For the sake of your tradition you have made void
the word of God. (Matthew 15:6 ESV)
This revelation of Christ in us, when it is a true, real, living revelation,
not only leads to and makes for stability and assurance and confidence, wonder
and freshness and Life, but it leads to loneliness, and I should be false to you
if I did not say so, and indicate what that means; because the majority even of
Christians are still hide-bound by tradition. They are still all of that other
kind: what they have received they have received through men or from a man; they
have taken on an already completed, rounded-off system of truth and teaching
called Christianity. They have entered into it and taken it up, and they cannot
see beyond it. You do not question their sincerity, nor do you doubt their
earnestness, but there is that about all they have which is so second-hand. It
is something which has existed through the Christian centuries, developed by
this one and that one, shaped, formed and phrased by different teachers. It has
become the evangel, evangelical Christianity in all its set terms, phraseology
and forms. They do not see beyond it. And when one moves out of that realm into
a personal, direct knowledge of the Lord through what we often term an open
heaven – but not, mark you, through a new or different revelation of Christ
that is something apart from the Scriptures – into that experience, where we can
say, "It pleased God to reveal His Son in me, and with me it is so real that
sometimes I wonder if anyone has such a knowledge, such an experience"; when we
move that way, we move into a lonely realm. The majority cannot follow, cannot
go with us, and cannot understand.
It does seem to me that there was something of that about
Paul, that even other apostles were not able to grasp or apprehend Paul. He
seemed to be very much one by himself. Yet here too we see the wonderful grace
of God.... It does seem that even Paul, surrounded though he was by all the other
apostles, had to go a lonely way, because this revelation was to him something
so personal. It does mean that: understand that; and probably some of you do
understand it in your experience. It will put you very largely into a lonely
position, so far as the majority of other Christians are concerned, if you are
going this way.