It Came through Revelation of Jesus Christ

In “A Statement from the Editor,”, the March 1956 issue, T. Austin-Sparks describes how he had received revelation and what it was that was revealed:

It is an axiom or fixed principle that spiritual and eternal values can only be ministered as they have proved to be living power in those who minister.

It has been by being taken into deep and painful experiences that we have come to see God’s Son in the greater fulnesses of His significance, and that we can truly say that every fresh ray of living light has been born out of dark and bitter travail. So we would have it; for if there is one thing more than another from which we would be saved, it is from having our teaching not in vital relation to our experience. God forbid that we should ever decline into a mere “teaching”! We desire to know no more truth than is experimental. It is an axiom or fixed principle that spiritual and eternal values can only be ministered as they have proved to be living power in those who minister. We can only comfort others with the comfort wherewith we ourselves have been comforted of God. Others can only really be helped by what has been the power of life in the would-be helper.

It has ever been God’s way to raise up a vessel...in which His message has been wrought by fiery ordeal.

Information, by itself, however correct and orthodox, however strongly held in conviction and passed on in passion, will lack an essential and indispensable quality or value for spiritual constitution. Hence it has ever been God’s way to raise up a vessel, personal or corporate, in which His message has been wrought by fiery ordeal. The messenger must not only have the message in him, but he must be in the message: not only in mind and feeling, but in experience and being….

No one should imagine that we think of what follows here as a ’special revelation.’...Nothing that we may set forth is new in itself, but all of it can be found in the Word of God ....It is not the things in themselves, but the power and life with which they break upon us as if by revelation, that constitutes a ministry.

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