‘WHAT WE LOOK FOR’

(Matt 25: 1-7; 1 Thess 5: 5-10)

It is just in so far as we are looking out that we are detached from this scene: not only have we the power of the Holy Ghost but there is something we look for.

I am not going to speak of what is abnormal, but of what is normal, and I should like to turn you to two or three scriptures as to what we look for. The first is the Person. See Philippians 3, at the end of the chapter. We read, “Our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ”. That is the Person that we look for. And again, in Hebrews 9. He comes before us. Saints looked for Him. “Unto them that look for him shall he appear”.

Now I want you to look further at what we look for. It is a new world (see 2 Pet 3: 13): “Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth”, and then the ordered condition of things in it which we also look for. These are seen in one more passage, Heb 11: 10: “He [Abram] looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God”.

In these passages I have three things. First, the Christian is looking out for a Person—for Christ, that is, he is not satisfied with himself, nor is he satisfied with anybody else. He says, ‘There is nobody in this world like Christ, and Christ is not here’. He is the Man in whom the whole delight of God is, the One who perfectly answers to the heart of God in every respect, and therefore a believer, awake, is looking for Christ as Saviour, the apostle says. Just what they were not doing in Matthew 25, for they were asleep. They had the oil, and you have the Holy Ghost. But what forms a man, as I said, is not only the possession of the Holy Ghost, but also the man’s object down here.

The Object the apostle sets before the Christian who is awake is Christ. That is to say, you are not satisfied with any man here, but you are waiting for Christ. It was so in 1 Thessalonians 1. They “turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God; and to wait for his Son from heaven”. They did not expect improvement in man down here, and they did not expect to be here themselves very long! Do we? They were converted to God, and God’s Son was coming from heaven, and they were waiting for Him.

They were therefore awake, and the apostle exhorts them to continue on that line. That is, the Person is the first thing, and I am sure there is no Christian awake in this company but prefers Christ to himself, and if you prefer Christ to yourself, you will prefer Christ to everybody else. The apostle saw Jesus with the eye of faith. It was a grand sight, GOD’S MAN. We are not to be occupied with men down here, for there is none good enough to be occupied with. There is something better even than serving God here and His saints, and that is waiting for Christ, “who loved me, and gave himself for me”, Gal 2: 20. The second thing is, there is a new world for faith. Peter insists on the import and result of being awake. He says, We look for “a new heaven and a new earth”, Rev 21: 1. There is nothing in the old that is good enough for one who is awake to what suits God.

We may say that a Christian who is awake is not satisfied nor dissatisfied nor indifferent! He is an anomaly, and Christ was an anomaly to the people of this world! A Christian awake is not satisfied with things as they are, he is not dissatisfied with his lot amidst them all, and he is not indifferent to what suits God! Peter looked for righteousness. The scene he wanted will be characterised by it. Righteousness will dwell there! Peter’s word thus well illustrates Matt 5: 6. How could we settle down in a scene unsuited to God? How be indifferent that it is unsuited to Him? It is sleep. Well I see that saints who are awake are practising righteousness (1 John 2: 29), and they are not practising anything else! If the Person was the first thing, the new world is the second thing.

The third thing is the city. Lot was asleep in his day, but Abram the man of faith, the only man who, as far as we know, in his day was awake. Abram looked for “a city, whose builder and maker is God”, Heb 11: 10. Sodom was the city that suited Lot. But “here have we no continuing city”. Sodom might contain its ordered condition of things, to be maintained and regulated by its judges, and Lot was one of them probably, compare Gen 19: 1 and 9!

But Sodom was no city for Abraham. As awake he dwelt outside it, where he had his altar, and we may safely assert this is our portion too, and where all who are awake today also dwell (Heb 13: 10), for we also “have an altar”! The idea contained in the figure of a “city” in scripture is an ordered condition of things, and all that therein suits that condition.

GOD’s city is not liable to shaking and decay, and the kingdom wherein it is is stable, it “cannot be moved”. It is a city that hath foundations, “whose builder and maker is God”. It will be an order of things in this world, planned and laid out to suit GOD. That is the idea that is conveyed to me in it, and which Abraham looked for. It is stable, but “here have we no continuing [stable] city”, Heb 13: 14. Did you ever think of what a wonderful order of things will be seen in this world when everything suits God in it ?

“The night is far spent, the day is at hand”, Rom 13: 12. I seek to draw your attention to what in Christendom characterises the night, and in that way to get before us the two classes of Christians—those that are awake and those that are asleep, because all Christians in this company and in every other company belong to one class or the other. Very soon after the departure of Christ, and the establishment of Christianity in this world, we see what characterised the profession of Christianity. It has all come true. It accounts for all we see around us in Christians. We read here, “While the bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept”. They looked for nothing at all. “And at midnight there was a cry made, Behold, the bridegroom!” What aroused the sleepers was, their attention was afresh directed to the One who had been forgotten by them!

Sleep is present ease in view of His absence. So that if Christ is not the prominent and present object we are asleep—morally asleep. And the person who is morally asleep is characterised by two things, he is not in the proper vigour and activity of life, and he is unconscious of the present state of things by which he is surrounded in this world! I will not say he is indifferent to it, he is unconscious of it. Sleep is either total unconsciousness or it is the mystic confusion of dreams. He is an unconscious sleeper, or a dreamer. But whichever it is, there is nothing attractive or helpful in him who has settled down in the midst of the condition of things as they are here. Now the apostle recognises these two conditions in the epistle to the Ephesians, chap 5: 14. He says, “Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from among the dead, and Christ [a living Person] shall give thee light”. So he does also in Romans 13, “It is high time to awake out of sleep”. And where he is telling the Philippians about Timothy, and contrasting Timothy with others in chapter 2, these are the words, “For I have no man likeminded” (among those saints who were around him) (Phil 2: 20), and I think the reason for his thus speaking of Timothy is that Timothy was a Christian who was awake, and Paul was awake, because he had got the hope, the coming of Christ, bright before him. That marks a Christian who is awake. These people in Matthew 25 had not the coming of the Bridegroom before them. They had gone to sleep, and what roused them was the cry that He was coming. “Behold, the bridegroom!” And that is exactly the case today. It is a prophecy.

You are a Christian and you know Christians, and if Christ is not the Object of your and their lives, there is certainly sleep, because it is very evident a sleeper has no object. The oil represents the Spirit of God in the believer, nevertheless the Spirit will not keep you from going to sleep, for all believers have the Spirit. Another thing is necessary, namely, you are to be subject to God’s power, His power within, so that you get an Object. The Holy Ghost sets before you an Object, and the two, working together, keep the believer awake. What a man looks for forms him: not merely what he has, but what he expects. I think you have the two things in Christianity. You have the Holy Ghost in all who believe; why then do they go to sleep? Well, the Holy Ghost must be free to give you an Object. There is the Spirit of God forming Christ, and there is the spirit of the world forming what suits it, and we are kept awake as long as we are under the control of the Spirit’s Object, which is exterior to us, and that is Christ. Christ is the object, and the Spirit of God is within us always working on us as the subjects of the Holy Ghost, and if we are satisfied with Christ we are dissatisfied with things down here. If a person is satisfied with things as they are down here he has gone to sleep, since Christ is not down here. The present state of things does not suit Him, nor does it suit, therefore, a saint who is awake. No, you are looking out for a new heaven and a new earth, and an ordered state of things which suits God. There is no order in this world now, everything is broken up through sin. But a city gives you an idea of an ordered state of things, where there is order and authority and system and arrangement. What has settled down upon Christendom is indifference to how God looks at things. Christians when they go to sleep are unconscious of the disorder and antagonism to God in the things which surround them, and, alas! the mass of Christians have gone to sleep. But there are a few awake, and there always have been a few awake. When the Spirit in Matthew says that “all” slumbered and slept, He means to give us what characterised the mass; but I doubt not that since Christ went away there have always been men of God who have not been asleep, but have been in the good of communion with the One who is absent in the hope of being alive in their natural bodies here when He comes back.

There is such a people today, and that is why I said there are two classes of Christians in this world. There are Christians awake, and Christians asleep, and some are asleep in this room, perhaps, and not in the good of the portion that belongs to them.

It is a remarkable “breastplate” that the Thessalonians are told to put on. It is “the breastplate of faith and love”, 1 Thess 5: 8. But there is a principle in faith. It looks away from things here. Men of faith endure by “seeing him who is invisible”, Heb 11: 27. They get up, and in their earthly calling they have to go through the day just as all have to, but the eye of their faith is ever open, ever on the lookout. We are looking for a Saviour; we are looking for a new heaven and a new earth; we are looking for “a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God”, v 10. Do you not think such people will display a consistency with all this? And that it will form them? Those people are awake.

A person who is asleep is not much good to anybody that I can see. When Christ comes before us, when the true condition of man and this world come before us, when they appear in all their naked wretchedness and misery, I think it is then we are just waking up. We are but feebly conscious of the true character of the things NOW, as God views them—even the best of us. When I know how God looks at things, and that the door is just going to be shut against all that is unsuited to God and against all who have not the Spirit of God, I wonder at this sleep. We know this is going to be done, because God has been pleased to draw our attention to the matter in this twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew. “The door was shut”, and the second Man—the Lord from heaven—comes into view, “Behold, the bridegroom!”

That alters everything. We have got another Man before us. It is not the best saint that ever trod the earth, no, it is THE BRIDEGROOM. If we have not got God’s Man before us, we have people in the world before us. To be occupied with these—with souls—is not high enough. You or they will become your object. Your usefulness and your service will engross you, and that is not Christ. That is as good a way of going to sleep as any other! But it is, I think, a very common way. A person may be apparently useful, and go hither and thither in service, but, remember, that person may be more sound asleep in God’s sight than anybody! If “the love of Christ constraineth us” (2 Cor 5: 14), Christ is before us, and such things will not be neglected, but they will drop into their suited places: their place is secondary. We shall be none the less earnest, but the spring will be right—and the spring is Christ. The apostle said, “to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain”, Phil 1: 21. He was not a Christian who was asleep if he could say that! He had nothing else to live for. ‘Paul, do not you live here for the saints and do not you live to preach the gospel?’ ‘No’, he says, ‘all those things only come into their place when the spring is right. Christ is first’. If we feel the absence of Christ we shall not settle down in a state of things without Him, nor even in the company of Christians—delightful as it is. There is something higher—it is Christ and the coming of Christ.

A man is formed by what he looks for. Take a man who is covetous. That is an internal characteristic of a man, but you will see that it forms him outside as well! The Spirit of God works in us, and the object of the Spirit of God is to bring out in us some little traits of Christ, and the world is a power too, and is trying to make you worldly, and these two powers work. But one power (which is exterior to us) is that of an object—Christ is the object. Do not settle down with anything short of Christ.

Christ is God’s object. The Spirit of God is in us in order to form Christ. We are the subjects of the activities of the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God is here, but the Object is not here. Christ is coming into this scene again, and in order to be kept awake you must say, not only ‘I have got the Spirit’, but ‘I am one of those who will go in with Him’. It is His presence that we want. We want these words to act on our LIVES: “Behold, the bridegroom”. Those five wise but sleeping ones were figures of saints, but still the word, “Behold, the bridegroom”, the word to them, is the word for the present.

Paul’s answer to this exhortation is, “We see Jesus”. It is Christ the apostle saw and had before him, and that is the spring which sent him forth preaching the gospel. Is it so with us? or are our hearts settling down in this present scene where Christ is not, where righteousness does not dwell, where there is nothing regular or organised which suits God?—there is going to be such a city, and if we are awake I believe we are looking for it! I do not believe a man who is asleep is looking for anything! He is perfectly content with himself and his surroundings, and he is no testimony to those around him.

If you want testimony, you will only get it from a Christian who is awake. I want to get into the company and to keep in the company of Christians who are awake, because I am in such danger of sleeping, and why? Because the night is around me! The apostle says that “those who sleep sleep in the night” (1 Thess 5: 7), and therefore we are easily affected by the night; there is a power in you—the Holy Ghost—and there is a power outside you—Christ—and these two are working to keep you awake. All the world lies in death, and believers have gone to sleep, and have forgotten how God looks at things, saying, “Peace, peace, when there is no peace”. It is high time to wake out of sleep, for that is the state of Christendom today! We are living in it, and the apostles saw its beginning. Their continual effort was to keep the saints awake to God and to the true character of the scene through which they were moving.

Sleeping is settling down here, satisfied or ignoring things as they are. And is not death true of the mass, and sleep of Christians? They have all forgotten that before another sun may rise CHRIST MAY COME! It is not enough to hold the coming of the Lord as a doctrine. I suppose all Christians in one way or another do that. My point is, that you are only awake when you act on it, that is, when people see by your everyday life that His coming is no mere dry doctrine to you. Living, with the heart set on the coming of Christ, will affect us just in as much as the Spirit of God controls in us. We require both the Spirit within us and the Object outside us. Every believer has the oil, the Spirit, but the world comes in, and the people who came to Christ when they were sinners and got their sins forgiven, sleep, and then they forget that they must still have Christ before them. As Moses lifted up the serpent and said, as it were, ‘Do not look inside, but look on God’s provision outside’, so we are to go on, looking, and it must be as true of us as it was of the apostle Paul. We only go on if kept as he, “Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith”, Heb 12: 2. That is the One to look to, and what people are looking to (or for) forms them—characterises them. We have the two, the Spirit and Christ, and if we want to be kept awake in this present day we must have the freshness of them. We must have on our spirits that Christ is not here, and that God is testifying that He is satisfied with Christ, but is not satisfied with the man that is here nor with things as they are.

He is going to bring Christ again into this world, and He is going to make everything according to His mind, and the believer is looking for Him, and for “new heaven and a new earth” (2 Pet 3: 13), and “for a city which hath foundations”.

In Christianity the coming of the Lord is our next event, and it should be joy to us to know it. It should put us independent of this wretched world, through which we only pass as strangers, day by day. For God, everything is connected with the coming of Christ. We want the power of the Spirit of God in us, and we want the power of God outside us drawing us to Himself, to keep us awake, for the atmosphere of this scene is poisonous, lulling to sleep, and produces moral torpor in real Christians, that is, in people who have got the Spirit of God, and torpor characterises the mass. The apostle was a Christian who was awake in his day, and I trust that we all want to be of that company! What characterised the departure of Christ was all sinking down into sleep. Do you think, for instance, you and I could so easily tolerate and accept and have fellowship with worldly principles and worldly persons (when we might easily avoid them) if we were in the present knowledge of how God views them? There is unconsciousness of the true state of men and things which exists today before God in this world. It only proves the existence of this state of sleep, and the same thing applies to everything that we have to meet with. Either I am awake and such things have lost, or are losing, their old attraction for me, or I am asleep. One question proves it. What harm is there? is the prominent question. Such a Christian has not the love of God bright in his soul. He is asleep—the question shews it, and he is of little or no use or testimony in this world.

You may say, ‘all woke up’. I shall reply, ‘Yes, but the only proof that all woke up was to me that they acted like people awake’. They “went forth” again, and the light shone out afresh. It was this that proved they were awake, and only this proves it in us today! Some found their lamps going out, and all needed trimming!

May the Lord give us to see that what kept people awake in the early days can keep us awake today!

 

From Helps for the Poor of the Flock—vol 8, 1903