Milo

December 18th

The test of loyalty

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God. Romans 8:28.

It is only the loyal soul who believes that God engineers circumstances. We take such liberties with our circumstances, we do not believe God engineers them, although we say we do; we treat the things that happen as if they were engineered by men. To be faithful in every circumstance means that we have only one loyalty, and that is to our Lord. Suddenly God breaks up a particular set of circumstances, and the realization comes that we have been disloyal to Him by not recognizing that He had organized them. We never saw what He was after, and that particular thing will never be repeated all the days of our life. The test of loyalty always comes just there. If we learn to worship God in the trying circumstances, He will alter them in two seconds when He chooses.
Loyalty to Jesus Christ is the thing that we ‘stick at’ to-day. We will be loyal to work, to service, to anything, but do not ask us to be loyal to Jesus Christ. Many Christians are intensely impatient of talking about loyalty to Jesus. Our Lord is dethroned more emphatically by Christian workers than by the world. God is made a machine for blessing men, and Jesus Christ is made a Worker among workers.
The idea is not that we do work for God, but that we are so loyal to Him that He can do His work through us—‘I reckon on you for extreme service, with no complaining on your part and no explanation on Mine.’ God wants to use us as He used His own Son.

December 18

“In all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.” (Rom. 8:37.)

THE Gospel is so arranged and the gift of God go great that you may take the very enemies that fight you and the forces that are arrayed against you and make them steps up to the very gates of heaven and into the presence of God.
Like the eagle, who sits on a crag and watches the sky as it is filling with blackness, and the forked lightnings are playing up and down, and he is sitting perfectly still, turning one eye and then the other toward the storm. But he never moves until he begins to feel the burst of the breeze and knows that the hurricane has struck him; with a scream, he swings his breast to the storm, and uses the storm to go up to the sky; away he goes, borne upward upon it.
That is what God wants of every one of His children, to be more than conqueror, turning the storm-cloud into a chariot. You know when one army is more than conqueror it is likely to drive the other from the field, to get all the ammunition, the food and supplies, and to take possession of the whole. That is just what our text means. There are spoils to be taken!
Beloved, have you got them? When you went into that terrible valley of suffering did you come out of it with spoils? When that injury struck you and you thought everything was gone, did you so trust in God that you came out richer than you went in? To be more than conqueror is to take the spoils from the enemy and appropriate them to yourself. What he had arranged for your overthrow, take and appropriate for yourself.
When Dr. Moon, of Brighton, England, was stricken with blindness, he said: “Lord, I accept this talent of blindness from Thee. Help me to use it for Thy glory that at Thy coming Thou mayest receive Thine own with usury.” Then God enabled him to invent the Moon Alphabet for the blind, by which thousands of blind people were enabled to read the Word of God, and many of them were gloriously saved.—Selected.
God did not take away Paul’s thorn; He did better—He mastered that thorn, and made it Paul’s servant. The ministry of thorns has often been a greater ministry to man than the ministry of thrones.—Selected.

18 DECEMBER

Our nearest kinsman

‘Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.’ Isaiah 7:14
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING: Hebrews 2:5–18

The Messiah must not only be a man, but partaker of our very nature. It had been easy to divine power to have formed the second Adam as he did the first, out of the dust of the earth. But, though in this way he might have been a true and perfect man, he would have been no more related to us than an angel. Therefore when God sent forth his Son to be made under the law, he was made of a woman. Thus he became ‘Goel’ [Hebrew for kinsman], our near kinsman. But farther, had he derived his human nature wholly in the ordinary way, from sinful parents, we see not how he could have escaped that inherent defilement which the fall of Adam has entailed upon all his posterity. But his body, that holy thing conceived and born of a virgin, was the immediate production of God. Therefore he was pure and spotless, qualified to be such a High Priest as became us, holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, who needed not, as the typical high priest of Israel, to offer up sacrifice, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people. These difficulties were obviated by a virgin’s conceiving and bearing a son. Let us now praise and admire the wisdom of God. Let us adore his power. Thus he created a new thing upon earth.

FOR MEDITATION:
JESUS, who passed the angels by,
Assumed our flesh to bleed and die;
And still he makes it his abode,
As man, he fills the throne of GOD.
Our next of kin, our Brother now,
Is he to whom the angels bow;
They join with us to praise his name,
But we the nearest interest claim.

SERMON SERIES: MESSIAH, NO. 5 [3/6], ISAIAH 7:14

December 17th

Redemption creates the need it satisfies

But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him. 1 Cor. 2:14.

The Gospel of God creates a sense of need of the Gospel. Paul says—“If our gospel be hid, it is hid”—to those who are blackguards? No, “to them that are lost; in whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not.” The majority of people have their morality well within their own grasp, they have no sense of need of the gospel. It is God Who creates the need of which no human being is conscious until He manifests Himself. Jesus said—“Ask, and it shall be given unto you,” but God cannot give until a man asks. It is not that He withholds, but that is the way He has constituted things on the basis of Redemption. By means of our asking, God gets processes into work whereby He creates the thing that is not in existence until we do ask. The inner reality of Redemption is that it creates all the time. As the Redemption creates the life of God in us, so it creates the things belonging to that life. Nothing can satisfy the need but that which created the need. This is the meaning of Redemption—it creates and it satisfies.
“I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me.” We preach our own experiences and people are interested, but no sense of need is awakened. If Jesus Christ is lifted up, the Spirit of God will create a conscious need of Him. Behind the preaching of the Gospel is the creative Redemption of God at work in the souls of men. It is never personal testimony that saves men. “The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.”

December 17

“And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is he that calleth you who also will do it.” (1 Thess. 5:23, 24.)

MANY years since I saw that “without holiness no man shall see the Lord.” I began by following after it and inciting all with whom I had intercourse to do the same. Ten years after, God gave me a clearer view than I ever had before of the way to obtain it; namely, by faith in the Son of God. And immediately I declared to all, “We are saved from sin, we are made holy by faith.” This I testified in private, in public, and in print, and God confirmed it by a thousand witnesses. I have continued to declare this for above thirty years, and God has continued to confirm my work.—John Wesley in 1771.
“I knew Jesus, and He was very precious to my soul; but I found something in me that would not keep sweet and patient and kind. I did what I could to keep it down, but it was there. I besought Jesus to do something for me, and, when I gave Him my will, He came to my heart, and took out all that would not be sweet, all that would not be kind, all that would not be patient, and then HE shut the door.”—George Fox.
My whole heart has not one single grain, this moment, of thirst after approbation. I feel alone with God; He fills the void; I have not one wish, one will, one desire, but in Him; He hath set my feet in a large room. I have wondered and stood amazed that God should make a conquest of all within me by love.—Lady Huntington.
“All at once I felt as though a hand—not feeble, but omnipotent; not of wrath, but of love—was laid on my brow. I felt it not outwardly but inwardly. It seemed to press upon my whole being, and to diffuse all through me a holy, sin-consuming energy. As it passed downward, my heart as well as my head was conscious of the presence of this soul-cleansing energy, under the influence of which I fell to the floor, and in the joyful surprise of the moment, cried out in a loud voice. Still the hand of power wrought without and within; and wherever it moved, it seemed to leave the glorious influence of the Saviour’s image. For a few minutes the deep ocean of God’s love swallowed me up; all its waves and billows rolled over me.”—Bishop Hamline.
Holiness—as I then wrote down some of my contemplations on it—appeared to me to be of a sweet, calm, pleasant, charming, serene nature, which brought an inexpressible purity, brightness, peacefulness, ravishment to the soul; in other words, that it made the soul like a field or garden of God, with all manner of pleasant fruits and flowers, all delightful and undisturbed, enjoying a sweet calm and the gentle vivifying beams of the sun.—Jonathan Edwards.

  “Love’s resistless current sweeping
  All the regions deep within;
  Thought and wish and senses keeping
  Now, and every instant clean:
  Full salvation! Full salvation!
  From the guilt and power of sin.”