MAY 16TH, 1921
MAY 16TH, 1921
MY DEAR BROTHER, — The question as to responsibility, which occasioned a good deal of controversy some five years ago, arose through some remarks made at a brothers’ reading in London. These remarks were to the effect that if the assembly had not failed in its responsibility it would not be translated. This seemed to many of us a very strange statement, and it was challenged. Much discussion followed, mainly turning on the question as to whether complete failure in responsibility [p. 113] was to be regarded as inevitable, or if it was not rather the truth that in the gift of the Spirit God had made provision for the fulfilment of responsibility in those who walk according to Spirit, Romans 8: 4. That is to say, as J.B.S. often remarked, in Christianity man’s capability (as having the Spirit) is equal to his responsibility. It was not a question of whether this one or that one had done it — though many attempts were made to put it on this ground — but of what was the truth of Christianity according to God.
... I believe the Lord allowed the question to be raised to call attention to the divine provision — in the gift of the Spirit — for saints to be found in wilderness conditions according to the pleasure of God. It had been seen clearly that man in the flesh was a complete ruin, and that on the line of purpose man was set up in perfection in Christ outside responsibility altogether. But it was not so clear in many minds that the grace of God, and the power of His kingdom, had come in to bring believers under the moral sway of God, and to give them divine capability in the Spirit to answer to His will in the sphere of responsibility. So that Christianity, looked at according to God’s mind, does not contemplate failure in responsibility, but the fulfilment of responsibility. It is not a question of whether I or anyone else has done it perfectly — we know that in many things we all offend — but of the true character of the present dispensation of God.
With much love in the Lord,
Yours affectionately in Him,
May 16th, 1921.