Reading:
Luke 24:46-49; John 20:21-23; Acts 1:8; ASV.
“And
He said unto them, Thus it is written, that the Christ should
suffer, and rise again from the dead the third day; and that
repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name
unto all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem. Ye are
witnesses of these things. And behold, I send forth the
promise of My Father upon you: but tarry ye in the city, until ye
be clothed with power from on high.”
“Jesus
therefore said to them again, Peace be unto you: as the Father
hath sent Me, even so send I you. And when He had said this, He
breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy
Spirit: whose soever sins ye forgive, they are forgiven unto
them; whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.”
“But
ye shall receive power, when the Holy Spirit is come upon you:
and ye shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all
Judća, and Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.”
Continuing
our occupation with the matter of the great Divine thought of
representation, we shall now be especially concerned with one
simple emphasis on the place of the Holy Spirit in this
connection.
In
our previous meditations we were seeing this Divine thought as
revealed in the Scriptures; firstly, God making man in His Own
image, after His Own likeness; and then the thought taken up in
fulness in Christ, Who is repeatedly declared to be the image of
the invisible God; and finally the thought carried over into the
Church, the elect, which is to be conformed to the image of His
Son, all speaking so clearly of this intention of God to be represented,
to be known by representation.
Christ’s
Representative Work by the Spirit
Now,
the Holy Spirit has a very vital place in this whole matter. When
the Lord Jesus officially took up this particular phase or
function of His life and work, you know it was then that the Holy
Spirit came specifically into evidence in His life and ministry.
It is true that He was begotten of the Holy Spirit, it is true
that He was very God, but in the official work for which He came
into this world, the work of the Son of Man, which is a
representative term or title, He stands to represent man, the
race. Luke’s Gospel, as you know, is particularly and
peculiarly the Gospel for the race, as Matthew is that for the
Jew, and Luke’s particular title for Christ is the Son of
Man, representative. He takes the place of man as God
intended man to be, to bring man in His own Person inclusively to
the Divinely appointed destiny. He, the inclusive Man, will
advance by all the stages of man’s course to that Divinely
appointed end, and eventually, glorified, exalted even at God’s
right hand, He will stand as inclusively representative of that
new race, that new creation. I say that, as Son of Man, He
will advance by all the stages of man’s progress toward that
glorious destiny; for He will be there as the first-fruits, the
firstborn among many brethren. That very phrase is linked
with this thought of representation. He “is the image
of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Col.
1:15); representative, firstborn. Just as the first-fruits
of the harvest were representative of the whole harvest, and the
farmer would take the first-fruits and offer them to God in token
of the whole harvest which would follow, so Christ was the
first-fruits of all creation, and the firstborn among many
brethren, and He occupies that position at God’s right hand
now representatively, the token of all to follow. But from
the very first step, through every stage of that course to the
glory, His way is by the Spirit.
The
Cross the First Step
In
a sense, a very real and true sense, the Jordan was the
first step toward the glory. The Cross is always the first
step to glory; there will be no glory if there is no Cross, and
the measure of glory will be the measure of the Cross. We
will leave that and come back to it again presently. The
Jordan was the first step toward that glorifying, not of Christ
alone and merely in a personal way, but the glorifying of man,
the many sons to be brought to glory by Him, the whole harvest to
be brought to glory by Him, the many brethren who come by Him. I
say, in a very real sense the Jordan was the first step toward
that glory, and in the Jordan, as we have already pointed out,
the governing idea is representation. A race which cannot be
glorified must be put out of the way, to make room for a race
which can be glorified. A mankind which can never come to
glory must be put away from occupying the ground of a man that
can come to glory. So, representatively in the Jordan in His
baptism, His death and burial in type, He takes the place of a
race, a mankind, which can never be glorified, and it is got out
of the way in Him representatively.
In
the reality of the Cross, of which the Jordan was the type, we
have that blessed accomplishment. All this that can never be
glorified, never come to glory in us, has been put away. Are
you worried, obsessed and troubled with all that about you which
can never be glorified? Well, if you have accepted Christ as your
representative, and have stood right into His representative work
for you, everything that will hinder your coming to glory has
been dismissed, every bit of it; and God is working on that
ground with us. The last phase of that work will have to do
with our bodies of death; they shall be changed, and made like
unto the body of His glory. We are coming in every part of our
redeemed being to glory, because what cannot be glorified has
been representatively got out of the way. That is, of course, the
ground for our faith.
In
His coming up out of the Jordan, type of His coming up from the
grave, He occupies the representative position of a man who can
be glorified, a mankind that can be glorified, a race that can
come to glory, and at a certain point in His life these two
things were brought together in one hour. In the Mount of Transfiguration,
Moses and Elijah spoke with Him of the death, or exodus, which He
was about to accomplish at Jerusalem, and in that same hour He
was glorified. The death and the glory came together in one
hour in Him. That is how it can be with Him because He so
perfectly represents God’s thought. It is
representation.
But
then this new creation, this new man capable of coming to glory,
of being glorified, this new race as gathered up into Him as its
Head, as its first-fruits, as its first-born, can never come to
glory, only as from that very point of standing on the new
creation ground, resurrection ground. The Holy Spirit takes
charge; and so, coming up out of the water, the heaven was
opened, and the Holy Spirit as in the semblance of a dove came
and rested upon Him. That is the first thing. The Holy
Spirit takes charge, so to speak, of this whole matter of bringing
to glory, of perfecting this new creation for glory. It is
the Holy Spirit’s work from beginning to end.
What
was true in the case of the Lord Jesus as the Head has to be true
in the case of the whole Body, and Pentecost must be the
counterpart of the resurrection side of Jordan, where the Body,
brought on to resurrection ground, is taken charge of by the Holy
Spirit, to be brought right through all the course and stages of
perfecting unto glory. There is a little phrase in Peter’s
writings about “the Spirit of glory resting upon you”
(1 Pet. 4:14).
So
our emphasis is there, that this is the object of the Holy
Spirit, this is the necessity for the Holy Spirit; for nothing is
possible of all this Divine thought apart from the Holy Spirit.
The
Father’s Attestation of the Son
But
there is a second part, another side or aspect of this. The
Spirit certainly comes, the anointing takes place, but upon the
anointing, the Divine voice is heard from heaven saying “This
is My beloved Son in Whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:4).
With the anointing there comes the attestation. God is
calling attention to this One, is indicating this One, is
pointing out this One, and in effect He is saying, This is My
representative! You know that on the Mount of
Transfiguration, when Peter in his impulsiveness would be found
dictating, advising, suggesting what should be done, the voice,
that same voice, came again: “This is My beloved Son in Whom
I am well pleased; hear ye Him;” referring everything to Him
for government, for direction: for dictating. “Hear ye Him.”
It is the voice of attestation from heaven at Jordan and on the
Mount, singling Him out as God’s representative. It is
representation again.
Now
those two things go together. They are only two aspects of
one thing, because the anointing means that God Himself has
committed Himself to this One. That is the meaning of the
anointing. As we were saying in our previous meditation,
where the anointing is you have to meet and deal with God. “He
reproved kings for their sakes, saying, Touch not Mine anointed
ones, and do My prophets no harm” (1 Chron. 16:21,22; ASV). It
is to meet God if we do touch the anointing or that upon which
the anointing rests, or those who are anointed. God has
committed Himself in that anointing. Therefore if God is
there committed, involved, wrapped up with that, that is God’s
representative, and that is as God functioning there. The
Holy Spirit has constituted that vessel of representation by His
coming and His presence; God is present. That means that all the
rights of Divine sovereignty have been taken up by the Holy
Spirit and brought into the midst of that which is anointed, that
which is indwelt by the Spirit. All the rights of Divine
sovereignty are in the Holy Spirit, and if He is present, He is
present in all the rights of Divine sovereignty.
I
do want you to be able to grasp this, because I feel it is
tremendously important for us as members of this Body of Christ,
indwelt by the Holy Spirit. We just very faintly touched
upon this matter yesterday, and I feel there is something more to
be said about it.
The
Sovereignty of the Holy Spirit
When
this counterpart of Jordan, death and resurrection and the open
heaven and the descent of the Spirit and the anointing, when the
counterpart of that took place on the day of Pentecost, the Holy
Spirit came in terms of Divine sovereignty to be present, and it
is a thing which you and I have to recognize, to which we have to
bow the knee absolutely. It may be that we have not
recognized sufficiently that receiving the Holy Spirit of
anointing means that the sovereignty in our lives is taken right
out of our hands. Have you asked for the Holy
Spirit? Have you prayed to be filled with the
Spirit? Have you recognized the tremendous importance of the
Holy Spirit indwelling? If you have not, then, of course,
that will account for all kinds of weaknesses, failures, slowness
of growth, powerlessness in service, ineffectiveness in life, and
a host of other things. But if you have seen the tremendous
importance of the Holy Spirit’s presence in power, in
fulness in the life—and I do trust that you have—then,
having sought the Spirit, you have consciously or unconsciously,
intentionally or unintentionally, invited that the whole
sovereignty of your life shall be taken out of your own hands,
and that it should be entirely transferred to another; and that
involves you in far more than you have any idea of. This is
the point we were trying to make yesterday.
On
the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came in terms of
sovereignty, and took hold. He took right hold in terms of
sovereignty and, in doing so, He made men say things the import
of which they accepted within the compass of their own
understanding, it is true. Yes, they were not opposed to those
things which they were saying, so far as they understood them,
but the things which they were saying, while they agreed with
them, only went to the range of their appreciation, their understanding
of them. But the Holy Spirit meant infinitely more than
that, and before long these very men who agreed up to the point
of their understanding and appreciation of the things they were
saying, were confronted with the fact that the things they said
committed them to a great deal more than they had understood. And
that is the practical issue of the sovereignty of the Holy
Spirit.
Peter
quite agreed, according to his understanding, the range of his
appreciation, with what the Lord had said about “unto the
uttermost part of the earth.” He quite agreed with what
he was saying... “to all that are afar off, even as many as
the Lord our God shall call” (Acts 2:39). But it will
not be many days before Peter will stumble right up against it,
the very thing he himself has said, and find it meant far more
than he intended it to mean, when it comes to Caesarea and a
Gentile house. “All that are afar off, even as many as the
Lord our God shall call!” Peter says, Not so, Lord; and
there is a battle. But you notice that the Holy Spirit, when
He gets Peter through, comes right down on that situation in a
mighty way. It is a matter of which the Holy Spirit has
charge, and the verdict, the conclusion of the whole matter is
Peter’s report at Jerusalem—“Who was I, that I
could withstand God?” “If God gave unto them the
like gift as He did also unto us... who was I, that I could
withstand God?” (Acts 11:17). There is a man having to
go down before the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit. He has
been committed to that from the beginning.
Now,
what do we want to get at in this matter? It is this: if you
and I really do come to the place where the Holy Spirit as Lord
becomes resident in us, we are confronted with this great law of
the absolute sovereignty of the Holy Spirit to do as He likes
with us and to take us completely beyond our own intentions,
right beyond our own prejudices, our own traditions, all our past
history, take us beyond our present mental range of what we now
conceive to be the right and the wrong. We have all got a
fixed mental horizon today. At this moment we would all put
a certain limit and bound and hedge to what we consider is right
and wrong, what we ought to do and what we ought not to do. We
move within our own mental interpretation of things, and that is
our range. Are we going to bind the Holy Spirit to that? If
so, we will never go on to God’s ultimate purpose and end. What
we shall find is that the Holy Spirit will demand from time to
time that we get rid of our hedges, and let Him lead us sheer out
of our own fixed bounds of acceptance and interpretation. He
will demand that, that is His sovereign right, and our progress
towards God’s final end, and, mark you, the measure in which
we can truly be representative for God here, depends entirely
upon that capacity for adjustment to a new revelation or indication
by the Holy Spirit, our capacity, our amenability to adjustment
to what the Spirit will show us.
It
seems to me that very often the Lord hedges our lives up to an
emergency, a crisis, a disputed position, in order to bring about
something new. The fact is, of course, we will not move into
anything more of the Lord unless we are compelled to. That
is how it works out, and however good and however great and
however precious may have been the Lord’s dealings with us,
showings to us, impartations to us, the best that He has ever
given to us will have to be brought to the place where it no
longer meets our fullest need, in order that we should move on to
something more. That is the way of progress. We have
had, perhaps, wonderful revelations, wonderful dealings of the
Lord with us; things have happened in our lives which have
eclipsed all that ever preceded them, and at the time we have
felt that we have reached the fulness. We have not; there is something
beyond this. Just at the time this is as far as it is
possible to go, but our experience and our history is that those
things which at the time and for a time were so great, so
wonderful, so all-absorbing, have come to be as though they were
not, with a growing sense of new need, new demand, and another
crisis has arisen in which we have had to know something more
than has ever been. And the Lord forces situations like
that. It is the way of enlargement, it is the way of growth. It
seems to me to be His only practical way of keeping us going on. But
it is the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit bringing about those
crises and making these demands; and I suppose that will be our
experience right to the end. If we really are under the
government of the Holy Spirit, we will never have reached
finality here, there is still more beyond; but to reach it we
have to lose contentment with what we have. One of the tragic
features of Christianity is the measure of contentedness with
that evangelical Christianity. The great need today is a
sense of need everywhere, amongst Christians and in the world, a
desperate sense of need. The Church will never grow until it
grows by this intense sense of need of something more. Men
will never come to Christ until they have a real sense of need.
The
New Testament is just full of this work of the Holy Spirit acting
sovereignly to precipitate situations in which a new knowing of
the Lord becomes indispensable to life, to very existence,
and when that is brought about the way is open for the Lord to
reveal Himself, and to come in in some new way; and that is the
enlargement of representation. The Holy Spirit, in His
sovereignty, holds us to His step by step method; He never acts
mechanically, He acts only in life. So you see, in the
Book of the Acts, the Acts of the Holy Spirit, He always kept the
Lord’s servants at very short commons in the matter of what
He was going to do. He never put the sovereignty into their
hands, He always retained it in His own hands. In the Book
of the Acts you cannot have a missionary programme; there is
no programme there. Men, of course, now have resolved the
New Testament into a missionary programme, though in fact it was
not one. Would to God we could get back behind programmes,
back to the point where the sovereignty is in the hands of the
Holy Spirit entirely.
The
Holy Spirit Directing Service
That
is seen in the choice and sending out of the representatives of
Christ. You see it in Antioch; Paul and Barnabas are there,
and for a whole year men with whom a great destiny is bound up by
foreordination must be there under God’s hand, and await God’s
time. Especially was this the case with Paul, known of God from
all eternity as the man for a tremendous mission. But even so,
and although apprised by the Lord from heaven of his mission
right from the beginning—“To this end have I appeared
unto thee, to appoint thee a minister and a witness” (Acts
26:16)—he cannot take the sovereignty of his missionary
calling into his own hands and work it out. He must get into
that company at Antioch, that representation of the Body, and
wait for the Holy Spirit. He waits twelve months there at
Antioch, perhaps a little more, and then the Holy Spirit said, “Separate
me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them”
(Acts 13:2). The Holy Spirit is holding this matter of their
life-work in His hands as sovereign. They cannot decide when to
take it up, even though they may know in their hearts quite
definitely what their life-work is.
Then,
as they go, they are not allowed to sit down and draw up a line
of action, a scheme, a plan, a timetable. They go under
the sovereignty of the Spirit. They reach a certain point
and Paul thinks one day of Ephesus, and his natural mind
consecrated to the Lord gets to work. Ephesus is a great
city, a very influential city. If only he can get to Ephesus and
get the Church planted there, get things going there, it will be
a tremendous thing! Yes, I think for the Lord’s sake,
we ought to go to Ephesus! But they were not suffered of the Holy
Spirit to preach the Word in Asia. Well, Bithynia is a good
place, a very important place, and it presents a great door of
opportunity: we had better go to Bithynia! No, the Holy Spirit
suffered them not to go to Bithynia; and while they tarried, not
suffered of the Holy Spirit to preach the Word in Asia or
Bithynia, a vision appeared to Paul in the night, a man of
Macedonia, and Europe is indicated first. Ephesus and Bithynia
will come in the order of the Spirit, in the Spirit’s
sovereign time, and the sovereign time of the Spirit is not yet
in that direction. The sovereign time of the Spirit is just
now in this other direction, Europe, Philippi (Acts 16:6–10).
Fruitfulness
Vitally Related to the Spirit’s Sovereignty
Now
all this is only taking little fragments out to indicate and
emphasize this, that the Holy Spirit coming into a vessel comes
in terms of absolute Divine sovereignty to take the rule of our
lives out of our hands, and that is why the Holy Spirit can never
come and do His work until you have been to Jordan. Until
the Cross is a fact, an accomplished fact, there can be no
sovereign government of the Holy Spirit carrying all the Divine
programme; for the Cross means the deposing, not only of the
sinful body of the flesh, but of the natural man. Paul is as
consecrated to God, to Christ, as ever a man has ever been on
this earth, with one exception, and yet even Paul with his utter
consecration to the Lord cannot assume this missionary programme
and follow it out himself. He has to be a bondslave of
Jesus Christ, he has to be under the sovereignty of the Holy
Spirit, he has to recognize when the Spirit suffers not. There
would have been, and there would be today, a very great deal more
fruitfulness, if the Church were governed in this same way. What
has happened is that Mark 16:15— “Go ye into all the
world”—has become a missionary programme that anybody
may adopt at will. All you have to do is to get saved, and
adopt that, and go into all the world, and preach the Gospel. Well,
God forbid that I should disparage anything in the way of
preaching the Gospel: that is not the point. But what about
the effect of it all comparatively after two thousand years? Half
the world is not touched yet after two thousand years. Look
at the difference between the few Apostolic years, with the range
then covered and the impact registered, and all the centuries
which have followed.
Is
not that an argument for this one thing, that you cannot adopt
the missionary manifesto and commission and go and work it out
yourself; that this is a Holy Spirit business; and while what I
am saying may seem to be the negative side, I want it to be the
positive. When the Holy Spirit gets hold of the situation,
He will do it, but He has to be sovereign.
The
Cross therefore clears the way for the sovereignty of the Holy
Spirit, and the Cross means that even consecrated natural minds
have to have something more than their own consecration as the
governing factor. So many say or think, If only I am
consecrated to the Lord, then I ought to do anything that comes
into my head that I think would serve the Lord! Oh no, that
may be zeal, but not according to knowledge; and that may be
waste.
The
Sovereignty of the Holy Spirit in Relation to His Perfect
Knowledge
Now
let us not go round the thing any more, but just strike the heart
of it. It is this: the Holy Spirit demands absolute
sovereign rights in our life, and to take the sovereignty right
out of our own hands; and that, of course, progressively. However
much we may know, we do not know all that is in the mind of the
Spirit, for the Holy Spirit never grows. The Holy Spirit of
God never has grown, He never does grow, His mind does not
enlarge. You never think of the mind of God enlarging, you
never think of God growing. I say that reverently. The
Holy Spirit never gets any new knowledge. From the very
beginning, the Holy Spirit has all the knowledge that can ever be
had, His knowledge is perfect.
That
is the significance of that wonderful word in the book of the
Revelation, where everything is consummated and brought to its
full end: “Saith He that hath the seven Spirits of God”
(Rev. 3:1). It is a figurative or symbolic term which means,
He that hath perfect knowledge, the perfection of spiritual
knowledge. He has that from the beginning, and I say again,
the Holy Spirit has never acquired one fragment of new knowledge
as He has gone on; He has had it all from the
beginning. When He came He had as complete a knowledge of
things as ever He will have. The Spirit’s knowledge is
absolutely final, but for ourselves what we do not know? At
most we know but a mere fragment of what the Holy Spirit knows
and means. That means that we are going to get a great deal
more knowledge as we go on. We can only get that increase of
knowledge as we are prepared to learn things all over again, all
anew. You see what I mean. There is no hope whatever
unless the Holy Spirit can in sovereignty just show us that we
know nothing, and that we have everything to learn, and that His
knowledge is infinite and will always be miles ahead of us, and
therefore adjustment on our part will be necessary again and
again and again. Have you come to a fixed position about
truth, about light, about the ways of God, about the mind of the
Lord, about what you ought to do and ought not to do, and what
you are never going to do? Have you come to a fixed
place? If so, you have shut the door on the Holy
Spirit. No one who believes in the Holy Spirit could ever
possibly say, I shall never do that! Peter said that: Nothing
common or unclean has ever passed my lips, and never will! That
was his position, but the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit showed
that everything of God’s purpose in his apostleship hung
upon whether he abandoned that closed position: and he could
quote Scripture for his position, too! It does not matter. One of
the remarkable things about the New Testament is the unlooked for
interpretations it gives to Old Testament Scriptures. No
wonder the Jews and the Judaizers who dogged Paul everwhere would
say, This man reads a lot into the Old Testament that is not
there, this man is putting constructions upon the Old Testament
that it will not bear, he has taken out of the Old Testament
something that is not there! Look at what Paul says about Old
Testament things. I cannot see it means that in the Old
Testament. It does look as if he is using the Old Testament
and putting a construction on it that was not meant in the Old
Testament. It is an extraordinary thing how in the New
Testament the Old is given a meaning you could never find without
the New Testament. The Holy Spirit knows what He means, and
He means a great deal more than ever men have yet seen. The very
Scripture you quote may mean more than ever you intended it to
mean. I think this is enough to show you how necessary it is for
us to be in a position where we are really open to the Lord, and
really under the Holy Spirit‘s government, ready to let go
our most cherished position, if the Holy Spirit indicates that is
the way. To say that, is not to say we are to be unstable
and carried about by every wind of doctrine and sleight of men,
or that we are just going to follow anything that comes along.
I
do not think the Holy Spirit ever denies Himself. What the Holy
Spirit has said at one time, He is not going to contradict at
another. But what may seem contradiction may be in this
form, namely, that the Holy Spirit, transcends what He has
already said. Just as a miracle is not necessarily a
violation of natural law, but a transcending of natural law, so
the Holy Spirit will not contradict or violate anything He has
said before, but He will transcend it and, when He does
transcend, it may look like a contradiction. It may be you
will be able to say, I am quite sure the Lord led me at a certain
time and in a certain direction, but He has led me right away
from that now! That is not necessarily a contradiction, that
is a transcending, a moving on. At that time you could not
have gone the further step, He could only get you that far then. But
in His own mind that was only a step which was to lead to
another, and yet another, and you leave a lot behind in such a
process. But oh, the point is that the Holy Spirit shall be
able to do what He is after.
Even
in the case of the Lord Jesus, it was like that. His was a
sinless nature and a sinless natural mind, but He would not use
it apart from the Father, and if One with a sinless natural mind
will not use it independently, what about us? How much more
necessary it is for the Holy Spirit to be sovereign in our case. Everything
of power lies in that direction. “Ye shall receive
power, the Holy Spirit coming upon you” (Acts 1:8).
The
Menace of the Natural Mind
I
think we can leave it with this one simple emphasis now, namely,
this need for the Holy Spirit to be sovereign. He must. There
are good people, godly people, who do not see, and who will not
agree, and the problem arises: Oh, they are godly, they are
consecrated, they have lived for God for many years, and yet they
are so opposed to certain things which seem to be so evidently
the mind of the Spirit; and they would deny that. What is
the explanation? Well, there may be several explanations,
but I suggest that this is one possible explanation in a great
many cases, namely, that the natural mind has never known the
Cross; yes, the consecrated natural mind. I am not talking
about the wicked natural mind. The consecrated natural mind has
never known the Cross. Our own mind is still our mind, it is our
judgment, even after we are saved. What we have said about
Paul and Ephesus and Bithynia, and other cases, is true of all
the most consecrated people. They still have a mind which
they can follow which is not the mind of the Spirit. The
mind of the Spirit is acting in another way from their mind. They
would go this way for the Lord. Oh, so devoted to the Lord, it is
all in the Lord’s interests; they would go that way, but the
Spirit is taking another course. Upon what does the whole
issue rest at such a time? Upon whether the Cross has been
planted sufficiently deeply in that life as to take the
sovereignty of mind out of its hands, so that the mind of the
Spirit can be sovereign. That is a very important thing. Are
you quite sure that the sovereignty of mind has been taken out of
your hands into the hands of the Holy Spirit, and that it is the
sovereign mind of the Holy Spirit that is governing, and that it
is not merely the case that you are sure of yourself, quite fixed
and final in your own conviction about a thing, and that your own
strength of mind and will, your reason, back of it all has fixed
you there? You may be a most devoted child of God, and yet
it can be like that with you. It is a terrible possibility
for the Spirit not to be sovereign in a most devoted child of
God, for their own minds still to be sovereign. There is no
way through there; that is deadlock, that is a closed door. If we
are going to be here in that growing representation of the Lord,
we have to be on the same basis as the Lord was on. That is to
say, from the first to the last it is the Spirit Who is to be
sovereign, and that by the power of the Cross.