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SPIRE BOOKS
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
OLD TAPPAN, NEW JERSEY
ISBN 0-8007-8170-8
Printed in the United States of America
IT is often said that the great aim of the preacher ought to be to translate Scripture truth from its Jewish form into the language and the thought of the nineteenth century, and so to make it intelligible and acceptable to our ordinary Christians. It is to be feared that the experiment will do more harm than good. In the course of the translation the force of the original is lost. The scholar who trusts to translations will never become a master of the language he wants to learn. A race of Christians will be raised up, to whom the language of God’s Word, and with that the God who spoke it, will be strange. In the Scripture words not a little of Scripture truth will be lost. For the true Christian life nothing is so healthful and invigorating as to have each man come and study for himself the very words in which the Holy Ghost has spoken.
One of the words of Scripture, which is almost
This book is a humble attempt to show what exactly the blessings are that God has covenanted to bestow on us; what the assurance is the Covenant gives that they must, and can, and will be fulfilled; what the hold on God Himself is which it thus gives us; and what the conditions are for the full and continual experience of its blessings. I feel confident that if I can lead any to listen to what God has to say to them of His Covenant, and to deal with Him as a Covenant God, it will bring them strength and joy:
Not long ago I received from one of my
My one great desire has been to ask Christians whether they are really seeking to find out what exactly God wants them to be, and is willing to make them. It is only as they wait, “that the mind of the Lord may be showed them,” that their faith can ever truly see, or accept, or enjoy what God calls “His salvation.” As long as we expect God to do for us what we ask or think, we limit Him. When we believe that as high as the heavens are above the earth, His thoughts are above our thoughts, and wait on Him as God to do unto us according to His Word, as He means it, we shall be prepared to live the truly supernatural, heavenly life the Holy Spirit can work in us—the true Christ life.
May God lead every reader into the secret of His presence, and “show him His Covenant.”
ANDREW MURRAY.
WELLINGTON, SOUTH AFRICA,
1st November 1898.
“Know therefore that the Lord thy God, He is God, the
faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love Him
and keep His commandments.”-
MEN often make covenants. They know the advantages to be derived from them. As an end of enmity or uncertainty, as a statement of services and benefits to be rendered, as a security for their certain performance, as a bond of amity and goodwill, as a ground for perfect confidence and friendship, a covenant has often been of unspeakable value.
In His infinite condescension to our human weakness and need, there
is no possible way in which men pledge their faithfulness, that God has
When God created man in His image and likeness, it was that he might
have a life as like His own as it was possible for a creature to live.
This was to be by God Himself living and working all
Man could not save himself from the power of sin. If his redemption
was to be effected, God must do it all. And if God was to do it in
harmony with the law of man’s nature, man must be brought to desire it,
to yield his willing consent, and entrust himself to God. All that God
wanted man to do was, to believe in Him. What a man believes, moves and
rules his whole being, enters into him, and becomes part of his very
life. Salvation could only be by faith: God restoring the life man had
lost; man in faith yielding himself to God’s work and will. The first
great work of God with man was to get him to believe. This work cost
God more care and time and patience than we can easily conceive. All
the dealings with
Of the many devices of which God’s patient and condescending grace
made use to stir up and strengthen faith, one of the chief was—the
Covenant. In more than one way God sought to effect this by His
Covenant. First of all, His Covenant was always a revelation of His
purposes, holding out, in definite promise, what God was willing to
work in those with whom the Covenant was made. It was a Divine pattern
of the work God intended to do in their behalf, that they might know
what to desire and expect, that their faith might nourish itself with
the very things, though as yet unseen, which God was working out. Then,
the Covenant was meant to be a security and guarantee, as simple
and plain and humanlike as the Divine glory could make it, that the
very
Oh that we knew how God longs that we should trust Him, and how
surely His every promise must be fulfilled to those who do so! Oh that
we knew how it is owing to nothing but our unbelief that we cannot
enter into the possession of God’s promises, and that God cannot—yes,
cannot—do His mighty works in us, and for us, and through us! Oh that
we knew how one of the surest remedies for our unbelief—the divinely
chosen cure for it—is the Covenant into which God has entered with us!
The whole dispensation of the Spirit, the whole economy of
Let us listen to the words in which God’s Word calls us to know, and
worship, and trust our Covenant-keeping God—it may be we shall find
what we have been looking for: the deeper, the full experience of all
God’s grace can do in us. In our text Moses says: “Know
therefore that the Lord thy God, He is God, the faithful God,
which keepeth covenant with them that love Him.” Hear what God says
in Isaiah: “The mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but
My kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall My covenant of
peace be removed, saith the
Let us ask very earnestly whether the lack in our Christian life,
and specially in our faith, is not owing to the neglect of the
Covenant. We have not worshipped nor trusted the Covenant-keeping God.
Our soul has not done what God called us to—“to take hold of His
Covenant,” “to remember the Covenant”; is it wonder that our faith has
failed and come short of the blessing? God could not fulfil His
promises in us. If we will begin to examine into the terms of the
Covenant, as the title-deeds of our inheritance, and the riches we are
to possess even here on earth; if we will think of the certainty of
their fulfilment, more sure than the foundations of the everlasting
mountains; if we will turn to the God who
The great lack of our religion is—we need more of God. We accept
salvation as His gift, and we do not know that the only object of
salvation, its chief blessing, is to fit us for, and bring us back to,
that close intercourse with God for which we were created, and
in which our glory in eternity will be found. All that God has ever
done for His people in making a covenant was always to bring them to
Himself as their chief, their only good, to teach them to trust in Him,
to delight in Him, to be one with Him. It cannot be otherwise. If God
indeed be nothing but a very fountain of goodness and glory, of beauty
and blessedness, the more we can have of His presence, the more we
conform to His will, the more we are engaged in His service, the more
we have Him ruling and working all in us, the more truly happy shall we
be. If God indeed be thereby Owner and Author of life and strength, of
holiness and happiness, and can alone give and work it in us, the more
we trust Him, and depend and wait on
In entering into covenant with us, God’s one object is to draw us to Himself, to render us entirely dependent upon Himself, and so to bring us into the right position and disposition in which He can fill us with Himself, His love, and His blessedness. Let us undertake our study of the New Covenant, in which, if we are believers, God is at this moment living and walking with us, with the honest purpose and surrender, at any price, to know what God wishes to be to us, to do in us, and to have us be and do to Him. The New Covenant may become to us one of the windows of heaven through which we see into the face, into the very heart, of God.
“It is written, that Abraham had two sons, one by the bondmaid, and one by the freewoman. Howbeit, the one by the bondmaid is born after the flesh; but the son by the freewoman is born through promise. Which things contain an allegory: for these women are two covenants.” -GAL. iv. 22-24.
THERE are two covenants, one called the Old, the other the New. God
speaks of this very distinctly in Jeremiah, where He says: “The days
come, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, not
after the covenant I made with their fathers” (
It has pleased Him, not as an arbitrary appointment, but for good and wise reasons, which made it indispensably necessary that it should be so, and no otherwise. The clearer our insight into the reasons, and the Divine reasonableness, of there thus being two covenants, and into their relation to each other, the more full and true can be our own personal apprehension of what the New Covenant is meant to be to us. They indicate two stages in God’s dealing with man; two ways of serving God, a lower or elementary one of preparation and promise, a higher or more advanced one of fulfilment and possession. As that in which the true excellency of the second consists is opened up to us, we can spiritually enter into what God has prepared for us. Let us try and understand why there should have been two, neither less nor more.
The reason is to be found in the fact that, in religion, in all
intercourse between God and man, there are two parties, and that each
of these must have the opportunity to prove what their part is in the
Covenant. In the Old Covenant man had
It will repay us richly to look a little deeper into this. This
relation of God to fallen man in covenant is the same as it was to
unfallen man as Creator. And what was that relation? God proposed to
make a man in His own image and likeness. The chief glory of God is
that He has life in Himself; that He is independent of all else, and
owes what He is to Himself alone. If the image and likeness of God was
not to be a mere name, and man was really to be like God in the power
to make himself what he was to be, he must needs have the power of free
will and
When man had fallen through sin, and God entered into a covenant of
salvation, these two sides of the relationship had still to be
maintained intact. God was ever to be the first, and man the second.
And yet man, as made in God’s image, was ever, as second, to have full
time and opportunity to appropriate or reject what God gave, to prove
how far he could help himself, and indeed be self-made. His absolute
dependence upon God was not to be forced upon him; if it was really to
be a thing of moral worth and true blessedness, it must be his
deliberate and voluntary choice. And this now is the reason why there
was a first and a second covenant, that in the first, man’s desires and
efforts might be fully
In the very nature of things there was no other way possible to God
than this in dealing with a being whom He had endowed with the Godlike
power of a will. And all the weight this reason for the Divine
procedure has in God’s dealing with His people as a whole, it equally
has in dealing with the individual. The two covenants represent two
stages of God’s education of man and of man’s seeking after God. The
progress and transition from the one to the other is not merely
chronological or historical; it is organic and spiritual. In greater or
lesser degree it is seen in every member of the body, as well as in the
body as a whole. Under the Old Covenant there were men in whom,
This is the teaching of the passage from which our text is taken. In the home of Abraham, the father of the faithful, Ishmael and Isaac are both found—the one born of a slave, the other of a free woman; the one after the flesh and the will of man, the other through the promise and the power of God; the one only for a time, then to be cast out, the other to be heir of all. A picture held up to the Galatians of the life they were leading, as they trusted to the flesh and its religion, making a fair show, and yet proved, by their being led captive to sin, to be, not of the free but of the bond woman. Only through faith in the promise and the mighty quickening power of God could they, could any of them, be made truly and fully free, and stand in the freedom with which Christ has made us free.
As we proceed to study the two covenants in the
This truth of there being two stages in our service of God, two
degrees of nearness in our worship, is typified in many things in the
Old Covenant worship; perhaps nowhere more clearly than in the
difference between the Holy Place and the Most Holy Place in the
temple, with the veil separating them. Into the former the priests
might always enter to draw near to God. And yet they might not come too
near; the veil kept them at a distance. To enter within that, was
death. Once a year the High Priest might enter, as a promise of the
time when the veil should be taken away and the full access to dwell in
God’s presence be given
It is thus not only in Abraham’s home that there were the types of
the two covenants, the spirit of bondage and the spirit of liberty, but
even in God’s home in the temple. The priests had not yet the liberty
of access into the Father’s presence. Not only among the Galatians, but
everywhere throughout the Church, there are to be found two classes of
Christians. Some are content with the mingled life, half flesh and half
spirit, half self-effort and half grace. Others are not content with
this, but are seeking with their whole heart to know to the full what
the deliverance from sin and what the abiding full power for a walk in
God’s presence is, which the New Covenant has brought and can give. God
help us all to be satisfied with nothing
less.
“Now therefore, if ye will obey My voice, and keep My covenant, ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto Me.”—EX. xix. 5.
“He declared unto you His covenant, which He commanded you to perform, even ten commandments.”—DEUT. iv. 13.i
“If ye keep these judgments, the Lord thy God shall keep unto thee the covenant,”—DEUT. vii. 12.
“I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, not according to the covenant which I made with their fathers, which My covenant they brake.”—JER. xxxi. 31, 32.
WE have seen how the reason for there being two Covenants is to be
found in the need of giving the Divine and the human will, each their
due place in the working out of man’s destiny. God ever takes the
initiative. Man must then have the opportunity to do his part, and to
prove either what he can do, or needs to have done for
Note now the terms of this first Covenant. “If ye will obey
My voice and keep My covenant, ye shall be unto Me a holy nation.” Or,
as it is expressed in Jeremiah (vii. 23, xi. 4), “Obey My voice, and I
will be your God.” Obedience everywhere, especially in the Book of
Deuteronomy,
Its work was not without fruit. Under the law, administered by the
grace that ever accompanied it, there was trained up a number of men
whose great mark was the fear of God, and a desire to walk blameless in
all His commandments. And yet, as a whole, Scripture represents the Old
Covenant as a failure. The law had promised life; but it could not give
it (
In studying the Old Covenant we ought ever to keep in mind the
twofold aspect under which we have seen that Scripture represents it.
It was God’s grace that gave Israel the law, and wrought with the law
to make it work out its purpose in individual believers and in the
people as a whole. The whole of the Old Covenant was a school of grace,
an elementary school, to prepare for the fulness of grace and truth in
Christ Jesus. A name is generally given to an object according to its
chief feature. And so the Old Covenant is called a ministration of
condemnation and death, not because there was no grace in it—it had
its own glory (
The two great lessons God would teach us by it are very simple. The one is the lesson of SIN, the other the lesson of HOLINESS. The Old Covenant attains its object only as it brings men to a sense of their utter sinfulness and their hopeless impotence to deliver themselves. As long as they have not learnt this, no offer of the New Covenant life can lay hold of them. As long as an intense longing for deliverance from sinning has not been wrought, they will naturally fall back into the power of the law and the flesh. The holiness which the New Covenant offers will rather terrify than attract them; the life in the spirit of bondage appears to make more allowance for sin, because obedience is declared to be impossible.
The other is the lesson of Holiness. In the New Covenant the Triune God engages to do all. He undertakes to give and keep the new heart, to give His own Spirit in it, to give the will and the power to obey and do His will. As the one demand of the first Covenant was the sense of sin, the one great demand of the New is faith that that need, created by the discipline of God’s law, will be met in a Divine and supernatural way. The law cannot work out its purpose, except as it brings a man to lie guilty and helpless before the holiness of God. There the New finds him, and reveals that same God, in His grace accepting him and making him partaker of His holiness.
This book is written with a very practical purpose. Its object is to
help believers to know that wonderful New Covenant of grace which God
has made with them, and to lead them into the living and daily
enjoyment of the blessed life it secures them. The practical lesson
taught us by the fact that there was a first Covenant, that its one
special work was to convince of sin, and that without it the New
Covenant could not come, is just what many Christians need. At
conversion they were convinced of sin by the Holy Spirit.
Do you, my reader, feel that you are not fully living in the New
Covenant, that there is still somewhat of the Old-Covenant spirit of
bondage in you?—do come, and let the Old Covenant finish its work in
you. Accept its teaching, that all your efforts are failures. As, at
conversion, you were content to fall down as a condemned,
death-deserving sinner, be content now to sink down before God in the
confession that, as His redeemed child, you still feel yourself utterly
impotent to do and be what you see He asks of you. And begin to ask
whether the New Covenant has not
“But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put My law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be My people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know Me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”—JER. xxxi. 33, 34.
ISAIAH has often been called the evangelical prophet, for the
wonderful clearness with which he announces the coming Redeemer, both
in His humiliation and suffering, and in the glory of the kingdom He
was to establish. And yet it was given to Jeremiah, in this passage,
and to Ezekiel, in the parallel one, to foretell what would actually be
the outcome of the Redeemer’s work and the essential character of the
salvation He was to effect,
1. “I will put My law in their inward parts, and write it in
their hearts.” Let us understand this well. In our inward parts, or
in our heart, there are no separate chambers in which the law can be
put, while the rest of the heart can be given up to other things; the
heart is a unity. Nor are the inward parts and the heart like a house,
which can be filled with things of an entirely different nature from
what the walls are made of, without any living organic connection. No;
the inward parts, the heart, are the disposition, the love, the will,
the
2. “And I will be their God, and they shall be My people.” Do
not pass these words lightly. They occur chiefly in Jeremiah and
Ezekiel in connection with the promise of the everlasting Covenant.
They express the very highest experience of the Covenant relationship.
It is only when His people learn to love and obey His law, when their
heart and life are together wholly devoted to Him and His will, that He
can be to them the altogether inconceivable blessing which these words
express, “I will be your God.” All I am and have as God shall
be yours. All you can need or wish for in a God, I will be to you. In
the fullest meaning of the word, I, the Omnipresent, will be ever
present with you, in all My grace and love. I, the Almighty One, will
each moment work all in you by My mighty power. I, the Thrice-Holy One,
will reveal My sanctifying life within you. I will be your God. And
ye shall be My people, saved and
3. “And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and
every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord, for they shall all know
Me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the
Lord.” Individual personal fellowship with God, for the feeblest
and the least, is to be the wonderful privilege of every member of the
New Covenant people. Each one will know the Lord. That does not mean
the knowledge of the mind,—that is not the equal privilege of all, and
that in itself may hinder the fellowship more than help it,—but with
that knowledge which means appropriation and assimilation, and which is
eternal life. As the Son knew the Father because He was one with Him
and dwelt in Him, the child of God will receive by the Holy Spirit that
spiritual illumination which will make God to him the One he knows
best, because he loves Him most and lives in Him. The promise, “They
shall be all taught of God,” will be fulfilled by the Holy Spirit’s
teaching. God will
4. “For I will forgive their iniquities, and I will remember their sin no more.” The word for shows that this is the reason of all that precedes. Because the blood of this New Covenant was of such infinite worth, and its Mediator and High Priest in heaven of such Divine power, there is promised in it such a Divine blotting out of sin that God cannot remember it. It is this entire blotting out of sin that cleanses and sets us free from its power, so that God can write His law in our hearts, and show Himself in power as our God, and by His Spirit reveal to us His deep things—the deep mystery of Himself and His love. It is the atonement and redemption of Jesus Christ wrought without us and for us, that has removed every obstacle and made it meet for God, and made us meet, that the law in the heart, and the claim on our God, and the knowledge of Him, should now be our daily life and our eternal portion.
Here we now have the Divine summary of the New Covenant inheritance.
The last-named blessing, the pardon of sin, is the first in order, the
root of all. The second, having God as our God, and
The central demand of the Old Covenant, Obey My voice, and I will be your God, has now been met. With the law written in the heart, He can be our God, and we shall be His people. Perfect harmony with God’s will, holiness in heart and life, is the only thing that can satisfy God’s heart or ours. And it is this the New Covenant gives in Divine power, “I will give them an heart to know Me; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people; for they shall turn to Me with their whole heart.” It is on the state of the heart, it is on the new heart, as given by God, that the New Covenant life hinges.
But why, if all this is meant to be literally and exactly true of
God’s people, why do we see so little of this life, experience so
little in ourselves? There is but one answer: Because of your unbelief!
We have spoken of the relation of God and man in creation as what the
New Covenant is meant to make possible and real. But the law cannot be
repealed that God will not compel. He can only
But is it really possible, amid the wear and tear of daily life, to
walk in the experience of these blessings? Are they really meant for
all God’s children? Let us rather ask the question, Is it
Do let us turn our hearts away from all past experience of failure,
as caused by nothing but unbelief; do let us admit fully and
heartily, what failure has taught us, the absolute impossibility of
even a regenerate man walking in God’s law in his own strength, and
then turn our hearts quietly and trustfully to our own Covenant God.
Let us hear what He says He will do for us, and believe Him; let
us rest on His unchangeable faithfulness
“These women are two covenants: one from Mount Sinai, bearing children unto bondage, which is Hagar. Now this Hagar answereth to Jerusalem that now is, for she is in bondage with her children. But the Jerusalem which is above is free, which is our mother. So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free. With freedom did Christ set us free. Stand fast, therefore, and be not entangled again in a yoke of bondage.”-GAL. iv. 24-81, v. 1.
THE house of Abraham was the Church of God of that age. The division
in his house, one son, his own son, but born after the flesh, the other
after the promise, was a divinely-ordained manifestation of the
division there would be in all ages between the children of the
bondwoman, those who served God in the spirit of bondage, and those who
were children of the free, and
A careful study of the Epistle shows us that the difference between
the two Covenants is seen in three things. The law and its works
is contrasted with the hearing of faith, the flesh and its
religion with the flesh crucified, the impotence to good
with a walk in the liberty and the power
The first antithesis we find in Paul’s words, “Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or the hearing of faith?” These Galatians had indeed been born into the New Covenant; they had received the Holy Spirit. But they had been led away by Jewish teachers, and, though they had been justified by faith, they were seeking to be sanctified by works; they were looking for the maintenance and the growth of their Christian life to the observance of the law. They had not understood that, equally with the beginning, the progress of the Divine life is alone by faith, day by day receiving its strength from Christ alone; that in Jesus Christ nothing avails but faith working by love.
Almost every believer makes the same mistake as the Galatian
Christians. Very few learn at conversion at once that it is only by
faith that we stand, and walk, and live. They have no conception of the
meaning of Paul’s teaching about being dead to the law, freed from the
law—about the freedom with which Christ makes us free. “As many as
are led by the Spirit are not
The second word, that reveals the Old Covenant spirit, is the word
“flesh.” Its contrast is, the flesh crucified. Paul asks: “Are ye so
foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are ye made perfect in the flesh?”
Flesh means our sinful human nature. At his conversion the Christian
has generally no conception of the terrible evil of his nature, and the
subtlety with which it offers itself to take part in the service of
God. It may be most willing and diligent in God’s service for a time;
it may devise numberless observances for
The proof that our religion is very much that of the religious flesh, is that the sinful flesh will be found to flourish along with it. It was thus with the Galatians. While they were making a fair show in the flesh, and glorying in it, their daily life was full of bitterness and envy and hatred, and other sins. They were biting and devouring one another. Religious flesh and sinful flesh are one: no wonder that, with a great deal of religion, temper and selfishness and worldliness are so often found side by side. The religion of the flesh cannot conquer sin.
What a contrast to the religion of the New Covenant! What is the
place the flesh has there? “They that are Christ’s have crucified
the flesh, with its desires and affections.” Scripture speaks
“Fallen from grace.” This is a third word that describes the
condition of these Galatians in that bondage in which they were really
impotent to all true good. Paul is not speaking of a final falling away
here, for he still addresses them as Christians, but of their having
wandered from that walk in the way of enabling and sanctifying grace,
in which a Christian can get the victory over sin. As long as grace is
principally
The contrast to this life of impotence and failure is found in the one word, “the Spirit.” “If ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law,” with its demand on your own strength. “Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not”—a definite, certain promise—“ye shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh.” The Spirit gives liberty from the law, from the flesh, from sin. “The fruit of the Spirit is love, peace, joy.” Of the New Covenant promise, “I will put My Spirit within you, and I will cause you to walk in My statutes, and ye shall keep My judgments,” the Spirit is the centre and the sum. He is the power of the supernatural life of true obedience and holiness.
And what would have been the course that the Galatians would have
taken if they had accepted
I cannot too earnestly beg all believers who long to know to the
utmost what the grace of God can work in them, to study carefully the
question as to whether the acknowledgment that our being in the bondage
of the Old Covenant is the reason of our failure, and whether a clear
insight into the possibility of an entire change in our relation to
God, is not what is needed to give us the help we seek. We may be
seeking for our growth in a more diligent use of the means of grace,
and a more earnest striving to live in accordance with God’s will, and
yet entirely fail. The reason is, that there is a secret root of evil
which must be removed. That root is the spirit of bondage, the legal
spirit of self-effort, which hinders that humble faith that knows that
God will work all, and yields to Him to do it. That spirit may be found
amidst very great zeal for God’s service, and very earnest prayer for
His grace; it does not enjoy the rest of faith, and cannot overcome
sin, because
“They shall be My people, and l will be their God. And I will make an everlasting covenant with them, that I will not turn away from them, to do them good; but I will put My fear in their hearts, that they shall not depart from Me.”—JER. xxxii. 38, 40.
“A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in My statutes, and ye shall keep My judgments, and do them. Moreover, I will make a covenant of peace with them: it shall be an everlasting covenant with them.”—EZEK. xxxvi. 26, 27, xxxvii. 26.
WE have had the words of the institution of the New Covenant. Let us
listen to the further teaching we have concerning it in Jeremiah and
Ezekiel, where God speaks of it as an everlasting Covenant.
In every covenant there are two parties. And
It was thus with the Old Covenant. God had said to Israel, Obey
My voice, and I will be your God (
If a New Covenant were to be made, and if that was to be better than
the Old, this was the one thing to be provided for. No New Covenant
could be of any profit unless provision were made for securing
obedience. Obedience there must be. God as Creator could never take His
creatures into His favour and fellowship, except they obeyed Him. The
thing would have been an impossibility. If the New Covenant is to be
better than the Old, if it is to be an everlasting Covenant, never to
be broken, it must make some sufficient provision for securing the
obedience of the Covenant people.
It is just because this, the essential part of the New Covenant, so
exceeds and confounds all human thoughts of what a covenant means, that
Christians, from the Galatians downwards, have not been able to see and
believe what the New Covenant really brings. They have thought that
human unfaithfulness was a factor permanently to be reckoned with as
something utterly unconquerable and incurable, and that the possibility
of a life of obedience, with the witness from within of a good
conscience, and from above of God’s pleasure, was not to be expected.
They have therefore sought to stir the
Let us beseech God earnestly that He would reveal to us by the Holy
Spirit the things that He hath prepared for them that love Him; things
that have not entered into the heart of man; the wonderful life of the
New Covenant. All depends upon our knowledge of what God will work in
us. Listen to what God says in Jeremiah of the two parts of His
everlasting Covenant, shortly after He had announced the New Covenant,
and in further elucidation of it. The central thought of that, that
the heart is to be put right, is here reiterated and confirmed. “I
will make an everlasting covenant with them, that I will not turn
away from them, to do them good.” That is, God will be unchangeably
faithful. He will not turn from us. “But I will put My fear into
their heart, that they shall not depart from Me.” This is the
second half: Israel will be unchangeably faithful too. And that because
God will so put His fear in their heart, that they shall not depart
from Him. As little as
Listen to God’s word in Ezekiel, in regard to one of the terms of
His Covenant of peace, His everlasting Covenant. (
Here is the inmost secret of the New Covenant. It deals with the
heart of man in a way of Divine power. It not only appeals to the heart
by every
This is nothing but the restoration of the original relation between God and the man He had made in His likeness. He was on earth to be the very image of God, because God was to live and to work all in him, and he to find his glory and blessedness in thus owing all to God. This is the exceeding glory of the New Covenant, of the Pentecostal dispensation, that by the Holy Spirit God could now again be the indwelling life of His people, and so make the promise a reality: “I will cause you to walk in My statutes.”
With God’s presence secured to us every moment
My brethren, the great sin of Israel under the Old Covenant, that by which they greatly grieved Him, was this: “they limited the Holy One of Israel.” Under the New Covenant there is no less danger of this sin. It makes it impossible for God to fulfil His promises. Let us seek, above everything, for the Holy Spirit’s teaching, to show us exactly what God has established the New Covenant for, that we may honour Him by believing all that His love has prepared for us.
And if we ask for the cause of the unbelief, that prevents the
fulfilment of the promise, we shall find that it is not far to seek. It
is, in most cases, the lack of desire for the promised blessing. In all
who came to Jesus on earth the intensity of their desire for the
healing they needed made them ready and glad to believe in His word.
Where the law has done its full work, where the actual
Let me say to every reader who would fain be able to believe fully
all that God says: Cherish every whisper of the conscience and of the
Spirit that convinces of sin. Whatever it be, a hasty temper, a sharp
word, an unloving or impatient thought, anything of selfishness or
self-will—cherish that which condemns it in you, as part of the
schooling that is to bring you to Christ and the full possession of His
salvation. The New
“Ye are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not on tables of stone, but on tables that are hearts of flesh . . . Our sufficiency is of God; who also made us sufficient as ministers of the New Covenant; not of the letter, but of the Spirit: for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life. For if the ministration of death came with glory, how shall not rather the ministration of the Spirit be with glory? For if the ministration of condemnation is glory, much rather doth the ministration of righteousness exceed in glory.”—2 COR. iii. 3, 6-10.
IN this wonderful chapter Paul reminds the Corinthians, in speaking
of his ministry among them, of what its chief characteristics were. As
a ministry of the New Covenant he contrasts it, and the whole
dispensation of which it is part, with that of the Old. The Old was
graven in stone,
Think a moment of the contrast. The Old Covenant was of the letter
that killeth. The law came with its literal instruction, and sought by
the knowledge it gave of God’s will to appeal to man’s
This passage brings into view that which is the distinctive blessing
of the New Covenant. In working out our salvation God bestowed upon us
two wonderful gifts. We read: “God sent forth His Son, that He
might redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the
adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit
of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.” Here we have
the two parts of God’s work in
In the promises of the New Covenant, as we find them in Jeremiah and
Ezekiel, as well as in our text and many other passages of Scripture,
it is manifest that God’s great object in salvation is to get
possession of the heart. The heart is the real life; with the heart a
man loves, and wills, and acts; the heart makes the man. God made man’s
heart for His own dwelling, that in it He might reveal His love and His
glory. God sent Christ to accomplish a redemption by which man’s heart
could be won back to Him; nothing but that could satisfy God. And that
is what is accomplished when the Holy Spirit makes the heart of God’s
child what it should be. The whole work of Christ’s redemption—His
Atonement and Victory, His
In a great deal of our religious teaching a fear, lest we should derogate from the honour of Christ, has been alleged as the reason for giving His work for us, on the Cross or in heaven, a greater prominence than His work in our heart by the Holy Spirit. The result has been that the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and His mighty work as the life of the heart, as very little known in true power. If we look carefully at what the New Covenant promises mean, we shall see how the “sending forth of the Spirit of His Son into our hearts” is indeed the consummation and crown of Christ’s redeeming work. Let us just think of what these promises imply.
In the Old Covenant man had failed in what he had to do. In the New,
God is to do everything in him. The Old could only convict of sin. The
New is to put it away and cleanse the heart from
It is as we bring all these traits of the New Covenant life together
into one focus, and look at the heart of God’s child as the object of
this mighty redemption, that we shall begin to understand what is
secured to us, and what it is that we are to expect from our Covenant
God. We shall see wherein the glory of the ministration of
We are accustomed to say, and truly so, that the worth of the Son of God, who came to die for us, is the measure of the worth of the soul in God’s sight, and of the greatness of the work that had to be done to save it. Let us even so see, that the Divine glory of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Father and the Son, is the measure of God’s longing to have our heart wholly for Himself, of the glory of the work that is to be wrought within us, of the power by which that work will be accomplished.
We shall see how the glory of the ministration of the Spirit is no other than the glory of the Lord, as it is not only in heaven, but resting upon us and dwelling in us, and changing us into the same image from glory to glory. The inconceivable glory of our exalted Lord in heaven has its counterpart here on earth in the exceeding glory of the Holy Spirit who glorifies Him in us, who lays His glory on us, as He changes us into His likeness.
The New Covenant has no power to save and
He is the great gift of the Covenant. His coming from heaven was the proof that the Mediator of the Covenant was on the throne in glory, and could now make us partakers of the heavenly life.
He is the only teacher of what the Covenant means: dwelling in our heart, He wakens there the thought and the desire for what God has prepared for us.
He is the Spirit of faith, who enables us to believe the otherwise incomprehensible blessing and power in which the New Covenant works, and to claim it as our own.
He is the Spirit of grace and of power, by whom the obedience of the Covenant and the fellowship with God can be maintained without interruption.
He Himself is the Possessor and the Bearer and the Communicator of
all the Covenant promises, the
To believe fully in the Holy Spirit, as the present and abiding and all-comprehending gift of the New Covenant, has been to many a one an entrance into its fulness of blessing.
Begin at once, child of God, to give the Holy Spirit the place in thy religion He has in God’s plan. Be still before God, and believe that He is within thee, and ask the Father to work in thee through Him. Regard thyself, thy spirit as well as thy body, with holy reverence as His temple. Let the consciousness of His holy presence and working fill thee with holy calm and fear. And be sure that all that God calls thee to be, Christ through His Spirit will work in thee.
“Now the God of peace, who brought again from the dead the great Shepherd of the sheep, in the blood of the everlasting covenant, even our Lord Jesus, make you perfect in every good thing to do His will, working in us that which is well-pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ.”—HEB. xiii. 20, 21.
THE transition from the Old Covenant to the New was not slow or
gradual, but by a tremendous crisis. Nothing less than the death of
Christ was the close of the Old. Nothing less than His resurrection
from the dead, through the blood of the everlasting Covenant, the
opening of the New. The path of preparation that led up to the crisis
was long and slow; the rending of the veil, that symbolised the end of
the old worship, was the work of a moment. By a death,
These events have an infinite significance, as revealing the
character of the Covenants they are related to. The death of Christ
shows the true nature of the Old Covenant. It is elsewhere called “a
ministration of death” (
The transition, if it is to be real and whole, must take place by a
death. As with Christ the Mediator of the Covenant, so with His people,
the heirs of the Covenant. In Him we are dead to sin; in Him we are
dead to the law. Just as Adam died to God, and we inherit a nature
actually and really dead in sin, dead to God and His kingdom, so in
Christ we died to sin, and inherit a nature actually dead to sin and
its dominion. It is when the Holy Spirit reveals and makes real to us
this death to sin and to the law too, as the one condition of a life to
God, that the transition from the Old to the New Covenant can be fully
realised in us. The Old was, and was meant to be, a “ministration of
death ”; until it has completely done its work in us there is no
complete discharge from its power. The man who sees that self is
incurably evil and must die; who gives self utterly to death as he
sinks before God in utter impotence and the surrender to His working;
who consents to death with Christ on the cross as his desert, and in
faith accepts it as his only deliverance; he
See how beautifully our text brings out this truth, that just as
much as Christ’s resurrection out of death was the work of God Himself,
is our life equally to be wholly God’s own work too. Not more direct
and wonderful than was in Christ the transition from death to life, is
to be in us the experience of what the New Covenant life is to bring.
Notice the subject of the two verses. In ver. 20 we have what God
has done in raising Christ from the dead; in ver. 21, what God
is to do in us, working in us what is pleasing to Him. (20) “The
God of peace, who brought from the dead that great Shepherd of the
sheep, even our Lord Jesus, (21) Make you perfect in every good thing
to do His will, working in you that which is pleasing in His sight,
through Jesus Christ.” We have the name of our Lord Jesus twice. In the
first case it refers to what God has done to Christ for us, raising
Him; in the second, to what God
It was “through the blood of the everlasting Covenant,” with its
atonement for sin, and its destruction of sin’s power, that God
effected that resurrection. It is through that same blood that we are
redeemed and freed from the power of sin, and made partakers of
Christ’s resurrection life. The more we study the New Covenant, the
more we shall see that its one aim is to restore man, out of the Fall,
to the life in God for which he was created. It does this first, by
delivering him from the power of sin in Christ’s death, and then by
taking possession of his heart, his life, for God to work all in him by
the Holy Spirit. The whole
Oh for a Divine revelation that the transition from Christ’s death, in its impotence, to His life in God’s power, is the image, the pledge, the power of our transition out of the Old Covenant, when it has slain us, to the New, with God working in us all in all!
The transition from Old to New, as effected in Christ, was sudden. Is
it so in the believer?
There may be someone who can hardly believe that such a mighty
change in his life is within his reach, and yet who would fain know
what he is to do if there is to be any hope of his attaining it. I have
just said, the death of the testator gives the heir immediate right to
the inheritance. And yet the heir, if he be a minor, does not enter on
the possession. A term of years ends the stage of minority
But what is one to do who is longing to be thus made ready? Accept
your death to sin in Christ, and act it out. Acknowledge the sentence
of death on everything that is of nature: take and keep the place
before God of utter unworthiness and helplessness; sink down before Him
in humility, meekness, patience, and resignation to His will and
mercy.
May God reveal to us the difference between the two lives under the Old and the New; the resurrection power of the New, with God working all in us; the power of the transition secured to us in death with Christ and life in Him. And may He teach us at once to trust Christ Jesus for a full participation in all the New Covenant secures.
“Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord hath made with you.”—EX. xxiv. 8; HEB. ix. 20.
“This cup is the new covenant in My blood.”—1 COR. xi. 25; MATT. xxvi. 28.
“The blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified.”—HEB. x. 29.
“The blood of the everlasting covenant.”—HEB. xiii.21.
THE blood is one of the strangest, the deepest, the mightiest, and
the most heavenly of the thoughts of God. It lies at the very root of
both Covenants, but specially of the New Covenant. The difference
between the two Covenants is the difference between the blood of
beasts, and the blood of the Lamb of God! The power of the New Covenant
has no lesser measure than the worth of the blood of the Son of God!
Your Christian experience ought
The First Covenant was not brought in without blood. There could be no Covenant of friendship between a holy God and sinful men without atonement and reconciliation; and no atonement without a death as the penalty of sin. God said: “I have given you the blood upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.” The blood shed in death meant the death of a sacrifice slain for sin of man; the blood sprinkled on the altar meant that vicarious death accepted of God for the sinful one. No forgiveness, no covenant without blood-shedding.
All this was but type and shadow of what was one day to become a
mysterious reality. What no thought of man or angel could have
conceived, what even now passeth all understanding, the Eternal
In the passage from
The blood of the New Covenant is redemption blood, a purchase price
and ransom from the power of Sin and the Law. In any purchase made on
earth the transference of property from the old owner to the new is
complete. Its worth may be ever so great and the hold on it ever so
strong, if the price be paid, it is gone for ever from him who owned
it. The hold sin had on us was terrible. No thought can realise its
legitimate claim on us under God’s law, its awful tyrant power in
enslaving us. But the blood of God’s Son has been paid. “Ye were
redeemed, not with corruptible things as silver and gold, from your
vain manner of life handed down from your fathers, but with precious
blood, as of a lamb without spot, even the blood of Christ.” We have
been rescued, ransomed, redeemed out of our old natural life under the
power of sin, utterly and eternally. Sin has not the slightest claim on
us, nor the slightest power over us, except as our ignorance or
unbelief or half-heartedness allows it to have dominion. Our New
Covenant birthright is to stand in the freedom with which Christ has
made us free. Until the soul sees, and desires and
As wonderful as the blood-shedding for our redemption is the
blood-sprinkling for our cleansing. Here is indeed another of the
spiritual mysteries of the New Covenant, which lose their power when
understood in human wisdom, without the ministration of the Spirit of
life. When Scripture speaks of “having our hearts sprinkled from an
evil conscience,” of “the blood of Christ cleansing our conscience,” of
our singing here on earth (
There is one more thing Scripture teaches concerning this blood of the New Covenant. When the Jews contrasted Moses with our Lord Jesus, He spake: “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink His blood, ye have not life in yourselves. He that eateth My flesh, and drinketh My blood, abideth in Me, and I in him.” As if the redeeming, and sprinkling, and washing, and sanctifying does not sufficiently express the intense inwardness of its action and its power to permeate our whole being, the drinking of this precious blood is declared to be indispensable to having life. If we would enter deep into the Spirit and power of the New Covenant, let us, by the Holy Spirit, drink deep of this cup—the cup of the New Covenant in His blood.
On account of sin there could be no covenant between man and God
without blood. And no New Covenant without the blood of the Son of God.
As the cleansing away of sins was the first condition in making a
covenant, so it is equally the first condition of an entrance into it.
It has ever been found that a deeper appropriation of the blessings of
the Covenant must be preceded by a new and deeper cleansing from sin.
We know
Many feel that they do not understand or realise this wonderful
power of the blood. Much thought does not help them; even prayer does
not appear to bring the light they seek. The blood of Christ is a
Divine mystery that passes all thought. Like every spiritual and
heavenly blessing, this too, but this especially, needs to be imparted
to us by the Holy Spirit. It was “through the Eternal Spirit” that
Christ offered the sacrifice in which the blood was shed. The blood had
the life of Christ, the life of the Spirit, in it. The outpouring of
the blood for us was to prepare the way for the
The blood of the Covenant, O mystery of mysteries! O grace above all
grace! O mighty power of God, opening the way, into
“I give thee for a covenant of the people.”—ISA. xlii. 6, xlix. 8.
“The Lord shall suddenly come to His temple, even the Messenger of the covenant, whom ye delight in.”—MAL. iii. 1.
“Jesus was made Surety of a better covenant.”—HEB. vii. 22.
“The Mediator of the Better Covenant, established upon better promises . . . The Mediator of the New Covenant. . . Ye are come to Jesus, the Mediator of the New Covenant.”—HEB. viii. 6, ix. 15, xii. 24.
WE have here four titles given to our Lord Jesus in connection with
the New Covenant. He is Himself called a Covenant. The union between
God and man, which the Covenant aims at, was wrought out in Him
personally; in Him the reconciliation between the human and Divine was
perfectly effected; in Him His people
The subject is so large that it would be impossible to enter upon
all the various aspects of this precious truth. Christ’s work in
atonement and intercession, in His bestowal of pardon and the Holy
Spirit, in His daily communication of grace and strength, are truths
which lie at the very foundation of the faith of Christians. We need
not speak of them here. What specially needs to be made clear to many
is how, by faith
I do not know how I can better set forth the glory of our Blessed
Lord Jesus as He accomplishes this, the real object of His redeeming
work, and as He takes entire possession of the heart He has bought and
won and cleansed as a dwelling for
The first step towards it, in one who has been truly converted and
assured of his acceptance with God, is the sense of sin. He sees that
the New Covenant promises are not made true in his experience. There is
not only indwelling sin, but he finds that he gives way to temper, and
self-will, and worldliness, and other known transgressions of God’s
law. The obedience to which God calls and will fit him, the life of
abiding in Christ’s love which is
The New Covenant is meant to be the deliverance from the power of sin; a keen longing for this is the indispensable preparation for entering fully into the Covenant.
Now comes the second step. As the mind is directed to the literal
meaning of the terms of the New Covenant, in its promises of cleansing
from sin, and a heart filled with God’s fear and God’s law, and a power
to keep God’s commands and never to depart from Him; as the eye is
fixed
Then follows another step. The heart-searching question comes whether we are willing to give up every evil habit, all our own self-will, all that is of the spirit of the world, and surrender ourselves to be wholly and exclusively for Jesus. God cannot take so complete possession of a man, and bless him so wonderfully, and work in him so mightily, unless He has him very completely, yea, wholly for Himself. Happy the man who is ready for any sacrifice.
Now comes the last, the simplest, and yet often the most difficult
step. And here it is we need to know Jesus as Mediator of the Covenant.
As we hear of the life of holiness, and obedience, and victory over
sin, which the Covenant promises, and hear that it will be to us
according to our faith, so that if we claim it in faith it will surely
be ours, the heart often fails for fear. I am willing, but have I the
power to make, and what is more, to
When this is seen, the believer learns that here, just as at
conversion, it is all of faith. The one thing needed now is, with the
eye definitely fixed on some promise of the New Covenant, to turn from
self and anything it could or need do, to let go self, and fall into
the arms of Jesus. He is the Mediator of the New Covenant: it is His to
lead us into it. In the assurance that Jesus, and every New Covenant
blessing, is already ours in virtue of
The fear has sometimes been expressed that, if we press so urgently
the work that Christ through the Spirit does in the heart, we may be
drawn off from trusting in what He has done and ever is doing, to what
we are experiencing of its working. The answer is simple. It is with
the heart alone that Christ can be truly known or honoured. It is
in the heart the work of grace is to be done, and the saving
power of Christ to be displayed. It is in the heart alone the
Holy Spirit has His sphere of work; there He is to work Christ’s
likeness; it is there alone He can glorify Christ. The Spirit
can only glorify Christ by revealing His saving power in us.
“And inasmuch as it is not without the taking of an oath: by so much also hath Jesus become the Surety of a better covenant. Wherefore also He is able to save completely them that draw near unto God through Him, seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for them.”-HEB. vii. 20, 22, 25.
A SURETY is one who stands good for another, that a certain
engagement will be faithfully performed. Jesus is the Surety of the New
Covenant. He stands surety with us for God—, that God’s part in the
Covenant will faithfully be performed. And He stands surety with God
for us, that our part will be faithfully performed too. If we are to
live in covenant with God, everything depends upon our knowing aright
what Jesus secures to us. The more we know and trust Him,
We read that it was because His priesthood was confirmed by the oath
of God, that He became the Surety of a so much better Covenant. The
oath of God gives us the security that His suretyship will secure all
the better promises. The meaning and infinite value of God’s oath had
been explained in the previous chapter. “In every dispute the oath is
final for confirmation. Wherein God, being minded to show more
abundantly unto the heirs of the promise the immutability of His
counsel, interposed with an oath, that by two immutable things, in
which it is impossible for God to lie, we may have a strong
encouragement.” We thus have not only a Covenant, with certain definite
promises; we have not only Jesus, the Surety of the Covenant; but at
the back of that again, we have the living God, with a view to our
having perfect confidence in the unchangeableness of His counsel and
promise,
Of the work of Christ, as the Surety of the better Covenant, our
passage tells us that, because of this priesthood confirmed by oath, He
is able to save completely those who draw near to God through Him. And
this, because “He ever liveth to make intercession for them.” As Surety
of the Covenant, He is ceaselessly engaged in watching their needs, and
presenting them to the Father, in receiving His answer, and imparting
its
Jesus, the Surety of a better Covenant, Jesus is to be our assurance
that everything connected with the Covenant is unchangeably and
eternally sure. In Jesus the keynote is given of all our intercourse
with God, of all our prayers and desires, of all our life and walk,
that with full assurance of faith and hope we may look for every word
of the Covenant to be made fully true to us by God’s own power. Let us
look at some of these things of which we are to be fully assured, if we
are to breathe the spirit of children of the New Covenant.
Then there is the assurance of the sufficiency of Christ’s finished
redemption. All that was needed to put away sin, to free us entirely
and for ever from its power, has been accomplished by Christ. His blood
and death, His resurrection and ascension, have taken us out of the
power of the world and transplanted us into a new life in the
It is even so with the assurance of what is needed on our part to
enter into this life in the New Covenant. We shrink back, either from
the surrender of all, because we know not whether we have the power to
let it go, or from the faith for all, because we fear ours will never
be so strong or so bold as to take all that is offered us in this
wonderful Covenant. Jesus is Surety of a better Covenant. The better
consists just in this very thing, that it undertakes to provide the
children of the Covenant with the very dispositions they need, to
accept and enjoy it. We have seen how the heart is just the central
object of the Covenant promise. A heart circumcised to love God with
all the heart, a heart into which God’s law and fear have been put, so
that it will not depart from Him—it is of all this Jesus is the Surety
under the oath of God. Let us say it once more: Surely the one thing
God asks of us, and has given the Covenant and its
I think some of us are beginning to see what has been our great
mistake. We have thought and spoken great things of what Christ did on
the Cross, and does on the Throne, as Covenant Surety. And we have
stopped there. But we have not expected Him to do great things in
our hearts. And yet it is there, in our heart, that the
consummation takes place of the work on the Cross and the Throne; in
the heart the New Covenant has its full triumph; the Surety is to be
known not by what the mind can think of Him in heaven, but by what he
does to make Himself known in the heart. There is the place
where His love triumphs and is enthroned. Let us with the heart believe
and receive Him as the Covenant Surety. Let us, with every desire we
entertain in connection with it, with every duty it calls us to, with
every promise it holds out, look to Jesus, under God’s oath the Surety
of the Covenant. Let us believe that by the Holy Spirit the heart is
His home and His throne. Let us, if we have not done it yet, in a
definite act of faith, throw ourselves utterly on
And now, notwithstanding the strong confidence and consolation the
oath of God and the Surety of the Covenant gives, there are some still
looking wistfully at this blessed life, and yet afraid to trust
themselves to this wondrous grace. They have a conception of faith as
something great and mighty, and they know and feel that theirs is not
such. And so their feebleness remains an insuperable barrier to their
inheriting the promise. Let me try and say once again: Brother, the act
of faith, by which you accept and enter this life in the New Covenant,
is not commonly an act of power, but often of weakness and fear and
much trembling. And even in the midst of all this feebleness, it is not
an act in your strength, but in a secret and perhaps unfelt strength,
which Jesus the Surety of the Covenant gives you. God has made Him
Surety, with the very object of inspiring us with courage and
confidence. He longs, He delights to bring you into the Covenant. Why
not bow before Him, and say meekly: He does hear
Dear believer, come and be a believer. Believe that God is showing you how entirely the Lord Jesus wants to have you and your life for Himself; how entirely He is willing to take charge of you and work all in you; how entirely you may even now commit your trust, and your surrender, and your faithfulness to the Covenant, with all you are and are to be, to Him, your Blessed Surety. If thou believest, thou shalt see the glory of God. What Christ has undertaken, you may confidently count upon His performing.
In a sense, and measure, and power that passeth knowledge, Jesus Christ is Himself all that God can either ask or give, all that God wants to see in us. “He that believeth in me, out of him shall flow rivers of living water.”
“And Moses took the book of the covenant, and read in the audience of the people: and they said, All that the Lord hath said will we do and be obedient. And Moses took the blood, and sprinkled it on the people, and said, Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord hath made with you concerning all these words.”-EX. xxiv. 7, 8; comp. HEB. ix. 18-20.
HERE is a new aspect in which to regard God’s blessed Book. Before
Moses sprinkled the blood, he read the Book of the Covenant, and
obtained the people’s acceptance of it. And when he had sprinkled it,
he said, “Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord hath made
concerning all these words.” The Book contained all the
conditions of the Covenant; only through the Book could they know all
that God asked of them, and
The very first thought suggested will be this, that in nothing will the spirit of our life and experience, as it lives either in the Old or the New Covenant, be more manifest than in our dealings with the Book. The Old had a book as well as the New. Our Bible contains both. The New was enfolded in the Old; the Old is unfolded in the New. It is possible to read the Old in the spirit of the New; it is possible to read the New as well as the Old in the spirit of the Old.
What this spirit of the Old is, we cannot see so clearly anywhere as
just in Israel when the Covenant was made. They were at once ready to
promise: “All that the Lord hath said will we do and be obedient.”
There was so little sense of their own sinfulness, or of the holiness
and glory of God, that with perfect self-confidence they considered
themselves able to undertake to keep the Covenant. They understood
little of the meaning of that blood with which they were sprinkled, or
of that death and redemption of which it was the symbol.
This self-confident spirit in Israel is explained by what had
happened just previously. When God had come down on Mount Sinai in
thunderings and lightnings to give the law, they were greatly afraid.
They said to Moses: “Let not God speak with us, lest we die; speak thou
with us, and we will hear.” They thought it was simply a matter of
hearing and knowing; they could for certain obey. They knew not that it
is only the presence, and the fear, and the nearness, and the power of
God humbling us and making us afraid, that can conquer the power of sin
and give the power to obey. It is so much easier to receive the
instruction from man,
If you would be delivered from all this, learn ever to read the Book
of the New Covenant in the New Covenant Spirit. One of the very first
articles of the New Covenant has reference to this matter. When God
says, I will put My law in their inward parts, and write it in their
hearts, He engages that the words of His Holy Book shall no longer be
mere outward teaching, but that what they command shall be our very
disposition and delight, wrought in us as a birth and a life by the
The New Covenant is a ministration of the Spirit (see Chap. VII).
All its teaching is meant to be teaching by the Holy Spirit. The two
most remarkable chapters in the Bible on the preaching of the gospel
are those in which Paul expounds the secret of this teaching (
Learn the double lesson. What God hath joined together, let no man
put asunder. The Bible is the Book of the New Covenant. And the Holy
Spirit is the only minister of what belongs to the Covenant. Expect not
to understand or profit by thy Bible knowledge without seeking
continually the teaching of the Holy Spirit. Beware lest thy
The Bible is the Book of the New Covenant. Ask the Holy Spirit specially to reveal to thee the New Covenant in it. It is inconceivable what loss the Church of our day is suffering because so few believers truly live as its heirs, in the true knowledge and enjoyment of its promises. Ask God, in humble faith, to give thee in all thy Bible reading, the spirit of wisdom and revelation, enlightened eyes of thine heart, to know what the promises are which the Covenant reveals; and what the Divine security in Jesus, the Surety of the Covenant, that every promise will be fulfilled in thee in Divine power; and what the intimate fellowship to which it admits thee with the God of the Covenant. The ministration of the Spirit, humbly waited for and listened to, will make the Book of the Covenant shine with new light—even the light of God’s countenance and a full salvation.
All this applies specially to the knowledge of
“Now therefore, if ye will obey My voice indeed, and keep My covenant, then ye shall be a holy nation unto Me.”-EX. xix. 5.
“And the Lord Thy God will circumcise thine heart, and the heart of thy seed, to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul. And thou shalt obey the voice of the Lord, and do all His commandments.”—DEUT.xxx. 6, 8.
“And I will put My Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in My statutes, and ye shall keep My judgments.”—EZEK.xxxvi. 27.
IN making the New Covenant, God said very definitely, “Not after the
covenant I made with your fathers.” We have learnt what the fault was
with that Covenant: it made God’s favour dependent upon the obedience
of the people. “If ye obey, I will be your God.” We have learnt
how the New Covenant remedied the defect: God Himself provided for the
obedience. It changes
In connection with this change, a serious and most dangerous mistake
is often made. Because in the New Covenant obedience no longer occupies
the place it had in the Old, as the condition of the Covenant, and free
grace has taken its place, justifying the ungodly, and bestowing gifts
on the rebellious, many are under the impression that obedience is now
no longer as indispensable as it was then. The error is a
terrible one. The whole Old Covenant was meant to teach the lesson of
the absolute and indispensable necessity of obedience for a life in
God’s favour. The New Covenant comes, not to provide a substitute for
that obedience in faith, but through faith to secure the obedience, by
giving a heart that delights in it and has the power for it. And men
abuse the free grace, that without our own obedience accepts us for a
life of new obedience, when they rest content with the
Let our first thought be: Obedience is essential. At the very
root of the relation of a creature to his God, and of God admitting the
creature to His fellowship, lies the thought of obedience. It is the
one only thing God spoke of in Paradise when “the Lord God commanded
the man” not to eat of the forbidden fruit. In Christ’s great salvation
it is the power that redeemed us: “By the obedience of one shall many
be made righteous.” In the promise of the New Covenant it takes the
first place. God engages to circumcise the hearts of His people—in
the putting off of the body of the flesh, in the circumcision of
Christ—to love God with all their heart, and to obey His commandments.
The crowning gift of Christ’s exaltation was the Holy Ghost, to bring
salvation to us as an
It is this indispensable necessity of obedience that explains why so
often the entrance into the full enjoyment of the New Covenant has
depended upon some single act of surrender. There was something in the
life, some evil or doubtful habit, in regard to which conscience had
often said that it was not in perfect accord with God’s perfect will.
Attempts were made to push aside the troublesome suggestion. Or
unbelief said it would be impossible to overcome the habit, and
maintain the promise of obedience to the Voice within. Meantime, all
our prayer appeared of no avail. It was as if faith could not lay hold
of the blessing which was full in sight, until at last the soul
consented to regard this little thing as the test of its surrender to
obey in everything, and of its faith that in everything the Surety of
the Covenant would give power to maintain the obedience. With the evil
or doubtful thing given up, with a good conscience restored, and the
heart’s confidence
Obedience is possible. The thought of a demand which man cannot possibly render, cuts at the very root of true hope and strength. The secret thought, “No man can obey God,” throws thousands back into the Old Covenant life, and into a false peace that God does not expect more than that we do our best. Obedience is possible: the whole New Covenant promises and secures this.
Only understand aright what obedience means. The renewed man has
still the flesh, with its evil nature, out of which there arise
involuntary evil thoughts and dispositions. These may be found in a
truly obedient man. Obedience deals with the doing of what is known to
be God’s will, as taught by the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and
conscience. When George Muller spoke of the great happiness he had had
for more than sixty years in God’s service, he attributed it two
things—He had loved God’s Word, and “he had maintained a good
conscience, not wilfully going on in a course he knew to be contrary to
the mind of God.” When the full light of God broke in upon Gerhard
Tersteegen, he wrote: “I promise, with Thy help and power,
Obedience is possible. When the law is written in the heart; when the heart is circumcised to love the Lord with all our heart, and to obey Him; when the love of God is shed abroad in the heart; it means that the love of God’s law and of Himself has now become the moving power of our life. This love is no vague sentiment, in man’s imagination of something that exists in heaven, but a living, mighty power of God in the heart, working effectually according to His working, which worketh in us mightily. A life of obedience is possible.
This obedience is of faith. “By faith, Abraham obeyed.” By
faith the promises of the Covenant, the presence of the Surety of the
Covenant, the hidden inworking of the Holy Spirit, and the love of God
in His infinite desire and power to make true in us all His love and
promises, must live in us. Faith can bring them nigh, and make us live
in the very midst of them. Christ and His wonderful redemption need not
remain at a distance from us in heaven, but can become our
And last of all, let us understand: Obedience is blessedness. Do not regard it only as the way to the joy and blessings of the New Covenant, but as itself, in its very nature, joy and happiness. To have the voice of God teaching and guiding you, to be united to God in willing what He wills, in working out what He works in you by His Spirit, in doing His Holy Will, and pleasing Him,—surely all this is joy unspeakable and full of glory.
To a healthy man it is a delight to walk or work, to put forth his
strength and conquer difficulties. To a slave or a hireling it is
bondage and weariness. The Old Covenant demanded obedience with an
inexorable must, and the threat that followed it. The New
Covenant changes the
In the New Covenant the chief thing is not the wonderful treasure of
strength and grace it contains, nor the Divine security that that
treasure never can fail, but this, that the living God gives Himself,
and makes Himself known, and takes possession of us as our God. For
this man was created, for this He was redeemed again, for this, that it
maybe our actual experience, the Holy Spirit has been given and is
dwelling in us. Between what God has already wrougbt in us, and what He
waits to work, obedience is the blessed link. Let us seek to walk
before Him in the confidence that we are of those who live in the noble
and holy consciousness: my one work is to obey
God.
Just listen, my brother. Thy Father loves thee with an infinite
love, and longs to make thee, even to-day, His holy, happy, obedient
child. Hear His message: He has for thee an entirely different life
from what thou art living. A life in which His grace shall actually
work in thee every moment all He asks thee to be. A life of simple
childlike obedience, doing for the day just what the Father shows thee
to be His will. A life in which the abiding love of thy Father, and the
abiding presence of thy Saviour, and the joy of the Holy Spirit, can
keep thee, and make thee glad and strong.
Now, my brother, just turn heavenward and ask the Father, by the Holy Spirit, to show thee the beautiful heavenly life. Ask and expect it. Keep thine eyes fixed upon it. The great blessing of the New Covenant is obedience; the wonderful power to will and do as God wills. It is indeed the entrance to every other blessing. It is paradise restored and heaven opened—the creature honouring his Creator, the Creator delighting in His creature; the child glorifying the Father, the Father glorifying the child, as He changes him, from glory to glory, into the likeness of His Son.
“Sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace.”-ROM. vi. 14.
THE words, Covenant of grace, though not found in Scripture, are the
correct expression of the truth it abundantly teaches, that the
contrast between the two covenants is none other than that of law and
grace. Of the New Covenant, grace is the great characteristic: “The law
came in, that the offence might abound; but where sin abounded, grace
did abound more exceedingly.” It is to bring the Romans away entirely
from under the Old Covenant, and to teach them their place in the New,
that Paul writes: “Ye are not under the law, but under grace.” And he
assures
The word grace is used in two senses. It is first the
gracious disposition in God which moves Him to love us freely
without our merit, and to bestow all His blessings upon us. Then it
also means that power through which this grace does its work in us. The
redeeming work of Christ, and the righteousness He won for us; equally
with the work of the Spirit in us, as the power of the new life, are
spoken of as Grace. It includes all that Christ has done and still
does, all He has and gives, all He is for us and in us. John says, “We
beheld His glory, the glory of the Only Begotten of the Father, full of
grace and truth.” “The law was given by Moses
The contrast which John pointed out is expounded by Paul: “The law came in, that the offence might abound,” and the way be prepared for the abounding of grace more exceedingly. The law points the way, but gives no strength to walk in it. The law demands, but makes no provision for its demands being met. The law burdens and condemns and slays. It can waken desire, but not satisfy it. It can rouse to effort, but not secure success. It can appeal to motives, but gives no inward power beyond what man himself has. And so, while warring against sin, it became its very ally in giving the sinner over to a hopeless condemnation. “The strength of sin is the law.”
To deliver us from the bondage and the dominion of sin, grace came
by Jesus Christ. Its work is twofold. Its exceeding abundance is seen
in the free and full pardon there is of all transgression, in the
bestowal of a perfect righteousness, and in the acceptance into God’s
favour and friendship. “In Him we have redemption through His blood,
The exceeding abundance of grace is equally seen in the work which
the Holy Spirit every moment maintains within us. We have found that
the central blessing of the New Covenant, flowing from Christ’s
redemption and the pardon of our sins, is the new heart in which God’s
law and fear and love have been put. It is in the fulfilment of this
promise, in the maintenance of the heart in a state of meetness for
God’s indwelling, that the glory of grace is specially seen. In the
very nature of things this must be so. Paul writes: “Where sin
abounded, grace did more exceedingly abound.” And where, as far as I
was concerned, did sin abound? All the sin in earth and hell could not
harm me, were it not for its presence in my heart. It is there it has
exercised its terrible dominion. And it is there the exceeding
Of this reign of grace in the heart Scripture speaks wondrous
things. Paul speaks of the grace that fitted him for his work, of “the
gift of that grace of God which was given me according to the working
of His power.” “The grace of our Lord was exceeding abundant, with
faith and love.” “The grace which was bestowed upon me was not
found vain, but I laboured more abundantly than they all; yet
not I, but the grace of God which was with me.” “He said unto
me, My grace is sufficient for thee; My strength is made perfect
in weakness.” He speaks in the same way of grace as working in the life
of believers, when he exhorts
It is impossible to speak too strongly of the need there is to know
that, as wonderful and free and alone sufficient as is the grace that
pardons, is the grace that sanctifies; we are just as absolutely
dependent upon the latter as the former. We can do as little to the one
as the other. The grace that works in us must as exclusively do all in
us and through us as the grace that pardons does all for us. In the one
case as the other, everything is by faith alone. Not to apprehend this
brings a double danger. On the one hand, people think
Let us listen to what God’s Word says: “By grace have ye been
saved, through faith; not of works, lest any man should glory.
For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works,
which God afore prepared that we should walk in them.” Grace stands in
contrast to good works of our own not only before conversion, but after
conversion too. We are created in Christ Jesus for good works,
which God had prepared for us. It is grace alone can work them in us
and work them out through us. Not only the commencement but the
continuance of the Christian life is the work
“Ye are not under the law, but under grace.” There are three
possible lives. One entirely under the law; one entirely under grace;
one a mixed life, partly law, partly grace. It is this last against
which Paul warns the Romans. It is this which is so common, and works
such ruin among Christians. Let us find out whether this is not our
position, and the cause of our low state. Let us beseech God to open
our eyes by the Holy Spirit to see that in the New Covenant everything,
every movement, every moment of our Christian life, is of grace,
abounding grace; grace abounding exceedingly, and working mightily. Let
us believe that our Covenant God waits to cause all grace to abound
toward us. And let us begin to live the
Grace unto you, and peace be multiplied!
“That My covenant might be with Levi. My covenant was with him of life and peace; and I gave them to him for the fear wherewith he feared Me, and was afraid before My name. The law of truth was in his mouth, and iniquity was not found in his lips; he walked with Me in peace and equity, and did turn many away from iniquity.”—MAL. ii. 4-6.
ISRAEL was meant by God to be a nation of priests. In the first making of the Covenant this was distinctly stipulated. “If ye will obey My voice, and keep My covenant, ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests.” They were to be the stewards of the oracles of God; the channels through whom God’s knowledge and blessing were to be communicated to the world; in them all nations were to be blessed.
Within the people of Israel one tribe was specially
Like Israel, all God’s people, under the New Covenant, are a royal
priesthood. The right of free and full access to God, the duty and
power of mediating for our fellowmen and being God’s channel of
blessing to them, is the inalienable birthright of every believer.
Owing to the feebleness and incapacity of many of God’s children, their
ignorance of the mighty grace of the New Covenant, they are utterly
impotent to take up
To those who desire to know the conditions on which, as part of the
New Covenant, the Covenant of an everlasting priesthood can be received
and carried out, a study of the conditions on which Levi received the
priesthood will be most instructive. We are not only told that God
chose that tribe, but what there specially was in that tribe that
fitted it for the work. Malachi says: “I gave him My covenant for the
fear wherewith he feared
The same principle is strikingly illustrated in the story of Aaron’s
grandson, Phineas, where he, in his zeal for God, executed judgment on
disobedience to God’s command. The words are most suggestive. “And the
Lord apake unto Moses, saying, Phineas, the son of Eleazar, the son of
Aaron, hath turned away My wrath from the
Even the New Covenant is in danger of being abused by the seeking of
our own happiness or holiness, more than the honour of God or the
deliverance of men. Even where these are not entirely neglected, they
do not always take the place they are meant to have—that first place
that makes everything, the dearest and best, secondary and subordinate
to the work of helping and blessing men. A reckless disregard of
everything that would interfere with God’s will and commands, a
It is this the world needs nowadays—men of God in whom the fire of God burns, men who can stand and speak and act in power on behalf of a God who, amid His own people, is dishonoured by the worship of the golden calf. Understand that as you will, of the place given to money and rich men in the church, of the prevalence of worldliness and luxury, or of the more subtle danger of a worship meant for the true God, under forms taken from the Egyptians, and suited to the wisdom and the carnal life of this world. A religion God cannot approve is often found even where the people still profess to be in covenant with God. “Consecrate yourselves to-day unto the Lord, even every man upon his brother.” This call of Moses is as much needed to-day as ever. To each one who responds there is the reward of the priesthood.
Let all who would know to the full what the New Covenant means,
remember God’s Covenant of Life and Peace with Levi. Accept of the holy
One of the great objects with which God has made a Covenant with us,
is, as we have said so often, to waken strong confidence in Himself and
His faithfulness to His promise. And one of the objects that He has in
wakening and so strengthening the faith in us, is that He may use us as
His channels of blessing to the world. In the work of saving men, He
wants intercessory prayer to take the first place. He would have us
come to Him to receive, from Him in heaven, the spiritual life and
power which can pass out from us to them. He knows how difficult and
hopeless it is in many cases to deal with sinners; He knows
In our priestly life there is still another aspect. The priests had
no inheritance with their brethren; the Lord God was their inheritance.
They had access to His dwelling and His presence, that there they might
intercede for others, and thence testify of what God is and wills.
Their personal privilege and experience fitted them for their work. If
we would intercede in power, do let us live in the full realisation of
New Covenant life. It gives us not only liberty and confidence with
God, and power to persevere; it gives us power with men, as we can
testify to and prove what God has done to us. Herein is the full glory
of the New Covenant, that, like Christ, its
“Ye are our epistle, written in our hearts, known and read of all men; being made manifest that ye are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God: not in tables of stone, but in tables that are hearts of flesh. And such confidence have we through Christ Godward: not that we are sufficient of ourselves, to account anything as from ourselves; but our sufficiency is from God: who also made us sufficient as ministers of a new covenant; not of the letter, but of the Spirit; for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth fife.”—2 COR. iii. 2-6.
WE have seen that the New Covenant is a ministration of the Spirit.
The Holy Spirit ministers all its grace and blessing in Divine power
and life.
What a contrast this to the Old Covenant. Moses had indeed received of the glory of God shining upon him, but had to put a veil on his face. Israel was incapable of looking on it. In hearing and reading Moses, there was a veil on their hearts. From Moses they might receive knowledge and thoughts and desires,—the power of God’s Spirit, to enable them to see the glory of what God speaks, was not yet given. This is the exceeding glory of the New Covenant, that it is a ministration of the Spirit; that its ministers have their sufficiency from God, who makes them ministers of the Spirit, and makes them able so to speak the words of God in the Spirit, that they are written in the heart, and that the hearers become legible, living epistles of Christ, showing the law written in their heart and life.
The ministry of the Spirit! What a glory there is in it! What a responsibility it brings! What a sufficiency of grace there is provided for it! What a privilege, to be a minister of the Spirit!
What tens of thousands we have throughout Christendom who are called ministers of the gospel. What an inconceivable influence they exert for life or for death over the millions who depend upon them for their knowledge and participation of the Christian life. What a power there would be if all these were ministers of the Spirit! Let us study the word, until we see what God meant the ministry to be, and learn to take our part in praying and labouring to have it nothing less.
God hath made us ministers of the Spirit. The first thought
is that a minister of the New Covenant must be a man personally
possessed of the Holy Spirit. There is a twofold work of the Spirit:
one in giving a holy disposition and character, the other in qualifying
and empowering a man for work. The former must always come first. The
promise of Christ to His disciples, that they should receive the Holy
Spirit for their service, was very definitely given to those who had
followed and loved Him, and kept His commandments. It is by no means
enough that a man have been born of the Spirit. If he is to be a
“sufficient minister” of the New Covenant, he must know what it is to
be led by the Spirit, to walk in the Spirit, and to say, “The
God hath made us ministers of the Spirit. Next to this
thought, of being personally possessed by the Spirit, comes the truth
that all their work in the ministry can be done in the power of the
Spirit. What an unspeakably precious assurance—Christ sends them to do
a heavenly work, to do His work, to be the instruments in His hands, by
which He works: He clothes them with a heavenly power. Their calling is
“to preach the gospel with the Holy
God hath made us ministers of the Spirit. There is something
still, of no less importance. The Minister of the Spirit must
especially see to it that
The minister of the Spirit, very definitely and perseveringly,
points away from himself to the Spirit. This is what John the Baptist
did. He was filled with the Holy Spirit from his birth, but sent men
away from himself to Christ, to be by Him baptized with the Spirit.
Christ did the same. In His farewell discourse He called His
There is nothing so needed in the Church to-day. All its feebleness
and formalities and worldliness, the lack of holiness, of personal
devotion to Christ, of enthusiasm for His cause and kingdom, is owing
to one thing—the Holy Spirit is not known and honoured and yielded to,
as the one only, as the one all-sufficient source of a holy life. The
New Covenant is not known as a ministration of the Spirit in the heart
of every believer. The one thing needful for the Church is—the Holy
Spirit in His power dwelling and ruling in the lives of God’s saints.
And as one of the chief means to this there are needed ministers of the
Spirit, themselves living in the enjoyment and power of this great
gift, who persistently labour to bring their brethren into the
possession of their birthright: the Holy Spirit in the heart,
maintaining, in Divine power, an unceasing communion with the Son and
with the Father. The ministration of the Spirit makes the ministry of
the Spirit possible and effectual. And the ministry of the Spirit again
We know how dependent the Church is on its ministry. The converse is
no less true. The ministers are dependent on the Church. They are its
children; they breathe its atmosphere; they share its health or
sickliness; they are dependent upon its fellowship and intercession.
Let none of us think that all that the New Covenant calls us to is to
see that we personally accept and rejoice in its blessings. No, indeed;
God wants everyone who enters into it to know that its privileges are
for all His children, and to give himself to make this known. And there
is no more effectual way of doing this than taking thought for the
ministry of the Church. Compare the ministry around you with its
pattern in God’s word (see specially
“To remember His Holy Covenant; to grant unto us that we,
being delivered out of the hands of our enemies, should serve Him
without fear, in holiness and righteousness before Him, all our
days.”-
WHEN Zacharias was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied, he
spoke of God’s visiting and redeeming His people, as a remembering of
His Holy Covenant. He speaks of what the blessings of that Covenant
would be, not in words that had been used before, but in what is
manifestly a Divine revelation to him by the Holy Spirit; and gathers
up all the former promises in these words: “That we should serve Him
without fear, in holiness and righteousness before Him all the days
of our life.” Holiness in life and service is to be the
There is no attribute of God so difficult to define, so peculiarly a
matter of Divine revelation, so mysterious, incomprehensible, and
inconceivably glorious, as His Holiness. It is that by which He is
specially worshipped in His majesty on the throne of heaven (
As the Holy One He says: “I am holy; be ye holy; I am the Lord which hallow you, which make you holy.” The highest conceivable summit of blessedness is our being partakers of the Divine nature, of the Divine holiness.
This is the great blessing Christ, the Mediator of
We are holy in Christ. As we believe it, as we receive it, as we yield ourselves to the truth, and draw nigh to God to have the holiness drawn forth and revealed in fellowship with Him, its fountain, we shall know how divinely true it is.
It is for this the Holy Spirit has been given in our hearts. He is
the “Spirit of Holiness.” His every working is in the power of
holiness. Paul says : “God hath chosen us unto salvation, in
sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth.” As simple
and entire as is our dependence on the word of truth, as the external
means, must our confidence
In the light of this Covenant promise, with the Blessed Son and the
Holy Spirit to work it out in us, what new meaning is given to the
teaching of the New Testament. Take the first epistle St. Paul ever
wrote. It was directed to men who had only a few months previously been
turned
Or take another verse in the Epistle (v. 21), also spoken to these
young converts from heathenism, in reference to the coming of our Lord.
Some think that to speak much of the coming of the Lord will make us
holy. Alas! how little it has done so in many .cases. It is the New
Covenant Holiness, wrought by God Himself in us, believed in and waited
for from Him, that can make our waiting differ from the carnal
expectations of the Jews or the disciples. Listen-“THE GOD OF PEACE
HIMSELF ”—that is the keynote of the New Covenant—what you never
can do God will work in you—“SANCTIFY YOU WHOLLY”; this you may ask
and expect,—”and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved
entire, UNBLAMABLE, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
And now, as if to meet the doubt that will arise: “Faithful is He
that calleth you, WHO WILL ALSO DO IT.” Again it is the secret of
the New Covenant—what hath not entered into the heart of man,-GOD WILL
WORK in them that wait for Him. Until the Church.awakes to see and
believe that our holiness is to be the immediate
Let us now return to the prophecy of the Holy Spirit by Zacharias, of God’s remembering the Covenant of His Holiness, to make us holy, to stablish our hearts unblamable in holiness, that we should serve Him IN HOLINESS AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. Note how every word is significant.
To grant us. It is to be a gift from above. The promise given with the Covenant was: “I the Lord have spoken it; I will perform it.” We need to beseech God to show us both what He will do, and that He will do it. When our faith expects all from Him, the blessing will be found.
“That we, being delivered out of the hands of our enemaes.”
He had just before said: He hath raised up an horn of salvation for
us; salvation from our enemies and the hand of all that hate us. It
is only a free people can serve a Holy God, or be holy. It is only as
the teaching of
Should serve Him. My servant does not serve me by spending all his time in getting himself ready for work, but in doing my work. The Holy Covenant sets us free, and endows us with Divine grace, that God may have us for His work,—the same work Christ began, and we now carry on.
Without fear. In childlike confidence and boldness before God. And before men too. A freedom from fear in every difficulty, because having learnt to know that God works all in us we can trust Him to work all for us and through us.
Before Him. With His continued unceasing presence all the day, as the unceasing security of our obedience and our fearlessness, the neverfailing secret of our being sanctified wholly.
All our days. Not only all the day for one day, but for every
day, because Jesus is a High Priest in the power of an endless life,
and the mighty operation of God as promised in the Covenant is as
unchanging as is God Himself.
I pray you, my Brother, do believe that God’s word is true, and say with Zacharias, “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, who bath visited His people, to remember HIS HOLY COVENANT, and to grant us, that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies, should serve Him without fear, in holiness rind righteousness before Him, all our days.”
“And they entered into the covenant to seek the Lord God of
their fathers with all their heart, and all their soul.”—
“The Lord thy God will circumcise thine heart, to love the Lord thy
God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul.”—
“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 turn to Me with their whole heart.”—
“I will make an everlasting covenant with them, that I will not turn
away from them, to do them good; but I will put My fear in their
hearts, that they shall not depart from Me. Yea, I will rejoice
over them to do them good, with My whole heart and My whole
soul.”—
IN the days of Asa, Hezekiah, and Josiah, we read of Israel entering
into “the Covenant” with their whole heart, “to perform the words of
the Covenant which are written in the book.” Of
If we have at all understood the teaching of God’s word in regard to
the New Covenant, we know what it reveals in regard to the two parties
who meet in it. On God’s side there is the promise to do for us and in
us all that we need to serve and enjoy Him. He will rejoice in doing us
good, with His whole heart. He will be our God, doing for us all that a
God can do, giving Himself as God to be wholly ours. And on our side
there is the prospect held out of our being able, in
Wholeheartedness in the love and the service of God! how shall I
speak of it? Of its imperative necessity? It is the one unalterable
condition of true communion with God, of which nothing can supply the
want. Of its infinite reasonableness? With such a God, a very Fountain
of all that is loving and lovely, of all that is good and blessed, the
All-glorious God: surely there cannot for a moment be a thought of
anything else being His due, or of our consenting to offer Him anything
less, than the love of the whole heart. Of
Have we not spoken enough of it already in this book? Do we not need
something more than words and thoughts? Is not what we need rather
We know what God’s giving means. His giving depends on our taking. He does not force upon us spiritual possessions. He promises, and gives, in such measure as desire and faith are ready to receive. He gives in Divine power; as faith yields itself to that power, and accepts the gift, it becomes consciously and experimentally our possession.
As spiritual gifts God’s bestowings are not recognised by sense
or reason. “Ear hath not heard, neither have entered into the heart
of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love
Him. But God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit. We have
received the Spirit which
Then, this Divine giving is continuous. I bestow a gift on a man; he takes it, and I never see him again. So God bestows temporal gifts on men, and they never think of Him. But spiritual gifts are only to be received and enjoyed in unceasing communication with God Himself. The new heart is not a power I have in myself, like the natural endowments of thinking or loving. No, it is only in unceasing dependence upon, in close contact with God, that the heavenly gift of a new heart can be maintained uninjured, can day by day become stronger. It is only in God’s immediate presence, in unbroken direct dependence on Him, that spiritual endowments are preserved.
Then, further, spiritual gifts can only be enjoyed by acting them
out in faith. None of the graces of the Christian life, like love,
or meekness, or boldness, can be felt or known, much less strengthened,
until we begin to exercise them,
All this is especially true of wholeheartedness, and loving God with
all our heart. You may at first be very ignorant of all it implies. God
has planted the new heart in the midst of the flesh, which, with its
animating principle, SELF, has to be denied, to be kept crucified, and
by the Holy Spirit to be mortified. God has placed you in the midst of
a world, from which, with all that is of it and its spirit, you are to
come out and be entirely separate. God has given you your work in His
kingdom, for which He asks all your interest, and time, and strength.
In all these three respects you need wholeheartedness, to enable you to
make the sacrifices that may be required. If you take the ordinary
standard of Christian life around you, you will find that
wholeheartedness, intense devotion to God and His service, is hardly
thought of. How to make the best of both
And now, who is ready to enter into this New and Everlasting Covenant with his whole heart? Let each of us do it.
Begin by asking God very humbly to give you by the Spirit, who
dwells in you, the vision of the heavenly life of wholehearted love and
obedience, as it has actually been prepared for you in Christ. It is an
existing reality, a spiritual endowment
When you begin to see why the New Covenant was given, and what it
promises, and how divinely certain its promises are, offer yourself
to God unreservedly to be taken up into, it. Offer, if He will take
you in, to love Him with your whole heart, and to obey Him with all
your strength. Hold not back, be not afraid. God has sworn to do you
good with His whole heart: do say, do not hesitate to say, that
into this Covenant, in which He promises to cause you to turn to
Him and to love Him with your whole heart, you now with your whole
heart enter. If there be any fear, just ask again and believingly for a
vision of the Covenant life: God swearing to do you good with His
whole heart; God undertaking to make and enable you to love and
obey Him with your whole heart. The vision of this life will
make you bold to say: Into this Covenant of a
Let us close and part with this one thought. A redeeming God, rejoicing with His whole heart and whole soul to do us good, and to work in us all that is well-pleasing in His sight: this is the one side. Such is the God of the Covenant. Gaze upon Him. Believe Him. Worship Him. Wait upon Him, until the fire begin to burn, and your heart be drawn out with all its might to love this God. Then the other side. A redeemed soul, rejoicing with all its heart and all its soul in the love of this God, entering into the covenant of wholehearted love, and venturing, ere it knows, to say to Him: With my whole heart I do love Thee, God, my exceeding joy. Such are the children of the Covenant.
Beloved reader! rest not till you have entered in, through the Gate Beautiful, through Christ the door, into this temple of the love, of the heart, of God.
IN the life of the believer there sometimes comes a crisis, as clearly marked as his conversion, in which he passes out of a life of continual feebleness and failure to one of strength, and victory, and abiding rest. The transition has been called the Second Blessing. Many have objected to the phrase, as being unscriptural, or as tending to make a rule for all, what was only a mode of experience in some. Others have used it as helping to express clearly in human words what ought to be taught to believers as a possible deliverance from the ordinary life of the Christian, to one of abiding fellowship with God, and entire devotion to His service. In introducing it into the title of this book, I have indicated my belief that, rightly understood, the words express a scriptural truth, and may be a help to believers in putting clearly before them what they may expect from God. Let me try and make clear how I think we ought to understand it.
I have connected the expression with the two Covenants. Why was it
that God made two Covenants—not one, and not three? Because there were
two parties concerned. In the First Covenant man was to prove what he
could do, and what he was. In the Second, God would show what He would
do. The former
What is needed to help a man to take that step is very simple. He must see and confess the wrongness, the sin, of the life he is living, not in harmony with God’s will. He must see and believe in the life which Scripture holds out, which Christ Jesus promises to work and maintain in him. As he sees that his failure has been owing to his striving in his own strength, and believes that our Lord Jesus will actually work all in him in Divine power, he takes courage, and dares surrender himself to Christ anew. Confessing and giving up all that is of self and sin, yielding himself wholly to Christ and His service, he believes and receives a new power to live his life by the faith of the Son of God. The change is in many cases as clear, as marked, as wonderful, as conversion. For lack of a better name, that of A Second Blessing came most naturally.
When once it is seen how greatly this change is needed in the life
of most Christians, and how entirely it rests on faith in Christ and
His power, as revealed in the Word, all doubt as to its scripturalness
will be removed. And when once its truth is seen, we shall be surprised
to find how, throughout Scripture,
Take the twofold passage of Israel through water, first out of Egypt, then into Canaan. The wilderness journey was the result of unbelief and disobedience, allowed by God to humble them, and prove them, and show what was in their heart. When this purpose had been accomplished, a second blessing led them through Jordan as mightily into Canaan, as the first had brought them through the Red Sea out of Egypt.
Or take the Holy Place and the Holiest of All, as types of the life in the two covenants, and equally in the two stages of Christian experience. In the former, very real access to God and fellowship with Him, but always with a veil between. In the latter, the full access, through a rent veil, into the immediate presence of God, and the full experience of the power of the heavenly life. As the eyes are opened to see how terribly the average Christian life comes short of God’s purpose, and how truly the mingled life can be expelled by the power of a new revelation of what God waits to do, the types of Scripture will shine with a new meaning.
Or look to the teachings of the New Testament. In Romans, Paul contrasts the life of the Christian under the law with that under grace, the spirit of bondage with the Spirit of adoption. What does this mean but that Christians may still be living under the law and its bondage, that they need to come out of this into the full life of grace and liberty through the Holy Spirit, and that, when first they see the difference, nothing is needed but the surrender of faith, to accept and experience what grace will do by the Holy Spirit.
To the Corinthians, Paul writes of some being carnal, and still
babes, walking as men after the flesh; others being spiritual, with
spiritual discernment and character. To the Galatians, he speaks of the
liberty with which Christ, by the Spirit, makes free from the law, in
contrast to those who sought to perfect in the flesh, what was begun in
the Spirit, and who gloried in the flesh;—all
Everywhere we see in Scripture, what the state of the Church at the present day confirms, that conversion is only the gate that leads into the path of life, and that within that gate there is still great danger of mistaking the path, of turning aside, or turning back, and that where this has taken place we are called at once, and with our whole heart, to turn and give ourselves to nothing less than all that Christ is willing to work in us. Just as there are many who have always thought that conversion must be slow, and gradual, and uncertain, and cannot understand how it can be sudden and final, because they only take man’s powers into account, so many cannot see how the revelation of the true life of holiness, and the entrance on it by faith out of a life of self-effort and failure, may be immediate and permanent. They look too much to man’s efforts, and know not how the second blessing is nothing more nor less than a new vision of what Christ is willing to work in us, and the surrender of faith that yields all to Him.
I would fain hope that what I have written in this book may help some to see that the second blessing is just what they need, is what God by His Spirit will work in them, is nothing but the acceptance of Christ in all His saving power as our strength and life, and is what will bring them into, and fit them for, that full life in the New Covenant, in which God works all in all.
Let me close this note with a quotation from the introduction to a
little book just published, Dying to Self: A Golden Dialogue, by
William Law, with notes by A.M.: “A great deal has been said against
the use of the terms, the Higher Life, the Second Blessing. In Law one
finds nothing of such language, but of the deep truth of which they are
the, perhaps defective, expression, his book is full. The points on
which so much stress is laid in what is called Keswick teaching, stand
prominently out in his whole argument. The low state of the average
life of believers,
THE thought of the law written in the heart sometimes causes difficulty and discouragement, because believers do not see or feel in themselves anything corresponding to it. An illustration may help to remove the difficulty. There are fluids by which you can write so that nothing is visible, either at once or later, unless the writing be exposed to the sun or the action of some chemical. The writing is there, but one who is ignorant of the process cannot think it is there, and knows not how to make it readable. The faith of a man who is in the secret believes in it though he see it not.
It is even thus with the new heart. God has put His law into it,
“Blessed are the people in whose heart is God’s law.” But it is there
invisibly. He that takes God’s promise in faith, knows that it is in
his own heart. As long. as there is not clear faith on this point, all
attempts to find it, or to fulfil that law, will be vain. But when by a
simple faith the promise is held fast, the first step is taken to
realise it. The soul is then prepared to receive instruction as to what
the writing of the law
This writing of the law means, further, that in planting this principle in you, God has taken all that you know of God’s will already, and inspired that new heart with the readiness to obey it. It may as yet be written there with invisible writing, and you are not conscious of it. That does not matter. You have here to deal with a Divine and hidden work of the Holy Spirit. Be not afraid to say: Oh, how love I Thy law! God has put the love of it into your heart, the new heart. He has taken away the stony heart; it is by the new heart you have to live.
The next thing implied in this writing of the law, is that you have accepted all God’s will, even what you do not yet know, as the delight of your heart. In giving yourself up to God, you gave yourself wholly to His will. That was the one condition of your entering the Covenant; Covenant grace will now provide for teaching you to know, and strengthening you to do, all your Father would have you do.
The whole life in the New Covenant is a life of faith. Faith accepts every promise of the Covenant, is certain that it is being fulfilled, looks confidently to the God of the Covenant to do His work. Faith believes implicitly in the new heart, with the law written in it, because it believes in the promise, and in the God who gave and fulfils the promise.
It may be well to add here that the same truth holds good of all the
promises concerning the new heart—they must be accepted and acted on
by faith. When we read of “the love of God shed abroad in the heart by
the Holy Spirit,” of “Christ dwelling in the heart,” of “a clean
heart,” of “loving each other with a clean heart fervently,” of “God
establishing our
And if the question be asked what we are to think of all there is
within us that contradicts this faith, let us remember what Scripture
teaches us of it. We sometimes speak of an old and a new heart.
Scripture does not do so. It speaks of the old, the stony, heart, being
taken away—the heart, with its will, disposition, affections, being
made new with a Divine newness. This new heart is placed in the midst
of what Scripture calls the flesh, in which there dwelleth no good
thing. We shall find it a great advantage to adhere as closely as
possible to Scripture language. It will greatly help our faith even to
use the very words God by His Holy Spirit has used to teach us. And it
will greatly clear our view for knowing what to think of the sin that
remains in us if we think of it and deal with it in the light of God’s
truth. Every evil desire and affection comes from the flesh, man’s
sinful natural life. It owes its power greatly to our ignorance of its
nature, and our trusting to its help and strength to cast out its evil.
I have already pointed out how sinful flesh and religious flesh is one,
and how all failure in religion is owing to a secret trust in
ourselves. As we accept and make use of what God says of the flesh, we
shall see in it the source of all evil in us; we shall say of its
temptations: “It is no more I, but sin that dwelleth in me”; we shall
maintain our integrity as we maintain a good conscience that condemns
us for nothing knowingly done against God’s will; and we shall be
strong in the faith of the Holy Spirit, who dwells in the new heart, so
to
I conclude with an extract of an address by Rev. F. Webster, at Keswick last year, in confirmation of what I have just said: “Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof. ‘Make no provision for the flesh.’ The flesh is there, you know. To deny or ignore the existence of an enemy is to give him a great chance against you; and the flesh is in the believer to the very end, a force of evil to be reckoned with continually, an evil force inside a man, and yet, thank God, a force which can be so dealt with by the power of God, that it shall have no power to defile the heart or deflect the will. The flesh is in you, but your heart may be kept clean moment by moment in spite of the existence of evil in your fallen nature. Every avenue, every opening that leads into the heart, every thought and desire and purpose and imagination of your being, may be closed against the flesh, so that there shall be no opening to come in and defile the heart or deflect the will from the will of God.
“You say that is a very high standard. But it is the Word of God. There is to be no secret sympathy with sin. Although the flesh is there, you are to make it no excuse for sins. You are not to say, I am naturally irritable, anxious, jealous, and I cannot help letting these things crop up; they come from within. Yes, they come from within, but then there need be no provision, no opening in your heart for these things to enter. Your heart can be barricaded with an impassable barrier against these things. ‘No provision for the flesh.’ Not merely the front door barred and bolted so that you do not invite them to come in, but the side and back door closed too. You may be so Christ-possessed and Christ-enclosed that you shall positively hate everything that is of the flesh.
“‘Make no provision for the flesh.’ The only way to do so is
to ‘put on the Lord Jesus Christ.’ I spoke of the heart being so
barricaded that there should be no entrance to it, that the flesh
IN the life of George Muller of Bristol there was an epoch, four years after his conversion, to which he ever after looked back, and of which he often spoke, as his entrance into the true Christian life.
In an address given to ministers and workers after his ninetieth birthday, he spoke thus of it himself: “That leads to another thought—the full surrender of the heart to God. I was converted in November 1825, but I only came, into the full surrender of the heart four years later, in July 1829. The love of money was gone, the love of place was gone, the love of position was gone, the love of worldly pleasures and engagements was gone. God, God, God alone became my portion. I found my all in Him; I wanted nothing else. And by the grace of God this has remained, and has made me a happy man, an exceedingly happy man, and it led me to care only about the things of God. I ask, affectionately, my beloved brethren, have you fully surrendered the heart to God, or is there this thing or that thing with which you are taken up irrespective of God? I read a little of the Scriptures before, but preferred other books, but since that time the revelation He has made of Himself has become unspeakably blessed to me, and I can say from my heart, God is an infinitely lovely Being. Oh! be not satisfied until in your inmost soul you can say, God is an infinitely lovely Being!”
The account he gives of this change in his journal is as follows. He
speaks of one whom he had heard preach at Teignmouth, where he had gone
for the sake of his health. “Though I did
“It was my beginning to understand this point in particular which had a great effect on me; for the Lord enabled me to put it to the test of experience by laying aside commentaries and almost every other book, and simply reading the Word of God and studying it. The result of this was that the first evening that I shut myself into my room to give myself to prayer and meditation over the Scriptures, I learned more in a few hours than I had done during a period of several months previously. But the particular difference was that I received real strength in my soul in doing so.
“In addition to this, it pleased the Lord to lead me to see a higher standard of devotedness than I had seen before. He led me, in a measure, to see what is my glory in this world, even to be despised, to be poor and mean with Christ . . . I returned to London much better in body. And as to my soul, the change was so great that it was like a second conversion.”
In another passage he speaks thus: “I fell into the snare into which
so many young believers fall, the reading of religious books is
preferred to the Scriptures. Now the scriptural way of reasoning would
have been: God Himself has condescended to become an author, and I am
ignorant of that precious Book which His Holy Spirit has caused to be
written; therefore I ought to read
“If anyone would ask me how he may read the Scriptures most profitably, I would answer him:—
“1. Above all he must seek to have it settled in his own mind that God alone, by the Holy spirit, can teach him, and that, therefore, as God will be inquired for all blessings, it becomes him to seek for God’s blessing previous to reading, and also while reading.
“2. He should also have it settled in his mind that though the Holy spirit is the best and sufficient Teacher, yet that He does not always teach immediately when we desire it, and that, therefore, we may have to entreat Him again and again for the explanation of certain passages; but that He will surely teach us at last, if we will seek for light prayerfully, patiently, and for the glory of God.”
Just one more passage, from an address given on his ninetieth
birthday: “For sixty-nine years and ten months he had been a very happy
man. That he attributed to two things. He had maintained a good
conscience, not wilfully going on in a course he knew to be contrary to
the mind of God; he did not, of course, mean that he was perfect; he
was poor, weak, and sinful. Secondly, he attributed it to his love of
Holy Scripture. Of late
In connection with what has been said about the New Covenant being a ministration of the Spirit this narrative is most instructing. It shows us how George Muller’s power lay in God’s revealing to him the work of the Holy Spirit. He writes that up to the time of that change he had “not experimentally understood the office of the Holy Spirit.” We speak much of George Muller’s power in prayer; it is of importance to remember that that power was entirely owing to his love of, and faith in, God’s Word. But it is of still more importance to notice that his power to believe God’s Word so fully was entirely owing to his having learned to know the Holy Spirit as his Teacher. When the words of God are explained to us, and made living within us by the Holy Spirit, they have a power to awaken faith which they otherwise have not. The Word then brings us into contact with God, comes to us as from God direct, and binds our whole life to Him.
When the Holy Spirit thus feeds us on the Word, our whole life comes
under His power, and the fruit is seen, not only in the power of
prayer, but as much in the power of obedience. Notice how Mr. Muller
tells us this, that the two secrets of his great happiness were, his
great love for God’s Word, and his ever maintaining a good
conscience, not knowingly doing anything against the will of God.
In giving himself to the teaching of the Holy Spirit, as he tells us in
his birthday address, he made a full surrender of the entire heart to
God, to be ruled by the Word. He gave himself to obey that Word in
everything, he believed that the Holy Spirit gave the grace to obey,
and so he was able to maintain a walk free from knowingly transgressing
God’s law. This is a point he always insisted on. So he writes, in
regard to a life of dependence upon God: “It will not do—it is not
possible—to live in sin,
A careful perusal of this testimony will show us how the chief points usually insisted upon in connection with the second blessing are all found here. There is the full surrender of the heart to be taught and led alone by the Spirit of God. There is the higher standard of holiness which is at once set up. There is the tender desire in nothing to offend God, but to have at all times a good conscience, that testifies that we are pleasing to God. And there is the faith that where the Holy Spirit reveals to us in the Word the will of God, He gives the sufficient strength for the doing of it. “The particular difference,” he says of reading with faith of the Holy Spirit’s teaching, “was that I received real strength in my soul in doing so.” No wonder that he said: The change was so great, that it was like a second conversion.
All centres in this, that we believe in the New Covenant and its promises as a ministration of the Spirit. That belief may come to some suddenly, as to George Muller ; or it may dawn upon others by degrees. Let all say to God that they are ready to put their whole heart and life under the rule of the Holy Spirit dwelling in them, teaching them by the Word, and strengthening them by His grace. He enables us to live pleasing to God.
I do not know that I can find a better case by which to illustrate
the place Christ, the Mediator of the Covenant, takes in
It was at the Oxford Convention in 1873 that he witnessed to having “received a new and distinct blessing to which he had been a stranger before.” For more than twenty-five years he had been most diligent as a minister of the gospel, and, as appears from his journals, most faithful in seeking to maintain a close walk with God. But he was ever disturbed by the consciousness of being overcome by sin. So far back as 1853 he had written, “I feel again how very far I am from enjoying habitually that peace and love and joy which Christ promises. I must confess that I have it not; and that very ungentle and unchristian tempers often strive within me for the mastery.” When in 1873 he read what was being published of the Higher Life, the effect was to render him utterly dissatisfied with himself and his state. There were indeed difficulties he could not quite understand in that teaching, but he felt that he must either reach forward to better things, nothing less than redemption from all iniquities, or fall back more and more into worldliness and sin. At Oxford he heard an address on the rest of faith. It opened his eyes to the truth that a believer who really longs for deliverance from sinning must simply take Christ at His word, and reckon, without feeling, on Him to do His work of cleansing and keeping the soul. “I thought of the sufficiency of Jesus, and said, I will rest in Him, and I did rest in Him. I was afraid lest it should be a passing emotion; but I found that a presence of Jesus was graciously manifested to me in a way I knew not before, and that I did abide in Him. I do not want to rest in these emotions, but just to believe, and to cling to Christ as my all.” He was a man of very reserved nature, but felt it a duty ere the close of the Conference to confess publicly his past shortcoming, and testify openly to his having entered upon a new and definite experience.
In a paper written not long after this he pointed out what the steps
are leading to this experience. First, a clear view of the
A careful perusal of this very brief statement will prove how everything centred here in Christ. The surrender for a life of continual communion and victory is to be to Christ. The strength for that life is to be in Him and from Him, by faith in Him. And the power to make the full surrender and rest in Him was to be waited for from Him alone.
In June 1875 the first Keswick Convention was held. In the circular calling it, we read : “Many are everywhere thirsting that they may be brought to enjoy more of the Divine presence in their daily life, and a fuller manifestation of the Holy Spirit’s power, whether in subduing the lusts of the flesh, or in enabling them to offer more effective service to God. It is certainly God’s will that His children should be satisfied in regard to these longings, and there are those who can testify that He has satisfied them, and does satisfy them with daily fresh manifestations of His grace and power.” The results of the very first Convention were most blessed, so that after its close he wrote: “There is a very remarkable resemblance in the testimonies I have since received as to the nature of the blessing obtained, viz., the ability given to make a full surrender to the Lord, and the cousequent experience of an abiding peace, far exceeding anything previously experienced.” Through all the chief thought, was Christ, first drawing and enabling the soul to rest in Him, and then meeting it with the fulfilment of its desire, the abiding experience of His power to keep it in victory over sin, and communion with God.
And what was the fruit of this new experience? Eight years later
Canon Battersby spoke; “It is now eight years since that
ONE would think that no words could make it plainer than the words of the Covenant state it—that the one difference between Old and New is, that in the latter everything is to be done by God Himself. And yet believers and even teachers do not take it in. And even those who do, find it hard to live it out. Our whole being is so blinded to the true relation to God, His inconceivable Omnipresent Omnipotence working every moment in us is so far beyond the reach of human conception, our little hearts cannot rise to the reality of His Infinite Love making itself one with us, and delighting to dwell in us, and to work all in us that has to be done there—that, when we think we have accepted the truth, we find it is only a thought. We are such strangers to the knowledge of what a GOD really is, as the actual life by which His creatures live. In Him we live and move and have our being. And specially is the knowledge of the Triune God too high for us, in that wonderful, most real, and most practical indwelling, to make which possible the Son became Incarnate, and the Holy Spirit was sent forth into our hearts. Only they who confess their ignorance, and wait very humbly and persistently on our Blessed God to teach us by His Holy Spirit what that all-working indwelling is, can hope to have it revealed to them.
It is not long since I had occasion, in preparing a series of Bible
Lessons for our Students Association here, to make a study of the
Gospel of St. John, and of the life of our Lord as set forth there. I
cannot say how deeply I have been afresh impressed with that which I
cannot but regard as the deepest secret of His life on earth, His
dependence on the Father. It has come to me like a new
Just think a moment what this means in connection with what He tells us of His life in the Father. “As the Father hath life in Himself, so He hath given to the Son to have life in Himself” (v. 26). “That all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father” (v. 23). And yet this Son, who hath life in Himself even as the Father has, immediately adds (v. 30): “I can of mine own self do nothing.” We should have thought that with this life in Himself He would have the power of independent action as the Father has. But no. “The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father do.” The chief mark of this Divine life He has in Himself is evidently unceasing dependence, receiving from the Father, by the moment, what He bad to speak or do. Nothing of Myself is manifestly as true of Him as it ever could be of the weakest or most sinful man. The life of the Father dwelling in Christ, and Christ in the Father, meant that just as truly as when He was begotten of the Father, He received Divine life and glory from Him, so the continuation of that life came only by an eternal process of giving and receiving, as absolute as is the eternal generation itself. The more closely we study this trutb, and Christ’s life in the light of it, the more we are compelled to say, the deepest root of Christ’s relationship to the Father, the true reason why He was so well-pleasing, the secret of His glorifying the Father, was this: He allowed God to do all in Him. He only received and wrought out what God wrought in Him. His whole attitude was that of the open ear, the servant spirit, the childlike dependence that waited for all on God.
The infinite importance of this truth in the Christian life is
easily felt. The life Christ lived in the Father is the life He imparts
to us. We are to abide in Him and He in us, even as He in the
Father and the Father in Him. And if the secret of His
Let us make Christ’s words our own: ”I can do nothing of Myself.” Take it as the keynote of a single day. Look up and see the Infinite God waiting to do everything as soon as we are ready to give up all to Him, and receive all from Him. Bow down in lowly worship, and wait for the Holy Spirit to work some measure of the mind of Christ in you. Do not be disconcerted if you do not learn the lesson at once: there is the God of love waiting to do everything in him who is willing to be nothing. At moments the teaching appears dangerous, at other times terribly difficult. The Blessed Son of God teaches it us—this was His whole life: I can do nothing of Myself. He is our life; He will work it in us. And when as the Lamb of God He begets this His disposition in us, we shall be prepared for Him to rise on us and shine in us in His heavenly glory.
“Nothing of Myself”—that word spoken eighteen hundred years ago,
coming out of the inmost depths of the heart of the Son of God—is a
seed in which the power of the eternal life is hidden.
This word is one of the keys to the New Covenant Life. As I believe that God is actually to work all in me, I shall see that the one thing that is hindering me is, my doing something of myself. As I am willing to learn from Christ by the Holy Spirit to say truly, Nothing of myself, I shall have the true preparation to receive all God has engaged to work, and the power confidently to expect it. I shall learn that the whole secret of the New Covenant is just one thing: GOD WORKS ALL! The seal of the Covenant stands sure: “I the Lord have spoken it, AND I WILL DO IT.”
LET me give the principal passages in which the words “the whole
heart,” “all the heart,” are used. A careful study of them will show
how wholehearted love and service is what God has always asked, because
He can, in the very nature of things, ask nothing less. The prayerful
and believing acceptance of the words will waken the assurance that
such wholehearted love and service is exactly the blessing the New
Covenant was meant to make possible. That assurance will prepare us for
turning to the
Hear, first, God’s word in Deuteronomy—
iv. 29: “If thou seek the Lord thy God, thou shalt find Him, if thou
seek Him with all thy heart and all thy soul.”
vi. 4, 5: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord; and thou shalt
love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul,
and with all thy might.”
x. 12: “What doth the Lord thy God require of thee but to fear
the Lord thy God, to walk in all His ways, and to love
Him, and to serve Him with all thy heart and all thy
soul.”
xi. 13: “Hearken diligently unto My commandments, to love the
Lord your God, and to serve Him with all your heart and all your
soul.”
xiii. 3: “The Lord your God proveth you, whether ye love the
Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul.”
xxvi. 16 : “Thou shalt therefore keep these statutes and do them
with all thy heart and all thy soul.”
xxx. 2: “Thou shalt obey His voice with all thine heart and with
all soul.”
xxx. 6: “The Lord thy God will circumcise thine heart, to love
the Lord thy God with all thine heart and with all thy soul” (see also
v. 9, 10).
Take these oft-repeated words as the expression of God’s will concerning His people, and concerning yourself; ask if you could wish to give God anything less. Take the last-cited verse as the Divine promise of the New Covenant—that He will circumcise, will so cleanse the heart to love Him with a wholehearted love, that obedience is within your reach; and say whether you will not vow afresh to keep this His first and great commandment.
Listen to Joshua (xxii. 5): “Take diligent heed to love the Lord your God, and to walk in all His ways, and to keep His commandments, and to cleave unto Him, and to serve Him, with all your heart and with all your soul.”
Listen to Samuel (
Hear David repeating God’s promise to Solomon (
Hear God’s word concerning David (
Hear Solomon in his temple prayer (
Listen to what is said of Jehu (
Of Josiah we read (
The words concerning Asa, in
Of Jehoshaphat, men said (
And of Hezekiah it is written (
Oh that all would ask God to give them, by the Holy Spirit, a simple
vision of Himself!—claiming, giving, accepting, blessing, delighting
in, the love and service of the whole heart—the sacrifice of the whole
burnt-offering. Surely they would fall down and join the ranks of those
who have given it; and refuse to think of anything as religious life,
or worship, or service, but that in which their whole heart went out to
God.
Shall we not begin asking more earnestly than ever, as often as we see men engaged in their earthly pursuits in search of money, or pleasure, or fame, or power, with their whole heart. Is this the spirit in which Christians consider that God must be served? Is this the spirit in which I serve Him? Is not this the one thing needful in our religion? Lord, reveal unto us Thy will!
Now, just a few words more from the Prophets about the new time, the great change that can come into our lives.
xxix. 13: “Ye shall seek Me, and find Me, when ye shall search for Me with all your heart. And I will be found of you, saith the Lord.”
xxxii. 39-41.—Let my reader not be weary of reading carefully these Divine words: they contain the secret, the seed, the living power of a complete transition out of a life in the bondage of half-hearted service, to the glorious liberty of the children of God.—”I will give them one heart, that they may fear Me for ever. And I will make an everlasting covenant with them, that I will not turn away from them to do them good ; but I will put my fear in their heart, that they shall not depart from Me. Yea, I will rejoice over them to do them good, with My whole heart and My whole Soul!”
It is to be all God’s doing. And He is to do it with His whole heart
and His whole soul. It is the vision of this God with His whole heart
loving us, longing and delighting to fulfil His promise, and make us
wholly His own, that we need. This vision makes it
Now one word from our Lord Jesus (
Praise God! this righteousness of the law—loving God with all the heart, for love is the fulfilling of the law—this righteousness of the law is fulfilled in us, who walk after the Spirit. Jesus came to make it possible. He gives His Spirit—the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus—to make it actual. Let us not fear to give ourselves a whole burnt offering, acceptable to God; loving Him with all our heart and mind and strength.
May I ask the reader just once again to peruse Chapter VI., on “The Everlasting Covenant,” and Chapter XVIII., on “Entering into the Covenant with the Whole Heart.” And say then, if you have never yet entered fully into this covenant of the whole heart, whether you are not ready to do it now. God demands, God works, God is, oh, so infinitely worthy of, the whole heart! Fear not to say He shall have it. You may confidently count upon the blessed Lord Jesus, the Surety of the Covenant, whose it is to make it true in you by His Spirit, to enable you to exercise the faith that knows that God’s power will work what He has promised. In His Name say: With my whole heart I do love Thee!
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