Reading: 1
Tim. 3:9; Phil. 1:27; Rom. 1:3,5; 16:25-26; Eph. 3:3-4,9; 4:13.
I think you will
have recognised the familiar thoughts and words in all those
passages, and the similar ideas. Some words stand out, such as
Gospel, His Son, the mystery, the faith. They are all common
words in those passages. And then, of course, there is the
associated idea of conflict.
So this morning
for a little while we are to be occupied with the mystery of the
Gospel, or what the Gospel is. There is a very great need for a
new apprehension of the nature of the Gospel. The Gospel has been
very much reduced and whittled down, made merely to mean one or
more of its parts, and its entirety, its fulness, has really been
lost sight of. What I mean is, that so often the Gospel is said
to be "the atoning work of the Lord Jesus",
"righteousness which is by faith", "the
forgiveness of sins"; all these things. All those things and
many more like them are in the Gospel, they are parts of the
Gospel, but the Gospel is something more than the parts. The
Gospel is the sum of all those parts. But even then, when you
have catalogued all the elements of the Gospel; God's redeeming
love, forgiveness of sins, atonement for sin, when you have
catalogued all the parts, you have still to get inside to know
really what the Gospel is.
The Present
Situation Amongst Christians
I am just
wondering in these days - and we are all wondering and thinking
very hard in the light of the situation - I am just wondering
whether this may not be the matter upon which God is, to a very
large extent, suspending operations today. I am just going to
talk for a moment out of my heart, because I do feel that we are
in a very perplexing, but very significant, situation at this
time. There is a sense in which it does seem that the Lord is not
doing very much. I mean there are no very manifest movements of
God on the earth along certain lines in which we look for God to
be moving. I do not mean that He is doing nothing, that there is
nothing going on. I believe there is, and in parts a very real
work of God going on. But, speaking generally, there is no great
movement of God in an outward way spiritually. For a long time
such forms of Divine activity seem to have been suspended. We
think back to Wesley, and even to Moody, and then see that at a
certain time a whole galaxy of great Bible teachers was raised
up. We have all the names of the men of a generation ago. They
have all gone. There are no movements like that, and have not
been for a long time. Moreover the situation has changed so much
that I do not believe that if all those men came back today, they
could meet the situation. Something has happened. The situation
has not only changed but it has become much deeper, and the need
is for something more than has been during these past
generations, something more potent and something deeper. The need
is such as to require something from God of a new order. It was
there, of course, in New Testament times. I am not thinking of
something extra so far as the New Testament is concerned, but I
am wondering very much whether this whole matter is not largely
one of a new apprehension of what the Gospel is.
We have a very
widespread situation the world over today amongst Christians
which is an altogether unsatisfactory one, and I think most
leaders and responsible people realise that. I think ministers
and missionaries are aware that the state of the converts and the
Christians is altogether unsatisfactory and inadequate. It is a
real question sometimes whether many of them have really been
born again. The spiritual life of the Lord's people is a very
shallow thing, speaking generally, a very poor thing. And surely
today it is manifest that the Church generally is failing to
register itself with any impact upon the world situation. There
is not a word, there is not a voice today for the present
situation. You may gather leaders together on the present
situation and no one has anything to say that really goes to the
heart of matters. Why this apparent hiatus, this suspension of
any general and impressive working, any working that is adequate
to the situation, God seeming to be doing nothing? Oh, I believe
that He is doing something inwardly, but that is not what I am
talking about. Why does this situation obtain?
The Need
for a New Apprehension of the Gospel
Well I say, I
wonder whether it is not because there has to be a new
apprehension of the Gospel. I believe that it really is the
demand of a late hour in the dispensation; that we have advanced
in this dispensation toward the end so much that the Lord cannot
any longer accept the elementary. He must have the mature, He
must have the fuller. Everything surely along the line of
intensification as we see it demands that.
Now, of course,
until His people have come to realise the ineffectiveness and the
futility, the weakness and the failure of the partial, He cannot
do anything; because the Lord always works with His people, and
therefore He must have them in a state which makes it possible
for Him to do something. If His people are content with something
less, it would be a very unwise thing for Him to give His full
thought in revelation. It would be perfectly useless. They would
have no sense of need of it. May it not be that that is one of
the deeper things He is doing, namely, creating and intensifying
the sense of the weakness and futility of things, raising big
questions even about the Gospel. I think there is reason to think
that it is so. Thus it may be - I only put it in that form - that
His answer is a new apprehension of the Gospel and what the
Gospel is.
God's Secret
Now is it not
interesting that here in the Scriptures you have such a phrase as
this - "the mystery of the Gospel", and that word
"mystery" is definitely stated to be a secret which God
has deliberately held through ages and generations, an
undisclosed, undivulged thought of His. He has verily in things
throughout the ages deliberately kept a secret, had a secret, an
unrevealed intention in relation to means and methods of reaching
His end. And note again, it is not the mystery of some profound
extra teaching, it is not that some revelation over and above the
simple Gospel is the message. Oh, if that has got into your mind,
get rid of it at once. The mystery is not some extra revelation
of Divine truth, it is not something apart from the Gospel. I
think a lot of people, when they hear words like those, "the
mystery which hath been hid for ages", think that is higher
truth, or something for people who are in another realm
altogether from the ordinary person, that it is for some sort of
spiritual aristocracy. No, it says here it is the mystery of
the Gospel.
And then again the
same word - "the mystery of Christ": and then, as we
have noted, the bringing of these two things together, the Gospel
of God concerning His Son, which is the mystery, the secret that
had been hidden through all the ages and the generations, but
which is now revealed: and Paul says, "my gospel".
Well now, what is
this mystery of the Gospel which is the mystery of Christ, which
is the mystery now disclosed? What is it? Can we put it into few
words? We will try. In brief, the mystery is the incarnation of
God in Christ in terms of sonship, with the intent that He should
be the firstborn among many brethren, so that there shall be a
Divine seed or family or Body. Oh, if we could but get inside of
a statement like that! God's secret!
How did God decide
to solve the whole problem of this universe after the chaos and
ruin resultant from the working of Satan, and men's complicity
with him, and the entrance of sin? How was God going to deal with
this whole situation? By Himself coming right down in the form of
man in terms of sonship and begetting a new race of beings as
sharers of His own Divine life; not His Deity but His Divine
life, partaking of His own Divine nature, becoming as a family,
His own moral and spiritual reproduction in the universe. I say
that is infinitely - may I use the word of God? - infinitely
ingenious. There is wisdom about that that is profound. Not a
working from the outside to try and remedy and patch up a broken
down situation, not a dealing with the thing objectively at all
but Himself coming right into it, God incarnate, God manifest in
the flesh in terms of sonship; that is, in generic terms, to
reproduce after His own kind. That is a secret which God kept
hidden through ages and generations. God had that secret.
But how was He
going to handle the whole thing? You can trace it now in the
types and see it there. It is there in the tabernacle, in the ark
of the testimony, it is there throughout the Old Testament in
symbols. But they saw it not; God hid it. Now it is disclosed,
the revelation is out. It is the mystery of the Gospel.
Sonship the
Occasion of the Conflict
What is the
Gospel? It is Jesus Christ, God manifest in the flesh in terms of
sonship, to generate a new race after His own kind, to bring many
sons to glory. That is it in brief. Oh, that is something very
much more than getting your sins forgiven, that is very much more
than justification by faith. It is that, but it is infinitely
more than that, and all the other things included; the deep, deep
inner secret of God, how He is eventually going to have triumph
in His original purpose; and what we have been seeing is this,
that the faith is not a system of doctrine at all. The faith,
according to the New Testament, is sonship, and it is in relation
to sonship as an inward, spiritual reality brought about by this
work of God in generation, it is that which is the occasion of all
the conflict. The Son came and, right at His coming, hell was
moved from beneath to withstand Him and to make His entrance into
this world impossible, and to get Him out of it as soon as could
be. All the way along it was upon this very point - "If thou
be the Son..." Hear it in the wilderness, Satan saying,
"If thou be the Son..." It is an assault upon sonship
in terms of doubt, to try to paralyse the effect of that sonship
by introducing some question about it. "If thou be the
Son..." So it was all the way through; and then on the Cross
you hear that Satanic hiss again, coming through the Jews who
cried, "If thou be the Son of God, come down from the
cross" (Matt. 27:40). Only when we are in conditions and
circumstances of extreme pressure and adversity, only then are we
able to understand a little of what it meant to have that
question raised at such a time. You the Son of God! Poor
Son of God! Look at you, look at your condition, look at your
situation! God has left you! This is the outworking of your own
foolish ways, your own self-chosen way; there is no trace of
sonship about this! "If thou be the Son..." - raising
the question again in the light of the awful conditions. It is
the assault upon sonship.
And then the
assault was transferred from the Son to His seed, and we know
quite well that the real nature of spiritual conflict is not
around our creed, our profession; it is over the spiritual life
that is in us. It is about that mystery in us of a difference. We
are going the same way as He went, we are being subjected to the
testing fires of adversity. The Lord allows conditions to arise
in our lives which seem wholeheartedly to deny that we are sons,
that we have been born out from God, that God is with us, that
God is in us by His Spirit. All the conditions seem at times to
put God far from us, and there is nothing whatever to argue that
we are sons. That is the test of faith.
And the faith is
just that; not only faith in Him but the faith is that we are
sons, sons of God, in the midst of a wicked and perverse
generation, in the midst of a world that is hostile, in the midst
of a cosmos full of antagonistic spirits. Yes, the fact of
sonship is there through new birth, but sonship is something more
than birth, sonship is maturity. That is where the consideration
at this time comes in. It is so clear that the New Testament
shows that the continuation unto the full growth of sonship is as
vital and as important as the beginning of sonship; that is, the
bringing of the Lord's people to full spiritual growth is as
important as bringing them to new birth. That is where there has
been a breakdown.
That brings us
right back to what I was saying at the beginning. Today, and for
a long time, evangelical leaders have put all the emphasis, or
the main emphasis, upon getting people saved. They are interested
in that more than anything else, and that is the direction of
their main occupation. With what result? That we see a most
unsatisfactory state among Christians, and that too in the face
of the fact that the very existence of the New Testament itself
is the evidence that to bring converted people to full spiritual
growth is as important as bringing them to new birth. Why have we
the New Testament, with Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians,
Philippians, Colossians, and all the other letters, occupied with
the fight of the faith to bring believers to full growth? Every
one of them is a battleground.
Look at Paul's
fight for Galatia. What a fight it was against those Judaizers
who had come in, and were causing arrest to the spiritual
progress of the believers there. Paul had to say, "I marvel
that you are so soon removed... unto another gospel".
Hebrews is another battleground. All these letters are
battlegrounds, and they all have to do, not with the conversion
of the unsaved but the going on of the saved, the terrific fight
of sonship. Why? Because the issue is not that babes are going to
oust the powers of darkness, but full-grown believers. The Church
has to come to maturity.
So the Apostle
says, "When he ascended on high, he led captivity captive,
and gave gifts unto men... and he gave some apostles: and some,
prophets"; and so on. What for? "The perfecting of the
saints... till we all attain unto the unity of the faith... unto
a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness
of Christ" (Eph. 4:8,11-13). The unity of the faith, the
fulness of Christ. You see, that is the thing that comes to
light. It is just as important for the seed or the family or the
Body to come to spiritual full-growth as it is for it to be
begotten at all. That is a tremendous thing. The mystery of the
Gospel is not just getting people born again. The mystery of the
Gospel is the fulness of Christ, and that only begins at new
birth. This is the disclosed secret, this Gospel, and it is the
occasion of the tremendous, unrelenting conflict, a cosmic
conflict with principalities, powers, world-rulers of this
darkness, spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenlies (Eph.
6:12). That is where the wrestling goes on.
The Focal
Point of the Conflict - Its Nature and Outcome
With one word of
emphasis, I close for the present. Beloved, the focal point of
the conflict is the spiritual advancement of the children of God
toward full-growth, and by any means whatever the enemy will seek
to interfere with that. He is striking right at the heart of this
thing all the time by every means in his power. God will reach
His end, He will come in, in His Son in terms of sonship, to take
up residence within those begotten of Him, and will grow in them,
increase His measure in them, until at last, brought to the unity
of the faith, they become a mighty embodiment and revelation of
God Himself; not in Deity, but in what He is spiritually and
morally in this universe, conformed to the image of His Son, a
living expression of God's own thoughts, to fill His universe.
The enemy is out against that, and every little step in that
direction is challenged, the spiritual growth is countered all
the time. He is striking at God's Son. Of course in principle it
is quite true that the fight rages round the person of the Lord
Jesus. There is a great fight going on between modernism and
fundamentalism. The one stands on the ground of the absolute
Deity of Christ, Christ manifest in the flesh, and the others
will not have it. So the fight rages. But that is an objective
fight really, a fight of creeds, philosophies, ideologies. It
does not get very far spiritually. I grieve to think that some of
the most unspiritual and unkind and unChristlike people have been
the most rabid fundamentalists who would fight to the death for
the Deity of Christ. It does not get you very far spiritually. It
is something more than that, is His Deity. You see what I mean.
It goes deeper than that.
The person of the
Lord Jesus means something more than what He is in Himself as one
apart. It is what He is in this life of sonship as manifested in
believers. God manifest in the flesh is not something in the way
of a creed to be argued out. God manifest in the flesh is
something to be proved by a life. I do not know but that it may
have a meaning, that Jesus Christ came into this world and was
Emmanuel, God with us, that God did incarnate Himself in that
Man, and did some things, and went back to heaven. It might mean
something, but I do not know that it would get me very far as
something back there. If that fact of God in Christ did not
become some reality right at the centre of my life, it would lack
something of real value. The mystery is this - "Christ in
you, the hope of glory" (Col. 1:27). It is the same mystery.
There are not a half a dozen mysteries in the New Testament. It
is the Gospel of God concerning His Son, and the Gospel is not a
system of truth to be preached, the Gospel is a Person, and the
power of the Gospel is not that you accept certain things
proposed to you about Jesus Christ, but that Jesus Christ comes
to reside in you by new birth. That is the Gospel. That, of
course, is going back to the very elementary; but oh, that we
could get a fresh glimpse of the immense significance of the
Gospel, the Gospel of God concerning His Son, Jesus Christ, God's
secret! I like to dwell upon that. If you sit down in the
presence of the world situation and try to sort it out and find
the solution to it, it is beyond us, altogether; but all through
the ages God has been perfectly at rest about this whole thing,
about the issue. He was able to say, I have the secret of the
whole thing, I have solved the whole problem, I have the means in
hand; in the end My method will absolutely succeed! And the
secret? - why it is just this: I will go down Myself in terms of
sonship and will generate a new race through faith, and that new
race will be brought eventually to spiritual full-growth; which
simply means that then I shall fill all, I shall occupy all the
space; there will be no room for anything else at all! That is
the issue for every Christian life. It is whether God is going to
fill the whole space or not, or whether we are going to have a
bit. All the time that is what is going on. Can the Lord gain the
ground, will we give way to Him? Are we holding the ground for
ourselves, are we in His way? Are we going to let the Lord have
all the territory of our being in every way. It is not so easy as
saying, Yes! It becomes a daily challenge. There is a strong,
many-sided, subtle self-life. We never know how difficult it is
to let the Lord have His way until He lights upon some pet
opinion of our self-life. But that is the issue. When the Lord
has gained His full way in all His own, as He will at the end,
the manifestation of the sons of God will take place, and the
whole problem will have been solved, the problem of this
universe.