Reading: Ps. 24:3; Rev. 14:1-5; Ps.
122:2-4.
We
have been led to look afresh at this whole matter of
spiritual ascendency. We have looked at the vast
expanses, seeing the thing very much as a whole. Now we
get closer to some of the aspects of it.
The Challenge of Ascendency
But
first of all there is this question of ascent. “Who
shall ascend into the hill of the Lord?” If I say
something that may sound rather blunt, you will
understand what I am trying to get at. At the outset I
would say, Well, who is concerned with ascending? Who is
interested in ascendency? What is the point in raising
the question at all? Such a way of approach immediately
raises this question: Have we yet become really concerned
with this matter of spiritual ascendency? You see, here
in the Old Testament, in the illustration of the thing in
the life of Israel, there is a good deal taken for
granted. It is assumed that there is both interest and
desire to ascend. You find the thing in existence. No one
is asked about it at all; no one is appealed to. The
people of God are not told that they ought to go up. It
is not a command in that sense, that some obligation is
put upon them. If you get the atmosphere of this Zion
factor as in the Psalms, you will find that there is
nothing like that at all. To go up is one great longing,
a life-ambition. “I was glad when they said unto
me, Let us go unto the house of the Lord. Our feet are
standing within thy gates, O Jerusalem”. Everything
that is said about it is just an expression of a great
life-desire. One thing which overshadowed everything else
in the aspirations of a true Israelite was — If only
I could go up to Zion! There was the trek three times a
year, as the Lord had prescribed through Moses. “Three
times in the year all thy males shall appear before the
Lord God” (Ex. 23:17). You may take it that was
not some onerous business they had to perform. For weeks
before, they were all astir about this trek to Zion. It
was the one thing in their thoughts, it governed the
whole of those three sections of the year. The
culmination of those months was Zion, and that visit to
Zion gave zest and new aspiration to get over another
period. It was the one thing for which they lived. I
think that is the spirit of the psalms, and certainly it
was the spirit of David. It is just assumed there was
interest in this matter and great desire concerning it.
That
ought to test us and challenge us. As we come to
understand, to see more fully what it means to come to
the place of spiritual ascendency, there ought to enter
into our lives a new zest. Of course, literally and
historically, we can understand it. For instance, it is a
good thing to gather together in conferences periodically
and have a valuable time of fellowship and ministry, and
perhaps many of you scattered over the earth look forward
to it. It is good to have a literal coming together from
all over the place from time to time, to enjoy the Lord,
and the fellowship of the Lord’s people. It is not
that we are talking about, good and valuable as it is,
and much as we should encourage it, for mutual help is
strength. But there is something which is far greater,
far more important than that. There is the spiritual
meaning of such things, and we are seeking to enter into
that spiritual meaning.
But we
begin with this: Is there really in us by a work of the
Spirit A MIGHTY URGE UPWARD IN THE SPIRITUAL LIFE? Have
we got it? Is it in us? Are the highways to Zion really
in our hearts?
Ascendency a Right Ambition
Historically
we see that this was a phase of Israel’s life; and
especially when they were in good spiritual condition was
this something which characterized them with great joy.
But what is represented is of much longer history, the
spiritual history of this principle. May I pause for
another parenthesis, by way of reiteration? Everything in
the Word of God, everything that God has appointed as
ordinance and function and event in the life of His
people, is only His way of saying something deeper. It is
the embodiment of something eternal, something which
belongs to a realm that is not passing, not of this earth
at all. In this going up to Zion we have embodied in type
this thing which has a so much longer spiritual history;
that is, the inborn constituent of human nature to rise.
As we have said before, it is not wrong to have ambition
or aspiration. I think a lot of people think that is a
form of soulishness which ought to be killed. Be careful
how you set about killing your souls! They have to be
redeemed, not killed; and in the matter of aspiration, of
ambition, it is not a question of quenching but of
redeeming and sanctifying. Aspiration is something which
God put into the very constitution of man. “Thou
makest him to have dominion” (Ps. 8:6). It is
there. There is nothing wrong with the thing itself, and
bound up with it there is this long history of
ascendency. But, of course, as we have said, it was
distorted, twisted, polluted, corrupted by the
self-motive, the self-interest, the self-principle.
Therefore in man by nature, aspiration and ambition is
usually to be something himself, to come into a place of
ascendency himself, in order to feel power in his own
hands. While there may be timid souls who think that
their trouble is all the other way round, let me say at
once that even an inferiority complex is only your way of
saying how you hate being down there; you want to be
something! It is there, whatever form of expression it
takes; and these psychological disturbances, which create
this depression and self-occupation and false humility
and circling round our wretched nothingness all the time,
are only the cry-out of something in our constitution.
They express a revolt in us; nature will out somehow, and
nature is this, “Thou makest him to have
dominion”. Now the Lord is not going to quench that.
He is going to redeem and sanctify it, and through the
Cross purge it of all the personal interest and motive,
and every element of self, until He has that
Christlikeness of true meekness and humility which can
govern, which can reign and take the throne. It is the LAMB
Who is in the throne. The very symbol of weakness and
dependence has come to govern.
So we
are thrown back to this: Are we without the right kind of
chastened, sanctified aspiration? There is an awful
malady which overcomes some people, and it is fatal. It
is what someone has called the malady of not wanting. We
might change the word and say the malady of not caring.
Something has gone very far wrong with us as Christians
if there is anything like that about us. While, on the
one hand, it should be farthest from our thoughts that we
in ourselves should be anything, on the other hand there
is this mighty ambition which God would have in us, that
we should be unto the praise of His glory, that in all
things He should be glorified in us. Are you suffering
from the malady of not wanting or not caring? Something
has gone wrong, there is a deep injury to your spiritual
life, if it is like that. Ask the Lord to heal you of
that fatal malady. It may be, of course, just the result
of frustrated personal desire. The personal element has
been disappointed and you find you have nothing to take
its place. That is terrible.
Testing of Motive —
The Lord or Self?
Well,
it is here, you see, in this realm of spiritual
aspiration, this outworking of the great power of
ascendency as God would have it in us by the Holy Spirit,
that all our testings take place — the testing of
all our motives. Why should we aspire, why should we go
on with the Lord, why should we pay the price, why should
we endure hardship? If the answer is that we do not stand
to get much out of it, then there is not much reason why
we should aspire if we live on that level. Motives are
tested along this line. Can you bear a seeming rebuff (it
will never be a real one) from the Lord? Can you go on
when He gives you no stimulants, when He seems to be
standing back? What is your motive for going on? If it is
a personal one, then you will have very little to feed
it. The Lord will starve all our personal interests in
this matter as we advance. He does not want us to go on
simply because He is all the time giving that which would
stimulate our going on. He wants us to go on for His own
sake, because we have come to see the transcendent value
of the things of the Lord. That is where we are tested.
It is the life of Abraham in a nutshell. It is the life
of many another servant of God who has stood closely
related to His great purpose in Christ; testing,
withholding, hiding, giving very little to encourage. Why
should we go on? Motives are tested.
Ascendency Demands Spiritual
Stamina
Faith
is tested, and endurance is tested, in this realm of
spiritual ascendency. We have to see something bound up
with this which puts stamina into us. We have to see, as
did the apostle, “the prize of the high calling of
God in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:14) for stamina to be
put into us as it was into him. Oh, what stamina, what
endurance, that man exhibited! How did he do it? He saw
the , he had the heavenly vision, and all
the vast accumulation of discouraging and disconcerting
things here could not move him. He was able to say, “None
of these things move me, neither count I my life dear
unto myself”; “that I may gain Christ”
(Acts 20:24, A.V. and Phil. 3:8).
It is
here, of course, that all the exhortations and appeals
and warnings come in Scripture. What are all the
exhortations about? They all revolve around this one
thing: Go on! “Cast not away therefore your
boldness, which hath great recompense of reward”
(Heb. 10:35). All the appeals are on this ground and
all the warnings are connected with this. You remember
those warnings which are taken out of the very life of
Israel, such as: “Today if ye shall hear his
voice, harden not your hearts” (Heb. 3:7-8). That
is said not to unsaved, but to believers. “Harden
not your hearts”. It is so easy for a believer,
should he take the situations and the circumstances of
spiritual development as an end in themselves, to get
hard of heart, bitter of spirit, resentful and
rebellious. “Harden not your hearts”, as they
hardened theirs and lost the inheritance. It is in this
realm that crises constantly arise in our life.
Ascendency Acquired in Common
Affairs
Again
and again we find ourselves brought to a crisis: Are we
going on or are we not? How many of you have been at that
point, many times perhaps, in your spiritual life? It is
almost as though you had been brought right to a
standstill by reason of the fury of the oppressor, the
hardness of the way, the difficulties of the situation,
the discouragement of the circumstances. Then you have
started to go round in a circle, and sooner or later you
have had to come to the place where you say to yourself,
“Well, what is going to happen? Either I am going on
or I am not!” A place of crisis, and the crisis is
always on the question of utterness. If I am going on, I
see that I have to go on without many things I want. I
have just to go on, and that is all there is to it. That
is utterness — going on because you can do no other
than go on with God, you have no alternative. And every
fresh crisis is a weakening of crises. You eventually
come to the place where you say, “I have been down
this street too many times before not to know where it
leads. I am not going down it again. It leads to
deadlock, there is no way out here at all”. The Lord
is working at us till He gets us to the place where we
will go on, no matter what the circumstances are. That is
spiritual ascendency in its practical outworking.
What
then is this matter of ascending into the hill of the
Lord? It is not some mountain on this earth that we are
going to climb. It is this everyday thing: Am I going on
with God right through to His full end? There are ten
thousand things to discourage and set back. Am I going to
allow them to do that? Spiritual ascendency meets us from
the first moments of consciousness every morning and it
is there with us all day long. Something is said, and we
go down under it. Some situation arises, and we at once
collapse. We all know it. There is not one of us who has
not been caught by this situation. For the moment, we get
down under it. We know quite well we shall never go on
till we get on top. The Lord does not lift it off us; He
says, “Come out from under it”. “What
doest thou here, Elijah?” (1 Kings 19:9). It is
the challenge to us to leave the place that we have taken
under things. That is spiritual ascendency; that is the
nature of it.
Service the Motive of Ascendency
What
is the motive of spiritual ascendency? The motive,
surely, as revealed in the Word of God in this very
connection, is the motive of service. The Bible is a book
of spiritual principles. What is the central thought of
the throne in the Word of God? It is service. Take
Joseph, for example. There is a man who through deep
discipline, frustration, disappointment, abandonment,
loneliness, and every kind of adversity, at last came to
the throne. We may say that he climbed there. It was a
moral and spiritual climb up. It was not just official,
not just haphazard. God’s eye had been upon him in
secret, and when the Lord had tried him (“the
word of the Lord tried him” Ps. 105:19), when
that trial was accomplished, they sent and brought him
out, and he was made prince in Egypt. But what was
connected with that? The story is so patent. It was
service. It was for the life of others. It was usefulness
in the day of need.
That
was the whole thought in the case of David. Starting from
that low place as a shepherd lad looking after the few
sheep, and the Lord looking into his heart, what a climb
his was to the throne! How much discouragement, how much
frustration, how much setback, how much heartbreak
through those years of the reign of Saul! Hunted, driven,
pursued; there was plenty there to make a man say,
“Well, it is not worth it. I am going back to my few
sheep, to a quiet personal life. At least I had
that!" But he never did turn back. He went on. It
was a moral climb to the throne. When David came to the
throne, he came there because he had proved himself a man
after God’s heart. It was an inward spiritual
history that had been developed. He came there, but when
he was there, what did it all mean? It is not just a case
of David in solitary isolation at the top of the tree,
having achieved and realized all his personal ambitions.
Oh, see the good, the benefit, the wealth, the fullness
for the people of God! It was not until David came to the
throne that Israel really did enter into their destiny,
their fullness. His reign and the earlier part of the
reign of his son, Solomon, was the peak of Israel’s
history. Far more marvellous than you and I have yet
recognized was that reign. There were powers, kingdoms,
rulers, which had held their ground and menaced the
people of God literally for centuries. They could never
be overcome even by Joshua, and right on through the
Judges they still held their ground within the compass of
that land of Canaan. But when David came to the throne,
every one of them was subjected. His kingdom was a vast
kingdom of a great triumph such as had never been before.
Yes, it is usefulness to the Lord’s people that the
throne represents, it is service all the time.
You
come over to the New Testament and there you find the
matter plainly expressed. “When he ascended on
high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto
men... and he gave some apostles; and some, prophets; and
some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers”
(Eph. 4:8-11). Is not this service in relation to
ascending?
Come
over to the Revelation. “These are they which
come out of the great tribulation, and they washed their
robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
Therefore are they before the throne of God; and they
serve him day and night in his temple” (Rev.
7:14-15). Upward to service, ascension and service
— it is a principle. We could draw on the Scriptures
to bear it out so much more fully. But there it is, a
divine law.
Spiritual
ascendency carries with it serviceableness, usefulness,
and we know quite well how it works in our present lives.
A man or a woman who is spiritually down under is no use
to the Lord. Only in the measure in which we have learned
spiritual ascendency — learned how to get on top of
things, and how to bring the enemy under our feet —
can we really be of service to the Lord. Our ministry is
not a ministry of truths, words, teachings, ideas. It is
the ministry of life, resurrection life, ascension life.
That is to say, it is the life which overcomes, it is the
power of ascendency, and we have to minister that. That
is the effect of life.
When
we come together and the Lord’s life is amongst us
in any measure, what is the effect? We all feel lifted
up. You will never minister life if you are down under
all the time. We cannot really serve the Lord, except as
we learn what it means to overcome — which is
another word for spiritual ascendency. It is the secret
of service.
Ascendency Persistently Assailed
Now is
that not just the focal point of all the enemy’s
assaults and attacks? Why does he bring about situations
to get the Lord’s people under? Why all the quarrels
among Christian workers, why the disagreements and
disaffections? Why situations where it is impossible to
go on any longer with so-and-so? Oh, yes, shame on us
that it is so, but that is the sad story of Christian
work. Why all these countless methods and ways of the
enemy to get the Lord’s people under? Simply to rob
them of their usefulness to the Lord, to put an end to
their service to Him, to open the way for death to
counter the power of life. We know quite well that our
usefulness to the Lord is a very practical matter, and
very often depends upon our going and humbling ourselves
before someone else, getting off our pedestal and getting
down very humbly and admitting we have been wrong. Even
if we have not been wrong, it means sometimes taking the
place of one who has been in the wrong in an effort to
get a situation cleared up, washing anybody’s feet
if only the way of a release of divine life can be
secured. It is very practical, this matter of
“marching upward to Zion”. It is not mere
poetry, no mere beautiful idea. It is right here every
day, and our usefulness and our service to the Lord may
be held up by some seemingly little practical matter of
everyday life. Nothing is small if it limits our
usefulness to the Lord. What we might call the smallest
thing carries with it no less an issue than the release
of the mighty life of God to some other lives. That makes
everything very big. Oh, if only we had a sufficient
motive for seeing to things! Our motive is not big
enough. We have taken a situation as something in itself.
We have looked upon it as something merely human,
something quite natural, just a happening. It may be a
thing very common to man, a thing to which we are all
very prone by nature, but we have failed to recognize
that behind that are vast issues, far-reaching interests.
The enemy knows all about it. Do not let us think that
the enemy will do very big things to get us out if he can
achieve his end by insignificant things. Sometimes we
think a thing is so insignificant that of course the
devil is not in that: he is occupied with bigger things
than that! But if it achieves the end, it will serve his
purpose best not to display himself too much. If he can
upset you and put you out of spirit, and out of use to
the Lord, by simply making someone say something
inadvertently, so long as the end is accomplished it is
as good as though he had rallied all his diabolical
forces and concentrated them upon you. Why should he do
that if he can succeed by a mere phrase? It is the end he
is after.
The
incentive to ascendency is service, usefulness to the
Lord. After all, ascendency is the outworking of
ascension union with our Lord, and everything comes from
that. The ascended Lord in heaven: everything flows from
that. But how can He fulfil all the purposes and
possibilities of His glorious ascension, if He has not
got a people in ascension union with Him through whom to
do it?
Let us
ask the Lord to write this thing in our hearts —
that it is spiritual ascendency that is so important, in
order that the Lord may be able to express Himself in
fullness; because, if you look again, you will find that
Zion is the symbol of spiritual fullness.