Milo

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.

27 DECEMBER (PREACHED NEW YEAR’S EVENING 1774)

Citizens of 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 87:1–7

Zion represents the church of God. It has two branches during the present state of things: the church in glory—that is, the heavenly state—and the church on earth. Heaven answers not to the idea of a carnal heart. It is the state and place where the redeemed of the Lord rejoice in his presence and love, freed from all their sins, troubles and enemies, to which they are exposed here. Zion likewise is the church upon earth. Not this or that particular church, or denomination, but it consists of all who know Jesus, and have peace and communion with God by him. These are said to come to Mount Zion, the city of the living God, and as sure as they belong to the church below, they belong to the church above, and shall in due time join. This then expresses the desire of awakened souls—they wish to be remembered with the power which the Lord bears to his people, in time and to eternity.

Now my dear friends, how stand you affected to this thought? What is Zion in your view? Have you no desire to be a citizen of Zion? They, and they only, are happy. Their sins are pardoned, their persons accepted, they have access to God, are under his immediate teaching, care, protection. His eye is upon them, his ear is open to them. How far is their portion preferable to the worldling’s while here, and when they die they are blessed indeed, and enter upon a glorious immortality. If nothing of this engages you, if you die before you are united to the Head of the church by faith, then when they are admitted, you will be shut out and must take up your abode with devils.
FOR MEDITATION: [Asking the way to Zion, written to be sung after this sermon]
Zion! the city of our God,
Firm, against every adverse shock,
How glorious is the place!
Its mighty bulwarks prove
The Saviour there has his abode,
’Tis built upon the living Rock,
And sinners see his face.
And walled around with love.

SERMON: JEREMIAH 50:5 [3/7] [TO THE YOUNG PEOPLE]

John Newton and Marylynn Rouse, 365 Days with Newton (Leominster, UK: Day One Publications, 2006), 371.

December 26th

Placed in the light

If we walk in the light, as He is in the light, … the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin. 1 John 1:7.

To mistake conscious freedom from sin for deliverance from sin by the Atonement is a great error. No man knows what sin is until he is born again. Sin is what Jesus Christ faced on Calvary. The evidence that I am delivered from sin is that I know the real nature of sin in me. It takes the last reach of the Atonement of Jesus Christ, that is, the impartation of His absolute perfection, to make a man know what sin is.
The Holy Spirit applies the Atonement to us in the unconscious realm as well as in the realm of which we are conscious, and it is only when we get a grasp of the unrivalled power of the Spirit in us that we understand the meaning of 1 John 1:7, “the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin.” This does not refer to conscious sin only, but to the tremendously profound understanding of sin which only the Holy Ghost in me realizes.
If I walk in the light as God is in the light, not in the light of my conscience, but in the light of God—if I walk there, with nothing folded up, then there comes the amazing revelation—the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses me from all sin so that God Almighty can see nothing to censure in me. In my consciousness it works with a keen poignant knowledge of what sin is. The love of God at work in me makes me hate with the hatred of the Holy Ghost all that is not in keeping with God’s holiness. To walk in the light means that everything that is of the darkness drives me closer into the centre of the light.