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"Not by Might, Nor by Power, But by My Spirit"

by T. Austin-Sparks

Conference messages given in 1933. Edited and supplied by the Golden Candlestick Trust.

Contents

Chapter 1 - God's New Thing

Chapter 2 - The Perfecting of God's New Thing

Chapter 3 - The Outpouring from on High of the Holy Spirit

Chapter 4 - The Two Sides of the Cross

Chapter 5 - Standing in the Way of Blessing

Chapter 6 - Resource in a Day of Limitation

Chapter 7 - That Which Hinders the Holy Spirit in Us

Chapter 8 - His Spirit Abiding Among Us

Chapter 1 - God's New Thing

Reading: Zechariah 4:1-14.

"Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts." That fragment of the Word seems more than any other to sum up what has been going on in my own heart of late, and which I believe has a Divine connection with our gathering together at this time. It is not my thought to go in any full or detailed way into the context of those words, although we may touch upon it from time to time, but simply to recognise that they are in themselves a summary of a very great deal in relation to the Lord's activities.

In the first place, of course, that phrase is the pivot of this whole chapter; everything in the chapter revolves upon that verse. All the history that is bound up with this chapter - and it is not an unimportant history - is gathered into these words. But more than being central to this chapter, this is a statement which expresses what is found everywhere in the Scriptures in relation to any new movement of the Lord. Wherever you may put your hand upon some actual or imminent new movement of the Lord in the Scriptures, you will find what is contained in this verse implicit in that: "Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts".

If you begin with the creation, and if you could be a spectator away back there when the Lord was about to move afresh in relation to this world, probably your heart would ask a very big question: "How can it be?"; taking note of the state of things, the earth without form and void, and darkness over the face of the deep, with all that such words contain and mean, to contemplate a new order, a new state, a new glory - something out of this ugliness, darkness, ruin, chaos, something which even the Divine eyes beholding could say: "It is very good", we should probably say: "How can these things be?" And the answer would come back to us: "Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord." And so it was. The Spirit of the Lord brooded on the face of the deep. "By My Spirit, says the Lord."

Or whether it should be in the bringing of a people out of a terrible bondage, a bondage so strong, so intense, so persistent as to almost, if not entirely, exhaust the last bit of hope on the part of the people concerned, and to test to its last degree the faith of a chosen instrument of God. When one judgment after another followed in swift succession, terrible, devastating judgments, striking horror and terror into the hearts of everyone involved, shaking the very foundations of life morally, religiously, nationally, socially, and yet to the nth degree apparently unavailing. And looking upon the humanly-speaking impossible and hopeless situation, again the question: "How can these things be?" The answer would be found in these words again: "Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord", for it was by the pillar of fire and cloud that that people were led out into liberty from their bondage. The Spirit of the Lord did it.

Or further, to bring them into the land of promise with all the difficulty that was associated with their possessing. We know the long monotonous story of failure, breakdown, disappointment, and as forty years are nearing their completion there is one big question: "Will these people ever get into the land"? "Is it not a hopeless thing?" Moses brought his fear to the Lord and told Him that if they did not come in, the nations would say God brought them out but He was not able to bring them in. And again the answer is in the principle of these words: "Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord". And it was by the Spirit as typified in Joshua that they came in and possessed. The Spirit of the Lord brought them in.

Moving on in their history to their scattering among the nations, their dispersion to the ends of the earth, a scattering which the Spirit of the Lord likens to being buried, going into graves, scattered over the face of the whole earth, and that people scattered like dust to the ends of the earth and buried in graves among the nations, and yet the Lord intends to bring them back, to recover them, to constitute them again a corporate people living in blessed fellowship with Himself. And seeing that state the question again arises: "How can these things be?" The answer again is: "Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts".

And in Ezekiel 37 you have the Spirit of the Lord coming and breathing upon the scattered dry bones, a parable of the bringing [to life] again - for is not the issue of that chapter this: "Behold, O My people I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel. And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves O my people, and brought you up out of your graves", and that by the breathing of God they stand up and come together from their scattered, disintegrated state, and stand up like one man. "By My Spirit says the Lord".

Or in the remnant coming back from the captivity and in all their weakness, impoverishment, and a history so full of discouragement and the sense of the hopelessness of things, the small remnant beginning to build and the adversary breaking in to thoroughly discourage them from the work, a long period of suspense, nothing done, and then again the call to go on with the work. With all that history and all that adversity, and all that weakness and discouragement, the question is: "How can it be?"; "By what resource?" "There is a great enemy and we have no army with which to withstand that enemy that we may fulfil this work of God, complete this building of His House, we have no might". As you notice the margin there is: "Not by an army". "We have no power, we are a weak and despised people with no power; it is a day of small things as to spiritual strength". Ah, but the rejoinder of the Lord is in that connection: "The thing shall be done, the top stone shall be brought forth with shoutings of Grace, grace unto it, but not by an army - Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts."

We go on in the story. The Lord Jesus is dead, and with His death, if you had no spiritual apprehension, everything has gone: all hope for Israel, all hope for mankind. It is said that time when He yielded up His spirit in the great pagan world a cry went out into the universe: "Great Pan is dead." That is a hopeless situation. That is despair. And the apostle tells us how hopeless it is: "And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain... and if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain, ye are yet in your sins." Then those who have fallen asleep believing in a resurrection will be disappointed, there never will be any such thing; and those who have not fallen asleep but who are alive and are looking for the power of His resurrection apart from the grave, they too will be disappointed if He is dead. A very dark situation comes in from the human standpoint when Jesus is dead. But how is that situation to be changed from despair and hopelessness into one of unsullied, unreserved hope and assurance, and all that which seems to have been lost, to be for ever gone, and established beyond the power of being lost? "Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts", "The Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead". You see the truth is implicit in every step of the activities of God all the way through. In the resurrection of the Lord Jesus it was that: "By My Spirit, says the Lord".

Pentecost was another movement of God, a fresh step in the Divine programme, but it speaks for itself. Look at the means available; look at the instrument on hand. It is not an army, and any signs of power are entirely lacking. It is a day of small things. It is a day of weakness. And if you had said to that little company that in a few days the thing which transpired would transpire, that three thousand souls would be swept into the kingdom of Jesus of Nazareth who had been slain and murdered, three thousand of the very faith that had done Him to death, in one hour would be swept into crowning Him Lord, you would say that if the Lord were to open the windows of heaven only could this thing be; and that is exactly what He did. He opened the windows of heaven. "By My Spirit, says the Lord". It was done.

And we are led to gather all this up into the personal experience of the believer as well as into the corporate experience of the Body of Christ. The principle of these words which are basic to this meditation is maintained by the Lord all the way through: "Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts".

Now, I have made that survey just to show that what I said at the outset is very true to the whole history of any fresh step that God takes, any new thing of the Lord. Every time it is on the same basis: "Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts".

Now if you will come still a little more closely to this chapter you will notice that it says four or five things in the main. It says firstly that:

God is the One who is Pre-eminently Interested.

That is where our hope begins and our confidence is raised up. I do not mean that those words are actually in the chapter, but the chapter is gathered up into that, that God is the One Who is pre-eminently interested. If you look for an adequate interest or concern in the people here, you look in vain. If this thing rests initially and primarily with man then nothing will be done. If the ends of God are to be left in the hands of men, then so much the worse for the ends of God. But what this chapter says, as it also represents everything throughout the Divine order and purpose, is that God is the One Who is pre-eminently interested and concerned; that this is a matter to which the heart of the Lord is devoted.

The Lord's new step necessary to His own glory is something which is first of all in His own heart with a very great concern, and He initiates it. There is a place for our coming into fellowship with the Divine concern, there is a necessity for our being workers together with God, this does not, of course, release us from any responsibility so that we can sit down and say: "This is God's business, He will do it", but there is also a place where we very often take the Lord's business so much out of His hands, that we feel that it is going to either be done, or never be done, dependent upon ourselves. And we become terribly harassed and driven and overburdened.

Without for one moment seeking a way out from a right kind of responsibility, I do feel that you and I should have more assurance that God is the One Who is pre-eminently concerned about His Own interests. We should be better workers if we had a stronger apprehension of that; we should work more in faith and confidence and less in fretful fear and distrust. God is concerned, and you see in all these Divine steps that He takes the initiative, and the thing comes out from God in the first place. And even though He may only work as He finds a people in fellowship with Him, nevertheless He takes the first step to get them in fellowship with Himself.

You say: "Well, strong persistent prayer is essential to anything that God will do." But I say to that, that unless the Lord inspires that prayer, it will be in vain, so that the Lord must have the first step even in prayer that is going to affect His things. And that means that after all, it is not by might, not by power and our trying to, but "by My Spirit" even to pray effectively. You see, it is with the Lord in the first place. He is the One more concerned than any.

And in the second place, this chapter says it is in a day when things are small that His new thing is usually done. A little fragment there:

"For Who has Despised the Day of Small Things?"

Just as far as I understand it in its context it means: "You people are saying that unless you have an army and power, this work can never be done: 'Look at us, look at our state, our weakness, our smallness, the defencelessness of our condition.' And by taking account of your own weakness and smallness and natural insufficiency, you are despising the very ground upon which God has ever and always come out to do His new thing." The Lord has not only come out at such a time, but the Lord has very often had to make it necessary that such things should be before He could come out. A thirty-two thousand army has, by sovereign action, had to be reduced to three hundred - and do not despise the three hundred when the Lord has brought that state of things about. It is in a day when things are small that the Lord usually comes out to do His new thing.

From that, we can take great comfort, individually and collectively. This is a day when things are small, small in many ways, I think we may say generally that the spiritual life of God's people today is a small thing; it is anything but a great, grand thing. Today the Lord's people are growingly conscious of insufficiency and weakness and need, and of the tremendous difference there is between themselves and their state, and the forces which are against them. Well, when we have come to that place we have come, not to the place of despair, but of hope, for in a day when things are small: "Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts".

Further, this chapter says to us that He must have:

An Adjusted People and a Purged Instrument.

Chapter three, of course, leads up to chapter four. All the chapters up to this chapter are bound together. The people are called to make adjustments. The instrument, the people, must be adjusted. Haggai and Zechariah are one in their prophecies, and in Haggai you have that adjustment brought into view concerning the Lord's House which lies waste, and the people looking after their own houses. And the Lord says: "This must be adjusted." The Lord needs a purged instrument - Joshua the high priest is seen in filthy garments; he is but representing the spiritual state of the people. He is, as it were, the spiritual head of this body, and what is true of him is true of all the members in filthy garments, and there must be a purging and taking away of the filthy garments, a purging, a cleansing. Adjustments and purging are necessary unto God's new thing.

We may be assured that for the new great thing that the Lord would do even at this time when it is so much needed, and when the cry is so deeply in our hearts, we believe, for this new thing, there will be nothing unless there is purging and adjustment.

And then finally, this chapter does say that:

Obstacles are Nothing to the Spirit-filled Instrument.

"Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts". "Who art thou, O great mountain? ...before Zerubbabel... a plain." Hindrances and obstacles are nothing when the Spirit of the Lord is in the ascendant in the instrument. Does not history prove that? There are many obstacles, many hindrances, and effective ones today, things which block the way. To begin to mention them might mean we should leave out some very important ones, but we know those things which block the way to the advance of the Lord's interests. What is needed? Not might nor power in the human or natural sense of those words, but a mighty renewing of the Holy Spirit, a mighty filling of the vessel anew with the Spirit of the Lord of hosts, and then obstacles and hindrances are as nothing, "...thou shalt become a plain".

Well now, that so far is only a gathering up of the outstanding features of this chapter. I think that there are very few who are not deeply moved with concern for some new thing from the Lord in our day, some new thing in relation to the, shall we say, the completing of the House of God, some fresh step of the Lord which shall issue in the bringing forth of the top stone with shoutings of "Grace, Grace unto it", something that will make these present causes of arrest to disappear, to be as nothing. Something that will break the obstructing power of the enemy in whatever form or shape he is presenting the interests of the Lord with a paralysing barrier. Something that will bring the saints to maturity, that will complete the number of the elect in the salvation of souls, whose salvation seems today to be far more doggedly and persistently arrested by the powers of hell than in any previous time; for every soul saved today is saved through great conflict and represents a tremendous victory. Souls are not swept in today, as once, but every individual soul saved has to be travailed for, battled for, and comes through at great cost.

We must be concerned to have something that will lessen that successful resistance of the power of Egypt over those sons who are to be brought to glory, and something that will meet the deep, tragic need of the Lord's people on the earth spiritually - the hunger, the ignorance of the Lord's people. I do not mean that unkindly, but I mean that lack of knowledge, lack of understanding, lack of light to bring them into the fulness of Christ, and the consequent weakness of testimony and loss of effectiveness in the world. The Lord's people are in dire need of illumination, dire need of a ministry to bring them into the fulnesses of Christ. There is real spiritual hunger, and there is also something which may be worse - a lack of hunger on the part of many of the Lord's children. Why that is we do not stay to consider, but there it is. Now, all this represents a need for the Lord to come through to consummate His purpose in this age, to really accomplish the thing, and to make His Christ more glorious in His church than He is.

Now, if that is so, and we fully believe it is so, a need for the Lord to do a new thing, then faith is encouraged by the fact that it is a day of small things, and in that day the Lord does His new thing. Exhortation is strengthened as it comes to us when we are told that to do it the Lord must have a purged and adjusted people. Hope and confidence surely will be made to abound with Life when we are reminded that the Lord Himself is more concerned than we are about it. But let us remember the thing which so often has been forgotten, and which has been the very thing to defeat the end which so many have desired, that this thing can be done by no human resources whatever: "Not by might, nor by power". This thing is out from the Lord, of the Lord: "By My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts".

Now then, what is it that we are led to as the one issue? To seek the Lord for a mighty new work of the Holy Spirit, a mighty outpouring of latter rain, a mighty expectation that the Spirit of God will meet this need and do this thing. We see the way, we see how the Lord will do it. We are assured that He is going to do it. Let us ask Him that nothing of our own sufficiency may get in His way; nothing of our own strength may hinder Him. Anything of our own stretching forth of the hand to try and bring it about may just make it necessary for Him to withdraw His hand, but in faith's confidence in Him, in all weakness, emptiness, insufficiency, trust Him, look to Him, call upon Him, that by the Spirit of the Lord of hosts a new thing may be done, and we believe that it is going to be. We are assured that the Lord is going to do a new thing. Are you assured of it? May it be His final thing to which the end is reached and the shouting go forth of "Grace, Grace unto it".

Chapter 2 - The Perfecting of God's New Thing

Reading: Zechariah 4:1-14.

It would be well if I went over this chapter with you, not that this chapter is the basis of the things we are led to consider, but there are so many things in it which are of the nature of principles and laws which run right through the whole of the Scriptures. If we just have the chapter summarised for us it will help us to go on. So very hurriedly and concisely we just glance over this chapter.

Zechariah 4:1 sees a prophetic instrument awakened as from sleep.

Zechariah 4:2 that awakened, prophetic instrument is interrogated as to what his vision is, what he sees. And he sees a candlestick which represents the vessel of testimony, all of gold, which speaks of the vessel being altogether of God and nothing of man. A bowl is on the top of it, speaking of the measure of the filling. And then that one bowl supplies seven lamps. The seven lamps speak of the spiritual fulness and completeness of the testimony. There are seven pipes, which speak of the channels of supply. Full ministry in the testimony.

Zechariah 4:3 two olive trees are seen. Two means fellowship and completeness in ministry. These are said later in the chapter to be the sons of oil; here, Joshua and Zerubbabel.

Zechariah 4:4-6 the word of the Lord to Zerubbabel.

Zechariah 4:7 the mountain of difficulty which becomes a plain before the Spirit-filled instrument, or shall we say more accurately, is as a plain. Mountains are not always removed, but mountains can be scaled in the power of the Spirit and got over, and in that sense becomes a plain. The top stone is then seen to be brought forth eventually with shouting's of "Grace, grace unto it". The top stone speaks of the certain completing of the work which God has taken in hand; and the shouting of "Grace" says that when all is done it will be through the grace of God. The final word of accomplishment is the word of grace.

Zechariah 4:9 the hands of Zerubbabel have commenced, they shall complete. Here is initiation and consummation, and it is said that this represents or speaks of vindication, "...His hands shall also finish it; and thou shalt know that the Lord of hosts has sent me unto you". The fact that the Lord sees to it that the work He gives to an instrument, that instrument fulfils if governed by the Holy Spirit, is the way in which the Lord vindicates His servants.

Zechariah 4:10 a day of small things. Also, verse 10 sees the seven eyes of the Lord which go to and fro in the whole earth rejoicing when they see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel. That is the Divine satisfaction to the full. Seven eyes - spiritual fulness rejoicing. As they go through the whole earth, they see one thing which brings complete satisfaction to the Divine heart, the plummet in the hands of Zerubbabel.

Zechariah 4:11-14 the two sons of oil, the anointed ones, but notice what they are by the anointing of the Holy Spirit is poured out and poured through the spouts to the testimony. These sons of oil are poured out to the testimony. We might more properly say the Spirit is poured out through the spouts to the testimony.

That, imperfectly, is a survey of the chapter and we are able to take things up there in the larger and perhaps more general way. The main thing with which it seems the Lord is occupying us now is:

His Further Work and Steps Towards the Completing of His Purpose by the Spirit.

That can be put in several different ways. The Lord is going to complete His testimony and to complete the vessel of the testimony, and in order to do it there must be a further movement by the Holy Spirit. "Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts".

Now, this chapter presents us with three things, which as we shall see in a moment, are three things which run from beginning to end of the Scriptures. The three things are here.

Firstly, the Lord of hosts, in a word, the Lord. Secondly, Zerubbabel. Thirdly, the Spirit, the Spirit of the Lord. And if you look more closely you will see that there are three activities in relation to those three persons; each of them has His own work, His own function. Number one, the Lord is the Originator; number two, typified by Zerubbabel, is the Constructor; number three, the Spirit of the Lord, is the Perfector. These three things are found all through the Scriptures. The Father originates and instigates; the Son constructs and arranges; the Spirit perfects and leads to final destiny.

We will open that out a little more fully by way of illustration. Take, for instance, Israel as the people of God. The Father originated all that related to them. God, the Lord, was the Originator of their distinctive history. He took the initiative. The whole thing was with Him first, and came from Him, The Father; the Lord commenced matters in relation to Israel. The Son, typified and represented by Moses, constituted, constructed and arranged. You remember the fragment in the letter to the Hebrews: "And Moses verily was faithful in all his house, as a servant... but Christ as a son over His own house". And what was Moses' business as a servant in the House of God? To constitute, construct and to order that House. What is the business of Christ as a Son over God's House? To constitute, construct, order, arrange. And then the Spirit perfects. The Spirit in Israel's history is represented by Joshua; Christ, represented by Moses, and the Spirit and the energies of the Spirit represented by Joshua, brings into possession, and points on and leads all to consummation; the perfecting of the thing which God originated and Christ constituted.

Now, these principles, relative to Israel as a type, hold good in the case of the church. Here a great body of Scripture is gathered up. It is, in the first place, the Father who originates and initiates the church. It is "the church of God which He has purchased with His own blood". It is God the Father who first designed the church, chose the church, the elect: it all commenced with Him and came out from God. God in the eternal counsels determined this, but the Son constituted, and ordered, and arranged the church, and does so. "I will build My church", said the Son. That is the Son's work. But then the Spirit is the Perfector. The church is perfected by the Spirit, He takes up that which in, and by Christ has been brought into being, by the will of the Father, the pre-determined counsel of God, the predestined purpose, He takes it up and orders it, arranges it, constitutes it; the Spirit comes to perfect it, to consummate it. And we must remember that the completing of the church is not just the adding to the church of the living stones. It is that, but that is the work of the Spirit in perfecting the number of the elect, in gathering ever-fresh living stones and adding into the building. That is the work of the Spirit perfecting, but it is a moral thing as well as a numerical thing, a spiritual thing, and it is not just having so many living stones, it is having a quality of stone, and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of sanctification, the Spirit of perfecting in that moral and spiritual sense as well as the spirit of completing in the numerical sense. So that the Holy Spirit comes to lead to the final destiny both as to the sum total, and as to the nature of the church.

And so we can gather that last word all up by saying that the Spirit is here to make perfect all that the Father originated and the Son constituted, and when you have got hold of that, you have the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in a nutshell: you know why the Spirit has come, and you know what He is doing, and you know His place, and you understand all His dealings with you. But one further word in that threefold connection before passing on.

The work of the Father is in His power to bring forth. Take your illustration again. The power which brought Israel out of Egypt, that is the power of the Father. "Let My son go", that is Fatherhood. And the miracle of the Old Testament is Israel's deliverance from Egypt. The Father's power to bring forth is the peculiar work of the Father. What applied to Israel applied to the Lord Jesus: "...but God raised Him from the dead." The paramount miracle of the New Testament is the raising of Christ from the dead, and Paul expresses it in these words: "The exceeding greatness of His power... which He wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead". The Father's work is the power to bring forth. That power is to "us-ward who believe", and that is to be taken not only in an individual sense but in a corporate sense, that as He brought Israel out and in, and as He brought Christ up again from among the dead, so it is the work of the Father to exercise power unto bringing forth. That is something to hide in and to rest upon. God is well able to do what He has determined to do, and in order to do it, His specific work is the exercise of His own exceeding great power. That is our hope for the end.

The Son's work is the power to arrange, to constitute. Everything in the House of God has to be constituted according to Christ. It has to be made according to the pattern: Christ in us and in the midst of us. That passage of Scripture, "Christ in you the hope of glory", literally applies to the corporate and not only the individual, and literally translated would be: "Christ in the midst of you, the hope of glory". Here you notice that is in Colossians, and Colossians is "holding fast the Head". Now, to be conformed to the Head, Christ in you or in the midst of you, is the constituting of the Body according to the Head. It is Christ in you that is constituting all things according to Himself, the Head, which is the assurance of glory when all things have been arranged and ordered by Him and brought into conformity to Himself as the Head over all things in the church, which is His Body, then it will be glory. So Christ is the power of a ministry which is peculiarly His in so constituting and arranging, as the Son over God's House. It is in that sense that disorder among the saints is a violating of the work of the Lord Jesus. It stands in opposition to the very work the Lord Jesus is doing. And secondly, it is therefore, the veiling of the glory of the Lord Jesus. Disorder among the saints hinders the work of Christ and hides the glory of Christ.

Now, the work of the Holy Spirit is the power to perfect. The work of the Father is the power to bring forth. The work of the Son is the power to order and arrange. The work of the Spirit is the power to perfect and bring all to its final destiny.

Now I can go on from there to begin my main point.

What is the Originating Purpose of God?

What is it that led God to originate and instigate? What is it, in the next place, which calls out the power of God in relation to His purpose as revealing the specific work of God? The answer is a very simple but far-reaching one. It is for His own glory. The originating purpose of God, which calls out the power of God, and is therefore the specific work of God, is that the end should be His Own glory. That is a truth stated, but that is also a test presented. The final test for believers, the final test of everything is in that direction. All the work of the Son and the Spirit are related thereto. The operation of the Spirit in our lives and in the church is all in that direction, and that work assumes the nature of finding out all that is not for God's glory and seeking to have it put away - testing us, trying us, challenging us, as to how much of our glory there may be in view; the glory of the flesh, the glory of man, the gratification of our things, and all that is in that realm. The originating purpose to which all the Divine energies are directed for its realisation, is for the glory of God, and that is encompassed within a clearly defined circle which excludes everything else, and includes just this. And upon that territory there are written these words in large type: "For the glory of God", and no flesh can encroach upon that, no man by nature can come within that circle. It is holy ground from which all of flesh, of man, is excluded; to approach which, all shoes of earth must be taken from our feet.

When you and I come under the initial operation of the Holy Spirit, by which we are born again, we come on to that ground: "For the glory of God". When the Holy Spirit pursues His course in our experience by discipline, chastening, instruction, He is governed by that originating purpose of God: "For the glory of God". When the Holy Spirit comes to anoint, to call to service or ministry of any kind, it is with this one thing on His lips: "For the glory of God". And oh, we enter there with that challenge into a realm where we have to look down, drop our faces in shame and our hearts smite us.

We know how this flesh likes to glory, even in the things of God, to sport itself in the blessings of God; to take praise for the very use God may make of us. Taking away the glory of God from Him and giving it to man is the work of the devil which strikes directly at the originating thought and intention of God. The glory of God is not that we might be saved and have all the blessings of salvation or sanctification, or be used of God in service, not to be a praise ourselves, or have any praise, but that all the glory is for God. That motived God in originating anything and everything, and whenever the slightest fragment of what God brought into being moves outside of that realm where it serves the glory of God, it has ceased to move in the direction of its Divinely determined destiny. It is set aside. It has missed its way. "To the glory of God" is a comprehensive fragment of Scripture. "Do all to the glory of God." That comes into line with God's first thought.

Secondly, the inclusive sphere of the realization of that originating purpose is Christ. Let me put it more simply. "That the Father may be glorified in the Son". That is a great governing law.

The Father who made all things for His glory, and was governed in all His originating by that end, for His glory, finds His end in the Son, realises all in the Son, and the inclusive sphere of the realisation of the Divine purpose is Christ. And it is in that sense that all that there is in the New Testament is comprehended in two words: "In Christ".

Oh, our little badge goes a long way doesn't it - in Christ. Everything of the Divine thought is in Christ. "That the Father may be glorified in the Son". Yes, but there is an additional truth to that. It is here that the church has its deepest meaning as the Body of Christ. The Body is not something objective to Christ. The Body is something in oneness of identification; not something apart from Christ - out there; but one with Christ, "...and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body; so also is the Christ". And our being gathered into Christ means that as the Body of Christ, one with Christ, the glory of God as His eternal intention and originating motive is going to be displayed in Christ and His members.

It is in the church by Christ Jesus that there will be glory to God unto all ages for ever and ever. That is the Ephesians word is it not? "Now unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, unto Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end." So that in Christ, in that organic spiritual oneness with Christ as His Body, not dismissing His separate entity or personality, not losing Him as a distinctive Member of the Godhead, but now by reason of this oneness of Life and Spirit, the church becomes the inclusive sphere of the realisation of God's originating purpose - for His glory. Now take up the Scriptures on that matter and you see that we are called unto His eternal glory, that it is in us He is going to be glorified, and at His appearing He comes to be glorified in His saints; but it is all the fulfilment of what God intended from the beginning, that we should be to the praise of His glory as well as to the praise of His grace.

Now, then we come to:

This Work of the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit takes that up to perfect the Father's purpose in the church as He did in Christ. He perfected firstly the purpose of God in the Christ. You must remember that Christ was a sphere of the Holy Spirit's operation; He was, in the first place, separated from His birth by the Spirit to be a sphere in which the glory of God should be manifested, and all His life was governed and controlled by that one thing, that the Father should be glorified in the Son, and He brought the two things together again and again. In the case of the sickness and death of Lazarus He said: "This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby." You see the two things, the glory of God and the glorification of the Son of God are one thing, but God is glorified in the Son. But that is the work of the Holy Spirit, and right to the end in His yielding up at the cross it was the work of the Spirit, "Who through the Eternal Spirit, offered Himself". And then it is "the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead". You see all that is the glory of God in Christ, by the Spirit. Now that which has been by the Spirit accomplished and consummated in the Head, in the Christ, in the Lord Jesus, is taken up by the Holy Spirit to be perfected, that in the saints there shall be made good that which has been fulfilled in Christ Himself. The Holy Spirit is working to perfect the saints according to Christ who is the realisation of the glory of God. So that by the Spirit's work we are being brought into conformity to Christ, that the glory of God should be revealed in us as it is revealed in Him.

Now the method of the Spirit is just to make Christ full in us. The travail of the Spirit, the energy of the Spirit, the longing of the Spirit, all the direction and object of the Holy Spirit is to bring the fulness of Christ into the saints, and the saints into the fulness of Christ, because Christ is perfected and consummated to the glory of God the Father, and the Spirit is out after doing in us what He has done in our glorious Head.

That embraces all the work of the Holy Spirit. He begins in our new birth, He goes on in all our discipline and child training, and in all that in the sovereignty and providence of God is allowed to come to us. He is working good because we are called according to the eternal purpose; working good because of the eternal purpose. The eternal purpose is the glory of God in the saints. The Holy Spirit is working good from all things in relation to that purpose. The Spirit goes on in all His anointing, in all His imparting of spiritual gifts, in all His giving of graces as well as gifts, in all His development of spiritual character, the character of Christ, in everything that the Spirit does, in all departments of His activity He is moving to the fulness of Christ in the church, till we all come eventually to the fulness of the stature of a man in Christ, the fulness of Christ.

Perhaps we shall have to adjust some of our ideas and our prayers about the Holy Spirit. We perhaps have wanted the Holy Spirit for salvation from the things which make us miserable and wretched, for blessing and service, but all these things are something in themselves and perhaps an end in themselves. We have to enlarge our horizon, we have to get out on something bigger and more adequate than that if we are going to give the Holy Spirit room to move in everything for the glory of God.

Every challenge which comes to you and me which precipitates a crisis for us, coming from the Lord, is in the Holy Spirit's intention to bring a greater fulness of Christ, and us into a greater fulness of Christ. And some very severe challenges come, and some very deep crises come. A challenge to tradition, perhaps a challenge to the narrow limitations of our upbringing and common acceptance, the things we have been taught to believe, the things in which we have been brought up, the background of our religious history - it may, after all, be a limiting thing, something that is not large enough for the fulness of Christ. It may have brought us so far but there comes a point where the Lord would enlarge us, would break our bounds, bring us out into His wealthy place, and in relation to that enlargement and enrichment a crisis is created which demands the letting go of something smaller. The Holy Spirit brings these crises into our experience. They seem to shatter everything for us but it is unto the enlargement of Christ. The question we must always apply to such experiences is this: "Has the Lord brought me to this?" "Is this thing by the Spirit?" "Have I any reason whatever to believe or to conclude that the Holy Spirit is in this?" "Have I come here by my own choosing? No, I have not." "Have I been driven here merely from the outside or have I reason to believe that there is something of the Lord in this, that the Lord's hand is in this whatever it may be?" It may be the letting go of something I have cherished for so long, or the acceptance of something which I have anything but cherished, something I said I would never touch and never have anything to do with; now I am faced with it and searched by it. "He brought me into the net", said the psalmist and a net is a most uncomfortable place to be in. Have you ever been in a net and tried to get out? The more you try to get out the more entangled you become. Now, if there is the slightest, remote reason for believing that the Lord is in it, oh, believe me beloved, the Holy Spirit has all His work compassed in and bound up with the fulness of Christ and you cannot go outside of that with the Holy Spirit. That is a tremendous thing to say but it is true.

The Holy Spirit has no sphere of operation in this dispensation outside of the fulness of Christ, and everything that the Holy Spirit does is in relation to the fulness of Christ and bringing us into it and it into the church. Now, if that is so, anything which we have reason to believe is bound up with the Spirit of God has as its end, its object, our coming into the fulness of Christ. The net may be a narrowing thing, yes, but it is unto enlargement. We are brought down to be brought up. We are buried to be raised. "This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby". In relation to the Lord Jesus no death is unto death, it is unto Life. Out of relation with Him death is unto death.

The Spirit of the Lord is working in relation to God's originating intention, becoming the power of God to realise that intention; the Spirit of the Lord is taking up what has been fully constituted by Christ in His own person as representing all that which is of God.

What I have just said could all have been said by simply quoting Scripture. You will be able quite easily to put Scripture to it all, but may the Lord just give us the vision and the enablement to apprehend, and the grace to accept and see that whatever our thoughts and ideas are about the Holy Spirit and His work, there is nothing that the Holy Spirit is here to do outside of the compass of a Divine intention, which is His glory in Christ manifested in us; to bring us to the fulness of Christ who is the fulness of God. That is all the Divine glory in the saints. There are other things which relate thereto; I will mention them and close.

The Holy Spirit has inspired the Scriptures from Genesis to Revelation, but it is a relative thing. It is not enough as a plank in a platform, as an item in a confession of faith, to believe in the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures. The only thing that is adequate in the acceptance of the inspiration of the Scriptures is to see the relationship of all this, and the Holy Spirit inspired the Scriptures throughout in relation to the purpose of God in Christ to bring the saints to God's end, and that is why the Scriptures are almost entirely bound up with the people of God. Weigh it up and you will find the Scriptures are almost entirely bound up with the saints, with believers. And that is why the Scriptures can never be understood apart from the Spirit of God, and that is why men who approach the Bible apart from the Spirit of God always make a mess of it. They have no understanding of it, they get themselves and everybody else into all sorts of confusions and contradictions and errors.

The Scriptures were inspired by the Holy Spirit in relation to God's end - the fulness of Christ, and if you are not moving in that direction, the inspired Scriptures have no meaning. You find if the Scriptures have got into the hands of an unsaved person, and that person is saved, it is by a special intervention of the Spirit and the Holy Spirit never does that where there is positive unbelief, or unwillingness to accept light. It is the honest and open in heart who come under the Spirit's ministry in reading the Word of God, apart from any other ministry, unto salvation. The Scriptures are locked up with the Holy Spirit and no one apart from the Spirit of God, can understand them. The Holy Spirit gave us the Scriptures in relation to the Divine intention concerning Christ. That is why it is the Scriptures that speak of Him: "These are they which testify of Me."

The Holy Spirit has given us the Person of Christ. From birth to death and resurrection, it is the work of the Spirit; and then in revelation to our hearts, we are given the Person of Christ. And the Person of Christ is bound up with the Holy Spirit and no one can know the Son but by the Spirit. The Holy Spirit has locked up the Person of Christ with Himself. And you see why it was that the Holy Spirit revealed the Person of Christ to such as Paul, to bring the church into the fulness of Christ. To talk of the Jesus of history is such nonsense and never gets you anywhere. It is the Christ of revelation by the Spirit who alone can get us through to our destiny according to God's purpose.

The Holy Spirit has given the church, the church is the fruit of the Spirit. "The Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead". No man can add to it by rolls or any other method. You cannot join the church. The Holy Spirit can make you a member of Christ. Oh, what a lot of nonsense and rubbish there is on Ecclesiology! The church is compassed by the Holy Spirit and you can only get in through the Spirit, and when you are in, you have to come absolutely under the government of the Spirit, or your being in, in its purpose, is nullified, paralyzed, limited. All these things are relative. They represent the work of the Holy Spirit, but they are only within the compass of the one great thing: to bring about the universal manifestation of the glory of God in the Son through the church.

May the Lord use what He has given to some real value for His glory.

Chapter 3 - The Outpouring from on High of the Holy Spirit

Reading: Acts 2:1-47.

With Acts 2 open before us, with no particular fragment for the moment, we shall seek by the Lord's enablement to enter into some of the deeper meaning of the great thing which is there recorded: the outpouring from on high of the Holy Spirit. We are all very much concerned with this matter, and our prayer is continually to the Lord that we might enter into this great reality experimentally, in a fuller and deeper way. I am quite sure that this chapter has all of our hearts.

I have been meditating upon some of the great differences between the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament and the Holy Spirit in the New, and I think I find in that contemplation the answer to all our questions and the way for the satisfying of all of our desires, or the entrance into the enjoyment of that for which we are constantly stretching out to the Lord in the matter of the Life of the Spirit. And in this little while in which we are together, as the Lord gives His grace and help, I will seek to bring to you one, two, or three of these great, these vital differences upon which there hangs so much for us and the Lord's people. They are, of course, very simple and almost obvious. That does not take away from their importance.

And the first of these is in the aspect which both represent. We have much in the Old Testament about the Holy Spirit. We are told of the Holy Spirit coming upon people, and we are told of the Holy Spirit being in people. We are told of many things which people did by the power and the equipment of the Holy Spirit. But when we have summarised all that the Old Testament has to say in the matter, we find that there abides, as it were in the very atmosphere, a sense of incompleteness, a sense of things being imperfect, a sense of something which has yet to be in this connection. And as we move on towards the later history of the Old Testament and come to the prophets, we find that there is always the forward-looking aspect in this matter, looking on. Joel, quoted in Acts 2, is the forward look: "It shall come to pass afterward..." Isaiah has a great deal to say about the day when the Spirit comes and what will be the result. Ezekiel is full of the coming Spirit. And other prophets have the same note and the same aspect.

It is all looking on with a sense of the imperfectness, the incompleteness, the partial thing of their knowledge and experience of the Holy Spirit. We might almost say that it has been a fitful experience, nothing abiding, permanent, nothing settled; a coming and a going, a doing and a withdrawing, but an ever-onward pointing towards something more. And the people of God in the Old Testament had no background history which was complete, which was absolute. They could not look back to anything that was final, and so they longed for finality; finality for them, lay ahead. They had had great events in their history to which they did ever and always look back, but they were conscious that the thing was not something done once and for all, and so the heart was still left with longing.

Now, the difference in the aspect of the New Testament from the Old is just there, that in the New Testament everything looks back, everything has to do with a background of fulness and finality that the thing has been done, has been accomplished, and that the fulness has come and is established. And I fear that perhaps one of the weaknesses of our position which in measure hinders the Lord, is our failure to stand upon that; that we are in spirit and mind too often on Old Testament ground, looking on to something instead of apprehending something - looking for something instead of accepting something, craving for something instead of recognising that that something is ours. Now, I said that that is very simple, but it is very vital; it goes right to the heart and root of things. For we today do not stand in hope of something, we should be standing in the certainty of something already accomplished. And it seems to me that the Lord requires that position. He demands it.

I have been trying to enter into the mind and thoughts of the Lord. I doubt whether that is possible to man, but reverently I have this morning been trying to put myself in the Lord's place, and listen to my own prayers, and listen to the prayers of so many of the Lord's people in which I, with them, continually plead with and cry to the Lord for something, unto something, in relation to the Holy Spirit. And in the Lord's place I think I should feel like this: "Why don't these people recognise that it is all done? Why is it that they are so slow in realising that long ago I did the thing forever that they are asking Me to do now?" That is, the Holy Spirit has never in the history of this world before, and will never again in the history of this world, come forth from the Father. Whatever there may be of latter rain, whatever there may be of the activity of the Spirit at the end, beloved, there will never be another Pentecost in that essential sense that the dispensation of the advent of the Holy Spirit begins again.

The Holy Spirit came and He did not go to come again. He is abiding for the age and He is here, not in any more limited sense than He was when He came, for God is not narrowed, Deity is not straitened, the Lord is not curtailed, He does not lose volume or capacity or dimensions with time; He is the same forever. The Holy Spirit is here as much as ever He was here, and if we are failing to know the power and fulness of the Spirit, we have to look elsewhere for the explanation and not in the direction of a new advent of the Spirit. And perhaps one of the directions in which we should look is this very one: that we are on wrong ground, rather on Old Testament ground in mentality, in spirit, in heart, than upon New Testament ground.

Oh, does it not come home to our hearts with fresh force as we just reflect upon it afresh, the Holy Spirit has come, He came long ago and has not gone. The Spirit of the Lord has been poured out, this is the age of the Spirit's advent and abiding. In other words, the Lord is here, and we are constantly asking Him to come. It has been growing upon me for a long time that there is some weakness in our constantly asking the Lord to come. I am not referring to His coming again, but I mean when gathered together we ask the Lord to come into our midst. If only immediately we were together we said in all faith and conviction: "The Lord is here according to His Word that where two or three are gathered together in His Name 'there am I' and He has not to be invited". In that sense, if we were to more strongly believe and take the positive, for granted attitude, that this is the day of the Spirit, and the day of the Spirit is not future it is now, the day of the Holy Spirit is not a future dispensation, this is the day of the Holy Spirit and it is honouring to the Lord to take that position, because any other position in effect says the Lord has not done that which He has done. And that must be spread over all matters.

To begin with, in that simple way, that is a difference of a vital character which carries very much with it, and it must begin to adjust and rectify our attitude and our praying, and of course it must begin to make us look for the explanations of weakness and limitation in this matter in the right direction, and not in the direction of the Lord having failed, or failing now; the Lord not having done His part. He has. I know that there are fresh manifestations of the Spirit, fresh expressions, fresh fillings of the Spirit. For these we long and pray, but the all-inclusive thing is that the Spirit is here and that at any moment He may manifest Himself. You do not have to fix dates, and you do not have to look to any chronological chart. It may be now. Any moment the Spirit may show Himself because He is here. God does not have to open the heavens again in that special sense. He has to bring us into a place where we enter into the enjoyment of what He has already done for us.

We can go on from there with one or two other matters. We are speaking now out from perhaps the deeper content of Acts 2 and that is where we begin. The Spirit has come, and the Lord said about that coming: "He abides with you." Now there are three other great factors which come up as basic to this matter and which lie back of our knowledge and experience of the Holy Spirit.

The first of these three is that:

The Question of all Righteousness has been Fully and Finally Settled.

That also gives character to the difference between the dispensations. In the Old Testament that question was not fully settled and finally settled. It was only dealt with along the line of types and shadows, forecasting, but the real thing was not done. The question of all righteousness was constantly cropping up, and with every fresh daily sacrifice there was the declaration in the very sacrifice that the question of all righteousness was not yet settled. So day by day, week by week, and year by year through literally millions of sacrifices, the question of all righteousness was still unsettled. But the question of all righteousness is now settled, and finally so. Until that question was settled the Holy Spirit could not come to fulfil His peculiar and particular ministry, the age of the Spirit in fulness was not possible.

The ground of the Holy Spirit's coming to do His work is the ground of the final settlement of the whole question of righteousness. And I believe with all my heart that one of the things by which the Adversary of the eternal purpose of God in Christ seeks to frustrate the work of the Holy Spirit in perfecting that thing, is to constantly raise among the Lord's people a doubt about all righteousness, the question of all righteousness. It is a thrust at the very work of the Spirit. It is a thrust at the very character of the dispensation. It is a thrust at the very realisation of God's purpose in Christ when any soul has a doubt about the question of all righteousness being settled.

And this thing which is spreading, and coming up in the heart of so many of the Lord's own children, the question of their standing before God, the question of their acceptance with the Lord, some doubt as to the utterness of their justification with God, some coming in of the dark suggestion of sin unpardonable - all that kind of thing is the work of the other spirit against the Holy Spirit in this age, and the only ground upon which the Holy Spirit has absolute liberty and freedom for us is that we stand where for us the question of all righteousness is fully and finally settled in Christ.

(I am quite sure you are not grasping it or you would respond to that! Let me try and help you into it. Perhaps it is just my way of putting it, or, perhaps it is too familiar - God forbid!).

There is a difference between Adam before the fall, and the justified sinner, and such a difference as to make them absolutely have no correspondence or fellowship. A lot of people think the justified sinner is brought back to the position of Adam before he fell. It is not so. No, we are not brought back to the position of Adam before he fell. If so, we may fall again, and that will not be to the glory of God. The whole history may be repeated, and wherein has God transcended in His new creation, His old creation? Wherein has God attained a better thing in the new creation than in the first creation if He has but brought us back to the place where Adam was before he fell? The difference is such a fundamental one, as immediately we see it to be a mighty power of deliverance. Now, Adam had a righteousness before the fall which was an untested, untried righteousness, and when it was tried and tested it collapsed, it broke down. It was a righteousness that could not go through the test and it failed, and the whole race went down on an untested righteousness which could not stand the test.

The Lord Jesus possesses a righteousness which has been tested out far, far beyond any test that was ever applied to Adam. His righteousness has been subjected to such fires as Adam never dreamt of, but His righteousness has triumphed in the final test where there was no other test. And He has given us that righteousness, that is our righteousness, by faith; a tested, proved, established righteousness.

You see, Christ and Adam have no relationship. They are two realms, two different beings: one in utter weakness without any righteousness and one in supreme power of a righteousness tried and proved. And that righteousness is given to the redeemed sinner, the justified sinner, and he is on different ground altogether from Adam before the fall. And let us remember that the righteousness of Christ which is given to us through faith, never, never fails, never breaks down. It is incapable of breaking down because it has reached the point where there is nothing left that can break it down. What a wonderful position is ours through faith in the Lord Jesus!

Now you see why the Holy Spirit could not come on the old ground; why the dispensation of the fulness of the Spirit was postponed. Because, in the words of the Lord Jesus: "because that Jesus was not yet glorified". The glorifying of the Lord Jesus was upon the basis of the question of all righteousness having been finally settled, and then the Spirit could come.

When you and I begin to be in doubt about the sin and salvation matter, we begin to dispute what Christ has done and what God has offered us, and what the Holy Spirit has come to make good to us; and how can anybody with any kind of weakness on such matters expect to live in the fulness of the Spirit? It is necessary, if we are to enter into the full blessing of the Holy Spirit, that we enter into the full blessing of the all-righteousness question having once and for all been settled. In other words, to enter by faith into our full justification in Christ. That comes up in Acts 2. Read it through with that in your mind and you will see that something has been done, and that accomplishment is registered in heaven by the exaltation of the Lord Jesus, and because of that the Spirit comes, and in fulness. When we recognise that, and enter into that, we are in the way of the Spirit's greater fulness and life and liberty.

This harassing, pursuing, driving, tormenting accuser is always trying to fasten upon us some impingement of condemnation to get in between us and our Lord in the matter of sin. It does not matter what it is, the slightest little thing where we may quite truly, or even in our imagination, have made a mistake. It has only to be an imaginary thing and the enemy is at once there to jump in on that ground to smite us with dark and deadly condemnation: "You have done wrong" and to crush us out with his accusation, to smite us to the ground with a sense of sin. And we allow it to linger, and we go down in our spirit under it, and the Holy Spirit's work is suspended at that point, whereas if we instantly turned to the Lord and recognised that in the precious blood of the Lord Jesus there is our justification, because of our cleansing, and we appropriated that by faith instantly, not condoning sin but regretful, yet holding on to God by faith, the power of the accuser would be broken and the Spirit's life and victory would flow into us and we should rise again. The enemy uses the slightest little thing to create and set up, truly or falsely, to bring a saint under accusation. Ah, but he knows what is bound up with that. The whole meaning of the Spirit's presence, the purpose for which He has come, the whole meaning of Christ's Cross and exaltation, and the whole purpose of God upon this matter of all righteousness.

When the Lord Jesus went to the Jordan, John would have put Him back in his sense of unworthiness, and the Master said: "Suffer it now, for thus it becomes us to fulfil all righteousness." In those words He was pointing on to His cross, to the antitype of Jordan, where in His death, His burial, and His resurrection that question of all righteousness would be fully and finally settled. So this is basic.

This is very important, and you and I have to settle these very elementary things of our faith to give a place to the Holy Spirit. Very elementary, but it is a blessed thing for you and me to really comprehend in a way that we can enjoy it in our hearts, that once and for all the question of all righteousness has been settled for us. That is no small thing, but until we have it in our hearts as a settled thing the Holy Spirit is not free to go on with His work, neither to fill us. How can the Holy Spirit ever have a completely free way in a heart that is doubting its salvation (I am speaking of believers) in a heart that has questions about its justification, or faith to apprehend in an adequate way that it stands before God as just and righteous in Christ? It is the wonder of wonders but nevertheless it is true and we ought to be reassured in our hearts by every reminder of it. You and I, in all that we are in ourselves that we would not be, and all that we are not that we would be, are nevertheless accounted in Christ as utterly righteous by God. It requires a lot of theology to define and explain it, but there is the fact. The Lord Jesus before the very eye of God, in His sinlessness, is the state which you and I have now come to by faith. Let that get in. The Holy Spirit will work on that. The Holy Spirit will take advantage of that position. He will have that free way.

The second of these three things is:

The Exaltation of Christ.

The question of sin and all righteousness has been fully and finally settled and dealt with. That is not an Old Testament position; that is a New Testament position. And then the fact that Christ is exalted comes up out of Acts 2. The Holy Spirit never came until that took place, but when that took place He was not long in tarrying. Ten days - a number which carries its own significance of drawing out the heart and testing the faith in the Lord Jesus, and then the Spirit came, but it was upon the ground that Christ was exalted to the right hand of the Majesty on high.

And do you notice that throughout the New Testament in all the preaching, these things are ever kept in view? This thing is brought to the fore invariably. The exalted place of the Christ is a thing which is always brought before the eyes of people there. It is a retrospect. It is something which has happened, something to which they look back, an accomplished fact. Christ is exalted. Christ is at the Father's right hand which is the place of honour and of power. Christ is there as Lord. And it was because that fact (which to us is commonplace in language) with its tremendous implications had come into their souls that they had such an enjoyment of the Spirit's life and fulness. And this matter tests us out, it tests me and it tests you. Sometimes things do seem to dispute that fact.

Very often the forces of evil, the assaults of the devil, and the course of circumstances seem very clearly and strongly to deny that fact, and then we are thrown into a conflict between two things. Are we going to accept things seen, the course of circumstances, the power of the devil, as the primary thing, the ultimate thing? Or do we immediately turn and say that in spite of this the Lord reigns and is on the throne? It is easy to say that on a platform, and for you to hear it and respond to it, but we do not always do it. We allow the swirl of things to hold us in its grip for days, perhaps for weeks before we leap with our affirmation that nevertheless the Lord is on the throne. But whenever we disentangle ourselves from our questionings, doubtings and fears, when we do extricate ourselves from that terrible impact which would swamp us, and make our full and complete affirmation and declaration which carries with it something of a determination that whatever is, we stand by the Lord, the Lord is on the throne, whenever we do that something happens, there is release at least in us if not in the conditions and we come into a new place.

It seems the Holy Spirit immediately takes advantage of that and we come out into a larger place, and now the way is open before us whereas we were hedged in. The Holy Spirit demands the ground of the exaltation of the Lord Jesus, and He could not come until that was established, and He comes on that ground; and He always requires it in us: a steady faith that the Lord Jesus has been exalted to the place of honour and power. There is much more bound up with that than I am able to mention now, but it is something for us to contemplate more fully as an essential for the knowledge of the Spirit in any commensurate and triumphant way.

The third thing is that:

The Church has been Brought into Being.

Now this represents something tremendous, because the church was in the forethought and foreknowledge and forecounselling of God before this world was; and in the thought of God before this world, the church was seen, chosen, predestinated, to be the very instrument and sphere of the realisation of God's eternal purpose - to be for God the satisfaction of His own heart in the thing which He was designing for this universe. And the church was to be the vehicle, means and vessel of the Holy Spirit's fulfilment of all the work of Christ, and the display thereof to the universe. And so, until the church is brought into being, the Holy Spirit does not have what He needs for the purpose of God to fulfil His ministry. And now the church is in being, and the Holy Spirit has got His vessel. But that for us carries a thing or two which I must mention before I close.

It means this, that you and I will only know the Holy Spirit's fulness and free action as we come into our vital place and position in the Body of Christ. The knowledge of the Spirit is bound up with the church which is His Body. That does not mean an institution on the earth which we join, but that does mean that we become spiritually a vital part of the Body of Christ. We have often said that the Holy Spirit is not given by God to a chain of individual units; the Holy Spirit is given to one Body. God never did create man as so many isolated units, He created a race as an organism: "and has made of one blood all nations of men". Now in this church, the Body of Christ, it is not so many links, so many individuals, so many units; it is to one Body that the Holy Spirit is given. It is in the one Body that the full purpose of God is going to be realised. Now set that aside and you are on the highway and main road to delusion and deception, and you will make the most ghastly blunders possible - and a great many have done that, "Oh, there is no time for anything corporate or anything along the line of fellowship. It is now every man for himself. It is for everyone to see they are all right. It is now an individual work." You cannot sweep the Bible away so easily.

You cannot set aside Ephesians with all its content like that. "But the word of the Lord endures forever", and you have to stand by the Word, and if you do not, you expose yourself to deception. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth, but as the Spirit of truth He will operate in the vessel which has been chosen of God from all eternity to be the peculiar means and instrument for the revelation of Himself. And it is the church, the Body of Christ which is the peculiar vessel of the Holy Spirit. He was poured upon the Head for all the members, and all the members are anointed in Christ. That is familiar truth to most of you, but it may be we need a little more real spiritual recognition and discernment in relation to the Body of Christ before we come into a fuller knowledge of the Holy Spirit's work and life and fulness.

This is the age of the church, in that Divine and spiritual and eternal sense, and the Lord does not set that aside; He abides by it. Much of our "churchianity" may destroy the true church of the Word of God and overshadow it, but the relationship of the saints as members of one Body, joined to one Head, actuated together by one Spirit, is an essential basis for the fulfilment of the purpose of God by the Spirit. And if we begin to cut ourselves off and get out of fellowship, get into wrong places and so on, we immediately check the work of the Holy Spirit. For Him to have free course means we have to recognise this is the age of the foundation of righteousness fulfilled, the top stone, Christ exalted; and all that goes between, the church His Body. Resting upon all righteousness, crowned with the Head, the Exalted Christ, built together a habitation of God through the Spirit.

Now I will close there, with all the consciousness of the vastness and the range of that, and how much more ought to be said, but I close by one further stress upon the thing which must bring us to our arrest actually when we do not give the Holy Spirit His indispensable free course.

I want to remind you that Adam before the fall laboured, and then had rest; he worked and then had a Sabbath. We begin in a new system entirely, a new order. We start with rest and work out of the energies of that rest. Our rest is from sin, in full justification. Our rest is in the completed work of God. Our rest is in the fulness of Christ's accomplishment and our redemption, and we take our rest there, and then out of the energy of that rest we work.

And the difference, as you notice Paul says in the letter to the Galatians, is that in the Old Testament the Lord's people were servants working for wages. They brought their sacrifices every day, and that was their work for the wages of righteousness, their justification as every day went, depended upon their works. The New Testament position is that we are sons who have the inheritance, and we work because we have an interest in working, not to get righteousness, not labouring as servants to be paid. We have already been paid. The inheritance is ours. We are sons. You see a son working and a servant working and you know the difference. Employ someone to work and you have to pay them their wages. But if the work is that which is yours in interest, because you are a son, the wages question does not arise. It is your interest, your delight, and your energy is in it. We are not working for wages, we have got our wages in full justification, and out of the energy of that, we are working.

We are not justified by works, but being justified we work. That is, we have entered into our rest. But have we? Do we know the vitality and the energy which comes out of having rest? Are we toiling away at this business of salvation and sanctification hoping we shall get the wages some day? You see the different position, the different dispensation; that we, when we come on to God's present position, then the Holy Spirit has a free hand.

The Lord help us to see what is in all the elementary but essential foundations of the Holy Spirit's coming, and the Holy Spirit's operation, and the Holy Spirit's fulness of life, for His Name's sake.

Chapter 4 - The Two Sides of the Cross

Reading: Acts 2:37-47.

There is a little word following on from what we were saying earlier. We were seeking to say something about the difference of the position of a justified sinner from the position of Adam before he fell, and we found that that difference is a very great one and a very blessed one. It is in that connection that I have this further little word. Let me put it this way: that the sinner justified by grace does not occupy the ground which Adam occupied before the fall, but he does occupy the ground which the Lord Jesus occupies in resurrection.

When you have said that, and seen that, you have embraced everything that the Cross of the Lord Jesus means. It is a tremendous thing to say and a wonderful thing to see, that justified by grace we stand upon the same ground that the Lord Jesus stands upon in resurrection.

Now, that means that all the work which the Lord Jesus came to do in His Cross is an accomplished thing for us and is put under our feet as the basis of our lives, and standing upon that, the Holy Spirit comes in. I expect you notice the connection here in Acts 2. The reply to the enquiry as to what should be done was that they should repent and be baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus and they would receive the Holy Spirit. Now, Peter had already quoted the prophet Joel, and in citing Joel he had used those terms which are very inclusive and far-reaching: "I will pour out My Spirit upon all flesh...". Now, that is a very wide range, not as wide as perhaps you might conclude by an unthinking reading of the Word, and yet very wide. This did not mean, for instance, that the whole world of men and women would be baptized with the Spirit at Pentecost; it did not mean that and that did not happen. It did mean that all flesh as represented at Jerusalem at that time would become one flesh under the baptism of the Holy Spirit when believing, when obedient. I mean that there at Jerusalem you have a wonderful display of how inclusive the Body of Christ is. Parthians, Medes, Elamites and all the rest from all nations under heaven gathered at Jerusalem, and the Lord's thought was that the representatives of all flesh should come under one anointing to become one Body. That is, to put it the other way round, the Body of Christ would include representatives of all flesh by the one Spirit, but as a matter of fact, the first movement of the Holy Spirit in coming did not touch that wider range. It only touched twelve, or those who formed the immediate company of such as were directly related to the Lord Jesus. It may have been just the twelve, they in the first instance alone received the Holy Spirit, there may have been more with them of course, probably there were, but the larger representation at Jerusalem did not receive the Spirit immediately. But the promise was to them, to all flesh, but there was something to be done on their part. They had to repent, with all that that means, and they had to be baptized that they might receive the Holy Spirit. And then as they were obedient the promise expanded and embraced them.

Now, the point is quite clearly there that the Holy Spirit coming upon and filling the life is dependent upon a certain course of faith's obedience, and that is represented here by the repentance on the one hand, and being baptized on the other. That gives character to baptism; that defines what baptism is. We should never say that to be baptized in a pool or bath of water, or in a river, or even in the sea, necessarily or inevitably brings the Holy Spirit. There are multitudes of people who have gone through the form of baptism with no such result, but entering into the spiritual meaning of that thing, and going through that thing with its true spiritual meaning does involve and carry with it the Holy Spirit. There had been an adequate message given to make that perfectly clear to those at Jerusalem, and this thing was not preached just as a thing, as some form through which they were to go. It was preached and commanded as an expression and understanding of all that had been said, and that is the only sound basis for being baptized; but when you have got that sufficient basis, well the Holy Spirit is committed to that course. "Ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit" provided you intelligently, understandingly go the way the Lord has revealed.

Now we have got to get through somehow on to the ground which the Lord Jesus occupies in resurrection before we can have the Holy Spirit. That is the place to which we must come. The Holy Spirit will never come this side of Jordan, the Holy Spirit will never come this side of resurrection ground. It is always, both in type and in truth in the Scriptures, made perfectly clear that the Holy Spirit does not come, only on the resurrection ground, so that we must get through to there. How can we get through to there? Of course the obvious thing is you can never get to resurrection until you have got through to death, for resurrection only applies to dead people and no one else. So that is the way. But that includes one or two rather important things and it includes that which is meant by "repent and be baptized". I suggest that those are two aspects of the Cross of the Lord Jesus.

The Cross of the Lord Jesus has two phases, or shall we say that the recreating work of God has two parts, and they are these. On the one hand, firstly, there is:

The Removing of Corruption

The healing of the breach between God and man, the death to sin, the atoning for guilt. Now, that all raises the sin question. That all has sin in view, and because sin has come in and become a positive menace to that original purpose of God which was, and is, to have everything for His own glory, and sin makes that purpose impossible. The Holy Spirit, if He is the Spirit whose business it is to take up that purpose of God and carry it out and fulfil it, then He must of necessity, antagonise sin. Let me say that again in a simpler form.

God had a purpose, as we were saying in chapter 2, which governed Him in all His creative activities. That purpose was that all things should be for His glory. The Holy Spirit has as His ministry the perfecting of the Divine purpose. Now sin has entered and sin is the thing which stands point-blank against the purpose of God, that is, that all things should be to His glory. Where sin is then, it is impossible for things to be to the glory of God. Therefore if God's purpose is to be realised and fulfilled, and the Holy Spirit has as His business its fulfilment, the Holy Spirit must of necessity antagonise sin; and that is why He is called the Holy Spirit. It gives force to His title.

We are not accustomed in the ordinary course of language and phraseology to use as a title the designation, "Holy God", neither do we speak commonly of, "Holy Jesus", but it is the commonest form of speech with us to say "Holy Spirit". We are so accustomed to that phrase that we have almost accepted it without a second thought as to why, strangely, the Holy Spirit should not be simply called the Spirit. Why so often the Holy Spirit? Simply because His whole mission and work is to fulfil the purpose of God, to perfect the purpose of God, that all things shall be for God's glory, and sin is the one obstacle and therefore, He must in His very Person and work stand in direct antagonism to sin. And therefore His title is the Holy Spirit.

Now, therefore, the Holy Spirit must bring sin into view in its nature, and bring man to recognise that He is against it, and man must be against it, and there must be an entire repudiation of it and more: there must be a death to sin.

So the first side of the Cross brings sin into view on its positive side, as something which is altogether opposed to God and His purpose, and shows how Christ died to sin once for all, and called upon man to repent, which means man must take the attitude of the Holy Spirit towards sin of utter antagonism and repudiation, and accept Christ's position and attitude towards sin which is one of death. That is one side of the work of the Cross: death to sin.

And when the Holy Spirit takes hold of these men, and Peter in particular, to give the message upon which the Holy Spirit will alight and set His seal, and by which He will come and commence His dispensational work and take up His ministry, the first thing He emphasises and stresses is an attitude towards sin, and that attitude is an utter one of death. And baptism is the testimony which puts that attitude into a concrete form, which gives an open expression to the attitude taken of death to sin which opposes God's purpose - not death to sins, but death to sin. And it is not something that you can take out of yourself and put into the water; you have got to go in with it, it is you. If the Lord had meant that sin is something that could be dealt with apart from ourselves, I am sure He would have instituted some other ordinance; He would have given us something objective to ourselves just as He gave the bread, the loaf, the cup in another connection; He would have given something and said: "This is a symbol of your sin which you put into the water", but He said "You have got to go in yourself", and that is the Lord's idea of sin. It is what the Holy Spirit calls: "...the whole body of sin", and sin is not something we can snatch out of ourselves. We are sin on the Adam side. That is the divide between Adam and Christ.

In Christ we are the righteousness of God. It is not just something objective, outside of ourselves; it is something which we inwardly become in Christ, and by Christ in us. Now then, the outward testimony in baptism by which we do not do something apart from ourselves, to which we go into in body, is a representation of our attitude towards sin, and our union with Christ in His death to sin. "For in that He died, He died unto sin once." And when it says "Repent", it means take the attitude towards sin of repudiating it. And when it says: "Be baptized", it means do that thing which implies that you accept in Christ your death to sin. That is one side.

There is the other side, the second thing is:

The Reversing of the Entire Order

And the changing of the entire state. We have seen that - with Adam before the fall and Christ in resurrection - the great difference. Adam has fallen. God does not reinstate Adam. It is not a question now of recovering Adam's rectitude, or as we have said, that may be upset again at any moment, and you have the fall all over again. You have got to dismiss that realm of Adam before the fall, and bring in another side, change the order and the state; and the other side is that of righteousness, an entirely different state from that of unfallen Adam, and that comes in with Christ in resurrection.

When Christ is raised from the dead the new order and new state is introduced. That is a righteousness which cannot fall, a righteousness which in itself cannot break down. It is not Adam's, either unfallen or fallen now; it is Christ's, and is ours in Christ, and never ours as apart from Christ; and it becomes ours by imputation and impartation when we vitally, by the Holy Spirit, become united with Christ in resurrection. So that to be baptized is not only taking an attitude and accepting a position as to death to the past, but it is a faith attitude of acceptance of an entirely new condition, new order, and new state in Christ on the ground of His resurrection. So that baptism becomes an outward declaration or means of confessing openly, that now we have come through in Christ onto resurrection ground, to hold an entirely new position in Him, and that all that is true of Christ on the ground of resurrection is for us. And that is exactly where the Holy Spirit comes in, to make good for us what is true in Him, "...and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit".

Firstly, the Holy Spirit cannot come upon the old ground. The Holy Spirit does not come upon a reconstituted old Adam; it is a direct contradiction to the Scriptures. The Holy Spirit comes upon a new creation, and old Adam is done with forever in the thought and sight of God, and must be repudiated by us. Now, do not excuse your old Adam. He is still about, I know, but our attitude to old Adam is not to excuse him, not in any way to argue for him, or to condone him, but to repudiate him, and when old Adam does get up, our attitude must be a very positive one. Many people say: "Well, you know, that is my weakness, that is my defect, that is my shortcoming, that is my human make-up, you must excuse that; we are all faulty in some way or other...". And so we excuse old Adam. Now our attitude towards old Adam must be one which is uncompromising, and if he does come up in any way, we do not try and take an easy passage; that is wrong, that must not be. It is the abiding attitude of repentance which is repudiation. The Holy Spirit demands that, and the Holy Spirit comes on that. But ours is not going to be all a negative thing. We are not going to be all the time jumping on ourselves or on one another, that is, on our old Adam and on the old Adam of other people, and all the time trying to squash and suppress him. There is another position which is our hope, our Life side. Christ is a positive, living reality. The power of His resurrection is good for us, and therefore, while repudiating old Adam, we do by faith appropriate the Lord Jesus, we livingly appropriate Him on the resurrection side for Life and for deliverance, and the Holy Spirit comes on that.

Let us not live on one side of the Cross only; let us live on both sides. Or let us live on one side and work from that side, as far as it is necessary to work back on the other side. We shall only know ascendency over old Adam as we live on the resurrection side of the Cross.

Now, I think you know this exhortation, which is not my exhortation; it is the simple rejoinder of the apostles to an enquiry: "What shall we do...?", and the rejoinder was couched in terms which employed two words, "repent" and "be baptized". What has that to do with it? Everything, because it is the opening of the way for the coming of the Holy Spirit, and that is the main thing.

The Holy Spirit comes along the way of, firstly, our repudiation of old Adam; repent. In other words, our acceptance of death, in Christ's death, to the old creation. And then the Holy Spirit comes along the way which is opened by our acceptance of an entirely new position in Christ, a righteousness of faith, which was never possessed by man fallen or unfallen: the righteousness of Christ. Christ is not just another Adam unfallen. Christ is One who infinitely transcends unfallen Adam even as Man. Now then, I trust we see what this testimony of baptism means and how important it is.

You may say: "Well a lot of people have the Spirit who have never seen all that and never done all that." I want to say to you quite solemnly that the Holy Spirit never departs from His basis, and if the Holy Spirit does at any time bless and manifest His presence without all that light being possessed, the Holy Spirit only does so with a view to lead into that light.

I want to call to your remembrance something that will hit that nail well on the head. You have an extraordinary and unique instance in the book of the Acts where the Holy Spirit came upon some people, and then Peter said: "Can any man forbid the water that these should not be baptized, who have received the Holy Spirit as well as we?" On one occasion some of us were talking about that and one of the brethren ventured to say that Peter made an awful blunder there, he wanted to come in with his mere rites and ordinances, and he wanted to have them at any price, and so although the Holy Spirit had come he must bring in his baptism! I do not know what your heart attitude is, but I do not believe that Peter made a mistake. If Peter was at that time speaking in the Holy Spirit in general, I do not believe he departed from it in doing that. Peter was governed by the principle that the Holy Spirit only acts at any time with a view to bringing people into the full light of His action. And Peter saw quite clearly that this involved that, and the thing must be put in order; that you cannot take for granted that the Holy Spirit will go on if you set aside something that the Holy Spirit requires. I think that particular incident is tremendously important in this very matter and if you like you can test it out.

I hope you will not test it out personally, but in the experience of others, I have known people who were undoubtedly the Lord's, blessed and used of the Lord, and knew something of the Holy Spirit, and then without anything from man at all, without being spoken to by man, the Holy Spirit led them to the matter of baptism, and they argued, discussed, asked everybody for their advice about the matter. Did they think it was necessary? Surely they belonged to the Lord, the Lord had used them. Was it necessary? It was like going back to the beginning again - the Holy Spirit had said it and they knew it. By conferring with flesh and blood they deferred, until at last quite definitely and positively it was ruled out, with disastrous results. The Holy Spirit led them no further, and from that time all that was past became something merely of the past and not living and up-to-date. They lived upon a past experience and things were not alive; there was no further going on with the Lord. I have seen that in a good number of cases, and I only say it because the Holy Spirit has a ground. His ground is what baptism is meant to declare, that which it testifies to. I believe the Holy Spirit, if He has His way, will ask for the declaration and not only the spiritual background. But there He must have the spiritual background. He will lead into that truth, and what is involved will become a matter of practical exercise; principles create a crisis.

For us, we want to understand what it is that is going on. Why these testimonies? Firstly, an open, practical form of declaration that an old regime, an old creation, an old history, even an unfallen creation in Adam is a past thing for ever, and a new creation which never was, and is now in Christ Jesus, and not an unfallen Adam, is brought in, and by faith we are in Him and in it. And to that twofold reality we give our testimony when we are baptized, and from that time the Holy Spirit goes on with His work of perfecting the purpose of God.

I am very much struck in noticing the Hebrew literal meaning of those words at the conclusion of the creation where it says: "And God finished all the work which He had created to make". I wonder If you have noticed the strange form of words there, and how awkward those words are? "And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had made" (A.V.) "And God finished all the work which He had created to make". The Hebrew explains that awkwardness and just means this, "And God finished all the work which He had created to make perfect." He had created a work to make it perfect. He reached an end of rest which was the beginning of another, and He was going to make perfect what He had created.

Now, that is just where we are in Christ. God has finished all the work which He created, but to make it perfect the Holy Spirit has come; to make perfect in us what God has finished in Christ. The new creation finished in Christ is going to be made perfect in the saints, and the Holy Spirit, as we were saying, has as His business the making perfect of what God originated. The Holy Spirit comes upon the finished work of Christ to work it out in us. The finished work of Christ is just what we have been saying, the two sides of the Cross. I think I need not say more at the moment.

Chapter 5 - Standing in the Way of Blessing

Reading: Luke 19:11-44.

"Because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation". I want to say a word at the commencement about this word 'visitation'. It is a very interesting word. It contains that which is full of significance, and really does give a very rich character to the sentence in which it occurs, it is the Greek word which relates to the office of an apostle or elder. This was to go from place to place and hold what we might call an enquiry and to look into things with a view to ministering to the situation as it showed itself by this enquiry. An apostle, (you notice it is the same root word), or an elder, would visit an assembly in a certain town, city, or province and there would enquire into things, get to know how things were, what the state of things was, and having enquired and found out how things were, would minister accordingly, and that was called a visitation. And that is the word which is here. Literally, the Lord Jesus is here shown to have come to a people investigating their state in order to minister to them as they had need. In this particular instance He had come in this visitation to take account of their need, and minister to them in grace, mercy, and the love of God. And that is what He meant when He spoke to them about the time of their visitation.

Peter in his first letter uses this same word and you will see in the light of what I have said, the richness of its meaning. 1 Peter 2:12: "...having your behaviour seemly among the Gentiles; that, wherein they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they behold, glorify God in the day of visitation". The day when the Lord comes to His own to take account of their state with a view to blessing them, in that day these may glorify God because of the grace which has been displayed in the saints. The day when the Lord comes to visit with blessing: in the day of visitation.

Joseph when he was dying used this word, and again you will see the significance of it when you read what he said to his brethren in Genesis 50:24: "And Joseph said unto his brethren, I die; but God will surely visit you, and bring you up out". God will hold a visitation and take account of your need, your condition, in order to deliver you from it, and that will be God's visitation. He will hold an enquiry with a view to meeting the need. When the Lord came into Egypt with Moses, it was on the strength of what He had said to Moses: "I have surely seen the affliction of My people... and have heard their cry... and I am come down to deliver them". That was the day of their visitation. God coming in, looking at the situation, in order to bless and to help accordingly.

Now, in many other places in both Old and New Testaments the word occurs and it always carries with it this sense, this meaning. But here in this particular passage in Luke 19 there is a tragedy associated with this visitation. You will see how in the context in this chapter, that there is reference made not once to the fact that He was nigh unto Jerusalem; things are gathered up into that. What He said and what He did is there shown to be because they were nigh unto Jerusalem, and they still went up towards Jerusalem and then when He beheld the city He wept over it and said: "If thou hadst known even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes" (v.42). A terrible forecasting of their undoing; and that part is closed again with this terrible summary: "because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation". "Thou knewest not the time when I came to take account of the situation with a view to ministering in grace to your need - thou knewest not."

We shall best enter into the heart of this word I think, if we take account of some of the reasons why they did not know. And the very first one seems to me to get us immediately onto the ground where we ourselves will have to watch against the same peril. It was:

The Unobtrusiveness of the Visitation.

The Lord Jesus came from the glory to His own. It was not with a fanfare of trumpets, and the marching of armies and the pageantry: the glory of this world. He simply came, He was here, and for the most part men were unaware of it. He came up, as it were, like an unassuming, unostentatious flower from the earth; no noise. He grew up like a tender plant and as a root out of a dry ground, and rather than be something in Himself to attract attention: "He has no form nor comeliness and when we shall see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him", and He moved quietly among men here and there. There was no ostentation and no obtrusiveness - and they knew not the time of their visitation.

Do you say: "How were they to know though?" Do you say: "Then they are to be excused! The manner of His coming surely weakens any argument against them." Before we are finished I think we shall see that they had no ground to stand upon. But beloved, it is just here that you and I have to be aware and alert. It may be that, as with Israel, months and years of prayer for the Coming One has gone on. It may be there has been much heart-crying for a visitation; a reaching out and a longing that the Lord would come, that the Lord would do something, that the Lord's presence might be a reality, that there should really be a visitation of God - a new thing, a presencing of the Lord. And the Lord comes so silently, and is there and the prayer answered, but we hardly perceive it. That He should come in a way so different from what we expected, and be present in a form so utterly other than what we had built upon, and yet as truly present, but we do not know it. The unobtrusiveness of the Lord's coming is very often the real test of a spiritual state.

You will see how, if these people had been in a spiritual state, they had any amount of ground upon which to work to make them aware of His presence, to make them alive to the great reality that He was there. But they looked for something else, something different, and His coming so quietly, so unostentatiously, discovered their spiritual state, "and they that were His own received Him not". No doubt if the Lord were to suddenly break into our midst tonight with a great shout, with the voice of an archangel and the trump of God, we would know He was here. No one would be in ignorance, and we should all rise and say: "He is here." But beloved, He is here. He is as truly here now as ever He would be in those conditions. He is here. And He is here in the great visitation of the Holy Spirit. This is the day of our visitation. The Holy Spirit is here to take account of our condition and to minister. And we may just as easily miss the Lord's purpose as did Israel of old. And it is perhaps because of the quietness, the unobtrusiveness, the lack of the alarm that is just making us blind and cold to the great reality. We want something other, something different, but it is all here. He is here.

And I believe with all my heart (how can I do other than believe with the knowledge I have of the gracious enabling?) that He is here at this very time, this very day, for a very special purpose in relation to you and to me. I would say to you from my heart, that it is fitting for us to consider and take seriously into account that this conference may represent a quite deep, unostentatious, but real visitation of the Lord, for a purpose. We are thinking of the next conference, and then of the conferences which follow, but are we sure that we are making certain of what the Lord is here for now? I have in my heart this awful fear that we go through these times, come out in the end, look back upon them and say that they were good, blessed times and the Lord was with us, and we remember them as not in any clearly defined way, but as times when the Lord was gracious to us and good, and it was good to be there, and we carry away and on with us no specific, definite thing which for all time has become the specific thing from God for our lives relative to that occasion. And the Lord does not come, as He does come, without a very special purpose. This, beloved, I suggest to you is a time of visitation.

There is nothing on the outside to glare and blare about the Divine presence, there is nothing that we can outwardly take account of which would force itself upon us as a token; the Lord is here. Oh yes, that may just be the thing which is our peril. Are we reached out to the Lord? Are we stretched out to the Lord? Are we in that spiritual state of keenness, alertness, aliveness, eagerness, which makes it possible for us to register and recognise the Lord's presence, and the Lord's purpose in being present? And it would be a great tragedy for us if we should not have recognised the visitation of God for some specific purpose. I urge upon you that we should challenge our hearts. The Lord is here. What for? Do we believe that this is all a chance thing, that this is all a man-made thing, that we are simply here because of our own whim, fancy, inclination, or against our inclination, or for any reason that could be contributed to some human mood or working or order, or do we believe that having put our lives into God's hand, we who are His, we are here by the arrangement of the Lord?

And let me say to any who do not know the Lord, there may be a marvellous providence behind your being here, to which you are altogether oblivious. There may be the eternal sovereignty of God behind your being in this tent at this moment, and both believers and unbelievers may be here by the ordering of God in relation to a visitation. This may be the night of visitation for an unsaved soul which will find eternity crowded in it and link you with eternity past and the realization of that eternity to be; upon this very hour all may hang.

And for us who are the Lord's, great things may be hanging upon this time and yet the ordinariness of it, the usualness of it, the absence of anything very stirring from the outside, may just be that which constitutes the real peril of this hour; that we should not seek in our hearts to know what is the purpose of God in all this. This may be a time of visitation and we miss it and the Lord has to say: "Because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation". And you will say that when the Lord says a thing like that He is putting the responsibility upon them and upon us. We might react: "Well, how can we be responsible for what we do not know?", but obviously the not knowing was their responsibility; that they could have helped the not knowing, that the not knowing lay at their door and not at His. That means that we shall go just a little further in our enquiry as to what may bring about that ignorance for which we are responsible.

And the next thing that I see in their case is this, that they wanted something other than what He was offering them. They were:

Wanting a Kingdom.

He put His finger upon the spot when He said: "...because they supposed that the kingdom of God was immediately to appear", and for them the kingdom of heaven meant personal gain, advantage, place, position, influence, power, glory and that He meant something which would be for them personally a gain; and He was offering... what? A cross and a way of suffering and a way of world rejection as the way of the greatest blessing that God could ever confer upon anyone. He was offering them fellowship with Himself. Can you conceive of anything greater than fellowship with the Son of God? That is the way of blessing.

The apostle Paul had a very large knowledge of things and of the Lord. He had a great knowledge of what blessing was, and in his last days in that connection his ambition was expressed in these words: "...that I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings". For that, said he, everything else was as refuse. Fellowship with the Lord, even in His sufferings, was a blessing coveted by the apostle at the end of a long experience as being something greater than all other things of which he knew. Yes, that is something very other than what the flesh wants. Flesh has no ambitions in that direction. They wanted something so different from what He was offering and because their hearts were set upon something other, something else, something different, because their hearts were set upon what they would call blessing, which for them meant something for personal gain and advantage, their setness of heart blinded their eyes and they saw not the time of their visitation. And do we not find our fleshly heart, our fleshly will, our fleshly mind so often reacting in that way? "Oh, why the emphasis upon that way, the way of the Cross; why always that? Can we not have something that is more delightful to contemplate, that brings more instant gratification, what we would call blessing?" It is the Christ of Calvary who is visiting, not now the Christ of glory - that will be later - the way to the glory is the way of the Cross. It may be that you are not just open to the way of the Cross, that you are not just open in heart to go that way, and the time of visitation is bound up with that, for the greatest blessing that can come is in that direction. "Oh", you say, "they are words..." and doubtless you would take hold of them and interrogate the speaker with them: "Do you believe that with your experience?"

I think that you and I in our great longing for still something greater and better in the larger range of vision which we have, are rather inclined to underestimate what we have got. And when we look back to a past time when we did not have what we have now, we have to ask ourselves: would we go back there? Even if it meant an easier road, without coming to the place we have come to now, and for what we have now, would we go back and take that easier road? For my part I must say, "No", and it has been the way of the Cross, and it is the way of the Cross, but in our heart of hearts we know we have something that makes it worthwhile. And if we in our little measure can say that, oh, does it not help us to understand the apostle Paul? Ask him if, in reviewing his life from the end, and he had the two things from which to choose again, his position as a Jewish Rabbi, an elder, a member of the Sanhedrin with all the prestige, all the influence, all the authority, with every advantage which he had religiously and socially, all his inheritance, everything there that was at that time of such great account to him now held to him in exchange for what he has, with all the suffering, the imprisonment, the scourging, the slander, the nakedness, the peril, the sword, shipwreck and everything else, what would his answer be? We have not to look far for his answer. "This way of the cross, this way of suffering has brought me into a place which makes all the other as the utmost refuse."

Our flesh does cry out for an easier way, our natural man does shrink from the suffering of the Cross, and yet we know that is the way of blessing. That is the way of the fulness of Christ. But it may be, because we are not prepared, we are unwilling to go that way, that we are blind to the fact that He has come in a visitation to enrich us along that line; and this is a time of visitation for enrichment. He takes account of our need, and offers to meet it in a very large way, but in a way that our flesh will not rejoice in. Are we willing? And I am quite sure that it was unwillingness on their part to have it in His way that blinded them to the time of their visitation.

There was another thing. It was:

Prejudice.

Prejudice which padlocks the heart and the mind, and which never gives a chance to any proposition or presentation. The thing is all closed beforehand. Prejudice! It is the prejudice which says: "Yes, I want the blessing but I will not have it that way, and I will not accept it there, and I will not take it from that channel." That is prejudice. "Oh yes, I would like to reach the end but I will never touch that means of reaching it." We find here and there in the course of His life, those two things come into collision. There was apparently an honest enquiry as to the way of life, but immediately He presented the means it was made perfectly clear that while they wanted the life, they were not going to have it that way, by that means. "No I will never accept it in that way." And I believe, beloved, that God very often chooses that way of testing us as to our reality. The way of the Cross seems to embody that very principle; that God has wrapped up some of His greatest blessings in something most unacceptable, something against which all our prejudice rises, and our attitude is, yes, we want the thing, but we will not have it that way. He brought unto them eternal life but it was because of the "He" as they saw Him from the natural side, that they would not accept.

Oh, beware that you do not miss the end, and fail to see the time of your visitation by having your eyes too much upon the way in which the Lord would bring it to you, the means by which the Lord would lead you to it; the instrument. We would take it from some but not from others. The Lord tested His servant Paul upon that very early in his experience. "Rise and enter into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do." "That settles it Lord, if You like to tell me here straight from heaven I will have it, and I will do it. Or if You like to send along one of Your very important people, or someone acceptable to me, all right, but Damascus, and the people there?! Who are they? What are they?" - you see, he would have lost it all. The grace of God triumphed in him and he was prepared to accept his instructions from the very vessel that he was out to destroy, and at the lips of a man who was not an apostle and of whom we know practically nothing else; but he got the blessing, and proved that he meant business. Oh, are we prepared to sweep aside all our prejudices? If so we may come into a very great blessing, so much greater than ever we imagined or ever we saw. And some of us, in the course of our lives, have had to deal with our prejudices, and when we have, we came into a blessing along the line to which we before were utterly prejudiced. We have had to have a real battle with our prejudices and have said we would never touch that, but the Lord has said that was the way the blessing lay. We have had to come right on to it. Their prejudice blinded them and they knew not the day, the time of their visitation.

And their pride was bound up with their prejudice. Pride is a great obstacle to blessing, perhaps the greatest obstacle. It is strange that the Lord has chosen all along the line, the humble, shall I say the mean ways of expressing our reality. A tank of water is a good challenge to the pride of some people. There is no virtue in the tank of water itself, but the Lord has used it very often to discover whether people mean business. I do not put that in as any kind of appeal, only by way of illustration. The Lord has chosen ordinary, humble, and mean ways of testing our reality, and it all comes to a question of pride. The way is the way which demands a good deal of humility and meekness and letting go what other people may think or say about us, and coming right down to a very lowly place, and that is the place of blessing. Is there not pride blinding us to the time of visitation, which is the time when the Lord has come to minister great blessing to us? We must search our hearts and must make quite sure that there is nothing to which we would not bend if the way of the blessing of the Lord was that way. "Bend me, oh bend me" - that is the way of blessing.

And so we might go on, touching this thing and that thing which we see as being a possible and probable hindrance to the knowing of the time of visitation. To close with we might mention an unwillingness to let go on some matter, or to give up something upon which the Lord has put His finger. On many things we have no hesitation or reservation, the Lord has no quarrel with us at all, but there is just that one thing, and all the ninety-nine other things are arrested and held up because of that one thing. And we are not prepared to yield that one thing, not willing to let go that one thing, not willing to let the Lord have that one thing; unwillingness to give up something the Lord has asked. And that one thing has in it the power of closing the door of a large blessing that the Lord wants us to have. The enemy is ever near us to say: "Well, if you give up that, if you let that go, you will have nothing left". He was a liar from the beginning, for that is the way of enlargement, not the way of loss. It is the way of increase, not the way of straitening. Have you got something about which the Lord has had a controversy with you? You answer back to the Lord: "But Lord, on all these matters I am with You, I am for You, I am unreserved in my devotion to You on all these lines; there is just that one...". Oh yes, but the Lord says that is obstructing the way to a blessing; that one thing will make all the difference in your life.

The Lord is here, beloved, this is a time of visitation, and He is here for a large purpose, but some unwillingness in some one direction - some pride, prejudice, ambition, or desire to have it other than the Lord offers it, some cherished thought which seems to be threatened by the way the Lord is leading - yes, any one of these things is enough to make us not know the time of our visitation and to be for us what that was for Jerusalem: the parting of the ways, to be desolation in the coming days. Desolation! It was not worth it, was it? Oh, may this not be a parting of the ways for us because we "know not"!

Now, I told you at the beginning I did not know why the Lord has led this way, but there it is. I have said what is on my heart, and I do not want anybody to be depressed, or feel distressed, that a great burden or weight has been put upon you; and yet we have all got to look to the Lord and say: "Lord, is it I? Is there some unwillingness to take the way that You are indicating? Is there some unwillingness to let go something upon which You have put Your finger? Is there some pride that is keeping me from yielding and bending? Is there some prejudice which locks me up and says, in that way I will not have it?" Is there some ambition or cherished thought that seems to be threatened by the way the Lord has indicated? If you can face the Lord with these questions and these matters and come out with a clear issue and peace in your heart, you will be all the more joyful for having another search and another examination and this will not weigh you down in heart. But beloved, if in the search you should discover that any one or more of these things is true, well, then it is the parting of the ways, it is Life or death.

The Lord give you grace to deal with anything He may show you as standing in the way of your blessing in this time of visitation - for His sake, and for yours.

Chapter 6 - Resource in a Day of Limitation

Reading: Zechariah 3:1-10; 4:6.

Once more at the outset let us make a survey of this and the present chapter. It is always important for us to be sure that when we are speaking from the Word of God, and especially from the Old Testament, what we are saying really does have an application in the thought of God to our own time and that we are not trying to make something apply. And so in order to get our present contact with the Word of God, and see that it is related to our own time, let us just glance over some of the features of this portion.

I think we have not far to look to discover the prophetic and the typical elements that are in this whole book of prophecies as well as in the other book which is its companion, in the prophecies of Haggai which precede these - I say the prophetical and the typical elements, and they are twofold.

Firstly, they are historical, as to Israel. They have that immediate application to Israel and are pointing on to future things. There is a future element and factor about these prophecies all the way through which had no fulfilment in the immediate history of the Lord's people. You take such a fragment, for instance, as that towards the end of the prophecies of Haggai (2:21,22): "Speak to Zerubbabel, governor of Judah, saying, I will shake the heavens and the earth; and I will overthrow the throne of kingdoms; and I will destroy the strength of the kingdoms of the nations." Now, that passage is quoted in the letter to the Hebrews where we are told that the things which can be shaken will be shaken. God will shake not only the earth but the heaven; and Haggai is quoted in relation to the desire of all nations coming. So that you see there is a future element here even in this fragment alone, and there are many others in these two books which had no fulfilment in that phase of Israel's history. It was prophetic as to their own history and lay in the future.

But there is also another side which is spiritual, as to the church. Again let me point out what is familiar to most of you: that these two things run parallel throughout the whole of the Word of God; that while there is a historical aspect which in the main relates to this earth and its affairs, there is also behind that historical a spiritual, which does not primarily relate to this earth but relates to the heavens although it affects this earth; and that is spiritual. There is a representation in the historical on this earth, of that which is spiritual in the heavens.

These two things run right through all the Scriptures, and here in these prophecies they are quite patent. You take some of the features of these prophecies and you will at once see this twofold aspect of things. Take some of the typical words and phrases here. Firstly you began with: "My house that lies waste." "My house". Now it does not require a very profound or comprehensive grasp of the Scriptures to see that that very phrase relates to two things. It related to the temple as here on the earth, and has been used many times in that connection - My house. But we also know quite well that that phrase is linked with another house which is not on this earth, which is not a material house at all. It is the House of God which is eternal and not temporal, and in the heavens and not of the earth. It is that House which is brought into view for us by the spiritual epistles of the New Testament; and the two find their meeting place in the Person of the Lord Jesus. On the one hand He gathered up in His Own Person in His own body, the temple of the old dispensation, and related it to Himself, and showed that that temple and that system passed out when on that side of the meaning of His Person He passed out. In the presence of the temple in Jerusalem, for instance, He said, which we say in a beguiling way to the unspiritual and undiscerning: "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up", this naos (Gr.), this sanctuary. They thought He referred to the temple but there was a sense in which He linked the temple with His own Person, but the recorder with spiritual illumination puts in brackets: "But He spoke of the temple of His body." So there was a link between the Person of Christ on the historic side with the temple of the old dispensation, but with His passing, that passed, and we know that it did in a very short time and it has not been reconstituted since.

But from the other side of the Person of the Lord Jesus which is the mystic side, the unseen side, the heavenly side, that side of Him to which He referred, when He said: "and no man knows the Son, but the Father; neither knows any man the Father, save the Son, and He to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him", to which John referred when he said: "...therefore the world knows us not, because it knew Him not". And on that spiritual and heavenly side He represents another House of God: the House which is not seen and handled, and not of this earth but is of heaven. It is that House to which these spiritual epistles refer and which they unfold for us.

Now, that is very elementary, but here you see in these prophecies by the very phrase: "My house", that you have a wide range which goes beyond the temple to the spiritual and eternal, and you have the two sides gathered into that phrase, that typical phrase.

You take other such typical words as "foundations". It is said here that the hands of Zerubbabel had laid the foundations. That word "foundations" at once introduces something which could well occupy us for a long time, and we know that while literally and historically it applied to that house being built by Zerubbabel, and the remnant back from the captivity, we come over to the New Testament and we have another kind of foundation: "For other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ." Paul said: "I laid a foundation, and another builds thereon", but these foundations are not material, but spiritual. The two sides of the one word.

Further, the headstone is mentioned here. The headstone is to be brought forth with shoutings of "Grace, grace unto it." And again, it is not just the completing and crowning with finality of an earthly structure, but it points on to that crowning of the spiritual building of the House of God with Christ in exaltation, enthroned, completing the work, or being the completion of the work for: "In Him were all things created, all things have been created through Him, and unto Him; and He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. And He is the head of the Body, the church." That is only another way of saying He is the Headstone, the Top Stone of the building.

Again, the candlestick is brought into view here. "What seest thou?" "...a candlestick all of gold". You at once leap into your New Testament and know that you find a spiritual counterpart of the actual candlestick of the Old Testament brought in in the book of the Revelation. A candlestick all of gold. And what it means is made very clear for us in the New Testament, that it is the vessel and instrument of the testimony of Jesus by the Holy Spirit.

Again, you have here the seven eyes of the Lord which run to and fro throughout the whole earth. The seven eyes are mentioned and are said to be the seven Spirits of the Lord which go to and fro. And here again in the number seven you have the completeness and perfection of spiritual vision and comprehension so that you have a spiritual side as well as a historical side or a literal side. And so we might go on.

Take this word Grace. "And he shall bring forth the top stone with shoutings of Grace, grace unto it" (Zach. 4:7). In the book of Ephesians, which is the letter of the House of God specifically, the letter of the Body of Christ, the letter in which the great truth of the House, the one Body is brought more particularly into view than anywhere else. In that letter the word "grace" occurs ten times, and the whole letter is governed by a reference to grace. That that building, all that is going on, from the constituting of that Body, the growing up into Him in all things, is said that it should be: "To the praise of the glory of His grace", so that the end of the building is the manifestation, the proclamation, the revelation of the grace of God. And that is the bringing forth of the completed thing with shouts of "Grace, grace unto it."

And may I just repeat what I said in that connection - let us never think that when we get into Ephesian truth that we have got out of the realm of grace. Many people think when you get into warfare in the heavenlies, you have gone beyond the realm of grace and are beginning to do something which merits something. All the work and the warfare in the heavenlies is still in the realm of grace, right unto the end. The top stone will be unto the praise of His glory, and we know in our hearts that in the conflict with the enemy, but for the grace of God it would be a poor look-out for us. It is grace right to the end. So there is a spiritual, heavenly side of this as well as the finishing of the temple in its temporal character and historical place.

You take the men here referred to, Joshua and Zerubbabel. Joshua is the high priest and Zerubbabel is the governor. Well, there is your historical representation, or typical representation, but it is perfectly clear that they represent something more than two men in a twofold capacity. They point on to One who embraces and embodies in His own Person both those aspects: the high priest and the governor. And that this House of the Lord, and this completion of the testimony in its full, universal sense, can only come about when the Lord Jesus occupies in fulness that dual position of High Priest and Governor. So that Joshua and Zerubbabel are a type of Christ as you find Him in the book of the Acts and that is your point of contact because you are coming on to this: "Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts", and that requires a Joshua and a Zerubbabel in union, occupying their place, taking their place. In the book of the Acts you have Joshua and Zerubbabel gathered up in the Person of Christ in His High-priestly position and work, but also as Governor at God's right hand, and then: "...by My Spirit" the thing is done. It comes, the Spirit of the Lord in relation to Christ's High-priestly work and governmental position, and the Spirit accomplishes the testimony. It is clear, I think, without going much further, that here you have a prophetic and a spiritual side to these prophecies. Having said all that let us get closer to the application to our own time.

In the first place we have:

A Remnant Company

Who are called in relation to the carrying on of the testimony of the Lord to its completion. A remnant company; for only a very small remnant or proportion of those who ostensibly represented the Lord's Name and the Lord's interest are found in the place of immediate, and direct, definite action to that Name and that testimony. The rest are interested in a way, but they have other interests, other ways which they are cherishing. They are out of touch with that which immediately and specifically and essentially represents the Lord's main interest. They form a majority but here is a comparatively small company who have forsaken all those other relationships and interests, ambitions and pursuits, and have come back to the place where the Lord's immediate interests are represented and are linked with those interests in their more thorough-going way. They are, as it were, on the spot for the Lord. They are right there in connection with that which speaks most immediately of the Lord's honour and glory. They are but a remnant, they are but a small company; it is as this chapter says: "a day of small things" in that sense - a people who have accepted separation from the world, who have abandoned all the concerns of this life as the things to which they are devoted, and have made the Lord's interests their interests, and made the Lord's interests the sum total of their horizon. They have limited themselves, so to speak, in this world to that which immediately concerns the Lord and His glory. I think, beloved, that you will agree at once that those people are now in the minority. I am not speaking about the worldly and unbelieving; I am speaking about professing believers, and those who take the Name of the Lord.

It is but a remnant, a small company comparatively, which has come to the place where the Lord's interests are the one sole concern of their lives, and for those interests they have forsaken all other personal and worldly interests. That is where you begin with this book. It is a remnant testimony that is in view. With this company the testimony of the Lord is bound up in the sovereign ordering of God. He binds up His testimony for its maintenance and its completion with those who are going all the way with Him, who are going to take the absolute position for His glory, who will not have a second best, or any compromise at any point; who will not argue that this and that is quite all right and there is no wrong or harm in it, and the Lord's blessing is upon it, but who have seen that though it may be good and though it may be blessed, yet the Lord has something other, and something more, and that to choose the lesser is only to make the good the enemy of the best, and they are not prepared for that. Their vision is for all that the Lord desires, and to that they are wholly committed. That, very largely I feel, would be the central call and challenge of such messages as these and perhaps it is that which constitutes the nature of our visitation, this time of our visitation.

The Lord, then, has linked His testimony with such, and in that day there is a state of limitation. This comes out in the chapter: "For who has despised the day of small things?" (Zech. 4:10). It is a day of limitation. I cannot but feel that there is something of sovereignty and providence related to that. I mean that the Lord does seem to relate His things of special value to days of small things. Let me put it in another way. It is in the day when we are very conscious of our weakness, of our insufficiency, of our total lack of ability, the day when we know that we have neither might nor power, that the Lord seems to relate those things which are peculiarly the outworking of the Spirit of the Lord of hosts. It is a day of limitation. At any rate, I like to take all the comfort from that that can be derived from it, and I do see that the Lord in His dealings with people has very rarely been able to do His great thing when His people have been great, but His great things come out in the day when His people are small and know it. One is not meaning merely numerically, but in the consciousness of inability, God has ever done His greatest things When they have fallen on their faces and said: "Lord, against this great host we have no might", the Lord's reaction has been: "Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts."

The day in which we live is:

A Day of Limitation

It is a day of straightness; the Lord's own dear out-and-out people are very conscious of their inability to face the situation as it is and to carry through the testimony to its fulness and finality. It comes back upon us again and again - how is this great thing to be done? How is this testimony to be maintained in strength, in fulness, in life, in power? How is it to be carried through to completion? Is it possible? Everything is set against it, the whole system of our time is against it religiously and otherwise, and it does seem that from time to time we shall be utterly broken in our expectation, in our hope, and in our endeavour to maintain and carry forward a pure, clear testimony which is all of gold; that is, all of God.

Very often the enemy seems to fling at us: "This is an impossible thing you are trying to do. It is not possible for these days: 'All of God! Nothing of man.' Unless you adopt some of the recognised methods and ways of (I am going to use a phrase I am not fond of) 'organised Christianity' you may expect to cease to be, you will be closed right up, you will have no standing, recognition or hearing, you will not be able to fulfil the ministry that you are trying to fulfil. Unless you advertise, blaze it abroad, and do this, that, and the other which is the done thing, well, you may give up all hope of success in the direction in which you are looking!" And so very often that presses in and the temptation comes to lower the level which may have been taken, and to begin quietly to use the usual means of carrying on the work of God. The position must be taken that, "No, the thing must be utterly of God, and the initiation and continuation and consummation must be of God." That does not mean we sit back in passivity, but we come in with God strongly, definitely, positively, working together, but we do not originate or initiate it and do not make it a thing of man or of men in its continuation, we count upon God. That is a high level. That is a candlestick all of gold, no alloy; that is all of God, all Divine. But there are so many who say: "It is an impossible position, you have taken far too high a standard and you will have to let go somewhere or you will be worsted and abandoned."

Well, we know quite well, that if it is not all of God then we had better give it up, and we know quite well that we have no might nor power for this; that it is not in us to get through on that level, but we recognise this, that the state of things in the days of Zechariah was just that state. There was a testimony to be recovered, reconstituted, and carried through typically to completion, and everything on earth and in hell was against it, and so far as the human instruments were concerned, they were altogether inadequate. On the earth as among men the whole thing was absurd and preposterous, ridiculous, fanatical, mad, unthinkable, but this is the word of the Lord unto Zerubbabel: "Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts", and that is the resource in a day of limitation, a day of small things.

Have you almost given up hope of something utter and all of God, being possible? And have you been tempted, like Abraham, to come along the natural line and try and realise the Divine end by Hagar, because you see that by Sarah it means such an utter miracle, such a thing as has never been heard of among men? We have more background than Abraham. We know we have the basic miracle of all time and eternity upon which to work: "God raised Him from the dead", and that is our hope. It is: "The Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead", who is the Spirit in us and therefore, "By My Spirit" is a prospect, a promise in a day of limitation and natural weakness and hopelessness.

Then again, what comes out of this chapter is that there is to be:

A Resumption

After a period of interruption and delay. Those of you who recall the history of the rebuilding of the temple will remember that it was commenced, and in its commencement there was much joy, delight, gratification, hope and expectation; but then there came in discouragement, threatenings and various things which stopped the work. And for some fourteen years nothing was done, and the people turned from the main interest to other subsidiary interests; from the central thing, the House of God, to departmental things, their own houses; from the inclusiveness of the House of God, the Body of Christ, to look after their own sectarian interests, their own departmental concerns. They lost the vision of the main and all-inclusive things for the local. Interpret this religiously and spiritually if you like.

The New Testament makes it quite clear that that was one of the troubles that came in quite early. It came into Corinth. Instead of seeing the fulness which the apostle brought out they were saying: "I am of Paul, I am of so-and-so" and they were on fragmentary things instead of all-inclusive things - the House of God. And if you get a vision of the real House of God, the Body of Christ, you will never be able to say: "I am of..." whoever the name may be. One of the great names among the Lord's people will not be the label under which you pass, and you will not even bring Christ down to a party, and make Christ a party, or a dividing thing among saints. There is to be a resumption of the central thing, a resumption of care for the all-inclusive thing after interruption and delay. The testimony in its fulness as different from its fragmentariness was to be taken up anew, and so after this delay the word of the Lord came to inspire, to encourage, to resume relationship to the whole testimony, to carry on towards its completion.

In those few words I see a very great deal of history. Again and again the Lord has, through some prophetic voice, roused His people to come back to a full testimony, and there has been a movement forward, something has been added towards its completeness, and that day has represented something more of, and for, the Lord than any previous day. There has been something recovered and carried forward, which was an addition to what has gone before, and then perhaps discouragement, the enemy rising up, or personal interests coming in, or some other thing, and the main thing has been left and interruption has taken place and there has been a period of delay. And the Lord has come again through some prophetic voice to arouse, and still another step has been taken, and then another period of delay.

I do not think I am far wrong if I say it is a time for a further movement towards the fulness of the glory of the Lord Jesus in His people. It is time that there was a new advance in relation to His full testimony. It is time that the Lord's people came into a greater measure of Christ, it is time that the greater completeness of the age-purpose of God should be attended to. This can be put in various and numerous ways, but you see exactly what is implied by this. This is a day when surely the Lord needs, even more than we do if there is any comparison, that there should be a real movement towards His own satisfaction in His people on a larger measure. And that that testimony and that work which is all of God, and which rules man out and takes all glory from man and brings all glory to God because it is all of gold, that that testimony should be known in the earth more than it is. For so much of the Lord's work today is coming down to the credit of man: it is man's organisation, ability, acumen, wisdom, energy, enthusiasm, and what not, and the thing is of man so much that we are unable, in surveying it, to say with a free heart: "This is by the Spirit of the Lord of hosts." There are human factors behind this which may account for it, that we are able to say so often about much of the work, that it is carried on by the sheer drive, or by its own momentum. You cannot recognise it is wholly of God, according to God, and by the energy of the Spirit.

Now there is a need for such recovery for coming into line with the goings of God, and this is a day when the Lord would have a resumption of that which is so utterly of Himself. Then how will it be? The fourth thing which comes up in this chapter is just this:

A Faith Fellowship with the Holy Spirit

I use that clause "faith fellowship" because it does represent a change of attitude, a change of aspect. You see, looking at things as they were, within and without, the heart could easily sink; they could give it all up and say: "It is quite an impossible task, we have neither resource nor ability of any kind for this work." Look at it all again, enemies on the outside, treachery on the inside, and then history from some standpoints does not altogether inspire us; this thing has been done before and it has broken down, been arrested, many have tried this and all that can lead into doubt, into unbelief and be paralysing. The word of the Lord unto Zerubbabel is: "Not by might, nor by power...". If you are looking in that direction you are looking in the negative direction - "but by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts". That is the positive direction, the Divine and heavenly, "Yes". "My Spirit". And it means a faith fellowship with the Holy Spirit which takes the attitude that although in ourselves and all around us, in history, and everything else, there might be discouragement and every ground for hopeless despair, in the Holy Spirit there is infinite possibility, nothing is impossible in league with the Spirit of the Lord of hosts.

Have you given up hope of seeing something wholly according to God? Have you begun to accept the attitude that it is not possible? Beloved, let this word come to you with fresh encouragement; let it come to you with its full impact: "by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts" this thing is going to be done. This matter is no longer in the hands of an earthly Joshua or Zerubbabel. It is in the hands of Him Who is High Priest and Governor at the right hand of the Majesty on high. His hands have laid the foundation; His hands shall also finish it. His hands shall finish it and they shall bring forth the top stone with shoutings of "Grace, grace unto it", because: "by My Spirit".

The Spirit of the Lord of hosts is operating in relation to an already triumphant Christ, and that is the basis of our faith for all testimony and for all the realisation of God's thought and will for us, through us, and for His people. The Lord strengthen us by His Word.

Chapter 7 - That Which Hinders the Holy Spirit in Us

Reading: Haggai 2:11-14; Zechariah 3:1-5.

Now I am, I think quite definitely, led (partly because no one else is led) to come with a fresh emphasis upon the condition necessary in such an instrument for the Holy Spirit to be able to do what He is desirous of doing. May I just in a further moment of retrospect remind you of a thing said more than once in this conference, that the peculiar ministry of the Holy Spirit, as differing from the work of the Father and the Son, is that of perfecting what the Father originated and the Son constituted. The Holy Spirit's work is to carry through to perfection what has been brought forth by the Father, and has been constituted in the Son. And the Holy Spirit has, then, as the governing object of all His activities, the making perfect of the purpose of God in Christ.

We are occupied very much with the need for further and fuller expressions of the Holy Spirit in our lives individually and collectively. We are tremendously exercised on this matter, that this is a time in which there is a desperate need for the Holy Spirit to do a new thing, to go forward in a new step to make His power in the work of God manifest anew; the work of God in our own hearts, in our own lives and the work of God in His people collectively. And this is really what governs us when we pray in our various ways concerning a new experience of the Holy Spirit.

Some people may use the term "baptism", some may use the word "anointing", some may speak of "filling", some may ask for "the power". Now, all these things may doctrinally and theologically relate to some specific line of the truth, but not all the Lord's people understand the doctrine so fully, or the theology so utterly, so they make up terms and phrases. But back of all this is a right motive, a true desire, and it is their way of seeking for some further and fuller realisation of the presence and work of the Holy Spirit.

It is not my intention to stay to sort you out on this matter, but to take up the heart cry of the people of God and to seek to touch, as the Lord shall enable, upon some things which may be in the direction of the Lord being able to respond to that heart cry. It may be searching, it may test us; nevertheless if we are honest we will bear the word. But what we want all the time to keep in view is not something for personal good and blessing, but it is that the Lord might have His testimony in fulness, in glory, and that the Holy Spirit may be able to accomplish His work which is the consummating of the purpose of God in Christ. Now He has come for that. It is a blessed thing to remind our hearts of the fact that the Holy Spirit has come with one definite and all-inclusive object, and that that object is to perfect the work which God originated and initiated concerning His Son Jesus Christ, in the saints. Now that is the foundation upon which we stand and which is a strong confidence.

Yet with all, the Holy Spirit may be hindered so far as we are concerned. As we were saying earlier, we may not know the time of our visitation, and the responsibility is at our own door so that it is necessary for the Lord to speak to us as to the way necessary by which He shall be able to do the work for which He, in the Holy Spirit, is here. Thus I have read these portions which lead on to the summit in Zechariah 4:6: "Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts". "It will be done by My Spirit." But there is something that leads on to that.

Haggai and Zechariah go together as fellow prophets relating to the same object. In Haggai you noticed as we read, the word has to do with the people. It referred to the state of the people, to what the Lord called "uncleanness". In Zechariah it referred to Joshua, the high priest, who was seen to be in a similar state, clothed with filthy garments, and in both cases this is seen to be how heaven sees the situation; not how earth sees it, not how men see it, but how heaven sees it - the word in Haggai was: "...before Me, says the Lord". In all probability the people themselves were ignorant of it and not alive to it. If they had been told as man to man that Joshua's garments as high priest were filthy, well, they would not have accepted it; they probably would have repudiated it. If they had been told their hands were unclean, their sacrifices were unclean, the works of their hands were unclean, they might not have accepted it and they might have been offended. But it is clearly pointed out by the Holy Spirit here that this is how God sees it and how heaven sees it, "...before Me, says the Lord". That is the word in Haggai.

In Zechariah it is even more amazing because the third chapter opens with: "And he showed me..." Who is this? This is a heavenly messenger who is giving a vision to the Lord's servant, and it is as though the Lord's servant was caught up to heaven, and in heaven he sees the Lord and he sees Joshua standing as in the presence of the Lord, and he sees the head of that other heavenly hierarchy opposed to God: satan, the adversary. It almost reminds you of the beginning of the book of Job where the sons of God are presented before the Lord and satan came among them. It is up there that this is taking place, in the presence of the Lord, and it seems that what is encountered is a scandal to heaven. Men may not call it such but heaven calls it that - a high priest, clothed in filthy garments - how heaven sees things. And after all, that is the thing that matters. It is not what we see in ourselves, or think about ourselves, or what other people think or say; it is what the Lord sees and how we are, in the view of heaven.

What the Lord saw represented two factors. One: something with which He had a controversy, something with which He could not agree, something which brought about a conflict between the Lord and those there represented. And the other thing: that because there was such a basis, such a controversy, satan had a place of weakening by being the adversary and the accuser. Satan was in a position of power, and when the Lord said: "The Lord rebuke thee, O satan" you must remember that it was not merely and only because the Lord uttered a form of words that satan was rebuked and put out of his position of power. The Lord immediately proceeded to make His rebuke effective by calling for a change in the state of things. And there is no power in rebuking satan while a state of things which gives him power remains. There has to be a change of state in order to effect a rebuke to satan.

Now, Joshua sums up in his own person representatively, the people. They and he are one, so that you find in the rest of Haggai 2 an account of how the people were baffled and defeated. Their labours were very largely in vain. You may glance at it and you will see that there was a constant reduction in the fruit of their toil, a constant loss and leakage in the result of their labours. They hoped for so much; they got so much less. They laboured for a certain measure and it always fell short, and it was as though there was a blight upon things and everything was just failing and coming short and never coming up to the full measure of expectation. There was never anything commensurate with the output of the energy, the labour, and the struggle. The cost was always far greater than the result and that was the effect of satan's power and satan's position. He had ground - and even the Lord could not change the situation while they were giving him ground - and the rebuke of satan always goes with a full store. You remember Malachi who follows so quickly on here: "Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in Mine house, and prove Me now herewith, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing". And what follows? "And I will rebuke the devourer for your sakes, and he shall not destroy the fruits of your ground". You see the two things: a state required in the people, and then the effective rebuke of the enemy so that he is not able to devour and take away from the fruitfulness of the Lord's people's labours.

Now having said that, we are able to come right to the heart of this. The heart of it is this something concerning which the Lord has a controversy. What is that something? It is one thing with many sides, many aspects, and it is represented by that strange interrogation of the priests: "If one bear holy flesh in the skirt of his garment, and with his skirt do touch bread... shall it be holy? And the priests answered and said, No. Then said Haggai, if one that is unclean by a dead body touch any of these, shall it be unclean? And the priests answered and said, it shall be unclean."

Touching the Realm of Death

In that interrogation you have got the sum total of this whole controversy of the Lord: touching a realm of death and thereby becoming defiled. And what is the realm of death? In the practical meaning of that, what is the realm of death? It is not a certain spiritual realm merely, an atmosphere, a region you call the region of death as some intangible thing, some indefinable thing; it is a very concrete thing: the realm of death.

If you turn over to your New Testament and begin to read Romans, and then Corinthians, and then some more in Colossians, you will soon become aware of what the realm of death is. In Colossians 2 you have the summing up of the whole thing in very few words: "In the putting off of the body of the flesh in the circumcision of Christ; having been buried with Him in baptism". What then does that grave stand for? The whole body of the flesh. That is the realm of death. The whole realm of death is the body of the flesh. And if one touch a dead body with holy things, they shall become unclean; they have touched the realm of death. Holy things in association with the flesh - or the flesh in association with holy things - raises a controversy with God. It brings us back into that great realm of the controversy of God in the curse.

Calvary represents God's universal controversy with fallen man, with man in his natural state by birth; God can have nothing to do with man. He had a controversy with that whole state in Adam, and against man in that state God has said forever, positively, "No, I have nothing whatever to do with that; I regard that as altogether outside of the realm of My interest to do anything more than that it shall be entirely put away, and that I shall have a new creation." And whenever that thing comes up, it raises the controversy again.

Now, the Lord Jesus representatively and voluntarily took the place of the whole Adam-fallen race, gathered up into Himself Adam's race as in opposition to God, and in the Cross of Calvary the darkness and the thunder and the billows and waves of God's wrath, the judgment of God, broke upon Him, because there He represented the whole body of the flesh which was in antagonism to God and with which God had this controversy. And so God had to forsake that and forever say that not one fragment of it was acceptable. And the circumcision of Christ was His Cross where the whole body of the flesh was cut off, put away, and buried forever. Now let any of that come up and the controversy starts again. And that is what is here: something with which God has a controversy because it belongs to the natural man and not to the new creation. That is a very inclusive thing. How many things are included in that! It is hopeless for me to attempt to cover that ground, but I may just touch it at one or two points.

We shall have to leave our hearts open to the Lord that if what I say should miss your particular point where the Lord has a controversy with you, you shall nevertheless not close the matter, but ask the Lord if there is any point in your own life, not mentioned, where He has a controversy with you, because the natural man, the body of the flesh comes up.

Flesh - Man by Nature

You understand by now that when we speak here of "the flesh", we are not just meaning that positive ugly flesh which everybody hates, flesh in its naked form which we all dislike. We prefer to use another phrase, but it is weaker and it does not always have such a positive element, when we speak of 'man by nature'. However, it is the same thing; what man is apart from grace, what man is apart from regeneration, just as he is at his best outside of Christ, unregenerate; that is the whole body of the flesh. Oh, how I would love to be able to stay there and have an hour on that very thing, because it is just there so many people, especially thinking people, have all been led astray. The deception which has come, especially to thinking people, is along the line of what they would term "inherent religion", the inherent religious side of the nature of man. And upon that which is the inherent religion, the enemy has constructed upon that very foundation, upon what man calls inherent religion of man, human nature, the devil has constructed a whole philosophy which has had the effect of ruling out entirely the necessity for regeneration. That is, that if we cultivate the religious nature that is in every one of us, if we give attention to it and stimulate it outwardly and inwardly by meditation and prayers and worship, and all the things which are religious and fine, refined, and ascetic, that brings us to exactly the same place as regeneration would bring us to, and therefore regeneration is not necessary. I want to say to you, not without thought, not without many years of the deepest consideration of this thing, that that whole realm of things is a positive lie, and is from the devil. Man never will arrive in the presence of God by the development of his own religious nature apart from regeneration.

I was speaking about man by nature, and by that I mean whether he is religious more or less, whether he is very religious, or there seems to be no vestige of religion in him. It matters not. In any case he is still man by nature and is thereby alienated from the life of God. Man will only come, as the Lord Jesus said, into the kingdom of heaven by being born from above.

Now, it is when anything of that realm of man by nature comes up that a controversy starts between God and that person, or those people. You may take it along one or two lines.

The Mind

We may take it along the line of natural reason. It is true that a great many good, honest, earnest, devoted, born-again children of God find their hold-up, their arrest, find themselves going round repeatedly in a circle and never arriving anywhere, always coming back to the point from which they started, because all the time they are trying to bring their own reason into the realm of Divine things. They are trying to get through by thinking it out with natural reason. Some truth, some thing that has come into view and been presented to them, and then they get their heads to work upon it and they begin an everlasting circle round that thing with the natural mind, the natural reason, and try to get through that way. On the one hand it is impossible, and on the other hand it arrests the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit cannot come along and carry us through to the realisation of God's purpose in power if we all the time are obtruding our natural reason into Divine things. There is a place for that, for meditation, but if we think we are going to apprehend the things of God by any natural quality or qualification, power or ability that we have, we are in a realm of utter impotence and failure. God's Word about this is perfectly explicit: "Now the natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them because they are spiritually judged." And in this meaning 'the spiritual' is those who have the Spirit as their Teacher. And you and I will never know livingly, savingly, vitally, one fragment of the things of the Spirit of God, but only as the Holy Spirit reveals them to us. Never! And we are battering our heads against a wall when we try to take up truth and see it through with our natural reason. The faculty of understanding the things of God has gone out of the natural man, he has not got it, it is dead, it died when he sinned.

Now, this may mean nothing to many of you. You may not see how it applies, but I am quite sure I am saying what the Lord wants me to say and we shall have to come to a place over the things of God presented to us where we take this attitude: "Now Lord, either it does not appeal to me, to my reason, I cannot see that, I cannot understand that. It is contrary to my reason, I cannot get through there with my understanding, but that does not mean that it is wrong, that it is not wholly the truth, or that it is not meant for me. What I do recognise is this: that by nature I have no power of seeing through that, but if that is the truth, I ask for and count upon the Holy Spirit to make that live to me, to shine it into my heart."

We have to come to the place where the ground of controversy which closes the way to God is put aside. God has a controversy when we are trying to bring His holy things into touch with a dead body, and in the course of things we become defiled. "Evil communications corrupt good manners", and communication on our part with the old man in ourselves is a corrupting thing. I heard a preacher once say that we must stand back a thousand miles from ourselves. He illustrated it by a pair of fine scientific balances so finely poised that even within two yards radius the warmth of a human body would make them tremble, and he said the heat of our own natural lives will upset the balance of spiritual things; and that is very true. That is also true in the realm of natural reason in relation to Divine things.

The Heart

What is true in the matter of the head may also be true in the matter of the heart. It may not only be a matter of 'cannot see' but it may be a matter of 'do not want': my natural desires about this, my natural likes and dislikes, what I feel about it, what I would prefer, and all these things which belong to the heart, so many things may just form a ground of controversy. Fear is a matter of the heart, and very often fear, fear for the consequences, fear for what it may cost, fear for what others may think and say, fear for the realm into which a suggested course will put us as to others and things, and that fear of our hearts coming up becomes at once the ground of Divine controversy with us, it closes the door; you never get through. It is a thing of the flesh and the natural life. It paralyses and shuts out the Holy Spirit, and it gives power to the devil to spoil us.

Not unsympathetic with it humanly, not inconsiderate for the fearful does one speak like this, and yet there is a place where the Lord calls us to lay hold of His strength, and in laying hold of His strength to sweep aside our fears. There is a time when the Lord says: "Let him that is fearful and afraid go home; he is not in this thing." He said that to Gideon's army and very few remained, but they were those who were putting fear aside and were going on with God no matter what it cost them. There is a time when our fear to open our lips may give a great occasion to the devil to bring condemnation and accusation upon us, and close the way to the Holy Spirit helping us in the matter of testimony.

Sometimes there has been an occasion to speak to someone about the Lord and their spiritual interests, and fear has closed our lips, and afterwards the devil has ridden in full charge and made us as miserable as sin, weakening our position. And we know the Lord is displeased, and we have had to go back to the Lord and plead that that thing be wiped out and be put right. On the other hand, an opportunity has arisen of like kind, fear has come, but we have looked to the Lord and said: "Lord, Your strength for this", and in that attitude we have set aside our fear and given our testimony. As we started we gained boldness and confidence and the Spirit has come in and when through we have such a blessed sense of Divine approval and joy, and very often the outcome has given us good reason to know the devil would have kept us quiet if he could have; but this thing was of the Lord.

Sometimes the same principle applies in the matter of our prayer in the gathering for prayer. Fear can silence us and give the enemy occasion, and spoil us, and make us know that there is a shadow over the Divine face, while on the other hand, with all the fear rising up, we have felt the Lord would have us open our lips and we have taken His strength and done it and found to our amazement certain liberty we never thought we should have. Afterwards there is such a joy, a sense of the Divine approval, and the enemy has had a set-back.

These are simple, but far-reaching ways of illustration. Fear may be a thing of the flesh and while allowed to remain, may constitute a basis of controversy with God, a coming up of the natural man and having his way. It is so in many other things of the heart, as I have said, things we would like, or things we do not like, things which are natural preferences, sympathies or antipathies which come from nature, and actuate, and so very often bring us into direct collision with the Lord. This is a matter then, in which our hearts must be settled and we have to take an attitude: "It is not what I like or dislike, or prefer, or what appeals to my sympathies, or agrees with my antipathies. No, it is: Is this thing of the Lord? It does not matter what I would like, it is what the Lord wants; it does not matter what I feel about it, it is what the Lord reveals." It is repudiating the whole body of the flesh and putting it back where God has put it outside in the death. But come into touch with it and you will be defiled, and there is a controversy in heaven.

The Soul

What is true of the mind and heart may also be true of the soul, and many of the deepest and greatest battles of the Lord's own people have been in this realm.

The Will

We sometimes sing, and I wonder if we believe it and accept the truth of the words that we sing, "My stubborn will at last has yielded." Whoever wrote that hymn evidently knew something about that, that there are things in the will of God for us which run entirely counter to our natural will, against which we revolt, concerning which we say "No, we will not."

There may be some here to whom the Lord has spoken, whom He has sought to reach, to draw them out in a certain direction, and they say that it will involve this and that and something else; the thing runs counter to their will, their like, their idea of things. May I plead with you in the Name of the Lord that you will not allow a ground of controversy between you and God to remain. Believe me, if you do, that controversy will go on and on and that until you lose your rest, your peace, until you come to a place where the joy of life goes out and where you have become a misfit in this world. And if you go on long enough you may finally close the door even in this life to the overtures of God, and know that your day of visitation is past and you cannot recover that which was offered to you. Do not allow the controversy to go on. Do not allow these things to come up from yourself, or anyone else's impact upon your thought and imagination, do not allow anything in that realm to come and create for you a ground upon which the Lord cannot agree, and which brings you into dispute with Him, and Him to a dispute with you.

The Lord set us free from our filthy garments. It is a strong word, but it simply means that the natural life is wrapping us round; the body of the flesh is just holding us in its grip and influence, controlling us. Oh that these filthy garments may be taken away, and then, clothed in fine raiment we may be in a place of acceptance with the Lord where He says: "If thou wilt walk in My ways, and if thou wilt keep My charge, then thou shalt also judge My house... and I will give thee places to walk among these that stand by. "

That is the way of the Holy Spirit's accomplishment of the great eternal purpose of God. It is the way to: "...by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts". It is the way of putting aside the whole body of the flesh in the death of the Lord Jesus. May we take that position if needs be, on any matter whatsoever, for His Name's sake.

Chapter 8 - His Spirit Abiding Among Us

Reading: Haggai 2:1-9.

There has been one desire in my heart all through this time of gathering together, a desire which has been looking for the answer of the Lord in its gratification, and it is that He would say something encouraging to our hearts. These times we expect to be searched, and interrogated, we expect to be made - if I may use very common language - to toe the line. We come really that we might be dealt with by the Lord as deeply and thoroughly as He sees necessary, therefore strong things are said, some things perhaps hard to bear, and the messenger is well aware of that difficulty, and would all the time be liking to say softer things. But we just have to be faithful to the Lord, and give the word that He lays upon our hearts and to which He binds us, and I confess to you that I have a good deal of surprise at the way this conference has gone. I feel that there is just a fragment remaining over which is with me, which is along the line of encouragement. May the Lord just make it so to all our hearts.

I come back to the books in which we have been moving a good deal in these days, the prophecies of Haggai and Zechariah. I think we will begin with our basic passage again in Zechariah 4:6: "Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts." It is the word of the Lord unto Zerubbabel. And then alongside of that, from Haggai 2:4,5: "Yet now be strong, O Zerubbabel, says the Lord; and be strong, O Joshua, son of Jehozadak, the high priest; and be strong, all ye people of the land, says the Lord, and work: for I am with you, says the Lord of hosts, according to the word that I covenanted with you when ye came out of Egypt, and My Spirit abode among you; fear ye not."

How unconsciously brethren do help us along! When our brother referred to the margin there in that connection, he all obliviously did a thing of affirmation because it was upon that fragment that I had been made to alight and abide in this connection: "My Spirit remains among you."

Now you will see that these words both in Haggai and in Zechariah which we have read, are words of exhortation and reassurance in a difficult time. And they are addressed to a people who desire, and not only desire, but have proved that they desire to go on with the Lord. They, like a far greater number of their own brethren, might have stayed in Babylon where things were very much easier. The majority of their brethren had found a comfortable home in Babylon and a line of more speedy and immediate remuneration for their labours and personal gratification. To come back to Jerusalem to ruin and desolation, to wreckage and all the marks of havoc was no pleasant prospect; it represented a good deal to discourage, to set back and to take the heart out of them, and there was all that of which we have already spoken which seemed to declare the whole project of recovery an impossibility. But they had come back. They had detached themselves from the other and they had responded to a call for the recovering of that which more immediately and wholly represented the thing upon God's heart, which is dear to Him.

It was a costly way, a way full of discouragement and difficulties, a way which would bring them under ridicule, reproach, and into a realm of a good deal of opposition. But they had given evidence that they wished to do the thing which they had come to see was in the will of God, costly though it might be. And so they were a people who really wanted (and gave proof of the fact that they wanted) to go on wholly with the Lord, making no compromise, having no reservations and giving no consideration to the easier way in the lowlands. And to such, a people these words are addressed. And may I say here that these words belong to such a people and to no one else, and we can very soon decide whether they belong to us. We can immediately begin to sift out this message ourselves and see whether these words are for us. Now, I am not going to step over onto the hard side again of hitting and striking and smashing. I want to keep on the other side for a little while.

Here are words addressed to those who have really stepped out, or who will really step out for all the will of God, for all the purpose of God, for the testimony and the candlestick all of gold, the thing which is utterly of the Lord, and to such the Lord sends this strong word of encouragement, comfort and reassurance. And He gives His Divine encouragement on three mighty and glorious grounds. They are really presented in three tenses, the past, the present and the future.

We will take them not in their order, but the past, the future and the present. As you look at the chapter you will see these three tenses with their wonderful fulness of encouragement and comfort. In Zechariah 4:6: "Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts". It is the word of the Lord unto Zerubbabel. And then alongside of that, from Haggai 2:4-5: "Be strong, O Zerubbabel... be strong, O Joshua... be strong, all ye people of the land, says the Lord, and work; for I am with you, says the Lord of hosts, according to the word that I covenanted with you when ye came out of Egypt." Now, that is the first ground of encouragement and exhortation. "Remember (margin) the word that I covenanted with you when ye came out of Egypt". What was that word? Well, turn to it, Exodus 19:4-6: "Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles' wings, and brought you unto Myself. Now therefore, if ye will obey My voice indeed, and keep My covenant, then ye shall be Mine own possession from among all peoples: for all the earth is Mine; and ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel."

"The word that I covenanted with you when ye came out of Egypt". And the words can again be divided into three things, not to dwell with them fully, but to note them.

"Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians."

Well, recall the whole story and the song of Moses on the far side of the Red sea, the ascription of praise to Him who had cast the horse and his rider into the depths of the sea, swallowed up the enemy wholly. Remember! Remember! And beloved, the past tense of the Lord's encouragement to those who will go all the way for Him and with Him has this first basic thing: the wonderful swallowing-up victory of the Lord right at the beginning of our spiritual history when He overthrew all the forces of hell against us. Oh, this is no small thing to stand upon.

We are always using a phrase: "The victory of Calvary". I hope that it has not lost its music, its charm, but I fear very often that we do not stand enough into the strength of it. The Lord would encourage us to go on because of the very foundation upon which we stand in His absolute triumph over the enemy right at the beginning. Our spiritual history rests upon His overthrow of the powers of Satan. We have got that behind us. We have got that secured forever.

As we say so often, Satan is a defeated foe, and that is good reason for going on. If really we did apprehend that as we should, we would never think of giving up the work or giving up the faith. But we need that assurance and we need to remember that, and we need to stand strongly in that in a difficult day, for the difficulties of the day would often seem to contradict that and say that Satan is not a defeated foe, that the powers of the enemy are not destroyed, and we have to come back to our foundation. God has said it, God has done it, and God has constituted our spiritual history upon that very fact. "Remember what I did unto the Egyptians." That is the word to Israel. He would say to us in the spiritual counterpart to that: "Remember what I did to the enemy." Remember He stripped off principalities and powers and made a show of them openly in His Cross, triumphing over them. Remember!

I think Paul comforted himself with that remembrance continually and found strength every time he called it to mind. "Remember what I did unto the Egyptians - you have seen what I did."

And then:

"And how I bare you on eagles' wings, and brought you unto Myself."

Have we not in our history something which corresponds to that? Those gracious sovereign and providential ministries of God to us which have brought us to the Lord. As we look over our history we cannot say it was by any effort or will of our own that we came to know the Lord, came into fellowship with the Lord. We cannot say that the position which we have now, in a blessed relationship to the Lord, is the result of any struggle of ours, anything that we have done. The gracious work of God has been behind our whole history and we today are where we are because of His grace, not because we even willed it. He bare us on eagles' wings and brought us to Himself. And when you think of the eagle's wings and the eaglets borne upon the strong outspread wings of the mighty king of the air, you can only recall the words of the Lord in His grace, those words which give us reassurance: "I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee", that He will carry us through to the end. He will perfect that which concerns us; He will not let us down. He brought us on eagle's wings to Himself. That is a very true thing in our spiritual past, a work of grace in our being brought to the Lord. And it is going to be grace like that all the way through; therefore, "Be strong and work", His grace will not fail.

And then the third thing:

"Ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation - a peculiar treasure."

The Lord's electing grace to make us His own peculiar treasure - we did not choose Him, but in His grace He chose us. It is a wonderful way in which the sovereignty of God has drawn us out and brought us to Himself, made us His own possession.

All this I would like to stay and enlarge upon, but I am struggling hard to bring everything within a small compass of time. Here is the past tense in a great threefold expression of Divine grace and sovereignty, and the Lord says because of that: "Be strong and work." To these people it was a word needed to save them from giving up the thing which they had undertaken; their despairing of ever seeing the testimony recovered in its fulness. Now upon the great truth and wonder of the sovereignty of the grace of God which lays right at the very foundation of our spiritual history, we have our first basis of reassurance from the Lord: "He which has begun a good work in you will perform it". He who initiated in this wonderful way is able to carry through to the end. "Remember the word that I covenanted with you when ye came out of Egypt." When we became the Lord's it was upon the basis of His mighty sovereignty and His infinite grace, and that is not going to change or fail.

And then as to the future tense, leaving the present for the moment, that comes in verse six: "For thus says the Lord of hosts: Yet once, it is a little while, and I will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land; and I will shake all nations; and the precious things of all nations shall come; and I will fill this house with glory, says the Lord of hosts" (Haggai 2:6,7). That is said, as you note, in relation to the full testimony of the Lord; what the Lord is going to do (and He declares it and this word is repeated in Hebrews 12:26), what the Lord is going to do in relation to His full testimony in order to have it is to shake heaven and earth, the sea and the dry land, and all nations. Why, that is something to strengthen standing for the testimony is it not? The Lord is so determined to have His testimony at last in fulness that in order to have it He will shake the very universe, and everything that can be shaken out of its place will be shaken out of its place, but His testimony cannot be shaken and it will stand when all else is shaken.

And have we not, beloved, some reason to believe that the day of shaking is very near? I am sure you are seeing that things are beginning to shake; all round and on every side things are shaking today, and behind the shaking is a Divine determination. The Lord is working towards one end and that end is the bringing forth of His Son with His elect. He shall realise the end upon which His heart has been set from all eternity. The Lord Jesus will soon be coming to be glorified in His saints. When that day arrives, then the fulfilment of these prophecies will have taken place, but in connection with that time and that event, the nations, the heavens and the earth will be shaken.

Now here is a word. Are you standing for the full testimony of the Lord? Are you standing with the Lord for all that He is after? Then the Lord is with you up to the point of shaking the very heavens and the earth and all nations. There is again a ground of confidence, a ground of assurance. It is a blessed thing if we can take it to our hearts and feel, "Well, now we have committed ourselves to a difficult, hard, suffering way because we are standing for the whole testimony of God as we understand it and know it, because we desire to have no alloy or mixture, but something all of gold for the Lord." And to take such a way, to commit ourselves to such a purpose, means very much difficulty, discouragement, opposition and hardship, yet it is blessed to know that in relation to that the Lord is going to move this very universe, shake heaven and earth, the sea and dry land, and all nations. Well, if He is going to do that for the thing for which we are standing, we are on the winning side, we are on the side of a mighty certainty, are we not? Let us seek to take the strength from this encouraging word. It is a word of encouragement, comfort, and exhortation to those who suffer because of the utterness of the way that they have taken, or are taking, or are willing to take with the Lord.

And then the third tense, really the second, the middle tense:

The Present.

Verse five: "...My Spirit remains among you" - "My Spirit abides among you". Not abode, but abides. That needs to sink into our hearts with its own blessed Holy Spirit illumination and strength. Oh, we cry: "Come Holy Spirit" - "Come, O come, great Spirit, come", and the Lord is saying all the time: "My Spirit abides among you." And I see that in the remnant activities of the Lord there are very rarely the objective, spectacular accompaniments of the Holy Spirit's presence. In the beginnings of God's activities there were those, but when you come to end time activities you very rarely have those accompaniments; the work of the Spirit is very largely a hidden, secret work, deep, something which the flesh cannot take hold of and sport itself in. It is a sifting time and the Lord does not want a great following of people who follow simply because they see something, who link on just because of the spectacular, manifest, outward proof to the flesh and to the senses. This causes mixed multitudes and again you have to have a course of sifting. In the end time the Lord has not time to do a lot of sifting. He must come down to the essence of a peculiar people, and so very often keeps away the spectacular, the demonstrative, and the Holy Spirit does His work secretly, hiddenly, but mightily; no advertisement, no noise, but something is going on, deep, strong, mighty; God is doing things. The world looks on and sees nothing that it can write up. And even half-consecrated Christians are dubious about the whole thing. They do not see what the remnant of the flesh in them craves to see of the outward evidences of a movement of God, but God is doing it.

Beloved, take comfort for it was said to these people. If there had been a pageantry of things it would have been obvious - "My Spirit is among you", but because of none of these outward manifestations the Lord, said it: "Be strong and work... My Spirit abides among you." "Go on, My Spirit is with you, My Spirit abides; get on with the work." The Lord would have us take some things at any rate, for granted, in a right way and we can take this for granted. If we are wholly for the Lord, the Lord is wholly for us. If we are right out for God, we do not have to ask the Lord to be with us. He is with us, "I am with you - My Spirit abides among you; fear ye not". And so the word is to go on with the testimony, and as you go on you will find that there is some factor far more than a human factor in this: "Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts", and when you get there, you will have to say: "I never did that; the Lord did that", and there is the proof of His Spirit abiding among us, and He is with us.

Now, our greatest fear, as these two books of prophecy reveal, must not be of the devil. Is the devil your greatest fear? Wherein then is the victory of Calvary? Where is that heavenly spiritual and universal counterpart of the engulfing of the Egyptians? Oh no, our greatest foe is not the devil and our greatest fear must not be of him. These two books of prophecy which have a great deal here in the New Testament show that our greatest fear must be of the flesh. The enemy is helpless and impotent if he has no flesh. That is why Joshua must have his filthy garments taken away; why these people must not touch the dead body and become defiled; because it gives the enemy just what he is after and gives him the place of power. Our greatest fear must be of the flesh because of the enemy back of that realm. If we are watchful in that realm, and seek ever and always to keep the Cross of the Lord Jesus between us and the works of the flesh and the life of the natural man, we shall go on and go through triumphantly, and it will be manifested that the enemy is a defeated foe. "And be strong, all ye people of the land, says the Lord, and work: for I am with you, says the Lord of hosts. My spirit remains among you; fear ye not." In other words, go on with the testimony, you have a great foundation in Calvary, you have a great expectation in the shaking that is coming, and you have a great God with you all the time.