"Hail, sacred union, firm and strong! One with incarnate Deity!" Nearer to Him than wife is to husband. Nearer to Him than the babe is to her who bore it, and from whose bosom it drinks in nourishment more freely and lovingly given than it can partake of it. Nearer to Him than the son is to the father whose heart yearns over him with paternal affection. This is relationship eternal, indissoluble. The bride embraced in the everlasting arms and ever-loving heart of her royal Bridegroom. This relationship cannot be fully described, and is only revealed a little here and there during our wilderness journey. The fullest and clearest revelation we have of this relationship we find in John xvii. 21: "That they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in Me and I in Thee; that they also may be one in us." This is covenant relationship in ties of love and blood which can never be forfeited nor alienated. "Ye are Christ's." Christ's sheep. Christ's brethren. Christ's Church. Christ's bride. 66 II. WHAT? The saint's inventory-"For all things are yours." This sounds strange in the face of Paul's declaration : "For whom I have suffered the loss of all things" (Phil. iii. 8); yet both are blessedly true. The moment we experience the possession of the unsearchable riches of Christ, away all old things are swept. I know it is so. With Christ we must suffer the loss of character, reputation, comforts, and earthly ease; ay, everything that tends to bind me to this wilderness world. Having nothing" is spiritually true in the experience of every living child of God who sits at the feet of Jesus learning His will and drinking in of His Spirit. Turn to 2 Cor. vi. 10: Having nothing, and yet possessing all things." There you have it. Having nothing in this world to minister to my spiritual necessities, all things of a spiritual and eternal nature I have in Christ. It is only in the enjoyment of this covenant relationship that we possess experimentally any of the blessings treasured up in Him. Men may own broad lands, marvellous riches, vast estates, and splendid titles, but what are these apart from Him whom our souls love? Men add house to house and field to field, they build barns and store them, go to bed in the evening and wake up in the morning in hell. We boast not of our possessions here. Yet Paul could say: "All things are yours." It was in the understanding of this, I believe, that caused Dr. Watts to sing so sweetly 66 Keep silence all created things, And wait your Maker's nod ; My soul stands trembling while she sings The honours of her God. Life, death, and hell, and worlds unknown, Hang on His firm decree; He sits on no precarious throne, Nor borrows leave TO BE." All things are in His sovereign hand, and all things serve Him. What? This unstrung bundle of nerves which I feel myself to be this morning among the all things which serve Him? Yes, and together with this, the Holy Ghost thundering down to the very depths of my spiritual existence, "I will show thee greater abominations than these." See! The temptations of the devil abound, disappointments meet on every hand, hopes are blighted, expectations perish, and where I seemed to be making for myself a spot in which I could serve God with cheerfulness, there, foe after foe breaks in upon me and spoils all my fair schemes of earthly and spiritual joy. Why? To teach me that I must find my all in Him, and that all things work together for good to me. All things are yours." First of all, the ministers of the Gospel are yours. Paul, Apollos, and Cephas are given as illustrations, and here we may consider the first clause of the text, "Therefore let no man glory in men." There is an abundance of this which makes for divisions and distractions. Invidious comparisons are drawn between ministers, and one is held up to admiration while another is despised. Is one, according to the mind of the Spirit, eloquent, another favoured with a sweet experience, another deeply taught and exercised? The one is as near and as dear to the Master as the other. It is folly for the children to be bolstering up one at the expense of another. Let me give you a case in point. One Tuesday night I was away. Previous to the service, one of our friends heard that I should be absent, and said to his wife, "We won't go to chapel to-night, as Mr. B. will not be there." He went to his room to have a smoke, but God gave him no comfort there. He left the room, met his wife, both were on the same errand; they must not stay away from chapel because Mr. B. was absent. They came. My dear old friend Ponsford preached from Rom. viii. 1. He was led to speak of the Headship of Christ as seen in the comparison of Adam the first and Adam the last. Precious truth was revealed to our friends, unknown to them before; and to this day they bless God for that visit to Grove chapel. God sends His ministers with His word and fits them for their respective spheres according to His will. Some are pioneers preparing the way, others are pastors for the feeding of the flock. Gifted ministers and humble servants are equally owned of God, and it is our mercy to know that popularity is no criterion of God's approbation. All God-sent ministers are yours, and though we may, and do, prefer one before the rest, let us be careful how we speak of any of God's anointed ones. "All things are yours. "The world?" Ay, the world, though we are separated from the world that lieth in the wicked one. Yet it is a marvellous fact that the world we are separated from is ours. The devil will try to make us believe that all the pleasures in this world are at his command. As he said to the Master, so he will say to the servant, "All these things will I give thee, if." A pretty set out that! Why, all things belonged to Christ as earth's rightful Lord and Head over all creation for His Church. The devil blinds the eyes of his own with the fleeting brilliancy and fading pleasures of this world. All that the world contains and all that transpires in it is for JEHOVAH'S glory and the good of His children. "Wherefore do the wicked live?" To be God's sword to cut the cords which bind His children to earth, God's hammer to smash their hard hearts and break all their fair designs of earthly ease, God's chisel, God's rasp, God's sandpaper, to polish His jewels of electing love. Why do the tares grow together with the wheat? To keep the wheat warm. It is marvellous for us to notice how God puts all creation under contribution for the good of His Church. See! "Fire and hail; snow and vapours; stormy wind fulfilling His word" (Psa. cxlviii. 8). The fire preserved the three Hebrew children. The water defended the Israelites and drowned their enemies. In Joshua's days, hailstones defeat the armies of Canaan. Hail, lice, flies, locusts plague the Egyptians. A snow-drift shelters a praying family from persecuting foes. A Scotch mist hides the worshipping Covenanters from the bloodthirsty dragoons of Claverhouse. God is never at a loss for means to shelter, defend, and feed His own. "The earth is the Lord's," and He will use it for His own glory. 66 "All things are yours." "Life or death." Is it this miserable fleeting life which must cease at the moment of dissolution? Yes, and something more. It is life in union with a risen Jesus, life promised before the world began, life communicated by the power of the Holy Ghost. Life imperishable, yet life given for a prey. Or death." Are you afraid of it? There are some who, through fear of death, are all their lifetime subject to bondage. Death, that thing of fleshly fear, is the portal of glory, over which God has written: "Jesus Christ has abolished death and brought life and immortality to light by the Gospel." The sting of death is sin, and the end of sin is death. In the death of Christ death lost its sting, for sin was put away and every question concerning it for ever settled between God and His elect. 66 Things "Things present, or things to come," are yours. are yours. present may not be very pleasant, but they are all right, all in the will.Things to come." The anxious dread to-morrow. The toils and weariness of the coming week. The endeavours of Satan's brood to spoil our rest and soil our reputation. The dreaded hour and article of death. The promises all fulfilled. Foes all defeated. God's purposes of redeeming love all fulfilled. Entrance into glory. A glorious eternity with Him. "All are yours; and ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's." "THE BELOVED." A Sermon PREACHED IN GROVE CHAPEL, CAMBERWELL, ON SUNDAY MORNING, APRIL 21ST, 1878, BY THOMAS BRADBURY. SUCH "Accepted in the Beloved."-Ephesians i. 6. UCH precious words as these, appear too full of glorious grace for "a poor vile sinner" like me to take upon my lips. I say not this to produce effect, or to awaken any fleshly sensation in your minds, for I know that such productions last only for the moment, and such pulpit effects, arising from the flesh and the devil, will perish with the experience of them. I have no desire to appear pre-eminent in sinnership, or in the experience of sin in its heinousness, but I speak thus, because God, in spite of my desires and determinations, makes me both know and feel the truthfulness of what I have declared. It is a sweet mercy to me to be enabled intelligently, and I believe spiritually, through the teaching of the Holy Ghost, to trace out a God-given and a God-wrought experience in harmony with those whom He has made conspicuous in the display of His sovereign, rich, and all-conquering grace. As I read my Bible and my Bible reads me-I love this blessed reciprocity-I find the longer a redeemed sinner lives, and is blessed with the company and confidence of the Lord Jesus Christ as the Revealer of the Father's secrets, the Executor of the Father's will, and the more he will want to know Him. I will tell you something more. The brighter the revelation of God's Christ to his soul, and the blacker self will be in his spiritual apprehension. The more his heart is warmed with a sense of the love of his God, and the more he will mourn because of his coldness and deadness. This is a paradox which no hypocrite or mere professor can understand for a single moment. As the child of God grows in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus No. 75,-PRICE ONE PENNY Christ, and he sees more of His beauty, enjoys more of His bounty, and feels more of His blessedness, the more he is brought into a true conception of what he is in himself as a wretched, ruined, undeserving, and hell-deserving sinner. See! Left to himself, all that he can do is to disbelieve every word of God's Book. Left to himself, though he takes up the hymn book and with his lips joins in singing these precious hymns, yet his heart is cold and listless, over which he mourns and weeps. He meets with God's dear people and he judges himself the vilest of them all. He meets with the children of the devil, and though his own heart shows him the wickedness of every one of them, yet he hates to be found amongst them. But amongst them he must be found, for to shun them altogether, "then must he needs go out of the world" (1 Cor. v. 10). The wheat will grow amongst the tares, and the tares amongst the wheat, but there is no spiritual association. Business and other matters necessitate the meeting of the children of God and the children of the devil, but the heaven-born one quits the other's company as quickly as possible, not because he thinks himself better than they, for he judges his wretched nature to be a thousand times worse. Yes, he discovers in himself a concentration of all the sins of all the people in the universe, and he discovers something else—a heart, yearning, longing, panting and desiring after communion with a glorious God, and fellowship with a precious Christ. He would embrace God's Christ with a warmth of love hitherto unknown, and he would remain in the heart-reviving embrace of the arms of everlasting love. It is no mean privilege to be brought into such an experience as this. When it is developed in the heart and understanding by the grace and indwelling of God the ever-blessed Spirit, Christ is exalted and self is ignored and excluded. This we see in the experience of the apostle Paul. When he was confronted by those who called in question his apostleship, he could say, "In nothing am I behind the very chiefest apostles, though I be nothing" (2 Cor. xii. 11). That appears to be high ground for Paul to take; but it was not a whit too high for God to give him, and what God had given, he had a right to maintain. For personal position and official importance the Spirit-taught child of God cares little, while the mere professor will aim for them with all his might. Perhaps the people of God sometimes put too low an estimate on the gifts of His providence, and hold them with too loose a hand: but for a man to aspire to a pulpit and make himself a king in it is purely absurd. king! A poor wretched pauper to be a king in a pulpit? A man who has a true conception of himself in the light of infinite excellency, and who measures himself according to the infinite perfections of his Lord and Master, will seek, not his own glory, but God's; not his own exaltation, but Christ's; not his own honour, but the Spirit's. The true estimate which the God-sent A |