REFRESHMENT
J. Spinks
I was thinking, dear brethren, about the matter of the refreshment that God provides for His people. This scripture was referred to in prayer last night, and I have been thinking of it a little since then. God Himself provides in this way, as the Lord did when He was here; He said to His disciples, “Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place and rest a little”, Mark 6: 31. For those who carry the burden of the testimony, there is divine provision made.
It is not all burden. Thank God that He provides a sphere of refreshment for His people. God Himself is said to have been refreshed when He beheld the creation that He had made; in Exodus it says that “He rested, and was refreshed” (Exodus 31: 17). Of course we can, by the Spirit, look forward and apply that verse to what He will bring in through the Man of His choice in the great moral creation, the Man of whom we have sung, who glorified God on the earth. What pleasure, what refreshment there was for the heart of God when He was here.
And so we can readily think of what pleasure God will get from what He will bring in; a whole universe will bear the stamp of that Man, and God will be refreshed by it.
So God knows what it is to be refreshed, and here He is providing a sphere where the people find something that would speak of divine provision for them. In the previous section they had come to the waters of Mara and they could not drink of it because it was bitter. I think that any exercised
believer knows what that is, but also knows the sweetness of seeing that Christ has been here as the One who has done the will of God. So the waters became sweet. That is an experience that exercised believers go through, that however bitter the experience, you find that, when you bring Christ into it, the waters become sweet, and immediately we come to this sphere which speaks really of eternal life.
I would just apply it very simply, beloved brethren. I think that these twelve springs of water and seventy palm trees would be like a local assembly, composed of persons who have overcome. I think that the palm trees would refer to that, and the springs of water would be those in whom the Spirit is free. What a sphere of refreshment it is! It refers to them spending three days in the wilderness (Exodus 15: 22), and it is indeed a wilderness. It is a wilderness to exercised believers. It is not a wilderness to persons who seek to find their lives here; I do not think that they will experience much of this. But as we are set on the line of being here in the path of the will of God He provides a sphere of refreshment for us, and this is it, a sphere of eternal life, where we can enjoy things together that the world knows nothing of. May the Lord just help us to enjoy these things more, to be here more in the path of the will of God, exercised to find the Lord’s mind, to be in the secret of His mind. I am sure we shall find increasingly these spheres of refreshing; it says in Acts, “that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord” (Acts 3: l9). These are very precious things, to be known increasingly in our localities, dear brethren. May the Lord help us in it, for His name’s sake.
Word in meeting for ministry, Grangemouth
25 December 1984