There is a
phrase in the New Testament with which we are very familiar. I
refer to the phrase, "filled with the Spirit". I have
been struck with the fact that the phrase occurs only in Luke's
writings, with but one exception, and that is in the letter to
the Ephesians.
Luke's
object in his writings is to present Christ as Son of Man, as
God's perfect Man. That we know to have governed his taking in
hand to write his treatise to his friend Theophilus, a Greek,
whose whole mentality circled round the ideal and perfect man,
and who, therefore, in his whole make-up would be looking for
such a man. In accordance with that mentality Luke took in hand
to write a first and a second treatise to his friend, and in so
doing his whole object and careful purpose was to set forth
Christ as that Man. So that both in the Gospel and in the Acts we
have the Man, Christ Jesus, or the Son of Man, particularly
referred to.
Man According to God's Mind
It is
significant that with but one exception every occurrence of this
phrase, "filled with the spirit" is in Luke's
writings, showing, I think, quite clearly and conclusively that
it is being filled with the Spirit which makes man what God
requires him to be; or, to put that in another way, it is man
marked out according to God's mind by being filled with the
Spirit. The Man that is set forth by God as His mind for
man, as His ideal, as the Man which answers to Him, is the Man
filled with the Spirit. To put that again in other words, it is
essential to be filled with the Spirit before there can be
attainment unto that manhood as represented by the Lord Jesus. If
there is to be a marking out by God of that which satisfies His
thought in humanity, it must be according to this Man, the Son of
Man, filled with the Spirit.
The
exception is also very illuminating and significant, because that
exception occurs in relation to the corporate man. In Ephesians
we have the "one new man" brought into view, the
corporate man, and in that connection there is to be a filling
with the Spirit. So you see the principle holds good, whether in
Luke or in Paul. That
filling with the Spirit is the way and the basis of the
realisation of what God has in view for man.
With
that before us we are able to proceed, and once more come to recognise
or to take a view of what it is the Lord is saying to us.
Man in the Throne
The point
which we have reached is, firstly, that God has perfected, in
terms of Sonship, a human nature which He took upon Himself, and
has taken that perfected human life, human nature to heaven. That
is the first step. It may be necessary to repeat that, in
speaking thus, we do not mean that there was anything in that
particular humanity that was sinful, but just as a babe may be
flawless, perfect as a babe, and yet has to grow in every sense,
inwardly and outwardly, to become a perfect man, so Christ was
perfected, not by reason of any imperfection in Him in a moral
sense, but by reason of testing unto the full development of
those perfect powers in His humanity. So in that sense the
full-grown Man is in God's presence, the fully developed, perfect
humanity.
The Descent and Work of the Holy Spirit
The second
thing is that the Holy Spirit has come in consequence of that.
The Holy Spirit could never come to do His real work in this
dispensation until that was established, and in consequence of
the exaltation, the glorification of the Lord Jesus, the Holy
Spirit has come. The Holy Spirit, therefore, from the outset is bound up with
the Lord Jesus in heaven in His purpose. He has come in consequence of that to
do in the Man corporately a two-fold thing.
Firstly, His
work is to implant that Man, Christ Jesus, in His perfected
humanity, as the indispensable, the irreducible minimum for the
new creation. Against that everything that the enemy can do,
every device, every subterfuge, will be set. The devices of the
enemy are very often religious devices, and we find that one of
the things which more successfully subverts this essential issue
is religion. Religion can be, and has proved to be, the greatest
enemy to the essential purpose of God. What are we continually
meeting? (You will forgive me if I speak of a certain realm of things
that is the only realm that can come under our survey, our
purview, and it is not with a view to striking at that thing in
particular, but we take it by way of illustration). We are
constantly meeting people who, when asked if they have been
really born again, will answer that it is not necessary, that
they have been confirmed, or they have joined the Church, or
something like that. They were baptised when they were infants,
and regeneration, new birth, as an experience, goes by the board.
It is a fact, however unsavoury it is to speak of. In this and in
many other ways the enemy's most successful means of diverting
from the issue is religion. Very often what is called the Church
is put in the place of the essential, and so by any means within
the range of his sinister and diabolical and supernatural
resource the enemy seeks just to turn things at that point of
introducing Christ into the believer. Once Christ is within you
have very God to encounter, the Devil has to meet all that God
stands for. It is a tremendous thing to have Christ within. It is
indeed the very hope of glory. But see what substitutes there are
for that! They are numerous.
The Holy
Spirit has come, in the first place, to introduce Christ - who as
Man has all the Divine alliance with Him - into the believer. We
ought never to be satisfied until we have good reason to believe
that this has actually taken place in the case of any soul with
whom we have to do; not mental assent or agreement or any such
thing, but that real thing which is regeneration.
All that
union with Christ means is gathered up into this simple form, and
presentation, of Christ introduced within, or, in other words, it
is Christ
dwelling within our renewed spirits. That is deeper and more
inward than our souls. Christ's main residence is not in our
souls, because we still go on with reasonings and thoughts which
are not Christ; feelings, passions and desires which are not
Christ; willings, choosings, and actings. That is all soul. Christ
is resident deeper than that. It is of the utmost importance to
recognise that, because there are many who for various reasons
have lost their mental balance, and then that fact causes them to
imagine, feel, believe, say, and do things which are utterly
horrible. But nevertheless in the deepest reality they are still
God's children. It is simply the outer human fabric that is
broken down, perhaps by excessive nervous strain, and they get
into asylums. Are we to say that by reason of these misfortunes,
these things which come to our humanity, they cease to be God's
children? Not at all. Christ dwells more inwardly than in our
souls, namely, in our renewed spirits. That is why it is
so
necessary that the
real transaction should take place, so that whatever happens
outwardly, whatever forces we may have to encounter, physical or
mental or spiritual, the deepest fact remains, that in our
spirits Christ abides. That is where sonship is. It is a matter
of spirit union.
The second
thing with reference to the Holy Spirit's coming is that, because
Christ is one, the work of the Spirit makes all believers one
Body in Christ. The introducing of Christ into a believer or into
individual believers is not the introduction of so many Christs
into so many believers, not a matter of there being as many Christs as there are believers. Christ remains one, and inasmuch
as Christ is one
and
indivisible, and yet is introduced by the Spirit into a million
believers, the Holy Spirit, therefore, makes of the million
believers one Body in Christ. The Body is one because Christ is
one. "There is one body, and one Spirit... one Lord..." The Holy Spirit is, therefore, not occupied with
individuals as individuals. The individual only comes in as a
part of the Holy Spirit's purpose, as a part of that essential
Body of Christ in which He is to have the full expression of
Himself in the ages to come. That Body is called the Church, and
no other Church is known in the Scriptures. The only Church recognised by the Word of God is that Body of believers in whom
Christ is resident, making them one corporate Body.
"As
the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of
that one body, being many, are one body; so also is the Christ". (1 Cor. 12:12). The article is left out of the Authorised Version, but in the Greek it is there. It has been
recognised that the Greek article in the New Testament is a thing
of very great importance. Its presence or its absence means
something far more than the presence or absence of a mere part of
speech. It governs a far-reaching truth. What is the Christ as
viewed from this standpoint? The Christ is a Head and members,
all one Body.
The Holy
Spirit is here, firstly, to introduce Christ into the believer,
and in so doing He is forming in all who believe one Christ,
constituting one Body, and that is the Church as in the New
Testament.
The Believer's Primary and Comprehensive Obligation
When that
has been recognised, then believers are committed to certain
obligations in relation to Christ within. The first and
comprehensive obligation (the obligation which includes a great
deal more) is that the believer must forsake the pre-new-birth
ground, and all that that means. That is only another way of
saying that the believer must forsake the whole ground of what he
is by nature. The Lord Jesus used very simple figures of speech
to embody great truths. He could never say what the truths were
that He was embodying because there was no spiritual
understanding, the Holy Spirit had not come. Afterward, when the
Holy Spirit had come there was illumination and enlargement of
the fragmentary things that He said. He packed all this great
truth of forsaking the ground of nature into a few brief words:
"If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, and
take up his cross daily, and follow me". "Whosoever
doth not bear his own cross, and come after me, cannot be my
disciple (taught one)". "Deny himself"! You
can take hold of that phrase and talk about self denial, and apply
it to all sorts of things, whereas the Lord Jesus meant by that
the repudiating of the whole ground of natural life, and not to
be governed by it at all. It is Christ that has cut that off by
the Cross, put the Cross against that, and by the meaning of the
Cross said to all that is ourselves by nature, 'You have no
standing here, you are not the
governing thing here'. When you have done that you can become His
disciple; that is, you can become His taught one, you can enter
into His school to learn what it is not to live on that ground,
but on His ground. That is our comprehensive obligation, to
forsake the pre-new-birth ground and to abide on the ground of
Christ.
Here again
the Lord Jesus put into an illustrative form the great truth of
having our lives on His ground. "Abide in me". "As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the
vine; so neither can ye, except ye abide in me". The
illustration is perfectly clear and simple, but you need all the
illumination of the Holy Spirit through the later word to show
what He was talking about. What is abiding in Christ? It is not
abiding in yourself, it is getting outside of yourself on to His
ground, so that He governs everything. That is very simple, but
vital.
Walking
by the Law of an Inward Life
This also
has several phases. One is that, since the Holy Spirit has
brought Christ within, we have to live and to move henceforth by
a new walk with the Lord. John said that we were to walk even as
He walked, that we should walk even as He walked. How did He
walk? His own statements about His walk are perfectly clear, that
He abode in the Father, had His life in the Father, lived by the
Father, did nothing out from Himself, but whatsoever the Father
did. It was deliberate, persistent walking in the Father; in
other words, by inward relatedness and communion, fellowship,
oneness with the Father. That is how He walked. So that ours is
to be a life in which we move in all things by an inward walk
with Christ, as differing from walking by an outward order, an
outward system of things. There is a system of Christianity to
which we are expected to conform if we are Christians. It is the
thing that is set up and established, and as Christians we are
supposed to conform to it. That is not the first consideration,
and that may be misleading. Our walk is not according to any
outward rule or system or order in the first place. Our life has
to be inward, with the Lord. We must recognise that everything is
now to come from the inside, from the Lord within. That means a
great deal more than the word may convey.
This can be
illustrated by taking certain instances. There was the whole
established Jewish
system with its headquarters at Jerusalem, and, as a Jew, it was
expected of the Lord Jesus that He would be in complete
conformity to that, and under its government. So at a certain
time when there was a feast at Jerusalem His brethren said to Him
that He should go up to the feast, and show Himself openly. 'If
He had nothing to be ashamed of why should He remain apart in
secret; and, in effect, He would be misunderstood if He did not,
would be regarded as a disloyal son of Abraham'. From every
standpoint of human reasoning He should have done it. There was
everything to support His doing it from the outward standpoint. Truly
He would be misunderstood. But there were, in addition, all the
other considerations of how others might be led astray, and made
to stumble should He not do so; and, after all, was not that the
system which God Himself brought into being, did not that
originate with God? His answer was: "You go up... I go
not up..." When they had gone up, then went up Jesus also.
It is so plain, you cannot miss the significance of it. It simply
works out in this way, that He refused to be governed by any
established thing on the outside, and stood His ground to be
governed by the Lord, by the Father. His position was this:
Father, do you want Me there? Not, Is it expected of Me? Is it
the thing that is done? Is it a matter of conforming to the
accepted and established order of things? He refused to move
until He knew that the Father wanted Him there, and when He knew
that He went up, and not before. It did not matter what people
thought about it, He was governed inwardly by the Father, and not
by something put on Him which was the common and accepted
and established thing.
Christ
dwelling within puts the believer upon that basis, henceforth not
to be governed by Christianity as something which has been
constituted as a world order and system, but by the Lord within.
The Holy Spirit has come to do that, to bring that about, that we
should live from the Lord within. That means, of course, knowing
the Lord within.
Submission to the Holy Spirit
Secondly,
this means for the believer that he (or she) must submit to the
training of the Spirit of the Father, by which we come to
sonship, or to maturity, which means, of course, spiritual intelligence,
spiritual strength, spiritual fulness. That is a large statement.
Let us break it up.
We must
submit ourselves to the training of the Father through the
Spirit. The Spirit of the Father would deal with us as with sons.
The Holy Spirit will take up this work of training. It is called
chastening in the letter to the Hebrews. It simply means
child-training. That work will be quite definite. The Holy Spirit
will deal with us if we are going to accept this life of inward
union with the Lord, and we shall not graduate in five minutes.
The trouble with so many is that they foreclose the matter
because it seems so slow. Let us remember for our comfort that
the Lord usually hides from the individual concerned what He is
doing in that individual. If you knew that you were getting on
and getting so much better, you would begin to glory in the
experience, make something of the thing, and God only knows how
this self impinges upon His holy things, and how in its horrible
pride, which is such an abomination, it is always ready to spoil
the precious fruit, to take and have for itself. So the Lord
usually hides from us and our sense is of getting a great
deal worse rather than a great deal better, being a great deal
less rather than a great deal more. May it not be that the fact
that we are not feeling just the same as we did feel, but are
feeling worse, feeling less, feeling poorer than ever, is a mark
that the Lord is working.
The point is
that we must submit ourselves to this training work of the Holy
Spirit, concerning living on Christ's ground and not on our own.
It will be a process, a long-drawn-out process, which may never
be finished while we are on this earth, however long we stay
here. There may be a great perfecting to be added in the moment
in which we are translated. Nevertheless, whether much is crowded
into a short time, or whether this means that the Lord has to
take account of our slowness of response, and perhaps rebellion,
and has to spread it over a long period, the fact remains that
the Holy Spirit is going to teach us, if we will let Him, the
difference between living on our own ground and living on
Christ's ground.
We must
submit first of all in one inclusive act, and put ourselves into
the hands of the Holy Spirit, and then as He goes on with His
graduated process we shall be called upon again, and again, and
again, to say, Yes! to the Holy Spirit. We shall be smitten; we
shall fall; we shall
stumble; we shall fail in this matter, but the Holy Spirit will
use those very things for our education. We shall learn, just as
children learn, not to do certain things by the suffering which
comes in doing them.
All this is
leading to maturity, that is, to spiritual intelligence. It is
very important to the Lord to have spiritual intelligence in His
people, in His children. That is mainly because of responsibility
that is going to rest upon them. There will be responsibility in
this life, the helping and enlightenment of others; for in the
process we are even now coming to a priestly position, and the
office of a priest, you will remember, was always to instruct. A
priestly position is bound up with sonship. It means spiritual
strength. Oh, that we had a clearer perception of the difference
between natural strength and spiritual strength! So often the
greatest spiritual strength comes through the naturally weak, in
those who have been most utterly weakened by God in themselves.
The Lord's
end is fulness: "...the fulness of him that filleth all in
all"; "Ye are made full in him". Experimentally this comes by the
teaching and training of the Holy Spirit, to which we must submit
ourselves. That submission is something that we must recognise
from first to last. We shall only defeat the ends of the Lord's
dealings with us if we are other than submissive to Him.
The
Believer's Relationships
The
next thing is that our relationships are to be governed by Christ within. You
notice that at the beginning we divided between the individual and the corporate. Now we have been speaking about
that which relates to the individual; we pass on to recognise
that which relates to the corporate. Because Christ is within by
the Spirit our relationships have to be governed by that fact.
This means two or three things.
Firstly, it
means that a basis of relationship must be recognised, laid down,
and settled as a final governing law. Christ is within all
believers. If they are truly born anew Christ is within by the
Spirit. We must, as believers, have it clearly settled that this
is the basis of our relationship. As we look at each other, we
must not be governed by what we see on the outside. It is an
established law that our relationships are now on the basis of
Christ within us. That is where we start.
That means,
in the outworking, that we must keep to that basis, and not be
moved by people's natures. That works in two ways, according to
the kind of person that is met with. All is very easy, of course,
when people are nice, and kind, and considerate, and gentle, and
thoughtful, and open. It is not difficult to go on with them. But
that has very often carried people on to a purely natural level
and has been disastrous. Much havoc has been wrought in lives by
that. The nice kind of people become the centre of a circle, and
others attach themselves to such because they are so nice, and in
the end it means disaster. In our going on with one another we
are not to be carried away by the niceness of one another. We are
not to be influenced by that at all. That is very dangerous.
Beware that nature on that side is not the ground of
relationship. Absalom was a very nice fellow, and he won the
hearts of the men of Israel with kisses and fair words, and was
probably a fine fellow to look at but you know
the result of that.
On the other
hand, we are not going to be governed by what believers are
naturally in the opposite way. Our relationship is not to be
governed by what we see in one another which is so difficult,
that against which we naturally revolt. We are not going to wash
our hands of one another and say we cannot get on together. Now
this is very practical. It is going to demand something from us.
That is not the basis of our relationship at all.
We are not
to be governed by people's natures, one way or the other, if they
are the Lord's children, but on the basis that Christ is within.
The
Importance of Growth for Fellowship
Then
further, there must be spiritual growth for spiritual fellowship.
You can be related without the more positive thing of fellowship.
The relationship remains, but now you are moving in fellowship,
and there must be spiritual growth for real spiritual fellowship.
Fellowship is intended to be the outcome of our relatedness, and
a relatedness which does not lead to fellowship is bereft of its
beauty and its fruitfulness, and of its real purpose. We cannot
go on with one another beyond the point of a common basis,
a common ground. I cannot go on with you simply on the ground of
your wanting to go on with the Lord, while all the time there is
the preponderance of yourself; and you cannot go on with me on
that ground. We can only go on together in
so far as there is a common ground of Christ. "Can
two walk together except they be agreed?" It is not a
question of, Can two be related except they be agreed? Yes, they
can. You can have children of the same parents, in the same
family, and thus related by one blood, yet they may not be
walking together. The question of walking together is a matter of
going on, making progress. You can only walk together in so far
as you are agreed, as you have common ground. If one stops
short and the other goes on, fellowship is limited between those
two to the point of advance. If one goes on in the flesh and the
other goes on in the Spirit, at the point where their both going
on in the Spirit ends their fellowship ends, not their
relatedness. We must not be governed by people, though they be
Christian people. We must not be governed by a system of
Christianity, Christian system though
it
be. We must be
governed by the Lord the Spirit in everything.
That is
where fruitfulness is. If we get that ground of moving together
in the measure of the Spirit we shall be on the ground of
absolute effectiveness. There are so many things involved in this.
So often a person sees something mentally, grasps something, gets
it from someone else, and essays to go on in that, but that thing
has never been wrought into their being, they have it secondhand.
It has never been wrought in their being by chastening,
discipline, training of the Holy Ghost, and come forth
from within them. We want to be sure in such matters that the
thing is inwrought of the Holy Ghost.
It may seem
difficult. You may think this is going to mean a lot of thinking
out, and always being on the alert. No. These are the issues,
this is the working of things. You need not take hold of all
these details, all this technique of life in the Spirit. The
secret is that the indwelling Lord governs, and that is possible
to everyone. We have here
put before us spiritual facts, and then it is for us to give
ourselves to the Lord to make those things alive in us. All this
is the outworking of a basic thing, and it is only intended to
point out the basic thing, because of the dangers of
artificiality, unrelated, false positions, which will inevitably
lead to disaster. We must give ourselves to the Lord to teach us,
it may be slowly, and through painful experience, nevertheless
unto the greatest value to Him and to all His interests, what
life in the Spirit is. That involves a great deal more than the
phrase itself would convey.
What is life
in the Spirit? If you take that as a phrase, as an idea, then
you may feel that it is a sort of power in you just swaying you
this way or that. That is not good enough. What is the Holy Spirit
doing? To what is He working? What is He after? The Holy
Spirit only operates in relation to glorifying the Lord Jesus, in
all the meaning of His Manhood at God's right hand, and it is His
to bring that Man, Christ Jesus, that Divine Man, into us to take
our place. It is the constituting of another Person in us, other
than ourselves, with His own thoughts about things, His own ways
of doing things other than ours, and we, by the operation of the
Holy Spirit, have to come to the place where, steadily and
surely, by our submitting to the operation of the Holy Spirit, He
takes our place. It is a process, but that is what the Holy
Spirit is after, to put Christ where we have been in that sense.
Remember
that everything is to be governed by Christ within, and
everything will be determined as to its value, its genuineness by
the measure of Christ that is in it; not by what we do for
Christ, but by the measure of Christ Himself in it. Everything is
determined by that, and must be so.