Beware of placing Our Lord as a Teacher first. If
Jesus Christ is a Teacher only, then all He can do is to tantalize me by
erecting a standard I can not attain. What is the use of presenting me with an
ideal I cannot possibly come near? I am happier without knowing it. What is the
good of telling me to be what I never can be – to be pure in heart, to do more
than my duty, to be perfectly devoted to God? I must know Jesus Christ as
Saviour before His teaching has any meaning for me other than that of an ideal
which leads to despair. But when I am born again of the Spirit of God, I know
that Jesus Christ did not come to teach only: He came to make me what He
teaches I should be. The Redemption means that Jesus Christ can put into any
man the disposition that ruled His own life, and all the standards God gives
are based on that disposition.
The teaching of the Sermon on the Mount produces
despair in the natural man – the very thing Jesus means it to do. As long as we
have a self-righteous, conceited notion that we can carry out Our Lord's
teaching, God will allow us to go on until we break our ignorance over some
obstacle, then we are willing to come to Him as paupers and receive from Him.
“Blessed are the paupers in spirit,” that is the first principle in the Kingdom
of God. The bedrock in Jesus Christ's kingdom is poverty, not possession; not
decisions for Jesus Christ, but a sense of absolute futility – I cannot begin
to do it. Then Jesus says – Blessed are you. That is the entrance, and it does
take us a long while to believe we are poor! The knowledge of our own poverty
brings us to the moral frontier where Jesus Christ works.
7月21日 竭誠為主
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