Let Us Know Him!

May it live with the reality of our dependence upon Christ our great Physician…and seek to know Him, drawing close to Him, The Word, through His Word!

J.C. Ryle writes – “Now the Gospels were written to make us acquainted with Christ. The Holy Ghost has told us the story of His life and death, His sayings and His doings, four times over. Four different inspired hands have drawn the picture of the Saviour. His ways, His manners, His feelings, His wisdom, His grace, His patience, His love, His power are graciously unfolded to us by four different witnesses. Ought not the patient to be familiar with the Physician? Ought not the bride to be familiar with the Bridegroom? Ought not the sinner to be familiar with Saviour? Beyond doubt it ought to be so. The Gospels were written to make men familiar with Christ, and therefore I wish men to study the Gospels……Surely we cannot know this Christ too well! Surely there is not a word, nor a deed, nor a day, nor a step, nor a thought in the record of His life, which ought not to be precious to us. We should labour to be familiar with every line that is written about Jesus.”

 

Meekness

I just came across this from D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones on meekness, from a sermon covering Matthew 5:5.  May God grant to me, and each of us, a greater measure of Christ’s meek humility!

 

The meek man is not proud of himself, he does not in any sense glory in himself. He feels that there is nothing in himself of which he can boast. It also means that he does not assert himself…He does not make demands for his position, his privileges, his possessions, his status in life (see esp. Phil 2:5)…the man who is meek is not even sensitive about himself. He is not always watching himself and his own interests.  He is not al­ways on the defensive…We spend the whole of our lives watching ourselves. But when a man becomes meek he has finished with all that; he no longer worries about himself and what other people say. To be truly meek means we no longer protect ourselves, be­cause we see there is nothing worth defending. So we are not on the defensive; all that is gone. The man who is truly meek never pities himself, he is never sorry for himself. He never talks to himself and says, ‘You are having a hard time, how unkind these people are not to understand you: He never thinks: `How wonderful I really am, if only other people gave me a chance.’ Self-pity! What hours and years we waste in this! But the man who has become meek has finished with all that. To be meek, in other words, means that you have finished with yourself altogether, and you come to see you have no rights or deserts at all. You come to realize that nobody can harm you. John Bunyan puts it per­fectly. ‘He that is down need fear no fall.’ When a man truly sees himself, he knows nobody can say anything about him that is too bad. You need not worry about what men may say or do; you know you deserve it all and more.  Once again, therefore, I would define meekness like this.  The man who is truly meek is the one who is amazed that God and man can think of him as well as they do and treat him as well as they do.  That, it seems to me, is its essential quality.  (Lloyd-Jones, D. M. Studies in the Sermon on the Mount)

 

For more reading in this similar vein, let me encourage you to read Humility by Andrew Murray (I just read it again a few weeks ago for the ??th time – pure spiritual gold!).