The Site and Sight of the Soul by Emily Lucas
Do you ever feel you’re constantly trying to catch up? With others, with deadlines, with yourself? We can experience this sense of lag, of dragging behind, a frustration that we are not where we want to be, nor who we want to be.
The site and sight of our souls woefully off-course.
Wandering blind. Wondering blind.
Our heads can preach and teach the doctrine, while our heavy hearts weigh us down. Nuisances we have to drag along to keep up. We can feel frauds, aware of the gap between systematics and sanctification.
We strive to get back on-course, but blind and lost, not able to see the wood from the trees before inevitably, we begin to spiral into self-despair. Self-destructive, soul-destroying striving that is far from the God our souls long to seek. This can’t be what the psalmist’s meant when they voiced the cries of their hearts, “Seek his face. ‘Your face O Lord I will seek’” (Ps. 27:8).
Surely it can’t mean the endless hamster-wheel of striving, starving, self-focused spirituality we can find ourselves on. We need to get off, get out, we need to escape this way. We need to escape ourselves. Our hearts need to hear the voice bigger than our own if they stand any hope of growth, of sanctification, of living and working. Often, God gifts us timely words, those voices that speak such life back to our souls.
Hear these words of Richard Sibbes:
Christ, when he suffered upon the cross, looked with a particular eye of his love upon all that should believe in him; as now in heaven he haths carried our name upon his breast.[1]
God’s “special,” “peculiar,” and “particular” love for you is the beginning, means and end of all your hope. See Christ seeing you. Looking at you, gazing with love upon you as he suffers for you on the cross. This is particular, special and “peculiar,” mystifying, gracious, personal love of God.
The grounds of all faith and assurance is God’s mysterious, gracious election of you. The path of perseverance, of progress in soulful, fruitful sanctification is found only ever in one place. To grow, we need to stop all self-striving, all dragging along, and stay put. The constant, consistent, never-changing, rooted stability of God’s particular, special love towards you as his elect, in Christ alone.
All springs of love, all spiritual strivings of the soul flow from and back to the stream’s source, the fountainhead. God himself, himself who is love. Our God, my God, your God who by his “secret” sovereign will has elect his children to particular salvation. From this place then we can begin to live and grow. The sight of our souls fixed uncompromisingly in one place alone, on one person alone, the love of God as revealed in Jesus Christ.
The “spring of all spiritual life which sets the whole soul-a working”[2] flow from our assurance in this place says Sibbes. Such sure comfort necessarily flowing from our particular faith in the particular love of God.
We could say in “Sibbesian” terms it is our soul’s cry “for me” to God’s special saving of me; declaring “in you alone, for you alone Lord.”
To avoid its starvation, destruction, be healed of its blindness, and find hope for sanctification, our soul’s site and sight must abandon the striving wandering, blind wondering, and stay resolutely put. In Christ alone, on Christ alone, for Christ alone.
When we see him, we can seek him. When we see how he has sought us, we can seek him. When we see how he loves us, has always loved us and will love us to the end, we can seek him. This is living. This is the true faith we speak and preach about. The general doctrines particularly lived out particularly in us, by us.
True faith as applying faith. Applying Christ to us. Faith as an adorning, gracious, gifted grace from God in Christ alone and through Christ alone and by his own Spirit, the Spirit of application. Of the joining of these gifts there can be separation and let no man put asunder.
Hear Sibbes’ words for your heart. Receive them from God in Christ as gifts by his Spirit quenching your thirsty soul, nourishing its starved state, and clothing your exposed, and weighed-down heart.
Christ is a garment, faith puts him on; Christ is a foundation, faith builds upon him; Christ is a root. faith plants us in him; Christ is our husband, faith yields consent, and consent makes the match. … The nature of faith is to make generals become particulars, to restrain generals into particulars.[3]
Christ clothing you with his very self. You are a dressed, adorned “particularly,” specially, providentially gracious participant of Christ’s sacrifice and self-sanctification. Your bridegroom has come, given you the robes of faith, and dressed you in them.
There is no leaving from this place, this standing in Christ alone. But there is always growth, perseverance, change and striving. For Christ continues this adorning, beautifying, clothing ministry for you, working out the impact and extent of this faith in you by his own Spirit. He yields you, consents your will, desires, affections, inclinations, habits, mind evermore towards him.
Who am I? Who do I want to be? These are good questions to ask ourselves. We can strive, self-examine, seek to this endeavour, but unless we are prepared to ask and face the reality of where we are, all we achieve is the tormenting subjecting of our souls to a hopeless pursuit.
There is no spiritual striving without standing, no true seeking without staying. The only hope for the sight and site of our souls is in the Saviour alone.
Notes
[1] Richard Sibbes, Salvation Applied in The Works of Richard Sibbes, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (Pennsylvania, Banner of Truth Publication, 1977), 5:387–389
[2] Sibbes, Salvation Applied in The Works of Richard Sibbes, 5:391
[3] Sibbes, Salvation Applied in The Works of Richard Sibbes, 5:387
