BEING WITH CHRIST

W. McKillop

Mark 3: 13, 14; Luke 8: 1–3; Matthew 20: 17–19; Mark 4: 35–38

What I would like to speak about, beloved brethren, is quite simple but I think vitally important at the present juncture of the testimony and it is the thought of being with Christ.

You notice in these passages what is emphasised is that persons were with Him. Finally, we shall, of course, be with Him in actuality; the answer no doubt to His prayer in John 17: 24, “Father, as to those whom thou hast given me, I desire that where I am they also may be with me, that they may behold my glory which thou hast given me”. That the Lord’s prayer will be answered is as certain as anything could be for we shall be with Him where He is and we shall see His glory. What a wondrous prospect is before us, how our souls should be exhilarated as we think of it! If we think of those who have fallen asleep, and the great matter of change, the apostle does not finish speaking about that without adding 1 Thessalonians 4: 17, “and thus we shall be always with the Lord”.

The exercise I have is that we might be with the Lord currently in the testimony. I can think of nothing that the Lord desires more than that He should have persons who are with Him, in purity, sympathetically, and supportively of His interests, and who are available to Him for whatever He has in mind. So I read this passage in Mark because the Lord establishes certain principles of operation that He intended to characterise the whole assembly period. I am quite clear that here He was selecting the twelve apostles, but the principles on which the Lord operated then are the same as those on which He is operating now. He goes up into the mountain; the Lord is not operating on the low level of what is current about us religiously, nor is He operating on any low level that may exist in any of our souls. He is operating from this elevated point of view, “he goes up into the mountain, and calls whom he himself would”. What I would like to say specially as to this passage is, if I am in the testimony at all, and you are in it at all, we are so because He has sovereignly called us into it. We have often noted that persons who ran up to Him in the way, the Lord dispensed with quickly because they are unreliable. But those who answer to His sovereign call, He is able to take up and able to use currently in the testimony and in the service of God in the assembly. It says, “they went to him”. I think that is a very great matter to come to, that if you are in fellowship, as we speak, if you are having part in the testimony of our Lord, it is because you have gone to Him. I do not know anything else that will keep us alive in the testimony until the Lord comes except going to Him.

So He appointed the twelve. Perhaps you noticed as we read these scriptures that the thought of twelve enters into them in every case. I think that is another principle that the Lord established at the beginning of the dispensation that He intends to go right through until the end, the thought of the twelve. I am not thinking just of the numeral twelve, but of what it signifies; it refers to the operations of love that the Lord carries on, and that He has persons who are usable in His hand who are almost interchangeable. It has been said, and it is a simple thought, that twelve is the most divisible of numbers. This would mean that the Lord is thinking about His system as something marked by spiritual liberty and flexibility, and yet under Him as sovereignly in charge of everything under God. The first thing said is that they might be with Him. If the Lord has sovereignly called you and me into the testimony, in His grace, it is that we might be with Him, and that is all of us. I am not thinking of what is individual at this point. There are our secret individual links with Christ, and the Lord values those, but I am thinking about the thought of the twelve as relating to what is collective. One thing that

we need to cleave to is that the Lord has in mind the full collective thought of the assembly in His current operations. We were instructed years ago, as older brethren will remember, that when the Lord said to Philadelphia, “shall know that I have loved thee” (Revelation 3: 9). He is thinking about the whole thought of the assembly, and that is really what the twelve has in mind. It is important in a broken day to keep that before us. A great deal of time and effort has been spent among us discussing issues and persons, so to some extent, the full thought that the Lord has in mind has escaped us or has become somewhat cloudy. The Lord would clarify things for us, and say, ‘Lay hold of what I have established as My operating principles at the beginning of the dispensation and be sure that you understand that I am still operating on those principles; I have not given them up, I have not changed them’. So the twelve went to Him. It would be wonderful if the thought of the twelve, as the result of these meetings, is amplified in our localities, and that collectively there is a greater movement inwardly to Him.

In Luke’s gospel, we find that the Lord is the One who is doing the work. Mark would say that the twelve were to do the work, and that is true. One thing I would point out, too, beloved brethren, is that Mark calls attention to the fact the Lord gave names to persons. I would like to encourage everyone, especially those who are younger, to get to the Lord and ask Him how He has named you with a view to where you fit in His system, because what He names you indicates where you are to be placed and how you are to function. Without that there will be a great deal of aimlessness and a good deal of uncertainty as to where I fit and how I am to be one of the twelve. So in Luke’s gospel, “it came to pass afterwards”. Well, we can think about the “afterwards”, to put it that way, of these meetings, that when they finish, the Lord has not stopped operating; He is working in these meetings, I think that is clear to anyone with eyes to see, but He is going to work afterwards and He is doing the work. Long ago, we were told by a great servant, that all anyone who serves can do is to bring light to the saints but the work must be God’s. We had that in the reading, “it is God who works in you both the willing and the working according to his good pleasure”, Philippians 2: 13. I am very conscious that, in attempting to speak a word to you, beloved brethren, in affection and respect, I cannot effectuate a single thing inwardly in any one of you which will be for God; it must be His work.

So, “he went through the country city by city, and village by village, preaching and announcing the glad tidings of the kingdom of God”. A good deal of the discouragement among us, and a good deal of the cloudiness of vision is because we need to come back under the influence of Christ as He has preached the glad tidings of the kingdom of God. As long as I cleave to my own thoughts, my view will be cloudy, and I will be uncertain where I fit in the divine system. So it says, “and the twelve were with him”. The Lord loves us and He wants us to be with Him, the twelve. The twelve would mean that there is no disunity, there are no persons here and there saying, this and that, things which are not the Lord’s mind. You notice, it is city by city, and village by village; the Lord has concern about every locality. In this passage, He would say to us, I am coming there because the thought of the twelve must not be surrendered. The saints must be kept together in the unity of the faith as well as the unity of the Spirit. Not only must the inward bond of affection be maintained so that we speak well of one another, but there must be the unity of the faith so that the mind of Christ is what governs us locally and universally. So these women come onto view. They are honourable women, like those we considered in Matthew, and it says, “and many others”.

There is plenty of room, dear sisters, for all of you in the “many others, who ministered to him of their substance”. Substance is acquired as we make way for wisdom. The early chapters of Proverbs show how to

acquire spiritual substance; to put it very simply, it is that you come to it that the wisdom of God is in Christ and you go to Him, and as going to Him you will acquire substance and then you can minister to Him.

We referred at the close of the reading to what is before us in the Lord’s coming. I read in Matthew because I want to suggest two things for our consideration. One is the Lord’s tenderness and priestly grace in keeping us together in the way. “And Jesus, going up to Jerusalem, took the twelve disciples with him”. Here are the twelve and they are disciples; the preaching of the glad tidings of the kingdom of God has had its effect and so the Lord can take these persons like ourselves, apart in the way and open up something to us. Here He was going up to Jerusalem to die and He would open up that to them to draw them sympathetically into the current of His sufferings. Matthew does not say as Mark does that “they understood not”. These are really kingdom men who are becoming assembly men. It is worth noting that this being the assembly gospel, it opens with the thought of ‘God with us’ and closes with, “behold, I am with you all the days”, but the same Person; Jesus Christ, “the same yesterday, and today, and to the ages to come”, Hebrews 13: 8. When it was said, “and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which is, being interpreted, ‘God with us’” (Matthew 1: 23), it alludes to Christ, and at the end He says, “I am with you all the days”, Matthew 28: 20.

The Lord would say to us that if you are going to be with Me, you need to understand that it is a suffering way. Not that we are going to be burned at the stake, not perhaps that we shall even suffer as believers are in Eastern countries, but, we might say, in a greater sense, we shall suffer in our spirits in a priestly way, taking on the iniquity of the sanctuary. I would not in any sense deprecate the physical sufferings of believers in other parts of the world; indeed, we pray for them that they might be strengthened, but our part, in suffering, is largely what we carry in our spirits in a priestly way. And the Lord would say, If you come into this with Me, and with the twelve, be prepared to suffer.

But then I would like to add something else, which might not be apparent in this passage, that at the present time the Lord is thinking about His appearing and His going up to Jerusalem again, not to suffer, but to reign in glory. It is a great thing to think about what is in the Lord’s mind. As one of the earlier servants said, the first movement will be at the right hand of God; it will not be in Palestine. Those things have a certain significance, but the real movement will be at the right hand of God. Would the Lord not tell the twelve disciples who were with Him, ‘I am about to go to Jerusalem and take up My rights, I am about to appear’?

I think He would. The brethren may remember that someone asked Mr. Stoney if the Lord would come in his lifetime, and he said, No. This person said, Why do you say that? and he said, Because if He were going to do so, He would have told me. You see, if we are with Him, He is going to tell us things. The wording here is interesting. He took the twelve disciples with Him, apart in the way. They are in the right way, they are in the way of God, they are in the way of faith, the way of testimony, the way of holiness, but the Lord takes them apart. He is saying to us, I believe, beloved brethren, ‘I just want you all to settle down a little bit and I want to say something to you about what I propose to do’. I have referred to His coming and His appearing, but I think the Lord would say something to us, as we are with Him, about what He intends to do in the testimony in the next little while, and I am not being fanciful in saying that. I am quite sure that if we just will be with Him and will let Him take us apart in the way. He will say, ‘For the moment just lay aside all that busyness; I know you are raising families, I know that your business requires a lot of you, I know that there is a great deal in the way of demand, but I want you just to come apart with Me for I have something to say to you.’ He loves us too much, beloved, to let us go on without knowing just what He is thinking now. I think the essence of union is that the assembly knows what He is thinking.

So I referred finally to that passage in Mark 4, “And on that day, when evening was come, he says to them”. We might say we are in the evening of the assembly period; it is just about over. As our brother said in the first reading, the time is short; we are in the evening; that does not mean we are in darkness, but it means that something is coming to a close, a certain day is finishing. “Let us go over to the other side”. This leads them to very intelligent and effective action. You notice it says, “having sent away the crowd”. That is what they did. In other places, the Lord sent the crowd away, but here, they do it because if they are going to the other side, they have to leave the crowd behind, whatever the crowd may represent, and “they take him with them”. Notice that, it is not the Lord taking them with Him, but they are taking Him with them, and it says, ‘as He was’. I would like to ask us all, beloved brethren, Is Christ as He is, all that we need in our localities? Are we able in affection and sympathy, and yet reverence, to take Him with us but, as He is? Here they took Him, as He was; they were not adding anything to Him, they were not saying, for instance, that we need something more than the ministry in the revival. They were not saying perhaps there are other things that have not come out in the ministry of brethren that are worth looking into; they take Him with them, as He was. I think it illustrates what the apostle says in 2 Corinthians as to simplicity as to the Christ. I would think that if we take Him with us as He is, it would be in the light of Colossians, that He is the image of the invisible God, He is the head of all principality and power, He is the Son of the Father’s love, He is the head of the body. Could anything be added to Him? Nothing! They take Him with them as He was. The word for us, I believe, is that we take Him with us as He is; we need nothing else. He is everything to us! I think they illustrate here that He indeed, the Christ, was their life. If we take Him with us as He is, we shall

show that Christ is our life; that Person is our life. What a triumph at the end of a prolonged dispensation marked by so much that has caused, we might say, sorrow in heaven as well as on earth, that there are persons who say, We shall take Him with us as He is, the Christ who is our life. Notice again, it is the thought of the twelve, the Christ who is our life, not my life, not your life, individually, but the Christ who is our life. And it says, “in the ship”. Then the Spirit of God adds, “But other ships also were with him”.

You notice nothing is said about them because He is not in those ships; He is in the ship. Let us not spend time trying to decide whether or not the Lord is somewhere else, the Lord is where He is. Where He was here was in the ship, and He was there restfully. There is a real touch of affection here, “and he was in the stern sleeping on the cushion”. Mr. Taylor said that some hand placed that cushion there for the Lord’s comfort. Can we together in our localities, beloved brethren, provide comfortable conditions for Christ? Can we take Him, as He is, with us? How affecting that He would submit to that, but He knows it is because there is pure uncorrupted affection for Him, and so He would let us take Him with us, as He is, and then He can be restful. It is very touching that He was in the stern sleeping. Think of how restful the Lord is in spite of all that is going on outside. The storm is not in the ship, the storm is outside the ship and the Lord is sleeping on the cushion. As Mr. Darby remarked, the only time scripture shows the Lord sleeping is when there was nothing else He could do.

What a model for us! And so He was in the stern sleeping on the cushion. I do not go on to the rest of the chapter because it is not the point in what I am saying, but I would commend this affectionately to you, beloved brethren, that we might be with Him. We soon shall be with Him eternally, but think of the privilege, the honour, the distinction of being with Him currently in the testimony and in the service of God, not just individually but on the principle of the twelve. I think nothing would

gladden the Lord’s heart more than to see this kind of unity among us universally, and all of us committed to this thought of the twelve, and working it out in the appreciation of His sovereignty in calling us into His own system and naming us in that connection so that we might function there for His pleasure. May God bless the word.

Address at Vancouver
17 August 2001