GOD'S THOUGHTS AND MY EXPERIENCE
Eric Burr
Exodus 19: 4; Deuteronomy 8: 2-5; Jeremiah 2: 1-3 (to "increase");
A question which was raised in the reading on Lord's day afternoon enters, I feel sure, into the experience of everybody here. The question is, if things have been so established by God, and for God, why is it that my experience is different; and also, why is it that I do not seem to have the power to maintain what I so enjoyed committing myself to? These are real questions: they come into the mind of every believer. I do not speak this evening in the sense that I can give definitive answers to them, because I think that in relation to such matters we may get light in a meeting like this, but the answers to the questions enter into the experience of each individual. That experience may be different with each one of us.
Nevertheless, the question can be answered, and a large part of a Christian's life lies in finding the answers. The questions are more important than we may think because, if we lean so heavily in relation to what God has done for Himself - and in one sense we cannot lean too heavily on that - that we neglect the other side, I think we shall have some kind of Christianity that has become Calvinistic. That is to say, we have taken up predestination in a way which is not intended in the scripture in Romans 8 to which our beloved brother has referred. If, on the other hand, I say nothing is mine apart from my experience, then I shall find that daily weakness in Christian experience almost overthrows me. I do not wish to use the word 'balance' in regard to these things, because both have to be worked out experimentally. Many scriptures might be read on this because, broadly speaking and as far as practical experience goes, the Bible is about those two questions. It is about a lot of other things, but it is about those two questions. Even the question raised in Job, for instance, "how can man be just with God? " (chap 9: 2) is the same question in another form. I have read these scriptures because they are the ones which occurred to me as we sat here. (How often one comes to this meeting never intending to say anything - perhaps with one's mind a bit in the direction of saying nothing - but the impression comes and one speaks.)
In Exodus 19 God says "I have ... brought you to myself". Looking back on the previous chapters, you might ask, where were the eagles' wings? No eagle has been mentioned in the book so far. But God says, I have done this: "I have borne you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself". That is in chapter 19. There is a lot of history to go on after this, but this is the point from which God starts. I know that the succeeding verse brings in contingent things - if you will keep my commandments, ye shall be to me a kingdom of priests, and so on - but God sets out His own position from the beginning, that "I have ... brought you to myself". That is absolute. That is what God has done for you and for me. He has done it in Christ - "I have ... brought you to myself". He gives us the Spirit so that we may fully enter into the power of it. One great weakness among Christians - I venture to say, among brethren - is a lack of power. We know all the words, what we lack is the power. But God has give us the power. We had it here in the preaching on Lord's day - ye shall "be clothed with power from on high" Luke 24: 49. There is power. "I have ... brought you to myself" is the point from which Christian history starts. There was the passover, true enough. What the passover does is to save you from judgment. The Red Sea puts you on new ground. It shows you Christ's death in relation to yourself. You go through the Red Sea and you are on new ground. God does not say, You have learned this and that lesson; He says, This is what I have done. It is a great thing to get established in the soul of a believer what God has done: "I have borne you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself". I ask the brethren, have you had the experience of being borne on eagles' wings? You may like the experience of Isaiah 40, that He gathers the lambs with His arm (see v 11). The shepherd puts the sheep on his shoulders in Luke 15, but God brings in a text here which relates to divine power in its fulness - "I have borne you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself". That is what God has done and that is the ground that God takes. This word was given to Israel and they were intended to live in the light of it and in the power of it. They were intended to go on - perhaps not for very long, but certainly for a year because they were going to build the tabernacle in the wilderness and that took a year, then a bit of a journey and they were really not far from the land. So God establishes this from the beginning: "I have ... brought you to myself", and I say to all the brethren - as believers - get this into your soul, that God has brought you to Himself! He did it in Christ. When He raised Christ from the dead and set Him at His own right hand, He sat us down in heavenly places in Christ. Let us get this into our souls.
But then there is experience. We all know the history and the Book of Numbers - chapter after chapter. It begins with everything in normality and then it goes on to breakdown. It is history - our history. It begins with everything normal and then it all seems to go wrong. You come to the point of unbelief and God then acts. He says, You will go forty years in the wilderness. The people moaned and cried, and they complained that they had to go through the wilderness. They blame Moses for it. Nevertheless, God did not cut them off. (I know that a generation dies in the wilderness and there is teaching in that, because there is what is in us that has to perish in the wilderness circumstances). But God brought the nation through. And he explains in Deuteronomy why it was. Now this is our experience: when I find that I am not up to what I know is the ground that God has put me on, I need to learn why it is that my experience falls short. I come to this, that God has done these things in order to humble me, in order that I might learn what was in my heart. It says here, "to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thy heart". In one sense God wanted to prove what was in the heart of Israel because He wanted to find out if there was a nation there that could serve Him. But the real lesson is for ourselves - "to humble thee, and to prove thee, and to know what was in thy heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments or not". This is our experience. One thing I say for the encouragement of everybody (it is not much good talking to the young people tonight because the great majority of us are over sixty) is this: God has taken us this way so that we might learn things about ourselves. But we shall only learn these things about ourselves if we cling to what is said in Exodus 19 amongst other things. We shall only go through the wilderness history and the humbling and proving experience if we have clasped to our souls that "I have ... brought you to myself". These two things go on together, but I cannot bear the wilderness unless I have God's view behind me. I cannot bear the wilderness experience with its humbling and proving and testing unless I know things from God's side. He is doing these things to prove to me what I am - all against the background that He has secured me for Himself. How blessed that is! It is grace in God that does this. Deuteronomy is not a book about laying down the law; it is the manifestation of the grace of God in experience. It comes at the end to a man who says "A perishing Aramaean was my father" (chap 26: 5), who brings the fruit of the land and worships. The book is bringing out the reality of what God does in souls. You find that God is humbling you. You cannot do things you would like to do, and God humbles you in that respect. Why did I want to do it? Why did you want to do things you could not do? God was in it; He was humbling you. You find things in you that belong to ordinary human nature that you would like to give expression to, and you find you cannot, knowing that God has brought you to Himself; it is because God is humbling you, and proving you, and showing you what is in your heart that is not yet consistent with the ground that He has taken of having brought you to Him self . It says that he humbled thee, and even suffered you to hunger. Not many people here have suffered actual hunger in any real sense, but why did He suffer you to hunger? In order that you might learn that you live only by the words that come out of God's mouth. It is pretty well true of most of us that, in every testing that we have in our Christian experience, we would rather learn from some other mouth than from God. We might even rather learn from some other brother, or some sister. We might say, Why is it thus with me? Rebecca said that: "If it be so, why am I thus?", Gen 25: 22. We would rather learn things from somebody else, but the great thing is to learn from God. You learn that you live by every word that goes out of the mouth of God.
I do not like to say these things are 'testing' - it is a word we use a lot. The question is, have we experienced the test, or do we mean that we do not really know very much about it and we had better ask somebody else. The 'somebody else' you had better ask is God Himself. Get back to God and find that you live by every word that goes out of the mouth of God! Every word that goes out of the mouth of God is consistent with what He has done in bringing you to Himself. God works in us. It has been said that He took them through the wilderness to grind the flesh out of them. How much we have had to experience that! But remember this: for a believer - not an Israelite - if the Lord took him the night or the day after he had established in his soul that God had brought him to Him self, he would find the reality of the fact that he was fit for the presence of God in that moment. There may be a lot of experience to be worked out because you are still here. God is working these things out, and it is for our encouragement that we can start with the point that He has brought us to Himself.
I have read the other two scriptures because they relate, not so much to what God has done, but to what I have done. It says in Jeremiah 2: "I remember for thee the kindness of thy youth"; that is what you were. In your youth the response to the kindness of God in you was kindness in yourself - "the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals". What a day that was! Some years ago a lot of cold water was poured on singing 'O! happy day that fixed my choice Thee my Saviour and my God!'. I never mind anyone singing that: it is the love of thine espousals. Let us not be ashamed of them, beloved! Let us seek to have them revived! It says, "when thou wentest after me in the wilderness" - when thou wentest after Me. Everything is credited to them, to Israel. This is not now "I ... brought you to myself", but "thou wentest after me"! It was "in a land not sown. Israel was holiness unto Jehovah". I think that was the commitment of the people; Israel was holiness unto Jehovah. It was their commitment to God; as we had on Lord's day, that is Romans 12. "Israel was holiness to Jehovah" is "present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your intelligent service". There they were committed. The remaining forty years brought out unholiness of the most extreme kind. Our experience has more than once - dare we confess it? - brought out unholiness of a most extreme kind. Perhaps not the most extreme, but it has brought out unholiness. We would have to say that about most of our lives and things that have entered into our experience. But you began with this: "Israel was holiness to Jehovah".
So Paul says, "perfecting holiness". That is to say, you are not trying to make yourself holy; you are trying to work out into result the holiness in which you first committed yourself to God. It says, "having these promises" - that is what God is for you, having all that in your soul - "perfecting holiness in God's fear". That is to encourage us. Get back to where you began; get back to the joy of your espousals; get back to that first love! The reproach of Ephesus in Revelation is that they had left their first love. Get back to it; be revived by it! It will keep you going in a day when, if you are leaning only on your own efforts, you will find just one failure after another. Do you wake up in the morning and say, This is a day in which I am going to fail again? Have you never said that? Let us face the reality of our own lives! But wake up in the morning and say, 'his compassions fail not; they are new every morning", Lam 3: 22. You can be besought by the compassions of God to present your body a living sacrifice. Then you go through another day perfecting holiness. Some problem comes up, something you would like to do and you are frustrated; something you wish you could do and you find you cannot; something you would rather not do and you have to do - all these things come up. Face them, perfecting holiness. It works out into very great results. The combination of what God has done, and what we did for God (let us not be ashamed to speak like that! ), has to be worked out. It is what Paul means when he says to the Philippians, "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling", chap 2: 12. Mr Darby's footnote there is most useful to everybody - 'work it out into result'.
I touch these things, beloved; and, as I said at the beginning, I do not claim to be definitive about them at all. But these are matters in which, out of our personal experience, we ought to be able to help one another. If I come to you and say, You are an older brother and I have a problem in my life with something that comes up, and keeps on coming up, and I cannot get through it, what are you going to do? Are you going to tell me to read ministry, or something like that? The ministry is invaluable. Are you going to tell me to read the Bible? That would help me a lot. But what I need from you is to say what you learned from the Lord in circumstances like that, that He was enough, and that God's promise would see me through. How blessed to find someone in whom you can find a resource of that kind! As I have said, most of us here this evening are fairly old: the beloved younger brethren are not here tonight. Let us, as older, charge ourselves that, out of the resources of our own experience, we will make ourselves readily available in simplicity to make those resources available to another generation.
May the Lord prosper us in it!
LONDON
21 August 1990
OBSERVANT CHILDREN
It was an old man, Job, who said to God "Thou Observer of men", meaning of all mankind including, of course, the youngest of children. Of another man God said "I will observe him", so we see how this matter is brought home to us in view of blessing. God is especially interested in those who are themselves interested in His things. Moses turned aside to observe a thorn-bush on fire but not burned up, and he found that God had something very import ant to tell him about redemption.
In the days of the flood God said of the rain bow, "I will look upon it". This reminds us that His eye can rest on that which speaks of the Lord Jesus Christ and His glorious place and service. We cannot look upon the full outshining of the sun in the heavens and we cannot behold the fulness of Christ. His distinct and distinctive glories we may gaze upon just as we see the sun's sevenfold glories in the rainbow. Centuries later in the days of Moses and of the Passover God said, "When I see the blood I will pass over you". The time of judgment had come and in His mercy He would spare all who had faith in the shelter provided.
It much confirms Christian believers to know that God looks upon His own word. In this way we an, as it were, hold Him to His promises. It was to Jeremiah that God said "I am watchful over my word to perform it". The prophet had seen in a vision a rod of almond wood - a tree which is very early to come out and blossom in Springtime. The word 'almond' itself means 'watchful'. Are you keen to read God's word?
J.C.Evershed