THE RADIATOR OP PERSONAL LIFE.
(a) Determination. Ex. 35:21; Esth. 7:5; Eccl. 8:11; 2 Cor. 9: 7; Kom. 6: 17.
(b) Design. 1 Kings 8:17, 18; 10:2; Ps. 21:2; Prov. 6: 18; Isa. 10: 7; Acts 11: 23; Rom. 10: 1.
(a) Perception. Deut. 29:4; Prov. 14:10; Isa. 32:4; Acts 16: 14.
(b) *Meditation. Neh. 5:7; Luke 2:19; Isa. 33:18; Ps. 49: 3; Ps. 19: 14.
*This includes deliberation and reflection.
(c) Estimation. Prov. 16: 1, 9; 19: 21; Ps. 33: 10, 11.
(d) Inclination. Deut. 32:46; Josh. 24:23; Deut. 11: 18; Prov. 3: 3.
VIRTUES AND VICES.
(a) All Degrees of Joy. Isa. 65: 14; 66: 5; Acts 2: 46.
(b) All Degrees of Pain. Prov. 25: 20; Ps. 109: 22; Acts 21: 13; John 16: 6.
(c) All Degrees of Ill-will. Prov. 23: 17; Deut. 19: 6; Acts 7: 54; Jas. 3:14.
A radiator is "a body that emits rays of light and heat." I have used a purely mechanical term, because it exactly pictures what the heart is, it is the centre that emits rays of light and heat in the physical frame, in the soul and in the spirit. The heart physically is the centre of the body; the heart sentimentally is the centre of the soul; the heart spiritually is the centre of the spirit.
A word about the three divisions in the chart. 1, Voluntary, simply means acting by choice; choice is made in the heart, not in the head. By 2, Versatility, is meant the power to turn easily from one thing to another, and by 3, Virtues, moral excellencies, and by Vices, immoral conduct.
1. The Voluntary Division.
The act of choice springs from the heart the Bible says, and there are two things we must look at — one is determination, and the other is design, (a) Determination means to fix the form of the choice. (Ex. 35:21; Rom. 6:17.) These passages are an indication of hundreds that prove from the Bible revelation that the act of choice is in the heart and not in the brain. Determination is not impulse. Impulse in anybody but a child is dangerous; it is always the sign of an unstable and unreliable person. Determination is to fix the form of my choice. Now that means, both in praying and action, I have the power in my heart to fix the form my choice is to take, and God demands this of us when we pray. The majority of us waste our time by mere impulses in prayer. Meditate on that and you will find many verses in God's Book which refer to this power of the heart to choose voluntarily. Impulse is not choice; impulse is very similar to instinct in an animal. It is the characteristic of immaturity that ought not to be your characteristic or mine. "We may take it as a safe guide in spiritual matters never to be guided by impulse in anything; to always take time to curb your impulses and bring them back and see what sort of form the choice would make based on that impulse.
When the phrase, " Bringing every thought and imagination into captivity" is taken in the full meaning, it means practically the harnessing of impulses. Thank God we have the power in our hearts to fix the form of our choice either for good or bad. No wonder the Bible tells us to guard our hearts, for out of them are the issues of our life. We never get credit for giving, impulsively, spiritually. If we suddenly feel •we ought to give a shilling to a poor man, and do it, we get no credit from God for it, there is no virtue in it whatever.# The majority of that sort of giving is a relief to the feelings, and is not an indication of a generous character, it is rather an indication of lack of it. God never estimates our gifts on the line of impulse. It is what we determine in our hearts to do that we get credit for; giving that is governed by a fixed determination. The Spirit of Go*d revolutionizes our philanthropic instincts. The majority of philanthropy is simply this impulse to save myself an uncomfortable feeling, by giving to the poor people. The Spirit of God alters the whole thing. My attitude to the poor, as a saint of God, is, "Give, for His sake," not any other motive. So with regard to everything, this power of voluntarily choosing in determining the form of our choice is the power in the human heart that God holds us responsible for using or not using.
Then take (b) Design. Design means more than determination. Design means to plan in outline.
1 Kings 8: 17, 18 is a typical case, and there are other verses that prove that God gives us credit for the design of our heart, not for the impulses of our hearts. He may never allow that design to be carried out, but He credits us with having the design. Sometimes when you have had a very good dinner and feel remarkably good, you say, "If I only had a thousand pounds, what would I do with it!" You do not get credit for that, until what you do with what you have got, is considered. The proof that the design for the thousand pounds would be worked out is what you do with what you have got. We cannot have designs in outline to please God, unless we have been working out in lesser degrees through our bodies, what God works in us to do. David had planned out in his heart what he would do for God, and, although God did not allow him to do it, God credited him with having the desire and design and the plan in his heart. Thank God we have a God who deals with the designs of our hearts both, for good and for bad! Character is the whole trend of the man's life taken together, not an isolated act here and there. Remember, then, these two voluntary powers of the heart, viz., I have a power to fix the form of my choosing! "Delight thyself in the Lord; and He will give thee the desires of thine heart.' ' Desire embraces both determination and design. God deals with us on the line of character building. Some people, when they read that verse in Psalm 37, behave before God like people do with a wishing-bone over a Christmas dinner. They say, "Now I have read this verse, I wonder what I shall wish for?" That is not desire. Desire is what you have determined in outline, in your mind, and planned out and settled in your heart, that is the desire God will fulfill if you delight in Him.
We describe that as being the power of turning from one thing to another. Now that, in the natural world, is called humor. The power to turn easily from one thing to another is owing to a sense of proportion. A "self-righting" lifeboat gives the idea. This is the power that sin destroyed in the spiritual people of God. Read Psalm 106: "Our fathers have sinned and we have sinned with them." How did they sin? They forgot what God did before; they had not any power of turning from their present trying circumstances to the time when the circumstances were not trying, and consequently they sinned against God. We have a power to turn from deep anguish to deep joy in times of trial. Psalm 42:6: "My soul is cast down within me," therefore will I turn and remember something else. There are some people who have the characteristic of being merry, and they think they must always keep up that "role." There are some people who have taken on the character of being great sufferers, and, having taken up that "role," they never turn from it. In the life of our Lord Jesus Christ, you will always find the basal balance of this quality; also take the apostle Paul's argument in Romans 8: "All Tthese things work together for good." You have to take all these things when put "together," not in bits.
If your circumstances are trying just now, remember the time when they were not trying, and you will find that the " self-righting " power is given all through, and you will be surprised when once you realize the enormous power of turning from one thing to another in the human heart. How much misery a human heart can stand, and how much joy! but if you lose the power of turning, you will upset the balance. God's Spirit restores and keeps this balance.
(a) Perception. That means the power of discernment, I wonder how many of us have the power of perception! (Deut. 29: 4; Prov. 14: 10.) In the first ease the power of perception is in the heart. Perception means the power to discern what I hear, what I see, and what I read; the power to discern the history of the nation I belong to, and the powrer to discern my personal life. How many of us have the power to "hear with our ears" according to Jesus Christ's statement? Jesus said, "He that hath ears to hear let him hear." You have got to have the power of perception to interpret what you hear in God 's light. Isaiah puts it very strongly in chapter 53: "Who hath believed the thing we are all saying and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?" That is, "Who has the power to discern the arm of the Lord?" We all see the common occurrences of our daily life, but who amongst us can perceive the arm of the Lord behind them, who can perceive behind the thunder, the voice of God? Remember Jesus Christ (John 12). The people said it thundered, but Jesus said His Father spoke to Him.
"What is the difference? The One had perception, the others had not. The light that smote Saul on the way to Damascus staggered and amazed the other men, but they saw nothing in it. Saul knew it was the Lord, and said, "Who art thou, Lord?" Why? The one had the power of perception and the others had not. The characteristic of a man without the Spirit of God is that he has not the power of perception; that is, he cannot perceive God's working behind the ordinary occurrences. That is the marvelous, uncrush* able characteristic of a saint.
You may put the saint in tribulation, you may put the saint amid an onslaught of "principalities and powers/ ' you may put the saint in peril, pestilence, under sword, you may put the saint anywhere you like and Paul says he is more than conqueror. Why! Because his heart being filled with God can always turn in the perceiving way to understand that behind all these things "working together for good" is God! How may of us have our ears open?
"Keep mine eyes from beholding vanity." That does not mean "keep my eyes shut," but "give me a power of perception to direct my eyes aright." A sheet of white paper can be soiled, a sunbeam cannot, and God keeps His saints like light.
Oh, the power of full-orbed righteousness! Thank God for the sanity of His salvation! He gets hold of us in our hearts, not our heads! (b), Meditation means getting to the middle of a thing. Meditation does not mean to be like a pebble in a brook letting the water of thought go over you, that is reverie, not meditation. Meditation is the most intense spiritual activity that brings every part of the body into harness, and concentrates its powers to profit. This includes deliberation and reflection. Now deliberation means that I am able to weigh well what I am thinking of, conscious all the time that I am deliberating and meditating. Neh. 5:7: "I thought within myself," is exactly the meaning of meditation. Luke 2: 19 is the meaning of meditation also. Please note, meditation is not prayer! A great many delightful modern people mistake meditation for prayer. Meditation is simply the power I have in my natural heart to get to the centre of a thing, and all this talk in pseudo-scientific circles about prayer being a reflex action is foolish. Meditation has a reflex action, but that is not prayer.
Prayer is definite talk to God, about which God has put an atmosphere, and by which I get answers back. Meditation very often accompanies prayer, but meditation is not prayer. Men can meditate who have not an ounce of the Spirit of God in them, and. this fundamental distinction is obscured over and over again, by teachers to-day. We read that Mary meditated, she got right to the centre of all the thought about her Son, and she never said a word about it to anybody as far as we know; yet read John's Gospel, and a wonder will occur to you. St. Augustine called John's Gospel the " Heart of Jesus Christ." Recall what Jesus said to John about His own mother, "Son, behold thy mother," and wtat Jesus said to Mary about John, "Woman, behold thy son," and from that hour
John took Mary to his own home. It is quite legitimate to think that Mary's meditations found marvelous expression under the guidance of the Spirit of God to John, and may have found expression in John's Gospel and Epistles.
(c) Estimation. Estimate simply means reckoning the value of. (Prov. 16:1-9.) God alters our estimates, we make our estimates in the heart. Let me put it down practically; those of you who have received God's Spirit and understand and know experimentally God's grace, watch how He has altered your estimate of things. It used to matter a lot what your worldly crowd thought about you, how much does it matter now? You used to estimate highly the good opinion of certain people, how do you estimate it now? You used to estimate that immoral conduct was the worst crime on earth, how do you estimates pride now? "We get horrified at immoral conduct in social life, how many of us get as horrified at pride as Jesus Christ was? How many of us begin to understand what Jesus meant when He said you are "whited sepulchres, a generation of vipers"? To whom was He talking? He was talking to Pharisees! God alters our estimates, and, you will find God is giving you a deeper horror of carnality than ever He gave you of ordinary immorality, a deeper horror of the pride that lifts itself against God ancl lives clean among men, than any other thing. God alters our hearts all along the line, and God will alter your estimates about honor. Every man has honor of some sort, a thief has an honor, a gambling man has an honor.
everybody has an honor of a sort, Jesus Christ had an honor, you may call Him a glutton and a wine bibber, you may call Him licentious, you may call Him mad, you may call Him possessed with a devil, but His mouth is shut, "He made Himself of no reputation;" but once you touch His Father's honor, and all is different. "Watch His first public ministry in Jerusalem, a "whip of small cords" overturning the moneychangers ' tables and driving men and cattle out. Why? His Father's honor was at stake. "Where is the meek and mild and gentle Jesus now?
The estimate of my honor measures my growth in grace. "What I will stand up for proves what my character is. If I stand up for my own reputation, it is a sign that it needs standing up for. God never stands up for His saints, they do not need it. The devil tells lies, but no slander on earth can alter a man's character; once let them slander God's honor, and you instantly find something else to deal with in your meek saint. You could not arouse them on their own account, but once you begin to slander God and you have awakened this sense of honor — a new estimate. We are able to have God's estimate. God help us to get to the right perspective, to get to ths place where we will understand and estimate that the things that are seen are temporal, ever holding a right scale of judgment.
(a) All Degrees of Joy. Joy resides in the heart. The Bible nowhere speaks about a happy Christian;
happiness depends on what happens, Christian joy does not.
(The Bible talks plentifully about joy, and I want to give you one warning about the effect of Christian Science. Mentally, there is not the slightest objection to what Christian Science does to people's bodies, "but there is a tremendous objection to what it does to people's minds. Its result in people's minds is to make them intolerably indifferent to physical suffering, it produces the antipodes of the Christian character, viz., hard and callous in time.) All degrees of joy reside in the heart. How can a Christian be full of happiness, (if happiness means depending on things that happen,) when he is in a world where people are going wrong, where the devil is doing his best to twist souls, where people are tortured physically, where some people are downtrodden and do not get a chance? It would be the outcome of the most miserable selfishness to be happy under such conditions, but joyfulness is never touched by external conditions, and a joyful heart is never an insult. Beware of preaching the gospel of temperament instead of the Gospel of God. There are any number of people to-day preaching the gospel of temperament, the gospel of " cheer up." Remember, Jesus Christ had joy, He was filled with joy. The word "blessedness" is sometimes translated happiness, but it is a very much deeper word than our word, happiness; it includes all that is meant in joy in its full fruition. Happiness is the sign of a child 's life, and God condemns us for taking happiness out of a child's life, but we should have done with happiness long ago, we are men and women who can face the stern issues of life knowing that the grace of God is sufficient for every problem the devil can present.
(b) All Degrees of Pain. (Prov. 25:20). This is simply what has been stated already, preaching the gospel of temperament, the gospel of cheer up, when a person cannot cheer up, telling him to look on the bright side of things. It is just like telling a jelly fish to listen to an oratorio of Handel's, it cannot, it has to be made all over again first; so to tell a man to cheer up when he is convicted of sin by God, is just as futile. "What he needs is the grace of God inside to alter him so that he can have this wellspring of joy. Pain exists in the heart and not anywhere else. We try to aggregate and measure pain in the mass, we cannot. "When there is a great accident and hundreds get killed, we are horrified, much more horrified than at one man getting killed. There is no such thing as pain in the mass, that mass of pain is individual and nobody can feel more pain than the acme of nerves will give, and the more physical expression through pain, the less pain. It is through refusal to estimate things in the right lights that we misunderstand the direction of pain.
(c) All Degrees of 111 Will. The deepest-rooted vice in the human soul is vengeance; drunkenness and sensuality and covetousness are deep, but they do not go as deep as revenge. It is some such thought as that, that explains Judas. Read the record of Judas, it says that he "kissed Jesus much/'and then we read of the remorse of Judas, but there was no repentance, in our sense of the word; the whole end of the man's life was reached, there was nothing more to live for. There are records over and over again that a man who commits murder after a long line of vengeance, dies of a broken heart, not because he is penitent, but because he has no more to live for.
It is the deepest-rooted passion in the human soul and the very impersonation of it is Satan, he has an absolute, clear detestation of God, an immortal hatred of God Almighty. He is at the summit of all sins, we are at the base of all. If it has not reached its awful height in us yet, it will, unless we let God alter the springs of our hearts.
Thank God He alters the heart, and when He puts His new life in the heart, we can work it out through the head, and in the expression of the life!
CHAPTER XL HEART: THE RADICAL REGION OF LIFE.
(c) Love. 1 Tim. 1:5; Prov. 23:26; Judg. 5:9; Phil. 1: 7; 2 Cor. 7:3.
(d) Hate. Lev. 19: 17; Ps. 105: 25.
(e) Memory. Isa. 65:17; Jer. 3:16; 2 Chron. 7:11; Acts 7: 23; 1 Cor. 2: 9; Luke 7: 66; 21: 14.
(f) Thinking. Gen. 8:21; 17:17; 24:45; Eccl. 1:16; Matt. 24:48; Heb. 4: 12.
(g) Birth of Words. Job 8: 10; Ps. 15: 2; Matt. 12: 34; Ex. 28: 3.
(d) All Degrees of Fear. Prov. 12: 25; EecL 2: 20; Deut. 28: 28; Ps. 143: 4; Jer. 32: 40.
(e) All Degrees of Anguish. Josh. 5: 1; Jer. 4: 19; Lev. 26: 36; Ps. 102: 4.
(f) All Conscious Unity. 1 Chron. 12:38; Jer. 32:39; Ezek. 11: 19; Acts 4: 32.
In our studies of the heart, it will be an astounding thing for us to be told, and then to realize, that love springs from our voluntary choice.
(c) Love. (1 Tim. 1:5; Prov. 23: 26; Judg. 5:9; Phil. 1:7; 2 Cor. 7:3.)
If the division is made in the Bible between Divine and human love, it is only to sum up, or illustrate, Divine love. Love is the sovereign preference of my person for another person manifesting itself in the self-imposed weakness of pity and compassion.
Take it in the highest meaning, and you will find that love never springs naturally, that is, it does not spring naturally out of the human heart. Therefore it is open to every one to choose whether he or she will have this love rooted in them by the gift of God's Holy Spirit.
What we are emphasizing is the need of voluntary choice; there is practically no use praying, "0 Lord, for more love! Give me love like Thine; I do want to love Thee better," if one has not begun at the first place, and that first thing is to choose to receive the Spirit that will shed abroad that love. (Rom. 5:5; Luke 11:13.) "We must beware of one tendency in ourselves, and that is to try to do what God alone can do, Und then to blame God for not doing what we alone can do. For instance,.. we try to "save" ourselves, but God only can do that, and then we 4:ry to "sanctify" ourselves, but God only can do that, then, after He has done those sovereign works of grace, we have to work that grace out in our lives. (Phil. 2: 12, 13.)
We have, then, to make the voluntary choice of receiving the Holy Spirit, who will "shed abroad" in our hearts this wonderful love, and create in us the sovereign preference for Jesus Christ, and if I have this sovereign love in my heart, then my love for all other people will be relative to that centre. Paul, you remember, brings that out very clearly when he says, "We do not preach ourselves, we preach Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves your servants, for Jesus' sake." (2 Cor. 4:5.)
The great mainspring, then, is this love, and I, by voluntary choice, can have it created and shed abroad in me, and the Spirit sheds abroad that love which will go on (unless I hinder by disobedience) developing and disciplining and manifesting the perfect love mentioned in First Corinthians, chapter thirteen.
(d) Hate. (Lev. 19:17; Ps. 105: 25.)
The exact opposite of love is hate. Hate is a subject we do not hear much about in connection with Christianity nowadays. The two passages quoted are chosen from an innumerable number in the Bible.
Hatred is the supreme detestation of my personality for another, and that other person ought to be the devil. You will find the Word of God is clear all through about the wrong of hating our brother men, and Paul shows us why it is wrong, that bad men are simply the manifestation of Satan's power. Paul says, "You do not battle against flesh and blood." (Eph. 6:12.) It is not the bad men we are fighting against, it is not the bad people, but it is the" principalities" and "powers" over and behind them.
The presentation of the love of God as having no hate for the wrong and the evil and the sin and the badness and the devil, would simply mean that His love is not as strong as my love, because the stronger and higher and more emphatic your love the more intense is its obverse, hate. God loves us and loves the world so much that He hates, with a perfect hatred, the thing that is twisting and the being that is turning men away from Him, away from right. The two antagonists, to put it in a crude, brief phrase, are God and the devil.
Probably the best way to use David's " cursing' ' Psalms is in some such way as this, "Do not I hate them that hate Thee?" What is it that hates God? Nobody you know hates God half as much as the old disposition in you; that is the thing you have to hate. The carnal mind is enmity against God, that is the thing you have to hate. It is the principle that lusts against the Spirit of God, and is determined to have your body and mind to rule them away from God, and the Spirit of God will awaken in you an unmeasured hatred of that power, until you not only get sick of it, but sick to death of it, and gladly make the moral choice to go to its funeral. The whole meaning of Komans 6:6 is just that thing put in Scriptural language, "We know that our old man is crucified with Christ." That "old man" is the thing the Spirit of God has taught us to hate. Make no excuse for it, and you will find the concentration of the love of God in your heart will fix your soul in horror against the wrong thing. So next time you come across those Psalms which sensitive people think so terrible, bring them to bear on the right thing.
One more thing, the Book says that God loves the world (John 3:16), and the Book also says that "if you love the world, you are an enemy of God." (1 John 2:15.) The difference between the loves is simply this; God loves the world so much that He goes all lengths to remove the wrong from it, and God loves me so much that He goes all lengths to remove the wrong from me, and I have to have the same kind of love. The other love simply means I take the world as it is, and am perfectly delighted with it. All your talk about sin and evil and the devil and atonement are all so many Orientalisms, and people say the world is all right and we are very happy in it! This is the sentiment that hates God. The person who is the friend of that is the enemy of God. (Jas. 4:4.) Do I love the world sufficiently to spend and be spent for God to manifest His grace through me, till the wrong and the evil are removed? Thank God that all these voluntary choices in my heart and life will work out those tremendous purposes! Have I made the voluntary choice? Have I settled the account with God? Have I come to the end of myself? Am I really a spiritual pauper? Do I really realize, without any cunning, that I have no power in myself at all to be holy? Do I deliberately choose, then, to receive from Him the sovereign grace that will work those things in me, and when He puts them in, work them out with glad activity?
"We explained this in a previous study, as "the power to turn easily from one thing to another.' ' "When you are in difficult circumstances, remember the time when they were not so trying. God has given you the power to turn yourself by remembering, and if you lose that power, you punish yourself, and that way will lead to melancholia and a "fixed idea."
As expressive of this great and surprising power, take (e) Memory, to emphasize again what we said before, is not in the brain, but in the heart. The brain is not a spiritual thing, the brain is a physical thing, and the brain recalls more or less clearly what the heart remembers. Memory exists in the heart because memory is a spiritual thing. When Jesus said to the rich man, "Son, remember' ' (Luke 16), He was talking to a man not in this order of things at all, to a man not with a physical brain. (Isa. 65: 17; Jer. 3:16; 2 Chron. 7:11; Acts 7:23; 1 Cor. 2:9; Luke 1:66; 21:14.)
These passages refer to the marvelous power of God to blot out of memory certain things. Forgetting, with us, is a defect; forgetting, with God, is an attribute. God forgets our sins, "I will remember them no more for ever," and these passages allude to the power God grants of forgetting.
Now look at Luke 1:66 and 21:14. There the memory is placed in the heart, and one never forgets unless by the sovereign gra.ce of God. The problem writh us, in this life, is, that we do not recall easily. Tour recalling depends upon the state of your physical brain, and when people say they have a "bad memory," what they mean is they have a bad power of recalling. Paul says, "Forgetting those things that are behind" (Phil. 3:13), but notice what kind of things he does forget; he never forgot what he was before, that is, Paul never forgot that he was a perjurer, a blasphemer and an injurious person. (1 Tim. 1: 13.) That is not what he is referring to, he is referring to his spiritual attainments. "I forget what I have attained to, because I press on to something else." Immediately you begin to "rest on your oars" about your spiritual experience, saying, "Thank God I have attained to this!" that moment you begin to go back. Forgetting to what you attained, keep your eyes fixed on the Lord Jesus, and press on.
Do not confuse those two statements. People say God helps us to forget our past life. Is that quite true? God's grace every now and again brings you back to remember who you are, and brings you back to remember the "pit from whence you were digged," so that you do understand that what you are is all by the sovereign grace of God, not by our own work, otherwise you would be the most uplifted, the most proud and worst of all creatures.
With regard to people with "impaired memory," as it is termed, some say it is best to remove them; it would be better, if it were legal, to put them into a sleep. Why? Because we estimate wrongly; we estimate according to the perfection of the machine, the condition of the character. Now God looks where we cannot see, God looks at the heart; He does not look at the brain, He does not look as man looks, He does not sum up the way we sum up; and here is the wonderful thing, that, by handing our lives over, by a voluntary choice, to God, and receiving His Holy Spirit, He can purify us down to deeper depths than we can ever think of going. Then -how foolish people are not to hand over the keeping of their lives to
Him, for "He will keep the feet of His saints/ ' and keep your heart so pure that you would tremble with amazement if you knew how pure the atonement of the Lord Jesus can make the vilest human heart, if that heart will keep in the light with God walking in the light as He is in the light. (1 John 1:7.)
We use that verse much too glibly. It is simply God letting the plummet right straight down to the very depths of a redeemed heart's experience, and saying, "Now that is how I see you" — made pure by this marvelous atonement of Jesus, the last strand of memory purified by God.
Now take the next thing, (f) Thinking. Thinking is placed in the heart, not in the brain. The real spiritual powers of a man reside in his heart, which is the centre of his physical life, the centre of his soul life, and the centre of his spiritual life. Thinking is in the heart, expression of thinking is referred to the brain and the mouth, because by those organs thinking becomes articulate.
Thinking according to the Bible, resides in the heart, and that is the region the Spirit of God deals with. Take this as a general rule, that Jesus Christ never answered any questions that sprang from man's head, because any question that springs intellectually merely from our brains, we have always borrowed from some book we have read, or from somebody else we have heard speak, but the questions that spring from our hearts, the real problems that vex us, Jesus
Christ answers those. You will find your problems and mine very difficult to state in words, and those are the problems Jesus Christ solves, those are the questions He came to deal with. He deals with this implicit centre.
The heart is the first thing to live in physical birth, and in the spiritual birth it is the same; and it is a wonderful thing that God can cleanse and purify the thinking of my heart. That is why God says "out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh." The Bible actually says that words are born in the heart, not in the tongue. The heart is (g) The Birthplace of Words. (Job 8:10; Matt. 12:34.) Jesus Christ said about His speaking that He always spoke what His Father wanted. Why? Did His Father write His words out and tell Him to learn them by heart? No, the mainspring of the heart of Jesus Christ was exactly the mainspring of the heart of God the Father, and consequently the words Jesus Christ spoke were the exact expression of God's thought, and the tongue in our Lord got to its right place; He never spoke from His head, He always spoke from His heart.
"If a man seem to be religious, and cannot bridle his tongue, his religion is vain," there is nothing in it. Now this tongue and this brain are under our control, not under God's.
Look at the history of words in different countries of our human race. Take our words to-day, take the words at the head of these studies, they are all technical words, there is no "heart" in them.
Very few people speak, in an ordinary way, from their hearts. Take the earlier days, take the language of the "Authorized Version" of the Bible! The Bible was translated into the language the people spoke. To-day our speech is a great aid to inner hypocrisy, and it becomes a great snare, for it is so easy to talk piously and live iniquitously. Remember, speaking from your heart does not mean " refinement " of speech merely; Jesus Christ's speech sounded anything but nice to natural ears sometimes. (Matt. 23.) Some words He used and some applications He made of His truths were terrible and rugged. Read His description of the heart: "Out of the heart," says Jesus, "proceed" — and then comes the catalogue. The upright men and women of the world simply do not believe it. Jesus Christ did not speak as a man there, He spoke as a master of men, with an absolute knowledge of what the human heart was like. That is why He so continually pleads with us to hand over the keeping of our hearts to Him. There is a difference between "innocent" and "pure"; innocence is the true condition of a child, not of a man or woman; purity is the characteristic of men and women. Purity is something that has been tested and tried, and has triumphed; something that has character at the back of it, that can overcome, and has overcome; innocence has always to be shielded. Jesus Christ, by His Spirit, makes us men and women fit to face the misery and wrong and discordance of this life, but always keeping in tune with Him ourselves.
All degrees of fear, all degrees of anguish, and all conscious unity reside in the heart. (Scripture in the chart.)
Watch, if you have not noticed already, how "natural virtues" break down. God does not build up our natural virtues and transfigure them. You will find, very often, natural virtues in a good, upright worldling; when born again of the Spirit of God, they seem to all go wrong, and confusion is the result of the Spirit of God coming in. Jesus Himself said, "I did not come to sow peace on the earth, I did not come to fling broadcast seeds of peace, I came to do the opposite, I came to send a sword,' ' something that would at once divide people, divide homes, divide a man's own personal unity with himself, and the reason is this, that our virtues naturally are not promises of what we are going to be, they are remnants of what we once were.
There is the difference between modern ways of looking at men and the Bible way. Modern people look at man and his virtues and say, "What a wonderful promise of what he is going to be! Give him right conditions, and he will develop and be all right. ' ' Jesus Christ says, "He must be born again first, he has not the germ of the right nature in him, he is a ruin, and only the Spirit of God changes that." Tou cannot patch up your natural virtues to come anywhere near Jesus Christ's commands. No natural love can come anywhere near the love Jesus Christ wants, no natural patience, no natural purity, no natural forgiveness, comes anywhere near what Jesus Christ commands. The hymn has it rightly:
"And every virtue we possess, And every victory won, And every thought of holiness, Are His alone.' '
What we have to learn is that we must bring every bit of this bodily machine into harmony with this new life of God, and He will exhibit in us the virtues that were characteristic of the Lord Jesus; He makes the supernatural virtues natural. That is the meaning of learning how to draw on God's life for everything.
(d) All Degrees of Fear. (Prov. 12: 25; Eccl. 2: 20; Deut. 28:28; Ps. 143:4; Jer. 32:40.)
Fear resides in the heart. If you take a big breath, you encourage your heart to pump the blood better through your veins, and the physical fear will go; that is the physical side, but the soul illustration is the same. God alters and expels all the old fear by putting a new Spirit and a new concern in. What is that concern? The fear lest I grieve Him.
(e) All Degrees of Anguish. (Jer. 4: 19; Josh. 5: 1; Lev. 26:36; Ps. 102:4.)
There you get the three, the physical, the psychical, and the spirit, all centered in the heart. All anguish is in the heart. Now what do I suffer* from? "What I suffer from proves where my heart is. What did Jesus Christ suffer from? The anguish of His heart was on account of sin against His Father. What is the anguish of my heart? Can I fill up what remains behind of His sufferings? Am I only shocked at social evils and social wrongs? or am I as profoundly shocked at pride against God? Do I feel as keenly as Jesus Christ did the erecting of man's self-will against God? The centering of the true anguish is right in the heart of man, and when God gets your heart and mine right, He brings us into fellowship with His sufferings, knowing the power of His resurrection, proving in my life the fellowship of His sufferings, filling up what remains behind.
(f) All Conscious Unity. (1 Chron. 12:38; Jer. 32:39; Ezek. 11:19; Acts 4:32.)
The first and last of these references are to unification. The heart is the place where the unification resides, it is where God works; when once He gets there, He brings spirit, soul and body into perfect unity. There are three other things that can do that besides God — the world, the flesh and the devil can do it. The world will give an all-conscious unification to man's heart, the devil will do it and the flesh will do it.
The man who gives way to sensuality, to worldliness, to devilishness or to covetousness, does not want God; he is perfectly satisfied without Him: God calls it idolatry.
We have to watch our hearts to see what they are getting into unity with; what is my heart bringing my soul and body into line with? " Other lords beside Thee, 0 Lord, have had dominion over us."