INAUGURATION OF THE NEW WAY
INAUGURATION OF THE NEW WAY
We had a very happy time last evening; the subject was Stephen, with which you are very familiar. The point which came so freshly before me was the new action of the Spirit of God. He had come down (Acts 2), but now He conducts up. In John 14 He was promised to come down, because Christ was going away. How He ‘opens the heavenly door’ and brings Stephen to the favoured hour. We must regard this as an inauguration of the new order. Saints amongst us generally are quite satisfied to be assured that the Holy Ghost has come down, there is seldom a desire to be led up. I was much pleased to hear ———— say, ‘I should like to know the Lord where He is.’ He is nowhere else now! He made the path of life through this dreary scene, but He is not here as He was then, and never will be again.
I read the latter verses of Acts 7, dwelling first on Stephen’s realisation of his own portion, shewing that the Lord prepared His servant for his work by feeding and nourishing his soul with Himself in glory, illustrating it by the case of Elijah in 1 Kings 19 when he was given two breakfasts before the journey to Horeb, the mount of God.
[p. 106] I shewed how the work of Christ had secured this new place for Stephen, and now he must set forth the new centre, the new testimony, which is a Man at the right hand of God — how He was there because He was rejected here, and the testimony is that He is in heaven. Thirdly, how the witness has to confront everything which opposed our Lord here, but in His power, and therefore triumphant as Stephen was. The Man in heaven is now the centre of all God’s ways.
I have been much interested while writing on ‘What is a Christian?’ in seeing that besides deliverance, which Jordan expresses fully, there is circumcision (Colossians 3: 1 - 11). Everything of man as he was must be relinquished; all the temptations of Satan which act on my flesh are now left behind and I encounter the direct opposition of the enemy against my dwelling in assured possession of the land.
In the type, and morally, we are called to possess after we have entered the land, yet I have no doubt that as united to Christ we are in possession, and in Ephesians 6 we have to keep possession. I have long seen the difference between the type and. the antitype. I have possession, but I have to keep it, and here the energy of the Spirit is known, and here your faithfulness is proved.