THE CALLING AND THE SERVANT
THE CALLING AND THE SERVANT
I was glad to get your letter and, after all the perils you have passed through, to learn that you are well and hearty.
It is truly blessed when the servant cheerfully enters into the peculiar trials of his fellows experimentally. Ezekiel did so in a very marked way, and the servant is always efficient in helping others when he has been helped himself. I believe ministry is most effective when the minister is ahead of those to whom he ministers in suffering for Christ. In christendom it is the opposite way, the bishop is a lord!
I am cheered that your heart has been led to seek more light on the subject of bringing out the heavenly man on earth. The more light, or rather sight, we have, the more extended is our field of vision. The same truth which appears small and terminable to one, because he can see no further, appears to another [p. 338] boundless and majestic, because he sees so much, though to both it is one and the same truth. I feel I know very little of the real testimony, which in one line I may define as reproducing or expressing here the Man Christ Jesus whom the world rejected, but whom God exalted; expressing Him here in the very place where He was rejected. This could not be done but by His body. The body is the fulness of Christ. All the saints that were ever on the earth could not as units represent Christ as His body only can.
Hence if the mystery - that is, what the Son of God is to the saints now, their veritable Head - is unapprehended in power, there cannot be any idea of what it is to represent Him here.
John 17 shows what is His heart for His own, entirely independently of what we are. In fact our blessed Lord, in that chapter, keeps His eye absolutely on His own heart, and pours out His desires, unaffected or uninfluenced by our state.
This will be answered surely on the earth by the bride coming down out of heaven from God, and is answered now as there is in any of us a coming down from heaven. It is plain we must get there first, before we can come from there. This latter you have in Ephesians. We are raised up together and made to sit together in the heavenlies in Christ. The place is the point, and the Person the means. Now as united to Him, the glorified Man, we are, according to God’s calling, to grow up unto Him in all things, who is the Head; and hence a manner of life is to ensue, quite beyond any we had known of before. This is the real point of difficulty to accept or to understand. Our blessed Lord while on earth confined Himself generally to the humbling which He bowed to when He became a man. If He were out of it for a moment, and said, “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” (Luke 2: 49). He readily yielded, and was subject to His parents. He set forth divine beauty in the details [p. 339] of daily life, in flesh and blood; He was ever a Nazarite. He set forth God in the Man, but entered not into natural joys. He was a Man of sorrows, the entirely dependent Man, the One who supplies grace to us, who feed on Him through His death, for all our daily trials.
But He is now glorified; He is not now straitened; and it is as He is now that the church is united to Him; and it is as He is now that we are to represent Him on earth, where He has been rejected. He has, blessed be His name, been in my circumstances; and as I feed on Him, He gives me His grace to walk in my own circumstances. This is simple enough; but as united to Him, I am in His circumstances, and I am empowered through this union to act for Him independently of flesh and blood, and my own circumstances; and here is the corn of the land. Of course, there is no higher walk here than as He walked, but it is possible now, through the power that worketh in us, to rise above all human feelings, as Stephen had done, and thus magnify Christ in my body by life or by death. And here I believe Ephesian practice comes in, and is in every way superior to the practice of the wilderness man.
The practice of the heavenly man is of the highest order; it has no lower standard than what Christ is.
If it be love, it is Christ’s love as an offering to God. If it be a man’s love to his wife, it is as Christ loved the church, and gave Himself for it. It is as He is now, and not merely as He was.
I think I have now opened my mind very freely to you; you encourage me. As to Philippians 3, it describes the heavenly pilgrim. The corporate always resolves into the individual, otherwise it would be a mere theory, but the individual does not ascend to the corporate; that is not the way of the truth except in learning it. I see great importance in the name Christ in Philippians. If you have not got hold of the body,
[p. 340] you cannot be individually in the current of God’s mind.
I hope I am not making my letter too long, but yours is so interesting I cannot forbear answering it in detail. I quite feel with you ‘that many are born mechanically as it were into the current of divine activity’. I am satisfied that the many who have broken away from the true ground are, as they allege, on the same ground as ever they were. I believe that many brethren, so called, embraced the truth of 1 Corinthians 12: 12, 13, the responsibility side of the one body, and really were glad to meet one another in this beautiful bond, who all the time had not the truth of the mystery; that is, that the Son of God is the Head; for when a question of discipline arose, the beauty of the bond gave way to the duty of the bond; and as they did not realise Christ’s place as all powerful to carry out His own mind and pleasure in the church, they collapsed, and in terms and acts denied the responsibility of the body, or rather the body itself.
It is a remarkable fact, that independency was the cause of the first division at Plymouth, and it is the same in the late one. Many fled from connection with Bethesda because of the bad doctrine, and not because of the independency, and they, I doubt not, are subjected to the same test now.
You touch on a very sad feature of the times when you speak of those who are zealous for right principles, etc., but are in spirit no further advanced than members of the sects. It is simply intelligence without power, for if there had been power, it would have shown itself in the holders of it first; as a candle must be lit in order to impart light to another; you will always find that those who hear them are like unto them. Reducing christianity to a science is most deplorable. I believe there is the divine stream running through the. lake, as it were, and the very vigour of it is separating it from the turbid, sluggish waters on either side.
[p. 341] We are not to be discouraged; God is for us, and Christ is above everything - Head. It is plain the nearer we approach to the morning star, the more suitable we shall become to Christ, like Rebekah when she approached Isaac; approximation produces suitability. As to your exercises before God, each one is formed by Him; and He is not less forming you now that He has given you more light and truth; and you must remember that all the way it is one tree, or one man. His first ways indicate His intentions about you; as I often say, our first circle indicates every circle throughout our course.
I believe there is intense and unspeakable blessing in being detained before the Lord; it is then one is divinely influenced; all our usefulness depends on our feeding on Christ. I do trust the Lord is awakening souls to the magnitude of His calling. The Lord bless you much in your work for Him. We shall be so glad to see you amongst us again if it be His will.