While it is true that
every spiritual blessing is a gift of grace and not
something to be merited, it is equally true that no
blessing is entered into without a real challenge,
demanding a genuine and honest proof that we mean
business with God. The history of Israel's entering into
the inheritance of the land covenanted to them is a great
illustration of how spiritual fullness is withstood by
foes of many kinds. The New Testament is one continuous
revelation of how spiritual fullness for the Lord's
people is withstood. It is an education to read the Word
with this in mind and to recognize the many forms which
this obstructing and frustrating activity takes. Both
outside and inside of the Church, and often inside
believers themselves, the enemy of spiritual fullness is
shown to have his ground of vantage. The fact is, beloved
of God, that only ''men of violence'' will really secure
the Kingdom (Matt. 11:12), and this violence will often
have to be done to some of our own positions,
mentalities, prejudices, fears, reservations,
antipathies, etc. We may settle it once for all that for
the fullness of the Lord's life and blessing we must be
on the Lord's ground. This is a law which will apply to
many particular matters.
Christian Fellowship
For instance, there is
the matter of our relationship to, and fellowship with,
all other children of God. Fellowship with the Lord's
people is an established law of spiritual fullness, and
there can be no fullness apart from it. This question of
Christian fellowship will have to be taken in both hands
and settled finally. We shall - if we are going to have
an "open heaven" - have to sit right down with
this matter and do some honest and energetic thinking and
deciding. What is the Lord's ground in this matter? It is
absolutely nothing other, more, nor less, than Christ
Himself and our common sharing of His life through new
birth and utter yieldedness to Him as our Sovereign Head
and Lord! Get down on to any other ground and we forsake
the place of fullness. If we get on to the ground of a
teaching, an interpretation, a particular and specific
doctrine, or even emphasis, as something in itself, we at
once set up standards or draw lines between ourselves and
others, and even unconsciously we divide and give out an
implication of division.
Or again; if we get on
the ground of a denomination, a sect, a mission, a
society, a "movement", or anything crystallized
as to an association of the Lord's people, with an
enterprise binding together those concerned - though it
may be for the Lord - we open the door to every divisive
thing, and we close it to fulness. On the one hand we
very soon become governed by false and unsound judgments.
Jealousies and rivalries can never see the light of day
if the one concern is the Lord. They are born of concern
for a thing. ''Sheep stealing'' is a common charge that
needs to be looked at again in the light of Christ. Whose
sheep are they? Are they His, or are they the property of
a certain Christian enterprise or society? Unto what have
they been "stolen"? Have they moved in a
certain direction because they have found a larger
measure of Christ there, or is it because they have really
been enticed to swell the ranks of something less of
Christ?
Are we really only too anxious to let "our"
converts or members go, if they are going after the Lord?
Do we want to keep some thing together? Is the
essence of division in the leaving of one association or
connection because a greater measure of spiritual life
has been found in other directions? Some thing exists
which fails continually to meet spiritual need. That
which does meet the hunger and longing of years comes
along and from the old dead and barren connections the
hungry move to the spiritual provision. Instead of
Christians being glad if a genuine spiritual move takes
place, the cry is not long in being heard: "Dividing
the Lord's people." Are we sure that behind much of
this sort of thing there are not vested interests,
sentimentalities, men's traditions, or our own
fears?
There is all the difference between the course
represented above and the divisions between the Lord's
people on the basis of doctrinal hair-splitting, or on
the ground of technicalities in procedure, to say nothing
of adherence to personalities, however much they may have
been instruments of blessing. Anything that draws a line
of fellowship narrower than the mutual love of the Holy
Spirit is a departure from the Lord's ground of fullness
of life. We are thinking of spiritual relationship and
fellowship, not of public or "official"
co-operation with what is unscriptural in doctrine and
practice.
If the children of God will only make Christ their ground
of fellowship, so much that hinders spiritual fullness
and accounts for the present weakness, limitation, and
defeat will be ruled out, and the great hinderer will be
despoiled of his ground.
Then there is another
direction in which this law of fullness operates and in
which some serious adjustment is necessary. It is that of
leaving room for
The
Sovereignty of the Holy Spirit.
It was on this very
matter that the book of "The Acts" was founded.
The Lord Jesus enunciated the law when He said to
Nicodemus, "The wind bloweth where it listeth... so
is every one that is born of the Spirit." On the day
of Pentecost there was "a sound as of a mighty
rushing wind." Have you ever been in a really mighty
rushing wind? The thing about a real windstorm is that it
takes the government out of all other hands and proceeds
to do as it chooses without reference or deference to
conventions, traditions, common acceptances,
inclinations, or fixed ideas. While it lasts, it is
sovereign. That is how it was then; but there were those
who were offended, shocked, scandalized, and who said in
effect that such a way could never be of God. A little
later Peter himself came flat up against this basic law
of the Spirit and had a controversy with the Lord. The
Lord showed him that a way of enlargement (although he
did not see at the moment that that was what it was) lay
in the direction of transcending or even violating all
his traditions and established religious rules. The Lord
knew that for Peter to go in unto the Gentiles would be
like a most orthodox and conservative Jew being asked to
eat unclean meat - "all manner of four-footed
beasts, and creeping things... and fowls of the
heaven" - even apparently to take a place superior
to Moses and Leviticus 11; but He asked him to do it.
Peter said, "Not so, Lord", a contradiction in
terms; but the Lord insisted, and Peter, in explaining
himself to those who suspected him, said, "Who was I
that I could withstand God?" Now what we have here
is that, over against the sovereignty of the Spirit, was
the fixed tradition of Peter in the one case, and the
same in the case of those at Jerusalem who
"contended with him" for doing what he did. On
a later occasion Peter fell into the same old traditional
snare and Paul had to contend with him very strongly
about it. The point is that the Lord was making for
spiritual increase, but an obstacle encountered was this
unpreparedness to leave room for the sovereignty of the
Spirit. If a child or servant of God in his or her secret
walk and history with God is led to move in a way that is
not according to the recognized and established system,
but new and different, and seemingly in violation of all
the accepted and fixed conventions or associations, there
is all too often a repetition of what took place in
Jerusalem; a suspicion, a contention, and an opposition.
Now, dear friends, look
here: we have got to take ourselves honestly in hand over
this or we may be found to be "withstanding
God" and "limiting the Holy One". Read the
Gospels and the Acts again, and ask the question as you
proceed, "How can this, and that,
and that be interpreted or construed as doing
violence to an accepted and long established Divine
order?" You will not get far before you are in the
company of those who opposed Christ at every step, and of
the Judaizers who pursued Paul across the world with the
one object of making his ministry impossible. They were
very jealous and zealous for the divinely established
order - as they believed it to be. Do you not recognize
that every movement of God down the ages has been in
conflict with something that men believed to be the
Divine order, and those concerned have been regarded as
doing the Devil's work? It was so with Christ, and it was
so with the apostles. It has been so again and again when God
has moved to enlarge His people by ignoring their fixed
framework of custom. It is so easy to use thoughtless and
misapplied slogans, or apply fragments of Scripture
wrongly (such as, "By their fruits ye shall know
them"). Very often such damaging dagger-thrusts are
only because of a failure to give the Lord room and right
to take some of His children by a way that is new,
unusual, or very strange. Philip leaves a center and
scene of great revival activity; he is suddenly missed,
and is - for a time - isolated to one man in a desert.
But it was under the sovereignty of the Spirit, and we
must wait until the whole story is written years
afterward before we pass judgment and say that Philip
went wrong. So we see that for all enlargement and
increase we must leave room for God to do new
things, strange things, things that we cannot understand
for the moment. We only put ourselves outside of His
intention to enlarge spiritually if we bind Him to our
own fixed judgments.
"Can any good
thing come out of Nazareth" was a popular prejudice
from which a good man did not altogether keep free, and
it fell upon One no less than the Lord Himself.
First published in "A Witness and A
Testimony" magazine, Nov-Dec 1941, Vol 19-6