THE LORD AND THE SPIRIT IN RELATION TO THE SERVICE OF GOD
I have turned to John’s gospel and the epistle to the Ephesians in order to show how the Lord and the Spirit enter into the matter of the service of God in the assembly. This woman in the fourth chapter of John is one who is to learn to function in the assembly. That is what John has in mind, as I understand it, in his ministry. He has in mind to secure the persons who are to constitute the assembly and to secure them as spiritually fitted for the service they are to carry on in the assembly. And so we have a woman, and the Lord says to her, “Go, call thy husband”, and she says, “I have not a husband”. That is, she confesses that she was without a head, without a man to guide her aright, to influence her aright. That is what we need if we are to be secured and held for the service of God. We need a head. Christ has come in for that express purpose, that He might be Head to every man that is willing to submit himself to Him, and, as Head, to influence, instruct, and direct him so that he may have part in the worship of the Father and the worship of God.
With every one of us there are certain moral questions to be solved first, and the Lord has come in in grace to undertake that. We could not solve them ourselves; we could never relieve ourselves from the bondage to sin in which each of us is naturally. Only One could do it, and that is Christ, and He has come in to do it. That is one item of His glory, that He has come in to redeem all those whom the Father has given Him from a condition of sin and guilt and liability to death under which they lay, in order that they might be secured and held for the service of the blessed God. How much it has entailed for Christ! We need to think more of this matter of sin; not only guilt, but the root matter of sin itself in our flesh from which we could never relieve ourselves, which could never be eradicated. The only way to deal with it is for sin to be condemned and the man involved in it to be ended in death. God has taken this wonderful way in Christ. It is a wonderful way, a way that only God could have conceived and only divine love operating in Christ could carry through, but it meant that the judgment on sin has been executed and borne by Jesus. He was made sin in order that the whole thing might be condemned and judged according to God, the Lord Himself sustaining the judgment and exhausting it. It is a wonderful thing to contemplate. This is the way the Lord has entered into this matter of securing the saints in view of the service of God. They could not be secured otherwise; they must have a holy judgment of sin according to God and themselves be extricated from it. And the Lord took that way, accomplishing redemption in order that He might have the right to give the Holy Spirit, and it is in the Holy Spirit we become qualified to take up our part in this precious service of God. So the Lord spoke to this woman about the Spirit, what He would be to her, becoming in her a fountain of water springing up into eternal life. The very fountain of life would be in the Spirit the Lord was prepared to give to her. But before He can give the Spirit He had to accomplish redemption. Now, having done it, has He not a moral right to establish a place as Head over every one of us? Is He not entitled to our complete yielding to Him that we might come under His influence? He has so perfectly considered for God, and so does He not gain our confidence to yield ourselves wholly to Him? The woman says, “I have not a husband”. The Lord in His reply shows that He knows all her history, so at the end of the interview she says, “Come, see a man who told me all things I had ever done: is not he the Christ?” That is to say, she has come to recognise the divinely appointed Head for man. That is the thought of the Christ, and she was evidently going to hold herself henceforth under His influence and direction. Real power lies in our holding ourselves in the Spirit's power under the headship of Christ. We are not now set to obey a code of rules; it is a question of being to Another that we might bear fruit to God, and as we are prepared to take up that attitude in our minds the Spirit will help because He is indwelling us all the time, and is always faithful to Christ and His cross. The more we come under the teaching and influence of the Spirit, the more we shall be helped to appreciate Christ, and be brought into consistency with His cross. This woman was secured. The Lord speaks to her of great things. He says, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when ye shall neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem worship the Father”. The Father! I doubt if the woman had ever heard of the Father until now. What light it would be to her, as the Lord spoke these words, that God was to be known as Father, and worshipped in that light!
And then He goes on to say, “But the hour is coming and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth”. That is to say, it is to be a real matter and a feeling matter, nothing formal, nothing worked up, but that which the Spirit Himself would produce, springing up. How beautiful it is as we are together in assembly to be responsive, and available in the Spirit to bring forward from our own souls that which can rise up in worship to the Father! Even the psalmist could call on his soul and all that is within him to bless God's holy name, and how much more, in this day of wonderful light and privilege, should there be that in our souls which the Spirit can call upon and bring into expression—not anything worked up or formal, but the worship of the Father in spirit and truth!
Then the Lord adds, “God is a spirit, and they who worship him must worship him in spirit and truth”. But before that He says, “The Father seeks such as his worshippers”. It is not the worship; it is the persons. “The Father seeks such as his worshippers”. This chapter deals largely with the matter of extrication, liberation, deliverance, whatever term we like to use, and then of power, and in this, as we have seen, both the Lord and the Spirit have their part. The Lord and the Spirit! It is a wonderful thing to think of one soul being the subject of the active service in grace of both the Lord Jesus and the Holy Spirit with a view that that one soul might become a worshipper of the Father and of God.
But now in chapter 14 of John, Thomas says, “We know not where thou goest, and how can we know the way”, and Jesus says to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father unless by me”, a most emphatic statement. Then He goes on to say, “If ye had known me ye would have known also my Father, and henceforth ye know him and have seen him”. From that moment onward, the Lord is speaking all through these chapters anticipatively of His going to the Father, and taking His place as Man in the presence of the Father, and it is in that light that we have known the Father and have seen Him. “Henceforth”, the Lord says, “ye know him and have seen him”. That is to say, as we follow Christ in our affections in the way which He has gone and in the position He has now taken up as Man in the Father's presence, we get an apprehension of the Father in relation to a Man (I speak reverently), in relation to His Son. We see the Father's love resting upon Christ and the affections of Christ responding to the Father, and we understand that that position having come about in Christ in manhood is what is the Father's mind for men, for us. So the Lord says, “I am the way”.
No one could have to do with the Father until Christ had entered the Father's presence as Man. Christ has opened up the whole position. Indeed, He says, “that where I am ye also may be”. The Father is apprehended as He is seen in relation to Christ, and Christ in relation to Him. It is a wonderful thing to have a sense of the Father's love as it rests upon Christ. From that standpoint we do not need to take account of the death of Christ as the expression of divine love. It is indeed a wonderful expression of divine love, and we shall never lose the sense of it in that light, but there is another sense in which we may learn love in its absoluteness and in its own sphere, and that is the Father's love to the Son; into that we ourselves are brought with Christ, and it is a most blessed thing. In Genesis 22 typically the Father’s love for the Son is brought in first before the sacrifice by which it was made possible for others to be brought into it. “Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest”. There is the idea of a father with an only-begotten son, and love in the primary thought of it is to be learned in that light, and then we get the additional thought of the love of God and of Christ in the sacrifice that was undertaken that the way might be open for us to be brought into the prime thoughts of divine love.
The Lord says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life”. Christ is not only the way, but He is the truth. The whole position is set out in Christ to be learned in Him. He is the truth and the life. We have part in His life as a Man by the Holy Spirit and we are thus held in constant touch with Him who is in the Father's presence. It is a wonderful position brought to pass by means of the incarnation. It has been in God's counsel from before the foundation of the world, and in Christ it has now come into being. I urge the young brethren to take time to contemplate Christ as Man in the Father's presence with the Father's love resting upon Him. It is with that scene you are linked up by the Spirit, and with the One who is the Centre of it. Do not limit your thoughts of the love of Christ and of God to what was expressed in the cross, wonderful as that is, but take time to contemplate Christ in the Father's presence, and you will get an impression of divine love in complacency and rest as you contemplate it. So we come to this verse in Ephesians. It says, “Through him”, that is, through Christ, “we have both”, that is Jew and Gentile, “access by one Spirit to the Father”. I did not read other passages in Ephesians which refer to the Spirit, although I might well have read them. Here the service that the Spirit fulfils is brought in as well as the mediatorial place occupied by Christ. It says, “Through him”, that is, Christ, “we have both access by one Spirit to the Father”. “Through him “ answers to what we have just been speaking of, “I am the way”, but then the Spirit enters into it as well, the Spirit on our side, and not only on our side according to what we had in John 4, but here the Spirit also as unifying the saints. The stress is “one Spirit”, and the truth is brought in in a setting in which it would be impossible, apart from the Spirit, for the saints to be unified. The apostle is contemplating the state of things in a Christian. assembly such as would be found at Ephesus. Jews would be there and Gentiles, both alike converted. How was it possible for them to move together when there was a barrier between them that could never be overthrown, save by the effectual appropriation of the death of Christ, and the real appropriation of the Spirit's service! That is what comes in here. Whatever there may be between brother and brother, or sister and sister, or brother and sister, it cannot be any more difficult to overcome than the difficulties that existed between the Jew and Gentile, when they were together in the assembly. That was the most difficult position to overcome—that Jews and Gentiles should be together and move together, and any difficulties there may be among us in differences of natural temperament and upbringing can be entirely overcome as, on the one hand, the bearing of the death of Christ is appropriated, and on the other the Spirit is availed of. So the stress here is on the one Spirit. He would keep our souls in contact with the death of Christ, because in the death of Christ the man that is difficult to his brother or sister is ended in death. Death is the end of the difficulties, whatever difficulties there may be. If I am a difficulty in the local assembly, and I die, the difficulty is ended. So death is the end of all difficulties, and we are entitled to appropriate the death of Christ in that light, as ending in ourselves and in others everything that would be difficult, and as we do it we shall find that the way is cleared for the Spirit unhinderedly to take possession of us all. He works a common appreciation of Christ, as it says here, “That he might form the two in himself into one new man, making peace; and might reconcile both in one body to God by the cross, having by it slain the enmity; and coming, he has preached the glad tidings of peace to you who were afar off, and the glad tidings of peace to those who were nigh”. There is just one Man before God, and we are all in Him by the Spirit.
So now it is said, “by one Spirit”. It is the Spirit viewed as a great unifying influence among the saints. When Rebecca was to be brought to Isaac there were camels, not simply one, but camels. “And Rebecca arose, and her maids, and they rode upon the camels”. It says, Isaac “lifted up his eyes and saw, and behold, camels were coming”. I believe the camels represent the power of the Holy Spirit to unify the saints so that they move as one towards Christ. It is wonderful that it is seen in operation in the assembly. Let it be seen more and more, because that is one of the grandest triumphs of Christianity—that a company composed of persons so entirely different, can be entirely free from all that would bring in difficulty and can move together as one in the power of the one Spirit. That is what we are to look for and what the Spirit would secure, in the service of God under the hand of Christ, so that the assembly may minister pleasure to God, which is the great crown of the assembly.
LONDON
29th March 1952
From Words of Grace and Comfort
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