THE "GO" OF RELATIONSHIP
"And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain."
Matthew 5:41
The summing up of Our Lord's teaching is that the relationship which
He demands is an impossible one unless He has done a supernatural
work in us. Jesus Christ demands that there be not the slightest
trace of resentment even suppressed in the heart of a disciple when
he meets with tyranny and injustice. No enthusiasm will ever stand
the strain that Jesus Christ will put upon His worker, only one thing
will, and that is a personal relationship to Himself which has gone
through the mill of His spring-cleaning until there is only one
purpose left - I am here for God to send me where He will. Every
other thing may get fogged, but this relationship to Jesus Christ
must never be.
The Sermon on the Mount is not an ideal, it is a statement of what
will happen in me when Jesus Christ has altered my disposition and
put in a disposition like His own. Jesus Christ is the only One Who
can fulfil the Sermon on the Mount.
If we are to be disciples of Jesus, we must he made disciples
supernaturally; as long as we have the dead set purpose of being
disciples we may be sure we are not. "I have chosen you." That is the
way the grace of God begins. It is a constraint we cannot get away
from; we can disobey it, but we cannot generate it. The drawing is
done by the supernatural grace of God, and we never can trace where
His work begins. Our Lord's making of a disciple is supernatural. He
does not build on any natural capacity at all. God does not ask us to
do the things that are easy to us naturally; He only asks us to do
the things we are perfectly fitted to do by His grace, and the cross
will come along that line always.
My Upmost For His Highest by Oswald Chambers September 25th