Do you not think that the Cross of Jesus Christ speaks to the world of a love which is not drawn forth by any merit of goodness in us? Men love because they dimly discern, or think they do, that there is something worthy of their love. God loves because we need Him; God loves because He is God. His love is not evoked by anything in me, except my dependence and necessity; but God’s love wells up from the infinite depth of His own nature, undrawn forth by anything in His creatures. ” I Am that I Am ” is His name. He is His own cause, His own motive; and as His being, so His love, which is His being, is automatic, self-originated, and pouring out for ever, in obedience to the impulse of His own heart, the inexhaustible treasures of His love. “Not for your sakes be it known unto you, O house of Israel, but for Mine own Name’s sake.”

But if that love revealed by the Cross be a love which is not drawn forth by any merit or goodness of ours, then, not being contingent upon our goodness, it is not turned away by our badness. We cannot sin it away. It was not bestowed on us at first, any more than His sunshine falls on us, because we deserve it, but because He is God, and He made us. And so it will encircle us for ever, and cleave to us to the very end, and never let us go.

The Cross of Christ preaches to us a love that has no cause, motive, reason, or origin except Himself.

That is what is meant by the theological phrase “free grace” – an expression which has often been regarded as the shibboleth of a narrow school, but which, rightly understood, is no hard piece of technical theology, but throbbing with life – the very grandest conception of the heart of God which men can grasp. Such grace, the gilt of such love, does the Christ commend to us.

“For our behalf,”- bending over us in order that the benefit might come to us, – that is the picturesque metaphor that lies in the little word ” for.” Observe, too, the significant present tense, ” God commendeth His love,” and the emphatic repetition three several times in the verse (Rom 5:8) of “us” and ” we.” Both peculiarities bring out the great truth that Christ’s death is a death, “not for an age, but for all time”; not for this, that, or the other man; not for a section of the race, but for the whole of us in all generations. The power of that death, as the sweep of that love, extends over all humanity, and holds forth benefits to every man of woman born.

Did you ever notice that there are two dwelling-places spoken of in the 91st Psalm? ” Thou hast made the Most High thy habitation,” ” There shall no plague come nigh thy dwelling “; or, literally translated, as in the Revised Version, ” a tent ” – a particular kind of abode.  The same word, “habitation,” is employed in the 90th Psalm – “dwelling-place.” Beside that venerable and ancient abode that has stood fresh, strong, incorruptible, and unaffected by the lapse of millenniums, there stands the little transitory canvas tent in which our earthly lives are spent.  We have two dwelling-places. By the body we are brought into connection with this frail, evanescent, illusory outer world, and we try to make our homes out of shifting cloud-wrack, and dream that we can compel mutability to become immutable, that we may dwell secure. We need a better dwelling-place than earth and that which holds to earth. We have God Himself for our true Home. Never mind what becomes of the tent as long as the mansion stands firm. Do not let us be saddened, though we know that it is canvas, and that the walls will soon rot and must some day be folded up and borne away, if we have the Rock of Ages for our dwelling-place.

But the wide scope and the paradoxical completeness of the promise itself, instead of being a difficulty, point the way to its true interpretation. ” There shall no plague come nigh thy dwelling” – and yet we are smitten down by all the woes that afflict humanity. “No evil shall befall thee” – and yet ” all the ills that flesh is heir to” are dealt out sometimes with a more liberal hand to them who abide in God than to them who dwell only in the tent upon earth. What then? Is God true, or is He not? Did this Psalmist mean to promise the very questionable blessing of escape from all the good of the discipline of sorrow? Is it true, in the unconditional sense in which it is often asserted, that “prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament, and adversity of the New “?  I think not; and I am sure that this Psalmist, when he said ” there shall no evil befall thee, nor any plague come nigh thy dwelling,” was thinking exactly the same thing which Paul had in his mind when he said,  “All things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are called according to His purpose. ” If I make God my Refuge, I shall get something a great deal better than escape from outward sorrow – namely, an amulet which will turn the outward sorrow into joy.  The bitter water will still be given me to drink, but it will be filtered water, out of which God will strain all the poison, though He still leaves plenty of the bitterness in it; for bitterness is a tonic. The evil that is in the evil will be taken out of it, in the measure in which we make God our Refuge, and “all will be right that seems most wrong” when we recognize it to be ” His sweet will.” Nothing can be ” evil ” which knits me more closely to God; and whatever tempest drives me to His breast, though all the four winds of the heavens strove on the surface of the sea, it will be better for me than calm weather that entices me to stray farther away from Him.

    If we take the words of our text just as they stand, they are charged with deep and beautiful significance. They tell us what our own experience confirms, that sleep is the gift of God. The world has gifts which it gives to its favorite children. It loads them with wealth or honor or fame. But God deals otherwise with His beloved, for “He giveth to his beloved sleep.”
It would, of course, be very wrong to say that sleeplessness is a mark of the divine displeasure. A man may be wrapt in the gracious peace of God, yet seek in vain the refreshment of sleep. Yet it is true that sleep, when it is given, is such a medicine for the weary and worn, that it can be nothing less than the gift of love. I think of Jesus in the storm-tossed boat, asleep on the pillow when everyone else was running around in wild alarm. I think of Peter fast asleep in prison when the coming morning was to bring his execution. I think of the tired worker when nightfall comes, and the sufferer who has been racked with pain through weary hours, and I learn how tenderly and deeply true it is that “He giveth his beloved sleep.”     Nor can anyone ever ignore that sweetest of all suggestions wherein the word is whispered over the sleep of death. A thousand memories of shadows and tears have clustered around that interpretation. It is when the fever breaks that one sleeps well, and when the struggle of life has ended and quiet peace has fallen, then love, through the mist of weeping, murmurs: “So he giveth his beloved sleep.”
The Stress and Strain of Life
But though that is a comforting and blessed truth, it is not the true interpretation of the words. If you read the verse in relation to its context, you will see that that could hardly be the meaning. The psalmist is warning against overwork which degenerates into worry. He is picturing the man who overdrives himself until he has no rest and no peace. And all this pressure and nervous activity is not only a sin in the sight of God, it is also, says the psalmist, a mistake. It is vain for you to rise up early and to sit up late. You will never gain the choicest things that way. Let a man be nervous, overworked and tired, and he is sure to miss the worthiest and the best. God giveth to His beloved in sleep—when they are at rest like a child within its cradle, when they are free from that turbulence of wild desire in which the still small voice is quite inaudible.
Remember that the psalmist never dreamed of casting a slur on honest, manly labor. He knew too well the blessings that we gain, and the sins that we are saved from, by our work. What was borne in on his soul was that by overwork we lose more than we gain, for many of the richest gifts of heaven only approach us through the path of slumber. It is imperative that the soul should be held passive if we are to have the inflow of His grace. It is imperative that its uproar should be hushed if we are to hear the still, small voice. And it is that which the psalmist hints at here, when, in the intense language of a poet, he cries to men, “Your stress and strain are vanity; God giveth to His beloved in sleep.”
The Blessings of Infancy
There is a world of love encompassing an infant, yet how unconscious the baby is of it all! When our Savior was drawing near the cross, He said to His disciples, “I go to prepare a place for you,” and they knew from that hour that when they awoke in glory, they would find that all was ready for their coming.
But not only in the land beyond the river is a place prepared for everyone God loves. When into this present life a child comes, hearts have been busy with preparation. Stooping over the little one is a mother’s love and all the splendor of a mother’s patience. Shielding it is a father’s strength and eagerness to provide for all its needs. And it is clothed and fed with food convenient and rocked to sleep and sheltered from the storm. And should it become ill, the best skill in the city is not good enough for the tiny sufferer. What a wealth of love and care is here, yet what is more passive than that little infant! Have these small hands helped in the preparation? Has that little mind done any of the planning? Helpless it lies, and-doomed to certain death, if life depended on its puny efforts. But “God giveth to his beloved in sleep”; He has prepared for His children, too.
The Pursuit of Happiness
If anywhere in life, it is in pleasure-seeking that it is vain to rise up early and to sit up late. Not when we are determined, come what may, to have a pleasant and a happy life does God bestow the music of the heart. He gives it when there is forgetfulness of self and the struggle to be true to what is highest though the path be through the valley of the shadow. The one sure way to miss the gift of happiness is to rise early looking for it and to sit up late waiting for it. To be bent at every cost on a good time is the sure harbinger of dreary days. It is when we have the courage to forget all that and to lift up our hearts to do the will of God that, like a swallow darting out from under the eaves, happiness falls upon us with glad surprise. Had Jesus lived just that He might be happy, He certainly would have escaped the cross. No one would have laughed Him to scorn in Jairus’ house; no one would have pierced His hands and feet. But He came not to be ministered unto, but to minister and to give His life a ransom for many; and so you find Him talking of His joy. Brethren, remember that nine-tenths of our unhappiness is selfishness and is an insult cast in the face of God. But the way to be happy is not to seek happiness. It is to be awake to what is higher and asleep to self-satisfaction. And then, as time passes, comes the discovery that God giveth to His beloved in sleep.
Heaven, the Gift of Sleep
The last gift of a kind God is heaven, and God giveth it to His beloved in sleep. We can never know how it would have been had man not sinned and fallen. Like Enoch, man would have walked with God till his never-halting footsteps brought him home. But death has passed upon all men for that all have sinned; yet “O death, where is thy victory?” God makes death’s foul embrace His opportunity; He giveth to His beloved while they sleep. As one stands with sorrowing heart beside the dead and looks on him from whom the breath has flown, it is very strengthening and soothing to say, “God giveth sleep to his beloved.” But isn’t it better to lift our eyes to heaven and, thinking of its liberty and joy, say, “He giveth to his beloved in sleep.”

~George Morrison~

The God-bedewed soul, beautiful, pure, strong, will bear fruit.   “His beauty shall be as the olive tree.” Anybody that has ever seen a grove of olives knows that their beauty is not such as strikes the eye. If it was not for the blue sky overhead, that rays down glorifying light, they would not be much to look at or talk about. The tree has a gnarled, grotesque trunk, which divides into insignificant branches, bearing leaves mean in shape, harsh in texture, with a silvery underside. It gives but a quivering shade, and has no massiveness, nor sympathy. Ay! but there are olives on the branches. And so the beauty of the humble tree is in what it grows for man’s good. After all, it is the outcome in fruitfulness which is the main thing about us. God’s meaning, in all his gifts of dew, and beauty, and purity, and strength, is that we should be of some use in the world.

The olive is crushed into oil, and the oil is used for smoothing and supplying joints and flesh, for nourishing and sustaining the body as food, for illuminating darkness as oil in the lamp. And these three things are the three things for which we Christian people have received all our dew, and all our beauty, and all our strength – that we may give other people light, that we may be the means of conveying to other people nourishment, that we may move gently in the world as lubricating, sweetening, soothing influences, and not irritating and provoking, and leading to strife and alienation. The question, after all, is, does anybody gather fruit off us, and would anybody call us  “trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified?” May we all open our hearts for the dew from heaven, and then use it to produce in ourselves beauty, purity, strength, and fruitfulness!

Union with Christ is the condition of all fruitfulness. There may be plenty of activity and yet barrenness. Works are not fruit. We can bring forth a great deal  ” of ourselves,” and because it is of ourselves it is naught. Fruit is possible only on condition of union with Him. He is the productive glory of it all. We are not to be content with a little fruit – a poor shriveled bunch of grapes that are more like marbles than grapes, here and there, upon the half-nourished stem. The abiding in Him will produce a character rich in manifold graces. “A little fruit” is not contemplated by Christ at all. God forbid that I should say that there is no possibility of union with Christ and a little fruit! A little union will have a little fruit. Why is it that the average Christian man of this generation bears only a berry or two here and there, like such as are left upon the vines after the vintage, when the promise is that if he will abide in Christ, he will bear much fruit?

JOSEPH of Arimathea and Nicodemus learned to be ashamed  of their cowardice, and their dumb lips learned to speak, and their shy, hidden love forced for itself a channel by which it could flow out into the light; because of Christ’s death. And in another fashion that same death and Cross is for us, too, the cure of all cowardice and selfish silence. The sight of Christ’s Cross makes the coward brave. It was no small piece of courage for Joseph to go to Pilate and avow his sympathy with a condemned criminal. The love must have been very true which was forced to speak by disaster and death. And to us the strongest motive for stiffening our vacillating timidity into an iron fortitude, and fortifying us far above the fear of what man can do to us, is to be found in gazing upon His dying love who met and conquered all evils and terrors for our sakes.

That Cross will kindle a love which will not rest concealed, but will be:  “like the ointment of the right hand which bewrayeth itself.”  I can fancy men to whom Christ is only what He was to Nicodemus at first, “a teacher sent from God,” occupying Nicodemus’ position of hidden belief in His teaching, without feeling any need to avow themselves His followers; but if once into our souls there has come the constraining and the melting influence of that great and wondrous love which died for us, then, dear brethren, it is unnatural that we should be silent. If those for whom Christ has died should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out. That death, wondrous, mysterious, terrible, but radiant and glorious with hope, with pardon, with holiness for us and for all the world, – that death smites on the chords of our hearts, if I may so speak, and brings out music from them all.

The sight of the Cross not only leads to courage, and kindles a love which demands expression, but it impels to joyful surrender. Joseph gave a place in his own new tomb, where he hoped that one day his bones should be laid by the side of the Master against whom he had sinned – for he had no thought of a resurrection. Nicodemus brought a lavish, almost an extravagant, amount of costly spices, as if by honor to the dead he could atone for treason to the living. And both the one and the other teach us that if once we gain the true vision of that great and wondrous love that died on the Cross for us, then the natural language of the loving heart is -

” Here, Lord! I give myself away;
‘Tis all that I can do.”

If following Him openly involves sacrifices, the sacrifices will be sweet, so long as our hearts look to His dying love. All love delights in expression, and most of all in expression by surrender of precious things, which are most precious because they give love materials which it may lay at the beloved’s feet.  What are position, possessions, reputation, capacities, perils, losses, self, but the sweet spices which we are blessed enough to be able to lay upon the alter which glorifies the giver and the gift?  The contemplation of Christ’s sacrifice – and that alone- will so overcome our natural selfishness as to make sacrifice for His dear sake most blessed.

How much Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus lost! – all those three years of communion with the Master; all His teaching, all the stimulus of His example, all the joy of fellowship with Him!  They might have had a treasure in their memories that would have enriched them for all their days, and they had flung it all away because they were afraid of the curled lip of a long-bearded Pharisee or two.

And so it always is, the secret disciple diminishes his communion with his Master. It is the valleys which lay their bosoms open to the sun that rejoice in the light and warmth; the narrow clefts in the rocks that shut themselves grudgingly up against the light, are all dank and dark and dismal. And it is the men that come and avow their discipleship that will have the truest communion with their Lord. Any neglected duty puts a film between a man and his Saviour; any conscious neglect of duty piles up a wall between you and Christ. Be sure of this, that if from cowardly or from selfish regard to position and advantages, or any other motive, we stand apart from Him, and have our lips locked when we ought to speak, there will steal over our hearts a coldness: His face will be averted from us, and our eyes will not dare to seek, with the same confidence and joy, the light of  His countenance.

What you lose by unfaithful wrapping of your convictions in a napkin, and burying them in the ground, is the joyful use of the convictions, the deeper hold of the truth by which you live and before which you bow, and the true fellowship with the Master whom you acknowledge and confess. And when these men came to Christ’s corpse, and bore it away, what a sharp pang went through their hearts! They woke at last to know what cowardly traitors they had been. If you are a disciple at all, and a secret one, you will awake to know what you have been doing, and the pang will be a sharp one. If you do not awake in this life, then the distance between you and your Lord will become greater and greater; if you do, then it will be a sad reflection that there are years of treason lying behind you. Nicodemus and Joseph had the veil torn away by the contemplation of their dead Master. You may have the veil torn away from your eyes by the sight of the throned Lord; and when you pass into the heavens, may even there have some sharp pang of condemnation when you reflect how unfaithful you have been.

Blessed be His name!  The assurance is firm that if a man be a disciple, he shall be saved; but the warning is sure that if he be an unfaithful and a secret disciple, there will be a lifelong unfaithfulness to a beloved Master to be ” purged away so as by fire.”

In a society like ours, in which the influence of Christian affects a great many people who have no personal connection with Christ, it is not always enough that the life should preach, because over a very large field of ordinary daily life the underground influence, so to speak, of Christian ethics has infiltrated and penetrated, so that many a tree bears a greener leaf because of the water that has found its way to it from the river, though it be planted far from its banks. Even those who are not Christians live outward lives largely regulated by Christian principle. The whole level of morality has been heaved up, as the coast line has sometimes been by hidden fires slowly working, by the imperceptible gradual influence of the Gospel.

So it needs sometimes that you should say, ” I am a Christian,” as well as that you should live like one. Ask yourselves, dear friends, whether you have buttoned your great coats over your uniforms, that nobody may know whose soldier you are. Ask yourselves whether you have sometimes held your tongues because you knew that if you spoke, people would find out where you came from and what country you belonged to. Ask yourselves have you ever accompanied the witness of your lives with the commentary of your confession? Did you ever, anywhere but in a church, stand up and say, ” I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, my Lord?”

And then ask yourselves another question: Have you ever dared to be singular?  We are all of us in this world often thrust into circumstances in which it is needful that we should say, “So do not I because of the fear of the Lord.” Boys go to school. They used always to kneel down at their bedsides and say their prayers when they were at home; they do not like to do it with all those critical and cruel eyes- and there are no eyes more critical and more cruel than young eyes- fixed upon them; and so they give up prayer. A young man comes to Lanchester, goes into a warehouse, pure of life, and with a tongue that has not blossomed into rank fruit of obscenity and blasphemy.  And he hears at the next desk there, words that first of all bring a blush to his cheek, and he is tempted into conduct that he knows to be a denial of his Master. And he covers up his principles, and goes with the tempters into evil. I might sketch a dozen other cases, but I need not. In one form or other we have all to go through the same ordeal. We have sometimes to dare to be in a minority of one, if we will not be untrue to our Master and to ourselves.

A minority of one……….do we dare?

Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.  Genesis 2:7  NASB

Living Being – Will we ever get past Genesis?  Probably not.  The depth of this account of creation can hardly be plumbed.  Once more we return to the source of our existence to discover additional insights into the Hebrew view of humanity.  God created us with inherent duality.

That might not seem like a big deal until you realize how completely this essential dualism opposes our Western view of human being.  The Greek view of humanity is reduced to a unitary principle – the principle of reason.  In the Greek view, the power of reason reigns supreme.  Man is man because he is able to reason.  His unitary being is derived from this fundamental.  Reason is what makes us human.

This assumption permeates the West.  It is the basis of our penchant for scientific exploration and explanation.  It is the bedrock of our view of government and law.  It is the source of our economic policy and our desire for worldwide agreement.  But it is not the biblical point-of-view.  In the Hebraic world, reason is a tool to be used for control of choice.  Reason is an instrument, not the source.  In the Hebraic view, the fundamental constituent of human being is the duality of the yetzer ha’ra (inclination toward evil) and the yetzer ha’tov (inclination toward good).  In other words, we are conscious beings precisely because we are in tension between these two elements.  We were created with both of these elements.  In fact, without both of them, we would cease to be human.  Being human cannot be reduced to a single unity because being human means making choices between two competing directions.  Being human consists of being the creature with two natures.  “Choice itself is not an act of the being, but an act of being.”[1]  We are the choices we make.  That’s what makes us human, choosing between yetzer ha’ra and yetzer ha’tov.

What this means is that efforts to remove the yetzer ha’ra are doomed to failure.  A being without yetzer ha’ra is no longer human but rather a lobotomized, instinctual creature much more like an animal.  Prayers asking God to remove my tendency toward evil might as well be prayers asking God to make me a robot.  The issue is not the removal of the evil inclination but rather the strength to choose otherwise and the wisdom to improve and accelerate the choices for good.  I do not ask God to rescue me out of my humanity.  I ask Him to rescue me in my humanity.  Choice is who I am.  What I need is strength to make the right choice.  Reason is one of the tools at my disposal to direct my choices, but reason is also under the influence of the yetzer ha’ra and therefore cannot be the only tool I use.  Reasonable men can still make evil choices.  Reason will not save me.  Only the application of God’s Spirit at the crossroads of choice can save me.  And that process will never cease as long as I am nephesh hayah (living person).

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

” I do not ask God to rescue me out of my humanity.  I ask Him to rescue me in my humanity.”

Over at Following Judah’s Lion: here

AND THE ANSWER IS

Iran is developing a nuclear weapon.
Syria is killing its own people.
The Muslim Brotherhood governs in Egypt.
North Korea is threatening.
President Obama may have one billion dollars to campaign with.
The Republican candidates are politics as usual.
The abortion mills are in full vigor.
The economy continues to struggle.
The western church runs toward apostasy.
Sexual sins are rampant
Earthquakes happen around the globe.
The Middle east is a war waiting to happen.
Iraq is a mess.
Afghanistan is a mess.
Pakistan is a mess.
Divorced men and women defend the sanctity of marriage politically.
Men’s hunger for money and entertainment is unquenchable.
It seems as if there is no answer to the world’s dilemma.

Oh, but there is an answer.

The cross.

While Christ lived, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus had  been unfaithful to their convictions; but His death, which terrified and paralyzed and scattered His avowed disciples, seems to have shamed and stung them into courage. They came now, when they must have known that it was too late to lavish honour and tears on the corpse of the Master whom they had been too cowardly to acknowledge whilst acknowledgment might yet have availed.  How keen an arrow of self-condemnation must have pierced their hearts as they moved in their offices of love, which they thought He could never know, round His dead corpse!

They were both members of the Sanhedrin: the same motives, no doubt, had withheld each of them from confessing Christ; the same impulses united them in this too late confession of discipleship. Nicodemus had had the conviction, at the beginning of Christ’s ministry, that he was at least a miraculously attested and God-sent teacher. But the fear which made him steal to Jesus by night – the unenviable distinction which the Evangelist pitilessly reiterates at each mention of him – arrested his growth, and kept him dumb when silence was treason.

Joseph of Arimathea is described by two of the Evangelists as ” a disciple “;  by the other two as a devout Israelite, like Simeon and Anna, ” waiting for the Kingdom of God.”  Luke informs us that he had not concurred in the condemnation of Jesus, but leads us to believe that his dissent had been merely silent. Perhaps he was more fully convinced than Nicodemus, and at the same time even more timid in avowing his convictions. These two contrite cowards, as they try to atone for their unfaithfulness to their living Master by their ministrations to Him dead, are true examples of secret disciples.  They were restrained from the avowal of the Messiah-ship of Jesus by fear. There is nothing in the organization of society at this day to make any man afraid of avowing the ordinary kind of Christianity which satisfies the most of us; rather it  is the proper thing with most of us middle-class people to say that in some sense or other we are Christians.  But when it comes to a real avowal, a real carrying out of a true discipleship, there are as many and as formidable, though very different, impediments in the way to-day from those which blocked the path of these two cowards. In all regions of life it is hard to work out into practice any moral conviction whatever. How many of us are there who have beliefs about social and moral questions which we are ashamed to avow in certain companies for fear of the finger of ridicule being pointed at us? It is not only in the Church, and in reference to purely religious belief, that we have the curse of secret discipleship, but it is everywhere.  Wherever there are moral questions which are yet the subject of controversy, and have not been enthroned with the hallelujahs of all men, you get people that carry their convictions shut up in their own breasts, and lock their lips in silence, when there is most need of frank avowal. The political, social, and moral conflicts of this day have their ” secret disciples,” who will come only out of their holes when the battle is over, and will then shout with the loudest.

My thoughts on this:

To say you are a disciple of Christ, sadly today, has a very different meaning than that of those original disciples who had the joy and delight of walking with Jesus in His life.   With that said, I believe that many in the world today claim they are “followers” of Christ, or disciples.  But they do not “Proclaim” they are followers of Christ.  It is hidden in the heart, much as we hide our shame.