November 18

“And I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is tried: they shall call on my name, and I will hear them: I will say, It is my people: and they shall say, The Lord is my God.” Zechariah 13:9

THE believer often commences his spiritual journey with shallow and defective views of the perfect fitness and glory of the Redeemer’s justifying righteousness. There is, we admit, a degree of self-renunciation—there is a reception of Christ—and there is some sweet and blessed enjoyment of His acceptance. Yet his views of himself, and of the entire, absolute, supreme necessity, importance, and glory of Christ’s finished work, are as nothing compared with his after experience of both. God will have the righteousness of His Son to be acknowledged and felt to be everything. It is a great work, a glorious work, a finished work, and He will cause His saints to know it. It is His only method of saving sinners; and the sinner that is saved shall acknowledge this, not in his judgment merely, but from a deep heartfelt experience of the truth, “to the praise of the glory of His grace.”

It is, then, we say, in the successive stages of his experience, that the believer sees more distinctly, adores more profoundly, and grasps more firmly, the finished righteousness of Christ. And what is the school in which he learns his nothingness, his poverty, his utter destitution? the school of deep and sanctified affliction. In no other school is it learned, and under no other teacher but God. Here his high thoughts are brought low, and the Lord alone is exalted. Here he forms a just estimate of his attainments, his gifts, his knowledge, and that which he thought to be so valuable he now finds to be nothing worth. Here his proud spirit is abased, his rebellious spirit tamed, his restless, feverish spirit soothed into passive quietude; and here, the deep humbling acknowledgment is made, “I am vile!” Thus is he led back to first principles. Thus the first step is retaken, and the first lesson is relearned. The believer, emptied entirely of self, of self-complacency, self-trust, self-glorying, stands ready for the full Savior. The blessed and eternal Spirit opens to him, in this posture, the fitness, the fullness, the glory, the infinite grandeur of Christ’s finished righteousness; leads him to it afresh, puts it upon him anew, causes him to enter into it more fully, to rest upon it more entirely; breaks it up to the soul, and discloses its perfect fitness to his case. And what a glory he sees in it! He saw it before, but not as he beholds it now.

And what a resting-place he finds beneath the cross! He rested there before, but not as he rests now. Such views has he now of Christ—such preciousness, such beauty, such tenderness he sees in Immanuel—that a new world of beauty and of glory seems to have opened before his view. A new Savior, a new righteousness, appear to have been brought to his soul. All this has been produced by the discipline of the covenant—the afflictions sent and sanctified by a good and covenant God and Father. Oh, you tried believers! murmur not at God’s dispensations; repine not at His dealings. Has He seen fit to dash against you billow upon billow? Has He thought proper to place you in the furnace? Has He blasted the fair prospect—dried up the stream—called for the surrender of your Isaac? Oh, bless Him for the way He takes to empty you of self, and fill you with His own love. This is His method of teaching you, schooling you, and fitting you for the inheritance of the saints in light. Will you not allow Him to select His own plan—to adopt His own mode of cure? You are in His hands; and could you be in better? Are you now learning your own poverty, destitution, and helplessness? and is the blood and righteousness of Jesus more precious and glorious to the eye of your faith? Then praise Him for your afflictions, for all these cross dispensations are now, yes, at this moment, working together for your spiritual good.