The Flower of Glory

If you do not read this whole post, please, at least read the last paragraph. I just received The Works of David Clarkson and already, I wish I had had them before now. David Clarkson was a Puritan who lived from 1622-1686. Almost nothing is known about his life. What is known however, is that he was, toward the end of his life, the colleague who assisted John Owen (my favorite Puritan!) the last year of his life, and then succeeded Owen as pastor in the same church. Clarkson, himself, died three years later.

Below is a quote taken from a sermon Clarkson preached on 1 John 1:3 entitled Believers’ Communion With The Father And Son from volume 3, page 165. He is forceful and brilliant, and Christ focussed.

‘These things write we unto you, that your joy may be full.’ Joy, fulness of joy; joy, which is the smile of happiness and the flower of glory.

The object of this happiness, or the object which is our happiness, is God in Christ, the Father and the Son, the Father of Christ, and the Father of believers. ‘I go to my Father and your Father;’ his Father by eternal generation, ours by adoption;…. which shews itself in indulgence, love, care, pity, providence. ‘And his Son Jesus Christ,’ that is the other object of our happiness; he who, ver. 1, is called ‘the Word of life,’ and, ver. 2,  ’eternal life.’ Now eternal life and happiness are reciprocal, and used as convertible terms in Scripture. Christ is the word of life in himself, eternal life to us: the word of life, essentialiter ; eternal life, causaliter.

And this is that happiness, that eternal life, which we have from him and by him. ….. And from the connection we might observe that fellowship, or communion with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ, is eternal life or happiness; for what is happiness but the enjoyment of the chiefest good? Now the Father and the Son are the chiefest good, and communion with them is the enjoyment of them; for then we enjoy the chief good, when we are united to it, when we have interest in it, and when we partake of it. But communion includes all these, as will appear in the explication.

And thence we might infer that eternal life is not confined to heaven. If we take eternal life for happiness, a man may have eternal life on earth. Heaven is not so much local as we imagine. Communion with God is heaven, and happiness, and eternal life. He that hath communion with God is in heaven while he is on earth ; and if a man could he there without this, he would want heaven even in heaven. There is no essential difference betwixt happiness on earth and happiness in heaven; they differ but gradually. If a man on earth could enjoy perfect communion with God, he would be perfectly happy.

Wherefore, I went to God again….

When John Bunyan was vexed with vehement sorrow thinking he had committed the unpardonable sin, he decides to talk to an older Christian for some encouragement. This is what he got…..

“About this time I took an opportunity to break my mind to an ancient Christian, and told him all my case; I told him, also, that I was afraid that I had sinned the sin against the Holy Ghost; and he told me he thought so too. Here, therefore, I had but cold comfort; but, talking a little more with him, I found him, though a good man, a stranger to much combat with the devil. Wherefore, I went to God again, as well as I could, for mercy still.”

I share this account of Bunyan’s because I love the way he ended it, “Wherefore, I went to God again, as well as I could, for mercy still.” Praise God for this. I think God was teaching Bunyan that his consolation, comfort, and relief depended and rested in God alone. Bunyan was being prepared for the suffering he would endure in his lengthy imprisonment still yet to come. And it was in this imprisonment that he wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress. There was no other way for him to have written that story except with comfort he found in God.

When God is taking you into the wilderness to be tried, He is forging in you a heart that will be dependent upon Him only. Not everybody is prepared by God the same way, but we should not be surprised if we are being sifted as wheat by the evil one, that God might be glorified in an abundant harvest of faith produced by this labor of suffering. Sometimes we get comfort through other believers, sometimes through circumstances, sometimes through a worship service. And these are means, but it is from the God of all consolation that comfort originates. So we must not only look for comfort in the means God uses, but we must look to the God whereby it starts. He is the great cause of all our comfort, all our peace, all our joy, and finally, all our rest.

So let us go to God again, as well as we can, for mercy still!

Fruitless Joys

Over at The Oak Log, Jude had posted this relevant quote to the previous Bunyan post:



“Fruitless joys are what we turn to when life is boring and gray and lonely and we know that tomorrow nothing will have changed. Fruitless joys aren’t necessarily scandalous sins. They may be little more than harmless hobbies in which we invest countless hours to make life a little less dull. They may be the newest gadgets we work so hard to own and worry about losing. They may be the fantasies and daydreams that swirl around in our heads that we know will never come true but somehow strangely bring a measure of excitement to an otherwise dreary life … Fruitless joys don’t transmute of their own accord into pain and discomfort and ugliness. They will lose their grip on your soul only when they are displaced by greater joys, more pleasing joys, joys that satisfy not for the moment but forever.” (Storms, C. Samuel. One Thing: Developing a Passion for the Beauty of God. Fearn, Ross-Shire, Scotland: Christian Focus, 2004.p137,139)

(HT: Jude St. John)