Milo

27 OCTOBER (PREACHED NEW YEAR’S EVENING 1785)

The supreme desire of our souls

‘And I will give them an heart to know me, that I am the LORD: and they shall be my people, and I will be their God: for they shall return unto me with their whole heart.’ Jeremiah 24:7
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING: Hosea 14:1–9

When we know the Lord we therefore come to him for pardon and for liberty. Both are in Christ—they who believe are accepted and made free. He becomes their God. They return to their allegiance and rest. They own and feel their dependence. They devote and yield themselves to him, and thus are restored to their proper rank and state as his intelligent creatures, under additional obligation of being bought with blood. Now they say—What have I to do any more with idols? He is their refuge; we are weak, defenceless, exposed, but Psalm 146:5 [Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the LORD his God]; Deuteronomy 33. There is our sap. The Lord is their tower and their shield. He is their portion, their happiness. The supreme desire of their souls is to him; they have fellowship with him—and for ever. They are his people, interested in all his attributes, perfections, promises and providences.

FOR MEDITATION: I doubt not many of thy children think highly of me, but what I really am thou only knowest, and well it is for me. Thou canst bear with me, but could my fellow creatures see me as I appear in thy sight, surely they would flee from me. Thou, Lord, knewest what I would be. Thou knowest that I desire to love thee, yea, that I do love thee, above all. Thou art the foundation of my hope and chief object of my soul’s desire. I trust there is nothing in heaven or upon earth that I hold in competition with thee. I seek my happiness only in thy favour and propose thy glory as the great end of my being.
Annotated Letters to a Wife, 27 October 1794

SERMON: JEREMIAH 24:7 [3/4] [FOR THE YOUNG PEOPLE]

October 26th

What is a missionary?

As My Father hath sent Me, even so send I you. John 20:21.

A missionary is one sent by Jesus Christ as He was sent by God. The great dominant note is not the needs of men, but the command of Jesus. The source of our inspiration in work for God is behind, not before. The tendency to-day is to put the inspiration ahead, to sweep everything in front of us and bring it all out to our conception of success. In the New Testament the inspiration is put behind us, the Lord Jesus. The ideal is to be true to Him, to carry out His enterprises.
Personal attachment to the Lord Jesus and His point of view is the one thing that must not be overlooked. In missionary enterprise the great danger is that God’s call is effaced by the needs of the people until human sympathy absolutely overwhelms the meaning of being sent by Jesus. The needs are so enormous, the conditions so perplexing, that every power of mind falters and fails. We forget that the one great reason underneath all missionary enterprise is not first the elevation of the people, nor the education of the people, nor their needs; but first and foremost the command of Jesus Christ—“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations.”
When looking back on the lives of men and women of God the tendency is to say—‘What wonderfully astute wisdom they had! How perfectly they understood all God wanted!’ The astute mind behind is the Mind of God, not human wisdom at all. We give credit to human wisdom when we should give credit to the Divine guidance of God through childlike people who were foolish enough to trust God’s wisdom and the supernatural equipment of God.

October 26

“He went up into a mountain apart to pray: and when evening was come, he was there alone.” (Matt. 14:23.)

THE man Christ Jesus felt the need of perfect solitude—Himself alone, entirely by Himself alone with Himself. We know how much intercourse with men draws us away from ourselves and exhausts our powers. The man Christ Jesus knew this, too, and felt the need of being by Himself again, of gathering all His powers, of realizing fully His high destiny, His human weakness, His entire dependence on the Father.
How much more does the child of God need this—himself, alone with spiritual realities, himself alone with God the Father. If ever there were one who could dispense with special seasons for solitude and fellowship, it was our Lord. But He could not do His work or maintain His fellowship in full power, without His quiet time.
Would God that every servant of His understood and practiced this blessed art, and that the Church knew how to train its children into some sense of this high and holy privilege, that every believer may and must have his time when he is indeed himself alone with God. Oh, the thought to have God all alone to myself, and to know that God has me all alone to Himself!
—Andrew Murray.
Lamertine speaks in one of his books of a secluded walk in his garden where his mother always spent a certain hour of the day, upon which nobody ever dreamed for a moment of intruding. It was the holy garden of the Lord to her. Poor souls that have no such Beulah land! Seek thy private chamber, Jesus says. It is in the solitude that we catch the mystic notes that issue from the soul of things.

A MEDITATION
My soul, practice being alone with Christ! It is written that when they were alone He expounded all things to His disciples. Do not wonder at the saying; it is true to thine experience. If thou wouldst understand thyself send the multiude away. Let them go out one by one till thou art left alone with Jesus. … Has thou ever pictured thyself the one remaining creature in the earth, the one remaining creature in all the starry worlds?
In such a universe thine every thought would be “God and I! God and I!” And yet He is as near to thee as that—as near as if in the boundless spaces there throbbed no heart but His and thine. Practice that solitude, O my soul! Practice the expulsion of the crowd! Practice the stillness of thine own heart! Practice the solemn refrain “God and I! God and I!” Let none interpose between thee and thy wrestling angel! Thou shalt be both condemned and pardoned when thou shalt meet Jesus alone!
—George Matheson.

26 OCTOBER (PREACHED NEW YEAR’S EVENING 1785)

Pray for a new heart

‘And I will give them an heart to know me, that I am the LORD: and they shall be my people, and I will be their God: for they shall return unto me with their whole heart.’ Jeremiah 24:7
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING: Ezekiel 36:22–32

God is known by his Word. Though you doubt not there is a God, you do not know him unless you know him from Scripture—and especially in Christ. His outward signs give some idea of his wisdom, power and goodness, but too faint to impress the heart. His holiness and justice, his grace and love, are revealed in the work of redemption. God is in Christ revealing himself to the world and reconciling the world to himself. Yea, you may have some outward knowledge of all this, and yet not know the Lord. He must give you a heart, a new heart—the heart of stone cannot come to him. Here we must begin. Pray for a heart of flesh. Oh that moment when a divine light shines into the dark heart! Should that favoured moment be now to any of you, you will say with Jacob, The Lord is in this place [Genesis 28:16]. They shall know me. While ignorant of God, we cannot know ourselves. We are separated from him, degraded and blinded. And therefore though our souls are immortal, our capacities too great to be filled with anything short of himself, we are seeking the living among the dead, hewing out cisterns, and regardless of the fountain. This state is sinful. For he made us, and we are his property. His will should be our rule, our law, his power our life, his glory our end.

FOR MEDITATION: It is possible to approve and profess the gospel, and yet to be quite strangers to that change of heart, that new birth, that hidden and spiritual life of faith in the Son of God, which are essentially necessary to the character of a true Christian. If profession does not spring from the root of a broken and contrite spirit, a solid conviction of sin, and such a sense of the wretched, ruined state of a sinner as makes the Saviour precious and all in all to the soul, and leads to a renunciation of self in every view, and a separation from the spirit of the world—though it may seem to flourish for awhile, sooner or later, it will wither, and come to nothing. The true Christian is like a river where the stream, though not always of the same depth or rapidity, yet always runs, because it is fed from an unfailing spring.
John Newton to William Wilberforce, 1 July 1789

SERMON: JEREMIAH 24:7 [2/4] [FOR THE YOUNG PEOPLE]

October 25th

The external crush of things

I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some. 1 Cor. 9:22.

A Christian worker has to learn how to be God’s noble man or woman amid a crowd of ignoble things. Never make this plea—‘If only I were somewhere else!’ All God’s men are ordinary men made extraordinary by the matter He has given them. Unless we have the right matter in our minds intellectually and in our hearts affectionately, we will be hustled out of usefulness to God. We are not workers for God by choice. Many people deliberately choose to be workers, but they have no matter in them of God’s almighty grace, no matter of His mighty word. Paul’s whole heart and mind and soul were taken up with the great matter of what Jesus Christ came to do, he never lost sight of that one thing. We have to face ourselves with the one central fact—Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.
“I have chosen you.” Keep that note of greatness in your creed. It is not that you have got God, but that He has got you. Here, in this College, God is at work, bending, breaking, moulding, doing just as He chooses. Why He is doing it, we do not know; He is doing it for one purpose only—that He may be able to say, ‘This is My man, My woman.’ We have to be in God’s hand so that He can plant men on the Rock as He has planted us.
Never choose to be a worker, but when God has put His call on you, woe be to you if you turn to the right hand or to the left. He will do with you what He never did with you before the call came; He will do with you what He is not doing with other people. Let Him have His way.