God's Worksmaship

We need constantly to remember that the work of God in us is the foundation of our Christian experience and faith, and as constantly do we need to remember that we never can experience the ground and spring of our Christian experience. In other words, our faith must be in the reality of the Redemption and never in what God has done in us and for us. What is experienced in our individual lives is the efficacious working of salvation, but we never can experience the God who gives us that experience. We are delighted with our experience, it is the thing we can talk about, but unless our faith is in the God who gives us the experience it ends in pietistic jargon; I try to pack all God’s tremendous redemptive energy into a side eddy—“I have got all this to myself.” If you know on what ground your experience has arisen you say, like Paul did, “I know whom I have believed,” not “I know what I have got.”

The thing to pay attention to is the miracle created in human experience, not on the ground of my reason, but on the ground of the Redemption, and it begins exactly as our Lord describes—“The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the voice thereof, but knowest not whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8 rv). Whenever I say “I want to reason this thing out before I can trust,” I will never trust. The reasoning out and the perfection of knowledge come after the response to God has been made. If we would learn on the threshold of our life with God to put away as impertinent, and even iniquitous, the debates as to whether or not we will trust God, we would not remain under the delusions we do; we would abandon without the slightest hesitation, cut the shore lines, burn our bridges behind us, and realise that what has happened is the positive miracle of the Redemption at work—we know with a knowledge which passeth knowledge. The whole of the New Testament exposition in the inspiration of the Holy Spirit is in order that we might know where we have been placed by Almighty God’s Redemption. Immediately we come in contact with Reality our thinking is based on revelation all the time, and as we maintain our relation to Reality we will find new revelations of truth flashing out continually from the word of God.