Reading: Matthew
27:38-50,54; 1 Corinthians 1:24; 1 Corinthians 2:2.
“But unto them that are
called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the
wisdom of God.”
“For I determined not to
know anything among you, save Jesus Christ and Him crucified.”
If I were asked, beloved, what, so far as I am concerned in the Lord speaking to me, is the theme of this conference, I should say that those two passages represent it. One, "Christ the power of God," the other immediately linked with it, and largely the explanation of it, "Jesus Christ and Him crucified."
This morning we shall be occupied, I think, for a little while mainly with opening the way to a consideration of Him thus, "Christ the power of God," "Jesus Christ and Him crucified."
Two Kinds
of Christians
There are two kinds of Christian
life which seem to me to very largely divide the Lord’s
people into two kinds of Christians. One, perhaps the more
common, is that of an almost continuous struggle to live up to
something which has been objectively presented, objectively seen.
It is Christianity as a system, as a kind of life, as composed of
a great many rules, laws and regulations; things
which ought to be, and ought not to be: something as apart from
the individual, called The Christian Life, and the individual has
seen that, had that presented and in a way apprehended it,
and then from that time there has commenced and developed a great
effort, endeavour, struggle to live up to it; to carry it out
objectively. It is Christian endeavour - it is a striving, a
putting forth of effort to attain unto a conceived level of life
which would be the Christian life. Very largely it is a matter of
conscience; very largely, therefore, it is a matter of fear, and
therefore it is not always a matter of joy. It is a strenuous
business, fraught with much disappointment and much failure. It
is rather an existence than a life, characterised by up and down
experiences. There may be from time to time a sense of having
succeeded, and feeling very pleased and very happy, very joyful,
very glad, but then by all the strange changes of our soul-life
we do not always feel just like that, feelings change, conditions
change, there are failures, there are collapses, there are
mistakes, and we come down, and come down badly. Then a fresh
effort has to be put forth to get up and to go on a bit more.
And so that kind of Christian life is a
somewhat burdensome one; and we find so many of the Lord’s
children in that realm, just longing to know something about real
victory, something about real overcoming, something about the
abiding joy of the Lord, deliverance from the strenuousness of
being Christians. Do you understand what I mean? It is the
experience of a very great many. The struggle life, the up and
down life, and for the most part, the sense that this Christian
life which is presented in the New Testament is something
different from that which is experienced by these children of
God, and either they have misapprehended the whole thing, or else
the thing does not really work. And the enemy is never slow to
pounce in upon such and harass them and tell them Christianity is
not a success, the Christian life is not what it is presented to
be. Well, that is one kind; we are
all too familiar with it. It is the Christian life which is
according to something objectively presented and accepted. But
there is another kind and that is, the entering into something
already completed in Christ. Not something to be attained unto,
but something already accomplished; not something at all to be
lived up to, but Someone to be lived with. The vast difference
between those two things in the outworking can hardly be
measured. It is “Christ, the power of God”. Now when we
have said that, we have opened the way to see just what the Lord
Jesus is, and we can never get outside of that and we never want
to. But it is very important that we should see exactly what that
means.
The Peril
in “Advanced Teaching”
Now there is no such thing as
teaching which is an advanced system as such. Teaching is not
departmental or sectional. What I mean is this. You hear of
people talking about truth which has to do with the “more
advanced stages of Christian life,” as though it were
something in a water-tight compartment by itself, sectionalised, and, well,
you can accept it or you can leave it; “that line of things,”
that particular teaching, regarded as something extra, something
different, something that is more than the normal Christian life,
something by itself, and you take it or you reject it, and it does
not matter very much. If you are going to live the “higher
life” then you must have the “higher teaching,” but if
you are not going in for that sort of thing well you must remain,
as you say, “simple Christians” and believers and abide
by the simplicities of the Gospel of Christ, and it does not matter
very much, it is just a matter of your interest in teaching and
in truth. Now I want very emphatically, as the Lord enables, to undermine and undercut
all such notions, because there is no such thing as “advanced
teaching” as a separate system. There is no such thing! It does not matter with what
you deal in the New Testament, you will never find it as a thing
by itself, departmentalised, sectionalised, in a water-tight
compartment, to be taken or left at your own will. Never! Never can you
come to the New Testament in that way!
We have spoken much of the
“Overcomer” for instance. The Overcomer of the book of
the Revelation and the Overcomer company coming at length to the
throne. Now it is quite easy to begin to take that as advanced
teaching, as something which is for certain people and not for
others. That is for some who care to go in for it; that need not be for
all, and it is quite optional after all whether you do go in for it.
Now what is the Overcomer individually, and collectively? The
Overcomer of the Book of the Revelation is only the ripe and full
product of the work of Christ in His cross; it is only Christ in
His fuller manifestation and expression. The Overcomer is still a
matter of Christ the power of God. Just exactly as in salvation
at its commencement, so in full triumph at its consummation. The
most advanced point is vitally connected with the most elementary
point. We are constantly brought back from the ultimate to the
initial in the Word of God. You get to Revelation and you get to
the throne, and you get to the triumphant Overcomer company, but
even there you are immediately linked with the blood of the Lamb,
and the Lamb slain, and that is initial and fundamental, basic.
The two things, the end and the beginning are brought together,
they are not separated, and you cannot take “Overcomer”
teaching and departmentalise it and make a system of it and say
that it is an advanced teaching for certain believers. No,
beloved, it is the normal outcome of your initial faith in
Christ. It is to be what God intended Calvary to be for every
believer. It is simply the realisation of God’s thought in
forgiving us our sins right at the beginning. It is only the
development, the normal development according to God’s mind,
of the elementary things of our salvation, and there is a very
great peril in becoming taken up with, and fascinated by,
advanced teaching, as though it were something in itself. A very
great peril, for this reason, that very often that fascination
causes an overlooking of the steps of advance. It is something
out there, objectively, and people get into it with their heads
mentally and take it up and are fascinated by it, and are
always talking about it, but they have not advanced
progressively into it in experience and spiritual development, and there is a failure to recognise that you cannot get to anything only by
definite steps of spiritual advance, and those steps are always in
relation to the Cross of Christ, for there is not one step
forward in the spiritual life which is not first a step backward.
What I mean is this, that there
has to be some undoing before there can be some updoing; there
has got to be some application of the Cross in some fuller way
before we can go one step further; and all advance into the fuller
things is by reason of the Cross being progressively applied and
wrought to release us from that which holds us back; that in the
flesh which holds us back from that which is in the Spirit. So
then we cannot come to anything by a mental process, and there is
that peril of fascination with advanced things which overlooks
the steps of advance to the higher, or deeper things of the Lord.
That is the peril; and we can never reach the higher, or the
ultimate, unless the beginnings are properly wrought in us, and
in this sense we never do depart from the beginnings. It is a
point which has often been noted, but which we do well never to
forget, that when Israel went over the Jordan, (a type of the
Lord’s people coming through identification union with
Christ in death and burial and resurrection, and coming on to
Ephesian and Colossian ground, that is the heavenlies) the base
of all their operations from that moment was Gilgal, and they never
went out to battle, to an undertaking, to possess any fresh
territory, but what they came back to their base immediately
after, and moved back from their base again for the next bit of
conquest. Gilgal is the place of the Cross, the cutting away, the
circumcision of the flesh, and beloved, every bit of advance into new
spiritual territory, apprehension, inheritance, is on the ground
of coming back to a recognition of that fact; that is, we never
move from our base finally, that the beginnings of our faith, the
first ground, which is the Cross of our Lord Jesus, governs every
bit of progress. So, as we have just said, that when you get to the end, the
consummation, and the Overcomer company in the throne, and the
great cry from heaven, “Rejoice O heavens,” the end of
God realised in that company, it is still in relation to the
blood of the Lamb, still in relation to the Lamb slain, never
have you got away from that, not for an instant.
Not
“Teaching,” But a Person
Now then, that being true we
must recognise that everything is bound up with the Person and
must never be regarded as just truth. That is the thing. We must
never look at things as truth, doctrine, teaching as such.
Everything is bound up with the Person. It is Christ the power of
God. It is Jesus Christ and Him crucified. The Person, though in
the glory, though exalted to the right hand of the Majesty on
high, though having ascended far above all principality and
power, though now in the power of His mighty resurrection, the
Person is still Christ as crucified. And beloved, you and I will
advance spiritually just in the measure in which that is a
practical reality in our hearts, in our lives, every day that we
live. It is still a Person and the Person is still Christ
crucified, in all the virtue of that. That has yet to be more
fully explained, of course. The Person is Christ crucified, that
is, Christ in relation to His Cross. Now what is the Gospel then?
Well, Paul tells us what the Gospel was, and is, so far as he was
concerned. You look over the Galatian letter, chapter one, verse
eleven. “For I make known to you brethren as touching the
Gospel which was preached by me” - now you notice what
he is saying - “As touching the Gospel which was
preached by me, I make known to you brethren, that it is not
after man, for neither did I receive it from man, nor was I
taught it, but it came to me through revelation of Jesus Christ.” Go back over that again. “Brethren, the Gospel which was preached by me was by revelation of Jesus Christ," verse 15, “When it was the good
pleasure of God to reveal His Son in me that I might preach Him
among the Gentiles.” You see the two things, the one note.
“The Gospel which was preached by me was by revelation of
Jesus Christ.” “It was the good pleasure of God to
reveal His Son in me that I might preach Him.”
What is
the Gospel?
What is the Gospel? The Gospel
is Christ crucified, as revealed in the heart. The Gospel is not
only attesting objective facts, even the fact of Christ
crucified, but what constitutes the Gospel is, that that which
was true in the Lord Jesus, has been revealed by God in the
heart. We are not constituted Gospel preachers because we
have read somewhere that Christ was crucified, raised from the
dead and ascended, and all those historic facts, but because God
has revealed in us, not facts but a Person in relation to the
facts, and the facts in relation to the Person. There has come to
our hearts by revelation of the Spirit of God Jesus Christ and
Him crucified, and that has constituted us preachers, that has
constituted the Gospel. There is no Gospel apart from that. Now
you see how that brings us back to our initial position. It means
this, that a struggling to reach, to attain, unto something
conceived as Christianity, is a failure to see Christ, Christ has
not been seen, He has not been revealed. Immediately the Holy
Spirit reveals the Lord Jesus in us, we have come into the place
where the work is done, and what we are doing now is to live out
from a perfected position, instead of striving to reach a
perfected position.
Now that wants making a little clearer. What
happens is this. The Holy Spirit brings Christ in His completed
work into our hearts, and then proceeds to conform us to Him as
we co-operate and go on. Do we realise that if Christ is in us,
He is not an imperfect Christ? He is not only the Christ Who has
dealt with our sins. He has covered the whole ground of our
perfection in the work of His Cross. When the Lord Jesus wrought
His Calvary work, beloved, He not only dealt with the matter of
forgiveness or remission of sins, so that when we come to the
Cross that is all we get; the Lord Jesus went right on by His
Cross, right on to the perfection of redemption until He reached
the throne of the absolute Overcomer. He swept the whole ground,
everything and anything that ever believers will encounter in the
course of their Christian experience as an obstruction,
resistance, difficulty, as a temptation, as something intended
and calculated to hinder them reaching God’s end - He met it
all. There is no experience that can ever come to you or to me in
the course of our Christian life which creates difficulty in our
reaching God’s end, but what Christ has already
met that. In Him, the Person, from the remission of sins to the
absolute victory over the dragon and all his hosts, in Him, the
Person, the whole ground is covered, is finished, is completed.
It is not something we have to struggle on to, it is done. Now
the Holy Spirit brings that Christ into our hearts with all that
He contains in His Person by reason of His Cross, and then, being
brought into vital union with Christ indwelling the next thing is
the Holy Spirit proceeds, as we let Him, co-operate with Him, as
we consent and as we go on, He proceeds to conform us to the image of God’s
Son, Jesus Christ, and to bring us into the fulness of Christ.
So that overcoming is not something to be struggled unto, it is
something to be wrought in us as we consent to the work of the
Cross. You see the difference. Oh, such a difference! “Christ
in you the hope of glory,” and some people seem to think
that their struggle is the hope of glory. It works out as the
despair of glory. They have soon come to discover that there is
not much hope of glory left along that line! So then the
Christian life, according to God’s thought, is Christ having
His way in us and us going on in living fellowship with Him.
There are enough tests in that because it is there that Christ
and Him crucified is applied.
Now we are going to see what
that means perhaps during this conference time. Just let us mention it now in an initial way. Going on with the Lord is the application of Christ
crucified. It is the daily “bearing about the dying of the
Lord Jesus that the life also of Jesus may be manifest.” The
dying of the Lord Jesus; and one very important aspect of the
dying of the Lord Jesus was a dying to everything but the will of
God. He took up that dying at Jordan, when the tempter came and
tried to get Him to act in His own spiritual interests, in the
interests of His great life work, but to act out of harmony with the
will of God, and He died every time to everything but the will of
God. That is Christ crucified, beloved, and that is in the dying of the Lord
Jesus. There is enough room you see, in going on with the Lord
for testing, for trying, and that is what makes the thing so
real. It is progress by death. It is life out of death. It is
gain out of loss. But blessed be God - and we must keep our
eyes on this - that Christ is there with the whole fulness, as it
were, in His hand, and as we go on “of His fulness we
receive, grace upon grace”. So what we have first of all to
see, and I feel the Lord wants us to see at this time perhaps more than we have ever seen, with
spiritual eyes, not mental eyes, is the meaning of Christ's death. Please do not say, Oh we know
all about that, we have heard so much about that. You have not
heard more about it than I have, at least I do not think you
have, and yet if there is one thing that is more real to me today
than ever it is the conscious need of knowing more of the
meaning of the death of Christ. Oh, may the Lord open that to us
in these days. Just hints of what is in the death of Christ are
sufficient to make us, if they are living hints, desire to look into this thing afresh.
Beloved, there is something in the death of Christ that you and I have
never seen, and my heart is just reaching out to get that at
which the Lord has hinted, and I am praying that it may come through us livingly in this conference.
I do not know that I am going to say much more this morning. We can advance from that point as the Lord leads in other gatherings. But I would like to close on this positive note now. To remind you
that the Holy Spirit has been charged with, and has accepted the
full responsibility for all this. That is, His work is to reveal
Christ in us and to produce Christ in us. Now that, on the one
hand, is a blessed thing for our hearts. After we have received the Holy Spirit as One whose mission, Whose responsibility is to reveal and reproduce Christ in the believer, if that is not done, the
Holy Spirit’s work is not done. And the only reason why it
will not be done is found in our own attitude towards Christ. The
Holy Spirit will never fail in Himself because He cannot in
Himself do the thing for lack of resource, lack of power, lack of
ability, lack of patience and persistence, and all that is needed
to do this. He will never fail on His own side; if He fails the
cause of the failure will be with us, because we do not let Him,
we do not co-operate. But we may rest assured that if the Lord,
the Spirit, has His way He will make every one of us
(not a little select company, sitting in the throne) - Overcomers. That
is for you, simplest believer in the Lord Jesus, you who delight
and glory in the great initial fact that you are saved from sin
and hell and judgment. The Lord in that saving of you has bound
up His throne, if you will let Him work it out. Of course, while
this fact of the Holy Spirit’s mission and work is a great
and blessed thing to bank upon, it is a test also on the other
hand. It is a test as to whether the Holy Spirit is having His
way. It may be a test as to whether we have received the Holy
Spirit. At least it is a test for believers as to whether He is
having His way.
That is, are you living the up
and down life, the struggle life? There is something all wrong
with that. That is not the life of the Holy Spirit. That is not
the life of the indwelling reigning Lord Jesus. So we must
recognise this, that power in relation to the Holy Spirit is not
some thing to be sought, to be had as an abstract force. It is
related to the Person of Christ, especially in connection with
His Cross. When we speak about the Holy Spirit we usually get
ideas of power, and when we are talking about power we usually
think of the Holy Spirit, but so often in effect the thought of
the Holy Spirit is without the article, it is “Holy Spirit”
in a kind of power, element, force, some thing that
comes and takes you up and does extraordinary things and effects
certain issues, it is the working just of an element, a mighty
element. That is foreign to the New Testament. Power in
connection with the Holy Spirit is inseparably bound up with the
Person of Jesus Christ and Him crucified, and the Holy Spirit
working as power only does so by revealing Christ and Him
crucified. That has always been so, in New Testament times and
ever since. The power of the Holy Spirit was manifested in the
revelation of Jesus Christ and Him crucified, so that Christ was
the power of God, and Christ is the power of God. Now then beloved, what we need to see is
the need for the Holy Spirit to make each part of Christ
crucified real in us. And that must be daily. Each part - that is
how I put it to simplify it - there are many parts of Christ
crucified. There is the death of course, there is the
resurrection, there is the exaltation; and the Holy Spirit has
got to make the spiritual meaning of each one of these parts of
Christ crucified real in us, but we have to recognise the need
for the Holy Spirit to do it, and we have to come to the place where
we count on the Holy Spirit to do it, where we definitely have an
understanding with the Holy Spirit that now it is understood that You
make all the meaning of Christ’s death real in me, and all
that is implied and involved in His resurrection and
ascension, real in me.
And so now the way is open for
us to go forward to see something more of what is in the death of
Christ, in the resurrection of Christ, in the exaltation, in the
enthronement. But these are only different parts of the one
Person and one work, Christ and His Cross. Beloved, I want this
thing to be gathered up in one practical word that you can grasp,
and I want to say this as the closing sentence. That everything for a
life of fulness, of victory is bound up with the fact that this
Christ Who has accomplished and perfected all is in our hearts
and is having His full way and full sway in our hearts, and that is
very different from struggling to live the Christian life. It is
the Christian life being lived by Christ, through the Spirit, in
us as we obey, comply, co-operate, actively and not merely
passively.