Behold, I have refined
you, but not as silver; I have chosen you in the furnace of
affliction. For My own sake, for My own sake, will I do it; for
how should My name be profaned? and My glory will I not give to
another (Isa. 48:10-11).
You know that Israel was chosen
not just to be something, but to serve a divine end. The being
was essential to the doing, and the divine end was the bringing
of the Lord into the world, into evidence, into manifestation,
into effect. It is a very great purpose; that God should choose
that, by human instrumentality, He should come unto His own, and
that He should be manifested in His own realm, that He should be
in evidence. God chose that the outcome should simply be that He
was known, understood, felt, that the one ultimate declaration
should be: It is the Lord, that is the Lord. Those are very
simple words, but they go to the root of everything.
That great purpose of God, which
has now been manifested as bound up with the saints of this
dispensation, made necessary refining fires and much affliction,
and, although it may be no new thing to be said to you, it can
come with a renewed emphasis that the supremely important thing
for you and for me and for the Lords people to be fully and
deeply aware of is that the Lord has no other object where we are
concerned than that of bringing Himself in ever-increasing
measure into evidence, into manifestation, for time and for
eternity. The all-governing thing with God is His
self-manifestation, and that can only be along the lines and by
means of spiritual life. There is no other way of manifesting
God, God becoming really known, only along spiritual lines. There
is not one of us who knows the Lord Jesus and has that knowledge
in any other way. We do not have a physical knowledge of Jesus.
We have come into our knowledge of Him in a spiritual way, and
every fuller bit of knowledge of Him is spiritual, essentially
spiritual, and God cannot be known in any other way. The Lord
cannot be manifested in any other way. There is that mystic,
strange, inexplicable something which is extra, which is the
Lord. I mean, it is not teaching. There may be a great mass of
teaching, and perfectly right and true teaching, a great fulness
of truth, and yet there may just be lacking that something, that
extra something, that mystic something that leaves it as truth, a
bulk of truth, and does not get you anywhere. When you have got
it all, it has not got you anywhere. It is not something
objective at all, objective in the way of truth imparted,
teaching given, doctrine held. It is not a matter of work done
for the Lord, in the Name of the Lord, things that we are doing
even the matter of leading others to accept Him, as an
engagement, as a form of activity, of work. It is not the
constituting or the constructing of something for the Lord in the
same way as we would go to work to build up some other
institution in the world and call it by this or that name; it is
not that. These may be means, but if there is not that extra, as
I call it, that mystical something, if it is just an objective
thing, it has failed in its divine value. That something, that
extra, is the Lord. The Lord has been imparted, and all teaching
and truth which does not impart the Lord not just
knowledge, truth and doctrine, material, however right in its
place if it does not carry with it the Lord and impart the
Lord and result in people who are alive, who are sensitive, who
are open, who are prepared, being able to say, Yes, the Word was
good, but the Lord met me in the Word if it is not that
extra, it has failed. If any of the work that is being done, all
the activities, all the business, with the best of motives and a
great zeal and devotion, whole-heartedness, if the upshot of it
is not that the Lord has come in, it is the Lord, something extra
to the Word, you have come into touch with the Lord; it has
failed.
What the Lord really does want
and is after and must have is intrinsic spiritual value, and He
may press that into a small compass outwardly, but it becomes
tremendously intense in a spiritual way. Do not misunderstand me.
I am not talking about our tenseness, but the thing itself
becomes of atomic power, crowded into a small compass. That is
the explanation of the terrific pressure which those who are
chosen to keep spiritual values pre-eminently in view experience.
Fire! When man sinned, God instituted deliberately the law of
travail. Why? Not as mere judgment and punishment. No! God said
in principle, There is no blessing that can rest upon the
flesh; blessing only rests upon what is spiritual, and if I were
to let man now, in his disobedience, get away with it and have
blessing upon his work, he would never be concerned about
spiritual things, spiritual things would go by the board.
That lot of suffering and travail is carried right through into
the life and service of the Lords people and the church.
Why so much opposition? Why so much adversity? Why so much
suffering, when you are right out for God? When you have nothing
but the Lords interests in view, still there is this
terrible time of spiritual trial, adversity, suffering and
testing, even in the Lords work. There is no place made at
all for ourselves, for the flesh. When I speak of the flesh now,
I am not speaking necessarily of evil; but the natural.
If this is true, the logic of it
is this, that the more spiritual value there is to be, or, to use
the other words, the more that there is to be of the Lord
intrinsically and essentially, the more impossible will it be for
any of nature to come in, and so, unto the greatest spiritual
measure we have to be brought to the place where what we can do
naturally is tested. We can do nothing. We are right up against a
wall. Other people can do things, men of the world can get things
done; we can do nothing, we are helpless. Every kind of resource
seems to have dried up, and now, well, it is the Lord. It is to
be the Lord, or everything is finished. You have heard that said
many times here. There is an intensity of pressure and trial
being brought to bear upon many of the people of God not
all, but in this particular intensity many people of God are
knowing something that they have never known before, headed right
up to breaking point. What does it mean? I am not going to talk
about why some go that way and others do not even of the
Lords people; why it is that in some realms they seem to
get along fairly easily, carry all before them, and in others
every half step is the result of a most terrible spiritual
ordeal, pressure, and conflict, and a long hold-up before even
half a step can be taken. That is not exaggerating. I am not
going to try to discuss why it is like that, but it is like that,
and it leaves no room for spiritual conceit, anything of
superiority. You get all that knocked out of you immediately you
touch that realm of being chosen for intrinsic value not
general, not superficial, wide area usefulness to God, but that
which is going to bring divine spiritual values intrinsically for
the people of God, for others, for the work of God.
Chosen for that means that
steadily right on to the end, all that is of man, his capability,
his efficiency, his ability, his everything, is going to be
squeezed right out. He is coming to the place where no more is
possible unless the Lord does it, and that is a deliberately
chosen way and method of the Lord, if the Scriptures are true.
Gods standard of values and mans are so different.
Man thinks in big terms, expansive, extensive, objective terms,
all objective. God is always thinking in terms of inward,
intensive, essential values. His standard of greatness is the
measure of divine spirituality. It is just the measure of
Himself. So I have refined you, but not as silver; I have
chosen thee in the furnace of affliction. For My own sake, for My
own sake, will I do it; ...My glory will I not give to
another.
You know in Romans 8, perhaps
the most familiar chapter in the Bible to you, it is always the
contrast there between the Spirit and the flesh. You know that in
that chapter you have got past the grave, you are now on
resurrection ground, and it is all now the spiritual. First, the
law of life has made you free, then it is all the Spirit, the
spiritual mind, the spiritual man, everything spiritual, and God
has not departed from that. Man, thinking in more material and
objective terms, has not taken God away from His basis. His basis
is still that, right from the cross; it is spiritual nature,
spiritual measure. It is all what is really spiritual in the
divine sense. It is the Lord.
And that explains so largely the
Lords dealings with us. Do believe it! The Lord is after
having mother tincture in spiritual life. That is, the
flavour, trace or tinge of the Lord Himself. That is
essentially spiritual intrinsic value.
Here, speaking among ourselves,
I do not see, as I have thought and thought and spent very much
time in weighing up everything, I do not see any other
explanation for the way in which we are dealt with by the Lord. I
see no other explanation for our existence. I have never accepted
that, if the Lord wanted to do what He is doing generally in this
world, why He should have made something more here, something
separate here? We were at one time doing that and getting on
splendidly in the general realm of earnest Christian evangelical
activity. That could have gone on. But the Lord did something and
brought us apart as a people, not let me say it strongly
not to make us in ourselves any more important. We have
not got one inch of ground to stand upon to speak of superior
importance or our superior value. But I do believe that He did
something because He wanted His people, perhaps in all the world,
or many of His people over this world, to come into something
more of Himself by putting this corporate vessel into the
furnace. You know immediately you come into touch with this, you
get into trouble. The only thing that will keep you going on,
that will maintain your relationship, is that you find more of
the Lord. If you do not, go, friend, go! Do not be attached to a thing.
It is the Lord. And if it is not, my prayer is ever: Wind
it up, put it out, if it does not stand justified in its extra
measure of the Lord.
But you are really going into
the furnace if you are going to be of intrinsic spiritual value,
if it is going to be the Lord. Oh, do not go out with teaching.
This is our teaching, what we stand for. No, none of
that! Go out and live and be the Lord, in effect, in
manifestation. That is the only justification. What the Lord is
after is men and women individually and collectively who do not
hold some higher truth, propound some fuller or deeper doctrines
or have a more exact New Testament technique, but who are the
impact and registration of Himself in a spiritual way, that it
can be said, "In touching them, I have met the Lord".
That is the way of a fiery furnace. God does not want
instruments. An instrument, a tool, is something you take up and
has to respond mechanically to you. God wants living beings
impregnated with Himself; to touch them is to touch the Lord
Himself. Well, that explains the way of the Lord with us in our
own experience, what He is after. It is a fresh challenge to us.
May it have this effect, that it saves us from looking at others,
what they are doing and what is being done, and coveting and
envying; saying, Well, you see... and then gravitating in heart
in that direction. Remember that it may be I am not going
to say dogmatically that it is, but it may be an election.
I have chosen.... Maybe He has put His hand on you
for something more. You could serve Him; you could be of use in
other realms. It may be He has put His hand on you for something
more, and because of that you go through it as other people do
not. Fire for you means something far more than for many others.
Think that it may be an election to serve the Lord in some deeper
way than the average, than the general, and the fire will see to
the matter of conceit and pride. There will be no room left for
them.
First published in the "Golden Candlestick" magazine, Vol. 132, from previously unpublished manuscripts.