The Grace of His Touch
THE GRACE OF HIS TOUCH
(Matt 13: 3; 17: 7)
In order to know our full blessing, and God’s purpose for man, we must see our association with Christ in the glory of God. Here the history of God’s ways as to man terminates, as they once also began in the garden of Eden.
I think that all is established in and by the second Man. He—“the Lord from heaven” (1 Cor 15: 47)—touches the leper (me) in this chapter. We see man in his true moral state before God in this picture. Corrupt and corrupting, at the Lord’s touch the leprosy—sin and all its accompaniments—fled. “Immediately his leprosy was cleansed”, Matt 8: 3. The past history is all ended and the man is clean.
But a second touch is needed. The Lord came down in this incident to man in his lowest extremity of misery. He Himself having accomplished the object for which He came, is the exalted One, and the accomplisher, in this universe, of all the purposes of God. As exalted thus, and in the glory (yet to come as to manifestation) of all that belongs to Him as God’s King, again He touches man. This is not to remove sin, but to connect them with Himself in all that He has entered upon as Man. They were sore afraid. But “Jesus came and touched them, and said, Arise, and be not afraid”, Matt 17: 7. Do you know this second touch as well as the first?
In His work He first touches the poor sinner. By His Spirit sent down from Him and by Him, He touches us again, in order to bring us into the consciousness of relation with Himself, in that new scene into which He has entered as Man. Many know the first, I think, who do not know the second. “My Father, and your Father; my God, and your God”, the same relation.
From Helps for the Poor of the Flock—vol 1, 1896
THE TWO PRAYERS OF THE APOSTLE
Richest in the unfolding of heavenly blessings, yet the first in failure (in Rev 2), we may well consider these two prayers for the Ephesian assembly. Evidently the subject of the prayers is that the saints may know the power of God as it has been manifested in two ways in regard to Christ. In Ephesians 1, the same power is “to us-ward who believe”; and in chap 3 it is the same “power that worketh in us”. We can learn it as it has been shewn to us in the Person of Christ. The place of Christ is different in each prayer. In the first prayer he asks that I may know the power of God coming in, when man and Satan had done their utmost and worst. I see this power taking Christ out of death and seating Him at the right hand of God “in the heavenly places, far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come”. This is Christ’s place now. And He is set as head of a body. “And gave him to be the head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all”.
Now the body is not actually there yet, but where He is, is the terminus, and He has reached it. He has reached it by power, a power superior to all the force of the enemy by which I am (while walking on earth) daily surrounded. No surer proof could God give to the saints that they too shall reach it, than this which is seen in Christ personally. This must be so because they form the “body”, of which He is the “head”. He is there (it is said) as “head of his body the church. Not only so, but the same power which set him there according to the purpose of God, is not only in us (Eph 2: 13), but “to us-ward who believe” (chap 1: 19). That is, it is in us who believe (internally), and it is to us who believe (externally), in order to place us there too, and to give us now the good of it in our souls.
How futile is all the boasted power of man! How vain before God that of the enemy! God will accomplish all His purposes respecting Christ and the church which is His body. This prayer then gives to us (for God delights to answer His own desires as to us, formed by the Holy Spirit in the apostle) one great formative principle for our steady walk here. It is the knowledge of the ultimate end as to me which is set before me in One who has walked where I now am, and who has reached the end.
I have now to walk where He did, I have to walk worthy of the vocation wherewith I am called (Eph 4: 1-4), and “not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind” (v 7), ignorant of God and His purposes. God would not have us to be ignorant, nor as children tossed about with every wind of doctrine, that is, with nothing really stable in our souls. Hence the prayer. I know where Christ is and I am associated now with the power which has set Him there. Working in me, it will work on continuously, until it has accomplished God’s purpose as to me in relation to Christ. It is “to us-ward who believe”, and the magnitude of this power (“the working of his mighty power”) has already expressed itself in giving Christ His place. I am in association with that power, so that the body shall have its true place with the Head. Nothing can frustrate this. My place in heaven is measured by Christ’s place there, and the key to all is that I am blessed “in Christ” (chap 1: 3); all my blessings are spiritual.
Now comes the second prayer in chap 3. And as the first was that they might know power connected with Christ as giving Him His place in heaven, so this is that they may know power connected with giving Christ a place in them. “That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith”. Nothing but the power of God could give us a sense of either, and the wisdom and reasoning of man about both utterly fail. But to know a power working “to us-ward who believe” and which has set Christ in heavenly glory, and a power so working by “his Spirit in the inner man”, that “that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith”—these two eclipse every human conception. All is Christ, the Spirit so working in us the knowledge of these two that we may be able to “comprehend with all saints”, and “to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge”. What could possibly be lacking to us to produce a steady and consistent walk here? And we need the knowledge of what the apostle asks in both passages before the walk is touched upon and before we can answer to God’s desire for us. First, Christ the end, and second, Christ the daily supply. Then comes the exhortation to “walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called” (chap 4), and what we see displayed then is life of Christ here, “with all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one another in love, endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace”. The first prayer I think is more objective, Christ there; the second more subjective, Christ here, and it is the power of the Spirit which is needed to make both known to us, see Eph 4: 20.
May the Lord continue to instruct us in the truth, and in the immensity of these two desires which are brought before us in these two prayers. We begin our little day amid the ruin of Ephesus, and we can only begin with it. But Christ is not changed, nor is the desire of God for us (as expressed by the apostle in these two prayers) changed. Richest, as I have said Ephesus was, in the unfolding to her of the relation of the children to God the Father (chap 1: 3, 4, 5) and of the church to Christ (chap 5: 23-32); yet first in failure (Rev 2: 4), we may surely learn our lesson from the Ephesian need of these two prayers, and ask would not the truth, if operative in them, have preserved the saints? and then what about us in relation to it as individual saints? May we not walk in the power of the truth which these two prayers unfold, and thus be individual overcomers, in the midst of the Ephesian failure? see (Rev 2: 7), addressed to “him that overcometh”.
From Helps for the Poor of the Flock—vol 1, 1896
