THE LORD LOOKING FOR SERVANTS
W. McKillop
John 12: 26 (to “servant”); Matthew 11: 28–30; 2 Kings 2: 9, 10
The Lord is looking for servants, and He is ready to come down to one, saying, “If any one”.
Not that He has in mind to exclude anybody, but it is a question of what He finds. “If any one serve me, let him follow me; and where I am, there also shall be my servant”. I did not read the previous verse, but I would refer to it, because if anyone wants to serve Christ he is going to have to come to this, that he hates his life in this world but he will keep it to life eternal. If anyone is minded to serve Christ, he must face the test of this previous verse; that he is going to have to hate his life in this world; but how great the incentive, he “shall keep it to life eternal” (v.25). Then the Lord says, “If any one serve me, let him follow me”. This would point to the power of attractiveness in Christ, because it is the attractiveness of Christ that leads us to follow Him. I do not think anyone in this dispensation, from the fishermen He called out from their fishing to the present moment, has followed Him except by affection.
Then He adds, “and where I am, there also shall be my servant”. If we are going to serve Christ, it must be as in nearness to Him, and it must be as being where He is at any moment in the testimony. You will understand what I mean when I say that where He was fifty years ago or a hundred years ago is not where He is at the present moment. Not that there has been any change morally in the position that the Lord has taken up in testimony, and assuredly there has been no change in the principles that He established, but the Lord is indicating that He is constantly in movement, and the test therefore for anyone who would serve Him is to be where He is.
In a general sense we know that He is outside the camp, so we would not expect to look for Him there, although He reserves the right to go there because He walks among the assemblies; the whole position is responsible to Him and if He will He can walk there judicially. What He wants us to find is that there is a position involving the revelation of God, and the blessed relationship of the Father and the Son, and that we can be with Him in that position. So He adds, “if any one serve me, him shall the Father honour”. It is a wonderful matter to consider, and I would commend it to us to ponder, how the Father would honour anyone who serves Christ. The Lord is looking for persons who, above all else, want to be with Him where He is. We are all quite clear, of course, that the Lord is in glory, and therefore it is a question of being with Him in our minds and in our hearts. He is not here corporeally, but He is to be served. He is to be followed, and He desires to have us in His company. You remember when He went to Gethsemane He took certain with Him and they fell asleep. The Lord felt that, not that we would criticise them, for they did not have the Spirit; they did love Christ, they were attracted by Him and they were held by His love for them. We have the Spirit and therefore we ought to be inwardly conscious of being constrained by the love of the Christ, so that not being where He is is unthinkable, and this would be especially true for those who serve because he says “my servant”.
If we are going to follow Him and serve Him, we need to learn from Him how to do it. So I read the passage in Matthew, “Come to me, all ye who labour and are burdened, and I will give you rest”. The servant cannot learn from Christ unless he is restful. If he is agitated about matters, disturbed about things, he is not going to learn much because he needs to be in rest. That would be true for all of us. We have that word in Isaiah 63: 14, “the Spirit of Jehovah gave them rest”. We have alluded to the presence and service of the Spirit, and He is doing exactly now what the Lord would do if He were here corporeally. So the Lord says,
“Come to me, all ye who labour and are burdened, and I will give you rest”. The Lord is thinking especially of assembly men and women. They are not burdened with their sins, they are not oppressed with what is going on in the world, but they are carrying assembly burdens, and the Lord is saying that in the midst of that you need to come apart and “I will give you rest”. So He says, “Take my yoke upon you”; that means that the servant is under control, the control of Christ.
He is under that yoke, and He says, “learn from me”. Now we may learn something from one another—I think we do—but what the Lord is saying here is that if we learn from Him, we are learning from perfection. There could be no greater learning experience than learning from the perfect Man. However gifted, or spiritual, or experienced a brother may be, however spiritual or experienced a sister may be, it is not perfection, and the Lord is saying, I want you to learn from perfection. That is the standard He has set before us, learn from Me, as we sometimes sing in that hymn, ‘Divine perfection in a Man!’ (Hymn 20). He says, “for I am meek and lowly in heart”. There never was a man like that before nor since. In the ways of God through discipline, and in the service of grace of Christ, we begin to learn how to be meek and lowly, but He was “meek and lowly in heart”. You can see that divine perfection in a Man is before us in what He says here.
Then He says, “ye shall find rest to your souls”. It is our souls that tend to be disturbed and upset. We need to come to Him to learn how He can give us rest in our souls. Elsewhere He exhorts His own to learn in patience to possess their souls (see Luke 21: 19), and that is often a needed matter because sometimes issues go on and are prolonged and our souls become perturbed. The Lord would say, I want you to see that I can give you rest in your souls, “for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light”. These words of Christ are immensely appealing to anyone who wants to serve Him. The Lord would say that if you want to learn how to serve, you must learn from Me. That is really how the twelve
learned, that is how they learned to administer food, that is how they learned to deal with difficult matters, they learned from Christ. In fact at one point one of His disciples said to Him, “Lord, teach us to pray”, Luke 11: 1. If you want, to know how to pray, and to pray with prayer as Elijah did (see James 5: 17), you must learn it from Christ. We learn some things from observing one another, and we are thankful for that; but I want to press this point that nothing can equal or surpass learning from the One who is divinely perfect and is available to us to be learned from.
I thought that Elijah and Elisha would help us typically to see how these things come about. I did not read all the opening verses of the passage, but I want to refer to them. It says that
“Elijah went with Elisha from Gilgal” (2 Kings 2: 1). One of the things that the Lord would teach us is the meaning of Gilgal. Gilgal was the cutting off of the flesh; in Christ it was actual, it was His death; to us, it is moral. But I would suggest, beloved brethren, that we need to learn the meaning of Gilgal from Christ, and we can only do that by being with Him and learning from Him. Colossians opens up what Gilgal means, that “ye have been circumcised with circumcision not done by hand”, but “in the circumcision of the Christ”, Colossians 2: 11. That is the death of Christ. How that should affect our souls! And the entirety of the work, “the putting off of the body of the flesh” through death, refers to the whole matter from Adam on, the body of the flesh. That expression covers the whole history of the race. Think of the immensity of what Christ wrought in His death, what He removed in death from before the eye of God. But it was not to leave an empty place. What He removed.
He proposed to fill with Himself, another order of man. As we company with Him, we shall find that He will open up this feature of the truth to us so that we get hold of it inwardly, spiritually. Most of us, I suppose, have it fairly well down doctrinally, particularly those who are older who have read the ministry; but the urgency of the Spirit in
these meetings, as I perceive it, is that we need to get this inwardly, spiritually, so that there is an evidence of it in us. I am not slow to say that it takes a lifetime to really come to what this means. Therefore we must be patient with our younger brethren. They may not have seen a great deal of the cutting off of the body of the flesh expressed practically in those of us who are older. The Lord give us grace who are older to exhibit that we are free of the working of the flesh.
Then “Elijah said to Elisha, Abide here, I pray thee; for Jehovah has sent me to Bethel” (2 Kings 2: 2). The Lord would test us. You remember one said to Him as they went in the way that he would follow Him wheresoever He went (see Luke 9: 57); but when the Lord explained to him the circumstances of following, he was tested. The Lord is not looking for over-eager persons who are not prepared to measure the cost of following Him and of being with Him where He is. You notice that in this passage there are these other persons, the sons of the prophets. They have a certain external connection and they are able to say certain things, but they show clearly that they are not Christ’s servants typically, and that morally they are not where He is. Notice how they come out to Elisha, “the sons of the prophets that were at Bethel came forth to Elisha” (2 Kings 2: 3), very self-confident persons, telling him something that no doubt they thought would impress him. What you see is that Elisha is a person who is governed by the unction, and he said, “I also know it: be silent!” You need no counsel from unspiritual persons, you want to get your inward direction from the unction.
What was referred to in the reading as to material published by others who are not walking in the path of 2 Timothy 2, no one who has the Spirit ought to need to be told that they ought not to waste time on it, because the unction teaches as to all things. Elisha sets out a man who is governed by the unction, and so he stands the test. When Elijah said, “abide here, I pray thee”. Elisha replied, “As Jehovah liveth, and as thy soul liveth, I will not leave thee!”. God grant that may be
the heartfelt committal of every person here this afternoon, “I will not leave thee!”. That is every one of us saying that to Christ in sincerity and truth!
Another point that is important here is that Elijah says repeatedly, “Jehovah has sent me”. If you are going to be Christ’s servant, you need to understand the principle of being sent, and no one can teach you that better than He. If you look at John’s gospel, the Lord repeatedly speaks about Himself as sent, and He intends that that in its measure should characterise everyone that follows Him and becomes His servant, that you are operating on the principle of being sent. I am not speaking of being sent in any official sense, but that you have the inward sense in your soul that the Lord is saying. You take up this particular service at this particular time. They say to him, too, “thy master”, as though Elisha did not know that. But I would ask every one of the beloved younger brethren. Have you come to it that Christ is your Master? If you are going to be in His service, you must come to it that He is the Master, that is 2 Timothy 2. The Master, that is His position, and it involves His absolute authority over every one of us. But you want to come to it, that the principle is so seen in you of subjection to Christ that others can say about you, “thy master”, and there is no doubt Who is meant; you are an expression, livingly, of subjection to Christ; you have learned from Him what it is to be subject to the will of God; you have learned from Him what it is to be sent; and you have learned how to be consciously wholly under His control. If you look at the gospels—and it is very instructive for us to see how the Lord was with His disciples—it was mainly when they were in difficulty and were afraid that they called Him “Master”. Well, better that they did that than not at all, but the Lord would have us to be constantly consciously maintained in the sense of His mastership. No one can serve effectively who is not maintained characteristically with a sense in his soul that Christ is the Master.
So they went to Bethel. The Lord would teach us what the house of God means. We have that in the first epistle to Timothy. Paul says, “These things I write to thee in order that thou mayest know how one ought to conduct oneself in God’s house” (1 Timothy 3: 14, 15), that is Bethel. What is all about us is a corruption of that, it is the great house, but we need to have imprinted into our minds that the house of God is still here, and that Christ is Son over it. We can learn from Him how to be in the house, in liberty and as governed by the principles of the house of God. So Paul wrote that to Timothy in the first epistle. As we know, in the second epistle he is writing in view of the ruin, but not the ruin of the house of God vitally; it is the ruin of the assembly as the public body. The house of God is only composed of persons who have the Spirit, and so it subsists. We can move in the light of it as under the hand of Christ, for He is Son over it.
Then they went from Bethel to Jericho, and Jericho as we know is the world as standing athwart the entrance of the saints into their inheritance. I would say this is a word especially for the young men. I would connect this thought with 1 John 2: 14, “I have written to you, young men, because ye are strong, and the word of God abides in you”; but then there is a warning as to Jericho, “Love not the world”. The Spirit of God would bring home to us that the present world is antagonistic to the Father, “If any one love the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (1 John 2: 15). The Lord would have us with Him in order to instruct us as to the need of getting free of what Jericho represents. It was destroyed once in Joshua’s time, but it was rebuilt. The world was destroyed morally in the time of the apostles, but it was rebuilt, and it is out there today in its power, its allurement. The Lord would have you company with Him, if you are going to serve Him, so that you should be morally as free of the world as He is. And so He said to His own, “I have overcome the world”, John 16: 33.
Wonderful matter that Jericho need be no obstacle to us! It is not the power of the world typified in Jericho that we are warned about by John, but the fact that we might love the world or the things in it.
Elijah moves on and he comes to the Jordan, and I think this is the position that tests the fathers spiritually among us. Again, those of us who have read the ministry can say that the Red Sea is Christ’s death for us and the Jordan is our death with Him. But do the younger brethren see the evidence of that in me as an older brother, and in others? Do they see that there are persons who have accepted the bearing of the death of Christ subjectively, and that they are free? Therefore they are stable in their localities and they are stable in assembly crises. The young men are strong—that is not said about the fathers; I think what marks the fathers is stability because they know Him that is from the beginning (see 1 John 2: 13). It is a great advantage if you have in your locality two or three fathers who know Him that is from the beginning. They will not deviate; no unsound words will come in through them, nor will they permit them; because they will insist on what has come in through Him that is from the beginning.
Again Elijah said to him, “Abide here, I pray thee”. The Lord would test you as to how far you would go with Him. If you are His servant, you will go the whole length with Him, involving that you are ready to accept death morally with Christ. When they come to the Jordan, these sons of the prophets “stood … afar off”, (2 Kings 2: 7). They cannot take hold of this mentally; it is what distinguishes the true servant of Christ from persons who are ostensibly in the truth. They stood afar off, but Elisha is there with Elijah. It is coming home to him typically that if Christ went that way actually, I must go that way morally if I am to reach the purpose of God. “And it came to pass when they had gone over, that Elijah said to Elisha. Ask what I shall do for thee, before I am taken away from thee”. No doubt Elijah felt the matter that he was leaving, no doubt Elisha felt it. You notice that Elijah speaks twice about being taken away from him. It never was God’s thought that Christ should remain here indefinitely in flesh and blood, precious and wondrous as that was, that holy sinless condition, the fine flour mingled with oil and anointed with oil. It never was God’s thought that Christ should remain here in resurrection, not then in flesh and blood, but flesh and bones; God never intended that Christ should remain on the earth in that condition either. And so Elijah says, When I am taken from thee. Let it come home to our souls, beloved brethren, that the Man who has died for us, the Man whom we love, the Man whom we love to serve, has gone up! The purpose of God required that—had He not gone up, we should never go up. Think of the glory of divine purpose that you and I, our very selves here at this moment, were in the mind of God to be with Christ above. As we see in Thessalonians, as soon as the resurrection of the dead and the change of the living takes place, we are caught up. So Elijah says, when I am taken from thee.
If you look at John’s gospel, you will find that the Lord constantly refers to the fact that He was going up. He says, “no one has gone up into heaven, save he who came down out of heaven, the Son of man who is in heaven”, John 3: 13. In chapter 6 He refers to the bread that came down from heaven, but as He opens up the great thought of eternal life and the food of eternal life. He says, “If then ye see the Son of man ascending up where he was before?” (John 6: 62). And when He is closeted with His own, before His death, He says to them, “ye would rejoice that I go to the Father” (John 14: 28), and when He prays for them in chapter 17, He says, “these are in the world, and I come to thee” (John 17: 11). And we have that blessed word to His own through Mary, “I ascend to my Father and your Father”, John 20: 17. The way that we have come into the heavenly order of things between the Father and the Son necessitated the ascension of Christ. Ultimately what the Lord said will come to pass, “where I am, there also shall be my servant”. We shall be with Him where He is. Now we want to be with Him morally where He is in testimony. Our hope is we shall be with Him actually where He is. So He said, “I ascend to my Father and your Father”.
You see why Elijah is so insistent on this matter, “if thou see me when I am taken from thee”.
It is not a Christ in flesh and blood on the earth that we have, it is not a Christ in flesh and bones in resurrection but still on the earth that we have, it is the Man who has gone up. So, by the Spirit we see Him where He is, as the apostle says to the Hebrews, as he seeks to get them to understand that they are “holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling “(Hebrews 3: 1), he says, “we see Jesus ... crowned with glory and honour” (Hebrews 2: 9). That is where He is, but not dissociated from us, because the Spirit is our bond with Christ. It is by that means that the Lord is available to anyone who wants to follow and serve Him. I commit these thoughts, beloved brethren, to you for pondering and to lead to fresh and deeper committal on the part of every one of us. He is absolutely worthy of the absolute consecration of our hearts to Him. As that is true, we shall find that is really our bond in the truth and in affection, and thus we can go on together as faithful persons, maintaining things until the Lord comes. May He bless the word.
Address at Edmonton
4 July 1997