Reading: Matt
11:29; John 1:51; Matt 3:16; John 1:4; Rom 8:2; 2 Cor
3:16-18.
The School of Christ;
that is, the School where Christ is the great Lesson and
the Spirit the great Teacher; in the School where the
teaching is not objective but subjective, where the
teaching is not of things but an inward making of Christ
a part of us by experience—that is the nature of
this School.
THE
MEANING OF THE ANOINTING
"Ye shall see the
heaven opened." "He saw the heavens opened and
the Spirit of God descending upon him." What is the
meaning of the anointing of the Holy Spirit? It is
nothing less and nothing other than the Holy Spirit
taking His place as absolute Lord. The anointing carries
with it the absolute lordship of the Holy Spirit, the
Spirit as Lord. That means that all other lordships have
been deposed and set aside; the lordship of our own
lives; the lordship of our own minds, our own wills, our
own desires; the lordship of others. The lordship of
every interest and every influence is regarded as having
given place to the undivided and unreserved lordship of
the Holy Spirit, and the anointing can never be known,
enjoyed, unless that has taken place. That is why the
Lord Jesus went down into Jordan's waters, into death and
burial, in type, taking the place of man in
representation, from that moment not to be under the
government of His own life in any respect as He worked
out the will of God, but to be wholly and utterly subject
to the Spirit of God in every detail. Jordan's grave set
forth the setting aside of every independent lordship,
every other lordship, every other influence, and if you
will read the spiritual life of Christ in the Gospels you
will see that it was to that position that He was every
moment adhering. Many and powerful were the influences
which were brought to bear upon Him to affect Him and
govern His movements. Sometimes it was the full force of
Satan's open assault, to the effect that it was necessary
that He should do certain things for His cause, or for
His very continuance in life physically. Sometimes it was
Satan clothing himself with the arguments and suasions of
beloved associates, in their seeking to hold Him back
from certain courses, or to influence Him to prolong His
life by sparing Himself certain sufferings. In various
ways influences were brought to bear upon Him from all
directions, and many of the counsels were seemingly so
wise and good. For example, with regard to His going up
to the feast, it was urged, in effect: It is the thing
that everybody is doing: if you do not go up you will
prejudice your cause. If you really want to further this
cause, you must fall into line with the accepted thing
religiously, and you only stand to lose if you do not do
that; you will curtail your influence, you will narrow
your sphere of usefulness! And what an appeal that is if
you have something very much at heart, some cause for God
at heart, the success of which is of the greatest
importance. Such then were the influences that were
beating upon Him. But whether it be Satan coming in all
the directness of his cunning, his wit, his insinuation,
or whether it be through beloved and most intimate
disciples and associates, whatever the kind of argument,
that Man cannot be caused to deflect a hairsbreadth from
His principle. 'I am under the anointing; I am committed
to the absolute sovereignty of the Holy Spirit, and I
cannot move, whatever it costs. Cost it my life, cost it
my influence, cost it my reputation, cost it everything
that I hold dear, I cannot move unless I know from the
Holy Spirit that that is the Father's mind and not
another mind, the Father's will and not another will,
that this thing comes from the Father.' Thus He put back
everything until He knew in His spirit what the Spirit of
God witnessed. He lived up to this law, this principle,
of the absolute authority, government, lordship of the
anointing, and it was for that that the anointing had
come.
That is the meaning of
the anointing. Do you ask for the anointing of the Holy
Spirit? Why do you ask for the anointing of the Holy
Spirit? Is the anointing something that you crave? To
what end? That you may be used, may have power, may have
influence, may be able to do a lot of wonderful things?
The first and pre-eminent thing the anointing means is
that we can do nothing but what the anointing teaches and
leads to do. The anointing takes everything out of our
hands. The anointing takes charge of the reputation. The
anointing takes charge of the very purpose of God. The
anointing takes complete control of everything and all is
from that moment in the hands of the Holy Spirit, and we
must remember that if we are going to learn Christ, that
learning Christ is by the Holy Spirit's dealing with us,
and that means that we have to go exactly the same way as
Christ went in principle and in law.
So we find we are not
far into the Gospel of John, which is particularly the
Gospel of the spiritual School of Christ, before we hear
even such as He saying, "The Son can do nothing of
himself". "The words that I say unto you I
speak not from myself." The works that I do are not
Mine; "the Father abiding in me doeth his
works".
"The Son can do
nothing out from himself." You see, there is the
negative side of the anointing; while the positive side
can be summed up in one word—the Father only.
Perhaps that is a little different idea of the anointing
from what we have had. Oh, to be anointed of the Holy
Spirit! What wonders will follow; how wonderful that life
will be! The first and the abiding thing about the
anointing is that we are imprisoned into the lordship of
the Spirit of God, so that there can be nothing if He
does not do it. Nothing! That is not a pleasant
experience, if the natural life is strong and in any way
in the ascendant. Therefore Jordan must be there before
there can be an anointing. The putting aside of that
natural strength and self-life is a necessity, for the
anointing does carry with it essentially the absolute
lordship of the Spirit.
You notice the issue of
that in 2 Cor 3:16. "When it shall turn to the
Lord", when the Lord is the object in view,
"the veil is taken away, and we all with unveiled
face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord are
transformed into the same image . . . even as from the
Lord the Spirit", or "the Spirit which is the
Lord". You are in the School and you can see Christ
and learn Christ; which is being transformed into the
image of Christ under the lordship of the Spirit.
"When it shall turn to the Lord", when the Lord
is our object in view! But with us, with us Christians,
with us very devoted, very earnest Christians, what a
long time it takes to get the Lord as the sole object. Is
that saying a terrible thing? We say we love the Lord;
yes, but we do love to have our own way as well, and we
do not love to have our way thwarted. Have any of us yet
reached that point of spiritual attainment where we never
have a bad time at all with the Lord? Oh no, we are still
found at the place where we so often think it is in the
interests of the Lord that our hearts go out in a certain
direction, and the Lord does not let us do it, and we
have a bad time; and that has betrayed us absolutely. Our
hearts were in it. It was not easy, absolutely easy and
simple for us to say, Very well, Lord, I am just as
pleased as though you let me do it, I delight always to
do Thy will! We are disappointed the Lord does not let us
do it; or if the Lord delays it, what a time we go
through. Oh, if we could only get at it and do it! The
time is finding us out. Is that not true of most of us?
Yes, it is true. We do come into this picture, and that
just does mean that, after all, the Lord is not as verily
our object as we thought He was. We have another object
alongside and associated with the Lord; that is,
something that we want to be or to do, somewhere we want
to go, something we want to have. It is all there, and
the Holy Spirit knows all about it. In this School of
Christ, where God's objective is Christ, only Christ,
utterly Christ, the very anointing means that it has to
be Christ as Lord by the Spirit. The anointing takes that
position. Well, so much for the moment for the meaning of
the anointing. It was true in Him, and it has to be true
in us.
"LORDSHIP"
AND "SUBJECTION"
If we are going to
graduate in this School, graduate to the glory, the
ultimate full glory of Christ, to be the competent
instrument in His Kingdom for government, the one way of
learning that spiritual, Divine, heavenly government
which is His destiny for the saints, is subjection to the
Holy Spirit. That is a very interesting word, that word
'subjection', in the New Testament. I think it has been
rather mishandled and given a wrong and unpleasant
meaning. The idea of subjection is usually that of being
crushed down underneath, being put under all the time,
suppression. "Wives, be in subjection to your own
husbands." That is now interpreted as, You have to
get down underneath; and the word does not mean that at
all. How shall we seek to convey what the Greek word for
subjection or submission really implies? Well, write down
the number 1; and then you are going to write subjection
or submission. How are you going to write it? Not by
putting another 1 underneath. The word means 'putting
alongside it or after it'. No. 1 is the primary number,
it stands in front of all that comes after, and governs
and gives value to all the rest. Subjection means that He
in all things has the pre-eminence. We come after and
take our value from Him. It is not being crushed down,
but deriving everything from Him as the first one: and
you never derive the benefits until you know subjection
to Christ. That is to say, you come after, you take
second place, take that place by which you derive all the
benefit; you get the value by taking a certain place. The
Church is not subject to Christ in that repressive sense,
not down under His heel or His thumb, but just coming
after, alongside, He having the pre-eminence, and the
Church, His Bride, deriving all the good from His
pre-eminence, from His having the first place. The Church
second, yes; but who minds a second place if you are
going to get all the values of the first by having second
place? That is subjection. The Lord's idea for the Church
is that she should have everything. But how will she get
it? Not by taking the first place, but by coming
alongside the Lord and in all things letting Him have the
pre-eminence. That is submission, subjection. The
lordship of the Spirit is not something hard that strips
us, takes everything from us, and keeps us down there all
the time so that we dare not move. The lordship of the
Spirit is to bring us into all the fullness of that
headship. But we do have to learn what that lordship is
before we can come into that fullness. It is of His
fullness we receive.
The trouble ever was,
from Adam's day till ours, that it is not someone else's
fullness that man wants, it is his own; to have it in
himself and not in another. The Holy Spirit cuts that
ground from under our feet and says, It is His fullness,
it is in Him. He must have His place of absolute lordship
before we can know of His fullness. That is enough I
think, for the moment, on the meaning of the anointing.
Do you grasp it? The Lord give us grace to accept the
meaning of Jordan in order that we may have the open
heaven and, by the open heaven, the anointing which
brings in all heaven's fullness for us. But it does mean
the absolute lordship of the Spirit. Lesson No. 1 in the
School—oh, that is not Lesson No. 1, that is the
very ground of coming into the School, that is a
preliminary examination. We never get into the School
until we accept the lordship of the Holy Spirit. That is
why so many do not get on very far in the knowledge of
the Lord. They have never accepted the implications of
the anointing, never really come down into Jordan. Their
progress, their learning, is very slow, very poor. Find a
person who really knows the meaning of the Cross, of
Jordan, in the clearing of the way for the lordship of
the Spirit, and you will find quick growth, you will find
spiritual development far ahead of all others. It is very
true. That is the preliminary, the entrance examination.
THE
FIRST LESSON IN THE SCHOOL OF CHRIST
But when you are in,
Lesson No. 1 begins here. It is but a reiteration of what
has been strongly said in earlier meditations. The first
lesson in the School of Christ which the Holy Spirit
takes up to teach us is what we have called the
altogether 'other-ness' of Christ from ourselves. This
may be not only the first lesson but a continuous lesson
throughout life. But this is the one thing with which the
Holy Spirit begins, the altogether 'other-ness' of Christ
from what we are. Will you take up the Gospel of John
with that one thought in mind and read it again, quietly
and steadily. How different Christ is from other people,
even from His disciples. You can expand from John's
Gospel to all the Gospels with that one thought. It will
be an education to you if the Holy Spirit is with you as
you read. How utterly different He is! That difference is
again and again affirmed. "Ye are from beneath; I am
from above" (John 8:23). That is a difference, and
that difference becomes a clash all the way along; a
clash of judgments, a clash of mentalities, a clash of
minds, a clash of ideas, a clash of values; a clash in
everything between Him and others, even with His
disciples who are with Him in the School. His nature is
different. He has a heavenly nature, a Divine nature. No
one else has that. He has a heavenly mind, a heavenly
mentality. They have an earthly mentality, and the two
cannot meet, at any point. When the last word has been
said, there is a big, big gap between the two. He is so
utterly other.
Now, you say, that being
so, we are at a very great disadvantage. He is one thing
and we are another. But that is just the nature and
meaning of this School. How is that problem going to be
resolved? Well, it is just resolved like this, that He is
all the time speaking about a time when He will be in
them and they will be in Him, and when that time comes,
in the innermost and deepest reality of their being, they
will be altogether other than what they are in every
other part of their being. That is to say, there will be
in them that which is Christ, that which is Christ in all
that He is as the absolutely Other. Sometimes they will
think that the best thing to do is this, but that
altogether Other inside will not let them do it.
Sometimes they will think that the wise thing is not to
do this, and that altogether Other inside keeps saying,
in effect, Get on with it! The outer man says, It is
madness! I am only courting disaster! The inner Man says,
You are to do it! These two cannot be reconciled. He is
within and He is altogether other, and our education is
to learn to follow Him, to go His way. "If any man
will come after me, let him deny himself . . . and follow
me." Deny himself: your arguments, your judgments,
your common sense sometimes. Follow Me!—and Christ
is vindicated every time. Men have done the maddest
things from this world's standpoint and have been
vindicated. This is no suggestion that you should go and
begin to do mad things. I am talking about the authority
of Christ within, the difference of Christ from
ourselves, and this is the first lesson the Holy Spirit
would teach anyone coming into the School of Christ, that
there is this great difference, this great cleavage, that
He is one thing and we are quite another; and we can
never be sure that we are on the right line save as we
submit everything to Him.
This is why prayer has
to have such a large place in the life of a child of God,
and this is why prayer had such a large place in His life
when He was here. The prayer life of the Lord Jesus is,
in a certain realm and sense, the biggest problem that
you can face. He is Christ, He is the Son of God, He is
under the anointing of the Holy Spirit, and He is without
sin in His person, and yet, and yet, He must spend all
the night in prayer after a heavy and long day's work.
Again and again you come upon Him in prayer. Why must He
pray? Because there are other influences at work, there
are other things which are seeking to call for
consideration and response and obedience, and He must
keep all the time in line with the anointing, in harmony
with the Spirit under whose government He has placed
Himself, because He can decide nothing out from Himself.
If He must do that, what of us? We are not even on His
sinless level. We have all that in our very natures which
works violently against God, God's mind, God's will. How
much the more necessary then is it for us to have a
prayer life, by which the Spirit is given an opportunity
of keeping us straight, keeping us on the line of Divine
purpose, keeping us in the ways of the Lord, and in the
times of the Lord.
Beloved, if there is one
thing that a child of God will learn under the Holy
Spirit's lordship, it is this thing, namely, how
different He is from us, how different we are from Him,
how altogether other. But, blessed be God, now in this
dispensation, if we are truly children of God, the
altogether Other is not merely objective but within. That
is the second phase of this matter of the 'other-ness'.
The first phase is the fact of the difference. Will you
accept this? Will you now, at this very point, this
moment, just settle this? The Lord Jesus is altogether
other than I am: even when I think I am most perfectly
right, He may still be altogether other, and I can never,
never rely upon my own sense of rightness until I have
submitted my rightness to Him! That is very utter, but it
is very necessary. Many of us have learned these lessons.
We are not talking out of a book, we are talking out of
our own experience. We have been quite sure at times that
we were right and we have gone forward to follow out our
rightness in that judgment, and we have come to grief,
and we have got into an awful fog of perplexity and
bewilderment. We were quite sure we were right, but look
where we have been landed! And when we come to think
about it, and put it before the Lord, we have to ask
ourselves, how much did I wait on the Lord and wait for
the Lord about that thing. Were we not a bit precipitate
with our own sense of rightness? And that is David and
the ark all over again. David's motive was all right and
David's sense of God's purpose was all right. That God
wanted the ark in Jerusalem was right enough, but David
got the thing into his soul as an idea, and it worked
itself up as a great enthusiasm within him, and so he
made the cart. The motive, the good motive, the good
idea, the devout spirit, got him into most awful trouble.
The Lord smote Uzzah, and he died before the Lord, and
the ark went into the house of Obededom, and tarried
there, all because man had a good and right idea, but had
not waited on the Lord. You know the sequel. Later on,
David said to the heads of the Levites, "Sanctify
yourselves, both ye and your brethren, that ye may bring
up the ark of the Lord, the God of Israel, unto the place
that I have prepared for it. For because ye bare it not
at the first, the Lord our God made a breach upon us, for
that we sought him not according to the ordinance."
The instruction was there all the time, but he had not
waited on the Lord. If David had brought his devout
enthusiasm quietly before the Lord, He would have
directed him to the instruction He had given to Moses,
and said, in effect, 'Yes, all right, but, remember, this
is how it is to be carried.' There would have been no
death, no delay, things would have gone right through.
Yes, we may get a very
good idea for the Lord, but we have to submit it to the
Lord, to be quite sure it is not our idea for the Lord,
but the Lord's mind being born in us. It is very
important to learn Christ; He is so other.
You see, this divides
Christians very largely into two classes. Christians can
be, in the main, divided into these two classes. There is
that very large class of Christians whose Christianity is
objective, is outward. It is a matter of having adopted a
Christian life, that now they do a lot of things which
they once would not do. They go to meetings, they go to
church, they read the Bible, lots of things that they
used not to do; and they now do not do quite a lot of
things they once did. That is what holds good more or
less in that class. It is now a matter of not doing and
doing, not going and going, being a good Christian
outwardly. That is a big class with its various degrees
of light and shade, a very big class of Christians
indeed.
There are others who are
in this School of Christ, for whom the Christian life is
an inward thing of walking with the Lord and knowing the
Lord in the heart, in greater or lesser degree. That is
the nature of it, a real inward walk with a living Lord
in their own heart. There is a great deal of difference
between those two classes.
THE
SPIRIT'S LAW OR INSTRUMENT OF INSTRUCTION
Well now, I must come to
a close. The altogether 'other-ness'; by what means does
the Spirit make that 'other-ness' known to us?—for
the Spirit does not speak to us in audible language and
words. We do not hear an outside voice saying, This is
the way, walk ye in it! Then how are we to know? Well, it
is in what the Apostle Paul calls "the law of the
Spirit of life in Christ Jesus". "In him was
life; and the life was the light." How are we to
know, by what means are we to be enlightened on this
matter, on the difference between our ways, our thoughts,
our feelings, and the Lord's? How are we to have light?
The life was the light. "He that followeth me shall
not walk in the darkness, but shall have the light of
life" (John 8:12). "The law of the Spirit of
life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and
of death." Then the Spirit's instrument, if I may
call it that, of our education is life in Christ. That is
to say, we know the mind of the Spirit on matters by
quickening, by sensing, discerning life, Divine life, the
Spirit of life. Or, on the other hand, if we are alive to
the Lord, we know when the Spirit is not in agreement
with anything by a sense of death, death in that
direction.
That is the thing that
no one can teach us by words, by giving us a lesson. But
it is a thing we can know. You know it by reactions,
violent reactions often. You have taken a course, and you
get a bad reaction. You strive in a certain direction to
realize a certain thing, and if only you would stop for a
moment and look at it, you know that you are trying to
bring that about. You know quite well that this thing is
not spontaneous, that this lacks the spontaneity which is
a mark of the Lord. You know the Lord is not coming
through there. You know quite well that you have no sense
of spontaneity and peace. It has to be forced, to be
driven, to be made to happen. More or less, I think,
every one of you who is a true child of God knows what I
am talking about. But remember, this is the Spirit's
instrument in the School for teaching Christ—life.
The mark of a Spirit governed, Spirit-anointed, man or
woman is that they move in life, and that they minister
life, and that what comes from them means life, and they
know by that very law of life where the Lord is, what the
Lord is in, what the Lord is after, what the Lord wants.
That is how they know. No voice is heard, no objective
vision is seen, but deep in the spirit life arbitrates,
the Spirit of life.
How necessary it is for
us to be alive unto God in Christ Jesus. How necessary it
is for us to be all the time laying hold on life. If
Satan can only bring his spirits of death to bear upon us
and bring our spirit under the wrappings of death, he
will cut off the light at once and leave us floundering;
we do not know where we are, what to do. He is always
seeking to do that, and ours is a continuous battle for
life. Everything for the realization of God's purpose is
bound up with this "life". This
"life" is potentially the sum of all Divine
purpose. Just as in the seed there is the life, not only
of the seed, but of a great tree, and that life, if but
released, will eventuate in that great tree, so in the
life given to us in our spiritual infancy, our new birth,
there is all the power of God's full and final and
consummate thought, and Satan is out, not just to cut off
our life, but to prevent God's final interests and
concerns in the full display which is in that life which
is given to us, that eternal life given to us now. The
Spirit is always concerned with that life, and He would
say to us, Guard that life: do not allow anything to come
to interfere with that life: see that whenever there is
something that grieves the Spirit and arrests the
operation of that life, you immediately resort to the
precious Blood which stands as a witness against all the
death, that precious Blood of Jesus, the incorruptible
life, the witness in heaven to victory over sin and
death, by which you can be delivered from that arresting
hand of Satan. That precious Blood is the ground upon
which we must stand to deal with everything that grieves
the Spirit and checks the operation of life, by which we
come to know, and know in this living way, Christ in
ever-growing fullness. The Lord help us.