Things From Which We Are Not Yet Delivered (Rewritten)

Christ offers to free believers in this life not only from sinful actions, but from the sinful, selfish bent that comes with fallen humanity. Now we need to name some things that do come from sin — and can look a lot like sin — but don’t actually have its moral character. In other words, they aren’t on the list of things Jesus promises to remove for us in the present life. They are —

First: Spiritual warfare — which, of course, includes temptation. Jesus himself faced temptation. “As he is, so are ye in this world.” “The disciple is not above his Lord.” The Christian life is a long battle, and our weapons come from Christ’s promised presence, the power of his word, and the gift of his Holy Spirit. Still, we do insist that we can be delivered from the most distressing and dangerous kind of war: a civil war — a revolt against Christ raging inside the believer’s own heart. 

That inner conflict troubles many who have received Christ with weak faith. They are living in Romans 7. But, Romans 7 was never meant to be the ideal Christian life; it is, instead, a picture of the struggle of a convicted sinner trying to find justification by works of the law. The ideal Christian life is in Romans 6: “But being now made free from sin, and become servants of God, ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life;” and also in Romans 8: “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.”

Someone may object here and ask whether “the flesh” — one of the three great enemies of the soul that trusts in Jesus Christ — isn’t an inward enemy, a traitor inside the walls. Certainly it is, at the beginning of the campaign. But the promise is, “Ye shall be cleansed from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit.” The command is, “Crucify the flesh with its affections and lusts.” The ideal life described in Romans 8 is exactly this: a death to sin. Whoever fully lays hold of Christ, the life, can be as free from sin’s stirrings within as the bodies in the grave-yard are free from the cares rushing through the market-place at midday. “If ye do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.” To mortify is to kill. The Gospel looks to the removal of every inner resistance to Christ in the believing soul.

But does not St. Paul say, “I keep my body under, and bring it into subjection, lest, after having preached the Gospel to others I should become a castaway!”? Christ would not bless us but curse us if he set us free from the innocent appetites our Creator put in us for preserving both the individual and the race. These blind, instinctive impulses must be governed by reason and conscience. Neither St. Paul nor any other saint was so holy that his hands would automatically drop his knife and fork the moment he had eaten exactly enough, without the will stepping in under the direction of judgment. Christ does not aim to free anyone from the need to use sound judgment about innocent appetites.

Second: Christ has not promised to deliver us, in this life, from infirmities. As long as we live in houses of clay, their weakness will humble us. I do not mean we must live under condemnation because of them. But as long as we are in this tabernacle, we will groan for deliverance from these involuntary failures and weaknesses. They, too, need the blood of sprinkling. That is why even the holiest person on earth is not beyond praying every day, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”

But what are these infirmities from which we should expect no full release in the present life? They are the scars of sin: the wound is healed, but the mark remains. In nature, and in grace as well, there is no medicine that removes scars completely — at least not now. You can patch a pitcher with cement so it will hold water; but strike it, and it will never ring like an unbroken vessel. To recover that true ring, you must hand it back to the potter to be ground to powder and made again. So it is with us. If we will place our shattered vessels in Jesus’ hands, he can mend us so we may be filled with the Spirit; but on earth we will not regain the pure Adamic ring of absolute perfection. We must pass through death — reduced to dust — and be rebuilt by the Divine Potter. Then we will be presented faultless — not in the dim twilight of some far-off region, but faultless in the full meridian splendor “of the presence of his glory.”

As examples of infirmities we cannot fully overcome here, consider lack of knowledge about matters on which we still must act — leading to errors of judgment, and opening the way for errors in practice.

Defective memory is another infirmity that even the fullness of sanctifying grace does not remove. It was never meant, in this life, to restore our intellectual powers to unfading strength. It quickens what is spiritually dead and strengthens conscience. A fallible judgment will still be ours, even when love to Christ has been perfected.

Hours of apathy and spiritual dullness, because of our bodily organism or the state of the nerves, are another example. We cannot always prevent such states. Christ does not promise to work a miracle to keep us alert and burning with zeal in a room whose air has been drained of oxygen by carelessness.

Third: we would love to tell the millions of groaning saints that, in this life, it is possible to love Christ so strongly that it shuts out every wandering thought in prayer. John Wesley, in his younger years, said that such a state could be reached by saints still in the body. But he lived long enough to see his mistake and confess it in his sermon on Wandering Thoughts. He wrote it to correct a practical error some were drifting into: trying to sanctify the mind as something separate from the heart. They believed the Holy Spirit could control the stream of thoughts so completely that every improper or wandering thought would be shut out, and the mind could be so fixed on God that no distraction could break in. Wesley saw that setting the bar that high made entire sanctification unattainable, and that pushing this extreme view was doing real harm to the precious doctrine of perfect love — which is very different from perfect thinking.

To anyone distressed about this, we recommend the entire sermon.  The heart of the matter can be put briefly. The work of the Divine Spirit is mainly — if not entirely — a setting right of the will. As John Fletcher said, “Christian perfection extends chiefly to the will, which is the capital moral power of the soul; leaving the understanding ignorant of ten thousand things. Adamic perfection extended to the whole man.” The flow of ideas does not answer to the will, and so it is not the task of grace to prevent wandering thoughts. Grace may lessen the problem by drawing the soul toward Christ like a great magnet, so that even our stray thoughts tend to turn toward him.

Fourth: nowhere do I find a promise that a soul believing in Christ will be delivered from all unpleasant and improper dreams. We long for such an experience, and we express that longing in song: —

“Yet in my dreams I'd be
Nearer, my God, to thee.”

Here we have to disagree with Jonathan Edwards, who urges Christians to examine their dreams to learn their true character and standing before God. As far as I can tell, our dreams follow no rule but the rule of opposites. The most peaceable people quarrel; the most gentle and tender commit murder; the most satisfied with life plot suicide; the temperate become drunk; and the pure become impure. These images — shaped by the day’s work, digestion, how much bedding we used, and a thousand other causes — tell us no more about our moral and spiritual condition than they do about our ancestral pedigree.

Fifth: we should not expect salvation from sudden shaking fear when something startling happens — like a thunderbolt’s crash, or an alarm ringing. This is instinct. And just as there is no sin in instinctive actions, there is no ground of condemnation in them. A well-known Christian woman once received a unexpected message from her husband a thousand miles away; afterward she apologized to me and asked God to forgive her for dishonoring Christ’s cause because her hand trembled when the message was suddenly put before her eyes. Both the apology and the prayer were unnecessary. There was no sin in that sudden agitation. For wise reasons, the Savior delays our deliverance from these things until our feet touch the other shore; and yet we are still commanded with Abraham “to walk before God and be perfect.”

Sixth: Jesus, the great Emancipator, does not free us from the uncomfortable sense that we fall short in our work in his vineyard. We never accomplish a thousandth part of what we long to do. Fields lie waste around us. Much of the good seed we scatter is wasted, and little fruit comes fully to maturity. When we face these facts, we start to think that if we were exactly right — perfectly guided by the Spirit of truth — we would do no wasted work at all; every effort would advance Christ’s kingdom; every word of instruction or exhortation would land with its intended effect, like the word of the Lord “which returneth not unto him void.”

We have recently heard people testify that they enjoy such fullness and guidance of the Spirit that every attempt to help others succeeds — the Spirit, they claim, infallibly directing them to the receptive person and giving them the precise words needed for deliverance. But something must be mistaken here. We find no such example in Holy Scripture. The holiest people feel the weight of failure in their labors. Sinners were hardened under St. Paul’s preaching. His inability to save his Hebrew brethren caused such deep sorrow that he could wish himself “accursed from Christ;” that is, that he could add an atonement beyond Christ’s to secure their salvation. Jesus himself, looking from Olivet toward the rebellious city soon to be desolated by God’s judgments, and crying, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem!” felt keenly what seemed like failure in his ministry.

If we read the words of God the Father rightly, we must understand that even absolute perfection does not rule out a painful sense of failure when free agents misuse their godlike freedom by rejecting mercy: “I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me.” He “willeth not the death of the wicked, but rather that they would turn and live: Turn ye, turn ye.” So we do not teach that it is possible, in this life, to be free from this sense of inefficiency. It is part of our probation — one of faith’s highest tests — to labor for God when we see no fruit; to sow for others to reap, or for birds to snatch away, or for thorns to choke. Was not this the bitter ingredient in the cup that made the Son of God a man of sorrows?

Seventh: Christ will not free us from death, nor from illnesses and disease. All these will be placed beneath the Conqueror’s feet, but not yet. “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” Still, when the gift of faith is given as a charism — not as a grace — the sick even in our day may be healed and death itself may be postponed in answer to prayer, as in Hezekiah’s case. 1 Cor. 12:9; James 5:15.

 

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This is a revision of Chapter 6 of Love Enthroned: Essays on Evangelical Perfection (1875) by Daniel Steele, completely rewritten with the assistance of Microslop CoPilot. The original chapter can be found here: DELIVERANCE DEFERRED.