Although we have said a
great deal about spirituality, and that as to the new man
and our spirit, I have not failed to recognise that all
this is perfectly meaningless unless we know the Holy
Spirit Himself. I trust that no one will have the
impression that we are talking about our spirits only;
everything is His working, everything depends upon
Him, and it is by Him that spirituality, in
the Divine sense, is possible. It is very necessary
always to honour the Holy Spirit. We, under His
government and direction in all things, and recognising
His Lordship, are having to consider the matter of our
own measure of spiritual life and nature, because that is
a tremendously important thing, as I think we have been
seeing.
In our previous
meditations we were occupied with the general principle
of spirituality, going on to the personal and inward
reconstituting through new birth of spiritual men and
women. Then we went on from the centre to the
circumference of spiritual effectiveness, and saw where
spirituality has its supreme registration - that is, in
the realm of spiritual powers back of all things seen,
the spiritual forces which are at work and which have to
be met and countered - and there it is that our spiritual
measure is tested and found out, when we are really up
against a Satanic situation.
God's
Mind About the Church
Now we are coming to
what is intermediate to these two, between the centre of
the personal reconstituting, and the outermost bound of
its effectiveness and value. What lies between those two
is corporate testimony, which has to do with the Church
and the churches. In the Divine scheme of things it is
the Church which is the intermediary, that which stands
between and has the ultimate effect in the spiritual
realm, I mean that individual Christians, though they may
be born again, as individuals will not get very far in
touching that outer-most realm of spiritual forces.
There, a real registration has to be a corporate one. It
will be the Church eventually which will be the
instrument of Divine government in this universe. So it
is necessary for us to spend a few minutes with the
Church before we come to the churches; and of course we
are continuing to keep before us the matter of
spirituality. Here spirituality means what the Church is in
God's mind. When we come to contemplate the Church in
its wholeness and entirety, of course, we come mainly to
the letters to the Ephesians and to the Colossians. There
we find God's mind about the Church. We must realize the
necessity for our seeing and apprehending what the Church
is in God's mind, not as we find it in the churches, not
as it actually is here; and we must stand on that ground,
or we shall be helpless in this matter of spiritual
impact. I mean that if we are going to accept what we
find in the New Testament as to the churches as being the
expression of all there is, we are very soon going to
give up the fight, and shall not get very far. Dr.
Campbell Morgan has remarked that there is often heard
the word - Oh, let us get back to the New Testament
church! But, he said, God forbid! - and went on to say
that you will look a long way today for a Christian
church that will wholly correspond in its defects to the
church in Corinth. When you come to think of it, there is
some truth in that. A church in which there is incest and
all that you find in Corinth! - God forbid that we get
back to the New Testament church if that is it! God
forbid that we should say that we have made no progress
from that! If we are going to accept that as the
standard, we are going to be crippled, and the measure of
our spirituality will be very small indeed, and therefore
the measure of our impact likewise. The Apostle who was
mainly responsible for these churches coming into being
repudiated their condition, would not accept it, was
fighting against it. Why? Because he had seen God's mind;
that was his position, his vantage ground, his strength.
If he had never seen God's mind and only saw this, what a
disheartened, disappointed, despairing man he would be!
He had seen God's mind about it.
It is the Church that
is in view in these epistles, and spirituality in
Ephesians and Colossians means first of all an inward
revelation of God's mind about the Church. It is a
tremendous thing for spiritual strength, for spiritual
power, for spiritual ministry, for spiritual impact, for
spiritual food - yes, for every spiritual value - to have
really had a heart revelation of God's mind about the
Church; not simply to have studied Ephesians and
Colossians, but for it to have broken in upon your heart,
to have seen it in an inward way. I say that is
spirituality with an impact, it is spirituality with a
dynamic; and what a dynamic it is! Look at the Apostle,
He looks out at the end of his life over the churches. He
knows them intimately; and he has to say - "all that
are in Asia have turned away from me" (2 Tim. 1:15):
they have repudiated Paul to whom, under Christ, they
owed everything. He looks out; and what a spectacle, what
a heartbreak! And the man in his circumstances of
imprisonment and isolation and limitation, looking out on
that, might well have died of a broken heart, or have
sunk down into the uttermost despair and written his life
off as a failure, and all his work as for well-nigh
nothing. But this man is not down there, he is in
triumph, he is delivered, he is saved, he is emancipated
from all that. The facts are true and real, and yet he is
triumphant. Why? Because he sees God's mind about the
Church and he knows that, if God ever had a mind about a
thing, He is going to have the thing like that; and, no
matter what appearances say, in the end God will have His
Church like that. God has not conceived a thing and
projected it, to be cheated of it. There it is and it
will be!
When you have grasped
that, you are able to get closer to these letters and see
the value of spirituality in general and in particular.
In general, like that. A true spiritual apprehension is
an emancipating thing. The spiritual is not the unreal,
it is the most real of all. It is far more real than the
temporal and visible. The eternal - they are the real
things. You do not see this Church here on the earth; it
is not seen, but it is there in the unseen with God, and
it is the eternal thing. If only we saw the invisible -
that is an extraordinary statement, "he endured as
seeing him who is invisible" (Heb. 11:27) - if only
we saw the invisible meaning, if only we saw in the
spirit what can never be seen in the flesh with our
natural eyes, it would be a tremendously emancipating
thing, because we should see that that is the eternal
thing that must be. When all else passes, that will be.
Spirituality buoys you up. There is so much
disappointment in the churches, in the things seen, that
you might give up in disgust, close clown your work and
go and do some other job; but you do not do that if you
have really seen. You may tell yourself that you are a
fool not to face facts, that you are simply putting on
blinkers, not taking account of realities; but because of
something that God has done inside you cannot accept
that, you must go on. You cannot accept the total ruin
theory, if you have had a revelation.
The
Timelessness of the Church
Then this revelation of
the Church works out in particular matters, and you can
see why the revelation is such a power when you come to
look at these letters. You find, first of all, that
spirituality as to the Church relates in particular to
its eternity, or, if you like, its timelessness, for the
Apostle, by the Spirit, in his letter to the Ephesians
almost immediately lights upon that. This is not
something which has been brought into being at some point
in time. "He chose us in him before the foundation
of the world": "foreordained": it goes
back to a dateless point outside of time. He sees the
past eternity linked with the future eternity, unto the
ages of the ages. He lifts the Church right out of time
and puts it where no time is, and says it has come out of
that past and goes on to this future. And when you get it
out there, something is going to happen. It must be, time
cannot make any difference. If this were something that
we created or raised up, something of mushroom growth or
simply of our lifetime, started with us and finished with
us, well, it is not worth the cost. Here the Apostle sees
beyond the temporal aspects of the Church, and says that
the Church according to God's thought is a timeless
thing. So far as we are concerned, we have no date for
its beginning and there is no date for its end. Of
course, we cannot explain that, but there is the fact
stated - and that is spirituality. The Church is in
eternity, it is timeless. And when it is established with
God outside of time, what can alter it? It must be! It is
with God; God comes out of eternal purpose to secure in
time something which is eternal; not something that
belongs just to the "now" of time, but in time
an eternal thing is secured. How difficult, how
impossible it is to speak of these things! God coming
out of eternal purpose, according to the eternal purpose
which He purposed in Christ before the world was - there
is something so strong about that, so settled, so fixed,
so irrevocable.
Here, in this
connection, is the principle of the Holy Spirit's
foreknowledge and sovereignty. I can quite understand
that you must have some kind of Calvinism. You may not go
all the way, you may have serious reservations, but you
have to have a place for something of the principle of
it, because here it is. God is coming into time to secure
an eternal thing according to foreknowledge and
predestination, and if you want a simple explanation and
application of that, listen to what the Lord said to the
Apostle about Corinth. "Fear not, Paul... I have much
people in this city" (Acts 18:10). Not - "I am going
to have"; "I have" - before they were all
saved. This shows the Spirit coming out in foreknowledge
and sovereignty, so that, if He gets hold of an
instrument which He can really direct, He knows to what
He will direct that instrument. You see the outworking of
this principle of foreknowledge and sovereignty in the
life of this man Paul. "They went through the region
of Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden of the Holy
Spirit to speak the word in Asia; and when they were come
over against Mysia, they essayed to go into Bithynia: and
the Spirit of Jesus suffered them not" (Acts
16:6-7); and then the Divine intervention, Europe,
Philippi. Why? We do not know why, we can only surmise.
Asia is not ready, Bithynia's time has not come. Over
here they are ready, there will be a response. The Spirit
knows, He has foreknowledge and is acting sovereignly in
relation to eternal knowledge, and the thing proves
right. You see the working of this. God is not working on
haphazard chances, as if He said, just go here and see if
there is anything. That is not God. It may seem like that
with us, but that is not God. He knows; He has come out
of eternity, and a really Spirit-led ministry is almost
romantic in touching need just at the time when it is
ready to be touched. At any rate, that is the romance of
the New Testament. The Spirit says to Philip in Samaria,
"Arise, and go toward the south unto the way that
goeth down from Jerusalem unto Gaza" (Acts 8:26). He
goes, not knowing why. But in the foreknowledge of God
there, just at that time and place, is a man, and he is
just ripe, and the Lord makes a contact. God is moving
out of eternal purpose, this is not just chance. But here
is a tremendous principle, and you can see the operation
of the law of spirituality so far as the Church is
concerned, that God is working out of eternal purpose,
securing an objective in time. It is something so solid,
so strong. I know all the mysteries and all the problems
bound up with that, but here is the fact, that God is not
just working from hand to mouth. He is working with a
complete foreknowledge. The Church, in God's mind,
existed before its first member was born, and He knew
every member before that first member was born. I say it
is a strong thing for our lives, if we have seen
something like that.
Of course, this does
not do away with preaching, or with seeking souls, or
with terrible conflict over souls. All the same, we have
to come under the Spirit's hand to seek them. We have to
go and preach, and very often preach at large, and not
know what God has got there. It has to be done in faith,
and very often we have to enter into, and go through, a
terrible conflict; and yet Divine sovereignty is still
the same. We might think that with Divine sovereignty
working out of eternal purpose the thing will happen in
any case. Ah no, it will not. We have to preach, travail,
battle, seek. These two things are not contradictory,
they are complementary.
The
Heavenliness of the Church
We now turn to a second
thought in the Divine mind concerning the Church as we
find it in these letters - its essential heavenliness
from God's standpoint. In the letter to the Ephesians the
constant repetition is "in the heavenlies in
Christ." We must seek to dismiss our natural,
soulical mentality about that. I am not saying that there
is no such place as a geographical heaven, but we must
rule out that kind of mentality of geography, and realise
that "in the heavenlies" is a spiritual
principle first of all before it is anything else, and
that, while it may mean that Christ is in a certain
geographical location, yet spiritually it signifies a
realm altogether outside of this world order. You know
quite well that two people can be side by side, as close
as two can be, and yet they may be in absolutely
different realms. That is the principle of heavenliness;
it refers to a different spiritual realm altogether.
True, it is above, elevated, higher, but that is
spiritual first of all before it is anything else. It is
a spiritual difference on an altogether higher level of
Divine thought - not of this order, not, as we say,
earthbound; it is heavenly, it is in a spiritual sense in
the heavenlies in Christ. Well, of course, that does not
want explaining. You can sit in your chair and be in the
heavenlies. Sometimes we sit here, and at the same time
we are a long way off. I do not mean we are dreamy, but
we are having a good time with the Lord, we are really in
our consciousness far away. I am not talking about the
psychic now, but the real spiritual enjoyment of the Lord
so that we forget the people around us; we are, to all
intents and purposes, somewhere else. That is a
commonplace thing in spiritual life, or I hope it is,
with us. It is a heavenly thing from God's standpoint,
and it is dynamic when we have really seen it. When
really it has come home to us in the power of the Holy
Spirit it is dynamic, because it results in tremendous
things in us first of all. Oh, what that revelation has
done with some of us! When ours was an earthly conception
of the Church, how we were engrossed with its
ecclesiasticism, its forms and procedure! The whole
system of things meant a lot to us. Then God broke in
with His conception of the Church as a heavenly thing,
and all this fell from us like a mantle; it went, and
from that time to this we have felt how futile and petty
it all is. But that does not happen until you have seen
in your heart; and I beg of you, do not go and do things
merely because you hear these things said. Ask the Lord
for the revelation. Do not come out of the earthly thing
until God has broken in upon you as to His heavenly
thing. "Come-out-ism" only makes trouble for
God as well as for man. Once you see God's mind about the
Church as a heavenly thing, it is emancipating, it makes
tremendous challenges within and without and puts you in
a place of being able to minister in a way that meets
need, brings in heavenly fulness, and God comes through.
In a word, it results in spiritual increase to have
really seen the heavenly nature of the Church. This
matter of what heavenliness is in the Church could occupy
us for a long time.
The
Universality of the Church
One further matter.
God's conception of the Church, or spirituality, here in
Ephesians concerns not only its timeliness, and its
heavenliness, but its universality. How comprehensive is
God's thought! In our earlier messages we have sought to
show how comprehensive Christ Himself is, embodying in
His own Person everything, in no way being just partial
but gathering everything up into Himself, and yet
standing right outside of everything. Christ, so great
that no nation that has ever been, or is, or will be,
will find Him unsuitable, inapplicable, but with all
their differences, national traits and temperaments and
constitutions, will find in Him, every one of them, the
answer to their needs. He embraces all nations, He is the
desire of all nations. And within nations, all the
different features which mark separate individuals find
their answer in Him. How comprehensive He is, how vast,
and yet how different! Yes, He meets the need of the Jew,
but He is not a Jew essentially; He meets the need of the
Greek, but He is not a Greek essentially; He meets the
need of all the Gentiles, but He is not a Gentile
essentially. As Son of Man, He meets every need of every
nation and tribe, and yet He is not of any one of them.
No one can say - He belongs exclusively to us. You cannot
find that the Jews say that Christ belonged exclusively
to the Jews; He would repudiate that, and you know quite
well that you dare not portray Him like that. Tisso, the
great Scripture artist, when he painted his pictures on
the life of Christ, painted all the figures around Christ
in their particular national and local distinctiveness. A
Roman was obviously a Roman in his pictures, a Jew was
obviously a Jew, and so on; you do not have to be told
that this man is a Jew, and that man is a Roman. When he
came to Christ, he dare not give any such
distinctiveness. He dare not paint him as a Jew nor as a
Roman. Christ would lose His real value to all nations if
you gave Him a distinctively national feature and
character. He has to be portrayed in some way that is
both a combination of all and yet different from all; and
that was Tisso's problem which he tried to solve in that
portrait. But, of course, portraiture is always a
dangerous thing. My point is this, that Christ does
embody all, and yet He is outside all. There is a
universality about Him which gathers up all need and
meets it, and yet is greater than it and different from
it.
And His Body is
constituted according to Himself. You cannot have an
English church, a Chinese church, an Indian church, a
Jewish church, a Gentile church . You cannot; it is an
utter violation of the Divine conception of the Church to
have anything like that. The Church, according to God's
mind, is universal, it is a different kind of thing
altogether from what is of the earth, and yet all will
find their need met there. They will come from the East
and from the West, from the North and from the South, and
they will find their spiritual need met in the true
Church, but not in a national "church," an
earthly thing, a local thing. Oh, that it might be more
like that today! That is the Divine conception, that is
spirituality, and the apprehension of that is the way to
real power, impact, value, effectiveness. If we have even
a small approximation to that in the churches, then
proportionately we achieve spiritual effectiveness and
value.
Spirituality
in the Churches
So much for the Church.
When we come to the churches, we come to what the Church
is actually - not as it is according to God's mind, but
actually, and then spirituality has to be recognised
along the line of formation into what is according to
God's mind. Spirituality is the law of formation where
things are imperfect. Coming to Corinth, what is the
Apostle's word? "I could not speak unto you as unto
spiritual" (1 Cor. 3:1). That is only saying in
other words, The reason for your present condition, which
is a deplorable one, is the absence of spirituality. Then
we begin to look into the whole letter and see the marks
of the absence of spirituality. We find that Corinth sets
forth the great importance of certain spiritual things.
The
Importance of Spiritual Insight
Firstly, the great
importance of spiritual insight and knowledge for
discrimination. One of the great causes of the condition
there was an inability to discriminate, a mixing up of
things which should never be confused but should stand
far apart, belonging to two different realms altogether.
That lack of the spiritual faculty for discrimination
resulted in this awful condition. Let us see some ways in
which that inability to discriminate operated.
(a)
In Discriminating Between the Natural and the
Spiritual
Firstly, it had to do
with the difference between the natural (or the soulical,
as it truly is in the Word) and the spiritual; the world
on the one hand, and the heavenly order and standards on
the other. They were mixing up world standards with
heavenly standards - note all that is said in 1 Cor. 1
and 2 about the wisdom and the power of this world. They
were very much interested in the matters of wisdom and
power. They desired to gain ascendancy, to be in a
position of influence; and their idea of ascendancy and
influence and power was the worldly idea, the wisdom of
the rulers of this world. They were therefore evidently
indulging in studies of the philosophies of the Greeks,
systems of thought and interpretation of the universe.
They were thinking that, if you advanced enough in this
wisdom, you would get to the heart of things, you would
solve all problems, and come into a place of competence
and power and influence. They could not discriminate
between the wisdom of this world and the wisdom of God,
and so the Apostle writes to them such things as these -
"The world through its wisdom knew not God"
(1:21). "God's wisdom... which none of the rulers of
this world hath known; for had they known it, they would
not have crucified the Lord of glory" (2:7-8).
"Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of the
world?" (1:20). These people were unable to
discriminate. This all seems to us very elementary. How
far back they must have been!
And the same with
power. They were after strength and power, and they were
going to have it on the world's line. So he says,
"Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of
God" (1:24). But - in substance he adds - you cannot
see it, you cannot discriminate. You notice what he is
saying about discerning, judging - that word so difficult
of translation. "He that is spiritual judgeth"
(discerneth, examineth) "all things, and he himself
is judged of no man" (2:15) - he is inscrutable. The
spiritual is inscrutable to the natural. These people
were not able to discriminate, hence this confusion.
Spiritual discernment and ability to discriminate between
things that differ but which often seem to be very alike
is a tremendous thing to bring the Church to God's idea
of the Church. We do need spiritual discernment and
understanding in the Church, to save the Church from its
present deplorable state. You know how true that is, how
very few Christians have real discernment. It is an
essential spiritual factor to bring the Church to God's
idea of the Church; without it, you get the Corinthian
condition.
(b)
In Recognizing Relatedness of All Ministries in the Body
Secondly, in the
relationship and the appraisement of Christ and His
servants. "I could not speak to you as unto
spiritual." Why? Well, "there are divisions
among you," and those divisions are of this kind -
"Each one of you saith, I am of Paul; and I of
Apollos; and I of Cephas; and I of Christ" - making
parties; and the failure here was their inability to see
that the Body is one, with Christ as its Head, and that
if there is a Paul ministry or an Apollos ministry or a
Peter ministry that they liked so much and preferred
above others, it is only the ministry of a member of the
Body and not something in itself, detached. The hand has
a function in the body and you cannot take it over there
in a corner. You dare not detach any member of the body
and circle round that. If you do, you have no conception
of the body and you have no conception of Christ. That is
what these people needed to see, and had not the
spirituality for seeing. This Body is one, these servants
of God are members of the Body functioning in their own
appointed ways, and they are all essential, they all make
up one Body, and Christ is that Body. "So also is
the Christ" (1 Cor. 12:12). But the Corinthians
were, in effect, tearing the Body to pieces and making a
church round one member of the Body. "There are
divisions among you." Spirituality in this case sees
the oneness and wholeness of the Body, and any particular
ministry not as something apart and detached, to be taken
up and circled round and made something of in itself, but
a contributory factor to the whole, which the rest can no
more do without than it can do without the rest. It sees
the relatedness in the Body of all its functions, its
ministers, and its ministries, that they are one and all
interdependent. Failure to see that results in chaos in
the Church. You would not have had half of what there is
today in the divisions of Christendom if there had been a
spiritual apprehension of the Body of Christ. Wherever it
is corporately found, you will be coming back to the
Divine idea, and there will therefore be a spiritual
power and spiritual fulness.
(c)
In Discriminating Between Spiritual Gifts and
Spiritual Persons
Thirdly, there was at
Corinth the spiritual inability to discriminate between
spiritual gifts and spiritual persons. In 1 Cor., if one
thing is clear it is this, that spiritual gifts are not
necessarily evidence of people being spiritual - that you
can, in this real sense, be a very unspiritual person and
have spiritual gifts. You will find that spiritual gifts
may, and very often do, only relate to spiritual infancy,
and not to spiritual maturity. The possession of such
gifts may run side by side in the same life with very
serious moral defects. This is a problem, this is
startling. But it was so at Corinth. As in no other
church, spiritual gifts are in evidence there: or, at any
rate, are spoken of: and in no other church are there so
many disorders - and worse than that. They could not see
the difference between spiritual gifts and spiritual
persons. Why should Paul head this whole matter of gifts
right up into chapter 13? What is the meaning of chapter
13 if it is not this? "If I speak with the tongues
of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become
sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal." Is he
suggesting an impossible thing? Is this a merely
hypothetical conjecture which has no reality in life or
experience - that a man can speak with the tongues of men
and of angels and have not love, and, being like that, be
sounding brass or a clanging cymbal? Speaking with
tongues - surely tongues are the ultimate thing, a great
evidence of spirituality? Not at all! The supreme feature
of spirituality is Divine love. God is love, and we are
to be made perfect in love. "Faith which worketh by
love" (Gal. 5:6) - this is maturity and this is
spirituality. "I could not speak unto you as unto
spiritual." So he heads this whole thing right up
through gifts to love, which is spirituality. He says, I
may have all these gifts, and yet may be an unspiritual
person. The gifts may only be marks of my spiritual
infancy. I am not saying that that is necessarily so.
Paul said that he spoke with tongues more than they all.
But spiritual gifts and spirituality do not necessarily
go together - that is the point. Spiritual maturity did
not go hand in hand with their gifts at Corinth. They
thought that the gifts meant much more than they did
mean, that they were the evidences of great spiritual
measure. They did not see. Let us come back to it - there
is a difference between spiritual gifts and spiritual
persons. The gifts - what are they? The result of the
Spirit coming upon a person. The spiritual person - what
is he? He is spiritual as the result of the Spirit
forming within. There is a lot of difference between
inward formation and merely outward action.
Well then,
in Corinth, spirituality meant a heavenly standard of
wisdom and power; the Body as a unified whole; and
spiritual measure inward more than spiritual gifts
outward. That is spirituality. I ask you yourselves to go
on with your New Testament looking for the marks of
spirituality in these letters, and when you get them, you
will be seeing the law by which the churches as they are
can be changed into the Church as it is, that is,
transformed into accord with the Divine thought. The
transforming power is spirituality.