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He bore it all and every moral issue was solved. Whether old
or young we are going to need, beloved, the help of the Lord
Jesus in solving moral difficulties. It goes on constantly. I do
not mean as to our place eternally with Christ; that is settled;
but the working out of good and evil here, that it may enter into
the fibre of the assembly.
The assembly is a great vessel that is trustworthy as to good
and evil. It says of the woman of worth, “She doeth him good
… all the days of her life”, Proverbs 31: 12. She knows what
good is and what evil is. You get another kind of woman early
in Proverbs who could not be trusted, but in chapter 31 you
have a trustworthy woman. The assembly is what the Lord
Jesus can confide in. So our salvation is to hold fast to the
glad tidings at the present time, and that involves exercise and
preaching. Paul was telling the Hebrew Christians, who were
already saved—‘Your salvation is to go outside the camp and
to bear His
reproach’. We cannot go on with education, sports, business,
and all these things (I am speaking of it now in the sense of
living in them and finding satisfaction in them), but we go
outside the camp bearing His reproach. We accept what He
did, like that wonderful man who was selected to carry the
cross of Jesus. May we be helped in it to be in fellowship with
His sufferings!
This leads to what Paul said in 1 Corinthians 1. The
Corinthians were very much affected by the city in which they
lived, and we may be affected by the cities in which we live
more than we realize. That is why the apostle said, “I did not
judge it well to know anything among you save Jesus Christ,
and him crucified”. He is saying to them, ‘You have to go
outside of Corinth and have to do with God about issues, then
you can be trusted with the city’. That is God’s way, beloved;
we want to be trusted with the things of God at the present
time and to learn, not as we might be taught in our cities by
men in the colleges, learning things that might damage us, but