Sit, Walk, Stand: The Process of Christian Maturity (4 page)

Let me take up again an earlier illustration. Perhaps there is a certain brother whom you find very trying and with whom you are constantly getting into difficulties. Whenever you meet him, he says or does something calculated to arouse in you resentment. This troubles you. You say, “I am a Christian and ought to love him! I want to love him; indeed I am
determined
to love him!” And so you pray very earnestly, “Lord, increase my love for him. O God, give me love!” Then, taking a firm grip on yourself and summoning all your willpower, you set out with a genuine desire to display to him that love for which you have prayed. But alas, when you get into his presence, something happens to bring all your good intentions to nought. His response to you is not in the least encouraging, but rather the reverse, and immediately your old resentment flares up; and once again the utmost you can do is to be polite to him.

Why is this? You were surely not
wrong
in seeking love from God? No, but you were wrong in seeking that love as something in itself, a kind of package commodity, when what God desires is to express through you the love of His Son.

God has given us Christ. There is nothing now for us to receive outside of Him. The Holy Spirit has been sent to produce what is of Christ in us; not to produce anything that is apart from or outside of Him. We are “strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward
man; . . . to know the love of Christ” (Eph. 3:16, 19). What we show forth outwardly is what God has first put within.

Recall once again the great words of First Corinthians 1:30. Not only did God set us “in Christ.” By Him also “Christ Jesus . . . was made unto us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption.” This is one of the grandest statements in Scripture.
He
“was made unto us. . . .” If we believe this, we can put in there anything we need and can know that God has made it good; for through the Holy Spirit within us, the Lord Jesus is Himself made unto us whatever we lack. We have been accustomed to look upon holiness as a virtue, upon humility as a grace, upon love as a gift to be sought from God. But the Christ of God is
Himself
everything that we shall ever need.

Many a time in my need I used to think of Christ as a Person apart, and failed to identify Him in this practical way with the “things” I felt so strongly the lack of. For two whole years I was groping in that kind of darkness, seeking to amass the virtues that I felt sure should make up the Christian life, and getting nowhere in the effort. And then one day—it was in the year 1933—light broke from heaven for me, and I saw Christ ordained of God to be made over to me in His fullness. What a difference! Oh the emptiness of “things”! Held by us out of relation to Christ, they are dead. Once we see this, it will be the beginning of a new life for us. Our holiness will be spelled thereafter with a capital H,
our love with a capital L.
He Himself
is revealed as the answer in us to all God’s demands.

Go back now to that difficult brother, but this time, before you go, address God thus: “Lord, it is clear to me at last that in myself I cannot love him at all; but I know now that there is a life within me, the life of thy Son, and that the law of that life is to love. It cannot but love him.” There is no need to exert yourself. Repose in Him. Count upon His life. Dare thus to go and see that brother and to speak to him—and here is the amazing thing! Quite unconsciously (and I would emphasize the word “unconsciously,” for the consciousness only comes afterwards) you find yourself speaking most pleasantly to him; quite unconsciously you love him; quite unconsciously you know him as your brother. You converse with him freely and in true fellowship, and on your return you find yourself saying with amazement, “Why, I did not exercise the least bit of anxious care just now, and yet I did not become in the least bit irritable! In some unaccountable way the Lord was with me, and His love triumphed.”

The operation of His life in us is in a true sense spontaneous, that is to say, it is without effort of ours. The all-important rule is not to “try,” but to “trust,” not to depend upon our own strength, but upon His. For it is the flow of life which reveals what we truly are “in Christ.” It is from the Fountain of Life that the sweet water issues.

Too many of us are caught
acting
as Christians. The life of many Christians today is largely a pretense. They
live a “spiritual” life, talk a “spiritual” language, adopt “spiritual” attitudes, but they are doing the whole thing themselves. It is the effort involved that should reveal to them that something is wrong. They force themselves to refrain from doing this, from saying that, from eating the other—and how hard they find it all! It is just the same as when we Chinese try to talk a language that is not our own. No matter how hard we try, it does not come spontaneously; we have to force ourselves to talk that way. But when it comes to speaking our own language, nothing could be easier. Even when we forget all about what we are doing, we still speak it. It flows. It comes to us perfectly naturally, and its very spontaneity reveals to everyone
what we are
.

Our life
is
the life of Christ, mediated in us by the indwelling Holy Spirit Himself, and the law of that life
is
spontaneous. The moment we see that fact, we shall end our struggling and cast away our pretense. Nothing is so hurtful to the life of a Christian as acting; nothing so blessed as when our outward efforts cease and our attitudes become natural—when our words, our prayers, our very life all become a spontaneous and unforced expression of the life within. Have we discovered how good the Lord is? Then
in us
He is as good as that! Is His power great? Then
in us
it is no less great! Praise God, His life is as mighty as ever, and in the lives of those who dare to believe the Word of God, the divine life will be manifest in a power not one whit less mighty than was manifest of old.

What does our Lord mean when He says, “Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven”? (Matt. 5:20). We have seen above how He goes on to set the contrast between the requirements of the Law of Moses and His own tremendous demands by His repeated use of the words “Ye have heard that it was said . . . but I say unto you. . . .” (Matt. 5). But since already, over many centuries, men had sought to attain to the first standard and had failed, how could the Lord dare to raise the standard higher still? He could do so only because He believed in His own life. He is not afraid of making the most exacting demands upon Himself. Indeed, we may well find comfort in reading the laws of the Kingdom as set forth in Matthew chapters 5 to 7, for they show what utter confidence the Lord has in His own life
made available to His children
. These three chapters set forth the divine taxation of the divine life. The greatness of His demands upon us only shows how confident He is that the resources He has put within us are fully enough to meet them. God does not command what He will not perform; but we must throw ourselves back on Him for the performance.

Does some difficult situation confront us? Is it a problem of right or wrong, good or evil? We do not need to look for wisdom. We need no longer apply to the tree of knowledge. We have Christ, and
He
is made unto us wisdom from God. The law of the Spirit of life
in Christ Jesus continually communicates to us His standards of right and wrong, and with them the attitude of spirit with which the difficult situation should be met.

More and more things will turn up to hurt our Christian sense of righteousness and to test what our reactions are going to be. We need to learn the principle of the cross—that our standard is not now the old, but the new man, “that after God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of truth” (Eph. 4:24). “Lord, I’ve got no rights to defend. Everything I have is through Thy grace, and everything is in Thee!” I knew of an old Japanese Christian woman who was disturbed by a thief who had broken into her house. In her simple but practical faith in the Lord, she cooked the man a meal—then offered him her keys. He was shamed by her action, and God spoke to him. Through her testimony that man is a brother in Christ today.

Too many Christians have all the doctrine, but live lives that are a contradiction of it. They know all about chapters 1 to 3 of Ephesians, but they do not put chapters 4 to 6 into practice. It were better to have no doctrine than to be a contradiction. Has God commanded something? Then throw yourself back on God for the means to do what He has commanded. May the Lord teach us that the whole principle of the Christian life is that we go beyond what is right to do that which is well-pleasing to Him.

But there remains something further to be added to the above on the subject of our Christian walk. The word “walk” has, as must already be obvious, a further meaning. It suggests first conduct or behavior, but it also contains in it the idea of progress. To “walk” is to “proceed,” to “follow on,” and we want to consider briefly now this further matter of our progress toward a goal.

“Look therefore carefully how ye walk, not as unwise, but as wise; redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Wherefore be ye not foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is”
(5:15–17).

You will notice that in the above verses there is an association between the idea of time and the difference between wisdom and foolishness. “Walk . . . as wise; redeeming the time . . . . Be ye not foolish.” This is important. I want now to remind you of two other passages in which these things are similarly brought together.

There are many passages of Scripture that assure us that what God has begun, He will finish. Our Savior is a Savior to the uttermost. No Christian believer will be “half saved” at the end, even if now that might be said of us in any sense. God will perfect every man who has faith in Him. That is what we believe, and we must keep it in mind as a background for what we are going to say next. With Paul, we are “confident of this very thing, that he who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil 1:6). There are no limits to God’s power. He “is able . . . to set you before the presence of his glory without blemish” (Jude 24; see also 2 Tim. 1:12 and Eph. 3:20).

It is, however, when we turn to the subjective aspect of this—to its practical outworking in our lives here and now on the earth—that we encounter the question of time. In Revelation 14 there are first fruits (14:4), and there is a harvest (14:15). What is the difference
between harvest and first fruits? It is certainly not one of quality, for the whole crop is one. Their difference lies only in the time of their ripeness. Some fruits reach maturity before others, and thus they become “first-fruits.”

My home town in Fukien province is famous for its oranges. I would say (and no doubt I am prejudiced!) that there are none like them anywhere in the world. As you look out on the hills at the beginning of the orange season, all the groves are green. But if you look more carefully, you will see, sprinkled here and there on the trees, golden oranges already showing up. It is a beautiful sight to see the flecks of gold dotted among the dark green trees. Later the whole crop will ripen, and the groves will turn to gold, but now it is these first fruits that are gathered. They are carefully handpicked, and it is they that fetch the top market prices—often three times the price of the harvest.

All will reach ripeness, somehow. But the Lamb is seeking first fruits. The “wise” in the parable are not those who have done better, but those who have done well
at an earlier hour
. The others, be it noted, were also virgins—“foolish,” no doubt, but not false. Along with the wise, they had gone out to meet the Bridegroom. They too had oil in their lamps, and their lamps were burning. But they had not reckoned on His tarrying, and now that their lamps burned low, they had no reserve of oil in their vessels, nor had the others enough to spare them.

Some are troubled at this point by the Lord’s words to the foolish ones: “I know you not” (Matt. 25:12). How, they feel, could He say this of them if they represent His true children, “espoused . . . as a pure virgin to Christ”? (2 Cor. 11:2). But we must recognize the whole point of the teaching of this parable, which is surely that there is some privilege of serving Him in the future which His children may miss by being unprepared. It says that the five came to the door and said, “Lord, Lord, open to us” (Matt. 25:11). What door? Certainly not the door of salvation. If you are lost, you cannot come to the door of heaven and knock. When therefore the Lord says, “I know you not,” He surely uses these words in some such limited sense as in the following illustration.

In Shanghai the son of a police court magistrate was arrested for careless driving. He was brought to court and found his father sitting on the magistrate’s bench. Court procedure is more or less the same the world over, and so the boy was asked, “What is your name? What is your address? What is your occupation?” and so on.