“The Moral Foundations of Life” (lxxxxiii.) {Left: Week 2, Day 1, Sunday, September 29th} (It appears I had this backwards…2 weeks left till next study begins) A Series of Talks on the Ethical Principles of the Christian Life by Oswald Chambers Our Lord on How to Think Matthew 6:19-24: 19 Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: 20 But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: 21 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. 22 The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. 23 But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! 24 No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. [2] We so readily look upon our Lord as Saviour in the fundamental way that we are apt to forget He is much more than Saviour, He is Teacher as well. In the same way we are familiar with the fact that all Christians have the Spirit of Christ, but not all Christians have the mind of Christ. We balk this because we do not care to go into the laboriousness of forming His mind. We all have times of inspiration and ecstasy, but in these verses our Lord is not talking of times of ecstasy, but of the deliberate set of the life all through. God does His great sovereign works of grace in us and He expects us to bring all the powers under our control into harmony with what He has done. It is an arduous and difficult task, it is not done easily; and remember, God does not do it for us. We have to transform into real thinking possession for ourselves all that the Spirit of God puts into our spirits. The last reach of spirituality is the thinking power, i.e., the power to express what moves our spirit. The Depository of Thought (Matthew 6:19-21) Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the earth, . . . but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven . . . (Matthew 6:19-20†† rv) We have to lay up treasure for ourselves, it is not laid up for us; and we have to lay it up in heaven, not on earth. To begin with, we do lay up the treasure of Jesus Christ’s salvation on earth, we lay it up in our bodily lives, in our circumstances; and the curse spiritually is to lay up treasure in experience. Whatever we possess in the way of treasure on earth is liable to be consumed by moth and rust. Our Lord’s counsel is to lay up treasure that never can be touched, and the place where it is laid up cannot be touched. “And made us to sit with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:6 rv). No moth nor rust in the heavenly places, no possibility of thieves breaking through there. When we lay up treasure on earth it may go at any moment, but when we learn to lay up treasure in heaven, nothing can touch it—“therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed. . . .” It is perfectly secure. Our Lord kept all His treasure of heart and mind and spirit in His oneness with the Father; He laid up treasure in heaven, not on earth. Our Lord never possessed anything for Himself (cf. 2 Corinthians 8:9). The temptation of Satan was to get Him to lay up things in the earthly treasury, viz., in His own body, and to draw from that source: “You are the Son of God, command these stones to be made bread; cast Yourself down and Your Father will send His angels to take care of you.”†† Our Lord never drew power from Himself, He drew it always from without Himself, that is, from His Father. “The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father do” (John 5:19). The one great interest in our Lord’s life was God, and He was never deflected from that centre by other considerations, not even by the devil himself, however subtly he came. “I and my Father are one.” It was a oneness not of union, but of identity. It was impossible to distinguish between the Father and the Son, and the same is to be true of the saint and the Saviour: “that they may be one, even as We are one.” Examine your own experience as a saint and see where your treasure is: is it in the Lord, or in His blessings? In the degree that we possess anything for ourselves we are separated from Jesus. So many of us are caught up in the shows of things, not in the way of property and possessions, but of blessings, and all our efforts to persuade ourselves that our treasure is in heaven is a sure sign that it is not. If our treasure is in heaven we do not need to persuade ourselves that it is, we prove it is by the way we deal with matters of earth. The religion of Jesus Christ is a religion of personal relationship to God and has nothing to do with possessions. A sense of possessions is sufficient to render us spiritually dense because what we possess often possesses us. Whenever our Lord spoke of “life” He meant the kind of life He lived, and He says, “ye have not [this] life in yourselves” (John 6:53 rv). Are we living the kind of life Jesus lived, with the skylights always open towards God, the windows of the ground floor open towards men, and the trap-door open towards sin and Satan and hell? Nothing was hidden from Jesus, all was faced with fearless courage because of His oneness with the Father. “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also . . .”† The Bible term “heart” is best understood if we simply say “me,” it is the central citadel of a man’s personality. The heart is the altar of which the physical body is the outer court, and whatever is offered on the altar of the heart will tell ultimately through the extremities of the body. “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.” Where do we make our depository of thinking? What do we brood on most, the blessings of God, or God Himself? Look back over your life as a saint and you will see how the weaning has gone on from the blessing to the Blesser, from sanctification to the Sanctifier. When we no longer seek God for His blessings, we have time to seek Him for Himself. TOMORROW: The Division of Thinking (Matthew 6:22-23) The lamp of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light . . . (Matthew 6:22 rv) To Be Continued….. Continuity of Study To Be Continued Daily for the next 2 weeks….
Posted on: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 20:04:26 +0000
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