The Rest And The Courage Of Faith
by
T. Austin-Sparks
On Knowing the Lord
"That I may know....." - Phil. 3:10.
"Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know Me." - John 14:9;
(A.S.V.).
Phil. 1:10; Heb. 8:11; 1 John 2:20, 27.
It is of the greatest importance for the Lord's children to recognize fully
that, above all other things, His object is that they should know Him. This is
the all-governing end of all His dealings with us. This is the greatest of all
our needs.
It is the secret of strength, steadfastness,
and service. It determines the measure of our usefulness to Him. It was the one
passion of the life of the apostle Paul for himself. It was the cause of his
unceasing striving for the saints. It is the heart and pivot of the whole letter
to the Hebrews. It was the secret of the life, service, endurance, confidence of
the Lord Jesus as Son of Man.
All these facts need looking at more closely. We begin always with the Lord
Jesus as God's representative, the Man after His own mind. In His life on earth
there was no part or aspect which did not have its strength and ability rooted
in, and drawn from, His inward knowledge of His Father, God. We must never
forget that His was a life of utter dependence upon God, voluntarily accepted.
He attributed everything to the Father: word, wisdom, and works. The miracles
were made just as possible through His apostles as through Himself. This does
not put the apostles on the same personal level as Himself. His Deity remains.
He is God manifest in the flesh; but He has accepted from the human and manward
standpoint the limitations and dependence of man so that God might be God
manifested. There is a subjection here because of which He is able to do nothing
of Himself (John 5:19, etc.). The principle of His entire life in every phase
and detail was His knowledge of God. He knows the Father in the matter of the
words He speaks, the works He does, the men and women with whom He has to do;
with regard to the times of speaking, acting, going, staying,
surrendering, refusing, silence; with regard to the motives, pretensions,
professions, enquiries, suggestions, of men and of Satan. He knows when He may
not, and when He may, give His life. Yes, everything here is governed by that
inward knowledge of God. There are numerous evidences in the "Acts" as the
practical, and in the Epistles as the doctrinal, revelation of God's mind, that
this principle is intended by God to be maintained as the basic law of the life
of the Lord's people through this age. This knowledge in the case of the Lord
Jesus was the secret of His complete ascendancy and of His absolute authority.
Masters in Israel will seek Him out and the issue which will precipitate their
seeking will be that of knowing. "Art thou the teacher of Israel, and
understandest not these things?" (John 3:10). Nicodemus has come to One Who
knows, and Whose authority is superior to that of the scribes, not merely in
degree but in kind.
Toward the end of the Gospel of John, which especially brings into view this
very matter, "to know" occurs some fifty-five times. Our Lord makes the
statement that "this is life eternal, that they should know Thee the only true
God, and Him, Whom Thou didst send, even Jesus Christ." (John 17:3). This does
not mean merely that eternal life is given on the basis of this knowledge. There
can be life with very limited knowledge. But life in fulness is closely
related to that knowledge, and the increasing knowledge of Him manifests itself
in increasing life. It works both ways; knowledge unto life and life unto
knowledge.
Seeing, then, that the Lord Jesus Himself, as Man, represents man according to
God, we are well prepared to see that
The
Dominating Objective Of The Divine Dealings With Us
is that we may know the Lord.
This explains all our experiences, trials,
sufferings, perplexities, weakness, predicaments, tight corners, bafflings,
pressures. While the refining of spirit, the development of the graces, the
removing of the dross, are all purposes of the fires, yet above and through all
is the one object - that we may know the Lord. There is only one way of really
getting to know the Lord, and that is experimentally.
Our minds are so often occupied with service and work; we think that doing
things for the Lord is the chief object of life. We are concerned about our
lifework, our ministry. We think of equipment for it in terms of study and
knowledge of things. Soul-winning, or teaching believers, or setting
people to work, are so much in the foreground. Bible study and knowledge of the
Scriptures, with efficiency in the matter of leading in Christian service as the
end in view, are matters of pressing importance with all. All well and good, for
these are important matters; but, back of everything the Lord is more concerned
about our knowing Him than about anything else. It is very possible to have a
wonderful grasp of the Scriptures, a comprehensive and intimate familiarity with
doctrine; to stand for cardinal verities of the faith; to be an unceasing worker
in Christian service; to have a great devotion to the salvation of men, and yet,
alas, to have a very inadequate and limited personal knowledge of God within. So
often the Lord has to take away our work that we may discover Him. The ultimate
value of everything is not the information which we give, not the soundness of
our doctrine, not the amount of work that we do, not the measure of truth that
we possess, but just the fact that we know the Lord in a deep and mighty way.
This is the one thing that will remain when all else passes. It is this that
will make for the permanence of our ministry after we are gone. While we may
help others in many ways and by many means so far as their earthly life is
concerned, our real service to them is based upon our knowledge of the
Lord.
The greatest of the problems of the Christian
life is
The Problem Of Guidance.
How much has been said and written upon this
subject! The last word for so many is, "Pray about it, commit it to God, do the
thing that seems right, and trust God to see that it turns out all right." This
to us seems weak and inadequate. We make no claim to ability to lay down the
comprehensive and conclusive basis of guidance, but we are strongly of the
conviction that it is one thing to get direction for the events, incidents, and
contingencies of life, and quite another thing to have an abiding, personal,
inward knowledge of the Lord. It is one thing to call upon a friend in emergency
or at special times for advice as to a course to be taken; it is another thing
to live with that friend so that there is derived a sense of his mind in general
that will govern in particular matters.
We want instructions and commands, the Lord wants us to have a
'mind.' "Have this mind in you," "We have the mind of Christ."
Christ has a consciousness, and by the Holy Spirit He would give and develop in
us that consciousness. The inspired statement is that "His anointing teacheth
you concerning all things." We are not servants, we are sons. Commands - as such
- are for servants, a mind is for sons.
There is an appalling state of things amongst the Lord's people to-day. So many
of them have their life almost entirely in that which is external to themselves
- in their counsel and guidance, their sustenance and support, their knowledge,
their means of grace. Personal, inward, spiritual intelligence is a very rare
thing. No wonder that the enemy has such a successful line in delusions,
counterfeits, and false representations. Our greatest safeguard against such
will be a deep knowledge of the Lord through discipline.
To know the Lord in a real way means steadfastness when others are being carried
away - steadfastness through times of fiery trial. Those who know the Lord do
not put forth their own hand and try to bring things about. Such are full of
love and patience, and do not lose their poise when everything seems to be going
to pieces. Confidence is an essential and inevitable fruit of this knowledge,
and in those who know Him there is a quiet restful strength which speaks of a
great depth of life.
To close let me point out that in Christ "are all the treasures of wisdom and
knowledge hidden," and the Lord's will for us is to come to an ever-growing
realization and personal appreciation of Him in Whom all the fulness dwells.
We have only stated facts as to the Lord's will
for all His own, and their greatest need.
The absence of this real knowledge of the Lord
has proved to be the most tragic factor in the Church's history.
Every fresh uprising of an abnormal condition has disclosed the appalling
weakness amongst Christian people because of this lack. Waves of error; the
swing of the pendulum to some fresh popular acceptance; a great war with its
horrors and many-sided tests of faith; all these have swept away multitudes and
left them in spiritual ruin.
These things are ever near at hand, and we have written this message to urge
upon the Lord's people to have very definite dealings with Him that He will take
every measure with them that they might know Him.
First published in "A Witness and A
Testimony" magazine, Nov-Dec 1930, Vol 8-6
|