Let us go out to Him, outside the camp, and bear the
disgrace He bore. (Hebrews 13:13 NLT)
We can organize our movements, lay our plans,
and draft our schemes. We can lay it all out according to the New Testament and it
can be dead, ineffective.... You see the difference between a
traditional system, whether it be Judaism or Christianity, and a living thing
coming all the time in a living way out from the Christ Himself by the Holy
Spirit, the Holy Spirit Himself doing it. Well, this is going to cost something.
See what it meant for these people. At the end of this letter you come on this:
“Wherefore, Christ also... suffered without the camp. Let us therefore go to Him
without the camp, bearing His reproach.” The camp was Judaism, and He suffered
without the camp because He repudiated Judaism and stood for the realization of
all God’s thoughts as in Himself personally. He gathered up everything into His
own person, “I am.” It is the Christ who is the full sum and embodiment of all
God’s thoughts and ways, and that takes the place of Judaism, and He, therefore,
repudiated Judaism and suffered without the camp. "Let us go to Him without the
camp."
What is the issue? If you are going to take this line you
are going to repudiate organized Christianity, going to repudiate Christendom as
a traditional system, going to repudiate that order of things which is made, and
going, therefore, to suffer reproach and be outside of the camp suffering His
reproach. In other words, we are
immediately going to come up against that force of antagonism to stop what has
come in through the death and resurrection and exaltation of the Lord Jesus, the
heavenly thing. Is it not sad that these people met it through God’s historic
people, the people who claimed to have the oracles, to be the elect, to be the
favored of the Lord? It is always like that. “A man’s foes shall be those of
his own household.” Do not narrow that down to the limits of a family where one
is a Christian and all the rest are not. That is not the point at all. It is his
own household, the Christian household. You will meet the antagonism to what has
come in from heaven as a heavenly thing; you will meet the antagonism amongst
those who are the traditional people of God in this dispensation. That is how it
will be. That is going to be the cost of a walk in Life with the Lord and not
with man, knowing the Lord for yourself.