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STUDIES IN
THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

STUDIES IN

THE SERMON
ON THE MOUNT

OSWALD CHAMBERS

Author of

"Shade of His Hand" "Baffied to Fight Better"
"Biblical Psychology," etc.

" We may an be disciples. Why should we not be

scholars of the one Teacher? Come, let Him lure

thee — give up all other teachers and hear this

Teacher sent from God"

LONDON:
SIMPKIN MARSHALL, LTD.

STATIONERS' HALL COURT, E.G. 4

EMMANUEL

STOP

Fourth Edition.

NOV 1 6 -348

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
THB ALDEN PRESS (OXFORD) LTD., OXFORD

INTRODUCTION

IN order to understand the Sermon on the Mount, it
is necessary to have the mind of the Preacher, and this
knowledge can be gained by anyone who will receive the
Holy Spirit (see Luke XL 13, John XX. 22, Acts XIX. 2).
The Holy Ghost is the only expounder of the teachings of
Jesus. The one abiding method of interpretation of the
teachings of Jesus is the Spirit of Jesus in the heart of a
believer applying His principles to the particular circum
stances in which he is placed. Be renewed in the spirit
of your mind, says Paul, that you may make out what is
that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.

Beware of placing Our Lord as Teacher first instead of
as Saviour. That tendency is prevalent to-day, and it is
a' dangerous tendency. We must know Him first as
Saviour before His teaching has any meaning for us, or
before it has any meaning other than that of an ideal
which leads to despair. Fancy coming to men and women
with defective lives and defiled hearts and wrong main
springs, and telling them to be pure in heart ! What is
the use of giving us an ideal we cannot possibly attain ?
We are happier without knowing it. If Jesus is only a
Teacher, then all He can do is to tantalise us by erecting a
standard we cannot come anywhere near. But if we know
Him first as Saviour, by being born again from above, we
know that He did not come to teach us only : He came to
make us what He teaches we should be. The Sermon on the
Mount is a statement of the life we will live when the Holy
Spirit is having His way with us.

ii STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

The Sermon on the Mount must produce despair in the
natural man ; and that is the very thing Jesus means it
to do, because immediately we get to despair we are willing
to come to Jesus as paupers and to receive from Him.
" Blessed are the poor in spirit " — that is the first prin
ciple of the Kingdom. So long as we have a conceited,
self-righteous notion that we can do the thing if God will
help us, God has to allow us to go on until we break the
neck of our ignorance over some obstacle, then we are
willing to come and receive from Him. The bedrock in
Jesus Christ's Kingdom is poverty, not possession ; not
decisions for Jesus Christ, but a sense of absolute futility —
" I cannot begin to do it." Then, says Jesus, " Blessed are
you." That is the entrance, and it does take us a long
while to believe we are poor. The knowledge of our own
poverty brings us to the moral frontier where Jesus Christ
works.

N.B. — The Conscious and Subconscious mind.

Every mind has two compartments — conscious and
subconscious. We say that the things we hear and read
slip away from memory, they do not really, they go into
the subconscious mind. It is the work of the Holy Spirit
to bring back into the conscious mind the things that are
stored in the subconscious. In studying the Bible never go
on the line that because you do not understand it, therefore
it is of no use. A truth may be of no use to you just now,
but when the circumstances arise in which that truth is
needed, the Holy Spirit will bring it back to your remem
brance. This accounts for the curious emergence of the
statements of Jesus ; we say — " I wonder where that word
came from." " He shall bring back to your remembrance
the things I have said unto you." The point is — will I obey
Him when He does bring it back ? If I discuss the matter

INTRODUCTION

with someone else, the probability is that I will not obey.
" Immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood. . . ."
Always trust the originality of the Holy Spirit when He
brings a word back.

Bear in mind this twofold aspect of the mind, there is
nothing supernatural or uncanny about it, it is simply a
knowledge of how God has made us. It is foolish, therefore,
to estimate only by what you consciously understand at
the time. There may be much you do not begin to grasp
the meaning of, but as you go on storing your mind with
Bible knowledge, the Holy Spirit will bring back to your
conscious mind the word you need and apply it to your,
particular circumstances. These three things always
work together — my moral intelligence, the spontaneous
originality of the Holy Spirit, and the setting of a life
lived in communion with God.

CONTENTS

PAGE

STUDY NO. 1. HIS TEACHING AND OUR TRAINING - 1

„ „ 2. ACTUAL AND REAL - - 12
„ „ 3. INCARNATE WISDOM AND INDIVIDUAL

REASON - 35

„ 4. CHARACTER AND CONDUCT - 62

5 [DEAS, IDEALS AND ACTUALITY - 79

STUDY No. 1.
KIS TEACHING AND OUR TRAINING.

Matthew V. 1-24.

(1) DIVINE DISPROPORTION. Matthew V. 1-12.

(a) The "Mines" of God. vv. 1-10 (cf. Luke VI. 20-26).

(b) The Motive of Godliness, vv. 11-12.

(2) DIVINE DISADVANTAGE. Matthew V. 13-16.

(a) Concentrated Service, v. 13.

(b) Conspicuous Setting, vv. 14-16.

(3) DIVINE DECLARATION. Matthew V. 17-20.

(a) His Mission, w. 17-19.

(b) His Message, v. 20.

(1) DIVINE DISPROPORTION, vv. 1-12. Our

Lord began His discourse by saying — " Blessed are . . . ,"
and His hearers must have been staggered by what fol
lowed. According to Jesus, they were to be blessed in
every condition which from earliest childhood they had
been taught to regard as a curse. Our Lord was talking
to Jews, and they believed that the sign of the blessing of
God was material prosperity in every shape and form, and
yet Jesus says — Blessed are you for exactly the opposite.
" Blessed are the poor in spirit." " Blessed are they that
mourn."

(a) The "Mines" of God. vv. 1-10.

The first time you read the Beatitudes they appear
beautiful and simple and unstartling statements, and they

2 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

go unobserved into the subconscious mind. We are so
used to reading the sayings of Jesus that they slip over us
unheeded, they sound sweet and pious and wonderfully
simple, but in reality they are like spiritual torpedoes that
burst and explode in the subconscious mind, and when
the Holy Spirit brings them back to our consciousness we
realise what startling statements they are. The Beati
tudes, for instance, seem merely mild and beautiful precepts
for unworldly people but of very little use for the stern
world in which we live. We soon find, however, that they
contain the dynamite of the Holy Ghost, they explode like
a spiritual " mine " when the circumstances of our life
require them to do so, and rip and tear and revolutionise
all our conceptions.

The test of a disciple is obedience to the light when these
things come to the conscious mind. It is not that I hunt
through the Bible for some precept to obey (Jesus Christ's
teaching never leads me to take myself as a moral prig) ;
but that I live so in touch with God that the Holy Spirit
can continually bring some word of His and apply it to the
circumstances I am in. I am not brought to the test
until the Holy Spirit brings the word back.

It is not a question of applying the Beatitudes literally,
but of allowing the life of God to invade you by regenera
tion, and then of soaking your mind in the teaching of
Jesus which slips down into the subconscious mind ; by
and bye a set of circumstances arises when one of His
statements emerges, and instantly you have to decide
whether you will accept the tremendous spiritual revolu
tion that will be produced if you do obey this precept of
Jesus. If you do obey it, your actual life becomes differ
ent ; and you find you have the power to obey it if you will.
That is the way the Holy Spirit works in the heart of a

HIS TEACHING AND OUR TRAINING 3

disciple. The teaching of Jesus comes with astonishing
discomfort to begin with, because it is out of all proportion
to our natural way of looking at things ; but Jesus puts
in a new sense of proportion and we have slowly to form
our walk and conversation on the line of His precepts.
Remember that our Lord's teaching applies only to His
disciples.

(b) The Motive of Godliness, vv. 11-12.

The motive at the back of the precepts of the Sermon on
the Mount is love for God. Read the Beatitudes with
your mind fixed on God, and you will realise their neglected
side. Their meaning in relationship to men is so obvious
that it scarcely needs stating, but the Godward aspect is
not so obvious. " Blessed are the poor in spirit " — towards
God. Am I a pauper towards God ? Do I know I cannot
prevail in prayer ; I cannot blot out the sins of the past ;
I cannot alter my disposition ; I cannot lift myself nearer
God ? Then I am in the very place where I am able to
receive the Holy Spirit. No man can receive Holy Spirit
who is not convinced he is a pauper spiritually. " Blessed
are the meek " — towards God's dispensations. " Blessed
are the merciful " — to God's reputation. Do I awaken
sympathy for myself when I am in trouble ? Then I am
slandering God because the reflex thought in people's
minds is — How hard God is with that man. It is easy to
slander God's character because He never attempts to
vindicate Himself. " Blessed are the pure in heart " —
that is obviously Godward. " Blessed are the peace
makers " — between God and man, the note that was struck
at the birth of Jesus.

Is it possible to carry out the Beatitudes ? Never !
Unless God can do what Jesus says He can, give us the
Holy Spirit who will re-make us and bear us into a new

4 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

realm. The essential life of the saint is simplicity, and
Jesus makes the motive of godliness gloriously simple,
viz : Be carefully careless about everything saving your
relationship to Me. The motive of a disciple is to be well-
pleasing to God. The true blessedness of the saint is in
determinedly making and keeping God first. Herein lies
the disproportion between Jesus Christ's principles and all
other moral teaching : Jesus bases everything on God-
realisation, while other teachers base everything on
self-realisation.

There is a difference between devotion to principles and
devotion to a Person. Jesus never proclaimed a cause ;
He proclaimed personal devotion to Himself — For My sake.
Discipleship is based not on devotion to abstract ideals,
but on devotion to a Person, the Lord Jesus Christ,
consequently the whole of the Christian life is stamped by
originality. Whenever the Holy Spirit sees a chance of
glorifying Jesus, He will take your whole personality, and
simply make it blaze and glow with personal passionate
devotion to the Lord Jesus. You are no longer devoted to
a cause nor the devotee of a principle, but the devoted
love slave of the Lord Jesus. No man on earth has that
love unless the Holy Ghost has imparted it to him. Men
may admire Him and respect Him and reverence Him,
but no man can love God • until the Holy Ghost has
shed abroad that love in his heart (see Romans V. 5.)
The only Lover of the Lord Jesus Christ is the Holy
Ghost.

Jesus puts all this blessedness of high virtue and rare
felicity on the ground of — For My sake. " Blessed are ye,
when men shall revile you and persecute you, and shall
say all manner of evil against you falsely, for My sake."
It is not suffering for conscience' sake, or for convictions'

HIS TEACHING AND OUR TRAINING 5

sake, or because of the ordinary troubles of life, but some
thing other than all that — For My sake.

" Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when
they shall separate you from their company, and shall
reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son
of Man's sake." Jesus did not say — Rejoice when men
separate you from their company because of your own
crochetty notions — but when they reproach you for My
sake. When you begin to deport yourself among men as a
saint, they will leave you absolutely alone, you will be
reviled and persecuted. No man can stand that unless
he is in love with Jesus Christ, he cannot do it for a con
viction or for a creed, but he can do it for a Being whom
he loves. Devotion to a Person is the only thing -that
tells ; devotion to death to a Person, not devotion to a
creed or a doctrine.

"Who that one moment has the least descried Him,

Dimly and faintly, hidden and afar —
Doth not despise all excellence beside Him,

Pleasures and powers that are not and that are.

Ay, amid all men bear himself thereafter
Smit with a solemn and a sweet surprise,

Dumb to their scorn and turning on their laughter
Only the dominance of earnest eyes."

(2) DIVINE DISADVANTAGE, vv. 13-16.

The disadvantage of a saint in the present order of
things is that he has to make his confession of Jesus not
in secret, but glaringly public. It would doubtless be to
our advantage from the self-realisation standpoint to keep
quiet, and nowadays the tendency is growing stronger to
say — Be a Christian, live a holy life, but don't talk about
it. Our Lord uses as illustrations the most conspicuous

6 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

things known to men, e.g., salt, light, and a city set on a
hill, and He says — Be like that in your home, in your
business, in your church ; be conspicuously a Christian for
ridicule or for respect according to the mood of the people
you are with. Again in Matthew X. Our Lord taught the
need to be conspicuous proclaimers of the truth and not
to cover it up for fear of wolfish men. (vv. 26-28.)

(a) Concentrated Service, v. 13.

Not consecrated service, but concentrated. Consecration
would soon be changed into sanctification if we would only
concentrate on what God wants. Concentration means
pinning down the four corners of the mind until it is settled
on what God wants. The literal interpretation of the
Sermon on the Mount is child's play ; the interpretation
by the Holy Spirit is the stern work of a saint, and it
requires spiritual concentration.

" Ye are the salt of the earth." Some modern teachers
seem to think Our Lord said " Ye are the sugar of the
earth," meaning that gentleness and winsomeness without
curativeness is the ideal of the Christian. Our Lord's
illustration of a Christian is salt, and salt is the most
concentrated thing known. Salt preserves wholesomeness
and prevents decay. It is a disadvantage to be salt.
Think of the action of salt in a wound and you realise that.
If you get salt into a wound, it hurts, and if God's children
get amongst those who are " raw " towards God, their
presence hurts. The man who is wrong with God is like
an open wound, and when salt gets in it causes annoyance
and distress and he is spiteful and bitter. The disciples
of Jesus in the present dispensation preserve society from
corruption. The " salt " causes excessive irritation which
spells persecution for the saint.

How are we to maintain the healthy salty tang of saint-

HIS TEACHING AND OUR TRAINING 7

liness? By remaining rightly related to God through
Jesus Christ. In the present dispensation, Jesus says, the
kingdom of God is within you without observation, men
are called on to live out His teaching in an age that will
not recognise Him, and that spells limitation and very
often persecution. This is the day of the humiliation of
the saints ; in the next dispensation it will be the glori
fication of the saints, and the Kingdom of God will be out
side as well as inside men.

(b) Conspicuous Setting, vv. 14-16.

The illustrations Our Lord uses are all conspicuous
viz., salt, light and a city set on a hill. There is no possi
bility of mistaking them. Salt to preserve from corrup
tion has to be placed in the midst of it, and before it can
do its work it causes excessive irritation which spells
persecution. Light attracts bats and night moths, and
points out the way for burglars as well as for honest people :
Jesus would have us remember that men will certainly
defraud us. A city is the gathering place for all the human
driftwood that will not work for its own living, and the
Christian will have any number of parasites and ungrateful
hangers-on. All these considerations form a powerful
temptation to pretend we are not salt, to put our light
under a bushel, and to cover our city with a fog. But
Jesus will have nothing in the nature of a covert disciple.

" Ye are the light of the world." You cannot soil
light, you may try to grasp a beam of light with the sootiest
hand, but you leave no mark on the light. A sunbeam may
shine into the filthiest hovel in the slums of a city but it
cannot be soiled. A merely moral man or an innocent
man may be soiled in spite of his integrity, but the man who
is made pure by the Holy Ghost cannot be soiled, he is as
light. Thank God for the men and women who are

8 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

spending their lives in the slums of the earth, not as social
reformers to lift their brother men to cleaner styes, but as
the light of God, revealing a way back to God. God keeps
them as the light, unsullied. If you have been covering
your light, uncover it ! Walk as children of light. The
light always reveals and guides, and men dislike it and
prefer darkness when their deeds are evil. (John III. 19-20.)
Are we the salt of the earth ? Are we the light of the
world ? Are we allowing God to exhibit in our lives the
truth of these startling statements of Jesus ?

(3) DIVINE DECLARATION, vv. 17-20.

(a) His Mission, vv. 17-19.

" I am come ... to fulfil." An amazing word ! Our
shoes ought to be off our feet and every common sense
mood stripped from our minds when we hear Him speak.
In Him we deal with God as man, the God-Man, the re
presentative of the whole human race in one Person.
The men of His day traced their religious pedigree back to
the constitution of God, and this young Nazarene Carpenter
says — I am the constitution of God, consequently to them
He was a blasphemer.

Our Lord places Himself as the exact meaning and
fulfilment of all Old Testament prophecies. His mission,
He says, is to fulfil the law and the prophets, and He
further says that any man who breaks the old laws because
they belong to a former dispensation, and teaches men to
break them, shall suffer severe impoverishment. If the
old commandments were difficult, Our Lord's principles
are unfathomably more difficult. Our Lord goes behind
the old law to the disposition. Everything He teaches is
impossible unless He can put into me His Spirit and re-

HIS TEACHING AND OUR TRAINING 9

make me from the inside. The Sermon on the Mount is
quite unlike the Ten Commandments in the sense of its
being absolutely unworkable unless Jesus Christ can
re-make us.

There are teachers who argue that the Sermon on the
Mount supersedes the Ten Commandments, and that
because we are not under law but under grace it does not
matter whether we honour our father and mother, whether
we covet, etc. That, in practical application, is sentimental
dust-throwing. To be not under the law but under grace
does not mean I can do as I like. It is surprising how
easily we can juggle ourselves out of Jesus Christ's prin
ciples by one or two pious sayings repeated often enough.
The only safeguard is to keep personally related to God.
The secret for all spiritual understanding is to walk in the
light, not the light of my convictions, or of my theories,
but the light that God is in. (1 John I. 7.)

(6) His Message, v. 20.

" Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteous
ness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter
into the kingdom of heaven." Think of the most upright
man you know, the most moral, sterling, religious man (e.g.,
Nicodemus was a Pharisee, so was Saul of Tarsus — " blame
less " according to the law) — who has never received the
Holy Spirit, and Jesus says you must exceed his righteous
ness, i.e., you have to be not only as moral as the most
moral man you know, but infinitely more — to be so right
in your actions, so pure in your motives, that God Almighty
can see nothing to blame.

Is it too strong to call that a spiritual torpedo ? These
statements of Jesus are the most revolutionary statements
human ears ever listened to, and it needs the Holy Ghost
to interpret them to us ; the shallow admiration for Jesus

10 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

Christ as a Teacher that is taught to-day is of no use.

Who is going to climb that " hill of the Lord ? " To
stand before God and say — My hands are clean, my heart
is pure ? Who can do it ? Who can stand in the eternal
light of God and have nothing for Him to blame in him ?
Only the Son of God, and if the Son of God is formed in
me by regeneration and sanctification, He will exhibit
Himself through my mortal flesh. That is the ideal of
Christianity — " that the life of Jesus might be made
manifest in our mortal flesh."

Your disposition, says Jesus, must be right to its depths,
not only your conscious motives but your unconscious
motives. Now we are beyond our depth. Can God make
me pure in heart ? Blessed be the Name of God, He can !
Can He alter my disposition so that when circumstances
reveal me to myself, I am amazed? He can. Can He
impart to me His nature until it is identically the same as
His own ? He can. That and nothing less is the meaning
of His Cross and Resurrection.

" Except your righteousness exceed. . . ." The right
eousness of the scribes and Pharises was right not wrong ;
that they did other than righteousness is obvious, but
Jesus is talking here of their righteousness which His
disciples are to exceed. What exceeds right doing if it
be not right being ? Right being without right doing is
possible by refusing to enter into relationship with God,
but that cannot exceed the righteousness of the scribes
and Pharisees. Jesus' message here is that unless we
exceed their righteousness in doing (the Pharisees were
nothing in being), we shall never enter into the kingdom
of heaven. The monks in the Middle Ages refused to take
the responsibility of life, all they wanted was to be and not
to do and they shut themselves away from the world,

HIS TEACHING AND OUR TRAINING 11

that does not exceed the righteousness of the scribes and
Pharisees. People to-day want to do the same by cutting
themselves off from this and that . relationship. If Our
Lord had meant exceed in being only, He would not have
used the word " exceed," He would have said — " Except
your righteousness be otherwise than. ..." You cannot
exceed the righteousness of the most moral man you know
on the line of what he does, but only on the line of what
he is.

The teaching of the Sermon on the Mount must produce
despair in the natural man ; if it does not, it is because
you have paid no attention to it. Pay attention to Jesus
Christ's teaching and you will soon say — "Who is sufficient
for these things ? " " Blessed are the pure in heart." If
Jesus Christ means what He says, where am I in regard to
it ? Come unto Me — says Jesus.

STUDY No. 2.
ACTUAL AND REAL.

Matthew V. 21-42.

(1) THE ACCOUNT WITH PURITY. Matt. V. 21-30.
(a) Disposition and Deeds, w. 21-22.

(6) Temper of Mind and Truth of Manner, w. 23-26.

(d) Direction of Discipline, w. 29-30.

(2) THE ACCOUNT WITH PRACTICE. Matt.V.31-37

(a) Speech and Sincerity, v. 33.

(b) Irreverent Reverence, w. 34-36.

(3) THE ACCOUNT WITH PERSECUTION. Matt.

V. 38-42.

(a) Insult, w. 38-39.

(b) Extortion, v. 40.

A man cannot begin to take in anything he has not begun
to think about, consequently until a man is born again
what Jesus says does not mean anything to him* The
Bible is a universe of revelation facts which have no mean
ing for me until I am born from above, when I am born
again I see in it what I never saw before. I am lifted into
the realm where Jesus lives and I begin to see what He
sees. (John III. 3.)

By Actual is meant the things we come in contact with

ACTUAL AND REAL 13

by our senses, and by Real is meant that which lies behind,
the things we cannot get at by our senses, (cf . 2 Cor. IV. 18.)
The fanatic sees only the real and ignores the actual ;
the materialist looks only at the actual and ignores the
real. The only sane Being who ever trod this earth ; was
Jesus Christ because in Him the actual and the real were
one. Jesus Christ does not stand first in the actual world,
He stands first in the real world ; that is why the natural
man does not bother his head about Him — " the natural
man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God : for
they are foolishness unto him." When we are born from
above we begin to see the actual things in the light of the
real. We say that prayer alters things, but prayer does
not alter actual things half so much as it alters the man
who sees the actual things. In the Sermon on the Mount
Our Lord brings the actual and the real together.

(1) THE ACCOUNT WITH PURITY, vv. 21-30.

Our Lord in these verses is laying down the principle
that if men are going to follow Him and obey His Spirit,
they must lay their account with purity. No man can
make himself pure by obeying laws. Purity is not a
question of doing things rightly, but of the doer on the .
inside being right. Purity is difficult to define, it is best
thought of as the state of heart just like the heart of our
Lord Jesus Christ. Purity is not innocence; innocence is the
characteristic of a child, and although, profoundly speaking,
a child is not pure, yet his innocence presents us with all
that we understand by purity. Innocence is a beautiful
thing in a child's life, but men arid women ought not to
be innocent, they ought to be tested and tried and pure.
No man is born pure, purity is the outcome of conflict.

14 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

The pure man is not the man who has never been tried,
but the man who knows what evil is and has overcome
it. The same with virtue and morality, no one is born
virtuous and moral, we are born un-moral. Morality is
always the outcome of conflict, not of necessity. Jesus
Christ demands that purity be explicit as well as implicit,
that is, my actual conduct, the actual chastity of my
bodily life, the actual chastity of my mind, is to be beyond
the censure of Almighty God — not beyond the censure of
ray fellow men, that would produce Pharisaism, I can
always deceive the other fellow. Jesus Christ has under
taken by His Redemption to put in me a heart so pure
that God can see nothing to censure in it. That is the
marvel of the Redemption — that Jesus Christ can give
me a new heredity, the unsullied heredity of the Holy
Spirit, and if it is there, says Jesus, it will work out in
actual history.

In Matthew XV. Our Lord tells His disciples what the
human heart is like — " Out of the heart proceed. ..."
and then follows the catalogue. We say — " I never felt
any of those things in my heart," and we prefer to trust our
innocent ignorance rather than Jesus Christ's penetration.
Either Jesus Christ must be the supreme authority on the
human heart or He is not worth listening to. If I make
conscious innocence the test, I am likely to come to a
place where I will find with a shuddering awakening that
what Jesus said is true, and I will be appalled at the
possibility of evil in me. If I have never been a blackguard,
the reason is a mixture of cowardice and the protection of
civilised life ; but when I am undressed before God I find
that Jesus Christ is right in His diagnosis. So long as I
remain under the refuge of innocence, I am living in a
fool's paradise. There is always a reason to be found

ACTUAL AND REAL l

in myself when I try to disprove what Jesus says.

Jesus Christ demands that the heart of a disciple be
fathomlessly pure, then unless He can give me His dis
position, His teaching is tantalising ; if all He came to do
was to mock me by telling me to be what I know I never
can be, I can afford to ignore Him. But if He can give me
His own disposition of holiness, then I begin to see how
to lay my account with purity. Jesus Christ is the sternest
and the gentlest of Saviours.

The Gospel of God is not that Jesus died for my sins
only, but that He gave Himself for me that I might give
myself to Him. God cannot take from me goodness, He
will take from me badness, and will give me for it the
solid goodness of the Lord Jesus. (See 2 Cor. V. 21.)

(a) Disposition and Deeds, vv. 21-22.

Our Lord is using an illustration that was familiar to
the disciples. If a man disregarded the common judg
ment, he was in danger of being brought into an inner
court, and if he was contemptuous with that court, he was
in danger of the final judgment. Jesus uses this illustra
tion of the ordinary exercise of judgment to show what the
disposition of a disciple must be like, viz., that my motive,
the place I cannot get at myself, must be right — the
disposition behind the deed, the motive behind the actual
occurrence. I may never be angry in deed, but Jesus
demands the impossibility of anger in disposition. The
motive of my motives, the spring of my dreams, must be
so right that right deeds will naturally follow.

In Psalm CXXXIX the Psalmist is realising that he is too
big for himself, and he prays— O Lord, explore me, search
me out, and see if there be any way of grief in me, trace
out the dreams of my dreams, the motives of my motives,

16 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

make those right, and lead me in the way everlasting.
Deliverance from sin is not deliverance from conscious
sin only, it is deliverance from sin in God's sight, and He
can see down into a region I know nothing about. By the
marvellous Atonement of Jesus Christ applied to me by
the Holy Spirit, God can purify the springs of my uncon
scious life until the temper of my mind is unblameable in
His sight.

Beware of refining away the radical aspect of Our
Lord's teaching by saying that God puts in something to
counteract the wrong disposition, that is a compromise.
Jesus never teaches us to curb and suppress the wrong
disposition ; He gives us a totally new disposition, He
alters the mainspring of action. Our Lord's teaching can
only be interpreted by the new Spirit which He puts in ;
it can never be taken as a series of rules and regulations.

A man cannot imitate the disposition of Jesus, it is
either there or it is not. When the Son of God is formed
in me, He is formed in my human nature, and I have to
put on the new man in accordance with His life and obey
Him, then His disposition will work out all the time. We
make our character out of the disposition we have. Char
acter is what we make, disposition is what we are born
with, and when we are born again we get a new disposition.
A man must make his own character, but he cannot make
his disposition, that is a gift. Our natural disposition is
gifted to us by heredity ; by regeneration God gives us
the disposition of His Son. Jesus Christ is pure to the
depths of His motives, and if His disposition can be formed
in me, then I see how I can lay my account with purity.
" Marvel not that I say unto you, Ye must be born again."
If I will let God alter my heredity, I will become devoted
to Him, and Jesus Christ has gained a disciple. Many of

ACTUAL AND REAL 17

us who call ourselves Christians are not devoted to Jesus.

Our Lord goes behind the old law to the disposition.
Everything He says is impossible unless He can put into
me His Spirit and re-make me from the inside, then I
begin to see how it can be done. When a man is born
from above, he does not need to pretend he is a saint, he
cannot help being one. Am I going to be a spiritually
real man or a whitewashed humbug ? Am I a pauper in
spirit or conceited with my own earnestness ? We are so
tremendously in earnest that we are blinded by our earnest
ness and never see that God is more in earnest than we are.
Thank God for the absolute poverty of spirit that receives
from Him all the time.

There is only one way in which as a disciple you will
know that Jesus has altered your disposition, and that is
by trying circumstances. When you are brought into
trying circumstances, instead of feeling resentment, you
will experience a most amazing change on the inside.
When circumstances put you to the test you will say —
" WTiy, bless God, this is an amazing alteration, I know
now that God has altered me, because if that had happened
before I would have been sour and irritable and sarcastic
and spiteful, but now there is a well of sweetness on the
inside which I know never came from myself." The proof
that God has altered our disposition is not that we persuade
ourselves He has, but that we prove He has when circum
stances put us to the test. Instead of the criticism of
Christians being wrong, it is absolutely right. When a
man says he is born again, he is put under scrutiny, and
rightly so. If we are born again of the Holy Ghost and
have the life of Jesus in us by means of His Cross, we have ,'
to show it in the way we walk and talk and transact all :
our business.

18 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

(b) Temper of Mind and Truth of Manner, vv.
23-26.

Our Lord in these verses uses another illustration familiar
in His day. If a man was taking a paschal lamb to the
priest as an offering and remembered he had leaven in his
house, he had to go back and take out the leaven before
he brought his offering. We do not carry lambs to sacrifice,
but the spiritual meaning of the illustration is tremendous,
it emphasises the difference between reality and sincerity.
If when you come to the altar, says Jesus, there you
remember your brother has ought against you, don't say
another word to Me, but go and be reconciled to your
brother and then come and offer your gift. Jesus does
not mention the other person, He says — You go. He does
not say — Go half way ; first go. There is no question of
your rights.

Talk about practical home-coming truth ! That hits
us where we live. A man cannot stand as a humbug for
one second before Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit makes
you sensitive to things you never thought of before. Never
object to the intense sensitiveness of the Holy Spirit in
you when He is educating you down to the scruple ; and
never discard a conviction. If it is important enough for
the Holy Spirit to have brought it to your mind, that is the
thing He is detecting.

The test Jesus gives is not the truth of our manner but
the temper of our mind. Many of us are wonderfully
truthful in manner, but our temper of mind in God's sight
is rotten. The thing Jesus alters is the temper of mind.
If when you come to the altar, there you remember —
Jesus does not say — There you rake up something in your
mind, that is where Satan gets hold of embryo Christians
and makes them hyper-conscientious ; but if at the altar

ACTUAL AND REAL 19

there you remember. . . The inference is that the Holy Spirit
brings it to your memory, never check it, say — Yes, Lord,
I recognise it, and obey Him at once no matter what the
humiliation is. It is impossible to do it until God has
altered your temper of mind ; but if you are a saint you
find you have no difficulty in doing what otherwise would
be an impossible humiliation. The disposition which will
not have the Son of God rule is the disposition of my claim
to my right to myself ; that, and not immorality, is the
essence of sin : I will possess my right to myself in this
particular matter. But if my disposition has been altered,.
I will obey Jesus at all costs.

Watch the thing that makes you morally snort. If you
have not had the temper of your mind altered by Jesus,
when the Holy Spirit brings something to your memory
to be put right, you will say — No, indeed, I am not going to
make it up when I was in the right and they were in the
wrong, they will say — I knew I would make you say you
were sorry. Unless you are willing to yield absolutely
your right to yourself on that point, you need not pray
any more, there is a barrier absolutely higher than Calvary
between you and God. That is the temper of mind in all
of us until it has been altered. When it has been altered,
the other temper of mind is there that makes reconciliation
as natural as breathing, and to our astonishment we find
we can do what we could not do before. Instantly you
obey, you find the temper of your mind is real. Jesus
makes us real, not only sincere. The people who are
sincere without being real are not hypocrites, they are
perfectly earnest and honest and desirous of fulfilling what
Jesus wants, but they really cannot do it, the reason being
that they have not received the One who makes them
real, viz., the Holy Spirit.

20 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

Jesus brings men to the practical test. It is not that I
say I am pure in heart but that I prove I am in my deeds ;
I am not only sincere in manner but sincere in the attitude
of my mind. All through the Sermon on the Mount the
same truth is brought out. " Except your right eousnes
exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees. ..."
We have to fulfil all the old law and do much more, and
the only way it can be done is by letting Jesus alter us on
the inside, and by remembering that everything He tells
us to do we can do. The whole point of Our Lord's teaching
is — Obey Me, and you will find you have a wealth of power
on the inside.

Our Lord goes to the root of the matter every time with
no apology. Sordid ? Frantically sordid, but sin is
frantically sordid, and there is no excuse in false modesty
or in refusing to face the music of the devil's work in this
life. Jesus Christ faced it and He will make us face it.

Our natural idea of purity is that it means according
obedience to certain laws and regulations, but that is apt
to be prudery. There is nothing prudish in the Bible.
The Bible insists on purity, not prudery. There are bald
shocking statements in the Bible, but from cover to cover
it will do nothing in the shape. of harm to the pure in heart,
it is to the impure in heart that these things are corrupting.
If Jesus Christ can only make us prudish, we should be
horrified if we had to go and work amongst the moral
abominations of heathendom, but with the purity Jesus
Christ puts in He can take us where He went Himself, and
make us capable of facing the vilest moral corruption
unspotted, kept pure as He is Himself. We are scandalised
at social immoralities because our social sense of honour is
upset, but are we cut to the heart when we see a man

ACTUAL AND REAL 21

live in pride against God? When the Holy Ghost is at
work He puts in a new standard of judgment and proportion.

Remember that every religious sentiment that is not
carried out on its right level carries with it a secret immor
ality, you are privately immoral if not publicly. That is
the way human nature is constituted, whenever you allow
an emotion that you do not carry out on its legitimate
level, then it will react on an illegitimate level ; grip it on
the threshold of your mind in a vice of blood and allow
it no more way. You have no business to harbour an
emotion the conclusion of which you can see to be
wrong.

God does not give a man a new body when he is saved,
he has the same body but a new disposition. God alters
the mainspring, He puts love in the place of lust. What is
lust ? I must have it at once — the impatience of desire.
Love can wait seven years ; lust can't wait two seconds.
Esau and his mess of pottage is a picture of lust ; Jacob
serving for Rachel is a picture of love. In these verses lust
is put on the lowest level, but remember, lust runs from
the lowest basis of immorality right up to the very height
of spiritual life. Jesus Christ penetrates right straight
down to the basis of our desires. If ever a man is going
to stand where lust never strikes him, it can only be because
Jesus has altered his disposition. It is impossible unless
Jesus Christ can do what He says He can. A disciple has
to be free from the degradation of lust, and the marvel
of the Redemption is that Jesus can free him from it.
Jesus Christ's claim is that He can do for a man what he
cannot do for himself. Jesus does not alter our human
nature, it does not need altering, He alters the mainspring,
and the great marvel of the salvation of Jesus is that He
alters heredity. Lust is the impatience of desire ; license

22 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

means — I will do what I like and care for no one ; liberty
means — I have the power to do what is right.

Do you see how we are growing ? The disciples were
being taught by Jesus to lay their account with purity.
Purity is too deep down for us to get to naturally. The
only exhibition of purity is the purity in the heart of Our
Lord, and that is the purity He implants in us, and He
says we will know whether the purity is there by the
temper of mind we exhibit when we come up against
things which before would have awakened in us lust and
self -desire. It is not only a question of possibility on the
inside, but of a possibility that shows itself in performance.
That is the only test there is, " he that doeth righteousness
is righteous." (1 John III. 7.)

(d) Direction of Discipline, vv. 29-30.

If God has altered the disposition, where is the need for
discipline ? Yet in these verses Our Lord speaks of very
stern discipline, to the parting with the right hand and
the eye. The reason for the discipline is that our bodies
have been used by the wrong disposition, and when the
new disposition is put in, the old physical case is not taken
away, it is left there for us to discipline and make it an
obedient servant to the new disposition. (Romans VI. 19.)

"And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it
from thee : for it is profitable for thee that one of thy
members should perish, and not that thy whole body
should be cast into hell." What does that mean ? It
means absolute unflinching sternness in dealing with the
right things in yourself that are not the best. " The good
is the enemy of the best" in every man, the bad never is,
but the good that is not good enough. Your right hand is
not a bad thing, it is one of the best things you have got,
but, says Jesus, if it offends you in developing your spiritual

ACTUAL AND REAL 23

life, if it hinders your following My precepts, cut it off and
cast it from you. Jesus Christ talked rugged truth, He
was never ambiguous, and He says it is better to be maimed
than damned, better that you should enter into life lame
in man's sight and lovely in God's than that you should
be lovely in man's sight and lame in God's. It is a maimed
life to begin with, such as Jesus describes in these verses ;
otherwise we may look all right in the sight of our fellow
men , but remarkably twisted and wrong in the sight of God.

One of the principles of Our Lord's teaching which we
are slow to grasp is that the only basis of the spiritual is
the sacrifice of the natural. The natural life is neither
moral nor immoral, I make it moral or immoral by my
ruling disposition. Jesus teaches that the natural life
is meant for sacrifice, we can give it as a gift to God,
which is the only way to make it spiritual. (See Romans
XII. 1-2.) That is where Adam failed, he refused to sacrifice
the natural life and make it spiritual by obeying God's
voice in it, consequently he sinned, the sin of taking his
right to himself. Why should God make it that the
natural has to be sacrified to the spiritual by me ? God
did not. God made it that the natural had to be trans
formed into the spiritual by obedience ; sin made it that
the natural had to be sacrificed, which is very different.
If you are going to be spiritual, you must barter the natural,
sacrifice it. If you say, I do not want to sacrifice the natural
for the spiritual, then, Jesus says, you must barter the
spiritual. It is not a punishment but an eternal principle.
This line of discipline is the sternest that ever struck
mankind, there is nothing more heroic and grand than the
Christian life. Spirituality is not a sweet tendency towards
piety in people who have not enough life in them to be
bad ; spirituality is the possession of the life of God which

24 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

is masculine in its strength, and He will make the most
corrupt, twisted, sin-stained life spiritual if He be obeyed.
Chastity is strong and fierce, and the man who is going to
be chaste for Jesus Christ's sake has a gloriously sterling
job in front of him.

When Jesus has altered your disposition, you have to
put your body into harmony with the new disposition, to
get the body to exercise the new disposition, and it can
only be done by stern discipline, discipline which will
mean cutting off a great many things for your own spiritual
life's sake. There are things that are to you as your right
hand and your eye, but you dare not use them, and the
world that knows you says — How absurd you are to cut
off that, whatever is there wrong in a " right hand ? "
and they will call you a fanatic and a crank. If a man
has never been a crank or a fanatic, it is a pretty sure sign
that he has never begun seriously to consider life. In the
beginning the Holy Spirit will check your doing a great
many things that may be perfectly right for everyone
else, but not right for you. No one can decide for another
what is to be cut off, and you have no right to use your
present limitation to criticise someone else.

Be prepared to be a limited fool in the sight of others,
says Jesus, in order to further your spiritual character.
If I am only willing to give up wrong things for Jesus
Christ, never let me talk about being in love with Him.
We say — Why shouldn't I ? — there is no harm in it. For
pity's sake, go and do it, but remember that the construc
tion of a spiritual character is doomed once you take that
line. Anyone will give up wrong things if he knows how
to, but am I prepared to give up the best I have got for
Jesus Christ ? The only right a Christian has is the right
to give up his rights.

ACTUAL AND REAL 25

(2) THE ACCOUNT WITH PRACTICE, w. 31-37.

Practice means continually doing that which no one
sees or knows but myself. Habit is the result of practice,
by continually doing the thing it becomes second nature.
The difference between men is not a difference of personal
power, but that some men are disciplined and others are not.
The difference is not the degree of mental power, but the
degree of mental discipline. If I have taught myself how
to think, I have mental power plus the discipline of having
got it under way. Beware of impulse. Impulsiveness is
the characteristic of a child, but it ought not to be the
characteristic of a man, it means he has not disciplined
himself. Undeterred impulse is undisciplined power.

Every habit is purely mechanical, and whenever we form
a habit it makes a material difference in the brain. The
material of the brain alters very slowly, but it does alter,
and by repeatedly doing a thing a groove is formed in the
material of the brain and it becomes easier to do it again,
until at last you become unconscious of doing it. When
we are regenerated, by the power and the presence of God
we can reform every habit that is not in accordance with
His life. Never form a habit gradually, do it at once, do
it sharply and definitely, and never allow a break. We
have to learn to form habits according to the dictates of
the Spirit of God. The power and the practice must go
together. When we fail it is because we have not prac
tised, not brought the mechanical part of our nature into
line. If I keep at it practising, what I practise becomes
my second nature, then in a crisis I find that not only
does God's grace stand by me, but also my own nature.
The practising is mine not God's and the crisis reveals
whether or not I have been practising. The reason we

26 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

fail is not the devil, but inattention on our part arising from
the fact that we have not disciplined ourselves.

w. 31-32. Marriage and money form the elemental
constitution of personal life and social life. They are the
touchstone of reality, and around these two things the
Holy Spirit works all the time. Marriage is one of the
mountain peaks on which God's thunder blasts souls to
hell or on which His light transfigures human lives in the
eternal heavens. Jesus Christ faces fearlessly the question
of sin and wrong, and He teaches us to face it fearlessly.
There is no circumstance so dark and complicated, no
life so twisted, that He cannot put right. The Bible was
not written for babes and fools, it was written for men and
women who have to face hell's facts as well as heaven's
facts in this life. If Jesus Christ cannot touch those lives
which present a smooth face but have a hideous tragedy
behind, what is the good of His salvation ? But, bless
God, He can. He can alter my disposition, alter the dreams
of my dreams, until lust no longer dwells there.

(a) Speech and Sincerity, v. 33.

Sincerity means that the appearance and the reality are
exactly the same. Remember, says Jesus, that you
have to stand before the tribunal of God, not of men ;
practise the right kind of speech, and your Father in heaven
will back up all that is true. If you have to back it up
yourself, it is of the evil one. You have no right to call
in anyone to back it up, your word ought to be quite
sufficient, whether men believe you or not is a matter of
indifference. Refrain your speech until it conveys the
sincerity of your mind. Until the Son of God is formed
in me I am not sincere, I am not even honest, but when
His life comes into me, He makes me honest with myself

ACTUAL AND REAL 27

and generous and kind towards others. We all know men
whose word is their bond, there is no need for anyone to
back up the word, the character and the life are sufficient.

There is a snare in being able to talk easily about God's
truth because frequently that is where it ends, if you can
get a good expression for truth the danger is you will
know no more. Most of us can talk piously, we have the
practice but not the power. Jesus is saying let your
conversation spring from such a basis of the Holy Spirit
that everyone who listens is built up by it. Unaffected
sincerity always builds up ; corrupt communication makes
you feel mean and narrow. There are men who never
say a bad word yet their influence is devilish. Don't
pay attention to the outside of the platter, pay attention
to the inside and practise the speech that is in accordance
with the life of the Son of God in you, and slowly and
surely your speech and your sincerity will be in accord.

(b) Irreverent Reverence, w. 34-36.

In Our Lord's day the habit was common, as it is to
day, of backing up ordinary assertions with an appeal to
the name of God. Jesus checks that, He says never call on
anything in the nature of God to attest what you say,
speak simply and truly, realising that truth in a man is
the same as truth in God. To call in God as a witness to
back up what you say is nearly always a sign that what
you are saying is not true. If you can find eight or more
reasons for the truth of what you say, it is proof that what
you say is not strictly true, if it were, you would never
have to find the reasons to prove it. Jesus Christ puts in
a truthfulness that never takes knowledge of itself.

Irreverent reverence is what Our Lord checks, talking
flippantly about those things which ought only to be
mentioned with the greatest reverence. I remember an

28 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

Indian woman who got wonderfully saved, she was an
ugly woman but at the pronouncement of the name of
Jesus Christ, her face was transfigured, the whole soul of
the woman was in reverent adoration of her Lord and
Master.

Integrity means the unimpaired purity of the heart.
God can make our words the exact expression of the dis
position He has put in. Jesus taught by example and
precept that no man should stand up for his own honour
but only for the honour of another. Our Lord was never
careful of His own honour — " He made Himself of no
reputation ; " men called Him a glutton and a wine-
bibber, a madman, devil-possessed, and He never opened
His mouth ; but immediately they said a word against
His Father's honour, He not only opened His mouth but
He said some terrible things. (See Mark XL 15-18.) Jesus
Christ by His Spirit alters our standard of honour, and a
disciple will never care about what people say of him, but
he will care tremendously what people say of Jesus. He
realises that his Lord's honour is at stake in his life, not
his own honour. What is the thing that rouses you ?
That is an indication of where you live.

Scandal should be treated as you treat mud on your
clothes. If you try and deal with it while it is wet, you
rub the mud into the texture, but leave it till it is dry and
you flick it off with a touch, it is gone without a trace.
Leave scandal alone, never touch it.

Let people do what they like with your truth, but never
explain it. Jesus never explained anything, we are always
explaining, and we get into tangles by not leaving things
alone. We need to pray St. Augustine's prayer — " O Lord,
deliver me from this lust of always vindicating myself."

ACTUAL AND REAL 29

Our Lord never told His disciples when they made mistakes,
they made any number of blunders, but He went on
quietly planting the truth, and He let mistakes correct
themselves.

In the matter of praise, when I am not sure of having
done well I always like to find out what people think ;
when I am certain I have done well, I don't care an atom
whether folks praise me or not. The same thing with
regard to fear, we all know men who say they are not
afraid, but the very fact they say it, proves they are.
We have to learn to live on the line of integrity all through.

Another truth we do not sufficiently realise is the in
fluence of what we think over what we say. A man may
say wonderfully truthful things, but what he thinks is what
tells. It is possible to say truthful things in a truthful
manner and to tell a lie by thinking. I can repeat to
someone else what I heard you say, word for word, every
detail scientifically accurate, and yet convey a lie in saying
it because the temper of my mind is different to the temper
of your mind when you said it. A lie is not an inexactitude
of speech, a lie is in the motive. I may be actually truthful
and an incarnate liar. It is not the literal words that
count but their influence on others.

Suspicion is always of the devil and is the cause of
people saying more than they need to say, and in that aspect
it " cometh of evil." If you submit children to a sceptical
atmosphere and call in question all they say, it will instil
the habit of backing up what is said — Well, ask him if you
don't believe me. Such a thought would never occur to a
child naturally, it only occurs when the child has to talk
to suspicious people who continually say — Now I don't
know whether what you are saying is true. The child
gets the idea that it does not speak the truth unless someone

30 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

backs it up. It never occurs to a pure honest heart to
back up what it says, it is a wounding insult to be met
with suspicion, and that is why from the first we ought
never to submit a child to suspicion.

(3) ACCOUNT WITH PERSECUTION, w. 38-42.

(a) Insult, v. 38-39.

If a disciple is going to follow Jesus, he must lay his
account not only with purity and with practice, but also
with persecution. The picture Our Lord gives is not
familiar to us. In the East a slap on the cheek is the
greatest form of insult, its equivalent with us would be
spitting in the face. Epictetus, a Roman slave, said that
a slave would rather be thrashed to death than nicked on
the cheek. Jesus says — If any man smite you on the
right cheek, turn to him the other also. The Sermon on the
Mount indicates that when we are on Jesus Christ's errands,
there is no time to be taken in standing up for ourselves.
Personal insult will be the occasion in the saint of revealing
the incredible sweetness of the Lord Jesus.

The Sermon on the Mount hits where it is meant to hit,
and it hits every time. Jesus says — Whosoever shall
smite thee on thy right cheek, as My representative, pay
no attention, i.e., show a disposition equivalent to turning
the other cheek also. Either Jesus Christ was mad to say
such things or He was the Son of God. Naturally, if a
man does not hit back it is because he is a coward ; super-
naturally, it is the manifestation of the Son of God in him,
both have the same appearance outwardly. The hypo
crite and the saint are the same in the public eye, the
saint exhibits a meekness which is contemptible in the
eye of the world, that is the immense humiliation of being

ACTUAL AND REAL 31

a Christian. My strength has to be the strength of the
Son of God, and He was " crucified through weakness/'
Do the impossible, and immediately you do, you know that
God alone has made it possible.

These things apply to a disciple of Jesus and to no one
else. The only way to interpret the words of God is to let
the Holy Spirit interpret them for you. Jesus said that the
Holy Spirit would bring back to our remembrance what
He has said, and His counsel is — When you come across
personal insult, not only don't resent it, but make it the
occasion of exhibiting the Son of God.

The secret of a disciple is personal devotion to a personal
Lord, and a man is open to the same charge as Jesus was,
viz., that of inconsistency, but Jesus was never incon
sistent to God. There is more than one consistency. There
is the consistency of a little child, a child is never the
same, always changing and developing, a consistent child ;
and there is the consistency of a brick wall, a petrified
consistency. A Christian is to be consistent only to the
life of the Son of God in him, not consistent to hard and
fast creeds. Men pour themselves into creeds, and God
Almighty has to blast them out of their prejudices before
they become devoted to Jesus. " The expulsive power of
a new affection " that is what Christianity supplies. The
reality of the life of the Son of God in you must show
itself in the appearance of your life.

The miracle of regeneration is necessary before we can
live the Sermon on the Mount. The Son of God alone can
live it, and if God can form in me the life of the Son of
God, as He introduced Him into human history, then I can
see how it can be done, and that is Jesus Christ's message —
Marvel not that I say unto you, Ye must be born again,
(cf. Luke I. 35.)

32 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

(b) Extortion, v. 40.

Another unfamiliar picture to us, but it had a tremendous
meaning in Our Lord's day. If a man's cloak and coat
were taken from him as the result of a law suit, he could get
back the loan of the coat to sleep in at night. Jesus uses
the illustration to point out what we are going to meet
with as His disciples. If they extort from you anything
while you are on My service, let them have it, but go on
with your work. If you are My disciple, says Jesus, you
have no time to stand up for yourself. Never insist on
your rights. The Sermon on the Mount is not — Do your
duty, but — Do what is not your duty. It is never your
duty not to resist evil, that is only possible to the Son of
God in you.

Under the Roman dominance, the soldiers could compel
anyone to be a baggage carrier for a mile. Simon the
Cyrenian is a case in point, the Roman soldiers compelled
him to be baggage carrier for Jesus. Jesus says if you are
My disciple, you will always go the second mile, you will
always do more than your duty, there will none of this
spirit — Oh well, I can't do any more, they have always
misunderstood and misrepresented me, but you will go the
second mile, not for their sake but for Jesus Christ's sake.
It would have been a sorry look-out for us if God had not
gone the second mile with us. The first thing God requires
of a man is to get born from above, then when he goes the
second mile for men it is the Son of God in him Who does
it. The only right of a Christian is the right not to insist
on his rights. Every time I insist on my rights I hurt
the Son of God. I can prevent the Son of God being
hurt if I take the blow myself, but if I refuse to take it, it
goes back on Him. (cf. Col. I. 24.)

ACTUAL AND REAL 33

v. 42 is an arena for theological acrobats, " Give to him
that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee
turn not thou away." That is the statement either of a
madman or of God Incarnate. We always say we do not
know what Jesus means when we know perfectly well He
means something which is a blunt impossibility unless He
can re-make us and make it possible. Jesus brings us with
terrific force straight up against the impossible thing, and
until we get to the place of despair we will never receive
from Him the grace that enables us to do the impossible
thing and manifest His Spirit.

These statements of Jesus revolutionise all our concep
tions about charity. Much of our modern philanthropy is
based on the motive of giving to the poor man because
he deserves it, or because we are distressed at seeing him
poor. Jesus never taught charity from those motives,
He says — " Give to him that asketh thee," not because he
deserves it, but because I tell you to. The great motive
in all giving is Jesus Christ's command. We can always
find a hundred and one reasons why we should not obey
Our Lord's commands because we will trust our reasoning
rather than His reason, and our reason does not take God
into calculation. How does civilisation argue ? Does this
man deserve what I am giving him ? Immediately you
talk like that, the Spirit of God says — Who are you?
Do you deserve more than other men the blessings you
have got?

" Give to him that asketh thee." Why do we always
make it mean money ? Jesus makes no mention of money.
The blood of most of us seems to run in gold. The reason
we make it mean money is that that is where our heart is.
Peter said " Silver and gold have I none ; but such as I
have, give I thee." God grant we may understand that the

34 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

spring of giving is not impulse nor inclination, but the in
spiration of the Holy Spirit — I give because Jesus tells
me to.

The way Christians wriggle and twist and compromise
over this verse springs from infidelity in the ruling pro
vidence of our Heavenly Father. We enthrone common
sense as God and say — It is absurd, if I give to everyone
that asks, every beggar in the place will be at my door.
Try it. I have yet to find the man who obeyed Jesus
Christ's command and did not realise that God restrained
those who beg. If you try to apply these principles of
Jesus literally without the indwelling Spirit, there will be
no proof that God is with you, but once get rightly related
to God and let the Holy Spirit apply the words to your
circumstances, and you will find the restraining hand of
God, for if ever God's ruling is seen, it is seen when once
a disciple obeys what Jesus commands.

STUDY No. 3.

INCARNATE WISDOM AND
INDIVIDUAL REASON.

Matthew V. 43-48, VI.

(1) DIVINE RULE OF LIFE. Matthew V. 43-48.

(a) Exhortation, vv. 43-44.

(b) Example, v. 46.

(2) DIVINE REGION OF RELIGION. Matt. VI. 1-18.

(a) Philanthropy, vv. 1-4.

(b) Prayer, vv. 5-15.

(3) DIVINE REASONINGS OF MIND. Matt. VI. 19-24.

(a) Doctrine of Deposit, vv. 19-21.

(b) Doctrine of Division, vv. 22-23.

(4) DIVINE REASONINGS OF FAITH. Matt. VI.

25-34.

(a) Careful Carelessness, v. 25.

(b) Careful Unreasonableness, vv. 26-29.

(d) Concentrated Consecration, vv. 33-34.

We live in two universes, the universe of common sense
in which we come in contact with things by our senses,
and the universe of revelation with which we come in
contact by faith. The wisdom of God fits the two universes

36 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

exactly, the one interprets the other. Jesus Christ is the
expression of the Wisdom of God. If I take the common
sense universe and discard the revelation of Jesus, I make
what He says foolish because He talks from the revelation
universe all the time. Jesus Christ lived in the revelation
world which we do not see, and until we get into His
world we do not understand His teaching at all. In Him
we find that the revelation universe and the common sense
universe were made one, and if ever they are to be one in
me it can only be by receiving the heredity Jesus had,
viz., Holy Spirit.

In the common sense universe the faculty required is
intellectual curiosity, but when we enter into the domain
from which Jesus Christ talks, intellectual curiosity is
ruled out and moral obedience takes the absolute place.
" If any man will do His will, he shall know. ..." If I
am going to find out the secrets of the world I live in, I must
work at it. God does not encourage laziness, He has given
me instruments whereby I have to explore this universe
and it is done entirely by intellectual curiosity; but when
I come to the domain Jesus reveals, no amount of studying
or curiosity will avail me one atom, my ordinary common
sense faculties are of no use, I cannot see God or taste
God, I can dispute with Him, but I cannot get at Him by
my senses at all, and common sense is apt to say there is
nothing other than this universe. How am I to get into
contact with this other universe to which Jesus belonged
and from which He talks ? I come in contact with the
revelation facts of God's universe by faith wrought in me
by the Spirit of God, then as I develop in understanding,
the two universes are slowly made one in me. They
never agree outside Jesus Christ.

An understanding of Redemption is not necessary to

INCARNATE WISDOM AND INDIVIDUAL REASON 37

salvation any more than an understanding of life is necessary
before we can be born into it. Jesus Christ did not come
to found religion, nor did He come to found civilisation,
they were both here before He came ; He came to make us
spiritually real in every domain. In Jesus there was
nothing secular and sacred, it was all real, and He makes
His disciples like Himself.

(1) DIVINE RULE OF LIFE. V. 43-48.

In these verses Our Lord lays down a Divine rule which
we by His Spirit have to apply to every circumstance and
condition of our lives. Our Lord does not make state
ments which we have to follow literally ; if He did we
should not grow in grace. In the realm of God it is a
spiritual following, and we have to rely on His Spirit to
teach us to apply His statements to the various circum
stances in which we find ourselves.

(a) Exhortation, vv. 43-44.

Our Lord's exhortation here is to be generous in our
behaviour to all men whether they be good or bad. The
marvel of the Divine love is that God exhibits His love
not only to good people but to bad people. In Our Lord's
parable of the two sons we can understand the father
loving the prodigal son, but he exhibits his love to the
elder brother also, to whom we feel a strong antipathy.
Beware of walking in the spiritual life according to your
natural affinities. We all have natural affinities, some
people we like and others we do not ; some people we get
on well with and others we do not. Never let those likes
and dislikes be the rule of your Christian life. "If we
walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship

38 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

one with another," i.e., God gives us fellowship with people
for whom we have no natural affinity.

(b) Example, v. 45.

Woven into Our Lord's divine rule of life is His reference
to our Example, and our Example is not a good man, not
even a good Christian man, but God Himself. We do not
allow the big surprise of that to lay hold of us sufficiently.
Jesus nowhere says — Follow the best example you know,
follow Christians, watch those who love Me and follow
them ; He says — Follow your Father which is in heaven —
that you may be good men ? That you may be lovable to
all men ? No, "that ye may be the children of your
Father which is in heaven," and that implies a strong
family likeness to Jesus. The Example of a disciple is
God Almighty and no one less, not the best man you know,
not the finest saint you ever read about, but God Himself.

" That ye may be the children of your Father in heaven."
Our Lord's exhortation is to love our fellow men as God
has loved us. The love of God is not like the love of a
father or of a mother, it is the love of God. " God commen-
deth His own love toward us." (Romans V. 8, R.V.)
The love of God is revealed in that He laid down His life
for His enemies, now, says Jesus, love your fellow men as
God has loved you. As a disciple of Jesus, identify
yourself with God's interests in other people, show to the
other man what God has shown you, and God will give
you ample opportunity in your actual life to prove that
you are perfect as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

' Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt
love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say
unto you, Love your enemies." Again I want to em
phasise the fact that the teaching of Jesus does not at
first appear to be what it is. At first it appears pious and

INCARNATE WISDOM AND INDIVIDUAL REASON 30

lukewarm and beautiful, but before long it becomes a
ripping and tearing torpedo, it splits to atoms every
preconceived notion a man ever had. It takes a long
time to get the full force of Our Lord's statements. " I say
unto you, Love your enemies." An easy thing to do when
you have not got any — an impossible thing to do when
you have. " Bless them that curse you " — easy to do it
when no one is cursing you, but impossible when some
one is cursing you, " Do good to them that hate you,
and pray for them that despitefully use you." It is easy
to do all this when you have no enemies, when no one is
cursing you or persecuting you, but suppose you have an
enemy who slanders and annoys and systematically vexes
you, and you read Jesus Christ's statement — " I say unto
you, Love your enemies " — how is it going to be done ?
Unless Jesus Christ can re-make me from the inside, His
teaching is the biggest mockery human ears ever listened
to. Talk about the Sermon on the Mount being an ideal !
Why, it would rend a man with despair — the very thing
Jesus means it to do, for if once we realise that we cannot
love our enemies, we cannot bless them that curse us, we
cannot come anywhere near the standard revealed in the
Sermon on the Mount, then we are in a condition to re
ceive from God the disposition that will enable us to love
our enemies, to pray for those that despitefully use us, to
do good to those that hate us.

" I say unto you, Love your enemies." Jesus does not say —
Love everyone. The Bible never talks vaguely, it always
talks definitely. People talk about loving " mankind "
and loving the " heathen " ; Jesus says — Love your
enemies. Our Lord does not say — Bless your enemies,
He says— Love your enemies. He does not say— Love them
that curse you, He says — Bless them that curse you.

40 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

Do good to them that hate you, not bless them. He does
not say — Do good to them that despitefully use you, He
says — Pray for them that despitefully use you. Each one
of these commands is stamped with sheer impossibility to
the natural man. If you reverse the order Jesus puts it
in, you can do it with a strain, but keep it in the order He
puts it in, and I defy any man on earth to do it unless he
has been regenerated by God the Holy Ghost. When a
man does love his enemies, he knows, and everyone else
knows too, that God has done a tremendous work in him.

The expression of Christian character is not good doing,
but God-likeness. It is not sufficient to do good, to do
the right thing, you must have your goodness stamped by
the image and superscription of God, it is supernatural
all through. The secret of a Christian's life is the super
natural made natural by the grace of God. The way it
works out in expression is not in having times of com
munion with God, but in the practical details of life.
The proof that we have been regenerated is when we
come in contact with the things that create a buzz, we find
to our astonishment we have a power to keep wonderfully
poised in the centre of it all, a power we had not before,
a power that is only explained by the Cross of Jesus.

v. 48 is a re-emphasis of v. 20. The perfection of v. 48
refers to the disposition of God in me — " Ye shall be per
fect as your Father in heaven is perfect " (R.V.) not in a
future state, but — You shall be perfect as your Father
in heaven is perfect if you let Me work that perfection in
you. If the Holy Spirit has transformed you on the
inside, you will exhibit not good human characteristics,
but divine characteristics in a human being. There is
only one type of holiness and that is God's holiness, and

INCARNATE WISDOM AND INDIVIDUAL REASON 41

Jesus puts as our example God Almighty. How many of
us have measured ourselves by that standard, the standard
of a purity of heart in which God can see nothing to blame ?
May this Divine rule of Our Lord's bring us to the bar
of the standard of Jesus. His claim is measured by these
tremendous statements of His. He can take you and
me, He can take the vilest piece of broken earthenware,
and can fit us exactly to the expression of the Divine life
in us. It is never a question of putting statements of
Our Lord in front of us and trying to live up to them, but
of receiving His Spirit and finding that we can live up to
them as He brings them to our remembrance and applies
them to our circumstances.

God grant we may get on to the courageous range of
faith that is required. " Be ye perfect as your Father in
heaven is perfect " — and men will take knowledge of me
that I am a good man ? Never. If ever it is recorded of
me — "What a good man that is" — I have been a betrayer
somewhere. If I fix my eyes on my own whiteness I will
soon get dry rot in my spiritual life. All my righteousness
is as " filthy rags " unless it is the blazing holiness of Jesus
in me uniting me with Him until I see nothing but Jesus
first, Jesus second and Jesus third. Then men take
knowledge of me, not what a good man I am, not what a
wonderful whiteness I have, but that Jesus has done
something wonderful in me. Keep always at the Source
of spiritual blessings — Jesus Christ Himself.

In v. 30 Our Lord said "it is profitable for thee that
one of thy members should perish and not that thy whole
body should be cast into hell/' i.e., He is referring to a
maimed life. In v. 48 He says — Be ye therefore perfect as
your Father in heaven is perfect. Is my Father in heaven
maimed ? Has He a right arm cut off, a right eye plucked

42 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

out ? In v. 48 Jesus completes the picture He began to
give in v. 30. Our Lord's statements embrace the whole
of the spiritual life from beginning to end. In Matt. V.
29-30 He pictures a maimed life ; here He pictures a full-
orbed life of holiness. Holiness means the perfect balance
between my disposition and the laws of God. The maimed
life is the characteristic at the beginning, and if you have
not had that characteristic, it is questionable whether you
have ever received the Holy Spirit. The entrance into Life
means what the world calls fanaticism. The swing of the
pendulum makes you go to the opposite extreme of what
you were in the life of the world, and you have to begin
the life with God a maimed soul. We are so afraid of
being fanatics : would to God we were as afraid of being
" fushionless." A thousand times rather be fanatics at
the beginning than poor fushionless creatures all our
lives, limp and useless. May we get on to the line where
we are willing to cut off the right arm, to pluck out the eye,
to enter into Life a hirpler, maimed, cutting off whatever
it may be, no matter how beautiful. And, blessed be the
Name of God, we shall find that He brings to a full-orbed
unity every life that will obey Him.

Always make allowances when people first enter into
Life, they have to enter it on the fanatical line. The
danger is to stay too long in the fanatical stage. If
fanaticism steps over the bounds, it becomes spiritual
lunacy. At the beginning of the life in grace you have to
limit yourself all round, right things as well as wrong;
then when God begins to bring you out of the light of your
convictions into the light of the Lord and you prefer to
remain true to your convictions, you become a spiritual
lunatic. Walking in the light of convictions is a necessary

INCARNATE WISDOM AND INDIVIDUAL REASON 43

stage, but there is a grander, purer, sterner light to walk
in, viz., the light of the Lord.

How impatient we are, when we see a life born from
above of the Spirit and the necessary limitations and
severances and maimings going on, we will try and do
God's work for Him, and God has to rap us sharply over
the knuckles and say — Leave that soul in My care. Always
allow for the swing of the pendulum in yourself and in
others. A pendulum does not swing rightly at first, it begins
with a tremendous swing to one extreme and only gradually
gets back to the right balance, and that is how the Holy
Spirit brings the grace of God to bear in our lives. " I do
not frustrate the grace of God," says Paul.

(2) DIVINE REGION OF RELIGION. VI. 1-18.

In Ch. V. Our Lord demands that our disposition be
right with Him in our ordinary natural life lived to men ;
in Ch. VI. He deals with the domain of our life lived to
God before men. The main idea in the region of religion
is — Your eye on God, not on men.

(a) Philanthropy, vv. 1-4.

It was inculcated, as it were, into the very blood of the
Jew to look after the stranger (see Deut. XV. 7-8, Lev. XIX.
9-10), and in Our Lord's day the Pharisees made a tre
mendous show of giving, they gave from the play-acting
motive, that they might have " glory of men." They
would put their money in the boxes in the women's court
of the Temple with a great clang which sounded like a
trumpet. Jesus says — Now don't give in that way, their
motive is to be seen of men, to be known as generous
givers, and " Verily I say unto you, They have their
reward," — i.e., that is all there is to it.

44 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

Briefly summed up, these verses mean — Have no other
motive in giving than to please God. In modern philan
thropy the motives we are " egged on " with are — It will
do them good, they need the help, they deserve it. Jesus
never brings out that aspect in His teaching ; He allows
no other motive in giving than to please God. In Ch. V.
He says — Give because I tell you to, and here He teaches
us not to have mixed motives. It is very penetrating to
ask ourselves this question — What was my motive in
doing that kind act ? We will be astounded at how rarely
the Holy Spirit gets a chance to fit our motives on to be
right with God, we mix the motive with a hundred and
one other considerations. Jesus makes it steadily simple —
one motive only, your eye on God ; if you are My disciple,
you will never give with any other motive than to please
God. The characteristic of Jesus in a disciple goes much
deeper down than doing good things, it is that he is good
in motive because he has been made good by the super
natural grace of God.

" Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand
doeth," i.e., do good until it is an unconscious habit of the
life and you don't know you are doing it, you will be covered
with confusion when Jesus Christ detects it. " Lord, when
saw we Thee an hungered, and fed Thee ? . . . Inasmuch
as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren
ye have done it unto Me.'* That is Our Lord's magna
nimous interpretation of kind acts that people have
never allowed themselves to think anything of. Get
into the habit of such a relationship to God that you do
good without knowing you do it, then you will no longer
trust your own impulse, or your own judgment, you will
trust only the inspiration of the Spirit of God. The
mainspring of your motives will be the Father's heart,

INCARNATE WISDOM AND INDIVIDUAL REASON 45

not your own, the Father's understanding, not your own.
Once get rightly related to God, and He will use you as a
channel through which His disposition will flow.

(b) Prayer, w. 5-15.

Prayer, says Jesus, is to be looked at in the same way
as philanthropy — your eye on God not on men. Watch
your motive before God, have no other motive in prayer
than to know Him. The statements of Jesus about
prayer which are so familiar to us are revolutionary. Call
a halt one moment and ask yourself — Why do I pray?
What is my motive ? Is it because I have a personal
secret relationship to God that no one knows but myself ?

The Pharisees had to pray so many times a day and they
took care that they happened to be in the midst of the
city when the hour for prayer came, and then in an osten
tatious manner they would give themselves to prayer.
Jesus says — Be not as the hypocrites are, their motive is
to be known as praying men, and verily they have their
reward. Our Lord did not say it was wrong to pray in
the corners of the streets, but He did say it was wrong to
have the motive to be seen of men. " But thou, when
thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast
shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret,"
i.e., get a place to pray where no one imagines that is
what you are doing, shut the door and talk to God in secret.
It is impossible to conduct the life of a disciple without
definite times of secret prayer. You will find that the
place to enter in is in your business, as you walk along the
streets, in the ordinary ways of life, when no one dreams
you are praying, and the reward comes openly, a revival
here, a blessing there. The Scotch have a proverb —
" Aye keep a bit tie to yersel," and as you go on with

46 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

God you learn more and more to maintain this secret
relationship with God in prayer.

When we pray we give God a chance in the unconscious
realm of the lives we pray for. When we get into the
secret place, it is the Holy Ghost's passion for souls that
is at work, not our passion, and He can work through
us as He likes. Sects produce a passion for souls, the
Holy Spirit produces a passion for Christ. The great
dominating passion in the New Testament is for our Lord
Jesus Christ.

Jesus also taught the disciples the prayer of patience.
If you are right with God and God delays the manifested
answer to your prayer, don't misjudge Him, don't think
of Him as an unkind friend or an unnatural father or an
unjust judge, but keep at it, your prayer will certainly be
answered for " everyone that asks receives." " Men
ought always to pray and not to faint," i.e., cave in.
Your heavenly Father will explain it all one day, He
cannot just now because He is developing your character.

In v. 8 Jesus goes to the very root of all prayer — " Your
Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye
ask Him." Common sense says — Then why ask Him?
Prayer is not getting things from God, that is a most
initial stage ; prayer is getting into perfect communion
with God, I tell Him what I know He knows in order that
I may get to know it as He does. Pray because you have
got a Father, says Jesus, not because it quietens you, and
give Him time to answer. If the life of Jesus is formed in
me by regeneration and I am drawing my breath in the
fear of the Lord, the Son of God will press forward in front
of my common sense and will change my attitude to things.
Most of us make the blunder of depending on our own
earnestness and not on God at all, it is confidence in Him

INCARNATE WISDOM AND INDIVIDUAL REASON 47

that tells. (1 John V. 14). All my fuss and earnestness,
all my gifts of prayer, are not of the slightest use to Jesus,
He pays no attention to them. If I have a gift of prayer,
may God wither it up until I learn how to get my prayers
inspired by God the Holy Ghost. Do I rely on God or
on my own earnestness when I pray? God is never
impressed by my earnestness, I am not heard because I am
in earnest, but only on the ground of Redemption, I have
" boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus "
and no other way.

" Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of."
Remember, says Jesus, your Father is keenly and divinely
interested in you, and prayer becomes the " blether " of
a child to his father. Our Lord took nothing and no one
seriously but His Father (we are inclined to take every
thing and everyone else seriously saving God), and He
teaches us to be children before men but in earnest before
our Father in heaven. Notice the essential simplicity of
Our Lord's teaching all through— right towards God,
right towards God.

Penance is to put myself into a strait jacket for the sake
of disciplining my spiritual character. Physical sloth
will upset spiritual devotion quicker than anything. If
the devil cannot get at us by enticing to sin, he will get
at us by sleeping sickness spiritually — Now you cannot
possibly get up in the morning to pray, you are working
hard all day and you cannot give that time to prayer, God
does not expect it of you. Jesus says God does expect it
of you. Penance means doing a hardship to my body for
the sake of developing my spiritual life. Put your life
through discipline but don't say a word about it, " appear
not unto men to fast." Jeremy Taylor said that men hang

48 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

out the sign of the devil to prove there is an angel inside,
i.e., they wear sad countenances and look tremendously
severe to prove they are holy men. Jesus taught His
disciples to be hypocrites — " wash your face," i.e. never
allow anyone to imagine you are putting yourself through
discipline. If ever I can tell to others the discipline I put
myself through in order to further my life with God, from
that moment the discipline becomes useless. Our Lord
counsels us to have a relationship between ourselves and
God that our dearest friend on earth never guesses. When
you fast, fast to your Father in secret not before men, don't
make cheap martyrs of yourselves, and never ask for pity.

When you are going through a time of discipline,
pretend you are not going through it, " appear not
unto men to fast." The Holy Spirit will apply it to
each one of us, there are lines of discipline, lines of limi
tation, physical and mental and spiritual, when the Spirit
says — you must not allow yourself this and that. The
ostensible fasts on the outside are of no use, it is the fasting
on the inside that counts. Fasting from food may be
difficult for some, but it is child's play compared to the
fasting for the development of God's purpose in your life.
Fasting means concentration. Five minutes' heeding of
what Jesus says and solid concentration on it, and there
would be transactions with God that would end in sancti-
fication.

Be not as the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces
that they may appear unto men to fast. May God destroy
for ever the grief that saps the mind, and the luxury of
misery and morbid introspection that men indulge in in
order to develop holiness, and may we bear the shining
faces that belong to the sons of God. " They looked unto
Him and were radiant,"

INCARNATE WISDOM AND INDIVIDUAL REASON 49

(3) DIVINE REASONINGS OF MIND. vv. 19-24.

It is a fruitful study to find out what the New Testament
says about the mind. The Spirit of God comes through
the different writers with one steady insistence to stir
up our minds (e.g., Phil. II. 5, 2 Peter I. 12-13.) The only
way Satan can get in as an " angel of light " is to those
Christians whose hearts are right but whose minds are not
stirred up. Our Lord in these verses deals with the mind,
how I am to think and to reason about things. Unless
we learn to think in obedience to the Holy Spirit's teaching,
we will drift in our spiritual experience without any thinking
at all. All the confusion arises when we try to think and
to reason things out without the Spirit of God.

(a) Doctrine of Deposit, vv. 19-21.

The Holy Spirit teaches us to fasten our thinking on
God, then when we come to deal with property and money
and everything to do with matters of earth, He reminds
us that our real treasure is in heaven. Every effort to
persuade myself that my treasure is in heaven is a sure
sign that it is not. When my motive has been put right,
it begins to put my thinking right.

" Lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven," i.e., have
your banking account in heaven not on earth, lay up
your confidence in God not in your common sense. It is
the trial of your faith that makes you wealthy ; and it
works like this : every time you venture out on the life
of faith you will come across something in your actual
life which seems to contradict absolutely what your faith
in God says you should believe. If you go through that
trial of faith, laying up your confidence in God not in your
common sense, you will gain so much wealth in your

50 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

heavenly banking account, and the more you go through
the trial of faith the wealthier you become in the heavenly
regions, until you go through difficulties smilingly and men
wonder where you have got your wealth of trust from.

It is a trial of faith all through. The conflict of the
Christian is not a conflict with sin but with the natural
life being turned into the spiritual life. The natural life
is not sinful ; the disposition that rules the natural life
is sinful, and when God alters the disposition we have to
turn the natural life into the spiritual by a steady process
of obeying God, and it takes spiritual concentration on
God to do it. If you are going to succeed in anything in
this world, you must concentrate on it, practise at it, and
the same is true spiritually. There are many things you
will find you cannot do if you are going to be concentrated
on God, things that may be perfectly legitimate and right
for others but not right for you if you are going to con
centrate on God. Never let your narrowness of conscience
condemn the other man. Maintain the personal relation
ship, see that you are concentrated on God for yourself,
not concentrated on your convictions or your point of
view, but on God. Whenever you are in doubt about a
thing, push it to its logical conclusion — Is this the kind of
thing that Jesus Christ is after or the kind of thing Satan
is after ? Immediately your decision is made, act on it.

(b) Doctrine of Division, w. 22-23.

The eye is the symbol for conscience in a man who has
been put right by the Holy Spirit. A single eye is essential
to correct understanding. One idea runs all through Our
Lord's teaching — right with God, first, second and third.
If I am born again of the Holy Ghost, I do not persuade
myself I am right with God, I am right with Him because
I have been put right by the Holy Spirit. Then if I walk in

INCARNATE WISDOM AND INDIVIDUAL REASON 51

the light as God is in the light, that keeps my eye single,
and slowly and surely all my actions begin to be put into
the right relationship, and everything becomes full of
harmony and simplicity and peace.

No one has a single motive unless he has been born
from above, we have single ambitions but not a single
motive. Jesus is the only One who had a single motive,
and when His Spirit comes into me the first thing He
does it to make me a man with a single motive, a single
eye to the glory of God. The one motive of Jesus is to
turn men into sons of God, and the one motive of a dis
ciple is to glorify Jesus.

" If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how
great is that darkness ! " Darkness is my point of view,
my right to myself ; light is God's point of view. Jesus
taught clearly the line of demarcation between light and
darkness, the danger is that these divisions get blurred.
Men love darkness rather than light because their deeds
are evil, said Jesus.

Jesus says we cannot serve God and mammon. A man
of the world disbelieves that, he says — With a little subtlety
and wisdom and compromise (it is called diplomacy or
tact), we can serve both. The devil's temptation to Our
Lord to compromise, to fall down and worship him, is
repeated over and over again in Christian experience.
I have to realise that a division as high as heaven and as
deep as hell must be made between the Christian and the
world. " Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world
is the enemy of God."

" Ye cannot serve God and mammon." What is mammon?
The system of civilised life which organises itself without
any consideration of God.

52 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

This doctrine of detachment is a fundamental theme of
Our Lord's, it runs all through His teaching. You cannot
be good and bad at the same time ; you cannot serve God
and make your own out of the service ; you cannot make
"honesty is the best policy" a motive, because immediately
you do you cease to be honest. The riddling the Spirit of
God puts a man through is the sternest on earth — Why are
you a student for the ministry, a missionary, a preacher of
the Gospel? There is one consideration only — I have to
stand right with God, to see that that relationship is the
one thing that is never dimmed and all other things will
right themselves. Immediately that relationship is lost
sight of, multitudes of motives begin to work and you get
worn out. Never compromise with the spirit of mammon.
When you get right with God, you become what is con
temptible in the eyes of the world. Put into practice any
of the principles of the Sermon on the Mount and you will
be treated with amusement at first, then if you persist, the
world gets annoyed and detests you. What will happen, for
instance, if you carry out Jesus Christ's teaching in busi
ness ? Not quite so much success as you bargained for.
This is not the age of the glorification of the saints, but
the age of their humiliation. Are you prepared to follow
Jesus outside the camp, the special camp you belong to ?

' Ye cannot serve God and mammon." Stand absolutely
true to God's line of things. Thank God for everyone
who has learned that the dearest friend on earth is a mere
shadow compared to Jesus, it is dominant personal pas
sionate devotion to Him, and only in Him are all other
relationships in life right, (cf. Luke XIV. 26.) This is not
ordinary integrity, it is supernormal integrity, a likeness
to your Father in heaven. In the beginning of your
spiritual life, make allowances for the swing of the pendulum.

INCARNATE WISDOM AND INDIVIDUAL REASON 53

It is not by accident, but by the set purpose of God, that in
the reaction we go to the opposite extreme of all we were
before. God breaks us from the old life violently, not
gradually, and only brings us back into the domain of
men when we are right with Him so that we are " in the
world " but not " of it." When we are matured in godli
ness then God trusts us, and trusts His own honour to us,
by placing us where the world, the flesh and the devil
may try us, knowing that " greater is He that is in you
than he that is in the world."

(4) DIVINE REASONINGS OF FAITH, vv. 25-34.

Faith is my personal confidence in the Being whose
character I know but whose ways I cannot trace by my
common sense. The reasonings of faith mean the practical
working out in my life of my implicit determined confidence
in God. Common sense is mathematical; faith is not
mathematical, faith works on illogical lines. Jesus places
the strongest emphasis on faith, and especially on faith
that has been tried. Faith tests a man for all he is worth,
he has to stand in the common sense universe in the midst
of things which conflict with his faith, and place his con
fidence in the God Whose character is revealed in Jesus
Christ. Jesus Christ's statements reveal God as a Being
of love and justice and truth : the actual happenings in
my immediate circumstances seem to prove He is not,
will I remain true to the revelation that God is good ?
Will I remain true to His honour no matter what happens
in the actual domain ? If I will, I shall find that God in
His providence makes the two universes, the universe of
revelation and the universe of common sense, work out
in perfect harmony. Most of us are pagans in a crisis,

54 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

we think and act like pagans, only one out of a hundred
is daring enough to bank his faith in the character of God.
The golden rule for understanding in spiritual matters
is not intellect, but obedience. In the spiritual world
discernment is never gained by intellect ; in the common
sense world it is. If a man wants scientific knowledge,
intellectual curiosity is his guide ; but if he wants insight
into what Jesus teaches, he can only get it by obedience.
If things are dark to me spiritually, the reason is there
is something I won't do. Intellectual darkness comes by
ignorance ; spiritual darkness comes because of something
I don't intend to obey.

(a) Careful Carelessness, v. 25.

Jesus does not say that the man who does not think
about anything is blessed, that man is a fool. Jesus
says — Be carefully careless about everything saving one
thing, your relationship to God. That means I have to
be studiously careful that I am careless about how I stand
to self-interest, to food, to clothes, for one reason only —
because I am set on minding my relationship to God.
Many people are careless about what they eat and drink
and they suffer for it, they are careless about what they
put on and they look as they have no right to look, they
are careless over property and God holds them responsible
for it. What Jesus is saying is that the great care of the
life is to put the relationship to God first and everything
else second. Our Lord teaches the complete reversal of
the reasonings of a practical sensible person, viz., don't
make the ruling factor of your life what you shall eat and
what you shall drink, but make the one point of your
life zealous concentration on God. The one dominating
abandon of the life is to be concentration on God, conse-

INCARNATE WISDOM AND INDIVIDUAL REASON 55

quently every other carefulness is careless in comparison.
In Luke XIV. 26 Our Lord is laying down the conditions
of discipleship, and He says that the first condition is
personal, passionate devotion to Himself until every other
devotion is hatred in comparison to love for Jesus.

" Take no thought for your life. ..." Immediately
we look at these words of Jesus, we find them the most
revolutionary of statements. We argue exactly the
opposite way, even the most spiritual of us — I must live,
I must make so much money, I must be clothed and fed —
that is how it begins, the great concern of the life is not
God, but how I am going to fit myself to live. Jesus
says — Reverse the order, get rightly related to Me first
and see that you maintain that as the great care of your
life, and never put the concentration of your care on the
other things. It is one of the severest disciplines to allow
the Holy Spirit to bring us into harmony with the teaching
of Jesus in these verses.

(b) Careful Unreasonableness, vv. 26-29.

To be careful of all that the natural man says we must
be careful over, Jesus declares to be unreasonable in a
disciple. " Behold the fowls of the air. ..." "Consider
the lilies of the field." Jesus uses the illustration of the
birds and the flowers not by accident, He uses it purposely
in order to show the utter unreasonableness from His
standpoint of being so anxious about the means of living.
" Behold the fowls of the air : for they sow not, neither
do they reap, nor gather into barns ; yet your heavenly
Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better then they ? "
Imagine the sparrows and blackbirds and thrushes worrying
about their feathers, Jesus says they don't trouble about
it at all, the thing that makes them what they are is not
their thought about it, but the thought of the Father in

56 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

heaven. A bird is a hard working little creature, but it
does not work to stick the feathers on itself, it obeys the
law of its life and becomes what it is. Jesus Christ's
argument is — Concentrate on the life I give you, and you
are perfectly free for all the other things because your
Father is watching the life on the inside. Maintain
obedience to the Holy Spirit, who is the real principle of
your life, and He will supply the " feathers " for you, you
are much better than a sparrow.

" Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow ; they
toil not, neither do they spin : and yet I say unto you,
That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like
one of these." It is useless to mistake careful considera
tion of circumstances for that which produces character.
You cannot produce the life on the inside by watching the
outside all the time.

Consider the lily, it obeys the law of its life in the sur
roundings in which it is placed, and Jesus says, as disciples,
consider your hidden life with God. Pay attention to
the Source and God will look after the outflow. Imagine
a lily hauling itself out of its pot and saying — I don't
think I look exactly right here. The lily's duty is to obey
the law of its life where it is placed by the gardener. Watch
your life with God, says Jesus, see that that is right and
you will grow as the lily. We are all inclined to say — I
would be all right if only I were somewhere else. There
is only one way to develop spiritually, and that is by con
centration on God. Don't bother whether you are growing
in grace or whether you are of use to others : believe on
Me. " Consider the lilies, how they grow" — they simply
are. Take the sea and the air and the sun and the stars
and moon, all these are, and what a ministration they
exert ! So often we mar God's designed influence through

INCARNATE WISDOM AND INDIVIDUAL REASON 57

us by our self-conscious effort at being consistent and
useful. It looks unreasonable to expect a man to con
sider the lilies, but it is the only way he can grow in grace.
Jesus Christ's argument is that the men and women who
are concentrated on the Father in heaven are those who
are the fittest to do the work of the world. They have no
ulterior motive of looking after circumstances in order to
produce a fine character. It cannot be done that way.
How am I going to grow in the knowledge of God ? By
remaining where you are, and by remembering that your
Father knows where you are and the circumstances you
are in, keep concentrated on Him and you will grow like
the lily spiritually.

" Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit
unto his stature ? " Jesus talks from the implicit domain.
How many people by taking thought are born into the
world ? You cannot get at the spring of natural life by
common sense reasoning, and when you deal with the life
of God in your soul, remember, says Jesus, that your
growth in grace does not depend on your watching it, but
on your concentration on the Father in heaven.

Notice the difference between the illustrations we use
in talking of spiritual growth and the illustrations Jesus
uses. We take our illustrations from engineering enter
prises, from motor cars, aeroplanes, etc., things that compel
our attention. Jesus Christ took His illustrations from
His Father's handiwork, from sparrows and trees and birds,
things that none of us dream of noticing. We are all
breathless and passionate and in a hurry. Jesus says you
may think till all is blue, but you cannot add one inch to
your height that way, and you cannot possibly develop
yourself spiritually in any way but the way I tell you,
viz., concentration on God.

58 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

Our Lord's counsel to His disciples is — Be like the lily
and the star. When a man gets born from above he is
inclined to become a moral policeman, an intolerable
spiritual prig, one who unconsciously presents himself as
better than other men. Who is the man who has influenced
me most ? The man who has buttonholed me, or the
man who lives his life as the stars in the heaven or the lily
of the field, perfectly simple and unaffected ? Those are
the lives that mould us, our mothers and wives and friends
who are of that order, and that is the order the Holy Ghost
produces. If you want to be of use, get rightly related
to Jesus and He will make you of use unconsciously every
moment you live, the condition is believing on Him.

Supposing Jesus tells you to do something that is an
enormous challenge to your common sense, what are you
going to do — hang back ? Once get your nerves into the
habit of doing a thing physically and you will do it every
time until you break the habit deliberately ; and spiritually
it is the same, you will get up to what Jesus wants over
and over again, and every time when it comes to the point,
turn back (like a man baulking a hurdle), until you break
the habit and resolutely abandon. Jesus Christ demands of
the man who trusts in Him the same reckless sporting
spirit that the natural man exhibits in his life. If a man
is going to do anything worth while, there are times when
he has to risk everything on a leap, and in the spiritual
world Jesus demands that I risk everything I hold by my
common sense and leap into what He says. Immediately
I do, I find what He says fits on as solidly as my common
sense.

In following Jesus it is a risk absolutely, a yielding
clean over to Him, and that is where our infidelity comes

INCARNATE WISDOM AND INDIVIDUAL REASON 59

in, we will not trust what we cannot see, we will not believe
what we cannot trace. Then it is all up with my dis-
cipleship. The great word of Jesus to His disciples is
" Abandon." When God has brought me into the relation
ship of a disciple, I have to venture on His word, to trust
entirely to Him and watch that when He brings me to
the venture, I take it.

Jesus sums up common sense carefulness in a person
indwelt by the Spirit of God as infidelity. After you have
received the Spirit and you try and put other things first
instead of God, you will find confusion. The Holy Spirit
presses through and says — Where does God come in in
this new relationship ? in this mapped-out holiday? in
these new books you are buying ? The Holy Spirit always
presses that point until we learn to make concentration
on God the first consideration. It is not only wrong to
worry, it is real infidelity because it means I do not think
God can look after the little practical details of my life,
it is never anything else that worries us. Notice what
Jesus said would choke the word He puts in — the devil ?
No, the cares of this world. That is how infidelity begins.
It is the little foxes that spoil the vines, the little worries
always. The great cure for infidelity is obedience to the
Spirit of God. Refuse to be swamped by the cares of
this world, cut out non-essentials and continually revise
your relationship to God and see that you are concentrated
absolutely on Him. The man who trusts Jesus in a definite
practical way is freer than anyone else to do his work in
the world, free from fret and worry, he can go with absolute
certainty into the daily life because the responsibility of
his life is off him and on God. Once I realise the revelation
Jesus gives that God is my Father and that I can never
think of anything He will forget, then worry is impossible.

60 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

(d) Concentrated Consecration, w. 33-34.

" Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness
and all these things shall be added unto you." " Seek ye
first the Kingdom of God " — " But, supposing I do, what
about this thing and that ? who is going to look after me ?
I would like to obey God, but don't ask me to take a step
in the dark." We enthrone our common sense as almighty
God and treat Jesus Christ as a spiritual appendage to it.
Jesus Christ hits desperately hard at every one of the
institutions we bank all our faith in naturally. The
sense of property and of insurance is one of the greatest
hindrances to development in the spiritual life. You
cannot lay up for a rainy day if you are trusting Jesus
Christ.

Our Lord teaches that the one great secret of the spiritual
life is concentration on God and His purposes. We talk
a lot about consecration, but it ends in sentimentalism
because there is nothing definite about it. Consecration
ought to mean my definite yielding of myself over as a
saved soul to Jesus and concentrating on that. There are
things in actual life that lead to perplexity, and I say — I am
in a quandary and I don't know which way to take.
" Be renewed in the spirit of your mind," says Paul,
concentrate on God, so that you make out what is His will.
Concentration on God is of more value than personal holi
ness. God can do what He likes with the man who is aban
doned to Him. God saves us and sanctifies us, then He
expects us to concentrate on Him in every circumstance we
are in. " Immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood."
When in doubt, haul yourself up short and concentrate
on God, and every time you do, you will find that God
engineers your circumstances and opens the way perfectly

INCARNATE WISDOM AND INDIVIDUAL REASON 61

securely, the condition on your part is that you con
centrate on God.

" Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteous
ness ; and all these things shall be added unto you." At
the bar of common sense Jesus Christ's statements are
those of a fool ; but bring them to the bar of faith and the
word of God, and you begin to find with awestruck spirit
that they are the words of God.

STUDY No. 4.

CHARACTER AND CONDUCT.

Matthew VII. 1-12,

(1) CHRISTIAN CHARACTERISTICS, w. 1-5.

(a) The Uncritical Temper, v. 1.

(b) The Undeviating Test. v. 2.

(2) CHRISTIAN CONSIDERATENESS. vv. 6-11.

(a) The Need to Discriminate, v. 6.

(b) The Notion of Divine Control, vv. 7-10.

(3) CHRISTIAN COMPREHENSIVENESS.

(a) The Positive Margin of Righteousness. \

(b) The Proverbial Maxim of Reasonableness. > v. 12.

" And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith
virtue, . . ." Peter is writing to those who are the
children of God, those who have been born from above,
and he says — Add, give diligence, concentrate. " Add "
means all that character means. No man is born with
character ; we make our own character. When a man is
born from above he has a new disposition given to him,
not character; neither naturally nor supernaturally are

CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 63

we born with character. Character is what a man makes
out of his disposition as it comes in contact with external
things. A man's character cannot be summed up by what
he does in spots, but only by what he is in the main trend
of his existence. When we describe a man we fix on the
exceptional things, but it is the steady trend of the man's
life that tells. Character is that which steadily prevails,
not something that occasionally manifests itself. What we
do steadily and persistently makes character, not what is
exceptional or spasmodic, that is something God mourns
over — " thy goodness is as a morning cloud," He says.
In Matthew VII. Our Lord is dealing with the need to make
character.

(1) CHRISTIAN CHARACTERISTICS, vv. 1-5.

(a) The Uncritical Temper, v. 1.

" Judge not, that ye be not judged." Criticism is
part of the ordinary faculty of a man, he has a sense of
humour, i.e., a sense of proportion, and he sees where
things are wrong and pulls the other fellow to bits ; but
Jesus says, as a disciple, cultivate the uncritical temper.
In the spiritual domain, criticism is love gone sour. There
is no room for criticism in a wholesome spiritual life. The
critical faculty is an intellectual one, not a moral one. If
criticism becomes a habit it will destroy the moral energy
of the life and paralyse spiritual force. The only Person
who can criticise human beings is the Holy Spirit. No
human being dare criticise another human being, because
immediately he does he puts himself in a superior position
to the one he criticises. A critic must be removed from
what he criticises. Before a man can criticise a work of
art or piece of music, his information must be complete,

64 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

he must stand away from what he criticises as superior to
it. No human being can ever take that attitude to another
human being, if he does he puts himself in the wrong
position and grieves the Holy Spirit. If a man is con
tinually criticised, he becomes good for nothing, the effect
of the criticism is to knock all the gumption and power
out of him. Criticism is deadly in its effect because it
divides a man's powers and prevents his being a force for
anything. That is never the work of the Holy Ghost.
The Holy Ghost alone is in the true position of a critic,
He is able to show what is wrong without wounding and
hurting.

The temper of mind that makes me lynx-eyed to see
where others are wrong does not do them any good, because
the effect of my criticism is to paralyse their powers, which
proves that the criticism did not come from the Holy
Ghost. I have put myself into the position of a superior
person. Jesus says a disciple can never stand off from
another life and criticise it, therefore He advocates an
uncritical temper, " Judge not." Beware of anything that
puts you in the superior person's place.

The counsel of Jesus is to abstain from judging. This
sounds strange at first because the characteristic of the
Holy Spirit in a Christian is to reveal the things that are
wrong, but the strangeness is only on the surface. The
Holy Spirit does reveal what is wrong in others, but His
discernment is never for purposes of criticism, but for
purposes of intercession. When the Holy Spirit reveals
something of the nature of sin and unbelief in another,
His purpose is not to make me feel the smug satisfaction of
a critical spectator — Well, thank God, I am not like that ;
but to make me so lay hold of God for that one that God
enables him to turn away from the wrong thing. Never

CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 65

ask God for discernment, because discernment increases
your responsibility terrifically ; and you cannot get out of
it by talking, but only by bearing the life up in inter
cession before God until God puts him right. " If any
man see his brother sin a sin which is not unto death, he
shall ask, and he shall give him life for them that sin not
unto death." (1 John V. 16.) Our Lord makes no room
for criticism in the spiritual life, but He does make room
for discernment and discrimination.

If we let these searchlights go straight down to the root
of our spiritual life we will see why Jesus says — Don't
judge, we won't have time to. The whole of the life is to be
lived in the power of God so that He can pour through the
rivers of living water to others. Some of us are so con
cerned about the outflow, that it dries up. We continually
ask — Am I of any use ? Jesus tells us how to be of use —
Believe in Me, and out of you will flow rivers of living
water.

" Judge not, that ye be not judged." If we let that
maxim of Our Lord's sink into our heart we will find
how it hauls us up. " Judge not " — why we are always at
it ! The average Christian is the most penetratingly
critical individual, there is nothing of the likeness of Jesus
about him. A critical temper is a contradiction to all
Our Lord's teaching. Jesus says of criticism, apply it to
yourself, never to anyone else. " Why dost thou judge
thy brother ? ... for we shall all stand before the judg
ment seat of Christ." Whenever you are in the critical
temper, it is impossible to enter into communion with
God. Criticism makes you hard and vindictive and cruel,
and leaves you with the nattering unction that you are a
superior person. It is impossible to develop the charac
teristics of a saint and maintain the critical attitude. The

66 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

first thing the Holy Spirit does is to give you a spring-
cleaning, and there is no possibility of pride left in a man
then. I never met a man I could despair of after dis
cerning what there lies in me apart from the grace of God.
Stop having a measuring rod for others. Jesus says
regarding judging — Don't judge ; be uncritical in your
temper, because in the spiritual domain you can accomplish
nothing by criticism. One of the severest lessons to learn
is to leave the cases we do not understand to God. There
is always one fact more in every life of which we know
nothing, therefore says Jesus — Judge not. It is not done
once for all, we have to be always remembering that this
is our Lord's rule of conduct.

(b) The Undeviating Test. v. 2.

" For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged ;
and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured
to you again." This statement of Our Lord's is not a
haphazard guess, it is an eternal law and it works from
God's throne right down. (See Psalm XVIII. 25-26.) The
measure I mete is measured to me again. Jesus puts it
here in connection with criticism. If you have been
shrewd in finding out the defects of others, that will be
exactly the measure meted out to you, that is the way
people will judge you. " I am perfectly certain that man
has been criticising me." Well, what have you been doing ?
Life serves back in the coin you pay ; you are paid back
not necessarily by the same person, but the law holds
good — " with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged."
And it works with regard to good as well as evil. If you
have been generous, you will meet with generosity again
through someone else ; and if you mete out criticism and
suspicion to others, that is the way you will be treated.
There is a difference between retaliation and retribution.

CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 67

According to Our Lord, the basis of life is retribution, but
He makes no room for retaliation.

In Romans II. this principle is applied still more defi
nitely, viz., what I criticise in another I am guilty of my
self. Every wrong I see in you, God locates in me ; every
time I judge you, I condemn myself. " Therefore thou
art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest :
for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thy
self ; for thou that judgest doest the same things." God
does not look at the act, He looks at the possibility. To
begin with, we do not believe the statements of the Bible.
For instance, do I believe that what I criticise in another
I am guilty of myself ? I can always tell sin in another
man because I am a sinner. The reason I can see hypo
crisy and fraud and unreality in others is that they are all in
my own heart. The great danger is to call carnal suspicion
the conviction of the Holy Ghost. When the Holy Ghost
convicts men, He convicts for conversion, that men might
be converted and manifest other characteristics. I have
no right to put myself in the place of a superior person
and tell them what I see that is wrong, that is the work
of the Holy Ghost.

The great characteristic of the saint is humility. I
realise to the full that all these sins and others would have
been manifested in me but for the grace of God, therefore
I have no right to judge. Jesus says — Don't judge,
because if you do, it will be measured to you again exactly
as you have judged. Which one of us would dare stand
before God and say— My God, judge me as I have judged
my fellow men ? We have judged our fellow men as
sinners; if God judged us like that we would be in hell.
God judges us through the marvellous Atonement of
Jesus Christ.

68 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

The kind impudence of the average truth teller is in
spired of the devil when it comes to pointing out the defects
of others. The devil is lynx-eyed for things he can criticise,
and we are all shrewd in pointing out the mote in our
brother's eye. It puts me in a superior position — I am a
finer spiritual character than you. \Vhere do you find
that characteristic ? In the Lord Jesus ? Never. The
Holy Ghost works through the saints unbeknown to them,
He works through them as light. If this is not understood,
you will say — That preacher or that teacher seems to be
criticising me all the time. He is not, it is the Holy Spirit
in the preacher discerning what is wrong in you.

The last curse in your life as a Christian is the person
who becomes a providence to you, he is quite certain you
cannot do anything without his advice, and if you don't
heed it you are sure to go wrong. Jesus ridiculed that
notion with terrific power — " Thou hypocrite, first cast
out the beam out of thine own eye ; and then shalt thou
see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."
" Thou hypocrite," literally — play actor, one whose reality
is not in keeping with his sincerity ; a hypocrite is one
who plays two parts consciously for his own ends. When
you find fault with other people you may be quite sincere,
yet Jesus says in reality you are a fraud. There is no
getting away from the penetration of Jesus. If I see the
mote in your eye, it is because I have a beam in my own.
It is a most homecoming statement.

If I have let God remove the beam from my own outlook
by His mighty grace, I will carry with me the implicit
sunlight confidence that what God has done for me He can
easily do for my brother, because he has only a splinter,
I had a log of wood ! This is the confidence God's salva-

CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 69

tion gives you, you are so amazed that God has altered
you that you can despair of no one. Oh yes, I know God
can undertake for you, you are only a little wrong, I was
wrong down to the remote depths of my mind, I was a
mean, prejudiced, self-interested, self-seeking person, and
God has altered me, therefore I can never despair of you
or of anyone. These statements of Our Lord's save us
from that fearful peril of spiritual conceit — Thank God
I am not as other men, and also make us realise why such
a man as Daniel bowed his head in vicarious humiliation
and intercession — I have sinned with Thy people. That
call comes every now and again to individuals and to
nations.

(2) CHRISTIAN CONSIDERATENESS. w. 7-11.

Consider how God has dealt with you and then consider
that you do likewise.

(a) The Need to Discriminate, v. 6.

" Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither
cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them
under their feet, and turn again and rend you." Jesus is
inculcating the need to examine carefully what you present
in the way of God's truth to others. If you present the
pearls of God's revelation to unspiritual people, He says
they will trample the pearls under foot — not trample you
under their feet, that would not matter so much, but they
will trample the truth of God under their feet. These
words are not human words, but the words of Jesus, and
the Holy Spirit alone can teach us what they mean. There
are some truths that God will not make simple. The only
thing God makes plain in the Bible is the way of salvation

70 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

and sanctification, after that my understanding depends
entirely on my walking in the light. Over and over again
men water down the word of God to suit those who are
not spiritual, and consequently the word of God is trampled
under the feet of " swine." Ask yourself — In what way
am I flinging God's truth to unspiritual swine ? Be careful
Jesus says, how you give God's holy things to " dogs,"
i.e., a symbol of the folks on the outside; don't cast your
holy things before them nor give the pearls of God's truth
to men who are swine. Paul mentions the possibility of
the pearl of sanctification being dragged in the mire of
fornication, it comes through not respecting this mighty
caution of Our Lord's. Some points in your experience
you have no right to talk about. There are times of
fellowship between Christians when these pearls of precious
rarity get turned over and looked at, but if you flaunt
them for the means of converting people without the
permission of God, you will find what Jesus says is true,
they will trample them under their feet.

Our Lord never tells us to confess anything but Himself.
" He that confesseth ME before men." Testimonies to
the world on the subjective line are always wrong, they
are for saints, for those who are spiritual and understand ;
but your testimony to the world is Our Lord Himself,
confess Him — He saved me, He sanctified me, He put me
right with God. It is always easier to be true to your
experience than to Jesus Christ. Many a man spurns
Jesus Christ in any other phase than that of his particular
religious ideas. The central truth is not salvation nor
sanctification nor the second coming ; the central truth is
nothing less than Jesus Christ. " I, if I be lifted up, will
draw all men unto Me." Error always comes in when we
take something Jesus Christ does and preach it as the

CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 71

truth. It is part of the truth, but if you take it to be the
whole truth you become an advocate of an idea instead
of a Person, the Lord Himself. The characteristic of an
idea is that it has the ban of finality. If you are only
true to a doctrine of Christianity instead of to Jesus Christ,
you drive home your idea with sledge hammer blows, and
the people who listen to you say — Well, that may be true,
but they resent the way it is presented. When you follow
Jesus, the domineering attitude and the dictatorial attitude
go, and concentration on Jesus comes in.

(b) The Notion of Divine Control, vv. 7-10.

By the simple argument of these verses Our Lord urges
us to keep our minds filled with the notion of God's control
behind eveiything and to maintain an attitude of perfect
trust. Always distinguish between being possessed of the
Spirit and forming the mind of Christ. Jesus is laying
down rules of conduct for those who have the Spirit.
Notion your mind with the idea that God is there. Once
the mind is notioned along that line, when you are in
difficulties it is as easy as breathing to remember — Why,
my Father knows all about it. It is not an effort, it comes
naturally. Before, when perplexities were pressing, you
used to go and ask this one and that, now the notion of the
Divine control is forming so powerfully in you that you
simply go to God about it. You will always know whether
the notion is at work by the way you act in difficult cir
cumstances. Who is the first one you go to ? What is
the first thing you do ? The first power you rely on ? It
is the working out of the principle indicated in Matthew
VI. 25-34, God is my Father, He loves me, I can never think
of anything He will forget, why should I worry ? Keep
the notion strong and growing of the control of God behind
all things. Nothing happens in any particular unless

72 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

God's mind is behind it, then I rest perfectly confident.
There are times when God cannot lift the darkness, but
trust Him. Jesus said God will appear at times like an un
kind friend, but He is not : He will appear like an
unnatural father, but He is not ; He will appear like an un
just judge but He is not. The time will come when every
thing will be explained. Prayer is not only asking, it is
an attitude of heart that produces an atmosphere in which
asking is perfectly natural, and "everyone that asks
receives."

A man will get from life everything he asks for, because
he does not ask what his will is not in. If a man asks of
life to make him wealthy, he will get wealth, or he was
playing the fool when he asked. " If ye abide in Me," says
Jesus, "and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye
will, and it shall be done unto you." We pray pious
blether, our will is not in it, and then we say God does
not answer; we never asked Him for anything. Asking
means that my will is in it.

You say — But I asked God to turn my life into a garden
of the Lord, and the first thing that happened was the
ploughshare of sorrow, and instead of getting a garden
I have got a wilderness. God never gives the wrong
answer, He had to turn the garden of your natural life
into ploughed soil before He could turn it into a garden
of the Lord, He is putting the seed in now. Let God's
seasons come over your soul, and before long you will have
a garden of the Lord.

We need to discern that God controls what we ask.
We bring in what Paul calls " will worship." Will is the
whole man active, there are terrific forces in the will.
The man who gains a moral victory by sheer force of will
is the most difficult man to deal with afterwards. The

CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 73

profound thing in man is his will, not sin. Will is the
essential element in God's creation of man ; sin is a per
verse disposition which entered into man. At the basis,
the human will is one with God, covered up by all kinds
of desires and motives, and when we preach Jesus the Holy
Spirit excavates down to the basis of the will, and the will
turns to God every time. We try to attack men's wills ;
Jesus says — Lift Me up, and I will push straight to the
will. When Jesus talked about prayer He never said —
If your human will turns in that direction. He put it
with the grand simplicity of a child — Ask. We bring in
our reasoning faculty and say — Yes, but, . . . Jesus
says — " If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ye
shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you."

"I f ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto
your children, how much more shall your Father which
is in heaven give good things to them that ask Him ? "
But remember that you have to ask things that are in
keeping with the God whom Jesus Christ reveals, things
in keeping with His domain. God is not a necromancer,
He is after the development of the character of a son of
God. If I want to know the things of a man, I can get at
them by the " spirit of man which is in him," but the
things of the Spirit of God are " spiritually discerned."

The discernment needed here is the habitual realisation
that every good thing I have has been given to me by the
sheer sovereign grace of God. Jesus says — Get this
reasoning incorporated into you — How much have you
deserved? Nothing, everything has been given to you
by God. Then may God save us from the mean accursed
economical notion that we must only help the people who
deserve it. One can almost hear the Holy Ghost shout

74 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

in the heart — Who are you that you talk like that, did
you deserve the salvation God has given you, did you
deserve to be filled with the Holy Spirit ? It is all done
by the sheer sovereign mercy of God, then be like your
Father in heaven, says Jesus, have a perfect disposition
like His. " Love as I have loved you." It is not done
once for all, it is a continual stedfast growing habit of the
life.

Humility and holiness always go together. Whenever
hardness and harshness begin to creep into the personal
attitude towards one another, we may be certain we are
swerving from the light. The preaching must be as stern
and true as God's word, never water down God's truth ;
but never forget when you deal with others that you are
a sinner saved by grace, no matter where you stand now.
If you stand in the fulness of the blessing of God, you stand
there by no other right than the sheer sovereign grace of
God. Then, says Jesus, if you, an evil being, saved by
grace, can do such kind things to others, how much more
shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to
them that ask Him?

|£)ver and over again we blame God for His neglect of
people by our sympathy with them, we may not put it
into words but by our attitude we imply that we are
filling up what God has forgotten to do. Never have that
idea, never allow it to come into your mind. In all pro
bability the Spirit of God will begin to show that it is
because we have neglected what we ought to do that
people are where they are! The great craze to-day is
socialism, and men are saying that Jesus Christ came as
a social reformer. Nonsense ! We are to be social re
formers, Jesus Christ came to alter us, and we try to shirk
our responsibility by putting our work on to Him. What

CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 75

Jesus does is to alter us and put us right, then these prin
ciples of His will instantly make us social reformers. They
will begin to work straightway where we live, in my re
lationship to my father and mother, to my brothers and
sisters, my friends, my employers or employees. Consider
how God has dealt with you, says Jesus, and then consider
that you do likewise to others.

(3) CHRISTIAN COMPREHENSIVENESS, v. 12.

Christian grace comprehends the whole man. " Thou
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with
all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength."
Salvation means not only a pure heart, an enlightened
mind, a spirit put right with God, it means that the whole
of man is comprehended in the manifestation of the mar
vellous power and grace of God; the whole man, body,
soul and spirit is brought into fascinating captivity to the
Lord Jesus Christ. An incandescent mantle illustrates
the meaning, if the mantle is not rightly adjusted, only
one bit of it glows, but get the mantle adjusted exactly,
and when the light comes the whole thing is comprehended
in a blaze of light ; and every bit of our being is to be
absorbed until we are one glow with the comprehensive
goodness of God. " The fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness
and righteousness and truth." Some of us have goodness
in spots.

(a) The Positive Margin of Righteousness.

The limit to the manifestation of the grace of God in me
is my body, and the whole of my body. We can under
stand the need of a pure heart, of a mind rightly adjusted
to God and a spirit indwelt by the Holy Spirit, but what

76 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

about the body ? That is the margin of righteousness in
me. We make a divorce between a clear intellectual
understanding of truth and its practical outcome. Jesus
never made such a divorce, He takes no notice of our fine
intellectual conceptions unless their practical outcome is
shown in reality.

There is a great snare in the capacity to understand a
thing clearly and to exhaust its power by stating it. Over
much earnestness blinds the life to reality, earnestness
becomes our god. We bank on the earnestness and zeal
with which things are said and done, and after a while
we find that the reality is not there, the power and presence
of God are not being manifested, there are relationships
at home or in business or in private that show when the
veneer is scratched that we are not real. To say things
well is apt to exhaust the power of doing them, so that
a man has often to curb the expression of a thing with
his tongue and turn it into action, otherwise his gift of
facile utterance will prevent his doing the things he says.

(b) The Proverbial Maxim of Reasonableness.

" Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men
should do to you, do ye even so to them." Our Lord's
use of this maxim is positive, not negative. Do to others
whatsoever ye would that they should do to you — a very
different thing from not doing to others what you don't
want them to do to you. What would I like other people
to do to me ? Well, says Jesus, do that to them ; don't
wait for them to do it to you. The Holy Ghost will kindle
your imagination to picture many things you would like
others to do to you, it is His way of telling you what to
do to them — " I would like people to give me credit for
the generous motives I have ; " well, give them credit for
having generous motives. " I would like that people should

CHARACTER AND CONDUCT 77

not pass harsh judgments on me," well, don't pass
harsh judgments on them. " I should like other people
to pray for me ; " well, pray for them. The measure of
my growth in grace is my attitude towards other people.
" Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," says Jesus.
Satan comes in as an angel of light and says — But you must
not think about yourself. The Holy Spirit will make you
think about yourself, because that is His way of educating
you as to how to deal with others. He makes you picture
what you would like other people to do to you, and then
says — Now you go and do those things to them. This
verse is Our Lord's measure for practical ethical conduct.
" Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do
ye even so to them." Never look for right in the other
man, but never cease to be right yourself. We always
look for justice in this world, but there is no such thing as
justice. Jesus says — Never look for justice, but never
cease to give it. The stamp all through Our Lord's
teaching is that of the impossible — unless He can make
me all over again, and that is what He came to do. He came
to give any man a new heredity to which His teaching
will apply.

Jesus Christ came to make the great laws of God in
carnate in human life, that is the miracle of God's grace.
We are to be written epistles, "known and read of all men."
There is no room whatever in the New Testament for the
man who says he is saved by grace but who does not
produce the graceful goods. Jesus Christ by His Re
demption can make my actual life in keeping with my
religious profession.

In our study of the Sermon on the Mount it would be
like a baptism of light to allow the principles of Jesus to

78 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

soak right down to our very make-up. His statements
are not put up as standards for us to attain ; God re-makes
us, puts His Holy Spirit in us, then the Holy Spirit applies
the principles to us and enables us to work them out by
His guidance.

STUDY No. 5.
IDEAS, IDEALS, AND ACTUALITY.

Matthew VII. 13-29.

(1) TWO GATES, TWO WAYS.

(a) All Noble Things are Difficult. \

(6) My Utmost for His Highest, ivv. 13-14.

(2) TEST YOUR TEACHERS, vv. 15-20.

(a) Possibility of Pretence, v. 15.
(6) Place of Patience, v. 16.

(d) Power of Publicity, vv. 19-20.

(3) APPEARANCE AND REALITY, w. 21-23.

(a) Recognition of Men. v. 21.

(b) Remedy Mongers, v. 22.

(4) THE TWO BUILDERS, vv. 24-29.

(a) Spiritual Castles, v. 24.

(b) Stern Crisis, v. 25.

(d) Scriptural Concentration, vv. 28-29.

An idea reveals what it does and no more. If you read
a book about life, life looks simple ; but go out and face

80 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

the facts of life and you will find they do not come into
the simple line laid down in the book. An idea works like
a searchlight, lighting up what it does and no more ; but
daylight reveals a hundred and one facts the searchlight
had not taken into account. An idea is apt to have the
ban of finality about it — the " tyranny " of an idea.

An ideal embodies our highest conceptions, but it con
tains no moral inspiration. To treat the Sermon on the
Mount as merely an ideal is misleading. There is nothing
of the ideal about it, it is a statement of the working out
in actuality of Jesus Christ's disposition in the life of any
man. A man gets ashamed of not being able to fulfil his
ideals, and the more upright he is, the more agonising is his
conflict — I won't lower my ideals, he says, although I can
never hope to make them actual. No man is so laboured
as the man with ideals he cannot carry out. Jesus Christ
says to such — " Come unto Me, and I will give you rest,"
i.e., I will " stay " you, put something into you which
will make the ideal and the actual one. Without Jesus
Christ there is an unbridgeable gap between the ideal and
the actual, the only way out is a personal relationship to
Him. The salvation of God not only saves a man from
hell, but alters his actual life.

(1) TWO GATES, TWO WAYS. w. 13-14.

Our Lord continually used proverbs and sayings that
were familiar to His hearers and put an altogether new
meaning into them. Here He used an allegory that was
familiar in His day, and lifted it by His inspiration to
embody His patient warnings.

Always distinguish between warning and threatening.
God never threatens ; the devil never warns. Warning is

IDEAS, IDEALS AND ACTUALITY 81

a great arresting statement of God's, inspired by His love
and patience. This throws a flood of light on the vivid
statements of Jesus, such as those in Matthew XXIII.
Be careful how you picture Jesus when you read His
terrible utterances. Read our Lord's denunciations with
Calvary in your mind. Jesus is stating the inexorable
consequence — " How can you escape the damnation of
hell ? " There is no element of personal vindictiveness.

It is the great patient love of God that puts the warning.
" The way of transgressors is hard." Go behind that
statement in your imagination and see the love of God ;
God is amazingly tender, yet He cannot make the way of
transgressors easy. God has made it difficult to go wrong,
especially for His children.

" Enter ye in at the strait gate. ..." If a man tries
to enter into salvation in any other way than Jesus Christ's
way, he will find it a broad way, but the end of it is distress.
Erasmus said it took the sharp sword of sorrow, and
difficulties of every description, heartbreaks and disen-
chantments to bring him to the place where he saw Jesus
as the altogether lovely One, and, he says : " When I got
there I found there was no need to have gone the way
I went." There is the broad way of reasonable self-
realisation; but the only way to a personal knowledge of
eternal redemption is strait and narrow. Jesus says — " I
am the way."

There is a difference between discipleship and being
saved. A man can be saved by God's grace without being
a disciple of Jesus. Discipleship means a personal dedi
cation of the life to Jesus. Men are saved so as by fire,
they have not been worth anything to God in their actual
lives. Go and make disciples, said Jesus. The teaching
of the Sermon on the Mount produces only despair in a

82 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

man who is not born again. If Jesus came to be a Teacher
only, He had better have stayed away. What is the use
of teaching a human being to be what no human being can
be — to be continually self-effaced, to do more than his
duty, to be disinterested, to be perfectly devoted to God ?
If all Jesus came to do was to teach men to be that, He is
the greatest taunter that ever presented any ideal to the
human race. But Jesus came primarily and fundamentally
to regenerate men ; He came to put into any man the
disposition that ruled His own life, and immediately that
comes into a man, then the teaching of Jesus begins to be
possible. All the standards He gives are based on His
disposition.

Notice the apparent unsatisfactoriness of the answers of
Jesus. He never once answered a question that sprang
from a man's head, because those questions are never
original, they always have the captious note about them.
The man with that type of question wants to get the best
of it logically. In Luke XIII. 24 a certain devout man
asked Jesus a question — " Lord, are there few that be
saved ? " And Jesus replied — " Strive to enter in at the
strait gate," i.e., see that your own feet are on the right
path. Our Lord's answers seem at first to evade the issue,
but He goes underneath the question and solves the real
problem. He never answers our shallow questions but
deals with the great unconscious need that makes them
arise. When a man asks an original question out of his
own personal life, Jesus answers him every time.

(a) All Noble Things are Difficult.

Our Lord warns that the devout life of a disciple is not
a dream, but a decided discipline which calls for the use
of all our powers. No amount of determination can give

IDEAS, IDEALS AND ACTUALITY 83

me the new life of God, that is a gift ; where determination
comes in, is in letting that new life work itself out according
to Christ's standard. We are always in danger of con
founding what we can do and what we cannot do. We can
not save ourselves, nor sanctify ourselves, nor give ourselves
the Holy Spirit ; only God can do that. Confusion
continually recurs when we try to do what God alone can
do, and try to make out that God will do what we alone
can do. We imagine that God will make us walk in the
light ; God will not, we must do the walking. God gives
us the power to walk, but we have to see that we use the
power. God puts the power and the life into us and fills
us with His Spirit, now we have to work it out, not work
our salvation, but work it out ; and as we do we realise
that the noble life of a disciple is a gloriously difficult one —
a difficulty that rouses us up to overcome it, not a difficulty
that makes us faint and cave in.

It is always necessary to make an effort to be noble.
Jesus never shields a disciple from fulfiling all the require
ments of a child of His. Things that are worth doing are
never easy. On the ground of Redemption the life of the
Son of God is formed in my human nature and I have to
put on the new man in accordance with His life, and that
takes time and discipline. " Acquire your soul with
patience." Soul is my personal spirit manifesting itself
in my body, the way I reason and think and look at things.
Jesus says that a man must lose his soul in order to find it.

We deal with the great massive phases of Redemption —
that God saves men by sheer grace through the Atonement,
but we are apt to forget that it has to be worked out in
practical living among men. " Ye are My friends," says
Jesus, therefore lay down your life for Me, not go through
the crisis of death, but lay out your life deliberately for

84 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

Me, take time over it. It is a noble life and a difficult life.
God works in me to do His will, only I must do the doing ;
and if once I start to do what He commands, I find I can
do it, because I work on the basis of the noble thing God
has done in Redemption.

(b) My Utmost for His Highest.

God demands of us our utmost in working out what He
has worked in. We can do nothing towards our redemp
tion, but we must do everything to work it out in actual
experience on the basis of regeneration. Salvation is
God's " bit," it is complete, I can add nothing to it, but
I have to bend all my powers to work out His salvation.
It requires discipline to live the life of a disciple in actual
things. " Jesus knowing that He was come from God and
went to God . . . took a towel . . . and began
to wash the disciples' feet." It took God Incarnate to do
the ordinary menial things of life rightly, and it takes
the life of God in me to use a towel properly. This is
Redemption being actually worked out in experience, and
we can do it every time because of the marvel of God's
grace.

" If ye love Me, ye will keep My commandments."
Jesus puts that as the test of discipleship. The motto
over our side of the gate of life is — All God's commands
I can obey. I have to do my utmost as a disciple to prove
that I appreciate God's utmost for me, and to learn never
to allow " I can't " to creep in. " Oh I'm no saint, I can't
do that." If that thought comes in, we will be a disgrace
to Jesus. God's salvation is a glad thing, but it is a holy,
difficult thing that tests us for all we are worth. Jesus
is bringing many sons to glory and He won't shield us from
the requirements of sonship. He will say at certain times
to the world, the flesh and the devil — Do your worst, I know

IDEAS, IDEALS AND ACTUALITY 85

that " greater is He that is in you than he that is in the
world." God's grace does not turn out milksops, but men
and women with a strong family likeness to Jesus Christ.
Thank God He does give us difficult things to do ! A
man's heart would burst if there were no way to show his
gratitude. I beseech you, says Paul, by the mercies of
God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice. . . .

(c) A stoot heart tae a stae brae, i.e., a strong heart
to a difficult hill. The Christian life is a holy life ; never
substitute the word " happy " for " holy." We certainly will
have happiness, but as a consequence of holiness. Beware
of the idea so prevalent to-day that a Christian must always
be happy and bright — " keep smiling." Preaching along
that line is merely the gospel of temperament. If you make
the determination to be happy the basis of your Christian
life, your happiness will go from you ; happiness is not a
cause but an effect that follows without striving after it.
Our Lord insists that we keep at one point, our eyes fixed
on the strait gate and the narrow way, which means pure,
holy living.

" Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me." It seems
an amazingly difficult thing to do to put on the yoke of
Christ, but immediately you do put it on, it makes every
thing easy. At the beginning of the Christian life it seems
easier to drift, to say " I can't," but once you do put on
His yoke, you find, blessed be the Name of God, that you
have the easiest way after all. Happiness and joy attend,
but they are not your aim, your aim is the Lord Jesus
Christ, and God showers the hundredfold more on you all
the way along.

In order to keep a stout heart to the difficult braes of
life, watch continually that worry does not come in.
"Let not your heart be troubled," is a command and it means

86 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

that worry is sinful. It is not the devil that switches
folks off Christ's way, but the ordinary steep difficulties of
daily life, difficulties connected with food, and clothing, and
situations. The " cares of this world," said Our Lord, will
choke My word. We have all had times when the little
worries of life have choked God's word and blotted out
His face to us, enfeebled our spirits, and made us sorry
and humiliated before Him — more so even than the times
when we have been tempted to sin. There is something
in us that makes us face temptation to sin with vigour
and earnestness, but it requires the stout heart that God
gives to meet the cares of this life. I would not give much
for the man who had nothing in his life which made him
say — I wish I was not in the circumstances I am in. "In
the world ye shall have tribulation : but be of good cheer ;
I have overcome the world " — and you will overcome it
too, you will win every time if you bank on your relation
ship to Me. Spiritual grit is what we need.

" Enter ye in at the strait gate." I can only get to
heaven through Jesus, no other road ; I can only get to
the Father through Jesus, and I can only get into the life
of a saint the same road.

(2) TEST YOUR TEACHERS, w. 15-20.

In these verses Jesus tells His disciples to test preachers
and teachers by their fruit. There are two tests — one is
the fruit in the life of the preacher, and the other is the
fruit of the doctrine. The fruit of a man's own life may
be perfectly beautiful, and at the same time he may be
teaching a doctrine which if logically worked out would
produce the devil's fruit in other lives. It is easy to be
captivated by a beautiful life and to argue that therefore

IDEAS, IDEALS AND ACTUALITY 87

what that life teaches must be right. Jesus says — Be
careful, test your teacher by his fruit. The other side is
just as true, a man may be teaching beautiful truths and
have magnificent doctrine while the fruit in his own life
is rotten. We say that if a man, lives a beautiful life, his
doctrine must be right ; not necessarily so, says Jesus.
Then again we say because a man teaches the right
thing therefore his life must be right; not necessarily
so, says Jesus. Test the doctrine by its fruit and test the
teacher by his fruit. " If the Son shall make you free,
ye shall be free indeed," the freedom of the nature will
work out.

" By their fruits ye shall know them." You do not
gather the vindictive mood from the Holy Ghost ; you
do not gather the passionately irritable mood from the
patience of God ; you do not gather the self-indulgent
mood and the lust of the flesh in private life from the
Spirit of God. God never allows room for any of these
moods.

We find that as we study the Sermon on the Mount we
are badgered by the Spirit of God from every standpoint,
in order to bring us into a simplicity of relationship to
Jesus Christ. The standard is that of a child depending
on God.

(a) Possibility of Pretence, v. 15.

"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's
clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves." Our
Lord here is describing dangerous teachers, and He warns
us of those who come clothed in right doctrine but inwardly
their spirit is that of Satan.

It is appallingly easy to pretend. If once we get our
eyes off Jesus, pious pretence is sure to follow. 1 John I. 7
is the essential condition for the life of the saint — " If we

88 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

walk in the light as God is in the light," i.e., with nothing
folded up, nothing to hide. Immediately we depend on
anything other than our relationship to God, the possibility
of pretence comes in, pious pretence, not hypocrisy (a
hypocrite is one who tries to live a twofold life for his own
ends and succeeds), but a desperately sincere effort to be
right when we know we are not.

I have to beware of pretence in myself. It is an easy
business to look what I am not ; it is easy to talk and to
preach, and to preach my actual life to damnation. It
was realizing this made Paul say — " I keep under my
body . . . lest that by any means when I have preached
to others I myself should be a castaway." The more
facile the expression in words, the less likely is the truth
to be carried out in life. A preacher has a peril that the
listener has not, the peril of being able to express a thing,
and the expression reacts in the exhaustion of never doing
it. That is where fasting has to come in — fasting from
eloquence, from fine literary finish, from all that natural
culture makes us esteem, if it is going to lead us into a
hirpling walk with God. " This kind can come forth by
nothing, but by prayer and fasting." Fasting is much
more than doing without food, that is the least part, it is
fasting from all that manifests self-indulgence. There is
a certain mood in us all which delights in frank speaking,
but we never intend to do what we say, we are " enchanted
but unchanged." The frank man is the unreliable man,
much more so than the subtle, crafty man, because he has
the power of expressing the thing clean out and there is
nothing more to it.

(b) Place of Patience, v. 16.

" Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather
grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles ? " This warning is

IDEAS, IDEALS AND ACTUALITY 89

against over-zealousness on the part of heresy-hunters.
Our Lord would have us bide our time. Luke IX. 53-55
is a case in point. Take heed that you do not allow carnal
suspicion to take the place of the discernment of the Spirit.
Fruit and fruit alone is the test. If I see the fruit in a
life showing itself as thistles, Jesus says you will know the
wrong root is there, for you do not gather thistles off any
root but a thistle, but remember that it is quite possible
in winter time to mistake a rose tree for something else
unless you are expert in judging. So there is a place for
patience, and Our Lord would have us heed it. Wait for
the fruit to manifest itself and don't be guided by your
own fancy. It is easy to get alarmed and to persuade
myself that my particular convictions are the standard of
Christ, and to condemn everyone to perdition who does
not agree with me ; I am obliged to do it because my
convictions have taken the place of God in me. God's
Book never tells us to walk in the light of convictions,
but in the light of the Lord.

Always distinguish between those who object to your
way of presenting the Gospel and those who object to the
Gospel itself. There may be many who object to your
way of presenting the truth, but that does not necessarily
mean that they object to God's making them holy. Make
a place for patience. Wait before you pass your verdict.
" Ye shall know them by their fruits." Wrong teaching
produces its fruit just as right teaching does if you give
it time.

" Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit ;
but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree
cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree
bring forth good fruit." If I say I am right with God, the

90 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

world has a perfect right to watch my private life and see
if I am ; if I say I am born again, I am put under scrutiny,
and rightly so. If the performance of my life is to be
steadily holy, the principle of my life must be holy, i.e.,
if I am going to bring forth good fruit, I must have a good
root. It is possible for an aeroplane to imitate a bird, and
it is possible for a human being to imitate the fruit of the
Spirit. The vital difference is the same in each: there
is no principle of life behind. The aeroplane cannot per
sist, it can only fly spasmodically ; and my imitation of
the Spirit requires certain conditions which keep me from
the public gaze, then I can get on fairly well. Before I
can have the right performance in my life, I must have the
principle inside right — I must know what it is to be born
from above, to be sanctified and filled with the Holy Ghost,
then my life will bring forth the fruit. Fruit is clearly
expounded in the Epistles, and it is quite different from
the gifts of the Spirit, or from the manifest seal of God on
His own word, it is the "fruit of the Spirit." Fruit-
bearing is always mentioned as the manifestation of an
intimate union with Jesus. (John XV.)

(d) Power of Publicity, vv. 19-20.

" Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn
down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye
shall know them." Jesus makes publicity the test, He
lived His own life most publicly (see John XVIII. 20).
The thing that enraged Our Lord's enemies was the public
manner in which He did things, His miracles were the
public manifestation of His 'power. To-day people are
annoyed at public testimony. There is no use saying —
Oh yes, I live a holy life, but I don't say anything about
it. Then you certainly don't, for the two go together. If
a thing has its root in the heart of God, it will want to

IDEAS, IDEALS AND ACTUALITY 91

be public, to get out, it must do things in the external and
the open, and Jesus not only encouraged this publicity,
He insisted on it. For good or bad, things must be
dragged out. " There is nothing covered that shall not
be revealed ; and hid, that shall not be known." It is
God's law that men cannot hide what they really are. If
they are His disciples it will be publicly portrayed. In
Matthew X. Jesus warned His disciples what would
happen when they publicly testified, but, He says, don't
hide your light under a bushel for fear of wolfish men ;
be careful only that you don't go contrary to your duty
and have your soul destroyed in hell as well as your body.
" Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves." Our Lord
warns that the man who will not be conspicuous as His
disciple will be made to be conspicuous as His enemy. As
sure as God is on His throne, the inevitable principle
must work, the revealing of what men really are.

One of the dangers of the Higher Christian Life movement
is the hole-and-corner aspect — you must have secret times
alone with God. God drags everything out to the sun.
Paul couples sanctification and fornication, meaning that
every type of high spiritual emotion that is not worked
out on its legitimate level will react on a wrong level.
To be in contact with external facts is necessary to health
in the natural world, and the same thing is true spiritually.
God's spiritual open air is the Bible. The Bible is the
universe of revelation facts, if I live there my roots will
be healthy and my life right. There is no use saying —
" I once had an experience " ; the point is — where is it
now ? Pay attention to the Source, and out of you will
flow rivers of living water. It is possible to be so taken
up with conscious experience in religious life that we are
of no use at all.

92 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

(3) APPEARANCE AND REALITY, vv. 21-29.

Our Lord makes the test of goodness not only goodness
in intention, but in the active carrying out of God's will.
Beware of confounding the appearance and reality, of
judging only by the external evidence. God honours His
word no matter who preaches it. The men Jesus refers
to in v. 21 were instruments, but an instrument is
not a servant. A servant is one who has given up his
right to himself to the God whom he proclaims, a witness
to Jesus, i.e., a satisfaction to Jesus wherever he goes. The
baptism of the Holy Ghost turns men into the incarnation
of what they preach, until the appearance and the reality
are one and the same. The test of discipleship as Jesus is
dealing with it in this chapter is fruit-bearing in godly
character, and the disciple is warned not to be blinded by
the fact that God honours His word even when it is preached
from the wrong motive. (See Phil. 1-15).

The Holy Spirit is the One who brings the appearance
and the reality into one in me ; He does in me what
Jesus did for me. The mighty redemption of God is made
actual in my experience by the living efficacy of the Holy
Ghost. The New Testament never asks us to believe the
Holy Spirit, it asks us to receive Him. He makes the
appearance and the reality one and the same thing. He
works in my salvation and I have to work it out, with fear
and trembling lest I forget to, and, thank God, He does
give us the sporting chance, the glorious risk. If I could
not disobey God, my obedience would not be worth any
thing. The sinless perfection heresy is that when I am
saved I cannot sin, that is a devil's lie. When I am saved
by God's grace, God puts into me the possibility not to sin,
and my character from that moment is of value to God

IDEAS, IDEALS AND ACTUALITY 93

because I can disobey Him. Before I was saved I had not
the power to obey, but when He has planted in me on the
ground of Redemption the heredity of the Son of God
I have the power to obey, consequently the power to
disobey. The walk of a disciple is a gloriously difficult
one, but a gloriously certain one. On the ground of the
perfect Redemption of Jesus, I find that I can begin now
to walk worthily, i.e., with balance. John " looked upon
Jesus as He walked. . ." Walk is the symbol of the ordinary
character of the man, no show to keep up, no veneer.
" I perceive that is a holy man of God which passeth by
us continually."

(a) Recognition of Men. v. 21.

" Not everyone that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord, shall
enter into the kingdom of heaven ; but he that doeth the
will of my Father which is in heaven." Human nature is
fond of labels, but a label may be the counterfeit of con
fession. It is so easy to be branded with labels, much
easier in certain stages to wear a ribbon or a badge than
to confess. Jesus never used the word " testify," He used
a much more searching word — " confess." " He that
confesseth Me before men." The test of goodness is con
fession by doing the will of God. If you do not confess
Me before men, says Jesus, neither will your heavenly
Father confess you, and immediately you do confess, you
must have a badge, if you don't put one on, others will.
Our Lord is warning that it is possible to wear the label
without the goods, possible for a man to wear the badge
of being His disciple while he is not. Labels are all right,
but if we mistake the label for the goods we get confused.
If the disciple is to discern between the man with the label
and the man with the goods, he must have the spirit of

94 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

discernment, viz., the Holy Spirit. We start out with
the honest belief that the label and the goods must go
together, they ought to, but Jesus warns that sometimes
they get severed, and we find cases where God honours
His word although those who preach it are not living a
right life. In judging the preacher, He says, judge him
by his fruit.

(b) Remedy Mongers, v. 22.

" Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have
we not prophesied in Thy name ? and in Thy name have
cast out devils ? and in Thy name done many wonderful
works ? " If I am used to cast out devils and to do wonder
ful works, surely I am a servant of God ? Not at all, says
Jesus. Does my life bear evidence in every detail ? Our
Lord warns here against those who utilise His words and
His ways to remedy the evils of men while they are disloyal
to Himself. " Have we not prophesied in Thy name . . .
cast out devils . . . done many wonderful works" — not one
word of confession of Jesus, one thing only, they have
preached Him as a remedy. In Luke X. Our Lord told
the disciples not to rejoice because the devils were subject
to them, but to rejoice because they were rightly related
to Himself. We are brought back to the one point all the
time — an unsullied relationship to Jesus Christ in every
detail, private and public.

" And then will I profess unto you, I never knew you :
depart from Me ye that work iniquity." In these solemn
words Jesus says He will have to say to some Bible exposi
tors, some prophetic students, some workers of miracles —
" Depart from me, ye that work iniquity." To work
iniquity is to twist out of the straight, these men have

IDEAS, IDEALS AND ACTUALITY 95

twisted the ways of God and made them unequal. " I
never knew you " — you never had My Spirit, you talked
the truth and God honoured it, but you were never of the
truth. " Depart from Me," — the most appallingly isolating
and condemning words that could be said to a human soul.
Only as we rely and recognise on the Holy Spirit do we
discern how this warning of Our Lord's works. We are
perplexed because people preach the right thing and prove
that God blesses the preaching, and yet all the time the
Spirit warns No, no, no. Never trust the best man or
woman you ever met, trust only the Lord Jesus. " Lean
not to your own understanding ; " " put not your trust
in princes ; " put not your trust in any one but Jesus Christ.
This warning holds good all the way along. Every character
if taken as a guide leads away from God. We are never
told to follow in all the footsteps of the saints, but only
in so far as they have obeyed God. " Follow my ways
which be in Christ." Keep right with God ; keep in the
light. All our panics, moral, intellectual and spiritual
come along that line, whenever we take our eyes off Jesus
we get startled — There is another man gone down, I did
think he would have stood right. Look unto Me, says
Jesus.

(4) THE TWO BUILDERS, w. 24-27.

The emphasis in w. 24-27 is laid by Our Lord on hearing
and doing. He has given us His disposition, and He demands
that we live as His disciples ; how are we going to do it ?
By hearing My words and doing them, says Jesus. I only
hear what I listen for. Have I listened to what Jesus has
to say ? Have I paid any attention to finding out what
He did say ? Most of us don't know what He said. If

96 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

we have only a smattering of religion, we talk a lot about
the devil ; but what hinders me spiritually is not the
devil half so much as inattention. I may hear the sayings
of Jesus, but my will is left untouched, I never do them.
The understanding of the Bible only comes from the
indwelling of the Holy Spirit making the universe of the
Bible real to me.

(a) Spiritual Castles, v. 24.

We speak of building " castles in the air," that is where
a castle should be, whoever heard of a castle underground!
The problem is how to get the foundation under your
castle in the air so that it can stand upon the earth. The
way to put foundations under our castles is by paying
attention to the words of Jesus. I may listen and read,
and not make much of it at the time, but by and bye I shall
come into circumstances when the Holy Spirit will bring
back to me what Jesus said — am I going to obey it?
Jesus says the way to put foundations under spiritual
castles is by hearing and doing " these sayings of Mine."
Pay attention to His words, and give time to do it. Try
five minutes a day with your Bible. The thing that
influences you most is not the thing you give most tune to,
but the thing that springs from your own personal relation
ship, that is the prime motive that dominates you.

" Ye call Me Master and Lord : and ye say well ; for so
I am " — but is He ? Think of how we back out of what
He says ! "I have given you an example, that ye should
do as I have done to you." We say that is all very well
up to a certain point, and then we abandon it. If you do
obey the words of Jesus, you are sure to be called a fanatic.
The New Testament associates shame with the gospel
(see Romans 1. 16, 1 Peter IV. 12-13).

IDEAS, IDEALS AND ACTUALITY 97

(b) Stern Crisis, v. 25.

Our spiritual castles must be conspicuous, and the test
of the building is not its fair beauty but its foundations.
There are beautiful spiritual fabrics raised in the shape of
books and of lives, full of the finest diction and activities,
but when the test comes, down they go. They have not
been built on the sayings of Jesus, but built altogether in
the air with no foundation under them.

Build up your character bit by bit by attention to My
words, says Jesus, and when the supreme crisis comes, you
will stand like a rock. The crisis does not come always,
but when it does come, it is all up in about two seconds,
there is no possibility of pretence; you are unearthed
immediately. If a man has built himself up in private by
listening to the words of Jesus and obeying them, when the
crisis comes it is not his strength of will that keeps him,
but the tremendous power of God — " kept by the power of
God." Go on building up yourself in the word of God when
no one is watching you, and when the crisis comes you will
find you stand like a rock ; but if you have not been
building yourself up on the word of God, you will go down
no matter what your will is like. All you build will end in
disaster unless it is built on the sayings of Jesus ; but if
you are doing what Jesus told you to do, nourishing your
soul on His word, you need not fear whatever the crisis is.

Every spiritual castle will be tested by a threefold storm
— rain, floods and wind : the world, the flesh and the devil,
and it will only stand if it is founded on the sayings of
Jesus. Every spiritual fabric that is built with the sayings
of Jesus instead of being founded on them, Jesus calls the
building of a foolish man. There is a tendency in all of
us to appreciate the sayings of Jesus with our intellects

98 STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

while we refuse to do them, and everything we build will
go by the board when the test comes. Paul applies this
in 1 Cor. III. 12-13 — " Now if any man build upon this
foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay,
stubble ; every man's work shall be made manifest : for
the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by
fire ; and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort
it is." It has all to be tested by the supreme test.

All that I build will be tested supremely, and it will
tumble in a fearful disaster unless it is built on the sayings
of Jesus. It is easy to build with the sayings of Jesus,
to sling texts of Scripture together and build them into
any kind of fabric. But Jesus brings the disciple to the
test — You hear My sayings and quote them, but do you
do them — in your office, in your home life, in your private
life ? Notice the repulsion you feel towards anyone who
tries to build with the sayings of Jesus. Our Lord makes
no room for having some compartments holy and other
compartments not holy, the whole thing must be radically
built on the foundation.

(d) Scriptural Concentration, w. 28-29.

This summing up is a descriptive note by the Holy
Spirit of the way in which the people who heard Jesus
were impressed by His doctrine. Its application for us
is not What would Jesus do ? but, What did Jesus
say ? As I ' concentrate on what He said, I can stake
my immortal soul on His words. It is a question of
scriptural concentration, not of sentimental consecration.
When Jesus brings a thing home by His word, don't shirk
it, e.g., something your brother has against you (Matt. V.
42) some debt, something that presses — if you shirk that
point, you become a religious humbug. The Holy Spirit's
voice is as gentle as a zephyr, the merest check, and you say,

IDEAS, IDEALS AND ACTUALITY 99

But that is only a tiny detail, it is much too trivial for the
Holy Spirit to mean that ; it is just that point, and at the risk
of being thought a fanatic you must obey. When you are
beginning to walk in the right way with God, you will find
the spirit of self-vindication gets unearthed, trying to fulfil
what Jesus says brings it to the light. What does it matter
what anyone thinks of you so long as Jesus thinks it is
the right thing to do — so long as you can hear Him say —
" Well done, good and faithful servant " ?

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

5. d.
My Utmost for His Highest - - - 3 6

Selections for the Year.

Shade of His Hand - - - -26

Studies in the Book of Ecclesiastes.

The Psychology of Redemption - 26

Baffled to Fight Better - - - 2 6

Studies in the Book of Job.

Biblical Psychology - - 3 6

In the Shadow of an Agony 2 6

Seed Thoughts Calendar 6

Booklets, Leaflets, etc.

Also obtainable from —

Mrs. Oswald Chambers,

40 Church Crescent,

Muswell Hill, N.10.

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