NIV
靈修
新聞
貼圖
為教會
The seed sown upon the rocky places where the soil was superficial sprang up quickly, but it withered as quickly because there was no deepness of earth. We have here a striking picture of so much religion which begins well, but which does not endure. The Christian needs a deeper life. Let your whole life be an entrance into that love which passeth knowledge. In Ephesians iii. 17-19, St. Paul prays "that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be strong to apprehend what is the depth, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye may be filled unto all the fulness of God." He prays that Christians may stand rooted first in the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, realizing and acknowledging that the depth of this love passeth knowledge. He believes it possible for the soul of a Christian to be so rooted in this love that he may be filled with all the fulness of God in such measure as may be granted to a saint upon earth.And how may we attain to this? "I bow my knees unto the Father." The way to remain rooted in love is in humble prayer upon your knees before God. Furthermore, "That He would grant yon according to the riches of His glory"—great indeed, and wonderful—"that ye may be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inward man." Only in the life that knows the powerful working of the Spirit is such a life rooted in love possible. And yet more: "That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith." The most important is that Christ in His everlasting love shall dwell in you every day, insuring a life ever more deeply rooted in the love of Him who gave Himself for us.
I beseech you, dear child of God, take time to bow before the Lord in prayer, and thus meditate upon, and appropriate, these words. Do not grudge time or trouble. Commune with the Christ who loved you with the same love with which the Father loved Him, that so you may get an insight into the greatness of the condescension of that love to you.
A condescending simile indeed! Just as a hen protects her brood and allows them to nestle under her wings, so will the LORD defend His people and permit them to hide away in Him. Have we not seen the little chicks peeping out from under the mothers feathers? Have we not heard their little cry of contented joy? In this way let us shelter ourselves in our God and feel overflowing peace in knowing that He is guarding us.
This should be a great encouragement to try to do good, since God has among the vilest of the vile, the most reprobate, the most debauched and drunken, an elect people who must be saved. When you take the Word to them, you do so because God has ordained you to be the messenger of life to their souls, and they must receive it, for so the decree of predestination runs. They are as much redeemed by blood as the saints before the eternal throne. They are Christs property, and yet perhaps they are lovers of the ale-house, and haters of holiness; but if Jesus Christ purchased them he will have them. God is not unfaithful to forget the price which his Son has paid. He will not suffer his substitution to be in any case an ineffectual, dead thing. Tens of thousands of redeemed ones are not regenerated yet, but regenerated they must be; and this is our comfort when we go forth to them with the quickening Word of God.
This groaning is universal among the saints: to a greater or less extent we all feel it. It is not the groan of murmuring or complaint: it is rather the note of desire than of distress. Having received an earnest, we desire the whole of our portion; we are sighing that our entire manhood, in its trinity of spirit, soul, and body, may be set free from the last vestige of the fall; we long to put off corruption, weakness, and dishonour, and to wrap ourselves in incorruption, in immortality, in glory, in the spiritual body which the Lord Jesus will bestow upon his people. We long for the manifestation of our adoption as the children of God. “We groan,” but it is “within ourselves.” It is not the hypocrites groan, by which he would make men believe that he is a saint because he is wretched. Our sighs are sacred things, too hallowed for us to tell abroad. We keep our longings to our Lord alone. Then the apostle says we are “waiting,” by which we learn that we are not to be petulant, like Jonah or Elijah, when they said, “Let me die”; nor are we to whimper and sigh for the end of life because we are tired of work, nor wish to escape from our present sufferings till the will of the Lord is done. We are to groan for glorification, but we are to wait patiently for it, knowing that what the Lord appoints is best. Waiting implies being ready. We are to stand at the door expecting the Beloved to open it and take us away to himself. This “groaning” is a test. You may judge of a man by what he groans after. Some men groan after wealth—they worship Mammon; some groan continually under the troubles of life—they are merely impatient; but the man who sighs after God, who is uneasy till he is made like Christ, that is the blessed man. May God help us to groan for the coming of the Lord, and the resurrection which he will bring to us.
One of the blessings of the old-time Sabbath was its calm, its restfulness, its holy peace. There is a strange strength conceived in solitude. Crows go in flocks and wolves in packs, but the lion and the eagle are solitaires.
Today we are looking at the faith of the Son. Paul testified, ‘The life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God’. This was Paul’s mode of living. He set himself to ‘imitate Christ’. As Yahweh the Son offered Himself to the desire of the Father by pouring out His intrinsic life, Paul sought to do likewise. Yahweh the Son ‘did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself’. He did not simply lay aside His prerogatives to take His own initiative. Rather by emptying, or we could say ‘by pouring Himself out’, He empowered the Father toward the counsel of His will. This was the faith of the Son.
Every time we eat and drink the communion, we proclaim the faith of the Son. Paul explains, ‘For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes’. Jesus said, ‘This cup which is poured out for you is the New Covenant in My blood’. When we drink the cup, we are committing ourselves to this way of living in the same way as Paul. Writing to the Philippians, Paul rejoiced in this imitation of Christ. ‘Even if I am being poured out as a drink offering upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, I rejoice and share my joy with you all.’ As the Son empowered the offering of the Father, Paul was able to empower the sacrifice and service of those upon whom he poured himself out.
The council of Elohim, the discussion between Father, Son and Holy Spirit before all ages, is the foundation of the Eternal Covenant. Think of it this
way: the covenant is the resolution of the council. They ratified the council
in the ‘volume of the book’; the book of the Eternal Covenant. Paul was referring to this when he said to the Ephesian elders that he did not keep back from declaring ‘the whole counsel of God’.
The first word of the council of God was a commitment to lay down all
Their fullness to God the Son. It was the Father’s desire and good pleasure that all the fullness should dwell in the Son. Thus it is recorded, ‘I have come – in the volume of the book it is written of Me – to do Your will’. In this way, the Son presented Himself as an offering. If He would pour out His soul then He would see seed, and the good pleasure of the Lord would prosper in His hand. This is the desire, good pleasure and will of Yahweh. This is the testimony of Yahweh and the council of Elohim. Without this counsel and dialogue there could be no Eternal Covenant.
The blood of the Eternal Covenant is the life of Their offering. It is the blood ‘as of a lamb’. The blood of the Lamb isn’t biological life. It is the life of the new creation. The life of every foreknown and named son of God was brought forth and poured out in this blood. When the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit made offering to the covenant, the blood ‘as of a lamb’
flowed as an everlasting fountain of life. The name of every foreknown son
of God was written in the Lamb’s book of life.
The Scripture says that by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. And by one offering, He died once for all. He offered one sacrifice for sins for all time. However, we need to be very clear that when we speak of ‘one offering’, we don’t mean that He fulfilled only ‘one’ of the five foundational offerings in the Old Testament, as if the other four are irrelevant. It means that the effectiveness of His one offering was itself the composite of all of those offerings. Implicit within this one offering of Christ is the fulfilment of the sin offering. Jesus is our sin offering. But He is also the burnt offering. Jesus gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma. If we walk in love, just as Christ did, then we will be partakers of that same offering and aroma. He is the firstfruits from the dead and in the exercise of His will, He has brought us forth as a certain firstfruits. He is our peace to whom we present the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. The Old Testament priests offered continually, year after year because they could not be effective in their ministry. They were beset by weakness and had recurring sin. Because of weakness they were beset by sin, and because of sin they were beset by weakness. Hence, they had to offer for themselves. Their priesthood was ineffective and the blood of their sacrifices was ineffective. It was not ‘precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ’. It had no capacity to atone and release us from our sins.
When we behold the light of the cross, we see how the Father used chastening to multiply His life in the obedient Son through offering. The Son finished His work as the Captain, Author and Finisher of the pathway for our sanctification as sons. The Holy Spirit now works to reveal the Father and Son to us. As He sanctifies the disciplines of the cross to us, our work of sonship can also be made complete. The Father was with the Son in this work, giving Him power. Christ was also strengthened through Eternal Spirit. The point for us is that there was power in the discipline to perfect His obedience and achieve righteousness. As we are drawn into the fellowship of the cross, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit can achieve this same righteousness in us. We know that He suffered in three aspects: the suffering of our penalty of death, the suffering of our trial and temptation in every point, and the enduring of the discipline involved in His work of obedience. The miracle of the cross is that it was a complete work. It provided a crossover from the death of sin to the obedience of sonship. The cross took the suffering of eternal death, converted it to a trial of faith and obedience, and multiplied the life of obedient sonship for all. The Son received and accepted the death of sin in Gethsemane, where the first blood was shed. Christ was obedient to pour out His life, by submitting Himself to the wounding that caused His blood to flow. By the discipline of the Father, the life that was ‘with the Father’, then laid down to the Son to have ‘in Himself’, was being multiplied and given to become our ‘new creation’ life.
