Praise and thank God for His sustenance and blessings and for  all who have been a part of ChristianBlessings these past five years.

It is my prayer   you have been blessed as I have been.

In looking ahead I asked the Lord for a  verse:

” Wherefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” 1 Corinthians 5:8

I. The Christian life ought to be a continual feast. Can this Christian life be in a continual feast?  It is more usually represented as a fight, a wrestle, a race.  But the metaphor of the feast goes deeper than that of the fight or race. Central to all, the Christian life is a glad festival, when it is the life that it ought to be. Is continual joy  possible in the presence of the difficulties, and often sadness, that meet us on our life’s path?  Should we  pump up emotions, or  ignore the occasions of much heaviness and sorrow of heart?

a.  It is possible to cultivate such a temper as makes life habitually joyful. We can choose the aspect under which we by preference and habitually regard our lives. All emotion follows upon a preceding thought, or sensible experience, and we can pick the objects of our thoughts, and determine what aspect of our lives to look at most. The sky is often piled with stormy, heaped-up masses of blackness, but between them are lakes of calm blue. We can choose whether we look at the clouds or at the blue.  If we are wise, we shall fix our gaze much rather on the blue than on the ugly cloud-rack that hides it. We can  minister to ourselves the noble kind of joy which is not noisy and boisterous, but is calm; still, like the heaven to which it looks; eternal, like the God on whom it is fastened.

b. If we would only steadfastly remember that the one source of worthy and enduring joy is God Himself, and listen to the command, ‘Rejoice in the Lord,’ we should find it possible to ‘rejoice always.’ For that thought of Him, His sufficiency, His nearness, His encompassing presence, His prospering eye, His aiding hand, His gentle consolation, His enabling help will take the sting out of even the bitterest of our sorrows, and will brace us to sustain the heaviest, otherwise crushing burdens, and greatly to ‘rejoice, though now for a season we are in heaviness through manifold temptations.’

c. We can clearly recognise the occasions for sorrow in our experience, and yet interpret them by the truths of the Christian faith.  We can think of them, – not so much as they tend to make us sad or glad, – but as they tend to make us more assured of our possession of, more ardent in our love towards  and more submissive in our attitude to, the all-ordering Love which is God.

d. If we think  of life, and all its incidents, even when these are darkest and most threatening, as being , His training of us into capacity for fuller blessedness, for fuller possession of Himself, we should be less startled at the commandment, ‘Rejoice in the Lord always,’ and feel that it is possible, yet to rejoice in the God of our salvation. Rightly understood and pondered on, it will teach us that the paradoxical commandment, ‘Count it all joy that ye fall into divers temptations,’ is, after all, the voice of true wisdom speaking at the dictation of a clear-eyed faith. The realisation of this continual festal aspect of life, is very largely in our own power.

Dispositions differ, some of us are constitutionally inclined to look at the blacker, and some at the brighter, side of our experiences. But our Christianity is worth little unless it can modify, and to some extent change, our natural tendencies. The joy of the Lord being our strength, the cultivation of joy in the Lord is largely our duty.

II. The Christian life is a continual feeding on a sacrifice. ‘Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us. Wherefore let us keep the feast.’ How   great was the self-assertion of Jesus Christ when He laid His hand on that most of Jewish rites,  to be a perpetual memorial through all generations: ‘You do not need to remember the Passover any more. I am the true Paschal Lamb, whose blood sprinkled on the doorposts averts the sword of the destroying Angel, whose flesh, partaken of, gives immortal life. Remember Me, and this do in remembrance of Me.’

The point to be observed is this, that just as in that ancient ritual, the lamb slain became the food of the Israelites, so with us the Christ who has died is to be the sustenance of our souls, and of our Christian life. ‘Therefore let us keep the feast.’

Feed upon Him; that is the essential central requirement for all Christian life, and what does feeding on Him mean? ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’ The flesh which He gave for the life of the world in His death, must by us be taken for the very nourishment of our souls, by the simple act of faith in Him – feeding which brings not only sustenance but life. Christ’s death for us is the basis, but it is only the basis, of Christ’s living in us, and His death for me is of no use at all to me unless He that died for me lives in me. Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, wherefore let us keep the Feast.’

We keep the feast

a. when our minds feed upon Christ. by contemplation of what He is, what He has done, what He is doing, what He will do; when we take Him as ‘the Master-light of all our seeing,’ and in Him, His words and works, His Passion, Resurrection, Ascension, sitting as Sovereign at the right hand of God, find the perfect revelation of what God is, the perfect discovery of what man is, the perfect disclosure of what sin is, the perfect prophecy of what man may become, the Light of light, the answer to every question that our spirits can put about the loftiest belief  of God and man, the universe and the future.

b.  when, with lowly submission, we habitually subject thoughts, purposes, desires, to His authority, and when we let His will flow into, and make plastic and supple, our wills. We nourish our wills by submitting them to Jesus, and we feed on Him when we not only say ‘Lord! Lord!’ but when we do the things that He says.

c.  when we let His great, sacred, all-wise, all-giving, all satisfying love flow into our restless hearts and make them still, enter into our vagrant affections and fix them on Himself. Thus when mind and conscience and will and heart all turn to Jesus, and in Him find their sustenance, we shall be filled with the feast of fat things which He has prepared for His people. With that bread we shall be satisfied, and with it only, for the husks of the swine are no food for the Father’s son, and we ‘spend our money for that which is not bread, and our labour for that which satisfieth not,’ if we look anywhere else than to the Paschal Lamb slain for us for the food of our souls.

III. The Christian life is a continual purging the old leaven.

In the Jewish Ritual, the cleansing from all that was leavened was the essential pre-requisite to the participation in the feast. Feeding on Jesus Christ,  is absolutely impossible unless our leaven is cleansed away. Children spoil their appetites for wholesome food by eating sweetmeats. Men destroy their capacity for feeding on Christ by hungry desires, and gluttonous satisfying of those desires with the delusive sweets of this passing world. Your experience, if you are a Christian will tell you that in the direct measure in which you have been drawn away into paltering with evil, your appetite for Christ and your capacity for gazing upon Him, contemplating Him, feeding on Him, has died out.  Let us remember that absolute cleansing from all sin is not essential, in order to have real participation in Jesus Christ.

For this power to cleanse you, you must

a.  have accepted Christ as Savior and Lord

b.  be what you are; realise your ideal, utilise the power you possess in Christ, and since by your faith there has been given to you a new life that can conquer all corruption and sin, see that you use the life that is given

c.  purge out the old leaven because ye are unleavened. You must cast it out, or it will choke the better thing in you. It spreads and grows, and propagates itself, and works underground through and through the whole mass.

If you do not eject Evil it will eject the good from you. Use the implanted power to cast out this creeping, advancing evil. It is possible for us all to keep this perpetual feast. To live in and  for Jesus Christ will give us victory over enemies, burdens, sorrows, sins.

We may, if we will, dwell in a calm zone where no tempests rage, hear a perpetual strain of sweet music persisting through thunder peals of sorrow and suffering, and find a table spread for us in the presence of our enemies, at which we shall renew our strength for conflict, and whence we shall rise to fight the good fight a little longer, till we sit with Him at His table in His Kingdom, and ‘eat, and live for ever.’

Praise the Lord!

Join me even as we walk this coming year  with the Lord, posting on this site what He inspires us  to write in blogs or comment , in the days ahead

. The life He calls us to is one of victory and joy, whatever the circumstance, so long as we abide in Him and purge ourselves of the dross of this world. The Lord help us to live as joint-heirs with and in Christ.

ptl2010

NOTE: it is not burying my head in the sand, but Christ living in me. Glory to The Lord!

Philippians 4:12-13

http://www.godtube.com/watch/?v=0CC19CNU

Reference and extracts : MacLaren’s Exposition of the Holy Scripture – I Corinthians.