Imitators Of Paul
IMITATORS OF PAUL
1 Corinthians 4: 9-16; 10: 31-33; 11: 1
In all these scriptures there is the thought of imitating Paul. It is remarkable that Paul is permitted by the Holy Spirit to present himself as one to be imitated, and there is grace from God, I think, in that. We can well understand that Christ is the standard of all that God intends to bring to pass in His saints, but it would be easy for us to think that while we are here we shall never attain fully to the standard set out in Christ. That might have the effect of making us ready to accept a lower standard than God intends, and so He is pleased to give us a standard which we are called upon to imitate in the apostle Paul—not perfect, but remarkably near to perfection—in a man of like passions to ourselves, God is pleased to set out the remarkable extent to which correspondence with Christ was wrought out in his life here, and I believe it is in that light that we are called upon to imitate Paul. He guards the position himself by saying, “Be ye imitators of me, as I also am of Christ”, showing that anything that he is as a model is the result of his having himself imitated Christ. At the same time, it seems to me to be of remarkable grace and encouragement that the Spirit of God allows Paul to present himself as one to be imitated.
Now the scripture in chapter 4 of I Corinthians is extremely challenging to us because I believe the Lord has in mind, in all the different exercises that He is raising amongst us in these days, that we should come back to what Christianity was in its true features at the beginning. There is no doubt that, when Christianity was established by the coming in of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and in the days that followed, the days of the apostles, there was a remarkable presentation in power of the true features of Christianity, and while we can enjoy, and do enjoy, the great privilege of recovery to the truth of the assembly and find a considerable measure of grace and power to answer to it in our movements together, I believe the Lord has in mind now that we should really arrive at the features proper to it in every way. So the apostle Paul feelingly appeals to the Corinthians. It is striking that so much of the apostle Paul’s ministry was devoted to the assembly at Corinth. His two epistles to the Corinthians constitute quite a large proportion of his total ministry. That shows how important in the mind of God the Corinthian position is, that is, the assembly in testimony here for God, viewed as in responsibility locally. It is there that things are worked out. It is there that things are expressed. It is there that Satan attacks. It is always in some locality or other that Satan attacks. It may, of course, spread to many localities, depending on the nature of the attack, but an attack is always made in some locality. The local position is what Satan is always opposed to, and it is in the local position that the service of God actually takes form and that the testimony of God actually comes into expression.
I would add, that while it is not prominent in the epistle to the Corinthians, partly because of the state that was there, underlying our position is the wonderful truth of the mystery, and that is the assembly as united to Christ. It is easy to say it, but I ask myself how much it is really laid hold of by us, that the assembly is united to Christ. It is His body, His fulness, that in which Christ and Christ alone is to be expressed, where “Christ is everything, and in all”. That really underlies every position in which we are seen. It underlies the local position according to Corinthians, where what is in view is, not exactly the expression of Christ, but the expression of God. But then, if we think of what the Lord Jesus was in His testimony here, what He was always set for was that God should be glorified in all things. That was, if one may say so, the consuming consideration with the Lord Jesus, that in all things God should be rightly represented. It was that that gave Him such depth of feeling when He made the whip of small cords and overturned the money-changers’ tables and drove out those who sold doves, and so on. What caused that depth of feeling was that God was being so grossly misrepresented in His house. If you study the movements of Christ as recorded in the gospels, and particularly in John’s gospel, you will be impressed with this, that one thing marked the Lord supremely from beginning to end, and that was that God’s will should be done and that He should be glorified in all that was done. Now, in the measure in which we are held in the light and appreciation of the assembly as united to Christ and deriving from Him, but here for the expression of Christ, in that measure God will be glorified in us too, and that is the position locally. The position locally is that the testimony of God is to be expressed in the place, in Corinth or wherever it might be, and so the assembly is addressed as “the assembly of God which is in Corinth”.
In the passage in chapter 10 the population of Corinth is divided into three classes: Jews, Greeks, the assembly of God. Everybody in Corinth was either a Jew, or a Greek, or a member of the assembly of God, and the assembly of God was there in the midst of Jews and Greeks, and any knowledge of God that Jews and Greeks in Corinth obtained was to be obtained from the assembly of God. Hence, how important, how serious in one sense, but how privileged, is our position, that we are here as representative of God, and therefore everything that we do either reflects credit or discredit on God. The name of God is brought into either good repute or disrepute by everything that the saints do. So the saints were addressed as “the assembly of God which is in Corinth ... those sanctified in Christ Jesus”, set apart to God in Christ Jesus. The Spirit we have received is the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus. There is no reason why we should live after the flesh. There is no reason why we should not live after the Spirit. It is intended we should, and the Spirit we have received is the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, involving that another order of man altogether, the second Man out of heaven, is to come into evidence in the movements and influence of the saints in the place where they are. Life in Christ Jesus is to be seen. So we are sanctified in Christ Jesus, set apart in Him to God in the place where we are. We are called saints, or saints by calling, the subjects of divine calling into this position, and so the apostle speaks to them in that light. But were they equal to it? It is sorrowful that he has to tell the Corinthians that, while he himself and his fellow apostles were one thing, the Corinthians were another. He says, “I think that God has set us the apostles for the last, as appointed to death”; all the apostles were in the same way publicly appointed to death. It is very challenging, but they were regarded as the offscouring of the world. That was the position, and the apostle Paul, I think I can safely say, led in it, but it was true of all the apostles. The apostles were the authoritative exponents of Christianity, for the features that God intended it should bear, and in the way they were regarded publicly by men they were nothing better than the offscouring of all things. But what about the Corinthians? He says, “We are fools for Christ’s sake, but ye prudent in Christ”. He does not un-Christianise them. They are in Christ, but alas, they were prudent people in the eyes of the world. The apostles from whom they learned, and who were the exponents of the truth, were fools for Christ’s sake, but the saints of the assembly at Corinth were prudent in Christ. He says, “We weak, but ye strong; ye glorious, but we in dishonour”. That was the sorrowful truth, that the Corinthian assembly was in honour and in acceptance in the world, whereas those from whom they had derived their very being (for Paul says “in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the glad tidings”) were in dishonour and regarded as the offscouring of all things to that day.
I believe the Lord would have us face these things, as to how far we are in honour in the world, and prudent in the eyes of the world, or how far we are fools for Christ’s sake. Not that we should do anything unnatural or extreme, but the whole scripture raises a challenge as to how far we are really in correspondence with Christ. There were two things that marked the apostle Paul: on the one hand his heart was held in the light and appreciation of Christ in glory, and on the other hand he was kept in his own mind and outlook in complete correspondence with the cross. There are those two things. There is the light of Christ in glory on the one hand, to hold and satisfy our hearts; there is the light of the cross on the other hand, as the expression of God’s judgment of the first man in all his features, and as the expression also of the world’s judgment of the Man whom God delights in. Do we carry these things in our minds and hearts—Christ in glory on the one hand, the cross of Christ on the other hand? The Spirit of God is always true to Christ and His cross. The apostle, in the first two chapters of his first epistle, dwells on the cross and then on the Spirit, these two things. When he went into Corinth he had determined (he knew what kind of state there was) to know nothing among them save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. Jesus Christ is the Man who displaces every other man. We know what kind of man Jesus was as we read the gospels. He is Jesus, the Christ, that is to say, God’s Anointed. God passes over all other men, however great their powers might be among men, however great their achievements, however great their name; God passes them all by and places the seal of His approval on Jesus. That is the force of Jesus Christ. He is the anointed, the chosen of God, and the very fact that He is thus chosen and anointed means that every other man is displaced and superseded. God says, They are of no value to Me. Let us not take the truth of Scripture as something that we simply carry in our minds, without letting it have its proper effect. The question is, Which man can be trusted to have the testimony of God committed to him? Is it safe to entrust it to the first man? It certainly is not. He will corrupt it and turn it to his own glory. No one can be entrusted with the testimony of God but the second Man, and those who are formed after Him. That was what Paul was labouring for in Corinth, that the Man whom God had glorified at His right hand should be formed in the Corinthians. So he had to maintain the cross in his own soul. In Christianity life is always out of death. We have always to maintain the sentence of death in ourselves. The Spirit of God will maintain us in the light of the cross of Christ as something that has a bearing on one’s self, and so the Lord said, “If anyone will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me”, Luke 9: 23. Day by day, just as regularly, so to speak, as you take your breakfast in the morning, so every day there is to be the renewed exercise of taking up one’s own cross; that is, the cross of Christ as bearing upon me. Each one is to go through this world as one to whom God has been pleased, with the rest of the saints in the place, to commit His testimony. It was just because Paul was so much like Christ, and so true to the cross, that he came in for this. He was railed at, he was insulted, he was as the offscouring of the world, the refuse of all, and not only was it true of Paul but of all the apostles. They were all of one mind, all marked by the same features. He says, “I think that God has set us the apostles for the last, as appointed to death. For we have become a spectacle to the world, both to angels and men”. Now the apostle shows them how out of keeping they were practically, but he says, “Not as chiding do I write these things to you, but as my beloved children I admonish you. For if ye should have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet not many fathers, for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you”. They owed their very existence spiritually to Paul. They had no other father in that sense in which he is speaking, and therefore he had a moral right to say, “I entreat you, therefore, be my imitators”. When things are normal, in ordinary affairs children look to their fathers. They take account of what their father does and says. If their father says, ‘I do not think much of that’, they do not think much of it; if their father approves things, they approve them, and that is right. It is intended that children should learn and take character from their fathers. So Paul says, in the most appealing way; “I entreat you, therefore, be my imitators”. It applies to us also, especially to us, for now we are living in a day when the truth of the assembly has been recovered to the saints, and Paul is the minister of the assembly, and he is, therefore, spiritually our father, and so this appeal from him comes home to us: “I entreat you, therefore, be my imitators”. You may say, The prospect is a serious one. Do not think I wish in any way to paint a gloomy picture. Far from it, only that the truth has to be faced. In Luke 9 it is said of the Lord Jesus that, when the days of His receiving up were fulfilled, He set His face stedfastly to go to Jerusalem. He knew what Jerusalem would mean. He knew what the closing phases of the testimony would mean for Him, and yet He set His face stedfastly to go there. That comes in the ninth chapter of Luke and there are something like fifteen more chapters after that, the greater part of the gospel taken up with the closing phases of the testimony, the last brief period in the Lord’s life. In chapter 9 of Luke we come to the transfiguration, and all that follows was concentrated in the last brief period of His life. In chapter 10 of Mark you will find that the Lord took pains to instruct the disciples what was ahead. He tells them how He was to go to Jerusalem and He would be condemned to death by the Jews and delivered up to the nations, and they should mock Him and scourge Him and spit upon Him and kill Him, and then the third day He should rise again. He always brought in the note of victory. It is a great thing to go into the conflict in the assurance from the very beginning that you are on the winning side. There is no doubt as to the final issue. The Lord always brought that in. So Paul in writing to Timothy says, “Remember Jesus Christ raised from among the dead, of the seed of David, according to my glad tidings”, but he sounds that note of victory at the outset, “raised from among the dead”. So all these exercises that the Lord is bringing forward, involving a good deal of limitation of outlook, a good deal of exercise as to how we are to make our way through, are in keeping with the closing phases of the testimony, but they have in mind—and let us be encouraged at the prospect of it—that we should come much more thoroughly into correspondence with Christ, and the features proper to the assembly as the body of Christ, than we have ever been. It has in mind that we should complete our course here in correspondence with Christ. You remember how, in Matthew 14, the disciples were in the boat, and the Lord was on the mountain, and the wind was contrary, and it was the fourth watch of the night. That is to say, the night was just nearing its end. The last phase of the testimony is in view, the wind was contrary, and the Lord came to them walking on the water, as though He would convey to them the sense that, though they were feeling the contrariness of the wind and the difficulty of getting through, He was completely superior to the waves and the winds. So He presented Himself and Peter says, “Lord, if it be thou, command me to come to thee upon the waters”. That is the point. Is the Lord in the matter? “If it be thou, command me to come to thee upon the waters”, Matt 14: 28. It is a question of answering to all the exercises that the Lord is raising in the sense that He is in the matter. The Lord gives one word, “Come”. That was enough, and Peter stepped out and walked on the waters. He was just as superior to the waves and the wind as the Lord Himself was, so long as he kept his eye on Christ. It was only when he turned his eye away from the Lord and began to look at the waves and the wind, that he began to sink, but he walked on the water, just as completely in superiority to the position as the Lord Himself was as He came to them, walking on the water. The passage in chapter 4 is occupied with how we stand in relation to the world, but in chapter 10 the apostle is speaking of his concern that God should be glorified in everything. He says, “Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatever ye do, do all things to God’s glory”. It is striking that he brings it down to such ordinary matters as eating and drinking. He does not say, ‘When you preach the gospel, do all things to God’s glory’; he says, “Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatever ye do, do all things to God’s glory”, as though he would say, ‘That is what you are here for’. It would solve a great many things for us if we could bear this in mind. It makes things very simple. I have wondered whether living as we have been living, in days of considerable material prosperity, and perhaps high wages, does not present its own tests and snares to the dear people of God. We do not belong to the world, and we are not characterised by the world. We are really apart from it in general, I think we can say, but the point is how far we bring into the Christian company the things of the world. “Love not the world”, John says, “nor the things in the world”, 1 John 2: 15. There is the danger of our bringing in the things in the world into the Christian circle. They may be harmless things, simple things, but are they regulated by the truth, by piety, bringing God into everything? Are they regulated by the principle of stewardship? If God entrusts me with a certain amount of money, it may be much or little, the principle of stewardship enters into it, of holding it for God and using it for God, and in Luke 16 the Lord says that if we are not faithful in the least things we shall not be in the greatest, and God will not entrust the greater things to us. Therefore, dear brethren, bear the word of exhortation, but I think we need to be a little more concerned as to practical stewardship, holding things God gives us as stewards, responsible to Him as to how we use them. It would do us no harm to exercise ourselves a little more as to piety, which means bringing God into things. Paul says, “Confessedly the mystery of piety is great. God was manifest in flesh”. He is bringing before us Jesus, come into human conditions, God in the Person of Jesus, in order that He might set out in a Man the glory of true piety. We read that He was heard on account of His piety, and He went through this world on the principle of bringing God into everything. “Preserve me, O God, for I trust in thee” was His language as a Man. Psalm 16 is a wonderful psalm, as setting out in detail the principle of piety as filled out by Jesus, and it links on with this thought of “Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatever ye do, do all things to God’s glory”. Let me commend to the dear brethren the principle of piety, and the principle of stewardship, of recognising responsibility to God for what He may have put in our hands, so that we use it rightly as those who have to render an account.
So here the apostle is concerned as to God being glorified, as to not considering for himself, having the good of others in view. God is always bent on people being saved, not only unconverted persons, but the saints too, saved from every influence of the world, and hence we are to be careful. He says, “Give no occasion to stumbling, whether to Jews, or Greeks, or the assembly of God”. That is another thing, to be careful that nothing we do will misrepresent God, or give an occasion of stumbling. Paul was marked by this kind of concern, whether God would be glorified and whether people would be affected adversely by anything that he did. He was very watchful that it should not be so. He says, “Not seeking my own profit, but that of the many, that they may be saved. Be my imitators, even as I also am of Christ”.
In the final passage he also calls upon us to be his imitators, and there he is held in his soul by the appreciation of Christ in glory, as the One who is the expression of what we have been called to. It is wonderful to think that we have been called with this holy calling. There is a glorious Man out of death in the Person of Jesus. He is the second Man out of heaven, entirely different from the first man; the Man of God’s purpose, a divine Person, Himself one of the Godhead, but He has brought into manhood all that is morally excellent in a Man for the pleasure of God, and we have been called with the calling on high of God in Christ Jesus. We have been sealed by the Spirit. There is the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.
Our ultimate destiny is that we should be conformed to His image in every way, and live in His life. We are being formed in moral conformation now. That is one of the things that the Spirit of God is labouring for all the time, moral conformation with Christ in glory. The work of conformation, as relating to our bodies, will only take the twinkling of an eye, but the work of moral conformation takes a lifetime, or at any rate the whole period from the time when God begins to work in us to the time when we go to be with Christ. It is a long process with most of us. It has in view results which will abide for eternity. Think of the saints coming out from heaven, almost without number, all like Christ, and the work of God so perfectly balanced and regulated that the final result is the fulness of Christ, with nothing superfluous and nothing lacking, one great vessel capable of expressing Christ. Now you and I have been called to that, and Paul kept it steadily before him. He was here nearing the end of his course, and he says, “One thing, forgetting the things behind, and stretching out to the things before, I pursue, looking towards the goal, for the prize of the calling on high of God in Christ Jesus”. If you or I were in a race we should not stop to look at things around, we should not, if we were wise, even turn round to see how the others in the race were getting on. We should simply keep our eyes on the goal, and have in our minds that at the goal there was a prize. That is the idea. The apostle says, You want to be as single-hearted and as singleeyed as if you were in a race. One thing is before us; complete conformity to Christ is the end to which God is bringing us.
We can see in Paul how things worked out practically. He was an old man by this time “Paul the aged”, he says to Philemon. He was in prison wrongfully, and there were brethren preaching Christ out of contention to add tribulation to his bonds. Think of the circumstances: an old man—how he would feel these things—wrongfully in prison, and even brethren preaching Christ out of contention to add tribulation to his bonds. How was he meeting it? Was there any spirit of complaint, or of giving up or discouragement? No, nothing of that sort. He felt it, he realised the need of the supplications of the saints, but he said that his one thought was that Christ should be magnified in his body, whether by life or by death. There was no repining or complaining. He had Christ as his life and his object, and whatever arose in his circumstances he would find, in the moral glory of obedience as set out in Christ in this epistle, an incentive to go on himself in a spirit of complete obedience to the will of God. As he took things in that light and found support on those lines, the very things he was feeling would be used by God for the perfecting of His work, and Christ be more and more formed in him. He says, “Be imitators all together of me, brethren, and fix your eyes on those walking thus as you have us for a model”, and then he speaks of some who caused him tears. Paul knew the glory of his ministry, and it caused him great sorrow that there should be any who were not taking it up although they were in the presence of it, “enemies of the cross of Christ: whose end is destruction, whose God is the belly, and their glory in their shame, who mind earthly things”. He says, “Our commonwealth has its existence in the heavens, from which also we await the Lord Jesus Christ as Saviour, who shall transform our body of humiliation into conformity to his body of glory”. That is the full expression of the calling on high of God in Christ Jesus—complete conformity to Christ—and the apostle understood that his circumstances were ordered of God in such a way as to promote that end, provided Paul himself was in line with God. So he says, “I pursue”, and he calls upon us to have him as a model, to have him as one to be imitated. He calls upon us, so that there may be this answer in us to that which was being set out in himself. I believe the Lord would have us now set our faces in the direction of taking these things on, because it is a question of finishing, and the finish is conformity to Christ.
LEWISHAM
17th October 1959
From Words of Grace and Comfort
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