The Secret of the Christian Life
by C.H. Mackintosh (1820-1896)
Charles Henry Mackintosh defined the secret of the Christian life thus:
“Earnest and constant occupation with Christ is the true secret of all practical Christianity. It is not rules and regulations that will ever make us Christ-like in spirit, manner and ways. We must drink into His spirit, walk in His footsteps, dwell more profoundly upon His moral glories, and then we shall, of blessed necessity, be conformed to His image. ‘We all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord’.” (2 Cor 3:18) (C.H.M’s Notes on the Pentateuch, from his comments on Deuteronomy Ch 25).
Elsewhere, C.H.M. penned the following:
“Nothing is of any value that does not spring from personal love to, and communion with, Christ Himself. We may have scripture at our finger ends; we may be able to preach with remarkable fluency, a fluency which unpractised spirits may easily enough mistake for ‘power’; but oh! if our hearts are not drinking deeply at the fountain head — if they are not enlivened and invigorated by the realization of the love of Christ, it will all end in mere flash and smoke. I have learnt…to be increasingly dissatisfied with everything, whether in myself or others, short of abiding, real, deep, divinely inwrought communion with, and conformity to, the blessed Master. Whimsical fancies I despise; mere opinions I dread; controversy I shrink from; all ‘ISMS’ I esteem as utterly worthless. But…I long to know more of His own precious Person, His work and his glory. And, then, oh! to live for Him: to labour, testify, preach, and pray, and all for Christ, and by the working of His grace in our hearts.”
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