Friday, December 4, 2015

Coming up from the wilderness


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Coming up from the wilderness

(J. C. Philpot, "Coming up from the Wilderness" 1857)

"Who is this coming up from the wilderness,
 leaning upon her Beloved?
" Song of Solomon 8:5

To come up from the wilderness, is to come up out 
of OURSELVES; for we are ourselves the wilderness. 
It is our wilderness heart that makes the world 
what it is to us . . .
  our own barren frames; 
  our own bewildered minds; 
  our own worthlessness and inability;
  our own lack of spiritual fruitfulness;
  our own trials, temptations, and exercises;
  our own hungering and thirsting after righteousness.

In a word, it is what passes in our own bosom
that makes the world to us a dreary desert.
 

Carnal people find the world no wilderness. It is an 
Eden to them! Or at least they try hard to make it so. 
They seek all their pleasure from, and build all their 
happiness upon it. Nor do they dream of any other 
harvest of joy and delight, but what may be repaid 
in this 'happy valley', where youth, health, and good 
spirits are ever imagining new scenes of gratification.

But the child of grace, exercised with a thousand 
difficulties, passing through many temporal and 
spiritual sorrows, and inwardly grieved with his own 
lack of heavenly fruitfulness, finds the wilderness 
within. 

But he still comes up out of it, and this he does 
by looking upward with believing eyes to Him who 
alone can bring him out. 

He comes up out of his own righteousness, and 
shelters himself under Christ's righteousness.

He comes up out of his own strength
and trusts to Christ's strength.

He comes up out of his own wisdom
and hangs upon Jesus' wisdom.

He comes up out of his own tempted, tried, 
bewildered, and perplexed condition, to find rest 
and peace in the finished work of the Son of God.

And thus he comes up out of the wilderness of
self
, not actually, but experimentally. Every desire 
of his soul to be delivered from his 'wilderness
sickening sight' that he has of sin and of himself 
as a sinner. Every aspiration after Jesus, every 
longing look, earnest sigh, piteous cry, or laboring 
groan, all are a coming up from the wilderness

His turning his back upon an ungodly world; renouncing 
its pleasures, its honors, its pride, and its ambition; 
seeking communion with Jesus as his chief delight; 
and accounting all things but loss and rubbish for 
the excellency of the knowledge of Jesus his Lord 
as revealed to his soul by the power of God; this,
also, is coming up from the wilderness.


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