RETURNING CAPTIVES

^[p. 108] RETURNING CAPTIVES

I was this moment (before I began to write) thinking that we can hardly be in full company with the Lord’s mind as to His present interests unless we have a sense of the state of captivity in which His people as a whole are in. I mean that however happy we are in Him, there must be a deep fringe of sadness encircling us because the carved work of His house is so broken down with axes and hammers, and hence ostensibly we hang our harps on the willows. It is ignorance of how He regards things if I can enjoy Him personally without a sense of what His mind is in walking amid the seven golden candlesticks. It is quite possible to enjoy Him and delight in Him in relation to myself, and yet to have little or no idea of how He feels about the state of the church. See an infant, and often even an older child, rejoicing in the love and company of its widowed mother, and it never yet has been awakened to the deepest, most prominent thought in the heart of the mother whom it loves and delights in so much. This world must in a sense be a blank to our blessed Lord, and though He has a home in His assembly, and His heart can delight in those who open to Him and with whom He can come in and sup, yet the one in real nearness to His heart, while deeply and fully enjoying His love, must feel this a strange land, and that we must remember Jerusalem above our chief joy. I think there is a double cause for estrangement and strangership now; we are here where our Lord is not; the people of God before never had any idea of this save when they were in captivity, then they were conscious that they were strangers in a strange land. This is our true position here, because of the rejection of Christ; but besides this we (the church) have gone down into the world; in unfaithfulness we have made friendship with the world, and hence we are not only (when our divine affections are revived) strangers here because Christ is absent, but we are also returning captives because of our own unfaithfulness.