Oswald Chambers: Conformed to His Image (excerpts)

RepentanceNever mistake remorse for repentance; remorse simply puts a man in hell while he is on earth. It carries no remedial quality with it at all, nothing that betters a man. An unawakened sinner knows no remorse, but as soon as a person recognizes his sin he experiences the pain of being gnawed by a sense of guilt for which punishment would be a heaven of relief, but no punishment can touch it. In the case of Cain (see Genesis 4:9-14) remorse is seen at its height:"My punishment is more than I can bear" (4:13). Cain was in the condition of being found out by his own sin; his conscience recognized what he had done, and he knew that God recognized it too. Remorse is not the recognition that I am detected by someone else, I can defy that; remorse comes when, intellectually and morally, I recognize my own guilt. It is a desperate thing for me to realize that I am a sneak, that I am sensual and proud; that is my sin finding me out. The Holy Spirit never convicts of sin until He has got Jesus Christ pretty close up; a human being would like to convict of sin before Jesus Christ is there. The classic experience of Cain has all lesser experiences folded up in it; few of us are actually murders, but we are all criminals in potentiality- "Whoever hates his brother is a murderer" (1 John 3:15); and one of the greatest humiliations in work for God is that we are never free from the reminder by the Holy Spirit of what we might be in actuality but for the grace of God.

When any sin is recalled with a gnawing sense of guilt, this biting again of remorse, watch carefully that it does not make you whine and indulge in sulks about the consequences. The beginning of sulks is blaming everybody but yourself, and every step you take in that direction leads further away from God and from the possibility of repentance. Whenever the lash of remorse comes, never try to prevent it; every bit of it is deserved. And if you are a worker, never tell a lie out of sympathy and say, "Oh, well, you don't need to feel like that, you couldn't help it." Never tell a lie to another soul. The temptation is tremendously strong to sympathize with a person and prove a traitor to his soul's true instincts; he may fling off from you at a tangent, but truth will tell in the end.

RealityThe Will to Believe the RedeemerBlessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.(John 20:29; cf. John 11:40)Reality is the thing that works out absolutely true in my personal life, but I must be careful not to confound the reality of my experience with reality itself. For instance, when I am born again I am not conscious of the redemption of my Lord, the one thing that is real to me is that I have been born again; but if I watch the working of the Holy Spirit I find that He takes me clean out of myself till I no longer pay any attention to my experiences, I am concerned only with the reality that produced those experiences, namely, the redemption. If I am left with my experiences, they have not been produced by the redemption. If experience is made the only guide it will produce that peculiar type of isolated life that is never found in the New Testament.

We say seeing is believing, but it is not; we must believe a thing is possible before we would believe it even though we saw it. Belief must be the will to believe, and I can never will to believe without a violent effort on my part to dissociate myself from all my old ways of looking at things and putting myself right over on to God. It is God who draws me, my relationship is to Him; consequently the issue of will comes in at once; will I transact on what God says? Never discuss with anyone when God speaks; discussion on spiritual matters is impertinent. God never discusses with anyone. Let me stake my all, blindly as far as feelings are concerned, on the reality of the redemption, and before long that reality will begin to tell in my actual life, which will be the evidence that the transaction has taken place. But there must be the deliberate surrender of will, not a surrender to the persuasive power of personality, but a deliberate launching forth on God and what He says. Remember, you must urge the will to an issue; you must come to the point where you will to believe the Redeemer and deliberately wash your hands of the consequences.

In testing for ourselves our relation to reality we are not left in a vague fog. We have the Word of God expressing God to us, and the Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, expresses Himself to us through His teaching made vitally applicable to every domain of human life. Any attempt to divorce the words of God from the Word of God leads to unreality; the words of God are only vitally real when we are in a right relationship to God through the Word. Men worship an intellectual creed, and you can't dispute it because it is logically correct, but it does not produce saints. It produces stalwarts and stoics but not New Testament saints, because it is based on adherence to the literal words rather than on a vital relationship to God, who is the one abiding reality. In the final issue Christian principals are found to be antichrist, meaning, an authority other than Christ Himself. It is quite possible to have an intellectual appreciation of the redemption without any experience of supernatural grace; an experience of supernatural grace comes by committing myself to a person, not to a creed or a conviction. I can never find reality by looking within; the only way I can get at reality is by dumping myself outside myself on to Someone else, namely, God. As soon as I do I am brought in touch with reality.

The Will to Receive the Redeemer.But as many as received Him (John 1:12)We do not create truth, we receive it. There are things that you perceive clearly, but are they real to you? They are not real if you have never been through a transaction of will in connection with them. Your perception is based on the weaving of your own brain, not on the knowledge of Someone who knows you. The Giver is God, and every gift He offers is based on His knowledge of us; our attitude is to be that of receiving from Him all the time, and in this way we become sons and daughters of God. It requires the greatest effort and produces the greatest humility to receive anything from God; we would much sooner earn it. Receiving is the evidence of a disciple of the Lord; reasoning about it is the indication of a dictator to God. Effective repentance is witnessed by my receiving from God instead of reasoning why God should give to me. When I am willing to be such a fool as to accept, that is repentance; the other is rational pride. We can only get at reality by means of the conscience, which ultimately embraces both head and heart. Thee is always a practical proof when we do get at reality: actuality is made in accord with it. Does your intellect make you in accord actually with what you think? Of course it does not. Read the lives of some of the most intellectual men, men whose aesthetic sensibilities are of the finest order, but their actual lives won't bear looking at. I cannot get at reality by my intellect or by emotion, but only by my conscience bringing me in touch with the redemption. When the Holy Spirit gets hold of my conscience He convicts me of unreality, and when I respond to God I come in touch with reality and experience a sense of wonder - "That He should have done this for me!" It is not extravagant, it is the result of a totally new adjustment, a relation to the reality that has been created in me by means of my abandonment to Jesus Christ.