Milo

December 3rd

Not by might nor by power

And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power. 1 Cor. 2:4.

If in preaching the Gospel you substitute your clear knowledge of the way of salvation for confidence in the power of the Gospel, you hinder people getting to Reality. You have to see that while you proclaim your knowledge of the way of salvation, you yourself are rooted and grounded in faith in God. Never rely on the clearness of your exposition, but as you give your exposition see that you are relying on the Holy Spirit. Rely on the certainty of God’s redemptive power, and He will create His own life in souls.
When once you are rooted in Reality, nothing can shake you. If your faith is in experiences, anything that happens is likely to upset that faith; but nothing can ever upset God or the almighty Reality of Redemption; base your faith on that, and you are as eternally secure as God. When once you get into personal contact with Jesus Christ, you will never be moved again. That is the meaning of sanctification. God puts His disapproval on human experience when we begin to adhere to the conception that sanctification is merely an experience, and forget that sanctification itself has to be sanctified (see John 17:19). I have deliberately to give my sanctified life to God for His service, so that He can use me as His hands and His feet.

December 3

“Is it well with thy husband? Is it well with the child?
And she answered, It is well.” (2 Kings 4:26.)

  “Be strong, my soul?
Thy loved ones go
Within the veil. God’s thine, e’en so;
  Be strong.

  “Be strong, my soul!
Death looms in view.
Lo, here thy God! He’ll bear thee through;
  Be strong.”

FOR sixty-two years and five months I had a beloved wife, and now, in my ninety-second year I am left alone. But I turn to the ever present Jesus, as I walk up and down in my room, and say, “Lord Jesus, I am alone, and yet not alone—Thou art with me, Thou art my Friend. Now, Lord, comfort me, strengthen me, give to Thy poor servant everything Thou seest he needs.” And we should not be satisfied till we are brought to this, that we know the Lord Jesus Christ experimentally, habitually to be our Friend: at all times, and under all circumstances, ready to prove Himself to be our Friend.
—George Mueller.
Afflictions cannot injure when blended with submission.

Ice breaks many a branch, and so I see a great many persons bowed down and crushed by their afflictions. But now and then I meet one that sings in affliction, and then I thank God for my own sake as well as his. There is no such sweet singing as a song in the night. You recollect the story of the woman who, when her only child died, in rapture looking up, as with the face of an angel, said, “I give you joy, my darling.” That single sentence has gone with me years and years down through my life, quickening and comforting me.
—Henry Ward Beecher.

“E’en for the dead I will not bind my soul to grief;
Death cannot long divide.
For is it not as though the rose that climbed my garden wall
Has blossomed on the other side?
Death doth hide,
But not divide;
Thou art but on Christ’s other side!
Thou art with Christ, and Christ with me;
In Christ united still are we.”

3 DECEMBER (PREACHED CHRISTMAS EVENING 1769)

Lost to God

‘For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.’ Luke 19:10
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING: Isaiah 1:2–8

A sinner may be described as lost to God. He made us and he made us for himself, for his own service, for his own glory, to know, love and honour him. But as it was said of the prodigal, this my son was lost [Luke 15:24], so God has lost the reverence, obedience and dependence due to him from his creatures. Speaking after the manner of men he expresses concern, and, as it were, disappointment upon this account (Isaiah 1:2 and 5:4). In him we live and move and have our being [Acts 17:28]. He gives us life and breath and all things, rain and fruitful seasons—a boundless capacity and an immortal duration. But what are the returns? How totally are we all lost to him by nature, and how totally are some of you lost to him still. May he give you to know it—instead of reverence, contempt and blasphemy. See how it is with angels and glorified spirits (Isaiah 6). But how is it upon earth? Ah, how is the holy arm of God profaned, his worship neglected. Instead of dependence upon him, self reigns in every heart. We trust in our own strength and live to our own ends (Daniel 5:23). Instead of obedience, the sinner has broken the bonds of God and cast off his yoke behind him. Which of his holy commandments is not transgressed wilfully, habitually, openly, without control and without remorse—as if it was, as indeed it is, a very principle of our vile nature to set our Maker at defiance? Consider each of you what part you have in these charges.
FOR MEDITATION:
The thief who near the Saviour hung
I take my pattern from the thief,
(In death, how happy he!)
I have no other plea;
Was answered when his dying tongue
For I of sinners am the chief,
Said, ‘LORD remember me.’
Then LORD remember me.

My sins are not less black than those
The Lamb upon his glorious throne
Which brought him to the tree:
As newly slain I see,
No thought can give my heart repose,
And trust he will not those disown
But LORD remember me.
Who plead, ‘remember me’.

SERMON: LUKE 19:10 [3/5]

December 2nd

Christian perfection

Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect.… Phil. 3:12.

It is a snare to imagine that God wants to make us perfect specimens of what He can do; God’s purpose is to make us one with Himself. The emphasis of holiness movements is apt to be that God is producing specimens of holiness to put in His museum. If you go off on this idea of personal holiness, the dead-set of your life will not be for God, but for what you call the manifestation of God in your life. ‘It can never be God’s will that I should be sick,’ you say. If it was God’s will to bruise His own Son, why should He not bruise you? The thing that tells for God is not your relevant consistency to an idea of what a saint should be, but your real vital relation to Jesus Christ, and your abandonment to Him whether you are well or ill.
Christian perfection is not, and never can be, human perfection. Christian perfection is the perfection of a relationship to God which shows itself amid the irrelevancies of human life. When you obey the call of Jesus Christ, the first thing that strikes you is the irrelevancy of the things you have to do, and the next thing that strikes you is the fact that other people seem to be living perfectly consistent lives. Such lives are apt to leave you with the idea that God is unnecessary, by human effort and devotion we can reach the standard God wants. In a fallen world this can never be done. I am called to live in perfect relation to God so that my life produces a longing after God in other lives, not admiration for myself. Thoughts about myself hinder my usefulness to God. God is not after perfecting me to be a specimen in His show-room; He is getting me to the place where He can use me. Let Him do what He likes.

December 2

“Perfect through suffering.” (Heb. 2:10.)

STEEL is iron plus fire. Soil is rock, plus heat, or glacier crushing. Linen is flax plus the bath that cleans, the comb that separates, and the flail that pounds, and the shuttle that weaves. Human character must have a plus attached to it. The world does not forget great characters. But great characters are not made of luxuries, they are made by suffering.
I heard of a mother who brought into her home as a companion to her own son, a crippled boy who was also a hunchback. She had warned her boy to be very careful in his relations to him, and not to touch the sensitive part of his life but go right on playing with him as if he were an ordinary boy. She listened to her son as they were playing; and after a few minutes he said to his companion: “Do you know what you have got on your back?” The little hunchback was embarrassed, and he hesitated a moment. The boy said: “It is the box in which your wings are; and some day God is going to cut it open, and then you will fly away and be an angel.”
Some day, God is going to reveal the fact to every Christian, that the very principles they now rebel against, have been the instruments which He used in perfecting their characters and moulding them into perfection, polished stones for His great building yonder.—Cortland Myers.
Suffering is a wonderful fertilizer to the roots of character. The great object of this life is character. This is the only thing we can carry with us into eternity.… To gain the most of it and the best of it is the object of probation.
—Austin Phelps.

“By the thorn road and no other is the mount of vision won.”