EXTRACT – THE SPIRIT AND THE FLESH

Take the illustration of the dove and the crow. The crow loves carrion and the dove loves pure food. They are both in the same cage. You control the food supply. Now, what about your reckoning? The crow cries out – he is always hungry for carrion, as the dove always is longing for pure food. You feed the dove. That is the principle that governs you. You view yourself as dead in relation to the crow. You say, ‘But he is alive’. Yes, but he came to an end in the death of Christ, and I cling to the light in the appreciation of the One who has ended him, and I turn my back on him; I will not let him have a morsel. But it is only as I feed the dove well that I can do that, for what is blessedly living has a deadening effect in regard to the flesh; just, alas, as ministering to the flesh has a deadening effect on me in regard to Christ …

You ask, ‘Why does the not crow die?’ Because I should not have the exercise of holding him in death if he died. You do not starve a man who has died. It is what is living that you starve, as refusing to recognise it. Magazines, hobbies, a thousand things, all are carrion that the crow loves. You and the crow were one once; you and the dove are now one, and you refuse the crow. He cannot get a morsel but what you allow to go into the cage. Nobody feeds him but you; nobody feeds the dove but you. The crow gets worse each day in your eyes, in the appreciation of the One who was crucified to remove him. Something appeals to the flesh; you say, ‘That is something for the crow, and I will not give it to him’. But you cannot give too much to the dove, but it must be dove’s food. The crow’s food is all around you, and it is only too easy to get. For the dove’s food, you have to take a journey; you have to get to divine Persons, and you must get amongst the brethren where the dove’s food is marketed, but you have to pay for the conditions of the food in diligence, and part of the payment is that you starve the crow,

‘If I my tastes deny

When I might gratify,

I suffer bitterly,

But sweet is liberty’.

… Mr Stoney said, ‘I might soak myself in a newspaper in the morning, and get into a temper in the afternoon. What has one to do with the other? Everything’. I fed the crow in the morning, and the very food I gave him enabled him to master me in the afternoon. I will have to pay for every morsel I give him; whereas every morsel I give the dove returns to me handsome dividends: “For he that sows to his own flesh, shall reap corruption from the flesh; but he that sows to the Spirit, from the Spirit shall reap eternal life”, Gal.6:8.

… Abraham scared those birds away (Gen.15:11). He starved the crow. He was an old man of a hundred years, but he did not ask them just to go. They will not go unless you scare them. He did not ask God to send them off. He used the power he had, typically in the Spirit, as dependent on the Lord himself, to scare them off. You say, ‘They may come back’. They will, if you appreciate Christ, because Abraham was appreciating God’s thoughts of Christ when the birds came, as set out in the animals which God had told him to take. But you have the secret of sending them off. You cannot prevent birds flying over your roof, but you can prevent providing them with material on the roof wherewith to make a nest. I may have to say, ‘The birds flew over my roof’. Yes, but there was nowhere for them to settle.

… Self-gratification or Christ is the issue. It is either the blessed Man who pleased not Himself, or it is the man, the big ‘I’ in me, that can only please myself. If we only understood the definiteness of the position! It is black or white – the white dove, or the black crow, but we bring in the greys, and God never does. At the cross, there were no greys. There was infinite blessedness in God as manifested in Christ, and nothing but blackness in Satan.

… A brother asked Mr Raven, ‘Tell me the secret of getting on’. Mr Raven replied, ‘If you want to get on, just retire!’. That is righteousness. It is positive unrighteousness to live where Christ died. In righteousness I disappear; in peace I reappear. I go out to the Lord in righteousness in His death; I come in in the Spirit in peace.

From a reading with P. Lyon, Gummersbach, Germany

2 May 1950

Edited and Published by John Brown and Paul Martin

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