Reading: Revelation 5:1-14; 7:9-17.
The Negative Aspect
We are concerned with the matter of spiritual life,
spiritual growth, spiritual progress. We are deeply distressed because of the
smallness, the limitation, the weakness of so many children of God after so
long a time. We are troubled because converts do not move on and believers do
not grow, and so few come to the place where they are able to take
responsibility and you have no need to be keeping a "weather eye" on them
all the time. Why do we have to write off so much of our life, as being very
full and yet so empty? The Lord has shown us why and the solution to the
problem is found in the Cross.
If spiritual growth is arrested or retarded,
you can usually trace in the case concerned some strength of natural life. It
does not always appear as strength, mark you. Its appearance is sometimes as of weakness.
It is not always the aggressive one who is marked by strength. Sometimes our
strength is in our passivity, in our unwillingness to take risks. We call
that, of course, being very humble, being meek, docile. Oh, but sometimes that
is the thing the Lord has to hammer at. That is the passive side. On the other
side, there is the more active and aggressive kind. But usually you can find
somewhere a strength of some sort which is the strength of nature, which is
not yielding or letting go to the Lord. The Lord has to deal with us according
to what we are. In those people who are all too ready to be aggressive and
take responsibility and do things, the Lord has to deal with them along one
line, in taking away all that in which their soul glories. On the other side, He has to challenge to do, challenge to accept
responsibility. He deals with us according to how He finds us. But the key to
the matter is whether we, in what we are by nature whatever that may
be, will really yield to the Cross; for the Cross is many-sided, and as
many-sided as there are temperaments amongst men.
The Cross is applied according to every man's make-up. What
would be the Cross to me would never be the Cross to you, and the Cross may
mean something different for every one of us. But it is universal. That is the
point - central and universal. It touches us all perhaps in a different way, and
it raises questions and issues for each one of us peculiarly. That is our
challenge of the Cross, and then it is a matter whether we, in what we
are, will come and allow the Cross to deal with us. It is no use our saying,
"What shall this man do?" The Lord will at once answer, "What is that to
thee? Follow thou Me". There is a personal, individual, shall I say, private
application of the Cross to every one of us, and our spiritual growth depends
entirely upon the Cross doing its work in us, and our response to it
personally.
There are a good many other matters which we could not
cover if we tried to. For instance, we do not know God's purpose for each
life. God's purpose touches each one in a different way. There is that
sovereign choice of God which has a place for each one of us, a peculiar work
for each of us to do. While it is related, a part of the whole, nevertheless
it is a facet of that great jewel, the City of God, and God has to have us
dealt with and responsive to Him in a particular way, in which someone else
has no place, and we, in the Cross, have particular dealings with the Lord
because of something which is peculiar to us in the Divine purpose.
So, you see, it is very necessary that we should recognize
that this cannot be taken as a kind of a general thing. It has to become
peculiar to each one of us. Oh, beloved, do believe that this is not just
teaching, or doctrine. It is of very great importance. But I would beg
you
not to accept it merely because I am saying it and emphasizing it, nor even
because I tell you that so far as some of us are concerned, it is a proved
thing. I would ask you for one thing only, namely, not to close your heart to
it, not to say, That is a teaching! but just to ask the Lord, "Is this right?", taking an attitude simply and honestly before the Lord, even should you
feel it is not true, and so leaving room for the possibility that the
prejudice may, after all, spring from yourself, from something in your
constitution or in your upbringing. Will you go to the Lord with this and say, "Lord
I do not see, it is difficult for me to believe it; but, if it is true, then,
Lord, I am open to the truth, and I want You to take me definitely in hand on the ground
of the truth". There is not one of us, I am sure, who wants to stand in the
presence of the Lord later on, and for the Lord to say, "My child, I would
have led you into something very much fuller if only you had given
Me the chance". Will you take a very honest and open-hearted attitude
toward the Lord in the matter?
That is the negative side. Of course, the things included in that are
legion. But it does mean this on all matters, that you and I have no
prejudices, no pre-conceptions, that we have not reached a position on any
point where we have come to finality. It means that we may yet have to change
our entire position on some matters. Things about which we are most certainty
convinced may have to go yet. We must recognize God's sovereign dealings with
us. There are some of us who at one time in our lives believed with all our
being that a certain thing was God's will, and God's directive will at that,
and we have come at length by the deepest experience, and experience which
has issued in the greatest values, to have to say, "That was only God's
permissive will, and God never meant it as anything like His end." It was
only a step towards something else, and the thing involved was to us
tremendous. We would have staked our lives upon it. But we have had to change
our entire attitude to that, and put it in a secondary place in the will of
God, and see that God was dealing with us where He found us, and leading us
step by step, and each step called for adjustment and a change. Oh, the
purpose of God was the same all the way through, but His methods with us had
to vary, and He has very graciously, in His sovereignty, used these imperfect
stages and steps to teach us much. I think we should say today that
our position now is so much the stronger because it represents such a change.
Oh, beloved, we have to keep that Cross where it preserves an open way which
makes it yet possible for new things to happen, without our so clinging to our
position that God cannot do revolutionary things in us still. The Cross is
fundamental to all that God wants to do, and when the Lord is going to do a new
thing, the Cross is going to deal with some fresh obstruction. Well now, that
is on the negative side.
The positive side of this arises when you see the object of
the Cross in God's mind. Why the Cross, you ask. Well, negatively the Cross is
to get this incapacitated man out of the way; for, while he is so injured and
incapacitated, he is yet a very active and very energetic and very positive
factor. If only he were so crippled that he could do nothing, it would be an
easy matter. But it is not so. He is the most active, energetic cripple,
bothering everything and everybody. But he has to be got out of the way for
God's positive object.
(b) The Positive Aspect
What is God's positive side of the
Cross? It is that the Cross shall make room for a man who is capable, who has
all the capacities, capabilities and faculties for Divine things: and it is
just at that point that the whole meaning and value of the Holy Spirit comes
in. It is not possible for us to know the Holy Spirit until the Cross has
become a reality. You never, in type or in antitype, reach the anointing until
you have come to the slaying. Thus Paul says this strong word to the Galatians: Christ was made a curse for us. "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the
law, having become a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that
hangeth on a tree: that upon the Gentiles might come the blessing of Abraham
in Christ Jesus; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through
faith" (Gal. 3:13-14). Made a curse for us that we might receive the
promise of the Spirit. That is borne out in the New Testament in every
instance of receiving the Spirit.
The Cross and the Spirit
Take one instance, Acts 19:1-5.
Paul, having passed through certain regions, came to Ephesus, and found there
certain disciples and said unto them, "Did ye receive the Holy Spirit when
ye believed?" evidently perplexed because of an anomaly, because of
something which was abnormal or sub-normal, something freakish. Here were
people who were calling themselves Christians and disciples of the Lord Jesus,
and he did not discern there the marks of their having received the Spirit.
This, thought he, is strange, this is extraordinary, because if they are Christians in the real, genuine, true sense, they
cannot be without the Holy Spirit, they must have received the Holy
Spirit. But here is a little group of people gathering together as Christians,
and yet the tokens of their having received the Spirit are not there: and
perplexed, he said, "Did ye receive the Holy Spirit when ye believed?" You
know their reply, "We did not so much as hear whether the Holy Spirit was
given." Then in what Paul next says he goes right to the heart of things. "Into what then were ye baptized?" What has that to do with it?
They might
have answered: what is the relationship between receiving the Spirit and
being baptized? If baptism is a testimony to our death and burial and
resurrection in Christ, then that is the foundation of receiving the Spirit
and Paul had put his finger upon the whole situation. In reply to his
question, they had said they had been baptized into John's baptism. Ah! so
that is it. Well, he explained to them the difference between John's baptism
and being baptized into Christ and then they were baptized into the Name of
the Lord Jesus, and when Paul had laid his hands upon them they received the
Holy Spirit. The two things go together always - the Cross and the Spirit.
The Cross in its negative side is to get rid of that old
cursed creation which can never receive the Spirit. Remember that! Anything
which lies under a curse can never receive the Spirit of God, and you have to
get it out of the way. What will you do with a cursed thing? You will put it
to death and bury it. That which has no curse then comes into view and the
Spirit comes upon that.
The Nature of the New Creation - The Joining of the Holy Spirit with the
New-born Spirit of Man
The positive side of the Cross is the coming in of the
Holy Spirit to what is born again, the newborn spirit of a believer, and the
joining of the Spirit of God with the spirit of man sets forth a new type of
being such as never has been in the creation before. Oh, yes, in the
Old Testament there were comings upon and workings within by the Holy Spirit,
but the joining of the Spirit of God with the spirit of man had never taken
place before. That is what Adam missed and the race in Adam lost and could
never recover because of the curse. There is a new creation in Christ Jesus
and the new creation is the joining of the Holy Spirit with the born anew spirit of man.
Now you have the Holy Spirit in and upon the spirit of man
as the Spirit of life, and that Spirit of life means that in the inward man we
are alive unto God. We know what it means to be alive unto things, to be alive
unto God. It is something very active: alive in consciousness, alive in every
way unto God. It is something quite new, is this aliveness unto God. Oh, it is
a blessed thing! I know this is very elementary; but it is a very blessed
thing to be alive unto God, to know that you are alive unto God. You see, this
is altogether different from a traditional relationship with God, a doctrinal
relationship with God, the relationship of a system to God. This is our
personal, inward, blessed possession, to be alive unto God. Well, I think it
is unnecessary for me to labour that. I hope you know really what it is to be
alive unto God within, through the Spirit of life.
The Holy Spirit Brings New Faculties
But that life, that
Spirit of life, means that there has been brought by the Holy Spirit into our
spirit a new spiritual capacity, new spiritual faculties; that whereas in our
natural state we could not, because we were incapacitated, now we can know the
things of the Spirit of God. We can receive the things of the Spirit of God:
we can move, intelligently and understandingly, in a realm which was closed;
and the difference is very great indeed. But it is a very - I was going to
say - subtle difference. Let me illustrate. There was a time when we did great
things with our Bibles. We read Romans, and no one in all the world could have
known Romans 6, so far as the chapter and wording was concerned, better than
we did. And we read Ephesians and knew it; and we could preach on Romans 6
and on Ephesians, and give the most splendid interpretation and the most
wonderful Bible analysis on the blackboard. We could say that the Church is
not an organization but an organism. We could use all that phraseology. Yet
with regard to Romans 6, when we were baptized we had truly testified to the
fact that we were being buried with Christ, and the day came, beloved, when in
very truth we met our Passover, our feast of unleavened bread, our smiting by
the Cross of this natural life. We came, under the hand of God, to a very real
experience and crisis of the Cross, and went through this, not just as
sinners, but as Christians and
preachers, ministers and workers, organizers. Something happened, a desperate
and terrible thing happened. It was death indeed. But that was followed by a
new knowing of the Lord, a new working of the Spirit, a release of the Spirit,
a coming out into a life under the anointing, under an open heaven, and not
only we, but everybody else, recognized that Romans 6 was something other
than just teaching when we now spoke of it. What that "other" was it would
be difficult to define. Ephesians too was different. Again, what the
difference was, it would be very difficult to say. It was certainly not in the
language, certainly not in the letter, certainly not in the doctrine; but
there was meaning, there was power, something had happened. Before we could
still preach Romans 6 and contradict it, and in the same way we could preach
Ephesians and speak of the heavenly Church being an organism, and yet be in an
earthly thing, limited and bound. Something happened, and not only were we in
resurrection, but grave-clothes went.
I have only said that to reach this point. There is a
difference. You may have difficulty in defining it, but it is the difference
between death and life; it is the difference between our coming and taking up
the Word of God with our natural powers of penetration and interpretation and
analysis and presentation, and that revelation of the Holy Ghost in our hearts
which lifts us into a new position and gives us an open heaven. It is a
tremendous difference, and the Cross is the basis of that. The Holy Spirit
brings new faculties, new capacities. They are different, altogether
different. Before we were working in the things of God with our heads, now we
are in them with our spirits. New faculties and a new power, spiritual power by the Holy Spirit. This is the positive side of the Cross.
So we have to challenge ourselves over this with regard to where we are. If
this is not true, if this is only true in a very small degree, if ours is not
this inward path which is growing brighter and brighter unto the noonday, why
is it? Well, the responsibility cannot be placed at the Lord's door. There is
some reason for it and God's answer to every such inquiry is the Cross. That
Cross is intended to clear the ground for all that God has to give us, and
into which He would lead us. If we are not coming into it, what is the reason? We can only say that somewhere the Cross is not being suffered to do its work. There is a
need somewhere for the Cross to do something more.
Now, when I have said all this about the subjective
application of the Cross, the Cross as a power, the Cross as an instrument,
the Cross as a working thing in our experience, I must remind you that this
has nothing to do with our acceptance, with our standing, with our position.
That is assured to faith when we receive Christ. This is simply the outworking
of God's purpose in us. But it is an important side. You cannot divorce these
two. The divorcing of these two has resulted in a most deplorable state in
Christendom and the end of the story is going to be terribly tragic. For
many, the history of Israel is going to be repeated. They are going to die in
the wilderness; that is, they are never going to reach the land of fullness, because Jordan has not
been crossed. That does not mean that they are lost eternally; but they have
missed all that God intended; they have come short of the fullness of Christ.
There is a great deal of work that is going to be burnt up when it is tried by
fire, a great deal of Christian profession is going to resolve itself into
nothing. It is only what is really of the Spirit of the Lord, produced
in us and produced through us, that is going to stand and go through; and
that is determined by how much scope the Holy Spirit has; and the scope is
determined by how thoroughly the work of the Cross is done in clearing the
ground.
The Lord give us grace to receive His word and to be before Him very much
that He will have His fullest way in us.