THE VERY ESSENCE OF SALVATION


By Andrew Murray  -  (1828-1917)          
 

Would God that we could learn that all that God speaks of sacrifices, even of the sacrifice of His beloved Son, is subordinate to the one thing – to have His creature restored to full obedience.  Into all the inconceivable meaning of the word, ‘I WILL BE YOUR GOD,’ there is no gateway but this, ‘OBEY MY VOICE.’

WE COME TO THE NEW TESTAMENT  –  Here we think at once of our blessed Lord, and the prominence He gives to obedience as the one thing for which He was come into the world. He who entered it with His ‘Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God,' ever confessed to men, ‘I seek not My own will, but the will of Him that sent Me.’

Of all He did and of all He suffered, even to the death, He said, ‘This commandment have I received of My Father.’

If we turn to His teaching, we find everywhere, that the obedience He rendered is what He claims from everyone who would be His disciple.

During His whole ministry, from beginning to end, obedience is – THE VERY ESSENCE OF SALVATION.

In the Sermon on the Mount He began with it: No one could enter the kingdom, ‘but he that doeth the will of My Father which is in heaven.’

And in the farewell discourse, how wonderfully He reveals the spiritual character of true obedience as it is born of love and inspired by it, and as it also opens the way into the love of God. Do take into your heart the wonderful words, (John 14:15, 16, 21, 23), ‘If ye love Me, ye will keep my commandments. And the Father will send forth the Spirit. He hath My commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth Me: and he shall be loved of My Father, and I will love him, and will manifest Myself unto him. If a man love Me, he will keep My words: and My Father will love him, and We will come unto him, and make Our abode with him.’

No words could express more simply or more powerfully the inconceivably glorious place Christ gives to obedience,  with its twofold possibility,  (1) as only possible to a loving heart,  (2) as making possible all that God has to give of His Holy Spirit, of His wonderful love, of His indwelling in Christ Jesus.

I know of no passage in Scripture that gives a higher revelation of the spiritual life, or the power of loving obedience as its one condition. Let us pray to God very earnestly that by His Holy Spirit its light may transfigure our daily obedience with its heavenly glory.
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Yours in Christ,
Paul N. F.