A Personal Knowledge Of The Lord
"Then said the Lord unto me,
Though Moses and Samuel stood before Me, yet My mind
would not be toward this people" (Jer. 15:1).
"Moses and Aaron among His
priests, and Samuel among them that call upon His name;
they called upon the Lord, and He answered them" (Psa.
99:6).
"And the people said unto Samuel,
Pray for thy servants unto the Lord thy God, that we die
not; for we have added unto all our sins this evil, to
ask us a king. And Samuel said unto the people, Fear not:
ye have indeed done all this evil; yet turn not aside
from following the Lord, but serve the Lord with all your
heart: and turn ye not aside; for then would ye go after
vain things which cannot profit nor deliver, for they are
vain... Moreover as for me, far be it from me that I
should sin against the Lord in ceasing to pray for you:
but I will instruct you in the good and the right
way" (I Sam. 12:19-21,23).
We come now to the fifth and, for the time
being, the last of these representative men who stand in
that relationship with God which is acknowledged by Him
to be one which has great weight and great power with
Him. In our previous meditation we were seeing what Moses
represents as to the ground of God's power put into
operation. Moses stood at the beginning of Israel's
national life. His work was mainly the shaping of the
rough material, the raw clay, into a vessel for God, and
he found it hard work.
The Situation Which
Confronted Samuel
When we come to Samuel, we come to the
point where that vessel is marred in the hand of the
potter, and there are extra and even more difficult
conditions. Samuel's work was with a vessel which was not
being made from the beginning, but with a lot of material
that had gone all wrong. It is important for us to
recognize exactly where Samuel stood, and that with which
he was confronted, in order to see the specific and
peculiar significance of his ministry, and therefore in
what way he represents power with God.
There were many features which made
Samuel's time very much like our own, and therefore many
features in our own time which are very much like his
time. His was a time when the people and the work of God
were not upon God's essential basis. They were on a
secondary line and basis, which was only accepted by the
Divine sovereignty. It was being governed and ruled, and,
as far as possible, blessed, in the sovereignty of God;
but it was not immediately in the thought of God. Taking
Saul as an illustration of that as a part of a much
greater whole, it is perfectly obvious that Saul was not
God's essential thought. But God went as far as He could
in the acceptance, the recognition, and the blessing of
Saul, and in using Saul and that order of things which
obtained in his days. God just did the best He could. But
it was not His real mind. It was secondary, and it only
came within His purview at all on the ground of His
sovereignty. God sovereignly uses and, so far as He can,
blesses whatever there is in existence - but, oh! that it
might be otherwise! That is His attitude, and that is
clearly seen as to the Lord's and Samuel's attitude
toward the whole order of things in those days.
A Situation Akin To That Of Our Day
It does not require a great deal of
spiritual understanding, perception, enlightenment and
education to see how akin to that time is our own. There
is, so far as what is of God on this earth is concerned,
something of which God is taking account, is allowing, is
accepting in a sense; He is using it, He is blessing it,
He is going as far as He can, but it is only just as far
as He can. He cannot wholly commit Himself to it. It is a
secondary idea. He has His own thought, but His people
are not in the good of that. I cannot very well go
further than that statement. It is a general statement,
but I say that you do not need a great deal of perception
to see that God is limited, and if you are at all
exercised and concerned about the situation - that is,
about the effectiveness, the fruitfulness, the
permanence, the purity, the power of what is related to
God on this earth - and troubled that it does not go
further, then you should look into it from this
standpoint: is it on a secondary line, or does it
correspond to God's original and full thought as to His
way, His means and His purpose? Well, read about the
times of Samuel and you see how restrained, limited and
straitened God was, and, therefore, what an
unsatisfactory state - to say the least of it - existed
amongst the Lord's own people. That is the setting of
Samuel, and that really is the key to the whole
situation: something which God uses as far as He can
because there is nothing else, and because the real thing
has been lost.
There are a lot of things in the whole
course of the Christian era, from those early New
Testament days, which are not God's thought as to how the
work of God should be done, by what means, on what basis,
according to what principles, which He has blessed and
used, and is still doing so, but they represent a
limitation to the Lord because they are secondary. And
that is where we are! There is no doubt about it. That is
Samuel's situation, and because he had to contend with
such a situation we see the significance of his life.
Samuel Against The Secondary And
For The Primary
What was that significance? Samuel came in
at a time like that to stand in the midst of it; on the
one hand against something secondary, and on the other
hand for something primary. I think his life is summed up
in that. Samuel did not wholly accept Saul, and he was
inclined to have absolutely nothing to do with the idea
of a king, so that the Lord had to say to him: 'Samuel,
they have not rejected you; they have rejected Me' (I
Sam. 8:7). Samuel was not going to have anything to do
with this, and the Lord had, in other words, to say
sovereignly: 'We cannot have what we would have, but we
will allow this. We know how it will work out;
nevertheless, give it a chance, facilitate it as far as
you can.' Samuel had that secret with the Lord all the
time. He knew how it would work out, and he was not
accepting it. He was there to hold things for God's
primary, full thought amongst His people. That is what he
represents.
Now we are going to break that up, and I
want to do so very simply. I do want that the Lord should
get this across in very definite ways, in simple ways.
When things are like that, when there is a lot of history
in the background, a lot of tradition, and the things of
God and the people of God have become very mixed and
confused, and are not clear, precise, definite, distinct
in relation to God, what does God have to do if He is
going to be true to Himself, to His Own thought, to His
Own intention, and go on without committing Himself to a
lower level, a lower standard, and wholly compromising
and surrendering? If He is going to react again to His
full intention, what will He do in such a day? He will do
exactly what He did with Samuel - and I do hope you are
not just following this with an objective mentality,
thinking back to Samuel and his day, or looking out in a
sort of nebulous, abstract way. I do hope that as we go
on, step by step, you are putting yourself right into
this. If it is true that the situation in our day is very
similar to the situation in Samuel's day, so far as the
Lord's people and the Lord's work are concerned, that
represents a loss to the Lord, something other than the
Lord intended to have at the beginning of the
dispensation, and we have to come to some position about
it and ask ourselves: Is God going to accept that as
final? Is He going to settle down and just take that
attitude, saying: 'Well, we can have no more. We will be
thankful if we can have half a loaf if not a whole one,
so we will leave the other.' We do not believe that is
God's attitude.
A New Beginning
If it is like that, then in such a time
God must react to the situation. His reaction will be on
the same line as it was in the case of Samuel - and what
was it in his case? Well, firstly, Samuel was a new start
in himself. That is a simple way of putting it, but it is
very precise. He was a new start in himself. Samuel was
not a child of tradition. He could not be; it was
impossible. A miracle from heaven had to be worked to
bring Samuel into this world at all. There was no open
way for Samuel to come into this world. He began at a
grave, a place of death. You know what I am referring to
in the case of Hannah. Oh no, this is not a succession,
this is not taking up a tradition, this is not just
following on something that has been. This is a new
beginning. Right from zero, right from death, he in
himself is a new beginning. He does not take things up
with a background of inheritance. God has taken
precaution against that in His sovereignty again. The
impossibility of Hannah having that child was God's
sovereignty in relation to His purpose. Nothing could
have been at all but by a special act of God. There is no
carry-over from the past, no link at all. It is a
clean-cut, new beginning.
You are wondering how that is going to be
applied. It can be applied in various ways, and quite
simply, too. Perhaps most of you have a tradition. You
say: 'Well, I am out of it. I do not come into this, for
I have a tradition.' Yes, many of us had a tradition. I
suppose everyone who comes into Christianity comes into a
tradition; but, you know, God can do something in a life
with a very big tradition to cut them clean off from
their tradition and bring them to an end of it. They can
make a completely new start, and if He is going to do the
kind of thing that He did with Samuel, He is going
to do that. But is He not doing it? Some of you young
people have been born into Christian homes and have been
brought up in godly surroundings, and you have received a
great deal of your Christianity secondhand. How you view
that, I do not know. I used to think that if only I had
had a long line of godly people behind me, it would be a
tremendous asset. I have changed my mind about that. I
used to think that the men who were 'sons of the manse'
had all the advantages. I was not a 'son of the manse',
and therefore I was handicapped. I have changed my mind
about that. Your tradition, even your Christian home, may
be a handicap to you. You may have got a lot secondhand
and it may not be yours at all; it may be your parent's.
You have taken it over. It may have become just a
straitjacket to you, or it may be an altogether false
position where you are concerned and it is not yours
right from the beginning. What is God doing with you? Is
He not putting you into positions and situations and
taking you through experiences where father's or mother's
religion is no use and you have to have your own? The
knowledge of God which has been given to you and which
may have helped you in the matter of counsel and
influence in your childhood does not stand up to the
situation now. You have to know God for yourself, and
unless you do, you are not going through. You know quite
well that if you are going to be of real value to God you
must not be just a child of tradition; you have to be
born right 'out of the blue' and know God right there
from zero. That is the application of this.
That application, I say, is made in
various ways and various stages. The trouble with a lot
of people is that they will not hand up their tradition
to God and let Him transcend all that is merely
secondhand and bring them from zero into something of
Himself. They are clinging to their accepted,
already-made beliefs and doctrines, and God has His great
difficulty there. He has to say, in effect: 'All right, I
cannot do anything here. I must go and work where I have
a chance.' If God is going to do today what He did in
Samuel's day, somehow there has got to be that clean cut
in between what is merely tradition and what is
experience, what is secondhand and what is firsthand,
what has come to us from the outside and what has come to
us inside.
You can see how true this was with such
men as Paul. What a tradition! What an inheritance! What
a history! Ah, but what a break right down to death and
starting all over again! He said: "It was the good
pleasure of God... to reveal His Son in me" (Gal.
1:15-16). That is the beginning. We need not enlarge upon
it. This is the very first thing. God needs men and
women, a vessel which is not constituted upon something
secondhand, although that something may be true and right
and of Himself. Do not despise it, but remember that is
not good enough. You have got to have it from the
beginning in yourself, and God would do that. He can do
it, and some of us know how drastically He can do it. We
have had a big tradition; we have had it all and been in
that whole history and realm, and then an end was
brought, and so complete that it was beginning all over
again, even although we were preachers and in the full
flood of Christian work and activity - an end, and a new
beginning, everything born right out from God in a new
way. Well, something like that is necessary. The Lord
will have His own way of doing it. You ask Him to do it.
Your transaction with the Lord must be this: 'Lord, give
me firsthand knowledge of Yourself. Bring me into the
place where everything is living between You and myself,
and where I know You for myself.' You may go through it,
but God will do it. It is essential.
Do you brethren - those of you who have
had years of experience - agree with me that one of the
paralysing handicaps today is a fully-fledged,
established system of Christian doctrine which is taken
up in a secondhand way and propagated? Put that round the
other way. Is not the weakness of today the inability of
men to come forth and say: 'Thus saith the Lord! The Lord
has spoken to me and He has spoken to me today! I am not
speaking about stuff that I have been collecting,
gathering up from books and libraries. God has spoken to
me, and this is what He is saying.'? Do you not feel
there is a need of men to come out with a message
straight from God? What is being given? So much that is
secondhand, so much tradition, so much long-established
truth, but it is not alive and crucial in the hearts of
the preachers. That is the situation. God must begin
again. Samuel represents a new start, and a new start in
himself.
A Personal Life With The Lord
And going hand-in-hand with that is
this: Samuel represents a personal life with the Lord;
not only a new start in himself, but a personal life with
the Lord. The Lord did not let him off. He did not say to
Eli: 'Go and tell Samuel. Samuel does not understand. He
is a little child and you must teach him.' God called
SAMUEL. It was one of those double calls of God which
made it emphatically personal: "Samuel,
Samuel". The only thing that Eli, with his long
experience, could do was to tell Samuel to get personally
into touch with the Lord - 'You say, "Speak,
Lord!"'. Samuel is just that. It is very simple, but
it is a wonderful and mighty thing - a personal life with
God. No one will bring God in power to meet and to change
situations which are not according to His mind and
satisfying His heart who has not a personal life with
God. Have you a personal life with God, so that you are
outgrowing a lot of things? There was a time when you
picked up a spiritual book and got a lot of help from it.
You now always think of that book as a wonderful book,
for it meant so much to you. After a year or two you pull
that book down again. Where has it all gone to? There is
nothing to bite on! Where did you get all that help from?
You have outgrown it. Yes, it belonged to a certain
stage, but not now. I use that only as an illustration.
Have you that personal life with God which means that you
are outgrowing your spiritual clothes all the time? The
clothes that were all right at one point are no use any
longer. Have you a growing personal life with the Lord?
Are you living upon the past - even of your own
experience? Are you living upon meetings, upon
conferences, upon addresses, upon someone else's help?
All these things are good, but if you live on these
things and they are the beginning and the end - well,
conferences will soon fade out. You see, the very
strength and value of a conference is that there are
living people together, people who are moving with God
and who are growing. It is a living thing. Is it like
that with you? Are you sure you have a personal life with
God, that God is speaking to you, dealing with you in
your own life, that He has His hand upon you and He is
doing something in you? It may be a painful thing -
perhaps one or more of a whole lot of things - but you
know that God is active in your life and is doing
something.
On the one hand, He is undoing, He is
weakening, taking away your own strength and stripping
you of your own sufficiency, but, on the other hand, He
is making Himself known. Oh, young people, let me beg of
you to take this to heart. It is so wonderfully and
gloriously possible for every one of you, the youngest
and the simplest, the one who has the greatest complex of
inferiority, to know the Spirit of God working and
speaking in your own life so that you can say: 'The Lord
would not allow me to do that. The Lord checked me up on
that. I know the Lord spoke to me about that.' That is
Samuel! It is simple, I say, but it is essential if God
is going to do something effective. He must have a people
walking with Himself. That does not admit of any
independence and unrelatedness and freelance line of
things where you say: 'God has spoken to me and I
therefore brush aside all that others have to say about
it and I recognize no authority in the Church.' God will
never do that. Because you have a personal walk with God,
it does not mean that He makes you a law unto yourself
spiritually. That is a misapplication of this principle.
Well, do please take this to heart. Do have very definite
dealings with the Lord. 'Lord, I must know You dealing
with me, speaking to me.' There are times in your life
when God allows you to do certain things, but as you move
on with Him you know that no longer does He allow that.
God overlooked it in the times of your ignorance, but now
He is not accepting it, and you know it.
Fellowship With God In His Dissatisfaction
Samuel had a personal life with God. These
two things - an absolutely new beginning in himself and a
personal life with God - led to Samuel being a link with
God in the Divine discontent, the Divine dissatisfaction
and the Divine reaction. God was not satisfied. What does
Eli know about that? What do the other people know about
that? They are going on; they have no registration of
God's dissatisfaction and discontent. God is not having
it and is reacting, but they are insensitive to His
feelings. That is the state of things. They simply go on
with the form of things. Yes, they are having their
services in the tent of Shiloh, they are still carrying
on their round of meetings and sacrifices and priestly
orders, but they are not troubled or disturbed with a
disturbance of God in their hearts. They simply go on,
and, I say again, there is a lot like that today. Samuel,
because of the things which we have mentioned, came
immediately into a sensitive, conscious, intelligent
union with the dissatisfied heart of God, and that night
in the temple God made known to him that dissatisfaction.
It involved him in difficulties and in most painful
courses. It was no easy thing for a young one like that
to go and have to tell the old what God thought about the
situation. But Samuel was brought so much into the heart
of God that he was able to be perfectly loyal to God and
hold nothing back. We will give Eli credit for this: that
he compelled Samuel to tell him what God had said, and
Eli accepted it, though tragically.
Ministry Out Of A Burdened Heart
But here the point is this: when God gets
that foundation with Himself, then there begins to arise
in those concerned a sense of things not being right. It
is not just that outward discontentedness, "agin the
Government" kind of thing - criticizing and judging
and superiority. Oh, dear friends, anything of the
pedestal judgment is foreign to what I am talking about.
It is utterly in a different world. But there is that
deep heart pang, the echo of God's disappointment,
dissatisfaction, something that you feel God's Spirit is
grieved about: it is suffering. It is out of that that
ministry is born. It was from that time that Samuel began
his ministry. When he came into heart union with God's
anguish and disappointment and dissatisfaction, and that
had its echo in his heart, then his ministry began.
Effective ministry from God must spring out of something
like that. Oh, you are not just going to MAKE addresses,
no matter what the subject, however high the truth may
be. It comes out of something that God has done inside
and you have a burdened heart about the state of things;
you have seen what God wants, and you have seen what
exists, and out of a burdened heart ministry begins. You
need not go and become an official in ministry for that.
You have not to go into what is called 'ministry' and don
a certain kind of attire and join some society. You will
just be where you are until God moves you somewhere else.
Samuel started there where he was, with his burdened
heart. Later on he went in circuit from Ramah round in
his ministry. The extension of ministry may come later,
but it is just where you are that your ministry begins.
Where you meet God, where you come into the personal
experience of Him, where you have your own personal life
with Him - that is where your ministry begins.
And what is your ministry? To be there in
relation to God's desire, God's thought, as one standing
against the tide of what is contrary to God, and even if
that tide will break over you, you stand against it. That
is the essence of ministry.
In that ministry Samuel became a bridge.
He and his ministry were a bridge for God, a bridge for
God's transition - Saul to David, from this kingdom to
that, from this state of things to that. The first book
of Samuel is called the book of transition, and that is
what it is. You know the issue - the transfer of the
kingdom from Saul to David. That is the issue of Samuel's
life, and he and his ministry were that bridge over which
God could pass, leaving one order behind and bringing in
another. Yes, it may in our case only be in measure, in a
limited way, but God needs the bridge to be the link -
one side rejecting, and the other side standing for.
You see, all that just comprises this
ground for God. You say: How is God going to work, move,
commit Himself, come in? It is just on those lines. He
must have a beginning which is a beginning with Himself
and not a secondhand thing at all, not something of the
past, not something from someone else, but with YOU from
the 'A' of the alphabet of spiritual life and experience
between you and God. He must have a walk with Him
on your part. Yes, in fellowship with His people, having
all that there is available of spiritual help in a
related way, but, nevertheless, in the midst of it all,
you are walking with God. It is only in that way that the
Holy Spirit says the same thing and safeguards what He is
saying to you, because He will say the same thing in all
who are walking with Him and that will be a great
safeguard. But the point is - a personal knowledge of and
walk with God is His way; then coming steadily, quietly
to know what God does not want, what He really does seek
and what He really must have to be a link with His heart
in that way. And then a bridge for God - that is, God is
able to reach His object in measure through us
individually and through us collectively. Oh, that it
might be like that with the Church as a whole! Perhaps it
is too much to expect. Because the whole is not like
that, are we just going to capitulate and say that NOTHING
can be like that? If Samuel had taken that attitude,
it would be a very different story, but he did not.
Samuel will be a bridge for God between all that is not,
and what God could have.
Do take this to heart! I do not want to
leave anyone out. I do not want to seem to be despising
anybody. I am not doing that when I especially appeal to
my young friends in this matter. Of course, it may be
that some who have been on the way a long time need a
word like this as a safeguard, or a deliverance from
things, even their own experience becoming a tradition,
something that was many years ago but is not right up to
date with God. Young people, you can be saved from so
much like that. You need not have many years of undoing.
You can come so quickly into this if you will be very
definite with the Lord. Say: 'Now, Lord, as for me, I
want everything to be firsthand. I do not despise what I
have been taught, what I hear, or people who know, but,
Lord, I must have it firsthand, I must know it for
myself. You must begin in my case as though I were the
first that ever knew You. You must bring me into a life
where I am just walking with You, where I am learning,
where I am knowing You in a growing, progressive way.
Then, getting that, You bring me into fellowship with
Your heart, what You feel about the situation, to
constitute me a servant, a useful instrument in relation
thereto. Whether You want to call me out into full-time
service or not is not the point; the thing is that I
should be here standing for God and influencing the
situation according to Your mind.' God commits Himself to
that; that counts with God, and that has power with God.
The great thing said about Samuel is:
"God... let none of his words fall to the
ground" (I Sam. 3:19). That is God committing
Himself to Samuel. Just think of a man speaking and not
one of his words falling to the ground, not one being in
vain or ineffective! That is tremendous! The point is
that God commits Himself, and that has power with God.