Reading: 2
Cor. 4:1-7
The first verse contains the little clause
upon which everything in this letter hangs, "Therefore,
seeing we have this ministry" "This ministry." — We
recognise that this letter is being written to the believers
at Corinth, and one of the features of this letter, and the
letters of Paul in general, is the way in which he unites
those to whom he writes with himself, and himself with them,
and makes it one matter. He is not saying, "Therefore,
seeing I have this ministry." He is saying, we have
this ministry, and if we just look back and on we will see
how he brings them into oneness with himself. It is one of
his great principles. It is basic to what the apostle is
seeking to do, because these Corinthians had challenged him
very seriously and raised many questions about him, some
disputing his apostleship, and he has met with a good deal
of suspicion and doubt and opposition. He is a man in the
presence of people in the church who do not like him, and
who do not want him, and who would rule him out and would
prefer others to him, and he has to meet a difficulty like
that. The difficulty that many ministers have had to meet.
How are you going to meet people in the church who really do
not like you, and do not want you, and are saying all kinds
of things about you that are unworthy? An expression of the
wisdom of the Holy Spirit is that He unites Himself to them
and involves them in his own position and involves himself
in theirs and deals with it as a common thing. Paul comes
right down to them and speaks to them as though they were
all facing common difficulties.
And so he says, "We
have this ministry." Why I mention this is that we shall all
recognise that we have this ministry. This does not belong
to a certain set called "ministers" or "missionaries" in any
official sense. It is the ministry of every child of God. It
has its intensified forms in those who are separated unto
the gospel in a special way, but we all have it. We are not
thinking of "ministry" as some detached and hedged-around
thing belonging to a certain class of people, but it is the
whole house of God and the whole body of Christ. It is the
ministry of every member, and every one of us in the
ministry, and therefore these words apply to you in a very
definite way. We
have this ministry.
Here you have ministry revealed according
to the mind of God. It is tremendously important to
recognise how the ministry and the minister are one. That is
one of the foundations here in this letter. You cannot
separate them. The ministry will never be more than the
minister, and the minister, in what he is, makes the
ministry. And so this letter, which has to deal so much with
this ministry is so very full of what is autobiography. It
is the inner life of the servant of the Lord. The inner
spiritual history of God's servant is here, and he does not
hesitate to bring out the personal, inner, spiritual history
of his on this very principle that the ministry is, after
all, only the expression of what the man is in his inner
spiritual history — what the Lord's servant is with the Lord
himself. The ministry and the minister are interwoven, and
the ministry is the outworking of what has taken place in
secret with the Lord on the part of the Lord's servant.
That gets us altogether out of a professional realm and
takes us out of the realm where we speak of "taking up"
Christian work, or "going into the ministry." There is
nothing in the New Testament that would suggest a mechanical
entering into what is called the Lord's work. You cannot
take it up. You cannot enter into it. It is the spontaneous
expression of your own inner history with God. And, after
all, the ministry is largely a question of personality. But
that wants safeguarding. What is personality? I am speaking
of it in the higher, spiritual sense. Personality is
character formed in secret with God. If you can get the
inside out of that, you have gone a long way in
understanding the "ministry." It is the expression amongst
men of what has taken place apart from men, where men have
not seen and do not know, where they are unable to trace
what is happening. The deep, inner, secret history where the
Lord alone knows what is taking place. And sometimes the
individual himself does not know what is happening.
God has got him into a realm beyond his own
depths and certainly where no one else understands him, and
it is there that spiritual personality is being formed. And
then eventually, out from those deep dealings of God with
him, in the hidden place he comes out with a message, and it
is not something he has arranged and prepared and put down
on paper. It is the expression of something that God has
done in him, not only shown to him, but done in
him, for the showing follows the doing. He shows the
meaning of what He has done, and that makes the message.
Presently, when you have gone through, God
begins to interpret what He has been doing and you come out
with a testimony. The Lord Jesus Himself had this
experience. We pointed out the other day that when He came
out and publicly stood before heaven and men and hell, two
things happened. On the one hand the Father said, "Thou art
My Beloved Son." On the other hand, "This is My Beloved
Son," calling the attention of men to Him as approved of
God. These two things were the result of thirty years secret
history with God. It was not that He had taken up that
ministry and got a kind of Divine ordination. He had been
living before God and in secret with God a long time.
Possibly one of the reasons why there is the break at the
age of twelve years is that the Lord Jesus has really had
some conception of His life work — "Wist ye not that I must
be in My Father's house?" He is repudiating Joseph there and
then, and He is linking Himself to His Father, so that
really, as a lad, He had the conception of His heavenly
relationship. And, just think, that growing into young
manhood He can only believe that during a stretch of years
He was all the time living in view of a day which seemed
never to come, when He would enter into His life work, and
He had to live through the time of seeming spiritual
inaction, of not reaching His real life work, not going into
His work, but living His life before God, well pleasing to
God, so that when at length the day came and He was able to
discern, He came forth with the words, "The time is
fulfilled." If, during this time before, there had been that
which was not pleasing to the Father, the heavens would not
have been opened. Personality and character developed in the
secret place with God. His brethren did not believe on Him,
His mother did not talk about it, so that He simply had to
live in secret with God.
That is a basic principle of ministry. It
is a tragic thing to take a young man or a young woman and
give them a short time in a Bible school and push them out
into the full responsibility of God's work. They have not
got the deep history wrought out in secret with God which
makes them able to meet the full force of the Satanic
opposition. They will either have to go to pieces or
compromise and come down to a lower level. There is no loss
of time in keeping back. God would take us through the
depths. We think that everything is seeming to be delayed,
but presently we shall know. Something is happening to make
us able ministers of the New Covenant. It is not collegiate
preparation, it is not training in the schools; it is a
secret history with God.
Paul was over twelve months in the church
in Antioch, but the saints are taking account. Saul knows
from God what his life work is, and I wonder if he chafed
during that time. But he stayed there, and in the secret he
was approving himself before God, and when the Holy Spirit
says to the elders "Separate me Saul" there is no question
in their minds that this man had proved himself. No, they
are ready to immediately act because God has in that stretch
of time called their attention to this man and made them
take account of him. And so they know and when the Lord's
time comes they do it. They laid their hands upon them and
let them go.
And so this ministry is not the
professional ministry, not according to the system of our
day. But this ministry comes out of a secret history with
God and this ministry demands that and it cannot be
effective beyond the measure of what has been wrought in the
secret place with God. Do not break away from God to get
into your ministry.
This servant's character has been formed. Christ is
interwoven with his ministry. "Paul a servant of God through
the will of God." The second feature of this ministry is
"through the will of God." The way in which Paul starts his
letters will give you a key to what he is going to say. He
is here establishing at once the authority of his ministry.
It is "through the will of God." He is going to tell you
what ministry by God's appointment is. And only ministry
that has this back of it has the authority of God upon it.
It is a tremendous thing to get the Divine seal. How did we
get into the Lord's service? Did we become suddenly
interested in Christian work and take it up? How did we get
in? How is it we have stayed in? Are we here because we know
it is the will of God?
This ministry must have the authority of
God in it, and the authority of God is the attestation from
heaven which comes in your own heart when God has seen in
you the development in secret of what He was seeking to
realise. You will never get the Divine ordination until you
have been "approved unto God." It must be when His hands are
laid on through an open heaven. And so we cannot be too
strong in our emphasis upon the necessity and the importance
of a secret life with God back of all ministry. It was so
with the Lord; it was so with Paul, it has been so with
everyone who has had this ministry. "He gave some apostles,
and some prophets, and some evangelists; and some pastors
and teachers." The gift will suffer and become purely
professional unless the secret spiritual history is
maintained in full strength. One of the perils of Christian
activity is that you get so busy you neglect the secret
history. You lose the background and presently you begin to
discover you have not that which meets the demand. You are
losing grip and power and you are on the highway to a
breakdown. It is the loss of the secret place and the secret
history with God, and one of the things that any servant of
God has to do is to refuse that measure of activity which
goes beyond the possibility of keeping an adequate secret
history with God. We have to settle this, difficult as it
is. Here is a call for ministry; we are not to accept it
simply because it is an opening to do some good. We must go
to the Lord in secret. We must never be called out because
it is an opportunity for doing good. The enemy would keep us
tremendously busy. One of the perils in these days is to be
always active in the outside things, and your time with God
becoming less and less. This ministry is founded on a deep
life with God in secret.
God must be able to keep us constantly
checked up in secret. We must go back to God and have those
quiet times where the Lord can constantly say to us, "You
remember so and so. That was not right. You will have to
correct that." Perhaps we have said something wrong or
failed to say something we should have said. God never
passes it over, and if we gave God the quiet time He would
bring up those things and we would be reminded of them. But
if we ride on over those things, in the end the Lord will
leave us to plunge on. It is what a man is before God, and
not what he is before men.
"This ministry." What is this ministry? It
is the only ministry that God approves. Preaching the gospel
is not the first thing in this ministry. "Seeing it is God
that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, who shined in
our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory
of God in the face of Jesus Christ." The light of the
glorious gospel of Jesus Christ shined into our hearts. What
surrounds this? The chapter before takes us back to Exodus
24. Moses had been with the Lord. He wist not that his face
did shine, but people saw it and could not look upon it. And
he was, after all, only reading the law. It was legalism, it
was the law of death.
But here is the law of life in Christ. The
God, Whose glory was on the face of Moses, then under a
veil, has shined without a veil into our hearts. There is no
veil over the face of Jesus Christ, and the unveiled face of
Jesus Christ is revealed in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.
"God hath shined into our hearts." What for? For the same
purpose as with Moses — to make known the mind of God to
others. How do others come to know the mind of God? By the
glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ being manifested
out from our inner lives. From that, others are able to see
the Lord; that we have an inner radiant knowledge of God.
"Christ in you the hope of glory." God hath shined in and
made us, not merely in what we say, but in what we are, an
expression of Christ as the revelation of God. That is the
ministry.
If that was applied to all ministry today,
I wonder how much would survive. How much ministry today is
the coming out of what is known of the glory of God in the
heart? That is what we must have — a secret history with
God. If all our ministry were like that, how much more would
be accomplished for God.
"We have this treasure (this unveiling of
the Lord Jesus in our hearts) in vessels of fragile clay."
He keeps us from taking any of the glory to ourselves, from
being anything men would take account of, "that the
excellent greatness of the power might be of God and not out
from ourselves." What a reflection of the revelation of
Jesus Christ! The excellent greatness of the power of God
revealed in our hearts! Do you pray for power in your
ministry? Get the excellent greatness of the power of Jesus
Christ in your heart and you cannot get greater power.
Therefore, you see why the devil is out to blind the mind.
For, once the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in
the face of Jesus Christ gets through, his rule is at an
end. It is the revelation of Jesus Christ which is going to
scatter the enemy. When He shall be revealed, the enemy's
day is over. And the exceeding greatness of the power in
this ministry is that we may have the inshining of God
revealing His glory in the face of Jesus Christ in our
hearts. It may not be platform ministry.
It is the Lord's ministry we are in, and there is to be an
expression of the power of God in every bit of it.
The ministry is the showing forth of Jesus
Christ. "It pleased God to reveal His Son in me, that I
might proclaim Him among the nations." It was the
inshining of Jesus Christ that made Paul a missionary. It is
setting forth Christ. That is this ministry, and we should
make it our prayer that what we know of the ministry for us
will be a showing forth of Jesus Christ. It is the glory of
the Father, and nothing can stand before it. In order that
it might be so, the vessel should be such that it shall not
take any glory away from Him. He will keep it weak so that
everything will be to His glory. We must recognise the
nature of the ministry before which principalities and
powers cannot stand. It is not what we say. It is the
measure in which the Lord Jesus Christ is mediated as the
glory of God that counts.
The Ministry is the ministry of Christ and
it is constituted solely upon the basis of what Christ is
within us. That is the examination for the ministry. That is
the certificate of the ministry. Paul tells them literally,
"Ye are our epistles, read and known of all men," — you are
our certificate of the ministry. By which he means that they
are the result of what the Lord Jesus has been in us. The
real credentials of the ministry is what the Lord Jesus is
in our hearts. Seeing that it is Christ within that
constitutes the ministry; that it is the ministration of
Jesus Christ, we are able to take this extra step and see
that Christ revealed within represents a position to which
we have come. It represents that we have come to a large
place. It means that we have come over Jordan.
You are familiar with the difference in the
inheritance under Moses and under Joshua, and you will
remember that under Moses there were two and a half tribes
who obtained their inheritance on the other side of Jordan.
Moses permitted them to do it although it was not God's
first will. Under Moses He gave them an inheritance on the
other side of Jordan, but all the rest had their inheritance
over Jordan in the land and for them it was a question of
fullness. For the others, it was partial and their
inheritance was possessed without their getting into the
land by the way of Jordan. And yet Moses gave this command
that they should see their brethren over Jordan, so they had
a kind of relationship to those who went over Jordan, but it
was not an experimental one. It was a formal one. It was not
a subjective one, it was an objective one. So that the
meaning of Jordan for them was objective and not subjective.
Jordan, as we have heard, represents all
the work of the Lord Jesus in His Cross — all that was bound
up in the death and burial and resurrection of the Lord
Jesus. You can have it objectively and have an inheritance,
but, if you have it subjectively, you have a far greater
inheritance. The two and a half tribes had the objective
benefits only — that which Christ did for
them. The others went over and had what Christ had done
for them and also what Christ did in them. It is
not the something outward only that we rejoice in. The
others went over in an inward way and they had the full
inheritance of the land. It is always best to have the
Jordan, with all it means, between you and your enemies.
That is the Old Testament illustration for this.
In the New Testament the letter to the
Romans illustrates this again. Romans 7 is the two and a
half tribe's position. One day you may feel safe, but the
next day you do not feel a bit safe. The thing is not
settled within. You rejoice in what the Lord has done for
you, but you are so conscious that you need something more
than that. You need it all to be done in you. But when you
go through into Chapter 8 you have got right into the land,
and Chapter 9 leads you on to Ephesians and Colossians, and
you find you are in the full inheritance, right in the land,
your full inheritance in Christ.
And it is there that you come to have your full ministry.
This particular ministry of which we are speaking is founded
upon, first of all, that you are right over Jordan and
Christ in His fullness is your possession, for Colossians is
Christ in fullness and that fullness in us — "Christ in you
the hope of glory." So that what 2 Corinthians 3 and 4
represent is that you have come to the place where "Christ
is all". In first Corinthians it is not Christ is all. It is
men and things — Paul, Apollos, gifts. Paul was labouring in
the first letter to bring them to Christ. Now the work has
been done, and second Corinthians brings in Christ in His
fullness, and then you get the ministry of Christ in effect.
Of course, when you get this revelation of Jesus Christ
within, you get an addition and spiritually it represents
the principle of God adding and so the Corinthians have come
to an advanced position. You cannot fail to notice the
change. The first letter leaves you in distress about this
people, but the second letter sees a tremendous change. They
have come on, and now the Apostle is able, right at the
beginning, to talk about "God Who said light shall shine in
darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of
the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus
Christ."
The ministry according to God has power, like
Joshua, to drive out the enemy and they have to flee. The
ministry which is like that, which scatters the enemy, is
based entirely upon the measure in which Christ is inwardly
full in us. If only we could get back to this basis of
ministry! The ministry of Jesus Christ is nothing more nor
less than the revelation of Jesus Christ in the heart of the
child of God, and you are going to minister more or less
effectively according to the measure of what Christ is in
you inwardly. God cannot go beyond that. All the other
ministry we talk about does not come within the Divine
thought. It makes the ministry a very simple thing, but a
very searching thing. It is not qualification as speakers.
It is not any scholastic equipment. Thank God for anything
that may be helpful, but if you begin to count on that you
are making a mistake. It is not that we are able to speak.
It is not that we have academic gifts or equipment, but it
is just what the Lord Jesus is in us and to us, being shown
through us. You may be the poorest speaker, but Christ can
shine out, and the impact of Jesus Christ within your life
can be such that the enemy begins to stir up. "Jesus I know"
— that is the ministry — where the forces of evil are forced
to take account of the presence of Christ before you speak,
where others around you are conscious that there is
something here that makes it difficult for them to sin
without knowing that they are sinning. Some may sin and not
know they are sinning until Christ comes on the scene in one
of His servants, and then they are smitten. It is the
presence of Christ. "God hath shined into our hearts."
We may preach all the sermons that ever men
could preach and it will accomplish nothing if Christ is not
the registration of our presence. It is Christ-consciousness
produced through the man and the woman in whom He reigns. It
is the measure of the inheritance.
And the ministry is open to all. "We have
this ministry," and we have this treasure in a vessel of
fragile clay. Why does God choose vessels like that? Why is
it that if He gets a highly polished vessel in itself, He
has to bring such a vessel to be very little in its own
eyes? Paul, with all his advantages, is brought to the place
where all these things are rubbish. Why a vessel broken? To
make room for the Lord Jesus. To give Him all the place. The
measure of Christ is the measure of the
ministry, not the measure of the vessel. And, although it
costs, I think we are prepared to be broken if only Christ
is commensurately revealed
And, of course,
when we get into ministry like that, we expect certain
things. We get the full impact of the devil. "We are pressed
on every side." The ministry of Christ brings you
immediately into direct contact with the forces of the
devil, but in those conditions the ministry is vindicated
because, under pressure, persecution, trial, you are not
destroyed; you are not left behind. "That the life also of
Jesus may be manifested." Here is a fragile vessel. In
itself you would not give anything for it. In itself it is a
very poor thing, and yet hell has been let loose upon that
fragile thing and hell has been defeated. What is the secret
of that? It is Christ in the vessel, the life whereby Jesus
conquered death, in a vessel like that. That is the
ministry. That the Lord Jesus Who has conquered death in a
vessel is simply proving hell impotent. That is when the
Lord has His full place. We have this ministry, and as we
have received this ministry, we faint not. "Though our
outward man does perish, our inward man is being renewed day
by day." "And our light affliction which is but for a moment
worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of
glory, while we look not at the things that are seen, but at
the things that are not seen." What the Lord wants to do is
to make a large place for Christ in us.
First published in "A Witness and A Testimony"
magazine, Nov-Dec 1931, Vol. 9-6