Our Posture Personified
“For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups (Jew & Gentile) one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.”
We cannot change anything by our own works. The only thing that can change our condition. The only thing that can change our circumstances. The only thing that can change is our posture—the only way our condition changes and we receive a new spirit and a new life.
My posture, our posture, ought to continually reflect the newness in Christ that resides in each one of us. Our posture ought to say to everyone and anyone who sees us that there’s something peculiar about that person, there’s something different about that person.
Christ himself is our peace. Christ is our peace with God and with others. Christ has made us into one body in himself (verses 15-16). We have become in spirit a new community.
Success in Christian works is not to be measured by any other standard of achievement. It is not the number of new buildings or the crowds that flock to listen to any human voice, not even mine. All of these things are frequently used as yardsticks of success, but they are earthly, not heavenly measures. Those who make the glory of God their end may be confident that the Lord goes before them, as truly as He went before Israel in the wilderness. We must live by faith.
On Sunday, January 6, 1850, a young man not quite sixteen years of age walked through a village street in a little town some fifty miles from London, England. On the bitterly cold day the snow fell heavily; but he was more concerned to find a church, because he was deeply conscious of his need of God, and of the breakdown, sin, and failure of his life even at the young age of sixteen.
As he made his way through the street with the snow falling, he felt it was too far to go to the church which he had intended to visit, so he walked down a back lane and entered a little Methodist chapel.
He sat down on a seat near the back, and it was as cold inside as it was outside. There were only about thirteen people there. Five minutes after the service was due to begin at eleven o’clock, the regular preacher for the morning hadn’t come. He had been delayed by the weather. So one of the deacons came to the rescue and began conducting the service, and after a little while announced his text, “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth, for I am God, and there is none else.” (Isaiah 45:22)
The deacon didn’t know much, so he only spoke for about ten minutes. Charles Spurgeon himself tells what happened next. “I had been wandering about, seeking rest, and finding none, till a plain, unlettered, lay preacher among the Primitive Methodists stood up in the pulpit, and gave out this passage as his text, “Look unto me, and be ye saved.” He had not much else to say that compelled him to keep on repeating his text.
I remember how he said, it is Christ that speaks. Look unto me. That is all you have to do. A child can look. One who is almost an idiot can look. However weak, or however poor, a man or woman may be, he or she can look, and if he or she looks, the promise is that he or she shall live.
Somehow in a very strange and amazing way that young man looked from the depths of his soul into the very heart of God. Why? How? Because Christ had opened the door. This young man went out from the church never to return again. He walked with a new sense of peace in his heart. He had looked and lived. His posture had changed.
(Some commentary from Enduring Word is cited.)
