SUNDAY TALKS “Obey my Voice” “I will Be Your GOD…!” God’s Provision is God’s Promise “Obey My voice, and I will be your God.” Obedience everywhere, especially in the Book of Deuteronomy, appears as the condition of blessing. Some may ask how God could make a covenant of which He knew that man could not keep it. The answer opens up to us the whole nature and object of the Covenant. .All education, Divine or human, ever deals with its pupils on the principle of faithfulness and is essential to the attainment of the greater. In taking Israel into His training, God dealt with them as men in whom, with all the ruin sin had brought, there still was a conscience to judge of good and evil, a heart capable of being stirred to long for God, and a will to choose the good and to choose Himself. Before Christ and His salvation could be revealed and understood and truly appreciated, these faculties of man had to be stirred and awakened. The law took men into its training, and sought, if I may use the expression, to make the very best that could be made of them by external instruction. In the provision made in the law for a vicarious atonement and pardon, in all God’s revelation of Himself through priest and prophet and king, in His interposition in providence and grace, everything was done that He could do, to touch and win the heart of His people and to give force to the appeal to their self-interest or their gratitude, their fear or their love. Are you fully living in the New Covenant? Is there still somewhat of the Old-Covenant spirit of bondage in you? At conversion, you were content to fall down as a condemned, death-deserving sinner, be content now to sink down before God in the confession that, as His redeemed child, you still feel yourself utterly impotent to do and be what you see He asks of you. And begin to ask whether the New Covenant has not perhaps a provision you have never yet understood for meeting your impotence and giving you the strength to do what is well-pleasing to God. You will find the wonderful answer in the assurance that God, by His Holy Spirit, undertakes to work everything in you. The longing to be delivered from this life of sin, and the extinction of all hope to secure this by our own personal efforts as Christians, will prepare us for understanding and accepting God’s new way of salvation; Himself working in us all that is pleasing in His sight. I can’t earnestly expect believers who long to know the utmost of the grace of God or what it can work in them. That they should not seek a clear insight into the possibility of an entire change in their relation to God, this is not what is needed to give us the help we seek. We may be seeking for our growth in a more diligent use of the means of grace, and a more earnest striving to live in accordance with God’s will, and yet fail in our attempt to do so. The reason is that there is a secret root of evil which must be removed. That root is the spirit of bondage, the legal spirit of self-effort, which hinders that humble faith that knows that God will work all, but does not yield to Him to do it. That spirit may be found amidst very great zeal for God’s service, and very earnest prayer for His grace; it does not enjoy the rest of faith, and cannot overcome sin, because it does not stand in the liberty with which Christ has made us free, and does not know that where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty, there the soul can say: “The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, has made me free from the law of sin and death. ” When once we admit heartily, not only that there are failings in our life, but that there is something radically wrong that can be changed, we shall turn with a new interest, with a deeper confession of ignorance and impotence, and then with a hope that looks to God alone for teaching and strength, to find that in the New Covenant there is an actual provision for every need. No New Covenant could not be of any profit unless provision was made for securing obedience. God as Creator could never take His creatures into His favor and fellowship, except they obey Him. If the New Covenant is to be better than the Old, if it is to be an everlasting Covenant, never to be broken, it must make some sufficient provision for securing the obedience of the Covenant people. This is indeed the glory of the New Covenant, the glory that excelleth, that this provision has made us free in a way that no human thought could have devised, by a stipulation that never entered into any human covenant, by an undertaking in which God’s infinite condescension and power and faithfulness are to be most wonderfully exhibited, by a supernatural mystery of Divine wisdom and grace, the New Covenant provides a guarantee, not only for God’s faithfulness, and there is no other way than by God Himself undertaking to secure man’s part as well as His own. Where the law has done its full work, where the actual desire to be freed from every sin is strong, and masters the heart, the promise of the New Covenant, when once really understood, comes like bread to a famishing man. The subtle unbelief, that thinks it impossible to be kept from sinning, cuts away the power of accepting the provision of the everlasting Covenant of God’s Word, “I will put My fear in their heart, that they shall not depart from me”,(Jer 32:40) is understood in some feeble sense, according to our experience. The Law is now written in the Heart of man so that we may “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof, ‘Make no provision for the flesh”. To deny or ignore the existence of an enemy is to give him a great chance against you; and the flesh is with the believer to the very end, a force of evil to be reckoned with continually, an evil force within man, and yet, thank God, a force which can be so dealt with by the power of God, that it shall have no power to defile the heart or deflect the will. The spirit of flesh is with you, but your heart may be kept clean moment by moment in spite of the existence of evil in your fallen nature. Every avenue, every opening that leads into the heart, every thought and desire and purpose and imagination of your being, may be closed against the flesh, so that there shall be no opening to come in and defile the heart or deflect the will from the will of God. The Law written in the Heart and is the Words of God that keeps us free. Yes, they come from within us, and by them there is provision, and no opening in our heart for things to enter. “No provision for the flesh”. We may be so Christ-possessed and Christ-enclosed that we can positively hate everything that is of the flesh. Our hearts can be so barricaded that there should be no entrance to it, that the flesh should never be able to defile it or deflect its will from the will of God. It has been such a blessing to me just to learn that one secret, just to learn the positive side of deliverance;” putting on the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Posted on: Sat, 03 Aug 2013 23:58:02 +0000
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