Lord, we can only pray from
our hearts under a very deep sense of need, of dependence... of
longing that Thou Thyself will stand fully possessed of every
moment of this time and of this day to give Thyself with great
application, and wisdom, and love, and power for securing the
completion, so far as this time is concerned, of what Thou didst
have in mind in bringing us together. Thou did say after feeding
that multitude: “Gather up, gather up what remains over that
nothing be lost”. That nothing be lost. We believe that this
is Thine own desire that nothing be lost, and we pray that Thou
would bring this very definitely into this day: that nothing be
lost. We ask in the name of the Lord Jesus, amen.
In our occupation with the Cross
of our Lord Jesus Christ through this week and our tracing of its
application to different situations and conditions represented by
the letters of the apostle Paul, we have this morning arrived at
the letter to the Ephesians and the place that the Cross has and
the meaning that the Cross has in that letter.
I hope that you may have read it
before the meeting or that at least some knowledge of it exists
in your minds so that it is not necessary for me to give you the
content of the whole letter. We are not concerned with that at
this time but with this one focus: what has the Cross to say to
us through this letter?
The actual mention of the Cross
in the letter is infrequent but references to it by way of
implication are very evident. You will recall that early on the
apostle addresses these believers as those who have been
quickened together with Christ and raised together with Him. That
thought occurs more than once in the letter implying that these
believers had come by way of the death and the burial and the
resurrection; and that they now stood on the other side of the
Cross. The Cross had had its place and largely done its work in
them. They, standing on resurrection ground, were now able at
least to be shown what the meaning of the Cross is in its greater
fullness.
And again we are impressed with
the spiritual sequence of things in these letters. We have said
the divine arrangement of them is so different from the human
chronological arrangement, but you move in real spiritual
sequence in these letters as they are given to us by the Holy
Spirit in this present order. That, as I have just intimated, is
very apparent and patent in the movement from Galatians to
Ephesians. In Galatians something had to be got out of the way -
the head of that giant, that Goliath Judaism and every other
"ism" represented by it - had to be cut off. That giant
head had to be decapitated and put aside. All legalisms of every
kind, everything that makes Christ smaller than He is, makes the
gospel smaller than it is, everything speaking of a wrong
limitation, had to be put out of the way before you can get to
Ephesians because, we are going to see, Ephesians is the
emancipation from all circumscribed horizons.
The Cross and
Emancipation from all Circumscribed Horizons
You’re going to move in a
big realm aren’t you when you come into this letter! And of
course anybody who knows this letter knows what a boundless thing
it represents. I’m not going to recapitulate a lot of things
that I have said in the little book with which some of you may be
familiar, “The Stewardship of the Mystery” but I can
remind you that this is the letter, more than any other
in the New Testament, of superlatives. Indeed, this man of such
tremendous ability intellectually and in other ways, was hard put
to it when he wrote this letter, to find language to express what
was in his heart, what he had come to see. His superlatives just
topple over one another and spoil all his grammar. He will just
build up: exceeding, abundantly, above all, and so on. It’s
the letter of superlatives and therefore we can rightly sum it up
in this way: as the letter of emancipation from every limited
horizon.
I remind you again, there is a
real aptness in this sequence... the Ai, going back to the Old
Testament, and Ai’s issue having been settled and Achan; the
element that would pull the people back onto the old Corinthian
grounds which we have been seeing. Achan having been removed with all
that belonged to him, wife and children. It looks very cruel,
very unkind... ruthless to pull Achan out and his family and
stone them all to death. But you must remember the Bible moves on
spiritual principles and anything to do with this kind of thing,
the thing itself, the Achan and any related thing to this that
Galatians represents, has got to be wholly and entirely put out
of the way. As Paul said, “Let it be anathema and again
I say let it be anathema”. He is not having any compromise
with any “ism” that limits Christ, or ground that is
smaller than Christ. And that all being dealt with so thoroughly,
now we can move on, come out into these great expanses of Christ
which this letter represents. And if I indicate a few things (and
I cannot do more than just indicate them with the most restricted
comment) you will have to take it away and spread it over for all
your future times with the Lord. But it is one thing into which
all these things are gathered with which we are concerned on this
last day of the feast, or so far as I am concerned. We get more
presently.
Here then, we have in this
letter a whole series of transitions from the limited to the
unlimited. First of all there is the:
Transition
from the Earthly to the Heavenly.
And all who know this letter
know that the characteristic phrase of this letter five times
repeated is “in the heavenlies”. A tremendous movement
has taken place in the horizon here! It has been thrust far back
from earth, from the earthly to the heavenly, the heavenlies in
Christ Jesus.
Now, I know quite well that that
is a difficult idea to grasp. And of course the natural mind
immediately gets pictures of something out there far away... the
heavens! What do you mean by that? And it is said that some
people are so heavenly that they’re no earthly good.
We’ll come onto that in a minute. Let us get quite clear as
to what this really means “in the heavenlies”. It is
true that Christ now is in heaven. It is true that there is a
super mundane realm in which principalities and powers, world
rulers of this darkness, hosts of wicked spirits operate... It is
true that there is a realm, but it can be very unpractical if it
is just a mental conception, a remote abstract idea: in the
heavenlies.
The first thing said about this
is that we have been made to sit in the heavenlies in Christ
Jesus. But we haven’t in another sense; we are sitting here
in this place and very literally so, and probably as the hours go
on with the talking you feel it is very literal to have to sit
there - very real! And so an element of unreality can come into
our mentality when we read this phrase repeatedly “in the
heavenlies”. What is really meant by that?
Well of course our names are
written in the heavens. In Christ in the heavens we have our
place and all our resources are in Him and to come from Him as
there. Our government has to be from heaven and many other
things. But even so, this has got to be brought more definitely
into our knowledge, our experience: the experience of
being in the heavenlies... that is the point. And until
we’ve got that settled, all this about emancipation from
limited horizons is but a beautiful conception. What is it?
Now let me say at once, it is -
for all practical purposes in the Christian life here and now, in
this world, in this life - it is an inward thing. An inward
thing. Very simple. If you have really been born again (and
you know quite well that that is not the exact translation of the
original language, it is "born from above" well, new
birth) if you really have come into the experience of the new
birth which is birth from above, what is your first
consciousness, your first awareness from that time? Something
that you come to realize right at the beginning? You know quite
well that you've parted with this world and this earth. That is,
that you no longer belong here. Something has happened that has
been the nature of a translation inwardly. Your interests...
those interests which were, are no longer your interests. Your
associations... your own people now, your own people are the
Lord’s people. Your gravitation is toward heavenly things.
It is an inward awareness and consciousness and we all know
something of that. As we go on in the life with the Lord that
becomes more and more real.
We are on a spiritual
pilgrimage, a spiritual pilgrimage inside of ourselves and our
pilgrimage is away, away, away. We find it increasingly
difficult to be at rest, at home in the things of this world and
the things which the people of this world have as their ultimate.
Now that’s very simple
isn’t it? But note: the apostle is saying this to people who
had gone a fair way on the pilgrimage. He’d been with
these people at Ephesus, and he said to them, their elders,
“I have not shunned to declare unto you the whole
counsel of God”. They had gone quite a way and yet here he
is after all, in this particular connection, as we shall see in
others, saying to Christians, to Christians well on the way:
“Your life is not here. Don’t expect anything here,
don’t look for anything here. All your resources are outside
and are to come to you from outside. As truly as ever the manna
had to come from heaven in type and symbol in the wilderness, day
by day, so you have to, and you can, learn to live every day from
above”. I say that’s almost elementary and simple
but... what is your experience?
I say to you that after - I
won’t mention the number of years - of seeking to walk with
the Lord, today, today with all the grey hairs and all the years
and all the experience, never a day comes but what more than ever
before I am conscious that unless the Lord supplies from heaven
today, I will not get through. They’re not words. It has to
be like that. And even after the greatest fullness, we might have
had large fullness yesterday, but we close the day with very rich
provision from the Lord. We begin the day as though we had never
had anything and we start all over again. It’s true!
It’s got to be like that. That is the first great horizon
into which we are emancipated: from earth to heaven.
Our whole way of life, if it
is a true spiritual life, if the Cross has really
cut in between us and this world, if we really have reached the
sixth chapter of the letter to the Galatians, the last word about
the whole situation of the earth touch and the earth bond,
“God forbid that I should glory save in the Cross of our
Lord Jesus Christ whereby the world is crucified to me and I to
the world”. If we really have reached that point of the
Cross to cut in, then we’re in a position, really in a
position to know this wonderfully enlarged heavenly sustenance,
heavenly provision, heavenly fullness... “has blessed us
with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in
Christ Jesus” where inwardly we are seated together
with Him. It’s an inward thing, an inward consciousness.
You know, I am tempted to put in
a big parenthesis there, “every spiritual blessing”.
But I think it would be impossible to say even a sentence that
would be adequate, but I remind you of what the apostle mentions
here as some of the spiritual blessings into which we have come
by reason of this transition inwardly in the spiritual life.
What does he say are these
blessings? Chosen in Him. Chosen in Christ before the foundation
of the world. Have you ever tried to contemplate that? Is that a
blessing? No accident in our salvation; the working out of an
eternal thought... chosen in Him. Dare I mention it:
predestinated... to be conformed to the image of His Son. What a
blessing! Accepted in the beloved. We could spend a whole
conference on that alone couldn’t we? Redeemed, in Whom we
have our redemption. Redeemed. Enlightened, these are words in
Ephesians you know, enlightened. Endowed. Sealed. All in Christ
Jesus, a few of the blessings in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus.
Wonderful things aren’t they? Now you see we need to extend
the conference for another month or two!
Ah, this is where the conference
ought to finish you know, with the twelve baskets full over. Such
a conception, such a mighty conception of that into which we have
been brought! With our horizon full of that, we go away
breathless at the greatness of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Well, that’s only one of
the transitions from the earthly into the heavenly. Next, the:
Transition
from Time into Eternity.
Before the foundation of the world
is where it begins and unto the ages of the ages is where it
ends. Lifted completely out of what time means; its power. You
know, in the other summary of the blessings in Christ given by
Paul which we have considered this week, he says about the love
of Christ, "Shall life or death..." (these are big things, the
compasses of this earthly sojourn, life and death) he says no,
they lose their power. They’re ruled out here in this
horizon of eternity! How I’d like to dwell upon it... before
the foundation of the world and of the counsels of God from
eternity concerning the Church.
I think I must drop back here
for this little bracketed statement. That word
“predestinated” can limit your horizon if you’re
not careful. I see the tragedy of this spread of ultra
predestination theology. I have seen, I know companies of the
Lord’s people going on in the freedom, the liberty, the
life, and the joy; all moving on rejoicing, and then this
thing has come in: predestination. And it is theological in
perpetration and they start going round in their
circles. And you can’t get anywhere at all beyond that.
It’s like a dead hand, a dead hand upon everything. Be
careful because predestination has nothing to do with individual
salvation. Get that? It has to do with the eternal vocation of
the Church. The Church! And that’s Ephesians. And
that’s where you get the word.
Well, take that as intended to
be helpful, to throw the horizon back to deliver us from this
awful bondage. It’s one of the “isms” you know. A
great man, good man was Calvin, but when it comes to Calvinism,
be careful. Be careful. From time into eternity we are
emancipated.
Thirdly,
From the
Temporal to the Spiritual.
Something very helpful if we can
grasp it, it really is a deliverance this, an enlargement; to
realize that the temporal - that is, the things of this life and
the things of time, things which make up our daily lives, the
events, the happenings, the permissive will of God in so many
things, and the directive will of God in other things - all that
has to do with our human life here is governed by the spiritual
if... if we are in this compass: in Christ.
As I said, in Romans you have
the whole thing gathered up comprehensively and then the letters
following break it up. And so out of Romans we bring this to
here, “All things work together for good to them that love
God” don’t stop there “...and are the called
according to His purpose.” And as we shall hear in a
minute, that is the great word of this letter.
So that the temporal things,
your sorrow, your loss, your disappointments... Oh what a large
world of happenings, experiences, trials, difficulties, sorrows,
sufferings, perplexities and so on; the things that come into our
lives. We call them the temporal things because they belong to
this life here if we are in this realm: in Christ Jesus
and the Cross has really cut in and emancipated us from the
finality of temporal things. And how often the temporal
experience becomes a finality with us! We think that spells the
end of everything. No, if in this realm in Christ, then the
temporal things are governed by spiritual interests. Do I need to
enlarge upon that?
Most of us look back upon things
that have happened that we’ve thought were chances, were
tragedies happening to us and they were pretty difficult, very
hard... and we thought that they spelled the end and we can now see
that they had very real spiritual values and that we should not
have come into the knowledge of the Lord which we have today but
for those things. They have not been narrowing things but
enlarging things! “The things which happened unto me,”
says Paul, “the things which happened, the happenings, have
worked out, have turned out for the furtherance...” a way of
saying: “enlargement”.
So this transition from the
temporal to the government of the temporal by the spiritual.
That’s a very large realm isn’t it when you can get out
there, when by the grace of God we can say in the presence of
this thing that’s happened which seems so devastating, so
desolating, seeming to write over everything: loss, failure,
disillusion. And when in the presence of that we, by the grace of
God, are able to say: "There’s some spiritual value in this
that would justify it, that will vindicate God’s wisdom in
allowing it. There's something in this. I can’t see it now,
I’ll come into sooner or later, come into it and I’ll
look back on this and say: Right was the pathway."
He
led them by a straight way? He didn’t, He led them round and
round and round in the wilderness and yet the verdict is “He
led them by a straight way”. However circuitous it may seem,
if it’s going to reach His end, it’s straight.
Now it’s easy perhaps to
say these things but, dear friends, these are things we have to
learn to be emancipated from: the domination of the temporal into
the government of the spiritual. You follow that up. Yes, and this letter is full of
that, you know. Full of that and a lot of time is wanted to
look at it. Let me remind you of chapter four, “I beseech you
to walk worthily of the calling wherewith you were
called...” You’ve got to walk amidst
conditions in this world which are very difficult. He’s
writing to Ephesians and God only knows what those Ephesians had
to live in, walk about, amongst, and how everything could have
dragged them down, forced them down, kept them down: this and
that and that which we will touch upon again. No, in the midst of
it all, “Walk worthily of the vocation wherewith you were
called”. Let the greater horizon lift you out of these temporal
things and give you a motive, an incentive for living here in
this world; the incentive of another dimension.
Or, to be very much more
practical, lifting out of this letter these temporal things, very
practical indeed: husbands and wives. That’s very practical
isn’t it? Very practical in the world in which we live,
husbands and wives and the relationship there. Oh, what a
training ground that is! Just when you get married you’ve
entered into utopia! You’re going to have no more trouble;
that man is absolutely perfect you know! That woman...
there’s never in the world anyone like her! We’re never
going to have any trouble together... Now I don’t want to
spoil it, and I am not speaking out of a history of
disappointment, so no-one pass that on!
But we all know that this, this
very relationship, is one of God’s through which we have to
learn very much of Jesus Christ. It’s a temporal thing
isn’t it? But look at the horizon into which this letter
puts it: “Even as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself
for it, so husbands love your wives”. Doesn’t that lift
it out into a dimension, isn’t that a transition? My word!
So Paul says, “I speak of a mystery, I speak of Christ and
His Church when I’m speaking about husbands and wives and
wives and husbands. I’m speaking about Christ and His
Church.” Can you bring even your marriage relationship onto
the ground of Christ and His Church and His giving Himself for
her? For her? And the other way in which this applies, the
opposite. But the point is, lifting it out of this poor scene as
we know it in the world.
And as perhaps sometimes you are
tried by your husband or your wife, sometimes perhaps (may I say
it?) almost to breaking point... I don’t want you to divulge
any secrets but I know human life well enough. Oh yes, I know it.
Somewhere away in a box of all sorts of odds and ends, I put it
away somewhere, there is a bullet. And I took that bullet from a
gun with which a Christian man was going to shoot his wife;
workers in the Church! That’s terrible, that’s perhaps
an extreme case but you see you can be driven by the devil to all
sorts of things because that relationship is intended by the Lord
to represent something so great. Oh if the devil can really get
in between husband and wife and smash that, he has succeeded in a
very, very big thing. He has robbed Christ of a testimony to
Himself and His relationship to the Church.
So I’m going to say that
perhaps there are few, if any, relationships that the devil is
against more than the relationship of a true partnership of
husband and wife and wife and husband. It seems that he stops at
nothing to spoil that because he’s going to gain a lot
because as Paul says, “I speak of Christ and the
Church”. Isn’t that lifting things out of one realm
into another? That’s Ephesians. Suffer the word that we must
be very faithful; that we’re not just roving in idealisms,
but in very practical matters here.
Then we come to the next
transition:
The Seen as
Overshadowed by the Unseen.
I think that is probably implied
in what I’ve been saying, but we might just underline the
phrase: the overshadowing of the seen by the unseen. And
here, dear friends, it is not just a statement in words; a
phrase. To me - not that I am anything important or a model - but
to me this is one of the most testing things in the
Christian life. I know of few more testing words in Scripture
than those words used by the apostle, not here but elsewhere:
“...Our light affliction which is but for a moment worketh
for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory... for
we look not at the things seen but at the things which are not
seen; the things seen are temporal, the things which are not seen
are eternal”. I repeat: I know of few passages of Scripture
more testing.
The seen! The seen... so real,
so real. It seems so ridiculous to shut your eyes to them, they
are real. All these things that this apostle passed through were
real: the shipwrecks (quite a number of them he says), a night
and a day in the deep, perils of robbers, perils of false
brethren and so on and on. Were they real? If not go and spend a
night and a day in a shipwreck in the sea clinging to some bit of
wood for a night and a day, is that real? No, your Christian
science won’t save you there!
When I was a young Christian I
was walking home from the city of London one evening after work.
A fellow joined up with me in Hyde Park and I was suddenly in
agony with toothache, I had an awful abscess in my tooth. This
fellow joined up and asked me what was wrong and I told him.
“Oh!” he said, “there’s no such thing as
pain, it’s all imagination!”
Well, I was in my teens and I
was a boxer... and I had been taught boxing by my brother who had
excelled in amateur boxing and he had split panels of doors with
the back of my head! So I said to this fellow, “Look here,
my friend, let me give you a real left, right from the shoulder
on the point of your jaw and then you say there is no such thing
as pain! Will you stand by your philosophy?” Well he
wasn’t allowing me to test him! I think his philosophy broke
down at that point, it never happened. Do you see what I mean?
No, no, no, this won’t do,
it won’t do at all. The things seen are very real; the
things felt are very real. They are very real. And the things
unseen seem unseen, seem to be abstract and
unreal and yet the apostle says that the effect of what we are
going through to bring an exceeding weight of glory depends upon
our not being occupied with the seen but looking beyond... beyond
to the unseen. I say: testing!
I mentioned before, one point in
this is that you spend your life, pour out your life. Costly
suffering for people, the people of God. And you come to the end
of your life and as far as you can see there’s very little
for it, and what you can see is a very great deal of discrediting
of you and your ministry; that’s Paul. The Lord in His
kindness, His great kindness, does sometimes lift the veil a
little bit and someone comes along and says, “You know,
thirty years ago I heard a message from you and I’ve never
forgotten it, it’s made a difference in my life”. Just
little bits like that, perhaps not enough to save you from seeing
the things that are seen altogether, but afterward... the great
afterward.
I believe, dear friends, we are
going to see very much more in the afterward of what the Lord's
values were in our being here than we can see at present. And it
doesn’t seem very comforting to these souls to say,
“Now, when you are gone from this world and perhaps know
nothing about it, all the spiritual values of your life will come
out”. Not very comforting is it? But what is our salvation?
"Looking not at the things seen..." things not seen. Oh! We do want
to see and we do want to be occupied with the seen don’t we?
I say it’s the most testing passage. Well there we are, the
unseen, the spiritual overshadowing the seen. We just hurry on.
The next transition here is from
existence to purpose.
Existence to
Purpose
It’s quite a big change
over and enlargement of horizon. Have you ever wondered why on
earth you were born? Why you came into this world? Perhaps that
has never troubled you at all, you think it’s alright, it's
quite a right thing that you were born; God made no mistake at
all when He brought you into the world! But some of us, you know,
have been down in the depths, “After all, well, did the Lord
make a mistake? Did He get hold of the wrong piece of material,
clay? Why, why, why?”
I tried to argue with an elder
brother of mine once many years ago about this matter of
salvation. Do you know what his answer was? He said, “I
absolutely repudiate any responsibility. I was never
asked if I wanted to come into this world, I was never given a
chance to say yes or no. I’m here without any option being
given to me and I do not, therefore, take any responsibility for
being here in this world”. What could you say to that? Oh,
but, but! What about God’s eternal purpose in your
being here? Behind it all Paul knows: chosen in Christ, called
according to His purpose. “according to His eternal
purpose” is the great phrase in Ephesians. Existence! Mere
existence, painful existence, all making the best of it saying:
let us eat and drink, tomorrow we die. Existence. Doing the best
you can because you’re just here and unless you commit
suicide you’ve just got to go through with it. Or,
compassed by God’s eternal purpose, out of the eternal
counsels of the Godhead: called, chosen in Christ. That’s a
dimension isn’t it? That’s not just making the best of
life, and a poor thing at that. No, it’s emancipation from
mere existence into great purpose. And with one remark I’ll
pass from that.
Dear friends, don’t you
feel that there’s a great lack in the preaching of the
gospel today? The emphasis of most gospel preaching today is:
well, get your sins forgiven and go to heaven; be happy ever
after, have a good time. You’re not surprised are you that
you have little tiny Christians who never grow up;
immature! No, I do feel this: that in presenting
Christ and the gospel to the unsaved we ought to present the greatness
of the eternal purpose concerning every life. And if they
grasp that, “My! Am I called to that? Is that the dimension
of salvation?” They’ll grow, you’ll have a
different type of person, conversion.
Oh, and then someone says
“But you can’t bring to simple little children the
great things of man and put that on their shoulders!” Well
that may be a natural argument, but what I have seen is the best
Christians that I know were converted in a ministry to the saints
in great richness. Oh yes, at the Lord’s table and in the
morning ministering when you were not thinking about the unsaved
at all, some of the best Christians were born again in that.
Purpose as overshadowing existence.
I hope I’m not tiring you,
we have so many transitions here but let us look at another one.
Ephesus
Let us go into Ephesus
the great city and what would impress us? What is it that these
people are all so obsessed with, dominated by, talking about? The
great temple of Diana of the Ephesians. One of the wonders of the
world. You know how much that was to the Ephesians, they tried to
kill Paul on that issue. “Great is Diana of the
Ephesians!” they cried! All other voices were quenched by
their acclamation of Diana and her temple... magnificent it was,
wonderful it was, with all its sensuality... too terrible to
describe. Yet so magnificent, so wonderful. This is Ephesus. Paul
represents to you something far more magnificent and glorious
than the temple of Diana; the Church which is His Body, that He
may present to Himself the Church, a glorious Church, not having
spot or wrinkle, Ephesian sensuality or any such, that the Church
may be a glorious Church, the transcendent Church. Oh,
Diana’s temple with all its magnificence fades from the
horizon when Paul brings into view this Church which is His Body!
Oh, the devil has defamed it, has done so much to spoil it and
the great need is a recovery of the true conception of that
heavenly nature.
And what an emancipation it is!
Yes, all those years with all the clerical attire and the
Churchianity, and the pulpits, and the whole ministerialism, and
the whole thing... it was so much and then the Cross came in and
through the Cross an opening up of the true heavenly nature of
the Church, the Body of Christ, and this all went. What was
holding and gripping so much the horizon, just faded out as nonsense;
child’s play, playing at churches, playing at chapels, just
the lot of it! Nonsense, child’s play... in the
presence of this conception, this unveiling. It was emancipation.
And dear friends, that’s poor compared with the apostle Paul, it’s only a faint reflection.
Look at the absolute
domination of Jerusalem and its temple and its system in the
light of this man. He had gone to the utmost limit of that
earthly system in every way. My word, see him going out against
those who won’t have it, who were called in to question.
Vehement, fierce, relentless; men and women being cast into a
prison. Stephen - and Saul, later Paul, standing by giving his
consent - a young man, glorious life, and the light of heaven on
his face... done to death. This is the man, the grip of this
thing upon this man. What will emancipate him? What will get him
out of that system and make it not only nonsense, but abhorrent?
You’ll never get him out by preaching, by teaching, by
persuasion, by coercion, nor by persecution. There is no force on
this earth that would lift that man right out into this
Ephesian position but what? He’s seen. He has seen! He has
seen Christ and seen the implications and significance of Jesus
Christ in God’s universe and one of the great implications:
the Church which is His Body. He’s seen. He’s out.
He’s out, so out, as you find him in Galatians, by
slaughtering hip and thigh the very things by which he once found
his very life. This is a large horizon. This is emancipation. The
Cross did it!
I don’t want to call any
one’s Christian life into question, cast any aspersions, but
I believe that if the Cross is known as it ought to be known,
you’ll be out of your “isms” and everything that
here as an earthly thing spells limitation; you’ll be out!
You won’t have to ask questions: “Ought I to leave
this? Ought I to leave that? Ought I to give up this and that?
Ought I?” Oh no! You won’t go round consulting with
flesh and blood because He has been telling you and you’ll
have to say, “I’m out! My spirit is out!” So much
is left behind. However great was Diana of the Ephesians and her
temple, what a poor, poor thing it is when once you’ve seen
the heavenly Church!
Well there we are. There’s
one more thing but it’s all included in what I’ve been
saying. You notice as you come to this letter to the Ephesians,
the apostle - where he begins to unburden his heart in the
letter, not long after he’s started - hoping almost
overwhelms him. He feels the hopelessness of this getting it
over. Ever felt like that? It’s good ministry when you do
feel like that you know. Your heart is so full, you’ve got
something so great... how am I going to get this over?
That’s what ministry ought to be! And he started out on this
and it wasn’t long before he put the pen down (so to speak I
don’t think he was writing it himself, he did dictation) he
put the pen down and dropped on his knees in the presence of the
overwhelmingness of this great dimension. He says, “I bow my
knee unto the Father of glory... that He would grant unto you
Ephesians who have so much, know so much, of whom I’ve given
so much, yet to you, with all that you have, that He would grant
unto you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him,
the eyes of your hearts being enlightened...”
Ephesus... the seat of learning,
the seat of all the library of the books of pagan mysticism. You
know when they were converted, when they came to the Lord, these
believers gathered up all their books of the mysteries into a
heap and made a great fire, burned them up. And the price is
given of that, and it’s a tremendous price. All the
learning, all the mysteries of paganism; all there in Ephesus.
“That He would grant unto you a spirit of wisdom and
revelation in the knowledge of Him”. That’s why
he’s speaking about the mysteries of Christ here, other
mysteries. “The knowledge, the eyes of your heart being
enlightened. You Ephesians who had all this in the books, oh,
there’s a horizon of spiritual knowledge, spiritual
understanding which leaves that as mere ashes. Nothing; all that!
You can have a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge
of Him which is beyond all human ability to comprehend!”
That’s what he said, you know, to the Corinthians, “Eye
has not seen, neither has ear heard, nor has it entered into the
heart of man the things which God hath prepared for them that
love Him but God has revealed them to us by His
Spirit”. Spiritual men who receive spiritual things which
the natural man can never, never grasp. He’s in the dark,
he’s in the dark by nature.
Now, Paul isn’t again
moving in abstract realms, don’t you know something of this?
You may say you know very little, but don’t you know
something of this: that the eyes of your heart have been
enlightened? That you have seen what you could never have grasped
or understood until you were born from above? You may
not be able to explain it any more than that man born blind in
John 9, when they tried to put him through his paces on
explaining his experience. How did He do it to you and so on.
Explain it! Define it! Poor chap, he’s out of his depth so
far as explanation and definition, the only thing is to say,
“Well, how He did it I don’t know. Who He is I
don’t know... but one thing I do know: I was blind and now I
see!”
Now, you may not comprehend all
the truth, but you know the principle that there is a work of the
Holy Spirit, that is leading us beyond all our own abilities
intellectually or any other way; we’re beginning to see
things. And you know, it’s startling, it’s very
startling, that angels (you think a lot of angels don’t
you?) angels don’t know what is being revealed to the
Church! It says “angels desired to look into”. Well, I
don’t want to get you too much bewildered but what I’m
saying is: here’s a horizon of understanding and knowledge
which, by revelation of the Holy Spirit will take us far outside
of this poor capacity - mental capacity or any other capacity -
take us outside into another realm. That’s how it ought to
be! It ought to be! Thank God, for some of us that has
happened through that great crisis of the Cross, it has
happened! A new dimension of spiritual knowledge and
understanding has opened and although today we have to say we are
only on the fringe, the fringe, oh there is so much beyond us!
Nevertheless it represents a very big transition from what it was
before.
Well, how? All this? Well,
it’s the place of the Cross isn’t it? The Cross planted
in our natural mind, in order to bring us the spiritual mind;
taking us through death onto resurrection ground - that is such
an expanse! The Lord Jesus lived and laboured under certain, very
real limitations to Him, not in Himself but those in others, His
disciples. How He tried to make them understand; but no. No,
their horizon was just a natural one, and He cried, “I have
a baptism to be baptized with and how I am pent up until it be
accomplished, oh, that it were already accomplished...” but
now an imprisoned spirit, imprisoned by the understanding, the
apprehension, the grasp of these men around Him; imprisoned. He
said, “I long for that time when all that will break down
and give place to the greater dimension of spiritual
understanding. It will not be until I’ve gone through the
baptism of passion, the baptism of the Cross. Oh, that that were
already accomplished!”
And now look after the
accomplishment. Oh dear, the change in their
apprehension, comprehension, and understanding on the day of
Pentecost is literally amazing! Literally amazing, think of how
they regarded the Cross itself before: an appalling
prospect, “If ever that happens we lose everything. Far be
it from Thee Lord, this shall never come to be. All our
hopes and expectations will be blighted and devastated if that
happens.” Look at the other side of it. Like this? No, not
at all. The Cross has done something to liberate Him in that. And
isn’t the Lord needing such an emancipation in us? It will
only be by the same process: we die to ourselves, to our own
minds, our own wills, the Self life, die to the soul life as we
have been speaking of it, and rise and come out onto the ground
of resurrection... the spiritual man. And then we begin to see as
we could never see before. The things upon which we looked at one
time as the things we could not accept, could not contemplate,
are the very things we embrace, “God forbid that I should
glory save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus!”
You, dear friends, must take
this to the Lord. I can’t put you through this. I can tell
you about it and tell you it’s real but I can’t put you
into it; cannot do it for you. You must go to the Lord and say,
“Now Lord, I do commit myself and trust Your grace to see me
through the Cross, that I commit myself, You do the thing. You do
the thing and when the pinch is on, and the cost is being applied
and I am being in myself put out by men, Christian men and all
that; hold me. Hold me, do the work, only see to it that I come
into this great emancipation which the Cross is meant to bring
about.”
Lord, relieve of all the
burden that is tension, and stress... whether it be mental, or
nervous or anything like that, even physical, and do bring us
into something of the apprehension of the wonder... the wonder of
that Cross and its tremendous possibility; what it can do. The
wonder of Christ apprehended in a spiritual way. Oh, we
don’t know how to pray, but we can only say now, if what has
been said here today and this week through Thy servants is
God’s truth, don’t let it pass into forgetfulness or
store it up in artificial reservoirs, but do make it a river, a
spring, breaking up in us unto life eternal. Cover all faults,
all mistakes, every defect in presentation and personality... May
it be Christ and His truth that abides with us, nothing else. We
commit ourselves to Thee, in the name of the Lord Jesus, amen.