“HE SHALL GLORIFY ME”

E. M. Walkinshaw

John 16: 13–16; 1 John 2: 26–28

I venture, dear brethren, to say a little about these passages as seemingly they would fit with what the Lord is saying to us. What impresses me is the great importance of listening to what the Lord is saying at the moment. He has said a good deal in the past within the structure of the good teaching that has been given—us, and He is still speaking, and the Spirit is here too.

It is vital, I think, that as exercised persons we should seek to follow what He is saying. It always comes freshly to mind, ‘He that has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the assemblies’. There is what He is saying at the present moment. Occasions such as these are not simply for happy conversation about matters of mutual interest, although matters of mutual interest engage us. There are many persons gathered together, many groups of christians, who speak over things that are of common interest to them, and about the things they know of the Lord. But I think what is essential in days like these is to locate the present speaking of the Spirit. We come in faith therefore to an occasion like this that we shall hear what the Spirit has to say to us today. He has spoken, as I have said, and we must pay attention to what He says because, as already commented in these meetings, it is current.

What the Spirit says would never be anything that would contradict what He has said in the past, but I think that at this present point in the history of the testimony the Spirit has something

to say that is distinctively for the testimony at this time.

So one desires to promote exercise on this line that we might recognise the way in which the Holy Spirit is glorifying Jesus. I think one could say unhesitatingly that He has thus far in this occasion glorified Jesus. We have spoken of Him as glorified above. Stephen saw “the glory of God”, and “Jesus standing at the right hand of God”, Acts 7: 55. I think that where faith has been existent there has been an impression left on our souls of the glory of that Man at the right hand of God. Then, too, an impression of the glory of Jesus as humbled. The poet says—

‘There on the hidden bread

Of Christ, once humbled here’.

But while we might fairly easily grasp the terms of what may come before us, I believe what is essential is that we should receive a spiritual impression from these occasions and an impression of glory which necessarily, as we have already said, centres in Jesus. So we think of the Spirit’s mission. Chapters 14, 15, and 16 of John’s gospel have been aptly described as the stronghold of the Person and the presence and the service of the Holy Spirit. The Lord would help us about that. First of all perhaps we could be reminded that He is a Person. “Be careful in his presence” (Exodus 23: 21) would no doubt be a typical reference to the Holy Spirit. Think of the Lord Jesus here as Man emphasising the personality of the Holy Spirit—

“But when he is come …” He is here, beloved brethren, and we can be assured that He will fulfil His mission. There is no fear of any breakdown in what He does, nor is there any fear of the things of our Lord ever coming into decay or breakdown as in His hands.

So Jesus says, I believe in implicit confidence

as going away to His Father, “When he is come, the Spirit of truth, he shall guide you into all the truth”. Now, as I apprehend it, that is not the terms of the truth, although without question He will bring the terms before us that our minds might be kept right. We have often heard it said that doctrine is to keep the mind right, but it does not feed the affections. Mr. Stoney said that doctrine is as clear as the moon, and just as cold. So the affections need to be reached.

“He shall guide you into all the truth” means, I think, that He is guiding persons into the substantiality and experience of the truth and, of course, that means that we are necessarily guided to Christ, because He said a little earlier, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life”, John 14: 6. So it all centres in Him. We need to keep near to the Guide. If you take a practical example, there are guides to take you round the caves, to keep you on the right course. You keep near to the guide, or you keep near to the company which is near to the guide. As to the truth, there is only one Guide and that is the Spirit. Where is He? You are exercised; I am exercised; others claim to be exercised. Where is He speaking? I am not referring now to His sovereign movements as a divine Person. But where is He speaking, and what is He saying? I think we can bring forward currently the comment of beloved Mr. Taylor that it is essential that we should learn to locate the Spirit.

Then Jesus goes on to say, “He shall glorify me”. How wonderful to think of the mission of this Person. What a service He is rendering to the Lord Jesus. If I might so say, if the Father has implicit confidence in Jesus, having placed all things in His hand, we can say that Jesus as Man, leaving this scene to go to the Father, left with implicit confidence in the Holy Spirit.

So He is the Spirit of truth, but His service is, Jesus said, to “glorify

me”. I believe He is doing this, dear brethren. I believe He is doing it at the present moment.

He is glorifying Jesus; He is bringing the things of Jesus and showing them to us. That would unquestionably link with what we had in our earlier reading, that wonderful heavenly order and association of life in which Jesus lives and in which we are to live, and He is bringing things to show them to us. How does He do it? That is not really the point! The point of what the Lord is saying is the fact that it is He who will do it. As to how He will do it we may have to enquire in other passages, but the great thing is to apprehend the presence of the Spirit, who is glorifying Jesus. So let us come to such occasions as these, dear brethren—and I believe we do—in faith that we shall listen to what the Spirit is saying at the present moment to the saints, to the assemblies, in the present position in which they are.

My second passage refers to the unction. I think it right to say that I shall never be able to say to the Lord, nor would any other believer, ‘Well, of course, I was wrong because Mr. So-and-so misled me’. I doubt if such a comment as that could ever be regarded as valid. You have the Spirit; I have the Spirit. We sit together as having in the Spirit, and by the Spirit, an intuitive conscious knowledge of what is of God. It is not that we are sitting here to criticize, or to try to find some comment which might not agree with the ministry, or to find fault with the remarks of one and another. How thankful we are in these days for an atmosphere which is conducive to the truth, conducive to speaking the truth, and conducive to the reception of the truth. So we do not sit together critically, but we are conscious by the Spirit of what is of God. Now, if my motive is wrong I shall lose the gain of the unction. Christ must be before me. Christ is

before the Spirit—“He shall glorify me”. My motive is to be the same; if my motive is His glory alone, I believe I shall get the gain of the unction, the inward, intuitive knowledge of what is of God. And then I shall not be concerned about making my failure the responsibility of somebody else—‘Mr. So-and-so misled me’. The Lord might say, ‘But had you not the Spirit? Did you not have the unction? Could you not know all things?’ What a resource, dear brethren, we have! There is the Person, and the presence, and the service of the Holy Spirit.

What a resource He is inwardly for the saints, to be able to detect what is of God and what is not of God.

So John says, “These things have I written to you concerning those who lead you astray”. But I think the unction is not just to detect evil, but that in the conscious knowledge of what is of God we should be able to perceive what is not of God. So as things come to us in these occasions we get the inward, intuitive consciousness that they are of God.

May the Lord help us first of all to see the greatness of the Person, and the presence, and the service of the Holy Spirit, and then our responsibility to locate Him, to be concerned, as giving place to Him within, to detect where He is, and thus to be able to apprehend, appreciate, and appropriate what is of God as it comes to us at the present moment. May it be so, for His glory.

Word in meeting for ministry, Buckhurst Hill, 24 December 1976

THE JUDGMENT-SEAT OF GOD AND OF CHRIST

J. N. Darby

I am not aware that this expression, “the judgment-seat of God” or “the judgment-seat of Christ”, is found anywhere else than in Romans 14 and 2 Corinthians 5; in the first of these two passages with a view to prevent individual judgments; in the second with a view to provoke to do good. The subject in itself is one of the most solemn and at the same time most blessed, and this so much the more as we understand it rightly. I believe that each act of our lives will be manifested then before the tribunal, according as the grace of God and His ways with us in connection with our own acts will be known then. We read (Romans 14) that

“every one of us shall give account of himself to God”; and the word, in this passage, mentions the tribunal in connection with the exhortation to brethren not to judge one another in respect of days, meats, or any other such thing.

I am disposed to think that the acts alone will be subject to manifestation; but all the private acts of our life depend so intimately upon our inward feelings, that it is, in a certain sense, difficult to distinguish the acts from the simple thoughts. The acts manifest the power of the thought or of the feeling. I believe that the whole of our acts will be detailed there, before the judgment-seat, not for us, however, as if we were in the flesh, and thus to our condemnation, but to make evident to our own eyes the grace that occupied itself with us—regenerate or unregenerate. In the counsels of God I am elect

before the foundation of the world; hence I think that my own history will be detailed before the judgment-seat, and, parallel with it, the history of the grace and of the mercy of God toward me. The why and the how we did this or that will be manifested then. For us the scene will be declarative, not judicial. We are not in the flesh before God; in His eyes by His grace we are dead. But then, if we have walked according to the flesh, we must see how we lost in blessing thereby, and what loss we have incurred; and, on the other hand, the ways of God towards us, all ways of wisdom, of mercy, and of grace, will be perfectly known and understood by us for the first time. The history of each one will come out in perfect transparency; it will be seen how you yielded and how He preserved you, how your foot slipped and how He raised you up again, how you were drawing near danger and shame and how He by His own arm interposed.

I believe this is the bride making herself ready, and I consider that moment as a wondrous one. There will be no flesh then to be condemned; but the new nature will enter into the full knowledge of the care and of the love, which, in true holiness and in righteousness and even in grace, have followed us step by step all through the running of the race. Some parts of our life, till then entirely unexplained, will be fully disclosed and become altogether plain; some tendencies of our nature, that perhaps we do not judge to be so pernicious and deadly as they are, and for the mortification of which we are perhaps now subjected to a discipline that we may not have interpreted aright, will then be perfectly explained; and, what is more, the very falls that plunge us now into such bitter anguish will be seen then to be that which God used to preserve us from something more terrible. I do not think that until then we shall ever have had a full knowledge of the badness of our flesh.

How blessed for us to know that then it will be not only all over with the flesh in the counsel of God, but that the flesh will no longer be attached to us! On the other side, I doubt not, the manifestation of God’s grace toward us individually will be so magnificent that even the sense of the perversity of the flesh that we had, if it could possibly enter there, would be excluded by the greatness of the sense of divine goodness. Why do we not deny and mortify the flesh when we think of that hour? The Lord grant that we may do so more and more to the glory of His grace. This great subject of the judgment-seat brings the soul to a very full knowledge of our individual standing.

Collected Writings Vol. 23, pp.369, 370