"And Jesus,
when he was baptized, went up straightway from the water:
and lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the
Spirit of God descending as a dove, and coming upon him;
and lo, a voice out of the heavens saying, This is my
beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Then was Jesus
led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of
the devil. And when he had fasted forty days and forty
nights, he afterward hungered. And the tempter came and
said unto him, If thou art the Son of God... Again, the
devil taketh him unto an exceeding high mountain, and
showeth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory
of them; and he said unto him, All these things will I
give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. Then
saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is
written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him
only shalt thou serve." (Matt. 3:16-4:3,8-10).
"And bring us
not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil
one." (Matt. 6:13).
"For as many
as are led by the Spirit of God these are the sons of
God" (Rom. 8:14).
"And suddenly
there came from heaven a sound as of the rushing of a
mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were
sitting. And there appeared unto them tongues parting
asunder, like as of fire; and it sat upon each one of
them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and
began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave
them utterance... Let all the house of Israel therefore
know assuredly, that God hath made him both Lord and
Christ, this Jesus whom ye crucified" (Acts
2:2-4,36).
In the first of these
passages we see the link between the Holy Spirit and
sonship: the Spirit is seen lighting upon the Lord Jesus
and a voice out of the heavens is heard saying,
"This is My beloved Son". That truth is taken
up again in the passage in the letter to the Romans,
chapter 8:14: "As many as are led by the Spirit of
God, these are the sons of God". In the second
passage, Matthew 4, the Son, under the government of the
Spirit, is led into the wilderness, and the issue of that
particular leading of the Spirit was a mighty victory for
the rights of God. "Thou shalt worship the Lord thy
God and him only shalt thou serve. Then the devil leaveth
him for a season." That is the end of that battle
and it is victory in the hands of the Son under the
government of the Spirit.
What I feel the Lord
wants us to recognize at this time is what a life or
church that is led and governed by the Holy Spirit does,
what it means to be led and governed by the Holy Spirit
so far as we personally and collectively are concerned:
in other words, what are the marks of sonship. You see,
beloved, we have to begin here, that sonship is proved by
our being led by the Spirit. How do we know that we are
sons, what is it that evidences sonship, in what way does
sonship manifest itself and work itself out? The clear
precise statement of the Word of God is by being
"led of the Spirit". It was so in the case of
the Lord Jesus. The marks of His Sonship were in His
being led of the Spirit. The statement moreover is quite
positive in Romans 8:14. How tremendously important it
is, therefore, that we both have the Spirit and are
governed by the Spirit. That is fundamental to
everything. I venture to say that, if that which I feel
the Lord wants to bring to us could be truly got over to
us now, it would be a matter of tremendous value to every
one of us. Let me repeat: the basis, the foundation of
everything, so far as our relationship with God and God's
purpose is concerned, is the presence and government of
the Holy Spirit, and that government, of course, means
and presupposes the absolute Lordship of the Holy Spirit;
because the Holy Spirit does not come save on the ground
of the death, the burial and the resurrection. It was
when Jesus was baptized and came up out of the water that
the Holy Spirit came upon Him, and baptism, as we all
well know, sets forth in testimony the fact that, so far
as any other government is concerned, be it the
government of Satan, or that of the world, or be it the
government of the self-life, that government is broken
and we are out of it; and our resurrection, typified in
our coming up out of the baptism, means that we are alive
and alive unto God only. Thus the ground is provided for
the Spirit to come in as Lord, and so become the basis of
everything in our relationship with God and God's purpose.
The thing that I feel we want to recognize is what that
really means.
A
Principle of Spiritual Guidance
There are a great many
questions which arise, questions we are often asked. They
sometimes seem to be theoretical questions, technical
questions about the Christian life. Now, we may seek to
help one another by giving what we might call a technical
answer, an answer, for example, from the Scriptures on
some passage or some interpretation. But I am always
doubtful as to the real helpfulness of that kind of
answer. I think, beloved, there is an answer which goes
deeper and which is much more satisfactory.
I have recently been
asked a question, and I will answer this question
publicly so that what help there may be in the answer
will be afforded others. The question turned upon the
difficulty over the difference between soul and spirit,
and the place which the soul is going to have in the
future life. Is it going to have any place at all or is
it going to cease? Now you know I might answer a question
like that with passages of Scripture, but I do not think
that would be the most helpful way, because it would
probably only raise more questions. But I am going to
answer it in this way, because, although we are not
dealing now with the matter of soul and spirit, I am
seeking to get at a principle of guidance, a principle of
spiritual guidance, the law of sonship.
I would ask you, What
is your experience as a child of God in the matter of
soul and spirit? Perhaps those words are too technical.
Let me put it more simply. What is your experience with
regard to that side of your life which is directly in
touch with the Lord, in the measure in which you have a
conscious life in the Lord (I think every child of God
ought to have some little measure of a conscious life
with the Lord), and that other side of your life which
you know to be yourself, not the Lord, but yourself, your
natural life; your spiritual life on the one side and
your natural life on the other. Now when, as a child of
God, you take just a little excursion into that region
which is your natural life, what is the result? It may
happen through a slip, a momentary breakdown, an
indulgence - "overtaken in a fault" is how the
Apostle expresses it - anything which means that, just at
that moment, you drop down into the natural life, or the
natural life rises up and gets the advantage for the
moment, asserts itself and becomes the dominating thing.
What is the effect of that upon you? If you are a true
child of God and are really seeking to live with the
Lord, you have a terribly bad time, and it is not just a
matter of your conscience in the same way as any man
might have a twinge of conscience. You know that there
are other factors in this, that of the Lord being
grieved, of something between yourself and the Lord
having been damaged. It is something much more than just
conscience. You have a bad time and you react, you
rebound, you are stung by that, and you make haste to get
back on to the other side. You seek to recover your
spiritual ground as soon as you can with considerable
regret and remorse and repentance. What has happened?
Well, you have come out of your spirit in its union with
God into your soul. You have learned a lesson. You take
account of this thing and you say, "How was it that
I slipped up there? Why was it, what accounts for that? I
will prayerfully watch that in the future. I know now
what that means." Now, it does not follow that you
never do slip in the same way again, but as you go on you
do spiritually grow out of that particular thing, and
what is happening is that in spirit you are taking the
mastery of your soul. You are not annihilating your soul,
but you are bringing it under government and making it
your servant; for mark, that frequently the occasion of
stumbling is only the evil form of an expression which is
necessary. Take anger, for example. You became angry; but
you became angry in your nature, your natural life, and
it was because there was a self-interest or some
self-element in your anger that you had such a bad time.
Anger is not evil. "God is angry with the wicked
every day" (Psa. 7:11). "Be ye angry and sin
not" (Eph. 4:26). Anger is not evil. You are not
therefore going to annihilate your soul and make anger
non-existent. I instance anger, but you can take any
other feature that you like in the same way and you will
find that the soul itself is not essentially evil. The
evil lies in the evil principle that has got hold of it.
What are you going to
do then? In spirit you are going to destroy the evil
principle and get the mastery of your soul, so that anger
is going to serve you. Love may have personal elements in
it; but you are not going to annihilate love because you
find love trips you up sometimes on a personal line and
leads you astray. You are going to destroy the evil
principle by the power of the death of Christ and master
your soul and bring it under, so that by your spirit you
use love, you govern the matter of love. Now then, the
point that I am after is not so much the difference
between the soul and spirit, but rather something related
to the Holy Spirit Himself.
The
Holy Spirit an Earnest
The Holy Spirit is a
basic necessity, but mark that the Word puts it in this
way, "...hath given us the Spirit as an earnest of
our inheritance" (Eph 1:14). What does that mean?
Well, if the Holy Spirit is the energy, the power, the
intelligence, by whom we are doing this very thing of
which I have been speaking, He is pointing on to something.
What is it that He is pointing on to as an earnest of
something that is to be? Why, He is pointing on to a time
when you and I will, in spirit, have our souls utterly
and perfectly under our government; not annihilated but
perfectly under our government, and I do not believe that
in the resurrection life, the life hereafter, we are just
going to be naked spirits. We shall be men, we shall have
souls, but without the evil principle and without the
soul being in the place of mastery. Through the organ of
the spirit we shall govern all the rest of our being and
enjoy a perfectly adjusted manhood. Manhood is not a
temporary thing. It is an idea of God which is to go on.
Well now, you see the
principle. But the question is answered when you get the
law. All questions are answered. The question is this in
general: What does the Holy Spirit do in us? How does the
Holy Spirit lead us? What does it mean to us in a
practical way day by day to be led of the Spirit? Oh, do
not just narrow that down to the question of, Lord, shall
I go here or there, shall I do this or that? That is only
a mere fragment of being led of the Spirit. Without any
such questions arising, the Spirit is in us to lead us,
and to lead us to moral issues in the way I have just
been speaking; that is, to show us the way and to say to
us, No, that is not the way, this is the way; and we
know, not by His pointing it out but by His effective
working in us. Our reactions, as true children of God,
are the work of the Spirit. That jumping back from the
ground that we have touched to our hurt, that is the
energy of the Spirit in us leading us, and it is a
terrible thing for any child of God ever to come to the
place where he can indulge without a reaction. The enemy
would like us, because of our failures, to say, Oh, well,
it is no good, we give it up! If you and I have a bad
time when we touch the natural realm, that is a glorious
evidence of sonship. Do not try to rule out all your bad
times and make light of them, but beware that the enemy
does not turn them to such effect as to make you
introspective and morbid. But remember the Spirit will
keep alive in you a very active sense of what is, and
what is not, in accord with the mind of God. These are
the sons of God who are thus led by the Spirit of God.
You see how we answer
all our questions. I answer all my technical questions by
looking to see what it means to me that the Holy Spirit
is in me. What is the Spirit pointing to? What is the
significance of today's touch of the Spirit upon my
spirit? That is an earnest of something. If that is
followed out, followed through, it will grow and develop
and it will lead me somewhere. That is going to answer
all my questions if I have got that principle. Have I
been too difficult for you? Oh, listen to the Spirit,
come under the government of the Spirit, and then, when
the Spirit checks you, urges you, moves in you, gives you
a bad time or gives you joy in your heart, note what that
means, what it is leading to. Oh, there is something
bound up with that, there is something at the end of
that. I interpret everything in life by that touch of the
Spirit and that answers all my questions. If the Spirit
touches my mortal body today with His living finger and
quickens it, I do not at once conclude that I have become
immortal, that death for ever has gone and incorruption
has settled down in my mortal frame. But I can say,
"My resurrection body will be like that in fulness.
It will simply be the consummation of that touch I have
known today. I have a wonderful accession of life today,
but the time is coming when that very thing will have
been developed to its fullest extent and it will be
nothing but Divine life. I have the Spirit as an
earnest". I am trying to illustrate this thing. The
Spirit touching us in any way, dealing with us in any way
as sons of God, is pointing on to what it will be when
sonship is manifested (the day of the manifestation of
the sons) and the creation is delivered from the bondage
of corruption.
Now all that is detail.
You can drop the detail and get back to the foundation.
What is it? The Holy Spirit is basic to everything. We
will never get anywhere without the Holy Spirit; we will
never know anything without the Holy Spirit; we shall
never teach anything in the purpose of God without the
Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit has to be a conscious
life with us; growingly so, as in the case of a baby. The
baby has very little self-conscious life to begin with.
As a baby, most things are done for it. But it is not
long before the very first and remote signs of conscious
life are there. Whereas up to a point there seems to be
no consciousness of anything in particular, suddenly you
will see a baby get its eyes fixed upon something,
suddenly it sees something. From that time, the baby is
taking account of something. It does not understand, but
is aware of some object and it cannot take its eyes from
it. It comes back to it, and as the days go by seems to
look for it. Self-conscious life has started, and from
that time onward that grows. In the spiritual life it is
just like that. At the beginnings, most things are done
for us as from the outside, although there is a remote
sense of a new self-conscious spiritual life. But, as we
grow, the Spirit's presence in us has to become a more
and more conscious life of government; and these who are
led by the Spirit of God are sons. That is the
foundation. It is the foundation of growth, it is the
foundation of understanding, it is the foundation of
God's purpose, it is the foundation of all that is
wrapped up in our relationship with God.
Forgive me
for being so elementary, but if we can only get this, it
is the key to everything. We do not want to have certain
questions answered in a technical way to the satisfaction
of our minds, but we get at the answer spiritually. We
are never really satisfied by having a question answered
so that our minds can grasp it. Presently we shall come
up against new features of the thing and want new
explanations. But if we can have the answer conveyed to
our spirit - ah, then we are satisfied; and I say the
answer is found in the presence of the Spirit and what
the Spirit is indicating by His present dealings with us.
What do His dealings with us indicate? What is the end of
it all? If the Spirit today touches us upon a question of
wrong, of evil, of something doubtful, what is the end of
that? The end is holiness, perfect holiness. It will take
some time because there are many things to be dealt with.
But the end, when reached, is a holy being. So with
everything else. In this the Spirit is therefore the
foundation.
Adjustableness
a Mark of a Life Governed by the Holy Spirit
There are
some other things that come up in that connection. One of
them is this, that a mark of sonship or a Spirit governed
life is adjustableness. Now, I want you to grasp this.
You see, it means that nothing is final with us, so far
as our attainment is concerned or our light, and that we
can never, if we are under the Holy Spirit's government,
come to a fixed place. We can never come to the place
where we just accept everything and go on with it as it
is. Oh no, a Spirit-governed life can never do that, can
never become stagnant, can never become fixed. There can
never be any sense of finality about the position or
state in such a life. I am not talking now about those
great truths which are settled, to which nothing is added
or need be added. We are settled, of course, in the
matter of what Christ has done and what Christ is, those
great objective truths of our faith. I am not talking
about that, but of our understanding, our apprehension,
our knowledge, our growth, our relationship to these
things, our position. These are all things which must
remain open to enlargement, to expansion, and it may be,
to drastic changes. You see, in traditional Christianity
we have come into something that is more or less fixed.
It is fixed in different ways. If you are a Baptist, then
your position is a fixed position. If you are a
Presbyterian or a Methodist, it is the same. These are
things which are rounded off. I am only illustrating, not
judging. What is within these things is something to
which you have conformed, of which you are a member. That
is your bound, your world: and I have only cited one or
two examples; I could take any number more.
Now then,
where are we? How did we get in? Perhaps we were born,
brought up, in those things, or perhaps we came into them
later. But they are something, and they represent a fixed
position and we, if in them, are fixed and governed by
that position. That is to say, within them, certain
things are interpreted in this way, certain things are
practised in this way. The method there is this method:
and how often, when you have been speaking of things,
have you had this reaction from people, "Oh yes, but
I was never brought up to that way of thinking. In the
church to which I belong" (really referring to the
denomination) "it is taught and practised like
this". That is a fixed position. Let me say it,
without judging of these things, that any fixed position
is a contradiction of the Holy Ghost and of sonship. It
does not matter what the position is, and it may be (I am
only going to say it may be, I could put it more strongly
than that) that if you really come under the government
of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of sonship, you may have
to make very drastic changes and cease to be that and
that, and go on with God. Adjustableness is a mark of
sonship, and, as the Holy Spirit has never brought any of
us yet to a final position, there is more light and
understanding yet to be received. The ways of God are not
all known to us yet.
We must
remember there is all the difference between the
permissive will of God, for such instruction in us as can
never be gained in any other way, and the whole will of
God, which is another thing. We all have to look back on
our lives and believe that certain steps which were taken
and courses followed were in the will of God for us. Yet,
in later life, we have had to repudiate the position into
which we then came, entirely change and adjust. But,
beloved, I am going to say this: it does not mean that it
was not the will of God for us that we took that step.
The Lord may at one time, in His permissive will, lead us
in a certain way, because of its being the only way we
can learn certain things we have to learn. But that does
not mean that God intends us to stay there for ever; that
He has settled us in that, and that, because He led us in
that way and into that, we dare not ever contemplate
moving out of it. That is bondage. You and I as sons have
to know liberty from bondage of every kind, and that
means that we are to be adjustable, free for adjustments,
not bound by any kind of conception that would prevent us
from making changes as we are led by the Spirit: and it
is true of every life that is Spirit-governed that
tremendous changes take place. The things which at one
time would never have been considered nor contemplated,
have become actualities now. The basis of the life is the
Holy Spirit, and the Spirit producing sonship means that
you and I have to be adjustable, and if we are not
adjustable, there is arrest at once. We are in bondage,
we are in limitation. The Lord Jesus was adjustable under
the government of the Holy Spirit. He was not playing a
trick on His brethren when one day they came to Him and
said, 'We are going up to the feast. Are you going up
with us? If you do not go, people will wonder; you will
prejudice your interest'. He said, 'No, you go up, I am
not going up'. Yet when they were gone up, then Jesus
went up to the feast. Is He playing a trick on them? Was
He simply saying, Well, I would rather go alone, I would
like to get rid of you? He had not the witness of the
Spirit at that moment that He was to go, and therefore He
had to stand His ground and take the risk of being
misunderstood. But when they had gone up, He evidently
got the Spirit's witness that He should go up, and He did
not say, I have told them I was not going up; they will
think I have played a trick on them, that I did not want
them. No, He did not argue like that, but moved in the
Spirit, and left it all with the Father. He was not bound
by those considerations, of what people would think and
say either way. If they should talk because He was not
there - all right, let them talk. As for Him, He must be
true to the Lord. Adjusting, even if it is at an hour's
notice, that is life in the Spirit, that is sonship.
This is
the basis of victory over the Devil. There is no
defeating Satan save on this ground of walking in the
Spirit, of being governed by Him. May the Lord give us
understanding in these basic things about our life with
Him.