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"He That is Spiritual"

by T. Austin-Sparks

First published in "A Witness and A Testimony" magazines, 1947

Contents

Chapter 1 - Spirituality the Key to All That is of God

Chapter 2 - Spiritual Warfare

Chapter 3 - The Church in the Spiritual Realm

Chapter 1 - Spirituality the Key to All That is of God

"So also it is written, The first man Adam became a living soul. The last Adam a lifegiving spirit.... The first man is of the earth earthy: the second man is of heaven" (1 Cor. 15:45,47)

"That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit" (John 3:6).

"God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth" (John 5:24).

"He that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit" (1. Cor. 6:17).

"As many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God... Ye received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father" (Rom. 8:14-15).

"Furthermore, we had the fathers of our flesh to chasten us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live?" (Heb. 12:9).

"Now the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, and he himself is judged of no man" (1 Cor. 2:14,15).

Spirituality the Key to All That is of God

A fragment from that last passage will do as the key to our consideration. "He that is spiritual." A spiritual state is the key to all that is of God. Spirituality is the door, and the key to the door, beyond which lies everything that relates to God. Without spirituality, there is no way through, the door is closed. The word "cannot" stands written as an impassable barrier - "cannot understand or receive the things of the Spirit of God." In reality, our lives are set in a realm of things spiritual. God is Spirit, therefore the supreme Reality, the supreme factor, the ultimate environment of this universe - God - is Spirit. Man, in the deepest and truest nature of his being, is spirit. He has a soul and a body. Evil forces in great power encircle man on this earth, and they are spiritual forces. But more, the entire temporal order is constituted upon spiritual principles and meanings. The visible things are but symbols of spiritual things; the seen things are types of unseen things. God has constituted this whole universe, in every aspect and detail, upon a basis of spiritual principles; they are tokens of something more than themselves. If God, Who is Spirit, makes anything, He makes it with a meaning, and that meaning is given to it by the mind of God. It takes its deepest significance from God Himself, therefore its deepest significance is spiritual. It is unnecessary, I am quite sure, and would take a very long time (although it would be tremendously profitable as well as interesting) to follow that out, and look at this seen, tangible, temporal universe and track down its spiritual significance; but it is a very simple line of consideration. We know how, right through the Bible, these things of creation are used to represent spiritual things. The sun, the moon, the stars, and every other created thing embodies some spiritual thought, meaning and law, so that, when we come to the revelation of Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit, we find a whole comprehensive and detailed counterpart, in a spiritual realm, of what we have in the temporal realm; a new creation in Christ Jesus with its initiation by God, Who said, Let light shine out of darkness, and who shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 4:6). Here is the new creation act, the new fiat for bringing in a spiritual order, which, in a spiritual way, reproduces all the laws which lie behind the creation of the natural order. We cannot follow that through now, but bear it in mind. It is a very strong and very full realm by which we can recognise really what God is after through and in and by all things.

If we were only to come down to our own personal physical makeup, and had we the knowledge of our own physical bodies sufficiently, we should be able to trace spiritual laws operating through and through in almost every part. I am almost tempted to yield to the fascination of such a consideration, but I will leave that to more expert people. But there it is; God has constituted our very bodies upon spiritual principles; we are, in ourselves, a material representation of spiritual laws, and when the Holy Spirit, through the Apostle, speaks of the Church as the Body of Christ, He is not only using an illustration, He is saying that a whole system of spiritual laws which operates in the physical body of an individual, operates in a spiritual way in the spiritual Body of Christ, the Church. Just as the violation of any one of those laws or principles of the physical brings about an unbalanced state which will lead to disintegration and finally to death, so in the Church the same laws obtain: violate any one of those laws, and you render the Church unbalanced, it will move to disintegration and out of its realm of vital things. I must not be detailed.

I am stating this, that the key to everything that is of God is spirituality. Here in 1 Cor. 15, the Apostle is saying much about the spiritual side of things, and amongst those statements he says concerning the body that not that which is spiritual is first but that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual. We might observe, by the way, that when he used that word "natural" he really used the word "soulical." That which is first is the soulical body and afterward that which is spiritual, indicating that the ultimate and final thought of God is the spiritual. The Apostle leads on very clearly to show that this body, this soulical body as such, is going to be changed. But there is a germ - the spirit is the germ - of a new body, and that spirit will be clothed with a spiritual body. It is something that we cannot wholly understand, but we can see something of what it is like when we remember that the forty days after the resurrection of our Lord Jesus were used precisely for this very purpose - to demonstrate and establish the nature of a spiritual man in his final and full constitution, visibly, as well as spiritually. There is no doubt that in those forty days the Apostles were convinced that Jesus was alive, that they had seen the Lord; they were left without a shadow of doubt - nothing could shake them on that matter. But what a Lord, what a difference! - an absence altogether of some things with which they were familiar. He was there, and He was there in a positive presence - not a ghost, not a disembodied spirit, but a full Manhood; and yet how different! He was using the forty days to show what the end of God is for man, the nature of things when God reaches His end. "Afterward that which is spiritual." God's final, ultimate thought is the spiritual, and I want to emphasize that for this purpose - that I am not talking about vapours and shadows and spooks and ghosts, and things floating about in the air. I am not talking about atmospheres, but about something very real - if I may use the word, very concrete - when I talk about spirituality. It is something very practical. The Lord Jesus sought surely to show that after His resurrection. "Children, have ye any meat?" He can make a fire of coals, He can cook fish on it, He can break the food and distribute it and He can eat with them, and yet in a moment can be out of sight. Dismissing time and geography, He is in one place and then in another far off, but He is real. Do not let us think we are talking about spirituality as something unpractical, mythical, abstract. We are going to see that it is a very practical matter; first that which is natural, and afterward, as the final thought and the goal of God's activities, that which is spiritual. The end and the eternal will be spirituality; we shall be in the full sense spiritual. Well, that is a general statement.

Temporal Things Governed by the Law of Vanity

Now let us get down to it more and more closely. We begin, then, by recognising that the world of things temporal is only a shadow of another, that it has no abiding qualities or values in itself. It is governed by the law of vanity, vanity meaning simply that it cannot of itself realise its own destiny. It will reach a point, and from that point turn back and in upon itself; its efforts, its groanings, its travailings, never issue in a final realisation of its intention. Nothing of it, by its own properties, can realise Divine purposes and ends. It is very important to recognise this.

As we get closer to this matter, we see how it applies specifically to Christian work. Oh, how many things are gathered into organised Christianity with the idea of making for effectiveness! The idea is that, if you can have these things, you are going to get results. Money - oh, how much could be done if only we had money! We must have the money! I ask you, how was it in the book of the Acts? Was anything done? With all the money today, how much is done of an abiding, eternal, spiritual value? If only you can get names and titles on your programmes and advertisements, you are going to effect something! Are you? If you can get reputation, scholarship, learning, ability, physical strength, business acumen, the work will be effected! Will it? I want to say that not in one of these things, nor in all of them put together, in themselves, is there any spiritual value, and there can be a very vast amount of spiritual value without any of them. God has taken pains along both lines to prove that. Along the line of their presence in abundance He has proved their spiritual futility; and along the line of taking the weak things and the despised and the foolish and the things which are not, by something which was nothing in itself He has through the ages demonstrated His own power and done mightily fruitful things for eternity. Well, that is simple and obvious, and it is only one more contribution to this fact, that it is spirituality that counts, that is the effective thing, the thing that gets through, and nothing else. The learning, the money, and all the other things may have a place, provided they do not govern, provided they are subservient to what is spiritual and are never banked upon as the things which are going to do the work: provided it is never assumed that if you have these things, a great work for God can be done; God will make evident the folly of that assumption. A whole range of things is employed by organised Christianity to secure Divine ends, but it does not work. Well, that is the first thing that we note in connection with spirituality.

Our Reconstitution as Spiritual Beings

We proceed in the next place to recognise that for spiritual - that is Divine, eternal, ultimate - purposes, we have to be reconstituted on a spiritual level and basis. That, of course, is the very heart of John 3. Nicodemus is interested in, and concerned about, the Kingdom of God, wanting to know about it, and has come to the Lord Jesus by night, evidently to talk about it. He had, like all other Israelites, an entirely temporal conception of the Kingdom, an earthly idea. It was formal, an official matter. The Lord Jesus does not waste any time at all with that. He simply brushes it all aside, ignores it, and says, "Ye must be born anew." "Except a man be born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God." That is elementary, but we are coming to this fact, that, in order to know anything at all about the things of God (and I take the Kingdom of God to be that realm in which all that obtains is of God, that which belongs to God) we have to be constituted according to God. Nothing is possible until we are reconstituted on a new principle, until we are, in other words, constituted spiritual beings in a new way. The very beginnings of things in relation to God are that they are a new and altogether other constitution, just as absolute as would be the reconstituting of us to live a fish's life - and perhaps more so. We have to begin over again. For the very first thing of God, that is necessary. I know that I am not saying anything that is new in itself to you, but I feel very much that there has to be a reconsideration of the whole Christian conception of things if we are going to have effectiveness.

The ideas of doing God's work, and of what His work is, are very often far from the truth. The ideas of the means by which God would work are very often largely outside of the pale of God's acceptance. We are concerned with real spiritual effectiveness, are we not? Then we have to learn the secret of it; that is what we are after. There is a crippling, paralysing "cannot" resting upon the natural, the soulical man, where the things of God are concerned; and yet how much of that soulical life is employed and relied upon in Christianity today to secure spiritual ends! If only you can get high-tensioned atmospheres, a good deal of stir and movement and emotion; if only you can get certain conditions brought about by a forceful, powerful personality with its impact upon the people; then you will get results! And a great deal of result is obtained, but it is not spiritual, it is not abiding and eternal. But unfortunately, the consequences are not limited to that. There issues ever more and more this great tragedy of people having tried and been disappointed and determining never to try again. The world is strewn with people who have had an experience and no more. Oh, the devil is clever!

We are saying that there is an unbridged gulf between the natural and the spiritual, and there can be no carry over; and yet in the Christianity of our day, there is a tremendous carry-over of the natural to the spiritual. We find the realm of God's things is simply full of natural elements, and they are all paralysing the spiritual. There has to be a tremendous removal of all this smother and cover of natural elements - men coming in with their drive and their ideas and conceptions and ways. It is killing the work of God. Until that is really dealt with in the power of the Cross of our Lord Jesus and all set aside, and God is free to do His own work by His own means along His own lines, there will be no commensurate result. God's means and God's way is spirituality from start to finish, the impact of a spiritual constitution. Yes, there is an unbridged gulf between the natural (the soulical) and the spiritual, and there can be no carry over. Look at the fact. It is so often very striking that a person of very considerable natural acumen, learning, intelligence and ability in this world is nothing in real spiritual things, though he be a Christian. Are you not often up against that? A Christian man may be tremendously able in business affairs and most acute in his business transactions, full of intelligence and worldly wisdom, able to carry the weight of an immense concern, to be the driving force of a great business, a man of weight and consideration in this world, but when it comes to spiritual things he may be a babe. You speak about the things of the Lord, and that great brain is altogether beaten by the simplest things of the spiritual life. You can get nowhere in talking about the Lord. I am often amazed as I meet and talk with Christian men who are carrying great responsibilities and who have undoubtedly great abilities, and when you talk about spiritual things they are unable to say anything, to make any contribution; you are talking in another realm. And yet they know they are born again, and they have been so for a long time. What is the matter? Well, there is a gulf. They have all that greatness on the natural side, but they are very small on the spiritual. All that they have of intellectual ability and equipment, and power in every way to handle big things naturally, serves them in no stead whatever when they come to handle the things of God; whereas somebody who has none of it, in the realm of things spiritual is a giant, a teacher. Well, that is a common-place in our experience.

But it comes right back to this, that there is a gulf, and there is no real bridging of this gulf, there is no carrying from one side to the other. The word "cannot" stands there. Here the word is not about the unregenerate, the grossly sinful. It is the Christian who is still natural, living on the basis of his soul, rather than in the realm of his renewed spirit. The natural man "cannot." That is the closed door in things spiritual. Whatever he is in things natural, in things spiritual he is a babe or a fool.

Counterfeit Spirituality

Now we come to the next thing, the recognition that there is a false and counterfeit spirituality which is purely soulical. It looks like spirituality, and passes for it, it assumes to be spiritual; but it is false, it is counterfeit. We find it in mysticism, and mysticism can go a very long way to simulate what is spiritual. Aestheticism so often looks like spirituality and has been mistaken for it. There is a vast amount of religion that thinks it is spiritual and claims to be, and yet it is purely aesthetic or mystical or soulical; it is not spiritual at all. There is a soulical insight which is the counterfeit of spiritual apprehension. It is purely psychic. Have you met people who see through, and get an insight into things in a remarkable way, and yet they are not spiritual people? They have a psychical insight, their souls are highly tuned to things which are not ordinarily apparent. We have often been impressed with this and puzzled by it. They can talk about the devil, the spiritual system, use the Bible language; they can talk about things of the Bible and get behind the actual written language, in some remote kind of way getting out interpretations which are not obvious. There are certain national constitutions which are peculiarly characterised by this very thing. I believe the Galatians were like that. If you trace the history of the Galatians, you will see that this is the peculiarity of a race. The people of Gaul, from whom the Galatians came, are like that. There is something psychic about them, and it looks like spiritual insight and understanding. It is false. You can have it in its extreme form; you can have it in more moderate forms. There is a counterfeit spirituality along that line, counterfeit spiritual knowledge which is simply mystical interpretation. There are people with phraseology and they are not clear, they are involved, and what are they after? They are trying to be spiritual on the basis of revelation, seeing things no one else sees or can see. Be careful! The enemy does simulate every truth in order to destroy the truth. We have to be in a true position, and there is this counterfeit, mystical interpretation. You can drive typology to an extreme, you can force it to a point where it loses its value and becomes almost ridiculous. Spiritual discernment is counterfeited, and shows itself along the line of premonitions and second sight; it is all soulical. Consecration is often counterfeited by asceticism, a false consecration. The monasticism of the Middle Ages and what remains of it is a false interpretation of spirituality, of consecration. It is purely soulical, and of what real spiritual value is it to anybody? Life can be, and so often is, counterfeited; exhilaration, even hysteria, is thought to be spiritual life. You know how we are all prone to this. There are times when we get a wonderful exhilaration by a presentation, a prospect opening, and for the moment we feel it is all alive. We give it a chance, we test it out, we wait a while. The thing dies out in us. Where is all the life we had about it? It was merely an exhilaration, something that appealed to our souls and found a response there. Therefore test things, give them time, take them into another atmosphere and see how they live. It is so easy to get into a false position when there is a hothouse condition, you can get a lot of things springing up rapidly and seeming to be genuine growths. But take them outside and they shrivel up. The things of God do not do that, they survive all atmospheres, they live though death encompasses. His life is not a prey to earthly conditions; it triumphs. Everything can be counterfeited, and there is a counterfeit spirituality along every line.

Note the difference, then, between what is truly spiritual and what is falsely so. Is it not patent that the more the formalism, the ritual, the external order, the less the real spiritual life, food and fulness? You cannot have more formalism and ritual and that whole system of things than you get in St. Peter's in Rome, but I challenge you to be really spiritually alive and in touch with God, and be able to live in that atmosphere. It is one of the things that stands out in my own experience. I always had a desire to see St. Peter's, and I went, and I was glad to get out of the place. It was death, suffocation. But I would not accept that finally. I went back again after years, I have been several times. At last I had to say, That is finished, no more of that! It is not only death, but there is something evil, something that grieves the Spirit of God in you. And yet look at it - see them prostrating themselves, their "adoration," their "worship"; but it is death. That may be the extreme end of things, but that can be graduated and modulated; and let me say without any hesitation, the measure of external ritual and formalism and that sort of thing determines the measure of spirituality. The more you have of that, the less you have of true spiritual life, of real spiritual food. A real life with the Lord is something very simple, shorn of all the art of religion; a few children of God gathered together in something which has no ecclesiastical traditions, no religious embelishments, no external forms, but just a simple meeting in the Name of the Lord: there you have life, power, fulness. I am not saying that things must be shoddy in order to have spirituality: I am saying that the law of life is spirituality.

It works in another way. The nearer to earth we get, the more we ourselves feel our importance. Man is biggest when he is nearest to the earth; he is smallest when he is farthest away. I remember my first time in an aeroplane; at ten thousand feet up, I looked down on the ground that meant so much weary toil to cross. It looked only inches big, the people and animals were like toys. The nearer to heaven you get, the less important are the things of earth. All this religious embellishment is the importance of the earth, of the world. The nearer you get to things spiritual and heavenly, the less of that you want, it all goes; you see how really petty and insignificant it is. See the Church from heaven, and all this that goes on down here is like playing at going to church; it is so small. There is a great deal of difference in the spiritual constitution.

To sum up what I am saying, it is this. Spirituality rightly understood is the secret of all that belongs to God. At the very beginning of our life with God, we have to be reconstituted as spiritual beings. "That which is born of the Spirit is spirit." "He that is spiritual." "As many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God." But there is a false thing to counterfeit and simulate spirituality, and it is not objective to ourselves, it is made out of ourselves. We make gods after our own likeness, our souls produce their own system, even in religion; and the Spirit produces His system. Said the woman to the Master, "Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and ye say, that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship." The Lord Jesus said, "Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father... God is a Spirit; and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth" (John 4:20-24). That is only saying, This Mount Gerizim and its temple and the temple in Jerusalem are purely temporal, earthly, the things of men's souls. Men must have something to see, to handle, something they can appreciate by their soul faculties, but that is not the realm of things since I, the Lord, have come. That is the natural, it is past. Now, the spiritual comes - neither here nor there, not a matter of place or things or anything like that on the earth. It is in spirit with the Father.

That is the order, that is the nature and character of this dispensation.

Chapter 2 - Spiritual Warfare

"Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out" (John 12:31).

"I will no more speak much with you, for the prince of the world cometh: and he hath nothing in me" (John 14:30).

"Finally, be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of his might... For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places" (Eph. 6:10,12).

"And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels going forth to war with the dragon; and the dragon warred and his angels; and they prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast down, the old serpent, he that is called the Devil, and Satan the deceiver of the whole world; he was cast down to the earth, and his angels were cast down with him. And I heard a great voice in heaven, saying, Now is come the salvation, and the power, and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accuseth them before our God day and night. And they overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb, and because of the word of their testimony; and they loved not their life even unto death. Therefore rejoice, O heavens, and ye that dwell in them" (Rev. 12:7-12).

Our occupation is with the content and outworking of a little fragment from 1 Cor. 2 - "He that is spiritual." We were occupied earlier with the centre of that so far as we individually are concerned, that is, the reconstituting of believers on a spiritual principle and basis. We were really turned in on ourselves - always a difficult and sometimes a dangerous thing. But we were seeing the nature of the new creation in Christ as being solely spiritual, and our great governing statement which covers all that we have to say was, and is, that spirituality is the key to everything that is of God; and that begins with a spiritual state or a new spiritual being, brought into life by new birth. We worked that out at considerable length. What follows now is an outcome of it. We are going to turn from the inward and individual, right out to the circumference of it.

Two Creations under Rival Authorities

The Scriptures we have read touch the realm in which we are going to move. It is the circumference of spirituality. The great all-encompassing facts are these. Firstly, there are two creations active, an old and a new, which represent two kinds of man: what the New Testament calls the soul-man and the spirit-(or spiritual) man. "Now the soul-man" - that is the literal meaning of the phrase translated "natural man" in 1 Cor. 2:14 - "Now the soul-man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God." "The soul-man"; compare this with "he that is spiritual" in verse 15. What is in view is a likeness after which the being is constituted. You know the meaning of "ikon" (Gr. eikon). An ikon is an image, a likeness, a figure; and here in the New Testament we have three Greek words derived from eikon. The word is changed to ikos, which implies "to take the likeness of." So you get this word psukikos, which means soul-likeness, after the likeness of the soul. That is what is referred to here in 1 Cor. 2. "Now the man of soul, the soulman," the man who is constituted soul-wise, "receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God." That is the man to which 1 Cor. 15:45 refers. "The first man Adam was made a living soul," the psukikos man. Then there is another word - sarkikos (Sarx means flesh). That is the man who is constituted wholly on the principle of the flesh. But then there is this other word so often used - pneumatikos; and he is the man whose likeness is of the spirit, the spiritual man. It is to him that such passages refer as "He that is spiritual": "The last Adam a life-giving spirit." just that by the way.

To get down to this matter of two orders, the psukikos and the pneumatikos orders, or the soul-order and the spirit-order. These are the characteristics or natures of two creations, the old creation, and the new creation in Christ Jesus. We are saying, then, that there are two creations, representing two orders of man, active, and very active. Of course, you know that in yourself personally that is true. There is an active old creation order or soul life. You know also, that, if you are a born-again child of God, there is another Man in you active, and these two do not get on well together, and that is largely the root and cause of all your trouble. But in the wider realm, this is true of the whole two worlds.

The second thing is that, over those two creations, there are two lords. There is the one of whom we have read, the prince of this world, the great ruler of this world, darkness with his hosts, his hordes of evil spirits - Satan, the Dragon, the Devil, and his angels. They are there over the old creation and governing it. On the other side, there is the Lord Jesus Who is Lord of the new creation.

Two Realms in Conflict

Thirdly, although we do not always feel it to be so inside of ourselves, there is nevertheless from God's standpoint and in God's mind an absolute divide between these two. They are split apart by nothing less than the Cross of Christ, and that Cross is immense. It puts things in two entirely separate realms. Later we shall come to see the working of that, but just for the moment I anticipate by reminding you of the object that the Apostle Paul had in view when writing to the Corinthians. At the beginning of his first letter he said "And I, brethren, when I came unto you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom... for I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified" (2:1-2). The object which he had in view in that deliberate determination was to put two worlds asunder in Corinth. They had come too near and were interfering with each other, and everything was upset because of the overlapping of those two worlds - the realm of the natural (you see how much Paul says about it) and the realm of the spiritual. We never get anywhere until this mix-up has been put right. So he said in effect, I determined to put the Cross right in there between these two things and split them asunder, put them apart. The Cross makes the great divide between these two creations, these two natures, soul and spirit.

Now another thing - and this is where we get very near to the point of our present meditation - the medium used by the prince of this world in the old creation is the soul of man; that is his line of action, his basis of operation. On the other hand, the means, the basis, the instrument of the Lord Jesus in the new creation is the spirit of man - of course, renewed in new birth, quickened and raised and joined with the Lord one spirit, and indwelt by the Holy Spirit. Man's spirit is the vessel of His activities. So you find that there is a continual conflict between soul and spirit in the individual; but also in the larger world, the whole world, it is like that.

Satan Always Works Through the Soul

All Satanic activities are soul-wise. That is a key which will unlock a vast realm of things, if only you get it into your hands spiritually. Satan's activities are all soul-wise. He assailed the soul of man in the beginning. You know what the soul is - mind, heart, will: reason, emotion and volition. Satan came arguing and reached man's mind; he came appealing and seduced his heart; he came driving and forced his will. So he got that creation soul-wise into his hands, and ever since then all his activities have been soul-wise. He is a spirit, an evil spirit, but he works soul-wise. This whole world is run by Satan on the psychological basis; it is all psychology. We have had perhaps the greatest exhibition ever given to this world of that fact during the recent years. More than anything else, it has been a psychological warfare. But we have seen through the psychology so much that is absolutely Satanic. You may call it a "war of nerves." What is that but a psychological war? But so it is apart from wars; this world is run on the psychological basis. Everything commercial is psychological; so are all the secrets of good business. You will never have any success in business if you do not know the psychological moment and the psychological method, and all that. All the secrets of good teaching lie there - in your psychological acumen to know the psychology of the child. This world is all on that level.

But let us come to this. Have you not recognised that the activities of the Devil are always like this - in some way to stir up the soul? When there is some interest of the Lord in view - a conference is coming, or something which has spiritual values wrapped up in it - have you not found again and again that, in advance of it, there is a drive made on your soul to provoke you, to get you bad-tempered, to do anything to get your soul stirred up? You know when that has happened you are out of position, you have to get quiet with the Lord and get the seething inside calmed down. It is extraordinary how it happens; it comes from nowhere; very often there is no explanation. You take on provocations that do not exist, interpret looks and words in a manner never intended; there are phantoms about all the time stirring up your soul. So often it is not coming from anything at all that you can trace - it is not anybody, it is nothing said - but somehow your soul is getting worked up and you are being put out of spiritual position; the seething of your soul like a ferment overflows your spirit and destroys its poise and strength and grip. Sometimes the method used is to depress. You feel terribly depressed. You cannot explain it, but something has happened in the atmosphere and registered upon you, depressing your spirit. Yes, all the Lord's people have known that. David knew a lot about it. "Why, art thou cast down, O my soul? And why art thou disquieted within me? Hope thou in God for I shall yet praise him" (Psa. 42:5). Sometimes you have to talk to your soul like that. You know the depression of the soul to take your strength away, to sap and drain your spiritual vitality. Sometimes the method is to bring the soul into darkness. What onslaughts the Devil made on Martin Luther along that line, to bring into the darkness of accusation and condemnation, where his assurance of justification and salvation was undermined and weakened! Many of the Lord's people know a lot about that, the darkness, the overclouding, when it seems that the soul is in a dark dungeon.

Sometimes the means is to inflate the soul, and, oh, what a lot of success the Devil has gained along that line. Nebuchadnezzar was the very embodiment of this whole principle of soul life. "Is not this great Babylon, which I have built?" (Daniel 4:30). That is the spirit of Antichrist inflating the soul. The word of the Lord is, "If a man thinketh himself to be something when he is nothing" (he really is, from God's standpoint, nothing) "he deceiveth himself" (Gal. 6:3). How many people there are deceived along that line of self-importance! You know what this world is like in this matter. But the tragedy is that the very realm of the things of God, the work of God, has become the playground for that sort of thing, people exhibiting their own self-importance, and bringing themselves into prominence - all the expression of an inflated soul life. You find absolutely nothing of that in the Lord Jesus when He was here, but the exact opposite. "I am meek and lowly in heart" (Matt. 11:29). "He poured out his soul unto death" (Isa. 53:12).

Well, there are many other ways in which the enemy works soul-wise. Sometimes he seeks to affright. How often he has tried to get us frightened, as he did in the days of Nehemiah - and in the days of Hezekiah, when Sennacherib came and started his demonstration around Jerusalem.

The Answer to Satan Through the Spirit

On the other hand, all Christ's activities are spirit-wise, and there you open up another whole realm of Scriptures; e.g., "born of the Spirit" (John 3:8) "renewed in the spirit..." (Eph. 5:23); "strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man" (Eph. 3:16); and - touching spiritual understanding - "the eyes of your heart enlightened" (Eph. 1:18). So you bring in the Scriptures, all bearing upon this spirit-wise activity of Christ. And this quickened, renewed, energised, indwelt spirit, is up against this soul of ours, and this soul world.

When we speak of spiritual warfare, let us not think in terms of the abstract. "They overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb." What do you take that to mean? - that they were a people of a phraseology about the blood and they started hurling their phraseology at the Devil? Well, phraseology, even about the Blood, has no effect on him. "They overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb." Whom did they overcome? - the Accuser of the brethren, who accused them day and night. How do you overcome an accuser? Only by having a better case than he has. You have to have a good case, and the Blood of the Lamb represents that in a mighty way. Our legal standing because of the Blood of the Lamb puts the enemy out of court if only faith will hold to it. And we must not think in geographical terms of Satan being cast down from somewhere high up and coming crashing to the earth. This is spiritual warfare. We have to get this spiritual sense and idea of things. Our soulical mentality is always drawing pictures of places, positions, spaces, but we have to understand that this is a spiritual matter - that Satan can, in effect, be cast from the highest heights to the lowest depths without any geographical factor coming in at all. You may have a person against you who lays a charge at your door, and thinks he has a very strong case. But you happen to have a case which undercuts that and tears it to pieces, and he goes down before you in utter collapse; he comes from a tremendous soul height to a very great depth. That is not a geographical thing but a spiritual. This is spiritual warfare, not geographical. "Our wrestling is not against flesh and blood" (Eph. 6:12), it is not in the realm of the physical and geographical at all. It is spiritual - you can call it moral if you like - and the Blood represents a legal case, and Satan can be cast down from heaven countless times in one day. You cannot do that literally: it can only be understood spiritually. A million people all over this earth may cast him down in one day at different moments of the day. As they stand by faith on the case that the Blood provides, they have a mighty and triumphant answer. That is how spirituality works out in warfare. Christ works spirit-wise. Soul cannot cast out soul, and the soul cannot cast out the Devil because the Devil has already got it in his hand. Satan has obtained ground in our souls, but in our renewed, born-again spirits he has no place. The evil spirit behind everything can only be overcome by a spirit strengthened with might by the Spirit of God, and that means by a subduing of the soul to the spirit.

The Subjecting of the Soul to the Spirit

Now we have touched a new aspect. The Lord spoke figuratively when He said that we should take up our cross and deny ourselves; and later He went further with that in a little fuller explanation when He said "Whosoever would save his soul" - that is the word there - "shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his soul for my sake, the same shall save it" (Luke 9:24). The whole soul life, the whole natural life of ours, has got to be brought into subjection to our renewed spirit before the enemy can be cast out. If we are actuated by natural, soulical interests, we have no power over the Devil; he has ground. It is only when our reasoning and desiring and feeling and willing have been brought into subjection to the Spirit of Christ in our spirit as something inside of us, by our own determined and deliberate choice, that the enemy can be defeated. The enemy can make havoc in a life that is lived on the soul level, as he did at Corinth - even though it be the life of a believer. The degree in which our natural life influences us is the degree in which we are powerless over the enemy, and, let me repeat, it is in that realm that things matter. The real issue of life is in the spiritual realm. Our accountability, our worth, our value, is measured by the degree in which we count there. It matters not what we are here in this natural world. We may be important people here naturally but we do not count for anything really beyond a few passing years, and then it is Sic transit gloria mundi - so passes the glory of the world. It is how much we count in things spiritual that is our real value.

Spiritual Ascendancy Demands Faith

Now, let me say further and again, things that are seen, things that happen, are not alone, they have spiritual factors behind them. Oh, young people, try to get hold of this. Ask the Lord to help you to get this really registered in your hearts, not as a part of your religious education or information, but really as a working principle in your lives. Your difficult situations, hold-ups, frustrations - they are not just alone by themselves. If you are a child of God, there is a spiritual factor and a spiritual intelligence behind, and you will never get through until you can get behind the thing and deal with that spiritual factor; until you know how to deal with the enemy, the things will not be loosened. The Lord's answer to these challenges may not always be in the same way, but always on one certain principle. Paul said, "I would have you know that the things which happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the progress of the gospel" (Phil. 1:12). That is one way in which the Lord answers the enemy - He sovereignly turns the work of the Devil to His own glory and to the fulfilment of the very thing which the Devil intended to prevent. The Lord's answer is not always in the direct way of casting out the Devil, nor a direct rebuke that brings the enemy's work to nought or stops him from working. The Lord very often allows him to work but answers him in many ways, and the ultimate issue is with the Lord, not the Devil. But always the Lord works to one principle, and that is the principle of our faith. Paul met the situation; he saw and felt the things that were happening. Do you think that in his heart he capitulated to Satan and said, The Devil has things in his own hand, it is of no use our trying to do anything? Not a bit! Paul's attitude was - the Devil sees we are having some success and he is working; he is apparently doing a lot of harm, but the issue of this thing will be with the Lord and not with the Devil. So, because of an attitude taken like that on the part of His servant, the Lord was constantly, in different ways, answering the Devil and getting the issue into His own hands. But the instrument of the Lord in defeating and casting down the Devil was the spirit of the servant of God standing strongly - and you do marvel how strongly Paul's spirit stood. Though Satan often seemed to have things his way, in the end the Lord triumphed every time.

Spiritual Ascendancy Through Discipline

We have spoken of our feeling of grief over the lost impact of the Gospel, and of the Church, and of Christian life generally; but where does impact begin? It does not really begin upon men, nor upon things, nor upon the world. Impact really begins upon the spiritual forces behind, and if you have not the spiritual strength, all your assaults and all your endeavours will be in vain. Are you in the Lord's work? Unless you can get behind people and things to the spiritual factors and forces, you may as well close down. You are not, in the long run, going to have much to show for all your labours. You are dealing ultimately with spiritual things. If you are going into the work of the Lord, remember you cannot get this equipment by mere Bible study or by any kind of soul-training. You can only get this along the line of the discipline of the soul and the strengthening of spirit, and that is why there should be a predominant element of practical life in all training for the Lord's work. For instance, to know how to live triumphantly in spirit with difficult people. You will never go out to meet the power of the enemy behind this world unless you have learned how to meet him in your own spirit and under discipline. So the Lord puts us through a severe gruelling before He really commits to our hands spiritual responsibility.

Let me say at once that the soul is not to be annihilated. We are not wrong in having souls; our souls have to be won, to be mastered and brought into charge of the spirit so that the self-element is eliminated and the soul serves the spirit and serves the Lord, and not ourselves.

You see the nature of spiritual warfare; you see the realm in which things matter most. Well, this takes us back to our earlier message - the reconstituting of us and the building of us up in an inward way, the increase of spiritual measure. May the Lord use this meditation to secure for Himself the instrument that He needs for casting out the prince of this world, for establishing and extending His true spiritual kingdom and reign.

Chapter 3 - The Church in the Spiritual Realm

Although we have said a great deal about spirituality, and that as to the new man and our spirit, I have not failed to recognise that all this is perfectly meaningless unless we know the Holy Spirit Himself. I trust that no one will have the impression that we are talking about our spirits only; everything is His working, everything depends upon Him, and it is by Him that spirituality, in the Divine sense, is possible. It is very necessary always to honour the Holy Spirit. We, under His government and direction in all things, and recognising His Lordship, are having to consider the matter of our own measure of spiritual life and nature, because that is a tremendously important thing, as I think we have been seeing.

In our previous meditations we were occupied with the general principle of spirituality, going on to the personal and inward reconstituting through new birth of spiritual men and women. Then we went on from the centre to the circumference of spiritual effectiveness, and saw where spirituality has its supreme registration - that is, in the realm of spiritual powers back of all things seen, the spiritual forces which are at work and which have to be met and countered - and there it is that our spiritual measure is tested and found out, when we are really up against a Satanic situation.

God's Mind About the Church

Now we are coming to what is intermediate to these two, between the centre of the personal reconstituting, and the outermost bound of its effectiveness and value. What lies between those two is corporate testimony, which has to do with the Church and the churches. In the Divine scheme of things it is the Church which is the intermediary, that which stands between and has the ultimate effect in the spiritual realm, I mean that individual Christians, though they may be born again, as individuals will not get very far in touching that outer-most realm of spiritual forces. There, a real registration has to be a corporate one. It will be the Church eventually which will be the instrument of Divine government in this universe. So it is necessary for us to spend a few minutes with the Church before we come to the churches; and of course we are continuing to keep before us the matter of spirituality. Here spirituality means what the Church is in God's mind. When we come to contemplate the Church in its wholeness and entirety, of course, we come mainly to the letters to the Ephesians and to the Colossians. There we find God's mind about the Church. We must realize the necessity for our seeing and apprehending what the Church is in God's mind, not as we find it in the churches, not as it actually is here; and we must stand on that ground, or we shall be helpless in this matter of spiritual impact. I mean that if we are going to accept what we find in the New Testament as to the churches as being the expression of all there is, we are very soon going to give up the fight, and shall not get very far. Dr. Campbell Morgan has remarked that there is often heard the word - Oh, let us get back to the New Testament church! But, he said, God forbid! - and went on to say that you will look a long way today for a Christian church that will wholly correspond in its defects to the church in Corinth. When you come to think of it, there is some truth in that. A church in which there is incest and all that you find in Corinth! - God forbid that we get back to the New Testament church if that is it! God forbid that we should say that we have made no progress from that! If we are going to accept that as the standard, we are going to be crippled, and the measure of our spirituality will be very small indeed, and therefore the measure of our impact likewise. The Apostle who was mainly responsible for these churches coming into being repudiated their condition, would not accept it, was fighting against it. Why? Because he had seen God's mind; that was his position, his vantage ground, his strength. If he had never seen God's mind and only saw this, what a disheartened, disappointed, despairing man he would be! He had seen God's mind about it.

It is the Church that is in view in these epistles, and spirituality in Ephesians and Colossians means first of all an inward revelation of God's mind about the Church. It is a tremendous thing for spiritual strength, for spiritual power, for spiritual ministry, for spiritual impact, for spiritual food - yes, for every spiritual value - to have really had a heart revelation of God's mind about the Church; not simply to have studied Ephesians and Colossians, but for it to have broken in upon your heart, to have seen it in an inward way. I say that is spirituality with an impact, it is spirituality with a dynamic; and what a dynamic it is! Look at the Apostle, He looks out at the end of his life over the churches. He knows them intimately; and he has to say - "all that are in Asia have turned away from me" (2 Tim. 1:15): they have repudiated Paul to whom, under Christ, they owed everything. He looks out; and what a spectacle, what a heartbreak! And the man in his circumstances of imprisonment and isolation and limitation, looking out on that, might well have died of a broken heart, or have sunk down into the uttermost despair and written his life off as a failure, and all his work as for well-nigh nothing. But this man is not down there, he is in triumph, he is delivered, he is saved, he is emancipated from all that. The facts are true and real, and yet he is triumphant. Why? Because he sees God's mind about the Church and he knows that, if God ever had a mind about a thing, He is going to have the thing like that; and, no matter what appearances say, in the end God will have His Church like that. God has not conceived a thing and projected it, to be cheated of it. There it is and it will be!

When you have grasped that, you are able to get closer to these letters and see the value of spirituality in general and in particular. In general, like that. A true spiritual apprehension is an emancipating thing. The spiritual is not the unreal, it is the most real of all. It is far more real than the temporal and visible. The eternal - they are the real things. You do not see this Church here on the earth; it is not seen, but it is there in the unseen with God, and it is the eternal thing. If only we saw the invisible - that is an extraordinary statement, "he endured as seeing him who is invisible" (Heb. 11:27) - if only we saw the invisible meaning, if only we saw in the spirit what can never be seen in the flesh with our natural eyes, it would be a tremendously emancipating thing, because we should see that that is the eternal thing that must be. When all else passes, that will be. Spirituality buoys you up. There is so much disappointment in the churches, in the things seen, that you might give up in disgust, close down your work and go and do some other job; but you do not do that if you have really seen. You may tell yourself that you are a fool not to face facts, that you are simply putting on blinkers, not taking account of realities; but because of something that God has done inside you cannot accept that, you must go on. You cannot accept the total ruin theory, if you have had a revelation.

The Timelessness of the Church

Then this revelation of the Church works out in particular matters, and you can see why the revelation is such a power when you come to look at these letters. You find, first of all, that spirituality as to the Church relates in particular to its eternity, or, if you like, its timelessness, for the Apostle, by the Spirit, in his letter to the Ephesians almost immediately lights upon that. This is not something which has been brought into being at some point in time. "He chose us in him before the foundation of the world": "foreordained": it goes back to a dateless point outside of time. He sees the past eternity linked with the future eternity, unto the ages of the ages. He lifts the Church right out of time and puts it where no time is, and says it has come out of that past and goes on to this future. And when you get it out there, something is going to happen. It must be, time cannot make any difference. If this were something that we created or raised up, something of mushroom growth or simply of our lifetime, started with us and finished with us, well, it is not worth the cost. Here the Apostle sees beyond the temporal aspects of the Church, and says that the Church according to God's thought is a timeless thing. So far as we are concerned, we have no date for its beginning and there is no date for its end. Of course, we cannot explain that, but there is the fact stated - and that is spirituality. The Church is in eternity, it is timeless. And when it is established with God outside of time, what can alter it? It must be! It is with God; God comes out of eternal purpose to secure in time something which is eternal; not something that belongs just to the "now" of time, but in time an eternal thing is secured. How difficult, how impossible it is to speak of these things! God coming out of eternal purpose, according to the eternal purpose which He purposed in Christ before the world was - there is something so strong about that, so settled, so fixed, so irrevocable.

Here, in this connection, is the principle of the Holy Spirit's foreknowledge and sovereignty. I can quite understand that you must have some kind of Calvinism. You may not go all the way, you may have serious reservations, but you have to have a place for something of the principle of it, because here it is. God is coming into time to secure an eternal thing according to foreknowledge and predestination, and if you want a simple explanation and application of that, listen to what the Lord said to the Apostle about Corinth. "Fear not, Paul... I have much people in this city" (Acts 18:10). Not - "I am going to have"; "I have" - before they were all saved. This shows the Spirit coming out in foreknowledge and sovereignty, so that, if He gets hold of an instrument which He can really direct, He knows to what He will direct that instrument. You see the outworking of this principle of foreknowledge and sovereignty in the life of this man Paul. "They went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden of the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia; and when they were come over against Mysia, they essayed to go into Bithynia: and the Spirit of Jesus suffered them not" (Acts 16:6-7); and then the Divine intervention, Europe, Philippi. Why? We do not know why, we can only surmise. Asia is not ready, Bithynia's time has not come. Over here they are ready, there will be a response. The Spirit knows, He has foreknowledge and is acting sovereignly in relation to eternal knowledge, and the thing proves right. You see the working of this. God is not working on haphazard chances, as if He said, just go here and see if there is anything. That is not God. It may seem like that with us, but that is not God. He knows; He has come out of eternity, and a really Spirit-led ministry is almost romantic in touching need just at the time when it is ready to be touched. At any rate, that is the romance of the New Testament. The Spirit says to Philip in Samaria, "Arise, and go toward the south unto the way that goeth down from Jerusalem unto Gaza" (Acts 8:26). He goes, not knowing why. But in the foreknowledge of God there, just at that time and place, is a man, and he is just ripe, and the Lord makes a contact. God is moving out of eternal purpose, this is not just chance. But here is a tremendous principle, and you can see the operation of the law of spirituality so far as the Church is concerned, that God is working out of eternal purpose, securing an objective in time. It is something so solid, so strong. I know all the mysteries and all the problems bound up with that, but here is the fact, that God is not just working from hand to mouth. He is working with a complete foreknowledge. The Church, in God's mind, existed before its first member was born, and He knew every member before that first member was born. I say it is a strong thing for our lives, if we have seen something like that.

Of course, this does not do away with preaching, or with seeking souls, or with terrible conflict over souls. All the same, we have to come under the Spirit's hand to seek them. We have to go and preach, and very often preach at large, and not know what God has got there. It has to be done in faith, and very often we have to enter into, and go through, a terrible conflict; and yet Divine sovereignty is still the same. We might think that with Divine sovereignty working out of eternal purpose the thing will happen in any case. Ah no, it will not. We have to preach, travail, battle, seek. These two things are not contradictory, they are complementary.

The Heavenliness of the Church

We now turn to a second thought in the Divine mind concerning the Church as we find it in these letters - its essential heavenliness from God's standpoint. In the letter to the Ephesians the constant repetition is "in the heavenlies in Christ." We must seek to dismiss our natural, soulical mentality about that. I am not saying that there is no such place as a geographical heaven, but we must rule out that kind of mentality of geography, and realise that "in the heavenlies" is a spiritual principle first of all before it is anything else, and that, while it may mean that Christ is in a certain geographical location, yet spiritually it signifies a realm altogether outside of this world order. You know quite well that two people can be side by side, as close as two can be, and yet they may be in absolutely different realms. That is the principle of heavenliness; it refers to a different spiritual realm altogether. True, it is above, elevated, higher, but that is spiritual first of all before it is anything else. It is a spiritual difference on an altogether higher level of Divine thought - not of this order, not, as we say, earthbound; it is heavenly, it is in a spiritual sense in the heavenlies in Christ. Well, of course, that does not want explaining. You can sit in your chair and be in the heavenlies. Sometimes we sit here, and at the same time we are a long way off. I do not mean we are dreamy, but we are having a good time with the Lord, we are really in our consciousness far away. I am not talking about the psychic now, but the real spiritual enjoyment of the Lord so that we forget the people around us; we are, to all intents and purposes, somewhere else. That is a commonplace thing in spiritual life, or I hope it is, with us. It is a heavenly thing from God's standpoint, and it is dynamic when we have really seen it. When really it has come home to us in the power of the Holy Spirit it is dynamic, because it results in tremendous things in us first of all. Oh, what that revelation has done with some of us! When ours was an earthly conception of the Church, how we were engrossed with its ecclesiasticism, its forms and procedure! The whole system of things meant a lot to us. Then God broke in with His conception of the Church as a heavenly thing, and all this fell from us like a mantle; it went, and from that time to this we have felt how futile and petty it all is. But that does not happen until you have seen in your heart; and I beg of you, do not go and do things merely because you hear these things said. Ask the Lord for the revelation. Do not come out of the earthly thing until God has broken in upon you as to His heavenly thing. "Come-out-ism" only makes trouble for God as well as for man. Once you see God's mind about the Church as a heavenly thing, it is emancipating, it makes tremendous challenges within and without and puts you in a place of being able to minister in a way that meets need, brings in heavenly fulness, and God comes through. In a word, it results in spiritual increase to have really seen the heavenly nature of the Church. This matter of what heavenliness is in the Church could occupy us for a long time.

The Universality of the Church

One further matter. God's conception of the Church, or spirituality, here in Ephesians concerns not only its timeliness, and its heavenliness, but its universality. How comprehensive is God's thought! In our earlier messages we have sought to show how comprehensive Christ Himself is, embodying in His own Person everything, in no way being just partial but gathering everything up into Himself, and yet standing right outside of everything. Christ, so great that no nation that has ever been, or is, or will be, will find Him unsuitable, inapplicable, but with all their differences, national traits and temperaments and constitutions, will find in Him, every one of them, the answer to their needs. He embraces all nations, He is the desire of all nations. And within nations, all the different features which mark separate individuals find their answer in Him. How comprehensive He is, how vast, and yet how different! Yes, He meets the need of the Jew, but He is not a Jew essentially; He meets the need of the Greek, but He is not a Greek essentially; He meets the need of all the Gentiles, but He is not a Gentile essentially. As Son of Man, He meets every need of every nation and tribe, and yet He is not of any one of them. No one can say - He belongs exclusively to us. You cannot find that the Jews say that Christ belonged exclusively to the Jews; He would repudiate that, and you know quite well that you dare not portray Him like that. Tissot, the great Scripture artist, when he painted his pictures on the life of Christ, painted all the figures around Christ in their particular national and local distinctiveness. A Roman was obviously a Roman in his pictures, a Jew was obviously a Jew, and so on; you do not have to be told that this man is a Jew, and that man is a Roman. When he came to Christ, he dare not give any such distinctiveness. He dare not paint him as a Jew nor as a Roman. Christ would lose His real value to all nations if you gave Him a distinctively national feature and character. He has to be portrayed in some way that is both a combination of all and yet different from all; and that was Tissot's problem which he tried to solve in that portrait. But, of course, portraiture is always a dangerous thing. My point is this, that Christ does embody all, and yet He is outside all. There is a universality about Him which gathers up all need and meets it, and yet is greater than it and different from it.

And His Body is constituted according to Himself. You cannot have an English church, a Chinese church, an Indian church, a Jewish church, a Gentile church . You cannot; it is an utter violation of the Divine conception of the Church to have anything like that. The Church, according to God's mind, is universal, it is a different kind of thing altogether from what is of the earth, and yet all will find their need met there. They will come from the East and from the West, from the North and from the South, and they will find their spiritual need met in the true Church, but not in a national "church," an earthly thing, a local thing. Oh, that it might be more like that today! That is the Divine conception, that is spirituality, and the apprehension of that is the way to real power, impact, value, effectiveness. If we have even a small approximation to that in the churches, then proportionately we achieve spiritual effectiveness and value.

Spirituality in the Churches

So much for the Church. When we come to the churches, we come to what the Church is actually - not as it is according to God's mind, but actually, and then spirituality has to be recognised along the line of formation into what is according to God's mind. Spirituality is the law of formation where things are imperfect. Coming to Corinth, what is the Apostle's word? "I could not speak unto you as unto spiritual" (1 Cor. 3:1). That is only saying in other words, The reason for your present condition, which is a deplorable one, is the absence of spirituality. Then we begin to look into the whole letter and see the marks of the absence of spirituality. We find that Corinth sets forth the great importance of certain spiritual things.

The Importance of Spiritual Insight

Firstly, the great importance of spiritual insight and knowledge for discrimination. One of the great causes of the condition there was an inability to discriminate, a mixing up of things which should never be confused but should stand far apart, belonging to two different realms altogether. That lack of the spiritual faculty for discrimination resulted in this awful condition. Let us see some ways in which that inability to discriminate operated.

(a) In Discriminating Between the Natural and the Spiritual

Firstly, it had to do with the difference between the natural (or the soulical, as it truly is in the Word) and the spiritual; the world on the one hand, and the heavenly order and standards on the other. They were mixing up world standards with heavenly standards - note all that is said in 1 Cor. 1 and 2 about the wisdom and the power of this world. They were very much interested in the matters of wisdom and power. They desired to gain ascendancy, to be in a position of influence; and their idea of ascendancy and influence and power was the worldly idea, the wisdom of the rulers of this world. They were therefore evidently indulging in studies of the philosophies of the Greeks, systems of thought and interpretation of the universe. They were thinking that, if you advanced enough in this wisdom, you would get to the heart of things, you would solve all problems, and come into a place of competence and power and influence. They could not discriminate between the wisdom of this world and the wisdom of God, and so the Apostle writes to them such things as these - "The world through its wisdom knew not God" (1:21). "God's wisdom... which none of the rulers of this world hath known; for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory" (2:7-8). "Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?" (1:20). These people were unable to discriminate. This all seems to us very elementary. How far back they must have been!

And the same with power. They were after strength and power, and they were going to have it on the world's line. So he says, "Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God" (1:24). But - in substance he adds - you cannot see it, you cannot discriminate. You notice what he is saying about discerning, judging - that word so difficult of translation. "He that is spiritual judgeth" (discerneth, examineth) "all things, and he himself is judged of no man" (2:15) - he is inscrutable. The spiritual is inscrutable to the natural. These people were not able to discriminate, hence this confusion. Spiritual discernment and ability to discriminate between things that differ but which often seem to be very alike is a tremendous thing to bring the Church to God's idea of the Church. We do need spiritual discernment and understanding in the Church, to save the Church from its present deplorable state. You know how true that is, how very few Christians have real discernment. It is an essential spiritual factor to bring the Church to God's idea of the Church; without it, you get the Corinthian condition.

(b) In Recognizing Relatedness of All Ministries in the Body

Secondly, in the relationship and the appraisement of Christ and His servants. "I could not speak to you as unto spiritual." Why? Well, "there are divisions among you," and those divisions are of this kind - "Each one of you saith, I am of Paul; and I of Apollos; and I of Cephas; and I of Christ" - making parties; and the failure here was their inability to see that the Body is one, with Christ as its Head, and that if there is a Paul ministry or an Apollos ministry or a Peter ministry that they liked so much and preferred above others, it is only the ministry of a member of the Body and not something in itself, detached. The hand has a function in the body and you cannot take it over there in a corner. You dare not detach any member of the body and circle round that. If you do, you have no conception of the body and you have no conception of Christ. That is what these people needed to see, and had not the spirituality for seeing. This Body is one, these servants of God are members of the Body functioning in their own appointed ways, and they are all essential, they all make up one Body, and Christ is that Body. "So also is the Christ" (1 Cor. 12:12). But the Corinthians were, in effect, tearing the Body to pieces and making a church round one member of the Body. "There are divisions among you." Spirituality in this case sees the oneness and wholeness of the Body, and any particular ministry not as something apart and detached, to be taken up and circled round and made something of in itself, but a contributory factor to the whole, which the rest can no more do without than it can do without the rest. It sees the relatedness in the Body of all its functions, its ministers, and its ministries, that they are one and all interdependent. Failure to see that results in chaos in the Church. You would not have had half of what there is today in the divisions of Christendom if there had been a spiritual apprehension of the Body of Christ. Wherever it is corporately found, you will be coming back to the Divine idea, and there will therefore be a spiritual power and spiritual fulness.

(c) In Discriminating Between Spiritual Gifts and Spiritual Persons

Thirdly, there was at Corinth the spiritual inability to discriminate between spiritual gifts and spiritual persons. In 1 Cor., if one thing is clear it is this, that spiritual gifts are not necessarily evidence of people being spiritual - that you can, in this real sense, be a very unspiritual person and have spiritual gifts. You will find that spiritual gifts may, and very often do, only relate to spiritual infancy, and not to spiritual maturity. The possession of such gifts may run side by side in the same life with very serious moral defects. This is a problem, this is startling. But it was so at Corinth. As in no other church, spiritual gifts are in evidence there: or, at any rate, are spoken of: and in no other church are there so many disorders - and worse than that. They could not see the difference between spiritual gifts and spiritual persons. Why should Paul head this whole matter of gifts right up into chapter 13? What is the meaning of chapter 13 if it is not this? "If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal." Is he suggesting an impossible thing? Is this a merely hypothetical conjecture which has no reality in life or experience - that a man can speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love, and, being like that, be sounding brass or a clanging cymbal? Speaking with tongues - surely tongues are the ultimate thing, a great evidence of spirituality? Not at all! The supreme feature of spirituality is Divine love. God is love, and we are to be made perfect in love. "Faith which worketh by love" (Gal. 5:6) - this is maturity and this is spirituality. "I could not speak unto you as unto spiritual." So he heads this whole thing right up through gifts to love, which is spirituality. He says, I may have all these gifts, and yet may be an unspiritual person. The gifts may only be marks of my spiritual infancy. I am not saying that that is necessarily so. Paul said that he spoke with tongues more than they all. But spiritual gifts and spirituality do not necessarily go together - that is the point. Spiritual maturity did not go hand in hand with their gifts at Corinth. They thought that the gifts meant much more than they did mean, that they were the evidences of great spiritual measure. They did not see. Let us come back to it - there is a difference between spiritual gifts and spiritual persons. The gifts - what are they? The result of the Spirit coming upon a person. The spiritual person - what is he? He is spiritual as the result of the Spirit forming within. There is a lot of difference between inward formation and merely outward action.

Well then, in Corinth, spirituality meant a heavenly standard of wisdom and power; the Body as a unified whole; and spiritual measure inward more than spiritual gifts outward. That is spirituality. I ask you yourselves to go on with your New Testament looking for the marks of spirituality in these letters, and when you get them, you will be seeing the law by which the churches as they are can be changed into the Church as it is, that is, transformed into accord with the Divine thought. The transforming power is spirituality.