We
today, as Christians, live in the full development of
that which Paul feared. It is very largely - though,
thank God, not wholly - present in Christianity today.
But it is very necessary to recognise that this is always
a persistent tendency in all Christian life. You and I
can fall into this peril as easily as anyone else:
indeed, to avoid it constitutes the greatest difficulty
that any Christian has, and certainly that any body of
Christians has - to avoid decline into a merely formal
system, merely outward order, into something organized
and institutional. All unconsciously, often
imperceptibly, we move away from the essential spiritual
nature of our life. I think you will recognise that this
is a warning that has a place today, as protective and as
recovering.
Let us
now, through these letters to Timothy, widen our horizon
a little, and be led out into the larger realm of this
matter. We shall find ourselves moving in a very large
sphere in this particular connection. These letters will
lead us there quite naturally. We take up again the
retrospective feature in these letters, looking back to
the beginnings, to the foundations, to the essentials. In
our last chapter we were occupied with the look back to
Jesus: "Remember Jesus Christ". Now we are
going to look back to the real basis of the Christian
life, as Jesus showed it; but let us go through Timothy.
Back To The Beginnings
As we
look into these letters, we find Paul reminding Timothy -
yes, reminding him very forcefully - of certain things
which lay right at the very root of his own life and of
his service to the Lord. We have fragments like this: 1
Timothy 1:18: "according to the prophecies which
went before on thee" - literally, 'the prophecies
which led the way to thee'; in modern language, 'in
accordance with the prophetic intimations concerning
you'. If you look at the context, you will see that the
time referred to was when Timothy was coming under the
anointing for service, for ministry, for his active part
in the Gospel. The Apostle is calling to remembrance the
great principle, the great truth and foundation, of his
life and work. Further, 1 Timothy 6:20: "O Timothy,
guard the deposit". 2 Timothy 1:6: "Keep
constantly blazing the gift of God which is in
you..."; again it is dated back, as you see, to a
particular time. 2 Timothy 2:2: "The things which
thou hast heard from me..."; 3:14: "Abide thou
in the things which thou hast learned..." You see
all this takes Timothy back. Paul is calling up the past,
calling up the foundations, calling up what has been. He
is, in effect, saying: 'Now, Timothy, this has got to be
reinforced, this has got to be consolidated, this has got
to be confirmed, in the face of the present tendencies
and perils, the present course of things. All this has
got to be brought up in a new way, and re-established. We
are going round a bend in the road, and that is always a
dangerous place and time, and we need on such an occasion
to be reinforced with what has been of God in the past.'
Now, I
am not going to dwell upon these passages. I am simply
taking up this factor of retrospect and résumé, which means
confirming that which has been, with the future, this
perilous future, in view. What does it all amount to? If
you look again more closely, you will find that it all
relates to the Holy Spirit. All this means, in effect,
that everything at the beginning came by the Spirit; that
everything, to use the other word, is by the anointing.
'Timothy, you stand where you are because of that
original anointing, because at the beginning the Holy
Spirit did something in you and with you. Timothy, your
ministry and service so far have been because of the Holy
Spirit. Now the threat and the tendency at this time is
to depart from that basis, and for another basis of
things to come in which is not essentially spiritual - it
is something else.' It is very important that we should
recognize that. I may say, in parenthesis, that never
before in my own life have I seen such a contrast amongst
Christians, and in Christianity, as there is today, and
it is really the cause and root of all the trouble. It is
a difference, not between the Christian and the world,
but within Christianity itself, between what is spiritual
and what is natural. And it is that that we must look at.
The Gospel Of Spirituality
Now, in
order to be helped, we must take our retrospect much
further back. We must go right back to John's Gospel. I
said earlier that Timothy naturally leads us into a wider
realm: and yet Timothy does not lead us back only. You
know that John's Gospel was written long after Paul's two
letters to Timothy. Although Paul's second letter to
Timothy was the last thing that he ever wrote, it was
years afterwards that John wrote his Gospel, his Letters
and the Revelation. So that Timothy leads us right into
the full development of this other thing. I wonder if you
have ever really grasped this. We take up our New
Testament in the familiar arrangement as we have it, and
we say, 'Well, of course, the first things in the New
Testament are the four Gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke and
John: that is the beginning of the New Testament'; but
have you recognized that at least the fourth of those was
written long after everything else in the New Testament?
If you were compiling the New Testament chronologically,
you would have to put John's Gospel right over near the
end.
Now do
you see what that implies? Why did John write his Gospel,
his Letters, and the Revelation, as the last writings of
the New Testament age, the apostolic age? The Gospel of
John was written when this other kind of Christianity
had become almost full-grown - this other kind of
Christianity that is not spiritual, but natural. You
have got to read John's Gospel in the light of the
situation existing in the Church when it was written,
otherwise you cannot really get its message, its values.
It is a great call-back to spirituality. This Gospel of
John is, as we know, the spiritual Gospel. It is not just
the earthly life of Jesus: everything here is of
spiritual, heavenly and eternal significance, not of
earth and time at all.
You
notice how it begins. Take the third chapter. The third
chapter of John was written when the Church had left its
first love, when the Church had left its first position;
when Christianity had taken on an altogether different
complexion from what it had at the beginning. This
chapter is the enunciation of a fundamental principle of
the Christian life which needs to be recovered. We know
this chapter - or we think we do. Of course, we know the
words. Perhaps we are almost wearied with that name,
Nicodemus. And yet - I do not exaggerate; please believe
me - I speak the truth when I say that I come back to
that Gospel of John, after having known it, and read it,
and studied it, and spoken on it, for many, many years,
and feel that we really have not grasped this - the
Church has not grasped what is here. It would be
impossible for the present situation amongst Christians
and in Christianity in general to exist, if what is in
the third chapter of John really obtained! I am not
exaggerating; I cannot be too strong about this.
And so,
at the risk of touching on things which you think you
know, let us look again at these words. We will not read
the whole chapter, but consider the following passages. "That
which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is
born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not
that I said unto thee, ye must be born anew."
(The margin says 'from above'.) "The wind bloweth
where it listeth, and thou hearest the voice thereof, but
knowest not whence it cometh, and whither it
goeth...." ('This thing is a mystery to you, you
don't know...'): "so is every one that
is born of the Spirit."
A New Entity
First of
all, you have an entity: "That which is born of the
flesh." That is an entity. That is not difficult to
understand on the natural side. Every little new-born
baby is an entity of the flesh: it is something quite
concrete, something quite definite, and you do not find
two in every respect alike. So far as the flesh is
concerned, and the natural, that which is born is a
definite, concrete entity - we know that. And, in just
the same way, "that which is born of the
Spirit" is a distinct, definite, concrete entity,
altogether different, but absolutely real. That entity,
born of the Spirit, is something quite definite and
altogether distinct from that which is born of the flesh.
With the new birth of every child of God, a spiritual
entity has been brought into being, different entirely
from the entity and the constitution of the natural, but
just as real, just as definite.
I
repeat: very, very few Christians seem to understand or
know this. We have 'joined' something, we have 'joined
Christianity', we have 'gone into the Christian religion'
- put it how you will. It is something objective; we have
come over into some other sphere of interests and
activity and life and conduct. That is the idea about
Christianity. The Lord Jesus here is saying - what the
New Testament confirms through and through - that this is
an altogether different thing; this is not one bit of the
order of the natural, this is spiritual; the natural and
the spiritual belong to two different orders and
kingdoms. That is the context of these words. And
therefore every born-again child of God is, in the
innermost truth of their being, a different entity. It is
not that they have 'taken on' something, or 'gone into'
something. I have often used the word 'species' - they
are a different kind of person in their very being, with
another constitution, something constituted by the Holy
Spirit, the Spirit of God, all from above.
People
are talking nowadays about visiting the moon. At the end
of the century men will perhaps have landed on the moon -
but not with their bare earthly constitution! No man,
just as he is, will ever do that. He will have to have an
apparatus which constitutes him, in effect, a different
kind of person, in order to live out there. To go into
that realm as he is would be disaster, destruction. And
you and I will never be able to go to Heaven without a
new constitution - and not an artificial one either! No
make-up about this! It has got to be constitutional.
There is a clear gulf, broad and unbridgeable, between
what we are naturally and what we are as children of God.
If you
really are a child of God, if you have come to the Lord,
if you have really had the experience of salvation, you
know that something has happened to you. This is
explaining what has happened. And the Holy Spirit says,
'Look here, things have got off that basis.' We have got
to get back there. We have got to recognize again this
broad line of difference and division between what is
natural and what is spiritual in Christianity. There are
few things more important than that we as Christians
should be able to recognize the fundamental difference
between what is natural and what is spiritual. We have a
new constitution, a different constitution, by the Holy
Spirit.
Natural Versus Spiritual
The
natural man is always trying to get things on to a
natural basis. He must bring everything on to the basis
of natural reason. He must be able to reason the thing
through, to comprehend, to compass the thing with his
reason. A very great deal of Christianity is just man
taking hold of the Bible, of Christian truth, Christian
doctrine, Christian things, and interpreting and applying
by natural reason. And the Word of God is as distinct as
anything can be: the door is closed to that, the door is CLOSED.
GOD has closed the door. You are not going to get
anything through by the power of your reason, however big
it is - not a bit!
Look at
our friend, Nicodemus. He stands for all time as an
example. "How can a man...? How can these things
be?" A good man, a clever man, an intellectual man,
a religious man, but outside the door. The door is
absolutely closed. Now, you can apply that everywhere.
Man may be most devout, most devoted, most religious; he
may be a red-hot fundamentalist, a champion of Christian
doctrine; and yet it may all be in the realm of his own
intellectual power and grip. There is a world that is
closed to him, of which he knows little or nothing. He
has 'heard the voice', but he 'knows not'. He has heard
the sound, and taken the sound as the sum: but there is a
mystery that is still outside of his kingdom; and the
result of this is that there may be good, yes, devoted,
earnest, sincere people, who, living in that realm in
Christian things, cannot understand spiritual people,
cannot understand the things of the Spirit at all.
Spiritual things will always be a mystery, an enigma, to
the natural mind.
"Remember
Jesus Christ". The difference between Jesus and the
Jewish leaders, in their radical and almost fanatical
devotion to religion, was not a difference of religion at
all. It was not that He was more religious than they. It
was the difference between the spiritual and the natural
in religion. To them He was an enigma, He was a mystery -
and, of course, He was all wrong. He could not be right,
for, you see, natural reasoning says this and that; but
how off the mark they were. Now do you get the point? It
is an exceedingly important one. A real walk with God in
the Spirit, while, of course, never contradicting
Scripture, but always being consistent with the Word of
God, is very often a lonely thing amongst Christians. The
tragedy is that it should be so, but it is very often
like that. What then is spirituality? It is first of all
a fundamental change in the being, in the entity, in the
person: that is spirituality. After that, it has many
outworkings.
The Sovereignty Of The Spirit
"The
wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the voice
thereof, but knowest not whence it cometh, and whither it
goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit."
A sovereign act of the Spirit. That takes us back to this
other fragment: "That which is born of the flesh is
flesh", and to that earlier fragment in this Gospel
by John, which makes it so clear, so emphatic:
"...which were born, not of the flesh, nor of the
will of man, but of God" (1:13). This is something
in the sovereign hands of the Holy Spirit and taken right
out of the hands of men. You cannot convert yourself, you
cannot convert anyone else; you cannot make yourself into
this other creature, this new creation, and you can never
make anyone else it. And you can never say when it is to
be, either for yourself, or for anyone else. All that is
a matter of the sovereign Spirit. If the wind decides to
blow, it does not give you notice a day beforehand! It
just blows, and when it blows you cannot say, 'You are
out-of-date, you have come at the wrong time - this is
not a convenient moment!' It blows, and that is all there
is to it.
Now here
you are touching a principle: the sovereignty of the
Spirit, as represented by the sovereignty of the wind.
You know quite well that [it] is useless to stand up
against the wind when it really decides to blow. Carry
that principle over further into the New Testament, and
you will read three times: "And the Lord added to
the church those that were being saved...",
"there were added unto them...", "there
were added to the Lord..." Who added? Did the
apostles add? Not at all. The Lord added. There is all
the difference between our being told to go and join a
church, and the Lord adding to Christ, or between our
joining what we call a church, and being added to Christ.
We cannot join Christ at our own will, just when we want
to, or think we will decide to, because being added to
Christ involves being re-constituted on a different
principle, and that is not in our power at all. It is the
Lord Who must do it, so that the adding is His sovereign
act: and when He decides to do it, it is wonderful, is it
not? And if He does not decide to do it, you can work
yourself to death, and nothing will happen. This is the
work of the Lord.
Look at
the day of Pentecost. The wind blew then - a mighty
rushing wind. Was it sovereignty? "And there were
added unto them in that day about three thousand
souls." This was the sovereignty of the Spirit. How
wide and far-reaching is the application of that! Oh,
that Christianity were on that fundamental basis today -
the absolute sovereignty of the Holy Spirit! Why is it
not so? Because of the present sovereignty of the
natural, because of the intrusion into Christianity of
the natural man.
A New Faculty
Read
again John chapter three. As we have seen, we have here a
new constitution, a new entity - "that which is born
of the Spirit". Here, too, we have the sovereignty
of the Spirit: He blows where He will, and there is
always a mystery, a glorious mystery, about Him and His
work. But notice, further, that it is a matter of
capacity. To Nicodemus, the Lord says: "Art thou the
teacher of Israel, and understandest not these things?
...We speak that we do know... If I told you earthly
things, and ye believe not..." 'Why, if you cannot
understand the secret of the wind - and that is a natural
phenomenon, that is an earthly thing that belongs to your
world of reason - if you cannot cope with that, what will
it be when I tell you heavenly things?' "We speak
that we do know".
Do you
see the point? Here is a difference of capacity, a new
and a different faculty of knowledge, of apprehension and
comprehension and understanding. It is a spiritual
faculty, for spiritual things. I know how familiar this
is to many: it is not new; but there is an urgent need
that we should bring this again to the whole realm of our
Christianity. I am sure that it has not yet been grasped
by many Christians, even of long standing in the
Christian life, that, by their very constitution as
children of God, they are supposed to have a faculty
which makes them capable of comprehending and
understanding spiritual things that no natural mind can
understand. The youngest child of God is supposed to have
this faculty. It may not be fully developed, but it is a
constituent of their very being. Have you grasped that?
And the very presence of that faculty is the basis upon
which everything in the Christian life is going to be
built. The Holy Spirit only builds upon HIS OWN foundations,
upon what HE HIMSELF puts down as a basis. And
that basis is a spiritual one: that which is of the
Spirit is spiritual. All our growth, therefore, is going
to be along the line of spiritual understanding,
spiritual knowledge: not the accumulation of a vast
amount of truth, or of religious, Christian information,
but what the Spirit teaches us. It will be THROUGH THE
WORD, but only WHAT THE SPIRIT TEACHES, for He
has come for that very purpose.
Now,
there must be a link between us and the Holy Spirit,
which is in correspondence with Himself, and the link
between the Holy Spirit and the born-again child of God
is the renewed spirit of the child of God, with this new
capacity, so that the child of God, over against the
whole world of merely intellectual knowledge, is able to
say: 'We know' - "we speak that we do know". It
may be very little, but you know, you know now. As far as
you have gone, it is a knowledge which is yours, which is
new and altogether different. You are able to say: 'I
don't know very much, but what I do know, I know; and the
way in which I have come to know it is not because it has
been presented to me, but because it has happened in me.
Something has been done inside; and, although I cannot
put it into words or theories, or compose it into a set
of ideas, I know - I KNOW!' "We speak that
we do know". There is something about spiritual
knowledge which is so strong, so settled, so satisfying,
so rest-giving. It is a new capacity. What is the
difference? "If I have told you earthily
things..." That is one realm: what about the
heavenly things? 'Now, Nicodemus, with all your wonderful
outfit of birth, upbringing, training, education, you are
still in the realm of earthly things, and even there they
are beyond you. You have not yet come into the realm of
heavenly things.' Therefore, "Marvel not that I said
unto thee, Ye must be born from above."
That is
a very, very great need in safeguarding the whole
Christian situation and in the recovery of spiritual
effectiveness in this world: a fresh discernment of the
fundamental difference between the natural and the
spiritual - yes, even in Christian things. No one thinks
that I am speaking about something that is extra to what
is in the Word of God. I am speaking about the necessary
faculty given by the Holy Spirit, and the necessary work
of the Holy Spirit, in order that we should rightly know
the mind of the Spirit in the Word of God. If we get on
to any other basis than that, all sorts of things will
happen, which will be very sad and very distressing and
very wrong. The Holy Spirit said through Paul to Timothy:
"All Scripture is given by inspiration of
God..." Paul is saying, in effect, 'Look here, we
must get back to what the Holy Spirit has given, what has
come from the Holy Spirit, and what, therefore, is
spiritual. We must get back to what God MEANS.'
John 3
is a tremendous offset, not only to the world of the
unconverted and un-born-again, but to a great amount of
Christianity as we know it, which is clearly not the
Christianity of a different entity, of a different
constitution, of a different capacity. Let us be sure
that with us it is the right thing, and not the false and
the imitation.
The Significance Of Pentecost
Let me
close with a word of warning. This is not necessarily a
special revelation that is given to any particular
persons. Be very careful there. It may sound a fine
point, but it is a very important one. It does not mean
that, because we are so reconstituted and have this other
faculty, we get a special revelation. No, it is not a
special revelation, but it is a special faculty for
knowing what has been revealed.
This is
the inclusive and comprehensive meaning of the advent of
the Holy Spirit. What took place on the day of Pentecost
corresponded, in the history of the Church, to what took
place in the personal life of the Lord Jesus at the
Jordan. At the Jordan He was baptized, signifying that He
was buried, that something was put out of sight. In type,
in figure, the natural man goes out of view. He rises in
type another man. And then what? Heaven opens, the Spirit
descends, and from that point everything is by the
Spirit. "Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into
the wilderness..." And then to Nazareth: "And
He opened the roll, and found the place where it was
written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me..."
Everything is by the Spirit.
Again,
let us be understood correctly. We have not said that in
the baptism of Jesus an "old man" literally was
buried as in the case of all other believers, but that -
sin apart - He was taking representatively the ground
that we all have to take in one particular respect, that
is that nothing shall be in life that is not of the
Father by the Holy Spirit. In Him it was wholly true, but
in us it is a position to be taken and then made real as
we seek to walk in the Spirit.
And so
we come to Pentecost. Has the Church in its
representation or nucleus been baptized into His death?
Well, look at them! Before they are re-established on
resurrection ground, they are baptized into His death
right enough. They have come to an end of all natural
resources, either for understanding anything, for seeing
through anything, or for being able to do anything. They
are as good as dead and buried - no prospect, no future.
"We hoped..." - we HOPED, in the past
tense - "that it was He which should redeem
Israel", and that hope has now gone, there is
nothing. Yes, they were indeed baptized into His death.
But now, on the day of Pentecost, what do we find? They
are raised as a vessel, and the Heaven is opened, and the
Spirit comes and fills it, and from that time everything
is by the Spirit. They had a new knowledge - and how
their knowledge grew, even in the Word of God! The Word
of God, which was for them the Old Testament, had been so
largely a closed book, spiritually. They had only got it
in the letter, and they were all wrong in their
interpretation of it, as it came to be proved. Now the
Bible is new for them, because they are on new ground;
potentially in the new day of the Spirit.