EXTRACT
Committal to the Fellowship
And then He spoke of His inheritance. What an inheritance He had! I was speaking of young people here. Some may be just asking for fellowship, as we say, but you see the thing becomes hackneyed. What do you mean when you say, ‘I want to break bread’? What are the saints to you? What the saints are must come into your mind. You are going to be with them, you are casting in your lot with them for time and for eternity. As you go on you will say, ‘I would not go to heaven without them’. That is in principle what the epistle to the Ephesians teaches—we are raised up together and made to sit down together in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus. There is no such thought, as far as I see, of one saint going to heaven by himself. I know Elijah and Enoch were taken up, but the idea of going to heaven is for God’s satisfaction. It is for our blessing, of course, for our exaltation, but we go up together; have been made to sit down together in the heavenlies. Now we have to learn, in coming in amongst the saints, to value them in that way. You are committing yourself to them for time and for eternity, and the more you know them, the better you love them. God loves them; the Lord Jesus said, “In them is all my delight”.
Then He says, “The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage”—He is alluding to the book of Joshua—that is what any Christian, any believer, should expect, that God apportions him something. You want what God apportions you. With the Lord Jesus, as a Man of faith here, it was a question of what was allotted to Him. Think of the Lord Jesus limiting Himself, so as to be, as a Man, an example to us—“the lines are fallen”—where have they fallen? They fell “unto me”. The book of Micah teaches us that when God is dealing governmentally with His people in judgment there are no lines, no apportionment. In Christendom there is no apportionment, there is no apportionment for people who take their own way. The Lord apportions things to people who love Him, who take the place of dependence, and is it not better to leave the matter in His hands? “The lines are fallen unto me”; it is better to take the Father’s apportionment. How humble and simple this makes us! It keeps us from treading on other people’s paths and territories; it is a question of what comes to us, and God makes it known; He says, ‘That is for you’, and it is measured, mind you, it is no accident; “the lines” means it is measured. God is a God of measure (2 Corinthians 10: 13); I love that! That is for me; God sees to it that that will not be taken away from me. As the Lord said of Mary of Bethany, she “has chosen the good part”—that was to minister to Him; and, He says, it “shall not be taken from her”. He accorded to her a portion in what she did.
J. Taylor (Vol. 89, pp.428–430)
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