READING:
John 16:12-15; 1 Cor. 2:9-16;
12:4-14,27.
The Lord has been directing our hearts toward the
matter of life in the Spirit. All that we have been saying is
related to that. It is well for us to be reminded, and
always to bear in mind the tremendous importance of the
Holy Spirit. Everything now for us depends upon the
Holy Spirit, and apart from Him absolutely nothing is
possible. The Lord Jesus Himself made that clear, and in
comparing two great values, namely, that of His own
physical remaining on the earth with His disciples, or of
His going away and the Holy Spirit coming to take His
place, He strongly upheld the latter and said it was
expedient for them that He went away, for if He did not
go away the
Holy
Spirit would not come; clearly indicating
that in His mind the coming of the Holy Spirit was far
more important than His remaining in physical presence.
In that connection you notice what He says, that
while here with them there were many things that He
wanted to say, that He had to say, but it was quite
impossible for Him to say them because of the lack of
capacity in them;
and it was clear that no matter how long He remained
that capacity was not likely to alter, to grow. The
surmounting of the difficulty was
plainly not a mere question of time, but of something
being done in them, which He personally, in physical
presence, could not do, but which the coming of the
Holy Spirit would achieve. Then all that ever He wanted
to say and do would be said and done. Is it not striking
that Paul should say these words: "Things which eye
saw not, and ear heard not... unto us God revealed
them through the Spirit". How evident this was in the
case of the Apostles themselves. It is a striking proof
that the Lord was right, and a forceful indication of the
supreme importance of the coming of the Spirit. So we
must know the meaning of the Spirit's coming.
The Meaning of the Coming of the Holy Spirit
I
want to break this up into fragments, though fragments
that have a great deal in them. To begin with, we must
turn from the immediate matter of the coming of the
Spirit and stand back on to the rim of things, the
circumference, and remind ourselves that the Word of
God reveals that there is a Divine purpose and a
Divine plan. That we know and believe. That is where
we begin. God has a great scheme (if we may use that
word), a great plan, a great purpose, which has
moved Him to the creation of this universe. That plan
or purpose has a far-reaching, comprehensive, and
minute order, and it involves faculties and functions.
It is important to recognise the meaning of those
technically sounding words. We have used three words;
order, faculty, function. Those things are written in God's
universe, and in every part of it. They are written in the
central feature of God's universe, man himself. Man
occupies the central place, and we have only to look at
ourselves to see that we are constituted on that basis,
and everything for the realisation of our object depends
upon our being in order. If we are out of order physically
or mentally then we shall not realise our destiny. There is
a recognised order, and the whole of a great science has
been developed to deal with disorder in the body. Then
there is function, and faculty. God's universe has these
things back of it for the realisation of its purpose.
We must remember that the things which are seen are
intended by God to be but indications of things unseen. The material, the seen universe, is
a parable, and the Word of God teaches quite clearly
that things here, when they are according to God's
natural order, are illustrations of a spiritual order. The
fifth chapter of the letter to the Ephesians makes that
perfectly clear in the matter of domestic relationships,
speaking about husbands and wives, wives and
husbands. The bringing together of these, the utterness of
the oneness, the nature of their relationship, clearly
indicates that this relationship, when it is a right one, is an
illustration of something spiritual, the relationship
between Christ and the Church. Adam and Eve are the
great types of Christ and the Church. We could trace
that through the Word in many connections, but we will
stay only to mention one further instance. The tabernacle
in the wilderness is distinctly said to be a pattern of things
in the heavens, not the very things themselves.
So on earth the Lord has instituted a complete order
for the purpose of illustrating a heavenly order. If you
consider any of these illustrations you will see that these
three things obtain and govern. How particular God is
about order! If you upset the order you destroy the
object. If you violate the order you defeat the end. That
is illustrated very clearly in our own physical frames. So
it is in the universe. Back of everything God has a
purpose and a plan, with a minutiae of order, faculty,
function.
The second thing is this, that because the order has
been upset by sin, by the fall, the natural man, as he is
called, is utterly devoid of the faculty, the capacity for
knowing this purpose and plan of God; and, not being
able to know it, it is quite impossible for him to function
in it. It takes a good many Christians a long time to
recognise it, but the fact is stated, and with God the
fact is final. Whether we recognise it or not, it is so.
The third thing is that the Holy Spirit knows that
whole purpose, plan, order of God. "The things of God
none knoweth, save the Spirit of God": but He does
know. He shall guide into all the truth because He knows
it.
This present world-order is a lie, a falsehood. The
Holy Spirit knows the truth about this universe; what
God means, what God intends, God's thought about it.
Then the Holy Spirit knows all that is included in that.
Only the Holy Spirit knows what the Divine order is for
a
universe which is to answer to God's mind. He knows
what the faculties and the functions are, in relation to
God's purpose. The Holy Spirit, knowing the whole
truth, is committed to it; that is, it is His business. He is
the executive member of the Godhead in relation to the
whole purpose of God, and He is committed to it.
The fourth thing is, the spiritual alone can know and
enter into God's purpose.
That leads on to the fifth. (We are getting away from the circumference to the
centre now.) The Spirit, therefore, begins by making people spiritual. To reconstitute the disordered
universe as an ordered whole according to God's intention, He does not begin
upon the circumference of the universe, He starts at the centre, namely, with man.
He begins by making people spiritual; that is, by giving His own nature and endowments or gifts to man. The spiritual
nature renews the spirit of man, and indwells that spirit as the new life of man's spirit, and to impart spiritual gifts,
spiritual endowments. These gifts are various, but they at once bring us into the realm of spiritual faculty and spiritual
function. It means that by new birth, and the consequent indwelling of the Holy Spirit, we have faculties which are
other than those we have by nature; faculties for knowing, for understanding, for discerning, for judging, for
examining, and much more; capacities which by nature we do not possess, for
doing, for being, for achieving, for attaining. This should be a tremendous
comfort to us, for what we are saying is not merely so much technique. Whatever
you may lack by nature of natural gift and qualification, that does not handicap you at all in the things of
God. The Holy Spirit gives gifts, endowments, and not only makes up what is lacking in nature but goes beyond
what nature can do.
Those five things lead us to this further point, that a life
in the Spirit is absolutely essential, and indispensable.
There we have six things on the positive side, but the
scale does not come to spiritual perfection until you add
one more and make it seven. This is more on the
negative side. It is that a life in the Spirit requires a setting
aside of the life in the flesh.
Now, to some extent we see what it is to be spiritual,
or what a life in the Spirit is, and how important a
question that of the Holy Spirit is.
The Lord Jesus knew this, and that is why He put such
value upon the advent of the Spirit.
The Spiritual Man Defined
For a few moments we will think further about the
spiritual man. What is the spiritual man? He is one who
has received the Holy Spirit, and has been constituted
something which corresponds to the Holy Spirit in
faculty and function, and in capacity. "He that is joined
to the Lord is one spirit". That is correspondence in
likeness, in nature. It is not only a kind of nature, a quality of nature, it is
a capacity. It means that there are characteristics, features of a practical
nature resultant from this. So we have such things as spiritual discernment, spiritual perception, spiritual
knowledge. The Apostle prays that the Word may dwell in us
in all spiritual understanding.
Now this is the difference between the action of a
force upon something which is moved simply as a
consequence of the impact, without there being anything
within the object that corresponds to the power and can
co-operate with it, and where the movement is purely
mechanical. The difference is that in our renewed spirit
there are introduced those faculties which correspond to
the faculties of the Spirit, and there is intelligent union.
Let us illustrate this. We are told at the beginning of the
Gospel by Luke that there was a man in Jerusalem
whose name was Simeon, and he was a righteous and
devout man, looking for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him. Now it says that this man
came by the Spirit into the temple at the time that the
parents brought in the child Jesus to do for Him after the
custom of the Law. Some people seem to have the idea
that there had been a previous arrangement, and that
Simeon was the priest. The record does not say so at all.
The narrative here is so natural. They brought in the child
Jesus to present Him to the Lord. This man was not there
as the officiating minister, ready to receive Him, but he
came into the temple at that moment. We should say, he
happened to come in just at that time. No! He came in
the Spirit, and when the parents brought in the child
Jesus there is nothing
to
indicate that Simeon knew who
the child was. No one had said, This is Jesus. He was
brought in by His parents much as any other parents
might bring in their child. He was like any other
child from all outward appearance; no different perhaps
from the hundreds or thousands that came into the
temple; ordinary parents with an ordinary babe.
Simeon, a man living in Jerusalem, came in at that time in
the Spirit, and when they brought in the child he took the
child in his arms and began to say the most astonishing
things: "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in
peace, according to thy word: for mine eyes have seen
thy salvation". They were taken aback. What is the man
talking about? How does he know all this? Where has
this come from?
Do you see the implication of that? Simeon came in
by the Spirit. His movements were by the Spirit, and his
movements were timed by the Spirit, and when he had
taken that babe into his arms the same Spirit witnessed
to his spirit, This is the Christ. There was nothing else to
indicate who the babe was. The Spirit bore witness to
the Christ. That is to say, Simeon, because the Spirit
was upon him, had spiritual perception. When he was in
the presence of Christ he recognised Him in his spirit.
Now you see what a spiritual man is. Simeon is an
illustration, though not the full expression of the later,
post-Pentecostal spiritual man. A spiritual man is one
who moves by the urge of the Spirit, whose movements
are timed by the Holy Spirit, and whose knowledge of
when he is to move is by the Spirit; who, in moving in the
Spirit, makes discoveries of the secrets of the Spirit
concerning Christ, and thus is in possession of a faculty
of spiritual perception, that when the Lord is doing
something he has intelligence about it. The faculty leads
to the function in relation to the great purpose of God.
That may sound difficult to you, but that is the normal
life of the believer, according to Romans 8. It is true that
we do not enter into it fully at once; we grow up into it,
as Paul's words remind us: "Grow up into him in all
things". But this is what the spiritual man is.
Not an Outward Order but a Way of Life
In our last meditation we referred to the Priestly
company. Here are priestly features. Simeon
undoubtedly performed priestly functions. Priestliness is
not official, it is spiritual, and true priestliness is
constituted on the basis
of
these things, namely, of being
led by the Spirit, instructed by the Spirit. These are the
sons of God, even those who are led by the Spirit of
God. Simeon is in the true spirit of sonship, and therefore
is a true priest in the spiritual sense.
It means that if the Lord's people are going to be
spiritual, and if they are, therefore, going to come into all
God's purpose, they must come into everything by the
way of life and revelation of the Holy Spirit, as differing
from entering into things mechanically by book, or by
tradition. It is there that there is such a great deal of need
on the part of the Lord's people. After all these centuries
of Christianity we find Christianity as a kind of set order
or system in this world, where everything that is in the
New Testament has been taken up and systematised and
projected, as it were, into the world as something fixed,
something set. For example, the command "Go ye into
all the world and preach the Gospel..." has been taken
up and become a sort of fixed thing, and everybody has
to do it if they are going to conform to the recognised
Christian system. The idea of the Church, again, has
become something very set and formal. It is the
development of spiritual things into a fixed, mechanical
order and system, and now that is traditional Christianity,
and so you are called upon to conform to it, and do
accordingly. That is perhaps one of the greatest
handicaps to spirituality. If we had not had all that
history, if we could be right back at the beginning, things
would be so much more simple, and we could get more
immediately and directly into the true spiritual condition;
but we are all the time labouring with this great weight of
things, and it is just there that there has to be the
cleavage.
That which is called Christianity is essentially a spiritual
thing, and not an earthly order or system, and every
fragment of it has to be entered into in a spiritual way, by
way of life and revelation. There is all the difference
between imitation and life. Oh, what a difference there is
between seeing a thing in an objective way and coming
into it in life! It is just there that the wonder, the glory, the
vitality, the energy, the power of things is found. You
have perhaps talked for years about things in the Word
of God, as in the Word of God, and you believed them
and gave them out as truth, and after doing that for years
suddenly you saw what they meant, and the whole thing
came in another way. All your talking, and
preaching, and believing before was quite true, quite
right, correct as to doctrine, but what effect had it on
you? Now that it has broken like this it is transfiguring,
and has brought real joy and delight, life and ecstasy.
That is what we mean by entering into things by life and
by revelation. In other words, it is coming into things by
the Spirit and seeing.
Many another man in Jerusalem could have come in at
that time and seen this babe, and perhaps have gone
through the same performance, taken up the babe and
said some prayers, asked a blessing, put the babe down
again and gone out, and that would have been the end of
it; but this man came in by the Spirit and made a
discovery. There was a spiritual faculty in him, and he
discerned something which no ordinary person would
have seen: "A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the
glory
of thy people Israel". Simeon entered in by life, by
revelation. In other words, he came in by, or in, the
Spirit. The Lord needs that His people should be of that
kind.
That applies to the whole purpose and plan of God,
and all the details in that plan. We have not to worry our
heads about all the things that are said to us here, we
have to get the inclusive and basic secret of these things,
and we shall find that it works out in this way. If we
become spiritual in this sense, if the Holy Spirit is the
commanding reality in our life, and we are walking by the
Spirit, we are bound inevitably to come into all God's
thought. The Lord wants a people to come into His full
thought. That is only possible as they cease to be
governed by some outward order of things, and learn
what it is to move with God in the Holy Spirit.
This life is a very vast life. It reaches into God's great
purpose, and we are a part of it;
we are "the called according to his purpose". We want
to know the purpose; we want to know our place in the
purpose; we want to know our faculties, our functions.
How shall this be? Not by studying up what they are,
but by being in life. It may be very interesting to have a
scientific knowledge of the workings of our human
bodies, but it is not necessary in order to live. Live, and
the thing happens. You never have to consider whether
you will take your next breath, to sit down and make a
mental problem of it. You do it, and everything else is
bound up with it, and follows in proper order. Breathing
properly has a great deal bound up
with it. Well then, live and everything else will follow.
That is only saying, in other words, Move, have your life
in the Holy Spirit, and all the plan and order of God will
follow. You are bound to come into it, you cannot help
yourself.
Thus the object is to get the Lord's people to a place
where they walk with the Lord, and are so open to Him
that they are prepared for all that walking with Him
means. Sometimes it will mean that they will have to
leave a great deal that is of a secondary character;
perhaps forsake many things, even religious things, the
accepted things, to walk with the Lord. There may be a
price attached to it; misunderstanding, and loneliness, and much besides; but if
you are so open to the Lord that nothing else matters, and you mean to walk with
God whatever the cost, no matter what people say you ought to do as (in their thought) a part of a great
Christian order or religious machine, you will come into
all God's secret thought as naturally as a flower opens to
the sun, and you will be making discoveries and finding
that there is a vast realm of meaning and possibility and
capacity and power that you never dreamed of.
The Lord is not going to stretch it out before us, and
show us it. We shall discover it as we walk in the Spirit.
The Relatedness of Believers
We will pass to a brief word on another aspect of
this, which is touched upon in chapter 12 of the first
letter to the Corinthians.
Paul speaks in Ephesians of the Body being the
Church: "the church, which is his body", the
assembly. The assembly of the Lord's people is the
anointed vessel of the Lord, for the Lord's purpose.
While it is true that the individual believer receives the
Spirit and is anointed of the Spirit, it is the whole Body
of Christ which is the anointed vessel of the Lord,
inasmuch as Christ is one, and the Holy Spirit brings
Christ into all true believers, and by doing so makes all
true believers one, because Christ is one and indivisible.
It is the same thing, in other words, to say that the
anointing is not distributed, as it were, in fragments. The
anointing is one anointing. We are all baptized in one
Spirit into one Body. That is how the Lord looks at
things from above. He looks upon this one corporate
entity as under one anointing. That means that the true
Church is essentially spiritual, because it is constituted by
the indwelling Holy Spirit. In its nature it is spiritual, and all
that we have said about the spiritual man, is true about
the Church according to God's mind. This is important,
because of the practical value bound up with the
assembly as God's anointed vessel.
The first practical value of this is life. You may not
have any experience that can support what we are going
to say, and you may not therefore at the moment see the
importance of it, but store it up in your heart; because, if
you are going on with the Lord, you will discover this,
and you will need this. Life is bound up with the
assembly, as God's anointed vessel. Unless we recognise and stand upon the value of the fellowship of
the Holy Spirit, which is the fellowship of believers (not
just something between the Holy Spirit and ourselves,
but something which is of the Holy Spirit between all
believers) we shall be broken. That is why Paul put what
we call the benediction at the end of the letter to the
Corinthians. It is perfectly clear why he put it at the end.
"The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ..."
That is an offset to all that was going on in Corinth.
How bent they were upon wisdom, and how all-important to them was the matter of gifts. Then Paul
reaches chapter thirteen: "Though I speak with the
tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am
become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal". Though I
have all these gifts, prophecy, faith, and so on, and have
not love - what is that? It is not gift, it is grace. So he
concluded, "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ..."
"...the love of God..."
There are many diversities. One says, I am of Paul;
another, I am of Apollos; another, I am of Peter. It is, I.
Paul speaks of "the love of God".
"...the fellowship of the Holy Spirit..."
You are all at sixes and sevens; one goes to law against
another of the same assembly before the world. This is
anything but the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. So Paul
says: "...the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all".
The assembly comes into view as a matter of the
relationship of believers in the Holy Spirit, the fellowship
of believers in the one Spirit; and for believers that is
absolutely indispensable for their life. If the Lord relates
you to a spiritual company of His people, you will
commit spiritual suicide if you break away
from it, away from where the Lord has really put you.
The Lord does not put us together just to have
companies, to have numerical representatives. The end
He has in view is life. It has been proved again and again
that a child of God has been recovered and saved as to
his very life by the restoration of broken fellowship with
other children of God, by the renewing of a broken
fellowship with God's people.
It can be tested in simpler ways than that. When you
are jaded, tired out, discouraged, and you join the Lord's
people for an hour, what is the result? You start the day
afresh! It means life to you. It is spiritual life. It is the
Lord's order, and life is bound up with the spiritual
assembly, because it is the Lord's anointed vessel. One
of the great objects of the Devil is to destroy the life of
the Lord's people by getting them scattered, separated,
isolated. This means that when the Lord has two or three,
or more if possible (the minimum is two), then there is a
strength which is greater than the strength of the
individual.
Fulness is bound up with the assembly. Get a real,
living, spiritual assembly in the Holy Spirit, and what an
enlargement, what an increase of the Lord there is in
light, in life. What perils of limitation there are in isolation,
in detachment.
The Question of Balance and Proportion
There is another very important thing bound up with
the fellowship of the Lord's people in assembly life, and
that is proportion. Isolation or detachment usually leads
to an unbalanced state, a loss of proportion, some kind
of an extreme which is dangerous, and which is not the
true thing. Keep the fellowship, and you keep the
balance. We need one another to keep one another safe,
to keep the balance, the proportion. When spiritual
people are in danger of becoming unbalanced, the Lord's
corrective is to get some new adjustment to the other
children of God. It lies in the direction of a recognition
and an enjoyment of fellowship.
How this reveals that back of assembly life, back of
the relationship of the Lord's people in a practical way,
there are heavenly, eternal, spiritual things of tremendous
importance and significance. The Lord never does
anything just for the sake of doing it, but He is always
governed by some other important and vital interest. It is
quite clear that the assembly means an enlarged measure of Christ, by reason of
many members.
When the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost, one of the
immediate results was that they continued in fellowship.
Fellowship is the result of the Holy Spirit. The result is
life. Let Ananias and Sapphira violate the fellowship
principle, and they die. Death is in that direction. Life is
in fellowship. It is strength, it is fulness. All these marks
are there at the beginning when the Spirit had come, and
there was balance, proportion, because of the enlarged
measure of Christ by reason of members being together.
It simply means that there is an enlarged measure of
the anointing. We can only know a very small measure
of the anointing as individuals, but if we come together
that measure is found in a larger degree. The anointing is
the Lord Himself present. The anointing is God
coming Himself, committing Himself. Thus it is written, "Where two or three are gathered together in my name,
there am I..."
That may raise some questions, but we are just now
laying down laws of the life in the Spirit. The outworking is for you to prove, and if you go on with the
Lord, if you are spiritual, if you are being led by the
Spirit, if you are coming in by the Spirit, if your life is
wholly committed to the Spirit, you will come to this. It
may be slowly, or it may be you will leap into it, but you
are bound to come to it. That is what lies behind the
Word of God. It is the heavenly, eternal thing. What a
different thing is the mere outward form without the
inward meaning.
May the Lord guard our hearts in relation to His
Word.