"Behold, my
servant, whom I uphold; my chosen, in whom my soul
delighteth" (Isa. 42:1).
In our previous
meditation, when we had seen the passing on into the
Church of the great vocation, and were speaking about the
electing of the Church in relation to the eternal
purpose, we reminded you that, seeing that it is the
Church as the Body of Christ that is the eternally
predestined instrument for the fulfilment of the purpose
of God (that very great purpose of God being brought
through sovereign grace into that Church, that spiritual
Body) we are therefore individually in the election to
service. By our very calling, the great purpose becomes
ours. In our very apprehending by Christ, the greatest
purpose of all ages comes to rest upon us, we are found
in it.
The
Purpose to be Served
Two things remain to be
said in that particular connection before we proceed with
other matters. One is as to the purpose. What is the
purpose of the ages? Well, it is made perfectly clear in
revelation through Paul that the purpose is to sum up all
things in Christ - the universal fulness of God's Son,
first gathered into Him, and then mediated by Him through
all ages to come. Into that we, by grace, are introduced.
That is why we have been brought into the fellowship of
God's Son. That is the meaning of our ever having been
saved, saved with a vast, timeless, universal purpose,
and that becomes the service of our lives.
What
Service Is
The second thing is
just that. What is the work of the Lord? What is
Christian service from God's standpoint? It is
contributing to the fulness of Christ. It is in the
measure of each several part ministering to that end,
that all things shall be summed up in Christ, and that He
shall be the fulness of all things. That great Divine
goal has many ways and many means of attainment, and it
is not a matter of whether you or I are serving the Lord
in the same way as someone else. That is not the point at
all. We standardise and departmentalise Christian work,
and we think of the activities of ministers and
missionaries and suchlike functions, and we call that the
work of the Lord, we think of that when we speak of going
into Christian service; but while I do not say that that
is not the work of the Lord, it is a very narrow and a
very artificial way of viewing things. The work of the
Lord is, and can be, no more than contributing to the
fulness of Christ and ministering of that fulness to Him
and from Him. How you do it is a matter of Divine
appointment, but that is the work of the Lord. So it is
not necessarily a matter of whether I am in what is
called the ministry, a missionary or a Christian worker,
in this particular category or that, or whether I am
serving the Lord in the way in which certain others are
serving Him. That is quite a secondary matter. We
would all like to be doing what certain people are doing,
and doing it in the way they are doing it. You might
aspire to be an apostle Paul - probably if you understood
a little more you would not! But you see, whether Paul is
doing it along his Divinely appointed line, in his
Divinely appointed way - or Peter - or John - or this one
or that one - the object comes first, the way afterward.
The service of the Lord - whatever may be the means, the
method - is ministering to the fulness of
Christ, and ministering of that fulness, and you
may be called upon to do that anywhere. It can be done
just as much out of public view as in public view. Many
who have ministered to the Lord and by whom He has been
wonderfully ministered are those of whom the world has
heard and read nothing. This, you see, is a 'Body'
matter, and a body is not all hands, not all major
members and faculties. A body is comprised of numerous,
almost countless, functions, many of them remote and very
hidden, but they all minister in a related way to the
whole purpose for which the body exists, and that is a
true picture of the service of God.
So think again. While
we would not put you back from aspiring to the fullest
place of service, nor say that you are wrong in desiring
to be a missionary, to go forth into the world in a
full-time spiritual capacity, remember that even before
the Lord puts you into that specific work you are a
minister all the same, for 'minister' is not a name, a
title, a designation but a function; and the function is
contributing something to the fulness of Christ, and
ministering something of that fulness. So it comes back
to us as a question - What am I ministering of Christ,
what am I contributing to that ultimate fulness? If it be
by leading the unsaved to Him, I am adding to Christ, so
to speak. That is all it means, but that is what it
means. I am building up Christ. If I am encouraging the
saints, I am ministering to Christ and of Christ. That is
"my servant... in whom my soul delighteth." In
whom does God delight as His servant? Those who minister
to His Son, and that is the beginning and the end,
however that may be done by Divine appointment. Having
said that, let us go on a little further with this matter
of the servant.
The
Beginning of Service the Servant Himself
"Behold, my
servant." God calls attention to the servant in whom
His soul delighteth. The beginning of all service in
relation to God is the servant himself. What makes a
servant of God? We think of a servant of God being made
by academic training, Bible teaching, by this or that
form of equipment, and we think when we have all that,
when we have been through the course and have in our
minds all that can be imparted of that kind, we are the
Lord's servants. But that is not the way the Lord looks
at it at all.
In the first place, the
Lord looks at the servant, and He is going to demand that
He shall be able Himself to point to His servant and say,
"Behold, my servant." I know that there is a
right sense in which the instrument has to be out of
view, but only in one sense; that is that he, in his own
person, his own personal impression as a man, his own
impact by nature, shall not be the registration made upon
people; only in that sense he has to be out of view.
There is another sense in which he has to be very much in
view. If that were not true, all the autobiography in
Paul's writings would be wrong in principle. Paul keeps
himself, in a right sense, very much in view. He calls
attention to himself very properly and very strongly and
persistently. The Lord is going to require that He shall
be able to say, "Behold, my servant," and the
servant to whom He will call attention will be the
servant who is the impression of Christ. Yes, Christ
registered, Christ presenced, Christ apparent, in the
servant. The beginning of all service, I repeat, is the
servant himself. God is far more concerned with having
His servants in a right state than He is with having them
furnished with all kinds of academic qualifications and
titles. It is the man, it is the woman, that God is
concerned with.
If you turn to the
letters of Timothy, you find there that beautiful
designation of the servant of the Lord, "O man of
God" (1 Tim. 6:2) Paul's appeal to Timothy is in
those terms. And then, speaking of the study and
knowledge of the Scriptures, he uses the same phrase
again "that the man of God may be complete, furnished
completely unto every good work" (2 Tim. 3:17). But
note the order - he says, "that the man of God may
be... furnished completely," not, that there may be
a complete furnishing to make a man of God; the man of
God already exists. Now all his study with the Word is to
make him who is the man of God an efficient workman. The
man of God comes before all his study. He is that before
he has a knowledge of the Scriptures.
You know that 'man of
God' was the great designation given to some of the
prophets of old. Elijah on one occasion, having been
hidden by God at the brook Cherith, found the brook to
dry up; and the word of the Lord came to him, saying,
"Arise, get thee to Zarephath... behold, I have
commanded a widow there to sustain thee" (1 Kings
17:9). Elijah went, and you remember how he found the
food situation. She was gathering two sticks to bake her
last cake for her son and herself, and then to die. But
the barrel of meal did not fail: the Lord was faithful to
His word. But then, after that, it came to pass that the
woman's son fell sick, and so sore was the sickness that
there was no breath left in him. The woman made her very
pathetic appeal to the prophet. He took the child up to
his own chamber, and called upon the Lord, and saw the
child revive, and he presented him alive to the mother,
who said, "Now I know that thou art a man of God,
and that the word of the Lord in thy mouth is
truth." What were the credentials of his ministry?
that he had the secret of life triumphant over death. He
had the word of life, and the word of life is not always
the mere usage of Scripture. You can use the Scripture
and it may have no effect at all, or you can use it and
it may have a mighty effect. A great deal depends upon
who uses the Scripture. It is the man of God who can use
it in that way and be attested as the true servant of the
Lord. It is the spiritual power of life that is in the
man that makes him (to use Paul's words to Timothy) an
approved servant of God. "O man of God."
"Behold, my
servant." Do you grasp the point? It is with you and
with me that the Lord is concerned; it is with what we
are, it is with our personal knowledge of Himself. It is
that we may have within us the secrets of the Lord, that
it may be true of us as it was of the Lord Jesus and of
others that the key to the situation spiritually is in
our hands. We, as Elijah, hidden away in secret, have
been in touch with God. There is a background. God had
said to Elijah, "Hide thyself"; and he was a long
time hidden before the word of the Lord came, saying,
"Go, show thyself...." Someone has remarked
that for every servant of God there must be much more of
the hidden life than of the public life. How true that
is! The Lord will take pains to ensure that the secret
history, the spiritual history, of every true servant of
His is looked after. With all the eagerness to get out to
do the work - and may it not abate! - with all our
enthusiasm to be active, all our desire and craving to be
serving, let us remember the first thing is the servant,
not the service. The first thing, the beginning of all
service, is the instrument. We see that the servant comes
firstly into the Lord's view, that He may have one to
whom He may draw attention in a right way and say, 'Look
at that servant of Mine, and see My work, see My grace,
see My power, see the traces of My hand.' When the Lord
has brought us to the point where that is possible, then
certain features will come out.
The
Marks of a True Servant
(a) Glorying in the Grace of God
The first feature of
the God-approved servant, the true servant of God, is his
glorying in the gospel of the grace of God on personal
grounds. It is not, after all, such a far cry from Isa.
42:1 - "Behold, my servant" - to Isa. 61:1 -
"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me; because the Lord
hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he
hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim
liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to
them that are bound; to proclaim the year of the Lord's
favour" - to proclaim the year of grace. Glorying in
the gospel of the grace of God - yes, on personal
grounds.
Let us look at the
letters to Timothy and Titus. These are the letters of
service, the letters of one great servant of God to
another servant of God, one great man of God to another
man of God.
"Paul, an
apostle of Christ Jesus according to the commandment of
God our Saviour, and Christ Jesus our hope" (1Tim.
1:1). That phrase "God our Saviour" is
peculiar to these pastoral letters; you find it nowhere
else, and in these letters it occurs seven times. Do you
not think it is significant that, not to an unsaved
person and not to a newly converted person, but to a
servant of the Lord fairly fully fledged (for, as you
notice in the next verses, the Apostle is saying that he
left Timothy at Ephesus to look after things; he was in
pastoral responsibility, and the Ephesian responsibility
turned out to be no small thing; and similarly in the
case of Titus), Paul, now well-advanced in life and
service, writes to Timothy and to Titus in places of
responsibility, in this way - "God our
Saviour," repeated seven times. That word Saviour
was not a word used by Paul with some extraordinary new
meaning in it. It was one of the common words of everyday
life among the Greeks at that time. It was the word on
the lips of the soldier who had come back from battle and
had been delivered from being killed, and he said he had
known salvation. It was the word of the sailor who had
been rescued from the deep when his ship had gone down,
and he said he had been saved. It was the word of the
physician who had brought someone back from a desperate
illness, and he called it their salvation. A common word
- the common language which everybody knew and
understood; he was not embellishing this with something
profound, he was right there in the simplicities - God
Who has saved us, our Saviour; the common salvation.
"And Christ
Jesus our hope." Well, that is a beginning word
for believers, for the drowning sailor, for the soldier
besieged or encompassed, for the invalid gripped by the
deadly fever - hope for them all. It is very beautiful,
as you follow through this letter, to see how much Paul
dwells in that realm.
"...according
to the gospel of the glory of the blessed God, which was
committed to my trust. I thank him that enabled me, even
Christ Jesus our Lord, for that he counted me faithful,
appointing me to his service; though I was before a
blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious: howbeit I
obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief;
and the grace of our Lord abounded exceedingly with faith
and love which is in Christ Jesus. Faithful is the
saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus
came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief:
howbeit for this cause I obtained mercy, that in me as
chief might Christ Jesus show forth all his
longsuffering, for an ensample of them that should
thereafter believe on him unto eternal life" (1 Tim.
1:11-16).
"This is good
and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour; who would
have all men to be saved, and come to the knowledge of
the truth. For there is one God, one mediator also
between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus who gave
himself a ransom for all; the testimony to be borne in
its own times" (1 Tim. 2:3-6).
That is all glorifying
in the gospel of the grace of God - and very late on in
Paul's life. My point, while being perhaps very simple,
is a very important one - that nothing is to cast any
shadow over our glorying in the grace of God; and there
are quite a lot of things that do that, I find. A lot of
people become taken up with what is called advanced
truth, and they become heavy, almost morose, they are
burdened about this great teaching, and lose all their
glorying in the grace of God. Nothing should ever be
allowed to bring a shadow on this glorying in the grace
of God on the part of a servant of God. Paul maintained
that glorying right to the very end, and here he is
saying to Timothy, by example as well as by precept,
'However many worries there are at Ephesus, however many
the problems in the churches, however much you may be
aspiring to a higher life, however much you may feel your
own unworthiness and weakness, never lose your glorying
in the gospel of grace.' That is really the import of it
all - to bring Timothy back to this. 'There are many
things in yourself and in men's attitudes toward you
(they will despise your youth), in your sufferings
physically (your oft infirmity), there are plenty of
things to bring a cloud over your life, but never allow
anything to eclipse or becloud the great wonder of the
grace of God in salvation.' Perhaps some of us need to
recover a little more of that.
Christ was a very great
teacher, but He was also a great preacher of the grace of
God, and here it is declared - He took up the very words
from Isa. 61 and applied them to Himself at Nazareth,
declaring that the very purpose of His coming and of the
anointing of the Spirit was to preach the gospel, the
good news, to proclaim the year of grace. Paul was a
great teacher; next to the Lord Himself, there has been
no greater in the dispensation; but with all that he
knew, all that he was, all his profound understanding of
spiritual things, he maintained to the end his glorying
in the simple basic reality of the grace of God in
salvation. I believe - and I am saying a very serious and
responsible thing when I say it - that the Lord will
allow anything rather than that we should get away from
grace. I am going to say something now that I think may
be very terrible in your hearing; if we have got away
from grace the Lord may even allow a fall, and maybe a
terrible fall, into sin in order to bring us back in a
personal way, so that on personal grounds the supreme
note in our lives should be the grace of God. I say, He
will allow anything rather than that we should get off
the ground of the grace of God. That is one thing He does
demand, and will have - a true, adequate, apprehension
and acknowledgment of the grace of God. We have no other
ground on which to stand, from which to move. It is all
the infinite grace of God, the mystery of His grace to
us.
(b)
Humility
Such an apprehension
produces humility, and of all the graces flowing from
grace, humility is the greatest. The opposite of humility
is the greatest evil - that is, pride. There never was a
greater sin than pride. It brought Satan from his high
estate, and the angels that fell with him, and it brought
the whole race crashing down in the awful fall. It
necessitated God's Son taking the lowest place,
suffering, dying - pride brought all that tragedy about.
Humility is of great price in the sight of God, and it is
a right apprehension of the grace of God that produces
humility.
(c)
Assurance
Grace produces
assurance, and what is the use of any servant going out
to serve the Lord who has not assurance? The enemy tries
to destroy our testimony by robbing us of our assurance.
He has destroyed many a ministry in that way. If we
really apprehend grace, it brings great assurance. Thank
God for His grace, grace which chose when I did not
choose, grace which has kept when many times I would have
given up; grace that has done so much gives me assurance
that it will complete the work. Grace started and grace
will finish, and that brings confidence. Get off the
ground of grace and you will be off the ground of
assurance.
(d)
Joy
And a sufficient
apprehension of the grace of God brings joy, it must
bring joy. If we get away from the ground of works - that
miserable ground of what we are, what we can or cannot do
- on to the ground of His infinite, redeeming, keeping,
perfecting grace, we are bound to get on to the ground of
joy. You cannot explain the joy of Paul to the end on
any other ground at all. You take the sum of all his
sufferings and trials and disappointments and problems;
those who owed everything to him spiritually at length
turning away from him, the very churches for which he had
hazarded his life having no more room for him, close
friends of missionary travels forsaking him; and yet full
of joy, and to the very end of his life exhorting the
saints to rejoice in the Lord. Why? It can only be
because he has such a tremendous hold on sovereign grace.
Grace will accomplish the work, grace will perfect what
grace began.
The
True Servant's Theme and Testimony - Grace
Arthur Porritt, the
biographer of Dr. Jowett, has a notable chapter entitled
"His Gospel," in which he seeks to analyse the
message of the great preacher. "The supreme note of
his preaching," he says, "was the proclamation
of the all-sufficiency of Redeeming Grace in its
relationship to the worst... The eternal love of God was
his basal doctrine of Christianity, and he proclaimed the
illimitable love of God with unwearied insistence.... To
the literature of Redeeming Grace, Jowett made a rich
contribution by his sermons and books. It was the 'big
theme' to which, above all others, he returned again and
again, as if, of all truth, it was the one facet that
entranced him.... To Jowett, Redeeming Grace was the
fulcrum of the evangelical message. 'With all my heart,'
he said, 'do I believe that this Gospel of Redeeming
Grace is the cardinal necessity of our time.' 'I cannot
do anything better than magnify the grace of God.' 'One
could preach twenty sermons on it.' Grace was Jowett's
sovereign word. He was always probing its depths to
discover some new aspect of its unsearchable riches. Each
discovery he heralded with satisfaction."
Here is a specimen of
his preaching of Grace - "There is no word," he
once declared, "I have wrestled so much with as
grace. It is just like expressing a great American forest
by a word. No phrase can express the meaning of grace.
Grace is more than mercy. It is more than tender mercy.
It is more than a multitude of tender mercies. Grace is
more than love. It is more than innocent love. Grace is
holy love, but it is holy love in spontaneous movement
going out in eager quest toward the unholy and the
unlovely that by the ministry of its own sacrifice it
might redeem the unholy and the unlovely into its own
strength and beauty. The grace of God is holy love on the
move to thee and me, and the like of thee and me. It is
God unmerited, undeserved, going out towards the children
of men, that He might win them into the glory and
brightness of His own likeness."
Dr. Jowett, wherever he
went, drew the multitudes. My point for the moment is
this - if that was so, and that was his theme, it shows
what people need, it shows to what the heart responds.
There is nothing that can take the place of the gospel of
the grace of God. If you think that when you get into
'Ephesian' realms you get on to some higher ground, look
into the Ephesian letter and underline the word 'grace,'
and you will find "Ephesians" is full of grace.
You cannot get away from it, however high and far you go.
Rather it is the other way. The greater the revelation
and the more the wonder and the vastness of Divine
purpose comes to your heart, the more you go down and
worship for the grace of God. No teaching ought ever to
carry us away from the grace of God.
But I did say this -
the true servant glories in the grace of God on personal
grounds; not as a subject, not as a theme, however
entrancing and wonderful; not as something in the Bible,
not as something that has worked miracles in lives in
India and in China and in London; but as something by
which he himself is living today. That is where Paul was
constantly coming in with his personal pronoun. "I
obtained mercy..."; "unto me... was this grace
given." It is right back there on personal grounds,
and the Lord will keep it there. Oh, do not go out with a
theme; go out as a man, a woman, who embodies the grace
of God, and is never, never tired of extolling that
grace. It is the hall-mark of a true servant of God.