The Normal Christian Life (24 page)
Oh, we need to be sincere and humble, and to open ourselves before God! Those who are open can see. God is light, and we cannot live in His light and be without understanding. Let us say again with the psalmist, “Oh send out thy light and thy truth; let them lead me” (Ps. 43:3).
We praise God that today sin is being brought to the notice of Christians more than hitherto. In many places the eyes of Christians have been opened to see that victory over sin is important in Christian life, and in consequence many are walking closer to the Lord in seeking deliverance there. Praise the Lord for any movement toward Himself, any movement back to real holiness unto God!
But that is not enough. There is one thing that must be touched, and that is the very life of the man, not merely his sins. The question of his soul power, his driving force, lies still at the heart of things. To make everything of sin, or even of the flesh in its more obvious manifestations, is still to be on the surface. You have not yet got to the root of the problem.
Adam did not let sin into the world by committing murder. That came later. Adam let in sin by choosing to have his soul developed to a place where he could go on by himself apart from God. When, therefore, God secures for His glory that race of men who will be the instrument of His purpose in the universe, they will be a people whose life—yea, whose very breath—is dependent upon Him. He will be the “tree of life” to them.
What I more and more feel the need of in myself, and what I believe, as His children, we all need to seek from God, is a real revelation of ourselves. I repeat that I do not mean we should be forever looking within and asking, “Now, is
this soul or is it spirit?” That will never get us anywhere; it is darkness. No, Scripture shows us how the saints were brought to self-knowledge. It was always by light from God, and the light is God Himself. Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Peter, Paul, John all came to a knowledge of themselves because the Lord flashed Himself upon them, and that flash brought revelation and conviction (Isa. 6:5, Ezek. 1:28, Dan. 10:8, Luke 22:61–62, Acts 9:3-5, Rev. 1:17).
We can never know either the hatefulness of sin or the treachery of our self-nature until there is that flash of God upon us. I speak not of a sensation but of an inward revelation of the Lord Himself through His Word. Such a breaking in of divine light does for us what doctrine alone can never do.
Christ is our light; and He is the living Word. As we read the Scriptures, that life in Him brings revelation. “The life was the light of men” (John 1:4). Such illumination may not come to us all at once, but gradually; but it will be more and more clear and searching, until we see ourselves in the light of God and all our self-confidence is gone. For light is the purest thing in the world. It cleanses. It sterilizes. It kills what should not be there. In its radiance the “dividing asunder of joints and marrow” (
KJV
) becomes to us a fact and no mere teaching. We know fear and trembling as we recognize the corruption of our nature, the hatefulness of self, and the real threat to the work of God of our soul-life and energy, untamed and uncontrolled by His Holy Spirit. As never before, we see now how much of us needs God’s drastic dealing if He is to use us, and we know that, apart from His dominion, as servants of God we are finished.
But here the cross, in its widest meaning, will come to our help again, and we shall seek now to examine an aspect of its work which meets and deals with our problem of the human soul. For only a thorough understanding of the cross can bring us to that place of dependence which the Lord Jesus Himself voluntarily took when He said, “I can of myself do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my judgment is righteous; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me” (John 5:30).
The Path of Progress: Bearing the Cross
I
N OUR PREVIOUS chapter we have touched several times upon the matter of service for the Lord. As we come now to look at the provision that God has made to meet the problem created by the soul-life of man, it will be helpful if we approach that problem by considering first the principles that regulate all such service. God has laid down spiritual laws which govern our world for Him and from which no one who tries to serve Him may deviate. The basis of our salvation, as we well know, is the fact of the Lord’s death and resurrection; but the conditions of our service are no less definite. Just as the fact of the death and resurrection of the Lord is the ground of our acceptance with God, so the principle of death and resurrection is the basis of our life and service for Him.
No one can be a true servant of God without knowing the principle of death and the principle of resurrection. Even the Lord Jesus Himself served on that basis. You will find in Matthew 3 that, before His public ministry ever began, our Lord submitted Himself to baptism. He was baptized not because He had any sin, or anything which needed cleansing. No, we know the meaning of baptism: It is a figure of death and resurrection. The ministry of the Lord did not begin until, in figure, He had taken His stand there. After He had been baptized and had voluntarily taken the ground of death and resurrection, the Holy Spirit came upon Him, and then He ministered.
What does this teach us? Our Lord was a sinless Man. None but He has trodden this earth and known no sin. Yet as Man He had a separate personality from His Father. Now we must tread very carefully when we touch our Lord; but remember His words: “I seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me.” What does this mean? It certainly does not mean that the Lord had no will of His own. He had a will, as His own words show. As Son of man He had a will, but He did not do it; He came to do the will of the Father. So this is the point. That element in Him which is in distinction from the Father is the human soul, which He assumed when He was “found in fashion as a man.” Being a perfect Man, our Lord had a soul, and of course a body, just as you and I have a soul and a body, and it was thus possible for Him to act from the soul—that is, from Himself.
You remember that immediately after the Lord’s baptism, and before His public ministry began, Satan came and tempted Him. He tempted Him to satisfy His essential
needs by turning stones to bread; to secure immediate respect for His ministry by appearing miraculously in the temple court, to assume without delay the world dominion destined for Him; and you are inclined to wonder why he tempted Him to do such strange things. He might rather, you feel, have tempted Him to sin in a more thoroughgoing way. But Satan did not do that; he knew better. He only said to Jesus:
“If thou art the Son of God
, command that these stones become bread.” What did it mean? The implication was this: “If you are the Son of God, you must do something to prove it. Here is a challenge. Some will certainly raise a question as to whether Your claim is real or not. Why do You not settle the matter finally now by coming out and proving it?”
The whole subtle object of Satan was to get the Lord to act for Himself—that is, from the soul. By the stand He took, Jesus absolutely repudiated such action. In Adam man had acted from himself apart from God; that was the whole tragedy of the garden. Now in a similar situation the Son of man takes another ground. Later He defines it as His basic life principle—and I like the word in the Greek: “The Son can do nothing
out from
himself” (John 5:19). That total denial of the supremacy of the soul-life was to govern all His ministry.
So we can safely say that all the work which the Lord Jesus did on earth, prior to His actual death on the cross, was done with the principle of death and resurrection as its basis, even though as an actual event Calvary still lay in the future. Everything He did was on this ground. But if this is so—if the Son of man had to go through death and resurrection (in figure and in principle) in order to work—can we
do otherwise? Surely no servant of the Lord can serve Him without himself knowing the working of that principle in his life. It is of course out of the question.
Jesus made this very clear to His disciples when He left them. He had died and was risen, and now He told them to wait in Jerusalem for power to come upon them. What is this power of the Holy Spirit, this “power from on high” of which He spoke? It is nothing less than the virtue of His death, resurrection and ascension.
To use another figure, the Holy Spirit is the Vessel in whom all the values of the death, resurrection and exaltation of the Lord are deposited, that they may be brought to us. He is the One who “contains” those values and mediates them to men. That is why the Spirit could not be given until Jesus had been glorified. Then only could He rest upon men and women that they might witness; for without the values of the death and resurrection of Christ, all such witness is empty.
If we turn to the Old Testament, we find the same thing is there. I would refer you to a familiar passage in the seventeenth chapter of Numbers. The matter of Aaron’s ministry has been contested. There is a question among the people as to whether Aaron is truly the chosen of God. They have entertained a suspicion and have said in effect: “Whether that man is ordained of God or not, we do not know!” and so God sets out to prove who is His servant and who is not. How does He do so? Twelve dead rods are laid before the Lord in the sanctuary over against the testimony and are left there for a night. By the morning the Lord has indicated His chosen minister by the rod which buds, blossoms and bears fruit.
We all know the meaning of that. The budding almond rod speaks of resurrection. It is death and resurrection that marks God-recognized ministry. Without that you have nothing. The budding of Aaron’s rod proved him to be on a true basis, and God will only recognize as His ministers those who have come through death to resurrection ground.
We have seen the death of Christ working in different ways. We know how it has worked in regard to the forgiveness of our sins, and that without the shedding of blood there is no remission. Further on, we have seen how His death works to deliver us from sin’s power, and that our old man has been crucified with Him in order that henceforth we should not serve sin. Going further still, the question of human self-will arose, and our need of consecration became apparent; and we found death working that way to bring about in us a willingness to let go our own choices and obey Him. That indeed constitutes a starting point for our ministry. But still it does not touch the core of the question. There may still be the lack of knowledge of what is meant by the soul.
Then another phase is presented to us in Romans 7 where the question of holiness of life is in view—a living, personal holiness. There you find a true man of God trying to please God in righteousness, and he comes under the Law and the Law finds him out. He is trying to please God by using his own carnal power, and the cross has to bring him to the place where he says, “I cannot do it. I cannot satisfy God with my powers; I can only trust the Holy Spirit to do that in me.” I believe some of us have passed through deep waters to learn this, and to discover the value of the death of the Lord working in this way.
Now mark you, there is still a great difference between “the flesh,” as spoken of in Romans 7 in relation to holiness of life, and the working of the natural energies of the soul-life in the service of the Lord. With all the above being known, and known in experience, there still remains this one sphere more which the death of the Lord must enter before we are truly of service to Him. For even with all these experiences, we are still unsafe for Him to use until this further thing is effected in us.
How many of God’s servants are used by Him, as we say in China, to build twelve feet of wall, only, when they have done so, to undo it all by themselves pulling down fifteen feet! We are used in a sense, but at the same time we destroy our own work, and sometimes that of others also, because of there being something undealt with by the cross.
We now have to see how the Lord has set out to deal with the soul, and then, more particularly, how this touches the question of our service for Him.
We must keep before us now four passages from the Gospels. They are: Matthew 10:34–39, Mark 8:32–35, Luke 17:32–34 and John 12:24–26.
These four passages have something in common. In each you have the Lord Himself speaking to us concerning the soul-activity of man, and in each a different aspect or manifestation of the soul-life is touched upon. In these verses He makes it very plain that the soul of man can be dealt with in one way and in one way only: by our bearing the cross daily and following Him.
As we have just seen, the soul-life or natural life that is here in view is something further than what we have in those passages which are concerned with the old man of the flesh. We have sought to make clear that, in respect of our old man, God emphasizes the thing He has done once for all in crucifying us with Christ on the cross. We have seen that three times in the epistle to the Galatians the “crucifying” aspect of the cross is referred to as a thing accomplished. In Romans 6:6 we have the clear statement that “our old man was crucified,” which, if the tense of the word means anything, we might well paraphrase: “Our old man has been finally and forever crucified.” It is something done, to be apprehended by divine revelation and then accepted by an act of simple faith.
But there is a further aspect of the cross, namely that implied in the expression “bearing his cross daily,” which is before us now. The cross has borne me; now I must bear it; and this bearing of the cross is an inward thing. It is this that we mean when we speak of “the subjective working of the cross.”
Moreover, it is a continuous process, a step by step following after Him. It is this which is now brought before us in relation to the soul, and as we have just said, with an emphasis here that is not quite the same as with the old man.
We do not have here the “crucifixion” of the soul itself, in the sense that our natural gifts and faculties, our personality and our individuality, are to be put away altogether. Were it so, it could hardly be said of us, as it is in Hebrews 10:39, that we are to “have faith unto the saving of the soul” (compare 1 Pet. 1:9, Luke 21:19).
