I am continuing for a
little while our previous meditation. We were thinking of
the uniqueness of the Son of Man, and seeking to see how
Christ is the Divine meaning to and of a new race, a new
creation; how in the new creation it is God's intention
and undertaking to reconstitute everything according to
Christ. We were especially emphasising the fact that He
stands alone; there is not another, there never has been
another, Son of Man in His particular sense, and that in
itself indicates what God is doing. There has come out
from heaven, from God, one Who is different from all
others, and in the very difference itself there is
implied the mind and the intention of God, inasmuch as
that One has been so vitally related to the race. We were
seeing how that, on the one hand, there was such a
feeling that He was one with all shades, aspects and
phases of the race, He fitted in - with men, women, and
children: with rich and poor: with learned and unlearned.
There was never a strain, an embarrassment, a sense that
He was an outsider, in any one instance. He fitted in
with different nationalities. On the other hand, while
everybody felt His kinship with them, they also felt just
as strongly how outside He was, how different. That is
unique. To be so utterly other and outside and different,
and not of this race in a very real sense, and yet to fit
in without any friction or strain, where things are open
and unforced, that is not natural. The only strain that
ever arose was in the realm of prejudice and bigotry and
determination not to have Him, or of willful sin,
deliberate unbelief, the closed heart. Given the ordinary
life, however varied, there was a marvellous kinship,
sympathy, understanding, fellowship - and yet He was One
from the outside, and One still of the outside. To
reconcile those two things is the miracle of the
incarnation, it is the mystery of Christ - and that is my
next point.
In the World, but not of the World
If we are going to be
conformed to His image, reconstituted inwardly on the
basis of Christ, as we are to be, we are going to find
this is the most difficult thing, and yet the thing that
has to be. Paul in one place touches on this very thing
about people becoming so exclusive in their Christianity
on the matter of externals, and he says, Well, if we are
going to follow that line, we might as well go right out
of the world altogether, we cannot stay here (1
Cor. 5:9-10). How can we be in the world and not of it, and
yet possess an abiding sympathy so that we do not
unnecessarily alienate people, and do not put ourselves
in some exclusive position, all the time frowning on
people and things and making them feel that we think
ourselves different and better by what we do and the way
we proceed? How difficult it is to contemplate this - to
be here, to touch human life at all points in all its
phases and aspects, and to touch it with sympathy and
understanding and kindness and solicitude, and not always
the spirit of condemnation and detachment; and yet at the
same time to register the fact unconsciously - oh, God
grant that it may be unconsciously! - that we are
different, we are not of it. I believe that a very great
deal of harm has been done by Christians getting a wrong
conception of their heavenliness. They have taken their
heavenliness in a wrong way. If you walk in close touch
with Christ, the heavenliness will register itself, you
need not worry about it. People have been alienated, and
even made antagonistic, by Christians who are all the
time frowning on them, giving the impression that they
are all wrong. I look again at the Master's life on earth
with this thought in mind. He comes into a situation
which is wrong; He does not condone it, nor smile upon
it, nor accept it, His whole nature is right outside of
it; and yet His touch with the persons involved is one
that does not necessarily alienate them, nor drive them
away, nor provoke them, irritate them, stir them to
antagonism. He comes into the situation and the effect is
either that they yield to His influence and He is able to
lift them out of the wrong, or they revolt positively and
turn away. I could cite instances. I am asking you to
look at the life of the Master with this spiritual
thought in view.
Consider the woman
taken in sin. Do you think He accepted that, or was
sympathetic to it, or could condone it? Do you not think
that there was a revulsion in Him against the thing? He
could not have any fellowship with it. He might well have
come to this woman with a frown and caused her to cringe,
to shrink, to break out in despair. He is outside of it,
you know what His nature is, but oh! He is able to come
near and touch her in such a way that she is not
alienated nor driven off, she is lifted and helped. Now
that is a simple incident, but I say it is a most
difficult thing to do in a world like this, and only
Christ in us can enable us to do it; but it is something
we have to look at.
What is the object of
Christian teaching? It is to present us with things like
this and make us face them in prayer. The teaching cannot
do it, but we can take it to the Lord. We can say, Lord,
here I am in this world and I have to touch things
against which my soul revolts, all that is of Thee in me
hates it, and I could very easily make these people feel
what I feel about it, and in so doing, I could drive them
away from Thee. But they have to be won, they have to
feel a lift by my presence rather than a crushing. Oh,
solve that problem! Really, a life in true harmony with
the Lord Jesus will be like that. "As he is, even so
are we in this world" (1 John 4:17). Can you meet
people of this world, whose life, manner, course and
system simply revolt your soul, and make them feel
something better by your presence - that you are not of
their way and they know it - and yet not alienate them
from the Lord? I say it is one of the difficult things
for us here. But I am quite sure that that is the meaning
of knowing Christ not after the flesh but after the
Spirit. That is one of the meanings of the new creation.
We have known so many well-meaning Christians who have
simply gone through the world making enemies, alienating
people, making them hate Christianity. That is not
Christ.
Now, the difficulty is
how to do that while standing clear - without yielding,
without compromise; but there is a grace of God that can
do it. The Lord Jesus did it, and if there is any meaning
at all in our having the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of
Jesus, the meaning is practical - we can do it too. His
closeness of touch, sympathy, understanding, forbearance,
gentleness, longsuffering, mercifulness, and yet His
complete "otherness" of nature - that is Christ
after the Spirit.
A
Perfectly Balanced Life
Then I want you to note
another thing about Him which has so much to do with this
inward adjustment of a Spirit-governed life - it has to
do with the wonderful balance in the life of the Lord.
How poised He was, how balanced! Take the matter of mind,
heart and will, and you find in His case those three were
perfectly balanced. We are very different naturally. I
suppose people as a whole can be divided up into three
classes - firstly, those who are more in the realm of
their head than anywhere else. They are all head in one
way or another. If they are not intellectual, they are of
another kind of mentality - introspective, analysing,
going round things in the mind, all thinking, all
puzzling, all reasoning, all working in that realm: that
is the chief characteristic. You can see it almost in
their faces. It is this trying to get through with the
head that more or less characterises people of a certain
class. Then you have another class - all heart, all
feeling, all emotion. They simply live in their feelings
- perhaps different forms, but still feelings. They are
governed by their feelings, and just how things affect
them in the realm of their emotional life. They are
either up or they are down - you can never be sure, but
you do know that, whether they are up or down, it is
their feelings that are ruling. If only they would think
a little more and not move so much on impulse, they would
be more balanced. The third class - people governed by
will, people of a drive, forceful, assertive. The will is
unreasoning sometimes. They do not stop to think. They
get a drive on, but do not think of the damage they are
doing to themselves or other people. Their will overrides
feeling - very good sometimes to do that, but to be all
will, all of that kind of strength, determination, grip
and force, oh, it is overbearing, and does a lot of harm.
People are more or less
divided into those classes naturally, but you cannot find
anything like that with the Lord Jesus on earth. You can
find will coming in at times very strongly, and sometimes
heart and sometimes mind. Yes, mind could come in, and
who could stand up against Him in that realm? Some of His
answers silenced, paralysed, those who were cleverest.
Look at some of the answers He gives, some of the ways He
deals with a problem. They think they have Him this time,
there is no way out. A simple statement, and the whole
thing collapses; they have not got Him at all! But the
point is this - while these things are there, they are
balanced; there is never strength of will to the hurt of
sensibility; there is never strength of emotion to the
damage of rightful severity. He does not allow His heart
to run away with His sense of judgment. He is perfectly
balanced; and that is one of our needs. But that is why
the Holy Spirit has come, and this is one of the things
that has to take place in a Holy Spirit ruled life. It
has to become a balanced life, to be saved from being
lopsided. Anything over-weighted makes going very uneven.
Draw a figure of a circle, and divide it into three
segments - "mind", "heart",
"will." Then get a bump on "will" a
little bigger than heart or mind, and make your circle
into a wheel, and see how evenly you go along! - the
unevenness of an unbalanced life. It makes going
difficult, hard and uncomfortable.
Take the even poise of
our Lord's walk here on earth. Now, what we all need is
that the Spirit of Christ should come in and bring about
an adjustment to Him, reconstitute us so that we go along
more evenly - not one day on the heights, the next day in
the depths, variable, changeable, because our soul-life
is so unbalanced. We have a long way to go in this, but
conformity to His image means that, amongst many other
things - the bringing of a poise into life, and saving us
from these terrible effects of straining, of living in
one realm of our souls more than another. We do need
that. We sometimes sing "And let our ordered lives
confess the beauty of Thy peace." I tell you, I
covet that - that ordered life inwardly.
But then not only were
the three things in Him balanced as three things, there
was a perfect balance in each one of them. There was the
perfect balance of His mind, the balance of His will, the
balance of His heart, in this way - you can have a mind
that is a very righteous mind, and be a person who is
very just and right and proper, very accurate, very alive
to anything that is a little doubtful. These very
righteous people are exceedingly trying to get on with,
and they make for great difficulty. You may be a very
righteous person in your standards, and require to have
things perfectly right - well, that is good in a way, but
supposing your righteousness of mind is destroying
tenderness and sympathy of judgment? I think George Eliot
went to the other extreme, but there is a lot in what she
said "To understand all is to forgive all." If
only we really did know more than we know, our judgments
would be less severe. We should see the necessity for
reconsidering our verdicts, and be a great deal more
sympathetic in our attitude of righteousness. The Lord
was like that. You could not have anybody whose standard
of righteousness was higher than His, or as high. His
standard was an inflexible standard of righteousness: you
can trace that in the Gospels; and yet His righteousness
was never destructive of, or injurious to, His
understanding, His sympathy, His kindness. A thing may be
wrong, but there are two ways of bringing home the wrong
and standing for the right. One is the destructive, the
hurtful; the other, while it is not a variation by a
hairsbreadth from the right course, is nevertheless full
of understanding and sympathy and insight. With us, it
may only amount to believing that there is an explanation
that we do not see, a reason that is not apparent to us,
another side to the story. (There are almost always two
sides to a story. You very, very rarely come upon a
matter that has not got two sides to it.) The Lord Jesus
lived there, He had His standard, but it was not
injurious to kindness and sympathy. We need that Spirit
of Christ, we need that reconstituting.
I am not going to
follow this in detail into each realm. You can see that
His strength of will never rode rough-shod over human
susceptibilities or did damage to men's hearts. His
strength of will only blazed out in full force when there
was the most obvious and manifest involving of the
highest principles, when He had really to withstand the
thing which was a positive affront to God. Then He will
have a whip and knotted cords, and you meet something
that does not compromise. But at other times, you can
feel the strength of His will, but you can feel that
strength coming through in understanding. I venture to
say that His relationship with those disciples would not
have lasted three days but for this. Look at the story,
and see how He bore and forbore, and went right through
to the end, and did not alienate one (save that one who
was already alienated from the beginning, who never
really was one with Him) but He kept those whom the
Father had given Him. "Those that thou gavest me I
have kept, and none of them is lost, but the son of
perdition" (John 17:12). But what a triumph of a
balanced life! It is what in the later New Testament is
called self-control, sometimes called temperance. It is a
poor translation into our English; but it means that, He
was able to preserve others in the way because of this.
The
Need for Subjection to Christ's Headship
I want to pass on to
the larger application of this. This is why the Word of
God so often emphasises that everything in the Church
must be according to Christ. He personally is the new
Man; the Church His Body is the one new man. Now here in
the Church, the Holy Spirit wants to constitute
corporately according to Christ, and if the old man comes
into the Church with his state of unbalance, and some
people or individuals in the Church move along one line,
and others along another line, of natural life - mind,
heart or will, any particular old creation line - they
destroy the Church, that is, they nullify its very
conception. In the Church all is to speak of Christ, and
therefore in the Church what Christ is has steadily to
grow and take ascendancy over all else: and that is why
there must be in the Church utter subjection to Christ's
Headship. We have such mental pictures about words like
that - Christ, the Head of the Body. Do you not see that
the Headship of Christ is a spiritual thing? Of course,
we are perhaps not thinking that it is a physical thing,
but somehow we do get an idea that it is an official
thing. It is not physical and it is not official; it is
spiritual. That means that Headship is in virtue of
certain spiritual properties, a spiritual nature; and
when we talk about becoming subject to Christ, and coming
under the Headship of Christ, we are only speaking
figuratively of being subjected to what Christ is - that
He really does come on like the head and stands over, and
everything is adjusted to Him and takes its nature from
Him; just as our bodies take their direction from our
heads, if we are normal people. Just as we live from our
heads, and our character and nature and actions and
speech are all controlled by the head, so the nature of
the Church is taken from the nature of Christ; and what
the Lord is seeking to get is a Church which does express
what Christ is - this balance. Yes, His strength, but
also His love; His truth and light, yes, but equally His
life. Oh, we can have such a preponderance of light and
truth - all head - and little heart. I have known, on the
other hand, companies where all is heart, the people
falling on one another's necks, with effusive terms of
so-called love, and yet they are not growing, not coming
to a place of responsibility. It sounds and looks like
love, but underneath there is something lacking. They
need instruction, they need edifying. When the Body is
fitly framed and compacted, balanced, brought into proper
articulation and harmony, taking its nature and its
character from Christ and therefore governed by what He
is as the new creation Man, then you are getting what God
is after; and you can have that in a local company and in
local companies, which thereby become, not places that
stand for some extraordinary truth, something different
from all other teachings, and all the time trying to get
hold of something that is extraordinary and remote from
common recognition - no, you simply get there an
embodiment and an expression of Christ, and that is all
that God wants, and all we ought to want. People meeting
us as companies as well as individuals will be meeting
something that touches them. They will say, If only there
were more of this, the world would be a different place,
and yet this is something so outside the realm of human
possibility that only God could do this; this is God! It
requires Almighty God, and yet here it is, it touches us,
we see that this is what is needed! Oh, the tragedy in
this connexion in these days! You hear it on the wireless
almost any day; you find the literature of our day just
crowded with it - the recognition of the fact that if
only things were on the line of Christ, if only Christ's
teaching were put into practice, if only Christ, and what
He was, really were here and expressed, how different the
world would be! There is plenty of recognition and
acknowledgment of that; but on the other side, men at
once begin to say, Well, let us get busy on this, we will
do this and that to bring it about. They do not recognise
that this is a miracle from heaven, and that it has to
come in by a birth, a reconstituting, a new creation
fiat. That is where the gap is, and the tragedy, and men
fall between the two. But we know better; there He is,
and there His Spirit is to do it. It seems to take a long
time. A little bit of conformity to His image seems to
occupy almost a lifetime. But nevertheless He is doing
something, it does make a difference to have Christ;
there are many changes because Christ has come in - we do
know that. There are going to be greater changes yet.
After all, whatever we may say about the poverty of
things in the Church, the world would be a poor place if
the people of God were taken out of it; and it will be,
when they have gone. There is something here that is not
of the world, and the world needs it. The Lord help us to
see Christ and get continually to Him for this conformity
to His image, this taking of the Spirit of Christ, this
inward reconstituting after the Son of Man, a new
creation in Christ Jesus.