"So
also it is written, The first man Adam became a living
soul. The last Adam a lifegiving spirit.... The first man
is of the earth earthy: the second man is of heaven"
(1 Cor. 15:45,47)
"That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that
which is born of the Spirit is spirit" (John 3:6).
"God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must
worship in spirit and truth" (John 5:24).
"He that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit" (1. Cor. 6:17).
"As many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are
sons of God... Ye received the spirit of adoption,
whereby we cry, Abba, Father" (Rom. 8:14-15).
"Furthermore, we had the fathers of our flesh to
chasten us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much
rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and
live?" (Heb. 12:9).
"Now the natural man receiveth not the things of the
Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him; and he
cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged.
But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, and he
himself is judged of no man" (1 Cor. 2:14,15).
Spirituality
the Key to All That is of God
A fragment
from that last passage will do as the key to our
consideration. "He that is spiritual." A
spiritual state is the key to all that is of God.
Spirituality is the door, and the key to the door, beyond
which lies everything that relates to God. Without
spirituality, there is no way through, the door is
closed. The word "cannot" stands written as an
impassable barrier - "cannot understand or receive
the things of the Spirit of God." In reality, our
lives are set in a realm of things spiritual. God is
Spirit, therefore the supreme Reality, the supreme
factor, the ultimate environment of this universe - God -
is Spirit. Man, in the deepest and truest nature of his
being, is spirit. He has a soul and a body. Evil
forces in great power encircle man on this earth, and
they are spiritual forces. But more, the entire temporal
order is constituted upon spiritual principles and
meanings. The visible things are but symbols of spiritual
things; the seen things are types of unseen things. God
has constituted this whole universe, in every aspect and
detail, upon a basis of spiritual principles; they are
tokens of something more than themselves. If God, Who is
Spirit, makes anything, He makes it with a meaning, and
that meaning is given to it by the mind of God. It takes
its deepest significance from God Himself, therefore its
deepest significance is spiritual. It is unnecessary, I
am quite sure, and would take a very long time (although
it would be tremendously profitable as well as
interesting) to follow that out, and look at this seen,
tangible, temporal universe and track down its spiritual
significance; but it is a very simple line of
consideration. We know how, right through the Bible,
these things of creation are used to represent spiritual
things. The sun, the moon, the stars, and every other
created thing embodies some spiritual thought, meaning
and law, so that, when we come to the revelation of Jesus
Christ by the Holy Spirit, we find a whole comprehensive
and detailed counterpart, in a spiritual realm, of what
we have in the temporal realm; a new creation in Christ
Jesus with its initiation by God, Who said, Let light
shine out of darkness, and who shined in our hearts to
give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in
the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 4:6). Here is the new
creation act, the new fiat for bringing in a spiritual
order, which, in a spiritual way, reproduces all the laws
which lie behind the creation of the natural order. We
cannot follow that through now, but bear it in mind. It
is a very strong and very full realm by which we can
recognise really what God is after through and in and by
all things.
If we were
only to come down to our own personal physical makeup,
and had we the knowledge of our own physical bodies
sufficiently, we should be able to trace spiritual laws
operating through and through in almost every part. I am
almost tempted to yield to the fascination of such a
consideration, but I will leave that to more expert
people. But there it is; God has constituted our very
bodies upon spiritual principles; we are, in ourselves, a
material representation of spiritual laws, and when the
Holy Spirit, through the Apostle, speaks of the Church as
the Body of Christ, He is not only using an illustration,
He is saying that a whole system of spiritual laws which
operates in the physical body of an individual, operates
in a spiritual way in the spiritual Body of Christ, the
Church. Just as the violation of any one of those laws or
principles of the physical brings about an unbalanced
state which will lead to disintegration and finally to
death, so in the Church the same laws obtain: violate any
one of those laws, and you render the Church unbalanced,
it will move to disintegration and out of its realm of
vital things. I must not be detailed.
I am
stating this, that the key to everything that is of God
is spirituality. Here in 1 Cor. 15, the Apostle is saying
much about the spiritual side of things, and amongst
those statements he says concerning the body that not
that which is spiritual is first but that which is
natural, and afterward that which is spiritual. We might
observe, by the way, that when he used that word
"natural" he really used the word
"soulical." That which is first is the soulical
body and afterward that which is spiritual, indicating
that the ultimate and final thought of God is the
spiritual. The Apostle leads on very clearly to show that
this body, this soulical body as such, is going
to be changed. But there is a germ - the spirit is the
germ - of a new body, and that spirit will be clothed
with a spiritual body. It is something that we cannot
wholly understand, but we can see something of what it is
like when we remember that the forty days after the
resurrection of our Lord Jesus were used precisely for
this very purpose - to demonstrate and establish the
nature of a spiritual man in his final and full
constitution, visibly, as well as spiritually. There is
no doubt that in those forty days the Apostles were
convinced that Jesus was alive, that they had seen the
Lord; they were left without a shadow of doubt - nothing
could shake them on that matter. But what a Lord, what a
difference! - an absence altogether of some things with
which they were familiar. He was there, and He was there
in a positive presence - not a ghost, not a disembodied
spirit, but a full Manhood; and yet how different! He was
using the forty days to show what the end of God is for
man, the nature of things when God reaches His end.
"Afterward that which is spiritual." God's
final, ultimate thought is the spiritual, and I want to
emphasize that for this purpose - that I am not talking
about vapours and shadows and spooks and ghosts, and
things floating about in the air. I am not talking about
atmospheres, but about something very real - if I may use
the word, very concrete - when I talk about spirituality.
It is something very practical. The Lord Jesus sought
surely to show that after His resurrection.
"Children, have ye any meat?" He can make a
fire of coals, He can cook fish on it, He can break the
food and distribute it and He can eat with them, and yet
in a moment can be out of sight. Dismissing time and
geography, He is in one place and then in another far
off, but He is real. Do not let us think we are talking
about spirituality as something unpractical, mythical,
abstract. We are going to see that it is a very practical
matter; first that which is natural, and afterward, as
the final thought and the goal of God's activities, that
which is spiritual. The end and the eternal will be
spirituality; we shall be in the full sense spiritual.
Well, that is a general statement.
Temporal
Things Governed by the Law of Vanity
Now let us
get down to it more and more closely. We begin, then, by
recognising that the world of things temporal is only a
shadow of another, that it has no abiding qualities or
values in itself. It is governed by the law of vanity,
vanity meaning simply that it cannot of itself realise
its own destiny. It will reach a point, and from that
point turn back and in upon itself; its efforts, its
groanings, its travailings, never issue in a final
realisation of its intention. Nothing of it, by its own
properties, can realise Divine purposes and ends. It is
very important to recognise this.
As we get
closer to this matter, we see how it applies specifically
to Christian work. Oh, how many things are gathered into
organised Christianity with the idea of making for
effectiveness! The idea is that, if you can have these
things, you are going to get results. Money - oh, how
much could be done if only we had money! We must have the
money! I ask you, how was it in the book of the Acts? Was
anything done? With all the money today, how much is done
of an abiding, eternal, spiritual value? If only you can
get names and titles on your programmes and
advertisements, you are going to effect something! Are
you? If you can get reputation, scholarship, learning,
ability, physical strength, business acumen, the work
will be effected! Will it? I want to say that not in one
of these things, nor in all of them put together, in
themselves, is there any spiritual value, and there
can be a very vast amount of spiritual value without any
of them. God has taken pains along both lines to prove
that. Along the line of their presence in abundance He
has proved their spiritual futility; and along the line
of taking the weak things and the despised and the
foolish and the things which are not, by something which
was nothing in itself He has through the ages
demonstrated His own power and done mightily fruitful
things for eternity. Well, that is simple and obvious,
and it is only one more contribution to this fact, that
it is spirituality that counts, that is the effective
thing, the thing that gets through, and nothing else. The
learning, the money, and all the other things may have a
place, provided they do not govern, provided they are
subservient to what is spiritual and are never banked
upon as the things which are going to do the work:
provided it is never assumed that if you have these
things, a great work for God can be done; God will make
evident the folly of that assumption. A whole range of
things is employed by organised Christianity to secure
Divine ends, but it does not work. Well, that is the
first thing that we note in connection with spirituality.
Our
Reconstitution as Spiritual Beings
We proceed
in the next place to recognise that for spiritual - that
is Divine, eternal, ultimate - purposes, we have to be
reconstituted on a spiritual level and basis. That, of
course, is the very heart of John 3. Nicodemus is
interested in, and concerned about, the Kingdom of God,
wanting to know about it, and has come to the Lord Jesus
by night, evidently to talk about it. He had, like all
other Israelites, an entirely temporal conception of the
Kingdom, an earthly idea. It was formal, an official
matter. The Lord Jesus does not waste any time at all
with that. He simply brushes it all aside, ignores it,
and says, "Ye must be born anew." "Except
a man be born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of
God." That is elementary, but we are coming to this
fact, that, in order to know anything at all about the
things of God (and I take the Kingdom of God to be that
realm in which all that obtains is of God, that which
belongs to God) we have to be constituted according to
God. Nothing is possible until we are reconstituted on a
new principle, until we are, in other words, constituted
spiritual beings in a new way. The very beginnings of
things in relation to God are that they are a new and
altogether other constitution, just as absolute as would
be the reconstituting of us to live a fish's life - and
perhaps more so. We have to begin over again. For the
very first thing of God, that is necessary. I know that I
am not saying anything that is new in itself to you, but
I feel very much that there has to be a reconsideration
of the whole Christian conception of things if we are
going to have effectiveness.
The ideas
of doing God's work, and of what His work is, are very
often far from the truth. The ideas of the means by which
God would work are very often largely outside of the pale
of God's acceptance. We are concerned with real spiritual
effectiveness, are we not? Then we have to learn the
secret of it; that is what we are after. There is a
crippling, paralysing "cannot" resting upon the
natural, the soulical man, where the things of God are
concerned; and yet how much of that soulical life is
employed and relied upon in Christianity today to secure
spiritual ends! If only you can get high-tensioned
atmospheres, a good deal of stir and movement and
emotion; if only you can get certain conditions brought
about by a forceful, powerful personality with its impact
upon the people; then you will get results! And a great
deal of result is obtained, but it is not spiritual, it
is not abiding and eternal. But unfortunately, the
consequences are not limited to that. There issues ever
more and more this great tragedy of people having tried
and been disappointed and determining never to try again.
The world is strewn with people who have had an
experience and no more. Oh, the devil is clever!
We are
saying that there is an unbridged gulf between the
natural and the spiritual, and there can be no carry
over; and yet in the Christianity of our day, there is a
tremendous carry-over of the natural to the spiritual. We
find the realm of God's things is simply full of natural
elements, and they are all paralysing the spiritual.
There has to be a tremendous removal of all this smother
and cover of natural elements - men coming in with their
drive and their ideas and conceptions and ways. It is
killing the work of God. Until that is really dealt with
in the power of the Cross of our Lord Jesus and all set
aside, and God is free to do His own work by His own
means along His own lines, there will be no commensurate
result. God's means and God's way is spirituality from
start to finish, the impact of a spiritual constitution.
Yes, there is an unbridged gulf between the natural (the
soulical) and the spiritual, and there can be no carry
over. Look at the fact. It is so often very striking that
a person of very considerable natural acumen, learning,
intelligence and ability in this world is nothing in real
spiritual things, though he be a Christian. Are you not
often up against that? A Christian man may be
tremendously able in business affairs and most acute in
his business transactions, full of intelligence and
worldly wisdom, able to carry the weight of an immense
concern, to be the driving force of a great business, a
man of weight and consideration in this world, but when
it comes to spiritual things he may be a babe. You speak
about the things of the Lord, and that great brain is
altogether beaten by the simplest things of the spiritual
life. You can get nowhere in talking about the Lord. I am
often amazed as I meet and talk with Christian men who
are carrying great responsibilities and who have
undoubtedly great abilities, and when you talk about
spiritual things they are unable to say anything, to make
any contribution; you are talking in another realm. And
yet they know they are born again, and they have been so
for a long time. What is the matter? Well, there is a
gulf. They have all that greatness on the natural side,
but they are very small on the spiritual. All that they
have of intellectual ability and equipment, and power in
every way to handle big things naturally, serves them in
no stead whatever when they come to handle the things of
God; whereas somebody who has none of it, in the realm of
things spiritual is a giant, a teacher. Well, that is a
common-place in our experience.
But it
comes right back to this, that there is a gulf, and there
is no real bridging of this gulf, there is no carrying
from one side to the other. The word "cannot"
stands there. Here the word is not about the
unregenerate, the grossly sinful. It is the Christian who
is still natural, living on the basis of his soul, rather
than in the realm of his renewed spirit. The natural man
"cannot." That is the closed door in things
spiritual. Whatever he is in things natural, in things
spiritual he is a babe or a fool.
Counterfeit
Spirituality
Now we
come to the next thing, the recognition that there is a
false and counterfeit spirituality which is purely
soulical. It looks like spirituality, and passes for it,
it assumes to be spiritual; but it is false, it is
counterfeit. We find it in mysticism, and mysticism can
go a very long way to simulate what is spiritual.
Aestheticism so often looks like spirituality and has
been mistaken for it. There is a vast amount of religion
that thinks it is spiritual and claims to be, and yet it
is purely aesthetic or mystical or soulical; it is not
spiritual at all. There is a soulical insight which is
the counterfeit of spiritual apprehension. It is purely
psychic. Have you met people who see through, and get an
insight into things in a remarkable way, and yet they are
not spiritual people? They have a psychical insight,
their souls are highly tuned to things which are not
ordinarily apparent. We have often been impressed with
this and puzzled by it. They can talk about the devil,
the spiritual system, use the Bible language; they can
talk about things of the Bible and get behind the actual
written language, in some remote kind of way getting out
interpretations which are not obvious. There are certain
national constitutions which are peculiarly characterised
by this very thing. I believe the Galatians were like
that. If you trace the history of the Galatians, you will
see that this is the peculiarity of a race. The people of
Gaul, from whom the Galatians came, are like that. There
is something psychic about them, and it looks like
spiritual insight and understanding. It is false. You can
have it in its extreme form; you can have it in more
moderate forms. There is a counterfeit spirituality along
that line, counterfeit spiritual knowledge which is
simply mystical interpretation. There are people with
phraseology and they are not clear, they are involved,
and what are they after? They are trying to be spiritual
on the basis of revelation, seeing things no one else
sees or can see. Be careful! The enemy does simulate
every truth in order to destroy the truth. We have to be
in a true position, and there is this counterfeit,
mystical interpretation. You can drive typology to an
extreme, you can force it to a point where it loses its
value and becomes almost ridiculous. Spiritual
discernment is counterfeited, and shows itself along the
line of premonitions and second sight; it is all
soulical. Consecration is often counterfeited by
asceticism, a false consecration. The monasticism of the
Middle Ages and what remains of it is a false
interpretation of spirituality, of consecration. It is
purely soulical, and of what real spiritual value is it
to anybody? Life can be, and so often is, counterfeited;
exhilaration, even hysteria, is thought to be spiritual
life. You know how we are all prone to this. There are
times when we get a wonderful exhilaration by a
presentation, a prospect opening, and for the moment we
feel it is all alive. We give it a chance, we test it
out, we wait a while. The thing dies out in us. Where is
all the life we had about it? It was merely an
exhilaration, something that appealed to our souls and
found a response there. Therefore test things, give them
time, take them into another atmosphere and see how they
live. It is so easy to get into a false position when
there is a hothouse condition, you can get a lot of
things springing up rapidly and seeming to be genuine
growths. But take them outside and they shrivel up. The
things of God do not do that, they survive all
atmospheres, they live though death encompasses. His life
is not a prey to earthly conditions; it triumphs.
Everything can be counterfeited, and there is a
counterfeit spirituality along every line.
Note the
difference, then, between what is truly spiritual and
what is falsely so. Is it not patent that the more the
formalism, the ritual, the external order, the less the
real spiritual life, food and fulness? You cannot have
more formalism and ritual and that whole system of things
than you get in St. Peter's in Rome, but I challenge you
to be really spiritually alive and in touch with God, and
be able to live in that atmosphere. It is one of the
things that stands out in my own experience. I always had
a desire to see St. Peter's, and I went, and I was glad
to get out of the place. It was death, suffocation. But I
would not accept that finally. I went back again after
years, I have been several times. At last I had to say,
That is finished, no more of that! It is not only death,
but there is something evil, something that grieves the
Spirit of God in you. And yet look at it - see them
prostrating themselves, their "adoration,"
their "worship"; but it is death. That may be
the extreme end of things, but that can be graduated and
modulated; and let me say without any hesitation, the
measure of external ritual and formalism and that sort of
thing determines the measure of spirituality. The more
you have of that, the less you have of true spiritual
life, of real spiritual food. A real life with the Lord
is something very simple, shorn of all the art of
religion; a few children of God gathered together in
something which has no ecclesiastical traditions, no
religious embelishments, no external forms, but just a
simple meeting in the Name of the Lord: there you have
life, power, fulness. I am not saying that things must be
shoddy in order to have spirituality: I am saying that
the law of life is spirituality.
It works
in another way. The nearer to earth we get, the more we
ourselves feel our importance. Man is biggest when he is
nearest to the earth; he is smallest when he is farthest
away. I remember my first time in an aeroplane; at ten
thousand feet up, I looked down on the ground that meant
so much weary toil to cross. It looked only inches big,
the people and animals were like toys. The nearer to
heaven you get, the less important are the things of
earth. All this religious embellishment is the importance
of the earth, of the world. The nearer you get to things
spiritual and heavenly, the less of that you want, it all
goes; you see how really petty and insignificant it is.
See the Church from heaven, and all this that goes on
down here is like playing at going to church; it is so
small. There is a great deal of difference in the spiritual
constitution.
To sum up
what I am saying, it is this. Spirituality rightly
understood is the secret of all that belongs to God. At
the very beginning of our life with God, we have to be
reconstituted as spiritual beings. "That which is
born of the Spirit is spirit." "He that is
spiritual." "As many as are led by the Spirit
of God, these are sons of God." But there is a false
thing to counterfeit and simulate spirituality, and it is
not objective to ourselves, it is made out of ourselves.
We make gods after our own likeness, our souls produce
their own system, even in religion; and the Spirit
produces His system. Said the woman to the
Master, "Our fathers worshipped in this mountain;
and ye say, that in Jerusalem is the place where men
ought to worship." The Lord Jesus said, "Woman,
believe me, the hour cometh, when neither in this
mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the
Father... God is a Spirit; and they that worship him must
worship in spirit and truth" (John 4:20-24). That is
only saying, This Mount Gerizim and its temple and the
temple in Jerusalem are purely temporal, earthly, the
things of men's souls. Men must have something to see, to
handle, something they can appreciate by their soul
faculties, but that is not the realm of things since I,
the Lord, have come. That is the natural, it is past.
Now, the spiritual comes - neither here nor there, not a
matter of place or things or anything like that on the
earth. It is in spirit with the Father.
That is
the order, that is the nature and character of this
dispensation.