this from her personal perspective (writing with the pronouns “I” and “we”) based on Paul’s witness in these epistles. According to Guyon, we can find a path to God, our Beloved.
Guyon describes this relationship with God in simplicity. The interior life begins with surrender to the living Lord. People see no path to God the Father and realize the truth that there is no path without Jesus Christ. God has sent us his only Son so by the great mystery of revelation, Jesus Christ becomes real to us. All of our powers, heart, and mind become strengthened when we see the Lord with eyes of faith. Jesus Christ calls to us and asks us to give him everything. In a wave of faith, we answer Christ, saying, “Yes!” to him and accepting our completion in him. We hear his wisdom, experience his healing, and feel his gracious kindness. We cling to him in utter dependency. We look to him to meet all of our needs.
As we do this, Guyon says we find a new and growing interior life within our heart, mind, strength, and soul that opens up a living place of encounter with Christ. In prayer we welcome Christ’s wisdom and salvation inside. We see that he offers to us a large and gracious interior kingdom where we revel in the Word of God. We accept the Scriptures and let them soak into our soul. We learn to love the Lord our God with our heart, mind, strength, and soul.
Following this, our lives become a place of Christ’s work. We learn to look eagerly for Christ’s presence. Surrendering and yielding to Christ’s power, he pours new virtues within us: love, faith, and hope are some of the first to open our interior life. As a believer loves Christ and develops an interior relationship, she begins to transform into becoming more like Christ and brings Christ more into the world. The believer lives Christ within her heart, mind, and soul and then bears the marks of Jesus Christ in the exterior life.
The revelation of this mystery of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is the point of Paul’s letters to the Galatians, Ephesians, and Colossians. Our interior relationship with Jesus Christ is the great mystery revealed to each of us. Guyon writes at the end of her Commentary on Ephesians, “Paul wrote this epistle that God gave him in prison, so that through all the centuries we would be instructed by it . . . The person, who has faith and love, also has peace. Paul desires that grace be unto all who have an undying love for Jesus Christ. This grace of graces and the source of all graces is pure love: without it all the other graces are not graces. God gives purity and he gives us pure love.”14
These commentaries on Galatians, Ephesians, and Colossians describe Jeanne Guyon’s Christian worldview. Even in the midst of extreme suffering, she enjoyed the presence of Christ and invites all to this rich and fulfilling life.
The Rev. Nancy Carol James, PhD
January 1, 2017
7. James, Pure Love, 27.
8. Guyon, Commentaries, 70.
9. Guyon, Complete Madame Guyon, 8.
10. James, Pure Love, 18.
11. Ibid.
12. Guyon, Commentaries, 79–80.
13 Ibid., 81–82.
14. Ibid., 135.
Guyon’s Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Galatians with Explanations and Reflections on the Interior Life
Paul—sent neither by human commission nor from human authorities, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead—2 and all the members of God’s family who are with me, to the churches of Galatia: 3 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, 4 who gave himself for our sins to set us free from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, 5 to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen. (Gal 1:1–5)
Paul tells us God chooses some ministers and gives them the authority of an apostle. Paul was an apostle of this kind. He was chosen by the resurrected Jesus Christ yet did not know Jesus in this world. Because of this, he did not have the advantage of the other apostles who lived with Jesus Christ.
An apostle has the privilege to communicate grace and peace to those who approach. In fact, the apostle’s true character is to communicate peace, because the spirit of Jesus Christ animates an apostle. An apostle must carry peace as Jesus Christ bore it on earth. But to whom did Jesus show himself on earth? To those who received his word and were his disciples, as he spoke to them: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives” (John 14:27).
We know that the world gives only a superficial peace grounded on profound disorder, violence, and war.
Jesus Christ gives his peace only to his followers. He says, “Do not think I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matt 10:34). His word is peace for us. Others, though, reject Jesus Christ’s word and instead choose a sword for their peace. Jesus Christ gives us his peace and delivers us from our sins. By his actions, we are delivered from this evil century, so full of trouble and war. The will of God is that we are delivered and separated from this evil century.
I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—7 not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ. 8 But even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed! (Gal 1:6–8)
It is a strange thing to know that even at the birth and beginning of the Christian faith, some people were fighting against the purity of our faith. We know from these Scriptures that the church has been persecuted since its inception. Evil is always actively trying to destroy the church. We know that the devil had tried to destroy Jesus Christ when he was an infant by persuading Herod to kill him. Because of this, Joseph took the infant Jesus to Egypt to save him. Later the devil inspired the crucifixion of Jesus and then these evil powers believed that they had annihilated him by his death. However, Jesus frustrated their plan, because his divine Father resurrected him from the dead. When believers are persecuted, Jesus carries all faithful believers in his heart. We all have victory through the power of Jesus Christ’s resurrection.
But the power of evil did not give up when his plans to destroy both Jesus Christ and the beginning of the church failed. The devil saw that he had not been successful in destroying the early church. So he made a plan to deceive the human race. The devil began persecuting Jesus’ children. He relentlessly worked to have people kill the faithful Christians. But the devil did not know that the blood of the martyrs is a seed that produces one hundred percent. Instead of destroying the church, these martyrs established the church. The devil’s second deception was the one Paul confronts in his letter to the Galatians. The devil deceived people about the law and tried to destroy the pure freedom of the Gospel. He made people believe falsely that they needed to still follow the rigors and details of the law. By going back to the law, these believers desert the gospel.
We know that Jesus Christ wants to give birth to new children in his church by placing his pure spirit within them. Because the Spirit of the Lord is always the same, it is certain that his children live in the purity of the Holy Spirit. Faithful Christians differ from these others who fall into error and derangement designed by the devil. These who fall under the power of evil are soon lost from the Spirit of the Lord, that is to say, they lose the spirit of docility and dependence on the movement of the Holy Spirit.
God