1 G. G. Findlay, The Epistle to the Ephesiam, 189.
2 S. D. Gordon, The Crowded Inn, 59.
EPHESIANS III. 17 151
II.
In the Heart.
1. "The heart," in the language of the Bible, ;iever denotes the emotional nature by itself. The antithesis of " heart and head," the divorce of feeling and understanding in our modern speech, is foreign to Scripture. The heart is our interior, conscious self, thought, feeling, will, in their personal unity. It needs the whole Christ to fill and rule the whole heart, a Christ who is the Lord of the intellect, the Light of the reason, no less than the Master of the feelings and desires.
^ That He may dwell in your hearts, that best room of the house of manhood; not in your thoughts alone, but in your affections ; not merely have Him in your minds, but have Him in your loves. Paul wants you to have a love to Christ of a most abiding character, not a love that flames up under an earnest sermon, and then dies out into the darkness of a few embers, but a constant flame, the abiding love of Jesus in your hearts, both day and night, like the flame upon the altar which never went out.^
^ I was reading lately Montalembert's Memoir of Lacordaire, and could not but feel that there was, and I hope is, high principle among some of the Roman Catholics of France. Here are one or two sayings of Lacordaire : —
" I will never believe that the heart can wear out, and I feel every day that it becomes stronger, more tender, more detached from the ties of the body, in proportion as life and reflection neutralize the covering in which it is stifled."
" I am sad betimes ; but who is there that is not so ? It is a dart which we must always carry in the soul ; we must try not to lean on the side where it is. It is the javelin of Mantinea in the breast of Epaminondas ; it is extracted only by death and entrance into eternity."
" I desire, like Mary Magdalene, the day but one before the Passion, to break at the feet of Jesus Christ this frail vessel of my thought."
Among his last words were, " I am unable to pray to Him, but I look upon Him " ; his very last, " My God ! open to me, open to me ! " ^
' C. H. Spurgeon. ' Letters of John Ker, 147.
152 CHRIST IN THE HEART
2. The indwelling of Christ in us is not like that of a man who, abiding in a house, is nevertheless in no sense identified with it. No ; His indwelling is a possession of our hearts that is truly Divine, quickening and penetrating their inmost being with His life. The Father strengthens us inwardly with might by His Spirit, so that the Spirit animates our will and brings it, like the will of Jesus, into entire sympathy with His own. The result is that our heart then, like the heart of Jesus, bows before Him in humility and surrender ; our life seeks only His honour ; and our whole soul thrills with desire and love for Jesus. This inward renewal makes the heart fit to be a dwelling-place of the Lord. By the Spirit He is revealed within us and we come to know that He is actually in us as our life, in a deep. Divine unity, One with us.
^ Be good at the depths of you, and you will discover that those who surround you will be good even to the same depths. Nothing responds more infallibly to the secret cry of goodness than the secret cry of goodness that is near. While you are actively good in the invisible, all those who approach you will unconsciously do things that they could not do by the side of any other man. Therein lies a force that has no name ; a spiritual rivalry that knows no resistance. It is as though this were the actual place where is the sensitive spot of our soul ; for there are souls that seem to have forgotten their existence and to have renounced everything that enables the being to rise; but, once touched here, they all draw themselves erect ; and in the Divine plains of the secret goodness, the most humble of souls cannot endure defeat.^
^ But if we remain wholly in ourselves, separated from God, we shall be miserable and unsaved ; and so we ought to feel ourselves living wholly in God and wholly in ourselves, and between these two sensations we shall find nothing but the grace of God and the exercises of our love. For from the height of our highest sensation, the splendour of God shines upon us, and it teaches us truth and impels us towards all virtues into the eternal love of God. Without interruption we follow this splendour on to the source from which it flows, and there we feel that our spirits are stripped of all things and bathed beyond thought of rising in the pure and infinite ocean of love.^
' Maeterlinck, The Treas%t,re of the Humble, 166. ' Maeterlinck, Ruysbroeck and the Mystics, 91.
EPHESIANS III. 17 153