Paul N. F. (24
Apr 2022)
"OBEDIENCE: THE VERY
ESSENCE OF SALVATION"
OBEDIENCE:
THE VERY ESSENCE OF SALVATION
By Andrew
Murray
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. Jesus 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 God very
earnestly that by His Holy Spirit its light may transfigure
our daily obedience with its heavenly glory.
How often and how earnestly we have asked how to be able to
abide continually in Christ. We have thought of more
study of the Word, more faith, more prayer, more communion
with God, and we have overlooked the simple truth that Jesus
teaches so clearly, ‘If ye keep My commandments,
ye shall abide in My love,’ with its divine sanction,
‘Even as I kept My Father’s commandments, and abide in His
love.’
For Him as for us, the only way under heaven to abide in
divine love is to keep the commandments. Do let me
ask, have you known it, have you heard it preached, have you
believed it and proved it true in your experience: obedience
on earth is the key to a place in God’s love in
heaven? Unless there be some correspondence
between God’s whole-hearted love in heaven, and our
whole-hearted, loving obedience on earth, Christ cannot
manifest Himself to us, God cannot abide in us, we cannot
abide in His love.
Yours in Christ,
Paul N. F.