prismaticbleed | may 2023 faithposting

0524

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"However deep sinful feelings may go, the new love and life I have in Christ goes deeper still. Sin goes against the grain of my true self; therefore, pursuing Christ is the most “true to self” I can ever be."

"Do not regard this lesson of the Incarnation as a mere vague trust, a mere abstract speculation. It is a belief which affects our estimate of ourselves our conduct to others. There is not one degradation of our being which does not spring from lack of self-reverence, of reverence for beings whom Christ hath redeemed, to whom He has given a right to be children of God. The Incarnation teaches us that our part is in Christ, our bodies His temple, our nature His image, our hearts His shrine. He who regards himself as akin to the beasts that perish will live as they do. He who regards himself as an immortal being, partaker of the nature which Christ wore and Christ redeemed, will aim at a noble and godly life."

" ‘Thou art a Teacher sent from God.’ Ah, brethren, that will not do; it will not do for you and me! We want something a great deal deeper than that... [Jesus] said, ‘Ye must be born again,’ in order that [we] might lay to heart this, that we need something more than a Teacher, [we need] a Life-giver... What men want is not to be told the truth; they know it already. What they want is not to be told their duty; they know that too. What they want is some power that shall turn them clean round. And what each of us wants before we can see the Lord is that, if it may be, something shall lay hold of us, and utterly change our natures, and express from our hearts the black drop that lies there tainting everything. Now, this necessity is met in Jesus Christ... it is Christ’s work as Redeemer, Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, Christ’s power as bringing to the world a new and holy life, and breathing it into all that trust in Him, which make the very centre of His work... if you want to understand Christ you must understand sin; and whoever thinks lightly of it will think meanly of Him... A true knowledge of myself as a sinful man, of my need of pardon, of my need of cleansing, of my need of a new nature, which must be given from above, and cannot be evolved from within, leads me, and I pray it may lead you, to cast yourself down before Him, with no complaisant words of intellectual recognition upon your lips, but with the old cry, ‘Lord! be merciful to me a sinner.’"
"Dear brethren, I bring that Cross to you now, and pray you to see there Christ’s real work for us, and for the world. He has taught us, but He has done more. He has not only spoken, He has died. He has not only shown us the path on which to walk, He has made it possible for us to walk in it. He is not merely one amongst the noble band that have guided and inspired and instructed humanity, but He stands alone-not a Teacher, but the Redeemer, ‘the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sins of the world.’"

"The true freedom is when, by the direction of our will, we change ‘must’ into ‘I delight to do Thy will.’ So we are set free from the bondage and burden of a law that is external, and is not loved, and are brought into the liberty of, for dear love’s sake, doing the will of the beloved... this freedom will bring with it the necessity for continual warfare against all that would limit and restrain it-namely, the passions and desires and inclinations of our baser or nobler, but godless, self. These are, as it were, deposed by the entrance of the new life. But it is a dangerous thing to keep dethroned and discrowned tyrants alive, and the best thing is to behead them, as well as to cast them from their throne. ‘If ye, through the Spirit, do put to death the deeds’ and inclinations and wills ‘of the flesh, ye shall live’; and if you do not, they will live and will kill you. So the freedom of the new life is a militant freedom, and we have to fight to maintain it... ‘the price of liberty is eternal vigilance,’ so we say about the new life of the Christian man- he is free only on condition that he keeps well under hatches the old tyrants, who are ever plotting and struggling to have dominion once again."