Unspoken Sermons

G >> George MacDonald >> Unspoken Sermons

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36

Some seem to take this to mean that the disciple must go against his
likings because they are his likings; must be unresponsive to the
tendencies and directions and inclinations that are his, because they
are such, and his; they seem to think something is gained by abstinence
from what is pleasant, or by the doing of what is disagreeable--that to
thwart the lower nature is in itself a good. Now I will not dare say
what a man may not get good from, if the thing be done in simplicity
and honesty. I believe that when a man, for the sake of doing the thing
that is right, does in mistake that which is not right, God will take
care that he be shown the better way--will perhaps use the very thing
which is his mistake to reveal to him the mistake it is. I will allow
that the mere effort of will, arbitrary and uninformed of duty,
partaking of the character of tyranny and even schism, may add to the
man's power over his lower nature; but in that very nature it is God
who must rule and not the man, however well he may mean. From a man's
rule of himself, in smallest opposition, however devout, to the law of
his being, arises the huge danger of nourishing, by the pride of self-
conquest, a far worse than even the unchained animal self--the demoniac
self. True victory over self is the victory of God in the man, not of
the man alone. It is not subjugation that is enough, but subjugation by
God. In whatever man does without God, he must fail miserably--or
succeed more miserably. No portion of a man can rule another portion,
for God, not the man, created it, and the part is greater than the
whole. In effecting what God does not mean, a man but falls into fresh
ill conditions. In crossing his natural, therefore in themselves right
inclinations, a man may develop a self-satisfaction which in its very
nature is a root of all sin. Doing the thing God does not require of
him, he puts himself in the place of God, becoming not a law but a law-
giver to himself, one who commands, not one who obeys. The diseased
satisfaction which some minds feel in laying burdens on themselves, is
a pampering, little as they may suspect it, of the most dangerous
appetite of that self which they think they are mortifying. All the
creatures of God are good, received with thanksgiving; then only can
any one of them become evil, when it is used in relations in which a
higher law forbids it, or when it is refused for the sake of self-
discipline, in relations in which no higher law forbids, and God
therefore allows it. For a man to be his own schoolmaster, is a right
dangerous position; the pupil cannot be expected to make
progress--except, indeed, in the wrong direction. To enjoy heartily and
thankfully, and do cheerfully without, when God wills we should, is the
way to live in regard to things of the lower nature; these must nowise
be confounded with the things of _the world_. If any one say this is
dangerous doctrine, I answer, 'The law of God is enough for me, and for
laws invented by man, I will none of them. They are false, and come all
of rebellion. God and not man is our judge.'

Verily it is not to thwart or tease the poor self Jesus tells us. That
was not the purpose for which God gave it to us I He tells us we must
leave it altogether--yield it, deny it, refuse it, lose it: thus only
shall we save it, thus only have a share in our own being. The self is
given to us that we may sacrifice it; it is ours that we like Christ
may have somewhat to offer--not that we should torment it, but that we
should deny it; not that we should cross it, but that we should abandon
it utterly: then it can no more be vexed.

'What can this mean?--we are not to thwart, but to abandon? How
abandon, without thwarting?'

It means this:--we must refuse, abandon, deny self altogether as a
ruling, or determining, or originating element in us. It is to be no
longer the regent of our action. We are no more to think, 'What should
I like to do?' but 'What would the Living One have me do?' It is not
selfish to take that which God has made us to desire; neither are we
very good to yield it--we should only be very bad not to do so, when he
would take it from us; but to yield it heartily, without a struggle or
regret, is not merely to deny the Self a thing it would like, but to
deny the Self itself, to refuse and abandon it. The Self is God's
making--only it must be the 'slave of Christ,' that the Son may make it
also the free son of the same Father; it must receive all from him--not
as from nowhere; as well as the deeper soul, it must follow him, not
its own desires. It must not be its own law; Christ must be its law.
The time will come when it shall be so possessed, so enlarged, so
idealized, by the indwelling God, who is its deeper, its deepest self,
that there will be no longer any enforced denial of it needful; it has
been finally denied and refused and sent into its own obedient place;
it has learned to receive with thankfulness, to demand nothing; to turn
no more upon its own centre, or any more think to minister to its own
good. God's eternal denial of himself, revealed in him who for our
sakes in the flesh took up his cross daily, will have been developed in
the man; his eternal rejoicing will be in God--and in his fellows,
before whom he will cast his glad self to be a carpet for their walk, a
footstool for their rest, a stair for their climbing.

To deny oneself then, is to act no more from the standing-ground of
self; to allow no private communication, no passing influence between
the self and the will; not to let the right hand know what the left
hand doeth. No grasping or seeking, no hungering of the individual,
shall give motion to the will; no desire to be conscious of worthiness
shall order the life; no ambition whatever shall be a motive of action;
no wish to surpass another be allowed a moment's respite from death; no
longing after the praise of men influence a single throb of the heart.
To deny the self is to shrink from no dispraise or condemnation or
contempt of the community, or circle, or country, which is against the
mind of the Living one; for no love or entreaty of father or mother,
wife or child, friend or lover, to turn aside from following him, but
forsake them all as any ruling or ordering power in our lives; we must
do nothing to please them that would not first be pleasing to him.
Bight deeds, and not the judgment thereupon; true words, and not what
reception they may have, shall be our care. Not merely shall we not
love money, or trust in it, or seek it as the business of life, but,
whether we have it or have it not, we must never think of it as a
windfall from the tree of event or the cloud of circumstance, but as
the gift of God. We must draw our life, by the uplooking, acknowledging
will, every moment fresh from the living one, the causing life, not
glory in the mere consciousness of health and being. It is God feeds
us, warms us, quenches our thirst. The will of God must be to us all in
all; to our whole nature the life of the Father must be the joy of the
child; we must know our very understanding his--that we live and feed
on him every hour in the closest, veriest way: to know these things in
the depth of our knowing, is to deny ourselves, and take God instead.
To try after them is to begin the denial, to follow him who never
sought his own. So must we deny all anxieties and fears. When young we
must not mind what the world calls failure; as we grow old, we must not
be vexed that we cannot remember, must not regret that we cannot do,
must not be miserable because we grow weak or ill: we must not mind
anything. We have to do with God who can, not with ourselves where we
cannot; we have to do with the Will, with the Eternal Life of the
Father of our spirits, and not with the being which we could not make,
and which is his care. He is our care; we are his; our care is to will
his will; his care, to give us all things. This is to deny ourselves.
'Self, I have not to consult you, but him whose idea is the soul of
you, and of which as yet you are all unworthy. I have to do, not with
you, but with the source of you, by whom it is that any moment you
exist--the Causing of you, not the caused you. You may be my
consciousness, but you are not my being. If you were, what a poor,
miserable, dingy, weak wretch I should be! but my life is hid with
Christ in God, whence it came, and whither it is returning--with you
certainly, but as an obedient servant, not a master. Submit, or I will
cast you from me, and pray to have another consciousness given me. For
God is more to me than my consciousness of myself. He is my life; you
are only so much of it as my poor half-made being can grasp--as much of
it as I can now know at once. Because I have fooled and spoiled you,
treated you as if you were indeed my own self, you have dwindled
yourself and have lessened me, till I am ashamed of myself. If I were
to mind what you say, I should soon be sick of you; even now I am ever
and anon disgusted with your paltry, mean face, which I meet at every
turn. No! let me have the company of the Perfect One, not of you! of my
elder brother, the Living One! I will not make a friend of the mere
shadow of my own being! Good-bye, Self! I deny you, and will do my best
every day to leave you behind me.'

And in this regard we must not fail to see, or seeing ever forget,
that, when Jesus tells us we must follow him, we must come to him, we
must believe in him, he speaks first and always as _the Son_ of the
Father--and that in the active sense, as the obedient God, not merely
as one who claims the sonship for the ground of being and so of further
claim. He is the Son of the Father as the Son who obeys the Father, as
the Son who came expressly and only to do the will of the Father, as
the messenger whose delight it is to do the will of him that sent him.
At the moment he says _Follow me_, he is following the Father; his face
is set homeward. He would have us follow him because he is bent on the
will of the Blessed. It is nothing even thus to think of him, except
thus we _believe_ in him--that is, so do. To believe in him is to do as
he does, to follow him where he goes. We must believe in him
_practically_--altogether practically, as he believed in his Father;
not as one concerning whom we have to hold something, but as one whom
we have to follow out of the body of this death into life eternal. It
is not to follow him to take him in any way theoretically, to hold this
or that theory about why he died, or wherein lay his atonement: such
things can be revealed only to those who follow him in his active being
and the principle of his life--who do as he did, live as he lived.
There is no other following. He is all for the Father; we must be all
for the Father too, else are we not following him. To follow him is to
be learning of him, to think his thoughts, to use his judgments, to see
things as he saw them, to feel things as he felt them, to be hearted,
souled, minded, as he was--that so also we may be of the same mind with
his Father. This it is to deny self and go after him; nothing less,
even if it be working miracles and casting out devils, is to be his
disciple. Busy from morning to night doing great things for him on any
other road, we should but earn the reception, 'I never knew you.' When
he says, 'Take my yoke upon you,' he does not mean a yoke which he
would lay upon our shoulders; it is his own yoke he tells us to take,
and to learn of him--it is the yoke he is himself carrying, the yoke
his perfect Father had given him to carry. The will of the Father is
the yoke he would have us take, and bear also with him. It is of this
yoke that he says, _It is easy_, of this burden, _It is light_. He is
not saying, 'The yoke I lay upon you is easy, the burden light;' what
he says is, 'The yoke I carry is easy, the burden on my shoulders is
light.' With the garden of Gethsemane before him, with the hour and the
power of darkness waiting for him, he declares his yoke easy, his
burden light. There is no magnifying of himself. _He first_ denies
himself, and takes up his cross--then tells us to do the same. The
Father magnifies the Son, not the Son himself; the Son magnifies the
Father.

We must be jealous for God against ourselves, and look well to the
cunning and deceitful Self--ever cunning and deceitful until it is
informed of God--until it is thoroughly and utterly denied, and God is
to it also All-in-all--till we have left it quite empty of our will and
our regard, and God has come into it, and made it--not indeed an
_adytum_, but a _pylon_ for himself. Until then, its very denials, its
very turnings from things dear to it for the sake of Christ, will tend
to foster its self-regard, and generate in it a yet deeper self-
worship. While it is not denied, only thwarted, we may through
satisfaction with conquered difficulty and supposed victory, minister
yet more to its self-gratulation. The Self, when it finds it cannot
have honour because of its gifts, because of the love lavished upon it,
because of its conquests, and the 'golden opinions bought from all
sorts of people,' will please itself with the thought of its
abnegations, of its unselfishness, of its devotion to God, of its
forsakings for his sake. It may not _call_ itself, but it will soon
_feel_ itself a saint, a superior creature, looking down upon the
foolish world and its ways, walking on high 'above the smoke and stir
of this dim spot;'--all the time dreaming a dream of utter folly,
worshipping itself with the more concentration that it has yielded the
approbation of the world, and dismissed the regard of others: even they
are no longer necessary to its assurance of its own worths and merits!
In a thousand ways will Self delude itself, in a thousand ways befool
its own slavish being. Christ sought not his own, sought not anything
but the will of his Father: we have to grow diamond-clear, true as the
white light of the morning. Hopeless task!--were it not that he offers
to come himself, and dwell in us.

I have wondered whether the word of the Lord, 'take up his cross,' was
a phrase in use at the time: when he used it first he had not yet told
them that he would himself be crucified. I can hardly believe this form
of execution such a common thing that the figure of bearing the cross
had come into ordinary speech. As the Lord's idea was new to men, so I
think was the image in which he embodied it. I grant it _might_, being
such a hateful thing in the eyes of the Jews, have come to represent
the worst misery of a human being; but would they be ready to use as a
figure a fact which so sorely manifested their slavery? I hardly think
it. Certainly it had not come to represent the thing he was now
teaching, that self-abnegation which he had but newly brought to
light--nay, hardly to the light yet--only the twilight; and nothing
less, it seems to me, can have suggested the terrible symbol!

But we must note that, although the idea of the denial of self is an
entire and absolute one, yet the thing has to be done _daily_: we must
keep on denying. It is a deeper and harder thing than any sole effort
of most herculean will may finally effect. For indeed the will itself
is not pure, is not free, until the Self is absolutely denied. It takes
long for the water of life that flows from the well within us, to
permeate every outlying portion of our spiritual frame, subduing
everything to itself, making it all of the one kind, until at last,
reaching the outermost folds of our personality, it casts out disease,
our bodies by indwelling righteousness are redeemed, and the creation
delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory
of the children of God. Every day till then we have to take up our
cross; every hour to see that we are carrying it. A birthright may be
lost for a mess of pottage, and what Satan calls a trifle must be a
thing of eternal significance.

Is there not many a Christian who, having begun to deny himself, yet
spends much strength in the vain and evil endeavour to accommodate
matters between Christ and the dear Self--seeking to save that which so
he must certainly lose--in how different a way from that in which the
Master would have him lose it! It is one thing to have the loved self
devoured of hell in hate and horror and disappointment; another to
yield it to conscious possession by the living God himself, who will
raise it then first and only to its true individuality, freedom, and
life. With its cause within it, then, indeed, it shall be saved!--how
then should it but live! Here is the promise to those who will leave
all and follow him: '_Whosoever shall lose his life, for my sake, the
same shall save it_,'--in St. Matthew, '_find it_.' What speech of men
or angels will serve to shadow the dimly glorious hope! To lose
ourselves in the salvation of God's heart! to be no longer any care to
ourselves, but know God taking divinest care of us, his own! to be and
feel just a resting-place for the divine love--a branch of the tree of
life for the dove to alight upon and fold its wings! to be an open air
of love, a thoroughfare for the thoughts of God and all holy creatures!
to know one's self by the reflex action of endless brotherly
presence--yearning after nothing from any, but ever pouring out love by
the natural motion of the spirit! to revel in the hundredfold of
everything good we may have had to leave for his sake--above all, in
the unsought love of those who love us as we love them--circling us
round, bathing us in bliss--never reached after, ever received, ever
welcomed, altogether and divinely precious! to know that God and we
mean the same thing, that we are in the secret, the child's secret of
existence, that we are pleasing in the eyes and to the heart of the
Father! to live nestling at his knee, climbing to his bosom, blessed in
the mere and simple being which is one with God, and is the outgoing of
his will, justifying the being by the very facts of the being, by its
awareness of itself as bliss!--what a self is this to receive again
from him for that we left, forsook, refused! We left it paltry, low,
mean; he took up the poor cinder of a consciousness, carried it back to
the workshop of his spirit, made it a true thing, radiant, clear, fit
for eternal companying and indwelling, and restored it to our having
and holding for ever!

All high things can be spoken only in figures; these figures, having to
do with matters too high for them, cannot _fit_ intellectually; they
can be interpreted truly, understood aright, only by such as have the
spiritual fact in themselves. When we speak of a man and his soul, we
imply a self and a self, reacting on each other: we cannot divide
ourselves so; the figure suits but imperfectly. It was never the design
of the Lord to explain things to our understanding--nor would that in
the least have helped our necessity; what we require is a means, a
word, whereby to think with ourselves of high things: that is what a
true figure, for a figure may be true while far from perfect, will
always be to us. But the imperfection of his figures cannot lie in
excess. Be sure that, in dealing with any truth, its symbol, however
high, must come short of the glorious meaning itself holds. It is the
low stupidity of an unspiritual nature that would interpret the Lord's
meaning as less than his symbols. The true soul sees, or will come to
see, that his words, his figures always represent more than they are
able to present; for, as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are
the heavenly things higher than the earthly signs of them, let the
signs be good as ever sign may be. There is no joy belonging to human
nature, as God made it, that shall not be enhanced a hundredfold to the
man who gives up himself--though, in so doing, he may seem to be
yielding the very essence of life. To yield self is to give up grasping
at things in their second causes, as men call them, but which are
merely God's means, and to receive them direct from their source--to
take them seeing whence they come, and not as if they came from
nowhere, because no one appears presenting them. The careless soul
receives the Father's gifts as if it were a way things had of dropping
into his hand. He thus grants himself a slave, dependent on chance and
his own blundering endeavour--yet is he ever complaining, as if some
one were accountable for the checks which meet him at every turn. For
the good that comes to him, he gives no thanks--who is there to thank?
at the disappointments that befall him he grumbles--there must be some
one to blame! He does not think to what Power it could be of any
consequence, nay, what power would not be worse than squandered, to
sustain him after his own fashion, in his paltry, low-aimed existence!
How could a God pour out his being to uphold the merest waste of his
creatures? No world could ever be built or sustained on such an idea.
It is the children who shall inherit the earth; such as will not be
children, cannot possess. The hour is coming when all that art, all
that science, all that nature, all that animal nature, in ennobling
subjugation to the higher even as man is subject to the Father, can
afford, shall be the possession, to the endless delight, of the sons
and daughters of God: to him to whom he is all in all, God is able to
give these things; to another he cannot give them, for he is unable to
receive them who is outside the truth of them. Assuredly we are not to
love God for the sake of what he can give us; nay, it is impossible to
love him save because he is our God, and altogether good and beautiful;
but neither may we forget what the Lord does not forget, that, in the
end, when the truth is victorious, God will answer his creature in the
joy of his heart. For what is joy but the harmony of the spirit! The
good Father made his children to be joyful; only, ere they can enter
into his joy, they must be like himself, ready to sacrifice joy to
truth. No promise of such joy is an appeal to selfishness. Every reward
held out by Christ is a pure thing; nor can it enter the soul save as a
death to selfishness. The heaven of Christ is a loving of all, a
forgetting of self, a dwelling of each in all, and all in each. Even in
our nurseries, a joyful child is rarely selfish, generally righteous.
It is not selfish to be joyful. What power could prevent him who sees
the face of God from being joyful?--that bliss is his which lies behind
all other bliss, without which no other bliss could ripen or last. The
one bliss of the universe is the presence of God--which is simply God
being to the man, and felt by the man as being, that which in his own
nature he is--the indwelling power of his life. God must be to his
creature what he is in himself, for it is by his essential being alone,
that by which he is, that he can create. His presence is the
unintermittent call and response of the creative to the created, of the
father to the child. Where can be the selfishness in being so made
happy? It may be deep selfishness to refuse to be happy. Is there
selfishness in the Lord's seeing of the travail of his soul and being
satisfied? Selfishness consists in taking the bliss from another; to
find one's bliss in the bliss of another is not selfishness. Joy is not
selfishness; and the greater the joy thus reaped, the farther is that
joy removed from selfishness. The one bliss, next to the love of God,
is the love of our neighbour. If any say, 'You love because it makes
you blessed,' I deny it: 'We are blessed, I say, because we love.' No
one could attain to the bliss of loving his neighbour who was selfish
and sought that bliss from love of himself. Love is unselfishness. In
the main we love because we cannot help it. There is no merit in it:
how should there be in any love?--but neither is it selfish. There are
many who confound righteousness with merit, and think there is nothing
righteous where there is nothing meritorious. 'If it makes you happy to
love,' they say, 'where is your merit? It is only selfishness!' There
is no merit, I reply, yet the love that is born in us is our salvation
from selfishness. It is of the very essence of righteousness. Because a
thing is joyful, it does not follow that I do it for the joy of it; yet
when the joy is in others, the joy is pure. That _certain_ joys should
be joys, is the very denial of selfishness. The man would be a
demoniacally selfish man, whom love itself did not make joyful. It is
selfish to enjoy in content beholding others lack; even in the highest
spiritual bliss, to sit careless of others would be selfishness, and
the higher the bliss, the worse the selfishness; but surely that bliss
is right altogether of which a great part consists in labour that
others may share it. Such, I will not doubt--the labour to bring others
in to share with us, will be a great part of our heavenly content and
gladness. The making, the redeeming Father will find plenty of like
work for his children to do. Dull are those, little at least can they
have of Christian imagination, who think that where all are good,
things must be dull. It is because there is so little good yet in them,
that they know so little of the power or beauty of merest life divine.
Let such make haste to be true. Interest will there be and variety
enough, not without pain, in the ministration of help to those yet
wearily toiling up the heights of truth--perhaps yet unwilling to part
with miserable self, which cherishing they are not yet worth being, or
capable of having.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36