Direct Enjoyment of God

We, as Christians, know that we should thank God for everything.  Those who do not thank God for their pleasures will, one day, lose them forever.  Moreover, we have no right to enjoy anything that is forbidden by God in His Word.  To do so sets us on a path that leads to disaster, not happiness.  Hell is the place where all pleasure is gone because people there are banished from God’s “presence” (2 Thessalonians 1:9).  Where people cannot enjoy God, either directly or indirectly, they can enjoy nothing.  Without God, there is nothing to enjoy.  The supreme excellence of the Christian’s happiness in heaven, therefore, will be to directly enjoy God.

From: The Happiness of Heaven by Maurice Roberts (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books/Darlington: EP Books, 2009), p. 116.

 

Chosen in Christ

The realization that God has chosen an individual to life and glory, though he was not a whit better than others, leads the mature Christian to cherish the most ecstatic feelings of gratitude to our heavenly Father.  With an upturned face, the adoring believer confesses to heaven that, apart from eternally-given grace, he would never have believed in Christ nor even have wished to believe.  Then, lowering his gaze and covering his streaming eyes, the grateful Christian exclaims: “My Father and my God!  To you, alone, be everlasting glory for such unmerited grace!” – Maurice J. Roberts (born in 1938)

 

False Assurance

Nothing is as tragic as a false hope of Heaven.  Yet, multitudes, in all ages, have lived and died in a false profession of faith in Christ.  They have claimed to be in union and fellowship with the Son of God, yet, all their lives, have been deluded.  So serious is the subject that it demands, of all who claim to be Christians, that they examine themselves to see if they really have what they claim to have.

It is not an exaggeration to say that self-deception on the part of religious people is more common than we might suppose.  After all, Christ, Himself, gave this warning in a variety of ways.  “If…the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Matthew 6:23).  Here, our Lord shows that our supposed grasp of gospel truth can be, essentially, false.  If so, it is fatal.

How terribly true that is!  Millions who, at this hour, hold to a false form of Christianity, do so with complete assurance.  Yet, their whole position before God is entirely false.  They are not only in the dark as to the real gospel, but they make their darkness doubly dark by imagining it to be light.

From: Union and Communion with Christ by Maurice Roberts (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2008), pp. 50-51.

 

Great God of Wonders

Whatever the pressures are to the contrary, the serious Christian must keep a careful watch over the inner state and attitude of his own soul.  Just as there are temptations for the careless and the idle Christian, so, too, are there snares for the Christian who becomes too busy.  We are too busy whenever we cannot safeguard our times of private prayer, meditation, and devotional Bible reading.  What happens when outward duties become excessive and over-demanding is that inner, secret duties are performed in a merely routine way.  It is all too possible to conduct our private and family worship with our minds half taken up with other things.  We persuade ourselves that we have been worshipping God but, on such occasions, we have been no better than those to whom God said, “This people draweth nigh unto Me with their mouth, and honoureth Me with their lips; but their heart is far from Me” (Matthew 15:8).

The tendency of our soul when we allow ourselves to pray, read, and worship with only half our minds is that we become accustomed to it.  “Practice makes perfect” in bad habits as well as in good ones.  Days go by when we attend to the familiar work of secret worship in our “closet” and yet never really put our heart in what we are doing.  The sacred page is turned, but the lofty truths which we are reading have no effect upon our minds our upon our characters.  This bad practice, if indulged in for long, becomes the norm.  Days become weeks and weeks become months during which we unconsciously slip deeper and deeper into the practice of prayerless praying and shallow, unfeeling devotions.  For this soul sleep, there is a high price to pay.

How do we account for the fact that scores and hundreds of persons who once called themselves “evangelical” and even “Reformed” have, over the years, slipped from this early zeal for God into an easy conformity?  Their once burning concern to defend and promote the truth of God has, in too many cases, become no more than a comfortable acceptance of the prevailing apathy.  No doubt there is, in us all, a youthful exuberance which requires curbing and maturing with the experience gained as we grow in knowledge.  But, if growth in knowledge results in loss of conviction, loss of zeal for truth, loss of passion for the distinctives of the gospel, and a willingness to associate with the enemies of the truth, we have paid too high a price for our “knowledge.”  Something has been forgotten.  The excellence of true religion is that it exerts a power over our heart and over our entire life.  This power is the spiritual influence of grace and truth acting on every part of our souls and firing us with a conscientious desire to advance God’s honour with all our might in this world as long as we live.  When we cease to live realistically for God, commending truth fervently and combatting error unflinchingly, we betray the fact that the power of God has declined in our life.  We can still repeat the formulas of orthodoxy, perhaps, and we can still say what is sound and Scriptural.  But there is not the same passion or conviction in what we say.  It is, sadly, all too clear that, although, in such cases, we retain a “form of godliness,” we have “denied the power thereof” (2 Timothy 3:5).

From: Great God of Wonders: The Life of Grace and the Hope of Glory by Maurice Roberts (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2003), pp. 3-5.

The Rev. Maurice Roberts was born in Chester, England, in 1938.

 

The Christian’s High Calling

Modern society has everything to live with and nothing to live for.  Touch a button, and we talk to friends all over the world.  Australia and Hong Kong are as close to London by phone as Clacton-on-Sea.  Touch another button, and the man with a big enough aerial can watch the television programmes shown in New York or Honolulu.  Press a switch, and your letter goes by fax right across the world in less time than it takes to read it.  The shops bulge with every commodity imagineable to make life easy and pleasant.

The strange fact is, however, that life is far from easy or pleasant for modern society.  Something more than fast foods and fast pleasures is essential if society is to find happiness.  Man’s machines mock him.  When he has mastered the skills necessary to manipulate computers and word processors, the old boredom returns.  An instinct deep down in man tells him that there is a “something” which he needs to find and which all his modern appliances cannot supply.

Society, if we are not mistaken, is in a perishing state in spite of all the political rhetoric to the contrary.  In communities where marriage and morality are becoming ever rarer; where people scarcely read and scarcely think; where pleasures are snatched at random to relieve the monotony and drudgery of life; where real love, or parenthood, or hope , or religion, are virtually non-existent – in such communities, it can scarcely be said that people live.  Even the educated of our modern world seem content to remain, so far as eternal things are concerned, in a permanently vegetative state.

From: The Christian’s High Calling by Maurice Roberts (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2000), pp. 2-3.

 

The Thought of God

It is very clear, from Scripture, that good men do, and evil men do not, turn intuitively to God when confronted with troubles.  When, for instance, David’s followers, for once, turned against him after the sacking of Ziklag and were so upset at the loss of wife and children that they were near to stoning him, we are informed that “David encouraged himself in the Lord his God” (1 Samuel 30:6).  Similarly, when Sennacherib and Rabshakeh laid seige to Jerusalem and all earthly hope of deliverance was cut off, Hezekiah, we are told, “spread it before the Lord” (2 Kings 19:14).  Again, when Nehemiah had betrayed his secret concern for God’s cause to Artaxerxes by an involuntary facial expression and was invited to make plain his request, he tells us that he “prayed to the God of heaven” (Nehemiah 2:4).  Like a flash of lightning, the souls of good men turn upwards to God when trials and fears confront them.

Whole psalms appear to have been written very largely for the purpose of encouraging believers to think of God when calamity strikes or when perplexity overshadows them.  “I will not be afraid of ten thousands” (Psalm 3:6), affirms David, when his enemies are increased.  “I will call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised: so shall I be saved from mine enemies” (Psalm 18:3).  “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?” (Psalm 27:1).  “I cried unto Thee, and Thou hast healed me” (Psalm 30:2).  “I sought the Lord, and He heard me, and delivered me from all my fears” (Psalm 34:4).  “He is their strength in the time of trouble” (Psalm 37:39).  “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble” (Psalm 46:1).  These, and scores of similar passages in the psalms, reassure us that godly men are not more ready to raise their minds to God in trouble than He is to hear and help them.  Indeed, the whole Bible sets this truth before us.

On the other hand, the unconverted have no spiritual access to God in the time of distress but are commonly swallowed up with despair, like Saul and Judas; or else, they harden themselves against God, like Pharoah, til they become restless.  Afflictions, therefore, are a fan in God’s hand to separate between good and evil men.  All men are good company in fair weather but the storms of life prove spiritual character.  In trouble, where do our thoughts fly to?  To “curse God and die” is the essential and inevitable philosophy of graceless men when they surprised by sudden calamity.  But the child of God instinctively looks at life’s miseries with a theological eye and finds God to be a comfort when all seems as bad as it can be: “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him” (Job 13:15).

From: The Thought of God  by Maurice Roberts (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1993), pp. 3-4.

The Rev. Maurice Roberts is pastor of the Free Church of Scotland (Continuing) in Inverness, Scotland.  He was editor of The Banner of Truth magazine from 1988 to 2003.