Our Resources
THE LOVE OF THE FATHER AND HIS POWER
It is well to know our resources. How fully they come before us as known of Christ when Man down here. The soul is kept in quiet just as this reserve is known, but greatly disturbed by all that happens if it is not known. The result is impatience.
Impatience is indicated generally by the ‘What shall I do?’ of everyday life. It is not so often that you hear the other side, ‘What will He do?’ If the sense of want is the work of the Spirit (see Ps 43: 1) you will hear the last question, if of the flesh the first. But I think that a sense of want will generally be found to be of the Spirit or of the flesh in the Christian course. I do not think that this last sense of want is possible when I have the consciousness that I have in the Father a perfectly inexhaustible and unlimited reserve. God known is what I find the soul comes to in Ps 23, “I SHALL NOT WANT ANYTHING” (JND’s French Bible) and then it is taken up with its fulness. The secret for patience and endurance in us down here is, I think, the love of the Father and His power.
It was this for Christ. “Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?”, Matt 26: 53.
But He would not doubt or test His love by seeking a manifestation of His power. The first is greatest. I could appeal to His love. But the second is also great. I could appeal to His power. There is angelic intervention. A legion was a great number, at one time it was 6,000, and later it was 3,000. His host of 36,000 angels, between me and all that Satan and man would do!
The Lord as man knew this reserve. He knew the love of the Father to Him personally, and He knew the circumstances of the day could not stand for a moment before angelic power. Do we not know both? The believer is now the subject of both love and power, John 17: 26; Heb 1: 14. But He did not seek for love to prove itself in angelic power! He was content with the love. This had brought Him into the circumstances surrounding Him, a love which would carry the Son through and meet all the exigences of the path in which the Father had placed Him! He would not appear to desire to oppose the Father’s will by an appeal to Him in intricate circumstances (though He could have appealed) to be answered by angelic power. He bowed and accepted the circumstances, conscious all the while of all that was in reserve. He did not appeal to it but He knew it. It is well when this marks us in our circumstances down here. It is just this knowledge of the Father and of His love (which, if He thought it necessary, would send forth twelve legions of angels into our circumstances) that will keep the soul from all the restlessness which desires, in impatience, to get out of, or to change, the circumstances through which it has pleased God to call us each one to walk. It then simply comes to this with each of us, I have no wish to change my circumstances, I am just here for the Father’s will, in the hand of love and power, and this was Christ’s path (1 John 2: 6) and it is no light thing to be kept with some little conscious sense of being in Christ’s path, His portion too in it, ours.
From Food for the Faithful—vol 2, 1899
