Episode III: Letters of Robert Murray M'Cheyne | Behold Your God Podcast

Welcome to another episode of the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Matthew Robinson, director of MediGratia, and I'm here again this week with Dr. John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church New Albany and the author and host of the Behold Your God study series from MediGratia.

The Fifth Evangelistic Letter: Christ’s Beauty and the Urgency of Conversion

This is episode three of our series, Letters to a Souls Seeking Jesus by Robert Murray McShane. And if you haven't listened to the first two, I want to encourage you to stop the podcast now and go to MediGratia .org or TheMeansOfGrace .org and go to our podcast section and listen to episode one and two, because these are sequential and that's just the way we need to go through.

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We'll jump right into letter number five to a soul seeking Jesus by Robert Murray McShane. McShane writes, Dear friend, I send you another line to tell you of him who is altogether lovely. I have a very dear boy in my parish who is dying just now.

He said to me the other day, I have just been feeding for some days upon the words you gave me. His legs are like pillars of marble set upon sockets of fine gold. Song of Solomon 515. For, said he, I am sure he is able to carry me and all my sins.

You may say the same if your eyes have been opened to see the beauty, fullness, freeness and compassion of the Lord Jesus. Nothing but the hand of God can open your eyes to see your lost condition as it truly is.

Flesh and blood cannot reveal him unto you, but my father. Oh, call upon him to do this for you. A spiritual discovery of yourself and of Jesus is better than a million of worlds to you and to me also.

Remember, you cannot be fair in yourself before God. Song of Solomon 16 must be all your prayer. Look not upon me. Take yourself at your best moments. You are but a vile worm in Jehovah's sight, and so am I.

Remember, you may be perfect in Christ Jesus. Allow yourself to be found in Christ. Oh, what will come of you if you are found in yourself? Where will you appear? You will shrink back and call on rocks and mountains to fall upon you and cover you.

But if you are hiding in Jesus, if your eye and heart are fixed upon his wounds made by our sins, if you are willing to be righteous in his righteousness, to lie down under the stream of his blood and to be clothed upon with the snowy fleece of the Lamb of God, then God will love you with his whole soul exceedingly.

The pure, full love of God streams through the blood and obedience of Jesus to every soul that is lying under them, however vile and wretched in themselves. Have you tried it? Have you tasted the holy love of a holy God?

Thy love is better than wine. It is better than all creature love or creature enjoyments. Oh, do not live. Oh, do not die out of this sweet, sweet, sin-pardoning, soul-comforting love of God. Remember, Jesus is quite willing to gather you under his wings, Matthew 23, 37.

Put that beyond all doubt. Remember also, the present is your only time to be saved, Ecclesiastes 9, 10. There is no believing, no repenting, no conversion in the grave. No minister will speak to you there.

This is the time of conversion. We must either gain you now or lose you forever. Oh, that you would use this little time. Every moment of it is worth a world. Your soul is very dear to me, dearer far to Jesus.

Look to him and you will be saved. Ever yours, Robert Murray McShane.

Well again in this letter he's going to hit the theme of being found in Christ. What is it to be in Christ? And the joy of the believer, when the believer understands all that means and that God viewing him in Christ is satisfied.

And that's a very mild word, you know, that the Father delights. It's not that Christ, again we have to be careful, it's not that the work of Jesus made God love us. The love of the Father is the reason the Son was sent.

But it is how the love reaches us through the just, the fair, the right, legal transaction where Christ becomes our representative in both his life and death. So those things are really precious for the believer.

I want to call attention to just a few things from this short letter. The first is this, that he uses the Song of Solomon and then he mentions a young man in his church, a boy who quotes the Song of Solomon in connection with the hope that there is in Christ.

And some people wouldn't read the Song of Solomon that way today, that they wouldn't see it as a picture or at least having applicability of the love of God to his people, of Christ to his church. I do read it that way.

But whether you do or not, here's the point. McShane is so full of the worth of Christ. He sees Christ from Genesis to Revelation. He has scoured the Scriptures. And he can take you to any book of the Bible and show you, you know, the fullness of Christ.

And not only McShane, but the people under his ministry are following suit. They're searching the Scriptures. They're finding pictures and types of Christ. And here's a dying boy in his church hoping in a picture that foreshadows Christ.

And so it really is, I think, for anyone who wants to be an effective evangelist, you can start there. Am I captivated by the fullness of Christ? Is He really all in all to me? Do I find Him everywhere in the Scripture?

Another thing is that, again, he points out that God alone can reveal the fullness, the beauty, the freeness, and the compassion that there is in Christ. He mentions here that a spiritual discovery of yourself and of Jesus is better than a million worlds to you.

You know, to be saved is worth more than having a million worlds. But he says a strange thing and to me also. And at the end of the letter, he says, your soul is very dear to me. And yet dearer far to Jesus.

It is good to remind the person we're witnessing to, you know, you're not a notch on our belt. You're not, we're not trying to get more people to join our church. For you to embrace Christ is the sweetest, most precious thing you can do.

But it is sweet and precious to me also because your soul is precious to me. And your soul, astonishingly, the soul of an enemy of God is precious to God. He pleads with them there in such a sweet way.

Oh, do not live. Oh, do not die out of this sweet, sin-pardoning, soul-comforting love of God. And as he talks about, you know, being in Christ or in yourself, really, I think we would suggest that Romans 5 is a great study for anyone who doesn't understand why McShane is making such a big deal about this.

You know, that may not be a thing that you've emphasized in evangelism before, but if you don't understand Romans 5, you're really missing so much of the depth and the breadth and the height of the gospel.

Where Paul argues that there are only two people that can represent us. None of us goes to God only on our own. We are either in Adam, and Adam represents us, and what Adam did in the garden has affected us.

And we don't want to be represented by Adam. You know, we might complain and say, well, is that really fair? God chooses my representative? I didn't pick Adam. Adam falls, and so falling short of the glory of God, he passes on a guilt and a pollution of sin.

And now here I am in this situation and partly due to Adam and if we don't like that situation, Paul says, well, there is another option. There is Christ. And if we think it's not fair to be represented by Adam, we'd have to admit it's not fair to be represented by Christ.

It's mercy. It's grace. In Christ, all that Christ did, like in Adam, all that Adam did affected me. Now, all that Jesus of Nazareth did affects me. His perfect life, his sinless death, his resurrection, all of these, Paul argues, especially in chapter six, these all, they change everything for you now.

These objective realities of your mediator, of your representative. So if you haven't really wrestled through Romans 5 and seen the root system of the gospel in the work of the representative Jesus of Nazareth, do give some time to that and make sure that you don't leave that until you've gotten a grasp of that.

McShane ends the letter then with urgency. We must either gain you now, he says to the listener, or lose you forever. Conversion will not happen in the grave. Conversion will not happen in the future when you see Christ face to face on his throne.

It must be now. And that urgency, while we never use it as a manipulative tool, that urgency ought to be in every parent's heart. It ought to be in every co-worker's heart. It ought to be in every preacher's heart.

And look, you think that that goes without saying, but it doesn't. The preacher becomes, you know, discouraged. And I feel it, you know, where I think, well, I lose the urgency. But that simple statement that he makes is so true.

And it ought to inflame our hearts for the lost. We must either win the lost with the gospel of Christ now, or they will be lost to us forever.

The Sixth Letter: Leaning on Jesus Through the Wilderness

Well, moving on now to the sixth and final letter from Robert Murray McShane to this anxious inquirer after Christ. This one is titled, Go Up, Leaning on Jesus. McShane writes, Dear friend, I have heard of you from, and there's a blank there, and have been praying for you that your eye may rest on Jesus and that your soul may lie in perfect peace under his blood shed for the sins of many.

I've been thanking my father too, for dealing so bountifully with you. He is the father of mercies and the God of all comforts. I will give you a sweet verse to meditate upon. Who is this that comes up from the wilderness, leaning upon the beloved?

Song of Solomon 8 .5. Do you think that this is your position? Truly, this world is a wilderness if you've seen it rightly. It is a place of guilt and shame. Every natural heart is a wilderness, a dead place without a drop of living water.

And then all natural hearts put together make up a wilderness world. The whole world lies in wickedness. There are a few that know and love Jesus, and these few are panting to get more of the living water.

But if you have truly fled to Jesus, you are coming up from the wilderness. Now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Have you found Jesus truly? Do you feel willing to be all vile and all hell deserving in yourself, and to let God's dear Son be all your shield and righteousness?

Oh, make sure of this. Never mind what man thinks of you. I would not give a straw for the opinions of men as to whether I was safe or no. It is not what man thinks of us that will cover us on the judgment day.

Oh no, you must be in Jesus, sitting at His feet, allowing Him to wash your stains away, allowing Him to enwrap your guilty soul in divine righteousness. If you were lying at the bottom of the sea, no eye could see your deformities.

So when the infinite ocean of Emmanuel's righteousness flows over the soul, you are swallowed up as it were in Christ. Your blackness is never seen, only His fairness. And thus a God of truth can say, behold, thou art fair.

Behold, thou art fair, my love. Thou art all fair, my love. There is no spot in thee. Song of Solomon 4, 1 -7. Keep this always in memory, and when guilt comes on the conscience, as it will, lie down again beneath the righteousness of Jesus.

Never lose sight of this. Jesus must be seen by the Father instead of our guilty soul. It is no change in our black soul that is to be our covering. You must leave self and stand in your elder brother.

Hide beside him. Let the Father's eye fall on him, not on you. This is what Jesus wants. He died to be a shelter for such as you. This is what the Father wants, for He is not willing that any should perish.

If you are seen by the Father a naked, guilty sinner, you must die. There is no help for it. But if Jesus appear for you, if you hide in His wounds like the dove in the clefts of the rock and under His snowy raiment, then the Father Himself loves you, and now you are coming up from the wilderness.

Every hour that strikes is an hour less between you and glory. Oh, do not grieve to part with the world if you are in Christ. An hour with Christ will make up for all your grief and pain. Half an hour in the presence of our God will make us forget a lifetime of agony, leaning on Her beloved.

Is this the position of your soul? Do you feel empty and weak and helpless? And do you see Him mighty to save, able to save to the uttermost? His legs are like pillars of marble. This is Christ's glory, that He justifies sinners who have no righteousness and sanctifies souls that have no inborn holiness.

Let Jesus bear your whole weight. Remember, He loves to be the only support of the soul. He is a jealous Savior. He wants to be entirely trusted. There is nothing that you can possibly need, but you will find it in Him.

All my springs are in Thee. Do you want righteousness? He has the spirit of a weaned child to give you, Psalm 131. Do you want love? He is the fountain of love. All the promises of God in Him are yea, and in Him amen.

I am sure if you get a glimpse of Him, you would lay your head in His breast and die there. May the Spirit anoint your eyes to see Him more and more, and soften your heart to lean on Him. Those that have leaned on Him through the wilderness shall sit with Him on the throne, Revelation 321.

Farewell, dear soul. The Lord feed you sweetly as He feeds the flowers by silent drops of dew. Ever yours, Robert Murray McShane.

Well, we come to the final letter, and again, as we discussed in a previous series on evangelism, these men include the Christian life in the bigger topic of evangelism, and that's very helpful for us.

It's easy to think that evangelism is just getting a person in the door, getting them out of trouble with God, and what happens next is someone else's issue, but a bigger picture of evangelism would include discipling, would include walking alongside them to some degree to help them see what does it look like to live with a living God now that you're in Christ.

So, he hits this, the theme that above his letter in the memoirs, it says, go up leaning on Jesus, and he borrows from two different passages in the Song of Solomon. Chapter eight, with a metaphor of a woman leaning on a man coming up out of a wilderness, and then chapter four, where God is pictured there, the husband speaking to the wife about how much he loves her.

So, let's think about those things. Chapter eight, what a picture. There's a wife who's tired and weak, and she's traveling through a barren wilderness area, and she will only make it out by leaning on the one that she loves, her husband.

So, there's a picture of the Christian, that's the wife, leaning. There's a picture of the Savior, Jesus, that's the husband being leaned upon, and there's a picture of the world, and you know, McShane makes the point, the world is a spiritual wilderness.

If you think about a wilderness, there's danger in the wilderness, but there's also just, it's just empty. There's nothing out there that really sustains life. If you think of something that's just barren and dry, there's no water, there's no food.

This is not the kind of place that a person wants to set up a house, you know, you don't go out there and say, you know, this would be a great place to raise my family. But spiritually, how many times do people look at what the world offers them, and they say just that, you know, this is a great place to plant my life.

This is where I'm going to be happy. This is a great place to get married. This is a great place to raise my kids spiritually in the emptiness and the danger of what sin offers us. So, the believer turns their back on that and moves away from that as they live the Christian life.

He says a wonderful thing here about people's opinions as he moves to chapter four, where the husband says to the wife, behold, thou art fair. Behold, thou art fair, my love. Thou art all fair, my love.

There is no spot in thee. It's not the bride talking to the husband, saying, you know, okay, you're a perfect husband, but I'm a pretty bad bride. It's the husband looking at the bride. And that may seem to us like quite an exaggeration.

How could God look at us and talk, ever talk to us like that? I can see a lot of spots. Are we saying God can't see as much as I can see? No. We're saying that in Christ, God finds no blame, no condemnation is laid against us because of the perfection of our Savior.

So, being represented by Christ, being seen in Christ, being hidden in the perfect righteousness of Christ, God can look at us and say, you are all fair in my sight. There is no spot in thee. And McShane says, I wouldn't give you a straw for the opinion of the world, but for the opinion of God, that's life and death for us.

You know, we can't forget that in dealing with biblical issues. What we're really asking at the heart of all of this is what does God say about me? Does He say I am all fair? That's hard to believe. Well, it's only because of being in Christ.

Now, He gives a couple of duties for the Christian. You're going to have to remember these things in order to come up out of the wilderness. How do you come up out of the wilderness? How do you live the Christian life surrounded by sin and temptation, leaning on Christ?

Well, it's by faith. So, you're going to have to remind yourself, preach to yourself, Christ is my righteousness today. Even when my conscience accuses me, my hope is Christ's righteousness and I'm still weak.

Christ is my strength today. And McShane makes both of those points in this letter. He ends it with a wonderful statement because the goal for the Christian, the goal for the baby believer is not to do well in this world.

The goal is encapsulated in this statement. He says this, those that have leaned on Him through the wilderness shall sit with Him on the throne. And that's the ultimate destination.

At every conference we attend these days, people stop by our booth to tell us how one of our studies or our films has helped or influenced them, their families or their churches. Eventually, we started asking if they'd let us record those stories and share them with you.

This is Jordan. Anthony Methenia, one of the contributors to the Behold Your God series, gave him a copy of.

Behold Your God, The Weight of Majesty. What it does, I think very well, is explains clearly the attributes of God while at the same time connecting them to these great men in history that we look up to and how they were held up by the attributes of God, by the knowledge of God, and then at the same time applying that to your own life in a practical way.

So it's not just scholarly, it's not just historical, it's also practical and it pulls them all together, through the stories that Pastor John tells, through the workbook, through the sermons, and then through the application.

It does it all very well. I would say the Behold Your God series is the best series on the attributes of God as far as contemporary series go, especially with all the materials that they have. No one's going to take you to the text more consistently, no one's going to connect it to history more consistently, and no one's going to apply it to your life more practically than Behold Your God.

For more information about.

Behold Your God, The Weight of Majesty, visit themeansofgrace .org. Thanks for listening to our series on Letters to a Soul-Seeking Jesus by Robert Murray McShane. I want to remind you again that those letters are available in The Memoir and Remains of Robert Murray McShane by Andrew Benar, published by our friends at The Banner of Truth.

But we've also extracted just that little small section, just a few pages, and made a PDF and we've put those in the show notes of these podcasts at mediagratia .org. A little easier to spell, perhaps, themeansofgrace .org.

So you can go there, you can download those and study them for yourself or perhaps use them in appropriate evangelistic situations. And so, John, just maybe a few words on what are those appropriate situations.

As we mentioned in the first broadcast,.

We use these within the church often with those who have expressed a pretty serious concern over their soul. So this isn't just a casual question. And we do give them at stated intervals, one a week or maybe two a week at the most, to give them time to really wrestle with these issues, really to give the Lord time to deal with the heart.

And we do a lot of discussion after they read to see that they've really understood them. And remember, there is a very specific order in these, and it is the order in the way that God deals with us. There is the emptying work of conviction, turning them away from all false hopes.

There is the turning their eyes toward the fullness that there is in Christ. And then really setting their feet on the path and saying, well, this is the Christian life. You started by faith and repentance, you will continue it like that.

And it ought to warm your heart as you discuss it with them and to fill your own life.

Again with the joy that you found in Christ. So whether that's you, you're at a place where you have been walking through this as if it was written to you, or whether that's you as you're studying as a believer with a desire to share the gospel more carefully with those who are seeking Christ.

I want to leave you with this thought, so encouraging to us, let Jesus bear your whole weight. Remember, he loves to be the only support of the soul. Thanks for listening to the Behold Your God podcast.

Closing Resources, Support, and Listener Information

All the scripture passages and resources we mentioned in the podcast are available in this week's show notes at Mediagratia .org slash podcast. That's M-E-D-I-A-G-R-A-T-I-A-E .org. You can also get there by going to themeansofgrace .org.

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