"I have yet many things to say unto you,
but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit..." (John
16:12).
"I could not speak unto you as
spiritual... I fed you with milk, not with meat... not
even now are ye able" (1 Corinthians
3:1-2).
"Ye
are straitened in your own affections... Be ye
enlarged" (2 Corinthians 6:12-13).
"...we
have many things to say, and hard of interpretation,
seeing ye are become dull of hearing... Ye ought to be teachers,
ye have need that one teach you the rudiments" (Hebrews
5:11,12).
In
the light of a wide and long knowledge, from far East to
far West, of Christians and Christian work, were I asked
what I most strongly feel to be the greatest - or one of
the greatest - needs of our time, I should not hesitate
to say: An increase of spiritual capacity. Note - I say SPIRITUAL.
Not intellectual. The desire, pursuit of,
and provision for education and knowledge outbounds all
that has ever been. The range of the intellectual and
scientific was never so great. Nor is there lacking
anything in the realm of the emotional. This is an
excessively emotional and passionate age, both in quest
and provision. The world is living on its emotions and
passions, and in Christianity everything is done and
provided to gratify the emotional senses.
Further,
there is no straitness and limitation in the area of
activity, of doing. The programme of Christian works,
movements, enterprises, occupations, is so full as to
leave no time for quiet thought and meditation. All of
these three realms make up the soul, the ego - mind,
emotion, will - and this is an age of the immense and
intense assertion of the ego, the soul of man; Christians
not excepted.
But
in all this, and what an all it is, we repeat our
conviction that a paramount need is of the increase of
spiritual capacity. The shallowness and superficiality of
spiritual capacity is nothing less than tragic and
pathetic. The cheap, the easy, the quick, the glamorous,
the popular; these are the features of our time which
characterize so much of Christianity. It is the way of
the world, and it has invaded the Church and organized
Christianity. Depth and stamina, painstaking endurance,
are a lost dimension. The passages of Scripture with
which we introduce this consideration indicate that this
lack of spiritual capacity has been a problem from the
time when Jesus was on earth. He was handicapped and
limited by it. It was necessary for Him to keep in
reserve "many things" that He had, and wanted
to say. The lack of spiritual capacity imposed a
"cannot" upon His ministry. At another time He
expressed this sense of frustration in a spontaneous
ejaculation: "And, oh, how am I straitened!"
(Luke 12:50). The Scriptures mentioned also show that the
same problem distressed the Apostles. Said Paul: "I
could not speak unto you as unto spiritual",
implying that he longed for a breakthrough into the realm
of the "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither
hath it entered into the heart of man... but God hath
revealed unto us..." What great and potent things
were withheld because of lack of capacity! Whoever wrote
the Letter to the Hebrews was deeply troubled because of
that arrested or retarded development which made him say
with a touch of bitterness: "We have many things to
say, but...", and then explained that he could not
go beyond the "rudiments". The fact that this
was a malady even in apostolic times surely does not
condone or excuse it in our days. The most that such a
reflection can do is to relieve us of some of the
surprise. But we shall feel the same limitation and
frustration if we know that the Lord has given us
something which has no free way because of limited
capacity on the part of God's people. It makes the going
so hard and wearing! It will not do, however, to sit down
with the fact, whether it be then or now. We have to
uncover
The Causes of Limited Capacity
Of
course, when children are children, and rightly so, we
have no greater requirement than to speak to them as
such, and not to expect more of them than is right and
proper. But our Scriptures relate to an un-normal,
sub-normal, or even abnormal state. Behind them is an
expectation that creates an element of shame, reproach,
and even scandal. There OUGHT to
be capacity, and there is not. The greater fullnesses are
available, but the channel is blocked, or the vessel is
not empty or open. Do our Scriptures throw any light on
the causes of this limitation, which is spiritual
tragedy? In both our Lord's case and in the Letter to the
Hebrews the cause is similar. It is
(1) The Blockage of a Fixed Tradition
In
both cases it was the impassable barrier of Judaism. But
let us at once understand that Judaism is not exclusively
Judaistic, it is an incorrigible propensity, tendency,
disposition, or habit. There is as much Judaism in
principle in Christianity as ever there was in Israel.
God has never done a new thing but in time men have
crystallized it into a set form of teaching and practice.
Sooner or later a label, a tag, a name is taken or given
to it, and that is that! It becomes a tradition, and the
tradition reigns supreme, until God exposes it. That
tradition makes its victims incapable of accepting and
adjusting to any new light, any Holy Spirit innovations.
The real nature and cause of such a situation is a
misapprehension of God's ways. It was true that God chose
Israel to be His "Peculiar people", and
separated them from all the nations. But Israel
misunderstood this sovereign act of God. They reasoned
that, in so doing, God had chosen them ALONE unto
salvation, and thus had for ever closed the door firmly
against all other people. The truth was that God's act
was with the intention of showing to all men what is His
way, basis, and provision for salvation. Israel should
have been a missionary nation, BRINGING God
to the ungodly! How God laboured, through His servants,
to make Israel know that THEY WERE NO BETTER than
other peoples, but rather needed as much mercy as any on
earth. This was not only said to them, but demonstrated
in their own history. Theirs should have been the servant
spirit marked by deep humility and indebtedness. But it
became just the opposite in extreme. They lost
everything! Now, the disciples of Christ inherited that
superior nature and set the fixed bounds of God's grace.
"The Kingdom to Israel" was the 'be all and end
all' of their traditional horizon. They just could not
accept a larger purpose.
If
there is one thing being emphasized by God in our time it
is that He must be given an open way to lead beyond even
that which may have been of Himself in a provisional way,
to say nothing of the necessity to let go our finalities
as to the means and methods which He employs.
The
New Testament makes plain that the warfare for the FULL
inheritance takes on its most intense and fierce form in
relation to deliverance from bondage to tradition.
(2) The Embargo on "Flesh and Blood"
This
may sound a strange heading, but it is not strange in the
New Testament. It occurs more than once in that form, but
it has a considerable contextual enlargement. It is a
phrase which relates to and embraces all that man is
apart from regeneration and the new creation. A classic
example is Nicodemus in John chapter 3. It is still more
fully explained and defined in the First Letter to the
Corinthians, and, in particular, chapters 2 and 3. It is
man in the old creation, sometimes referred to as
"Natural" (Greek: soulical); sometimes as
carnal, i.e. 'fleshly'. Its first occurrence is in
Matthew 16:17. Wherever the actual words are used, or
their meaning enlarged upon, there is always the embargo
which says "cannot". So Paul said: "The
natural man cannot..." He might just as well have
said: "Flesh and blood cannot", because he did
actually use the phrase in 1 Corinthians 15:15:
"Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of
God."
Jesus
drew the line of demarcation and distinction, as well as
incapacity, when He said to Peter: "Flesh and blood
hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in
heaven" (Matthew 16:17).
Now
the fact and the force of this embargo is seen so fully
in the case of the Corinthians. They - or a large number
of them - were living on that side of their human nature
which was not regenerated; their "old man"; the
other-than-Christ side. On that side their judgments,
their behaviour, their disposition, were those of this
world and its ways. Hence their spiritual immaturity,
arrested growth, sub-normal capacity. It all speaks for
itself and needs very little enlarging upon.
From
all this failure and tragedy in the case of both Israel
and Corinth, the truth is clearly and strongly written
that such painful history is the result of an unnecessary
limitation of spiritual capacity.
But
when we have said all that, we must go deeper and find
what the record shows to be causes and the remedy.
The Secret of Enlarged Capacity
The
turning-point upon which the Lord laid the release from
the disability was in a single word: "Howbeit"
... "Many things to say, but ye cannot bear it now.
Howbeit..." "Howbeit, when the Spirit of truth
is come." Incapacity gives way to capacity by the
advent of the Holy Spirit. That, of course, is a
statement which we all believe as a doctrine, and as
evidenced in the life of the disciples. There is no
mistaking it where they were concerned. But that is not
all of the truth. The Holy Spirit HAD come
in the time of the Corinthians, and they had received
Him. But still their spiritual capacity was limited. The
explanation is found in the ground demanded by the Holy
Spirit for His work of enlargement. In the case of the
disciples the Cross meant a devastating work in THEM.
That crisis gave the Holy Spirit the way to
that tremendously enlarged capacity which we see in them
on, and after, the Day of Pentecost. But the principle of
the Cross had to apply even after that. They were Jews,
and the Jewish tradition was not thrown off easily. Peter
had a battle over the Gentile Cornelius, but the Spirit
won on the basis of the Cross. The Corinthians were
Gentiles and had their own battleground. They had had a
crisis, but had understood the Cross in only a limited
way. This is implied by Paul when he said: "When I
came unto you... I determined not to know anything among
you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified" (1
Corinthians 2:1,2).
The
issue, then, is that increase of spiritual capacity can
only come by way of suffering. That is - the Cross. The
suffering may be disillusionment as to our own ability,
as with Peter. It may be parting from some very strong
religious ideas, associations and sentiments. It may be
the breaking of our own natural selves, the strong
self-life. Be what and how it may, in no realm of
creation is there enlargement and increase without
suffering. This is most true in the Christian life. It is
only those who have suffered who have most to give, and
who have capacity for more.
This,
then, surely explains God's sovereignty in allowing us
suffering. Suffering is not meant by God to be loss and
deprivation. Satan says that it is. God means suffering
to result in increased spiritual capacity, and spiritual
capacity is the basis of added responsibility, trust, and
fruitful ministry.
The
branch of the Vine may bleed from the drastic pruning and
feel stripped of much glory; but more and better fruit is
the Divine Vinedresser's vindication.
First published in "A Witness and A
Testimony" magazine, May-June 1967, Vol 45-3