To him who overcomes, I will give some of the hidden manna to eat.
(Revelation 2:17)
God always keeps the revelation of Himself in Christ bound up with practical
situations. You and I can never get revelation other than in connection with
some necessity. We cannot get it simply as a matter of information. That is
information, that is not revelation. We cannot get it by studying. When the Lord
gave the manna in the wilderness (a type of Christ as the Bread from heaven), He
stipulated very strongly that not one fragment more than the day's need was to
be gathered, and that if they went beyond the measure of immediate need, disease
and death would break out and overtake them. The principle, the law, of the
manna, is that God keeps revelation of Himself in Christ bound up with practical
situations of necessity, and we are not going to have revelation as mere
teaching, doctrine, interpretation, theory, or anything as a thing, which means
that God is going to put you and me into situations where only the revelation of
Christ can help us and save us....
Now then, that is why the Lord would keep us in situations which are acute,
real. The Lord is against our getting out on theoretical lines with truth, out
on technical lines. Oh, let us shun technique as a thing in itself and recognize
this, that, although the New Testament has in it a technique, we cannot merely
extract the technique and apply it. We have to come into New Testament
situations to get a revelation of Christ to meet that situation. So that the
Holy Spirit's way with us is to bring us into living, actual conditions and
situations, and needs, in which only some fresh knowledge of the Lord Jesus can
be our deliverance, our salvation, our life, and then to give us, not a
revelation of truth, but a revelation of the Person, new knowledge of the
Person, that we come to see Christ in some way that just meets our need. We are
not drawing upon an "it," but upon a "Him."