According to the Riches of His Grace: Redemption and Wisdom (continued)
The Heart of Wisdom and Election (continued)
Now Paul is writing in his letter of Ephesians about the mystery hidden from ages and generations, hidden from before times eternal in Christ, but now brought out from the hidden place and committed and conveyed. And these things are in the mystery: "predestination, foreordination, redemption ..." Anybody here doubt that they are mysteries? And men have been putting themselves into natural distortions through hundreds of years to explain just these words, "predestination, foreordination," and they are still going on with it. Paul knows how deep are these riches of His grace, what a tremendous thing is brought to us in Christ, and before it all he falls down on his knees and says, "I bow my knees unto the Father, that He would grant unto you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him" (Ephesians 3:14, 1:17). Wisdom and revelation, that is, the ability to see into the heart of things, and all I can add to that is that the Holy Spirit has come and is with us in order to disclose to us the heart of these things.
Perhaps the greatest need of Christians today is to see the meaning of the things that they believe, to see the meaning of what true Christianity is, to see the meaning of all these thing that make up our Christian faith. They are depths beyond all reaching, they are immeasurably great things. These things are unfathomable, and we need an ability, a God-given ability to be able to see into the heart of this. But thank God that is possible. Thank God the Holy Spirit is given for that very purpose. And what I am saying to you, dear friends, is just this: "That you and I may have this same Spirit and this work of the Spirit to open our hearts, the eyes of our heart to give us this wisdom to see into the heart of the things of Christ." And what a wonderful thing it is, just to see in a little way. To be able to say, "My, I never saw that before, that is light, that is indeed illumination, that is revelation, that is the truth, it has an effect, it is not just the mental pleasure, fascination, it does something in us, it puts us into a position where we cannot throw that away easily, it has become a part of us, we will never say we can do without it."
We will never say: "Well that is all very wonderful, that is all very nice, but let us come back to the simplicities, to the things easily understood." You cannot do that once you have seen into the heart of things, you cannot throw it away, you cannot part with it easily, to do so would be to do irreparable damage to our own spiritual life. "I and this truth, this light are one, it is not some thing that I have got, it is myself, my very self, my very life, I have seen it, because God has made it known to me. No use trying to explain it all, I just cannot do it, but there it is, it is myself. He has made it a part of myself." And that is wisdom, seeing right into the heart by the opened eye, knowing in an inward way, an interior way, the meaning of the things that we have heard and read and, perhaps, believed.
But dear friends, as I think you will see from what I have said this afternoon, there is depth, a fullness in such a word as redemption. A word which we have only just touched the fringe of. And everything else in our salvation is in the same category, it is of the dimensions of God Himself. And it is going to take eternity for us to comprehend it. But it is given to us here to know, and to know more and still more of the depth of the wisdom of His grace!
~T. Austin-Sparks~
(continued with # 17 - (The Exceeding Riches of His Grace: Selection and Adoption)
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