At the season of the New Birth, says Sterry, ” God discovers Himself in the soul as a glorious ground, out of which thy life and thy Jesus spring up together by degrees, like twin-lilies— roses from the same stalk or root, which is Christ.” When the set time is come, nothing can withstand that rising, for Jesus Christ and the soul are together born anew from the womb of Eternal Love where they lay hid. ” They now come up together in one Spirit into one spiritual life and heavenly image, in which Paradise also comes up new and fresh together with them.” In the moment of Regeneration or Conversion, the divine nature is new-born in the soul; or stated otherwise, the soul is newborn into the divine nature, and ” comes forth with a new and divine being into a new and divine world.”
Speaking of the New Birth, Sterry says:
“When the Father openeth Himself as a Fountain of Divine Love in your spirits ; when the Lord Jesus ariseth up and appeareth to you as the Birth and Image of Divine Love within this Fountain ; when your selves appear in Him one Love-Birth in this Fountain of Love together with Him ; then may you rejoice and say : ‘ Now I live; now I am new-born from the Love-spring on high, in the highest glory.’ You that have the mystery of this Divine Birth revealed in you, who see the garden of Love flourishing in the midst of the Fountain of Love within you, retire into this Fountain, into the Garden in the Fountain, the Lord Jesus in the Bosom of the Father.”
This is the rise to the kingdom of God in the soul of man, and ” the first motion in religion, the winding of the soul about the utmost point of the creature, and turning in towards God again” ; or, otherwise expressed, ” the touching of the soul with God.”
By Sterry, the mystic or spiritual Christian is regarded as one who possesses the immediate and powerful breathings of the Spirit of Christ Jesus within him, and his teaching on the Person and office of Christ—his evangelical representation—is pronounced. As might be expected, he lays great stress on the doctrine of the Indwelling Christ. The appearances of God in nature were but candle-lights, dim and flickering, but in the Gospel the Divine manifestation is an Eternal Brightness—” one entire light, God shining forth by His Son,” God in Christ ” appears as One, comprehending the creature in Himself, clothing Himself with the creature,” thus taking away the distance and division. He ” finds a distance, but makes an unity.” The Mediator breaks not the unity, because He is one with both. God in giving us His Son Jesus gives us all that He is, all that He doth, all that He brings forth, His possessions, treasures, joys, glories, Himself.”
Moreover, while the Gospel ” is the unveiling of the Face of Christ,” it is also the unveiling ” of our true face,” for the spiritual man—the man of life and glory—is already complete, already ours, ” only it is hid above in God.” But it is one person with us; it is our truest self. The man therefore who saves the life of his natural flesh and abides in it, loses the life of his spiritual flesh till it disappears from him; but he who allows the outward and earthly life to perish preserves the heavenly life in himself.
” The spiritual man and Jesus Christ are both one spirit, have both one face.” So close is the spiritual marriage which the Lord makes between Himself and the soul that we do not see Jesus aright if we see not ourself in Him ; while we see not ourself aright unless we see our Saviour in ourself; for “Christ maketh a Christian one mystical person with Himself.” And the means by which the Lord makes the saint one Image with Himself are, according to Sterry, four: Manifestation, Propagation, Translation, and Combination or Marriage. Sterry expresses the intimacy existing between the soul and Christ by saying that the mystic carries about with him, in the earthen vessel of his flesh, an unspeakable treasure. He has Christ and God sojourning with him ” under the same roof of this tabernacle ; for God is in Christ, Christ is the spiritual man; the spiritual man lives in the natural; God is one with Christ; Christ and the spiritual man are one spirit.” Thus the mystic maintains a perpetual fellowship with his Saviour, since He is in him as one with him. ” It is a single life ; it is an association of lives ; it is the life of two in one; of a saint and his Saviour, it is a marriage of lives and spirits.”
The mystic fellowship of the soul with Christ is well expressed in the following words: “If the Lord Jesus be in thee, let thy life be thy Saviour’s, and not thine ; let the life which thou livest be by the faith of the Son of God; by an Union or Incorporation with Him. Let thy life be a resignation of thyself to thy Saviour, a derivation of His life into thee. He hath loved thee above all things; let Him possess thee entirely. Be thou His, and not another’s— not thine together with His. He hath given Himself in exchange for thee, to be in thee, instead of thee. Let Him alone form and act thee.”
Sterry warns, too, with emphatic words, against the pretending to a union which does not exist: “If we say that Jesus Christ the Light of God dwells in us, and yet delight not in the ways of His Spirit which are life, beauty, pleasantness, liberty, but are found in the paths of flesh and walks of sensuality, we are not united to Him who is Truth, but have our hearts still lying in the bosom of him who is the father of lies.”
Sterry bids us search out ” the secrets of the Spirit of Christ in our soul. Thou hast a Master in thy own breast. None teaches like Him. Propound thy darkness, thy desires, to the spirit of the Lord Jesus in thine own soul; there hearken to the private whispers; there receive the inward answers, replies, representations of that Spirit which will pour forth itself into a stream of sweet and deep apprehensions, in a flood of powerful and glorious manifestations, if thou wait upon it. It will give thee life, light and language in heavenly things.” The Indwelling Christ is the supreme Illuminator, and the mystic is drawn to Christ by the cords of a conquering love. “O Jesus! cast Thou but one glimpse of Thyself into our souls, and we shall run from all things after Thee, fly beyond all things towards Thee. How dark and cold are these shadows to him that hath seen the Light of Beauty in Thy Person, and felt the warm life of love in Thine embraces!”
God having revealed Himself in the soul, draws the soul farther away from the outward image, beyond and above the most retired principles of nature into the spiritual principle and state which is the Spirit of Christ, and where God and the creature are united. The spiritual state of things when made perfect becomes the divine state of things in God. Sterry describes the union of the soul with God in the following words: “The soul having been awhile taught in the bosom of Christ, begins to grow up to a fuller sense of God, in a more naked, abstracted, absolute, and comprehensive manner. Now she begins to put off all that ever she put on, that God may be her only clothing. She begins to think it not enough to live and walk in the spirit of God— except she be one Spirit with Christ and God. She perceives some dark glimpse of that which is meant, to know as we are known—that is, in patrid, at home in God, comprehensively, by being comprehended in God, and so comprehending Him again.” The desire of the mystic is to dwell for ever in the naked embraces of the Eternal Spirit of Life and Beauty, to go from hence for ever, but departing, to be for ever with the Lord.
Sterry knows, however, that the heavenly image in the soul that has been reborn is subject to various clouds and storms while in the body, for it is always in conjunction with the fleshly image. This seldom suffers it to shine forth clearly and purely; often, indeed, it is so clouded and captivated that it can send forth neither sweet beam nor spark to enlighten the soul ” to any sensible discovery of it, or warm thee with any sensible comfort in it.” The soul has to pass through a night of eternal darkness upon all earthly contents,” ere it is brought out of the light of this world into the Day of Christ.” But by resignation, consecration and prayer the mystic wins his way. He dwells in the Spirit, as a priest in the Temple, in purity, spirituality, with a holy reverence and a sacred awe. He offers up perpetually his life as a sacrifice to the life of Christ. This is his constant prayer: ” Come thou north wind, thou living power of my Saviour’s death, blow upon me; come, thou south wind, thou glorious power of my Saviour’s Resurrection, breathe upon me.”