Chapter 08. A Retrospect and Review

Chapter 8.
A Retrospect and Review "Through the meadows, past the cities, still the brimming streams are roll’d, Now in torrent, now expanding into silver lakes and gold, Wafting life and increase with them, wealth and beauty manifold.

"Whence descends the ceaseless fulness, ever giving, never dry?

Yonder, o’er the climbing forest, see the shining Cause on high—

Mountain-snows their watery treasures pouring everlastingly."

WE have touched the middle point of the Epistle. The close of the third chapter and the beginning of the fourth mark that point, not precisely in respect of space, for the last three chapters make a considerably longer section than the first three, but in respect of subject-matter. With some obvious qualifications, the first three chapters treat of doctrine, and the last three of practice; the first lead us to the secrets and resources of the Christian life, and the last to its exercise in the Church and in the world. The connexion of the two sections is vital and profound; this hardly needs to be explained. But it cannot be too earnestly pressed on the attention of the believing reader. For it is a grand illustration of the truth that, in the Gospel, all the doctrine bears upon practice, and all the practice is rooted in doctrine. Or, to put it in terms more living, more personal, more fully true; all the revelation of God in Christ is for the sake of His people’s life and service before Him; all the Christian’s life and service depends, for its peace, purity, and power, upon his revealed Lord and God, known, trusted, invoked, and used. But of this we shall see much more when we travel forward into the latter section of the Epistle. Meanwhile, and that we may follow up this theme the better in its place, let us pause a little while here, and look back upon the ground already traversed. We have as it were reached the top of a mountain road; the place invites to rest, and also to retrospect. We shall soon move on towards the plains and cities. Let us sit still for a time under the quiet sky, and contemplate the everlasting hills among which we have ascended, as they lift their heads heavenwards and pour their waters down the pass at our feet, towards the scenes of human life.

What on the whole then is the view of Christian life, in its source and secret, given us in the first three chapters of our Epistle?

I. We notice first, as we have done before, that the view, whatever it is, has to do not with some disciples, but with all. This is particularly noteworthy, when we remember that in the second part of the Epistle we have a full recognition of the varieties of human duty. There we shall find the totally different functions of spouse, parent, child, servant, master, each treated explicitly and apart. But in the first section nothing of the kind occurs. The streams are many, the fountain is one. Whoever and whatever the disciple is, the greatest truths are true for him, for her. The highest, the deepest, the holiest privileges are his or her possession, in the plan of God. And he and she are called, each one, to "possess these possessions" to the full, and to enter in experience into the very sanctuary of blessing. This is a perfectly simple assertion, and manifestly true. Only, it is so sorrowfully in contrast with the current facts of actual Christian life, (or to speak more exactly, of the actual life of Christians,) that it needs continual restatement, to keep it really alive as a practical force upon us.

I do not now refer to our nominal, visible "Christendom" in its larger sense, to the multitudes of the "christened" in our own and other regions where the Faith is accepted as the current creed. Rather, I have in view circles which by comparison are near the centre; the people who in Evangelical parlance would be recognized as "converted," as "decided," as really "in earnest." Is it not true that among Christians thus described, and in whose lives there is much to respect, there appears too often a strange contrast when they compare their inner creed and their deepest experience with St Paul’s account here of the "grace and peace" of—not remarkable Christians, but—Christians? Not in formula, no doubt, but practically, have we not allowed ourselves to be content with a life of the soul lived rather in the suburbs than in the sanctuary? A life lived on "religion "rather than on Jesus Christ? At best, a life lived near Him rather than in Him, and in which it would be difficult to find a congenial place for such words as "in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus," "Christ dwelling in the heart by faith"?

Yet the Apostle writes those surpassing phrases with the whole Asian mission in his view. Of every one, without exception, who truly calls upon the Lord, he affirms that the Father has raised that man with His dear Son, and has seated him in Christ in the heavenly places. For all the disciples, without reserve, he bows his knees in importunate and expectant prayer that they may be so dealt with by the Spirit that they may, every one of them, have Christ resident in the heart by faith"—with all the wonderful sequel of that experience.

Let us not be content with observing, or with owning, this difference, this contrast. Assortissons notre Christianisme, as Monod says in the extract quoted in our last chapter. "Let us class our Christianity aright." Is it apostolic, or is it something quite different? And if not apostolic, in its convictions, and (in some genuine measure) in its experience, let us make haste in our turn to "bow our knees unto the Father." "I will not let Thee go except Thou bless me. For I am a Christian, O my Lord, and Thou meanest the fulness of Thy blessing for every one of Thy disciples."

II. We observe next, coming into detail, that the apostolic doctrine of the Christian life is that it is a life wholly and sublimely heavenly in its source. Truly, as in the warm language of some of our beautiful old hymns, the eternal world is its home of birth:

"Rise, my soul, and stretch thy wings, Thy better portion trace;

Rise, from transitory things, Toward heaven, thy native place."

I do not think that either John Cennick, in that heart-moving song of faith, or St Paul here, means to tell us that we had a personal pre-existence, and lived in heaven before we were born of our mothers here below. But they do mean, the Apostle does tell us, that we believers did exist to the eternal Mind "before the foundation of the world"; that then and there we were "chosen in Christ"; "predestinated to the adoption of children by means of Jesus Christ"; "blessed with all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus."

Let us look from our hill-top upon that great Alp of truth, shining all over with the sunshine of everlasting love. It has its precipices, it has indeed. Cave praecipitium, "Beware of the edge," was well said by Augustine, great teacher of the sovereignty of grace, and of the mystery of the eternal purpose. But the mountain is as beautiful as it is steep and massive, viewed from the foot of the Cross, and seen as part of the great landscape and system of Redemption. It has no frown then for any human soul which in the least degree is seeking God. And for the soul which has found Him in Christ, it only smiles and radiates blessing from all its peaks and glaciers, with the assurance of a salvation nothing less than eternal in its origin, its purpose, and its end. It is the light of Christ which shines upon those steeps and summits. He looks out upon the believing soul from the mysteries of the choice, and the foreordination, and the blessing, and the acceptance. It is no law of fate, no iron destiny, with which we deal; it is the will of the Father, manifested and effected in the Son; nothing there can be alien, really and ultimately, from eternal Love. So let us dwell in due time and measure, on the revelations of the first great paragraph of the Epistle, with glad and thankful hearts. In the words of the Seventeenth Article of the English Church, "the godly consideration of predestination and our election in Christ is full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort to" (note the deep conditioning words) "godly persons, and such as feel in themselves the working of the Spirit of Christ, mortifying the works of the flesh, and their earthly members, and drawing up their minds to high and heavenly things."[1]

III. Another grand aspect of the inner Christian life, as seen in this section of the Epistle, is that it is a life of supernatural illumination. For his Ephesian converts, for all of them, (let us note that point with renewed recollection,) the Apostle prays that the Holy Ghost may so work as the Lord of Light that they may supernaturally see the present and the coming grandeur and wonder of salvation; "the hope of the calling," "the riches of the glory of God’s inheritance, consisting of His saints," and also the mysterious force working in them now, even His resurrection-power, the same power which called their Lord from His grave, and set Him on the throne, and made Him Head of the Body.

Let this be observed, as a divine suggestion for the life of all true Christians. The Ephesians are viewed by St Paul, evidently, as already abundantly alive in the spiritual sense. "When ye believed, ye were sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise"; "You did He make alive, dead as you were in your trespasses and your sins"; aye, "He made you sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus." What more did they want? In one respect, nothing more at all, for they had "received Christ Jesus the Lord," as their eternal Life, by the Life-Giver’s power; and "all spiritual blessings" are "in Christ Jesus," and therefore are in them in whom He is. But this may be true in covenant, in provision, and very far as yet from true in experience, in conscious possession. So, for these Spirit-sealed disciples, the Apostle prays for the Spirit—not as for a fresh personal advent of the Holy Ghost to them, but as for a fresh putting forth of His power upon them. And the special result of this is to be that they know what they possess. Their "heart’s eyes" ( Romans 1:18) are to be lighted up, to see the landscape of glory before them, and also the golden treasures, wrought out of the mines of heaven, actually in their hands for present use upon the way. He wants them to be nothing short of "enlightened Christians" in the highest sense of the term; to be illuminati indeed. They are to be simple as infants in the sense of need, in the tenderness of penitence, in directness of reliance, and in gladness of obedience, yet to be "wiser than the aged" all the while in God-given insight into the mighty "reason of their hope," and into the secrets of God, "revealed to babes," for His people’s present power and joy. This was the Apostle’s standard for common Christian life in Asia; and the Apostle was no visionary. He meant anything in the world but fanaticism, and fitful ecstasies, and the reveries of an abstract pietism. But he knew well that for the fulness of human life in a sinful world nothing can be more practically useful than the fulness of the Spirit of God, as He fully manifests to the believer the depth of man’s need and the magnificence of the Lord’s supply. As then, so now. An illuminated Christian life is "revealed unto babes" in the nineteenth century, as in the first. To the young, to the uneducated, to the naturally slow, the Spirit in our day, as in that day, "takes of the things of Christ and shews them," in a way indescribably different from that of the mere literary and verbal exegesis of the student. Only a few weeks ago a Christian friend, widely experienced in the realities of life, was talking to me of a man singularly illuminated, filled to a remarkable degree with divine light, light shed upon the fulness of Christ, "the hope of His calling," and the "greatness of His power" in the hearts of His disciples. This person’s life was outwardly so consistent with its manifest inward brightness that he was a proverb in his neighbourhood for all that was happy and helpful. And who was he, who is he? A workman, a labourer, employed under the County Council of London to cleanse the sewers in a district of the East. I have myself sat, time after time, by the bed of an old man, once the bailiff of a small farmer in Dorset, and supposed for many a year to be the type of all that was dull and ignorant. But Christ, through a saint of His, found the old man in his latter days, as he lay decayed and blind in a little room, in a back yard, in a dark lane. And on the Spirit’s work of conviction and regeneration came down the Spirit’s work of "enlightening the eyes of the heart," with a wonderful insight into the hope of the calling, and the greatness of the power. I have listened to that feeble old peasant as he got upon his favourite and wonderful theme of salvation; self-consciousness was utterly absent from the tone, the manner, the phrase; humbly, very quietly, never glibly, the words would come. But the Lord spoke through them; His light was in them. Truly, He had "given understanding to the simple," supernatural understanding of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, the inner verities of our salvation. Shall we too covet the working within us of "the Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him"? Shall we go upon the Saviour’s explicit promise ( Luke 11:13) and "ask the Father"? "Ask Him!" Such is the brief inscription of a card which, day by day, meets my eye as I sit at my study-table; it was given me not long ago by a Christian friend. Out of the Lord’s promise it takes the implied precept. "He shall give the Holy Spirit to them that—ask Him"; therefore, "ask Him." For every department of the revealed work of the Comforter—" ask Him." Ask the Father, in the Name of the Son, at the instance of the Son, on the warrant of His word. Then we too shall live the life which was to be the normal life of all the Asian disciples, the life of those who supernaturally see their hope of glory, and supernaturally experience "the greatness of His power to usward who believe."

IV. But the Apostle, as we have seen, has even more to pray for in the interest of the Ephesians. And again, it is in the interest of all of them that he prays. His thought about any of them cannot be satisfied without this supreme result of the Holy Spirit’s work within them—"Christ dwelling in their hearts, by faith." In the proper place I translated that passage ( Luke 3:14, etc.), and gave some comments on its expressions in detail, and on its general message. Here I attempt no fresh particulars of exposition; I only point my reader’s attention to two manifest facts in the passage. The first is that the "coming of Christ to reside in the heart, by faith," is presented as a definite thing in itself; a blessing, a gift, an experience, not to be confused with the Christian life in general, but which the truly living Christian may yet greatly need to seek. The other fact is that, unmistakably, St Paul here views this blessing, this experience, as by no means reserved for a select few among the disciples. He is thinking of the whole Church. He is "bowing his knees," with the whole mission-community upon his heart. The people whom he addresses in the last paragraphs of the Epistle are all equally before him here; the husbands and wives of Asia, the fathers and mothers, the sons and daughters, the masters and the slaves. His prayer is that every one of them, in all the days of their commonplace human life, in all the strong temptations of that life to live apart from God, may so live close to God that this shall be the description, the formula, of that life—"Christ dwelling in the heart by faith." So it was a definite blessing, and it was a blessing urgently to be sought for by them all. Observe further that it stood related on the one side to purely miraculous divine action, and on the other side to quite simple human reception. It required on the one side that the Christian convert should be "strengthened with might by the Spirit in the inward man"; no power short of that could enable the being to enter upon this "secret of the Lord." On the other side, the reception of Christ as Indweller was to be simply "by faith"; that is, by the personal reliant welcome of the human affections and will, opening the door without reserve, bidding "my Lord the King to come to His own house in peace." Is there need that we should remind one another that these are truths for our century as much as for the first? There should be no need to do so, but indeed there is. With simplicity and humility I do remind my reader, and God knows I would be daily reminded myself, that every one of us is divinely intended to live a Christian life of which the inmost secret is this, Christ dwelling in the heart, by faith; the Spirit strengthening us thereto in the inner man.

I shrink from an elaborate attempted analysis of the blessed mystery in itself. I would only say a little about what must assuredly be some of its results where it has begun to be. It must produce a deep and absolutely genuine humility. It must produce an inner calm which shall greatly tell upon the air and manner of outward life, aye, on look, and on tone of discourse. It must produce an abiding "Christ-consciousness," at the back, so to speak, of the manifold experiences of life; with this presence in the heart, by faith, we shall not find it a chimerical hope, day by day, and hour by hour, to "do all to the glory of God." Our life in its activities and interests may, and very possibly will, go on as before; we shall walk, and talk, and work, and rest, and sigh, and smile, as men really living in a real society. People will find us doing, not dreaming; attentive, active, full of the sense of duty and responsibility—only, kept amidst it all, by a power not our own, in a tone and temper which mean that "the Lord is there."

"I sit here and talk to you," said Tersteegen to his friend Evertsen, "but within my heart is the eternal adoration, unceasing and undisturbed. I thank God that He has given me a little chamber into which no creature has entered besides."[2] Tersteegen lived a real and useful life. He did not shun his kind. His mind was fully open to his period; he astonished Frederick the Great by the manly good sense and high ability of a written criticism on one of the King’s anti-Christian writings. But behind it all, Christ dwelt in his heart, by faith; and the Indwelling only made his life more real. Have we not known our Tersteegens?

One word more in closing this line of reflection. It is suggested by the words just quoted; "within my heart is the eternal adoration." Yes, this also will assuredly be one precious result and evidence of the Indwelling. Within the heart will be adoration. If indeed "the Lord is there," He will be felt there to be the Lord. All His fair characters and attributes will in their measure be made known to us; but all will be overshadowed, or rather overshone, with this—it is the Lord. "My Master, O my Master!" Only, "Lord" seems to say more than even "Master"; the Lord is the Master who is the Maker too; who is not to be served only, even with the most entire surrender, but to be worshipped all the while.

He knows our frame; He knows that we cannot be perpetually, with each breath, formulating an articulate Te Deum to Him in explicit words, or even thoughts. But He can keep our inmost being, as to its spiritual attitude, for ever upon its knees. And He only knows how greatly He can enable us to speak our worship too, with an instinctive readiness and frequency which once we could not have imagined.

"Christ dwelling in the heart by faith." Let us clasp and cherish the words, and use them in the most practical needs of life. "Not I, but Christ liveth in me"; "Christ dwelleth in me." I listened lately with deep attention to a Christian man’s quiet narrative, given to me in private, of his experience of discovery in this matter, "The fear of man" had been a burthen to him. It was brought home to him that the secret of deliverance was to recollect that his Lord was in him, and that his Lord was not afraid. Sudden and wonderful was the revolution within. Some circumstances attended it which I cannot for a moment think to be, in God’s purpose, normally meant for all believers. But the essence of the thing—is it not meant for all? For it is but an extension and application, in the light of the Holy Spirit, of the truth of the Indwelling in the heart, by faith.

Come in then, Lord, oh come, and dwell, and let Thy presence evermore expand within.

"O Jesus Christ, grow Thou in me, And all things else recede; My heart be daily nearer Thee, From sin be daily freed."[3]

I thus conclude this chapter of retrospect and review. After all, I have only taken a few great specimens from the treasures of our Epistle, to illustrate its view of the inner Christian life. I have said nothing, for example, of the teachings of St Paul here upon the ideal of the Christian Church, in relation to the soul of the Christian man. But let this at least be remembered, in that direction. We are living in a period of deep and complicated unrest and perplexity in the visible Church of Christ. There is much to rejoice us in many quarters and many aspects of the life of Christendom. But there are those of us whose hearts often fail them when they contemplate the phenomena, within the Church of England for example, of doubt, of worldly conformity, of grotesque and retrograde superstition, of altogether unchastened wrangling. No thoughtful Christian can look on unmoved; few but must think often over the problem of practical measures for reformation. But let the Ephesian Epistle teach us this, that the deepest of all secrets for strength and cohesion in social Christian life is the extension far and wide in individual Christians of the life hid with Christ in God, the Spirit’s light shed in the soul upon the glories of salvation, faith’s welcome to the Lord’s own Dwelling in the heart.

"Make my life a bright outshining Of Thy life, that all may see Thine own resurrection-power Mightily shewn forth in me;

Ever let my heart become Yet more consciously Thy home."

Miss J. S. Pigott.

^[1]I quote a few sentences written on this subject in some notes on the Epistle to the Romans prepared for a Bible-reading Union:" The sovereignty of grace is a side of revelation full of awe.... Only, we are well assured that it is notthe whole.

^[2]Mrs Sevan,Sketches of the Quiet in the Land,p. 430, ^[3]From the German of Lavater:O Jesu Christe, wachs in mir.The English will be found inHymns of Consecration and Faith.