EXTRACTS

How important this is for young believers! Our days are days in which we have had to withdraw from the camp, and our circumstances are not such as to attract the flesh. The Lord never intended that the flesh should be attracted by the assembly’s position in this world. But Joshua as a young man departed not from the tabernacle. To bring it down to our own time, this means that I apprehend the assembly in its relation to Christ; that divine Persons are there and divine secrets are made known; so I make it my dwelling-place, as it were. I never fail to attend the gatherings of God’s people, for God is there. God—speaks there, so you get direct communications from Him. Here He spoke to Moses face to face. Wonderful honour put upon Moses! And “Joshua the son of Nun, a young man, departed not out of the tabernacle”.

You can see thus how he became spiritual. He was in the very centre of divine secrets, where divine communications were made. Not that they were made to him exactly; they were made to Moses, but he was there. The thing is to be there.

You have little idea what you miss in absenting yourself from the gatherings of God’s people.

See what Thomas missed. What a wonderful time they had that first day of the week, the day on which the Lord rose! How fresh everything was as He came in from heaven, as it were, to where the disciples were! And Thomas was not there; he was away somewhere in unbelief. The Spirit of God does not lift the veil and tell us how Thomas spent that day; we do not know; but we do know he was in unbelief on that day, and in his unbelief he missed the greatest possible privilege. I do not know if he ever recovered the loss; it is doubtful, because that occasion was not repeated. Every time the Lord comes there is something new.

J. Taylor (Vol. 21, pp.179, 180)

By his behaviour, a believer gives expression to the progress he had made in his soul through the previous experience. It does not appear here that Abram made any headway spiritually whilst he was in Egypt, but it is quite evident that having returned, he had lost nothing. That is, he comes back to the point of departure and begins over again. It says in Genesis 12: 8,

“there he builded an altar unto the Lord, and called upon the name of the Lord”. Then in chapter 13, verse 4, it says, he “called on the name of the Lord”; the same expression. There is no indication that he had made any headway since the time he builded that altar, but then he is recovered. It is, as far as I understand it, that he has come back in his soul to the point he had left, and that is what I think you might call complete recovery, that one has not carried back any of the principles of the country into which he departed. I believe that in our day this truth is most important, because generally speaking there has not been complete recovery.

Certain principles of the world, which the saints have acquired, have been brought back and mixed with first principles.

J. Taylor (Vol. 9, pp.348, 349)

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