ENTRANCE INTO THE ASSEMBLY

^[p. 266] ENTRANCE INTO THE ASSEMBLY

I desire to trace the way the work of grace is known. The work is the fruit of God’s love, and therefore ever remains, but it is only in parts that we know it in the power of the Spirit.

First, after new birth we believe on Him and His death on the cross; then we believe on Him raised from the dead by the glory of the Father. Now a new day is opened to us, the Spirit of God assures us of God’s reception, the Father’s kiss to the prodigal. Next, we learn that there is no good in us, but that “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death”. (Romans 8: 2)

Often a very long time may elapse, perhaps the forty years in the wilderness, between these two - acceptance and deliverance. The one, how God receives me in Christ; the other, how I can joy in God - set free from the flesh by the power of the Spirit. Now, I know that Christ is my life, and the more I enjoy Him the more I find that He is not here, and this makes the world a wilderness to me. And now the question arises - Where is He as to this world? We are taught in figure the true answer in Matthew 14, where He walks on the water. If He is known here He is known in an entirely new way, as supreme above all the power of evil - He was always superior to it, but now He is supreme above it all - and He teaches Peter in the step from the ship to Himself to take a place where His own life alone could maintain him, and thus John 6 and Matthew 14 occurred at the same time. He does not appear in the world again as He was here, but He that was here is made known in the world as He is now, Son of God over His own house. And Peter, though a stone already, has to come to the living Stone, the Son of God, to be built in, and to realise what it is to be with ^[p. 267] Him in the holiest of all, and from thence to come out to show forth the praises of Him who has called us out of darkness into His marvellous light.

Scarborough,