Obtaining

Two intimate friends were once lunching together, and after the host had said the usual grace, “For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful,” his friend asked him when he was expecting to have that prayer answered. “What do you mean,” was the reply. “Why,” was the rejoinder, “to my certain knowledge you have been praying for the last twenty-five years to be made thankful: is it not about time that you were thankful?” In the same way in the Christian life there comes a time when we should cease asking and commence obtaining. This is the value of distinction between God’s promises and God’s facts. The promises are to be pleaded and their fulfillment expected. The facts are to be accepted and their blessings at once used. When we read, “My grace is sufficient for thee,” it is not a promise to be pleaded, but a fact to be at once accepted and enjoyed. When we say “The Lord is my shepherd,” we are not dealing with a promise or the groundwork of prayer, we are concerned with one of the present realities of the Christian experience.

Until He Comes

Our Lord Jesus Christ during the latter part of His earthly ministry laid special stress on two great facts associated with Himself; His death (Matt. xvi. 21; John vi. 51; viii. 28; xii. 32); and His coming again (Matt. xvi. 27; xix. 28; xxiv. 27, 37, and 44; ch. xxv.). His death was to be “for the life of the world” and “a ransom for many”; His coming was to be the crown of His revelation and the constant hope of His followers. On the first occasion when the Lord revealed to His perplexed disciples the fact of His approaching death (Matt. xvi. 21), He spoke also of His coming and glory (Matt. xvi. 27) thereby linking the two great events and showing the latter to be the complement and perfect explanation of the former. Then, “on the same night in which He was betrayed,” our Lord instituted an ordinance which was to combine in its full spiritual meaning a reference to His atoning death and His glorious coming; an ordinance which would be a standing to both, and serve for the sustenance and expression of His disciples’ faith in the one and of their hope in the other (Matt. xxvi. 26-29; I Cor. xi. 26).

Hope in His Coming

The fulness of God is the fulness of hope. “That ye may abound in hope.” Hope in the New Testament is a Christian grace wrought in the soul by the Holy Spirit. It is to be carefully distinguished from our modern use of the word as equivalent to hopefulness, just as a mere matter of buoyancy of temperament. The Christian hope will undoubtedly produce hopefulness, but the two are never to be confused, much less identified. The one is the cause, the other the effect. Hope always looks on the future and is concerned with that great object which is put before us in the New Testament. The Christian hope is fixed on the coming of our Lord, and this is a very prominent element of New Testament teaching. It is to be feared that it does not obtain great prominence in much of present day Christianity. Most people look forward, not to the coming of the Lord, but to death; yet the one object of expectation set before us in the New Testament is the coming of our Lord. Now-a-days, the general idea is that death will come, and the Lord may come; but Scripture reverses this and says, “Death may come, but the Lord will come.” There is something in the very fact of dying which is abhorrent to the Christian man. It is not that he is afraid to die, but that he naturally shrinks from that which is ever spoken of in the Bible as man’s “enemy.” “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death” (1 Cor. xv. 26). The Lord’s coming, on the contrary, is a subject of joy, satisfaction, blessedness, and the contemplation of it can do nothing but good to the soul.