04. Chapter 4: The Will Of God

Chapter IV THE WILL OF GOD Eph 6:6. — Doing the will of God from the heart. This short sentence, eight words in the English, seven only in the Greek, is a wonderfully comprehensive account of the action of the Spiritual Life. Take it word by word, and every detail in it is a great principle, meant to underlie a most happy experience and practice. “Doing” is its first word; doing, as against dreaming; doing, in the sense of a genuine obedience, and not merely an approval, a recognition, of what claims to be obeyed. “Doingthe will of God” is its next word; reminding the Christian that he is indeed not his own, that he exists for Another, for his Maker and Redeemer, and that his own being will never work aright, will never fulfil its true “law,” will never rest, out of the line of the will of Him who has made him, has re-made him, owns him altogether, and purposes to use him. “Doing the will of Godfrom the heart,” or more precisely “from the soul,”is its last word; a word which conveys at once precept and promise; bids the man seek such a “doing” as shall be not friction and fatigue but a matter of strong, warm interest and willingness, “not a sigh, but a song”; and by thus bidding him seek, assures him that he shall find; tells him that such a doing is divinely possible in the life of grace, no day-dream but a living and practical reality for “the children of the day” (1Th 5:5).

Before I go further, here let me pause, as in the presence of the King, and recollect all this for myself, and reverently press it on my reader’s recollection. Not one word have I written in the previous lines that is not of the alphabet of the Gospel, or at least of its one-syllable lessons for the little children of God. But monosyllables, even in an infant’s lesson, can and often do convey unfathomable and pressingly important truths; and so it is with these. The simple statements just presented, if they express to me and to my reader not only a holy theory but in some genuine measure a holy experience, are the description of a life most blessed, most peaceful, most successful and fruitful, in the Lord’s own sense of fruit and of success. Let that sentence of the Apostle, or any part of it, be to us merely theory, and we shall know little indeed of the peace and joy of God. So be it not with us, not for an hour more, if it is so now.

Approaching the words in their connexion, we find a most remarkable and suggestive connexion indeed. Whom is he addressing specially here?It is the Christian slave; the man who has found Christ, or rather has been found of Him, while being the absolute property of a human owner, under the then laws of society and the state. This man had had no voice, not the faintest, in the choice of his service, of his duties, of his burthens, of his residence, of his surroundings of any sort. His purchaser might be the best of men, or the worst; he might be Philemon, he might be Felix, or Nero. He might be a believer, or a persecutor. He might be just and generous by natural character, or capricious and unfair to the last degree. The tasks he imposed upon his slave might be well adapted to the strength and character of the worker, or extremely uncongenial, trying, and exhausting. Most assuredly the Master in heaven would take account of the unfairness or cruelty, and deal with the offender in due time. But meanwhile the slave of man who was also the believing bond-servant of the Lord Jesus, was to leave that wholly to his own and his human master’s Master, and to accept the conditions of his servitude, however uneasy, as the conditions under which he was to do the will of God from the soul. Doubtless occasions for disobedience might arise; for the earthly master might possibly order him to sin. But this was a matter by itself; this would be a question not of the pleasantness or bitterness of his surroundings, the weight or lightness of his yoke, but of right and wrong, of the will and preferences not of self but of Jesus Christ. As regarding everything else that fell in his way in slavery, as regarded caprice and violence, tasks beyond his strength, uncongenial to his nature, tasks never raised perhaps above the lowest or apparently most useless level, he was to recognize in it the will of God, and do it from the soul. The abstract question whether slavery was right or no was never presented by the Gospel to the slave, though the precepts addressed to the master must often have suggested the question tohim. No, the Gospel never taught revolution, though its inmost principles were pregnant with peaceful and just reform. It at once contented and ennobled the slave-convert by glorifying the actual conditions of his life with the surprising truth that, as the world stood then, they were for him the will of God, and that in accepting and fulfilling them he was serving in blessed truth the eternal Master.

It is plain from the New Testament that in countless cases this was grasped, welcomed, and lived out by human souls, through grace. Though the Apostles said not one word about emancipation, they made great multitudes of converts among the slaves. We infer with wonder and joy, from the Epistles, that the life of God, the life lived by faith in the Son of God, the life of peace, and purity, and heavenly love, was lived in the slave-circle of many a household, large and small, in that corrupted classic world. Not merely in the gaps and breathing-times of their servile duties, but in the duties and through them, multitudes of saints supernaturally saw the will of Him who had shone upon their darkness, and transfigured them into His own children.

Dwelling where an apparent iron Destiny had fixed them, they yet found in it liberty and choice, for it was to them no longer fate but the will of God. Moving up and down in their compulsory surroundings, they found themselves abiding in Jesus Christ. Taking the orders of their Greek or Latin owner, or those of his underlings, they heard through them the voice of the will of God. Were they instructions for honourable occupation, and kindly given? This was well, and welcome. Were the orders vexatious in matter, or manner, or both? Here indeed was call for the miracle of grace and power; but a call never in vain, if the heart was indeed given up to God and abiding in His Son. “His grace was sufficient for them” (2Co 12:9). He shone as the First Cause through the cloud of the second. The mistakes of man were but the vehicle for the unerring touch of the love of God. Through man’s unkindness, or positive malevolence, He who “loveth righteousness and hateth wickedness” (Psa 45:7) was however carrying out nothing but His will through and on His saint. The soul which, by the Spirit, recollected and rested upon that truth might tabernacle in the body of the most oppressed of bondmen, but it was possessed of a peace and liberty undreamed of by the serene Stoic. For its refuge was not in itself but in Jesus Christ; in His power, not in his own; in His will, not in its own.

Such blessed lives — were they not blessed indeed then, as they are eternally blessed now in the life of glory? — St. Paul contemplates, takes for granted, and writes for, in this passage. He knows that the experience is not visionary, for he knows these slaves as Christians indeed. That is to say, he knows them as redeemed, regenerated, sanctified. He knows them as Christ’s purchased ones, ransomed with the blood of the Lamb, and united by the Holy Spirit to the plenitude of their Redeemer’s life and power. They were human, mortal, sinful. Of themselves they could do nothing. But they were in union with Christ by grace, and by grace they could receive out of Him “all sufficiency” for all actual demands, for all the will of God expressed in circumstances. Each one of them was “joined into the Lord, one Spirit” (1Co 6:17; Php 4:13). Therefore, “in Him that strengtheneth, they could do all things — all things of the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning them” (Eph 2:10). His commandments were for them no longer “grievous” (1Jn 5:3), not because of their strength of resolution and long-practised fortitude, but because their will was most meekly yielded up to their beloved Possessor and Life. Were they not blessed? Was not their life one of far more than imperial liberty, wealth and peace?

I have written on, and on, about this case of the slave of old. But it has been because for myself I feel that every realized detail of that case bears with wonderful directness, a fortiori, upon that of each Christian in real life now. It is difficult to imagine the lot and path in which we may not feel that argument to us from them, those dear elder brethren at Ephesus, is strong and tender indeed.

Believer in the same Lord who enabled them to do His will from the heart, can He not enable you, here and now, to do that will from your heart in your surroundings? Are you sorely tried by those surroundings? Are they in themselves humiliating to you, or exasperating to you? Are they full of acute heart-pangs, or heavy with chronic heart-ache? Is your sphere of work and influence seemingly very narrow? Is the exterior of your daily duties very secular, very earthy? Not one of these things is forgotten before your Lord. Your slightest pain finds response in His sympathy. But let that thought be but the stepping stone to this, that for you as for the slave-saint of Ephesus there lies open in that same Lord the blessed secret of a life which shall move amidst these same unwelcome surroundings as a life free, and at leisure, and at peace, full of love and rest, blessed and blessing; a life hid with Christ in God; a life in whicheverything, from your rising up to your lying down, private trial and anxiety, wrong or peril in Church or State, the smallest cross and the largest, is seen in the light of the holy, the beloved, will of God, and so is met not with a sigh, or a murmur, but “from the soul. ” “The will of God, done from the soul,” shall be to you — yes, indeed, it shall be — a whisper of life unto life. You have “yielded yourself to Him, as one that is alive from the dead” (Rom 6:13); what are these things, while they last, but opportunities, dear opportunities for His sake and in His peace, of expressing that Holyfait accompli? Not for one moment are you asked to live thus upon the resources of nature. “Without Him you can do — nothing”(John 15:5). But it is “God who is” (Php 2:13) not only who may be, “working in you, both to will, and to do, for the sake of His good pleasure,” for the sake of His blessed will. Recollect that fact, and find in it a transfigured life.

“The will of God”!Let us, to animate and endear every thought of it, remind ourselves often of its blissful purposes. True, it is sovereign; let us bow low before its sovereignty, its irresponsible and unknown ways. But in all its infinite range it is the will of Him whom we know in Jesus Christ, and who has told us such gracious things about it through Jesus Christ. If it wills for us immediately toil and trial, contradictions, disappointments, tears — as it sometimes does, as it once did for our Lord and Life — what does it always will ultimately, and with infinite skill and power to attain its end?It wills, He wills, “that not one of His little ones should perish” (Mat 18:14). He wills “that every one that seeth the Son and believeth on Him should have everlasting life, and be raised up again by Christ Jesus at the last day” (John 6:40). He wills “our sanctification”(1Th 4:3). He wills, as His Son wills, that they whom He has “given” to His Son should “be with Him where He is, to behold His glory” (John 17:24). In belonging to such a God, for every part and detail of our lives, is there not both peace and glory?In accepting, loving, bearing, doing, the will of such a God is there not a blissful light upon every step of our road home?That road, even step by step, was trodden before us by the Son of Man, who took on Him the form of a bondservant, of a slave — the Apostle boldly uses the word — the slave of the will of His Father (Php 2:7). As He came down to tread it, He said, “I delight to do Thy will, O my God” (Psa 40:8). As He trode it, He said, “My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me, and to finish the work; Not my will but Thine be done” (John 4:34; Luk 22:42). And it is He who by His Spirit dwells in us, and we in Him.

Lord Jesus Christ, who thus workest in me, work on and evermore, work now, both to will and to do; to will now not my choice but Thine; to do now Thy will from the soul. Amen.