#meetness

03.11.18 | JAKNESS IS CANON ✨

by Daniel Wilson

"Giving thanks unto the Father, who has made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light." - Colossians 1:12

"Meetness" is a suitableness, a fitness for a certain state or certain employments; a disposition of heart, of feeling, of habits, adapted to a certain condition, namely, the society of the saints in light. Meetness is a very different thing from pardon and justification, and the attempt to confound it with them and thus build up man's merits on the ruin of Christ's righteousness is the fundamental error of too many of our modern divines.

This meetness is an internal change, gradually produced by the Holy Spirit by the renewing of the soul, which fits and prepares the fallen and corrupt heart of man for holy pleasures, holy duties, and holy society in the heavenly world. By nature we have no meetness, no preparation, no qualification, no congruity, no capacity for partaking of the inheritance of the saints in light. We have not only no right nor title, because we are sinners and have broken the law of God and are under the curse, but besides that, we are excluded by having no taste, no possibility of finding happiness in a holy heaven. We should be out of our element there. It would afford us no gratification. It would be distasteful, incongruous, miserable to us.

There is a "carnal mind" in each of us which is "enmity against God." There is a will opposed to the divine will. There are affections full of impurity, disorder, perturbation, opposition to holiness. There is an understanding darkened, besotted, "alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in us, because of the hardness of our hearts." There are false notions attached to the words happiness, pleasure, satisfaction. The business of heaven, the perpetual songs of praise, the incessant contemplation, adoration, love of infinite holiness there exercised, the converse with holy beings, the ceaseless effusions of perfect love to God and his saints would afford us no delight. For "the natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him. Neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." Nor will the offers of the Gospel, nor a profession of belief in it, nor the outward privileges and sacraments of the church, if there be nothing more, make us fit. "No man can come unto me," says our Lord, "except the Father who has sent me draws him."

But God makes us meet by the interior operations of his Spirit, with which he is pleased to accompany the preaching of the Gospel. "The Lord opened the heart of Lydia, that she attended to the things spoken by Paul." "By grace ye are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God. "Then has God also granted to the Gentiles repentance to life."

The apostle uses the expression partakers of the inheritance with reference to the division by lot of the land of Canaan to the several tribes and families of Israel. And he intimates that in like manner we are made meet to be partakers, to have our allotted portions, of the inheritance of the heavenly Canaan. Agreeable to this, "Come, ye blessed of my Father," will be the welcome at last, "inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world."

This implies what is the truth of the case, that we do not attain the heavenly glory by our own works or doings in the way of merit, but in the way of inheritance--a free gift in consequence of the will and testament of our dying Saviour who purchased the inheritance for us, for which the Father is pleased to fit us and make us meet by the operations of his Spirit.

This inheritance is of the saints in light. The saints are now in much darkness, in sorrow, in heaviness through divers temptations, in troubles, storms, afflictions. Though brought "out of darkness" already "into the marvelous light of the Gospel, compared with the total blindness of the heathen and ungodly, yet they are in so much remaining affliction and sorrow that compared with the glorious light and bliss of heaven their state is a dark one still.

It is only hereafter that they will be saints in light, absolutely and entirely. In joy without intermixture, in felicity without alloy, in light without obscurity, in holiness without defect, in entire freedom from darkness, temptation, sorrow, trouble, change. There the saints will walk in the unclouded light of the beatific vision. "The city will have no need of the sun, neither of the moon to shine in it, for the glory of God will lighten it and the Lamb will be the light thereof."