[*]The glorified Jesus comes into us as we want Him and invite Him to come. He comes to abide forever if we are wise enough to want and choose for Him to abide and increase unto perfect triumph. After we receive Him we have but one problem, and that is to choose to abide in Him and to be perpetually giving His Love to all. This might be called the first key.
In my quest for abiding in Him, I had become aware that it was so all-important I must give up everything that separated me from Him. I was willing to make the separation and expected it to be very costly. I was seeking to find out what to give up when it was spoken through me, “My presence shall go with thee and give thee rest. Go in love and I will always go with thee.” A new world opened to me. I did not have to give up, but I had to give forth—I had to give forth love, only love and all possible love to everybody and everything.
One may do so-called spiritual work and render so-called Christian service in an unloving spirit and thus be dry, uninspired and dull; and one may wash dishes or dirty clothes or plow a mule in the new ground and do it in love and joy and conscious, intimate fellowship and union with Him. The love test is the Test of Tests. He being love, we have to abide in love, go in love, and do all things in love in order to abide in Him. When we get out of love we get out of Him. And when we repent and get back in love, we get back in Him, and get back where we went out.
Paul Moody, the youngest son of Dwight L. Moody, says the most precious memory he has of his great father was the night after he had been somewhat severe on him during the day. After little Paul had retired he felt a large hand over his head and his father was there asking his forgiveness. When you go in love and humility it is easy to receive forgiveness and to be more loved, and to be far more loving.
A distinguished Methodist minister gave this testimony while preaching in my home town. When he was a boy he was so happily converted he was essentially walking in glory while out in the field plowing old Betsy. She wanted to bite off a peach tree and he was determined that she should not. She stole a march or him and did it; the devil stole a march on him and made him very angry. He jerked the blood out of her mouth and unmercifully beat her. Of course he went spiritually dead. The contrast with being alive was so painful that he threw himself in the furrow behind the plow asking God to forgive him.
Nothing seemed to happen until he arose and threw his arms around the old mare and asked her forgiveness. Then he was back in more glory than before. Through anger he got out of love and through repentance to God and to the old mare he was put back in more love than before the offense.
So as we have seen, wherever you get out of love is where you must get back in love. If you have violated the spirit and law of love in dealing with your own wife, you’ll have to repent to her as well as to God. You could not be sweet enough with all the other women in the world to get back.
This is illustrated in mathematics. Whenever you make a mistake the correction has to be made in terms of the mistake. You might be correct in all the rest of mathematics but you will never be happily at one with mathematics until correction is made at the point of error.
Jesus Christ Who is perfect Love is reconciling us to God who is perfect Love, and we have to be reconciled to be loving in the whole of life. And whenever we miss the way of love we have the blessed privilege of seeing our mistake, asking forgiveness and becoming more loving than before the violation.
The second key made known to me of ineffable union is to put this union with Him first. As Jesus put it, keep first the Kingdom of Heaven and everything else that is good and desirable will be added. Whatever we do we have to do in love and this love will always be a pure love if we always keep first this keeping in union with Him. If we are not in union we have to get in union before we are of any real service to Him or to anyone. We are as worthless when separated from Him as a branch is when separated from the vine.
In union with Him everything clicks. You hardly have to do things. They seem to do themselves. Outside of union with Him we are of no value except to repent and get back.
If you are away from home don’t try to find out which of two wrong things you should do. Leave everything and return to Him. In union with Him you will know what to do; let your supreme concern be to be in union; if you are out of union get back in union and when in union increase in union. If we put first that which is first, which is perfect union with Him and perpetual outflow of love towards all, everything else is cared for.
The third key of achieving this union with Him is to be dedicated to continuous fellowship and prayer. Both in prayer and in fellowship if we are wise we give Him first chance to speak to us and we look to Him to do the leading. He says so much when He even says a little, while we say so little even when we say so much.
While praying on May 6, 1927, I said to Him, “Is there anything You would like to say to me?” I had a hearty laugh with myself even before I gave Him an opportunity to answer. I said to myself, “Even if I had called on me no more important that the President of the United States and talked like a blue streak until I was telling him good-bye and then said, `Mr. President, would you like to put in a word?’ the laugh would have been on me.”
After the laugh, this was given. “I want you to be in Me all of the time and I give you the keys.” I knew the keys were not authority to judge, but the secrets of entering and abiding in Him.
Three days later when I was speaking to a small group I said, “This ineffable union with Jesus, or the Kingdom of Heaven as a perfect experience, is at hand; all we have to do is to leave on the outside everything that is keeping us on the outside and come in.” Then it was put before my mind the things on the outside of the holy city and the holy presence, murderers, adulterers, and liars and unbelievers and everything that works harm or injury to anyone. Love works no injury but all possible good, so everything that is unloving, everything that is harmful, everything that is against life and against joy has to be left on the outside.
The fourth key is to humble yourself as a little child at the feet of Jesus. The smaller you are the easier it is to get in. The gate is just large enough to let you and all possibilities of good enter, and narrow enough to keep out all that would keep Heaven from being Heaven if it were not kept out.
At the place of utter yielding and humility with the key of holy love, we enter into Him and are placed where we belong in the body of Jesus Christ or Kingdom of God. Each is placed just where he belongs and given the work that he can do best of all. Here one does his work so well and so happily if necessary he would pay for the privilege of doing it, and yet does it so well he gets the best pay of all.
Until one finds something so good he must tell it he really has nothing worth saying. If you have to pay a man to preach, you had better pay him not to preach, for he really has nothing worth listening to. We are all comparatively worthless and inefficient outside of Him and His will and best work for us. We are all tops in His best will for us and doing the thing and the things we can do best of all.
Another key or secret of ineffable union with Him is to have great delight in doing His will. This comes with the new covenant. The old covenant failed because it sought to force us to do things we knew we ought to do but did not enjoy doing. The new succeeds because right desire and delight are written in the heart and in the mind, so like Jesus we delight Above all else in doing His will. When we love to do what we should do, we are essentially in Heaven no matter how much hell there may appear to be around about us. Here we go to His will like birds go to the air. Yes, this is the deepest secret of all, to love greatly and to delight in Him and in doing His will. Here we find His will is always that which is the wisest and the best and the happiest for all.
The new covenant succeeds because it puts His will within ours, His desire within ours, His mind within ours; and then we discover that His will is the wisest thing of all and the happiest thing of all.
Everything is promised to the overcomer. And to be an overcomer we have to meet all evil with good. If we meet any evil with evil we are overcome by this very evil. We can never overcome hate except with love, and we will find in the end the only way we will overcome the sword will be with the cross.
To abide in Him we will have to be perpetually giving His love, as well as receiving His love. We have to receive before we can give and we have to give to continue in receiving. As good as it is to receive His love, it is still better to give His love.
It is comparatively easy to receive the Holy Spirit and to receive the glorified Jesus within. He is knocking and longing to come in and is much more desirous to baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire and with power and glory than our Baptist friends are to baptize with water. He is always ready. We only have to make ourselves ready and to offer ourselves to be made ready. But as we have seen, the entering and abiding in Him require that we let go the things within and without which keep us out of Him, and humble ourselves and become happily yielded to His guidance and to His best for us and for all.
This becomes easy enough when we learn the secret of being angry at sin and at the same time loving and compassionate to the sinner. We have to hate iniquity as well as love righteousness. But at the same time we have to have love and compassion for those who have been caught in iniquity and to love them all the more because of their great need of love and deliverance. Jesus is the perfect example of this. He loves sinners and they love to be with Him. I mean sinners who know they are sinners. He had great compassion for them and gave Himself in love for their deliverance.
In this connection, one finds himself in the will and love and inspiration of Jesus, ceasing from all judgments of condemnation unto defeat and giving himself with Jesus to the judgments of love and mercy unto victory.
Jesus saw in Peter (even while he was apparently as unstable as water) a stone and gave him the new name even before he brought forth the new man. He saw in Saul of Tarsus (who upon his own conviction was the chief of sinners) the possibility in His hand of becoming one of the chiefest of saints. This attitude towards sinners is most effective in bringing them into the Kingdom. It is the only attitude that can be used to bring them in and to keep you in while dealing with them.
As previously indicated still another key to the abundant life and the continuous union with Him is to know as friend Mrs. Jerry Gerlach has put it, “The self-deception of self-effort is just as subtle as the self-deception of self-righteousness.”
We are as dependent upon Him for our skills and successes, for our life and health and all else in the so-called natural world as we are dependent upon Him for salvation and righteousness and for all the Heavenly gifts. When we see this we learn to do everything in joyous dependence upon Him, and all of our activities, instead of separating us from Him, will bring us into deeper union. As long as our so-called secular activities are separated from the spiritual, the secular takes our mind off of the spiritual. But when seen in the true light the secular is a part of the spiritual. In the Heavenly city there is no Temple, there is no religion apart from Life there. Life and worship have become one; all life is worship; all work is worship and all worship is love. In this City there is no lack; even the streets are paved with gold. There is nothing that should not be. In perfect union there is perfect everything else.
Footnotes / Endnotes:
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- * [Note, footnote is on the Subtitle word Keys*.] For a report of the quest for the secrets or keys of the Kingdom, see Manifest Victory, pp. 113-166. See also the author’s chapter in Together, by Glenn Clark et al., published by Abingdon-Cokesbury. (↩)