CHRIST OUR LIFE
“Christ who is our life”. Colossians 3:4
I am certain that many who joined in our act of surrender last night have felt, as I have felt: O God, how little we understand it! And that they have prayed: Lord, God, Thou must Thyself take possession, if we are to know what it really means. But we believe, as we said, that through faith on our part He does accept, although the experience and the power of that absolute surrender do not come at once, and that it is ours to hold fast our attitude before God until the experience and power do come.
But let me now add, what was only mentioned in passing last night that if this absolute surrender is to be maintained and lived out, it must be by having Christ coming into our life in new power. That is the thought of which I wish to speak this morning. It is only in Christ that we can draw nigh to God, and it is only in Christ that God can draw nigh to us. We need to have “Christ our life”. Beloved, we are here pleading with God to work mightily in London and in the world, in the power of the Holy Ghost, for the sanctification of His people and for the conversion of sinners. What we need is that what we ask God to do in others should be fully done in ourselves. We want to let God reveal Christ to take entire possession of us, and then Christ will be able to work through us above what we ask or think.
The thoughts I want to put before you in illustration of this great truth, “Christ our life”, are four very simple ones. If we want to understand those words, let us consider, first, Christ before us as our Example; secondly, Christ for us as our Propitiation; thirdly, Christ with us as our Saviour from sin; and lastly, Christ in us as our strength and our life. O Lord, while men has to speak, give Thy grace, that we may not cover ourselves with any covering but the covering of Thy Spirit. Lord God, awaken in the heart of speaker and hearers the realization that we are all children of Thy family, bowing before Thy feet. Awaken in every heart a deep faith that our God, by the Holy Spirit, is going to reveal Christ to us even now. Our Father, we wait on Thee. Our soul doth wait, and our hope is in Thy word.
If Christ is to be our life we must look, in the first place, as:
1.- Christ before us as our example. When I speak of Christ as my life, it must not be a vague indefinite thing, but I must know. Life always works itself out in conduct and action, and I want to realize that if Christ comes into me as my life, it must not only be something hidden in my heart, but something that proves itself in every action and in every moment of my existence. And if I want to know how it will show itself, what my sentiments and words and actions and habits will be if I have Christ’s life, I must go to the life of the Lord Jesus upon earth and study that. And as I study the life and walk of God’s own beloved Son, I must remember that before God took Him up to heaven, God let Him live here upon earth, that in His life I might have a picture, a revelation, a complete representation of what my God wanted me to be, and was willing to make me. That is the light in which you must study the life of Christ in the Gospels not the only, but one most important, light.
And what do I find, then, as I look at Christ? We spoke last night of absolute surrender to God. That was the very root of Christ’s life. He came as a man whom God had sent into the world, and as a man who had nothing to do but to fulfill the will of God; and He came as a man who had nothing in Himself, but who everyday depended upon God and waited for God to teach Him, and to speak words through Him, and to show Him the works He had to do. “The Son can do nothing of Himself”. He lived a life of absolute surrender to God. God’s will, God’s honour, God’s kingdom He lived and He died for them, and He did it, not under strain at certain times, throwing it off at other times to seek relaxation in something of the world, and forgetting to hold communication with God, as many Christians do. Religion to them is a strain and a burden and a duty, and it is so delightful just to relax a little and throw off the strain. Ah, no! God was Christ joy, and the Fountain of living waters to Him, and it was His delight and His strength to live in God and for God. The will of God was His meat and refreshment and strength.
And God comes to all of us who ask this morning: My God, I gave the vow last night of absolute surrender, and thou knowest that, though it was done in feebleness and in trembling, it was done in honesty and in uprightness; but my God, what does it mean? How am I to live that life? The Father points to the beloved Son, and He says, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Hear Him, follow Him, live like Him, let Christ be the law of your life.”
Let us yield our hearts to God in prayer, for Him to search us and discover to us whether the life of Christ has actually been the law that we have taken for the guide of our life. I do not speak about attainment, but let us ask, Have I actually said : Oh, how blessed it would be! Oh, this is what I covet, and what I wait upon God for! I want to live for God in the way Christ lived? It almost sounds as if it were too high and presumptuous. But what does Christ mean when He said so often: As I, even so you; as I loved, even so love one another; as I kept the commandments of My Father, so if ye keep His commandments, ye shall abide in My Love? What does the Holy Spirit mean when He says, “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who made Himself of no reputation, but humbled Himself and became obedient unto death”? The mind of Christ must be my mind, my disposition, and my life.
There is many a man who wants eternal life in heaven from Christ, but who does not want the life here on earth which Christ lived. And there is many a believer who has written it down, alas, there can be no thought of imitating and following Christ with any measure of exactness; he does not aim to come near to Christ. But if last night you honestly said: Father, Thou hast a right to it, and my heart gives absolute surrender to God from henceforth; then come this morning and say: The life of Christ must become mine.
But secondly. If we want to know what this means, “Christ our life”, we must not only look at Christ and His work before us as our example.
2.- Christ for us as our Propitiation. In His life Christ prepared the path in which we are to walk. He left us an example that we should follow in His footsteps; He marked out the road in which we were to move on the way to eternal life. But that was not enough, for we were shut out from that path and that life, by sin and its curse, death. And so Christ, after having prepared and marked out the blessed path, went Himself down into the suffering and the death of Calvary, giving up His will to God unto the death. There He bore our sins and our curse, and the chastisement of our peace was laid upon Him, that by His stripes we might be healed. He gave His precious blood, “the blood of the everlasting covenant”, that by it He might gain an entrance for us into the very presence of our God.
And now Christ is there as our High Priest, to apply within our hearts, as a living Saviour, the divine power of that propitiation. And whenever we think of drawing nigh to God, and of serving God and of offering ourselves unto God, and the thought comes up and it is right that we should thus look at it I in my sinfulness, I with my transgressions and backslidings since I was converted and received Christ, I with the sinfulness of my nature, can I actually have fellowship with God every day? Then the answer comes: We have been made nigh by the blood of Jesus”.“Having……boldness by the blood of Jesus, let us draw near”.
Were there any of you last night who felt afraid to make the great surrender, the absolute surrender, because you felt too unworthy? Oh, think of this; your worthiness is not in yourself, or in the intensity or uprightness of your consecration; your worthiness is in Christ Jesus. We read in God’s Word, it is “the altar that sanctifieth the gift”, and we know that Christ is not only the Priest and the Victim, “the Lamb that was slain”, by that the living Christ is Himself the Altar. Seven days the altar was to be sanctified by a sevenfold blood sprinkling; and after that God said, That altar shall be an altar most holy: whatsoever toucheth the altar shall be holy. And in the New Testament we are taught that “the altar sanctifieth the gift”. Christ is our Altar. Oh, if there is anyone afraid, and asking, can God accept me in my feebleness? Come, child of God, and be not afraid. Lay yourself upon Christ, the living Altar, the everlasting Propitiation, who can make you acceptable to God every moment; and rest there. Rest upon Him in the sweet consciousness and faith. All unworthy and all feeble though I be, the altar sanctifieth the gift, and in Jesus and resting on Him, my God accepts my feebleness, and I am well pleasing in His sight. Oh, Christians, seek to maintain it as the power of continual access to God. “If we walk in the light, the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin.”It is in Christ that the door to the heart of my Father is open every moment; it is in the blood of the blessed Lamb of God that every moment from above, the inflowing of the divine life can come into your heart and mine.
But thirdly, I have not only Christ before me as my Example, and Christ for me as my Propitiation, but I have…
3.- Christ with me as my Saviour from sin, my Friend, my Leader, and my Guide. Yes, that was the precious promise of our gracious Lord ere He left. “Lo I am with you always”. And earlier than that He had said, when the disciples could not yet understand Him, “Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there I am in the midst of them”.
What you and I need to realise is this: that Jesus Christ is nearer to us than our nearer earthly friend. Ah! if we would but take time to turn our eyes and hearts away from this world, and from all the loving faces and friends that surround, us, and all the joys that attract us, and all the love that greets us, and fix them steadfastly and humbly and trustingly on the face and the love and the joy of Jesus, He is able so to manifest Himself to us that our hearts shall be filled with the consciousness Jesus is with me. You know how deep in the consciousness of a father, for instance, every morning as he rises, is the thought: I have beloved children, I have a beloved wife, I have a family; we meet at breakfast. It is so natural, the whole heart is full of it, it does not need a moment’s thought. Can it be that Christ can make His presence as near and as clear and as dear to me as the fellowship of the dearest ones upon earth? Christ can do it, and Christ longs to do it, and Christ is worthy that we should let Him do it.
O God, when will the time come when Thy Son will be to us nearer than father or mother, wife or husband, child or brother? Oh, hasten that blessed hour!
Jesus Christ wants to live with you, and to walk with you, that He may do this blessed work for you He wants to be with you as your Companion, so that you never shall be alone. No trial, no difficulty, no fire, no water through which you have to pass, but in which the promise of Jehovah, in the Old Testament, “ I will be with thee”, will not be fulfilled to you in Christ Jesus. No battle that you have to fight with sin or temptation, no feebleness that makes you tremble in the consciousness of what your are yourself, but it is possible to have Christ as Leader, to show you the way in which you have to walk; Jesus Christ as Companion, to comfort you by His presence, and make your heart glad; Jesus Christ as Saviour from sin, in His mighty power watching over you, and working in you all God’s good pleasure. Oh that God might show us that the life of absolute surrender is a life that can be lived in Christ Jesus, a life that can be lived because Christ Himself will care for us and watch over us.
And then comes the last thought:
4.-Christ in us as our life and our strength. That is the crown of all. The young convert ordinarily understands very little of that. Many a believer has lived long in some experience of Christ with Him as Guide and Helper, but has never yet come to realise what this other means: Christ in me, my very life and my very strength, And yet that it what the Apostle Paul tells us is the great gospel mystery, the mystery that was hid for ages and generations, but has now been revealed; the mystery of God’s people, of which he says “the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you”. Christians, the riches and glory of our God in heaven are manifest to you in this God wants you to have Christ His Son living in you. Oh, may we come to that today not to ask for a little blessing, a beginning of blessings, but to have our whole life opened up to the indwelling, to the control, to the sanctifying power of Jesus Christ.
We speak to workers. Our great thought has been that of work. What is needed if God is to bless all these workers in London who have gathered together here? How is God’s power to come and to work? Beloved, Christ is the power of God, and we want more of Christ, we want the whole Christ, we want Christ in every one of us revealed by the Holy Ghost, and then the power of God will work.
Yesterday morning we spoke of a church so filled with the Holy Ghost, that the Holy Ghost could say to that church: Set apart for Me the men that I have called for My work. And we spoke of workers as people who are fit and ready and willing to be set apart for the Holy Ghost. How can each church be brought to this condition? In one way only. John the Baptist preached Christ who baptized “with the Holy Ghost and with fire”. That tells me Jesus Christ is the One from whom the Holy Ghost must flow into us in ever new and larger measure; and if you want the power of God’s Spirit to be revealed in London, or away in heathendom, it must come from a closer attachment to Christ; a closer union with Him, a larger revelation of Christ dwelling in Christian people. A blessing then must come. Did not Jesus say, “He that believeth on Me, out of him shall flow rivers of living water”? And is not this by faith, by believing, that Christ comes and dwells in the heart, and becomes Himself the Fountain out of which the Holy Spirit flows? What do we read in the last chapter of the Revelation of St. John? “And He showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb”. Yes, the Lamb went and sat down upon the throne of glory, and the river of water of life flowed out. It is the Lamb who must lead you and me to the fountains of living water, and give them within our hearts, so that we shall have power to work among men not the power of reason, not the power of human love, and zeal, and earnestness, and diligence, but the power that comes from God.
Are you ready for that power? Are you ready to surrender yourself absolutely to God and receive it? Can you truly say: Lord, I am utterly given up to Thee. It is done feebly, tremblingly, but, Lord God, it is done. I have received but little of what I know my God can give, but as an empty vessel, cleansed and lowly, I place myself at Thy feetagain, day by day, and moment by moment, and I wait upon my God? And, child of God, what eye hath not seen nor ear heard, and what men have never been able to conceive, what you have not conceived, God will do for them that wait for Him, and for them that love Him.
Our Convention will profit us very little unless it lead us closer up to God, and to have larger expectations from God, and closer fellowship with God. How can that be? Christ Jesus can do it for us. Christ is our life. He will live in us the same life He lived upon earth. Shall we not expect Him to do it in the fullness of His promise? Shall we not come with every sin and every hindrance and every shortcoming and everything that causes self condemnation, and cast it all at His feet, and believe the blood cleanses, and Jesus gives deliverance? Do believe, and then expect it and accept it, that God Himself will reveal Christ within us in the power of the Holy Spirit. God grant it to every beloved worker gathered here.
“Christ who is our life”. Colossians 3:4
I am certain that many who joined in our act of surrender last night have felt, as I have felt: O God, how little we understand it! And that they have prayed: Lord, God, Thou must Thyself take possession, if we are to know what it really means. But we believe, as we said, that through faith on our part He does accept, although the experience and the power of that absolute surrender do not come at once, and that it is ours to hold fast our attitude before God until the experience and power do come.
But let me now add, what was only mentioned in passing last night that if this absolute surrender is to be maintained and lived out, it must be by having Christ coming into our life in new power. That is the thought of which I wish to speak this morning. It is only in Christ that we can draw nigh to God, and it is only in Christ that God can draw nigh to us. We need to have “Christ our life”. Beloved, we are here pleading with God to work mightily in London and in the world, in the power of the Holy Ghost, for the sanctification of His people and for the conversion of sinners. What we need is that what we ask God to do in others should be fully done in ourselves. We want to let God reveal Christ to take entire possession of us, and then Christ will be able to work through us above what we ask or think.
The thoughts I want to put before you in illustration of this great truth, “Christ our life”, are four very simple ones. If we want to understand those words, let us consider, first, Christ before us as our Example; secondly, Christ for us as our Propitiation; thirdly, Christ with us as our Saviour from sin; and lastly, Christ in us as our strength and our life. O Lord, while men has to speak, give Thy grace, that we may not cover ourselves with any covering but the covering of Thy Spirit. Lord God, awaken in the heart of speaker and hearers the realization that we are all children of Thy family, bowing before Thy feet. Awaken in every heart a deep faith that our God, by the Holy Spirit, is going to reveal Christ to us even now. Our Father, we wait on Thee. Our soul doth wait, and our hope is in Thy word.
If Christ is to be our life we must look, in the first place, as:
1.- Christ before us as our example. When I speak of Christ as my life, it must not be a vague indefinite thing, but I must know. Life always works itself out in conduct and action, and I want to realize that if Christ comes into me as my life, it must not only be something hidden in my heart, but something that proves itself in every action and in every moment of my existence. And if I want to know how it will show itself, what my sentiments and words and actions and habits will be if I have Christ’s life, I must go to the life of the Lord Jesus upon earth and study that. And as I study the life and walk of God’s own beloved Son, I must remember that before God took Him up to heaven, God let Him live here upon earth, that in His life I might have a picture, a revelation, a complete representation of what my God wanted me to be, and was willing to make me. That is the light in which you must study the life of Christ in the Gospels not the only, but one most important, light.
And what do I find, then, as I look at Christ? We spoke last night of absolute surrender to God. That was the very root of Christ’s life. He came as a man whom God had sent into the world, and as a man who had nothing to do but to fulfill the will of God; and He came as a man who had nothing in Himself, but who everyday depended upon God and waited for God to teach Him, and to speak words through Him, and to show Him the works He had to do. “The Son can do nothing of Himself”. He lived a life of absolute surrender to God. God’s will, God’s honour, God’s kingdom He lived and He died for them, and He did it, not under strain at certain times, throwing it off at other times to seek relaxation in something of the world, and forgetting to hold communication with God, as many Christians do. Religion to them is a strain and a burden and a duty, and it is so delightful just to relax a little and throw off the strain. Ah, no! God was Christ joy, and the Fountain of living waters to Him, and it was His delight and His strength to live in God and for God. The will of God was His meat and refreshment and strength.
And God comes to all of us who ask this morning: My God, I gave the vow last night of absolute surrender, and thou knowest that, though it was done in feebleness and in trembling, it was done in honesty and in uprightness; but my God, what does it mean? How am I to live that life? The Father points to the beloved Son, and He says, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Hear Him, follow Him, live like Him, let Christ be the law of your life.”
Let us yield our hearts to God in prayer, for Him to search us and discover to us whether the life of Christ has actually been the law that we have taken for the guide of our life. I do not speak about attainment, but let us ask, Have I actually said : Oh, how blessed it would be! Oh, this is what I covet, and what I wait upon God for! I want to live for God in the way Christ lived? It almost sounds as if it were too high and presumptuous. But what does Christ mean when He said so often: As I, even so you; as I loved, even so love one another; as I kept the commandments of My Father, so if ye keep His commandments, ye shall abide in My Love? What does the Holy Spirit mean when He says, “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who made Himself of no reputation, but humbled Himself and became obedient unto death”? The mind of Christ must be my mind, my disposition, and my life.
There is many a man who wants eternal life in heaven from Christ, but who does not want the life here on earth which Christ lived. And there is many a believer who has written it down, alas, there can be no thought of imitating and following Christ with any measure of exactness; he does not aim to come near to Christ. But if last night you honestly said: Father, Thou hast a right to it, and my heart gives absolute surrender to God from henceforth; then come this morning and say: The life of Christ must become mine.
But secondly. If we want to know what this means, “Christ our life”, we must not only look at Christ and His work before us as our example.
2.- Christ for us as our Propitiation. In His life Christ prepared the path in which we are to walk. He left us an example that we should follow in His footsteps; He marked out the road in which we were to move on the way to eternal life. But that was not enough, for we were shut out from that path and that life, by sin and its curse, death. And so Christ, after having prepared and marked out the blessed path, went Himself down into the suffering and the death of Calvary, giving up His will to God unto the death. There He bore our sins and our curse, and the chastisement of our peace was laid upon Him, that by His stripes we might be healed. He gave His precious blood, “the blood of the everlasting covenant”, that by it He might gain an entrance for us into the very presence of our God.
And now Christ is there as our High Priest, to apply within our hearts, as a living Saviour, the divine power of that propitiation. And whenever we think of drawing nigh to God, and of serving God and of offering ourselves unto God, and the thought comes up and it is right that we should thus look at it I in my sinfulness, I with my transgressions and backslidings since I was converted and received Christ, I with the sinfulness of my nature, can I actually have fellowship with God every day? Then the answer comes: We have been made nigh by the blood of Jesus”.“Having……boldness by the blood of Jesus, let us draw near”.
Were there any of you last night who felt afraid to make the great surrender, the absolute surrender, because you felt too unworthy? Oh, think of this; your worthiness is not in yourself, or in the intensity or uprightness of your consecration; your worthiness is in Christ Jesus. We read in God’s Word, it is “the altar that sanctifieth the gift”, and we know that Christ is not only the Priest and the Victim, “the Lamb that was slain”, by that the living Christ is Himself the Altar. Seven days the altar was to be sanctified by a sevenfold blood sprinkling; and after that God said, That altar shall be an altar most holy: whatsoever toucheth the altar shall be holy. And in the New Testament we are taught that “the altar sanctifieth the gift”. Christ is our Altar. Oh, if there is anyone afraid, and asking, can God accept me in my feebleness? Come, child of God, and be not afraid. Lay yourself upon Christ, the living Altar, the everlasting Propitiation, who can make you acceptable to God every moment; and rest there. Rest upon Him in the sweet consciousness and faith. All unworthy and all feeble though I be, the altar sanctifieth the gift, and in Jesus and resting on Him, my God accepts my feebleness, and I am well pleasing in His sight. Oh, Christians, seek to maintain it as the power of continual access to God. “If we walk in the light, the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin.”It is in Christ that the door to the heart of my Father is open every moment; it is in the blood of the blessed Lamb of God that every moment from above, the inflowing of the divine life can come into your heart and mine.
But thirdly, I have not only Christ before me as my Example, and Christ for me as my Propitiation, but I have…
3.- Christ with me as my Saviour from sin, my Friend, my Leader, and my Guide. Yes, that was the precious promise of our gracious Lord ere He left. “Lo I am with you always”. And earlier than that He had said, when the disciples could not yet understand Him, “Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there I am in the midst of them”.
What you and I need to realise is this: that Jesus Christ is nearer to us than our nearer earthly friend. Ah! if we would but take time to turn our eyes and hearts away from this world, and from all the loving faces and friends that surround, us, and all the joys that attract us, and all the love that greets us, and fix them steadfastly and humbly and trustingly on the face and the love and the joy of Jesus, He is able so to manifest Himself to us that our hearts shall be filled with the consciousness Jesus is with me. You know how deep in the consciousness of a father, for instance, every morning as he rises, is the thought: I have beloved children, I have a beloved wife, I have a family; we meet at breakfast. It is so natural, the whole heart is full of it, it does not need a moment’s thought. Can it be that Christ can make His presence as near and as clear and as dear to me as the fellowship of the dearest ones upon earth? Christ can do it, and Christ longs to do it, and Christ is worthy that we should let Him do it.
O God, when will the time come when Thy Son will be to us nearer than father or mother, wife or husband, child or brother? Oh, hasten that blessed hour!
Jesus Christ wants to live with you, and to walk with you, that He may do this blessed work for you He wants to be with you as your Companion, so that you never shall be alone. No trial, no difficulty, no fire, no water through which you have to pass, but in which the promise of Jehovah, in the Old Testament, “ I will be with thee”, will not be fulfilled to you in Christ Jesus. No battle that you have to fight with sin or temptation, no feebleness that makes you tremble in the consciousness of what your are yourself, but it is possible to have Christ as Leader, to show you the way in which you have to walk; Jesus Christ as Companion, to comfort you by His presence, and make your heart glad; Jesus Christ as Saviour from sin, in His mighty power watching over you, and working in you all God’s good pleasure. Oh that God might show us that the life of absolute surrender is a life that can be lived in Christ Jesus, a life that can be lived because Christ Himself will care for us and watch over us.
And then comes the last thought:
4.-Christ in us as our life and our strength. That is the crown of all. The young convert ordinarily understands very little of that. Many a believer has lived long in some experience of Christ with Him as Guide and Helper, but has never yet come to realise what this other means: Christ in me, my very life and my very strength, And yet that it what the Apostle Paul tells us is the great gospel mystery, the mystery that was hid for ages and generations, but has now been revealed; the mystery of God’s people, of which he says “the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you”. Christians, the riches and glory of our God in heaven are manifest to you in this God wants you to have Christ His Son living in you. Oh, may we come to that today not to ask for a little blessing, a beginning of blessings, but to have our whole life opened up to the indwelling, to the control, to the sanctifying power of Jesus Christ.
We speak to workers. Our great thought has been that of work. What is needed if God is to bless all these workers in London who have gathered together here? How is God’s power to come and to work? Beloved, Christ is the power of God, and we want more of Christ, we want the whole Christ, we want Christ in every one of us revealed by the Holy Ghost, and then the power of God will work.
Yesterday morning we spoke of a church so filled with the Holy Ghost, that the Holy Ghost could say to that church: Set apart for Me the men that I have called for My work. And we spoke of workers as people who are fit and ready and willing to be set apart for the Holy Ghost. How can each church be brought to this condition? In one way only. John the Baptist preached Christ who baptized “with the Holy Ghost and with fire”. That tells me Jesus Christ is the One from whom the Holy Ghost must flow into us in ever new and larger measure; and if you want the power of God’s Spirit to be revealed in London, or away in heathendom, it must come from a closer attachment to Christ; a closer union with Him, a larger revelation of Christ dwelling in Christian people. A blessing then must come. Did not Jesus say, “He that believeth on Me, out of him shall flow rivers of living water”? And is not this by faith, by believing, that Christ comes and dwells in the heart, and becomes Himself the Fountain out of which the Holy Spirit flows? What do we read in the last chapter of the Revelation of St. John? “And He showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb”. Yes, the Lamb went and sat down upon the throne of glory, and the river of water of life flowed out. It is the Lamb who must lead you and me to the fountains of living water, and give them within our hearts, so that we shall have power to work among men not the power of reason, not the power of human love, and zeal, and earnestness, and diligence, but the power that comes from God.
Are you ready for that power? Are you ready to surrender yourself absolutely to God and receive it? Can you truly say: Lord, I am utterly given up to Thee. It is done feebly, tremblingly, but, Lord God, it is done. I have received but little of what I know my God can give, but as an empty vessel, cleansed and lowly, I place myself at Thy feetagain, day by day, and moment by moment, and I wait upon my God? And, child of God, what eye hath not seen nor ear heard, and what men have never been able to conceive, what you have not conceived, God will do for them that wait for Him, and for them that love Him.
Our Convention will profit us very little unless it lead us closer up to God, and to have larger expectations from God, and closer fellowship with God. How can that be? Christ Jesus can do it for us. Christ is our life. He will live in us the same life He lived upon earth. Shall we not expect Him to do it in the fullness of His promise? Shall we not come with every sin and every hindrance and every shortcoming and everything that causes self condemnation, and cast it all at His feet, and believe the blood cleanses, and Jesus gives deliverance? Do believe, and then expect it and accept it, that God Himself will reveal Christ within us in the power of the Holy Spirit. God grant it to every beloved worker gathered here.