Beloved of the Lord,
Once again we send you
a few lines of remembrance and fellowship. Firstly, let
us say how grateful we are for all the expressions of
appreciation and assurance of prayer which have been
coming from so many, near and far. We know that the
"Witness and Testimony" goes to a fairly large
number of folk all over the world, but it is good to have
an answering voice sometimes, so that we know that the
contact is a living one. Let us say at once that our
mailing list is not just a bit of office equipment or
business, but a list of fellow-members of the One Body
who are a definite spiritual concern. We note on the map
just where you are; some parts are fairly thickly
studded; other parts show a wider distribution. Many of
our friends in England who used to gather with us are now
scattered over the country. Time was when we used to
travel to and fro by road and pass through many of the
places where these friends are now staying. Were it not
for the restrictions on fuel through war conditions, how
many living points we should have on such journeys now!
This, with the large number of such points of contact in
other countries, U.S.A., Canada, India, China, etc.,
etc., more and more strengthens in us the desire to set
forth on an extended ministry of fellowship and building
up. May that day not be far ahead. In the meantime, let
it be known that, as Paul said, we have you in our
hearts, and would fain come to you to impart some
spiritual gift.
The Lord has been
greatly stressing in our hearts His thought as to the
Church being a family, and the churches being local
families. Or perhaps it would be better to say that His
family is the Church, and local families are the
churches. This gets us at once away from church technique
as a first consideration, and brings us back to the basic
thing - organic life.
The Divine thought is
surely not to have companies of Christians constituted by
a New Testament technique, or system of doctrine and
practice, any more than it is to have congregations,
preaching-places, or just meetings. Primarily it is to
have spiritual families; and a Divinely governed and
ordered family will express its life according to what is
true doctrine and right practice. Thus, when it is time
for His people to take spiritual responsibility, if the
Holy Spirit had things on His right basis, He would
distribute them so that new spiritual families are
brought into being. This is organic growth as differing
from organised expansion which is so unsatisfactory in
its resultant spiritual measure. How much safer and purer
is this Divine method. For one thing, it starts from the
inside and not from without. Its bond is mutual love, not
doctrine. It grows by spiritual birth or organic oneness,
not by adherence or "joining". Its success is
not determined by its size or numbers, but by its spiritual
life and inward measure of Christ. There is nothing
professional about a true family; neither is there
anything artificial or formal. What a true natural family
would be in every respect, as to its own inner corporate
and family life, and as to its growth, testimony, work,
and multiplication of itself in new families in due
course, so the local companies of the Lord's people ought
to be; for God intended His visible institutions to
embody His invisible, spiritual, and heavenly thoughts
and principles. But it is all spontaneous and vital, not
organised and technical. We cannot go further here with
this Divine thought, but we ask; May this not be the
Lord's object in allowing or causing that ever present
sense of inadequacy, limitation, and dissatisfaction in
"organized Christianity"; and may this not lie
behind His permitting of so much destruction in the realm
of the traditional framework which has really come to
take the place of the true spiritual family? There is
nothing like an emergency and suffering to bring down to
the bedrock things; and the bedrock of true Christian
experience is that, beneath all else, the Lord's true
people are a family - "The Church of the firstborn
ones".
The first thing that
the Lord Jesus said on His resurrection was "Go to
my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father
and your Father". When the meaning of His
resurrection was made good in the coming of the Holy
Spirit, we find that the believers in Jerusalem were
spontaneously constituted a spiritual family,
"breaking bread from house to house". Later,
reference was made to one local company as "the
Church in thy house". Let us remember that only two
spiritually responsible ones are essential to be the
starting-point of a family. May this not be the principle
behind the sending forth at the beginning "two by
two"?
But let us ever
remember that the Lord has a governing object in mind in
the family, and that the family is not an end in itself.
Spiritual fulness is His end, not only spiritual
fellowship. Much loss has been suffered by the Lord and
His people by other forms taking the place of the
spiritual fulness. Beware of substitutes. Beware of
letting go something of the measure for which you have
been apprehended. This is one of the perils of isolation
and scattering from the family where your home has been.
The one powerful bond of a true family is that the desire
and will of its head governs all its members. If the
Lord's desire for spiritual fulness governs us all, it
will be a safeguard or guiding principle, and
motive-power which delivers from many personal and lesser
interests or considerations which would eventuate in
limitation and disappointment. We are quite certain that
spiritual fulness is only possible by emancipation from
the artificial and man-made system of procedure which
obtains today, and a return to the simple but powerful
basis of organic life kept pure by the direct government
of the Holy Spirit, as it was at the first. Well,
beloved, the Lord open your hearts to all that is of
Himself, and our prayer is, in the words of an Apostle,
that "none of you should be deemed to have come
short".
Our love and greetings
in Him.
Yours - for all your
fellow-members here,
T. AUSTIN-SPARKS.