We possess God; God possesses us. What does that mean? Well, it means
plainly and chiefly this, a mutual love. For we all know--and many of us
thankfully can bear witness to the truth of it in our earthly
relationships,--that the one way by which a human spirit can possess a
spirit is by the sweet mutual love which abolishes 'mine' and 'thine,'
and all but abolishes 'me' and 'thee.' And so God sets little store by
the ownership which depends on divinity and creation, though, of
course, that relation brings with it a duty. As the old psalm has it,
'It is He that hath made us, and we are His'; still, such a relationship
as this, based upon the connection that subsists between the Maker and
the work of His hands, is so purely external, and harsh, and
superficial, that God does not reckon it to be a possession at all.
You perhaps remember how, in the great word which underlies all these
New Testament conceptions of God's ownership of His people, viz. the
charter that constituted Israel into a nation, He said, 'Ye shall be
unto Me a people for a possession above all nations, for all the earth
is Mine.' And yet, though that ownership and mastership extended over
everything that His hands had made, He--if I might so say--contemned it,
and relegated it to a secondary position, and told the people that His
heart hungered for something deeper, more real, more vital than such a
possession, and that therefore, just because all the earth was His, and
that was not enough to satisfy His heart, He took them and made them a
peculiar treasure above all nations. We have, then, to think of that
great Divine Love which possesses us when He loves us, and when we love
Him.
But remember that of this sweet commerce and reverberation of love which
constitutes possession, the origination must be in His heart. 'We love
Him because He first loved us.' The mirrors are set all round the great
hall, but their surfaces are cold and lifeless until the great
candelabrum in the centre is lit, and then, from every polished sheet
there flashes back an echoing, answering light, and they repeat and
repeat, until you scarce can tell which is the original and which is
the reflection. But quench the centre-light, and the daughter-radiances
vanish into darkness. The love on either side is on one side spontaneous
and underived, and on the other side is secondary and evoked, but it
_is_ love on both sides. His possession of us is, as it were, the upper
side, and our possession of Him is, as it were, the underside of the one
golden bond. It matters not whether you look at the stream with your
face to its source or with your face to its mouth, the silvery plain is
the same; and the deepest tie that knits men to God is the same as the
tie that knits God to men. There is mutual possession because there is
mutual love.
Then again, in this same thought of mutual possession there lies a
mutual surrender. For to give is the life-breath of all true love, and
there is nothing which the loving heart more desires than to be able to
pour _itself_ out--much rather than any subordinate gifts--on its
object. But that, if it is one-sided, is misery, and only when it is
reciprocal, is it blessed. God gives Himself to us, as we know, most
chiefly in that unspeakable gift of His Son, and we possess Him by
virtue of His self-communication which depends upon His love. And then
we possess Him, and He possesses us, not less by the answering surrender
of ourselves, which is the expression of our love. No love subsists if
it is only recipient; no love subsists if it is only communicated.
Exports and imports must both be realised in this sweet commerce, and we
enrich ourselves far more by what we give to the Beloved than by what we
keep for ourselves.
The last, the hardest thing to surrender, is our own wills. To give them
up by constraint is slavery that degrades. To give them up because we
love is a sacrifice which sanctifies, even in the lowest reaches of
daily life. And the love that knits us to God is not invested with all
its blessed possession of Him, until it has surrendered its will, and
said, 'Not as I will, but as Thou wilt.' The traveller in the old fable
gathered his cloak around him all the more closely, and held it the more
tightly, because of the tempest that blew, but when the warm sunbeams
fell he dropped it. He that would coerce my will, stiffens it into
rebellion; but when a beloved one says, 'Though I might be much bold to
enjoin thee, yet for love's sake I rather beseech,' then yielding is
blessedness, and the giving ourselves away is the finding of God and
ourselves.
I need not touch, in more than a word, upon another aspect of this
mutual possession, brought into view lovingly in many parts of
Scripture, and that is that there is in it not only mutual love and
mutual surrender, but mutual indwelling, 'He that dwelleth in love
dwelleth in God, and God in him.' Jesus Christ has said the same thing
to us, 'I am the Vine, ye are the branches. He that abideth in Me
bringeth forth much fruit.' We dwell in God, possessing Him; He dwells
in us, possessing us. We dwell in God, being possessed by Him. He dwells
in us, being possessed by us. And He moves in the heart that loves, as
the Master walking through His house, as the divinity is present in the
temple, and as the soul permeates the body, and is sight in the eye and
colour in the cheek, and force in the arm, and deftness in the finger,
and swiftness in the foot. So the indwelling God breathes through all
the capacities, and all the desires, and all the needs of the soul which
He inhabits, and makes them all blessed. The very same set of facts--the
presence of a divine life in the life of the believing spirit--may
either be looked at from the lower end, and then they are that I possess
God, and find in Him the nutriment and the stimulus for all my being, or
may be looked at from the upper end, that He possesses me and finds in
me capacities and a nature the emptiness of which He fills, and organs
which He uses. In both cases mutual love, mutual surrender, mutual
inhabitation, make up God's possession of me and my possession of God.
II. And now let me point you in a very few words to some of the plain,
practical issues of this mutual possession. God's possession of us
demands our consecration. 'Ye are not your own, ye are bought with a
price,' therefore, to live for self is to fly in the face of the very
purpose of Christ's mission and of God's communication of Himself to us.
There are slaves who run away from their masters and 'deny the Lord that
bought them.' _We_ do that whenever, being God's slaves, we set up
anything else than His will as our law, or anything else than His glory
as the aim of our lives. To live for self is to die, to die to self is
to live. And the solemn obligations of that most blessed possession by
God of us are as solemn as the possession is blessed, and can only be
discharged when we turn to Him, and yield the whole control of our
nature to His merciful hand, believing that He has not only the right to
dispose of us, but that His disposition of us will always coincide with
our sanest conceptions of good, and our wisest desires for happiness.
Yield yourselves to God, for He has yielded Himself to you, and in the
yielding we realise our largest and most blessed possession. It is a
good bargain to give myself and to get God.
God's possession of us not only demands consecration, but it ensures
safety. Remember that great word, 'No man is able to pluck them out of
My Father's hand.' God is not a careless owner who leaves His treasures
to be blown by every wind, or filched by every petty robber. He is not
like the king of some decrepit monarchy, slices of whose territory his
neighbours are for ever paring off and annexing. What God has God
preserves. 'He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him
against that day.' 'They are Mine, saith the Lord, My jewels in the day
which I make.' But our security depends on our consecration. 'No man is
able to pluck them out of My Father's hand.' No! But you can wriggle
yourself out of your Father's hand, if you will. And the security avails
only so long as you realise that you belong to God, and are living not
for yourself.
Possessing God we are rich. There is nothing that is truly our wealth
which remains outside of us, and can be separated from us. 'Shrouds have
no pockets,' says the Spanish proverb. 'His glory shall not descend
after him,' says the grim psalm. But if God possesses me He is not going
to let His treasures be lost in the grave. And if I possess Him then I
shall pass through death as a beam of light does through some denser
medium--a little refracted indeed, but not broken up; and I shall carry
with me all my wealth to begin another world with. And that is more than
you can do with the money that you make here. If you have God, you have
the capital to commence a new condition of things beyond the grave.
And so that mutual possession is the real pledge of immortal life, for
nothing can be more incredible than that a soul which has risen to have
God for its very own, and has bowed itself to accept God's ownership of
it, can be affected by such a transient and physical incident as what we
call death. We rise to the assurance of immortality because we have an
inheritance which is God Himself. And in that inexhaustible Inheritance
there lies the guarantee that we shall live while He lives, because He
lives, and until we have incorporated into our lives all the majesty and
the purity and the wisdom and the power that belong to us because they
are God's.
But we have to notice the two words that lie at the beginning of our
first text--'_In whom_ we were made an inheritance.' That opens up the
whole question of the means by which this mutual possession becomes
possible for us men. Jesus Christ has died. That breaks the bondage
under which the whole world is held. For the true slavery which
interferes with the free service and the full possession of God is the
slavery of self and sin. Jesus Christ has died. 'If the Son make you
free ye shall be free indeed.' That great sacrifice not only 'breaks the
power of cancelled sin,' but it also moves the heart, in the measure in
which we truly accept it, to the love and the surrender which make the
mutual possession of which we have been speaking. And so it is in Him
that we become an Inheritance, that God comes to His rights in regard to
each of us. And it is in Him that we, trusting the Son, have the
inheritance for ours, and 'are heirs with God, and joint heirs with
Christ.' So, dear friends, if we would 'be meet for the inheritance of
the saints in light,' we must unite ourselves to that Lord by faith, and
through Him and faith in Him, we shall receive 'the remission of sins
and inheritance among all them that are sanctified.'