It is clear, I think, that the precept to do 'all things without
murmurings and disputings' stands in the closest connection with what
goes before. It is, in fact, the explanation of how salvation is to be
wrought out. It presents the human side which corresponds to the divine
activity, which has just been so earnestly insisted on. God works in us
'willing and doing,' let us on our parts do with ready submission all
the things which He so inspires to will and to do.
The 'murmurings' are not against men but against God. The 'disputings'
are not wrangling with others but the division of mind in one's
self-questionings, hesitations, and the like. So the one are more moral,
the other more intellectual, and together they represent the ways in
which Christian men may resist the action on their spirits of God's
Spirit, 'willing,' or the action of God's providence on their
circumstances, 'doing.' Have we never known what it was to have some
course manifestly prescribed to us as right, from which we have shrunk
with reluctance of will? If some course has all at once struck us as
wrong which we had been long accustomed to do without hesitation, has
there been no 'murmuring' before we yielded? A voice has said to us,
'Give up such and such a habit,' or 'such and such a pursuit is becoming
too engrossing': do we not all know what it is not only to feel
obedience an effort, but even to cherish reluctance, and to let it
stifle the voice?
There are often 'disputings' which do not get the length of
'murmurings.' The old word which tried to weaken the plain imperative of
the first command by the subtle suggestion, 'Yea, hath God said?' still
is whispered into our ears. We know what it is to answer God's commands
with a 'But, Lord.' A reluctant will is clever to drape itself with more
or less honest excuses, and the only safety is in cheerful obedience and
glad submission. The will of God ought not only to receive obedience,
but prompt obedience, and such instantaneous and whole-souled submission
is indispensable if we are to 'work out our own salvation,' and to
present an attitude of true, receptive correspondence to that of God,
who 'works in us both to will and to do of His own good pleasure.' Our
surrender of ourselves into the hands of God, in respect both to inward
and outward things, should be complete. As has been profoundly said,
that surrender consists 'in a continual forsaking and losing all self in
the will of God, willing only what God from eternity has willed,
forgetting what is past, giving up the time present to God, and leaving
to His providence that which is to come, making ourselves content in the
actual moment seeing it brings along with it the eternal order of God
concerning us' (Madame Guyon).