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T. Austin-Sparks - on Suffering

Contents

An Apostle's Supreme Ambition

Blessedness of the Unoffended

Captivity In The Lord

Conformed to the Image of His Son

The Eternal Reward of Labour and Suffering

"The Fellowship of His Sufferings"

The Fellowship of His Sufferings

"For the Glory of God"

For the Sake of the Name

The Importance and Value of Experience

Joy Out of Travail

The Law of Travail

Let Us Go On

"The Lord is Greater Than All"

The Lord's Attitude To His Children In Adversity

The Lord's Field

A Man in Heaven and Christ in You

The Marks of Jesus

The Meaning of the Fire

The Nature of the Dispensation in Which We Live

One Universal Answer

The Shining Face

The Spirit in Prison

Spiritual Exercise

The Strategy of God

Suffering and Glory

The Things Which Befall Us

Threshing, and the Lord's Balance

Timothy and Demas

The Transcendent Value of the Knowledge of Christ

Why the Strange Ways of God?

An Apostle's Supreme Ambition

"That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, becoming conformed unto his death" (Philippians 3:10).

There are few words in his writings which reveal how committed to the Lord Jesus this man was. The whole context is one consummate outpouring of his heart to the One whom he said had "apprehended" him, and he focuses all in a brief half sentence: "That I may know him."

The impressive thing about this expressed ambition is the time at which it is made. Here is a man who has had a revelation and knowledge of Jesus Christ greater than any other man up to that time. That knowledge commenced whence as he said, "it pleased God to reveal his Son in me". That beginning devastated him, and sent him into the desert to try to grasp its implications. Later he had been "caught up into the third heaven and shown unspeakable things, which (he said) were not lawful to be uttered". Between, and around those two experiences, there is evidence of an ever growing knowledge of Christ. Here, after all that, near the end of his life, he is crying passionately: "That I may know him."

The very least that we can say about this is that the Christ in view was a very great Christ indeed, who outstrips the greatest capacity and comprehension of man. This stands in such tremendous contrast to the limited Christ of our recognition and apprehension! How very much more there is in Christ than we have ever seen! But we must break down our verse. It is divided by its main words, and can be stated in its four phrases.

(1) The all-governing passion: "That I may know him."

(2) The effectual power: "The power of his resurrection."

(3) The essential basis: "The fellowship of his sufferings."

(4) The progressive principle: "Conformed to his death."

1. THE ALL-GOVERNING PASSION

"That I may know him."

Here a little study in words is both helpful and necessary. In the original language of the New Testament there are two words for 'knowing' or 'knowledge' or 'to know'. They run in numerous occasions and connections right through the New Testament.

One of these words has the meaning of knowledge by information; being told, reading, by report. It is more the knowledge which comes by observation, study, searching, or talk. It is rather knowledge about things, persons, etc. The other word carries the meaning of personal experience, intimate acquaintance; and inward knowledge. Sometimes there is a prefix which gives the meaning of "full knowledge" (epi). The second of these words and meanings is that which Paul is using and employing here: 'That I may have or gain more of the knowledge of Him which is personal experience by personal acquaintance, by living, firsthand relationship with Him.'

This removes everything from the realm of mere theory, the intellect, and being told. It is the result and effect of an act of the Holy Spirit within. That is why Paul links with this knowledge "the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings". It is powerful knowledge, born of deep experience. And this is the only true knowledge of Christ! It is planted or wrought deep in the inner life.

2. THE EFFECTUAL POWER

"The power of his resurrection."

While there is a future aspect of the whole statement, that is, the consummation in glory, we must understand that in each of these phrases Paul is thinking of this life. Even in the next verse, where he speaks of attaining to the "outresurrection from among the dead", he is thinking primarily of present spiritual and moral out-raising. He had known something of this power already. His conversion was such. Again and again, in what he called "deaths oft" he had known it. Perhaps greatest of all were his experiences in Asia and Lystra (II Corinthians 1:9; Acts 14:19-20).

Resurrection power and life are the knowledge of Christ. This is how we know Him, and this is available for every believer. It is for endurance, for overcoming, for fulfilment of ministry, for maintaining the Lord's testimony in the world; for every need which demands it in relation to the interests and glory of Christ. It puts life on a supernatural basis. It is the power of His resurrection, the greatest miracle in history.

3. THE ESSENTIAL BASIS

"The fellowship of his sufferings."

In this connection there are some things that we must at once set aside. There were sufferings of Christ which we do not share, and are not called upon to share, although sometimes there seems to be a very fine and thin line between them.

We do not share the atoning sufferings of Christ. There is a whole realm of suffering which was His alone. The work of man's redemption was His alone, for us. When He who was without sin was made sin for us He was alone, even God-forsaken in that eternal moment. Upon that fact the whole truth of His unique Person hangs, and the whole system of perfect sacrifice rests; the spotless Lamb.

But when all that is accepted and established, there are sufferings of Christ in which we have fellowship with Him. We also, for His sake, may be despised and rejected of men. We can be discredited, ostracised, persecuted, mocked, tortured, and even "killed", both in an act and "all the day long". Paul speaks of a residue of Christ's sufferings which he was helping to fill up for "His body's sake which is the church". This is another, and different, area and system of suffering. Paul looked upon this as an honour and something in which to rejoice, because it was for the One whom he so deeply loved. But he also saw that this suffering with and for Christ provided the basis for knowing Christ and the power of His resurrection This Apostle would agree that only those who know this fellowship truly know the Lord. We know that! It is perfectly evident that real usefulness in a spiritual way comes out of the winepress, and "they that have suffered most have most to give" There is nothing artificial about the fruit of Christ.

4. THE PROGRESSIVE PRINCIPLE

"Becoming conformed unto his death."

It is important in understanding the Apostle to realise that he was not thinking of conformity to Christ's death as the end of all else. His real meaning was that he should increase in the knowledge of Christ, know the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings by becoming conformed to His death. His death - Christ's - was behind, something at the beginning, and the spiritual history of the believer is a working back to what that death meant. It meant the end of the "old man", crucifixion to the world mind and will; the closing of the door to a whole system which was not Christ-centered and Christ-governed.

All this had been stated and presented in Paul's earlier letters; but it was a meaning which had to be progressively made real and true in spiritual experience. The meaning of Christ's death - Paul taught - was to be the inner history of the believer, and this would work out - progressively - in the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings. So that, by being conformed to His death, he would come to the fuller knowledge of Him and of that Divine power. It is ever so.

The all-governing passion opens the way for the effectual, and effectuating power, by the essential basis, through the progressive principle of conformity to His death.

From "A Witness and A Testimony", September-October, 1969

Blessedness of the Unoffended

Transcribed from a message given by T. Austin-Sparks in 1959. The spoken form has been retained verbatim. Words which were not clearly discernible have been enclosed in [square] brackets.

Reading: 2 Kings 2:1-15

Turn to the gospel by Matthew, chapter 11 and verse 2:

“When John heard in the prison the works of the Christ, he sent by his disciples,  And said unto him, Art thou he that cometh, or look we for another? Jesus answered and said unto them, Go your way and tell John those things which ye do hear and see:  The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have good tidings preached to them. And blessed is he whosoever shall find none occasion of stumbling in me.”

In the letter to the Hebrews, chapter 10 at verse 35:

“Cast not away therefore your boldness, which hath great recompense of reward.  For ye have need of patience, that, having done the will of God, ye may receive the promise.”

To revert to the old version of Matthew 11:6: “Blessed is he who shall not be offended in me.” The blessedness of the unoffended. You will know that the word there ‘offend’ or ‘offended’ so frequently used in different connections in the New Testament, just means ‘a stumbling block’. Literally: “Blessed is he who will not find Me to be a stumbling block”or “who will not stumble at Me”. It is changed into the word ‘boldness’ in the Revised and we shall see why in a moment or two.

The first thing then to take note of is that the word of God does take account of the possibility of our being offended with Him. It does not say anywhere that that possibility should never arise and will never arise. The Lord has no where said that we shall never have any occasion for being offended with Him. He HAS indicated that there will be PLENTY of opportunity for so stumbling at Him, falling over Him, coming down because of Him - if you like: crashing because of Him. There will be plenty of occasion or opportunity for doing so. He has never said that it will never be so. It is as well for us to recognize that.

Temptation is never sin. We all are tempted in this as in many other ways. And as you know, temptation is only another word for trial, so it is translated in some places “trial”. And there’s nothing wrong with trials, with being tried, if you like, with being tempted. And there will always be plenty of opportunity for being tempted to be offended with the Lord.

The Lord sent no word of rebuke to poor John the Baptist in the prison when he was perilously near to being offended with the Lord because of his situation. The Lord was not hard on John because of his question. He might, had He been another, have said, “But John, did you not point Me out as the Lamb of God? Did you not proclaim Me as the One, the Messiah? Haven’t you preached about Me to multitudes? Have you not made the strongest declarations and affirmations as to what you believed about Me?  And here you’re asking a fundamental question about Me. John, what’s gone wrong with you?” No, nothing like that. The Lord knows our frame, that we are dust. And the Lord, I’m saying, takes account of this ever present possibility, in our weakness, of being offended with Him. But he does attach to this matter a particular blessedness if we don’t crash over the Stumbling Block of His ways with us, “AND blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in Me”. There’s the possibility, then as to the reasons for the possibility.

I read that old story of Elijah and Elisha for one purpose only, just to get at one thing which is so common in our experience. It’s no new thought, it has often been mentioned here, but note it again. It’s a strange story that, isn’t it? The  strange behaviour of Elijah. It DID seem that Elijah was trying to put off Elisha, if you like: to reject him.  Again and again he said, “You stay here, the Lord has sent me to so and so. You stay here.” On the face of it, it looked as though he was being rejected, put aside, not wanted; just not wanted. And Elisha, had he been what some of us are and said, “Oh well, if you don’t want me then, alright! I’ll stay here. I’ll not go any further. It’s quite evident that you have no place for me any more, no room for me, I don’t count… Alright, well, sorry but…”  You see that’s [breached], that’s being offended. Doesn’t it often look like that with the Lord? So often the ways of the Lord with us COULD be interpreted in that manner, the Lord doesn’t seem to want us, He has no longer any interest in us, indeed He is relegating us to the place of the rejected. It seems that He is prepared to go on without us.  We are not wanted – that’s what it amounts to - we are not wanted, the Lord doesn’t want us!  Have you ever interpreted His ways like that? That’s a form of offendedness or stumbling at the Lord isn’t it? A coming down by the strangeness of the Lord’s SEEMING willingness to do without us, to go on without us, to set us aside.

Of course that’s not all the story of Elijah and Elisha or Elisha and Elijah, we’ll look at it again in a moment, but there’s one way which we can be offended with the Lord: His seeming either loss or lack of interest in us and concern, REAL CONCERN to have us.  But, if we knew the truth about Elijah, he was far more concerned to have Elisha than he was to get rid of him. But he wanted him on certain terms, on the terms of a man who had demonstrated that nothing else mattered in life than fellowship with His Lord. From that, he was not going to be put off, even by the Lord Himself. If you like to translate the thing into relationship with the Lord, it would amount to this: “Lord, You may feel that You can do without me but I can’t do without You and I’m not going to. You started this business and You’ve just got to go on with it till the end, I’m not going to let go.” May it not be that that is something of very great importance to the Lord in relationship of a servant who is going to be useful to Him? He’s proved that his Lord is after all his life; he can’t be shaken off. Think about that.

You have John the Baptist, here he is in prison. How utter John has been for the Lord! How he has poured himself out in the interests of Christ! How devoted: “Behold the Lamb of God! Behold the Lamb of God! He it is of Whom I said, There cometh one after me, the latches of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose. He must increase, I must decrease.” Here is devotion; devotion to his own abnegation, and now he is in prison. He is in prison, his ministry is cut off, his popularity is suspended if not ended, and in prison. The Lord seems to be doing nothing about it.  Nothing about it? I think there’s something in this, that when the Lord sent reply to John, told him of all the wonderful things that He was doing, in healing all manner of sicknesses, even to the raising of the dead; did He anticipate that if He’d stopped there John would have said “Yes, but why doesn’t He do something for me? I’m the lone one, doing it for everybody, but not for me! A lot of people are getting His blessing and good, but I am left out!” How easy it is to be offended when we seem to be just THE one person who is overlooked. And just at that point, because perhaps the Lord anticipated that that is how John might have reacted, said, “And blessed is he that is not offended in Me” - covered Himself and perhaps helped John over His difficult style; the seeming indifference of the Lord, and the seeming favoritism or precedent, or selectiveness of the Lord - that He’s blessing here, there, and this one, that - but He leaves me out; forgets me.

Or when you come to the letter to the Hebrews: “Cast not away your confidence which hath great recompense of reward” - I might stay with that word “confidence” just for a moment as you see it’s translated in the Revised Version ‘boldness’ because it’s the same word as is used of Peter and John in Acts 4 when they stood before the rulers, charged with filling all Jerusalem with their doctrine and they knew, they knew very well what kind of a place Jerusalem was, what they had done in Jerusalem to the Lord Jesus - the Spirit was there, for their destruction. But they stood before those self-same rulers and it says about the rulers, “When they beheld the boldness of Peter and John” that word ‘boldness’ is the same word here as in the Authorized ‘confidence’ and Revised ‘boldness’. What was it? Their forthrightness! Their unreservedness! Their absence of uncertainty! Here they are, they’re not wavering, they’re not, as we say, speaking with their tongue in their cheek as to what will happen to them if they are not very careful of what they say; being politic, diplomatic, carefully choosing their words lest they cause offence, or being very careful because they’re not so sure of their ground. The word here ‘confidence’ or ‘boldness’ is this; none of that!

They’ve got both their feet solidly down. They are speaking with assurance and confidence, they are forthright, they are not reserving anything. And to the Hebrews the word is “Cast not away your downright forthrightness, your certainty, your assurance, your confidence; cast it not away, it hath great recompense of reward”. Now you see that you have to read the whole of this letter to the Hebrews in the light of that phrase alone, that clause alone. The whole context of this letter is over against much that was gnawing at the confidence of these Christians. There was, as we recently pointed out, the persecution. The writer reminds them of their early days when, at their beginnings, they suffered so great a contradiction, they suffered greatly at the beginning for their faith. Then they were confident, bold, assured, but the sufferings had increased, persecution, the activities of the Judaizers to undermine their confidence and faith in the Lord Jesus, the long delayed return of the Lord which they had been taught to expect at any time… all eating at their confidence.

These are some of the reasons for being offended, and you can add what you like to them - probably find something in the Word of God which corresponds to anything that you like to add - there are plenty of grounds and reasons for being offended if you’re going to be! But, the divine recompense: “And blessed is he that shall not be made to stumble or who shall not stumble, be offended, in Me.” I ask you, was Elisha justified in the end in sticking to it? Forgive me, that sounds vulgar, was he justified in sticking to it, shall we say, to the bitter end? No bitter end of course!

Of course Elisha had somehow a shrewd idea of what was going to happen, “I know it” he said, “I know it, I know it, hold your peace!” But the point is that Elisha was not going to let go without getting something out of this for God; getting something out of this for God! He was the Lord’s servant, he was Elijah’s servant, he had got to carry on the testimony - great weight of responsibility was going to rest upon him - because of that, for that very reason, he was taken this testing way.  COULD  he, could he be put off? Could he be put off? And Elisha teaches us a lesson, oh, that we might learn it and be of the same spirit; to hold on: “Cast not away your confidence which hath great recompense of reward!” Elisha found that to be true and came into it.

This letter to the Hebrews lifts into view something very great at the end of the times of testing, doesn’t it? “Wherefore receiving a kingdom which CANNOT be shaken…” RECEIVING a kingdom which cannot be shaken! And, what you and I perhaps crave for, as much as anything in these days, is something that is substantial and unshakeable and sure and certain - the Rock.  We are shaken, we’re thrown about, everything is like that - often do wonder where we are, “Receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken. Let us hold fast, let us hold fast the beginning of our confidence, firm unto the end. Cast not away your confidence.”

Of course we ought never to speak of things in the letter to the Hebrews without seeing the full context, reminding ourselves of it: the almost infinite difficulty of humans as we are, living a heavenly life, and walking a heavenly way on this earth. It is so utterly contrary to our nature. There is NOTHING in us by nature that helps us to walk a heavenly way, to have everything on a heavenly basis. Nothing at all, everything is against that: to come down to earth, to have what we can see, what is tangible, what is present. Our whole soul life wants it NOW and wants it in our hands; wants it as we can see it! Oh, this Heavenly Way of the letter to the Hebrews… the HEAVENLY  way, partners in a Heavenly calling… it is unspeakably difficult to nature, it is contrary to nature, and we find all the way along, almost every day that this difficulty arises in some form or another.

But, with all that, we agree in our heart of hearts that the Heavenly IS the real and it is the ONLY object worth living for. We’ve got enough in our spiritual experience to know that the Heavenly is after all the only thing for which to live. “Cast not away your confidence which hath GREAT recompense of reward… you have need of patience that having done the will of God you may receive the Promise.”

Captivity In The Lord

Read: Ephesians 3:1, 4:1; 2 Timothy 2:9 & 1:8.

There is a very real sense in which the Apostle Paul, in his own person and experience, was an embodiment of the history of the Church in this age. Indeed it would seem to be a principle in the Divine economy that those to whom a revelation has been entrusted should themselves have it so wrought into their very being and history that they are able to say, "I am your sign." To take the one fragment which is now before us, the end of Paul's life saw a process of narrowing down and limitation working itself through by "a great falling away" on the one hand, and a closing up from the general to the specific in the case of which (him who) represented the testimony on the other. This is precisely what is foretold as to the conditions at "the end" and it is not a little significant that it is specially referred to in prophetic utterances to Timothy - in the end letter. So that this phrase "The Prisoner in the Lord" occurring as it does in the last writings, is prophetic in its meaning, and wonderfully explanatory of the end way of the sovereignty of the Lord.

What we have here, then is

I. The instrument of the Lord's testimony in a place of limiting by the will of God.

As we read the record of the incidents which led up to Paul's going to Rome as a prisoner, and especially when we read the words of Agrippa: "This man might have been set at liberty, if he had not appealed unto Caesar" we are not far from feeling that there were mistakes and accidents, but for which there might have been a much more propitious issue, and the ministry of the Apostle at large might have extended. There may have been times of stress when Paul himself was tempted to wonder if he had not been impulsive in that appeal to the Emperor. But as he went forward, and when the Lord spoke to him from time to time giving light, it became clear that, however the thing might have been construed humanly, there was a sovereign government of God in it all, and that he was in prison not as the Emperor's prisoner, but as the prisoner of the Lord.

Perhaps Paul did not accept this all at once. Possibly he did not realise just how it would work out. A more or less quick trial and release may have been put to mind. Some hope of further ministry amongst beloved saints seems to be absent from his correspondence. (There probably was a short period of release from the first imprisonment.) At length, however, he fully accepted what was becoming increasingly clear as the Lord's way, and it grew upon him that this was in the greatest interest of the Body of Christ. Thus we see that when the time comes for the Lord's people to be brought face to face with the ultimate and supreme things of the revelation of Jesus Christ: things beyond personal salvation: things which relate to the mind of God from above being saved: then there has to be a narrowing down, a closing up, a limiting. Much activity that has been, and all quite right for bringing things to a certain position and state, now ceases to carry them further, and something more intensive is needed.

That which represents the testimony in its fullest and closest approximation to the ultimate purpose of God, then, has to be shorn of much that has been good, necessary, and of God in a preparatory way, and must be shut up to what is ultimate. The captivity is not to a conceived truth or a superimposed doctrinal acceptance. It is wrought into the very fiber of the being by experience following revelation, and revelation interpreting experience. It is not the championing of some espoused interpretation: it is that it is the very life of instruments and the instrument is that in its very being. It is not a matter of wanting to be or not wanting to be, but cannot be other, a prisoner, the sovereignty of God has done it.

II. The importance and value of seeing and accepting things into God's light.

This applied both to Paul and to those who were brought into touch with him. For the Apostle the settling in to the sovereign ordering of God in his imprisonment issued in increasing illumination leading to spiritual emancipation.

No one can fail to recognize the tremendous enrichment of ministry as contained in what are called "the Prison Epistles".  If he had been restive, piqued, rebellious, or bitter, there would have been no open heaven, and a spirit of controversy with the Lord would have closed and bolted the door to the fuller Divine unveilings and clarifyings.

When all was accepted according to the mind of the Lord, then "the heavenly places" became the eternal expanses of his walking about, and earthly bondage gave place to heavenly freedom. So it must be with every instrument set apart in relation to the higher interests of the Lord's testimony. Then the reading of certain passages in his letters and the record of his imprisonment shows how this applied to others. Take the following:-

"Be not ashamed therefore of the testimony of the Lord, nor of me his prisoner" (2 Tim. 1:8). "And he abode two whole years in his own hired dwelling, and received all that went in unto him. ...teaching the things concerning the Lord Jesus" (Acts 28:30).

"The Lord grant mercy unto the house of Onesiphorus: for oft he refreshed me, and he was not ashamed of my chain; but, when he was in Rome, he sought me diligently, and found me" (2 Tim. 1:6).

Clearly the effect of these passages is that there had to be a Divine apprehension and not merely a human appraisal of Paul's position. Human levels of mentality would have produced an atmosphere of doubt, suspicion, question, and would have let in elements of false imputation. Regarded on merely natural lines, association with the prisoner would have involved such associates in the suspicion and prejudice. Doubt of the Lord's servant was very widespread, and even many of the Lord's people were not sure of him. But the Lord was shutting up a very vital revelation to this channel, and for such as were really in spiritual need, and such as were to stand in a living relation to fullness of testimony from identification with Christ in death and resurrection, on to throne-union with Him, power over "Principalities, Powers" etc., and on to the ministry "in the ages to come", there had to be a putting aside of all human, personal, and diplomatic considerations and a standing right in there with the instrument where God put it in honorable imprisonment. For possession of which is to come through the vessel, there has to be a coming where the vessel is, without consideration for reputation, influence, or popularity.

In this way the Lord sifts His people and finds out who really is wholly for Himself and His testimony, and who is actuated in any measure by other considerations and interests. The instrument in this position of popular rejection is thus the Lord's means of searching, and it will thus meet their need.

The other truth remains here, then, is that

III. Shame, reproach and limitation are often God's ways of enriching the whole Body of Christ.

This has always been so. The measure of approximation to the fullness of the revelation has always been accompanied by a relative cost. Every instrument of the testimony has been laid under suspicion and reproach in a measure commensurate with the degree of value to the Lord, and this has meant that, humanly, they were limited to that extent. Many have withdrawn, fallen away, held aloof, doubted, feared, and questioned. But as Paul could say "my tribulations for you, which are your glory" (Eph. 3:13), or "The prisoner of Christ Jesus in behalf of you Gentiles" (Eph. 3:1), so the measure of limitation in the Lord is the measure of enrichment in His people. The fuller the revelation, the fewer those who apprehend, or the greater the number of those who stand aloof. Revelation only comes through suffering and limitation, and to have it experimentally means sharing the cost in some way. But this is God's way of securing for Himself a spiritual seed plot.

A seed plot is an intensive thing. There things are narrowed down to very limited dimensions. It is not a great extensive show that is immediately in view, but things are all considered firstly in the light of seed. The real meaning of things is not always recognized there, but you can travel the world over and find a great many gardens which are the expression of that intensive and restricted seed plot. If ever there was such a seed plot it was Paul's prison in Rome.

All this may apply to individual lives in relation to the Lord's testimony. There may often be a chafing against limitation, confinement, and a restless hankering after what we would call something wider or less restricted. If the Lord has willed us to the place where we are, our acceptance of it in faith may prove that it becomes a far bigger thing than any human reckoning can judge. I wonder if Paul had any idea that his prison meant his continuous expansion of value to the Lord Jesus through nineteen hundred years? What applies to individuals also applies to corporate bodies, assemblies, or companies of the Lord's people scattered in the earth but one in their fellowship in relation to the Lord's full testimony. May the Lord be graciously pleased to cause the merely human aspect of prison walls to fall away, and give the realization that, far from being limited by men and circumstances, it is imprisonment in the Lord, and this means that all ages and all realms are entered through that prison.

Conformed to the Image of His Son

Reading: Rom. 8:15-30.

I want to speak to you in a general and simple way on what seems to me to be so evident in this portion of Scripture, as related particularly to the time in which we live. I think you will agree that the people of God in this time, as in many past times of severe pressure and trial and suffering, need delivering thoughts, which lift up and out and re-assure the heart and make steady the going; and I do not know of anything in the Word of God more calculated to perform that function than this familiar passage. It brings us right back to the foundation of all things with some mighty affirmations, some tremendous statements — into the eternal and establishing thoughts of God concerning His own people in all times. It is in those thoughts of God, as we recognize them, that we find our strength in times of special stress.

God’s Purpose, Focused in His People, Explains World Events

The first and basic thought here is this. God has a fixed, determined purpose. He has His thoughts from eternity clearly and perfectly defined. The world is not in a jumble; things are not, from God's standpoint, in chaos. They may be from man's point of view, but from God's they are not. One clear, sure thought and purpose is actively at work in all these things which are going on as they affect and touch the life of the people of God, and we must remember that, at the heart of the universe, are the elect; the very core of everything is the people of God, the "called according to his purpose." That is why they are never exempt from the things which go on in the world; God never puts them into positions isolated from world happenings, never sets them aside in some place where they are untouched and unaffected. There is a sense in which the people of God register the happenings in the cosmos more than others do, and suffer more. The Lord's people are the heart of things and God's fullest thought is centred in them; and around that people, embodying that thought of God, the whole creation is gathered, according to this Scripture, and is said to be groaning in travail in direct relation to this thought of God which is to emerge ultimately in the manifestation of the sons of God.

Now, I do want to put this as simply as possible. God's thoughts are very high but they are not beyond any who have the Holy Spirit. Right from the beginning, before the world was created, God had a definite thought. It was not an idea that He was going to try out, not something that had come into His mind and He was going to experiment with it to see if He could bring it to pass. When God thinks a thought it is as good as an act. "I know the thoughts that I think toward you... to give you an expected end" (Jer. 29:11); and who will for a moment allow room for God's thoughts to be ultimately defeated? No, God's thoughts are God's acts. So that He had a thought which was as good as an accomplishment from the beginning, and right through the ages He has been at work with that thought in relation to His own people; and in such times as this in which we are living, times of great trial for the people of God, that thought of God takes on a new meaning and His people ought to turn back to it in order that they may be saved.

Need for Spiritual Evaluation Above Earthly Happening

I was talking to someone recently who is very much in the affairs of this world, and he said, 'Of course, this world is all upside down, everything is wrong, nothing is as it should be.' He was not talking religiously, but as a man of the world, without any knowledge whatever of God's thoughts. He went on to say, 'Of course, so far as our lifetime is concerned, we shall never see recovery, things will never be normal again' — and he spoke with a note which indicated that for him life and the world were all gone; everything for which we lived and hoped, our whole system of things, had gone, there was nothing left; we might just as well depart this life now. If we are going to live at all in relation to this world and this world order, we are going to be in a terrible tangle. To put it quite precisely in the light of present conditions, our essential need is for deliverance from looking for a change of circumstances and the return of conditions in which we can settle down and perhaps enjoy again all the old liberties. If we are from day to day hoping that there will be a complete change and that something will happen which will completely alter things for the better: if we are living in things as they are or as we would like them to be, the ups or the downs of these present world happenings: we are destined and doomed to despair and to live under a terrible strain. We have to get out of this somehow, we have to be above it. Of course, we shall be touched with the suffering and the sorrow and the conditions; we shall feel things in the realm of our souls; but in the innermost part of our being, in our spirit, we have to be free from this. We shall never be able to bear our testimony, fulfil our ministry, or be that for which God has chosen us unless we are in a position of spiritual detachment and ascendency above what is happening. We need deliverance, and we must have it. When we take up our morning paper and read of the course of this world's affairs, we can become terribly involved in it, and the shadow be over us for the rest of the day. That will not do, and if things do go from bad to worse in the realm of earthly things, we have to find a place where still we are outside of it. The same holds good in the matter of elation because of good news, and the apparent improvement of conditions. Disillusionment may cast us down, sooner or later. We must be above this world.

What is it, then, that will secure us there? What will deliver us? It will be the basic and all-governing thought of God. If only you can be assured that God is definitely giving Himself to something, and can see what that something is, and can have, by the Holy Spirit, the witness in your own being that He is doing that in your case, you are delivered. Otherwise you are in chaos and you will soon be in despair. That is where the world is. It is indeed "having no hope and without God in the world."

God’s Thought – A People Conformed to the Image of His Son

What is this basic thought? The words are so familiar, but I believe everything in history from the beginning to the end in relation to the people of God turns upon this one familiar fragment —

"Whom he foreknew, he also foreordained to be conformed to the image of his Son" (Rom 8:29).

"Conformed to the image of his Son" — that is the basic, all-governing thought of God where His people are concerned. That is what He has been at work upon from the beginning with His people. That is at the very heart and root of our present experiences, our trials, our suffering. God is at work upon you and me with this one thing in view — conformity to the image of His Son. That means many things, which we do not now stay to consider, but we take fresh note of it as the underlying, undergirding fact. Going right back before time, "foreknown, foreordained," on to "the ages of the ages," the realization; "conformed to the image of his Son." The previous verse (v. 28) expresses this — God is working all things for good with those who are called according to His purpose.

What good? What is the good of the suffering and trial that we go through? It is this — that God is (may I use the word?) reproducing His Son in us; and His Son is His hope, and His ultimate glory is to be revealed manifestly in the saints in terms of sonship. It is the hope for the whole creation — "subjected to vanity... in hope." We are travailing in hope. The hope is in God's Son, and the hope is the manifestation of that Son in the saints. "Christ in you the hope of glory."

Conformity to Christ Wrought through Common Trials

Now to bring that down again to very simple terms. Go back to the place where, for the time being, the Lord has put you, where He has called you to live your life and do your work in all the trial and difficulty and suffering of it, and do not strain to get out of it. Do not lose the present value of it by always living mentally or hopefully in a time when you will be out of it, but go back there and recognize that if you are the Lord's, if you love God and are called according to purpose (as you are if you are in Christ), God is seeking to do something with you and in you by means of the conditions of your present situation. You will only defeat God's end if you try to get out, and fail to recognize and accept what He is seeking to do. I can think of few things more regrettable and grievous than that we should look back upon any part of our life and have to say, 'I might have realized some great purpose of God in that period of my life if only I had taken another attitude toward it than the one I did take; I was chafing, impatient, all the time looking for a way of escape; I was rebellious, living in another mental world of my own creating, in which I would do and be this and that; and I missed all that God intended at that time.' I say, there can be few things more grievous than that.

So we must go back to the sphere and conditions in which the Lord has placed us, with this attitude — God has a thought which relates to me as one of His Own; and that thought is, that through the conditions and sufferings of my life He should develop in me the features of His Son. On the one hand, the features of the old creation may be seen to be more and more terrible and horrible, as I recognize them in myself; but over against that God is doing something which is other than myself, not me at all. He is bringing into being Another, altogether other, and that is His Son. Slowly, all too slowly; nevertheless something is happening. That sonship is not very much manifested yet, but it is going to be manifested. What God has been doing will come out into the light eventually — conformity to the image of His Son; "that he might be the firstborn among many brethren."

So we look out upon the people of God on the earth amongst whom we are included, and we have to adjust our ideas as to why we are here. There may be things to do, but God is far more concerned with the being than with the doing, and we have to learn all over again what service is. I am not going to pursue that at the moment, but I would say this — service to God is essentially spiritual, or, in other words, it is the measure in which Christ Himself is brought into God's universe for God's satisfaction; and we know that we can never bring Christ into anyone's life by preaching. Have you learned that yet? How much of Christ has resulted from all the conferences you have attended? I am under no delusion that what I am saying to you can reproduce Christ in you. We may talk to the end of our days, but all our preaching is not going to produce Him. We can only help one another in this matter to understand what God is seeking to do.

Only God’s Spirit can Conform us to Christ

And so we come back to this second thing in relation to purpose. There is the thought, the purpose, which God has in view, upon which He is at work, but the Holy Spirit is brought in here so definitely and fully as the indispensable agent.

"The Spirit... maketh intercession... according to God."

The words — 'the will of' God — are printed in italics in the Bible; they are not in the original. The Spirit Who knows God, God's thoughts, God's mind, is working according to God and working in us. We have received the Spirit of sonship, adoption, by which we cry, Father! We are children of God to be manifested as the sons of God, but all this is because the Holy Spirit is operating, making intercession with, groanings which cannot be uttered. "The Spirit helpeth our infirmity." He comes alongside. He alone can reproduce Christ, conform us to His image. And yet we have thought that service was preaching, teaching, doing this or that or a hundred and one things! Oh, that is only the vehicle of the Spirit. Let us be undeceived about this matter. You are not going to be one whit better spiritually for attending meetings unless the Holy Spirit does something. All that is said may be very true, but your knowing it all will not reach the end of God. We are wrecked upon the Holy Spirit in this matter. Therein is the need for real exercise over everything that we hear.

The fact is this, that we may advance a long way in spiritual knowledge (I mean in information, the knowledge of the truth) beyond our own real measure, and then have the shock, under terrible conditions, of discovering that all that we have accumulated through the years does not help us. We are right up against things and have to say, 'I have not got the realities I thought I had, they are not helping me; I am being brought right back to foundations in my real, personal, living knowledge of the Lord Himself.' The peril then, of course, is to jettison all the teaching we have had and to say that it is a valueless thing. It is not valueless; but we must recognize that there is all the difference between knowing the thoughts of God in our minds, and the Holy Spirit's using that knowledge to accomplish God's ends. Thus we have to come back with every fragment and have very real dealings with the Lord. Our attitude every time must be, 'Lord, do save me from ever coming to the time when what I have heard proves only to have been a thing heard; make it a basis of Holy Spirit activity to reach the Divine end.'

Now, if you can grasp this, it is going to be a great deliverance. Why are the people of God suffering? — that they may be conformed to the image of His Son. Of course, we may not need a world upheaval to do that, but God is going to use all conditions to that end, and, tragically enough, there are multitudes of the Lord's people who do need a world shaking. They are so bound up with the externalities of Christianity, with its whole structure and system, that nothing but that which will overthrow, disintegrate, destroy, and raise tremendous questions about the whole business, will bring them to the place where the Spirit of God can begin really to do the work which He has come to do in them.

Need for Inwrought Knowledge of the Lord

I do not want to speak too much about work and service at this time, but we are all conscious how very testing are the limitations that growingly bear down upon us as those who would serve the Lord. They raise many questions and problems in our minds, so far as concerns the fulfilment of what we have thought to be our ministry. The situation is a very trying one. We have to look deeper, still more inward, as to God's thought.

This is a fact borne out in the case of every servant of God in history who has really come under the hand of God — that the real values of their lives for all time have been those which correspond to the wine of the grape, the thing trodden out in the winepress, the agony of the heart; and you know that it is true in your case that if ever you have had anything at all which you knew to be worth while and which has really helped someone else, it has been born out of some travail in your own experience. You have gone into the winepress, through an agony, to produce it and that is the nature of real service to God.

How do we know? — not have information, but know? We only know anything in that deepest sense by going into a situation where we are stripped of everything in order to prove that one thing, and to find in knowing it our deliverance, our salvation. That is the way in which we learn, and there is no gap whatever between that kind of knowledge and our very being. That knowledge is not objective to ourselves, it is ourselves, and when we give that we give ourselves. We cannot stand back from that and say, 'I believed that once but I do not believe it any longer; I had those ideas, but I do not hold them now.' Oh, God could never be satisfied with anything like that. There may be sifting and adjustment as to our ideas, but the Lord is after 'true knowledge.' We stand or fall by our knowledge, because true knowledge is life, is being, and it is what God Himself is in us.

Perfected through Sufferings

I wonder if you grasp the point. What is God doing with His people? He is using all these things which are happening, primarily to bring about in His people that conformity to the image of His Son which is to mean Christ in manifestation in an elect people — a people foreordained because foreknown for this very thing. This thought of God is a delivering thought. How do you pray for the Lord's people in times of trouble? Of course, we are all tempted to pray for their deliverance, to cry to the Lord that they may escape. It may be right at times to pray thus, but suppose the Lord does not deliver? He does not always deliver at once. He allows the situation to continue, to become long drawn out. The enemy will encamp upon that fact and give it his own twist and interpretation — 'God is not doing anything; He has left His people, is standing back, is not concerned.' There is no answering voice, no slightest indication that He is taking any account at all. It is like that very often, and that is a real playground for the enemy. God apparently makes no response. How shall we be delivered from going to pieces, from being overwhelmed in such a time and under such conditions? Only by grasping this thought of God; and then we have to begin to pray along other lines. If God does not act to deliver His people, there is a deeper and a higher thought and purpose than their deliverance, and He is at work upon that; and deeply in them He is going to reproduce the patience, the endurance, the longsuffering of Jesus Christ. If you go right over the whole ground of God's Son perfected through sufferings and can read your Gospels anew and understand Him as He differs so utterly from the standards of men, you can see what God is doing with us His people. Meekness and gentleness — these are foreign things to our natures; under stress, under adversity, under the cruel hand of tyrannical men, to say, 'Father, forgive'! He could say "I am meek and lowly in heart." Oh, you see — the image of His Son. Such testing conditions are a terrible challenge to our natural dispositions. Our whole nature revolts against meekness and lowliness and wants to rise up and be even with the other one, or be the master. Our nature does not accept and delight in opposition, antagonism, frustration, persecution, and all such things.

But think — and this is the marvel of Christ in Pilate's hall and before the High Priest — think again. Spat upon, mocked, struck, in every way degraded — and He is almighty and infinite God incarnate Who, with the parting of His lips, the silent lifting of His hand, could have smitten that crowd out of existence! The centurion was right; when he saw what had happened he was filled with fear and said, Truly this was the Son of God. We have heard of people suddenly discovering their awful mistake and dying of heart failure on the spot. Think of the shock that has to come yet to those who treated Him as He was treated — when they see Him. You can understand something of what took place in Saul of Tarsus (who knew all about what had happened in Jerusalem) when he saw Him — "I am Jesus" — saw Him in a brightness above that of the noonday sun.

But my point is this, He accepted and endured all that, going through to the bitter end, letting them hammer nails through His hands and feet and fix Him to the Cross, with all the deriding — "He saved others; himself he cannot save... Let (God) deliver him now, if he desireth him: for he said, I am the Son of God." And He did not stir a finger or utter a word, when twelve legions of angels were standing ready for His aid.

(If one angel could smite the host of Sennacherib, what would twelve legions do?) That is meekness and lowliness of heart, and that is what God is trying to effect in us. That is the thought of God; that is going to be glory in God's universe; that will make a world worth living in, and a universe of that nature will be bearable. God thus works in us; and so the portion we read finds early in it these words —

"I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us."

First published in "A Witness and A Testimony", March-April, 1951

The Eternal Reward of Labour and Suffering

Reading: Numbers 27:1-7; Joshua 15:13-19, Romans 8:17.

I have just one thought that I want to pass to you here. It relates to inheritance. In the New Testament that word is found to compass quite a lot. In the first place, inheritance is there shown to be a matter of birthright; then it is extended to a bequest, a gift; and then still further it applies to reward for labour, for service. It is in this last connection that my word lies.

While it is fully recognized - not for a moment would we detract one iota from the grand fact - that everything is of grace: even enablement to work for reward is of grace - while that is true, this other aspect of inheritance, or heirship, as a matter of reward for service and suffering, is very fully revealed. Inheriting by labouring, entering into the fruits of labour; inheriting by warfare, entering into the spoil of battle; entering into suffering and being recompensed for suffering. It is surely inherent in labour, in suffering, that there should be some gratification, and the gratification is the wages. While we know that it has been grace that has enabled to suffer and to labour, nevertheless we have suffered and we have laboured and we have battled, and there is something for that, by the faithfulness of God - there are wages, there is that sense of achievement. There is no greater gratification than to know that, through labour and suffering, something has been achieved.

Inward Relationship to the Object in View

It is just there that I put my finger. The very heart of suffering, the very heart of co-heirship with Christ, is this wonderful sense of inward relationship to the object in view, inward relationship to the inheritance, inward relationship to the result, the reward. And that is the explanation of suffering, of labour, of conflict. The Lord does not just give to us without cost. He always brings us into the cost of that which He is going to give. It will be grace all the way through, but He brings us into the cost of the reward. In the end, let us repeat, we shall acknowledge that any part we have had in it of suffering, labour, warfare, has been infinitely outweighed by what He has given - and that is where grace will always be our theme; but I do believe that mingled with our gratitude will be this sense that the Lord enabled us to achieve, that He did not act without us and apart from us. He brought us into it, and there will be this deep, inward, heart-relatedness to the result, that we share with Him the gratification. That is the very heart of suffering, I believe.

Now why am I saying this? Where was this born? how was this born? Well, in a very practical way. I have just returned from a time in the United States, and it has not by any means been an easy time - very much otherwise. But we have been profoundly grateful all the time that you dear friends were so many hours ahead of us. In the Eastern part of the States you were five hours ahead. When we got further West you were six hours ahead, and we constantly reminded ourselves that your prayer gatherings were ahead of us. They had gone before and we were just following on, in our own prayer and in the conflict and the pressure; following on, and, as we believe, being carried through. And there came to me this: Those dear friends are right in the battle, and if there is anything here that really is for the Lord, if anything results for the Lord, it belongs to them, quite as much as it belongs to us. It is theirs; in a certain sense they will own this; it will be, so to speak, their property. They have battled for it, suffered for it, endured for it, toiled for it. They have gone on ploughing the way, pioneering the way, and it is theirs.

That is the thought right at the heart of this word, that there is something that becomes ours through suffering. Yes, it is the Lord's, and it is all of His grace, but it is ours.

Suffering is a Purifying Thing

And that means surely that what we have laboured for, suffered for, travailed for, becomes something over which we are very jealous. Suffering for anything is a very purifying thing. Take the matter of the child for which there has been suffering, travail. Well, other people who have not so suffered and travailed and gone through for the child can see all the defects and pass all the criticisms and arrive at their judgments, good or bad, about that child, and just stand apart and say their say about the child. But the mother may see very little of that. There is something for the mother which transcends all that. 'Oh yes, you may say that, but that child is very precious to me. I have suffered for that child, that child is my child, the child of my heart and the child of my travail, and, while I may see its faults, there is something which covers them all, there is the jealousy of a love born of suffering'.

Now you see what I am getting at. There is nothing that is precious to the Lord, and which He would make the property of His people, but there will be suffering for it. It will only become their property - in that sense - as they suffer for it, and then woe betide who criticizes that! If you are detached from a thing, if you are detached from a testimony, from a work of God, you can do all the criticizing you like. You have no inward heart-relationship to it, and so you pass your judgments upon it. But if you are in it and you have suffered, if it has been a costly thing where you are concerned, then you are seeing more than all the failings, more than all those faults. The people who can criticize like that and judge and point out faults are the people who have not suffered.

On the other side, we may know all the terms, all the phraseology, all the doctrine, all the truth, and it may be just objective, something we have heard; we have lived in the midst of it, it is familiar to us. But what the Lord will do if that is to become ours is to take us into travail over the matter. He will relate that thing to our hearts in a deep, inward way, so that none of us will be able to say, 'I know all about that, I have heard all about that, I could tell you all that you could tell me about that'. The Lord would so work in a costly, deep and painful way in relation to that, to make it ours through travail, that we are brought into a new position. We are not spectators, looking on, criticizing; we are on the inside, looking out, defending. We are jealous over it. Suffering is a great purifying thing. It destroys selfishness. It destroys that self-interest that is the cause of so much of the trouble. It makes us in a disinterested way jealous for what is of God. Yes, suffering purifies, and suffering makes this deep, inward link.

It gives an extra feature to things. That extra feature where we cannot just be occupied with faults and be people of a criticizing attitude, the extra feature with a love which covers a multitude of sins. We have suffered together. When we suffer together, what a lot we get over! We have gone through it together, perhaps through the years. We have been in the fire together, and there is a love, there is a jealousy which, let people say what they will about the other persons, simply rises up in us because we have suffered.

Joint-Heirs with Christ Through Suffering

"Heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified with him" (Rom. 8:17). This is not just an official thing, something that is a gratuitous gift in a mechanical way, as much as to say, 'Well, you have done a bit of work; here are your wages'. That thing has been wrought in us through the suffering and the cost and the warfare and the labour, and there is this sense of an inward co-heirship with Christ, if we suffer. It will be a very blessed thing, to us who know how much we are dependent upon the grace of God, how little we can even bear without the support of His grace; it will be a wonderful thing when at last He says, 'This is the reward of your suffering'. We shall say, 'Well, after all, it was our light affliction - in the light of the far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. How have we earned this?' But there will be some gratification in recognizing that the Lord has taken account of what we have gone through, and has brought us into a sense of His own gratification, and given us to feel - 'Well, it was not in vain, it was not for nought'.

Why did I read those passages in the Old Testament from Numbers and Joshua? They both have to do with inheritance. I read them for this reason, that here were people who, in the first place, were concerned, were jealous, for the inheritance. And then they were people who were prepared to enter into the cost of the inheritance, after which, when they had got it, it was theirs. Yes, it was the Lord's, but it was theirs. Do you see what I mean? It is theirs. And many of us have gone through the years in toil, in suffering, in labour and warfare in the Lord's interests, and if there is anything that comes out of that at all, it is ours, in this sense - that we are jealous over it with a right kind of jealousy. It belongs to us in the Lord. Yes, it is the Lord's, but it belongs to us in the Lord, the fruit of suffering and of travail and of cost. Your faithfulness in prayer, and in prayer-gatherings - it is not without cost that you continue like that. Your faithfulness in the upholding of those who go out - it costs. Taking the years over, it is not without price if there is anything. The Lord has given it to you as your inheritance; that is yours. All that eternal spiritual value is yours in Christ. Now look after it, cherish it, watch jealously over it, and from all attacks defend it. If only we had this inward sense of relatedness to everything that costs, what a difference it would make, how less ready we should be to see the defects and the faults!

The Lord bring us to understand that the meaning of the conflict and of the suffering, from His standpoint, is not only - and I say this quite reverently - not only in order to get something for Him. It is because He wants us in an inward relatedness to it, as a very part of ourselves. I believe that is the very essence of this joint-heirship with Jesus Christ. What does it mean to inherit if we suffer? Surely it means - 'This is what you have earned through the grace of God. Here it is: you have paid for this in fellowship with Christ'. I do not understand all this in the New Testament about 'suffering together with Him', 'filling up that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ for His Body's sake, which is the Church' - I do not understand unless it is this, that the Lord wants us not just as bits of a machine to work out some piece of work for Him. He wants a real heart-relatedness: so that, as we suffer with Him - and we are suffering with Him, there is no doubt about that - as we suffer with Him, we shall be gratified with Him. Glorified - yes, but gratified; the deep sense of gratification that we had a share in this. The Lord give us a right attitude toward all the cost.

First published in "A Witness and A Testimony" magazine, Jul-Aug 1952, Vol 30-4

The Fellowship of His Sufferings

"The Sufferings Of Christ Abound Unto Us" 2 Cor. 1:5

Read: 2 Corinthians 1:3-5; 2 Corinthians 6:8-13; 2 Corinthians 2:4; 2 Corinthians 11:23-28; 1 Corinthians 4:9-13; 2 Corinthians 1:8-10

There is a very great deal summed up in the passages we have just read, but what I have on my heart to say will be confined to two things; firstly, the sufferings and the suffering, and secondly, the need and the values of suffering.

The Fact And Range Of Suffering

Little need be said, I think, as to the fact of the sufferings. We know the people of God are not exempt from sufferings. That, I think, need not be laboured. But there are many sufferings into which they enter because they are the people of God; and that, perhaps, needs a little thinking about. There are sufferings we may bring upon ourselves, sufferings which need not be, but I am not thinking about those. I am speaking about the sufferings of Christ, of the fact of these, and that they are the common lot of the people of God, and that when they come upon us, there is nothing wrong m that. Indeed, we shall see before we are through that it is quite to the contrary.

But when you think about these sufferings, with Paul as the great example and interpreter, you are led to see that these are not just incidents, local or earthly things. Even when they take legal and earthly form and colouring by reason of situations and circumstances and events, they have a far greater range than anything incidental, local, temporal, earthly. The range of these sufferings is no less than the spiritually universal. They reach out beyond ourselves, our circle, our lives, our time, and beyond anything here and now. I would use the word 'dispensational' but for its being perhaps misunderstood. Paul's sufferings comprehended the dispensation and are virtuous to-day after so many centuries, and have touched every realm of the celestial and the diabolical. These sufferings are more than just incidents in life, painful as they may be. They are set within a vast realm of significance and effectiveness. They are, in the main, the 'kick-back' of a vast and mighty system of antagonism to everything that is of Christ.

We must therefore accept the fact of such sufferings, and adjust to the spiritual significance of it. If you and I ever do get the idea that the Christian life is to be a perpetual picnic, we shall get ourselves into all kinds of difficulties and perplexities and disappointments. If we seek to escape from the sufferings of Christ, we are going to cut the very vitals of our spiritual worth-whileness. Take heed to that. We have to accept the fact that, being the Lord's here, our inheritance is an inheritance of the sufferings of Christ, and we must not seek to avoid them.

The Suffering Within The Sufferings

But then I used the words, the sufferings and the suffering; the plural and the singular. The suffering-that is, the suffering which is within the sufferings. Sometimes it is the suffering which brings about the sufferings. Take Paul, for instance, and the suffering to which he refers in II Corinthians 1:8-10 "our affliction which befell us in Asia". The word 'affliction' there is from a Latin root which means 'a flail', and it pictures the wielding of a flail upon the naked body of a bound man, bruising and breaking and battering; it is a strong word. Paul says that is what happened to him in Asia. "Weighed down exceedingly, beyond our power, insomuch that we despaired even of life: yea, we ourselves have had the sentence of death within ourselves..." 'We had the answer to our enquiry; the answer was - It is death!'

Now, that is the suffering within the sufferings. You do not think for a moment that that was just a physical matter. A man who could go through all those experiences which are recorded of Paul, and who could say that to depart and be with Christ was far better, was not afraid of dying. Not at all! There must have been some suffering within the sufferings. 'Weighed down exceedingly, beyond our power": that was something inward; it was not because he was desperately ill and might die at any moment. What then is this? It may have been due to the report that came to him of conditions in Corinth, for it was at this time that he received the news of the terrible state of things in Corinth recorded in these letters, and he speaks of "that which presseth upon me daily, anxiety for all the churches "(2 Cor. 11:28). Even if it was physical sickness that assailed him, we know that sickness in the body is very often caused by grief of heart; the outward sufferings are sometimes the result of inward distress. Thus we have the suffering within the sufferings.

There is a spiritual suffering for Christ's sake; and that which Paul speaks of in this portion as "the sentence of death", though beyond our explanation, yet does seem to suggest that he got into a terrible state spiritually because of certain conditions. If I were to try to reshape this situation, I should say, Paul had received this terribly bad news about the state of things in the church at Corinth, with more perhaps from other directions as well, and he had gone down under his suffering and said, 'Is it worth it? Is it not all in vain? Is it not an utterly hopeless situation? Am I not wasting my life in pouring it out for such people?' When you start like that, there is no end. You can go down and down until waters of despair gradually close over you. You try to pray and you cannot, for a doubting man can never pray. He may cry, but he cannot pray. A man who has let go to that sort of thing cannot pray; heaven is closed. And Paul, so to speak, interrogates himself and says, 'What is the meaning of this?' The answer is, 'It is death; along that line it is death; if you get down there, there is no way through and no way up; that is the end of everything - death!'

I am not going further with that to see how Paul came to the turning point and to the so great deliverance. That is not in our present consideration. My point at the moment is that death here was spiritual, not physical. He was tasting something of the real nature of death. Death is a sense of being excluded from God, of heaven being closed, of there being no way through and no way out, shut up and shut in, at the end of everything; and that registered in or upon your soul. That is more than physical death. Some of us more than once would have been glad to die physically. But this other thing is spiritual death, and it is terrible, it is awful; there is no gladness about that. To taste that is to know something of the sufferings of Christ. Those sufferings may be known along other lines, but we are not attempting here to define in detail the whole range of Christ's sufferings, but only to stress the fact of them.

The Need And Values Of The Sufferings Of Christ

What is the point for us? Everyone of you will have to make your own application, for I do not know why I am led to this message; the Lord only knows His own wisdom. But there are some very practical matters bound up with this; and so we come to the second part of our subject, namely, the need and the values of this kind of suffering. Let it be settled with us once for all that the sufferings 6f Christ are an absolute necessity. I am going to say a very strong thing, and it is this-that if you know nothing about the sufferings of Christ, there is something wrong with you as a Christian. I am not, of course, speaking of such as have only just entered upon the Christian life, though suffering is sometimes encountered right from the first. But obedience and faithfulness soon lead to the experience of some form of Christ's sufferings. If you are avoiding those sufferings, if you are rebelling against them, you are taking an entirely wrong line. They are the true lot of children of God. I do not say that you will each have them in the same measure or of the same kind, but you will have them. Ask the Lord if your bad times may not, after all, fit into this. You have been thinking of them merely as circumstances, as disappointments, working out to your misfortune, your disadvantage. But wait; see whether these are not, after all, bound up with your spiritual life, whether they do not bear a relationship to your spiritual growth. Interrogate yourself, examine this question.

Reality By Suffering

They are necessary for several things; first of all, to keep things real, practical and up-to-date. The Lord is not going to allow any one of us to live upon a past, upon a theory, upon a tradition, upon a doctrine as a doctrine. He will allow us to live only on what is real and practical and up-to-date, and, being made as we are, we do not so live unless we are made to. I could make a lot of personal confessions now, but they would not be of very much value except by way of illustration. If I know even a little about the Lord and the Lord's things, I can tell you perfectly frankly it is because of suffering. I could not and would not have learned unless the Lord had made me learn, and taught me in a very deep and practical school where things were kept right up-to-date, and where every bit of ministry sprang out of some new experience. It is a law which applies to us all. The fact is that these sufferings are absolutely essential to keep things real; and you know as well as I do that people want reality. They have a right to say, 'How did you get to know that? Have you proved that? How much has that been to you in the deepest hours of life, when things were beyond your power? Did that prove to be true then?' If we are not able to say with all our heart in utter sincerity, 'I found the Lord to be like that in my actual experience; I have put that truth to a thorough test and proved it', then we are frauds. The Lord has no place for frauds; therefore He keeps us up-to-date. Reality is by suffering.

Growth By Suffering

Progress and growth are also secured by this means. All nature declares it. Growth, development, increase, is by that expanding power which creates a creak and a groan and an ache within the organism; and in the spiritual life it is like that. We speak about growing pains. I believe that is considered to be unscientific now, but it is a very useful phrase. Yes, there are growing pains, and the sufferings of Christ in the members of His Body are related to growth. The difference is this, that in what we have called growing pains it is the growing that is actually taking place which causes the pains, while here, in what we have before us, it is the pains which produce the growth afterward. We grow by means of suffering, there is no doubt about it. Show me a mature spiritual life, and you show me the embodiment of much suffering of some kind-not always physical-a life which has gone through things. Paul found his turning point there - "that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God who raiseth the dead"; a new discovery from the depths. Where he touched bottom, he discovered God in a new way-"God who raiseth the dead". Such knowing of Him comes along that line. The values of suffering are there.

Ability By Suffering

But then note what he says in this first chapter again - "God... who comforteth us in all our affliction, that we may be able..." Oh, there is a lot in that! That speaks of stock in trade, the means for service, does it not? We may often have bad times about our lack of ability in many ways, comparing ourselves with other people and deploring our lack of ability in this and that. Oh, for ability! But what is the greatest ability after all? The best and most fruitful ability is to be able to help people in the deep experiences of spiritual life; to be able to explain to them the meaning of God's dealings with them, to be able to show them what is in-tended to be the outcome of it all, to be able to give them some support by counsel which comes from real knowledge some of that comfort which we ourselves have received of God. That is real service, that is building up the Body of Christ, the House of God-being really able, in a spiritual way, to strengthen the sorrowing. That comes through suffering.

Now, are you going through it, having a bad time? What are you putting it down to? Are you the Lord's? Is your life committed to Him? Then see if you really can rightly and properly separate between your bad time and your spiritual life. If you can, all right, just write it all off as the common lot of anybody else who is not a Christian No, you cannot disentangle this. It is all bound up together. It is going to have an effect upon you, one way or other, either to spiritual increase or spiritual loss. But oh, let us adjust. If the sufferings of Christ abound unto us, they are the sufferings of Christ. They may be soul sufferings, they may be in the physical realm, they may be both combined, but the Lord is sovereign in these sufferings, to great, beneficial, valuable ends.

I close by reminding You of this other word which the Apostle addressed to those Corinthians - "I wrote unto you... not that ye should be made sorry, but that ye might know the love which I have more abundantly unto you" (II Cor. 2:4). You cannot have love without suffering. The two things go together; and mark you, your willingness to suffer, your attitude toward suffering, will prove your love for the Lord. Many people are not experiencing the sufferings of Christ because they have not enough love for His people. If you really have a heart love for a child of God, you are going to suffer for that child of God. If you have a heart love for the people of God, you are going to suffer for the people of God. If you have a heart love for a company of the Lord's people to which He has joined you, you are going to suffer for that company. If you have a heart love for your Lord, you are going to suffer with your Lord when you see His Name dishonoured and His interests reversed. Our love is the measure of our suffering. If our suffering is little, it may be the great wrong is that our love is too small.

"For the Glory of God"

From "The Work of the Ministry" - Volume 1.

"This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified thereby" (John 11:4).

"He that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes; and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go" (John 11:44).

"But the chief priests took counsel that they might put Lazarus also to death; because that by reason of him many of the Jews went away, and believed on Jesus" (John 12:10-11).

We know quite well, but it may be as well if we remind ourselves, that in this Gospel there is brought out the one thing which governs all the interests and activities of God - namely, His glory, and His glory in the face of Jesus Christ: so that the one thing in view, giving meaning to everything, is the glory of God through the Lord Jesus. Let us keep that in mind, because if we detach anything from that we lose both its meaning and value, and probably lose our way. God is doing everything for His glory, and that particularly in the lives of those who are His.

God's Glory Manifested Against a Background of Suffering

Let us now come to the first of these three fragments in this wonderful illustration. "This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God". The statement is the explanation and the interpretation of a very mysterious providence, a providence which lifts things which otherwise could be regarded as the common happenings in human life on to another level, and clothes them with majesty, with glory. It is not an uncommon thing that a man should be taken ill and die, and there are literally countless things which just happen like that, making up the sum of human life and experience, every one of which can be regarded as the common lot, the everyday experience; but here is something which, by the illumination of the Lord, has to be seen in another way - and another way which almost startles us. It is that the sovereignty of God, moving toward that great object of His own glory in His Son, acts to make a man ill, to bring sickness upon a man; and providence stands back and lets that sickness take its course, until the man dies and is more than dead, and all the features of an earthly human tragedy are there, of bereavement, of sorrow and heartbreak. They are all there - and yet God is in this thing, involved and implicated by His own act in a most remarkable way, and it is made known that this thing was determined by God Himself with a tremendous object in view, the greatest object in the heart of God - His own glory.

Now you see the far-reaching possibilities of such a consideration, and the tremendous range of application. We shall be content just now to take the fact that when God is seeking to glorify Himself, to bring His Son into His rightful place of recognition, of Lordship, those things which we may naturally regard and interpret as the haps and chances of human life, to which all are subject, may be something predestined of God, under God's control, to bring out something greatly to the glory of God, to God's satisfaction.

Now, friends, this is something to which you and I have to seek quite diligently to adjust ourselves. Let us widen and enlarge the application from just human indisposition or sickness, even if it does culminate in death. Let us view in the light of this perhaps a lifetime of difficulty and adversity and suffering, perhaps something that has come to us for which we have more than thrice sought the Lord that it might be removed, and the Lord has in effect said, 'No': there has been no removal; it is something that we are called upon to experience and endure. It may be something in our lives as a whole, or it may be some event in our lives of great distress. Oh, look at it, whatever it may be in your case that you would have removed, to which you would take the attitude that Mary and Martha took - This is a tragedy, this is a misfortune, this is a great adversity, this is an overwhelming sorrow, this is all against us, all contrary to our good and to our blessing and to our joy. The Word of God makes it clear in more than one place that there is a sovereignty behind the lives of His own, "the called according to His purpose", which may have not just let that thing happen, but actually ordained it, and made that very thing, ordered by the will of God, the means by which something should come from our lives very much to the glory of God. I know that it is not easy to take that attitude toward things when you are in them - it is the most difficult thing; but here is something which is concrete as a statement, and it says in a general way to us, "to them that love God... that are called according to his purpose" (Rom. 8:28): 'You who love the Lord, there is some tremendous possibility for the Lord's glory, the Lord's satisfaction, wrapped up in that which you are inclined to regard as a trouble, suffering, adversity, a setback, a tragedy, if not a catastrophe, a strange and mysterious providence which has reversed your hopes and expectations - all that and much more. That may be something that the Lord has not only allowed to take place, but has arranged Himself.' In the end, of course, we recognize that and acknowledge it, and we shall not be sorry that we went through that thing. I do not think Mary and Martha were sorry afterwards that they went through it. I think there was tremendous gain there, but the point is that in the lives of those who love the Lord there is in suffering something for God's glory, and if our hearts are set upon His glory, we shall share it. "If so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified with him" (Rom. 8:17).

That is just the first brief but quite real message to us, and it must be taken by every one of us according to our own hearts' secret bitterness and sorrow. You know the Lord has dealt with you in a strange way, upset all your plans, suspended all your expectations, reversed all your hopes, brought everything to a standstill, whatever it might be. Now "this sickness is not unto death". If Christ, the Resurrection and the Life, is involved in this, it is unto life; it cannot be unto death, but for the glory of God.

Manifested Glory Limited by an Earth Touch

The second passage - "Jesus saith... Loose him, and let him go". Do not forget that the glory of God is still governing, though that glory may be partially under arrest. The glory of God is found in the uncreated life of God, or the risen life of Christ, the life of the One who is the Resurrection and the Life. The glory is inherent in that Divine eternal life. Lazarus has got to the point where he has the life, it is in him, he has come forth in the power of that resurrection life, but it is in limitation; therefore the glory is in limitation, and the full realization of the Divine intention, the full display of glory, requires that that life shall be loosed, shall be freed. From what? We say, Grave-clothes. What are the grave-clothes? Well, "dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return" (Gen. 3:19). The grave-clothes are just the 'earth touch'. That is a very very full phrase. It is some link with old mother Earth, it is some still remaining tie with that cursed creation where nothing can go right through to fullness. Here it is the question of fullness of life, full release and resultant full glory; and, in any realm where the curse still rests, we know that the mark of the curse is that things go so far and then they fade out, die away, nothing really comes right through to fullness.

Here is Lazarus; he has got so far - but what is the good of this man tied hand and foot? Even though he has life, he cannot do very much, he cannot be of much use. He is not going to walk about and display the glory of God as a living corpse, always speaking of the grave - his one testimony being, even though he has life, the grave. He speaks of the grave, bears marks of the grave on him all the time - there is an earth touch. You see the comprehensiveness of application. We have to learn under the instruction of the Holy Spirit what and where is the earth touch in our case. It may be some ambition, natural ambition, some personal craving, something that we ourselves want for our own satisfaction. It may be any one of a thousand things that is still an earth touch, that means that we are not completely released for God, we are not really free for the Lord, still some ground of controversy, still some ground of bargaining with the Lord - If You will do this, then I will... There is still some earth touch somewhere, some bit of worldliness - oh, anything that touches that earth realm; and therefore, although we may have this wonderful life and have heard the call of the Son of God, we are still in limitation, still in straitness, still tied up, still not absolutely free and emancipated that the glory of God should be served in fullness. "Loose him, and let him go"; cut the earth ties.

I know, of course, that there is the dispensational outworking of this thing and that these grave-clothes dispensationally speak of the law, the Jewish law, because it is here, right in the midst of Judaism, that the testimony is borne. This is Galatians. The whole letter to the Galatians is in the words "Loose him, and let him go". Get rid of the legalism of the law and let this raised man go free. But there is a spiritual interpretation, and it is a wider one. There is this more extensive application, and the principle is universal - have an earth touch, and your life comes under arrest, the glory of God is limited. What is your earth touch? Well, let us ask ourselves, are we free? Are we really living in the fullness of this life and the effectiveness of this life in service? If not, why not? Are we still clinging to something for ourselves, still holding on somewhere to that which is banned by God, which cannot live? It is the death touch because it is the earth touch. The word is: "Loose him, and let him go".

Satan's Opposition to the Manifestation of the Glory

And the third passage - "the chief priests took counsel that they might put Lazarus also to death; BECAUSE that by reason of him many of the Jews went away, and believed on Jesus". Anything that is in the full way of the glory of God, loosed for Divine purpose that God may be glorified in it, becomes the object of Satan's malice. That is a third truth, which perhaps we need not emphasize, for we know it well, that if God does something in our lives out of which He gets glory to Himself through His Son, it is not long before the hate and spite of the enemy is directed against us. That is a part of our fellowship with the Lord. If they are going to put Jesus to death, they are going to put Lazarus to death as well, because these two are one. We are bound up with the Lord in this, and we shall find that if the Lord is after getting glory in and through our lives, and yet more glory, then the enemy will make us the targets of his real venom and he and his will take counsel to put us to death.

But how far can he go? He cannot go any further at any time than the Lord of Life permits him to go, because now His Son has been offered at Calvary, and for us it is our privilege, not to be killed, but to lay down our lives of our own free will.

Well, three things - "not unto death, but for the glory of God". What is it that you and I are wrestling with? See in it the possibility of Divine glory: it may be something ordained of God - tragic as it seems to you - ordained of God to be in the long run for His glory. Get free from that which limits the glory and frustrates the purpose of God in your adversity and trial - that is, any earth touch, any personal clinging; and remember that, even when you have done that, you are not going to escape the attention of the enemy - you are going to be an object of his consideration; and if the devil thinks anyone or anything is worth his consideration, it must be of value to the Lord.

For the Sake of the Name

"For the sake of the Name they went forth" (3 John 7).

"...the world hateth you... they will also persecute you... But all these things will they do unto you for my name's sake, because they know not him that sent me" (John 15:19-21).

That portion in the Gospel throws light on the statement in the epistle, and shows that it was ignorance as to Who it was that bore the Name that led to the persecution of the servants who sought to honour the Name.

The Significance of the Name

We do not realise how little that name Jesus meant to the world, and especially to the Jews, in those days. It was a very common name, and for the people of those days there was little to discriminate between one Jesus and another. How different it is with us! What a shock we should have if today a father named his boy Jesus! We should say it was blasphemy! Why is this? Well, what a lot has come to be known as included in that name! What a lot that name now represents for so many in this world! The result is that we can hardly think of anybody else being allowed to have that name. We now reserve it for One only; but not so then. That which you and I know to be compassed by that name had to be made known, had to be established. It was entirely unknown and unrecognized, and it was the whole work of the Church to make known what lay behind a common name held by an uncommon person; for there was nothing common about One who was called by that name at that time.

Now Christianity as a whole, its full content, has been gathered up in small phrases. In New Testament times it was like that. For instance, the very name Christian was a most comprehensive thing. It came about also that they summed up the whole of Christianity in a little phrase, "the Way". Paul went on his journey to Damascus with authority from the High Priest to arrest any he found that were of "the Way" (Acts 9:2). He said, "I persecuted this Way" (Acts 22:4), and again, "After the Way which they call a sect, so serve I the God of our fathers" (Acts 24:14). At Ephesus "there arose no small stir concerning the Way" (Acts 19:23). So you see, everything of Christianity in those days was gathered up into this phrase, "the Way".

In exactly the same manner Christianity became gathered up into this phrase, "the Name". It was Christianity. "The Name" carried everything that Christianity meant for the world in those days. It became therefore the very concern of Christians to make known the fulness of the meaning of that name, the uncommonness which lay behind it. Yes, that was the great concern - not to make a name, not to seek a name, not to have a name, but to make known the Name. This we find they did in several ways.

Testimony to the Name

Firstly, by testimony. Everywhere they testified in the name and to the name of Jesus. It was the universal and spontaneous ministry of the Church. So much had they found in Him who bore the Name, so much had it become to them, that it was to them an exclusive name, a unique name, no matter how many others might be called by that name. For them there was really only One who had that name, and so much was it so, that everywhere they were bearing testimony to Him who bore it. They were saying, "This Jesus"; "Jesus of Nazareth". How something very common and well-known became invested with something beyond all knowledge, beyond all that is ordinary! How heaven became bound up with something which amongst men was nothing in particular! - and they had seen what heaven's estimate of the Name was. Yes, truly for them they could say 'How sweet the name of Jesus sounds!' Everything for them in their own hearts and lives was bound up with the Name, and so it broke out in testimony everywhere.

That is a simple statement, but what I am really throwing out by way of challenge to our own hearts is this, that all real ministry is testimony, and there is no particular class set apart for that. The ministry springs out of the preciousness of the Name, the value that has been brought to our own hearts and lives in the name of Jesus. If you and I have no ministry and no testimony, then it is because He is not as precious to us as He should be. It cannot be otherwise. Oh, no, this is not a legal obligation, something put upon us that we must do - that if we are Christians we must confess Jesus, we must speak about Him, we must tell people, and have a bad time if we fail to do so. That is a wrong realm of things. With them, the very heart union with Him and the preciousness of His name resulted in testimony. It was spontaneous.

Suffering for the Name

Then it expresses itself in suffering. It was said concerning Paul at his conversion, "I will show him how many things he must suffer for my name's sake" (Acts 9:16). Again, of the disciples it is recorded that they rejoiced "that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonour for the Name" (Acts 5:41). You may know something of suffering for the Name, but it is here that our heart-relationship to the Lord is really put to the test. There are numerous ways in which we may suffer, but suffer we shall if that name is upon us. Whether we accept the suffering or shirk it may be another matter. Whether or not we yield under the pressure, and compromise and lower our standard, will prove how much the Name is to us after all. For the sake of the Name they went forth in testimony. For the sake of the Name they went forth in suffering. It came upon them; they were called to suffer for the Name.

Living According to the Name

Then the Name determined their manner of life. What a strength it was to them that the Name was so much, what a safeguard, what an inspiration! This lay behind their manner of life, their character, their conduct. I think we often need to be checked up here. You see, our very character, demeanour, behaviour, everything about us, can either honour or dishonour the Name. This is not too low a level upon which to speak. We want to watch, because there are always those who, inspired by the great defamer whose sole object is to dishonour our Lord, defame Him by any possible means. Satan is always provoking people to watch those who bear the Name and to come at once upon anything that they judge to be out of keeping with it. This can touch us in countless ways and at countless points. To be slovenly, slipshod, careless, in our behaviour, our talk, our dress, our deportment before people, all of this touches the Name. There is so much that tells us that we are to commend ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God (2 Cor. 4:2). We are not to order our conduct merely in the light of what we think to be all right and unharmful, but in the light of what the world looking on may say about it, and of how others may interpret what we do. It is the Name that is involved.

I said this is a great strengthening and safeguarding thing. It is also an objective thing which can take us out of ourselves. We may have our bad times spiritually and go badly down under trial - it may be physical, it may be circumstantial, it may be a direct assault by the devil himself; but then how often have we taken ourselves in hand and said, 'Look here, now, do not forget the Lord's name! Other people are watching, they are taking note. It is the Lord's name that is at stake. Pull yourself together, however badly you may be feeling; anoint your face, appear before people as though it were otherwise.' We have to slay out of hand that element of self-pity, that drawing of attention to ourselves. There are times when for the sake of the Name we are to go before people with our faces anointed while our hearts are breaking. Otherwise others may lose heart, may despair, may find something in us which they are looking for to support some doubt of theirs; and we must not feed that sort of thing. God help us, it is not easy; but that is suffering inwardly for the sake of the Name. How many tragedies there are in the background of lives which no one else knows anything about except the Lord. The face is kept strong for the sake of the Name, by the grace of God. It must be like that.

Jealousy for the Name

I am trying to emphasize one thing, namely that "for the sake of the Name they went forth"; and for them that meant that before men they were going to be a credit to their Lord. They were going to live and conduct themselves so that no one should be able to cast dishonour upon the Name because of them. They were going to suffer much persecution for His name's sake, but in their meekness, their unoffendedness, in their selflessness under suffering, yes, in the triumphant joy of their Lord even when their hearts were very heavy, they would all the time be firstly considering the Name; not, 'How bad I am feeling, how hard my lot is', but, 'I must be careful for the sake of the Name'. That is the message.

It is an attempt - as I think the Lord has laid it on my heart - to bring us in a new way to a place where the name which is called upon us is seen to be a glorious name, a triumphant name, a beautiful name. I could say very much more from the New Testament about that name. It is the name of supreme authority, and so they went forth to make known its authority. Their proclamation was, Jesus Christ is Lord! They did not use the Name merely as a charm or a talisman with which to do things, or for their own glory. No, it was through faith in the Name that the Holy Spirit worked wonderful things for the glory of Him whose name it was. It was the name of authority; it was the name of matchless beauty; and oh, so much more!

First published in "A Witness and A Testimony" magazine, Nov-Dec 1951, Vol 29-6

The Importance and Value of Experience

"And not only so, but we also rejoice in our tribulations: knowing that tribulation worketh stedfastness; and stedfastness, approvedness; and approvedness, hope: and hope putteth not to shame; because the love of God hath been shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit which was given unto us" (Rom. 5:3-5).

Experience Gained Through Tribulation

"Stedfastness (worketh) approvedness".

There are different translations of the word which is here rendered 'approvedness' - in the Authorized Version it is 'experience', in the Revised it is 'probation' and in the American Revised it is 'approvedness' - showing that it must be a rich word, a word of some meaning and content. It really means approvedness as the result of testing, and I really think that the Authorized Version gives the best rendering in using the word 'experience', because from the same root we get our word 'experiment' - a try-out and the result; and that is just the essence of the word here. "Tribulation worketh stedfastness" (or patience, if you like) and stedfastness (or patience), experience".

In the New Testament, not only in statements but in many ways, experience has a very high place indeed in the work of God and is of very great importance and value in God's sight. Experience really is the quality or essence of stature, of maturity. There is a grave absence of outstanding leaders in our time in every realm, leaders of whom we could say that they are head and shoulders above their fellows. There was a time when it was otherwise. In politics and statesmanship, in art and literature and music, there are great names, but they very largely belong to a past generation. Such men are not with us today, and there is this serious lack of leadership, of men of stature, men who count. The Lord places such great importance upon experience, and shows that there is nothing that can be a substitute for it, and that He Himself is prepared to take very great and serious risks with lives in order to work experience into them.

It does sometimes seem that the Lord is experimenting with us. Whether that is a right way to put it or not, what I mean is right. Because of its very great value and importance, the Lord is prepared to put us into situations in which the most serious consequences may develop, in order to get this one thing; for here is the heart of usefulness and value to Him - experience.

Experience Cannot Be Transferred

Experience with God is much more than knowledge. We may be very greatly informed, and have a great deal of knowledge, but, lacking experience, our knowledge will remain purely technical information. Experience is more than knowledge. It is also far more than human cleverness. Clever people may be able to do a lot of things and seem to be successful. The absence of this quality of experience will find that their structures will sooner or later come crashing down, for there is no body there. Experience is something that we can never inherit, nor can it be transferred from one to another in any other way; it has to be bought. It is therefore the sole possession and property of the individual who has it. It is something very personal. If it had been possible for the Father to bring His own Son, the Lord Jesus, to the designed and determined end in any other way, He would have done it. The only way was experience: "...yet learned (he) obedience by the things which he suffered" (Heb.5:8); He was made "perfect through sufferings" (Heb. 2:10). Even Jesus Christ (and I speak in a certain sense) had to buy His experience. He had to come to the full end, or the end of fulness, to be made perfect, made complete, by the way of experience.

The Holy Spirit, with all that the gift of the Spirit means of enduement and endowment and instruction and strengthening, is not a substitute for experience. We are very often found asking that certain things shall be done for us by the Holy Spirit which the Holy Spirit will never do. He has to lead us into experience. It is the only way in which He can answer our prayers. Many prayers are answered through experience. You ask the Lord to do something, and He takes you through experience, and you arrive at the answer in that way. You had not meant that, of course: you wanted the Lord to do the thing there and then as a gift, as an act; but that would have been merely objective, something given, whereas He wants to make it a part of yourself, and so He answers prayer by some experience. 'Stedfastness worketh experience', and if there is no experience, what is the good of anybody or anything?

So then, experience is of greater importance than being delivered from tribulation. 'Tribulation worketh experience'. Oh, how often we have asked the Lord why He allowed this and that, or why He did not do this or that. Why did He not hinder Adam from sinning? Why has He not stopped the world in so many things that have had most terrible results? Experience is very largely the answer.

Experience the Very Quality of Service

Experience is very important because, after all, it is the very quality of service. When we come to real life, and we are really up against things and the issues are of the greatest consequence, we do not want just information, we want experience, and we go where experience can help us. Is that not so? Thus experience is the very body and quality of service and usefulness to the Lord.

Bunyan, in his allegory, has a man called Experience, one of four shepherds on the Delectable Mountains - Knowledge, Experience, Watchful and Sincere - all, of course, parts of one whole ministry, and not to be regarded as separate. There is a knowledge which, if it is in the hands of or in company with experience, is all right, and one does not discount the value of knowledge; but it has to be experimental knowledge, it has to be in the company of experience. And of this Experience, the shepherd, what does Bunyan say? A visitor to the country of the four shepherds described him like this: 'Firmly knit in form and face, a shrewd but kindly eye, a happy readiness in his bearing, and all his hard-earned wisdom most evidently on foot within him as a capability for work and for control'. That is a good definition of experience: 'capability for work and for control', 'hard earned wisdom'. He was a shepherd, and we know that the Bible idea of the shepherd is different from ours. A shepherd in our land has to go scouring for sheep to try to get them together, using dogs and other means to collect them. A shepherd in Syria only had to go to a certain spot and begin to sing a psalm and the sheep knew his voice and gathered to him, and he could lead them anywhere while he was praying his prayer or singing his psalm. They knew his voice and followed him. And so it is today: leadership is shepherdhood; shepherdhood is leadership. But experience is the shepherd, therefore experience is the leader.

Of course, it will entirely depend upon whether we are concerned to be of the greatest value to the Lord and to others, or whether we are self-centred. If we are thus concerned, this matter of experience will make appeal to us, but if otherwise, then what I am saying will not amount to anything. But here it is, the Lord puts value upon the matter of usefulness, and whether we are mentally interested in it or not, and whether or not our hearts have become as yet bound up with it, we cannot get away from the fact that the Lord is actively engaged on this work; He is seeking to make us useful. What is the why and wherefore of experiences, of the difficult and hard way that God takes us, and of the way in which He, so to speak, takes terrible risks with us? He does indeed seem to take risks. He risks our rebellion, He risks our bitterness, He risks our misinterpretations of His dealings with us, He risks our 'kicking over the traces' and breaking away and running off. He risks a lot when He puts us into difficult situations, but He thinks it is worth while for experience; for even our wrong reactions will make for experience in the long run. Even our rebellion and bitterness He will sovereignly control, and we shall come to know we can learn something along that line; we shall be able to help, instruct and advise where such help is acceptable and needed. Yes, He is doing it all to get experience, to make of us not professional pastors but men who are shepherds, 'firmly knit in form and face', with that 'shrewd but kindly eye', that readiness, with all the 'hard-earned wisdom', to be of help to those who need it. That is what the Lord is doing with us, to bring experience.

Experience Practical, Not Theoretical

So experience is the very sum of what is practical. It is experiential, experimental, it is the practical side of knowledge. That is almost too obvious to need saying. Tribulation is very practical, very real, you cannot get away from that. The demand for patience in tribulation is very practical; that is no theory. And if the object of the tribulation in its working of patience is steadfastness, is experience, it is exceedingly good. We may lack many other things, we may not have great knowledge or learning, great capabilities or cleverness, by which the world sets such store. Should it come to our being tested by this world's standards of ability, and we were to answer and say, 'I have only experience', it would not go down at all. They would say, 'What degrees have you, what examinations have you passed?' To say that we have had some experience would not be sufficient, whereas if we had all the other without experience, we should very likely be acceptable in this world. But it is not like that with God. The examinations that are held are on another basis altogether. We may not have many things, we may not be very much, we may be despised when it comes to what we have accomplished in the academic way, what titles we carry, what degrees we have - we may not be much in that world, but remember that God puts a very great deal more importance upon experience than upon all the rest, and that is a thing we can all have. From the least to the greatest, we can all have experience, and because in the sight of the Lord it is so important, He sees fit to let us know a good deal of tribulation. "Tribulation worketh... experience".

Have you got the full meaning of that word that is translated into our English word 'tribulation'? Tribulation is a picture word in the Greek - the picture of a farm instrument that we call the harrow; and you know what we mean when we say we have had a harrowing experience. Oh, the tearing and the cutting and the lacerating from the harrow! That is the word here, literally, actually; the harrow going over our backs, and it works experience. Experience is of such value.

Experience of Eternal Value

What more can one say other than that it must be of eternal value? The value must be eternal, otherwise life is an inexplicable mystery and an enigma. The time may come when you young people, having passed through deep experiences and having bought your experience at great price, and thus having in your possession something of very great value, find that younger people do not want your experience, nor think anything at all of it, and never consult you. When what you have through deep experience has very little outlet in this world, a very limited scope for expression, what an enigma! All this you have gone through, all you have bought at so great a price, what is the value of it? It must be eternal. God must be working to get something with a longer range than this poor life. With tribulations increasing perhaps as you get older, what is it all for? Well, He is working with a longer view, and there must be something that counts with Him beyond time, and so He allows the tribulation to produce patience, and patience experience; "Whether there be knowledge, it shall be done away"; but experience shall abide and serve in the eternal ages.

First published in "A Witness and A Testimony" magazine, Jul-Aug 1951, Vol 29-4

Joy Out of Travail

Transcribed from a message given in 1958.

One or two fragments of the Word, firstly in the book of Genesis, chapter 3, verses 16 and 17: “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.”

The letter to the Romans chapter 8 at verse 22: “We know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only so, but ourselves also...”

The gospel by John, chapter 16 at verse 21: “A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but when she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for the joy that a man is born into the world.”

The letter to the Galatians chapter 4, verse 19: “My little children, of whom I am again in travail until Christ be fully formed in you...”

It’s not the first time that we have spoken on this matter here, but I feel quite sure in my heart that it is the Lord’s word for this time. This law of travail is written deep in creation and perhaps mostly in human history. It is one fact which no one can deny. It is there. We cannot get away from it. It is forcing itself upon our consciousness and recognition all through our lives.

The Bible, as we have seen, begins with the establishment of this law, both in human life and in the natural order. The Bible ends with the abolition of that law; its complete removal from every realm of creation. It can be traced through the whole Bible. In almost every book of the Bible, this law of travail can be found. And in the last book, the book of the Revelation which is the culmination of all the things that are in the rest of the Bible, we find that the outstanding feature of that book is this law of travail. In every connection and direction, it’s a book of travail. The Church is in travail. The overcomers are in travail. The nations are in travail. All the heavenly bodies are in travail. It is the culmination of this law which has been operating all the way through history. It began with the birth of the first child; it ends with the birth of a new heaven and a new earth.

It is therefore a very important thing that we should understand the meaning attached to this law - why God introduced it and established it and has never lifted it and never does; but holds all history of individuals, of families, of society, of nations, and peculiarly of the Church, to this law. I say its very important that we should understand the divine meaning attaching to travail. What did God mean man to learn by it?

Of course this morning we are not so concerned with man in general, or even with the world, although it would be instructive were we to see what God is doing in nations and in society and in industry and in science and in every other realm by this law, for it’s there; but that is not our present object. If the Church is what we are given to understand that it is, the central object of God’s concern, of God’s interest, the center of His concentrated activities, then the Church has something to learn from this law because there is no doubt about it that however true it is in every other realm, the Church has at the very center of its history the working out of this law of travail. There is a concentration, it would seem, of this law in the Church.

Whenever God has done anything that had the Church in view - that is, an elect, a people for His Name - on every occasion of His fresh movements in that direction it took place through travail. I have only to hint at some of the experiences of the men of God in the early phases of history. What travail they went through in relation to the purpose of God, individually I mean: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, David, Moses and all the others. And the people of Israel, the Lord said “I have seen the affliction of My people, I have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters, I am come down...”

It was out of travail that Israel was born as a nation; deep, terrible, anguish. The same is true in the recovery of the remnant from captivity. You know that this is the word that the prophets used about Israel in that connection, they were always speaking about Israel’s travail, Zion travailing. The birth of the remnant from exile came through the terrible travail of the seventy years.

In some degree I think it was true when the Lord Jesus was born. There was Simeon and Anna and others waiting for the consolation of Israel. The indications are that they were in this state of the birth throws of a new age, and it was not out of relation with their prayers and their faithfulness and their sufferings that Christ was born into this world. We know what happened when He was born, the prophecy fulfilled: the voice of weeping... Rachel weeping for her children that were not. It was a state of travail through which He came.

But of all these instances, perhaps the greatest was the travail of the Cross. What an anguish was the Cross to the disciples, to those believers! They were not a small company altogether. The Cross was a terrible experience of pain, of anguish, of suffering. Out of it came the Church. The Church was born out of that suffering. And so we go on to the end and we find that the same thing obtains in the final emergence of creation and Church and nations by the coming of the Lord.

What does the Lord mean us to learn? Why did He introduce that law at the beginning? Well, briefly and simply and yet, dear friends, with such depth of meaning for us here, as well as for all the Lord’s people, the main lesson as I see it is this: The Lord introduced and established that law of travail in order to bring about a deep and an adequate appreciation of divine values.

Man was given everything that the heart could desire at the beginning. He was blessed with every blessing! He was surrounded with everything that he could wish for and he seemed to take it so much as a matter of course, so much for granted. And he held it so cheaply, so lightly, so superficially as to forget the greatness of the love of God in the giving and in His creation; to forget how wonderful it all was that God had done that and what God had done. And to be ready at the slightest offer of something for his own gratification, to just let it all go... You can see quite clearly that that was the trouble: no real heart appreciation of God and God’s love and God’s greatness and of all this that God had given... he took it so easily. Easy come - easy go.  I think the heart of that sin and wrong and tragedy was just that ease with which man can turn from God, from what God had said. “God said this... well, what does it matter?” God said it! The ease with which he can turn away from it and let it go for some bribe, some way that would be to his self pleasure. And the Lord brought in this law of travail to recover the sense of values and you can see exactly how that works out.

You know, if you don’t suffer for a thing, you don’t value it. If it costs you nothing then it means little to you. If you have really suffered agonies and anguish for anything, for anyone, over any matter, that thing is of infinite preciousness to you. You’re going to fight for that, you’re going to watch over that with keen jealousy. That is something very precious. And is not that just how the law of travail works? Yes! It’s like that. If it comes without travail, without any cost, well it’s taken too lightly isn’t it? Far too lightly. It doesn’t mean all that that means which has cost you almost your very life.

The Lord introduced this factor that in every birth it’s a question of life or death. Life and death are in the balances every time. The governing question: how is it going? You’re held in tension... and when it’s alright how the heart goes out: thank God! Thank God... Worship. God comes into His place. God comes into His place, very often with those who have never given Him any place before, at any rate there is a spontaneous: “Thank God!” You see the principle, you see how true it is. And so God established this, ah yes, this painful way, this suffering way, as the only way in which He could recover and establish the law of values, of preciousness, and save man from his superficiality with regard to the most costly things.

He did it in order to secure a heart relationship with Himself and with everything that comes from Him. A heart relatedness, that is love! Love! A love that is far removed from despising the Lord or anything of the Lord. A love that involves the very life itself; that if its object is lost then life itself goes with it. See? It’s like that.

Every divine deposit, every divine deposit is on that basis, dear friends. Sooner or later, every divine deposit will take on this value. Anything that comes from God will sooner or later pass into the realm of suffering, into the realm of travail, to find out how much value we put upon it, how much it really means to us, how much we have seen of God in it. It will become a matter of life or death. Under this law all divine things have been put upon this basis.

Take the matter of fellowship with God, our very union with the Lord, this relatedness that He has brought about between us. I venture to say, dear friends, that there is nothing, nothing in all the range of our lives as God’s people which causes us so much exercise and sometimes so much travail, as this matter of our communion and fellowship with God. Lose the consciousness of the nearness of the Lord, the consciousness of fellowship with the Lord just for a moment, just for a day, and what anguish it brings; that lost consciousness of the Lord. The Lord does not depart and does not forsake, He’s promised never to do it, but that does not mean that the Lord does not allow us to go through times when we have not the consciousness of His presence, when the clouds gather around and He seems to have gone, to be far away and left us alone. Then what happens? Does it matter? Does it matter? Can we go on just the same? Oh no, everyone who is really in union with the Lord goes into travail over that and can never, never come to rest until that’s recovered and the Lord is saying: "This thing has got to be kept upon the basis of preciousness". And that’s the only way of doing it, through suffering, is it not? Our very fellowship with God has to become at times a matter of life and death.

If only we could take the time to illustrate... You know Moses and the Lord, having that controversy with the Lord over Israel. It seems to me at times the Lord does play a part, play act. And the Lord said to Moses, “Stand aside! Let Me destroy these people, let Me wipe them out and make another people.” What does Moses do? Oh no! He’s not having that. He reasons and argues with the Lord: “Blot me out of Thy book if You don’t forgive them.” What was the Lord doing? I believe that the Lord was only doing this in the place where He got that man Moses in union with His own heart and I think in His own heart the Lord said, when Moses uttered those words, “That’s where I wanted to get you! That’s what I’ve been after, to find out how precious My people are to you, how precious My interests are to you, how precious My investment in this people is to you. I must have somebody with Me in My travail that gives a due value and that will not, not let go easily. With whom it is a matter of life and death.” Blot me out - life or death. You see? That’s the heart of God, the heart relationship.

It’s a matter of the values of the Cross of the Lord Jesus. Oh, are you tired of the Cross and hearing about the Cross? Shortly before he went to America brother Harrison told me of the time he had spent with a group of students in a retreat. He had spoken on the Cross and they had said, “Oh we’re so tired of hearing about the Cross, haven’t you something else to talk about? Talk about something else; not the Cross.” Are those values of the Cross a matter of life and death to us? Do we hold them lightly? Is it just a teaching, a truth? Or of infinite value and preciousness?

What about the matter of divine Life? Divine Life! Is not the Lord trying all the time to bring us to the point where we recognize the infinite value of divine Life? Physically? Yes! It may be that behind much of our physical suffering is this secret: the Lord seeking to bring us to the place where divine Life is everything to us and we lay hold on it. We have a tremendous appreciation of divine Life for spirit, for soul, for body. So the Lord throws us into situations where if it isn’t His Life then there’s no surviving. If we do not now prove the tremendous value of divine Life, we are finished! We’re finished, this is the end if we do not know Him again in the power of His resurrection.

It’s not a theory, a teaching, it’s something that has come right into our very history, as a part of our being: divine Life!  Yes, without it we’ll not survive. It is that or it is death. But you see, the Lord works in relation to that to make it real. Oh, that you realized that dear friends, and rose up on this matter and saw the infinite value of the Life that He has given because so many, so many Christians just say, “Yes, I have received eternal Life in Jesus Christ.” But what does it mean as a practical, everyday reality for the whole man: spirit, soul and body? Divine Life! God meant it to be so for us all.

The Word of God. Well, I say much about the value of the Word of God, but oh, do we not get tremendous exercise about this? Have you never travailed for a word from God? Never been on your knees, and on your face... oh, that the Lord would speak out of His Word for me in this situation? And has not His speaking out of His Word to you been birthed out of travail? Has He not brought you into a situation where only if He speaks can you get through? Only as He gives you a word can you go on! It just doesn’t come easily. You know quite well it isn’t just a matter of opening the book and reading. No, you have to travail for something from the Word, it’s got to become so precious as to be of the value of Life without which you'll die. “Man shall not live by bread only, but he shall live by the Word of God.” Live! Live! What’s the alternative? It’s to die, but for the Word of God. Our life hangs on the Word of God! That’s what it’s to be to us.

And what about the Church? Oh here, dear friends, we touch something that we all need to be very, very clear on and very strong about; this matter of the Church. Oh, we have so much teaching in the Church, we’ve got all the Church truth and doctrine. Perhaps you’re tired of hearing about the Church and the Body of Christ and relatedness. You know, dear friends, there are believers, there are children of God who would give all that they could, all that they possess, and all that this world could give them if they had it, in order to know something of the fellowship which is so cheap with us. "Oh, for an hour with the Lord’s people! Oh, for a day within the communion of the saints! Oh, to be able to be there amongst them!" Yes, they know through travail something of the value of the Church. And in our experience, and we do speak out of experience, we have learned, we have learned the truth of the Church not only from the Bible but in this way: the absolute necessity to our very life of the people of God. Had it not been for the people of God we should not have got through. You know it's like that, and so the Lord takes us into experiences where only the Church can save us (if I may put it like that) only the Church can be our salvation, only relatedness can be our life. Don’t hold this lightly. Don’t throw it away easily.

Believe me, dear friends, I’m not a prophet, but believe me that if you have been brought in any vital way into relation to the truth of the Church, sooner or later in your life that’s going to be a matter of life or death to you. God grant that it may never be too late, to come to the end and say, “Oh! If only... if only I had more valued and cherished the great gift of the Church and all the values bound up with it of covering and help, I would not be today where I am! I am here now because I have held too lightly the precious things that God gave.” I say again, sooner or later (God grant it may not be later or too late) you’re going to come in a very practical way up against the truths that God has given you and then it's going to be your life or your death.

God has given you much. Oh, be not like Adam and make it necessary for the Lord to take you into deep anguish and suffering in order to teach you the value of what He’s given you. Suffer that word, it has cost Him everything to bring us where we are. Let us not put too little value on it.

Well I won’t stop there, I referred to John 16:21 and the two sides there, a woman when she’s in travail and so on. The other side: but! The issue! When it’s all over, the child is born, she forgets about the travail in her joy that a man is born into the world. The Lord never meant suffering to end with itself. He never meant travail to be the last word. He never intended that the end should be death, though death is always in the balances of this thing, He never intended it to be like that. He took the little family in Bethany into anguish, into deep anguish, but He said “Not unto death but for the glory of God!”

There is written in the very law of travail the law of hope, the law of a new prospect. And all I’m going to stay to say about that this morning is this: we, individually or as a people, may go through times of deep suffering, trial, and everything seems to be in the balances. How is it going, how’s it going... is it life or death? We’re in the grip of this crisis. Oh, let us believe with all our hearts that although we come this way again and again in our history, under the hand of God it’s unto something new!  It’s unto something better! it’s unto a new hope with a new expectation! Don’t you believe that the end is shame, is remorse, is disappointment. God never established the law of travail that that should be the end, but that there should be a birth of something infinitely precious. And it happens again and again doesn’t it?

Every new emergence of something of the Lord is more precious than what was before, but it’s costly. It’s costly. If I may say so, dear friends, it may be that we here have been going through travail, we’re in the time of suffering and perhaps we’re inclined to feel that it’s an end, there’s going to be loss. No! That’s not the Lord’s way. The Lord has so worked that, isn’t it strange, we come into experiences in life where it’s the most terrible experience you’ve ever had and now, and now of course, this is the end. This is going to put the finish to everything. And it is the most terrible suffering! And when it’s past, the strange thing about human nature about some things is that we forget; we forget the anguish, that is, it passes. But what it has brought is the thing that governs and dominates everything isn’t it? The values that have come. Supposing we were always living in all the anguishes that we have ever had, life would be unbearable. But that passes, but we are living in the values.

Well I think that’s all I’ve got to say, do remember that cheapness in relation to the things of God will only end in disaster. Unbelief will end in despair. The faith in God in a dark and difficult day will produce something new and something better. If we are too easy-going about our spiritual values, nothing substantial will be effected.

The Lord give us a due sense of the value of everything that He has given us and brought us into, that we will not be able just to discard it and throw it away as though it didn’t matter. May we be saved from that and have this law of love, infinite love for Him and all things that are in Him, written deep in our hearts.

The Law of Travail

"Unto the woman he [God] said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children... And unto Adam he said... cursed is the ground for thy sake; in toil (sorrow) shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; ...in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread" (Genesis 3:16,17,19).

"The creation was subjected to vanity... For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain..." (Romans 8:20,22).

The presence of the law of travail in the whole creation is beyond dispute. That it was something imposed by the Creator because of sin is a fundamental truth of the Bible. That it is something not in the first thought of God, but something running counter to man's nature, is common experience. But we are left to draw from God's act and the Bible's teaching the meaning and necessity of travail. What that meaning is lies at the heart of this present meditation.

It can be put very precisely in this way: What costs little is little valued. What comes easily is let go easily. What we suffer over becomes precious. What we labour for is not despised, but jealously guarded. And so on.

That brings us to a surmise and a deduction as to the introduction of this law. But note, the law was not established with partiality. Not only was the woman to be subjected to it, but man also. Then we are told that "the whole creation... travaileth".

The surmise and deduction to which we are brought is that the behaviour of Adam and Eve in the garden implied or indicated a serious lack of reverence and esteem. Everything was made for them and given to them as a trust and a responsibility. They were the custodians of Divine interests. Nothing was an end in itself; all was full of glorious potentialities, to be sacredly guarded and let out to full realisation. It would seem that all was taken too much for granted and as a matter of course. An adequate and governing sense of values was lacking, and they just looked upon everything in the light of how it served their pleasure. This weakness and lack was fully exploited by the discerning tempter, and was made the ground of his assault. Hence, the law of travail was established to counter this disposition. Man must be made to realise that God places a value upon His gifts, and that everything in His mind is costly and precious. What we are not prepared to suffer for we lightly esteem. This is surely and so clearly seen in redemption. Whether it be basic redemption in the Cross of Christ, or the progressive redemption in the Christian's life, or the consummation of redemption in the 'creation's deliverance from the bondage of corruption', and the 'manifestation of the sons of God', all is at very great cost and through deep and anguished travail. Christ sees His seed through the travail of His soul. The Church and true Christians come to spiritual fulness through "the fellowship of his sufferings". The creation itself will come to glory through great upheavals and anguish. The Bible says and shows all this.

But to return to the specific point and its application. If God gives freely and richly He will look for and expect a reverent and serious regard for, respect for, and appraisal of His gifts, as for a sacred trust and responsibility. The presentation of salvation is often too cheap, and that unspeakably costly thing is made a matter of the pleasure of the recipient. The result is that when the true value is involved in a testing ordeal of trial and adversity, many are disappointed and go away. They have not seen that it is something of such value as to be worth suffering for.

If the Lord gives a rich and costly ministry to His people, sooner or later they will pass into a time which will be nothing less than deep and desperate travail, and that ministry will be tested as to how much it really means to those to whom it has been given. The same is true with regard to those who minister. A true servant of God is one in whom, through suffering and passion, that which he gives has been born. His ministry must carry the impress of deep history with God. A merely ritualistic, liturgical service, however devoutly performed, will not produce spiritual men and women. It may make people religious, but that can be true in realms other than Christianity.

Christ's travail was not because there was no religion. There was an abundance of it in Jerusalem and elsewhere. But there was little or no sense of the costliness of God's gifts. Two thousand years of anguish in the case of Israel is God's way of showing that His greatest Gift - Jesus Christ, His Son - cannot be so lightly regarded and disposed of as Israel thought.

The travail of a mother has much to do with her love for her children, unless she is wholly unnatural and subnormal. When the farmer or gardener has toiled and laboured, and spent anxious days and nights over his harvest, he does not lightly esteem the seed or the soil, but cherishes and cares for it.

Let us look at suffering and adversity as God's way of seeking to bring us into His estimate of what He has given. 'He that has suffered most, has most to give.'

First published in "A Witness and A Testimony" magazine, Jul-Aug 1961, Vol 39-4

Let Us Go On

Transcribed from a message given by T. Austin-Sparks in April 1959.

The spoken form has been retained verbatim.

I turn you again to the letter to the Hebrews, in chapter 2, at verse 1:

"Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things that were heard lest haply we drift away from them."

If you know anything about this letter at all, you know that it is the great letter of spiritual crisis. The writer compares what he has to say with the crisis of Israel at Kadesh Barnea where they came after so long a period of instruction, to the point where it was all to mature into the realization of its purpose or all to fade out so far as they were concerned and they miss it all. This writer gives quite a lot of his message to that particular application. Indeed we would all agree that that was a very great crisis in the life and history of Israel. And this letter really circles round a spiritual crisis comparable to that.

As you know, there is here throughout, the blending of two dominant notes; one of warning, the other of exhortation. Nine times in the letter we have this warning note: “Lest”. Lest... it begins in the verse that we have just read, “Lest haply we drift away” and then it goes right on to chapter twelve. The other note which is struck ten times through the letter is “Let us”. “Let us… Lest”. It’s not our intention to trace the warning and the exhortation through the letter but just to note the fact that it is a crisis which continually arises in the history of the Lord’s people. It arose as we have seen with Israel in the wilderness. Here, quite evidently, it had arisen at the time of the writing of this letter; a very serious crisis indeed for those to whom the letter was written. And it’s the kind of crisis that arises from time to time and it just amounts to this: taking this first verse of chapter two, there has been a deposit, there has been much given, the Lord has revealed Himself to His people. Now, after a period, a sufficient period, a period of probation and of testing in relation to that, the question arises: Are we going right on into the full meaning and value and realization of all that He has given or are we going to drift away, to fail to enter in? It's something that the Lord presses periodically. It came with Israel after forty years of testing in the wilderness. It’s a point of interest that most probably this letter was written about forty years after the Lord Jesus commenced to present all that we have here in chapter one, in the incarnation in His presence in this world.

It was a crisis and the crisis had two particular points, one, as to all that the Lord had given which He would never allow to just pass without some very real effort, some entreaty, some warning that all that He meant could be missed. The other, the fact that very near to the time of the writing of this letter was Israel’s own great crisis. If the letter was written as we have suggested, somewhere about the year 60AD or in the sixties, we know that it was 70AD when Israel and Jerusalem were completely shattered and scattered over the earth by the Roman destruction of their city, their country. And their temple and all that it represented, the synagogues - these were to be finished. And now the test would be, what of the spiritual value of it all? Take away their meeting places and their public meetings and their public ministries and all that upon which they depended so much externally; remove it all! That was imminent. What remains? The Holy Spirit had these two things in mind in directing the writing of this marvelous letter. It was indeed a great crisis. Who is to say that that on the second point will not be repeated worldwide as it is taking place in quite a large part of the world today? The Lord may know of a day not far away when that will spread and all those things which are the externals of Christianity, upon which Christians depend, will be swept away and no longer available. We’ve had a little touch of it in our lifetime, many Christians have in this very country, and it could be very much more so and very quickly, that crisis may be looming upon the near horizon.

So this letter is indeed a letter of crisis in both ways. We ask what was the cause or what were the causes of this crisis? On the spiritual side, firstly, I think there's no doubt about it, it was the cost of the way that these Christians had embarked upon and had been called upon to follow. You read the letter again and you will see the suggestions or the indications that it was because the way was proving so hard. They had started... started upon the heavenly way, partners in a heavenly calling, they had taken a position with Christ. That position is hinted at at the end of the letter, “Let us go to Him without the camp”. To be outside of the religious camp, outside of the popular camp, outside of the traditional camp, is a hard place and a hard way. They had taken a position with the Lord but were finding that it was a very testing way indeed. They were being tested on every point in every possible way. It was a hard way. A hard way. Reference is made to what they suffered as they took that position.

Now, this suffering came largely from without. We don’t know where these believers were, whether they were in Jerusalem or in Rome; there’s argument for both, but we can very well imagine that if it were in Jerusalem they were right up against a very, very severe testing of their position spiritually. They were in the place where the Lord Himself was crucified, the place where Stephen had been martyred, where the believers had been scattered. If they were in Rome, it was only quite recently that Claudius had issued his edict against the Christians and they had been expelled and scattered and martyred. Whatever it was, it came from the outside in the beginning and it was a hard and costly way, but it is significant to note that before we’re at the end of this letter, the writer (the Holy Spirit through the writer) speaks of all this suffering as the child training of a father. “My son despise not thou the chastening, the child training of the Lord, for whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth...” and so on. Their sufferings may have come from devil-driven men, from the very devil himself, and yet they’re in the hands of a Father, Father has hold of those sufferings for the training of His children. That’s impressive! But it doesn’t altogether ease the situation to know that... the sufferings are still the sufferings wherever they come from and whatever their nature is and even if the Lord has hold of them they’re still sufferings. And because of this costliness of the way, these believers were losing heart, becoming discouraged, and the crisis of their going on arose. Hence this tenfold repetition: “let us, let us, let us go on”.

Perhaps also in addition to that, it was occasioned by some disappointment that the Lord’s coming was so long delayed. I think that is hinted at, at one point at least, where it says, “Yet a little while and He that cometh will come”. They were evidently a bit disappointed that all the promises of His coming and the assurances that He was coming soon had not matured and He delayed His coming. It was a real test of faith and patience over that. We may know something about that too.

Sometimes, you know, it loses its charm and its helpfulness to be told the Lord is coming, you say, "Well we’ve heard that for so long and so often and that’s what people have looked for in every age and He hasn’t come yet". The hope fades. Well, it began then. It began then and they were disappointed and, because of that disappointment, inclined to let go instead of go on.

There are hints also in this letter that the crisis was occasioned by the deceitfulness of the soul. I think chapter 4 verse 12 hints at that: “The word of God is quick and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the dividing of soul and spirit”. The deceitfulness of the soul... I think that will be borne out in what we have yet to say. You know our own souls can lead us astray. Our own soul desires and ambitions and conceptions and what we feel and think ought to be. There’s a contrast in this letter between a realm of Christian life in the soul and a realm in the spirit. I think we could immediately, almost immediately, take that up for a minute or two.

The nature of this crisis... there are the causes, what was the nature of it? That, I think mainly, if not entirely, is a matter of contrasts. Contrasts... a new era had come in. A new economy or order had been introduced with Christ and now, the changeover was the change, the tremendous change, from the earthly to the heavenly. With the Son of God from heaven, there had come in the heavenly order and from that time onward, the old earthly order of the things of God, as we have in the old economy of the Old Testament, ceased.

I don’t think, dear friends, that we, or Christians at large have yet grasped the tremendous, the immense significance of the martyr Stephen. You know that he was a young man full of faith and full of the Holy Ghost, who did mighty things and then was martyred. Have you studied Stephen’s discourse? Have you seen that in that discourse, right there in Jerusalem under the very shadow of the great temple and all its system of many centuries, right there, Stephen simply wiped off the slate, the whole of the Old Testament regime! “God dwelleth not in temples made with hands” said he. Say that over against the temple at Jerusalem and see what you’re going to meet!

In that discourse Stephen clearly declared that all that earthly system was finished with, all finished with, and a new heavenly system had come in. And the Lord put His seal upon that as he was passing from the earth himself, he saw the heavens opened and the Son of Man seated at the right hand of God. The only occasion after Christ Himself in the New Testament where that title occurs of Jesus, “Son of Man” - the Man is at God’s right hand. Everything now is heavenly; it’s passed from earth. But what a testing position is a heavenly position! It’s a crisis! It creates a crisis, it’s the very essence of a crisis: “Pull that down to earth, have something here, something on this earth, have something here, abandon that heavenly position, (that heavenliness by which those who so speak, mean that which is so abstract and unreal), let’s get down to earth, to reality!” That was the nature of this crisis: the contrast between the heavenly and the earthly, and they were at the point of leaving the heavenly for the earthly. Great warnings are connected with that and all the exhortations, “let us go on, let us go on”... The contrast between the tangible and the spiritual. The soul wants something that it can take hold of, can manipulate, can grasp! That is the soul, to have something tangible... and all this talk about the spiritual and spirituality, how "unreal" it is... That’s the crisis, is it?

With the coming into this world of Christ, the whole thing changed: not in this mountain, not in Jerusalem but in Spirit, in Spirit and in Truth from this time the whole thing is a spiritual thing. But how they longed for the thing that was here! To be grasped... that’s a crisis. The contrast between the temporal and the eternal. Do you see how in this letter, and oh do read it again with these things in mind, how in this letter there is always the forward look, the look to the end.

You come to that great chapter of faith, chapter 11, it’s the onward-looking faith, it’s still onward, "let us, let us, look off, let us run", is the great summary of it all; it’s still onward, it's still before us! The eternal is the thing to govern. This life and all that is here is not the whole by any means. It’s all unto something that lies in eternity. With Jesus Christ the eternal has invaded time and the Church is taken out of time into eternity. We belong to eternity but the soul wants it now, now! The only, the only place for “now” in this letter is that now is the last hour of time. Now, today, is the acceptable time, this is the last hour of time, that is the only "now" here. It is the eternal that is everything. But how difficult for our souls to let go the "now"... the present, for the eternal. We’re not made like that. Our whole being says, "Let’s have it now, we must have it now!" It’s not natural for us to live for an unknown future - if that’s the right way to put it - the contrast between the visible and the invisible. Of Moses this writer says he endured as seeing Him who is invisible. Oh, but we must see, we must see it, our soul says that, our whole nature says we must see it, we must see it today, we must see it here, we must see it! There's something that our eyes can see, can behold! In other words, something that we can grasp with our physical senses.

This letter is constructed upon the principle of the invisible. They in the old dispensation had it all visibly, they had an earthly tabernacle and priesthood and all that belonged to them, but now, the reality is in heaven, it’s not seen! That was but a shadow, the reality is unseen, but it’s far more real! But it's unseen, and that’s the test of the soul. I’m sure you'll know the meaning of this.

Well, all this constituted this crisis of whether they were going to choose this or that, the one or the other. Go back to something earthly from the heavenly, to something tangible from the spiritual, to something temporal from the eternal, something visible from the invisible. And it is quite evident I think, in this letter before you’re through, that a division was coming about between these believers. They were dividing into two camps. That is the point of the exhortation "forsaking not the assembling of ourselves together as the manner of some is". Some were saying, "We’re not going on with that any further" and they were having their own meetings and their own circle and not going on, not going on in this way. A division was taking place; two companies. Here were those who had seen the heavenly calling and the heavenly vision and were going on with it; here were those who, if they had seen it, were letting it go, were drifting away from it. And what a forceful word that is! It has a nautical meaning in the original, as you know. It’s the picture of a ship approaching its moorings on the current and missing its moorings and drifting away and onto the rocks. Lest we come up to this and miss it and drift away and as Israel at Kadesh Barnea were wrecked, we should be wrecked. It’s a warning, it’s an exhortation.

It surely does, dear friends, touch us in our own individual lives and it touches us as a company of the Lord’s people. It defines very much for us, but may we all hear not only the warning, yes the warning, but the constant note of exhortation, “let us fear, let us go on”. The Lord help us.

"The Lord is Greater Than All"

"THE LORD IS GREATER THAN ALL..."

That is the motto which we have taken to govern this year 1954. Under that all-embracing statement we have gathered three other aspects of His superior greatness.

The inclusive declaration - for such it was (Exod. 18:11) - related to the emancipation of an elect nation from this world. All the forces of Satan and men were fully extended in that conflict. The battle seemed to sway nine times between defeat and victory, and there was plenty of room for a day-to-day despair as to the triumphant issue. But God was drawing out the power of the enemy to its final limit in order to show the exceeding greatness of His power. The final exclamation in the presence of the accomplished fact was: "...the Lord is greater than all...". It requires no deep knowledge of the Bible to see that what we have in the letter to the Ephesians corresponds to Exodus in a spiritual and still greater way, and that for a similar heavenly purpose the transcendent greatness of the Lord is in operation.

The first aspect included is: "God is greater than man" (Job 33:12). The setting is in the drama of Job. Over a long period, and with a volume of arguments, three 'friends' of Job had exhausted themselves in trying to prove that Job's suffering was due to his sin. Job, on the other hand, exhausted both them and himself in proving that they were wrong. An impasse is reached, and neither side can move the other. Then a fourth, hitherto a silent listener, begins to speak. He takes neither side, but takes position with God. "God is greater than man", he says, regarding the three, for God knows what they know not as to the real background of what is happening. They talked and argued in utter ignorance. God understood all. It is ignorance and folly to attribute all suffering to the sin of the sufferer. There is a mystery behind much suffering, and it may amount to the very vindication of God, as in Job's case, but supremely in the case of God's own Son. There is such a thing as "the fellowship of his sufferings". This is far beyond man's wisdom.

But Job thought that he had vindicated himself, and stood four-square upon his own righteousness. Yet God's standard, both of wisdom and holiness, is greater than that of the most perfect man. Man, at his best, cannot stand equal to God. The end of the conflict sees God standing alone in His transcendent wisdom, power, and grace, and man at His feet worshipping.

The next statement, in 1 John 4:4, is: "Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world."

The context shows that "he that is in the world" is inclusive of "that wicked one", "false spirits", "false prophets" (Antichrist), false brethren, "the world".

That constitutes a fairly formidable situation for the children of God. But "greater is he that is in you". "In you"; not outside, but inside. The balance of power, no, the outweighing power, is within, when He is within. "Christ in you, the hope of glory."

Finally, "God is greater than our heart" (1 John 3:20).

The passage is admittedly a difficult one. "Heart" here must be regarded as synonymous with 'conscience'.

The heart, or conscience, acts accusingly or excusingly. But in either case our consciences are not infallible. They are still trammelled by tradition and other things of the past.

If our hearts condemn us, there is in God a way of dealing with and removing condemnation. (See the context of the whole Letter.) If we justify ourselves to our own satisfaction we must still bring everything into the presence of God, for He may see that to which we are blind, and we may still see that there are hidden things which would undercut all self-righteousness.

"God is greater than our heart" is a blow struck at introspection. Our hearts - either way - are not the final criterion. It is also a blow struck at spiritual pride. Finally, it is a blow struck at despair because of our own sinfulness.

So the "all" is a very great and many-sided all. Perhaps our need is to see that the Lord is much greater than we have thought.

May we all have our hearts enlarged to the greater dimensions of the one who is our God.

First published in "A Witness and A Testimony" magazine, Mar-Apr 1954, Vol 32-2

The Lord's Attitude To His Children In Adversity

"In all their affliction He was afflicted, and the Angel of His presence saved them: in His love and in His pity He redeemed them; and He bare them, and carried them all the days of old" (Isa. 63:9).

The first clause of that verse is what will occupy us for a few minutes, and it will be as in the more correct translation that some of you will find in the margin of your Bibles. While there is some authority for the ordinary translation of the words here, the actual language of the original reads thus - "In all their adversity He was no adversary." You can choose between the translations which you like best, and you will not be in error if you prefer one to the other; but this alternative translation to the usual text conveys a message of its own which I think should be of very great help, encouragement and strength to us.

The Fact Of Adversity

First of all, we note that adversity amongst the people of God is recognised and accepted - that is, it is taken for granted. It is unnecessary to say that, amongst the people of God, adversity is a fact. None of us requires to be told that. Here the word of God takes note of the fact that the Lord's people do know and suffer adversity, and their adversity is under His eye. That is only said lest anybody should think that adversity signifies that things have gone wrong. Perhaps at times we do feel that because of severe and continuous adversity there must be something wrong. While there may be a realm in which the adversity is the result of some wrong-doing, the enemy having rightful ground, nevertheless that is not the thing that is referred to here. In the first instance, it was not adversity because of evil and wrong; it was the adversity which is the common experience of the Lord's people who are moving with Him; and when it is like that, as we shall see in a moment, there is nothing wrong about it at all. So much by the way for the fact of adversity.

The Nature Of The Adversity

Then we come to the nature of the adversity referred to here. The word "adversity" is really the word "straitness" - "In all their straitness He was no adversary" - and that thought of straitness is capable of manifold application. What was the straitness referred to? Well, Israel is here seen as in the wilderness. You notice that all the phrases which follow take you back to Israel's life in the wilderness, and it was the life in the wilderness with its many forms of straitness to which the word referred.

First of all, they were shut up with regard to many things which the world had, and the world could do, which constituted the whole life of the world and gave the world its pleasure and, so far as it went, its satisfaction. They were cut off from all that, and sometimes that form of straitness came home to them very hardly and severely. You know when they got into a very bad time how their hearts went back to Egypt and they thought and dwelt upon the onions and the garlic and all the rest of the things there. In Egypt we did have this and that and the other thing which we miss now, and it is hard to be cut off, as we are, from those things; there was a certain element of certainty in Egypt, but out here you never know where you are going to be one day from another, or what is going to happen to you - so far as actual evidence is concerned you do not know whether you are going to be fed tomorrow. It is all such a life of faith, and faith is a life of straitness so often, cut off from much and shut up to this wilderness where things are, to the natural mind, 'narrowed down' to God. (We know that is the wrong way of putting it - to the spiritual mind things are expanded to God; but who has got fully there, to the place where always earthly straitness is really heavenly enlargement?) Naturally, this is how it was with Israel - shut in, narrowed down, pent up, straitened so far as many things in this world were concerned. Because they were the Lord's people they could not do this nor have that. There was a whole realm of things cut off from them; naturally, in the soul, it was straitness.

Adversity No Proof That The Lord Is Our Adversary

When you and I begin to feel that - and there are days when the pure, unsullied joy of the Lord Himself and of heavenly things becomes clouded and veiled and remote, and we seem to be far more sensitive to the straitness of our lives and how we are shut up - how quickly the enemy comes in and says, "The Lord is against you! This is not the goodness of the Lord, this is not the bountifulness and graciousness of the Lord, this kind of life really is not the life that the Lord promised you." In our hearts and minds he tries to turn the Lord to be our adversary because of the consciousness of the present situation of difficulty. He misrepresents the Lord; he gives to the Lord the colour of our trial, of our difficulty, and says, "The Lord is like that, He is a hard master to serve; this Christian life is not all that it was represented to be; the Lord has deceived you, He has failed you; and so on." He twists the whole thing to malign the Lord.

What the word here is saying is quite definitely this - in all that straitness, that privation, that pent-up-ness the Lord was not against them; however it seemed, the Lord really was not against them. Then we must find some other explanation. The facts are very real, these conditions are very true. Adversity, trial, suffering are very real, and if they do not mean that the Lord is against us, what is the explanation?

The Lord's Intention Of Good

The only alternative, surely, is that the Lord is meaning this for good - that in His intention it is not ultimately for our limitation and deprivation but for our enlarging, for our enrichment. Evidently the Lord means other than the circumstances seem to say He means. In all this straitness He is not against you. "If God be for us...?" (Romans 8:31). In the adversity, the straitness, the cutting off of many things, the saying 'No' to a lot, the Lord is not against you, He is not out to rob you of any really good thing, to take from you any real pleasure, He is not working contrary, to your interests, He is no adversary; but in all, He is for you while you are in the way of His will, going on with Him.

I said that that word "straitness" is capable of manifold application. I am not going to pursue in any detail those lines along which it could be applied. You know straitness. How often the enemy shuts the doors and then says the Lord has shut them because He is against you! How often the enemy brings you into suffering, puts upon you something, and then says, "It is the Lord!" How often the enemy tries to becloud your assurance and bring condemnation and accusation upon you, and to bring you under a sense of judgment, and then says, "It is the Lord!" Not a bit of it! That is not necessarily the explanation or interpretation at all. You notice that the first phase of this thing finds the people out and moving with the Lord, and as they did so, they came into this adversity of many kinds; and the declaration is that this did not mean that the Lord was against them.

If we wanted to, we could gather up many Scriptures to show how the Lord was really for them in those very days of difficulty and adversity. I just give it to you as something to put your feet upon.

The Lord The Adversary Of The Rebellious

The passage moves into another and darker stage. "They rebelled... therefore He was turned to be their enemy" - their adversary (Isa. 63:10). But even when we state that dark aspect of the thing, it only enhances the other. Have you rebelled against the Lord? Can it really be said of you that you have taken the attitude which these people came to take? You know some of the hard and terrible things which they said in their rebellion, when their hearts turned away from the Lord. In effect, they said, We do not want this Lord any more; we will not have this Lord any more. Can that be said of you? Well, then, the Lord in such situations must turn to be the enemy of that, and be your enemy while you are in that position; He cannot stand by you while you are there. But if it is not like that with you, and despite all weaknesses and all failures, faults, imperfections (yes, we are never without something that might well be condemned in us) nevertheless our hearts are toward the Lord, it is our desire to go on with Him, then He is no adversary. Yes, many imperfections, but He is no adversary. It is when we, like these people, deliberately and positively turn and rebel against the Lord, and say, in effect, We will not obey, we are not going on! then He turns to be our adversary. That means He has to bring into judgment.

The Lord's Love To The Rebellious

But even so, the third phase is a very blessed one. "Then He remembered..." (Isa. 63:11). Even when He had to be their adversary because of the attitude which they had adopted, the end of it is 'He remembered.... Moses," He remembered His word; and the last phase is that He came back in love to restore. In the end the Lord reaches out even to the rebellious. "Yea, the rebellious also" says the Word (Psa. 68:18). "He knoweth our frame; He remembereth that we are dust" (Psa. 103:14). Are you one of those who at some time has really turned in heart, in hardness and bitterness and sourness, against the Lord because of the difficulty of the way and you have become very rebellious against Him, and how the enemy says, The whole thing is hopeless; you see you have shut the door, and that is the end! Oh, how this enemy will take hold of everything to use it for our destruction! But, even if we have done that, the end is "He remembered...." It is a marvellous overture of His love again to the rebellious.

They are going on with the Lord; they suffer adversity, but that does not mean He is against them. They rebel against Him, and He has to bring them into discipline; at that time He must be against them. But that need not be the established, permanent situation. "His mercy endureth for ever" (Psa. 106:1, etc.). If in our hearts at some time or other we have become bitter, have felt the Lord was too hard and the way anything but the way of His love, if we have entertained bitter and rebellious thoughts, Satan comes in to try and consolidate them into some unalterable situation that has forever closed the door in terms of unpardonable sin. Yet - the Lord remembered His word, and His love is found, after all, not to have changed. I hope there are not many who have turned and rebelled. If you have, here is a word of comfort and encouragement for you.

The main word, however, is for the majority of us who, while our hearts are toward the Lord, find much straitness, much shutting up of the way, much narrowing down, much cutting off, much that to the natural life seems a dark way; yet it does not mean the Lord is against us. It means just the opposite. The Lord is after an enlargement that is much more than enlargement of this life here. Although we have all here, and yet are small in the measure of Christ, what have we gained? We have gained nothing. So if the enlargement of Christ seems to mean the narrowing of self and the world, that is the evidence of the Lord for us, and not against us. "In all their adversity He was no adversary." In all their straitness, He was not against them.

The Lord's Field

"Give ye ear, and hear my voice; hearken, and hear my speech. Doth he that plougheth to sow, plough continually? doth he open and harrow his ground? When, he hath levelled the face thereof, doth he not cast abroad the fitches, and scatter the cummin, and put in the wheat in rows, and the barley in the appointed place, and the spelt in the border thereof? For his God doth instruct him aright, and doth teach him. For the fitches are not threshed with a sharp threshing instrument, neither is a cart wheel turned about upon the cummin; but the fitches are beaten out with a staff, and the cummin with a rod. Bread grain is ground; for he will not be always threshing it: and though the wheel of his cart and his horses scatter it, he doth not grind it. This also cometh forth from the Lord of hosts, who is wonderful in counsel, and excellent in wisdom" (Isa. 28:23-29).

"Moreover the profit of the earth is for all: the king himself is served by the field" (Ecc. 5:9).

Spiritual Agriculture

This is one of the numerous examples and aspects of that great truth that the whole natural creation is intended by God to be a symbolism of heavenly and spiritual things. We know there is a great deal in the Scriptures which sets forth the idea that the Lord's people are to the Lord like a field to be cultivated. Many of the terms of Scripture indicate that, as you know - the Lord's field, the soil, the ground, the seed, the planting of the Lord, the trees of the Lord, and so on. All these terms are symbols of spiritual things. The Lord is cultivating; there is a spiritual agriculture under the hand of the Lord, the great Husbandman. This passage which we have just read in Isaiah brings to us this one thing among others, that, as in the case of Israel, so in the case of the Church - which, of course, involves us all individually - the Lord deals with His people as with a field, or as with a farm, to be fruitful in various ways, to represent different kinds of satisfaction to Himself. Over and through all, the Lord works to get for Himself satisfaction.

He ploughs. The interrogation here - "Doth he... plough continually?" - is to be carried into the case of Israel, for God was indeed ploughing Israel and was going to make Israel like a ploughed field, and there was going to be some very deep cutting, shearing down deep into the very soul of Israel, laying open and bare and turning over. It was going to be very hard work with Israel. But the Lord in this question says, 'I do not do that sort of thing just for its own sake, and, although that is a very painful aspect of My activities, it is only done with a view to fruitfulness.' The ploughing has its place and its time, it has to be done; that may seem to be destructive, hard, painful, the ruthless activity of the Lord with His people. He is ploughing deep into their souls, making deep furrows in their very being; but that is an aspect and a phase, something which will not go on always. He does not continually plough. That will be completed for the time being - but it will be completed - and when it is, the Lord gets on with that for which the ploughing is necessary. He gets on with the positive and constructive aspect, the putting in of the seed.

The Lord is after some kind of fruit from every life for His own satisfaction. Even the king is served by the fruit of the field. It comes even to the Lord's table. The Lord lives upon what He produces in our lives.

Fruit Possible on Resurrection Ground Only

I started by saying that the whole of this creation is a symbolism of spiritual things, and that here, in this realm of agriculture, we have very much that indicates what the Lord is after. The very creation itself seems to have this symbolism. You go back to Genesis 1. There you find the earth without form and void, and darkness covering the face of the deep; everything is in chaos; and then on the third day the dry land appears. The third day speaks always of resurrection, and resurrection is out of a chaos. We come to know well enough at some time or other in our lives what a chaos this old creation is. We may have known something of it before we were saved. We may have come to know a little more about it when we were saved, but I think we have been learning ever since we were saved that a far greater chaos lies in the direction of the old creation than ever we imagined. We know the darkness that lies in the natural realm; we know the bareness, the unprofitableness, of this natural life so far as God's satisfaction is concerned. We know that from us in our natural state there is nothing that can come to His table for His pleasure and satisfaction, that we are no field yielding to His pleasure.

But then that great work is done in our union with Christ - "planted together" (Rom. 6:5). You see, it is an agricultural figure again. "If we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection." The third day there was the mighty act of our being raised from the dead with our Lord Jesus; and therein, so to speak, 'the dry land' appears. Here is a new field for the Lord to work upon. And that principle is constantly in operation. It is seen in a crisis, but it is going on all the time; that is, it is also a process by which the Lord brings us more and more on to that resurrection basis where there can be more and more for Him. Death works on one side, and is made to work; there must be the growing realisation of the hopeless mess there, the increasing consciousness of the chaos and the darkness lying over that old creation of ours. Yes, that is death working on the one side, but issuing in resurrection on the other side, where God is going to have more.

The Husbandman's Wisdom

But the point that I want to emphasize is this - the wisdom of God over all this. The farmer carries out the ploughing and other agricultural activities, putting in the seed into its own place. I take it that the meaning of it all is that the Lord Who gives wisdom to this man, this earthly man, is acting with Israel in that kind of wisdom. He is saying, 'What I am doing, I am doing in wisdom; I know what I am doing.' He does that which His infinite wisdom dictates is necessary and which He knows will bring the greatest and best fruit for His satisfaction. 'O Lord, this ploughing, this upheaving, this deep cutting, this furrowing - why is so much of it necessary?' Well, He is "wonderful in counsel." He knows when the ploughing work should go on, and when the ploughing work is done for a season, and so He is governed in His dealings with us by infinite wisdom, having in view the greatest measure of fruit.

Fruit for the King in Terms of Christ

We have our own ideas as to what is fruit for the Lord. So often with us it is a matter of a kind of service and place of service. It is not like that with the Lord. Let us remember that, after all, the fruit that the Lord is after is not so much the fruit of our activities as the quality of our lives. Of course He wants fruitfulness in service, in what we do; but even in that we shall be disciplined. If you think you are going to get away from the plough when you get into the Lord's work, you make a great mistake. Some of us know, after many years of being in the work of the Lord, that we are not away from the plough yet. We are continually being opened up, broken and cut. Yes, the plough comes back into use again from time to time. There is something more yet for the Lord. What is it? Not so much what we may do in service for the Lord, but more that answers to the Lord's mind in life; for, after all, it is Christ that the Husbandman is after, and real fruitfulness is just that Christ is given back to Him in our lives - the fruit of life.

That means death and resurrection, if 'the dry land' appears on the third day. But once the Lord gets us on to resurrection ground, there is something there for Him. I notice in Genesis that, after the record of the appearing of the dry land, nothing is said about the creation of the seeds that were to bring forth the trees and the fruit and the herbs and so on; the land spontaneously yielded, the vegetation grew. The seed was there, and the life was in the resurrection earth. There was something for the Lord in resurrection which spontaneously began to grow; and if we really do go through these processes which bring us on to resurrection ground, there is something there for the Lord which will begin to show of itself. We have not to strain to produce it - it comes. It comes out of the ordeal, it just shows itself, it must manifest itself. The life seed is there and it will grow in the power of that resurrection.

Fruitfulness Governed by Heavenly Ordinances

There is only one other thing I am going to point to at this time in this connection. It is that, on the fourth day, the Lord created the heavenly bodies, sun, moon and stars, so that this earth came under a completely established order of government in heaven; and the continuation of fruitfulness and fruitful seasons was the result of this established government of heavenly bodies. We know that to be true. The seasons are governed by the heavenly bodies, and therefore the fruit of the earth absolutely depends upon the established order of things.

But here we come to see that our fruitfulness for the Lord's satisfaction demands all established order of things in heaven and that we can and must come into it and under it. When the Lord was challenging Job at the end of the story, one of the questions that He put, in order to show that after all Job did not know everything, was - "Knowest thou the ordinances of the heavens?" (Job 38:33). That is a great phrase "the ordinances of the heavens." Translate that spiritually, and you find in the New Testament that the Church stands related to an established order of things in heaven; and if you and I are going on to a life of full fruitfulness, we shall come up against those ordinances of the heavens. They represent an order that is fixed and heavenly. It has got to govern us. We have to come under it, respond to it; and until we do, the Lord's full purpose in all His effort with us in ploughing and harrowing is arrested; there is no yield, or at best the fruit is limited. There is a heavenly order fixed. I am not going to indicate what those ordinances of the heavens are, but if we are really on resurrection ground, that is, under the government of the Holy Spirit, we shall come up against this and that and another thing which is a fixed heavenly ordinance - something that is established - and response to it, like the earth's response to the sun, will determine the measure of the fruitfulness of our lives.

You have only to walk down the drive here to get plenty of illustration of that. See those distorted, twisted trees down there. The branches are all shapes, and in themselves rather poor things. Why? Because they found themselves in a position where there was not enough light and air, and for their very life's sake they have strained tortuously to reach out to find what they needed; and because they were circumscribed in their movements, and there was not enough light and air for them, they are these poor, twisted, crippled things. They show that there is something of the heavens to which they must come into correspondence, that they must find for their very life and fruitfulness. And of course you have seen in other cases where a tree is in a position to get all the light and air it needs, what a grand tree it is. It is obeying the ordinances of the heavens; it is right in touch with fixed principles of heavenly government.

In His wisdom God has said, 'Now, such-and-such is a heavenly law, a heavenly principle, a heavenly ordinance which is fixed, and you will never yield your full quota of fruit for My satisfaction if you do not recognise that.'

One of the laws is the law of corporate life, of the house of God. If you detach yourself and live as an individual, your measure is limited. And I could indicate many others. The ordinances of the heavens are fixed, and it is going to be a poor lookout for the things of the earth if they are not in line with those ordinances and if there is not a correspondence with them.

We are not concerned with merely earthly ordinances. The Lord's Table, for example, can be, and has been, made an earthly ordinance, but it is really an ordinance of the heavens, it is an ordinance of the risen Christ Himself. You may put it aside as a merely earthly ordinance and suffer nothing, but if you come into the realm of resurrection, it takes on a new meaning and new value. This is an ordinance, not of man, not of an ecclesiastical system, but of heaven - something precious and living, from which the Lord gets something. And there are many things like that; the ordinances of the house of God, of corporate life, and so on. They are all established things if, I say again, we are in the Spirit, we come into the line of those wise counsels of God which are working unto fruitfulness.

The Lord knows what He is after, and takes the way with each one of us that will reach His end most effectively. It may be a plough, it may be a harrow; but it is not going to be always the same. Each will have its place and He will turn to other phases; but whatever the phase, it is governed by the wisdom which is seeking for Himself the very answer to His creative activities - that for which He brought this spiritual field into being at all - that the King's table might be served. And He Himself is the King.

First published in "A Witness and A Testimony" magazine, May-June 1949, Vol 27-3

A Man in Heaven and Christ in You

"Now when they heard these things, they were cut to the heart, and they gnashed on him with their teeth. But he, being full of the Holy Spirit, looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, and said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God. But they cried out with a loud voice, and stopped their ears, and rushed upon him with one accord; and they cast him out of the city, and stoned him: and the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul. And they stoned Stephen, calling upon the Lord, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. And he kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. And when he had said this, he fell asleep." (Acts 7:54-60).

It is wonderful that the first man to be a witness unto death in the Christian era should be the embodiment of all the great spiritual truths of Christianity. It is as though the Lord placed right at the beginning of the dispensation a representation on this earth of those great spiritual realities.

The two great basic features of living Christianity are here definitely set forth. Those two things are (1) A Man in heaven, and (2) Christ in you. Stephen saw Jesus standing on the right hand of God. He said: “I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God.” That is the Man in heaven! Then as to Christ in you, the Word says: “He, being full of the Holy Spirit...” This is a fulfilment of the words of the Lord Jesus in the Gospel of John: “If I go not away the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I go, I will send Him unto you” (John 16:7). It is by the Holy Spirit that the Lord Jesus is in us.

Those are the two major features of a living Christianity. They are two things which have opened up into two of the great doctrines of Christianity: Christ glorified, Christ in the presence of God, the Man in the Throne and all that that embodies and represents; and, on the other hand, the indwelling of Christ by the Holy Spirit. Everything in a living Christianity is gathered into those two things; you cannot get outside of them. It is marvellous that the word is used: “He... saw... Jesus” (v.55). This man whose name is mentioned for the first time at the end of this chapter, Saul, not so long afterwards had a similar vision. “I am Jesus”, said the glorified Lord to him on the Damascus road.

Satan thought he had triumphed absolutely when he succeeded in turning the first Adam away from God’s purpose, a Man in the glory, but this speaks of the absolute triumph of the Lord over what Satan thought to be his triumph. This is God’s answer: Jesus as the Man in the glory!

Then how will He bring the many sons to glory? “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” So that to be filled with the Spirit becomes necessary to the very purpose of God. Notice the effect in this model case! A Man in the glory, the Spirit filling, an instrument mirroring that Man in the glory. They looked upon his face, and it was as the face of an angel. Then: “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.” Is not that the character of the Man in the glory reproduced? Is not that conformity to the image of God’s Son?

It was in the time of suffering, pain, opposition, antagonism, hatred, malice, bitterness. What a difference in these two pictures! On the one hand: “They gnashed on him with their teeth.” That is one picture of the fangs of a beast uncovered. On the other hand: “His face... the face of an angel” (Acts 6:15). What a contrast! What religion can do, and what Christianity can do! What tradition can do, and what revelation can do! This truly is what Paul meant when he said, later than this: “We... beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” That word “beholding” in the Greek is a much richer word than our English word; it is a combination of two ideas. It is beholding and reflecting, and there is only one word in the English which gets near it, and it is “mirroring”. That was Stephen. He beheld, he reflected, because he was filled with the Spirit.

The spiritual course of the age is summed up in this first witness. He saw the Man in the glory; he was filled with that Man in the glory; he was like that Man in the glory. And it was all produced through suffering, emptying.

The Marks of Jesus

A Message to Younger Christians

"I bear branded on my body the marks of Jesus". (Galatians 6:17.)

The marks of Jesus; whether these were actually marks on his body, scars of his sufferings, or whether he was using a figure, a well-known figure of speech, we may not be quite sure. It is possible that Paul meant both; that is that there were marks on his body, marks of the rod with which he had been beaten, marks of stones with which he had been stoned, marks of the hardships through which he had passed, and then, looking at them, he thought of them in the light of the brand. You know what the brand is. Animals are branded, branded with hot irons. And he looked at those scars and thought of them as brands. But it does not matter very much which it was. It was quite true that Paul bore branded in his very being the marks of Jesus. It is that that matters - that there shall be the marks of Jesus.

I want to suggest to you that these marks, these scars to which the Apostle referred as branded on his body, were marks which represent three things. In the first place, they were

1. The Marks of Ownership

They declared that he belonged to the Lord Jesus, and everybody could see it. I think that that was very much in the mind of the apostle because of the figure of speech, or the well-known custom to which he referred.

The brand - "I bear branded on my body the marks of Jesus". Every owner has his own branding mark, branding iron, and all who see that mark can know to whom that one so branded belongs. I think further that the Apostle had in his mind not the branding of animals, but, what in the Greek world in his day was a well-known custom, the branding of slaves. Now you know, in those days and in that world slaves were purchased at a price, became the property of the master, and there was no getting their liberty unless in some way they could pay the price which had been paid for them, and this was very doubtful. If they earned any wages at all, it would be a whole lifetime before they could save enough to buy themselves free. But there was a way out, there was a custom. They could go to the temple of their god and see the priest and they could sell themselves to the god to become the property of the god or the gods - heathen gods, of course, which were no gods. If they did that, the priest took a branding iron which had the mark of the god, the particular god or deity, and he pulled up the sleeve of the slave and branded on his arm the mark of the god, and from that time he was regarded as the slave of the gods, which meant that he was free from all other slavery. He could go out. Now, should his old master, or the successor of his old master, or any of his relatives, try to bring him back again into bondage - as they might; they might pursue him, overtake him, seek to bring him back again into slavery - when they sought so to do, all that he had to do was to draw up his sleeve and show the brand mark of the god, and they dare not touch him. If they did, they became the enemy of the god - the god was against them, and no one would dare that. Because he was a slave of the god, he was a free man in the world.

Paul knew all about that, and I think it was to that he referred when he said "Let no man trouble me". Let no one try to bring me into bondage! Let no one lay any hand upon me to make me their property! I belong to the Lord Jesus, and "I bear branded on my body the marks of Jesus". A little way before he had said - "God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world". He was saying, in effect, "O world, to whom I was once a slave, to whom I was once in bondage, who once claimed me and held me and used me; O world, I am freed from you because I have been made the captive slave of Jesus Christ by His Cross. He has set me free from your bondage and captivity. My bondage to Him spells my liberty from the world. O world, do not seek to get me back again. Lay no hands of yours upon me. Old life, which I once had, do not seek to capture me again. I belong to the Lord Jesus. I bear branded in my body His marks". I think the message there is a perfectly clear one. The marks of Jesus, for all to see, to be shown to all, speak of our belonging to Him, of His being our Master, and this means faithfulness and loyalty in our allegiance to Him as our Master. Faithfulness and loyalty to HIM.

We all know the test of loyalty to the Lord in this world. The world is reaching out a hand, as it were, to come and interfere with our loyalty to the Lord Jesus; - just not to let it be known that we belong to Him. Such are the standards today, the mental standards of life, that it is so widely thought to be an unmanly, unwomanly thing to be a Christian. It is not robust, it is not strong, you must be of an inferior kind if you are a Christian. That is how it is, we know it quite well. This world despises Christians, and the temptation to all Christians is in some way to be Christians without "giving it away", without letting it be too obvious, and so we hide behind quite a lot of things. "We do not want to make a show of religion"; "we do not want to thrust religion down people's throats"; "we do not want to offend people and upset our chances of influencing them by giving it away too soon". All sorts of things like that, hiding round corners, thinking we are going to get a better advantage, we are really going to serve the Lord's interests much better by going carefully, going slowly, and all the time taking cover and camouflaging.

Well, "henceforth let no man trouble me; for I bear branded on my body the marks of Jesus" and all can see it. I am quite sure that is what is here, that is what is meant; the manifest marks and signs of His ownership, that we belong to Him. And I really believe, after all, that the world far more highly respects and esteems the Christian who lets it be known "straight from the shoulder" than the one who covers it up.

I remember one day many years ago, when I was only a lad, a deep impression that was made upon me. I was in a shop; it was commercial travellers' day in that shop and two commercial travellers came in. One came in, looked all round to see who was in the shop, saw some people there, so stepped over into the corner and waited. Then he proceeded to his business in a sort of way that suggested to my youthful mind that he was ashamed to be doing business; that he did not want people to know what he was. It was all so under cover. Perhaps I should not have noticed it so much had it not been for the next episode. The door opened, and in came a fine, big fellow, a strapping young man. He saw the manager - "Good-morning, Mr. So-and-so. I have a splendid line for you today", and started right away. Everybody in the shop heard all about it. He went straight at it and captured the business, he got it forthwith. He was bent on business. It made a tremendous impression on me. As we came out of the shop, someone who was with me said, "That is the way to do business". Forgive me if that seems to be coming on to a very low level. I do feel that there is a great deal in being open and letting it be known where you stand. No hiding the brand.

We belong to the Lord; we are glad that we belong to the Lord; we are very glad to call Him "Master"; we have no compromise over that. We belong to the Lord and we tell Him that, and we will tell every other Christian that, but is it only in the realm where we are accepted, where we know we are accepted, where we know it is quite safe and quite comfortable to let it be known? What about this world? The marks of His ownership. Remember Paul and that shipwreck. How outstanding he was! He warned them, and then the time came when they were at their wit's end, and he came up to the Master of the ship and he said, "Be of good cheer. The Lord, Whose I am, and Whom I serve..." That's it - no covering there. He let it be known. I do not think I need try to drive that home. That lies here, right at the beginning - the marks of faithfulness and loyalty in our allegiance to Him, Whom we are glad to call Master and Lord; to Whom we really do owe everything. Is it not just a little unfair, to say the least of it, when we are prepared in secret with Him to acknowledge that we owe Him everything, to be ashamed to let it be known out in the world Whose we are?

"Ashamed of Jesus, that dear Friend

On Whom my hopes of heaven depend?"

These were also

2. The Marks of Devotion in Service

Marks, not only of ownership, but of devotion in service. Paul had gained many a scar in his devoted service to the Lord. The service of the Lord for him meant suffering, and the marks were the marks of faithfulness unto sacrifice. It may not be that all of us will be called into that form of service known as "missionary service" to which Paul was called, and many others. But that does not matter in this connection.

We are not going to get very far in our devotion to the interests of the Lord Jesus in this world without discovering that it is going to mean sacrifice, suffering unto sacrifice. It is going to cost. It may cost something in the matter of position, recognition; the best things may not be allowed to come our way. We may not be given an open door into certain circles, those circles may be closed to us. There may be many whose friendship we would like to have, but which friendship will be withheld from us. In many ways we may have to suffer loss, suffer unto sacrifice if the interests of the Lord Jesus are going to be pursued and furthered through us. I doubt whether it is possible for the real interests of the Lord Jesus to be served without sacrifice on our part. I do not think it is possible, and it may be that you and I at the close of our course here will look back and see many things that might have been ours, positions, and acceptances, and rewards, but which we have never come into, never possessed. We have to let them go for Jesus' sake, and we may at that time bear the brand of the Lord Jesus in this connection. Why? Why this? Why that? Why has it meant this? Why has it cost that? Why have I never got where some have got? That is the brand of the Lord Jesus, the mark of Jesus.

There are gains hidden from view which will more than compensate for that. This man, who wrote these words, wrote in another place, "Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal: but the things which are not seen are eternal". But the things seen do hold us so much, don't they? It is so difficult to get our eyes away from things seen; that is, the things that are manifest, things that can be taken account of, they are so present to view. The losses, the sufferings, the trials, the difficulties, the adversities, these are things seen. Things not seen - what are they, after all? Well, so far as we are concerned, the things that are not seen are promises. That is what it amounts to. They are real in God, but to us they are nothing more than promises. We have not got them, they are not seen. For present practical purposes they are only promises, yet far more exceeding and eternal, far more excellent, a weight of glory exceeding and eternal - a weight of glory. That is there unseen, while we bear the marks of loss here, loss of what we might have had, could have had. It was there for us, but, because of the interests of the Lord Jesus, it had to be let go. The marks of the Lord Jesus - faithfulness unto sacrifice, the unpopular way with all that it costs.

Then lastly, these marks on the Apostle were

3. The Marks of the Likeness of Jesus

The brand, if it has any object at all, is something for others to see, to take note of, something which makes clear to all who are in any way interested that that particular one is defined and designated the property of another. It is something to show. And the marks of the Lord Jesus are not only marks of ownership and marks of devotion in service, but they are marks of likeness. I have always thought that exhortations to Christlikeness are not enjoyable things. I must confess that, whenever I hear people exhorting us to be Christlike, I have not found very much response. It is no use me telling you to be Christlike, so I am not going to do it, and yet I am saying that for you and for me there has got to be Christlikeness as the mark of His ownership of our lives. How does Christlikeness come about? Well, the marks of devotion in service come about by the measure in which we are prepared to suffer for Him, make sacrifices for Him. The marks of Christlikeness come about by the measure in which we have communion with Him, so that the marks of Christlikeness are the result of faithfulness in communion.

You see, the marks of ownership are the results of faithfulness in loyalty; the marks of devotion in service are the marks of faithfulness in suffering and sacrifice; the marks of Christlikeness come out of faithfulness in communion with the Lord. How shall I be like Christ? How will you be like Christ? How will others see the marks of Jesus in us? Just in so far as we are faithful in our communion. You know that in everyday life. Start the day without your quiet time, without your prayer, and it will not be long before there are other marks in your life than the marks of Jesus. Neglect prayer, neglect communion with your Lord, and the traces of the Lord will soon disappear from view. On the other hand, look after the matter of communion, preserve that quiet time, those quiet times, look after your times of prayer, see to it that He has a place in your heart, a large place in your heart everyday and you need not worry about being like the Lord Jesus. All the worry to be like the Lord Jesus will not make any difference. People who walk closely with Him, keep in touch with Him, look after the prayer life, do carry those marks of His restfulness, His peacefulness, His patience, His gentleness, His kindness, His love; - the marks of Jesus. That is how it comes about. I do not tell you to strive and I do not tell you to strive and struggle to be like Jesus. I say, keep in touch with Jesus. Do believe me, for I have gone this way. I know, oh! I know, on the one hand the blessedness, and on the other hand the bitterness of suffering bound up with this very thing. The blessedness of looking after the quiet times, the prayer times, the communion life with the Lord! Oh yes! In business, in the world, what a difference it makes! On the other hand, things breaking in, adverse things that interfere with the life of communion with the Lord, and the result-! Oh, the miserable, wretched result! May I urge upon you to see to faithfulness in communion with your Lord, and, perhaps without knowing it (and it will be better so), you will be bearing the marks of the Lord Jesus, His likeness. I do not want you to be able to go about showing people how like Christ you are. We want it to be there and yet not to know it. It will be there if you look after the life of communion. So be faithful in this. And then? Well, what matters? "Henceforth let no man trouble me". It would all be in vain. They will come and try to draw away, to entice; the world will seek to allure. They will try to upset and annoy, but I belong to Jesus. I am satisfied with Jesus. I have all that I want in Him. "Let no man trouble me; I bear branded on my body the marks of Jesus". May it be like that with all of us!

"His forever, only His, Who the Lord and me shall part?"

His, for His interests above my own and all others, His servant - Whose I am and Whom I serve. His, in blessed and unbroken communion, that through me His likeness may be seen. The marks of the Lord Jesus.

The Meaning of the Fire

“Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver; I have chosen you in the furnace of affliction. For My own sake, for My own sake, will I do it; for how should My name be profaned? and My glory will I not give to another” (Isa. 48:10-11).

You know that Israel was chosen not just to be something, but to serve a divine end. The being was essential to the doing, and the divine end was the bringing of the Lord into the world, into evidence, into manifestation, into effect. It is a very great purpose; that God should choose that, by human instrumentality, He should come unto His own, and that He should be manifested in His own realm, that He should be in evidence. God chose that the outcome should simply be that He was known, understood, felt, that the one ultimate declaration should be: It is the Lord, that is the Lord. Those are very simple words, but they go to the root of everything.

That great purpose of God, which has now been manifested as bound up with the saints of this dispensation, made necessary refining fires and much affliction, and, although it may be no new thing to be said to you, it can come with a renewed emphasis that the supremely important thing for you and for me and for the Lord’s people to be fully and deeply aware of is that the Lord has no other object where we are concerned than that of bringing Himself in ever-increasing measure into evidence, into manifestation, for time and for eternity. The all-governing thing with God is His self-manifestation, and that can only be along the lines and by means of spiritual life. There is no other way of manifesting God, God becoming really known, only along spiritual lines. There is not one of us who knows the Lord Jesus and has that knowledge in any other way. We do not have a physical knowledge of Jesus. We have come into our knowledge of Him in a spiritual way, and every fuller bit of knowledge of Him is spiritual, essentially spiritual, and God cannot be known in any other way. The Lord cannot be manifested in any other way. There is that mystic, strange, inexplicable something which is extra, which is the Lord. I mean, it is not teaching. There may be a great mass of teaching, and perfectly right and true teaching, a great fulness of truth, and yet there may just be lacking that something, that extra something, that mystic something that leaves it as truth, a bulk of truth, and does not get you anywhere. When you have got it all, it has not got you anywhere. It is not something objective at all, objective in the way of truth imparted, teaching given, doctrine held. It is not a matter of work done for the Lord, in the Name of the Lord, things that we are doing — even the matter of leading others to accept Him, as an engagement, as a form of activity, of work. It is not the constituting or the constructing of something for the Lord in the same way as we would go to work to build up some other institution in the world and call it by this or that name; it is not that. These may be means, but if there is not that extra, as I call it, that mystical something, if it is just an objective thing, it has failed in its divine value. That something, that extra, is the Lord. The Lord has been imparted, and all teaching and truth which does not impart the Lord — not just knowledge, truth and doctrine, material, however right in its place — if it does not carry with it the Lord and impart the Lord and result in people who are alive, who are sensitive, who are open, who are prepared, being able to say, Yes, the Word was good, but the Lord met me in the Word — if it is not that extra, it has failed. If any of the work that is being done, all the activities, all the business, with the best of motives and a great zeal and devotion, whole-heartedness, if the upshot of it is not that the Lord has come in, it is the Lord, something extra to the Word, you have come into touch with the Lord; it has failed.

What the Lord really does want and is after and must have is intrinsic spiritual value, and He may press that into a small compass outwardly, but it becomes tremendously intense in a spiritual way. Do not misunderstand me. I am not talking about our tenseness, but the thing itself becomes of atomic power, crowded into a small compass. That is the explanation of the terrific pressure which those who are chosen to keep spiritual values pre-eminently in view experience. Fire! When man sinned, God instituted deliberately the law of travail. Why? Not as mere judgment and punishment. No! God said in principle, ‘There is no blessing that can rest upon the flesh; blessing only rests upon what is spiritual, and if I were to let man now, in his disobedience, get away with it and have blessing upon his work, he would never be concerned about spiritual things, spiritual things would go by the board.’ That lot of suffering and travail is carried right through into the life and service of the Lord’s people and the church. Why so much opposition? Why so much adversity? Why so much suffering, when you are right out for God? When you have nothing but the Lord’s interests in view, still there is this terrible time of spiritual trial, adversity, suffering and testing, even in the Lord’s work. There is no place made at all for ourselves, for the flesh. When I speak of the flesh now, I am not speaking necessarily of evil; but the natural.

If this is true, the logic of it is this, that the more spiritual value there is to be, or, to use the other words, the more that there is to be of the Lord intrinsically and essentially, the more impossible will it be for any of nature to come in, and so, unto the greatest spiritual measure we have to be brought to the place where what we can do naturally is tested. We can do nothing. We are right up against a wall. Other people can do things, men of the world can get things done; we can do nothing, we are helpless. Every kind of resource seems to have dried up, and now, well, it is the Lord. It is to be the Lord, or everything is finished. You have heard that said many times here. There is an intensity of pressure and trial being brought to bear upon many of the people of God — not all, but in this particular intensity many people of God are knowing something that they have never known before, headed right up to breaking point. What does it mean? I am not going to talk about why some go that way and others do not — even of the Lord’s people; why it is that in some realms they seem to get along fairly easily, carry all before them, and in others every half step is the result of a most terrible spiritual ordeal, pressure, and conflict, and a long hold-up before even half a step can be taken. That is not exaggerating. I am not going to try to discuss why it is like that, but it is like that, and it leaves no room for spiritual conceit, anything of superiority. You get all that knocked out of you immediately you touch that realm of being chosen for intrinsic value — not general, not superficial, wide area usefulness to God, but that which is going to bring divine spiritual values intrinsically for the people of God, for others, for the work of God.

Chosen for that means that steadily right on to the end, all that is of man, his capability, his efficiency, his ability, his everything, is going to be squeezed right out. He is coming to the place where no more is possible unless the Lord does it, and that is a deliberately chosen way and method of the Lord, if the Scriptures are true. God’s standard of values and man’s are so different. Man thinks in big terms, expansive, extensive, objective terms, all objective. God is always thinking in terms of inward, intensive, essential values. His standard of greatness is the measure of divine spirituality. It is just the measure of Himself. So “I have refined you, but not as silver; I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction. For My own sake, for My own sake, will I do it; ...My glory will I not give to another.”

You know in Romans 8, perhaps the most familiar chapter in the Bible to you, it is always the contrast there between the Spirit and the flesh. You know that in that chapter you have got past the grave, you are now on resurrection ground, and it is all now the spiritual. First, the law of life has made you free, then it is all the Spirit, the spiritual mind, the spiritual man, everything spiritual, and God has not departed from that. Man, thinking in more material and objective terms, has not taken God away from His basis. His basis is still that, right from the cross; it is spiritual nature, spiritual measure. It is all what is really spiritual in the divine sense. It is the Lord.

And that explains so largely the Lord’s dealings with us. Do believe it! The Lord is after having mother tincture in spiritual life. That is, the ‘flavour’, trace or tinge of the Lord Himself. That is essentially spiritual intrinsic value.

Here, speaking among ourselves, I do not see, as I have thought and thought and spent very much time in weighing up everything, I do not see any other explanation for the way in which we are dealt with by the Lord. I see no other explanation for our existence. I have never accepted that, if the Lord wanted to do what He is doing generally in this world, why He should have made something more here, something separate here? We were at one time doing that and getting on splendidly in the general realm of earnest Christian evangelical activity. That could have gone on. But the Lord did something and brought us apart as a people, not — let me say it strongly — not to make us in ourselves any more important. We have not got one inch of ground to stand upon to speak of superior importance or our superior value. But I do believe that He did something because He wanted His people, perhaps in all the world, or many of His people over this world, to come into something more of Himself by putting this corporate vessel into the furnace. You know immediately you come into touch with this, you get into trouble. The only thing that will keep you going on, that will maintain your relationship, is that you find more of the Lord. If you do not, go, friend, go! Do not be attached to a thing. It is the Lord. And if it is not, my prayer is ever: Wind it up, put it out, if it does not stand justified in its extra measure of the Lord.

But you are really going into the furnace if you are going to be of intrinsic spiritual value, if it is going to be the Lord. Oh, do not go out with teaching. ‘This is our teaching, what we stand for.’ No, none of that! Go out and live and be the Lord, in effect, in manifestation. That is the only justification. What the Lord is after is men and women individually and collectively who do not hold some higher truth, propound some fuller or deeper doctrines or have a more exact New Testament technique, but who are the impact and registration of Himself in a spiritual way, that it can be said, "In touching them, I have met the Lord". That is the way of a fiery furnace. God does not want instruments. An instrument, a tool, is something you take up and has to respond mechanically to you. God wants living beings impregnated with Himself; to touch them is to touch the Lord Himself. Well, that explains the way of the Lord with us in our own experience, what He is after. It is a fresh challenge to us. May it have this effect, that it saves us from looking at others, what they are doing and what is being done, and coveting and envying; saying, Well, you see... and then gravitating in heart in that direction. Remember that it may be — I am not going to say dogmatically that it is, but it may be an election. “I have chosen...”. Maybe He has put His hand on you for something more. You could serve Him; you could be of use in other realms. It may be He has put His hand on you for something more, and because of that you go through it as other people do not. Fire for you means something far more than for many others. Think that it may be an election to serve the Lord in some deeper way than the average, than the general, and the fire will see to the matter of conceit and pride. There will be no room left for them.

The Nature of the Dispensation in Which We Live

Reading:

"The spirit himself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are children of God: and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified with him. For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed to us-ward." (Rom. 8:16-18).

“For we would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning our affliction which befell us in Asia, that we were weighed down exceedingly, beyond our power, insomuch that we despaired even of life: yea, we ourselves have had the sentence of death within ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God who raiseth the dead; who delivered us out of so great a death, and will deliver; on whom we have set our hope that he will also still deliver us; ye also helping together by your supplication." (2 Cor. 1:8-11).

"For our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal."  (2 Cor. 4:17-18).

Just leave those words in the background, while we come to stand before the general prospect or presentation.

First of all, it surely is of very great importance that we, the Lord's children, should be able to recognise those governing features of the dispensation in which we live, that which gives to this dispensation its character, its nature. The importance of recognising that is, that unless we do, we shall be out of joint all the time, we shall be found in a state of inward conflict, we shall have a battle continually going on inside us which completely unfits us for the battle outside; and I am sure that you will agree that it is no use trying to fight a situation  outside, an enemy outside, while you are all the time occupied with one inside. Until we have got something settled, we are weakened, if not altogether paralysed, in the real work and warfare to which we are called, and the thing that has got to be settled is this matter of what is the nature of the dispensation in which we live. If we have got some wrong ideas about that, then we are constantly turning in and back upon ourselves, not making very much progress, a state of strife and strain and uncertainty and questions all the time.

Well then, I suggest to you that that which gives to this dispensation its particular character, that from which this dispensation derives its real nature, that is, as to God's mind, is in the fact that the Lord Jesus is in heaven and that He is known, only known, but known and ministered by the Holy Spirit. If you and I really could grasp what that means we are going to be taken a long way.  The first half is that the Lord Jesus is in heaven, that is, He is not on the earth. If He were on the earth, an entirely different system of things would obtain. You think about that.  If He were on the earth, the same things would be happening as did happen when He was on the earth. Everybody who had aches and pains would be going after Him wherever He might be, if He were in Palestine or in any other part of the world, they would be going after Him with aches and pains to get these cleared up.

There would be people who would take all their temporal difficulties and troubles and situations to Him and all the problems of this life as here on the earth.  And then the whole world situation, political and so on, to have this whole temporal realm of things dealt with, and it would resolve itself into a matter of Jesus constituting a temporal order. As they did then, so they would now, want Him to be the leader of a new political or social movement, to deal with the political situations and the social difficulties, and so on.

Supposing you heard that the Lord Jesus was just round the corner. You would be after Him like a shot with some of your troubles, perhaps your physical troubles, or domestic quarrels, to get them put right. What shall I do with my brother?  How am I to deal with my wife, my husband?  All that would be going on, and when He was here on the earth, they were all the time seeking to get Him to deal with a whole temporal state of things on this earth.  We do not find very many coming to Him really with spiritual troubles when He was here, not directly and deliberately with spiritual troubles.  Not many raised the question of sin and how they were to be forgiven and have it dealt with.  He had to go behind to deal with that, refer to that; they did not.

Well, you see, Jesus is in heaven.  He is not on earth, and that means that everything in this dispensation from the Divine standpoint is heavenly in its essence and nature.  It is not firstly, primarily, but quite subserviently, of secondary account, that He touches the temporal situation. Until you and I have got this adjusted, we are going to be in trouble all the time.  Why does not the Lord do this and that and the other thing, a thousand and one temporal things?  Why does the Lord allow this and that and the other? "Our light affliction..." (2 Cor. 4:17). "If we suffer with Him..." (Rom. 8:17).  Look at all the suffering that there is in the New Testament when you get past the Lord's days on the earth - the suffering amongst the Lord's people.  Why, why does not the Lord come in?  Yes, we would bring Him down to earth again, into that realm, but He is not coming down. He is in heaven, and that is a governing thing for this dispensation.  He is in heaven, and everything primarily with Him is heavenly.

He is to be known and ministered by the Spirit, the Holy Spirit.  He is not known as He was known in the days of His flesh. He is not known after the flesh. "Though we have known Christ after the flesh," said Paul, "yet now we know him so no more" (2 Cor. 5:16).  He is not known temporally in the first instance.  He is known and only known by the Holy Spirit and ministered to us, given to us, imparted to us, by the Holy Spirit alone, which means that this dispensation is pre-eminently spiritual in the mind of the Lord; heavenly and spiritual.

The Lord Jesus has been perfected, that is brought to completion, fullness, finality, and has been filled by God, filled unto all fullness, and has therefore become the pattern and the standard for believers.  He is in heaven and in heavenly fullness as a Man, and has been set forth as God's heavenly pattern for the people of God. So that this dispensation is above all things, from God's standpoint, governed by this - our being brought to that which Christ is, to heavenly completeness and spiritual fullness.  It is heavenly and it is spiritual, heavenly completeness, spiritual fullness, and the Lord is devoted to that object in this dispensation, and looks at and deals with everything in the light of that.

A LIVING WAY

The next thing, in line with that, is that everything unto that end is a matter of moving in Divine, heavenly, spiritual life.  It is the living way, the living way, of reaching God's end.  That is, it has got to be, it can only be, by the Holy Spirit getting us there.  We can never reach that goal, that object of God, Christ in heaven and in Divine fullness, we can never reach that goal of God along any lines, by any means, save by a definite work of the Holy Spirit, that is, by a living way.  Man cannot do this; no means of man can accomplish it. You see, you may, for instance, attend meetings.  You can attend them three times a day or more every day of your life as long as your life can possibly be and not be one iota spiritually advanced.  It is not the number of meetings or the nature of the meetings that we attend, it is not the addresses to which we listen.  It is not anything of that kind at all that gets us to God's end.  It is the Holy Spirit doing something in a living way, our coming by the way of Divine life to Divine fullness.

If one thing is true among others, it is this, that you and I are utterly hopeless in the matter of making people spiritual.  You may put them into institutions and colleges, and make them preachers, and make them organizers, and make them workers, and make them a hundred and one things, but you can never make them spiritual.  It is no use having homes and places for gathering together the Lord's people with a view to making them spiritual.  If ever you think that that is what you are going to do with them, let me tell you, you cannot do it. You can give them a lot of knowledge, teach them what is in the Bible, can turn them out very different from what they were when they came in in many respects, but you cannot make them spiritual.  I cannot make myself spiritual, you cannot make yourself spiritual.  You are helpless in that matter.  Unless the Spirit of God comes and does something, we are helpless, and that is the great mistake many have made, that they have thought by imparting Biblical knowledge and knowledge of spiritual things and how to work for the Lord, they are qualifying people for the Lord's use.  Does it work out like that?  Not necessarily; unless there is something extra to all that which is God's own work, then that does not count with God, it does not get anywhere with God, and really it only provides the background of fresh tragedies.  It is true of many.  I am not saying that those things are wrong and useless.  I am speaking of one thing.  We cannot make people spiritual, in that matter we are helpless.  Only the Holy Spirit can do it, and that is done only on the basis of life or in a living way.  It can only be accomplished by real, inward, spiritual history under the hand of the Holy Ghost.

THE PURPOSE OF SUFFERING

Now, it is just there that suffering, affliction, adversity, frustration and all those things have their place.  Why adversity in the Lord's work and in relation to the Lord?  Why frustration, why suffering, why affliction?  When the story is told at last, when it is fully told at last - and what an immense story it will be – what we shall discover is that it was the frustration, it was the suffering, the affliction, the adversity, the sorrow, the trial, that was the means of making us spiritual, nothing else – it was that that did it.  We have to say, by the grace of God, that we owe our spiritual measure of increase to the suffering through which the Lord allowed us to go.

"Our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal" (2 Cor. 4:17-18).

God is working eternal values which are not seen, but only to be grasped by the eye of faith. We have got to settle this, or else we are beaten before we start.  Are we not all the time really fighting strongly to get the Lord on to a temporal basis with us?  Why have any adversity, why have any suffering?  Indeed, why have an enemy at all, why have a devil, why have afflictions and persecutions?  Why should we have this if the Lord is Lord almighty, all-powerful, all-gracious, and really is concerned for His interests and for the progress of His work?  If the Lord really is with us and on our side as the Mighty One, then the devil ought to be swept out of the way, and all hindrances and frustration ought to go to the wind, and all sufferings at once ought to be subjugated, and we ought to know nothing of this, we ought to ride triumphantly on without any of this sort of thing which is a weight upon us, and is only interrupting and frustrating growth and progress.  The devil all the time is hindering and the Lord is not getting.  Is He not?  That is a matter you and I have got to settle.

The fact is that the New Testament is full of that sort of thing.  The one man who has more of the heavenly vision, the knowledge of things spiritual, than any other man in the New Testament is the man who knows more of this other side than any other man.  He tells us more about what he had to go through.  “Thrice I was shipwrecked” (2 Cor. 11:25). There is something wrong about that – the Lord letting one of His great apostles be shipwrecked again and again, just escaping with his life on a spar!  Imprisoned again and again, thrashed with rods, suffering hunger, cold, nakedness.  Oh, the list!  We do not know when these things happened.  He simply tells us that they did happen.  Most of them have never been recorded by Luke.  Why?  Because he was not writing the life of Paul, he was writing the life of the Lord Jesus, but Paul mentions them.  Paul says, “I once and again would have come to you, but Satan hindered " (1 Thess. 2:18).  Oh, there is something wrong about that!  Paul does not explain it, he does not say that it is wrong, he takes it in his stride.  You see what I mean.

We are so wanting to bring the Lord again on to the temporal basis, to clear up all these difficulties, to get hindrances out of the way, to have a clear course, to lift us right out of adversity, suffering, affliction, weakness, and very often we are tempted to make that the criterion as to whether the Lord is with us and for us.  You know quite well there are plenty of Job’s friends about, Christian ones too, always ready to say, 'Yes, it is because you are wrong, you are in error, that is why you have so much of it!'  That is a matter that has got to be settled.  Here it is.  Are we going to expect anything different from what the Lord had Himself, the heavenly Lord?  Are we going to expect anything different from what Paul and the believers of his day had? These letters are so full of references to these afflictions and sufferings of the saints.  Do they mean that Satan is triumphant and the Lord is defeated, or that the Lord is not with His own?  Let us get that settled.

What, then, is the meaning of all this?  Oh, let us look again.  Is it not by these means that we are being made conformable to the heavenly Christ?  You know the fact remains that the people who live in that infant stage of temporal things and who will not walk with the Lord unless He gives them proof positive in temporal realms of His being with them are not spiritually helpful people, that is, they are not the people to whom you can go in the deepest hours of your life.  There is an inward place.  People who can help those who really do know the deepest tests of faith, are those who have gone through and been sustained even when the Lord has not shown His hand for their deliverance.  Is that not true?  It is a level of life.  Conformity to the heavenly Lord is by everything being heavenly and the Lord not letting us off in this matter of heavenliness.  You want it down here, you want it in the temporal realm, things seen, things that you can bring up as proof positive, all the evidences.  You want it like that, but the way of conformity to the heavenly Christ is not along that line. Things will be heavenly, and oh, my word, they are!  We have not got much here, the Lord does not give you much here. It is all heavenly, it is HIMSELF.  As soon as you and I begin to make a great deal of the THINGS, the Lord may step in and smite the things in order that He might be the object and not the things, the heavenly Lord known and ministered by the Spirit in a living way on the line of life.

CONCEPTION, NOT IMITATION

I do wish that we could see and really grasp inwardly this, that our New Testament is not something to be imitated in any matter.  Our New Testament is something in the hands of the Holy Spirit to be wrought in us. You see, the New Testament did not come out of a study at all.  Paul did not go and shut himself up in his study and think out the doctrines of Christianity as a theologian, look up his commentaries and authorities and so on, giving you the manual of New Testament doctrine.  Paul was every day of his life right up against terrible tragedies, actual situations, and the New Testament was written right in the midst of the fight on the battlefield, grappling with problems, grappling with living problems, and when those letters were written they never thought that they were writing Holy Scripture, they never thought that in time to come people would sit down and study every word and resolve it into a doctrine, and crystallize it into "New Testament teaching." They never thought like that.  What they were doing was that they were trying to meet a practical situation right on the spot, and it was wrung out of them.  Yes, the Holy Spirit came through in that way and revealed the meaning of Christ in a living situation; and unless you and I are right in a living situation, faced with a terrible problem in our own case or someone else's, we will never be conformed to the heavenly Christ. We will never come to that by sitting down and studying New Testament doctrine.  It has got to be wrought on the anvil of experience, and that experience is going to be, in a certain sense, tragic experience.  It is going to be something of a real question of life and death.  Anyone who has really walked with God knows that I am telling the truth, that what they have come really to know of God, what they have come to possess of real spiritual value and strength, has come out of some dark and terribly grim and awful experience in their own life.  They were taken into the depths where faith rocked.  They did not know but what this was the end of everything. That is how they have grown and become spiritual and heavenly.  They have not come there because the Lord has pandered to every childish demand for satisfaction and gratification and answered prayer in everything temporal.  They have been tested, and if the Lord has subsequently come in to do things to answer prayer, He has only come in when He has done the spiritual thing inside and prepared and made it safe to do that.  He has done it after travail.  THIS IS THE NATURE OF THIS DISPENSATION. It is heavenly, it is spiritual and God is governing the life of His true children with this fact.

Now, all practical points, all practical matters, have got to arise out of a spiritual quest.  They have got to come up by reason of our seeking to know the Lord, to go on with the Lord, to reach the Lord's end, not the other way round.  Quite a lot of people think if they do this and that and the other thing, that the Lord will lead them to spiritual things.  Oh no, we cannot duplicate, we cannot reproduce, anything that is spiritual. You cannot duplicate a spiritual assembly.  You cannot duplicate a spiritual company of the Lord's people. You cannot duplicate a real spiritual order.  Now listen to me, brethren.  It is no use going about the country saying, 'We are going to set up New Testament companies, order of assemblies!'  You cannot do it.  You cannot duplicate anything spiritual.  You get people together and say, 'We will have a New Testament order and this is it' – and then have your order written down - 'this is the order of a New Testament church!'  The thing may be absolutely dead.  You cannot reach spiritual things by coming out of this and that and coming to some thing else.  Oh no, let it be said very, very strongly, you can never guarantee that you are going to reach any fuller spiritual measure by coming out of something.  I would never for a moment suggest to you that if you came out of a certain connection, a certain denomination, a certain church, a certain association, it would be to your spiritual gain, unless that thing, of course, were wrong in some quite positive sense.  If you are in some personal relationship which is evil, of course you will not move spiritually until you break that; but I am not talking about that.  You can never assure people that they will make spiritual progress if only they will come out of this connection and that, and become connected with something else.  Never do it, never hint at it, you may put them into an entirely false position.  If ever such questions - I have only mentioned that out of a large number that I might mention - if such questions are ever to arise at all, if you have to leave something, withdraw, associate somewhere else, if ever such questions are to arise at all, they have got to come up as you are seeking the Lord and His fullness, to go on with Him.  The Lord will make it perfectly clear to you that that is a hindrance, a spiritual hindrance, that is definitely athwart the path of spiritual progress.  It has got to be an issue like that.  Do not do anything because somebody else tells you you have got to do it.  It has got to arise as a practical issue as you have a quest for God's fullness.  It has got to be in the living way, not the legal way, not the technical way.

Let me repeat.  It is impossible to duplicate spiritual things. It cannot be done; it is a work of the Spirit of God.

I am speaking of a principle which is so perfectly clear in the New Testament if you look at it.  You see, Paul and the other Apostles did not leave the Temple and did not leave Jewry in order to join the Christian Church, in order even to go on with the Lord.  No, no, they did not.  They went to the Temple, they continued going to the Temple, they continued going to the synagogue, they continued association with the Jews, in fellowship, if you like, with them, until the matter became an inward, spiritual issue, a thing from heaven, a thing by the Holy Ghost, and then you find gravitation according to life, conformity to heavenly type; and when they came to see that the Temple is not that thing at Jerusalem, it is something in heaven, THAT came by revelation of the Holy Ghost, not because someone told them that was so.  If ever they came to withdraw from the Temple and the synagogue because they had seen the heavenly, it was a crisis in their spiritual life, a mark of their spiritual progress.  It was not because it was said to them, 'You have got to leave this, come out of that, association with that is all wrong!'  No, it was a spiritual matter with a living issue, and you cannot find the point at which it happened with them.  There is no secession recorded in the New Testament, no split as a part of the history of Christianity.  It happened, and it did not happen with all the Christians at once, just this one and that one.  It happened, that is all. In the end, they saw there was a difference.  It was a spiritual matter.  That is my point.

And so that is the nature of things now.  It has got to be like that.  If you are in something not on that basis, I ask you to go back and reconsider your whole position.  Are you where you are because it has become in you at some time a spiritual issue, a matter in which your spiritual life was involved, something between you and the Lord?  Is that the basis on which you are where you are?  If not, let me urge you, go back, do not be afraid, don't you think the Lord will be grieved with you.  He will not be grieved with you putting things on a right basis.  We must be on the basis of what is living, of the Spirit, in a heavenly way, that is, on the basis of Christ in heaven known and ministered by the Holy Spirit.

WHY WE ARE WHERE WE ARE

Now, there are many more things I would like to suggest to you.  May I just add this little word for each life? You see, the Lord disposes of us entirely on spiritual considerations, that is, our spiritual growth, and through that, the spiritual growth of others.  That is the thing that is governing the Lord in His disposing of us all the time.  If only I were in such and such a place, in such and such a situation, had such and such a job; if only I were there or here, how much more I could be doing for the Lord, how much more I could be counting for the Lord!  But where I am, I am bottled up, I am shut up, I am pressed down, and there seems so little for the Lord, so little, practically nothing, if anything at all, for the Lord.  It all seems so inadequate, so insignificant, so unworthwhile, and life is passing, nothing very much to show!  Are you up against a situation like that?  Things seen; what you want to see, you cannot see.  That is the trouble, this matter of the things seen, even spiritual values.

Let me say this, and I understand the position, I know.  It is a thing we have got to settle.  What is the Lord doing?  Have I deliberately taken myself out of the Lord's hands, taken my own way, acted without prayer, without committing my way to the Lord, chosen my own course?  Oh well then, if that is true, there may be an explanation of the situation, but if I am where I am without any self-will, where the Lord has been given first place, where I have sought to honour Him, trust Him, put my faith in Him and subject everything to Him, and yet this situation obtains, what is the explanation?  The Lord is more concerned with my, and with your, spiritual and heavenly measure than He is with the number of things we are doing.  We would call spiritual success the number of converts, the number of churches, the number of workers.  The Lord does not.  It is the spiritual measure of ourselves that matters.  That is what it is with the Lord.  The heavenly measure, the spiritual measure, what there is of the Holy Ghost, that is the thing that matters. "Let him that glorieth, glory in this, that he hath understanding, and knoweth me" (Jeremiah 9:24).  This is a hard school, knowing the Lord, a bitter school, nevertheless, that is what the Lord is after, a spiritual, heavenly measure of Christ.  He is more concerned about that than He is about anything else, and remember that you and I can NEVER HELP ANYONE BEYOND OUR OWN SPIRITUAL MEASURE.  The Lord is preparing us in this hard school to do something more than the average, to be something more than the average, of spiritual value.  Whether it is here or hereafter, that is not the question, but that is the end that He has in view.  Let me repeat.  The Lord disposes of us on entirely spiritual principles.  He puts us into the place, the situation, the circumstances, where our spiritual life is the thing in question, our spiritual life is the matter in hand, and we shall usually find that the Lord puts us where everything is contrary to our natural disposition, because that is the difference between Christ and Adam, between the spirit and the flesh, between the new creation and the old.  Am I naturally one who shrinks and would not take responsibility, would never do by initiative myself?  Well the school for me is, in the Lord's choosing, going to be one where I will have to take the initiative for my spiritual life, I have to do that from which my whole nature shrinks.  I would like to be in a corner where no demands were made on me, where I could be left alone; but the Lord is not going to leave me there.  Or the other way.  Am I one who naturally would lead, would dominate, would govern, would master, would lord it?  Mine is going to be the bitter school of self-emptying where I shall eventually come to a place where I am not doing anything of myself.  It is a bitter school because it lets men ride over your head, it brings you into the net, and all that about you that wants to be vindicated, justified, is simply being ground to powder, being humbled in the dust.  That is the school which is going to make way for the Lord Jesus.

I wonder if you have contemplated the Lord Jesus.  He was all this, you see, born to be Lord of the universe, and yet knowing how to be a servant.  Again, He, the meekest of men, at times had to rise up and take a course, as in the cleansing of the Temple.  Do you think it was easy?  No, not easy.  He did it on principle, on grounds of righteousness, but I believe that the Lord Jesus would rather not have done that.  I believe the Spirit of Christ was, If I must come to you with a rod, it hurts Me more than it hurts you; it is not because I love to wield the rod, that is not My nature, nor the nature of the Spirit! - and yet it works both ways.

Now you think of it, and that is what it means. The Spirit is making us, through our afflictions, which afflictions are things which work contrary to our natural constitution, making us to be conformed to Jesus in heaven and that by the Spirit, a spiritual life.  Now I have suggested.  Do you agree?  Is it right?  I hope the Lord will make it clear to us all and give us grace.

One Universal Answer

Perhaps one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the difficulties of the Christian is to accept in a practical way, and establish as a governing rule of life, the things "most surely believed" as truth. We are all greatly oppressed with some of the big problems and questions which are related to Christian life and experience, either subjectively or objectively; and yet, the most difficult thing is to accept the true answer or solution when it is offered.

This difficulty is largely due to the fact that, before a change in the situation in question can be effected, there has to be a change in our attitude toward it. We want things changed. God wants us changed. But even here, it is not just a psychological change. That might be very artificial and self-deceptive. The question is: Is there one answer to most, if not all, of our problems? Is there just one thing which, if we embraced it, would be Gods answer to, and explanation of, our difficulties? Has God one answer to most of our cries of Why?

The Problem of Suffering

Take the problem of suffering. That may include many things; physical, circumstantial, spiritual. It may relate to ourselves or to others. Almost countless are the ways of Gods dealings with us, which are most trying and hard to bear. The most acute form of suffering is that which relates to God Himself: His silence; hiding Himself; seeming to have neither knowledge nor care. Prayers seem to be unheard, and are, apparently (we would say positively) unanswered.

What is the explanation? Well, the Word of God has made very clear that such an explanation exists.

There is one all-comprehending, all-embracing, all-governing purpose to which God has committed Himself, by creation, by redemption, and by union. That purpose is the conformity of a race to the image of His Son. This is mans chief end and chief good. What more satisfied and happy person is there  even amidst suffering and sorrow  than he or she who is most perfect in patience, love, faith, and the other fruits of the Spirit? If our requests regarding things were granted, while we were left the same people, unchanged in disposition and nature, it would not be long before we should be in the same unhappy condition over other things. There is possible for us some inherent quality that wears out circumstances and reigns above them. Some of the most radiant people have been the greatest sufferers in infirmity, poverty, or other forms of adversity; whilst the most privileged are often the most discontented.

The solution to the problem of suffering does not lie in being philosophical; it is not in fatalistic resignation  This is my lot; I suppose I must accept it. It is not in passive or active suppression of desire. It is far removed from self-pity, bitterness, cynicism, or envy, and the rest of their wretched family of wilderness-makers and wanderers.

We may have to let go the particular occasion of our trouble, and first recognise, and then embrace with our heart, the fact that in the affliction there resides the immense eternal potentiality of an increase of the image of Gods Son, which is to be the one and the only character and nature of the eternal kingdom. We have too much visualised the Heaven that is to be, as geographical and pleasurable, without giving sufficient weight to the fact of a nature to be inculcated and perfected.

The Work of God

Why is it that  God willing and purposing a certain object to be accomplished, eg the salvation of souls, the building of the Church, the increase of spiritual measure; and God being Who and What He is, All-mighty, All-wise, All-gracious  the work is fraught with so many problems? The workers are often at the end of themselves; everything is so hard and heartbreaking; and in deepest suffering many die with so little accomplished. Why is the vindication of those who have honestly sought to do the will of God and have suffered deeply at the hands of men, even Christian men, so long delayed?

How much we could enlarge upon the perplexities of the work of the Lord! But if we could say all, does not the same solution apply as above?

It has become almost a platitude now to say that God is more concerned for the worker than for the work. Yes, and, as a proposition, we may quite honestly believe it; but as applied and experienced it is the root of unspeakably much perplexity and disappointment. Yet there it is: the whole fact that, second causes being admitted or rejected, the work of God has never been something easy or straightforward, with the continuous manifestation of His absolute All-mightiness making difficulties as though they were nothing.

God will never put work or service in the place of character; and, if we do that, eternity will reveal that, however much we may have done, we are very small amongst the inhabitants of the Land, whose stature will be measured by the measure of Christ. It would be well if all who contemplate or are engaged in the work of God were governed by this one absolutely final law: that, both as to themselves and as to those amongst whom they minister, the ultimate test is  not how much work is done, but how much of Christ is present, or results from the ministry. This might solve many problems, explain many strange ways of God, and seal life with the kind of success that is worthy of the name in the eyes of Heaven.

The Churchs Unity

We touch on one other problem, though it is too big for any adequate handling here: the problem of the Churchs unity or disunity.

What a problem and heartbreak this is! What efforts are being made to solve it! Never was it engaging so much attention as now. We are not unfamiliar with this matter from the standpoint of Church History, the Ecumenical movement, World Councils, Conferences, and so on; and we sincerely trust that we shall not be thought to consider ourselves superior when we say with emphasis that we believe that there is one answer and only one.

It is Gods answer, anticipating all divisions and established before them. That answer is a right apprehension of Christ, and conformity to Him. Every Christian believes in the oneness of the Body of Christ. Books, almost without number, have been written on the Church. But we are really no nearer a manifest expression of the Church, as set forth in the letters of Paul to the Ephesians and Colossians, because the real secret is in the measure of Christ in all concerned. No two members of Christ can keep apart, if Christ is really dominantly Lord in their hearts by the Holy Spirit! We may have put systems, institutions, denominations, traditions, interpretations of doctrine, etc, before Christ Himself. It may be necessary to dethrone and displace these, and make everything of Christ, before there will be any solution of the problem.

There are other questions and difficulties, but the same answer applies to all. Gods end  to which, in a  thousand ways, He works  is that Christ may be all and in all, and light is thrown upon all the dark things by this.

First published in "A Witness and A Testimony" magazine, July-August 1958, Vol 36-4

The Shining Face

Read: Daniel 1:8-16; Acts 6:15; 7:56

"When Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tables of Testimony in his hand, he did not know that the skin of his face shone and sent forth beams by reason of his speaking with the Lord. When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, behold the skin of his face shone, and they feared to come near him. Exodus 34:29-30

And all of us, as with unveiled face, continued to behold as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are constantly being transfigured into His very own image in ever increasing splendor and from one degree of glory to another; from the Lord, the Spirit. 2 Cor 3:18

You will notice the common feature of all these passages to be the shining face. We have been gathered together for a season up here on the mountain with the Lord and we have to go back, to be scattered in different places, and meet the difficult situations, and we want to go back with shining faces. But we want to know the secret of the shining face. That does not need to be taken literally. We may not always have a countenance that is cracking with mirth, but there is that which even in the midst of adversity and difficulty and suffering and trial speaks of something within the heart that is God’s peace, God’s rest, God’s joy. It is possible to know the peace that passeth understanding. It is possible to know joy unspeakable and full of glory even amidst very great pressure and suffering. It is possible for there to be recognised, even in a pain marked countenance, something that is of God.

What one is speaking of is not necessarily just a shining of our faces, but something shining through our faces, something which our faces indicate which is more than merely human endurance, human bravery and courage; something of the deep strength and grace of God. That is what I mean by the shining face, and in these four instances of which we have read we have the secrets of the shining face in this sense. You know it is that, that is the testimony. It is not always the things that we say, but that which is expressed through us in times of stress and trial and provocation and opposition and antagonism and suffering. It is then that that which is caught, as it were back of our faces, that is the testimony.

When it is known that we are undergoing trial, when it is known that we are in suffering, when it is known that others in a different realm would act and speak and react to things in the flesh, as men would react; there is just that betrayal of something of the Lord Jesus. That is the testimony. It is the betraying of the Lord Jesus in the right sense. And it will be very little good to the Lord, very little gain to Him or us, if as we go back and continue in the scenes of our life, and when there is a test, there is not some fuller indication of the Lord Himself in our hearts and lives. People will come to their conclusions on that basis - what we reveal under pressure, under trial.

That is the proof of the thing, not what we know and what we say. But when we pass through intense difficulties and adversity, what is revealed at such times. And in order that the testimony may be maintained, we want to understand what the secrets of the shining face are. They are four-fold.

"Moses Wist Not That His Face Did Shine."

The first is in the case of Moses. Moses had been up in the mount with the Lord and the Lord had spoken with him. Moses had come to see that upon which the eye of the Lord was resting. He had stood by the side of the Lord and he had looked with the Lord’s eyes as the Lord brought before him His own vision, and that vision was expressed in the type, in the tabernacle. It all passed before the eye of Moses in the most minute detail. From the ark, out to the Holy Place to the Court and all its contents, and the priesthood and the sacrifices, and he saw what God’s eye was resting upon. And by reason of the Lord’s speaking to him about that, he became alive with the very glory of the Lord.

It is a wonderful thing to recognise that the Lord’s glory became imparted to Moses by reason of that which became the common object of their eyes. What the Lord was looking at, Moses was looking at, and as they both looked at it together they shared the same glory. When does the Lord’s own face light up with glory? When is the Father’s face full of glory? When He looks upon the Lord Jesus. The tabernacle was only the Lord Jesus in a representation, and it was the Lord Jesus in all His Mediatorial, Priestly Person and work gathered up in a great system, but it was the person of the Lord Jesus as relating to man’s fellowship with God—the place, the sphere where God and man come into oneness, where God can, without sacrificing His holiness, have fellowship with man and where man can without being consumed by the very holiness of God, have fellowship with God. From Him, the Lord Jesus Christ, with a centralmost reality of the mercy seat He will speak with you face to face.

God has set forth Christ as a propitiation. God sees beyond the pattern to the reality, His Son, and it was Christ Who was in the eye of the Father in all His wonderful, mediatorial work to bring men nigh to God and God nigh to man. When that is in the eye of God, His face is full of glory, and when we get what is in His eye, we partake of the glory of the shining face of God.

Simply, it just means that when we are occupied with the Lord Jesus in all that He is from the Father to us and to the Father for us, when we are occupied with Him, then we know the shining face. Be occupied with anything else and you lose the shining face. Be occupied with yourself and your own spiritual life and condition, so that you are always self analysing, and it will not be long before you have lost the shining face.

Keep your eye upon Jesus and you will know the secret of the shining face. Look around on things as they are in the world and you will lose it. The secret of the shining face is to get God’s thought about the Lord Jesus, to get your eye where God’s eye is. That is tremendously important.

The only hope for God of the ultimate realisation of His purpose is to look at the Lord Jesus. He has all the guarantee in Him. And He says, "Because He is what He is, my end is secure, I have My Sabbath, My rest, My eye is upon Him." And until we have seen that God has reached His end in Christ, and our eyes are upon Him, we have not got the secret of hope and confidence and rest and satisfaction. It is the secret. It is a wonderful reality.

I cannot tell you what a blessing this brought to my own heart when the Lord showed me what He had made the Lord Jesus to Himself on my behalf. I was always craving to bring to the Lord something that would satisfy Him in myself. If I could bring to the Lord a perfect life, that would please Him and satisfy Him, and He could be perfectly satisfied with me! But it was impossible and it seemed no good trying. The more you try, the further away you seem to be, and the longer you live the more you know the utter deceitfulness of your own heart.

Oh, to be able to come before the Lord with something that would please Him! And now the Lord says, "I have made the provision for all that. I have provided you with absolute spiritual and moral perfection. I have found those in One, and I have put them into your hands. I accept you in Him, I am satisfied with you in Him, you are accepted in the Beloved." You cannot bring perfection to God, and that is the only thing that will satisfy Him, but the Lord Jesus fulfills - fills full - all the Divine requirement.

In Leviticus, God speaks about the offering. "If any man desires to bring an offering," then the Lord provides as to the offering. You have got to desire to bring an offering. And you know quite well it is no use bringing to God anything that is not absolutely perfect, and where will you find that? That only which is according to Christ satisfies God. When this breaks upon us, it is rest. It is the shining countenance. When we get to the perfections of His Son, we have found the good pleasure of God and we stand, not looking at God askance, but we stand by the side of God and we are both looking at the same thing and sharing the same glory. God’s objective is the Lord Jesus.

Moses did not know that his face was shining. It is a great thing to be occupied with the Lord Jesus inside, and people will take note of it. "He wist not that his face shone," but others did, and that is the important thing.

Daniel’s Secret Of The Shining Face

Daniel has learned the secret of the shining face, and there is something deeper here, more testing. Daniel is in Babylon. Babylon is in the ascendancy. Jerusalem is in ruins. We know what these things mean spiritually. We know that that which really is wholly according to God, that which was at the beginning, is not to be found today - that where the Holy Spirit absolutely governs and where it is all the Lord Jesus. You do not find that in the ascendancy today. It is the other religious system made by man that is in the ascendancy. That is Babylon. And the mass of the Lord’s people are in captivity to it, a man-made Christian system.

And here is Daniel, seeing that which is according to God broken, ruined, and he sees this other thing, that is not according to God, holding sway and engulfing the mass of the Lord’s people. The wonder of it all is that Daniel did not accept Babylon. He repudiated Babylon and clung to Jerusalem. If Jerusalem is literally in ruins, to Daniel it is not so. He does not accept the things seen. He knows that Babylon is only a temporary thing and that God is going to have His testimony again. And God is going, through a remnant, to get His house again. He knows that God cannot be defeated and so he will not defile himself with the king’s dainties. God is his life and he repudiates that which seems to have the upper hand for the time being and clings to God.

Daniel also sees beyond and sees when Babylon and all the other kingdoms will be shattered. If you accept Babylon you will lose the shining face. If you accept religion as it is today and say, "It is the best there is," you will get involved in something that is not of God. And people more and more today are revolting, and are not satisfied. People say, "Oh, to be out of it, to find the real thing." God is going to have His real thing. God cannot be robbed of that thing which He has set His heart upon.

Let us set our hearts upon it, and not accept anything else. It is so easy to say, "Christianity is in a mess, but we must make the best of a bad job." But there is no joy along that line. God is working today secretly even in Babylon. And when we come to the book of Ezra, we find that God acts sovereignly. He stirs up the spirit of Cyrus and he makes a proclamation. That is God’s outside action. But there is a company with whom God has secretly worked in Babylon.

And God is seen working in Babylon today with His own remnant and they are gradually moving in a detachment from this system so that when God’s time comes He will have that which is after His mind. But Daniel was the first one. He represented that company. He stood for what was of God although it might not be manifested at the moment. Do not accept anything less than what God has set His heart upon. Daniel’s secret of the shining face was in that He looked on to God’s sure end and believed that in a dark day the ultimate purpose and thought of God was certain of realisation.

Stephen’s Secret

Stephen - all that were in the council, looking upon him, saw his face as it were the face of an angel. What is the secret? I believe the second passage is the secret. "And lifting up his eyes he said, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God." Stephen was a man full of the Holy Ghost and faith, and the Holy Spirit had drawn Stephen’s attention to the Lord Jesus in glory. Read Acts 7. It is almost matchless in New Testament literature, and see the place that he gives to the Lord Jesus. He heads it right up to the Lord Jesus in glory and, while he is under the test, that is the thing that sustains him, and when he comes to the last moment he sees literally with his eyes what he had been seeing with his heart all the way through. And that just means this - when we see the Lord Jesus in glory we have seen this, that God having got Him there, the Son of Man, having got one all-inclusive Man there, it is all right for us. He can get us there.

That One has simply fathomed all judgment, all death, all the power of Satan and the grave. He has exhausted all and God has got Him there. He had all the sin of all the creation from Adam onward heaped upon Him, and then that One came to glory. He had all the power and fury of the devil heaped upon Him, and God got that One to glory; the power of Death and Hades being liberated upon Him, and God brought that One to glory. We will never have to go through all that He went through. Stephen saw that one Man in the glory, being such a One as He was, is the guarantee that God could get him there, let all hell rush upon him. It is the secret of the shining face.

Sometimes we may, by reason of many things, wonder if we shall get to glory, if we shall hold out to the end, but, blessed be God, he is capable of getting us there. It is not our doing, it is the Lord’s doing. Why? Because He has already got our forerunner in His presence. That bears you up in the time of opposition. And men filled with the Holy Spirit are especially the object of stones.

Paul’s Secret

And now, finally, what Paul says about himself and about us. We all with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image, from glory to glory" - transformed. It is by the Lord, the Spirit. And what is the secret of this shining face? 2 Cor. 4:6, "God hath shined into our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." The secret of the shining face in this case is not Christ objectively but Christ subjectively. It is a blessed thing to realise that the One Who has gone up there is His great triumph is within us. It does not depend on what is outside of us. But the Lord is inside us, Who has already overcome. We are familiar with the terms but it is a great day when suddenly we wake up to know what Christ is in us. Has it ever come to you by a sudden flash of light? Christ in you! "Know ye not, as to your own selves, that Christ is in you." (2 Cor 13:5) "That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith." (Eph 3:17) Get that, spiritually apprehended, and you have got the shining face. All that which is around you is no match for Him. "Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world." (1 John 4:4).

Ask the Lord to make this live. To know this means a wonderful lot to the life. May the Lord take us back with that in our hearts which speaks of the Lord Jesus! That is the testimony. Our eye is upon what God’s eye rests upon, our hope is set upon God’s hope, our assurance upon God assurance. And it is all the Lord Jesus.

The Spirit in Prison

The history of Christianity from the latter days of the Apostles is the history of prisons. Not literal, material prisons, though there have been not a few of these, but prisons which are the result of man's inveterate habit of taking hold and bringing into bondage. How many times has the Spirit broken loose and moved in a new and free way, only to have that way brought under the control of man and crystallized into another 'Form', Creed, Organization, Denomination, Sect, 'Order', Community, etc.! The invariable result has been that the free movement and life of the Spirit has been cramped, or even killed, by the prison of the framework into which it has been drawn or forced. Every time we seek to express something Divine in word or form we at once limit it, and when that expression or form becomes the established and recognised formula, we have in effect put fetters on the Spirit. God gives a vision, and every God-given vision has illimitable potentialities; but all too soon the vision is laid hold of by men who never had it in or of the Spirit, and the grapes of Eshcol turn to raisins in their hands. So very many of the living fruits of the heavenly country have suffered in this way, and have become dried, shrunken, unctionless shadows of their early glory.

Upon a living movement of the Spirit, born with fire in the heart of some prophet, successors, sponsors, or adherents build an earthly organization, and imprison the vision in a tradition. So a Message becomes a Creed; a "Heavenly Vision" becomes an earthly institution; a movement of the Spirit becomes a 'Work', which must be kept going by the steam of human energy, and maintained by man's resourcefulness.

Sooner or later any real or seeming departure or diversion from the 'recognised' and traditional order of Creed or practice will be heresy, to be violently suspect, repressed, and outcast. Too often what, at its beginning, was a spiritual energy producing a living organism expressing something that God really wanted and to which He gave birth has become something which the next generation has to sustain and work hard to keep going. The thing has developed a self-interest and it will go hard with anyone or anything interfering with it, or seeming so to do. The Spirit has become the prisoner of the institution or system, and the people become limited spiritually as the result.

Why is all this so true, resulting, as it does, in strain, divisions, jealousies, rivalries, and often deception? And, if there is any remedy, what is it?

The answer is to be found in an honestif costlyfacing of the fundamental question: Why am I where I am? Did I enter into something objectively? Was it something already formed which was presented to me, with an appeal, an argument, a 'need'? Was it a something at all? Or did the Spirit open the eyes of my heart, and give me a heavenly vision, which on one side made me cry "Woe is me" and on the other "Here am I"? Was it a life crisis? Did I take up a 'teaching', a complexion of truth, a 'work', an enterprise? Was I right at the very source of life? Was it a definite and overpowering 'apprehending' from Heaven? Is my position that of relationship to something from which I can resign? In a word, is my imprisonment that of a system or order of an outward kind, or am I the 'bondslave' of the Spirit? The Apostle Paul, in particular, shows that the former bondage or imprisonment can even be to what is in the Bible, in the form of what he calls "the letter", and the Biblein this sensecan be 'death' ("the letter killeth"2 Cor. 3:6). Not that we can have the Spirit and the life without the Word, but it can most certainly be the other way round.

It is so seriously important that we, and everything, shall be kept continuously in touch with the original source of life. Succession and continuation is not ecclesiastical, traditional, or of human choice and decision; it is certainly not policy, expediency, or fear. It is anointingthe anointed eye, ear, hand, and foot. It is a fire in the bones, not the obligations of a profession, association or idea.

The Spirit must have initiated our course and position. The Spirit must be referred to and deferred to all along the way. The Spirit will be a rebel in anything in which He may have His liberties limited; and if He is in us, He will make us such rebels. This does not for a moment mean that all rebellion and bid for what is called 'liberty' is of the Spirit. It just means that we are broken people in the realm of nature, and robbed of a power to fight for our own conceptions.

So it becomes just the issue of imprisonment to the Spirit, or something other or extra. It must be, at the greatest cost, and because the Spirit has done a deep and drastic thing in us"Here am I; I can do no other. So help me God."

First published in "A Witness and A Testimony" magazine, Mar-Apr 1961 Vol. 39-2

Spiritual Exercise

"But solid food is for fullgrown men, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern good and evil" (Heb. 5:14).

"All chastening seemeth for the present to be not joyous but grievous: yet afterward it yieldeth peaceable fruit unto them that have been exercised thereby, even the fruit of righteousness" (Heb. 12:11).

That word 'exercise' is the word that includes what I have in my heart. The word means what it says. If you heard the Greek word for this English word 'exercised', you would at once recognize another English word. It would, of course, have been impossible for the translators to put the other one in, as you will see, but the Greek word sounds almost exactly like our English word 'gymnastics'. If you like to put it in here you can - 'to those who have been through the gymnastics in relation to this matter of full growth'. 'Exercised' does mean something like that - those who have undergone gymnastics in relation to development.

The Object of Spiritual Exercise

If you look to see the object of this exercise, you will discover that it has to do with just one thing - but a very great thing. It is not just development, getting big; it is what we call capacity - that is, ability, or being able for things. That is the Divine object in this exercise, quite clearly set forth in this letter. And capacity, as I am sure you will agree, is a very vital matter. Whether it is in the natural realm or in the spiritual, it does amount to something to have capacity - to have ability. It is a very distressing thing to find how few, even of the Lord's people, have real spiritual capacity. You will see what that means as we go on. But let us get the object of this exercise in view, that we may make no mistake. It is not just to be something, but to be able for something - that is capacity. In gymnastics you can do it for its own sake, just to develop yourself, just to be something, but the real object is to be able to do things, to be capable of much more.

Spiritual Exercise Related to an Afterward

But here is a strange thing. This is so related to an "afterward". You notice it is afterward that the values of this exercise, of this increased capacity, are to be found. There may be, of course, immediate "afterward"s - there are - but there is always the great "afterward": for what we find is that, just when people are beginning to have a bit of capacity - because it takes a long time with most of us - it is time to go home. The gymnasium closes down, we go to the Lord. Life all along has been one continuous exercise. There has been no 'let-up' in the exercise. We do not do it for a term and then work out the values for the rest of our lives. Here we are, those of us who have been on the way some time, and are on the last lap - we are still in the gymnasium, and it seems as though we are going to be there to the end. This whole matter of increased capacity continues to our last day, and the last breath of our last day, on this earth. Then what about it? There must be a big afterward, or life is an enigma, a deep and terrible enigma: so that the Scripture does come in with much emphasis and abundant evidence that all this is for a big afterward. It is capacity for something, ability to do, in the 'ages of the ages'.

Now that opens up a very large realm, and I am not going to enter into it. All I am saying is that it must be so - or I, for one, cannot understand why we cannot get this over quickly, and then for the rest of our time just be doing the thing for which we have been prepared. But the preparation goes on and on and ever on, and it will never cease while we are here.

The Realm of Spiritual Exercise

What is the realm of this exercise? Here it speaks of having the senses exercised. Well, of course, that is very simple and easily understood. In our natural, physical man we have five senses. We have our sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Those are the five senses of our physical natural life. But there is also an inner man called the "hidden man of the heart", and that inward man has what corresponds to the outer man's five senses. There is a faculty of spiritual sight, of spiritual hearing, of spiritual smelling or sensing, of spiritual taste and spiritual touch, and these senses are very important to the life of the inward man - yes, more important even than the senses of the physical man.

We know how we feel the tragedy of people who have lost any of those outward senses. It is a great loss; it is an imperfect life, a life of limitation. But it is equally true of the inward man. To be without spiritual sight is a tragic loss and a terrible limitation; or without spiritual hearing, that capacity for answering to the Spirit - "he that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith": if there is no capacity for hearing, that is a desperate situation. What loss there is if there is no sensing - sensing as in the matter of smell, so that you at once scent things. I know how wrongly that has been used, in an everlasting attempt to scent heresy and fault and wrong, but there is a right faculty of spiritual scent which is very important. I believe it was to that that reference was made concerning our Lord - "his scent shall be in the fear of the Lord" (Isa. 11:3, A.R.M.) - quick of scent, right on the mark in scenting what the Lord wanted. And how true it was of His heavenly life: what it saved Him to scent the enemy and what the enemy was up to, to scent what the Father wanted and when He did not want things. It is important to be quick of scent. And so with our taste and with our touch - our contact, and what we register by contact.

This is a very real inward man, and these are the senses which form the basis of spiritual capacity: these are the things to be exercised, to be 'put through it' for increase and development. In Hebrews 12 you know that the Apostle is speaking about Sonship, and then in verse 9 he uses the phrase "the Father of our spirits" (R .V.M.). 'We have had fathers of our flesh and they saw to it that our fleshly, our physical, senses were developed, that we were kept up to the mark on knowing right and wrong in the natural realm; they taught us there what was true and what was false'. Now we have a Father of our spirits, and it is our spiritual faculties and senses that are the object of His concern. He is concentrating upon the development of capacity in spiritual seeing, and spiritual hearing, and spiritual sensing and tasting and touching. This is what is meant by the full-grown man.

The Nature of the Exercise

Then we come to this exercise. What is the nature of the exercise - if you like, of the gymnastics? - for the Lord does 'put us through it'! Some of you may not have been through gymnastics. I remember the very first time I went into a gymnasium as a youngster, and a vaulting-horse was put in front of me and I was told that I had to take it at a bound. I had never tried that before. I was scared! But I was put through it, I was not let off. No running round that horse, no running underneath it; I had to clear it, and I had to go on till I could make a clean show of it. And in every part of that gymnasium it was the same. It was terrible for a time, but capacity grew with exercise. This word "chastening" means that. We have such an idea that chastening means thrashing. It does not. It is child-training, it is discipline, it is gymnastics. It is being put through it, so that these senses may be developed and capacity increased.

The point is this - that there is no development unless you are given something beyond your capacity. It is true in every realm. It means that the Lord is constantly putting you into situations beyond your capacity. If it is a matter of seeing, and you cannot see, what are you going to do - when you just cannot see what the Lord means, what the Lord is after, what He is doing? Give it up? Say, 'I cannot see' - that is an end of it - and go home? Of course not! We are there for that faculty to be developed and capacity increased. Have we not already proved that through many a dark way? We just cannot see or understand, but we have at least learned something of the ways and mind of the Lord. And in every other way too we are put into positions beyond our capacity. Does that comfort you? Are you out of your depth today? Are you in situations that you just cannot cope with? The explanation is in Hebrews 12.

There is a very great cost bound up with capacity - that is what I find. There have been people of whom we have despaired. We have wondered if ever they really would see, whether they would ever grow at all. They seemed to stay for so long in exactly the same place and with the same measure, and we have despaired. And then the Lord has taken them into a very deep place, breaking and shattering and emptying; and before they are through, things have changed inwardly: they have got a new knowledge of the Lord; they have come out with something which we had despaired of their ever reaching. There is something there now; there is the possibility now that they are going to count for something more. They are seeing.

I do not think there is any other way for increasing capacity. Capacity is a costly thing. We had better face it: every little bit of increase means agony. There is a big afterward in view. "All chastening seemeth for the present to be not joyous, but grievous" - and do not expect it to be otherwise - but afterward, and maybe, in measure, in the afterward here, we may be of greater value to the Lord, as He puts us through His school.

Yet, even so, as I said at the beginning, the work goes on to the end. And then what? Well, we may leave something behind for the profit of others, but surely that is not the end. No, there is the great afterward. You notice that this letter puts so much emphasis upon going on to the end, continuing to the end. One thing that we learn in the Lord's school is this - that we must never foreclose on God: we must not accept an end until He says it is an end. Let me put that in another way. How often there comes an afterward, when we thought there was going to be no afterward. We had thought it was all at an end, and then there comes an afterward, and we reproach ourselves for giving up too soon, before we ought to have given up. We give up in our spirits and we cease to run with patience. We go through a black, dark time when we seem to have been brought to the end and there is no more, and the enemy seeks to make us accept that. 'This is the awful end of everything'. And we find, like Abraham and his horror of great darkness, that when it seemed that it was the end of everything, it was only the beginning of something more of the Lord - something far greater - a new beginning. So we hold on, realising that this costly way is a preparation for larger values, though it be "for the present... not joyous, but grievous".

First published in "A Witness and A Testimony" magazine, Jul-Aug 1952, Vol 30-4

The Strategy of God

From "This Ministry" - Messages given at Honor Oak - Volume 3.

Reading: Job 23:8-14.

"He hideth himself" (v. 9).

"He knoweth the way that I take" (v. 10).

"He performeth that which is appointed for me" (v. 14).

The Initial Move with God

This is one of the most remarkable books of the Bible for quite a number of reasons, and we may well be thankful that God had it written, placed it in His Book and has preserved it throughout all these generations. It has a very great purpose to serve in His thought, and when you come to the remarkable things in it, the first is that in this whole drama - for it is nothing less than Divine drama - God took the initiative. It is important and helpful to remember that. I think a lot of people have thought that the Devil took the initiative, but it does not say so; it says, "When the sons of God came to present themselves before Jehovah... Satan also came among them. And the Lord said unto Satan... Hast thou considered my servant Job?" (1:6,8). God took the initiative; God drew the attention of Satan to this man; God drew out what Satan thought about Job. It was the initiative of the Lord, not the initiative of the Devil. I say that is a very remarkable and forceful thing when you see all that follows. Evidently to the Lord Job had a very great significance, and He drew Satan's attention to that significance and then allowed it to be submitted to Satan's onslaughts.

I am not going to follow that in any full way, but I do believe that in some measure it is true of every child of God and of the saints as a body who stand upon true spiritual ground, that there is a great significance to the Lord bound up with them, and that He allows - I was almost going to say submits them to - the onslaughts of Satan for the bringing out of that significance to His own glory.

Before we come to the particular phrases which we have underlined, we might just indicate one or two aspects of the great significance of the life of Job.

God's Object in His Strange Dealings with His Children

First of all, God was intending to establish and reveal a ground upon which Satan is undone and worsted and brought to the end of his power. It is interesting to note the disappearance of the Devil from the book of Job. He is very much in evidence in the beginning. You hear no more about him after a while and in the end, while he is not referred to, everything indicates that he has been completely put to flight and to shame.

Now I have said I am not going to follow that through, but that is absolutely true with regard to the Church. The final issue of the Church after its time of tribulation, trial, suffering, affliction is this, that Satan is cast out; and the object of God's strange, mysterious, deep and sometimes almost unbearable ways with the Church (the true Church, His people) is to bring about that issue. Some people think that when you come to the book of Revelation, Chapter 12, Satan is cast down from heaven in order to make room for the saints. That is just the wrong way round. The saints reach there and he is cast out; he is never cast out until the saints get there. When the Man-child reaches the Throne, Satan is cast out. That is the point. That chapter is a chapter of travail, the culmination of suffering. The Church comes to the glory and Satan is forced out of the heavens. And that is one of the big issues here in this book of Job, explaining everything.

God Deals with His Children According to His Knowledge of Them

As to Job himself - and this brings us very much nearer to this chapter - God is clearly seen here as dealing with His servant according to His Own deeper knowledge of the man, a knowledge deeper than the man had of himself. Job had a certain conception of himself, and outwardly he was right. God's summing up of him to Satan was that he was not wrong so far as outward things were concerned. He was a perfect and upright man (Job 1:8), there was none like him in all the earth if it were a matter of outward righteousness and good acts, and that was the realm in which Job lived. But God knew him inwardly in a way in which Job did not know himself, and dealt with him according to that deeper knowledge. All that I am going to say about that for the moment is this, that when the Lord really does get us in hand and deal with us, when He does allow Satan to assail and almost torment us, the result will be seen, not only finally in one great ascent, but in this - that progressively and from time to time we recognise and acknowledge that the Lord has dealt with us quite rightly and in the only way suitable to us, and that we have been coming to see what we did not know or believe about ourselves. He does not standardize His methods and deal with all His people in exactly the same way. What to one would be acute agony, to another would be very little trouble at all. The Lord knows us, He knows the secret pride of our hearts, the conceits about us which we would never believe about ourselves and would never allow anyone else to point out - and if they did, we would be untouched. He deals with us according to His knowledge; and in the end, in honesty of heart we have to say, The Lord's way with me was the only way in which He could deal with me and get me where He wanted me. That is, we have come to see that we had certain tendencies, propensities, certain perils in our makeup, and these had to be met and dealt with in a peculiar way. The way in which the Lord has dealt with them was the only way in which they could be dealt with.

That is one of the secrets of this book of Job. Job did not know himself inwardly, good man though he was, and you notice as the Lord puts him through the fires he is beginning to acknowledge things that he would never acknowledge before. In the end, this man, who had earlier told the story of his own goodness, and stood so strongly on the ground of all the kind things he had done - how he had never failed to answer to need where he saw it - in the end he says, "Wherefore I abhor myself" (Job 42:6); and although it is not so stated, it can be concluded that Job would have said, The Lord has taken the only way by which He could bring me to the place where He wanted me. The Lord had to deal with him according to His Own knowledge of him. That is what He is doing with us all.

I wonder how many of us here are now able to say, with a little knowledge of ourselves, as we begin to know our own peculiar makeup and perils and peculiarities and weaknesses, that the way the Lord has been dealing with us is the only way in which we could be dealt with effectively? It is a very great thing as we are able to come to that position, because the heart acknowledgment is just this - He is faithful and true! He is faithful with us because He knows us, and He is true to us because He knows us. That is, in faithfulness and truth He is dealing with us according to what He knows of us which we do not know of ourselves, and which we can never accept from anyone else. That is an issue of this book, and it is a great issue to come to the place where we justify God even against ourselves.

God Working to Produce Eternal Spiritual Values

But then one other thing in general. God was making something of tremendous spiritual value for posterity in His dealings with Job. The story of this book is the story of God's producing something which for all ages was going to be of great spiritual value. You cannot fail to recognise how universal this book is, and how almost timeless it is. It is evidently a patriarchal book - that is, it belonged to the time of the patriarchs, probably the time of Abraham. Job was a Gentile living away somewhere by the Euphrates. He is a mysterious man. How did he come to know God and offer sacrifices? Those sacrifices were never on the Levitical basis. He offered sacrifices lest his sons should have sinned. This is not the mediatorial sacrifice of the Lord. There is no reference whatever to anything like the law of Moses and the sacrifices we have later. It is much earlier than that, it goes right back to the beginning of things. How universal and continuous it is! This scene in the heavens comes into view again and again. Right up to Ephesians you have it, warfare in the heavenlies, an interest in this earth in the heavenlies; and that great universal, spiritual realm, covering all time - not just the life of a man in some remote place on the earth - God was doing something to produce values for His people right on to the end. Who is there among the Lord's true people who has never been helped by this book? The more you look into it and think about it, the more powerful is its ability to help you spiritually. This book of Job is of tremendous value to the Church. All I mean to indicate by that suggestion is that in these dealings with us by God, He is producing something of lasting spiritual value to serve others. It may be that some of us are going through something in a spiritual way like that through which Job went - disappointment, deprivation, so that God seems to be against us and the language of our hearts is Job's - "Oh that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his seat! I would set my cause in order before him and fill my mouth with arguments" (23:3,4). This is the common complaint of the heart under trial. What is the Lord doing with us when He handles us like that, so deeply, so terribly? He is producing something spiritual to be of service to others. This is to be stock in trade for the saints - and not only in the short duration of this life here on earth. "His servants shall serve him, and they shall see his face" (Rev. 22:3). There is work to be done, and the spiritual measure to which we attain here is the measure in which we are going to be of use to the Lord afterward, and so the fires become very intense for some; but He is producing something of abiding value for others. That is one of the issues of this book.

God's Hiding of Himself

Now right in that setting come these words which we hardly need to dwell upon. Firstly, "He hideth himself." I doubt whether there is one of us who does not know something of the poignancy that lies in that statement. "He hideth himself." That is one of our greatest occasions of suffering, the fact that the Lord hides Himself. Our cry all the time is that He will show Himself, come out into the open, let us see Him and see what He is doing. But "He hideth himself." He was enshrouded in the mystery of His ways with His beloved servant. In all the values of this book, this is not one of the smallest, that God could say of a man that he is perfect and upright and there is none like him in all the earth, and then could hide Himself from that man. You see the point. Oh, the misrepresentation of God and of Job which this book brings out! This is one of the things which God set Himself to destroy out of hand. This misrepresentation came through Job's friends. They were pious men, in their way godly men, who said some very lovely things - and yet they were used by the Devil as instruments against this choice servant of God. A problem arises here, which we make no attempt now to answer. Were the things spoken by these men Divinely inspired utterances? Can we take them as Scripture? "Lay thou thy treasure in the dust... and the Almighty will be thy treasure" (Job 22:24-25) - is that an inspired utterance, can we take our stand on that? That is something to be fulfilled as the Word of God, and yet that - and many another equally lovely thing - was uttered by men of whom God said in the end "Ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right" (42:7).) Here is a man of whom God can say that he is perfect and upright. NATURALLY He can never say that about you and me, or about any one of us - though thank God He can say it of us IN CHRIST. Yet He could say it of Job naturally as to outward life. He could say finally of Job that he had said the thing which was right. "Ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath." God could speak so at the beginning and at the end about this man, and draw Satan's attention to him as the most perfect man on the earth, and then hide Himself from him in the time of his anguish. I say the precious thing about that is that God's hiding does not always mean that God is against you; it does not mean what these men interpreted it to mean, that God had a controversy with Job and that there must be some deep, awful, secret sin in his life which he was hiding or to which he was blind but which the eyes of God could see. That is all false, says God: this man is perfect and upright; and yet under the accusation of pious men, under the assaults of the devil to this man's anguish, God hid Himself.

Have you had one boil? You know the misery and the pain. Job was a man covered from head to foot with these things. That was only one phase of his suffering. Children gone, flocks and herds gone, camels gone, his home gone, his friends gone, and his wife turned against him saying, "Renounce God, and die." Job was left like that. And God, affirming this man's perfection and integrity, still hides Himself. "He hideth himself." What is our case compared with Job's? The Lord deals with us in the same way; He hides Himself. He must have an object which far outweighs all the dangers of the possibility of His being misunderstood and misinterpreted. His servant was given plenty of occasion to say, God is unfaithful, unloving, unrighteous; He has turned against me; and so on. But God ran the risk of it because He saw something of value which far outweighed all that. He knew that in the long run He would be justified and not condemned. "He hideth himself." Do not think, my beloved, tried, pressed brother or sister, that the fact that Satan assails and things are so difficult and hard means of necessity that you are under judgment. Even if you are standing on the ground in Christ of righteousness from God, and are not persisting in a known course of wrong over which the Lord has a controversy with you; even if you are able to say, I stand not on any ground of my own, but on the ground of His righteousness through faith, and I repudiate all known, habitual sin: even then it does not mean that God is necessarily coming out to you to show Himself always very wonderful. He may hide Himself, and those who mean well may interpret that fact the other way. It is one of the most difficult things to bear when calamity falls; people will come along and say, The Lord must have some cause for judging you, you must lie under some condemnation for Him to allow that. "He hideth himself."

God's Knowledge of our Way in Spite of His Hiding

The verses with which we began suggest a picture. Here is Job, as it were, going along a road. It looks to him like a road through a forest, and the Lord is somewhere in the vicinity and Job is looking for Him. He says, The Lord has hidden Himself somewhere in this forest, He is deliberately keeping out of my way; I sometimes seem to see an indication that He is doing something, and I immediately turn first in this direction and then in that, but I cannot find Him. He is hiding in the wood and He will not be found by me, but He is watching from His hiding place. "He knoweth the way that I take." While He is hiding, He is not disregarding; while He is hiding, He is not ignoring; while He is hiding, He is not forgetting.

God's Sovereign Working

Nay, more; He is not only hiding and looking out and knowing all about me, but He is instigating it all. "He performeth that which is appointed for me." He is not only a hidden watcher, He is a hidden actor, the prime actor, because the cause, the author, the perfecter. "He performeth that which is appointed for me: and many such things are with him." Oh, the faith of Job in the sovereignty of God through it all! "He hideth" - yes; but "He knoweth" - yes; but more, "He performeth." Let us take all the comfort these words should bring to us as individuals and as the Church as we pass through the time in which God is doing things of which we have no knowledge. He is answering a whole universe in His dealings with us, getting through to issues of tremendous account. May our faith be sufficient to believe it and to hold on to this - that "When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold."

Suffering and Glory

Reading: Hebrews 11:32-40, 2 Corinthians 11:23-33; Colossians 1:24; 2 Timothy 2:3

It is a remarkable combination which we find in those first people of God - the combination of suffering and joy. It is not easy for us to put ourselves into the atmosphere and conditions in Jerusalem in those first days, but there is no doubt about it that it was a perilous time. The crucifying of the Lord Jesus had by no means satiated the lust of His enemies. We know quite well from the story of Saul a little later that everyone who was of "THE WAY" was an object of that blood lust, and there was a mighty hostility raging in the hearts of those enemies of Christ. We know that His followers had to meet sometimes behind closed and barred doors. And yet we find that the word 'praise' abounded in their midst. "With gladness and singleness of heart, praising God" (Acts 2:46,47) is the phrase. Yes, even when they had been haled before the magistrates, threatened and made to understand very clearly what the consequences would be for them if they persisted in their course, they rejoiced, it says, "that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonour for the Name" (Acts 5:41); a great mingling of joy with suffering.

The night in which the Lord was betrayed was a night of solemnity and heaviness, and there were deep shadows in that upper room; yet there was One Who could take the cup, knowing all that the cup meant, and give thanks, and, as a last thing before they went out, suggest that they should sing a hymn. So you pass through the New Testament and you come on such wonderful passages as those we have just read. Here is Paul recounting his sufferings, most of which we know nothing about so far as a detailed record is concerned - a long list of intense sufferings; but making it clear that he gloried, rejoiced, in his sufferings. And that eleventh chapter of Hebrews, too, does not conclude with a dirge, but in triumph; and you cannot fail to feel as you read through verse after verse that here is strength, here is triumph, here is ascendancy, there is nothing mournful here.

What does all this say to us? It is all gathered into the Table of the Lord. To His disciples He said, "Are ye able to drink the cup that I am about to drink?" (Matt. 20:22,23); and that for them was the cup of passion, the cup of suffering. It was the filling up of that which was lacking in the sufferings of Christ, given to His Church (Col. 1:24); and suffering it was. They were drinking the cup even unto death.

But take up whichever you like of those men. If there was one man in all the circle who ought never to have sung or rejoiced again, never to have gone about the world with his head lifted up again, who ought to have had the most melancholy voice and look, always trying to let people know what a miserable mess he had made of things, it was Peter. But listen to Peter - "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Peter 1:3). (The word 'blessed' there is the word which means 'praised.'). "Praised be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who according to His great mercy (Peter knew what he was taking about) begat us again (Unto the most awful despair? No!) unto a lively hope" (not "a living hope"; the word is much more emphatic than that. You can be living without being lively. There are quite a lot of people who are living, but are not a bit lively) - "unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." There is something of tremendous hopefulness, and optimism in that. And it was the same with the other Apostles.

Accepting The Fellowship Of His Sufferings

Now, what is the point again: Well, first of all, we must face the fact and we must seek help from God always to bear in mind that we are going to have a path of suffering if we are in fellowship with the Lord Jesus. That is one side. Perhaps it is because we have not at the outset calculated with that that we have such a long-drawn-out period of joylessness and defeat. There has to come a point when we sit down and do some calculating and come to a definite conclusion on this matter - that, although very often we may not be able to see that our suffering is because of our relationship to Him (the sufferings are so manifold and diverse, and very often they look as though they have no relationship at all with our Christian life) at the same time, whether we can discern it or not; the fact remains that the pathway of the child of God, of the fellow of Jesus Christ, is the pathway of suffering. I say, postponement or delay in settling that matter keeps us all the time in that state of hoping and waiting for it to be different, and, because the difference does not come, getting downcast and feeling that all is wrong and that the Lord is against us and all that sort of thing, thus giving all the ground that the enemy wants for destroying our testimony. The very first thing to remember when we take this cup is that while we are taking it as the cup of salvation, while we are remembering the atonement which is in the Blood, and all the wonderful redemption which is ours because of that Blood, the cup does also speak to us of fellowship with His suffering. It is His cup, it is filling up that which is lacking - the remainder - of the afflictions of Christ for His Body's sake which is the Church. We are not able to see the values of that in ourselves - we are kept far too occupied with the cost, the suffering and the trial - but oh, some looking on are able to see a marvellous spiritual growth, a wonderful refinement of spirit, the beautifying of the life. Yes, there is something which is going up to His praise and glory as Christ is being formed through the fires of adversity and suffering. It is fellowship with Him in His sufferings, after all, if it is bringing about more Christlikeness. So our first thing is to reckon with this and get it settled.

What are you expecting, what are you waiting for, what are you concerned about, what are you pleading and praying for? If you are praying for full and final deliverance from adversity and suffering and difficulty and all that sort of thing, let me tell you your prayer will never be answered. Forms of suffering may change, but in some form or another we are going on to the end in a way of adversity. Satan is not going to become our friend while we are friends of Jesus Christ. The kingdom of Satan is not going to rally to our support while we belong to the kingdom which is opposed to his. Let us settle that. It will get us free, perhaps, from this entanglement.

Deliverance Without Deliverance

And the next thing is that there is deliverance while there is no deliverance. There is a passage of Scripture which probably has often puzzled you. It seems to be something that recoils upon itself and says that it is not true. "God is faithful, Who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation make also the way of escape, that ye may be able to endure it" (1 Cor. 10:13). What do you make of that - 'escape by enduring it'? That is not getting away from it, that is getting on top of it. Paul pleaded about that thorn in his flesh, that it might be removed; thrice he sought the Lord concerning this thing, but the Lord said, "My grace is sufficient for thee: for My power is made perfect in weakness." And Paul's reaction was - "Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me... for when I am weak, then am I strong" (2 Cor. 12:8-10). Paul was not delivered from that "messenger of Satan." That is the bald way of describing his trial. It may be taken to cover your particular trial - that difficult person with whom you have to live, or whatever else it may be. Let us come right to the point, and say, 'It is something that the devil wants to use for my undoing, for the ruination of my testimony, and the Lord has definitely and deliberately permitted that.' Paul was not delivered from that stake in the flesh, that messenger of Satan that constantly buffeted him; and yet he was delivered! "Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my weaknesses"; like that old warrior in the Old Testament, who said, "Give me this mountain" (Joshua 14:12); 'do not remove this mountain, do not get it out of the way; give it to me, give me a chance to master it, to bring it under, to gain ascendancy!'

Now, this is no easy, glib talk. It is the outcome of a good deal of personal exercise. God knows how we have cried and sought for deliverances which have not come. Forgive this personal word to back home what I have been saying. During this past week or two I have been praying very much about that thorn in the flesh, that messenger of Satan, and I did not see the Lord answering in any way at all. And during the same time I have been reading some books. I have been reading again the life of Wesley, and of Whitfield, and the story of the Scottish Covenanters; and then I found myself reading 2 Corinthians 11; and suddenly pieced the whole thing together. Oh, those terrible sufferings of John Wesley! Up and down the country, often laid prostrate with physical weakness and suffering; in every town persecuted, mocked, stoned, or dragged by the hair; what a time that man had! And his brother Charles shared it. The Scottish Covenanters - why, one is made to blush with shame in reading the awful sufferings, the martyrdoms, the tortures of those people; hunted, without food, without homes, having to live on the open hillside, in caves, anywhere. And here is Paul giving us his list. Oh, should we all the time be stipulating that our lot ought to be very much easier? And yet they triumphed. What a triumph was Wesley's! We sing, 'Oh, for a thousand tongues to sing my great Redeemer's praise.' Do you know that Wesley did not mean what we usually think he meant when he wrote those words? We think he meant, 'Oh, that I had a thousand tongues!' He and his brother had been into a town for some meetings. Only a few people came and they poured out their hearts to the Lord. Then they went out and saw a great mob in the street, coming from a sports event, and John Wesley said to his brother, 'Oh, for a thousand tongues to sing my great Redeemer's praise.' It is the same thing in effect. 'Oh, for thousands of tongues that are out there to sing my great Redeemer's praise!' Those were their sentiments. That is triumph!

The Lord's Table is a blending of joy with suffering, but I do not believe that the Lord is going to make any changes in our circumstances until we have got on top of them. Whatever change of situation and conditions may be in His will, actual deliverance will wait until we are delivered in this inward way from our spirit of stipulating that we cannot go on unless the Lord provides better conditions for us. Such a spirit is a denial of grace, that is a denial of His sufficiency. "My grace is sufficient for thee... Most gladly therefore..." No, the way out is up; the way of victory is over, not from. So before ever anything changes, we have somehow got to find the grace that will result in our being filled with joy. Sometimes, with Peter, we are "put to grief in manifold trials"; sometimes, with Paul, we are "smitten down"; but if we will give the grace of God a chance there is the old joy back again! Give it a chance! It is there, it is not quenched, it is not dead. The point is, what is the normal? Is the normal - misery, depression, melancholy? Or do these mark us only for the time being, sometimes? Is the normal - Joy, hopefulness, optimism? Some people, I am afraid, have the idea that they are going to give something away if they smile. It will not do. There must be about us, after all, something bubbling up which is not just ourselves. It is the Lord.

So we come to the Lord's Table. As we take the cup, we shall, on the one side, have that reckoning - 'I know what this means: the fellowship of His sufferings: to take my share of hardness with the apostles and the prophets; by the grace of God, I take the cup.' But there is also the other side - rejoicing to be counted worthy to suffer for His name and realizing that through His Blood there is the begetting again to a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

May we have grace to seek the Lord with this resolve, that by His grace we are not going to capitulate but to triumph, even in the time of trial and suffering, and find our deliverance in that way. "God... will make... the way of escape, that ye may be able to endure it."

The Things Which Befall Us

"For we would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning our affliction which befell us in Asia, that we were weighed down exceedingly, beyond our power, insomuch that we despaired even of life: yea, we ourselves have had the sentence of death within ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God who raiseth the dead: who delivered us out of so great a death, and will deliver: on whom we have set our hope that he will also still deliver us" (2 Cor. 1:8-10).

The Fact of the Experience of Suffering

The first thing that comes to us from this little bit of Paul's autobiography is the fact of this experience. He does not seem to regard it as some extraordinary thing. He takes it, it would seem, almost as the normal course of the life of a servant of God. He simply speaks of it as something which befell him in Asia - almost like a normal happening. Great and evidently terrible as it was, it is taken as something which just befell, happened, occurred; and this would say to us that the tremendous experiences of adversity and suffering and trial through which the Lord's people go must not be regarded as spiritual catastrophes, as if everything has gone wrong, our universe is going to pieces, Satan is simply carrying everything away and the Lord is left stranded and defeated. That is a strong way of putting it, but it is said merely to draw attention to this fact, that in the course of the life of a very true and faithful and devoted servant who stands for the Lord's highest and fullest interests, things like this do befall him. The word here is better expressed by our word "converge upon." You and I, in the time of difficulty and adversity, deep suffering and trial, are so often tempted to think that something very wrong has taken place, and there is a big question as to whether it ought to be, seeing we belong to the Lord. We are really in heart devoted to the Lord, we mean business with Him - and now look at this! Well, it befell and it befalls. We must get to the point of a conclusion about this, that there is no charm resting upon the life of the most devoted child of God, there is no special providence to say that no adversity shall overtake, shall befall. It just does happen, it is a fact, and that is where we begin.

It happened to Paul, it befell him, it "converged upon" him, but he does not raise any questions at all about God or about spiritual issues in such a way as to lead him into difficulties with the Lord. Are you one whose way has been, and perhaps still is, one of great adversity, trial, suffering, perplexity? It has happened to you, it has overtaken, it has befallen you. Well, Paul is not alone in this, that it is a part of the course of things. It has a meaning; but my point at the moment is that these things are facts. You cannot get away from them. You must settle down to it that they are facts to be recognised and accepted as making up the lot of a true servant and child of God. That is where we begin.

Exercise in Regard to the Experience

But then there is another thing here. Of course, we do not know what was the exact nature of this particular trial. Some think it refers to Paul's time in Ephesus and that he was nigh unto being flung to wild beasts in the arena. He did say on another occasion that he fought with beasts at Ephesus, speaking metaphorically (1 Cor. 15:32). It may have been that, but it is more probable that it was some terrible illness which overtook him, some sickness which brought him to an end of all hope. Whatever it was, he says: "We despaired even of life; yea, we ourselves have had the sentence of death within ourselves." You wonder why he repeats that word "ourselves." That is the difficulty of translation. If it were put into literal English, it would be something like this. "We doomed ourselves"; that is, We came to a verdict ourselves about the situation. As to ourselves, our verdict was - This is the end, death! But what we want particularly to note is the exercise that the affliction produced in Paul. Evidently he had been looking into this thing, scrutinising it and saying, What is the Divine meaning in my situation? What does the Lord mean by this? Although it looks like a hap, it has befallen me, yet the Lord has something bound up with it. There was enquiry and exercise about the situation, and in his prayerful investigation, he comes to realise what the Lord's mind is, and he sums it all up in the little word - THAT. "We have had the sentence of death within ourselves, THAT we should not trust in ourselves, but in God..." All this happened in order that... There was a Divine object, a Divine meaning, something quite precise. In order that...

Well then, the second step is that we must have inward exercise in order to find out what the Lord means by the things which befall us, because nothing happens to a true child of God without the Lord having a meaning in it. There must be exercise until we come to the point where we are able to say, Oh, I see - that is the Lord's object and aim and purpose. It is in order that... What a mighty "that"! It is the issue of a prayerful enquiry as to why we are permitted to go through some of the dark ways of trial and suffering in which we despair. We come to an end, and we pass sentence upon ourselves. We say, "Well, I am finished, I am at an end: so far as I am concerned, it is death, there is no hope." We pass the sentence. But we believe that God has something in it and we have got to get that out of it; the result must be a concrete "that..."

The Explanation - "God Who Raiseth the Dead"

That leads right up to the final thing, "...that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God who raiseth the dead." It is a passing right over from one ground to another, from the ground of ourselves to the ground of God. In ourselves there is death, an end; but with God there is a beginning - "who raiseth the dead." It is the whole history of the Church gathered up into a little clause of four words. It is the whole object of the Church in this dispensation, wrung out of the soul exercise of this man Paul. What is the history of the Church? What is the Divine object in the Church in this dispensation? It is that in every part God shall have opportunity of showing that by Jesus Christ He has conquered death and triumphed over all the limitations and all the finalities of what is natural, and has made possible the limitless fullness of resurrection life. Dear friends, it is true that at the last the Church will be seen to have been God's instrument in establishing in this universe the fact that through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, death, that age-long enemy of God and man, has been absolutely destroyed. That truth is going to be worked out through the Church. "Now unto principalities and the powers in the heavenlies might be made known through the church the manifold wisdom of God" (Eph. 3:10). In all that is this central thing - death. What do we mean by death? We are not talking simply of physical death, but of a great spiritual thing. Death is the thing which pronounces an end. Whenever you and I say, This is the end, we are finished! - we have succumbed to death. That is the verdict of death, for death always says that. The Church should never believe in ends - that is to capitulate to death. Although a thousand times in ourselves we might feel the end has come, in the very experience which brings us to that place God has invested a new realisation that in Him that finality is cancelled out. We should never expect an end until God says, That is the end! He is the God of hope, "who... begat us again unto a living hope, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, unto an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away" (1 Pet. 1:3-4). If we leave out the negative and read only the positive statement in the passage which we are considering we read: "That we should... trust in God who raiseth the dead."

Are you expecting ends, limitation, feeling that for you there is no hope, no future? Do not believe it! Get down to this and see it as the great eternal fact - God is trying to bring us to the place where we stop expecting what the Devil is constantly offering through circumstances - death, an end, limitation. God is all the time thinking of increase, enlargement. That is the history of the Church. Again and again, generally and in individual cases, it has been said, This is the end: it is all over: the Lord has done with us; and yet - oh, how slow we are to learn it, to get it fixed, established! - it does not prove to be the end, does it? We find that there is still a lease of life, still something more in the Lord's intention; and even when the point is really reached of an end here on earth, we do not believe that is the end of life and work - it is emancipation unto fullness.

These are very simple things, but all hang upon this little word "that." God allows very deep and hard and painful things - things which bring us in ourselves really to the point of giving up, where we pass the verdict of death upon ourselves. He allows them with this object, that - however much we may have known and proved the truth in our earlier experience - He may bring us yet a stage further into the power and good of it, that God raiseth the dead. If He does that, then there is hope for anybody and for anything. The Lord give us more of this disciplined, instructed, enlightened faith. We cannot come to it by being told it, by hearing it a thousand times, but only by experience. Some of you know what we are talking about. You know despair, you know hopeless situations, you know what it is to come to the place where you are finished and throw up your hands. If you do not, you may know it yet. The Lord is after getting us, as many as He can, through to that place where, in and through His Church, death is swallowed up in victory, death is no more. That is practically the last word of the Bible. Nearly the first words of the Bible are about the entrance of death; the tree of life was cut off. At the end of the Bible we read "Death shall be no more" (Rev. 21:4). That has got to be wrought out in an instrument, and we know that that process is very practical. The Lord enable us to learn that lesson and gain the vantage ground of the triumph of Christ's resurrection.

From "This Ministry" Messages given at Honor Oak - Volume 3.

Threshing, and the Lord's Balance

"Give ye ear, and hear my voice; hearken, and hear my speech. Doth the plowman plow continually to sow? doth he continually open and break the clods of his ground? When he hath made plain the face thereof, doth he not cast abroad the fitches, and scatter the cummin, and put in the wheat in rows and the barley in the appointed place and the spelt in the border thereof? For his God doth instruct him aright, and doth teach him. For the fitches are not threshed with a sharp threshing instrument, neither is a cart wheel turned about upon the cummin; but the fitches are beaten out with a staff, and the cummin with a rod. Bread corn is ground; for he will not ever be threshing it: and though the wheel of his cart and his horses scatter it, he doth not grind it. This also cometh forth from the Lord of hosts, which is wonderful in counsel, and excellent in wisdom" (Isaiah 28:23-39).

"I will proceed to do a marvellous work among this people, even a marvellous work and a wonder: and the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid... They also that err in spirit shall come to understanding, and they that murmur shall learn doctrine" (Isaiah 29:14,24).

"And when they had preached the gospel to that city, and had made many disciples, they returned to Lystra, and to Iconium, and to Antioch, confirming the souls of the disciples, exhorting them to continue in the faith, and that through many tribulations we must enter into the kingdom of God" (Acts 14:21,22).

This parable that we have read from Isaiah is related particularly to spiritual understanding, in connection with the meaning of the ways of the Lord with His people. The context of the passage is concerned with the faithful company of the Lord's children, who, in the midst of many unfaithful ones, were suffering for their faithfulness. That is always a difficult thing to understand; it is very testing of faith. It was because of this perplexity, in the presence of such suffering, that the Lord gave His servant the word of this parable.

The general meaning of the parable is clear enough. Men apply to natural processes their inborn or acquired wisdom - wisdom born either of instinct or of experience - as to what should be done with this and that, when it should be done, and how it should be done; but they often fail to recognise two things. Firstly, that the wisdom by which they are so acting has come from God - 'This also cometh from the Lord'; and secondly, that, behind the very things that they are doing, expressing the wisdom or knowledge that they have acquired, whether by learning, by experience, or by training - behind what they are doing, because it is God-given wisdom, there is a spiritual meaning. They do many things, and they do not see the spiritual meaning of the things they are doing. I have often felt, and sometimes said, that I wish that all the experts in the different realms of knowledge and science - medicine, biology, physics, and so on - could see through their expert knowledge to the spiritual interpretation. Isaiah is saying here, that behind things that are done in nature - in this case, the operations of agriculture - there are spiritual meanings.

The Meaning of the Plough

At the beginning: "Doth the plowman plow continually to sow?" Well, the answer of common sense is, No, of course he does not! He would be a madman if he ploughed, and then went on ploughing all through the year; if he did nothing else but plough, or harrow his ploughed ground. Does he do that continually? No; it is a job that has got to be done - the breaking up, the turning over, the exposing to the elements, the harrowing - it is an essential operation, but it is not continued indefinitely. It is something to be done, but it has its time and place, its beginning and its end.

The Lord is speaking to His faithful people who are feeling that they are under the plough; furrows are being cut deep into their souls; they are being turned up and turned over, laid bare, exposed, broken, harrowed. The Lord says, even to faithful people: 'This is necessary we are looking ahead to a harvest, to real values; this is an essential aspect of the work. But... take this comfort: this is not going on for ever.' Under the hand of the Lord it is periodic, and it is timed. It comes into the individual life of the child of God; it comes into the life of a company of the Lord's people; and, as history shows, it comes into the experience of the whole Church. From time to time, down through the centuries, it seems that the action of God once more is cutting deep, overturning, breaking up. It is the hard way toward some fresh harvest. But the word of the Lord is: 'My dear people, remember this: I am the Man with His hand on the plough: I have this whole thing in hand, it will not go on for ever.' It is something necessary - everybody will agree with it in nature; we agree with it, surely, in grace - but it has its time limit; and when that phase is accomplished, the Lord terminates it, and says: Now, that is done and we can get on with the next thing.

The Sowing of the Seeds

Now the parable goes on with the seed. You notice that four kinds of seed are mentioned here. And it is a very interesting thing, though it is difficult to detect this in our translation, that the verbs used are chosen definitely and specifically in relation to the kind of seed. Fitches, the 'love-in-a-mist' or 'devil-in-a-bush' of our gardens, the smallest of them all, are sown broadcast. The 'cummin' is also very small, but a little larger. The fitches are said to be just 'scattered'; but for the cummin another verb is used: it is 'distributed', sown more carefully than the other. And when you come to the barley and the wheat, it is 'dropped' into holes; it is given more particular care as to where it is put. It is not just broadcast; it is planted.

Now, probably you can see something through that. The Lord's people vary. I do not think that the parable is intended to discriminate in values. Everything has its own value, and everything has its own worth, its own significance. It is all a part of the great harvest. But supposing we look at the fitches and the cummin, not as something of less importance, but perhaps as those who are smaller, shall we say, in the immature or child stage. I think they comprise by far the larger number of the Lord's people, scattered abroad. They are the Lord's people in general, scattered broadcast over the earth - "the field is the world" (Matt. 13:38) - and because they have not come yet to a point of greater maturity, or to the phase where something more is to be realised, the Lord deals with them in His own gracious way.

The Harvesting of the Seeds

Notice what follows: how the fitches and the cummin are dealt with in one way; the wheat and the barley are dealt with in quite another way. To the little fitches and cummin no cart wheel is taken; no threshing machine is employed; it only just needs the gentle tap of the rod. So easily is the work done with these that the harder dealings of the threshing-floor are not called for. They are but children. Now, is this not true of the Christian life? Sometimes you wonder why some people get away so easily; so many Christians get off with it so lightly; the Lord does not seem to deal with them as He deals with others - perhaps with you. Well, all right, their time has not come. Of course all parables break down, you cannot change fitches into wheat; this is where all parables have their limitations. Within a certain general realm, where there is the intrinsic value to the Lord, the Lord's dealings, for the time being, are apparently very light and easy-going; it is just the staff, it is just the rod, it is just a pull-up here and there, without anything very drastic. The Lord deals with people according to their measure. At a certain stage their measure is this, and the Lord deals with them accordingly.

A Question of Measure

But, immediately the question of greater measure, and greater value, comes into view (sometimes that comes into view very early; sometimes it seems to take much longer) - as soon as greater values, like wheat and barley, come into view, the handling of the Lord is very much more drastic. "Bread corn is ground". If it is a question of the value of 'bread', then those who are going to be 'bread', that is, food, for the people of God, are going to have very drastic handling by the Lord. If you feel the Lord is handling you in that way, bruising, hammering, using the flail on you, I say it to you emphatically, that is a hopeful sign. The Lord is meaning something more of value in your life for others. It is 'bread' corn that is bruised.

Many young Christians do not understand when we speak to the Lord's more mature people about the difficulties and the sufferings of the Christian life. They think that we are a bit morbid, and making the Christian life something complicated and hard. To any such young Christians I would say: If you are the Lord's, the Lord will deal with you appropriately to where you are spiritually. He will not be too hard on you; He may be very gentle with you, He may just correct you with the rod, quite lightly, because so far you are just in that category of the 'fitches' and the 'cummin'. But remember, it may not always be like that. The Lord who wants the most, and whose heart is set upon 'bread' for His people - that over the whole earth His people should receive strength, sustenance, building up, through your ministry, individually or collectively - if it is going to be like that, to satisfy that desire of His heart, you are going to have a difficult time; you are going through the 'threshing-floor'; you are going to know the 'bruising'.

If the Lord is not able to do that, and He has to keep us on the elementary, easy-going basis, where we are all having a happy time, and the Lord very rarely does anything corrective and stringent, it is not a compliment to our spiritual life. It may just mean that He is not able to do all that He would do if He could in this great need of bread. So, if He really does turn His cart-wheel upon us , if the hoofs of the horses stamp upon us, if the flail gets to work, it is because He is looking upon us as bread-corn, something by which He is going to serve Himself in the interest of others.

An Explanation of Discipline

That, very briefly and imperfectly, is Isaiah's parable. Now, if you look, you will see how that worked out with this company. The suffering remnant - suffering not because of their own unfaithfulness, but because of the unfaithfulness of the nation as a whole, suffering under the Lord's hand, being dealt with, disciplined - it was that remnant which was the Lord's key to the whole later situation. It has always been like that. The key to the situation of all the Lord's people is a remnant, a company, who suffer together with Him, and who allow themselves to go through the discipline that is necessary.

What is the Lord saying, perhaps to you, in the parable? Perhaps you have had a harder time than many people, and you do not understand it. You have perhaps said: Is this necessary to the Christian life? Look at all these other Christians; they do not have my difficulties and troubles. Well, the parable explains it. The whole point of this parable is spiritual understanding. The Lord deals with His people in different ways. Yes, these others are His people, but, but... so far they just cannot serve Him in the way in which He wants to be served, and so He is dealing with them, quite gently, in their category, in their measure; but you may be chosen to something more.

The idea has been very common in Christianity, that it is a great and wonderful thing to be 'mightily used of the Lord'! Oh, to be a great evangelist! Oh, to be a great teacher! Oh, to be a great Christian worker! Let me tell you, that is an entirely false conception. The truth is that those who serve the Lord most truly go through the deepest suffering. The balances are truly kept by God - extra suffering, extra usefulness; little suffering, little usefulness. That is how God keeps His balances, and that is what is here, implicit in this story. You may be having a more or less easy time. I do not want to dishearten you by saying it may not always be so, but if you really want to be of greater use to the Lord, remember it may be by a deeper discipline of the Lord. And if you are having a particularly difficult time, most likely it is because the Lord is going to meet need more fully through you.

First published in "A Witness and A Testimony" magazine, Jul-Aug 1961, Vol 39-4

Timothy and Demas

The Verdict of the Long-run

Therefore do not be ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me His prisoner, but share with me in the sufferings for the gospel according to the power of God. (2 Tim. 1:8).

Be diligent to come to me quickly for Demas has forsaken me, having loved this present world, and has departed for Thessalonica... (2 Tim. 4:9,10).

The position in which both Timothy and Demas - amongst others - found themselves at the time when Paul wrote this letter was the acid test. Various other forms of testing might leave the metal still undetermined as to its through-and-through genuineness, but when at length subjected to the acid the verdict will be final.

Paul and his position was the acid test. It was not alone the fact that he was Rome's prisoner, and that the world was against, so that his life was to be forfeited for his faith. There were more factors than that. There was the fact that in every city and town the whole Jewish fraternity was against him. Then, not only was the world and the religious system which had - in a sense - produced Christ and Christianity - against him, but he was suspect amongst many Christians themselves. Even Peter found some things in his letters "hard to be understood".

Paul's position of being outside of the world, outside of the so widely established religious order, and so utterly spiritual and heavenly in object and method, meant well-nigh universal misunderstanding, suspicion, and ostracism. Association with him left no hope of popularity, wide acceptance, or even generous appreciation. On the contrary; the shadow resting upon Paul would rest upon all his associates, and their chances of influence would be prejudiced before ever they gave their message.

The alternatives were quite clear. If the world was at all in their hearts, the utterness of Paul's way left them no honest course but to leave all that for which he stood and go where that heart-dividing element drew them - back to the world. Demas did this. Paul was too much for anyone who had a secret love for the world.

Another course was open to such of whom it could not be said bluntly that they "loved this present evil age." An open association with Paul jeopardised their existing opportunities in the Lord's work, or introduced an element of risk into the prospects of wide ministry, they could secretly and inwardly be in sympathy with Paul, but keep quiet about it, and never let their sympathies be known. They might even go as far as to let Paul know that they had a very real agreement with him, but at the same time intimate that their very usefulness to the Lord (?) would become curtailed if they openly associated themselves with him and his position. Thus they would be involved in being one thing to Paul, and another to his enemies. The only remaining course would be to be quite sure about Paul's position, decide whether God was with him, and risk everything on a full unashamed fellowship with him, believing that in the long run God would vindicate, and in the meantime a man with a mandate from heaven cannot have his ministry stopped by all the forces of earth and hell; God will sovereignly see to that, and if every door which man can close is closed, God has others which no man can shut.

This last course Timothy took. What is the verdict of the long-run?

Tragic as is the answer concerning Demas, perhaps his was the more honest way than that of those who adopt the middle course.

These three courses are presented to many of the Lord's people today, and the question for many - especially those in the Lord's service - is, will they compromise in the matter of their position and relationships in order to preserve their own influence, or will they pay the price, lose everything, and have such a Divine support as will see at length something accomplished which is in spite of everything having conspired to make it impossible?

First published in "A Witness and A Testimony" magazine, May-Jun 1934 Vol. 12-3

The Transcendent Value of the Knowledge of Christ

“I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3:8).

“For to me to live is Christ...” (Philippians 1:21).

“The excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus...” Clearly that means that the knowledge of Christ in the case of the Apostle Paul far transcended all other knowledge. For him it was a knowledge that outstripped in its value all other knowledge which he had had or conceived himself capable of having. He sets the knowledge of Christ Jesus his Lord over against every other thing, and just as the candle light pales when the sun shines, so for him the most powerful light and glory which man is capable of experiencing faded in the presence of Christ Jesus his Lord.

Such words were not just words in the case of Paul. This was not some fine flourish of language. Coming from such a man as he was, they carried tremendous weight, not because of who he was, but because of the life out of which the words sprang.

Really to get something of the power and the strength — the depth, the fulness, the wonder of this phrase, of this language — it is necessary to turn to contemplate this man’s life and to see the background of his words. Words are of value in proportion to the reality of a man’s history — the history that lies behind his words and relates to his words. We may say things, but those things may be worthless, because there is nothing behind them in ourselves. Or we may say things, and those things may carry with them tremendous weight of meaning and value because of what lies behind them in the person of the speaker. We must remember, then, that when Paul said these words, he was practically at the end of his earthly course... and that a whole life crammed with spiritual history lay behind every syllable. But what a life! Everything culminated and was gathered up into these final utterances.

Paul’s Sufferings

Look at him personally. Here is a man, worn and feeble, upon whom there has broken... and upon whom there has rolled waves — mighty and continuous waves of every kind of suffering that you could think of if you sat down to try to catalogue the sufferings of man: a victim of gross perjury, the prey of many contending enmities; a broken and enfeebled physical frame; in circumstances of deep affliction; vexed with hundreds, possibly thousands, of opponents; having very few real friends now remaining.

He has placed on record some of his experiences of adversity. They run like this: In afflictions, in necessities, in tumults, in labours, in watchings, in fastings; chastened, sorrowful, poor, having nothing; in prisons, in stripes above measure, in deaths often; “five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day have I been in the deep; in journeyings often, in perils of rivers, in perils of robbers, in perils from my countrymen, in perils from the Gentiles, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren; in labour and travail, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness. Besides those things which are without, there is that which presses upon me daily — anxiety for all the churches” (2 Corinthians 11:24-28).

There are many other touches as to the experiences of this man of God. He lightly refers to them and passes on: “I who am rude of speech” (that is what some had said about him): “I who am despicable in presence” (again, what some had said about him). The yes and the no man — that is, the man who vacillates, who at one time says yes and at another time no. Sending requests to a beloved yokefellow, he says: “Bring the cloak which I left at Troas” ...clearly showing that he was knowing coldness.

If you look among his writings and in his history, you accumulate a tremendous amount that points to his history of suffering, of trial, of adversity. In the end he says: “All they in Asia have turned away from me”; “Only Luke is with me.”

Then we see what he had given up for that; see that for which this is the exchange from the human side. He tells us what his natural advantages were — how that he had a reason and occasion to boast more than any other.

Paul’s Sacrifices

“If any man thinks to have confidence in the flesh, I yet more (more than any man): circumcised the eighth day (i.e., he was born a Jew; he was not a proselyte), of the stock of Israel (not a graft, but the original stock), of the tribe of Benjamin (After the name of the tribe, the next most distinguished name is that of Saul, the first king, who was of the tribe of Benjamin), a Hebrew of Hebrews: as touching the law, a Pharisee; as touching zeal, persecuting the Church” (Philippians 3:4-6).

All of that represented position, advantage, influence, reputation — something in this world that provides a basis of honour and success, a name and a place among men. He had exchanged that for all this of which we have spoken... and much more.

How does Paul feel about it? See the extremes in this man’s life: the extreme, on the one hand, of honour and earthly glory — that in which men pride themselves, that which from this world’s standpoint was to his advantage. It went a long way. On the other hand is the opposite extreme. Think of it! A man like that, standing out amongst men in a place of conspicuous honour and privilege and influence, yet beaten with rods, thrashed with a whip, flung into prison, stoned, and all the rest. How does he feel about the exchange? What is his attitude to the whole thing? At the end of a life like that, how does he sum it up?

“Rejoice in the Lord” ...rejoice... rejoice! You say: There is something behind these words! These are no empty words. Put a history, an experience, like that behind an utterance, and the utterance counts for something. It is amazing.

If we stayed long enough to meditate upon it, it is calculated to bring us down to our knees in shame. There is no complaining, no repining here; no saying: “I have given up everything (and it is a big “everything”) for Christ, and look what He has brought me to — see what I have got! No! There is not a sound or a sign of complaining about it all.

If he says, “Sorrowing” (and he does), he immediately couples with it: “Yet always rejoicing.” If he says, “As having nothing,” immediately he says, “Possessing all things.” If he says “As poor,” he instantly says, “And yet making many rich.” His attitude toward the whole thing is not one of complaint, but rather the opposite — glorying, rejoicing, and bidding others rejoice. Alone, forsaken, enemies all around, his lifework being torn to pieces by those enemies, universally suspected, all friends leaving him, alone in prison — rejoicing, glorying, exulting.

The Excellence of Knowing Christ Jesus

This goes a long way beyond us. But what is the explanation? It is the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus. The knowledge of Christ — to know Christ as He may be known; to know Christ as He is open to be known; to know Christ as He desires to make Himself known; that is the explanation... and Paul had come into that in large measure.

He is saying this, in other words: It is possible to know Christ in such a way that, although to begin with you may lose everything in this world that is precious in the eyes of men, you have something infinitely more; and to go on with, it is possible so to know Christ that no matter how many may be the forms of suffering, how deep may be the suffering, how inexplicable may be some experiences, how continuous — right on to the end — the adversity may be, yet that knowledge of Christ is something which keeps you above and well above... so that you are not submerged. Although these mighty seas of sorrow and suffering and adversity may throw their weight against you, they break; they do not break you... they break on you. It is possible to know Christ like that. That is what he is saying, if we understand him aright.

Most of us will have to confess that too often the problem has shaken us; the suffering has brought clouds of questionings and doubts into our hearts; we have not stood up to it like this. But our object is not just to see Paul doing this thing, neither is it to measure ourselves to a disadvantage at the side of Paul; but it is to see that Paul’s Christ is our Christ, and what was possible to Paul is possible to us... that Christ is the same yesterday, and today, and forever; He is a Christ who is knowable in exactly the same way that Paul knew Him.

Christ as the Dynamic of Life

What is the way to this knowledge? On the one hand, there is our side, and I think the answer is: “For me to live is Christ.” How will you know Christ in fulness? How will you know Him as He can be known: Only on this basis, that for you to live is Christ. What does that mean?

Paul went into Arabia for three years after he met Christ on the way to Damascus, and during those three years he had ample time in solitude to face the implications of his new relationship. For him it became perfectly clear in the course of three solitary years that it was going to cost him everything. All these issues were faced out then. For him it became simply and ultimately a matter of life and death. It meant this: Everything I have on this earth — in this world — has got to be held for the Lord, for Christ; and if, in the course of my relationship to Him, all or any of these things have got to go, then I settle that now. If it means suffering, persecution, and death itself, I come there now — I accept it all — so that for me to live will not be home, family, friends, reputation, acceptance, influence; but if it means none of these things at all — rather, the loss of all things — then the very motive of my being in this world will be none of these things, but only Christ... Christ, the dynamic of life!

In other words Paul would say: “For me to be on this earth simply means Christ! I will accept with gratitude what He may give! If He gives something or allows me to retain something here, I will be grateful for it; but if all has to go, then it does not make any difference. Christ — and only Christ — is the object, the dynamic, the motive of my being on this earth!”

When we have settled things like that — when it is really brought to that conclusiveness of issue — that for us to live is Christ, then the Lord has a very open way to become everything to us. Is it not true in our case that too often our relationship to the Lord, our Christian life — our being Christians and being brought into difficulty, resulting in suffering has led us to stand still or draw back for a minute and say: “Ah, well, I did not expect that it would mean this! I do not know that I am prepared for that!” Something like that has very often happened with us, has it not? Suffering the loss of all things is easy language, but really only a man who has put everything once and for all into the balances can know Christ in fulness — utter fulness — and say: “I suffer the loss of all things for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ!”

It just means this: the utterness of Christ to us requires our utterness for Him. If we are holding anything instead of Christ — apart from Christ, contrary to Christ — we are limiting our own knowledge of Christ.

That is one side — our side: “For me to live is Christ.” We have failed — we have broken down in this matter. And yet our hearts are bent and set upon one thing (I trust they are)... that when we have passed this way, which we pass only once, the eternal verdict will be that our having lived was Christ. It is a solemn thing to bring into view: What is going to be the effect of my having passed this way? Unto what have I lived? What will the end of my life represent as the result of my years? What will eternity show — and what will time show — as to the value of my having gone this way?

When we are utterly for the Lord like that, it gives the Lord the opportunity of the other side — the divine side: “The eyes of your understanding being enlightened... to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge... that God may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him.”

I am sure that if the human side is right and there is utterness for the Lord... the divine side will be all right. But between the two there comes a test — there comes a point where the whole issue of life is focused upon one full-orbed decision: Am I going to be in this world with any interests of my own whatever, or is it going to be, no matter what it costs and what the way may be, just Christ? That is very often headed up in a practical test — not a mental test — and not whether the Lord asks us to say a thing... but to do it. Everything as to our knowledge of Christ in fulness hangs upon an act — sometimes one act that commits us.

We may recognise the implications: ostracism, persecution, defaming, misrepresentation, suspicion, loss of influence, loss of reputation, loss of place — launched out in a way in which comparatively few will go with us and in which we shall be misunderstood. That may be the way of the challenge of the Lord... and of His highest interests. The question is: Are we going to stand back and say, “No, I cannot go that way”? Or is it going to be: “For me to live is Christ”? If so... and we put that into the required act... we shall know the excellency of Christ and have the most excellent knowledge of Christ — Christ excelling. May it be so with all of us.

First published in 1935

Why the Strange Ways of God?

"But arise, and stand upon thy feet: for to this end have I appeared unto thee, to appoint thee a minister and a witness both of the things wherein thou hast seen me, and of the things wherein I will appear unto thee" (Acts 26:16).

"But the Lord said unto him, Go thy way: for he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles and kings, and the children of Israel: for I will show him how many things he must suffer for my name's sake." "...if so be I press on, if so be that I may lay hold on that for which also I was laid hold on by Christ Jesus" (Phil. 3:12).

It is not my intention to speak at length on these passages, but to take out of them some things that are implied or embodied in them as principles. They resolve themselves into a matter of cause and effect. "For to this end have I appeared unto thee..." "I will show him how many things he must suffer for my name's sake" (Acts 9:15-16). "...that I may lay hold on that for which also I was laid hold on by Christ Jesus." "...that for which...": "...to this end..."

Sovereign Purpose Governs Our Salvation

The first aspect of that is clearly one of sovereign purpose. Purpose is the positive and governing aspect of salvation. It is that unto which we are saved. Of course, it would not be wholly right to say that that from which we are saved is the negative aspect of salvation, but it is the negative aspect compared with this other. It is not the 'from' but the 'unto' or the 'for' which is really the positive thing in salvation. Stagnation had no place even in the unfallen creation. God did not just make everything and put man in charge and set fixed bounds to the possibilities of man and creation. The potentialities were immense; and when Adam failed, he lost not only what was, but also what could have been. It is said that Adam was "a figure of him that was to come". (Rom. 5:14). Figures are always less than that which they represent. Adam was intended for something more than he was. Christ is that something more - infinitely more - and when Christ redeemed, He not only redeemed what was before Adam sinned, but also all that Adam never possessed or inherited but which was intended for him. Purpose governed creation, and we know, as a part of the very gospel itself, that the purpose of God was missed by Adam, and is missed by the Adam race. Moreover, the whole purpose of God is never possessed and entered into in experience the moment we are born again.

I said that stagnation is no feature of God's creation even when it is unfallen; but for any to be born again, and thus to begin to know the good of redemption, and then to fail to recognize that they are saved not only from something, but unto something immense, means that stagnation sets in and they are always dating everything by the past; whereas those who have apprehended the fact of purpose are always occupied with the future, with something beyond.

Sovereign purpose, we have said, is the positive and the governing factor of salvation. You have heard that many times, but I do want to emphasize it again. Perhaps you have not grasped it. There are still many Christians who are just glad they are Christians: they know Christ as their Saviour and they are seeking day by day to live as Christians: but they are not conscious of any great, powerful, dominating motive of sovereign purpose in their salvation. They are not drawn on by an enlarging vision and apprehension of that sovereign purpose. Those little statements which we noted earlier, such as "...that for which I was apprehended...", "...to this end have I appeared unto thee", mean little or nothing to them. But to us, as to Paul, the Lord would say, 'Not just to save you, not just to deliver you from perdition, not just for your escape from judgment have I appeared unto you, but I have a great revelation to give you of that unto which I have saved you'. That is the effect of His words to Paul, and they are true for us also, as Paul makes clear in his letters. You need to be sure that you are really gripped in your innermost being by such a consciousness, by this sense of being apprehended by and for sovereign purpose, so that it is dominating your life - something which eliminates the element of time, so that you are not limited by the idea of just living as good a Christian life as you can until you die. This outbounds our life here, and we know it well.

That is all I want to say about the first thing. But I want to be sure that you are really in the grip and control of this that the early Christians felt so much and which the Apostles (especially Paul) took such pains to bring home to the Church. Sovereign purpose governs God's activities in the life of every child of His, and that sense and fact of purpose, as related to our salvation, is after all the main part of our salvation, the positive aspect.

God's Ways Determined by His Purpose

Then, of course, there follow quite naturally the sovereign ways of God with us in relation to His sovereign purpose. The only thing I will say now about that is this, that God's ways with us will be, and must be, consistent with His sovereign purpose. Here is where we need to be really intelligent and alive. We must look to see how our ways correspond to God's purpose under His sovereign control. It is a part of our education, and of our heart gratification when we are able to discern it, to observe how our experience and our history tally with God's object and with the principles which govern His purpose. From time to time it will be well for us if we just stand still and say, 'Now, this is what is revealed as God's purpose, and we are called according to His purpose. Does my spiritual experience and history give me heart-assurance that God is taking the only way by which that purpose can be fulfilled?'

What do we mean by that? Let us cite a point or two that might illustrate it. Here we open up something very vast, and we can only just stand and look at it from the outside.

The Purpose - The Expression of a Testimony

(a) Life in the Midst of Death

"The testimony of Jesus" is a phrase that sums up a very great deal in the book of the Revelation. Indeed, it sums up the whole Bible. Now supposing, for argument's sake, that the object of the Church's calling is a testimony to Divine life. (It is no supposition, though, but a reality. "In him was life" (John 1:4): "I came that they may have life" (John 10:10): that is the testimony of Jesus.) Supposing then the testimony of Jesus is the testimony of Divine life: what is necessary in order that our experience and history should tally with Divine purpose? It is that we should have a setting in which we are assailed continually by death. Life becomes a very real thing when death is all around and very active. So, if the purpose is the manifestation of Divine life, then those who are called according to that purpose will have to have a history of conflict with death. That is simple and obvious. If, therefore, you and I have such a history and such an experience, are we to stand back and say, 'Oh, this is all wrong! Would that we could get out of this!'? We should rather say, 'This is in accordance with the object in view, there is a consistency about God's ways with us.'

The mystery of life is one of the supreme features, if not the supreme feature, of the whole record in Scripture. I am not attempting to deal with it exhaustively here, but only to bring out the point that immediately concerns us. What is the mystery of Christ? Many men besides Jesus Christ were brought up in Nazareth. Stand them all in a row. Can you discriminate between them other than by purely natural features? No. And yet there is a difference between Jesus and the rest. What is the difference? While outwardly He looks like the rest, there is a mystery about Him, there is something there, He is not the same. People tried to deal with Him as they dealt with other men, but they found they were dealing with someone unique, in whom there was something different. "The mystery of Christ" (Eph. 3:4), who Christ really was!

The mystery of life. "Called according to his purpose." Supposing then that the Church is to be a manifestation of the life, a testimony to Divine life, then the Church will be set all through its history in scenes of death, with the forces of death raging against it.

(b) Light in the Midst of Darkness

The same is true of light. "I am the light of the world" (John 8:12). But there was no glow about Him, no halo round His head, nothing outward that said to men, 'This is the light of the world'. But vital union with Him by the Spirit later meant that those in union had a wonderful illumination in their own spirits. In that way, not physically, they became luminaries for those who were seeking the light. There was a mystery still about it. No one could discern it except in a spiritual way. Supposing then the calling is this - to manifest the light. Then we shall be placed in darkness again and again for the testimony's sake.

"He is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles and kings, and the children of Israel: for I will show him how many things he must suffer for my name's sake". He must suffer in order that the Name may come out in all its glory. The cause of all is to be found in the calling and election, and the effect of the calling is to be seen in suffering, a setting that brings out the reality of this calling. "...to this end..." Have you yourself a sense of this? Then check up as you go along and see if the ways of the Lord with you are not after all perfectly consistent with the thing that He is after.

(c) Heavenliness in the World

You say that a principle of the Church's life is heavenliness, other-worldliness, detachment from this world spiritually. Very well, the Church and the individuals in it will often find themselves in a position where, if heaven does not intervene for them, everything here is at an end, and you will not have this world on your side with its favour and applause. Will you begin to grumble and say you are having a hard time? The truth is, your experience is consistent with the principles of your calling.

It may be helpful to make a suggestion. When you feel you must give up because the way is too hard and too difficult, or you feel tempted to think that everything is wrong and ought not to be like this, just ask the question - 'After all, does not this way show God's perfect consistency with His Divine principles and with the object in view unto which He has chosen us?' And so often we have to say, 'After all, the consistency is patent; He could not do it in any other way; this is the only way.'

First published in "A Witness and A Testimony" magazine, Jan-Feb 1952, Vol 30-1