FAITHFUL MEN
Nehemiah 1: 1–4; 2: 11, 12; 7: 1, 2
The Lord presents Himself earlier in the Revelation as the faithful and true witness and it is a challenge that while we await His coming this feature be found with us all. It will be after the assembly has been raptured that things in this world will rapidly come to a head and be dealt with. The Lord Jesus in His own blessed right will come in His glory. We are in the time still of His rejection but we love His appearing when the ignominy and the shame of the cross will be reversed in the glory that is to be displayed and we shall be with Him who is to be wondered at in all those who have believed, 2 Thess 1: 10. What a moment that will be! We are in the waiting time and because of that it is a somewhat testing time and it is a time that calls for a peculiar quality of devotedness and consecration and faithfulness. It is that latter feature I want to speak of, a few faithful men. Thank God we are among them in our measure. We could not claim much; the Lord knows our measure; He knows how much we love Him. I do not think love for Jesus is just a question of profession, it is a question of action, “If ye love me”, He said, “keep my commandments”, John 14: 15. That would be proof, and keeping His words.
You meet many people who say that they love Him but sadly do not appear to keep His word, therefore their love is in question. Dear brethren, let not our love be in question, let us demonstrate it. It is not difficult to demonstrate it. Oh what a privilege if we can just simply serve one another in love because we love the Lord. In some sense the present moment is bringing out the calibre of our faithfulness. We have read of one who was faithful above many, a remarkable man. He was not the only one, there were others, but he was faithful above many. I am not suggesting that there is competition in faithfulness, I think it comes out by virtue of what a man is. Of course I am including the beloved sisters, in fact I would like to suggest that is where it excels. The beloved sisters represent something exceedingly precious in regard to the assembly. At the cross it was the beloved women that stood there. At the resurrection it was a beloved woman who was there. We want to remember these things. I think we all should represent something inwardly in an intensity of love for the Lord that is reliable in difficult days. And we are in them. We should not be surprised at the pressures; they have been foretold; the Lord in love foretold it all; “difficult times shall be there”; and He has given us full directions and provisions how to comport ourselves. Let us keep the directions; they are not difficult. His commandments are not grievous; His commandments are for our blessing.
So I read of this man Hanani who was a faithful man and feared God above many. This was a time in Nehemiah of great recovery, similar in character to our own time, though publicly the city was in ruins, burned with fire, the gates destroyed, and the people in great affliction. Oh how it draws out our hearts even to think about it, of the disasters and sorrows of the testimony. Nehemiah wept; he says; “I sat and wept, and mourned for days”. Dear brethren, there are those doing it; let us do it too. Let us feel as the Lord feels about His beloved assembly. If He wept over Jerusalem, how much more over the church. I do not know how you feel, but I feel my own shallowness; I would love to have a greater depth of feeling as to how the Lord feels about His assembly. So He says to Philadelphia, “thou hast kept the word of my patience”, Rev 3: 10. It is not just ourselves waiting, He is waiting. He is passing many beloved brethren through deep waters. Why? To share His feelings, so precious, so pure, in regard to His chief interest. The assembly as the Lamb’s wife will understand those feelings and know those sufferings, she will be a fit consort to enter into the very depths of His affections in regard to what has taken place. Oh what a privilege to share in His feelings in the Spirit of Christ in a day such as this. So let us rise to this.
The assembly publicly will never be restored. The ship, you remember, was broken with the force of the waves, but the prow remained, Acts 27: 41. Something remained, but that ship was never publicly salvaged, never re-floated. It is dreadful to think of a claim to be the church publicly. We walk in this light, and, thank God, the principles remain, the prow remained firm; the firm foundation of God stands. We know what that is, it is direction for a broken day. Paul immediately gathered those sticks—that is the recovery—into a bundle. Oh what would have been in his mind as he gathered those sticks in difficult circumstances, the cold, and the rain that was falling? And the viper attacked and seized Paul’s hand. Why? What did he attack? He saw something emerging of the assembly which he thought he had destroyed. Oh, beloved, we have been through deep waters these years; the enemy thought he had wrecked it all, but he has not. Let us learn the preciousness of being bound together in that bundle of life, keep near one another in confidence and love and respect, and give no occasion for the enemy. The viper came out of the heat. Satan will attack at the most precious point. Paul shook it into the fire, and felt no harm, Acts 28: 5. He did not swell, or fall down suddenly dead. He maintained his power through self-judgment. He met it judicially. We are not ignorant of Satan’s thoughts. I believe that as the conditions that make way for eternal life develop, we need to be the more on our guard to protect them.
So we have this faithful man Hanani and what he reports. Nehemiah says, “Hanani; one of my brethren, came, he and certain men of Judah. And I asked them concerning Jerusalem”. That was the subject he was concerned about. Oh, dear brethren, let us think of Christ’s chief interest. It is not the literal Jerusalem, it is the assembly, that is His whole interest. He has not yet taken up the matter of the nations; He will do that presently; I have no doubt that already He is preparing the way of the east; He will do that quickly after the church has gone, but the nations at the moment are but a drop of the bucket, Isa 40: 15. The whole matter now is the assembly and she is almost complete. The most have already gone, they are with the Lord. Nearly all have gone, we are just a few, and there are many others in Christendom who love the Lord. We would not dare un-Christianise them. Maybe we could not, alas, walk with them, but if they are redeemed they are redeemed, and they belong to Christ. However, we sorrow, and, as Nehemiah, we sit and we weep and we mourn certain days.
Then he rises up and gives a lead. We should look for such a lead; he says, “and I came to Jerusalem, and was there three days. And I arose in the night, I and some few men with me”; Thank God for them! Only a few, it may be only two or three—what can they do? They gather to Christ’s name and they have a wonderful experience, that He comes to them. It is a wonderful thing that two or three can provide a Christian circle, and what marks that circle is that it has only one centre, and that is Jesus. He comes into the midst of them. Where there is a heart for Christ we can be assured of His presence. So this dear man gives a lead; and he says, “I told no man, what my God had put in my heart to do for Jerusalem”. I just want to leave that word with the brethren. We could put it on one another, could we not, what are we able to do for Jerusalem? What can we do? It is so simple, but it is so real, because it is actuated by love for Christ. If I love the Lord I will be doing something for Him, I can care for His own. “We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love the brethren”, 1 John 3: 14. It is a wonderful thing to be in a circle like this. Not too many years ago some of us wondered if we would ever see this again; we wondered if we would ever have the privilege of Christian fellowship like this. Thank God for His faithfulness! When we were not faithful, He was; He does not deny Himself; He is true to His work. We cannot cease to thank Him for maintaining a witness and a testimony, and, we may say, He expects us in faithfulness to maintain it till He comes. So they rise up and they work. Let us not slacken the work; there is a tremendous work going on, maybe far wider than we are aware of. We tend to get somewhat narrow, I suppose, in our thinking; I believe the Lord is working on a far wider field than we may be aware of, and let us have eyes to see it and hearts to appreciate it, and be available wherever the work of God is, to nurture it and to do it without claiming anything save the fact that we love Him, and we love His name, and we gather and call upon the Lord out of a pure heart. I just wanted to refer to this because it says of this man that he was a faithful man and feared God above many. Now this is not to discourage anyone, it is rather to encourage everyone to exemplify and show in some way the proof of our love in being faithful to Him until He come.
Now I turn to a faithful minister at the end of Ephesians. What a minister he would be! First of all a beloved brother, “Tychicus, the beloved brother and faithful minister in the Lord”. Now this is most important, that the minister should provide food. The Lord nourishes and cherishes the assembly, Eph 5: 29. He nourishes it; that would be food; cherishes it means that He loves it. Let us learn to love what He loves and do what we can. Alas, so many are not available—how we sorrow that men who should be available in service are not available, the clerical system holding the most in bondage. Thank God we have been freed from that; I trust so. We fell into it again, did we not? Oh the need to develop mutuality among the brethren, to be in a circle of conscious spiritual support and substance in which it is easy to bring out something that will nourish and build up the brethren, serving one another, it says, by love, Gal 5: 13.
This is a “beloved brother and faithful minister”. What does that mean, a “faithful minister”? He sees the need. He is not a minister getting at persons; that is not ministry. I do not mean that it does not have an edge; I think in some sense every meeting tests you, searches you. And you say to the Lord, ‘Thank God it does’. Wonderful things happen in a meeting. I think we get more in a meeting than when alone. I am not weakening being alone; that is important; make sure you have your times alone with the Lord. Make time for that, and make time for reading too. That is what Paul said to Timothy, “Give thyself to reading”, 1 Tim 4: 13. People say they have not time. Dear brethren, that does not stand. We all know we do what we want to do, and I would say, Read those ministries. Read the Scriptures first, certainly, but read the ministry, get it into you. The more you read it the more you will want to read it.
This is a faithful minister and he is in Ephesus, “Tychicus, the beloved brother and faithful minister in the Lord”. I believe it is important to begin things from the top. That is what Paul did; that is how he worked. He did not go to Corinth when they wrote to him, he wrote a letter to them. He said; I am staying here in Ephesus; I can see things better from up here. Like every good general, he does not go down into the dust of the battle, but looks at the battle from his own vantage point. Paul says, I am remaining at Ephesus. There were plenty of adversaries—many. Oh, what a skilful general; what a warrior that beloved man was; how much we owe to him! In the very testing circumstances of his prison we get a, letter like this and he says, Here is a faithful minister, he “shall make all things known to you; whom I have sent to you for this very thing, that you may know of our affairs and that he may encourage your hearts”.
How is Paul’s ministry getting on? That is, really what this means. Our recovery is to the Pauline light of the assembly. Beloved, it is a tremendous heritage we have come into and let us value it, the service of God and the gospel. We cannot put too much value on maintaining the truth of the mystery, of the one body, and the new man. That is how Christ is continued in testimony here until He comes. I do not weaken what may be preached for the relief of souls; you thank God for that; but Paul’s glad tidings involves more than relief for souls. It involves, and leads into, what is exceedingly precious to the heart of Christ. Let us each therefore be a beloved brother and a faithful minister. Let us stimulate one another to do what we can, like the woman of whom the Lord said, “What she could she has done”, Mark 14: 8. Let us be available in our measure, thinking nothing, I trust, of ourselves but everything of Him whose we are and whom we serve.
Now just a word as to Revelation 17. As already mentioned, this is still future; He has not yet come into His rights as the King of kings and Lord of lords. All the circumstances among the nations are rapidly heading up and at any moment this Judgment could be executed. But the first thing is that the church will be raptured, or I should say rather, the sleeping saints will be raised; that is the next thing to take place; and we shall be changed. We need to think of these things. If we are still here, we shall be changed, in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, and we shall together be caught up, 1 Cor 15: 52. Then things will happen rapidly and the Lord will assume His rights, as it says here, “These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them; for he is Lord of lords and King of kings”. Oh, what it will be to come with Him in His appearing! And then it says, “and they that are with him …”. I love that thought, to be with Him then. We can be with Him now; we want to be with the One we love. A faithful man has an objective more important than himself; he has an objective outside himself and his motive is his love for that objective; that is a faithful man, and he is faithful unto death. Such will have a crown of life. Are we equal for that? How many have gone that way, gone to the stake, gone to execution, gone to martyrdom, rather than surrender their faithfulness to their Master. Let us have that spirit.
We may not be called upon to face literal martyrdom, I do not know. The dispensation began that way in Stephen. I would not like to say it may finish that way. I do not know. We would be ready for it. I know the dear brethren would be ready for that. Some are going through things like it, almost worse, so we need not speak of that. When He comes we are going to be with Him, and then it says “they that are with him called, and chosen, and faithful”. “Called” would be the heavenly calling, would it not? There has been a call, a heavenly call into the fellowship of God’s Son. What a privilege! This world offers, I suppose, thousands of fellowships, but there is nothing that can equal the exceeding, privilege of being called into the fellowship of the Son of God. And then “chosen”; that was sovereign, before, the world was founded we were chosen, marvellous thing! It was the Father’s glory that chose us in Christ before the world was. You marvel at it. There is a sense of awe as you think of that, that God; who knows the end from the beginning, in sovereignty would choose us then. The calling involves responsibility. At some point sovereignty and responsibility will need to come together, they will coalesce. God’s sovereignty will be justified. Then the last thing, “and faithful”. I want to leave that with the brethren. That is our side. Let us be true to the calling, let us justify God’s sovereignty and be faithful to His chief interest here until the Lord comes, for His Name’s sake.
PLAINFIELD NJ
29th July 1989
______________________