Milo

September 26th

The unblameable attitude

If … thou rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee … Matthew 5:23.

If when you come to the altar, there you remember that your brother has anything against you, not—If you rake up something by a morbid sensitiveness, but—“If thou rememberest,” that is, it is brought to your conscious mind by the Spirit of God: “first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.” Never object to the intense sensitiveness of the Spirit of God in you when He is educating you down to the scruple.
“First be reconciled to thy brother …” Our Lord’s direction is simple—“first be reconciled.” Go back the way you came, go the way indicated to you by the conviction given at the altar; have an attitude of mind and a temper of soul to the one who has something against you that makes reconciliation as natural as breathing. Jesus does not mention the other person, He says—you go. There is no question of your rights. The stamp of the saint is that he can waive his own rights and obey the Lord Jesus.
“And then come and offer thy gift.” The process is clearly marked. First, the heroic spirit of self-sacrifice, then the sudden checking by the sensitiveness of the Holy Spirit, and the stoppage at the point of conviction; then the way of obedience to the word of God, constructing an unblameable attitude of mind and temper to the one with whom you have been in the wrong; then the glad, simple, unhindered offering of your gift to God.

September 26

“We walk by faith, not by appearance.” (2 Cor. 5:7, R. V.)

BY faith, not appearance; God never wants us to look at our feelings. Self may want us to; and Satan may want us to. But God wants us to face facts, not feelings; the facts of Christ and of His finished and perfect work for us.
When we face these precious facts, and believe them because God says they are facts, God will take care of our feelings.
God never gives feeling to enable us to trust Him; God never gives feeling to encourage us to trust Him; God never gives feeling to show that we have already and utterly trusted Him.
God gives feeling only when He sees that we trust Him apart from all feeling, resting on His own Word, and on His own faithfulness to His promise.
Never until then can the feeling (which is from God) possibly come; and God will give the feeling in such a measure and at such a time as His love sees best for the individual case.
We must choose between facing toward our feelings and facing toward God’s facts. Our feelings may be as uncertain as the sea or the shifting sands. God’s facts are as certain as the Rock of Ages, even Christ Himself, who is the same yesterday, today and forever.

“When darkness veils His lovely face
I rest on His unchanging grace;
In every high and stormy gale,
My anchor holds within the veil.”

26 SEPTEMBER (PREACHED NEW YEAR’S MORNING, 1770)

Dying daily

‘I protest by your rejoicing which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily.’ 1 Corinthians 15:31
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING: 1 Corinthians 15:12–34

This is a very lively and animated expression, especially in the original, where the words stand differently from our version: by your rejoicing which I have—that is, by our mutual rejoicing—I die daily. The Apostle uses these words as one proof of his faith in the doctrine of the resurrection and its influence to bear him above the troubles of life. They may be understood either to express the hazards and designs he was continually exposed to from the world, as a Christian and a preacher, or as the habitual experience and frame of his mind, from a conviction of the vanity of this life and the importance of the next. In this latter sense, the words suggest a subject which seems not unsuitable to our entrance on a new year.
Diary, 20 January 1755:

As merchants begin their books with an inventory of stock, so would I in a brief manner set down my present state for my future government. I trust that the Lord has caused more of his goodness to pass before me this year than I ever before experienced; I hope particularly he has taken me more off my own bottom, and given me to see more of the necessity and the sufficiency of the Lord Jesus Christ in his office of Saviour of his people, and has made me more willing to depend upon his righteousness only. I trust he has enabled me to see more clearly the truth and comfort of those particular doctrines of the glorious gospel which in these days are by many either denied, or explained away. On the other side, I labour under weakness, I am wearied with a body of sin and death; often when I would do good, evil is present with me, my affections are cold and wavering, my faith weak and interrupted. Thus I find my life to be a continual warfare. But blessed be God for the hopes of final victory over sin and corruption, through Jesus Christ our Lord, by whom I hope I can in a low degree say the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world.

FOR MEDITATION: Every believer should follow the Apostle’s steps here, so as to be able to say, I die daily.

SERMON: 1 CORINTHIANS 15:31 [1/6]

September 25th

The “go” of relationship

And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Matthew 5:41.

The summing up of Our Lord’s teaching is that the relationship which He demands is an impossible one unless He has done a supernatural work in us. Jesus Christ demands that there be not the slightest trace of resentment even suppressed in the head of a disciple when he meets with tyranny and injustice. No enthusiasm will ever stand the strain that Jesus Christ will put upon His worker, only one thing will, and that is a personal relationship to Himself which has gone through the mill of His spring-cleaning until there is only one purpose left—‘I am here for God to send me where He will.’ Every other thing may get fogged, but this relationship to Jesus Christ must never be.
The Sermon on the Mount is not an ideal, it is a statement of what will happen in me when Jesus Christ has altered my disposition and put in a disposition like His own. Jesus Christ is the only One Who can fulfil the Sermon on the Mount.
If we are to be disciples of Jesus, we must be made disciples supernaturally; as long as we have the dead-set purpose of being disciples we may be sure we are not. “I have chosen you.” That is the way the grace of God begins. It is a constraint we cannot get away from; we can disobey it, but we cannot generate it. The drawing is done by the supernatural grace of God, and we never can trace where His work begins. Our Lord’s making of a disciple is supernatural. He does not build on any natural capacity at all. God does not ask us to do the things that are easy to us naturally; He only asks us to do the things we are perfectly fitted to do by His grace, and the cross will come along that line always.

September 25

“Why go I mourning?” (Psalm 42:9.)

CANST thou answer this, believer? Canst thou find any reason why thou art so often mourning instead of rejoicing? Why yield to gloomy anticipations? Who told thee that the night would never end in day? Who told thee that the winter of thy discontent would proceed from frost to frost, from snow and ice, and hail, to deeper snow, and yet more heavy tempest of depair? Knowest thou not that day follows night, that flood comes after ebb, that spring and summer succeed winter? Hope thou then! Hope thou ever! for God fails thee not.
—C. H. Spurgeon.

“He was better to me than all my hopes;
He was better than all my fears;
He made a bridge of my broken works,
And a rainbow of my tears.

“The billows that guarded my sea-girt path,
But carried my Lord on their crest;
When I dwell on the days of my wilderness march
I can lean on His love for the rest.

“He emptied my hands of my treasured store,
And His covenant love revealed,
There was not a wound in my aching heart,
But the balm of His breath hath healed.
Oh, tender and true was the chastening sore,
In wisdom, that taught and tried,
Till the soul that He sought was trusting in Him,
And nothing on earth beside.

“He guided by paths that I could not see,
By ways that I have not known;
The crooked was straight, and the rough was plain
As I followed the Lord alone.
I praise Him still for the pleasant palms,
And the water-springs by the way,
For the glowing pillar of flame by night,
And the sheltering cloud by day.

“Never a watch on the dreariest halt,
But some promise of love endears;
I read from the past, that my future shall be
Far better than all my fears.
Like the golden pot, of the wilderness bread,
Laid up with the blossoming rod,
All safe in the ark, with the law of the Lord,
Is the covenant care of my God.”