"SOUL FOOD"
The same truths we learn or experience in the beginning of religious life can be so broadened and intensified to us by the Holy Spirit that they seem new to us; hence the same terms we used to express ourselves by are inadequate to convey the deeper meaning of our hearts. Suppose a young child, a grown person recently converted, a perfected and anointed believer, a disembodied saint in heaven, and one of the oldest angels, were all standing together, and should all repeat in concert the words, "God is love!" What an almost infinite difference there would be in the meaning of those words to each of the five persons respecting the words. While the words are the same, yet, in the apprehension of their significance, there is as great disparity as between a drop of water and the ocean.
There are very few enlargements of the heart in Divine things till the believer passes the Jordan of sanctification; and even then the great expansions and uplifts into the supernatural life of the Holy Ghost will depend on many conditions.
All the words of God are susceptible to innumerable degrees of meaning, so that the same passage can be fulfilled in us over and over, in a deeper measure, until it hardly seems the same Scripture it used to be; and even in the resurrection and glorified states, we will find the words of the Bible accomplished in us in a measure beyond all our present dreams of their meaning. This thought is eminently true when applied to the manifestation of Christ to our inner spirit.
Just suppose we could open every Christian mind on earth, and get a correct picture of what each one has of the Lord Jesus in his or her heart. What a picture gallery it would make! What the blessed Jesus is to us in our heart and mind, measures what we are to Him and for Him. It is the operation of the Holy Spirit upon our perceptions, mostly in secret prayer, by which Jesus grows on us, till all our early views of Him are eclipsed by deeper and sweeter visions of His person and character. Of this widening perception of Christ in the mind, Faber very sweetly sings:
"Thou broadenest out with every year,
Each breadth of life to meet,
I scarce can think Thou art the same,
Thou art so much more sweet.
"With age Thou growest more divine,
More glorious than before,
I fear Thee with a deeper fear,
Because I love Thee more.
"Changed and not changed, Thy present charms,
Thy past ones only prove,
Oh, make my heart more strong to bear
This newness of Thy love.
"Jesus! what hast Thou grown to now?
A joy, all joys above,
Something more sacred than a fear,
More tender than a love.
"With gentle swiftness lead me on,
Dear God! to see Thy face;
And meanwhile in my narrow heart,
Oh, make Thyself more space!"
The newness that Faber speaks of is not really in Jesus or His love, but in our newer apprehension of Him. Oh, what an unlimited field of work the Spirit has to open up all our capabilities to the perceiving and receiving of the riches of Christ!
It often happens that, just after coming through some great loss, or crushing sorrow, or dark trial, that the heart will get a broader, brighter, sweeter view of the Lord than ever in the past, as if the stretching of the soul by intense suffering has qualified it for an outlet into the depths of God.
There are riches in Jesus which can be opened to us in prayer, for which there are no corresponding words in our language; traits of His character, insights into His God-man personality, glimpses of glory, emotions imparted from Him, unutterable charms revealed to us, which work swift wonders and enlargement in us, but which we are unable to interpret to anyone else. Paul's vision into God may have been a thousand-fold deeper than anything I ever had, when he exclaimed, "Oh, the depth of the riches!" But after eighteen centuries in a sea of glory, what must be his vision of those riches to-day!
Inasmuch as every truth of Scripture is susceptible to being manifested to our souls in an almost unlimited degree of pungency, clearness and force, we should diligently seek for the Holy Spirit to continually increase these things in us. The depth and altitudes of Divine things can not be had by chance, or under the delusion that God will work them in us anyhow, if we only lie passive in His hand. There are many times and things in which our only true work is to lie passive in God's will, but in other things it requires thoughtfulness, constant, persevering co-operation -WITH- the Spirit, to reach the ever- widening fullness of His promises.
As our days go by, the feeling of repentance, of sorrow for sin, of self-nothingness, of gentleness of thought, of tenderness for others, of the vividness of Jesus and His coming, and the reality of all eternal things, should steadily grow in brighter colors and hotter emotions in our souls. Only see how dull and sluggish all our nature is toward Divine realities; that even after we have been converted and sanctified, the awful effect of the morphine of sin has left such a deposit of indolence and mental stupidity in us as to demand incessant zeal to realize the brightness and power of heavenly things.
Soon -- oh, soon! -- we are to stand right in the blazing realities of God and eternity,
and all our faculties are hardly half awake. Do we often think of that inexpressible hour
when we shall gaze on our precious Jesus for the first time? Have we seriously
determined in union -WITH- the Holy Ghost that all spiritual things shall be more and
more real to us? God looks at the determinations of our hearts, and if we want the Holy
Spirit to make things powerful to us, we must determine that He shall.
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