Expositions of Holy Scripture: Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. JohnMaclaren, Alexander
Religion
Expositions of Holy Scripture: Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John
Maclaren, Alexander
Bible. Ephesians -- Commentaries; Bible. Epistle of John, 1st -- Commentaries; Bible. Peter -- Commentaries
The last, the hardest thing to surrender, is our own wills. To give them
up by constraint is slavery that degrades. To give them up because we
love is a sacrifice which sanctifies, even in the lowest reaches of
daily life. And the love that knits us to God is not invested with all
its blessed possession of Him, until it has surrendered its will, and
said, 'Not as I will, but as Thou wilt.' The traveller in the old fable
gathered his cloak around him all the more closely, and held it the more
tightly, because of the tempest that blew, but when the warm sunbeams
fell he dropped it. He that would coerce my will, stiffens it into
rebellion; but when a beloved one says, 'Though I might be much bold to
enjoin thee, yet for love's sake I rather beseech,' then yielding is
blessedness, and the giving ourselves away is the finding of God and
ourselves.
I need not touch, in more than a word, upon another aspect of this
mutual possession, brought into view lovingly in many parts of
Scripture, and that is that there is in it not only mutual love and
mutual surrender, but mutual indwelling, 'He that dwelleth in love
dwelleth in God, and God in him.' Jesus Christ has said the same thing
to us, 'I am the Vine, ye are the branches. He that abideth in Me
bringeth forth much fruit.' We dwell in God, possessing Him; He dwells
in us, possessing us. We dwell in God, being possessed by Him. He dwells
in us, being possessed by us. And He moves in the heart that loves, as
the Master walking through His house, as the divinity is present in the
temple, and as the soul permeates the body, and is sight in the eye and
colour in the cheek, and force in the arm, and deftness in the finger,
and swiftness in the foot. So the indwelling God breathes through all
the capacities, and all the desires, and all the needs of the soul which
He inhabits, and makes them all blessed. The very same set of facts--the
presence of a divine life in the life of the believing spirit--may
either be looked at from the lower end, and then they are that I possess
God, and find in Him the nutriment and the stimulus for all my being, or
may be looked at from the upper end, that He possesses me and finds in
me capacities and a nature the emptiness of which He fills, and organs
which He uses. In both cases mutual love, mutual surrender, mutual
inhabitation, make up God's possession of me and my possession of God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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