The Revealer Revealed
Thoughts upon the Revelation of Christ to and in His People
by W. Hay M.H. Aitken, M.A.
in 1885

Revealer Revealed is a 16 chapter work on Christ being revealed.[download id=”254″ forma

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Revelation of Christ as the Savior 1
The Revelation of Christ as the King 17
The Revelation of Christ as the Teacher 33
The Revelation of Christ as the Life-Power 49
The Revelation of Christ as the Bridegroom 65
Mirrors of Christ 81
Faith 97
Watchfulness 113
Love 129
Joy 145
Peace 161
Perfection through Suffering 177
Not Our Own 193
Walking with God 209
The Bathing and the Washing 225
Hearing and Doing 241
Preface and Introduction
The title of this volume sufficiently indicates the connection that binds its contents together. The first series of sermons—five in number—has to do with one great subject regarded in its various stages—the progressive revelation which Christ makes of Himself to the soul of the willing learner.
The connection between these obviously consecutive discourses and those that follow is not difficult to discern, and indeed is indicated by the latter part of the title, which speaks of Christ as revealed in, as well as to His people. Christ reveals Himself to us in order that he may reveal Himself in us, and the measure of our apprehension of what he is to us will, as a rule, be the measure of our capacity to manifest Him in our character and conduct.
This is the divine order, and it is both a natural and a reasonable one: first, the apprehension, then the manifestation; first, the incidence of the divine light upon the human mirror, and then the reflection of that light from the mirror upon the darkened world around.
The fruits of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, and so forth—what are they but so many features of the indwelling Christ? But these inward reproductions of the divine character must necessarily depend, at any rate to a great extent, upon the clearness and fullness of our apprehension of the divine Person, and of the relations in which he stands to us.
Think, for example, how the apprehension of Christ as the Savior must ever induce within the heart the self-same joy as moved the enthusiasm of the shepherds of old upon the plains of Bethlehem when first the glad tidings of a great joy were proclaimed in their ears! or reflect how the strength of our faith must needs be dependent upon the recognition of Christ as our life-power—“the power that worketh in us!” (Ephesians 3:20). Or again, consider how the willing admission of the sovereignty of Christ within our hearts—the Prince of Peace—ordering and harmonizing all that He controls must contribute to the deepening, of our inward peace! or how the thought of Christ as the Bridegroom of His Church must tend to intensify our love!
Unquestionably, on the other hand, defective and inadequate views of what Christ is to us must ever tend to induce a defective and unsatisfactory type of Christian character; and has not this been the case only too frequently in the history of the Christian Church? Nay, is it not so with us today?
How many do we meet with who seem to rest satisfied with the primary revelation! They have found the Savior, and that appears to be all they know or seek to know of Christ Hence springs a certain antinomian looseness of practice, a disposition to say, “Lord! Lord!” without any serious and honest attempt to do the will of the Father. How common, alas! it is, to meet with ignorant Christians who seem never to have entered the school of Christ, or taken the place of learners; or with self-sufficient Christians who have scarcely began to understand what the apostle means when he says “Yet not I, but Christ that liveth in me …” (Galatians 2:20); or with cold and loveless souls that never seem to have had their hearts stirred with the thought of that supreme relationship in which Christ is to be bound to His spiritual Bride, and that Bride to His heart of hearts.
Well might our blessed Lord exclaim, “This is life eternal, to know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3). For by such knowledge not only do we maintain the hope of eternal life to be enjoyed hereafter in higher worlds, but we come under the power of its mighty energies now, and reap all the benefit of the operation of its wondrous forces. Here indeed knowledge is power; the life-stream is deep, and full, and strong, just in so far as the fountain of life is an object of believing apprehension.
I may perhaps be understood to have spoken of these progressive revelations which Christ makes of Himself to His people as if they marked so many distinct and definite stages in Christian experience, constituted in fact so many successive steps in our spiritual Jacob’s ladder; but such an impression requires a certain amount of modification, or it may be misleading. No doubt certain special revelations do in a certain special degree belong to certain epochs of spiritual experience; but inasmuch as each of these relations may be more or less complete in degree, inasmuch as each of them may be said to constitute a part of that great life-lesson which we all have to learn, it will follow that these various manifestations of Christ to the human heart will usually be concurrent. We shall not have done with contemplating the primary revelation of the Savior, nor with finding more and more of what is wondrous and glorious in it, when the divine light within is resting in all its splendor upon that last and crowning epiphany—the epiphany of the Bridegroom; and we shall be yielding ourselves more and more fully to the claims of the King while we are learning the spirit of the disciple, or apprehending the mighty energies of His life within. Looked at in the abstract, these revelations are consecutive, and no doubt there is a special point in our experience in which one or other particularly obtrudes itself upon our attention; but looked at in the light of the possibilities of Christian experience, the revelations may be said to be concomitant. They have indeed their proper order; but each fresh revelation has an indefinite extension, and is found to be only a fuller development of that which has preceded it.
It only remains to add, returning to the volume that lies before us, that the closing sermons are of a more general type, dealing with points of practical moment in that life in which we are to reveal the Christ who has revealed Himself to us. I offer this volume then to my fellow-Christian, who, like myself, desires to “follow on to know the Lord” (Hosea 6:3). May He be pleased to use it for the clearer manifestation of His divine glory to human souls! and may some, at any rate, of those who peruse these pages, see more distinctly than they have ever seen what Jesus is to them, and thus be the better enabled to become to our divine Master that which He has a right to demand, and expect that we should be.
W.H.M.H. Aiken
Bedford