4.
Vocational Union
"I will build
my church" (Matthew 16:18).
"Christ was
faithful over God's house as a son. And we are his house,
if we hold fast our confidence firm unto the end"
(Hebrews 2:6, R.S.V. margin).
"Christ
Jesus... in whom each several building, fitly framed
together, groweth into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom
ye also are builded together for a habitation of God in
the Spirit" (Ephesians 2:20-22).
"Ye also, as
living stones, are built up a spiritual house" (1
Peter 2:5).
I trust that you are
seeing in these various aspects of union with Christ a
particular value and meaning and conception bound up with
each one. If you have not quite clearly and definitely
grasped that, will you please go back again and start at
the beginning, not just accepting that these are forms of
union with Christ, that there is eternal union and there
is creational union and there is marital union, but
fasten upon the particular meaning and idea of each one,
and, if you can, put a single word against each, a word
of your own choosing.
The word which stands
against this fourth aspect is vocation, for the house of
God is constituted for a specific purpose for which a
house exists. Before we can go any further, we must just
stop with that word "house." "Whose house
are we." It is a very interesting and a very full
word. When we use the word "house," at any rate
in English, our minds have a very limited conception. In
the original word, all the ideas of a dwelling, a
household, an arrangement, the furnishings and the
stewardship are found, and it is those various meanings,
like the facets of a jewel, that we are now going to
consider briefly. But remember that the governing thing
is union with CHRIST in this sense, union with
Christ as a house.
(a)
A Building
The first meaning of
the original word is a building. "I will build
my church." "Every house is builded by someone;
but he that built all things is God" (Heb. 3:4).
The house is a building. This building is that which
corresponds to Christ Himself. He said, as He looked at
the House, the stone house, the great temporal building,
and immediately transferred its spiritual significance to
Himself, to His own body - "Destroy this temple,
and in three days I will raise it up" (John 2:19).
"I will build my church; and the gates of Hades
shall not prevail against it." All the
destructive arts of hell will not be able to prevail
against that which He builds, His building: a building,
not now of stone, but of living stones. That is Peter's
word about this house - "Ye also, as living stones,
are built up a spiritual house."
This house, which
"house are we," has as its governing object and
vocation the making of God Himself present and available
to men. That is the first idea. The building is for a
habitation of God, "a habitation of God in the
Spirit" a habitation of GOD, in the person of
the Holy Spirit, so that God becomes present and
available. That is a statement. It could remain just a
statement of truth, but things ought not to remain merely
as such. It is the setting forth of a test, the test as
to whether the house of God exists, and the test as to
the existence of the house of God, or of living stones
comprising the house of God, is first of all whether God
is present or not. Is God known to be there? That is the
test of everything so far as the house is concerned, for
that is its vocation. It has no meaning apart from that.
In the Old Testament
there was a time when the glory went up from the
sanctuary: it went up from the place where God had been;
and, although the thing continued, the fabric went on, it
was a shell - it had no significance, no value, no
meaning at all, or, if it had any meaning, it had the
meaning of tragedy. The glory had gone up, removed; God
was no longer to be found there. So, quite simply, the
test of the existence of the house of God and of living
stones is just that. Is the Lord found in us, and is the
Lord found in the midst of us? If He is, that just
satisfies all His requirements. He does not want the
elaborate and the ornate structure. "Where two or
three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the
midst of them" (Matt. 18:20). That is the house
of God. The house of God is determined, not by a name, a
title, a designation, a place, a thing. It is determined
by the presence of the Lord, and anywhere, amongst any
two or three, no matter where that may be or who they may
be, if God is found there, that is the house of God, and
that is all God wants.
The trouble with people
is that they must have something over and around it, a
building to meet in and call the "church." How
often the glory has departed immediately something like
that has happened; something has gone. Begin to arrange
this thing, begin to set up an order of things, and where
has the Lord gone? That is what you come to so often. The
Lord simply says, Give Me living stones together, and
that is all I want. Do not try to improve on that. You
can gather more living stones: that is the way but that
is all I want - living stones together in an inward
"togetherness"; firstly because it is union
with Christ, Christ united, Christ in His oneness. The
Lord says, Give Me that, and I will make My presence very
real.
And then of course the
object is not that that should exist merely as something
enjoying the Lord's presence. So often that is where a
mistake is made. "Yes, we are having a lovely time
with the Lord, we few, this little group, we are having a
lovely time with the Lord" - and you think that you
can perpetuate that indefinitely. You cannot. It is not
only for the presence of the Lord: it is to make the Lord
available to others, that they may know where to find the
Lord - nay more, that they shall know that the Lord CAN
BE FOUND. It is to provide the answer to their
question, "Will God indeed dwell with men?"
Yes, here He is. The presence of the Lord is the answer
to men's hearts, to men's quests, and that is enough.
When the Holy Spirit came to the Church on the day of
Pentecost, "the multitude came together," and
that is what happened - God was made available. What is
needed is a few living stones, not to discuss doctrine,
theology, the technicalities of Church order or anything
like that, but to speak of the Lord, to be occupied with
the Lord. If the Lord is not enough to occupy us for all
our days here, there is something wrong with us. If you
peter out - with apologies to Peter! - when you begin to
talk about the Lord, and then have to fill up the
conversation with all sorts of other things, there is
something seriously wrong.
God's eternal desire
has been to have a dwelling and to dwell with men. So the
Bible reveals. A marvelous thing! It was the thing which
astounded Solomon. "Will God in very deed dwell on
the earth? behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens
cannot contain thee" (1 Kings 8:27) - "and yet
He has commanded me to build Him a house!" God
wanting to dwell with men. That is the very first thing
about a house - that it should be a place of RESIDENCE.
Union with Christ, you see, means bringing God in:
for where Christ is corporately expressed and personally
present, there God comes in. Do remember that. If you
want to know God's presence, be occupied with His Son,
for, as we said in an earlier meditation, God's
appointments are with His Son.
(b)
A Household
The second phase of
this wonderful word "house" is union with
Christ as a household. That is a slight enlargement of
the conception. You will understand what I mean, or what
that means, if I remind you that in the Old Testament you
have such phrases as "the house of Jacob" or
"the house of Israel," or, in the New
Testament, "the household of faith" (Gal.
6:10). In Germany you had the House of Hanover; in
England you have the House of Windsor.
A household denotes two
things - a single progenitor and a family name. For
example, the house of Jacob - Jacob was the progenitor,
and the house takes his name; or the house of Israel -
one man gave his name to a whole line, the house of
Israel. And then consider the household of faith. This
household of faith - we know who the progenitor is.
"I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of
God" (Gal. 2:20), said the Apostle. We are of those
who are of the faith. It is the collective thoughts of
one household, and brings in immediately the conception
of the Church as a family, Father, Son and children.
Now here I want to say
something which is to most of you by no means new, but
which is of very great importance. We must not take these
things as abstract truths and ideas. We can, of course,
have all the teaching on the house of God; we can know
what the Bible says about the house of God and get the
whole technical conception - and yet it can mean nothing
of practical value. This house of God must be expressed
locally; it must be found in existence locally. What we
are going to say in this connection shortly, under
another phase, makes it quite clear that this thing must
be in EXISTENCE in order to satisfy God's
requirements. There must actually and literally be, in
locations, that which corresponds to the union of living
stones - be it even so few as two, the irreducible
minimum - to provide God with this.
But it is not, let me
say it again, an ecclesiastical building called the house
of God. Our Christian mentality is all astray. There are
people, who really ought to know better - for they are
under the sound of the teaching all the time - who, when
they come into gatherings, still say, in prayer or in
worship, that they are glad to have come to the house of
the Lord, meaning that they have come to a PLACE. They
do not mean that they are glad to have come into the
presence of the Lord's people - though of course that may
incidentally be true. The house, for them, is still this
other idea of some place, of something external. But that
is not it. It is not an ecclesiastical thing - to say
nothing about architecture. It is not any particular
place or any particular form. We can kill the house of
God by starting with its technique - demanding the
technique of the house of God. Whatever comes along that
line must come organically and spontaneously, as we shall
see at another time. We do not begin by constituting
something according to a form. We are present together in
a place, a location, as living stones, livingly
expressing this house of God and fulfilling its vocation,
bringing God into that area, making God available.
Perhaps that will be better borne out as we go on.
Well, this
family conception, this household idea, speaks, firstly,
of purity of strain or pedigree. You remember that in the
days of Ezra and Nehemiah a very severe test was applied
to everyone who had any place at all in recovering and
reconstituting the house of God. He had to show his
pedigree, because there were a lot of people who wanted
to have "a finger in the pie," who wanted to
come into that thing and have a place there, and because
a lot of people had come in and there had been a mixture
of seed, everyone must now show his pedigree. "Now,
then, your birth certificate, please; where were you
born, when were you born, what is your parentage, how far
back does it go?" If I asked you this, what would
you say? When were you born?
Now,
perhaps you do not have to be able to say the precise
day, hour, moment, when it happened, but you must at
least be able to say, Yes, I know that at a certain time
in my life something happened, and that happening was
nothing less than a new birth. You must be able to do
that to be in the household. And what is your parentage?
Where were you born? Now you would be quite wrong if you
said, I was born again at such-and-such a place. The only
answer is, I was born in heaven, from above; my
citizenship is in heaven, my franchise is in the city of
God. "This one was born there" (Psalm 87).
"All my fountains are in thee" - I take my rise
and my support from up there, the heavenly city. Where
were you born, and how far back does your pedigree go?
Ah, blessed be God, it goes back beyond time, altogether
outside of time. In Christ, we are not children of Adam;
we are children of eternity. We are chosen in Him before
the foundation of the world.
So this household must
imply absolute purity of strain, of pedigree; there must
be no mixture here.
Then it
speaks of filial relationship, The household of God is a
family which is a family bound together by filial
relationship. "We know that we have passed out of
death into life, because we love the brethren" (1
John 2:14). The filial relationship and our birth are
linked together. You cannot prove your birth if you do
not love the brethren - the brotherhood, the family. You
cannot prove your birth if that is not true. The proof of
our birth is our mutual love one for another.
And then
as a household it speaks of loyalty and jealousy for the
Name. How the house of God is spoiled, how the household
is marred, by our lack of loyalty. We may not think it is
lack of loyalty to our Lord - we do not mean it like that
- but we all bear His Name, and lack of loyalty to the
Name is found in our lack of loyalty to one another. Is
it not a terrible tragedy that Christians, whether
individuals or companies, find it so easy to criticize
one another? There is a loyalty in the world that is very
often better than the loyalty between Christians. Think
of the loyalty of the professions - you never hear one
doctor speaking to the detriment of another doctor. There
is a covenant of honor, there is a standard of loyalty,
and there is always an extenuating, an excusing, not only
there but in other realms also. But here, sadly, amongst
us, we do not so easily try to excuse, to cover a
multitude of sins, to let what is good be the object of
our attention more than what is bad. That is a
contradiction of the household.
And it is
very practical. If that is a true conception of God's
presence, God being available, then it requires a very
practical outworking in our relationships. The house
requires the household, the larger conception of the
family, of the pure strain of heavenly life that is above
this earth.
(c)
A Temple
Again,
union with Christ is a temple. Perhaps you might think
that that has been covered when we say that God is
present and God is available. These are not watertight
compartment ideas of union with Christ. They are all
parts of a whole, the house of God. The temple simply
brings out one particular idea. You see, it is not only
where God is. God is in His holy temple, but that temple
idea is that it is there that God's rights are recognized
and where God gets His rights, because that is just the
meaning of worship. The temple is the place of worship,
and worship is just giving God His rights. God's rights
are absolute, and in His temple God gets everything - all
is unto God. In the day when the temple was not what God
meant it to be, as a figure very much otherwise, indeed -
Isaiah wrote, "In the year that king Uzziah died I
saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up,
and his train filled the temple" (Isaiah 6:1). It is
the place where there is no room for anyone else. You
know the story of Uzziah - how he entered the temple to
burn incense, unlawfully, without right he forced his way
in and touched the altar, and he was smitten with leprosy
and died in a lazar-house. In other words, he got into
God's place. And then, when Uzziah was out of the way,
Isaiah saw the Lord filling the temple. That is the true
idea of the temple, and there it is "Holy, holy,
holy," as we shall see. The thought behind the
temple, then, is - Here, amongst these people here, in
the two or the three or in the greater companies locally
found, God is getting everything. God has a full, free,
unhindered, unreserved way; His rights of complete
capitulation, surrender, yieldedness, obedience, are
ceded to Him. And it is not just in lip, it is in life.
That is the temple, a living temple, a spiritual house.
God's rights are ceded to Him.
(d)
A Stewardship: (e) An Order
And then,
finally, we come to union with Christ as a stewardship
and an order. The word translated
"stewardship," strangely enough, is from the
same root as the Greek word for "house": it
means the management of a house or household, and gives
us our word "economy." It is the word that is
elsewhere translated "dispensation" - what we
call an economy, or administration; that is, an order of
things - the order which exists in a certain place at a
certain time. It has two aspects: one is that it
represents and expresses this Divine, heavenly, order;
the other, that it is an administrative place, a place of
administration, or ministry. That is the double idea of
stewardship.
I was
saying a little while back that it is foolish to think of
a heavenly order being found without some company to
express it. There must be that here and there in the
earth which EXPRESSES this order, in which this
order is seen. Now, I am not contradicting myself in
saying again that you must introduce the New
Testament system. It just depends on how it comes in,
but it must be there. It must be a heavenly order
expressed. But it is possible to have the order without
the doctrine, and it is better so than to have the
doctrine without the order. We have found that the very
thing is there, in existence, and people do not know
anything about it. There it is: it exists - a wonderful
spiritual order. They have sensed that this is how the
Lord would have things done. When it has been pointed out
to them that there is a whole revelation from God on that
very matter, they had never realized it, but there it is.
They have come under the regime of the Holy Spirit, and
found that this is how the Lord does things, this is what
the Lord would have; it is spontaneous.
So we do
not begin by saying, "Now, to have an expression of
the heavenly order, you must first bring a company of
people together, and then you must have the Lord's Table
and baptism, and you must have brethren in authority and
corporate ministry - everything must be corporate and in
fellowship." Do not have that kind of mentality. It
is deadly; it can be as earthly as anything else. You
will find, if the Holy Spirit really gets things into His
hands, that you will begin to be exercised about things.
We have seen that happening so wonderfully. Where Christ
is preached, with a seeking of complete and utter
surrender and abandonment to Him and the establishment of
His lordship and headship; when all those things are
brought into view and have been accepted, it is not long
before people say, "I am beginning to be exercised
about so-and-so; you have never said anything about this,
but it has been coming up with me lately."
That is
the way, and the only way, that is fruitful and valuable.
The Holy Spirit precipitates things when He gets His
place. He brings the house, He brings the stewardship,
the dispensation, the economy, the heavenly order, and
when it comes up like that, it is a very blessed thing,
and you say, "This is not some system of teaching I
have taken on; it is something the Lord has shown
me." That is the way, and the only living way. If
you walk in the Spirit, if you really walk in the Spirit,
you will find that, as you go on, all sorts of
adjustments will be made because the Lord indicates them
to you; all sorts of things will be put away or be
brought in, because the Lord is speaking. He is a Son
over God's house, and as such He is bringing in this
heavenly economy, this heavenly order; not to have
ordinances, but testimonies - those things which embody
spiritual and heavenly principles.
Well, that
is familiar ground to many, but to all who read these
lines it may not be equally so, and it may be the Lord
would have that word said. Yes, union with Christ as a
stewardship: there is an arrangement that the Holy Spirit
will make in the house of God, that Christ as the Son
over God's house will bring into being; a heavenly
arrangement. It means a new mentality - "stewards of
the mysteries of God" said Paul (1 Cor. 4:1) - a new
mentality, a new conception of things; or, as Peter said,
"According as each hath received a gift, ministering
it among yourselves, as good stewards of the manifold
grace of God" (1 Peter 4:10). In "housekeepers
of the manifold grace of God." If you think that is
straining the sense, look at the context. "Using
hospitality one to another" - that immediately
precedes it. "According as each hath received a
gift, ministering it among yourselves, as good
'housekeepers' of the manifold grace of God."
It means a
new mentality bringing heavenly conceptions;
heavenly-mindedness. It says that Adam gave names to
everything - I suppose the animals and the flowers. (I am
quite sure he did not give Latin names: none of that in
Paradise, please!) He gave names to everything. My point
is this. We have to find a heavenly name for everything,
find out what the Lord calls things. The Lord calls a
thing by a certain name. We go round it and call it by
other names, but the Lord says, No, that is that, it is
this; you are calling it by another name. We have to call
things by their right names, give the right heavenly name
to things. The Lord calls a certain virtue meekness; we
call it weakness. Give the right heavenly names to things
and you will have plenty to do - it is a very big world.
The other
aspect is administration or ministry: the house as a
stewardship, a ministry, a place of ministry. That does
not mean, of course, setting up a professional ministry
or a particular company called ministers. It is the
household; that is the place of ministry. Everybody in
this household ought to have a stewardship; everyone
ought to be a steward of the manifold grace of God. In
some way or other you can be a steward, because you are CALLED
to be a steward, to have something of the Lord to
give. That is why the Lord is dealing with you as He is.
He is trying to make you a steward in His house, to make
it possible for you to have something to give to someone
else, something of Himself that you have received, that
you have come to possess that you can pass on to someone
else.
Well, all
this is compassed by the word for house, and its related
forms, all referring to the house of God. This
house is a wonderful thing. Do ask the Lord to make more
clear to you what it involves, and let us ask the Lord
very much that there may be literal expressions of His
heavenly house found more and more widely on this earth.