SPIRITUAL HEALTH
N. T. Meek
I would like to say something, dear brethren, as to being in good health, especially spiritually, though one would not wish to exclude what we speak of as physical health, because the apostle John desired that the beloved Gaius should be in health, in physical health. When he heard news of him I suppose he would say, ‘Is he well?’—not in the kind of perfunctory way that we tend to drop into, but genuinely glad to know whether he was well, free of pain, able to eat and sleep and get about and get out to the meetings. It would mean something to John; he is one of the most spiritual men in the Scriptures, but no spiritual man is unnatural. I hope we understand that; the more spiritual a man is the more rightly natural he is, and practical too. So we have not got to think, any of us, that you cannot be both spiritual and natural, if you understand what I mean. Sometimes we speak of the natural in a derogatory sense, and it can have that sense, but it can also have a right sense. When we were born we were natural; we were not born spiritual, we were born natural, all of us. When we were babies that is all we were, natural. It was not wrong; it is just the condition. It takes us a little time to get spiritual, but that is better; it is better to be beautiful spiritually than it is to be beautiful naturally.
That is why, I think, God tells us the names of Job’s daughters after all his exercises and discipline were over. Job’s second family, we have been taught, was a spiritual family. We grow up under our parents’ eyes and initially we are natural. But sooner or later some spiritual features begin to appear. I suppose our mothers rejoiced when they held us in their arms for the first time; that is right; that is natural; father looked over her shoulder, wondering at the miracle of it, the wonder of it; it was a creatorially natural situation, and our parents rejoiced, and rightly so. But there came a time when something that was not natural began to show itself, and that is what meetings like these are intended to foster. No one is going to deny you a walk along the Naze this afternoon, but that will be just physical, you understand that; the greater thing is what is spiritual.
John is not impractical, he says, “I desire that in all things thou shouldest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospers”. He had heard about Gaius evidently, not only that he was relatively free of aches and pains, but that he was prospering in his soul, and that was the best news of all, for he says, “I have no greater joy than these things”—to hear that the saints were prospering in their souls. Nehemiah is another one who asked about the saints, how they were getting on, how Jerusalem was faring. The news was not too good and made him sad. I would say this very simply, that the saints are always glad when there is evidence that you are prospering. Perhaps you had just begun to preach and you got on all right, and then the next time you still got on all right, and the third time it was better still. That is Mark’s gospel; that is the preacher’s gospel; that is how it should be. In Mark 4 the result from the sowing is thirty, sixty, and a hundred fold. If you get better like that you will find that the brethren will come out and hear you—‘He was quite good last time and this time perhaps he will be still better’. I suppose there is a limit to this and every one of us who preaches or seeks to serve the saints in any way finds that sometimes we get a check and it was not so good; you did not get on too well, and you felt very deflated, and that is good for you; perhaps next time you will be back in form, in spiritual form. You do not recover without exercise and you do not do it without displacement.
So here we have John writing to Gaius; he wants him to be in health. That is the desire of every right-minded believer; he wants his fellow-believers to be in good health, spiritually especially, but physically too so that they can serve the saints, get to the meetings and be free of too much pain, too much trouble. Dear brethren, as we get older we get more sympathetic with one another. When you are young you are not so sympathetic, not characteristically. You always think the old people pile the agony on, do you not? There is a little story I could tell you about an old sister. A brother spoke to her and said, ‘How are you. Mrs P?’ She replied, ‘I have got this rheumatism behind my eyes, and an ache in my leg, and a pain in my back’. ‘Ah’, he said, ‘Mrs P., seventy years of His mercy!’
Mrs P. was not so sure about that! I hope it is so that we get more sympathetic as we get older, more feeling for one another. When someone is suffering you feel it with them in measure; perhaps that is one reason why the Lord has never exonerated the saints from physical limitation. It is partly to make us sympathetic with all men. One thing we had to learn in the war was that we were not immune from the troubles that afflicted the nations; falling bombs made no discrimination. We may have thought they would, but they fell on believer and on unbeliever; they took believer as well as unbeliever. A solemn thing it was, a solemn time to be in, because no one knew and no one had any real protection; you just had to commit yourself to God and to His will. We still have to come to that in many ways, and although you do all you prudently can, in the final resort you have to commit yourself to God and to His will.
I think you have got that really in the scripture in Exodus where typically we get this company of young saints having just got free of the world, and they are treading the wilderness. God
was teaching them too; He taught Ephraim to walk; I suppose that was in the wilderness. He was gently taking them. He was very careful, very tender, with them, but they were not to escape the tests. We would be very doubtful material if we were never tested! Now one way of making a metal stronger is to put it under a tensile test. You take a piece of mild steel and you strain it, it reaches a certain value and you relax it; you find the next time you strain it it will go a bit further, it will sustain more load. That strain has actually strengthened it; although it was so onerous at the time, it actually strengthened it. God does that with us. He strains us, puts us under tension and pressure. Of course, nothing is going to break in heaven, no saint is going to break there. You may say the tension will be off. Well, I suppose it will be, but the tension that was down here will show its superlative result—it works for us. Paul says, “in surpassing measure an eternal weight of glory”, 2 Corinthians 4: 17.
Well, these young brethren face this test, they face the wilderness, and first they found no water. Then they came to where there was some water, and—Oh, what a disappointment!—they could not drink it, it was bitter! It is like a circumstance that comes upon us and it is bitter; perhaps something you have set your mind on, but everything seems to go awry and finally the whole thing grinds to a halt. The experience is bitter. What are we going to do, dear brethren, when these things happen? What sort of tone will they disclose in us? What sort of state of health? Do we break down? God tests us; He stretches us, but He does not break us. It was a bitter experience; they did want some water, they really did want some water, and it was bitter. Moses cried to God, and God showed him wood. What does that mean? It means in principle He showed him Christ, “and he
cast it into the waters”. Think of that. Christ being cast into the waters. There was no will in Jesus that resisted God’s will. He had a will, but it never resisted God’s will, whereas mine does. It is one of the things that we have to learn, one of the things that we have to face, that our wills often resist God’s will. My blessing lies in my submitting myself to His will. That is really what you get here, is it not? The wood was cast into the waters “and the waters became sweet”. I suppose it was literally a miracle, but what it teaches, the moral import of it, has been proved by saints of every generation, that if you can find Christ in the circumstance, what was bitter will become sweet. Dear brethren, and especially dear young ones, I am not speaking poetically, it is the truth, and if you can bring Christ into that circumstance that seems so bitter, you will find it will become sweet, you will be able to bear it.
So God leads them on gently, and He says to them, ‘If you will listen to My voice, then I will do something wonderful for you’; and it really is wonderful. He says, “If thou wilt diligently hearken to the voice of Jehovah thy God, and do what is right in his eyes, and incline thine ears to his commandments, and keep all his statues, I will put none of the complaints upon thee that I have put upon the Egyptians”. What a promise! never to have an Egyptian illness, never to get the complaints that the world gets. What are these complaints? Ambition is one, independence would be another, rivalry would be another one. Egypt’s illnesses are moral. Of course they are physical too. I suppose we have all heard about this dreadful thing called Aids, and it should sober us, because it is one of the physical illnesses of Egypt, and I have no doubt Paul is referring to something like that when he speaks in chapter 1 of Romans about persons receiving “in themselves the
recompense of their error which was fit” (Romans 1: 27).
Well, I did not want to speak about that. I wanted to touch just briefly upon these moral complaints that we as Christians should be free of. We have mentioned three of them, ambition, independence and rivalry. They are current diseases in the world and cause a lot of trouble. What, dear believer, is your driving force? Is it ambition to get on in the world? What good will that do you? What if you gain the whole world and lose your soul? ‘Ah’, you say,
‘I do not want to gain the whole world, just a little part of it’. In principle it is the same, and the result will be dissatisfaction. “Having sustenance and covering”, says Paul, “we will be content with these. But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare”, 1
Timothy 6: 8, 9. How often we have seen it!
Another Egyptian complaint is a very sore one—the imitation of the fashions of the world.
There are those here who have lived long enough to have seen how fashions go in cycles.
They come and go; how vain and empty they are! It is a sorrow to see a child of God, a lover of Jesus, being a slavish follower of the whims of fashion. “The fashion of this world passes”, 1 Corinthians 7: 31. How true the scripture is! Are my garments and bearing compatible with a heavenly calling? We should, dear brethren, soberly face these things; is my motive really to please the Lord?
One does not care to speak at length about these Egyptian complaints, but a time comes when a person must ‘deliver his soul’ (Ezekiel 3: 16–21). I touch on one further matter only and that is wedding occasions. The arrangements and attire at some of these are getting perilously close to the world. Do we really want them so to be? Some features even offend common sense, but the greater sorrow is in the
weakening of the testimony of a despised and absent Lord. Can we not set the Lord before us—is not “everything, whatever ye may do in word or in deed”, to be done in the name of the Lord Jesus? (Colossians 3: 17).
Beloved, I would like to appeal to our affections. As Israel were leaving Egypt for that very good land, so are we soon going actually to go out of this world to enter that one which is so infinitely blest. May we be taking the moral journey now and be among those who are counted worthy “to stand before the Son of man”, Luke 21: 36. ‘Nothing’, the poet said, ‘will make up if His ‘Well done’ be missed’.
I am conscious that I have not touched on every matter that could be cited, but may the Lord help us soberly to consider our position and seek help to keep free of Egypt’s complaints, for His name’s sake.
Substance of an address at Walton-on-the-Naze
25 October 1986