THE ALL OF GOD
The wisdom of the fathers
THE ALL OF GOD
It lies in the very being and nature of God that He must be all. From Him and through Him and to Him are all things. As God He is the life of everything: all life is only the effect of His direct and continuous operation. It is because all is thus through Him and from Him that it is also to Him.
Everything that exists serves only as a means for the manifestation of the goodness and wisdom and power of God. Sin consists in nothing but this, that man determined to be something and would not suffer God to be everything ; and the redemption of Jesus has no other aim than that God should again become everything in our heart and life.
At the end, even the Son shall be subjected to the Father, that God may be all in all. Nothing less than this is what redemption is to secure. Christ Himself has shown in His life what it means to be nothing, and to suffer God to be everything; and as He once lived upon the earth, so does He still live in the hearts of His people. According to the measure in which they receive and rejoice in the truth that God is all, will the fulness of the blessing be able to find its way into their life.
The All of God: that is what we must seek. In His will, His honour, His power must be everything for us. No moment of our time, no word of our lips, no movement of our heart, no satisfying of the needs of our physical life, should there be that is not the expression of the will, the glory, the power of God.
Only the man who discerns this and consents to it, who desires and seeks after it, who believes and appropriates it, can rightly understand what the fulness of the Spirit must effect, and why it is necessary that we should forsake every thing if we desire to obtain it. God must be not merely something, not merely much, but literally, ALL.
(from "The Full Blessing of Pentecost" by Andrew Murray)