‘GRACE, THE POWER OF UNITY AND GATHERING’
What I think important to be understood is that the active power that gathers is always grace – love. Separation from evil may be called for. In particular states of the church, when evil is come in, it may characterise very much the path of the saints. It may be, that through many acting under the same convictions at the same time, this may form a nucleus. But this in itself is never a gathering power. Holiness may attract when a soul is in movement of itself. But power to gather is in grace, in love working; if you please, faith working by love. Look at all the history of the church of God in all ages, and you will find this to be the case. Grace is the formative power of unity, where it does not exist. I take for granted here that Christ is owned as the centre. If evil exist, it may gather out of that evil, but the gathering power is love.
… There are two great principles in God's nature, owned of all saints – holiness and love. One is, I may be bold to say, the necessity of His nature, imperative, in virtue of that nature, on all that approach Him; the other, its energy. One characterises; the other is, and is the spring of activity of, His nature. God is holy – He is not loving, but love. He is it in the essential fountain of His being; we make Him a judge by sin, for He is holy and has authority; but He is love, and none has made Him such. If there be love anywhere else, it is of God, for God is love. This is the blessed active energy of His being. In the exercise of this He gathers to Himself for the eternal blessedness of those who are gathered, its display in Christ, and Christ Himself, being the great power and centre of it. His counsels as to this are the glory of His grace, His applying them to sinners and the means He employs for it, the riches of His grace. And in the ages to come He will shew how exceeding great these were in His kindness to us, in Christ Jesus.
… I have read over the tract I have referred to1. I confess, it seems to me that one who would deny the abstract principles of that tract is not on Christian ground at all. I cannot conceive anything more indisputably true, as far as human statement of truth can go. Still there is something more than truth to be considered, and that is, the use of truth. God's imputing no sin to the church, through grace and redemption, is always blessedly and eternally true. To a careless conscience, I may have to address other truth. Now, I repeat, that on reading that tract I do not see how a person resisting the principles stated is on Christian ground at all. Is not holiness the principle on which Christian fellowship is based? And the tract is really and simply that. … Now separation from evil, when right, which I now assume, still distinguishes him who separates from him from whom he does so. This tends to make one's position important, and so it is; but with such hearts as we have, one's position mixes itself up with self – not in a gross way but in a treacherous one; it is my position, and not only so, but the mind being occupied with what has been important (justly so in its place) to itself, tends to make, in a measure, separation from evil a gathering power, as well as a principle on which gathering takes place. This (save as holiness attracts souls who are spiritual by a moving principle in them) it is not.
Holiness is not merely separation from evil, but separation to God from evil. The new nature has not merely a nature or intrinsic character as being of God. It has an object, for it cannot live on itself – a positive object, and that is God. Now this changes everything; because it separates from evil – which it abhors, therefore, when it sees it – because it is filled with good. … Hence [the new nature] is holy, calm, and has a substantive character of its own, apart from evil, as well as abhorrent of it. With us this can only be in having an object, because we are and ought to be dependent only so far as we are positively filled with God in Christ. We are occupied with good, and hence holy, for that is holiness; and, therefore, easily and discerningly abhorrent of evil, without occupying ourselves with it. It is God's own nature; He is essentially good; delights in it in Himself.
… Now here [1 John 1] the separation from evil, walking in the light, in God's revealed character in Christ, in the practical knowledge of God as revealed in Christ, in the truth as it is in Jesus in whom the life was the light of men, is fully insisted on with lines as clear and strong as the Holy Spirit alone knows how to make them. He who pretends to fellowship, and does not walk in the knowledge of God according to that knowledge, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But what makes the fellowship? This keeps it pure – but what makes it? The revelation of the blessed object, and centre of it, in Christ.
… Holiness, then, is separation to God, if it be real, as well as from evil; for thus alone we are in the light, for God is light.
… God's love in Christ is not only an object which gathers – it is an activity which does so. … Love is relative; it acts and shews itself. Hence God has acted. … It is the activity of love which is the power of gathering.
… Here we have not only the attractive, sanctifying object bringing into fellowship, but the activity of love, which acts, gives itself, in order to gather; in this we are allowed to have a part. It is this, while sanctifying and maintaining His holiness, making us partakers of it, [which] reveals God and gathers weary souls.
Now this alone is the proper principle and power of gathering: I do not say on which souls are gathered; for that is clearly holiness – separation from evil in which alone communion is maintained – or darkness would have fellowship with light. But love gathers; and this is as evident to the Christian as that it gathers to holiness, and on the principle of it. … Hence grace is the acting power in and alone capable of revealing truth; for Christ's being here is grace; His working effectual grace.
Now, the very existence of such an object and such a power would prove a gathering power, gathering into unity, for it must, being divine, gather to itself.
… Grace reigns through righteousness. Now, this it is, by uniting souls in the power of the Holy Spirit to Jesus, which gathers by the cross, whence the truth is told to us as we are here, to Christ in heaven, who tells our true place to faith there – saving always, of course, His personal divine title.
… In the full divine sense, without grace, there is neither truth nor holiness. … The power of unity is grace; and, as man is a sinner and departed from God, the power of gathering is grace – grace manifested in Jesus on the cross, and bringing us to God in heaven, and bringing us in Him who is gone there. This is holiness: certainly the cross was not acquiescence in evil.
From ‘Grace, the Power of Unity and Gathering’
J.N. Darby Collected Writings vol.1 pp.366-377