Milo

December 28th

Continuous conversion

Except ye be converted, and become as little children.… Matthew 18:3.

These words of Our Lord are true of our initial conversion, but we have to be continuously converted all the days of our lives, continually to turn to God as children. If we trust to our wits instead of to God, we produce consequences for which God will hold us responsible. Immediately our bodies are brought into new conditions by the providence of God, we have to see our natural life obeys the dictates of the Spirit of God. Because we have done it once is no proof that we shall do it again. The relation of the natural to the spiritual is one of continuous conversion, and it is the one thing we object to. In every setting in which we are put, the Spirit of God remains unchanged and His salvation unaltered but we have to “put on the new man.” God holds us responsible every time we refuse to convert ourselves, our reason for refusing is wilful obstinacy. Our natural life must not rule, God must rule in us.
The hindrance in our spiritual life is that we will not be continually converted, there are ‘wadges’ of obstinacy where our pride spits at the throne of God and says—‘I won’t.’ We deify independence and wilfulness and call them by the wrong name. What God looks on as obstinate weakness, we call strength. There are whole tracts of our lives which have not yet been brought into subjection, and it can only be done by this continuous conversion. Slowly but surely we can claim the whole territory for the Spirit of God.

December 28

“Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice.”
(Phil. 4:4.)

“Sing a little song of trust,
  O my heart!
Sing it just because you must,
  As leaves start;
As flowers push their way through dust;
Sing, my heart, because you must.

“Wait not for an eager throng—
  Bird on bird;
’Tis the solitary song
  That is heard.
Every voice at dawn will start,
Be a nightingale, my heart!

“Sing across the winter snow,
  Pierce the cloud;
Sing when mists are drooping low—
  Clear and loud;
But sing sweetest in the dark;
He who slumbers not will hark.”

“An’ when He hears yo’ sing, He bends down wid a smile on His kin’ face an’ listens mighty keerful, an’ He says, ’Sing on, chile, I hears, an’ I’s comin’ down to deliber yo’: I’ll tote dat load fer yo’; jest lean hawd on Me and de road will get smoother bime by.’ ”

28 DECEMBER (PREACHED NEW YEAR’S EVENING 1774)

Asking the way to Zion

‘They shall ask the way to Zion with their faces thitherward, saying, Come, and let us join ourselves to the LORD in a perpetual covenant that shall not be forgotten.’ Jeremiah 50:5
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING: Psalm 119:33–40

They shall ask the way. This intimates:
(i) Their natural ignorance. Men in a state of nature know many things, but not one knows the way to Zion. Many never heard of it. And many who have heard much, know nothing aright. They walk in a way of their own, seek salvation by works, or think they are right because they follow a multitude. Christ is the way, but to know him as such we must be taught, for none can know him so as to choose him and walk in him, to love, trust and worship him, but by the Holy Spirit.
(ii) Their willingness to be taught. The Lord convinces them of their ignorance, and makes them desirous of instruction. They see they must perish unless they come to Zion, and this makes them teachable. They are afraid of leaning to their own understanding and being mistaken in a point of this consequence.
(iii) That the Lord has appointed means of directing enquiring souls, otherwise it will be in vain to ask. The Lord is the only effectual teacher, but he does not speak to them by an outward voice from heaven. For this purpose he has appointed:
(a) prayer. Teach me thy way [Psalm 27:11]. If any lack this wisdom, let them ask of God [James 1:5].
(b) the Word. This is given for a lamp to their feet and a light to their path.
(c) the ordinances. This is a great privilege when afforded, as likewise …
(d) the Lord’s people. These are glad to help enquirers, by telling them how they have been led themselves.
FOR MEDITATION: [Asking the way to Zion, written to be sung after this sermon]
There, all the fruits of glory grow,
The gospel shines to give you light,
And joys that never die;
No longer, then, delay;
And streams of grace, and knowledge flow,
The Spirit waits to guide you right,
The soul to satisfy.
And JESUS is the way.

SERMON: JEREMIAH 50:5 [4/7] [TO THE YOUNG PEOPLE]

December 27th

Where the battle’s lost and won

If thou wilt return, O Israel, saith the Lord.… Jeremiah 4:1.

The battle is lost or won in the secret places of the will before God, never first in the external world. The Spirit of God apprehends me and I am obliged to get alone with God and fight the battle out before Him. Until this is done, I lose every time. The battle may take one minute or a year, that will depend on me, not on God; but it must be wrestled out alone before God, and I must resolutely go through the hell of a renunciation before Him. Nothing has any power over the man who has fought out the battle before God and won there. If I say—‘I will wait till I get into the circumstances and then put God to the test,’ I shall find I cannot. I must get the thing settled between myself and God in the secret places of my soul where no stranger intermeddles, and then I can go forth with the certainty that the battle is won. Lose it there, and calamity and disaster and upset are as sure as God’s decree. The reason the battle is not won is because I try to win it in the external world first. Get alone with God, fight it out before Him, settle the matter there once and for all.
In dealing with other people, the line to take is to push them to an issue of will. That is the way abandonment begins. Every now and again, not often, but sometimes, God brings us to a point of climax. That is the Great Divide in the life; from that point we either go towards a more and more dilatory and useless type of Christian life, or we become more and more ablaze for the glory of God—“My Utmost for His Highest.”

Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest: Selections for the Year (Grand Rapids, MI: Oswald Chambers Publications; Marshall Pickering, 1986).

December 27

“His soul entered into iron.” (Psalm 105:18.)

TURN, that about and render it in our language, and it reads thus, “Iron entered his soul.” Is there not a truth in this? That sorrow and privation, the yoke borne in the youth, the soul’s enforced restraint, are all conducive to an iron tenacity and strength of purpose, and endurance or fortitude, which are the indispensable foundation and framework of a noble character.
Do not flinch from suffering; bear it silently, patiently, resignedly; and be sure that it is God’s way of infusing iron into your spiritual life. The world wants iron dukes, iron battalions, iron sinews, and thews of steel. God wants iron saints; and since there is no way of imparting iron to the moral nature but by letting people suffer, He lets them suffer.
Are the best years of your life slipping away in enforced monotony? Are you beset by opposition, misunderstanding, and scorn, as the thick undergrowth besets the passage of the woodsman pioneer? Then take heart; the time is not wasted; God is only putting you through the iron regimen. The iron crown of suffering precedes the golden crown of glory. And iron is entering into your soul to make it strong and brave.
—F. B. Meyer.
“But you will not mind the roughness nor the steepness of the way,
Nor the chill, unrested morning, nor the searness of the day;
And you will not take a turning to the left or the right,
But go straight ahead, nor tremble at the coming of the night,
For the road leads home.”

Lettie B. Cowman, Streams in the Desert (Los Angeles, CA: The Oriental Missionary Society, 1925), 372–373.