OUR RELATIONS WITH DIVINE PERSONS IN THE ECONOMY
W. McKillop
Romans 12: 1, 2; 2 Corinthians 4: 7–10; Romans 8: 12–17
One of the last things that the Lord said to His own, before leaving, according to Matthew, was to make disciples and to baptise them to the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. This would impress on us that the Godhead is one; one name is given; the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The Lord intends that wonderful light should govern assembly persons. Indeed those who are made disciples and are baptised to that Name are brought into the most wonderful realm of light there could be, for it involves the full declaration of God, known as Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Well, clearly, divine light given to us is intended to effectuate something permanent in us for the praise of God eternally. In the light of that passage, I have read these three scriptures—the first one relating to the will of God, the second to the life of Jesus, and the third to the leading of the Spirit of God. You can see that the Lord having declared God and made known this wondrous name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, intends that we should be affectionately and subjectively and intelligently in relation to each of these Persons in the positions that they have taken up in the economy.
The great dominating thought would be the will of God. The place that the will of God has in the truth cannot be overestimated, because the Son Himself coming into humanity said, “Lo, I come ... to do, O God, thy will”, Hebrews 10: 7. The Lord might have spoken about many other things, or more specific things, but He speaks about doing the will of God. Therefore this passage in Romans should be of the greatest interest to lovers of Christ, to assembly persons, because what is in view is the “good and acceptable and perfect will of God”. The apostle opens by beseeching them by the compassions of God; in that sense, we are all vessels of divine compassion; each one of us is here because of the compassions of God. The compassions of God, of course, involve His sovereignty, for He says, “I will shew mercy to whom I will shew mercy”, Romans 9: 15. The compassions of God, therefore, involve the operation of His will. You and I would not be here except God, acting according to His own will, did so on the line of the compassions of God. Having mentioned this to affect our hearts, the apostle says, “to present your bodies a living sacrifice”. That would be in contrast to the dead sacrifices of Judaism; they had their place in the earlier ways of God. Even as far back as Abel, a dead sacrifice had its place, and God looked on Abel and on his offering. But all looked on typically to the great sacrifice in the purpose of God, that is the sacrifice of Christ.
So he says, “present your bodies a living sacrifice”. It is our privilege, whether we are young or old, to present our bodies a living sacrifice to God. As affected by His sovereign compassions, our souls are moved to see that our bodies should be offered to God. They can be offered as holy and acceptable to God because of the work of Christ and because of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. I suppose, in one sense, the greatest sacrifice a believer can offer is the sacrifice of his body, as holy, acceptable to God. He says, “which is your intelligent service”. I would say to the young boys and young girls here, that God is looking for you to act on the line of affectionate intelligence, and that you should begin to think about your body in relation to His will. It is quite right for boys and girls to play, indeed in the world to come, the streets of Jerusalem will be full of boys and girls playing in the streets. It is not safe for them to do that now, but what they can do is begin to think about offering their bodies as a living sacrifice to God, and he says “which is your intelligent service”.
Think of a boy or girl of twelve or more beginning to think about God and about responding to His love, and coming to understand that I can present my body to God because of the death of Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit. “Be not conformed to this world”; we know what this world is; if you look at a newspaper you see what it is morally; it is like the earth before the flood, it was full of violence and corruption. That is all that needs to be said about it; men are doing many things to try to improve their lot but the essential moral truth is that the whole earth is full of violence and corruption. But there is one place where you can be safe, and that is in the assembly. The Lord would be especially interested in conveying that to you because, like Noah, we can say He has prepared an ark for the saving of His house. That is what is said of Noah—he prepared an ark for the saving of his house, and the Lord has done that in the assembly. He has prepared something to preserve you and me until He comes for us and removes the assembly from this world.
So it is needful that our minds should be transformed, they need to be renewed. If our minds are not renewed by communion with the Spirit, by reading the Scriptures and by praying and reading the ministry, our minds will soon become like the minds of ordinary people. They will be filled with business, sport, entertainment, whatever. Well, the apostle wants to preserve us from that line of things, that we should be transformed by the renewing of our mind, to this great end that we may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God. I suppose everyone here, even the young people, would agree that the will of God is good, it is for our blessing; God has in mind to bless us and that means that as we recognise Him and bow to His will, we begin to prove that it is good. It involves our blessing and then as we know God and trust Him we find that His will is acceptable.
There was once a man who was on the road to Damascus and he was not subject to the will of God. The Lord came out of heaven in grace and met him and later it was said to him, “it is hard for thee to kick against goads”, Acts 26: 14. God loves you too much to let you do what your mind naturally inclines to, so you find things are in your way. I suppose it would be a foolish person who would kick against a cattle goad; cattle quickly learn that they cannot contend with the goad, they have to submit and go in the direction indicated. So, it is a great thing to find that we are not kicking against restrictions and limitations. One thing that is very helpful to boys and girls to understand is that God has put authority in your parents because they have love for you, and as they get wisdom from God they are going to direct you in a right path. I would commend to the boys and girls here to read the first ten chapters of Proverbs, because you have there a man who was instructed by his father and his mother. He learned a great deal about the will of God, and you can learn something about the will of God through the instruction of your parents.
Then he says “and perfect will of God”. To put that very simply it means that whatever God does is right; His will is perfect. Indeed there is a man in another scripture who says “as for God, his way is perfect”, Psalm 18: 30. He has come to understand that, whatever happens, the will of God is perfect. If you have any doubt of that, I would point you to God giving up Christ on Calvary’s cross; He was delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, which involved His will, and the blessing of the whole eternal day flows out of that, showing the perfection of the will of God.
I read in 2 Corinthians 4 because we have the second divine Person in the economy mentioned, Jesus. The apostle’s exercise here is that the life also of Jesus may be manifested in our body. Now this is an interesting thing to think of, that the body which you have offered as a living sacrifice to God, according to Romans 12, in 2 Corinthians 4 becomes a vessel for the manifestation of the life of Jesus. We referred to features of that life in the reading, as to what the Lord said, “I am meek and lowly in heart”, Matthew 11: 29. Those are two features of the life of Jesus. There is much more, of course, that comes out in the life of Jesus. The apostle begins by saying that “we have this treasure in earthen vessels”. I would say, with affection and respect, that we saw an evidence in our beloved brother who had to go out, of what an earthen vessel is. Certain things may happen in our vessels that affect us physically, but nevertheless the treasure is there, the treasure is in the earthen vessel. It has been said by others, what comes out in this section is the fragility of the earthen vessel. What this leads us to, is that we are dependent on God—“we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the surpassingness of the power may be of God, and not from us”, 2 Corinthians 4: 7. We have no power inherently or conferred to maintain the earthen vessel. God by His power maintains it. I cannot maintain myself, nor can you. The surpassingness of the power, as he says, must be of God and not from us. This makes us dependent. Not only dependent that we should be preserved physically, but also that the treasure should be maintained intact, and that the body becomes a vehicle for the expression of the life of Jesus.
He says, “and not from us—every way afflicted, but not straitened”. That is, the assembly person is never driven to the wall in a matter; he may be afflicted but not straitened—“seeing no apparent issue” and that casts us on God. You say, if something comes up, How shall I get through this?
How shall I work it out? Well, what he is saying here is that our way is not entirely shut up, so it is not a matter of human ingenuity or cleverness, but rather of quiet dependence on God. “Persecuted, but not abandoned”, how wonderful that is, that we are never given up by God!
There was only One who was abandoned, and that is that we might never be abandoned; God would assure us of that, the Spirit of God in our hearts would assure us of that—“Cast down, but not destroyed; always bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus”. We have been taught that the dying of Jesus is the path of the Lord from the mount of transfiguration to the cross. I have thought a lot about that. One thing that struck me is that, as the Lord went from the mount of transfiguration to the cross, His way became more and more narrowed up. It says, for instance, in one scripture, “he would not walk in Judaea”, John 7: 1. And as He went on, there were fewer and fewer with Him, until finally when His enemies came to take Him in the garden He was left alone; it says that they all forsook Him and fled.
I do not think we will have to be in that position, I do not think any assembly-minded person will one day find himself wholly alone without anyone else. I think we will always have company in the way of other assembly-minded persons. So he says that this is going on in us, “bearing about in the body”, that is that it involves the actual physical being, but it involves the inwards too; “bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may be manifested in our body”. I suppose one of the greatest evidences of the wisdom of God is that, although the devil thought he had banished Christ from the earth, the life also of Jesus is manifested in persons who belong to His body. Think of the wisdom of God; the outward appearance of things looking as though the whole matter was finished, and yet here some two thousand years later, there are persons who are an expression of the life of Jesus. What the devil sought to extirpate from the earth is here in persons who are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and who find that He is the source of life and power subjectively in them.
That is why I referred to the leading of the Spirit of God. He says “for as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God”. Now we understand, of course, that we are all sons of God by faith in Christ Jesus, that by faith we became sons through adoption, even before we had the Spirit of adoption. But then, what God is looking for is that there should be a demonstration here, an incontrovertible demonstration, that His sons are here and the power of the demonstration lies in that they are led by the Spirit of God. So, we have this word that we are not debtors to the flesh, and that in the Spirit we have power to put to death the deeds of the body; the deeds of the body would be over against the life of Jesus in our body. He says, “for as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God”. Wonderful to think of assembly persons, of no account publicly, going through the wilderness as we speak of it, and the evidence that they are sons of God is that they are led by the Spirit. They are not led by their own ambitions or wilful thoughts, or worldly desires, or anything like that; they are led by a divine Person who has come down to be with us, to lead us, to safeguard us, to keep the glory of Christ before us, and to assure us of the certainty of everything that we speak about in our meetings.
It says, “The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit, that we are children of God”. The witness of the Spirit is not connected with what is material; there is the false doctrine abroad in Christendom that if you come into divine things and do this and that, you will become wealthy and so on; it is all of Satan. The divine thought is that we should be led by the Spirit.
As led by the Spirit, we are also children of God, so we are the objects of divine affection and care. The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit; think of the Holy Spirit bearing witness with your spirit and my spirit that we are children of God; that we are the objects of divine care and protection and blessing in a hostile scene, because that is what is in mind here.
But think of the precious privilege we have, “ye have not received a spirit of bondage again for fear”. That belongs to the old system that has been removed in the death of Christ.
Christendom has raised up the old system and it is a system of bondage and fear. What we have come into by the grace of God is a system of liberty and nearness and holy privilege.
“Ye have not received a spirit of bondage again for fear, but ye have received a spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father”. The Lord’s own words become our words. It must be very affecting to the Fathers heart that there are persons here, not only that are led by the Spirit of God, but also who can use, in sincerity and truth, the very words the Lord Jesus used, saying, “Abba, Father”. It shows what holy liberty we have been brought into, and the word is urgent, “whereby we cry, Abba, Father”. It is the outgoing of our spirits, our intelligent affection as to God in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Well that is pretty much, beloved brethren, what I have thought I might speak about, and I trust you yourselves will find it encouraging and refreshing, especially in view of the Lord’s day, the first day of the week, when we have before us the remembrance of the Lord Jesus and the worship of the Father; remembering that the Father seeks such as His worshippers.
May God bless the word.
Address at Denton
18 June 2005