Way Into the Holiest - 34: THE ESTABLISHED HEART
By F.B. Meyer
"It is a good thing that the heart be established with grace, not with meats, which have not profited those who have been occupied therein." (HEBREWS 13.9.
IT is a good thing to have an established heart. With too many of us the inner life is variable and fickle. Sometimes we have days of deep religious earnestness, when it seems impossible for us to spend too long a time in prayer and fellowship with God. The air is so clear that we can see across the waters of the dividing sea, to the very outlines of the heavenly coasts. But a very little will mar our peace, and bring a veil of mist over our souls, to enwrap us perhaps for long weeks. Oh for an established heart!
Now there is one thing which will not bring about this blessed state of establishment. And that is indicated by the expression, "meats", which stands for the ritualism of the Jewish law. There is ever a tendency in the human heart toward a religion of rites. It is so much easier to observe the prescriptions of an outward ceremonial than to brace the soul to faith and love and spiritual worship.
Set the devotee a round of external observance, it matters little how rigorous and searching your demands, and the whole will be punctually and slavishly performed, with a secret sense of satisfaction in being thus permitted to do something toward procuring acceptance and favour with God.
There is a great increase of ritualistic observance amongst us. We behold with astonishment the set of our times toward genuflexions, the austerities of Lent, the careful observance of prolonged and incessant services, and all the demands of a severe ritual. People who give no evidence in their character or behaviour of real religion are most punctilious in these outward religious rites. Young men will salve their consciences for a day of Sabbath-breaking by an early celebration.
In many cases these things are revivals of ancient Babylonish customs, passed into the professing Church in the worst and darkest days of its history. But their revival points to the strong religious yearnings of human nature, and the fascination which is exerted by outward rites in the stead of inward realities.
But "meats" can never establish the inner life. The most ardent ritualist must confess to the sense of inward dissatisfaction and unrest, as the soul is condemned to pace continually the arid desert of a weary formalism, where it comes not to the green pastures or the waters of rest. "They have not profited them those who have been occupied therein."
Another obstruction to an established heart arises from the curiosity which is ever running after divers and strange doctrines. In all ages of the Church men have caught up single aspects of truth, distorting them out of the harmony of the Gospel, and carrying them into exaggerated and dangerous excess, and directly any one truth is viewed out of its place in the equilibrium of the Gospel, it becomes a heresy, leading souls astray with the deceitfulness of the false lights that wreckers wave along the beach.
And when once we begin to follow the vagaries and notions of human teachers, apart from the teaching of the Spirit of God, we get into an unsettled, restless condition, which is the very antipodes to the established heart.
There is only one foundation which never rocks, one condition which never alters. "It is good that the heart be established with grace." Primarily, of course, the established heart is the gift of God. "He which stablishes us with you in Christ is God." "The Lord shall establish you an holy people unto Himself." "The God of all grace make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you." We need therefore to pray to Him to give us the heart established in grace.
But there are certain conditions also indicated in this context with which we do well to comply.
WE MUST FEED ON CHRIST.
The very denial of the tenth verse proves that there is an altar whereof we have a right to eat. Not the Jews only, but Christians also, lay stress on eating; but ah, how different the food which forms their diet ! In the case of that ancient system out of which these Hebrew Christians had just emerged, the priests ate a considerable portion of the sacrifices which the people offered on the altar of God. This was the means of their subsistence.
In consideration of their being set apart wholly to the divine service, and having no inheritance in the land, "they lived by the altar." But we, who are priests by a finer right, have left behind us the Tabernacle, with its ritual and sacrifices, and cannot feed on these outward meats without betraying the spirituality of the holy religion we profess.
Our altar is the cross. Our sacrifice is the dying Saviour. Our food is to eat His flesh. "This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die." "The bread is My flesh, which I will give for the life of the world."
Eating consists of three processes, apprehension, mastication, and assimilation, and each of these has its spiritual counterpart in that feeding upon Christ which is the very life of our life. We, too, must apprehend Him, by the careful reading of the Word of God. The Word is in the words. His words are spirit and life.
We need not be always reading them, any more than we should be always eating. But just as a good meal will go on nourishing us long after we have taken it, and indeed when we have ceased to think about it, so a prolonged prayerful study of the Word of God will nourish our souls for long afterward.
