(Notes of an address given at the September Conference
1927.)
Now, beloved, as you are aware, we are being led these days
to consider —
THE CROSS AND THE OVERCOMING LIFE
and one wants right at the very beginning to tell you
something in order to settle you, and this is — not any one of you will ever
be an overcomer. You may take that as the key to the Conference, in the sense
in which for many years many of us have thought of being overcomers. Of course
I know that wants a lot of explaining, but I simply say that because it is
necessary to settle it once and for all that we, in ourselves, will never be
overcomers, and that opens the way for the whole of this theme and its reality
of meaning to come from the Lord to us. There is only one Overcomer in the
universe, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and if there are ever any
other overcomers, they will not be others at all, they will simply be the
extension of His overcoming — the expansion of His victory. It will be by
reason of that vital corporate oneness with Him which is not two lives, two
distinct experiences, but which is one and the same experience shared. That is
the nature of overcoming. It will simply be the impartation on His part of His
own triumph, the sharing of His own victory, so that it does not become
several victories, or a thousand victories, but it becomes one victory in One
Body, not in a host of bodies; and in order to apprehend that truth, and the
meaning and nature of that, you have to go a long way back. Not to Calvary, but
much, much farther back than Calvary; you have to get right back before the
world was, and there discover the secret of God's heart. The thing which was
wrapped up in His own mind as His secret purpose toward which He would work
through the ages, and in the fullness of times disclose, so that it no longer
would be a hidden mystery, but still a mystery, though a disclosed mystery.
Now that may sound complicated for you. Can a thing still
be a mystery when it has been revealed in the sense in which we have spoken of
the mystery of Christ of late? That no one whose spirit has not been illumined
by the Spirit can ever understand or apprehend; that the believer and the
company of believers known as the Body of Christ still do remain an enigma and
a mystery in the realm of the flesh, and even in the realm of their own flesh,
not only in the world; that we are a puzzle to ourselves and our deepest
experience in relation to the Lord is a thing that we can never understand
with our own minds, a thing which utterly defeats and defies all our own
efforts to analyse and understand. The thing that is going on in the centre of
our being by the operation of the Holy Spirit is beyond us all the time, and
all that we know is that we have got to follow something that is going on,
this something that is being revealed not to our outer understanding, but to
our inner conviction, and we have to go on by faith; and only as we go on by
faith do we get any revelation as to the nature of what is happening, it
becomes clear sometimes; and it does require a good deal of persistence and
continuance and endurance in this mysterious process of the divine operations
in our life before we have understood just a little of what the Lord is doing
with us, and what the Lord is after. It comes out one day, and we apprehend it
clearly; but there it is, a mystery all the time; and although to our spirit
it is an unveiled mystery, a disclosed mystery; to our flesh and to the world,
and to all flesh around us it is still a thing too deep for natural
apprehension, or human understanding, or the manipulation and analysis of our
own thinking. We cannot unravel this thing.
Now that thing was in the heart of God before times
eternal, disclosed in Christ, only in Christ, in the fullness of times. An
eternal truth, not a thing which just comes out and is mentioned for the first
time at some period in history, but a thing which has been mentioned all
along, all through the ages, but it has its interpretation given in the
fullness of times. There is a great deal of difference between the shaking on
the part of God continuously of a thing, and the spiritual apprehension of the
meaning of that thing. You notice how frequently that was so even in the case
of the Lord's disciples. The Master was saying things to them all the time,
but He had to cover His utterances and His activities by saying — "What I do
thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know afterward, and the things that I am
saying you do not understand now, but you will understand them later." And you
find that afterward, in that near afterward when the Holy Spirit, the
Interpreter came, then they remembered
His words. Then they remembered that it was spoken; then they remembered that
He had said these things, and they had come to pass. He knows; it had been
settled all the time, and God is saying His eternal things right down through
the ages, but not until the times of God arrive is the interpretation given.
That is why I most strongly stand that the truth of the Body of Christ was not
mentioned for the first time through the Apostle Paul. It was not a thing that
came out in mention and reference at some New Testament time; it is a thing
that is all the way through the scriptures from beginning to end; just as the
Cross is, and others of those great revelations. They are there all the way
through, but it is not until a certain time, and a certain condition is
realised that the interpretation is given.
Now we shall see this in this very subject, so we get back
to the times eternal that were in the heart and mind of God, and find that a
two-fold election is made on His part for the realisation of His purpose. The
election of a Head and the election of a Body, the two, of course comprising
one entity. The election of the Head and of many members to comprise with the
Head one Body — a two-fold election made by God. We are back there before
there was any fall — "In the foreknowledge of God we were chosen in Him before
the foundation of the world," and that elect Body was there and then placed
beyond the reach of any destructive power, or of any possibility of failure.
Oh, you get hold of that. That the elect Body of Christ was before times
eternal placed in the same position as the Head, beyond the possibility of
failure, so that although the strong delusions of the last days may lead
multitudes away, and deceptions will be of such a nature as to be almost
impossible of discerning and avoiding, it will come to this point that the
very elect would be deceived, if it were possible. But it is not
possible! God has secured that beyond the possibility of defeat, or failure,
or a deception which would wreck it as God's eternally chosen and elect
instrument for Christ. Now just get that as basic truth, and you may take up
your Word, and find that there it is. It is there all the way through, and it
is a very blessed thing to remember.
Of course it does, I know, make possible to our finite
understanding many problems, but these things are not revealed in all their
meaning in the Word of God, and we are, I take it, not supposed to understand
yet. There are those historic, or theological problems which we have not yet
been able to fully explain. For instance, the election according to the
foreknowledge of God over and against the absolute free will of man. How do
you reconcile the two. But there they are, and the working out of the election
is on the ground of faith on the part of the elect. Now how do you put these
things together? There are many others; but we are not staying with that. The
basic fact is this. That God has, before times eternal, chosen a Body in
Christ with the same kind of choice as He did choose Christ as the Head of the
Body; and this Body being one, many members holding the Head, it is one in its
ultimate inevitable triumph which cannot be destroyed. Now how is that going
to be brought about? Well, the method of God is next revealed, and that is by
incarnation. We are familiar with certain passages. You might remember such a
passage, for instance, as this — Colossians 1:27, "The mystery which hath been
hid from all ages and generations, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory."
Ephesians 5:30, "We are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones...
This mystery is great." Now passages like that, which are eternal in their
sweep, take you right back, and right on. We shall add others to them as we go
along, but the method of God is by incarnation. Christ as God incarnate.
"Whereas the children are partakers of flesh and blood, so He also partook of
the same."
The whole theme of the incarnation of Christ is so
frequently dealt with here that I think I need not stay with it. We accept it,
but we must recognise this, that the ultimate purpose of God is not
incarnation merely in an individual entity known as Jesus of Nazareth. The
ultimate and full intention of God with regard to the incarnation is that He
should incarnate Himself in that Body, that elect Body, so that it becomes the
shrine of God in which He dwells — the temple of God in which He dwells, and
all what was true in type of the tabernacle in the wilderness and the temple,
and infinitely more, is true of the House of God, the Body of Christ, the
sphere, centre and vehicle of His self-manifestation and of His glory.
There God is, as God said — "I will dwell in them and walk
in them." Now when you recognise and realise that it is God who has
come out of eternity, first incarnating Himself in a separate individual
historic body, and accomplishing that immense work of the Cross, who has
changed the form of His incarnation after that accomplishment and become, as
the factor in Calvary, incarnate in the Body and in all its members. There you
have the eternal secret of God's victory, which is Christ's victorious
resident by the Holy Spirit within the believer — within the House of God. The
great difference between the two dispensations of the Bible — the Old and the
New — is that the one is always objective, and the other is subjective. The
Old, up to Calvary, including the experience, was objective. Everything was
objective. You get back in the wilderness, the Cross in the figure of the
serpent lifted up — it is objective, and he that looked, lived. When we sing
these hymns about "Look and live!" we must not get an objective materialistic
mentality and have this conception of looking at something — looking out to
something — we have got to look for that spiritual reality to be made real and
experimental within our own spirit. The great difference is between the
objective in the old dispensation, and all becoming subjective in the New.
Calvary is not objective now; Calvary is subjective. God as in the blood is
not objective, but subjective. Everything is subjective. It is within, because
He is within the centre of all things; and He is the sum total of all things.
Now, beloved, do you get that far? Have you really had a spiritual
quickening to that basic fact. It would make the biggest difference possible
in your experience. One spoke of how the Master was always referring to this
very thing. You remember how frequently He was speaking of it. Take His
parable of the vine and the branches. I think Hudson Taylor's discovery of the
reality of corporate life with Christ through that parable is one of the most
beautiful expositions of the truth that we could have. I would like just to
give it to you: "As I thought of the vine and the branches, of the Lord, the
blessed Spirit poured direct into me, how great seemed my mistake in having
wished to get the sap, the fullness out of Him. I saw not only that Jesus
would never leave me, but that I was a member of His body, of His flesh, and
of His bones. The vine now I see is not the root merely, but all — root, stem,
branches, twigs, leaves, flowers, fruit — and Jesus is not only that, He is
soil, and sunshine and showers and ten thousand times more than we have ever
dreamed, wished, or needed."
Oh, the joy of seeing that truth, the oneness, that the one
Life is in all, in every part to the uttermost leaf or twig or bit! And that
Life, beloved, is the Life whereby Jesus conquered death! That is the Life of
His resurrection.
Now our mistake has just been to try and achieve victory on
the outside, to fight, to struggle, to be overcomers and to wage a terrific
warfare, without recognising that the only triumph and the only warfare is
that which Christ, Himself, wages and achieves. One has found such tremendous
help in the recognition of this wonderful reality, and since one has come to
appeal to the Lord as within, this is to meet the situation! Oh, the
difference from appealing to Him as somewhere objectively, outside, to come in
and deal with the situation! Nothing ever happens along that line, but to
recognise that He dwells within — the realisation and fulfilment of that
eternal intention in the mystery of God "That Christ may dwell in your hearts
by faith". What do you mean by that last clause "by faith"? Do you mean to say
that He dwells by faith? No, that would be as good as saying that faith makes
out to be what it is not. "This is the victory that overcometh, even our
faith." But what is the direction, or the nature of that faith that overcometh?
The faith that believes, and believing counts upon, "Greater is He that is in
you than he that is in the world." You see this is the victory that overcometh
the world. "Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world." Now
put that fact in that "Christ may dwell in your heart by faith." That is,
faith reckons upon the fact that if you have received the Holy Spirit into
your spirit, you have received God into your spirit. You have received the
triumphant Christ right into the centre of your being, and in faith, appealing
to that, He manifests Himself, and you discover that this is the secret of
overcoming.
This is the victory that overcometh, the faith which turns
to the Lord not as objectively, but as within and says — "Now, Lord, as within
me, I appeal to You to rise up and meet this situation." There is a vast deal
of difference between that, and our calling upon the Lord and going out
ourselves to meet the situation. That is Old Testament, that is not New
Testament. The New Testament is the Lord rising up within our spirit to meet
the situation, He who already has the victory, who possesses it, and dwells
within us; and that is why one said at the beginning we shall never be
overcomers in that detached, or separate sense. He is the only Overcomer, and
He will have to do all the overcoming in us, and for us. He will have to work
out His overcoming, work out His victory, simply sharing with us that which He
has within, and this is how "He prepares a table in the presence of our
enemies." He shares with us the fruit of His victory right in the middle, and
what is more central to the situation than your own spirit. Your spirit,
beloved, and my spirit, they are the very centre of the conflict. This
conflict only arises because Christ is in the spirit, because He is there.
This kind of warfare, this conflict is the challenge of the enemy, not to us
as such, he may well snap his fingers at us! Let us never think that we
can meet him. The Lord deliver from any vain confidence of being able to meet
the enemy, he would snuff us out very quickly, but it is because the Lord is
there, and he is the sworn enemy of Christ and he wants to destroy the
manifestation of Christ in us; and so it is in the nature of a battle that
cannot be helped. You have seen some people who can never cross each other's
path but what they fight, and like some animals in the streets, they are sworn
enemies, they can never see each other without getting their backs up and
showing their teeth. Forgive the very low level of the illustration, but it is
like that, the enemy cannot come anywhere within the range of the Lord Jesus
Christ, but what he shows his teeth, he snarls, and it is because Christ is in
you that the battle rages.
Now the Lord has got to meet the enemy, has got to share
right in the presence of the enemy the fruits of His victory. But, of course,
we are not going to lie down and say — Now, Lord, I simply sit down and You
meet the enemy. That is not it. He is in our spirit, and He has given us in
the first place, a spirit and made us distinct from all other results of His
creative activity by giving us a spirit, because He is a Spirit, and only
spirit can have fellowship with spirit, or understand spirit, or know spirit.
He has given us a spirit in the first place in order that there might be on
the level of His own nature and likeness co-operation as well as communion,
and by His resurrection, and our apprehension in faith of the meaning of His
resurrection for us through Calvary, He has quickened and raised from the dead
our spirit which was slain in the fall, and brought it up out of its sepulchre,
out of its place of death, quickening it with His own Life by His own Spirit
and entering into our spirit in order that our spirit, being energised by Him
might co-operate with Him intelligently in that. And this is a very vital
thing to remember, that the Lord is victorious, and the Lord is in you.
Don't conflict this, because one finds that there are so
many of the Lord's people who are simply submerged and defeated and broken,
and there is so much that is a contradiction of the fact that Christ is in
them for the simple reason that their spirit has not stood up in the Name of
the Lord and claimed His energising. Oh, how wonderful are the results of a
divinely energised spirit. That is the secret and the key to everything. This
is very familiar ground to most of you, but perhaps for the sake of some it is
necessary for the Lord to take us back to the beginnings, and in all matters,
even in the physical realm where there is no resource, where there is
infirmity and weakness, and the very sentence of death — the secret of
accomplishing the Word of God is not in having our bodies reinvigorated and
made whole and robust, it is in having our spirit energised by the Life of
God, so that our spirit can lift up our body in the hour of God's will, and
carry it to do the Lord's will. That is the 'marvel' and the perpetual miracle
of Christ dwelling within — the hope of glory. You take some of the Lord's
poor cripples, there is no hope of glory in them physically, or mentally, or
in any other way; but they do become a praise and a glory to God, and the
glory of God is seen in them. Why? By reason of the expression of this basic
and central truth. "Christ in you, the hope of glory," and they are counting
upon Him in a positive way to manifest the fact that He is within. Surely that
was the secret of the life of the Apostle Paul in all his infirmity, in all
his affliction, in all his weakness, in all that came upon him and arose up
within his own natural life, which might well have curtailed, to say the least
of it, or swamped him and put him finally out of action. "Nevertheless in
labours more abundant I labour, more than all." The marvel of it was this
continuous energizing of his spirit, and his spirit co-operating with God in
rising up and claiming the energising; and so he did what was physically
impossible to him otherwise.
Beloved, not only in the physical realm, but in every other
way, the need of the Lord's people is to recognise that if they are the Lord's
children they have been born again, and if they have received the indwelling
of the Holy Spirit — Oh, may I pause there! That is the point.
The whole point of the emphasis, of the interrogation upon
that question "Did ye receive the Holy Ghost when ye believed?" Did ye? If
not, the eternal intention of God that you should be an incarnation of God in
that sense has been thwarted. This far-reaching question in a moment takes you
right back to what God intended before the world was, that you should be
indwelt by Him, the shrine of God therefore. (And the need of many of the
Lord's people again is to recognise the relative element in truth. They are
all the time making it personal, incidental, fragmentary, a thing which is a
bit of truth, an isolated spiritual reality, something for personal
experience, instead of seeing that every fragment of this thing is related to
the vast intentions and purpose of God. If only you get a revelation of the
vastness, of the infinite range of every fragment of Divine truth, how far it
takes you back, and how far it takes you on, and all that is wrapped up with
it — the smallest fragment — you would feel the power of it, and realise that
there is a dynamic in it; but when you limit it and make it personal and local
it loses all its power, and you go on all the days of your life circling
around that thing and it never becomes anything experimental to you; and at
last you give it up. You need, therefore, to know and to recognise the
relative element in truth — how vast it is, and how it is a part of a thing
which God pre-determined before the ages and the generations.)
Well, that is all in brackets, but we come back now out of
the brackets to this, that what the Lord's children want, above all things, to
recognise is that if they are utterly His children, born of, and out from Him,
having received the Holy Spirit to dwell within, they must in their renewed
spirit co-operate with Him, count upon Him, exercise faith in the inward
reality of Christ, and that is the only secret of victory. You will find that
the Lord has got to do everything for you, that you will have, in spirit, to
count upon Him and exercise your spirit in faith. You will have to say — Lord,
now I cannot face this, and He energises. I very often have to do that myself,
to let you into a secret — the Lord doing everything, but it is the
co-operation of faith. Oh, faith is a tremendously active thing! Faith is not
a passive thing; faith is not just flabby, as if to say — I leave it to You,
Lord, I believe You are able; and so leave it there. Now that is not the
mighty energising faith of God by which He created worlds.
First published in "A Witness and A Testimony"
magazine, Oct 1927, Vol. 5-10