"Thou Desirest Truth in the Inward Parts"
by
T. Austin-Sparks
Transcript of a message given in July 1958. The spoken form has been retained verbatim.
On Thursday evening last, we were occupied with Psalm 51 and the
Lord gave us a very precious word, and our brother was very greatly
helped. We shall not forget it. And I'm sure that he will not feel
that I am trying to improve on what he said when I bring you back to
that Psalm this morning for a few minutes. That is not my thought at
all, but before Thursday and since, an emphasis has been in me of
one part of the psalm and I feel that it is the Lord's message for
us. It is in verse 6. Psalm 51 verse 6:
"Behold, Thou desirest truth in the inward parts"
"Thou desirest truth. In the inward parts." I think that, in a very
real sense, that is the heart of the psalm. If we were able to
really recognise the meaning of those words, just exactly what they
do signify, we should see that everything in this psalm, and in the
wider context of this psalm in deep human experience with God,
everything is centred there and it is the key to everything. We can,
I am sure, say that this psalm touches the deepest depths that ever
man could touch in the need of God and the mercy of God.
In Psalm 1 we have the blessedness of the man who has not walked in
sin, and the counsel of the ungodly, and so on. Well, his is a
blessedness indeed. In Psalm 32 we have the blessedness of the man
whose sin is covered, whose iniquity is pardoned, whose sin is
covered; and I take it that that is the provision which is made in
sacrifice in blood and priesthood for the man who sins. Well, it's a
blessing to find that provision on hand, but here in this psalm, we
are altogether outside of any of the ordinary provisions. Perhaps
you have not recognised this: that David's sin, which was behind
this psalm, was altogether outside of the provision of the law of
Moses. There was no provision in that whole sacrificial
system for this sin.
The sin of David was the sin unto death; it was blood guiltiness,
the sin unto death. The only thing that the law had to say for
sinning in this way, was death. And so we are altogether outside of
the provision of the law here; vast, comprehensive, and detailed as
that provision was, it made no provision. God has got to make some
special provision here. And we were reminded on Thursday that it is
in that special provision of the sacrifice of His Son - something
far bigger than any Jewish sacrifice, or altar, or priesthood,
something reaching deeper down than anything than ever was known in
Israel - it is in that that we find David saved from death. He knew
the death of this thing. He cried, as you know here, that he might
be delivered from blood-guiltiness. Well, this is the deepest point
to which we can come, any man can come.
There are different degrees of God's dealing with the soul. He deals
with us upon one level, in a certain way, and then we go into a
deeper death and He's got to deal with us in another and deeper way
and still we go deeper... And He has got to make a provision and
deal with us in a still deeper way. I'm not saying that it is in the
ordering and will of God that we go right down to these deaths, but
here is a wonderful thing: God is going to touch bottom in this
matter of man's sin and man's need and His own grace - He'll touch
bottom! That is, He'll go to the deepest depths. And when David
says, "Thou desirest truth in the inward parts" he's going
beyond the law, which was all outward; no mere formalism about this,
no mere Jewish ritual in this, no mere outward observance of the
rites and the ceremonies in this! No. This has got to go right into
the innermost being in the inward parts, in the inward
parts. And God works toward that.
God is ever working toward the most inward parts. Do you recognise
that? Do you understand what He's doing with us? Oh, He will meet us
in blessing on a certain level as we walk before Him like the man in
Psalm 1, He will meet us with His gracious provision when we
transgress and trespass and fail and do wrong. He will meet us there
in grace, but God is going to pursue this matter to the most inward
place of our being and register there His work of grace and
redemption. "Thou desirest..." and David did not come to that until
he reached de profundis, the deepest place of need, of
failure, of conscious weakness and worthlessness. Then he cried,
"It's not enough to just please God in ordinary ways, it is not
enough to observe the ritual of the law and go to the ceremonies and
carry out all that which is external, God is after truth in the inward
parts...," right down into the depths of our being. Why? Why?
Because truth is a major feature and constituent of the Divine
nature.
God is called the God of Truth - the God of Truth. Jesus
Christ, the second person of the Godhead, called Himself the Truth,
"I am the Truth..." "For this purpose came I into the world that I
might bear witness of the truth"! The Holy Spirit is
described as the Spirit of Truth, "When He, the Spirit of Truth is
come..." The Godhead - Father, Son and Holy Spirit - are
characterised by this one feature: Truth! And God desires and has
set His heart upon having people who are partakers of the Divine
Nature. And so, He is working ever more deeply toward this end,
that what is true of Himself, shall be true of His children - those
begotten of Him - that they should be true sons of God in
this sense.
Satan is described as the liar and the father of lies. For that
reason, all untruth is an abomination to God. God has consigned
all liars to the lake of fire. He has excluded from the New
Jerusalem "everything that maketh a lie". God hates everything
that is not true, not true... and true right through and through
like Himself. He hates it, He must have, He desires truth in the inward
parts.
The interference of Satan with God's creation - with man -
resulted in man becoming something false where God is concerned:
he is a misrepresentation of God's mind; and he is
a deceived creature. "The god of this age", says Paul, "hath
blinded the mind of the unbelieving". Man is a deceived, blinded
creature... "Thou desirest truth in the inward parts".
Now you see how large a matter this is, and one is hard-pressed
to know what to say, and what not to say about it. But let us
dwell for a moment upon this clause: "the inward parts".
The Inward Parts
You will detect in this Psalm that that is running right through,
you know. Here it is, "in the inward parts", "create in me a clean
heart... renew a right spirit within me... a
broken spirit and a contrite heart Thou wilt not
despise". You see, it's all this innermost realm of things that
has now arisen as the real need. The real need. No more
deception, no more falsehood, no more mockery, no more
make-believe, no more going on as though it was all right but it
is not all right; no more using external means to cover over
inward foulness; no more going to meetings, and saying prayers,
and joining in the whole system, when the inward parts
are not right before God. The inward parts... Seeing then that we
are what we are by nature now, this represents a re-constituting
of us. A reconstituting of us! Anything that does not minister to
that is false in itself. Any system of religion that just puts on
from the outside, and covers over the inner life by mere rite and
ritual is false; it is not true.
The work of God is to reconstitute human nature.
And that, of course, involves two things. On the one side, it
involves a breaking down, a breaking down. And if you know
anything about God's dealings with lives which come into His
hands, there is undoubtedly a large place for that - a progressive
breaking down, breaking down... getting to the root of things, and
undeceiving us. If we have got any illusions about ourselves, they
will all be gone when God has done with us. If we are governed by
any kind of falsehood or lie about ourselves, and our position,
and our work, when God has done with us, that will all be gone.
He's going to break us down until we see ourselves stark, as an
unclean thing, with all our righteousnesses as filthy rags. So He
will break us down, and He does. But there is the other side, of
course, all the time, for God is not only, and always, negative;
there is the constructing, bringing us to the place where anything
that is false, anything that is not absolutely transparent and
true, straight, clear, is hateful to us.
More and more our inner man revolts against our own falsehood!
Any exaggeration comes back on us at once with conviction of
wrong; any false statement hits us hard, and we know that we have
not spoken the truth. Oh, it is a tremendous thing to get into the
hands of the Holy Spirit! This reconstituting of our entire nature
until, like God, the one thing, the one thing that we hate is
anything that is false. "I hate", said David, "every false way". I
hate every false way. We must come there, but we must be great
lovers of the truth. This is going to pursue us everywhere; it
will pursue us into our own life within ourselves, that we are not
deceiving ourselves at all. We're not deceiving ourselves, before
God we know exactly what God thinks about us, and we know where we
stand in the light.
It will pursue us into our social life, and all our social lies
and make-beliefs will have to come under the light of God. Oh,
what a tremendous amount of falsehood, make-believe, there is in
the social realm. Yes, our economy is built up very largely, our
social economy is built up on lies. What about all the make-up?
Isn't it to make out that you are something that you're not, to
give a semblance of something that is not true? You see, the whole
social life is like that; it is a fabric of untruths, and we have
many ways of just saying things that really are not true. The
"friendly lie".
It will pursue us into our business; the lie that gets us a good
sale or a good buy - the commercial lie. And so, through and
through, God will pursue this matter of truth. Forgive me dear
friends, but it's a very, very important thing with God. If God
does hate what is untrue, and desires truth in the inward parts,
how can He bless where there is anything that is false, of any
kind at all? His eyes see.
Well, He's got to reconstitute us, and that's what the Spirit of
Truth does. And this is a time work - indeed, it is a lifelong
work, a lifelong work. This thing comes more to light, becomes
more intense, the further on we go. The Lord lets you off with a
lot of things as spiritual infants, as we do our children. We know
that they are children, and we don't take too much notice of
certain things which we know are not quite right or not at all
right. And God is very patient and very tender to bring us on, to
bring us on. It wouldn't do for Him to come right in with all the
fulness of the exactness of His nature too soon - He spreads it
over the whole lifetime. And the nearer we come to the Lord, and
the closer we walk with Him, the more meticulous the Holy Spirit
is over this matter of truth - the closer are His dealings with
us. It's very true, you see, perfecting truth in the fear
of the Lord - perfecting! The nearer we get to the end,
perhaps the more stringent will be the Lord's dealings with
anything false in our lives. It's a time matter, but God is very
faithful - He is very faithful; He doesn't let things pass. Do we
want Him to be faithful? Well, it's not comfortable to say, "Yes,"
but it is good that He should be faithful with every
inconsistency, every contradiction, every falsehood, in the inward
parts.
That carries the matter deeper than our own natural, moral life.
I'm not talking about morals now. It's right to be honest; it's
right to have integrity; it's right to be straight; it's right to
be true, naturally, humanly; but I'm not talking about that. This
thing goes deeper than what we call "common honesty", it's deeper
than our natural moral life at its best, for the simple reason
that, by nature, we have not got God's conceptions and God's
standards. God's thoughts about things are very different from
ours. We would often allow what God would never allow! He has a
different point of view about things altogether. We judge in one
way and God judges in another. It is necessary for us to come to God's
standpoint about things. Oh, we would say, "There's no harm
in that..." but what does the Lord say about it? "Oh, there's no
wrong in that; look at so-and-so and so-and-so," and take our
standard, perhaps, from other people? We have known people to do
that; point to some outstanding figure in the work of God, in
whose life was a certain thing and that one has been taken as the
model, to be copied, and that thing, "Oh, there's no harm in it;
look at so-and-so." And I have known lives and ministries to be
ruined on that very principle. No, no, God says, "Walk before Me!
Not before any human model; not before any human standard, don't
reason like that, 'There is no harm in it; so-and-so does it; it
is quite a common practice'. No, no! Walk before Me". We have got
to get this in the spirit, in the spirit; the inward man.
It's deeper than our best moral standards. Otherwise there's no
point of it being in the Bible at all, if our moral standards can
rise to God's satisfaction - why must we be so handled and
reconstituted? It's deeper than our intellect, than our reason.
You cannot, by reason or intellect, arrive at God's standard at
all. Not at all! Oh, don't think that ever by any method of
reasoning, you are going to reach God's standard. You never will.
Here it is only by revelation of the Holy Spirit. Christ has got
to be revealed in our hearts by the Spirit. There is no
point in Jesus saying: "When He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He
shall guide you into all the truth", if we could get there
by our own intelligence! Not at all. It must come by the Spirit's
revelation of Christ in our hearts, in the inward parts.
This is something spiritual. "God is Spirit; they that worship Him
must worship Him in spirit and in truth" - spirit and
truth go together. Only what is spiritual, what is of God, is truth
- only that!
The Apostle Paul had a great intellect, as everybody knows, and
he had a very high standard of moral life, and he was an utterly
deceived man before his conversion. "I verily thought that I
ought...." 'It was a matter of conscience with me to do many
things contrary....' He was conscientious. He could say, as
concerning the righteousness which is of the Law: blameless!
There's a moral standard! There's an intellectual standard,
there's a conscientious standard! But all wrong, all wrong...
mistaken, deceived. No, that's not the way. It's only by the work
of the Holy Spirit Himself in us, changing us, completely
changing us. It may be that common honesty, sincerity will be a
way along which God can come. I am quite sure, that if we are not
going to be honest and straight with God, He is not going to meet
us, but that will not get us there. He may require the gangway
across which to pass to us, of meaning business with Him, and
being thoroughly honest with Him. But let us not think that any
sincerity of ours will bring us to be partakers of the Divine
nature - not at all! "Thou desirest truth in the inward parts",
in the inward parts, the deepest realm of our being - in our
spirit.
Well, I think that's all that I dare take time to say on this
matter this morning, but we ought to leave it at the point where we
do recognise that God has provided for this in sending the Holy
Spirit: "When He, the Spirit of Truth is come..." It's all a matter
of the Holy Spirit as Lord within us, having His place as absolute
Lord over intellect, over our own moral pride, conceit, and
satisfaction. Oh, let me come back to where I started: The Holy
Spirit will take this thing right down, thank God. Thank God! Oh,
what are you hoping in? Are you hoping in something in yourself -
the man of Psalm 1? Or are you hoping in the law and the ritual
and the ceremonies and the sacrifices - the man in Psalm 32? And
yes, you get God's mercy and grace there if you can satisfy Him on
either of those grounds at all - there's a blessing. But, God is
not going to stop there. And thank God He doesn't.
Do I say too terrible a thing when I say that God will bring us
to the place of complete despair on all other grounds than His
mercy in order that He might reach His end, reach His end, which
is His own satisfaction in us - that "no flesh should glory in His
presence". "He that glorieth shall glory in the Lord." So
our Psalm is of mercy and of grace, boundless beyond...
beyond anything that ever has been provided for in the old
economy. It is provided for in Jesus Christ.
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