "

Not as though I had already attained, either were
already perfect... .

Philippians 3:1

It is a snare to imagine that God wants to make us perfect specimens of what He can do; 

God's purpose is to make us one with Himself. 

The emphasis of holiness movements is apt to be that God is producing specimens of holiness to put in His museum. If you go off on this idea of personal holiness, the dead-set of your life will not be for God, but for what you call the manifestation of God in your life. 

"It can never be God's will that I should be sick." 

If it was God's will to bruise His own Son, why should He not bruise you? 

The thing that tells for God is not your relevant consistency to an idea of what a saint should be, but your real vital relation to Jesus Christ, and your abandonment to Him whether you are well or ill.

Christian perfection is not, and never can be, human perfection.

Christian perfection is the perfection of a relationship to God which shows itself amid the irrelevancies of human life. When you obey the call of Jesus Christ, the first thing that strikes you is the irrelevancy of the things you have to do, and the next thing that strikes you is the fact that other people seem to be living perfectly consistent lives. Such lives are apt to leave you with the idea that God is unnecessary, by human effort and devotion we can reach the standard God wants. 


In a fallen world this can never be done. 


I am called to live in perfect relation to God so that my life produces a longing after God in other lives, not admiration for myself. Thoughts about myself hinder my usefulness to God. God is not after perfecting me to be a specimen in His show-room; 

He is getting me to the place where He can use me.

 Let Him do what He likes.

My Utmost for His Highest "When we choose deliberately to obey Him"

THE LAW AND THE GOSPEL

     For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend

     in one point, he is guilty of all

     James 2:10

  

The moral law does not consider us as weak human beings at all, it takes no account of our heredity and infirmities, it demands that we be absolutely moral. 

The moral law never alters, either for the noblest or for the weakest, it is eternally and abidingly the same.

The moral law ordained by God does not make itself weak to the weak, it does not palliate our shortcomings, it remains absolute for all time and eternity.

If we do not realize this, it is because we are less than alive; immediately we are alive, life becomes a tragedy.

"I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died." 

When we realize this, then the Spirit of God convicts us of sin.

Until a man gets there and sees that there is no hope, the Cross of Jesus Christ is a farce to him. 

Conviction of sin always brings a fearful binding sense of the law, it makes a man hopeless - "sold under sin."

I, a guilty sinner, can never get right with God, it is impossible. 

There is only one way in which I can get right with God, and that is by the Death of Jesus Christ.

I must get rid of the lurking idea that I can ever be right with God because of my obedience - which of us could ever obey God to absolute perfection!

We only realize the power of the moral law when it comes with an "if." God never coerces us. In one mood we wish He would make us do the thing, and in another mood we wish He would leave us alone.

Whenever God's will is in the ascendant, all compulsion is gone. 

When we choose deliberately to obey Him, then He will tax the remotest star and the last grain of sand to assist us with all His almighty power.

My Utmost for His Highest, "No longer relying on God"

Behold, as the eyes of servants look unto the hand of their masters ... so our eyes wait upon the Lord our God.

  Psalms 123:2

This verse is a description of entire reliance upon God.

Just as the eyes of the servant are riveted on his master, so our eyes are up unto God and our knowledge of His countenance is gained (cf. Isaiah 53:1. R.V). Spiritual leakage begins when we cease to lift up our eyes unto Him. The leakage comes not so much through trouble on the outside as in the imagination; when we begin to say -

"I expect I have been stretching myself a bit too much, standing on tiptoe and trying to look like God in stead of being an ordinary humble person."

We have to realize that no effort can be too high.

For instance, you came to a crisis when you made a stand for God and had the witness of the Spirit that all was right, but the weeks have gone by, and the years maybe, and you are slowly coming to the conclusion - 'Well, after all, was I not a bit too pretentious? Was I not taking a stand a bit too high?' 

Your rational friends come and say - Don't be a fool, we knew when you talked about this spiritual awakening, that it was a passing impulse, you can't keep up the strain, God does not expect you to. 

And you say - Well, I suppose I was expecting too much.

It sounds humble to say it, but it means that reliance on God has gone and reliance on worldly opinion has come in.

The danger is lest no longer relying on God you ignore the lifting up of your eyes to Him. 

Only when God brings you to a sudden halt, will you realize how you have been losing out. 

Whenever there is a leakage, remedy it immediately.

Recognize that something has been coming between you and God, and get it readjusted at once.

My Utmost for His Highest, "Have mercy upon us, O Lord,"

Have mercy upon us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we

     are exceedingly piled with contempt.

     Psalms 123:3

The thing of which we have to beware is not so much damage to our belief in God as damage to our Christian temper. 

"Therefore take heed to thy spirit, that ye deal not treacherously."

The temper of mind is tremendous in its effects, it is the enemy that penetrates right into the soul and distracts the mind from God. 

There are certain tempers of mind in which we never dare indulge; if we do, we find they have distracted us from faith in God, and until we get back to the quiet mood before God, our faith in Him is nil, and our confidence in the flesh and in human ingenuity is the thing that rules.

Beware of "the cares of this world," because they are the things that produce a wrong temper of soul. It is extraordinary what an enormous power there is in simple things to distract our attention from God.

Refuse to be swamped with the cares of this life.

Another thing that distracts us is the lust of vindication. 

St. Augustine prayed -"O Lord, deliver me from this lust of always vindicating myself." That temper of mind destroys the soul's faith in God.

"I must explain myself; I must get people to understand." 

 Our Lord never explained anything,

He left mistakes to correct themselves.

When we discern that people are not going on spiritually and allow the discernment to turn to criticism, we block our way to God. God never gives us discernment in order that we may criticize, but that we may intercede.

My Utmost for His Highest : "All that it cost God to forgive you"

     In whom we have ... the forgiveness of sins.

     Ephesians 1:7

Beware of the pleasant view of the Fatherhood of God 

- God is so kind and loving that of course He will forgive us. 

That sentiment has no place whatever in the New Testament.

The only ground on which God can forgive us is the tremendous tragedy of the Cross of Christ; to put forgiveness on any other ground is unconscious blasphemy. The only ground on which God can forgive sin and reinstate us in His favour is through the Cross of Christ, and in no other way. 

Forgiveness, which is so easy for us to accept, cost the agony of Calvary. 

It is possible to take the forgiveness of sin, the gift of the Holy Ghost, and our sanctification with the simplicity of faith, and to forget at what enormous cost to God it was all made ours.

Forgiveness is the divine miracle of grace; it cost God the Cross of Jesus Christ before He could forgive sin and remain a holy God. Never accept a view of the Fatherhood of God if it blots out the Atonement.

The revelation of God is that He cannot forgive; He would contradict His nature if He did. 

The only way we can be forgiven is by being brought back to God by the Atonement. God's forgiveness is only natural in the supernatural domain.

Compared with the miracle of the forgiveness of sin, the experience of sanctification is slight. Sanctification is simply the marvellous expression of the forgiveness of sins in a human life, but the thing that awakens the deepest well of gratitude in a human being is that God has forgiven sin. 

Paul never got away from this. 

When once you realize all that it cost God to forgive you, 

you will be held as in a vice, 

constrained by the love of God.

My Utmost for His Highest, "I can't."

     If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.

    -- John 8:36

  

If there is any remnant of individual conceit left, it always says "I can't." 

Personality never says "I can't," but simply absorbs and absorbs. Personality always wants more and more. It is the way we are built. We are designed with a great capacity for God; and sin and our individuality are the things that keep us from getting at God. 

God delivers us from sin: we have to deliver our selves from individuality, i.e., to present our natural life to God and sacrifice it until it is transformed into a spiritual life by obedience.

God does not pay any attention to our natural individuality in the development of our spiritual life. 

His order runs right across the natural life, and we have to see that we aid and abet God, not stand against Him and say - I can't do that. 

God will not discipline us, we must discipline ourselves. 

God will not bring every thought and imagination into captivity; we have to do it. 

Do not say - O Lord, I suffer from wandering thoughts. Don't suffer from wandering thoughts. Stop listening to the tyranny of your individuality and get emancipated out into personality.

"If the Son shall make you free . ." Do not substitute 'Saviour' for 'Son.' 

The Saviour sets us free from sin; this is the freedom of being set free by the Son.

It is what Paul means in Gal. 2:20 - "I have been crucified with Christ," his natural individuality has been broken and his personality united with his Lord, not merged but united.

"Ye shall be free indeed," free in essence, free from the inside.

We will insist on energy, instead of being energized into identification with Jesus.

My Utmost for His Highest: "Still Human!"

Still Human!

 

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. . . whatever you do, do all to the glory of God —1 Corinthians 10:31

In the Scriptures, the great miracle of the incarnation slips into the ordinary life of a child; the great miracle of the transfiguration fades into the demon-possessed valley below; the glory of the resurrection descends into a breakfast on the seashore. This is not an anticlimax, but a great revelation of God.

We have a tendency to look for wonder in our experience, and we mistake heroic actions for real heroes. 

It’s one thing to go through a crisis grandly, yet quite another to go through every day glorifying God when there is no witness, no limelight, and no one paying even the remotest attention to us. If we are not looking for halos, we at least want something that will make people say, "What a wonderful man of prayer he is!" or, "What a great woman of devotion she is!" If you are properly devoted to the Lord Jesus, you have reached the lofty height where no one would ever notice you personally. All that is noticed is the power of God coming through you all the time.

We want to be able to say, "Oh, I have had a wonderful call from God!" But to do even the most humbling tasks to the glory of God takes the Almighty God Incarnate working in us. To be utterly unnoticeable requires God’s Spirit in us making us absolutely humanly His. 

The true test of a saint’s life is not successfulness but faithfulness on the human level of life. 

We tend to set up success in Christian work as our purpose, but our purpose should be to display the glory of God in human life, to live a life "hidden with Christ in God" in our everyday human conditions ( Colossians 3:3  ).

Our human relationships are the very conditions in which the ideal life of God should be exhibited.

My Utmost for His Highest : We have to battle through our moods

FAITH AND EXPERIENCE

The Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me.

Galatians 2:20



We have to battle through our moods into absolute devotion to the Lord Jesus, to get out of the hole-and-corner business of our experience into abandoned devotion to Him. Think Who the New Testament says that Jesus Christ is, and then think of the despicable meanness of the miserable faith we have - I haven't had this and that experience! Think what faith in Jesus Christ claims - that He can present us faultless before the throne of God, unutterably pure, absolutely rectified and profoundly justified. Stand in implicit adoring faith in Him, He is made unto us "wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption." How can we talk of making a sacrifice for the Son of God! Our salvation is from hell and perdition, and then we talk about making sacrifices!


We have to get out into faith in Jesus Christ continually; not a prayer meeting Jesus Christ, nor a book Jesus Christ, but the New Testament Jesus Christ, Who is God Incarnate, and Who ought to strike us to His feet as dead. Our faith must be in the One from Whom our experience springs. Jesus Christ wants our absolute abandon of devotion to Himself. We never can experience Jesus Christ, nor ever hold Him within the compass of our own hearts, but our faith must be built in strong emphatic confidence in Him.


It is along this line that we see the rugged impatience of the Holy Ghost against unbelief. 

All our fears are wicked, and we fear because we will not nourish ourselves in our faith. How can any one who is identified with Jesus Christ suffer from doubt or fear! It ought to be an absolute pæan of perfectly irrepressible, triumphant belief.

My Utmost for His Highest: If any man be in Christ

THE TRANSFIGURED LIFE

     If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; old

     things are passed away; behold, all things are become

     new.

  Corinthians 5:17

    

What idea have you of the salvation of your soul? The experience of salvation means that in your actual life things are really altered, you no longer look at things as you used to; your desires are new, old things have lost their power. One of the touchstones of experience is - Has God altered the thing that matters? If you still hanker after the old things, it is absurd to talk about being born from above, you are juggling with yourself. If you are born again, the Spirit of God makes the alteration manifest in your actual life and reasoning, and when the crisis comes you are the most amazed person on earth at the wonderful difference there is in you. There is no possibility of imagining that you did it. It is this complete and amazing alteration that is the evidence that you are a saved soul.

What difference has my salvation and sanctification made? For instance, can I stand in the light of 1 Corinthians 13, or do I have to shuffle? 

The salvation that is worked out in me by the Holy Ghost emancipates me entirely, and as long as I walk in the light as God is in the light, He sees nothing to censure because His life is working out in every particular, not to my consciousness, but deeper than my consciousness.

My Utmost for His Highest: "We know a thing is right"

THE SUPREME CLIMB

Take now thy son .

Genesis 22:2

God's command is - Take now, not presently.

It is extraordinary how we debate!

We know a thing is right, but we try to find excuses for not doing it at once. To climb to the height God shows can never be done presently, it must be done now. The sacrifice is gone through in will before it is performed actually.

"And Abraham rose up early in the morning and went unto the place of which God had told him" (v. 3). The wonderful simplicity of Abraham!

When God spoke, he did not confer with flesh and blood.

Beware when you want to confer with flesh and blood, i.e., your own sympathies, your own insight, anything that is not based on your personal relationship to God. These are the things that compete with and hinder obedience to God.

Abraham did not choose the sacrifice. Always guard against self-chosen service for God; self-sacrifice may be a disease. If God has made your cup sweet, drink it with grace; if He has made it bitter, drink it in communion with Him. If the providential order of God for you is a hard time of difficulty, go through with it, but never choose the scene of your martyrdom.

God chose the crucible for Abraham, and Abraham made no demur; he went steadily through. If you are not living in touch with Him, it is easy to pass a crude verdict on God. You must go through the crucible before you have any right to pronounce a verdict, because in the crucible you learn to know God better. 

God is working for His highest ends until His purpose and man's purpose become one.

My Utmost for His Highest: " losing for ever any idea of yourself "

FELLOWSHIP IN THE GOSPEL

     Fellow labourer in the gospel of Christ.

Thessalonians 3:2

    

After sanctification it is difficult to state what your aim in life is, because God has taken you up into His purpose by the Holy Ghost; He is using you now for His purposes throughout the world as He used His Son for the purpose of our salvation.

If you seek great things for yourself - God has called me for this and that; you are putting a barrier to God's use of you. 

As long as you have a personal interest in your own character, or any set ambition, you cannot get through into identification with God's interests. You can only get there by losing for ever any idea of yourself and by letting God take you right out into His purpose for the world, and because your goings are of the Lord, you can never understand your ways.

I have to learn that the aim in life is God's, not mine. 

God is using me from His great personal standpoint, and all He asks of me is that I trust Him, and never say - Lord, this gives me such heart-ache. To talk in that way makes me a clog. When I stop telling God what I want, He can catch me up for what He wants without let or hindrance.

He can crumple me up or exalt me, He can do any thing He chooses.

He simply asks me to have implicit faith in Himself and in His goodness.

Self pity is of the devil, if I go off on that line I cannot be used by God for His purpose in the world. I have "a world within the world" in which I live, and God will never be able to get me outside it because I am afraid of being frost-bitten.

My Utmost for His Highest: "not the strength of one man's personality"

SACRAMENTAL SERVICE

Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up
that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ... .


Colossians 1:2
http://www.SearchGodsWord.org/desk/?query=col+1:2&sr=1


The Christian worker has to be a sacramental "go-between," to be so identified with his Lord and the reality of His Redemption that He can continually bring His creating life through him. It is not the strength of one man's personality being superimposed on another, but the real presence of Christ coming through the elements of the worker's life. 

When we preach the historic facts of the life and death of Our Lord as they are conveyed in the New Testament, our words are made sacramental, God uses them on the ground of His Redemption to create in those who listen that which is not created otherwise. If we preach the effects of Redemption in human life instead of the revelation regarding Jesus, the result in those who listen is not new birth, but refined spiritual culture, and the Spirit of God cannot witness to it because such preaching is in another domain. 

We have to see that we are in such living sympathy with God that as we proclaim His truth He can create in souls the things which He alone can do.


What a wonderful personality! What a fascinating man! Such marvellous insight! What chance has the Gospel of God through all that? It cannot get through, because the line of attraction is always the line of appeal. 

If a man attracts by his personality, his appeal is along that line; if he is identified with his Lord's personality, then the appeal is along the line of what Jesus Christ can do. The danger is to glory in men; Jesus says we are to lift Him up.