To the Church of the Laodiceans

To the Church of the Laodiceans
[Sermon Excerpt by George MacDonald]

The Christian life is a constant fighting.... You think Jesus Christ came to save you from any suffering and to do you good. He came to save you from your sins, and until you are saved from them He will step between you and no suffering. "As many as I love I rebuke and chasten. Be zealous, therefore, and repent." Rev. 3:19

What does repent mean? To weep that you have done something wrong? No; that is all very well, but that is not repentance. Is repentance to be vexed with your self that you have fallen away from your own ideal...? No; this is not repentance. What is repentance? Turning your back upon the evil thing; pressing on to lay hold of that for which Christ laid hold upon you. To repent is to think better of it, to turn away from the evil. No man is ever condemned for the wicked things that he has done; he is because he won't leave them...

The Son of the Father-the Eternal Son, with my heart and soul I believe, Who was ever and always with the Father; we cannot understand these things, but we get a little nearer to the profoundest truth of the Universe when we know something of the relation of the Son to the Father, for upon that the whole universe hangs-I say, the Eternal Son of the Father speaks of Himself as a suppliant at our door. "Behold, I stand at the door and knock."... Do you hear Him knocking at your hearts? He wants to get in. What do I mean by that figure? Well, I mean this, that He want to get to your inner house, your consciousness, your life, and to clean it out for you, and to turn out that self that you are always -to turn it out, and put the Eternal Father in its place.... It is His Father that He want to see ruling there. He is to be one with us in a way that there is no power in our hearts to understand the closeness of it, no figure in our language to say how close it is, for except you know how close the relation of Jesus Christ to the Father you cannot know how close the relation of every child of God, every creature that He has made, is to his Father, his origin...

When you are unhappy, restless, dissatisfied, do not know what to do with yourself, is is just because you have not Christ as your friend. To know God by knowing Christ, that is salvation, that is redemption, and nothing else is.