Dear friends, what is
the Lord doing with us? That is what we want to know.
What is He doing with you and me, and with those who are
really in His hands? Is He not doing with us that which
He has done with all who have come completely under His
hands; that is, leading in a way and realm where human
understanding and ability are completely confounded and
exhausted, where it is totally impossible to cope
mentally with His ways, or to explain Him? We cannot see,
we cannot understand; neither is it in us to do, to
achieve. We are learning that all our resources are of no
avail and that everything depends upon the Lord Himself -
His wisdom, His strength, His grace.
Well now, if it is your
experience so far and at this time, understand that it is
quite right, it is not all a mistake. True, it is very
painful, it is testing. It is testing up to that point
where your feet have to touch the very brink before you
prove God. You have to come to an utter end of one way
and to a beginning that is a beginning even to the point
of lifting your feet to take a step to prove God, for God
to come in. You say that is very utter. Yes, but it is
this utterness of the difference between the Lord and
ourselves that we have to learn, and that is going to set
us over against the colossus of false doctrine, of the
iniquitous lie which is being built upon this earth up to
heaven, the lie of humanism.
That is the greatest lie
that has been brought into this universe, that it is in
man to be his own savior, that it is in man to rise to
perfection, it is in man to be God; it is all in man, the
roots are in himself. I say that is Satan's colossus of
iniquitous untruth, and God is working out the
contradiction of that in a company, in His Church. It is
being wrought, worked out, in the unseen; and while it is
so difficult to accept it in the day of suffering,
weakness, and darkness and inability to understand, if we
knew the truth the probability is that it is just this:
God is doing with Satan in and through the Church what He
did with Satan in and through Job, answering his
challenge and his lie. Here is a broken, shattered,
helpless little vessel of saints, bewildered, stripped,
thrown back upon their God, unable to do or to
understand, clinging to Him and seeking to prove Him, and
through that the greatest iniquity in this universe is
being assailed by God and answered.
The lie! There never was
a time when that lie has reached greater proportion than
it has today. But in you and in me, poor broken ones, God
has His answer, and it does mean something to the Lord
that we have been emptied out to the last drop, thrown
back upon Him where He is our wisdom, He is our strength,
He is our life, He is our very breath. That means
something to Him.
Karl Barth has coined
for us a phrase which has gained a great deal of strength
and place, and it is a very useful one - ''the altogether
other-ness of Christ.'' Oh, that goes much further than
we realize, certainly much further than most people are
prepared to believe. Even yet in evangelical Christianity
there is a clinging to the idea that we transfer
everything to Christ and to Christianity when we are born
again. We transfer all our faculties and our powers over
to the interests of Christ and then, instead of using
them for ourselves and for the world, we use them for
Christ. That is the meaning of consecration, of
surrender, as the terms are used so largely today in
evangelical Christianity - the consecration of ourselves,
our gifts, our faculties, our everything, to the Lord and
to His service. But that falls short of something. It is
not the transference and the consecration of everything
that we are to the Lord to be used straightway as it is
over on His side - for His interests instead of in the
world. Christ is other yet, Christ is still different yet
from consecrated natural life; oh, so other! Something
has to happen, our entire mentality has to be changed,
transformed. The mind has to be renewed; we have to have
an altogether different kind of outlook, even about the
things of God. It is a constitutional matter, not merely
a directional one.
This is the meaning of
the Lord's dealings with us; namely, to get a new
mentality, a new conception; another, not our old one
transferred, but another; and the distance is not the
distance of time or geography necessarily, it is the
distance of difference; and we make faster or slower
progress spiritually according to how we learn this
lesson. What is the secret of spiritual progress? It is
the letting go of our own will and mind to the fact, to
the truth, that after all, though Christians at our best,
wanting to be a hundred per cent for the Lord, it is not
in us either to be or do. Our will can never do it, our
reason can never accomplish it, our impulses and desires
can never get us there. We have to come to a brokenness
and yieldedness where nature is laid low in the dust and
all our treasure is with the stones of the brook and the
Almighty becomes our treasure (Job 22:24-25); the Lord
alone our wisdom, our strength and vision, our desire.
Until you and I have learned the lesson of that utter
brokenness and yieldedness and letting go to the Lord,
spiritual progress is delayed.
May the Lord show us the
great distance that lies between ourselves as Christians
and Christ, and give us a heart that yields to the
Spirit's work in teaching that lesson and making it good
and bringing us more and more to the measure of His Son.
An extract from "From the Wilderness to the Land", Chapter 1. First published in "A Witness and A Testimony" magazine, Sep-Oct 1943, Vol 21-5.