OUR MOTIVE
OUR MOTIVE
Intelligence in truth depends on the spiritual state of the soul. It is quite impossible, before you have apprehended your union with Christ, that you should comprehend what the effects of that union are. Now we are hid with Him. When He shall appear, all shall be put in order, all shall suit His presence. Now all is confusion. The world has cast out Christ; but He has gone up to the right hand of God, and is gathering His saints until He appears, shows Himself to them, and puts all straight. The moment Christ shows Himself, He must have the upper hand of all evil. It was a matter of promise to the saints of old. Would it be your delight if He fulfilled it? If we are settling ourselves down here, we shall not desire that day; we shall not look for His appearing. We have to go through this world, an immense system of which Satan is the head; but our [p. 8] hearts ought to have communion with God, conscious of Christ’s separation from it all, and of our association with Christ Himself. Now we have the same as He, all but the glory. You cannot separate the Head from the members. There is nothing which Christ takes up but what is ours; suffering is thereby ours also. You cannot separate Christ and all He has from the saints. He is in them and with them, and when He shall appear, they shall be like Him. Ever since the Holy Spirit came down from heaven, this is our place. One thing that characterises Scripture is that the highest motives are supplied for the meanest things. Servants are exhorted not to purloin (see Titus 2: 10 - 14). Brethren are not to go to law because they shall judge the world. In the most minute and commonplace actions the coming is brought in as a motive; nothing less is contemplated but that the very thing which moves all actions in the saints should be that they have, and are to have, Christ’s presence.
The Lord Jesus having come and reconciled us with Himself, all His object was to set us in the same place with Himself, and nothing short of this. You cannot put Him in a place in which you do not necessarily, and in virtue of it, put me. And what is the consequence? I have this hope — the realisation of this union. Associated, identified, mixed up with Christ. You cannot separate the two. The world and Christ are now at issue. Christ retires as it were; He does not assert His rights. But by and by the world will have to succumb, and it shall be manifested then that the church had its place in Him before and beyond the creation of the scene in which it was to be gathered. Our hope is that which flows necessarily from connection with Himself, the being with Him for ever, connected with Himself everlastingly. He will come again to receive us unto Himself. And what more? Nothing? “That where I am, there ye may be also”. For ever with the Lord — that is all! And that is full blessedness.