THE DISCIPLE, HIS OUTLOOK AND COMMITTAL

E. M. Walkinshaw

Colossians 3: 1–4; Luke 14: 25–35; 1 Timothy 4: 12–16

It was in my mind to say a word of encouragement to strengthen our outlook as believers, that it might be in the right direction. We are easily diverted, needless to say, but while diversions have been many and varied I think the Lord would encourage and strengthen us to have a right outlook, so that our steps might follow. It is most necessary that it should be so. The gospel having reached us and brought us into blessing, it is necessary to see what the end is that God has in His mind, and also to understand that Christ’s place is our place. One would long to understand a little more that our place is heaven. I have sometimes wondered—I do not know whether you have—whether I would be at home in heaven if I were transported there. It is quite an exercise if you think of it, shall we say, logically. Of course, you will not be transported there until you are in the condition to be there, but I think the Lord would present the exercise to me in my responsibility as to whether I would be at home in heaven if I were transported there. I acknowledge that it is my place—His place, my place. Now let the younger ones lay hold of it that where Jesus is is your place, not because you have earned it, of course, but because He has won it for you. I think affection for Him would attract us to Him where He is, detaching us more

and more from things here and attaching us to Himself there.

Christianity is a wonderful thing; it is as Christ is. How wonderful that you have come into the environment of it! How much Jesus has brought to you! He has brought relief to you, the forgiveness of sins—what a wonderful blessing that is, that my sins have been forgiven. Some of us do not think much about it, but some persons are in real, deep exercise about their sins. How wonderful it is to have the light and knowledge and enjoyment of the forgiveness of sins. Then the gift of the Holy Spirit—could you think of anything greater than the gift of the Holy Spirit? We made a distinction this morning between giving and receiving. God has given His Holy Spirit to those who obey Him, but I think I could quite rightly ask, Have you received Him? Have you received what God has given? A brother drew attention to the fact that Scripture says, “We have received” the Spirit (1 Corinthians 2: 12). Now, personally, I do not take that for granted; I do not just take it that because it is a text of Scripture then it must be true of me. That is rather like supposing that I have eternal life because a text of Scripture says, “He that believes on me has life eternal”, John 6: 47. I cannot just take a text of Scripture and say it is necessarily true of me; but in raising the exercise it is not to discourage or depress, but to exercise me as to whether I have received.

I would like to exercise every person here, especially the younger people, as to whether you have received the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry ‘Abba Father’. It seems to me most profound and wonderful that we can cry ‘Abba Father’; that to God, the One who is supreme, the One who created the heavens and the

earth by His almighty power, that to such a One I can say, ‘Abba Father’ because of what Jesus has done. I would like therefore to exercise each of us as to whether he or she has received the Holy Spirit. Now you are in the environment of His influence, where there is wonderful blessing, where there is known the power of the age to come; but it is possible to be in such an environment and, while getting some benefit from all that is passing where that power is known, not to be in the vital gain of it. Now the Lord is, if I can apply such a word to Him, anxious that you should be in the gain of it and that I should be too. So we have these occasions in which we converse with a view to an impression of Himself, exercise of conscience, and attraction of our affections towards Him. So I raise that question with you, because it must relate to this matter of your outlook.

Now what is your outlook? Jesus said, “Did ye not know that I ought to be occupied in my Father’s business?” (Luke 2: 49), wholly in it. Now I ask myself what am I wholly in? Or what am I half-heartedly in? I may be engaged in my own business, engrossed with it; well, the Lord would have me wholly engaged in His business. That does not mean that I neglect my own, but that it does not absorb or govern either my life or my outlook. So in this first passage the apostle in writing to these Colossians, having presented the truth to them, now says, “If therefore ye have been raised with the Christ”—it is not an ‘if’ of doubt, as we know, but rather of consequence; it could be ‘since’, I suppose—“seek the things which are above, where the Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God”. I wonder if you are seeking those things. You will perhaps be like me, feeling that you know little about them, but

Paul says, Seek the things that are above, where the Christ is. You have been raised with Him and surely the normal moral consequence is that you would seek the things where He is.

I wonder if each of us is doing that. We are travelling along the road, getting older day by day, and what is our outlook, what are we seeking? “Ask, and it shall be given to you. Seek, and ye shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened to you”, Matthew 7: 7. That is a step-by-step exercise until you find access. How wonderful that is! So Paul says, “Seek the things which are above, where the Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God”. I do not enter into what the things are. As one servant of the Lord said many years ago, Whenever we read this scripture someone will ask the question, ‘And what are the things that are above?’. I think the point that he was making is that you should be seeking them; they belong to you, they are yours through what our Lord Jesus Christ has done and the place He has won for you, and surely your affections are to be attracted to that Person. So Paul says, “Have your mind on the things that are above, not on the things that are on the earth; for ye have died, and your life is hid with the Christ in God”.

Now notice, he not only says have your mind on the things that are above, but he adds, “not on the things that are on the earth”; not on them. He does not refer to the world here, he does not say ‘not on the things of the world’. I wonder if any here have their mind on the things that are in the world. It is very easy, and the world is so attractive—Do you not find it so? Many things in it are not necessarily grossly evil, as men speak, but nevertheless they are things that are not of the Father, and therefore clearly not

included in the Father’s business. Is your mind on those things—that great area and dominion that Satan has built up to entertain man away from his God? I wonder if any young person is hankering after the world. Do not tell me you have never done so, because I will not believe you! All of us have at some time or other hankered after the world. During the so-called ‘system’ things were insidiously introduced among us that were of the world—not of the Father’s business. You ponder that; I will not name them, they have been named in ministry, and they were things whereby Satan diverts the mind of the lover of Christ away from Him.

So Paul says, “Not on the things that are on the earth”. Those things can be more dangerous because many could be legitimate. You could be engrossed in wainscoting your house, or making your garden very lovely. It does not mean to say that you do not decorate your house—of course it does not mean that—or that you do not dig your garden and keep it consistent with the testimony so that your neighbours do not complain; it does not mean that—but where is your mind, what is the bent of it? It is a remarkable thing that Paul puts the negative there, ‘not on the things on the earth’, so that you cannot turn round and say, ‘Well yes, of course, I have my mind on both’. That is not right; you see, you belong to heaven.

Oh that every one of us, dear brethren, could understand that we belong to heaven, we belong to Christ; He has redeemed us, and where He is is our place and finally we shall be there, but now our mind is to be on those things where He is. Now this is the way to develop, this is your outlook towards heaven, and as your mind is so engaged you are giving room to the Holy Spirit. He

is pleased with someone who thinks like this, and He is forming you according to the way you are thinking, so that the impressions you have do not simply remain impressions but you are formed according to them; this is what is in mind, formation according to the impression. You see, what you hear today, or what you hear in the ministry meeting in your locality, or the reading, as to the letter of it may pass out of your mind, but if in exercise you have taken it up with God and it is formed in your soul it is there permanently, although it may not be actively in your mind at any one time. Hence the importance of what we call formation. Is your outlook in this direction? I think the Lord would encourage us that it should be.

Paul says, “Your life is hid with the Christ in God. When the Christ is manifested who is our life, then shall ye also be manifested with him in glory”. Now you will notice ‘who is our life’, and “then shall ye also”. I think it is most important when you read scripture to notice the tenses and the differences in the words; nothing is indiscriminate. The Holy Spirit would teach us, “then shall ye also be manifested with him in glory”. I think of the coming of the Lord Jesus, the appearing, the manifestation, and I would like to lay hold in faith of the fact that when He is manifested we shall be manifested with Him. Someone has said it is rather like David in a hidden sense and Solomon in the sense of glory; how wonderful as our minds are in that direction that our life at the moment is hid, but we know that we shall be manifested with Him in due time. You see, your life being hid men cannot understand it. They say, ‘I do not know where you get your enjoyment from; no television, no radio, what do you do? Must be a very boring life!’. It is hid, of course. I

hope the television is not your life; maybe when we are young we take a passing glance as we go past the shop, perhaps more than a passing glance, but the Lord would help us to be relieved so that our outlook is upward, not outward. How wonderful that is that it is hid; man does not understand it. It is hid, but not simply hid, but with the Christ in God—What could be greater than that? I think, beloved brethren, that if our outlook is in this direction the Holy Spirit would help us forward in our souls so that our realization of the things above follows the setting of our mind upon them. I do not doubt that these things are outlined largely in the epistle to the Ephesians, where we are regarded not as down here, in the first few chapters, but up there; but in Colossians we are regarded as down here but with our minds up there. I wonder if your mind is on the things that are above, morally above, true, but also where the Christ is.

Now I will say a word about the believer’s path. It says in Luke 14, “Great crowds went with him”; but the Lord turns round and speaks—“If any man come to me”. You will always find that if there is something that appears to be, or is, spectacular, it will draw a crowd; but that is not reality. “Great crowds went with him”; and no doubt many of them had received blessing, many of them had felt the touch of His hand, maybe had been cured, captives had been delivered, persons who were blind given their sight, the lame given power to walk; but it is now not a question of being a recipient of blessing, but of the path of discipleship. You say, ‘Well, it does not sound from these words very much like grace; it sounds very severe’, “If any man come to me, and shall not hate his own father and mother, and wife, and children … he cannot be my disciple”.

thing that comes between the soul and Christ prevents you from being a disciple. Sobering words, and they need to be understood. There are many questions raised in this passage. Some might say, ‘Surely I do not have literally to hate my father and mother; that would be contrary to what we said in the reading, that He was subject to His parents’. We need to understand what the Lord means when He says this, as to what may come, with any person, between the soul and Christ.

What I wanted to call attention to is sitting down and counting the cost. We must do it. As we go on in life we are brought face to face with the fact that we must sit down and count the cost. Our brother referred to the Lord’s sitting down in Luke 4, and we spoke of Mary sitting down in chapter 10; now here somebody sits down, it is deliberate, and counts the cost. What will it cost? If I take this path, what will it cost? Perhaps there is someone here who is weighing that over, as to what it will cost to take this path. It says you will be mocked if you start to take it and fall away. Many have done that, I think. One man followed the Lord and fled away again (Mark 14: 51); he had not sat down and counted the cost. Oh that we might do this, dear brethren; whether it is a question of building or whether it is a question of conflict, it is essential that we should sit down and count the cost, weigh it up. We must not take up divine things lightly. I am not suggesting for one moment that you should sit down and count the cost and then give up, because there is wonderful resource in Christ; even if the enemies be twice or three times as many, there is wonderful resource in Christ and in the Spirit to enable us to go on. What the Lord points out is the sobriety of taking up the path of discipleship, but I would like to

be in it.

I think the spring of devotion to Christ as a disciple is in affection for Him; I doubt if there could be any question about that, it is affection for Christ. As I see the way that He has gone I say there is a resource in Him to help me to follow. I may be very weak, and feel my weakness; well, it is good to feel it, but do not feed on it. I often stumble, and that must be admitted too. A beloved servant used to say that God does not look at the number of times you fall over, but where your face is set when you get up, in which direction. Give up?—the righteous falleth seven times and rises up again (Proverbs 24: 16), so that the setting of the face is in the right direction, and I think the spring of it is affection for Christ. Do you love Christ? If you think of our first passage it is love for Christ; where He is I will be because I love Him—not simply because I think I ought to be there, but because I love Him. The same applies to the path of discipleship. I follow Him in some degree as I love Him, and I do not doubt that the degree of nearness to Him can be measured by the degree of love for Him. Now, how much do you love Christ? How much do I? Of course, we must not be too much occupied with ourselves, nevertheless I think the Spirit of God would generate, if I may use such a word, love for Christ in our hearts so that we might understand on the one hand that we belong to Him there, and on the other that we are to follow Him here.

So the Lord in Luke 14 is quite severe in what He says, as He is in other places. He says, “Salt then is good, but if the salt also has become savourless, wherewith shall it be seasoned? It is proper neither for land nor for dung; it is cast out. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear”.

Now I think the Lord would bring that before us, “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear”. Frequently the Lord said this, and others have said it too. Now which of us here will listen to the Lord? There is no reason why we should not all, but not in a crowd. “If any man come to me”—let each of us sit down and count the cost, and having counted the cost let us not turn back, but let us go forward as understanding that the Lord is our resource, as He has been throughout all the generations of His people, “Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations”, Psalm 90: 1. What a resource we have in Him and in the Holy Spirit who is present.

So we will not think of giving up but of going forward, and pray for all our brethren that they with us may come into the bond of the truth not the bond of brethren, not a specialist teaching, nothing like that, not into a particular group of Christians—but come to understand in some little degree the light of the assembly and understand that the truth is our bond. When we say our bond we do not mean the brethren with whom we walk; the truth is our bond means that it is the bond of all the saints. How many may be in it is always a question; how many of us may be in it is a question, because as I have already said we may sit in the environment of the truth and listen to its terms and yet not be vitally in it. Now one of the objects of these occasions is to stir our affections, stir our consciences, that we might be concerned to be vitally in the things of our Father.

Well, Timothy is exhorted by an older man, by Paul. I do not suppose Timothy would have said, ‘Well, there is Paul getting at me again’; he would have received it. Paul had an interest

in Timothy. It is a wonderful thing when someone has an interest in you. Some young people in the world feel that no one has an interest in them. Perhaps I may relate a simple incident as to a young girl in our office with a very unhappy background and in most unhappy circumstances. One of the older women said to her, ‘Well, you know, if I were your mother you would not do this and that; you would not go to night clubs and come home in the early hours of the morning’. To her astonishment the reply was, ‘Well, I wish you were my mother; at any rate I should have somebody who is interested in me’. That completely surprised the older woman, as you can imagine.

There is somebody who has an interest. How wonderful if somebody has an interest in me, although he may seem to be difficult and appear to be getting at me, and all that kind of thing. If the younger brethren will bear with me, when we are young that is how we feel sometimes as to an older brother or sister, we think that they are just ‘stuffy old grumps’, just to be plain, do we not? But they have an interest in you, a real interest in your soul. There was once a brother—another aside!—whose name was Tom Gilbert and he lived in Dartford and often spoke to me when I was a boy. I always had the impression that, just at that moment when he was speaking to me, he was not interested in, or thinking about, anybody else, just me. He did not give me the impression ‘I will shake your hand and then I must be away because I am in a hurry’; he always left me with the impression that he had an interest in me. So bear with the older brethren if they have an interest in you.

Paul had an interest in Timothy. Here he says, “Let no one despise thy youth”, well, Timothy

would receive that, “but be a model of the believers”, a model of the believers, not to them, as we have often noticed, but of them. As you move around, whether you are in the office or among the brethren, wherever you may be, be a model of the believers, “in word, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity”. What a word from an older man like Paul!—and the Spirit of God has recorded it for us. We are to be, each of us, a model in word, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity. “Till I come, give thyself to reading, to exhortation, to teaching. Be not negligent of the gift that is in thee, which has been given to thee through prophecy, with imposition of the hands of the elderhood”. Timothy could easily react, ‘Well, you are implying that I am not giving myself to reading, that I am not a model, that I am not giving myself to teaching’, and so on. I do not think Timothy would react like that; he would bear the word of exhortation knowing that it came from a man who had an intense interest in love in him personally, so that he wrote him two letters. We can understand Paul’s writing to a large company of believers, but he wrote two letters to an individual because he was so interested in him and in his spiritual progress. May we be more interested in the spiritual progress of one another and pray for one another, exhort one another, show an interest in one another, as Paul did to Timothy.

“Occupy thyself with these things; be wholly in them” (as we were reminded, that is the same expression as the Lord used of Himself in Luke 4) “that thy progress may be manifest to all. Give heed to thyself and to the teaching” (“to thyself” first, notice); “continue in them; for, doing this, thou shalt save both thyself and those that hear thee”. How wonderful these words of Scripture, dear brethren! May they come home as an exhortation to every one of us. I agree they

were written to a young man, because his position and responsibility in the testimony would be in mind, the continuation of what was Pauline that has come right down to our day, but nevertheless I am sure this would also apply to younger women as well. The Lord would give us to understand the needs of the testimony and help each of us, brother or sister, old or young, to be wholly in the things of our Father. It is a wonderful privilege, even if at the same time it is quite a sobering responsibility.

May the Lord help us, dear brethren, in our outlook and committal, first of all to have our mind on the things that are above, that is, the bent and characteristic thinking of the mind, if I may put it like that, is to be on the things that are above where the Christ is; then to have an outlook to be a disciple, but to weigh over the cost, to sit down and count the cost, and then to learn to receive what has been included in holy Scripture as an exhortation from the older to the younger, and to know what it is to give heed to ourselves and to the teaching, and then maybe, in God’s goodness, to save not only ourselves but others who may hear us. May it be so, for His pleasure.

Address at Maidstone
22 November 1975