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TOPIC: Simpson, A.B. - Personal Testimony (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: The Reading
Other Subjects in this Topic:
Personal Testimony - Sanctification*
A.B. Simpson
The following testimony was given in substance by Rev A.B. Simpson on Sunday night September 12th [1915], in connection with the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination.
An occasion so unique as this may justify a personal testimony, and the opening up of the holiest and most sacred confidences of one's Christian life. Fifty years ago the one who addresses you this evening was ordained in this sacred place. He was a young, ambitious minister of twenty-one, and had not yet learned the humbling lessons which God in His faithful love is pleased to teach us as fast as we are willing to learn. God was pleased to give him a loyal and united congregation and what would ordinarily be called a successful ministry. He was sincere and earnest up to the light he had received and had not learned any other gospel than the old story of the cross. God had graciously given to him a very true conversion, and, notwithstanding the temptations of college life and the ambitions of his intense nature, he was according to the ordinary standards an earnest, sincere, and successful minister, and the measure of blessing that God was pleased to bestow upon him in this dear old church was far in excess of anything he had a right to expect.
But even after nine years of his active ministry in Hamilton he had not yet learned the deeper lessons of spiritual life and power which God was pleased to open to him after taking him from this place. There is a remarkable passage in Isaiah telling us that when the Spirit is poured out from on high, the wilderness shall become a fruitful field, and the fruitful field shall be counted for a forest. When that experience came to him, the field of his former ministry, which had seemed so fruitful, suddenly appeared barren and withered, and he felt as if his true ministry had scarcely yet begun. It may not be out of good taste to testify to the things which God has been pleased to show to him in the more than forty years that have passed since his last official relations with this Church.
In the first place, He took care to show him very thoroughly, very patiently, very inexorably his own nothingness. In a crisis hour of his spiritual experience, while asking counsel from an old, experienced friend, he was shocked to receive this answer, "All you need in order to bring you into the blessing you are seeking, and to make your life a power for God, is to be annihilated." The fact is, the shock of that message almost annihilated him for the time, and before God's faithful discipline was through, he had learned in some adequate measure, as he has been learning ever since, the great truth which our text expresses, "I am not sufficient to think anything of myself."
Second, the next great lesson the patient Master was pleased to begin to teach him was the all-sufficiency of Christ. Never shall he forget the morning that he spent in his church study reading an old musty book he had discovered in his library on the subject "The Higher Christian Life." He had struggled long and vainly with his own intense nature, his strong self-will, his peculiar temptations, and his spiritual life had been a constant humiliation. He had talked to his people about the deeper things of the Spirit, but there was a hollow ring, and his heart was breaking to know the Lord Jesus as a living bright reality. As he pored over this little volume, he saw new light. The Lord Jesus revealed Himself as a living all-sufficient presence, and he learned for the first time that Christ had not saved us from future peril and left us to fight the battle of life as best we could, but He who had justified us was waiting to sanctify us, to enter into our spirit and substitute His strength, His holiness, His joy, His love, His faith, His power, for all our worthlessness, helplessness, and nothingness, and make it an actual and living fact, "I live, yet not I but Christ liveth in me." This was indeed a new revelation. Throwing himself at the feet of that glorious Master he claimed the mighty promise, "I will dwell in you and you in me." Across the threshold of his spirit there passed a Being as real as the Christ who came to John on Patmos, and from that moment a new secret has been the charm, and glory, and strength of his life and testimony. And he shall never forget how he longed to come back to the land of his birth and the friends of former years, and tell them that magic, marvelous secret, hid from ages and generations, but now made manifest in the saints, which is Christ in you, the Hope of glory. Henceforth it was not his struggles, his character, his ethical culture, his moral goodness, but his constant dependence upon the living One who has said, "Because I live, ye shall live also." And whatever has been accomplished these forty years in personal victory or public service, he counts it a great privilege to stand here today and say, "Not I but Christ." "I have learned the secret, I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me."
This is not only the secret of spirit victory, but of mental efficiency and physical strength. It is such an identification with the incarnate Christ that His intellectual force passes into our limited capacity, and we can say, "We have the mind of Christ"; and His physical vitality quickens our failing strength, lifts us above disease and infirmity, and enables us to say, "The life of Jesus is made manifest in our mortal flesh."
Yes, "we are not sufficient even to think anything as of ourselves, but our sufficiency is of God." And although we are daily delivered unto death for Jesus' sake, yet the life also of Jesus is made manifest in our mortal flesh."
Furthermore, this divine sufficiency extends to all our service for Christ and makes us efficient in the Master's work. It is a great thing to learn that we do not have to go on our resources or fight on our charges. Our good works are prepared for us that we should walk in them, and "God is able to make all grace abound toward us, so that we, always having all-sufficiency in all things, may abound unto every good work." Christian usefulness is not the exploiting of Christian talent, but witnessing in the power of the Holy Ghost and doing the works of Jesus because He works in us. The Holy Spirit is our power for service. He quickens the mind in the apprehension of the truth. He stirs the heart with love for souls. He inspires the preacher with faith, authority, and divine efficiency. He convicts the world of sin, righteousness and judgment, and not only works in the preacher but in the hearer, giving efficacy for the word of His grace and using often the humblest instruments to accomplish the greatest good. The following lines sum up the testimony of the speaker and many others who have learned the secret of a living and indwelling Christ.
Once it was my working,
His it hence shall be
Perhaps the most wonderful experience of this deeper revelation of Christ is in the realm of answered prayer. This great secret opens heaven and puts in our hand a checkbook which only needs the endorsement of faith to give us fellowship with all the wealth of God's providence and grace. How wonderful the answers to prayer which gild the memories of difficulty with celestial and eternal light.
Third, the third great light which God has permitted to fall upon these forty years is the glorious light of prophetic truth and millennial hope. Once the vision stretched away into a human horizon, the golden age to which one was looking forward was to be brought about by evolution, human progress, modern civilization, the spread of Christianity, man's best endeavors. But a generation ago there came a new revelation and a new hope, not of a slow and uncertain evolution of human progress, but a glorious revelation of prophetic fulfillment, a kingdom coming not from the earth but from the skies, the New Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven, the promise of the Coming One, who some glad day will supersede the poor counterfeit kings of earth and will fulfill His glorious promise, "This same Jesus shall so come again." It is glorious indeed to be working for a cause that cannot fail, not struggling to convert the world, but gathering out of it a little flock to meet the King and welcome Him back to end the tragedy of human failure,
And make this blighted world of ours
His own fair world again
Oh, how it dries our parting tears when our loved ones cross the threshold, etc. Oh, how real it makes our redemption, not some far-off mysterious heaven, but this old green earth restored, and these mortal frames clothed in immortality and glory.
And finally, has come the vision of the world and its evangelization, the sacred trust which widens our horizon, makes every man our neighbor, and gives us a bishopric as wide as the human race. That is the glorious renaissance of modern church history, the new missionary movement, the splendid watchword, the evangelization of the world in the present generation.
Let us thank God together, dear friends, for the wonderful new revelation which God has given us in the opening years of the twentieth century. He is short-sighted indeed who allows himself to miss this holy calling and fails to have a part in these stupendous days upon which the end of the age has come and which look out already into the eternal morning.
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