I have been thinking of you moving to a new place in the wilderness. I see that there is no real happiness here until we accept this world as really a vast howling desert -- a dry and thirsty land where no water is. When we truly accept it as a place where there is nothing for the new man, then we look to the Lord alone as our resource:
'Heavenly springs shall there restore thee,
Fresh from God's exhaustless tides.' (Hymn 76)
We are saved out of Egypt -- the world of judgment, by the death and resurrection of Christ, and we enter on His triumph, as we have walked through the Red Sea. His death -- the only way out of our own death, and thus not only are we in peace, but the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost. You first know the happy terms on which the blessed God is with you; next -- thou there may be a long interval, that the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made you free from the law of sin and death. You are not in liberty, but as you are in the life of Christ. Many have a sense of the love of God, and how He is towards them, who are not in liberty, that is, not living in the life of Christ. It is then you know Him in a new way, and you find your joys in that which ministers to His life. You are now peculiarly attached to Him; you were first drawn to Him by His work for you; now you know Him as your life, and you are so bound to Him in love that you can say, "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?" (Romans 8:35). Now the fact of living His life of itself reduces this world to a wilderness;
there is nothing in it for the life of Christ. If you live His life, if He lives in you, you must live outside this scene; and as you do, you receive from Him the manna, that is, grace from Himself to live here as He lived here. But if you are not in His life, if Christ be not living in you, you could not live here as He lived here; you could not get the manna -- the life which He lived here. No one could have His resources in the wilderness but Himself, and you must be in His life, He must live in you, before He could lead you into the resource that He had when He was in the world -- which was a real wilderness to Him. If He lives in you, you are sure to get the manna:
I feel that we lose ground when we accept that which ministers to our natural life, and when we are not with constancy set in liberty from ourselves, in His life -- jealous lest anything should divert us from living in His order of things.
The Lord grant that your happiness may not be from anything around you, but that you may so enjoy Christ outside of everything, that Jordan may be a real privilege to you -- liberation in death with Christ from everything here. This doubtless is the happiest moment for any one who is truly in the wilderness.
I see great importance in the Lord leading His disciples apart to rest awhile: "and when they were alone, he ex-pounded all things to his disciples" (Mark 4:34). I am sure that the reading of the word and prayer are necessary, and that great help comes to us through ministry; yet there is another exercise which surpasses all the rest; indeed, the others are, I might say, invalid without it. I mean meditation. "Meditate upon these things; give thyself wholly to them" (1 Timothy 4:15). I believe that as your physical constitution requires
rest, or all your power would become enfeebled, however you might eat and drink and act; so it is with the spiritual man. However much you may take in, and receive in an honest and good heart, there must be, like a grain of wheat, months underground, unseen by any mortal eye, a secret germination before there is the blade -- anything to be seen. The most valuable grain requires a longer time underground. I mean that the deeper the truth I receive, the longer the time of meditation before it characterises me. I think many do not habituate themselves to sitting before the Lord; one does not appear to be doing anything, and yet that is the very time in which the peculiar lines of His mind and pleasure for one are acquired. See the effect of His presence on the two disciples at Emmaus. They only saw Him, and the effect was so great that they started at once for Jerusalem -- the place He Himself was going to, though He said nothing to them about it. It is wonderful the unaffected correspondence to His own present mind there would be in us if we were more in His company. Being guided and decided by a text is legally right, but there is not about it the ease, the unction, the concert with Him, which a sight of Himself imparts. It will be deep joy to my heart if your coming seclusion through the Lord's grace should be a time of being 'beside' yourself, that His society may so conform you to Him that you will come forth able to comprehend all His words better, simply because you know Himself better.
I am indeed thankful for the way you write about the heavenly side of truth, I believe in your heart no other could please you. If you were dead you would be in unbroken enjoyment with Christ where He is. You are a new being with divine ability to enjoy Him, but the marvel of God's grace is, that we who are saved from the ruin and misery of the first man, are left down here where we were in misery, to be not only in abounding joy by the Spirit, but still more, to be here as members of His
body -- descriptive of the heavenly Christ, where He is not. The calling is God's calling, and none but God could produce this in either you or me. The treasure is in an earthen vessel. The Spirit's ministry attaches me to Christ (Ephesians 4:13), and God's hand in discipline severs me from every obstruction, as it is felt to be an obstruction. These two actions are always going on. The Spirit attaches and discipline detaches.
.I believe many do not in their faith go beyond millennial saints. I am studying the difference between the saint now and the saint in the millennium. Forgiveness, absolute forgiveness of sins and earthly joys can go on together. To be subject to the Holy Ghost's control can be accepted in terms while seeking earthly things. The law as the rule of life can be accepted while seeking earthly things. Remembering the blood, its efficacy, and the benefit of Christ's work, in adoration and worship, can go on with earthly things.
The easy way of getting at truth through the Synopsis has injured many. The divine teaching is not one bit easier now than it ever was. There is no advance in occupation with Christ without a corresponding displacement in you. Christ is not magnified in my body but as the flesh is driven back. God only can do this.
As to the life of our Lord here in the flesh it was wholly consistent with eternal life. He was ever the expression of God. There was a divine beauty about each act, though He was a real man. He never learned anything from any one but God. But I do not like defining. Christ is my life now. He was here, He is in heaven, and He will never be here again as He was here. He lives unto God. I believe many imagine that Christ lived here as the saints will live in the millennium. I think the great teaching of the first three gospels is that Christ raises me above everything, not that He removes storms and troubles from me. He makes me superior to them, because He was in them; now He is not in them; He is quite out of them, and there I am called to enjoy Him.
The question in your letter is a very important one -- 'How to keep clear of what hinders'. You write, 'I used to think that separation was more from things without, but now I see that it is an inward work accomplished with God'. You are quite right; but the more you are separated unto God, the more you are in His light, the more will you be separate from things without, because you will feel that they are incongruous and inconsistent. Every Christian has a measure of separation; he separates according to his conscience. Thus with many their separation is up to their consciences. The conscience is a good guard but not a guide. The Lord is the guide by the Spirit or through the light of the word. It is as you know the Lord -- "In thy light shall we see light" (Psalm 36:9) -- that you learn separation. A separation which you saw was necessary and right last year would be no rule for you when the Lord is better known. I do not believe that you could have a sense of the moral disparity of things here until you first know the order of things which suits Him, and you cannot know this, but as you are in His presence. It is not merely reading nor praying in itself. I can describe it only by the Queen of Sheba in the presence of Solomon; she was so absorbed with Solomon and his things that there was "no more spirit in her". You get a sense in this nearness to Him of His holiness that you could not acquire anywhere else, and as you are transformed into moral correspondence to Him, you find that you have new tastes and new interests. You are not trying to have them, you have acquired them in His presence. Hence natural tastes and interests which previously had an acknowledged place are now superseded without any effort. You will get a good illustration of this in studying the difference between El-elohe-Israel and Bethel (Genesis 33, 35). Your altar, or morally your approach to God, indicates the measure of your relation to Him or His relation to you. Jacob was off the line at El-elohe-
Israel -- he had bought a parcel of a field, he assumes that he is God's object. After much discipline there, God tells him to go to Bethel. It is twenty years since he had been there, but in remembrance of the character of the place, Jacob said to his household: "Put away the strange gods that are among you, and be clean, and change your garments" (Genesis 35:2). You must know holiness first, and be at home in it, before you can naturally carry it out. The great secret of all blessing is to come from the Lord. Every Christian goes to Him. You will be much interested in studying how the servant in the Old Testament was pre-pared for his service. The Lord draw your heart so to Himself that you may come from Him to do every service. Do not attempt to do too much. Let quality not quantity be the desire of your heart as to your service. A fruit tree grows fruit for its owner and his friends. This is your calling. The Lord bless you much.
It is a time of deep blessing when you realise, though it is always true, that there is but a step between this world of sin and sorrow and the presence and home of the Lord. Instead of taking that step continually in spirit, the tendency is to seek for alleviation and relief here. Of course, if we did not receive mercy we could not exist here, but the question with me is -- Do we really regard His home as our home, or are we wanting Him to make our natural home comfortable? I believe all the present contention arises from ignorance in some, and from reluctance in others, to accept that Christ, who is our life, is not here. He was here, but He will never be here again as He was here. We are here, and we, as His word works in us, find His sympathy and support here; but to find Himself, we must rise with Him, and thus leave morally all this scene to which we are naturally attached. My comfort is that Christ lives in me; hence in things down here He enables me to walk, and to behave here as He did, and as I am in communion with Him, I know -- "because I
live, ye shall live also" (John 14:19). What He was comes to me from Him, and what He is is more naturally mine, because He is my life and I am united to Him there. What He was is necessary for my pilgrim journey and will terminate, the other never will.
Now study the epistles and you will find that the most part of them is taken up with telling you what Christ is to you here. In Romans you do not touch resurrection as to yourself. In 2 Corinthians you reach Christ in glory. 1 John is acquainting you with Christ who is not here. He is the eternal life.
As to new birth, as far as I understand, it is God's sovereign act before you have believed, and that it is thus stated in John 3. Where it is said "born of God", it is in connection with faith. I believe Mr. -------- said 'The Son quickeneth always'; but in my judgment the point of that passage (John 5:21) is that man is raised out of death; the Son as Man -- the last Adam "quickeneth whom he will". I quite agree with you, that the more heavenly the truth is, the more difficult it is to explain, and therefore to communicate. 'It is an out-of-the-world condition of things.' It is outside of the conception and the sensibility of the human mind.
I perfectly agree with the statement, 'Christ has to be tasted and known in the soul'. I may believe that I am united to Christ, but I do not understand it nor know it until I have tasted of that great fact.
I said to --------, 'If the Queen were to make two offers to you, one -- that she would make your concerns and interests her object, and the other -- that if you were really attached to her you might come and share all her concerns and interests, which would you choose?' The answer was, 'If we accept the second we should be diverted from or give up the first. When I am really interested in Christ's interests my own interests are merged in His'.
The text I give you is, "Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah's tent, and took Rebekah, and she became his wife; and he loved her" (Genesis 24:67). The greatness of Christ's love is not known until union with Him is known. Then you know the love of Christ that passeth knowledge. I feel one has a very feeble conception of that love. Every believer loves Him for His work. That love likes to make much of Him, as the woman in Luke 7. Then comes the love of knowing that He is your life: you are in Him. You suffer now for Him and with Him. Next, you love Him as indispensable to you -- the Priest who bears you above every pressure while in His company, so that you are without a cloud before God. You are then drawn away from the earth. Next, you seek Him at His own side of things in the assembly. Many turn to the assembly to gain something for themselves. The assembly is the only place where you can find Christ on the earth according to His present interests. When in gladness of heart you have found Him there, you are sure to be interested in His interests on the earth. The queen of Sheba illustrates the greatness of your gain when you behold Christ's glory as He is in the assembly. The more you are with Him, the more you seek to be under His full control. Then you learn Him as Head. Now your cup is full, and you come out here in His sensibilities and qualities. One step more and you are brought to the consummation of bliss. You realise that you are united to Him in heaven, and now you are in perfect concert with His mind, and you share His ability to do His pleasure; and now His love that passeth knowledge becomes known to you, and your one thought is to be descriptive of Him here. At first, you see, it is all from Himto you, but as you are really at His side you receive from Him for Himself; He is paramount, which is the proof that you are in the consciousness of union. I hope that you may fully enter into the purpose of God for you. I see that it is not enough now to desire the fair beauty of the Lord. No! there cannot be any confidential
service now but as it comes from love, and love is only known to us as we know His love for us, and you never can know it but near Him. The love in Canticles is for yourself. Even John leaning on His breast is for oneself. It is only when I realise that I am united to Him that I am, as it were, merged in Him. If you know this greatest blessing, you will find that everything which is not Christ is less and less attractive to you, and you will find much more alone with Him than in any company.
It is most profitable and interesting to review the past, to remember all the way the Lord has led us. There are epochs in our history. The gentle and blessed way by which He has led one from one step upwards to another. The surrender He has led one to make for Him, and the consequent gain. But when we review our history we see how slowly we have surrendered all of the old man, and through Gilgal -- the only entrance to the place where He is -- have found our all in Him. The progress is slow, but we know that it is real, not at first from the gain, but from the sense of relief in the removal of the obstacle, as a mote from the eye. If you are true to yourself you will find that there is some link to the earth, and by it that you are held back; the last link is the one most difficult to break. The one in the ascendant is the stone before the wheel; and when you are in the energy of the Spirit it shows itself in the removal of this obstruction. There is nothing more interesting than the way the stone is rolled away. Go back to your conversion and recall your exercises before the Saviour displaced the sinner to the joy of your heart. Then what a step, what a surrender, and how great a gain when you separated from the world and found yourself in company with His own gathered to His name. Well, many doubtless, have been the surrenders since. It is when you become "a young man", a strong, intelligent, capable man of God that the conflict begins from without. "Love not the world, neither the
things that are in the world" (1 John 2:15). Surely it is a fine sight to see a saint refusing everything here which suits and attracts a man. Then you are a "father"; you have found compensation, or the "manifold more" in Christ. I might be in spirit at the door of heaven as at the door of a garden, with the key of it in my hand, when a picture or a worry might hinder me from entering. My title is unquestionable, but I am diverted from entering, and there will be no entering until the stone be removed; though there may be increased vigour, yet health is not re-established until the distraction, be it pleasure or pain, be removed. I do not think that improvement in spiritual health is the same as progress. I do not see how any one can really progress but inside the door of Gilgal. I may be gaining in health and in the enjoyment of life, but it is as the old man is put off that I grow in heavenly tastes and ways.
I daresay you have surrendered as much as any one, yet you might be detained or diverted as a Barnabas was, and even as Paul was. All I press upon you is, that surrender must go on "We which live are alway delivered unto death" (2 Corinthians 4:11). The most disappointing people possible are those who made a great surrender at first in the way of separation, and are so satisfied with their one great achievement that they think no more is necessary. They are like ancient towers, monuments of greatness in another day, covered with ivy, but neither capable nor fitted for the exigencies of the present hour. I do not say that you should be occupied with surrender, but sensibly in the Spirit inside Gilgal, where all the old is left behind; consequently, the more you are educated and imbued with the new-"Christ everything and in all", the more separate you must be from the old when you return to it.
The Lord I believe is always preparing the loving heart for some advancement, and this advancement cannot be without the surrender of the first man, which would neutralise it. Hence surrender is a prelude to advancement, "He, casting away his garment, arose, and came to Jesus" (Mark 10:50). Paul was in prison, John was in exile before either were sufficiently dissociated from earthly things to be fully occupied, one -- with the things in heaven, and the other -- with the Lord's ways on earth. I have written a long letter,
and have indifferently expressed what I desire may characterise you. To advance to His stature be your one great thought -- going on to perfection; not merely happiness and usefulness, but increasing with the increase of God; and for this you must daily forget the things that are behind. May your divine stature greatly increase to the joy of the Lord.
... The truth with many is like the old cathedrals, the form correct, but the strength gradually declining. Even with the true-hearted the attempt and desire is too often to carry on Christian things by human means; and with nominal Christians, refinement and luxury, mentally and materially, are sought instead of religion. All this is to give man prominence.
Well, thank the Lord, He is still working. The divine path is an impossibility to man. Minister to, or suit the natural man, and you must diverge from the divine path. God could not propose any path to His own now but one impossible to man. Propose one possible for man, and you have departed from the path in which Christ walked, which is the only one pleasing to God.
As to the difference between "I will come to you" and "I ... will manifest myself to him" (John 14:18, 21), the first is to the assembly, the latter to the individual. The former is the fact that He would not leave them orphans; the latter, that He would make the faithful one sensible of His company. Paul knew the latter when he said, "The Lord stood with me, and strengthened me" (2 Timothy 4:17).
I believe the one great hindrance to our progress is the limited measure of our desire and preparation. We often think that we are wishing for and ready for much more than we are. We always get what we value; we may use any amount of adjectives in prayer, but God knows the mind of the Spirit. Christians in general never seek more of Christ than His support down here. You do not touch the old corn of the land until after Gilgal. How
can any one be in the current of Christ's present interests unless he knows Him where He is? If you want to know any one as he is, you must be in his company. "He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shew it unto you" (John 16:14).
I have had, through the Lord's goodness, a very happy time, though with occasional exercises. "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning" (Psalm 30:5). At present I feel distressed at the imperfect way the truth is apprehended. From the gospel up, Satan's object is to deprive us of it as much as he can. A measure is accepted which meets man's need, but our relation to God is not reached. I ask myself, How is this lack to be corrected? It is very helpful to see in Ephesians 4, that if you were well grown you would not be "tossed to and fro". The higher you go the safer you are a fine principle, hence Satan would prevent us from going to the top!
I have been lately very much interested in the subject of intimacy with the Lord (John 10:14, 15), where it begins, and the height or measure to which it rises. I think it begins when I see Him risen from the dead, as Jonathan saw David after he had slain Goliath, and it rises to union; but I must leave it to you to trace it out for yourselves.
I am glad that you feel as you do about prayer. I feel that one has so little faith in one's prayers. Thank God one has sometimes, and it is very blessed.
The nearer we get to the Lord for one another the deeper the love, because it is more as He loves.
The Lord has been very gracious to me. At each place I see a great advance in those who have been exercised as to the truth. When the truth in its divine immensity comes before me I have no relief but in prayer, casting myself on the Lord to lead me into the knowledge of it. I was struck the other day with the words "the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him" (Ephesians 1:17). If you have not the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him you cannot apprehend God's calling. Christianity is more and more wonderful to me daily. John does not recognise as Christian any below the little ones -- those who know the Father, and have the unction of the Holy One. I do not see in many the knowledge of the Father. The one who knows the Father, knows that as His son he belongs to the divine circle. In that circle the interests of God are the subject of interest. The child wants many a thing in the nursery which are not in the drawing-room, and he is brought into the latter as fit for it. I am too conscious of the little knowledge I have of this circle. The nursery is properly on the earth, and many are satisfied if they can appropriate the psalms -- God's care and interest for you in your path here -- who seem never to apprehend that they are called to the drawing-room; but I must not run on.
I hope dear -------- is prospering at --------. The Ananias and Sapphira element is working still; namely, obtaining credit for a devotedness which is not deserved; but we have only to follow up the conflict in the Spirit of Him who is greater than Gideon. There is much loss when a victory is not followed up. The Lord help him to do good service at this critical time.
I believe the defect in souls in general is the incompleteness of their conversion. It is pardon that is apprehended, and not acceptance. Acceptance embraces God's side -- how He feels, and this should be chief, for you as a sinner have offended Him. The offender has been removed from His eye by a Man -- the Lord Jesus Christ, and He can receive you on the ground of the Man who glorified Him in bearing your judgment. You do not enjoy acceptance but in the way in which it was acquired or effected for you, and if you are in the acceptance you know that no improvement of the flesh could commend you to God, and that you cannot be before Him but in Christ, and hence "the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death" (Romans 8:2). If you are in any degree dark as to the crucifixion of the old man, you are not in acceptance, and your liberty by the Spirit can never go beyond your conscious acceptance.
I feel the Spirit of God does not get His place with us because we do not seek to be in consonance with our acceptance.
As to your new work, the class of women, if you confine it to the poor and ignorant, it may be useful. I believe the place of power for a woman is with the individual. I do not think she is intended to lead or guide a company. I believe women are the best visitors, and they are very helpful to individuals. The Lord will direct you. I have no doubt that where there is the simple desire to help souls, the desire will be granted, and the blessing you seek for others will be abundantly granted to yourself. I look to Him to keep you in the sense of His present favour. I think in these difficult days each step must be well considered before the Lord.
It is a great cheer to me to see a home descriptive of the heavenly Man, the Lord Jesus Christ. Some one speaking to me lately was saying how nice and attractive some Christians are, though they are not on the heavenly line, sometimes more so than those who are really set for it. Now I think I can explain this. The former study to suit man and to commend themselves to man's judgment. The latter study Christ more. I daresay many would consider Martha a very estimable woman, kindness and consideration personified, while they would regard Mary as reserved, absorbed and exclusive; but she was the real servant after all.
It is a day when you must have heavenly beauty or you will be carried away by earthly -- Babylonish beauty. Babylon is the present rival. If a saint be diverted from the heavenly it is by something earthly, and the more naturally beautiful it is, the more ensnaring. The effort of the enemy is to divert from the unseen and the heavenly, by occupying you with the visible which is in itself beautiful. The argument is that there is no harm in it, but however harmless in a natural point of view it diverts you from the heavenly, and that is harm indeed.
I do trust and desire that dear --------'s trial in his business may be a great gain to him. The highest order of discipline is to help us. Trial of circumstances is less trial than that of health or bereavement. May the Lord explain it all fully to him.
The Lord bless you much. You must rise to Christ in heaven (Ephesians 3:16) before you can descend with heavenly ability to act for Him here.
Your view of everything here ought to partake of that of Noah after the flood. The first thing, the altar of a sweet savour -- one unbroken offering of praise, the preciousness of Christ intensified to your heart. Nothing is so acceptable to the Lord, as you see in the case of Noah.
So pleased was He with the expression of the fragrance of Christ from the hands and heart of His servant that thereon He makes new and most favourable terms with man, still as weak, and in nature as corrupt as ever. And herein we learn a principle of His way of acting with each of us individually. When we, after a night of storm or a time of exile in whatever form it may be, come to an end of all flesh, and each of us, believe me, has to come to it one day in some form or other; the flood must overtake every saint one way or another, and it never will be in an honouring way. If we after the flood, and when again on the land, occupy ourselves primarily and pre-eminently with the goodness of God, and His delight in us, not re-calling the past, or fearing the future, He will be so pleased that He will appoint new blessings and unbounded favour for us even in this scene; for "as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him" (Psalm 103:13). He loveth to be gracious. The altar of burnt-offering -- the presenting in one ever-continuing strain the fragrance and value of Christ is your work; mercy and favour are His answers to your work, and you will find it in everything as you delight yourself in Him. "Delight thyself also in the Lord; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart" (Psalm 37:4). Lazarus is not only raised out of the dark prison of death, but he is freed from the grave clothes which bar his liberty, and then he sits at the table with Christ.
The Lord lead you to see how much He values your heart. "My son, give me thine heart" (Proverbs 23:26), and the heart occupied with Christ commands every blessing from God, as it is said, "Because ye have loved me" (John 16:27). You are now to render to Him the fruit of your lips, giving thanks to His name, and "this also shall please the Lord better than an ox or bullock that hath horns and hoofs" (Psalm 69:31). With you the winter is over and gone, and now the singing time has come. The flood has passed, and the dove has the olive leaf in her mouth.
... I do not think that, as a rule, saints are enough impressed with the gravity of choosing a place to reside in. In Israel's time it was of so much importance that the ark went out of its place, and took three days journey in advance to find out a resting place for them, and in that place there were two things which could not be obtained in any other place. The one was the cloud, the other the manna -- guidance and food -- both now combined in the Lord. I do trust you may find both at --------. It is not always that there is much food, where there is much ministry. Food is that which feeds, and you know that often the Lord's crumb is more than a long discourse.
There is a great deal in the way in which you enter on a new path. In the type the manna was gathered before the day began. No doubt morning prayer is a relic of this solemn exercise. I am not slighting morning prayer, but I do not think it is enough. I understand gathering manna before the sun was up, to be this -- I have waited on the Lord until He assured me that He would be my continued support in this new path, even as manna for the day was obtained before the day began: it was, so to speak, in the cupboard. You can ever fall back to the way He revealed Himself to you then. You will have your troubles and your difficulties. You will see His wonders in the deep, but He will bring you to the desired haven....
The Lord be with you in this new path. The more He is to you, the better you will serve His own, and the happier you will be yourself. It is very interesting and helpful the difference between the act of the woman in Luke 7 and that of Mary in Mark 14. In Luke 7 the act of devotedness is to make much of Him here; many make sacrifices with this motive; some build a church, and the like. The act in Mark 14 is devotedness that sacrifices what would lend distinction to oneself, because He is no longer here. Deep was her grief because of the death of
Lazarus, but the abnegation of that which claims acknowledgment with regard to herself, is the tribute of her heart to Him, rejected from the earth....
The beginning gives a character to every history. When we begin with the Lord, we are sure in His grace to return to our start, which was the work of His grace. He remembers our brightest day, and restores us to it. See Jeremiah 2:2. The divine principle is that you are prepared for the step before you take it. The manna was given before the day began; you come from the Lord prepared for the new course which is before you; as you read in Psalm 23, you come from a scene of abundant resources into one of dearth and death. You are like a ship provisioned before the voyage is undertaken. My desire for you is, that you may be assured by Himself that He is with you: "Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me". I do not mean that there should be prayer that your house should be devoted to His service. I mean that as an Israelite was sure that he had gathered manna sufficient for the coming day, that you, in a far deeper and fuller way, should be assured that the Lord has ordered this course for you, and that as on the arm of His might you enter on it, you have His arm all the way.
May you begin with this confidence and be greatly blessed in doing His pleasure, and may many rejoice in you as channels of His grace. May you seek the prosperity of His own, not merely to please, but to please unto edification. Christ loved the church and gave Himself for it. This is true service.
I rejoice that you have happy remembrances of your little time in L--------. When we remember that Christ is our life, it is sad how much we can enjoy apart from Him. We do not intend to give Him up, but like the bride in Canticles 5, we "sleep" -- we are not in the activity of life!
Last Sunday morning a brother read from John 20:11, a few verses. It is very affecting the way Mary Magdalene learns the Lord. He does not resume association on natural grounds. To the natural eye He is not here; He is seen by the spiritual eye in the assembly. May we feel more fully and deeply that He is not here, and consequently know the deep joy of seeing Him in the Holiest. The more truly we accept that we are in the place of His rejection, the more shall we seek Him in the sphere of His exaltation. He was our Saviour on the earth; He is our Priest in heaven. Many never get beyond the Saviour; they do not enjoy association with Him in the blessedness of His nearness to God.
I feel I ought not to look for anything where Christ died and was rejected, but that I can look for everything where my Lord is in glory.
The great desire and satisfaction of affection is company. If your heart is really set on the Lord, nothing can satisfy you but His company. "They left all and followed him". How could I enjoy union if I did not value companionship? We must learn Hebrews before Ephesians.
My text for you is -- spiritual things are communicated by spiritual means. It is necessary in order that the conscience should be affected that you should understand the words addressed to you, hence the apostle says
that he would rather say five words with his understanding that thereby he might teach others also. Though the truth is clearly presented to the understanding, yet there must be conscience (that is sense of the claim of God on you), or there will be no response. It is not merely that you see the truth proposed, but you see that you are to be an exponent of it as proposed. You are cast upon God, and then the Spirit works in you. The good seed sown on the rock is truth received with joy; there is not conscience work; where there is, there is no jubilant apprehension nor quick acknowledgment of the truth. When there is conscience, the truth works in the soul before it is confessed or expressed in words. It grows like a tree in the roots before the branches. Nurserymen transplant their young trees often, in order that there may be more roots than branches.
There is one unfailing mark of having received the word in your natural mind, and that is, you will be sure to rely on natural means for the accomplishment of it. Eve accepted the promise of God in her natural mind, and reckoned that it would be fulfilled in a natural way. Doubtless Lot accepted in his natural mind the word to Abram; he openly takes the path of faith, there was a good profession, the branches were there, but the roots were feeble. King Saul, in essaying to destroy Amalek according to God's command, illustrates the way the natural mind accepts and interprets the word of God; all that was vile and refuse he utterly destroyed, but spared the best of everything and the king! He had no sense of the divine meaning of the word. The defection of Barnabas is a solemn warning to us; we should have expected from his course and service that there was no flaw in the roots. The branches were good, but a serious imperfection in the roots was disclosed when he was carried away by the dissimulation of Peter.
It is a notable fact that the day of increased light and power is the day of testing to every saint. A bright day had dawned in the church at the conference at Jerusalem, and now, with the increase of light the contrariety to it is exposed. Many a one goes on fairly in the twilight, who is detected and alienated in the bright hour. I wish for
you as well as for myself that the word of God may be not only understood as to its meaning, nor merely admired. I think admiration is very deceptive. May God's claim on us be so felt that the Spirit will be free to form the word in our souls. I believe as the sense of God's claim is on me, because of His word, my conscience is exercised; I pray, and then the Spirit engrafts the word in me, it becomes part of my being, I grow thereby. May you be thus richly blessed.
I think there would be something peculiar about one who had the Lord as his resource. I do not think that it could be known except as He is known, and then it would be the natural consequence. The eye finds naturally its resource in its head; there is no effort about it. If it sees anything the head is at once referred to concurrently with the seeing. If Christ is everything to me He must be my resource. As a rule Christians seek everything more than the true subjective. The true subjective is loving the Lord, and being in moral correspondence to Him. The church was to lose the candlestick because it had left first love, though the works were commendable. In reading the word or listening to it, according as I have capacity and true taste, I am delighted with it; but you will remark that the one who reads or hears the word with the sense that he is to correspond with it hears or reads as if he were depressed, because he is conscious at the time that if that word rules him he must come out in a new colour, and therefore he longs for prayer.
In my experience I have seen many start well surrendering for the Lord's sake, who did not continue to do so, and the consequence was that they were, in a way, like a fir tree, the top shoot broken off, therefore no increase of growth though still alive. The Spirit in me is always working to concentrate me on Christ, and if Christ were dwelling in my heart everything would be determined by Him; and the better He is known the more He will be loved.
I am not trying to think of Him. I am not like -------- occupying myself with my great devotedness or my own death, or reaching heaven. The only thought is "Whither thou goest, I will go" (Ruth 1:16). I am controlled by Him. Many are attached to Him who are not controlled by Him.
I rejoice that I can most heartily greet you entering on another year. The word I give you for it is 'Ebenezer, hitherto hath the Lord helped us'. In order to know Him in this special grace, there must be -- first, separation from all that is false; secondly, dependence on Himself; and thirdly, contending earnestly, practically following up the rout of the enemy.
If you are not in absolute separation your heart is not prepared to serve the Lord only, and if you are not set on serving the Lord only, you will not have confidence in praying to Him. Samuel, in offering the burnt-offering, type of Christ's acceptance with God, is confirmed in his confidence, and the Lord heard him. He thunders, He routs the enemy, but you must follow it up; you must identify yourself with the Lord's battle; and thus there will be a notable, a never-to-be-forgotten, sense of His succour, for He will specially and manifestly appear on your behalf. Samson preceded Samuel. Samson had great strength and achieved great works; Samuel appeared to have no strength, prayer was his only resource, and he accomplished far more than Samson did, because he was cast wholly on the Lord.
May you enter on this new year in the most assured confidence in the Lord. You can say, "Thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me" (Psalm 23:4), and as this is true, so will there be a "table" -- divine recompense for you in the very spot where you had suffered for the Lord; as Paul in the house of the jailor. The Lord bless you much, and make you a blessing. The more you are blessed the more I shall rejoice.
I think it is very interesting to observe the way we are exercised under discipline of any kind. I am assured that our great lack is intimacy with the Lord. I am confounded when I read John 10:14, and see that I am brought into the same kind of intimacy as there is between the Father and the Son. If this intimacy were unbroken we could not doubt His love, and the more assured we are of His love, the more we confide in Him, if we believe that He is wisdom itself. If we confide or have confidingness in Him, we could not open our mind to Him and then accept counsel from any one else. He has our full mind and confidence, and we rest in His wisdom; we have committed ourselves to Him. You are always, so to speak, under the power of the one whom you fully confide in. This is true in a very special way with the Lord; He claims it, because of His great love and interest in you. No one can make the Lord his resource except as he knows Him as Solomon -- as wisdom.
Confidingness comes from nearness. I do not think that we know and confide in the Lord's love until we are near Him. I can only know love as I am near the one who loves me. I can know the greatest service at a distance, but I cannot understand love until I am near. It is in nearness that I discover the motive for the service. I may love for the service, as a babe loves its mother or nurse. Often an infant loves the nurse more than the mother, because of the service ministered to it; but afterwards the child learns the love that is in the mother's heart, as greater than any service she could render. Love serves while service is needed, but love is deepest when it can rejoice in the full satisfaction of its object. John knew doubtless that the love was there before he confided in it, but he
learned to confide in it in nearness. Peter would have liked to be in John's place, but he had not the confidence in the love that John had. I may know that I am loved, but I only know the depth of the love when I am near, and as I know it, I confide in it.
In a day of knowledge without power, there is a danger of assuming to be where one is not really. With many, though there be the knowledge of truth, the first step is hardly entered on. It is done. David has the head of Goliath in his hand. Until that is apprehended, the second step cannot be known, and that is, the intimacy which subsists between my Saviour and me. This I illustrate by the link between Jonathan and David, and this blessed intimacy is set forth in John 10:14, 15. Everything else for me grows out of this intimacy -- not only the apprehension of all that He was on the earth, and how He can sympathise with me in my path here; but all that He is now, and that I am called into communion with Him there.
If we do not reach this intimacy, it is only His service for us, and not His interests, which occupies our hearts. All we look for is His succour in our trials here, as if we were not called to represent Him here on earth, as those united to Him in His exaltation.
It is very interesting to mark the invisible support we receive as we walk on with God, from another who is also walking with God. The judgment of a spiritual friend,
even though unexpressed, has weight. I do not think we are sensible enough of the value and effect of moral influence, as I may term a body beaming and brilliant with moral light. Where there is a 'dark part' there is hindrance to the light shining out, and that dark part evidently is the thing most difficult in our nature to be suppressed, most impenetrable to the light. The light is acquired by beholding the Lord's glory, not by beholding the Lord simply, nor the glory simply, but by beholding the Lord's glory, because then I am gazing on the perfection of my acceptance, and then I grow. Growing is an exquisite time; the heart entranced with the perfection of divine beauty in which Christ is, and it is then the light permeates me; it is stopped by whatever is the greatest obstruction in me, and until I have been transformed there is a check to the bright shining. If there were no fear in any form, nor care in any form, supposing the heart thus relieved was enjoying Christ as its one treasure, the light would be burning. Fearlessness of man without the fear of God is simply recklessness; carelessness without faith in God is simply folly. Often the most naturally timid or the most anxious help us most, when their greatest stronghold has been captured, and is now under the sway of the light. The arsenal of the enemy has been turned into a tower of strength, just as Hebron, once the place of intimidation, became through faith the citadel, the centre of strength and support. Blessed be God (how amazing His grace!) He turns the dry land into water springs. He supplants the greatest defect by the greatest virtue. The thief is to become a giver. Peter the denier of his Lord is to strengthen his brethren, is to be the foremost in owning Him. How much more interesting a Christian's life is than we generally imagine; "Ye shine as lights in the world", and the light is all acquired from Him who is the one treasure of the heart. The more I enjoy Him, the more is my joy, for He is my joy, and the more I am in moral likeness to Him whom I enjoy.
May the Lord be increasingly more and more the joy of your heart, and as He is, the light is penetrating and taking possession of every part of your heart.
This is a sifting time. The good grain is winnowed from the chaff by the sieve. The chaff has size but has not weight. The grain passes through the sieve, the chaff does not; it consorts with its own, as the grain does with its own sort: all solemn work.
I remark that there is a very marked difference between the student of the word, and the contemplater of Christ. The student of the word may be able to give you a text for everything; he is a good musician, he can play any piece. Now the contemplater of Christ may not always have a text at hand, but he has the manner and grace of Christ without being conscious of it; he is transformed. The student is enlightened; and in the darkness he seems to be much helped, and to help others; but though a good musician as I have said, he has not the ear that the contemplater has. Where the ear is good, the soul of music is there. Mary Magdalene was the contemplater and she surpassed Peter and John. I believe that often one gets more from praying, when near the Lord, than one is asking for. I mean that by being near, one acquires the "peace of God" though one has not asked for the peace of God. It is quite interesting to note the difference in every detail between the student and the contemplater. The one is rigid and correct, walking by line and rule, and often glad to be off parade, and able to relax. The other is transformed, and though he may not know the why or the wherefore, his taste is changed; he turns away from things which once attracted him, his ear is so sensitive that sounds which once amused him now grate on him, and even when the musician plays well he feels a lack. I do not think that the student, though he may be very sincere, has this delicacy of ear; he can notice an incorrect quotation. Of course the two should be combined, because it is as the Lord is in the vision of my soul that His word fully affects me; like the disciples going to Emmaus; they were not in the efficacy of the word until He was seen by them, and then, why and wherefore they could not tell, they go the same
road as He went, and to the same place that He went to, though He did not tell them, and this I call communion. The student is thinking how he shall act. The contemplater is like the mariner at sea looking for the sun, looking for the Lord. When I see Him I shape my course with respect to Him, and then it is that I not only play, or act correctly, but the music or the act is only the echo of the divine note or thrill within.
May you be more and more the contemplater and thus your knowledge of the Lord will enable you to play skilfully of Him who dwells by faith in your heart. May thus the best of blessings abound to you.
To me the most significant mark of decline amongst us is the apparent inattention to communion. There is a certain measure of communion over a passage of scripture, but I do not consider that communion in the true sense. The word fellowship hardly conveys to me the meaning of communion, though there is only the one word in the original for both. Now what do you understand by communion? I consider that communion is to be in concert with the Lord in His present thoughts and interests. Peter had great affection for the Lord (in John 21) but he was not in communion with Him. Martha was not in communion; Mary sought it and found it.
... I quite echo your words -- 'How one's heart longs at times for more wholehearted devotedness'. I say to myself. What would produce a revival? What would you say? I find many godly, some devoted, but very few "virtuous". "Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies" (Proverbs 31:10). Virtuous is having no heart for anything but Himself, what is of Himself. I enjoyed my
retirement very much. I cannot tell you how death was rolled in on all that I hitherto was attracted to, and I had great enjoyment in my retreat. I never enjoyed contemplation more. I had no immediate claim on me, and when I was really riveted on the Lord's love and ways it was truly delightful, so real, so beautiful, so permanent.
I increasingly feel that the Lord would not have allowed us to be tested as we were by the -------- teaching if we had been holding the truth in integrity. No truth can be received in power without an excruciating effect. This saying attracted some of them in D--------. The new and eternal sensibly displaces the old and temporal. The more you are in Christ's life the less you are in natural life, though you have greater power in natural duties. I find everywhere that there is little interest about the church; where there is devotedness it is generally confined to the gospel. I think that there is a great lack in praying for servants individually. When I hear someone praying for the whole church I long to ask him -- 'Do you pray in particular for those known to yourself?' Surely if I do not pray for those whom I know I cannot truly pray for those I do not know. I feel differently to the person that I habitually pray for. I wonder what you would think of the little meetings in --------, I sometimes feel as if the testimony were dying out here. It cannot be maintained but in rigid separation from the world.
It quite cheered me your lamentation after more devotedness, because what I dread is activity without it. I believe the Lord in His love for my company in spirit and mind, would rather that I had one thought in concert with Himself, than if I had done every good work that was done in the town on that day. The Lord bless you much.
I am lecturing on the formation and calling of the bride. I began on the resurrection. Second, Christ formed in you. Third, "Part with Me". You cannot know Him as Priest except as you have part with Him. This is your
side, and you cannot join Him in the assembly -- His side, except you have part with Him; and until this is known, you cannot apprehend His interests as they are to Himself; and if you do not understand them in some measure as they are to Him, you have not part with Him. I think He first draws you into company with Himself as to yourself -- sets you free from every pressure in His company; He liveth in you; and then He carries you on into the range and scope of His own interests, which you begin to learn in the assembly.
I find after all, that everything in your spiritual history depends on the gospel you have received. No one can know the liberty wherewith Christ hath made him free, who does not know first, that the blessed God has removed in the cross, to the fullest relief of His heart, and to His endless glory, all that man who was under His judgment, so that He can now receive the believer in the acceptance of the Beloved. As Christ is the glorified Man, your liberty is to be in moral keeping with this -- the greatest and unalterable acceptance. You know the first by faith, and you are in the second by the Spirit of God.
My text for you is, "But one thing is needful" (Luke 10:42). Very slowly we acknowledge this great fact. "But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her". The Lord was apparently the object of both sisters; Martha cared for Him with great assiduity and self-sacrifice, and yet Mary who sat at His feet and heard His word had chosen the good part. Very slowly it is that we learn to regard Mary's act as pre-eminently superior to Martha's. The excellence of Mary's lay in her preferring to ascertain the Lord's mind (to derive from Him) to ministering and giving to Him like Martha. It is a great blessing to see that the Lord prefers your patient desire to learn His mind to your zealous labour for Him. He prefers the servant who seeks communion with Him to the servant who without
the communion devotedly works for Him. Communion is more to Him than any work. To be like Mary it is not enough to study the scriptures; you require to be so near Him that He may direct you to scripture and explain His mind to you by scripture. Though you may spend as much time in doing so as another would in working for Him, be assured that He will prefer you to be in concert with His mind. It is of course right to study scripture and to enjoy its unfoldings, but this may be mere knowledge, and will be misapplied if there be not concert with His mind. It is not what you can do, or how you can turn an opportunity to good account, but one thing absorbs your heart. There is often great interest in the scriptures without communion. In communion Christ is always paramount, and you will be more occupied with His pleasure than with the effect of His words on yourself.
May you be so His friend that He will tell you what He is doing (Proverbs 8. 14, 15). The Lord grant that you may begin this coming year in a renewed and special way set on communion with Him. I do not mean merely praying, but I mean in the transforming effect of His presence, so that you are controlled according to His pleasure.
The text I give you is Hebrews 4:11. You will have to be diligent to enter into God's rest, lest you fall after the example of the Israelites, who hearkened not to the word. The word is -- "go up and possess the land". They heard the word but it "did not profit them not being mixed with faith". You have heard the word, that you are quickened with Christ, raised up, and made to sit in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus. The word has been often 'preached' to you. Do you believe that it is a fact that in God's mind you have been elevated to this great height? It is true of you in God's grace but it is only true to you as you in
faith apprehend what is God's mind for you. In faith you are assured of the fact, though you have not reached the fact, and by the Spirit you are in spirit there already. The Spirit of God is the power to carry you there, and as you are in faith as to God's purpose for you, He gives you already to taste of the joys which belong to the heavenly rest. The question is -- Have you faith in the word made known to you? Faith counts on the word of God outside and apart from everything here. When you are in faith you see nothing but God. The moment the heart is detained by anything here, faith is obstructed. The visible is antagonistic to the invisible. If you walk in the Spirit you will be sensible of this in a moment; the effects and influences of the visible are counter to the invisible. Eve had lost faith when she saw that the tree was good for food, and pleasant to the eyes. If she had kept the faith -- dependence on God -- she would not have looked, but she had parted with the faith which overcometh the world when she "saw". I see it in myself and in every one; the moment one gets occupied with the visible one has parted company from the invisible, and is apart from faith, whether in personal matters or in the assembly matters.
The Lord grant that your faith may grow this coming year. J.N.D. has said, 'To walk in faith you must be faithful', that is, you must walk with a good conscience.
May the word of God be daily more precious to you. Avoid all reading which would divert you from it, or the society of any who do not minister to you from it.
I agree with you 'that in the gospel we wait for heaven', but I am convinced that the slowness or delay in realising our union with Christ, is that the gospel, as of God, and from God, is not apprehended. You get heaven in the gospel. The blessed God has been so infinitely satisfied in the cross that all the distance on His side has gone; a Man has glorified Him, and that Man is in glory, and hence every one believing in Christ now, is accepted in the
Beloved; his place is in glory, and the more he beholds the Lord's glory the more is he transformed into the same image. It is really his place. The Father according to His pleasure not only justifies the believer where once he was under judgment, but He compels him to come from the place of judgment and misery, unto His own place where neither sin nor misery has ever been.
You ask me about the sermon on the mount. I see no key to it but the nature of the new man. I do not think that it is the principles of the coming kingdom, I think the principles are those of the man of God. "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect" (Matthew 5:48) is the highest standard.
I am much interested here, thank the Lord, and I am out every evening. You ask for my subjects. The gospel first, not only the service rendered by Him, but the second great step -- the knowledge of His love in doing the service; I consider that when this is known there is progress, and that there is no progress without it.
I was struck this morning with the sense that if I am in the place of Christ's rejection, as I am in heart loyal to Him, I am set to stand here for Him. Christ should be expressed by the church on the earth during His absence; and the more truly we are in the truth of the assembly, the house of God, the better qualified we are, because of the transforming effect of His presence, to represent Him. No reading nor praying could of itself effect this; nothing but the indescribable effect of His presence in glory, the antitype of the holiest of all. The greatest favour you can receive is to be shewn something more of the Father's things. The greatest mercy on the earth or from the earth can bear no comparison to the love of the Father, and if His love is not in you the love of the world -- visible things, will attract you.
However exalted our standing is, and it could not be greater, I remark that the blessed God always deals with us according to our state. He looks upon the heart; he that asketh receiveth, he that seeketh findeth. He deals with us according to the way we deal with Him. He has satisfied His own heart in accepting us in the Beloved; we are always there in His eye, but as to our enjoyment of His wondrous grace, it is to him that hath shall more be given. It is striking the way the sentence -- Them that love him, occurs. I am persuaded that if there were more real prayer in private, God seeing in secret, there would be a large rewarding openly. It is not that there is not time spent avowedly in prayer, but I feel that one can repeat sentence after sentence and desire after desire, all right in themselves, without there being a sense in the soul that they are really spoken unto God and that He hears, that I have had, so to speak, an audience. A beggar gives me a great idea of prayer; he watches me to see the effect his appeal makes on me; he is not thinking of his words at all. "Watch and pray", that is, I watch what God will do.
I wish you had said a little on private prayer. Here I believe is the real defect. Every man was to build the wall opposite his own house. See Nehemiah. I do not believe that a man is fit to pray in the assembly until he has settled all his own affairs with the Lord. Nay more, I find that it is a great thing, however imperfectly I do it, to bring the interests of the Lord, and those used of Him in those interests, before Him, in the measure in which He has allowed me to be connected with them. I am assured that one is much helped by commanding personally to the Lord those whom we believe "have a good conscience, in all things desirous to walk rightly" (Hebrews 13:18).
I think that there is often a measure of happiness derived from the reading of scripture which after all is not permanent. Often interesting communications gladden us, great and beautiful realities charm us, but this is not the renewal of the sense of His personal affection. Nothing really binds us to Him but the sense of His love which passeth knowledge, and it is thus only that we are filled unto the fulness of God. He is the fulness of God, and thus love is only known in conscious union with Him. It could not be known until then. Until Rebekah came to Isaac she could not know his love. One quarter of an hour sitting under His shadow with great delight effects more for the Christian than hours spent over the word. The word tells you what you are to get. It is Christ by the Spirit who gives us everything. The word addresses your conscience, then you pray, and then the Spirit works in you accordingly. Saints as a rule, know a great deal more of the Bible than they know of Christ. It is more the knowledge of the sayings of a Person than of the Person Himself, as one might read a biography. It is an immense difference when the Person is known; you value His sayings because Himself is everything to you. It is the Person that forms you and not His words, though the Person communicates His mind by His words.
I have been deeply interested in the resource there is in personal love to the Lord, when His death has removed everything between me and Him; my heart is welded to Him. If you could remove the air between two pieces of marble, you could not disunite them, so thoroughly would they be welded together. How blessed!
I think I understand you as to the church apprehending the Lord's sense of its beauty to Him. You get the idea in the Canticles, "There is no spot in thee", as also, "I am my beloved's". The more I dwell on our relations to Christ, the more I am assured that there are three great stages in our history.
First, we love Him because of the service which He has rendered to us, as Jonathan loved David, and the mark of this stage is that we want to serve Him by giving.
The second is the love I have formed for Him personally, because I have found resource in His company. You could not love any one personally if you were not in that person's company, as Ruth to Naomi. Shewn in Canticles 3:4. Then it is not merely giving Him your property, but you give yourself to Him. You own you belong to Him. You follow Him.
Thirdly, you are united to Him. If you were not fit to be His companion, you could not be united to Him. This when known as a fact leads you (in the sense of an irrefragable bond) into concert with Him in all His interests, which you never can have until you are in the assured sense of being united to Him, and then you see you are far beyond espousal, if you understand me. The Lord lead You out boldly for Himself.
Entering on another year, I give you Canticles 2, part of verse 3: "I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste". The better you know that which is divinely good and beautiful, the better can you discern any departure from it. Every Christian has some standard by which he discerns good and evil. Many a one lives in a good conscience because he is up to his
standard. The higher the standard, the better you can separate the precious from the vile. The high moral standard of the law, man's relation to God and to man, suits the natural mind, and commends it, for it enables it to estimate every one on that level. But when you become in any degree acquainted with Christ in the light in which He is, where your heart not only learns to confide in Him, but He satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with goodness, you will be so entranced with the interview and the society you have been in, that the legal standard will not at all suit you; you discern everything now by quite a new standard. You will feel more a stranger here than ever, more like the man who was blind (John 9), now in the solitude of light, but there Christ satisfied his heart. You must be, as I may say, at home with Christ before you will know what suits Him, but once you do know what suits Him, you will find that it is not the legal standard, that is, man or his ways which you are discerning (which is the forte of the natural mind according to its vigour); but that the one commanding thought and purpose of your heart by the Spirit is to find out what suits Christ. As you walk in the Spirit your heart will be cheered, and through Him you mortify the deeds of the body. He interposes as the natural mind is ready to express itself; He blocks it, and leads you into concert with Christ's mind. This is walking by the Spirit, and He is more ready to lead you than you are to be led by Him. Unless you grieve Him by preferring the flesh He will lead you, and then you will rejoice that you have escaped, and that you can resume your place under Christ's shadow with great delight, and thus you will have joy unspeakable and full of glory.
The Lord lead you to come from Himself, and as blessed by Him, to enter on this new year, and thus to be a real help and comfort to His own and to all around you.
I am more and more convinced each day that the check to our prosperity is that the Spirit's work in us is not
conscientiously submitted to. Everything has been accomplished for us; every desire of God for us has been fulfilled; but the Spirit's work -- God's work now -- is to make true to us what is true for us. Many Christians are like houses in the course of construction, with a pile of bricks or stones lying quite contiguous to each building, but the building making very little progress. I adduce the pile of bricks or stones as illustration of a knowledge of the word. Much is known by each of us which has not been appropriated. It is comparatively easy and pleasant work to procure the bricks or stones -- I mean to read the word, and learn the unsearchable riches of Christ, and yet with this there may be very little of the old house pulled down, and therefore very little of the new one built up. God only can pull down the old one, and God only can build up the new. I believe that if we were conscientiously walking with the Spirit, we should know the brick or stone -- the special truth which He is adding, the one which we next require for His work, in us. Until the needed brick has been built in, that is until we are really edified, no more progress in the building will be made, however much of the word we may learn.
I suppose many when dying make very rapid progress, but then the opportunity for the deep enjoyment and privilege of being here for Christ is over.
I think we all have to take it to heart how very little the Lord Himself is the resource of our hearts. Many devoted Christians make service their resource. Some make the word their resource, but how rarely one meets any one who enjoys Christ Himself as his entire resource. The acquisition of knowledge of divine property has marked us; but while the Lord has thus favoured us with light how very little there is of that alteration as to tastes and ways which marks soul progress. There may be plenty of bricks and stones, plenty of knowledge, but no advance in the building. Soul-work is the mason at work, and here the lack is.
A person's private prayers would tell the real object before the soul. According to the intensity of desire, so is the prayer. What you desire most is sure to be paramount, it is sure to find some vent: therefore, "he that seeketh findeth" (Matthew 7:8).
I did look forward to happy seasons with you here -- seasons when something would be gained for our acquaintance in the eternal future, but it has been ordered otherwise, and because of the Lord, it cannot be without blessing.
It is very touching how the Lord waits on the afflicted one, and as He is recognised, how the heart is drawn out to Him. To Jacob (Genesis 28), bereaved and torn from his mother's side for the first time, a lonely, houseless wanderer, with only a pillow of stone to rest on, instead of all the care that a devoted mother expended on him, the Lord appears in a vision, and introduces him to the house of God, the gate of heaven, and in company with the angels. Then Jacob's heart is drawn out to God: thus true instincts are awakened; there he vows to the Lord, but he undergoes many trials and sufferings before he fulfils the self-same vows. He never fulfilled them until he came to Bethel in chapter 35. He had allowed many things to come in -- family interests, and present advantages to interfere with his return to Bethel, where only he could fulfil and satisfy the divine desires that had been awakened in his soul. We are never thoroughly happy until we satisfy the divine desires that have been awakened in us. A bird never sings until it flies; its true instinct has not been fulfilled until it flies. To hop is not enough for a bird; in fact, it only hops to fly, and if a wing be wounded there is no singing -- no true joy until there is recovery; the true instinct has been interrupted. I believe saints have sadly hindered themselves by not seeking to satisfy or comply with their divine instincts.
These instincts would make us at times appear very eccentric, but the Lord would vindicate us in the way He would satisfy the desire which He had awakened. Zacchaeus may have looked ridiculous to man climbing up a tree; he was ruled by his divine desire, and rewarded far and away beyond his expectations. The woman in Luke 7 would brave the reproaches of the Pharisee, and intrude
into his house to see the One her heart clave to, and surely she was abundantly rewarded. But, like Jacob we go through many a trial and sorrow in order that we may give up and surrender everything, and be free to go to the spot where the heart can enjoy the Lord of whom it has tasted; like Caleb getting possession of the very land where he had gathered grapes 45 years before!
The word to us, as it was to Jacob, is, "Go up to Bethel, and dwell there: and make there an altar unto God, that appeared unto thee when thou fleddest from the face of Esau thy brother" (Genesis 35:1). That was about 40 years before. Let us gratify the divine instincts which the Lord has given us, cost what it may.
Truest love to you, and prayers for your progress and joy in Christ, and may you delight yourself in the Lord where your heart knows there is only true delight.
I had a very interesting subject last evening: my illustration, the standard rose tree, will explain it to you. The rose needs sun, and its own climate to promote its bloom; the stem, the briar, must be kept down by the knife. As I behold the glory of the Lord I am transformed, that is the effect of beholding Him; the rose prospers; occupation with Christ where He is produces this. Next, by the hand of God everything in me which would obstruct the flourishing of the rose is cut off. "We which live are alway delivered unto death" (2 Corinthians 4:11). I gain through the attractiveness of Christ, and God severs me from everything which would distract. The power of Christ attracts and transforms, the hand of God delivers to death that which would distract. I am disencumbered in the presence of Christ by the brightness and bliss of Himself and His things; but I am actually severed from them as I find I have much better with Him who is greater than Solomon. I see, and am transformed; I delight in it; and then God helps me by rolling in death on that which
would divert me. I was speaking on the twofold action of attaching us to Christ on the one hand, and being detached by God's hand from 'the stone before the wheel' on the other; an exotic in a soil (an adverse nature in me) and in a climate (the whole world) both of which are absolutely and relentlessly adverse to it, and yet it is here that by the power of God it is to flourish.
I have been interested in seeing that through the death of Christ, we are cleared of everything between us and the Father's house; as we walk in faith we realise it, but then we have to die; we are circumcised; and thus in armour we face Satan, and we walk in constant dependence on God.
It is a very solemn question -- What am I living for? Every one has an object, let him conceal it as he may. The smallest acts of his life betray him; he may be on his guard as to his momentous acts, but when he is off his guard he betrays himself. It is a saying in the world -- a man's character is betrayed by his involuntary acts. So with the believer. If the smallest acts spring from devotedness to Christ there is no fear but that the great ones will.
The next thing the soul learns after salvation is the great fact that Christ is not here, that He has been rejected in this world where we live. When this comes home to you in divine power everything here assumes another aspect to you. The very beauties of the creation wrought by His hand afford you but a melancholy pleasure in the thought that He should have come to His own creation, and His people would not have Him. No one can be here rightly who does not live in the deepening sense, 'I am in the place where my Lord, my all, has been rejected and refused'.
The next question is -- What am I doing there? The true answer is that my heart is not here, my heart is in heaven, but I seek to be here for Him, who is all my delight, in this scene of His rejection where His "treasure" is, for His heart is here, though He has left the place; and therefore
the chief and real interest of a heart true to Him is the only place He comes to, that is, the midst of His own, His assembly. Approbation of a true object is not enough; there must be untiring, absolute devotion to Christ.
I do not see that any one could learn his mission but in nearness to the Lord. I see that in John 20:21, the Lord sent His disciples, they were sent by Him. I read in Ephesians 4:7, that "unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ". I am assured that there is a special grace given to each (as each Christian is a member of Christ's body), but I find that very few Christians have learned from Christ what his or her mission definitely is. I think many a Christian's history confirms this opinion; 'a wasted life' is the true title of many a history.
It is plain enough that every Christian is called of God to something definite. The real difficulty is to ascertain the speciality, and this I do not think can be ascertained but in nearness to the Lord, and when you are interested in His interests. We first learn that He is interested in us, and then we gradually become interested in His interests. It is then you ascertain your mission.
I am glad that you are so interested in --------; the great thing to bring before him is Jesus on the cross, "the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God" (1 Peter 3:18), there is life in a look, he that looked lived. Marvellous truth! Christ was here for the sinner, and the sinner having received His grace is now to be here for Him. Could there be a greater favour or a greater privilege? The great work of grace in us is to transform us. The idea in the world is to improve, to effect an improvement. It is reformation, but the work of grace is transformation. You are the same person, but you are completely altered by having a new object, as the queen of Sheba was by seeing Solomon's glory. It is a wonderful process. As the flower acquires its radiant colours from the sun, so may you be transformed by the glory of a greater than Solomon.
In beholding the Lord's glory you are "transformed according to the same image", and you have the power in you which is to effect this transformation, for it is "even as by the Lord the Spirit;" so that you see the work of grace is not to reform but to transform you, and the more obstructive the natural character the more evident is the transformation. I hope I am not writing too much, but I desire greatly that you should apprehend what a Christian should be as "a body of light".
Thank the Lord, I am very happy and encouraged. I am assured that He has taught us the right way. I do not deny that we are very feeble in it, but I can say, "The Lord of hosts is with us" (Psalm 46:7), and that is everything. I have been much interested in seeing the marks of the Lord being with His people. I could hardly explain all to you now. The first
I daresay this summary will interest you, though it is very crude and undeveloped.
You ask me to tell you the effects of the glory. You are transformed there. In Philippians 4:6, 7, you are transformed from depression of one kind or, another into the
most inconceivably blessed state -- you have the peace of God that passeth all understanding. See Paul in 2 Corinthians 12, how transformed he was -- taking pleasure in infirmities which had so greatly distressed him, and for the removal of which he had prayed three times!
... It is a great thing to have the word laid up in our hearts, and so vividly there, that it can declare itself. Its voice is heard when a demand for its light occurs. It is a great thing (as Mr. D. used to say) 'to think in scripture'. To be so in the mind of the Lord as revealed in scripture, that you are ever looking at everything in the light in which the word sets it. How different every way of it is to man's judgment! The more you seek light from the word for everything, the more it will come to you. He that honoureth me, I will honour. The Lord Himself is now our Urim and Thummim. He could say, "I have more understanding than all my teachers: for thy testimonies are my meditation" (Psalm 119:99). The Lord has ever but one judgment, we must exclude our own, which is no easy matter, before we can know His. This is one of the great gains in drawing near to Him, for I must disappear then. The Lord bless you much, and keep the light of His word ever fresh in your heart....
The marks of His presence when practically known are:
... I am sure that I am in my right place and that is a comfort. Every one here is naturally running counter to God. Providence is God ordering for man doing his own will, but when I am led of the Lord, I am no longer doing my own will, but I am in concert with Him in the midst of the universal contrariety here. He supports me because I coincide with Him. How happy for each of us to move along this scene in concert with the Lord and serving Him. A saint who truly serves is like a hound; he comes from his home and rest, where he is fresh and happy, to enter on the chase; he enters the plain or the forest of this world to follow the game. I mean, it is not some pre-conceived service or routine; he goes forth ready to capture whatever may arise; he finds his pleasure in implicitly pursuing, as he is directed. He delights in the chase, but he delights in his master more, and he returns in the evening whatever has been the day's success, in the simple enjoyment of being beside his master. This is just an illustration of the way we should live to serve. If we are not fresh and happy in secret with the Lord, as the home of the heart, we are not fit for the chase. The first and the greatest thing is my own restful condition with the Lord. This is a happiness entirely independent of service. I may know my duty is to hunt, but I am perfectly happy in my home, the home of my heart -- happy there par excellence. I enjoy service, but service over is over, but the love and nearness to my Master is not over; that I return to as paramount when the hunting is over. I enjoy the hunting or service, but it is not my home nor is it the solace of my heart. No; I am ready to drop it all and retire to the rest of my heart near my Master, from which rest I started. My happiness is not that I have hunted well, served well, but that I have a Master who delights and satisfies my heart.
I have been much interested seeing the difference between Christ's service for us and our service for Himself.
If I do not know the first, I cannot know the second. We are left here to serve Him, and each of us has been given a speciality, I am not to copy any one. If we were in communion, that is, near enough to Him to know what He is thinking of (wonderful thought!) no two would act alike, though quite in unison; we should not tread on one another's heels. It would be very blessed.
No one understands the mind of Christ until he is personally attached to Christ; then Christ's things are his interest. There is great gain when this is entered on.
Through mercy I have quite recovered here. We have a reading at the room three times in the week. The work of the Spirit in us, is our subject. Romans is the first step. As the French say, 'It is the first step that costs'. The real difficulty is the first step. You are justified, and you prefer Christ to Adam; you are in the Spirit and not in the flesh. Then you are ready for Hebrews, which is the second step -- to be in Christ's company. Who can tell all we gain there! We like the company of those who, like a second self, help and encourage us in our heart's best desires; how infinitely more do we gain in His company, from the lowest infirmity up to the brightest glory.
I hope dear -------- will be kept by the Lord for His own service. The idea in Christendom that the clergyman is the only one in sacred orders, misleads many. Every member is necessary. The whole body suffers when any one member is dislocated.
I am greatly impressed that the test question for everything is, 'Is it for Christ or for Adam?' I believe it is the happiest day here when you so prefer Christ to Adam that you heartily acknowledge His absolute title to you. When Isaac is in his place, Ishmael will not be tolerated, he will be cast out. I believe it is a most joyous moment when Christ is acknowledged in His place, and though you may swerve from this through temptation, yet you will never have a good conscience unless you give Him His rightful place. I do not believe any one can progress until he prefers Christ to Adam. The thing coveted most by the eye of Adam is unattractive to Christ. His tastes are altogether outside of man's most refined tastes. Man has made Christianity a lever to elevate himself, and now that he has, by means of the Bible, reached an elevation hitherto unknown, he seeks to arrive at independence of God. The secret thought of the typical man of the day is, that there is a great destiny for man on the earth, and to this end he is working. Babylon will be the consummation, even that man, independent of God, can possess the earth in unbroken satisfaction. The only way we can meet this terrible inroad is by persevering fidelity to Christ, because the heart prefers Him to Adam.
The first step consequent on justification is, you prefer Christ to Adam; the next, you have His company. That is Hebrews. Then you get the assembly -- the only place where He is to be found on earth. All is easy to you when you take the first step.
"Behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her. And I will give her vineyards from thence, and the valley of Achor for
a door of hope: and she shall sing there, as in the days of her youth, and as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt". It is very interesting and encouraging to remember all the way the blessed God has led you; so that eventually you shall sing in all the fervour of first love. I have learned this practically. For many years I asked the Lord that I might serve Him, at length I was brought into the wilderness. The world is a wilderness to you when you enjoy Christ in glory. Sorrow and disappointment do not make the world a wilderness to you.
When I know Him in the holiest, as my resource in the presence of God, I am as one out of my element in this world, it is a dry and barren land to me, where no water is, but He sustains me to do His pleasure here. I may add for your encouragement, that now, through the unaccountable goodness of God, I have more joy of heart than in my brightest day. The sense of His favour is better than life itself. Be assured that the highest and brightest desire of your heart will be more than fulfilled, but it will be in the wilderness that He will "speak comfortably" to you, and then He will be more to you than your heart could ever have desired.
May this greatest blessing be yours, so that you may enjoy His favour with unhindered delight.
I do not know of anything that you should surrender, but I feel that the danger is, lest, when one has surrendered much, there should be the feeling that there is no occasion for any more. I remember once saying to J.N.D., with reference to the Lord's words, "For their sakes I sanctify myself" (John 17:19) -- 'Then sanctification is immeasurable'.
'Yes,' he replied, 'immeasurable'. You will see my thoughts fully in the next 'Voice''.
I have been dwelling very much on the way in which every one's course is affected by his goal or aim; I mean, what he is running on to. In fact, you can tell any one's goal by his course. You cannot rise higher than your goal. I do not mean heaven at the end, but the daily ultimatum of your heart. Nothing is a goal that I do not see. I quite agree with you that it is life and its peculiar enjoyments which we so require to know more of. I believe many a one is hammering away at the old man and the flesh, who is not advancing one bit in spiritual life. It is like the Romish confessional, after every confession you can begin a new score! You may batter the old man to dust and then indulge him a bit! But when it is life and the joys of God that you are absorbed with, you may be sure that the old or the first man, who was shut out when you were in the joys of the life of Christ in His sphere, is not speedily relished when you return to man's sphere. There is nothing I long for more than to be more habitually 'beside' myself, 'no spirit left' in one through beholding His glory. Oh, it sets one so loose to everything here, for what entrances one is apart from everything here.
I have a subject much on my mind -- the difference between man's mind and Christ's mind. Man's mind, however beautiful, never rises higher than man. Christ's mind always thinks first of God. It is the lack of this which creates all our difficulty in judging of things. Man can have beautiful conceptions and sensibility, but it does not rise above man. The mind of Christ always begins with God, and this is "wisdom". "She openeth her mouth with wisdom". When one hears any one's speech, one ought to be able to tell whether he speaks from man's intellect or from Christ's mind, which has been given to us. As the apostle says -- "But we have the mind of Christ" (1 Corinthians 2:16).
May you enter on this year with confidence of heart in the Lord. The children of Israel gathered the manna, and went on gathering until the sun melted it. I mean by this that you are to wait upon the Lord until you have received confidence in His sufficiency for all that may be before you in this coming year. I desire that you should not anticipate anything. It is often easier to bear up under great trials than under small, unexpected ones. The true way is to walk each day in faith. I know nothing of what is before me, but I know that the Lord is before me. This is the way to begin. This is the only way to be supported and kept. But being supported (for support refers to pressure and demand on you), there is still another blessing, and as I call the first confidence, I call the second confidingness. That is, that you open out your heart fully to the Lord, as the queen of Sheba did to Solomon. This will have a marvellous effect on you. It will not only impart great restfulness to you, but there will be a simplicity and genuineness about you because you have no idol, no reserve; you have opened out everything to the Lord, and you are resting in His wisdom as to everything; and at the same time, if you have truly confided in Him, you will be so entranced with Him in His own interests that there will be "no more spirit" in you. You will be (if only for a moment) led into such true deep joy apart from all self-consideration, that you will long for a renewal from it, convinced that there is a happiness where there is no self-consciousness nor thought of self-interest, and this will in a very marked way wean you from all of yourself, even what is gain to you, for Christ.
May you thus enter on this coming year to the Lord's pleasure and your own deep joy.
May the great thing before your heart be that you are here for Christ. The more fixedly this is before you, the brighter and the happier you will be. No one can be here for the Lord until he knows the blessing that the Lord has accomplished for him. I do not mean that the assurance of salvation is known, but that through Christ's death you are not only cleared in God's sight of all that was under the judgment of God, but that you know that you have died with Christ, and thus are at the other side of death, and the man on whom death lay. Knowing this consciously you begin your new history here; you are the Lord's, your body is His, and as you are near Him, and led by His Spirit, you do not consult your own will or the mind of the flesh, but you consult Him, whose you are; and you are glad to do so, just because it is righteously His due. Secondly, you like to do the will of Him who has so loved you, and does so love you, and as you love Him you keep His commandments; that is, you do His will, and not your own, and thus you are always pleasing Him. May you so love Him that His will may be the control most pleasing to your heart. May He thus bless you much. He has been very gracious to you these many years, and, blessed be His name! He loves to the end.
When the Lord led His disciples into the "desert" (Matthew 14:13 - 32), they little expected the great things they would learn there. He feeds the poor of the flock with more than enough, from apparently insufficient means. This He can do for you now; and in addition to this, He takes His place in supremacy. When here He was superior
in the storm; now He is supreme; and the heart that is set on Him leaves all human support to reach Him by His own power. There cannot be communion or company with Him now but at the other side where man is not; that is outside oneself, and all here. The judgment of God is on man. It has been removed for the believer in the death of Christ. You cannot reach Him in that condition on account of which He died (the flesh). It must disappear, as removed judicially, and it is removed in Christ's death. Hence it is at the other side of His death, and in His resurrection, that we are justified; and it is as we are dead with Him that we are where He is. We must cross the Jordan to eat of the corn of the land.
Without question, to depart to be with Christ is "far better". But to my mind it is a great triumph to His grace that He can make the greatest bereavement and loss to us naturally, of unspeakable gain to us, endearing Himself to us in a very special way, as He becomes the One to fill up, in His own blessed way, the blank which death had made. Mary of Bethany, if she mourned the loss of a brother (her only support here), learned when Jesus walked with her, that she had in Him One beyond a brother; for the Lord never hinted that He would raise up Lazarus. But when He had filled the blank in her heart with Himself, He gave back Lazarus to her, and so great was His place in her heart that in the next chapter, when she knew that He was about to die, she buried with Him the most costly property she possessed, and the thing that would have most contributed to her own distinction. I never saw any one severed from this scene by sorrow of itself. I see that when the heart, bowed with sorrow, finds compensation and solace in Him, it is weaned from the
place where the sorrow is, and drawn away to Him where He is. Then I see that out of the eater comes forth meat, and out of the strong sweetness.
The darkness of sorrow is deep indeed, but I pray that the deepest joy may be known to you with Christ Himself. The deepest sorrow here, but the deepest joy with Him in company with Himself.... Surely when we are in spirit apart from this place, and with Christ at the other side of death, we taste of a joy and a solace which bears us above the deepest anguish here.... There is a blessed solace for the heart in sorrow when you are drawn to His side. Many who enjoy Christ's work as the Saviour do not really know Him as Priest. As Saviour He came down to us, but He who was down here, and died for us, is a great Priest for us in heaven itself, ever to maintain us in His own acceptance there.
... I quite sympathise with you as to --------. I believe that is the right feeling, a sense of desolation here, but I am comforted and greatly compensated for my loss as I am drawn to the Lord Himself at the other side of the waters of death. The people of this world boast of their heroism, etc., but the Lord wept with Mary! He groaned in spirit, and was troubled. The Lord was tenderness itself, He could say to His disciples, and He felt it -- Ye will leave me alone and yet I am not alone, for the Father is with me. You may be full of feeling, but borne above it by the greatness and blessedness of His own company. May you know more of this. Through Him we have access by one Spirit unto the Father; you come near in Christ's blessedness. It is truly wonderful! Nothing mellows any one so much as sorrow does, when the heart has found sympathy in it from the Lord.
Your chief friend is the one who is found near you in sorrow. Any one can share in your joy, but there is really only One who can enter into the nature of your sorrow,
and He, blessed be His name, is very near you in your sorrow. He proves to us that it is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting. However prepared you may have been for the present blank, yet it is a blank, his place shall know him no more.
The silence of death is a terrible reality, though, through divine grace, you can anticipate the great day when we shall all surround our Lord, and be with Him for ever. I believe that the removal of a beloved one, especially a parent or a husband from the family circle, is a dispensation (though very sorrowful) fraught with much spiritual gain. The reality of death is first before the heart; then the reality of the Lord's sympathy, the only true reparation of the great blank; and finally, the question is how the bereaved ones will address themselves to the new and untrodden path that remains for them. It is in the latter that I see almost every one fail, and I conclude that it is because the Lord has not been known as having by His own company more than made up for the blank. The worldly claim consideration from others as a palliation for their grief. They proclaim their sorrow in every ostensible way; and Christians even often feed their sorrow instead of being relieved of it in the most touching way by Him who can more than make up to us for any loss entailed on us by man's sin.
May each of you, according to the measure of your sorrow, be consoled by the Lord Himself, and thus out of the eater shall come forth meat.
Your note greatly comforted me. Sorrow -- real sorrow -- masters us more (possibly) than anything. Illness you may survive, there is hope. Reverse of circumstances can be improved, but the sorrow because of bereavement tests one's resources in the Lord more than anything, especially as it is justifiable. Nothing commands so much respect as real sorrow. We read, "I have not eaten thereof in my mourning" (Deuteronomy 26:14). It is not intended that we should not feel death, and the nearer it comes to us the greater the
wrench. I believe, like the standard rose tree, the more the rose flourishes the more the briar -- the stem, must be checked. In fact, the rose does not flourish if the briar is allowed to grow. The sun (Christ) for the rose, but the knife (God's discipline) for the briar. What blessed gain to find everything in heaven, and nothing at all here.
May the Lord comfort you fully, and make you a comfort to others. The dearest human heart which we could ever have, has died for us; and He now lives for us and sympathises with us.
I hope -------- is rejoicing under the shelter of a wing that will never fail in the coldest and roughest day.
It is ---- years this month since the Lord called away our son --------, then 18 years of age, to Himself. It seemed almost unaccountable to me that He should have deprived me of him when he was so thoroughly devoted to Him, and therefore could have been such a help and comfort to me. It is very easy to me to weep with you -- the sorrowing parents of your beloved child. I never realised the exit of a saint until I saw our dear -------- pass away. It then made a very decided mark on me. Stephen looking up stedfastly into heaven came before me in quite a new way. And, thank the Lord, it grows upon me: the distance seems shorter. The Spirit leads up to the brightest spot, and God allows the wave of death to overtake us here so that we may be partakers of His holiness. We could not do the one nor the other. It is all His doing. Surely, from the bottom of my heart, I desire and pray that this immeasurable sorrow may be only the night before your brightest day. The Lord comfort you both in His own most blessed way.
The Lord came to Bethany where the sisters were in the depth of their sorrow. That was the time for Him. They had the one and the self-same sorrow; death had taken away the stay and comfort of their hearts. He came to
console them, but though they had the same bereavement they did not find in Him similar consolation. That is, He comforted Mary more than Martha. Martha in the house of mourning was like a dark, cold cellar, where there was no crevice for the light and heat of the sun; while Mary had every window open in the largest room of her heart to receive every ray of comfort, in such fulness shining on her.
Blessed Lord! He waited till things were at their worst. Elijah knew His mind in another day, he stayed in the widow's house until the death of her son. If the Lord had not waited until the worst had come, His ability to relieve from the worst would not have been known. He comes to you now, dear Mrs. --------, in this moment, to make you know that He can comfort you in this, the saddest and darkest hour; but you must be a Mary and not a Martha, you must receive the rays of His comfort; you must not dwell on your sorrow, and loss, and bereavement, you must simply turn to Him to make up the blank. Look to Him, as one would open a dark, cold room to the noonday sun, and surely if you do, you will receive a comfort from Him that will more than compensate you for your great loss and sorrow. May you and your dear daughters prove it to be as I say, is my heartfelt prayer.
There is no sorrow so great as the sorrow because of death, and this the more so as the one removed is near and dear to you. The loved one is gone -- the blank never to be filled up. There is a desolation about death that no one can understand who has not been in it. But your desolation is the Lord's opportunity of making known to you the deep interest He takes in you, not merely in your bright hours, but in the moment when you are well-nigh crushed with sorrow. It imparts the deepest sense of His interest that He should draw near to me when absorbed with my own sorrow, to so console me with Himself that He becomes more to me than my sorrow. This His sympathy effects. It is an effect never to be forgotten, or rather the
impression He will give you of His love will never be forgotten, so that your deep affliction through His grace will be turned into the deepest blessing, the "dry ground into watersprings" (Psalm 107:35), "the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness" (Isaiah 61:3). May thus great blessing accrue to you from this deep sorrow! May the Lord be more and more endeared to you, as He was to Mary of Bethany.
There are sorrows that the heart thinks that it only knows; and this is true, speaking naturally, and yet there is One who knows well the deepest, and far more than the deepest sorrow ever in our hearts. Sorrow is to me not only the deepest feeling known to the heart, but it is, I might say, the sublimest, because entirely one's own. No one else can have the same. How aptly it suits one in sorrow to "sit alone". How truly the heart can say, 'My sorrow lies too deep for human sympathy', and yet, as I have said, when the Lord joins you in this great solitude you will find in Him, as Mary did, that not only He knows your sorrow, but that His sorrow was deeper, beyond any comparison. This is hardly the time for you to get a clue to the meaning of the hurricane which seems to have spared nothing. In our moral world there is a needs-be for these violent gales. They may often precede greater mercies. It is only for you and for me to accept them, and be as assured of His love in the storm as in the mercy.
I was glad to get your letter before I left -------- telling me of your sorrow, not that I was glad of your sorrow, I need not say, but that you counted on my sympathy in
your sorrow. It is far easier to tell of our joys than of our sorrows. The former elates you, the latter in a way diminishes you. "I was brought low, and he helped me" (Psalm 116:6). There is peculiar solace in confiding our sorrows to the Lord. We can do it to Him in a way and in a fulness that we cannot to any one else. A touching line in a hymn may have occurred to you, 'My sorrow lies too deep for human sympathy'. The one who has passed through the most sorrow is the one who feels every fresh sorrow the most....
... I preached to a very interesting company last evening. I was seeking to set forth that not only is all the misery and judgment on the sinner removed to God's glory, but God's love is satisfied in the nearness in which He sets us.
It is a relief to me that your present sorrow, though so near you, is not in your own immediate circle. It is not only that we suffer most where we feel most, but where there is most natural vitality there the death must come. I believe that in the end there is less suffering in surrendering than in losing by death. I am sure that if each sorrow here drove us to Christ for solace, and if His hand had drawn us from the sorrow, and this place -- the scene of it, to Himself where there is none, we should be gaining much. May this be your gain, thus out of the eater comes forth meat.
If when we are under pressure here we had any sense of being so near to the Lord that He absorbs us, how blessedly we should gain from the pressure. It is incomparable the sense that His presence not only relieves us from our pressure, but that near Him we become more attached to Him. They say love possesses its object, and surely there is great satisfaction of heart in loving one whose love so exceeds ours.
It is, I am sure, very trying about --------, but you would not like the words said to Ephraim to be applied to you, "Let him alone". It is the continued and varied pressure which tests. "Count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience" (James 1:2, 3). Generally, we are looking for relief, and not so much for endurance which is the result of the trying of your faith. To live ever in dependence on God is the great lesson here. This was the manner of our Lord's life here. "Man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord" (Deuteronomy 8:3). It is a great thing to learn faith: that is, simple dependence on God. The more natural resources you have, the more difficult it is to be wholly dependent on God. Still it will comfort you much to be assured that the Lord is teaching you dependence on Himself, and it is very remarkable that faith is necessary in everything. "The just shall live by faith", not only in your circumstances, but in everything. I believe the Lord allows many things to happen on purpose to make us feel our need of Him. The more you find Him in your sorrows or wants the more you will be attached to Him and drawn away from this place where the sorrows are, to Him in the place where He is. The Lord comfort you, and give you to know His sympathy all the way down from heaven, so that your heart may be drawn up to Him by the very support which He vouchsafes to you.
The account of your sufferings has affected me much. I can only ask that you may be so near the Lord that you may taste of the great reality that He is outside of all the sorrows here, though, He was in them all, and can sympathise with you in all yours. He can bear you company in them, but He can do more: He can conduct you
to His own side of things, where there is fulness of joy. The former is what your or my need requires where Christ was, the other is where Christ is, and as He is your life, this is more naturally+ or truly yours than the former, for the former will pass away, the latter remains for ever. We so often limit Him to our own side. Doubtless He allows us in illness to be where there is no footing, in order that we may reach Him and know Him as Peter did when he walked on the water to go to Jesus.
The difference is very marked when we are convalescent. If you have only learned the Lord at your own side, the tendency is to be occupied with yourself, or to seek to be an object of consideration, whereas if you have been led to His side, His interest and concerns will singularly occupy you.
The Lord bless you, and raise you up to be more and more for Him.
Surely the blessed Lord has kept noted down the many kind attentions which now for many years have cheered me with the love of Christ through you, and hence I should go even far out of my way to see you in your failing health. I have been struck lately with the distinctness in which the "inner man" comes out in the sickness or suffering of the "outer man". In health or prosperity this distinctness is not so clearly apprehended. In a way they seem one, but when sickness or affliction comes, then the new being becomes distinctly known, that it has nothing to do with the sickness or the affliction, though the body in which it is, suffers. On the contrary, if the link with Christ be simply maintained, it has a clearer and a fuller sense of how entirely free it is in its nature and life from the sufferings of the outer man, and of how it is really independent of the things which are so essential
+I mean by 'naturally' that where my life is that is the most natural place for me.
and necessary to the outer man; and this is very helpful, because it imparts a strength and personality to the inner man, which enables the sufferer not only to bear his sufferings better, but even if his sufferings were removed to give a prominence to the inner man -- this new individuality, which he had not done before, nor was he so conscious of its great existence. Thus sickness and affliction in the Lord's discipline help to remove that which interferes with our spiritual growth; for as the outer man perisheth the inner man is renewed day by day. Hence we often find that the greatest sufferers have the most joy in the Lord, and, as dissolution approaches, a more decided sense and ability to dispense with that which is perishing, and thus an "abundant entrance" is ministered. How blessed to feel in oneself such positive link in life and nature to Christ, that to pass away from all here would only consummate that which is the source of real enjoyment here in the midst of suffering; and that the blessed Lord who is ministering help to us in our infirmities here, down from the highest heaven, is the One we shall be with for ever when there is no more need of this help. What a peculiar sense of rest and enjoyment it gives one to taste even a little of the happiness of being with Him, for then He sees of the travail of His soul and is satisfied. All enjoyment without a consciousness of His joy would be feeble and flickering, but when we can connect our joy with His, and as the fruit of His, as the moon borrows its light from the sun, we can always turn to His to brighten our own.
May He be so fully and vividly before your soul that your heart may make its boast in Him all the day long.
Though my sympathies are all active in concern for you, I am cheered in the assurance that you are an object of the deepest interest to our blessed Lord at this time. I feel that the Lord is leading you in a path now where no one can be any comfort to you but Himself. He is as it
were insulating you to Himself. It is a most blessed experience when one is sensibly where there is nothing, nor no one but Himself, and that you lack nothing there. One comes out from such an experience in a way surprised that old and approved interests here are not now indispensable to me though they are better answered to. I believe after the experience I speak of you will feel that there is little here to interest you where there was once so much; but you will be so entranced with His delights that you will be ever rejoicing that they are through grace your own, and that you can always return to them while you discharge every duty and fill every relationship here in a finer way and after a divine fashion. There is a leading desire in the heart of our Lord for each of us, even that we may have part with Him -- be with Him in the new place where He is now. As we advance "we who live are alway delivered unto death"; we find more of death here as we find and enter on more of life with Him; we are saved by His life. This is a Mount Moriah to you both, and the great value of it to you is that you are accumulating in your heart confidence in God.
Is it not striking how the Lord leads one through death, in spirit, as Abraham, in offering up Isaac, and Jacob in the supposed death of Joseph, and yet the reality of it did not occur in either case? To enter into and accept the loss of what is most precious to one, and then be left here with the feeling 'I can do without it, because of what Christ is to me' is very blessed. I could not have learned the worth of Christ to me, and how He can fill the heart without the loss of the natural, but often in His mercy, when I have thus learned the value of Himself, the other is restored to me.
Oh, how little one is prepared for the tunnel! It is remarkable the way the Lord disciplines each, as a rule (when it is for deepening), after one has accepted the truth, which, if lived in, would enable one to be superior to the
suffering, and thus prove the value of the truth. I remark that every saint is passed practically into the tunnel as soon as his heart is set on following the Lord, on being for Him here, during His rejection, a thought very little in the mind of His people as a ruling one. To do good and to be safe comprise all Christianity, even in the minds of many of the enlightened. To be like Christ here, which is John 17, is not considered as great as serving Him. John 15 is service, but it is His interests, not man's primarily, though man be the gainer, or the subject of it.
What a blessed testimony is ours, to 'live Christ'. Does not the heart delight in loving the One who has so loved us.
How various are the ways by which each one is taught death. Abraham learns it in surrendering his son, Jacob in losing his son, supposing him to be slain by wild beasts, after he had lost Rachel by death.
The Lord is "touched with the feeling (or sympathises with) our infirmities". Will is sin. Infirmity is not a sin, though it might lead to one -- as Sarah, when from fear she told a lie! Fear is not a sin in itself. I may be a timid nature. The Lord had more sensibility than any man but He never gave way to it unduly. He could say 'the floods of ungodliness made me afraid'. If I am weak or in pain He feels with me as to the suffering, but the gain to me is that I know how He feels for me, apart from my will, and how His grace would lead me to feel in the suffering. If He did not feel with me He could not help me; He does feel with me, but He meets it divinely; I meet it, as a rule, selfishly. He could say under great trial, "I thank thee, O Father" (Matthew 11:25). He says to me as it were, I feel it as much as you do, or a great deal more. When He was here He felt things far more deeply than the disciples did. He felt the storm, and the indifference of the Pharisee. He knows and understands my feelings, and when I am conscious of this I am not swayed by them. I can go through the
sorrow divinely however weighed down by it, God is more before me than my feelings. I do not deprive Him of His due, "the tithes", in my sorrow. My very suffering, which the Lord enters into, leads me, when enjoying His sympathy to learn His way in them, and thus I have advanced in the knowledge of Himself in the trial. When I am relieved of the trial I may rejoice, but the sympathy which I have known in it increases and enhances my knowledge of Him.
There is one thing which one learns in constant company with the Lord that could not be learned any other way and that is sensibility. I see how He feels every incongruity, but I see how He treats it, not as it affects Himself, but as it affects God. This is the way Paul learned to treat the "thorn"; your trial is I doubt not of this order; you may be sure the more you feel it the more there is grace for you to bear it. Feeling is nothing without the grace. Feeling in our Lord drew out the grace that was in Him because there was nothing but good in Him. In me the feeling tends to draw out temper, etc., but when I have His sympathy I am sure to have His divine way of answering to the feeling.
How slowly one learns that His sympathy is not expressed in removing the affliction but in raising one above it to Himself, so that He becomes so endeared to the heart that He is more an object to the heart than oneself.
I am very thankful to hear that you are more relieved of the pressure of illness, and I trust that the relief has come after you had learned support under the pressure. Martha was relieved but not supported -- she did not find sympathy. I have been much interested in studying intimacy with Christ. He is known to us first as to our side of things; I think as we know Him sympathising with us we are not only supported, but we are in heart
drawn away from things here to Himself; and as we enter upon His things, beginning with the holiest of all, we have "part" with Him. The translators of the New Testament did not understand John 10:14, 15; there should be no dividing of the verses; the correct translation is -- "... and I know those that are mine, and am known of those that are mine, as the Father knows me and I know the Father". The same kind of intimacy; How very blessed! May we know more of it.
Patience or endurance is a wonderful quality. I am convinced that the sense of the Lord's support under a pressure, not only attaches us to Him in a peculiar way, but nothing so weans us from this place. Relief makes this place more agreeable, but support detaches us from everything here, because we are supported by One who is not here, and He is increasingly endeared to us.
Hearing of the anxiety you have been passing through on account of the illness of your children, I must write you a little word of sympathy. The Lord not only knows our sorrows but He makes us know that He is, as it were, more interested in us than ever; just as the illness of your child makes you feel a deeper interest in that child. Your love and interest are not really greater, but the suffering of the child draws out your heart in a very special way to the child. Thus our Lord's heart has been drawn out the more to you. I remember one of my own children was almost pleased to be hurt because of the attention and interest awakened in our hearts for it. We do not always realise that our Lord's love (it passeth knowledge) is as great and as deep when we have no need, though it be better known to us when we are in some need, and more looked for. Doubtless for this reason He allows us to be in straits, that we may seek Him, and find Him in some new and fuller way. Exercise therefore yields blessing.
It is not that I know the reason why I am afflicted but that in the affliction my heart seeks rest and relief from Him.
There is no subject of the same personal interest to us after our salvation as the discipline of the Lord. As well as I remember, the word translated "chastening" in the Old Testament is about forty times translated "correction", and this gives a better idea of the Lord's mind than chastening. There are two kinds of discipline: one to correct you, and the other to help you. I see that the good effect of discipline is to cast you on the Lord, not so much to find out the cause of it, as to draw you to Himself. It is then and there you are severed from the idol which was a mote in your eye. I think it is possible to see, though not near the Lord, the cause for a particular discipline, and others are very ready to see the cause for it. But there is one thing that you can never learn unless you are quite near the Lord, and that is, the way to get out of the wrong path, and to find the right one. If Lot had been near the Lord he would have found the right path; he adopted one of his own choosing. Jacob (Genesis 35) is told by the Lord to go up to Bethel; that was the right path. After a lapse of twenty years, he returns to it. The point of departure is the point of restoration, and, to me, that is the one thing essential. This Peter learns in John 21. In the discipline to help you, you will be continually touched by the minuteness of His interest in you. You are made low by some grief to prepare you for a season of blessing. G. V. W. used to say that if we are not brought low before we receive some new blessing, we shall be immediately afterwards. In principle no flesh can glory in His presence.
I believe Christians lose much because they are not in full confidence of heart with the Lord. If the hairs of my head are numbered by Him, why should I shrink from making known to Him all my requests? I surely should not, if I believed that He cares more for me than any one
else in the world cares for me. May you more and more enjoy the blessed reality of sitting under His shadow with great delight. Prefer His company to any and every one's. Accustom yourself to seclusion with Him, and the more you do, the more you will cultivate it.
... Last week -------- gave a tea, and saints from -------- were invited. I spoke afterwards on growth and discipline. By the Holy Ghost you are assimilated to Christ, and at the same time God's hand in discipline removes the obstruction in you to the leading of the Spirit. The Spirit does not lead but in conjunction with the conscience: you never advance without a good conscience. As my conscience is enlightened I am cast upon God, and as I am, the Spirit leads me in correspondence with the light; and concurrently with this, the stone before the wheel, or the obstruction in my flesh, is removed by discipline. "We who live are alway delivered unto death". This is discipline to help, there is also discipline to correct. Jacob at Shalem suffers from the latter; at Bethel, from the former.
Do you see the difference between crossing the Jordan and circumcision which followed? I do not believe that we can see anything in doctrine or in practice aright, unless we are clear, through the Spirit, of the man of the earth; that is circumcision.
It is right to be exercised by discipline, but you should not be depressed. We are inclined to be buoyant when everything is naturally pleasing to us, though that is the very time that we require a check, and in the trial we often say, "Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest" (Psalm 55:6). If your physician were
to tell you that a certain course of discipline was necessary for your health, you, as you were wise, would patiently endure it. This, to my mind, is the good of exercise. You are neither to despise the discipline nor faint under it. You are so largely favoured in your family circle, that I am not surprised that you should be constantly reminded by the illness of your family that this earth is the wilderness. The wilderness is the place, as with Israel, where there was nothing to be had, all must come from God.
The effect of exercise is that you become assured that the discipline is for your blessing. "He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?" (Romans 8. 32). There are two kinds of discipline, one to correct you -- the other to help you. Jacob learns the first at Shalem, Genesis 34, and at Bethel he learns the second -- his mother's nurse dies, he was not ready for this excision until he was near God; "we who live are alway delivered unto death". It is a bad sign when you are overlooked. "Ephraim is joined to idols: let him alone" (Hosea 4:17). The simple fact that God, who is your Father, is greatly interested in your welfare, and that you are a special object of His attention, will greatly comfort you when you are near Him; and besides this, the word of the Lord will be fitly spoken to you, so that you will be gaining in a two-fold way -- by discipline, and by the ministry of the word. Hence, the more you are exercised, the more will you see that the discipline which the Father sees necessary for you, prepares you, so to speak, for the ministry of the word -- the Lord's nourishing and cherishing.
May you be much cheered because of His constant interest in you. May you thus be greatly blessed.
I am thankful that you are better. The Lord seems to be much interested in you, for His discipline is so constant. We are subjected to a twofold discipline; one, to correct
us, as with Jacob at Shalem; the other, to help us, as with Jacob at Bethel. The latter is, "we who live are alway delivered unto death". I see that in personal pressure from bad health or from sorrow we can look for His support, that is, He draws you to Himself in making known His sympathy, so that, though the suffering continues, you are borne above it with Himself. I think some mistake patience or bearing it well for this support. The latter is a very peculiar ministry. Patience has to do with the race and with difficulties. Support with infirmities. In difficulties I endure; in infirmities, personal sufferings, I seek His support -- and this is a ministry never to be forgotten! See Mary in John 11.
You are indeed subjected to divers trials. I hope you are learning to count it all joy when you are thus tried. I do not think that any one can tell us the intention of the Lord in the discipline we are subjected to. It is only when near to Himself that we can understand the nature of His loving interest in us. Hence, though often we cannot tell the cause for a particular trial, yet as we are exercised about it with Him, we get the end intended for us by it. It yieldeth the peaceable fruits of righteousness to them that are exercised thereby.
I think we sometimes have the idea that if we were going on rightly things would be smoother here for us. This is not the case so as far as I see. There is a discipline to correct us and a discipline to help us. If you are in a wrong path, as you seek the Lord, you will be corrected, but on the other hand, the more you are set for Him here, the more you find that there is nothing for you here, though at the same time you are daily finding more in Him. "We who live are alway delivered unto death". The more you enjoy the Lord who has been refused here, the more you are practically severed from all here.
It is most interesting to be truly in concert with the Lord as to all His ways with you; and as you are, you are
sure to become so restful about yourself, that His interests more and more command your attention. You cannot know His joy but as you are in communion with Him. You thus have come to His side where is unsullied light, and you are more assured than ever of your place with Him, though you are not seeking this, but seeking to be in concert with Himself. The Lord bless you much.
I find that the lack in many souls is liberty -- "the liberty wherewith Christ hath made you free". There can be no progress until this is known and maintained.
I see many nowadays who are not entering the harbour fully freighted, and all because they are not walking in spiritual activities while in this death-period, for the ruling passion is strong in death. If you have not died with Christ, death is before you, and the greatest death must necessarily be where you most like to live, and there the ruling passion is. No one has really died with Christ where the ruling passion is fostered, because it is there that death must begin, for there the tenacity of life is greatest. Whatever of yourself you try most to spare, that is the stronghold of your natural will, and hence you will find in all God's ways with you that He cuts at the root of that particular taste or prepossession, and you can say, 'What I feared greatly has come upon me'. One is mortified, disappointed, or bereaved. Why? Because the working of the natural will was most active in the quarter in which it was checked, and there death is most felt. It is often admitted as a doctrine that we have died with Christ by those who are not at all willing to be so dead as to be only a vessel for Christ's use -- to accept death to everything of the natural will. This is bearing about in our body the dying of Jesus. If any one studies and reviews the history and manner of God's ways with him from the first, he will see that God has always been subjecting him to checks. Blisters rise most where they
are most needed, and the blister is to draw the inflammation to the surface. What a life of disappointment Jacob had! But at last he worships God, leaning on the top of his staff, loosened in heart from all here, and thus he had an abundant entrance. If he had studied the ways of the Lord with him, he would have recalled the irritated feelings which he had indulged in when he was disappointed. Whenever you are vexed -- mortified, there your will is active. You may have sorrow at the same time, which is a very different exercise. If you are vexed, your self-love is touched. When you have sorrow, it is because you have lost what was dear to you. In the one case you are made little of, in the other you are bereaved. In the one, you are disappointed; in the other, you are in grief. The discipline or mode of dying in each is widely different, as well as its effect. The discipline in the first exercise is to reduce your self-importance, and thus the blister was necessary, it removes the inflammation. The vexation or disappointment arises from wounded pride; you thought you were entitled to favour. In the other case, it is sorrow, because you have lost what your heart valued. In this discipline you learn that Christ has not been enough for you, and hence is disclosed the obstacle to your progress, the stone before the wheel, in order that you may be more fully a vessel for Christ here. The end of the discipline in both is, that you may so accept death that every hindrance may be removed, and that you should be here wholly for Christ.
The first thought of every true soul is -- what saith the Lord?
The cause of the failure of every one springs from disregard of the simple meaning of God's word. God supplies enough of His mind to secure us from the dangers of the scene in which we are. God gave His word to establish His people against the dangers to which they were exposed, and had it written in order to ensure His
mind being known, and that souls might judge themselves by it. The word to Eve was enough to guide her, but she departed from it. The word to Cain was enough, and he would not hear it. The word to Noah was enough, but his descendants departed from it and built a city and a tower. God's visible token was not enough for them. The word to Abram was enough; he failed first in not answering to it fully, and afterwards in going down to Egypt. God has always said enough to supply us with plenty of counsel for our circumstances, and there is no failure that is not traceable to a departure from the word given. Isaac was not in God's mind about Jacob and Esau because he forgot the word of God. Israel forfeited the land because they would not accept the word of God. If they had obeyed it, which faith always does, they would have succeeded like Caleb. Moses lost the land because he exceeded the word of God, the word given to him was enough, but he went beyond it. The failure before Ai was because the word of God had been transgressed, and Joshua showed his weakness in crying to God about it instead of examining whether they had departed from the counsel of God. This is always the cause of failure, therefore we should always seek to ascertain where the departure from His word has been, for until that is rectified there is no use in attempting anything else. Israel did not attend to the word of the Lord in driving out the inhabitants of the land, and consequently, as the Judges show us, they suffered from this contempt of His counsel. Had they adopted His counsel, how differently they would have fared.
Saul did not attend to the word of the Lord, and he forfeited the kingdom. The word tested him and proved his incompetency for God's service. Alas! how often it is so with us! David is humiliated in divine things in the midst of and at the height of his achievements, because he overlooked the counsel of God respecting the Levites carrying the ark. David suffers from the sword in his own house because he disobeyed the word of God. How self-indulgence is requited by a never-ending sorrow, more so in a king than in a menial!
Israel is a captive in Babylon for seventy years to fulfil
the seventy sabbatical years, which they refused to accord to God as His word enjoined. The Jew is condemned because Christ's words had no place in them. "If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin: but now they have no cloke for their sin" (John 15:22). "He that is of God heareth God's words: ye therefore hear them not, because ye are not of God" (John 8:47). If Peter had attended to the word of Christ, he would not have denied Him; and yet that very word convicted him afterwards. There is the double value of the word; it would preserve us from danger, and convict us when we fall into the danger, so that we may accord with its dictation.
In a very small way, but with serious mistakes, we may misunderstand the words of the Lord from interpreting them with the natural mind. The great point for me is to clearly understand a person's mind. Fear, love or gain may so influence as to hinder one from getting a true apprehension of another's mind. I only know any one's mind as it has transpired, or as he in some way has disclosed it. So as to God's mind; I can only know His mind as He has revealed it, and it is only by the Spirit that I can understand and act upon it.
I was thinking yesterday of the difference between knowing a person by hearsay, and knowing such an one by companionship. I think there is a great deal of opinion, if I may so say, of our Lord, which one cannot aver from actual acquaintance. I mean that the word is the authority for the opinion and not personal knowledge of Him. I do not in any way lessen the value of the word. The word describes to me what He is, but when I come to know Him, my knowledge of Him confirms what I have read of Him in the word. If there were no word, there would be no definite or defined idea of what my knowledge personally would come up to, and if there were no personal knowledge there would be a 'hearsay', which had
never been proved or confirmed. When what I read of Him in the word is confirmed by my personal knowledge of Him, through divine teaching I have a sense of what suits Him, so that I do not need the word for every act. Moses breaks the tables of stone without any word to that effect. Divine instinct told him to do so. He had knowledge of God and knew what was suitable to Him. There would be no acting contrary to the word, on the contrary, all would be in keeping with it, but then there would not be waiting for positive orders. If I know Him only by the word I am afraid to act without a text -- to do anything without an express injunction. If I know Him well by the Spirit, His word gives me authority for all that my knowledge of Him reaches to. It defines what my knowledge apprehends. The word explains to me the One whom I know, but I act for Him not so much in obedience to a given word, though that could not be over-looked, but because I know and am authorised by the force and bearing of the word to adopt the course which would suit Him.
Do you understand the force of the saying, "Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?" (1 John 5:5). If your faith reaches to the Son of God it puts you apart from and above all that is not of God.
May you enter on this another year in confidence in the Lord, that He will enable you to be according to His pleasure in the duties and services to which He has called you. Your duties and services are well defined, and you are in every way competent to discharge them. The Lord fits us for the duty or mission to which He has called us. But however fit as to natural qualities, you are to answer to His mind. There are two things absolutely required in order that you may accomplish His pleasure: one is unqualified obedience to His word, and the other is His
own sympathies while executing it. If you have not unqualified obedience you are not subject, you are not reliable as a servant; and if you do not work in His compassions, you misrepresent Him. To render unqualified obedience we must have no will of our own. You must not exercise your own judgment as to whether it is wise or right; if really subject, you obey to the letter. If like Jonah you swerve from it, and in unbelief evade it, you are sure to fall into greater difficulties than you would have encountered if you were obedient. You as a rule have perception or light enough to see what you are called to. Your danger is that you would evade it, because you yield too much to your own idea of prudence; but surely the greater your light or perception, the more you require to be obedient to the word of the Lord. "If ye love me, keep my commandments" (John 14:15). True love is always controlled by its object. Where you would naturally least like to serve, there the Lord will be most honoured, if you serve fully and in His compassions. May you not avoid difficulties, but be able to say, "By my God have I leaped over a wall" (Psalm 18:29).
I am glad that you are proving in your solitude the eternal resources which are in Christ. If He be risen out from among the dead where are we? Are we among that from which He has risen, or are we with Him who has risen out of it? It is very clear, nothing can be more marked and definite, than that I cannot enjoy that which God has given me in His Son, and go on with that for which He was judged in the cross. If I do not see the fulness and nature of that which God gives, I cannot see the extent and completeness of my separation from that which was under judgment, and which has been judged in the cross of Christ. It is in the greatness of the one, that I am morally superior to the other. The effort to hook on the one with the other is simply because God's gift in His Son is not enjoyed. If it were enjoyed the incompatibility
of the two going on together would be plain enough. If I know what the "great supper" is, and have an appetite for it, I should not like or allow natural things to come in and divert my time and attention from it. There can be no reviving of that which was under judgment. Christ died under the judgment of it, and rose out of it, and we are in Him.
I am growing in desire of heart to learn, outside of this scene, how to act in it. Our practice generally is to go from the things here to Christ to learn how to deal with them; we have things here before us, as it were, when we are conferring with Him. I do not say that we are not to make known all our requests, we are told to do so in Philippians 4, but this in moral order, and for moral greatness comes after chapter 3, where Christ is the object and the goal. First, He is preferred to everything in myself; and secondly, He is preferred to everything on the earth; so that both, in me, and around me, He surpasses everything. It is from this circumcision that I enter on things here; and I let men know how yielding I am, how I can give up, because God is my resource, and to Him I do more than let my requests be known; I make them known (one word in the original). To man I let it be known that I can give up, but I turn to God, and make known to Him my requests; and the peace of God -- His own state, is the portion of my heart in a world of evil and opposition. I think we ought to seek to act here as an angel would, who knew nothing of what was passing here, but who knew well what was according to God, and what God would have him do in the place, because his knowledge is exclusively from God, and not from man. In addition to this we have before us the Blessed One, now in glory, who did everything according to God when He was here, and who is still a Man. We shall always be baffled and hindered here unless our eye
is on that perfect and glorious Man. When we are not led and controlled by Him we fall into the ways of the natural man; and then when in distress, we turn to God to deliver us, rather than to strengthen us in Christ; and hence deliverance is more the theme of our song than Himself. To be able to say, "I laid me down and slept; I awaked for the Lord sustained me" (Psalm 3:5) is evidence of perfect calm in the midst of pressure; but when the soul is in the strength of Christ it sings of the Lord -- "He hath triumphed gloriously". If I am occupied with myself, and things here, the most I can arrive at is repose -- like the frigate-bird; but if I am in company with the Lord I am in a way His harbinger from the heavens; He is my support and stay on earth, but I am His carrier-pigeon as it were from heaven, bearing His message here as He would send me. He comes down to me and makes me a frigate-bird, enables me to rise above the pressure here, and I can then come down from Him and be His carrier-pigeon. Few are restful enough to ascend from earth to heaven, and therefore there are so few who can descend from heaven to earth to express Christ and to declare His mind and thoughts as regards things here. When I wish you to be the carrier-pigeon I do not overlook your being a frigate-bird, because you could not be truly and happily the former without being the latter.
As to --------'s remark about 'high truth' (as they call it) depressing one, of course it would, if Christ were not my life, and if He were not sitting where I am seeking to be in spirit. Caleb, as you have been hearing, sets forth how a mere man was sustained by God in an unknown and untravelled path, but the case with us is that we follow Him who is our life and strength in the path where He has gone before, having overcome all that lies between; there is nothing to depress now, as there might have been to a Caleb; for all has been perfectly overcome, all is perfectly
assured to me in the One who is set down at the right hand of God, and it is really not the question whether I can get there, but whether He is there. Is the greater than Caleb in the land of promise? Yes. Then Caleb's daughter is surely there, nay, she has more, for she has both the upper springs and the nether springs -- association with Christ there, and the Holy Ghost here. --------'s speech is simply a misconception of the fulness of Christ's work and the completeness of our identification with Him. I find that no one, who is really in Christ, consciously a new creation, thinks anything too high which puts him closer to Christ. Love could never be too near to its object. Nearness to Christ is the instinct of divine life, as we see in the first question of the two disciples who followed Jesus (John 1), "Where dwellest thou?" Why is not this the first question now? Because there is not simple devotedness of heart to Christ.
-------- has written a book on communion, in which the nearest and dearest thought in the heart of Christ is never alluded to. Levelling down is what he terms communion; to me it is a very sad book. I feel the true servant as he knows the mind of Christ, as he is in communion with Him, will have conflict in spirit for the saints who are so dear to Him; but though the more I am in His mind, the deeper will be my conflict, because I cannot be satisfied with anything short of His mind, yet the more shall I be in all the grace and patience that is in Him, for as I am with Him, I receive of Himself as a whole, if I may use the expression, and not merely virtues from Him; and though I suffer more because of the state of things around me, I am at the same time better able to bear up and to overcome than when I was suffering less, so that the deeper the sense one has of the need of the saints the more one is like Shammah in the field of lentils (2 Samuel 23:11, 12).
... I hope you are better in every way now. The jewel is in the casket, or, in other words the bird is in the cage. The bird is the new being, and it sings to the glory of God; the cage is the body. There are many alterations and improved modes effected in the cage, in order that the bird may be more truly happy and gratifying to the owner. So the body of the saint is dealt with by the Lord in order that what is precious to Him may be more truly for His glory. How blessed (as the old woman in Shetland said) to feel that 'because of Christ I am a revenue of glory to God'.
I have remarked lately that the commonest defect in us, however inoffensive, is the one that needs not only to be most corrected, but, as it is corrected, the good effect appears in every detail of one's life. I was writing to a person the other day who is constitutionally inert, and I went on to remark that if she could overcome this, the dilatoriness which it causes, unpunctuality, &c., the result would be that an animation would be imparted to her whole being. It is not easy to find out always your commonest fault. I find out mine by the way the Lord speaks to me, and by the way the Father disciplines me. I believe whatever balks my communion with the Lord is my commonest failing. One must, of course, know what communion is first before one can lose it. There can be no communion until I am sensibly clean. It is the feet of clean people which are washed, not those of unclean people. I am 'clean', suited to His eye, first; and if I get soiled it is to the trouble of my own conscience; it does not change or affect the Father's heart towards me, because Christ has set me outside of everything, to the eternal satisfaction of His heart, but my conscience is soiled when I am out of communion, or rather the soil throws me out of communion, and I am unable to take my true place near Him, because I have contracted what is unsuited to the light. You will always find the truer you are, that the
thing you confess first on retiring to your own room is the plague of your heart; and if you do not feel it, you are not really in the light, and you are not restored. If you are restored you are sensible of two things -- one, that he that trusteth in his own heart is a fool, and the other blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord.
I have had, through the Lord's goodness, very interesting times in several places. The subject of union with Christ and the effect consequent on the consciousness of this relationship (identity of interest with Him) laid hold of souls remarkably. It is plain that all of God's people at any time are not in the line of His interest -- what I call the 'trade winds'. The snare in the present day is to be more occupied with the battle on this side Jordan than on the other side. There was visible fighting against Og and Sihon, every one could see the battle, and the success of Israel. This is the battle that the ardent labourers wage against the unconverted world; but in the battle on the other side Jordan, not a blow was struck, but there was a greater battle and a greater conquest. Fighting for man's benefit is always a more visible thing than fighting for Christ's glory. Who saw the great conflict that Paul had? What can be more blessed and privileged than to be called and enabled to make space here for Christ -- the only Man ever on this earth who was fully up to the mind of God, and the One who is in every way dearest to us.
May the Lord lead you both more deeply and fully into His confidence that you may be more and more for Him.
I think that there is a true desire to avoid any sin, but I do not believe that many see that the old man has been
judicially terminated in the eye of God in the cross, so that it is never revived to Him with respect to any believer in Jesus. Alas, we revive it; but He could not, because it has been removed from His eye for ever, and He has been glorified by the Son of man at the moment that it was removed. Hence, when we are in the Spirit we are free from the law of sin and death, and if we walk in the Spirit we do not fulfil the lusts of the flesh. It is by faith we see that we have died with Christ but if we were as much set upon walking in the Spirit as we are on avoiding sin, we should be free from the law of sin and death; the latter secures credit to ourselves, the former magnifies the Spirit of God.
I do not believe union with Christ (not merely association) can be realised unless we are consciously in the nature of Christ. Then it is not merely that we are kept from sin, but that we are in a nature which does not sin.
It is always in the strait that the real measure of one's faith in God comes out. We like faith in itself, but faith is always tested. It is the test that proves its reality and works endurance; you can bear up. It is here that many fail. They see a truth, they think they have faith, but if it be really grasped in the power of the Spirit, there will come a time for the proving of the faith. So with Abraham, he believed about 40 years before he was tested. Paul writes of the first -- the faith; James of the second -- the testing. It is here where all the misconception as to the objective and subjective has occurred.
I enjoyed my time at --------. I think there is exercise of soul there, and where there is exercise there is sure to be
progress. Generally you will find that saints are exercised about their service. There is no fear but that the service will be right if you come from the Lord, and in this you must seek Him and be exercised before Him. When you are exercised before Him you are sure to get something from Him. When you are exercised about service, you are trying to impart something. You never can impart beyond what you have received....
The first effect of grace in the heart is surrender for Christ; the second is to suffer with Him; the third, to have part with Him; the fourth, to come from Him, for Him here; the fifth, to derive from Him -- the Head; the sixth, because united to Him, to be wholly in His interests. A wonderful path!
When I know the Lord Jesus Christ as my Saviour, I am to Him as Jonathan was to David, when Goliath was slain, and his head in David's hand. I strip myself to make much of Him. I love much because I am forgiven much. This is the alabaster box in Luke 7.
When I know my Saviour as the One whose "left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me" (Song of Songs 2: 6), when He is the life and cheer of my heart, I long for association with Him, I would fain leave the earth, where He is not, for the place (heaven) where He is. Like Ruth, my heart says, "Where thou goest I will go". I not only spend my property to honour Him, but I long to leave the place where the property is for His place. It is then that I am prepared for the great truth that I am united to Him in heaven. I could have no greater solace, no greater satisfaction to the love that He has awakened in my heart than the consciousness that I am united to Him. This is the climax; this crowns all. I am now in company with all His own -- the bride; for ever indissolubly joined to Him in a scene entirely suited to Him, where nothing could occur to mar my happiness. And now I am so restful, so assured of the fulness of my relationship that I
am found down here in the spirit of a faithful wife, doing His pleasure in the smallest details in His house.
I have been enjoying the first and the second steps. The first is when you prefer Christ to Adam -- a grand step. "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me" (Galatians 2:20). I am personally attached to Him, and can echo the close of Romans 8. I love Him, I know He loves me. This is the first step as to separation. "Henceforth know we no man after the flesh" (2 Corinthians 5:16), though we are still in flesh. Now the second step is that not only do I prefer Christ to the most beautiful traits of Adam, but that I am so dependent on the company of Christ, who is not here, that I am drawn away from this place to Him who daily is more indispensable to me. I am weaned from the things here (not only from the man here), not because I have received other things, but because I am in company with a Person -- with Him who is not here. I am drawn away from this place to Him. In His company I receive, not only sympathy in my infirmities -- an immense favour -- but I am so borne above them that I am led by Him into the holiest. This I call the second step. There are many more.
One trait of the heavenly man is that he is entirely occupied with Christ's interests. They are now his paramount interest. The first trait I make out is the simple acceptance and sense that he belongs to heaven. As a nobleman would feel as to the House of Lords, he would know that he belonged to the House of Lords and not to the House of Commons. The second is, that he does not belong to the man here, he repudiates it, because he belongs to
Christ. The third -- Christ's mind is his, the unity of the Spirit in all His members, not merely having Christ's mind for his own guidance and help, but in every member of Christ's body here, and that is the unity of the Spirit. Fourth, all his practical life exceeds that of a saint in the wilderness, even to a slave. See Ephesians 6. Fifth, the opposition is of a most subtle character; it is not now the roaring lion so much as an unceasing effort to spoil the desire of his heart, which is to set forth Christ in heaven. That is Satan's effort, to induce you to deny the testimony. Sixth, you must be in Christ's power practically to be able to stand. You cannot excuse yourself under the plea that you are doing a right thing, though doing it in a wrong way. Satan would soon expose you, and show that the heavenly man is not maintained in your ways, even as to your temper. The feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace must characterise your walk. Seventh, your portion and place is with Christ in heaven, while you wait for Him here.
We have had an interesting reading on the wilderness. The general thought is that afflictions make this world a wilderness. I do not think that is true. I see that many who are afflicted seek for something to make amends for their affliction, to balance it, as they say. I do not see that any one can be in the wilderness until he has liberty, until he is free from the law of sin and death. "For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free" (Romans 8:2). When you are walking in liberty, in the life of Christ, you find that nothing here ministers to your life. In the type there was nothing to minister to man naturally; he was sustained by manna, and no one can touch the manna but as he is in liberty.
What is the difference of effect between knowing the love of Christ and knowing Him as the wisdom of God? Love makes you an object, you are attracted to Him -- His wisdom so entrances and absorbs you that there is no
spirit left in you. Many know something of His love, which compels them to follow Him, who do not know Him as wisdom -- as the greater than Solomon.
As to guidance, the only way to get it is to be so near Himself, that your own mind is in abeyance because His mind rules, as the queen of Sheba found in the presence of Solomon. I used to study this passage and that passage to obtain light. I see now that if I were really near Him beholding His glory (2 Corinthians 3:18), I should be transformed, should come from Him so impressed with Himself that His interests would, as it were, naturally control me, and the better I know the transcendent blessedness of being near Him, the more shall I bear about in my body the dying of Jesus, and seek to be free of any hindrance in myself.
As to communion, it is deeply interesting the line of things which interest the Lord at any given time. To be in concert with Him touching them I should call communion. A child likes to come into his father's study often to be near his father; but by degrees he becomes interested in what the father speaks of. The great hindrance with us is that the works of God in the first creation (the seen things), so invite our (as we think) legitimate attention that we are not ready for the things that are unseen.
I am greatly interested in seeing the absolute importance of having a new place, whether as in the gospel, in which it is a hope only, from which all your present joys are furnished; or in the mystery -- a seat there now in the heavenlies, as a member of Christ. If I have not the first, I have hopes and prospects here. The leeks and the onions come up before me, or the piece of land, or the oxen;
but if I am abounding in hope by the power of the Holy Ghost, I am racing on to it, tasting of it in the sanctuary; while as a member of Christ I am 'in spirit there already', the goodly land is known to me. The effect from these two would be very marked. I should by the first -- the hope -- be diverted from the world, or rather from earthly things by the great supper; while in the second I should be strengthened by the might of His power to act for Him in heavenly beauty down here. The power that takes me up is the power that enables me to stand for Christ here. If it has taken me up in spite of all opposition and hindrance here, of course it will enable me to be superior to them when down here.
I dwelt chiefly on the fact that we have a place in heaven where Christ is, that we cannot be right in any way, or reach the finish of the gospel if we do not maintain that our place is in heaven, though we are still on earth; and the power of heaven, the Holy Ghost is in us here, and the more we are in the fellowship of the Holy Ghost the more we know and feel the opposition of the world....
In the gospel, I was saying, how seldom the sinner seeks more than escape from perishing, like the prodigal. To recover one's first position with God is little thought of. Secondly, that it is not enough to say that God delights in saving, though that be perfectly true. The truth is that God delights in having; His heart must have the prodigal with Himself.
Very gladly I address myself to the subject of your letter, and trust that I may make my reply satisfactory to you. Christ is in glory; that is our link to glory. He is there, we are not there personally, but we are united to Him where He is by the Holy Ghost, and hence He in us is the hope of glory. "Glorify thou me". "Received up into glory" -- "Glorified his Son Jesus" are testimonies enough to the fact that Christ is glorified, which no saint would deny. But if He be glorified, and if I am united to Him
where He is (and this is by the Spirit of God), when He appears I shall appear with Him in glory. Now seeing Him in glory I am transformed into likeness to Himself, as He is there; not as He was here merely, though if my eye is on Him in glory, my walk down here would be practically similar to His. When the Lord says on the going out of Judas (John 13:31, 32), "Now is the Son of man glorified, and God is glorified in him. If God be glorified in him, God shall also glorify him in himself, and shall glorify him immediately [or straightway]", He presents to us the new state of man before God, consequent on His suffering and death. The Son of man is glorified, and God is glorified in Him, hence He straightway is glorified. The man here, the first Adam, even in God's chosen people, had chosen the glory from men instead of the glory from God (John 12:43), and the blessed One had proved after thirty-three years' sojourn among men here, that there was no possibility of raising any to His own unique condition before God, unless He died, unless He in Himself bore the judgment resting on the life of the first Adam (John 12:24). Now if He has to die in order to reinstate man before God, it is plain that the life for which He died cannot be any longer tolerated. Hence in verse 25, as a parenthesis, He adds: "He that loveth his life shall lose it; but he that hateth his life", etc. The life of the first Adam is no longer to be cherished, but on the contrary, as a moral existence it is to be hated. Thus not only am I freed from the old man ( ) in the cross of Christ (Romans 6:6), but I am thankful to be delivered from the body of this death (Romans 7:24). Well, then, here I am, surrounded on all sides by the first man, but I am a new creature in Christ Jesus, who is not here, but who is in glory. The Man who glorified God here is in the glory of God, and I am through the grace of God united to that blessed One where He is, and, through the self-same Spirit, I am instructed in the things (the fatted calf) which God hath prepared for them that love Him. He reveals them to me by His Spirit; consequently when Christ was definitely rejected from the earth, we find in the end of Acts 7, that the present action of the Holy Ghost is then declared or inaugurated. Stephen being full of the Holy
Ghost, looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God and Jesus. The Spirit shews him Jesus and connects him with Jesus in glory. This is the first time that any one was able to survey the glory without fear, or shrinking from it. And why? Because Jesus is the link to it, and the saint here is linked to Him there by the Holy Ghost. Now this is the only true place for the saint today. Christ being rejected from the earth, the grace of God does not cease, as Philip states in Acts 8:33, "His life is taken from the earth", which is tantamount to this, your Saviour has no life connected with earth, He is not alive here, but where He is alive is not there added. That link the conversion of Saul of Tarsus supplies. Jesus in the glory is revealed to the chief of sinners. In the case of Stephen the Holy Ghost had connected the saint with the Son in glory; but now the grace of God reveals His Son in glory to the chief of sinners. Man -- the first Adam, in his state and condition was repelled by the glory of God. It demanded righteousness, and he had none. But now that the Son of man is glorified, it is the ministry of righteousness and the ministry of the Spirit. Every room of the glory is thrown open to us. Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty, and instead of the glory repelling, it now claims us as its own, and transforms us into the image of the glorified Man there.
We are quickened together with Him, and raised up together, and made to sit together in heavenly places in Christ, which is our proper home, and where our life is. Hence it is: "If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God" (Colossians 3:1). I am here still to carry about in my body the dying of Jesus, that the life of Jesus may be made manifest in my mortal body; I am on earth to live Christ, the heavenly Man, who is not here.
In the millennium the saint will live the earthly man, he will enjoy the earth, and rightly, because Christ will then be here reigning and no longer the rejected One. To live the earthly man now is the snare and tendency of the saints in the present day of His rejection. If I am connected with the Man in glory -- the Son of God -- I must retire from everything that is of the man here, for
whom He was crucified; hence the more I live in company with Christ glorified the more am I down here conversant in walk and ways with Christ crucified. If it is a question of my going to God, it is the resurrection of Christ which is the grand point presented, as in Romans. If it is my walk here (as in 1 Corinthians), it is Christ crucified, ending in chapter 15, with my resurrection! The answer to your question is -- I am united to Christ in glory by the Spirit, and as I behold Him there, I am transformed into the same image. As He is there so am I in the glory with Him and the power of the glory is in me through Him by the Spirit.
I hope you had a prosperous journey, after leaving those dear people yesterday. It is a great thing to keep the best company in divine things; the most blessed effect is the consequence. "While the king sitteth at his table, my spikenard sendeth forth the smell thereof" (Song of Songs 1:12). Well, I trust that we both feel that our blessed Lord has had us at His banqueting house, and that He has prepared us for increased devotedness to His interests here. I find it a very testing question when anything has to be decided on -- which course would be for His interest -- the paramount thing before the mind being His interests. I desire that we should be in company as to this, and I am persuaded that the more separate we are the more we promote the interests of the Lord.
I have been writing on 'How to promote the unity of all saints', and as I study the subject I am increasingly convinced that the more we are apart from everything here for God, the more we are able to help others, and the more influence -- spiritual influence -- we shall have with them. There is a great moral difference between the acceptance accorded to one who is a great donor in temporal things and the acceptance inspired by, and rendered to, the "virtuous woman", I mean the saint
who is absolutely devoted to the Lord. I can tell the Lord, what I desire for you, and He knows it exactly. Every one is a friend to him that giveth gifts, but every spiritual person honours and delights in the one who is most spiritual. May this honour and delight be more yours day by day. May you advance more and more, and may we be increasingly in company with the Lord's present interests.
The more I think of being interested in the Lord's interests the more vast and amazing does it seem to me that we should be allowed and invited by Him into so great a privilege. First, I find that He is near me, and so fully interested about all that concerns me, and then in nearness to Him, I regard every one whom I meet, or am connected with, as He would desire, and I seek for them what would suit His interests and pleasure. I meet with people that you do not, and you meet with and are connected with people in a way that I am not; each one we meet and are connected with would evoke a distinct notice and attention from Him if He were in our places. Now, if we were really near Him, this distinct notice and attention is what we, in our measure, should render through His grace acting in us: and it is just here that I feel one fails, some-times giving the notice and attention suited for A to B, not having Him sufficiently before the soul. There can be no rule on the subject, but if one were really near Him one would act to relations and to all others as would suit Him, and the interests which He has at heart; we should not give one too much attention and another too little. We should not allow one claim to divert us from others, for however great and incumbent any one's claim might be, it is after all His interests in the place, or in our circle that are to be paramount, and if I am not able to take an interest in all that with which He connects me, there must be weakness somewhere; I must have lost my balance somewhere. The point with me is -- How can I take in all His interests in the circle in which He sets me according to His own mind? I must not overlook
any of them. The lamp is not for every room in the house, but it is feeble and imperfect if it does not cast light on every object in the room where it is placed, though the one nearest to it, or needing most of it, may necessarily take in most of its light, and that is quite right; but nothing in the room, the sphere to which it is appointed, must be unprovided with a suited share of the light.
It is in their extent and variety that the magnitude of the Lord's interests press on me; if I am not able to enter into them it is plain that I am not in concert with Him; but as I am, how occupied, how engrossed, how filled up is my time, and my heart; nay, everything assumes a weight and an importance which I cannot explain to any other, and then even hearing about His interests would awaken prayer and remembrance in me. I should feel that I had not the mind of a man but the mind of Christ.
The Lord lead you to be so near to Himself that you may have great skill, as well as enjoyment of heart, in casting the suited ray on every object in the circle in which He has placed you, and so enter increasingly into the magnificence of His grace.
What a wondrously blessed thing it is to know that we have our Lord's sympathy in the trials we pass through. I am sure when we know that we have it we are not eager or impatient for deliverance, but alas! with some of us, our trials are so often the fruits of our own unsubduedness, that we cannot look for His sympathy in the things themselves, though of course we may and should know His sympathy, the moment we accept His way for us in them.
In the sorrows of unfaithfulness we cannot expect His sympathy except as we retrace our steps. The Lord could sympathise with Lot leaving Sodom, but not as to his loss and trials in it.
I think the reason why Mary (John 11) knew more of the Lord's sympathy was because she leaned on Him
more -- leaned, if I may so say, on His love more than on His power.
It is quite true that we are made in different ways, and at different times to realise the wilderness. I have been thinking what is the law of discipline, I mean what is the unerring and unvarying rule by which it is administered, and with this I have a thought in my mind (though it is not yet matured into a meditation), that holiness is the only refuge for widowhood though it leads to widowhood. I think the widow, who gave all she had for the temple (Luke 21), God's testimony on the earth, is a striking and lovely example for us. She was not seeking to amend her own condition, though to a Jewess her condition was the most sad one, but to expend her last to maintain what remained for God on the earth. If we realised our place as sent into the world for Him we should not only be above the world in spirit, but we should carry such joy in our hearts, because of our nearness to God, that we should not be detained by anything here. A real blank cannot be filled up, and doubtless it ought to remain as the witness to the heart here of what this life is, but the more so, the more there ought to arise out of the dreariness of the blank, the beacon-light to the day of reunion and glory.
I have been much helped by seeing that the true way to assure one's heart of any desired or promised condition is seeing our Head in it first; then there is nourishment ministered.
Those chapters in Numbers which you refer to are all very instructive and magnificent. What a spirit was Balaam's, willing to compromise truth in order to meet the carnal mind, and this for his own gain! What real relief and strength to the heart there is in looking by faith to that wondrous moment when our Lord shall present us to Himself.
(Judges 7)
We had an interesting reading here a few evenings since. We had Judges 7, and we were considering what characterised the 300. The "water" represents temporal mercies. Prosperity tries a man more than adversity, for the former gives an opportunity for your weakness to indulge itself, the latter summons up all your strength. Well, if my heart is truly set on the Lord's glory and His battle, I do not bow down on my knees to enjoy passing mercies, while on the other hand I do not despise them, I taste and refresh myself with them, but as one intent on something greater. I do not think that we ought to refuse any of the 32,000, but I think we ought to be prepared to be sifted down to the 300. The Lord in mercy empower us to be among those devoted to Himself, and keep us true.
I see no escape from the present widespreading confusion but contending "earnestly for the faith once delivered". Those in the foremost rank will suffer most, but will in the end come off best....
As to what you say of Paul's ministry. In Ephesians he calls it the mystery of the gospel, and in Colossians the mystery of Christ. The gospel and the church comprised his ministry. I hope to be able to send you a meditation by which you will see in outline the practical effect which the hope of the gospel and being dead with Christ produces in various lines, according to the line of truth apprehended. If the truth, though only received in terms, be really delighted in, surely when made real to us by the Spirit we shall the more delight in it.
I have been cheered by the simple thought of the Father desiring to make merry with the lost son. Love only enjoys itself after it has satisfied itself. It works for itself until it satisfies itself. This was God's wondrous way in Christ, but His love waits to enjoy itself with me in the very top circle of nearness and communion. If I do not reach that circle, I do not reach God's joy in having satisfied
His love in providing it for me. If I walk through this world with the sense of this love for me in my heart, I am necessarily the giver to every man as man, because I am greater than man as man; my life and not merely my lips testify to my independence of men, and of the joy of my heart in God. The living waters flow out.
As to the passage, "Magnified thy word above all thy name" (Psalm 138:2), I understand it as setting forth the honour and inviolability which God attaches to His word. What reliance ought we to place in His word and what reverence ought we to preserve for it. I feel for your dear mother especially in being shut out by suffering from the morning meeting. May she make sure of and count up her treasures. They say a sailor's pleasure and pastime at sea is overhauling his box. Can we ever ascertain all the treasure in our box?
I do not think that a soul learns differently in much light to what it did in little light. Every one has to grow: and where there is growing there must be a beginning, and a beginning is always small. "Whereunto ye have already attained" belongs to every stage of the new history. The calling now is immensely higher, and the power to raise us to it is the Holy Ghost given to us; yet I believe that we have to learn as deeply as the saints learned when their calling was lower and the light much less. I think it a mistake to suppose that because greater light has come in there is an easier way, or an offhand way of learning now. I believe Saul of Tarsus saw the finish, and where grace in its fulness set him: but I am certain that he learned as deeply as Peter did (Luke 5), if not more so, that he dared not face the holiness of God's presence but through Jesus; nay, that his learning was just as true and as deep as any saint in the Old Testament times, only (and that was a great deal) that they were not able to see the bright finish as he was. They were like birds in a fog, wishing
to reach the pure light of heaven, but not able to do so; while he saw that when his wings were matured, the full expanse of heaven was before him. Learning is very real work, and there is no maturing without it, and I do not believe that any one matures brilliantly, who does not learn sufferingly. Easily got, easily gone, was never so corroborated as in the highest things. I believe, therefore, that though the Spirit is in us and with us now, there is not an ignorant state presented to us in scripture of any saint that we have not to get clear of experimentally, and that the education vouchsafed to the disciples going to Emmaus is as necessary for us as for them; indeed, when it has not been learned there is always a lack in the soul of divine revelation about Christ.
Of course, if one is not keeping His word He could not manifest Himself. Love keeps His word, but the heart that has tasted of His company in heaven loves to observe His commandments as the guide to its affections, and the acme of its delight is for Him to manifest Himself. I do not think that many know what this manifestation means. Mr. -------- asked me why I declined speaking of it at R--------. I replied, because I considered it such a deep subject, and I know so little of it, though I value it extremely. The disciples who had known Him on earth followed Him by faith to heaven, but their hearts were not comforted until He manifested Himself to them on earth.
I should like to see more earnestness in souls in seeking to know the Lord. I am afraid of their being satisfied with seeing truth about Him. I am quite sure that if there were more breaking of heart to know more of the Lord, wondrous disclosures would be made to us. I never feel that I have prayed truly without the sense more or less of agony in my desire to get clear of everything which hinders me from apprehending more of what He has apprehended me for.
-------- said high truth was not practical. I reply -- The highest truth produces a practice least visible to the eye of man, and the more one seeks to be practically heavenly, the more will Satan try to cast a cloud or a tarnish on everything connected with one; but the Lord knows all, and there I have learnt to rest.
I believe there is much conveyed in the Lord's words to Peter "Lovest thou Me", to promote devotedness. As loving is the highest and most enjoyable activity in God, so must it be in us. And in loving the Lord we are loving One who first loved us, in fact there could not be love otherwise, because if we love God we must know Him. How could we love one whom we do not know? In loving the Lord we love One who in no way checks our love, but who on the contrary draws it out and increases it, for He has Himself produced it in us by revealing His own love. It is said that love must have an ideal; that is, it has a standard to which, when it is true, its objects, in order to satisfy it, must come up; though among men, it is only that they fancy it. Love is an activity which cannot view with indifference the state of its object. With man therefore it is an advantage that love is blind. But with God, the activity of His love puts away in the cross of His Son the entire offending thing in judgment. That is, He righteously gets rid of our condition which is painful to His love, and hence, having "graced" us in the Beloved, His love has nothing to check it. It is not that He loves us in spite of our faults, but He can rest in His love, for there is nothing in us (as we are in Christ, entirely new before Him) any more to offend Him.
What a complete satisfaction to His love! The very exactitude and inexorability of His righteousness subserve His love. Lessen the righteousness and you lessen the love. The love cannot allow anything in me that would be below the divine standard, for the standard of divine love is perfect in His eyes, and therefore God's standard must be what answers to Himself. We, in our love, are obliged to tolerate and excuse, because even in our ideas of perfection, we must make allowance for imperfection, or we must condemn ourselves, or be dishonest. God commends his love to us while we were yet sinners. He from His own side removes every atom of the offending thing,
so that we now, in the life of His Son, may make our boast in God through Him by whom we have received the reconciliation. Everything has been removed by His love that we may have full access to Him and make our boast in Him, that we may be with Him on the happiest terms, and then His love dwells in us and surrounds us, and nothing can separate us from it. See Romans 8, end. In my flesh there is plenty to pain His love, but He has judged it from His side for ever, and I am called to do so, and as I love Him I do. "All things work together for good to them that love God" (Romans 8:28). If I love Him, I love what suits Him. I am not surprised to see judgment on everything that is unsuited to Him. See the opening of Deuteronomy 11, "If thou love", etc., and in 1 Corinthians 2:9, "Which God hath prepared for them that love him". If I love Him, I love His perfection, for after all, the thing that satisfies love is that the object is according to its standard of perfection. Hence the Lord shall see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied, and He will present us to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle, or any such thing, but holy and without blemish. Now the more we love the Lord the more are our souls filled with His perfection, and the less we can bear that which is unsuited to Him, and the more do we seek to be conformable in every thing to His mind, and to seek His pleasure. This activity, the spring of love, imparts the greatest charm to, and is the reward of devotedness. The eagle delights to lead her offspring into the same power as herself; this is a feeble type of divine love, which will have its objects like in nature, and in ability. That is the nature of Christ's love for us, and eventually we shall be perfectly like Him. Hence as we love Him, we seek that all who belong to Him should be here like Him. If we have learned in any little measure to fly, we take the place of the eagle mother, and encourage the young brood to fly. This is the delight of love, and this devotedness is of the highest order. The satisfaction of love is that there should be nothing in its object to check it, but that it should be according to its own standard of perfection, and this delight and satisfaction Christ will have in the church when He presents her to Himself glorious, without spot or blemish or any such thing.
I was glad to hear from you, and I lose no time in trying to answer your questions. I think our place in glory will be determined by our walk and course here. The new being is formed here, its capacities are satisfied in glory, and in the glorified body. Each of us will fill a particular place in the kingdom, a stone in the temple. The stone is quarried here, and in view of its destined place; and in glory it is set in the place fit for it; and this is explained and confirmed at the 'Bema of Christ'. I do not think it will be a question of the intelligence of saints: the eyelid has as much intelligence as the eye, but the eye has a more distinguished place -- though not more necessary. So in a building, though there is a positional difference between foundation and corner stones, and ordinary ones, the latter are as much part of the building as the former. You see in the circle which surrounds a great potentate just what I mean -- men with full intelligence in every capacity, and each with his appointed duties; but some are nearer the sovereign and are more largely used by him than others. They all know the sovereign, their intelligence is, in one sense, alike. They compose the royal circle, but there is difference as to position, and as to the qualities which are required for a true discharge of the duties attached to each; and yet all are quite intelligent as to the mind and feelings of the sovereign personally: the lower officer is acquainted with the heart of his sovereign as well as the higher one, though in a different degree; it is not a question of intelligence but of position. The babe in Christ will be as intelligent about Christ's love to him, and will enjoy Him as much as Paul -- we shall all know as we are known. But a babe does not understand the grace of Christ as Paul does: he has not been practised in the ways of Christ on earth as Paul has been. The man with one pound, and who by faithful service had increased it to
ten pounds, is evidently better qualified to rule over ten cities than the one with five pounds, as the product of his one pound. I think that our qualities for position are acquired now; there will be no opportunity for learning grace by-and-by, and it is in learning the grace of Christ, and growing up to Him now, that one is qualified for higher positions in His service by-and-by. The intelligence and the enjoyment will be alike, though the position will be different, because the qualities for the position will be different. The babe will see and enjoy everything quite as much as the father; but a babe would not be qualified to administer the grace of Christ in service, as a father would. They are all in royal garments, and all at the royal table, but each in a different position of trust and service, in keeping with the spiritual growth in this scene, where man has been set of God; for in some way, we shall, I suppose, ever have some connection with the earth. Nothing of the new man can be lost, but by exercises here in the ways of God we grow into conformity to Christ, and into knowledge of God in His ways; and this growth qualifies and capacitates for position in the glorious company hereafter. These are my thoughts, I have never, that I remember, written before on the subject, and therefore I timidly put them forth for your reflection. See Luke 22:28 - 30.
I regard you as one of the women who strive together with me [the right reading] in the gospel. Very blessed place for a woman to be found in, that is, in fellowship with the apostle's testimony. Many work who do not strive together with the apostle in the gospel. There is a remarkable connection between a soul's enjoyment of a truth, and the purpose and zeal in the propagation of it, The latter indicate the measure and nature of the former. If it be the benefit of the gospel which occupies me, my zeal, at best, will be but to make known the benefit of it, and there will be a great deal of effort with this.
But as one gets into the counsel of God in the gospel, there will be, with increased sense of its greatness, a corresponding sense of the opposition to it, and therefore a girding up of one's loins to resist. The one is more aggressive, the other more unyielding: one is a meteor, the other a star. When your heart is settled in the purpose of God, there will be an evenness.
You must take care not to live on your enjoyment of divine things; enjoyment is not creative; it is the counsel and love of God which sets you where there is fulness of joy. You must not seek the joy, but rest in the place where He has set you and in Him by whom you are entitled to this great joy. If you seek joy you are, even if you reach it, only like a meteor, a brilliant light for a time, but the star possesses light and imparts it. I do not think that joy of itself is the highest state, though I think that enjoying the Lord, He Himself filling my cup, is perfect bliss. I find I am joyful when I am conscious that Christ is sufficient -- "no bread" but Jesus only (see Matthew 16:1 - 10), and I do not believe any joy can surpass this. Prayer, ministry of the word, everything which contributes to supplant any rivals to Him, and to give Him the throne of my heart undisturbedly, help on my joy; but, if these things are not ministering to me, I do not lose my joy, though I may grieve that souls are not helped, but I have not lost my own portion, though there be nothing around to add to me. The darker the night, and the less I receive from others, the more am I called upon to render to all. Should I become dark, or depressed, because the darkness is great and oppressive? No, this is the very time for the true heart to "strive together with me in the gospel", as the apostle says, and when he wrote that he was in prison! If you only seek enjoyment for yourself, you will be at best but a meteor, which vanishes in the darkness, but if you rest in the fact that Christ can and does fill your cup, you will, like the bee, gather honey in the summer time; and like her too, have it in store in the winter. I might be oppressed and grieved by trying meetings, for instance, but if I were thereby to lose my joy I should only add to the general disorder. I am most thankful for the fellowship of meetings, but I am not dependent on
them: I come to help them and to receive, but if my help be not accepted, my joy in the Lord does not leave me, but remains with me. I think you judge yourself, or rather your state by the amount of your joy, this, I believe, is unwise. I judge myself as to whether Christ is enough for me, and I do not raise the question of my joy at all; but I find that when He is enough my joy is full, I am rejoicing in the Lord, for He fills my cup. If my heart be full of life I must be warm and healthy.
As to your question about communion, I think I should distinguish between communion, and walking in communion. I think it is quite possible to have had communion with God as to a certain part of His purpose and grace, and to have made no advance from that part; and yet it was true communion as far as it went, and one might even revert to it, as a known moment of power and enjoyment. I think, for instance, a soul may have a true sense of the value of the blood in the sight of God, and can always refer to that moment with delight and assured blessing; but he has to revert, which in itself proves that he is not in communion as a present thing, for if he were, he would connect the past with the present, and be conscious that the stream, small at the source, only widens and deepens as it proceeds, the first drop swelling by every fresh acquisition, but the present part of the stream imparting a force and sense of power and blessing which the first drop could not alone. If I have to revert to the first drop in order to prove that I have tasted of water in the desert, it proves that I am not now in full concert with the mind and thought of God in my course and journey, or in company with His interests and counsels, and thus through grace shaping myself in keeping with them. In the latter case I am walking in the light and have communion with Him. In the former case I only revert to a time when I was true to my calling, and had a sense in my soul of enjoying a certain blessing. That blessing
was according to God's mind, and in that mind I was for the moment, and so far I had common mind with Him, and such was the impression it made on me, that I always can revert to it; but the fact of my reverting to it thus proves that I have never known any like it since. I quite believe that there may be and is a great distinctness about the first drop to a parched soul in a weary land; but then this great era (begun with this distinct taste) is to be continued. It is only the beginning of a stream of endless blessing which communion with God necessarily is, for in all His counsels and interests I find strength and cheer. It is, I admit, a great thing to have had a taste of it, but I fear that there are many who comfort themselves by the past taste (remaining in its value) instead of being daily invigorated in the deep, full stream of His love and purposes, and which necessarily cannot be known but in His own region, namely, the light, which is also our only region. Hence, if we walk in it, we have fellowship with one another.
I hope you are now quite convalescent, and that you have written, not with pen, but in your heart, a psalm; that is, a record of the way the Lord has led you: "I was brought low, and he helped me". A psalm is very much like what I think our feeling at the judgment-seat of Christ will be: we are brought into remembrance of all the way which the Lord thy God hath led thee. However great our crookedness and failure, the psalm will be -- Goodness and mercy have followed me all the days of my life. I think often a severe illness has been a great crisis in one's life; we may not know the cause for it, but it is the exercise in consequence of it which yields so much blessing. It is a great thing to be practically conscious that all on this side is death -- like Abraham going up Mount Moriah. I am much attracted by his moral dignity, because of his faith in God, as he ascended that mount. He was prepared
to put out all natural light with his own hand. "They that sow in tears shall reap in joy" (Psalm 126:5). Oh! our lack is that we do not accept death on our side because so assured of life -- of Himself in resurrection on His own side. Abraham could never forget that journey. I dare say there has been much in your illness as to the exercises of your soul that you will never forget. It is true that in the mind of God we are always over Jordan, but though in the wilderness the joys of heaven are ours, like the grapes of Eschol, the reality of being over is never known until by faith we accept it as having died with Christ, and that therefore heaven is our place, and we know it to be our place, and that this side is not our place, and we know that it is not. The more you are with the Lord on the other side, the less disappointed you will be here, for when you are there you import new joys and new hopes into this old world, from an entirely new one, and you therefore in every way surpass the inhabitants of this old world. May this be more and more your happy song.
I hope you and -------- will soon go to the seaside, and that while you continue to enjoy one another's company, you will be jealous lest the Lord should lose any of your company; and that you will seek that you only prepare one another the more for seclusion with Him. I was asked once what was the most desirable thing on earth; and my answer was, 'A congenial companion -- or counterpart'; but now I am afraid of any one or any thing which might supplant the Lord, even for a moment. Not that I do not enjoy the company of some, but I feel I must deny myself when I have the opportunity of gratifying myself. Denying oneself, when one has nothing to deny, is easy; but when one has, then the real acquired power is declared.
I was showing them on Sunday that power, however latent, indicates itself by the height at which it aspires.
You know I rejoice in your aspirations, because they
indicate exercise and taste within; and I am cheered in my own heart at the deepening interest that I am made conscious of, for some at least, that they might be in full suitability for Christ, all glorious within, clothing of wrought gold. It is such an interest, that at times the poor heart would almost like to be freed of it; and yet nothing so really delights and invigorates the heart, even of man, as the depth and purity of the affection which controls it. For -------- it has grown from year to year, and though it is not so matured for you, yet I am sure that it is of the same divine order, because it is your prosperity which gratifies it, not what you are to me. I mean that when the interest in another is of that order, it is gratified, not by the return it gets, but by the progress and gain of the object of it.
It is very interesting to bear in mind that the body is the Lord's. David even had some idea of this truth when he preferred pestilence to any other suffering. To be under the hand of One who so perfectly loves us and owns us. "The body is the Lord's". One can speak to Him so easily about it; much more so than about one's circumstances. They (circumstances) are more in the Father's hand, and I suppose discipline in the way of bodily suffering is from Him. Bodily suffering from the Lord is, I think, on account of laxity; we are judged of the Lord (1 Corinthians 11:32). I conclude there must be a sense of reserve between the Lord and me when He chastens me through the body. Whereas when I suffer in my body as the Father's discipline, I am sensible, and the more so as I am near Him, that it is to make me partaker of his holiness to detach me from some hindering influence. For instance, if I were passionately fond of singing, He might send me hoarseness, and this would be a proof that I was progressing ("we who live are always delivered unto death");
whereas if I were not progressing -- not seeking to get on -- He might let me fall into some snare through my singing -- meet with company that would injure me in some way.
How delightful to be near enough to Him to understand His love! He likes our company, and it is His work that has made us fit to be His companions. He fits us for Himself first, as the steward ornamented Rebekah before she came to Isaac; but it was with Isaac's ornaments. It is interesting to see that in the type she is in nature the same as Isaac; so Christ makes us of His nature, before we are united to Him, or rather to fit us for union with Him. How little we enter into this union! What restfulness it would give, what peculiar interest in all that is His it would lead to! May we truly grow into it.
I wrote to --------, 'I should rejoice to see you in the forefront for separation.'...
The Lord bless you much. You are very dear to us, and may He keep you for His own service.
It is very interesting to note the difference between "milk" and "solid food" (Hebrews 5:13, 14). Every one gets milk, but "solid food belongs to full-grown men, who, on account of habit, have their senses exercised for distinguishing both good and evil". It is the exercise that is so profitable, for in it God is before me. It is not only that I have the faith, but I must keep a good conscience -- that is, I must walk with God in connection with faith. The great failure of the church was being satisfied with faith, or a creed, and putting away conscience, and consequently it made shipwreck. I believe in the full grace of God, but I am exercised before God for every step, that there may be consistency with His grace. It is not that I seek to gain anything, for everything has been given to me, but to walk with an uncondemning heart before Him (1 John 3:21). It is the personal intercourse which subsists with the Lord, and the more that I distinguish things that differ, the better am I fitted to enjoy Himself,
for He is the "solid food". He brings you to His banqueting house. The more you are exercised, the more you are apart from what is unsuited to Him. You enjoy the company of our Melchizedek, not only to bear you above every infirmity, but to delight your heart with His company in the holiest.
May you thus be richly blest. May you daily enjoy not only His sympathy, that is His countenance and help on your own side, but may you be so free of heart from your own things, that in spirit you are at home with Him where He is, lost in wonder, love and praise!
Subjection to His will is everything. The path of wisdom is pleasantness and peace, and surely we could not have more than that. We very slowly get to wisdom -- His wisdom in each arrangement for us. Paul prayed three times before he got to the wisdom of his suffering; and when he got to it, he could say: "I take pleasure" in the very thing he had desired so earnestly to have removed. Love is God's motive in everything, but "in wisdom hath he made them all". Wisdom therefore "is the principal thing; ... and with all thy getting, get understanding" (Proverbs 4:7). We are often tried now, because we do not see the wisdom of God's ordering for us.
I am allowed in His grace to be out at meetings almost every evening. I have been deeply interested in setting forth what our blessed Lord is to the church -- the Head. I think I used to dwell more on what we are to Him. Both are very interesting, but what He is to us is the greatest. The Lord cheer your heart much in deepening acquaintance with Himself. Be like Ruth -- "Where thou goest, I will go". You cannot do without Him or be without Him. Oh, for more personal attachment to Him! And then how settled and assured the heart is when we know that we are united to Him where He is.
In the early mornings it is a privilege to speak of you and others before the Lord.
Is it not a wonderful thing that we can go to God about everything? It is not only to get answers to our requests, but to learn His mind about them. In Jewish times they turned to the priest with the Urim and the Thummim, but how much better for us to turn to the love of the One who is touched with the feeling of our infirmities. He is, blessed be His name, ever in the aspect to suit us. If He is thinking of you, He must present Himself to you as your need requires. I believe there is more gained in His presence than we generally admit. How could I have the peace of God if I had not been impressed with it in His presence? My difficulties might remain the same, but I am not the same. I have been impressed in my interview with Him with His peace. I really have no light about anything but from Him, and hence the importance of being in His presence, as the sanctuary typified. I believe we cannot speak of anything but as we learn from Him. I must come to Him to learn His mind. I may get a favourable or an unfavourable answer, but I cannot tell which it may be until I am near Him. He impresses me by Himself also, which I consider of great value. In the storm with the disciples in the ship He was asleep; if they had been near Him in spirit -- really identified with Him, they would have been as calm as He was. But they were unbelieving; they awoke Him, and He only brought about what He had indicated in His own Person -- there was a "great calm".
As to the use of means, I see that our blessed Lord never made little of any means present; He considered the present means adequate for the emergency.
I am very glad to hear of dear -------- being at --------. In watering others one is watered oneself. This is certainly most true in praying for others.
How a parent's heart is drawn out in interest and care for the child that is most dependent on it, and most needing or counting on the parent's care. And as this is true of man in the simply natural state, how much more of Him from whom cometh down every good and perfect gift. Surely each of us has learned that the more we have depended and counted on our Father's care, the more He had proved it to us, and thus made us still more dependent on Him. As, or in proportion as, we need Him, so we find Him. To the one He has shewn most He will shew more. The largest tree gets most of the sun; as it spreads itself out, so it receives. "He that seeketh, findeth" (Matthew 7:8). I can rejoice in the increase of your confidence in Him, learned as it is in your need of Him and in turning to Him. How differently and yet how truly He leads each of His children to find "our springs are in thee" -- one in one way, and one in another.
We had a good reading on Acts 27. Faith in God will carry us safely over every difficulty and opposition. The opposition there came mainly froth the very best intentions and human prudence!
I wish you could have told me something more hopeful about --------, but I believe the true way is to follow the example of the Israelites in patiently walking round Jericho. It is sure evidence of faith in God when we can wait quietly on Him. It is not only "continuing in prayer", but "watching thereunto". The more quietly one walks on waiting upon God, the more surely and evidently will the work be of God. When we are waiting on God we are made sensible of the mind of Christ so that we are not unfeeling, though we be apparently inactive.
... I felt how you were learning to cast your care on Him who careth for you. Sorrow knits the hearts of friends nearer together than joy does. Blessed be God, He is the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. He knows the sort of pressure which will keep our hearts from wandering to broken cisterns which hold no water. May you both draw richly and abundantly from Him -- the fountain of living waters.
It is amazing to me the way our blessed Lord carries on His purpose with each of us, step by step and chapter by chapter. The more we sit and muse on His ways, and even His words to us, the more we are comforted with His minute assiduous attentions, perfectly holy, yet perfectly tender. The queen of Sheba learned Solomon in His glory, and thus we know Him now. This knowledge connects us with and introduces us into His things, while the way He has with Mary in John 11 unfolds to us how we learn Him in our own sorrows down here. As I learn Him in the latter, I feel that the One most necessary to me here is no longer here; and as I know Him in glory, I am beside myself -- "no more spirit" in me, and I am filled with praise and worship on account of His greatness and blessedness. May these two lines of knowledge of Him abound to you both.
I thank you for your kind solicitude about my health.... I quite feel that the Lord taketh not pleasure in the legs of a man, and I think I have learned that I must not attempt too much. I think I should give my attention more to readings, and not so much to lectures. It is a great moment when one is made to feel that a mere thread holds one to all here, if at the same time, Stephen-like,
one is conscious of the increasing might of the bond to our Lord Jesus Christ. That is real weaning! ...
I rejoice greatly in the Lord's gracious ways with you on every side. Blessed Lord! He does not omit any side. Such a cheer to you and your beloved husband to see your dear sons openly on the Lord's side, and the dear girls also built in. How often we find that the night is before the day! This is the divine way -- the evening before the morning; we are prepared in adversity for prosperity. David has to pass through the sorrow of Ziklag to the throne; humility before honour.
May every blessing abound to you. The Lord prosper you in every good word and work.
The Lord is wonderful in His skill with each of us. He nourishes and cherishes. I think He does the first (the nourishing) to every one, but the cherishing is a very peculiar ministry. A nurse cherisheth her children. When He cherishes me I sit under His shadow with great delight, as the beloved disciple. Every believer knows something of the great services of Christ to us, as Jonathan knew the service of David, when he slew Goliath. The next great step is that His company is necessary to me, like Ruth with Naomi. This is most enjoyable and prepares for the climax, even that as of the bride I am united to Him. This bond is eternal. It is not only that I am in the full efficacy of His work for me, but I know that I am for ever united to Him.
I often turn over in my thoughts the magnitude of being united to a heavenly Man in glory. How entirely unknown that is to us naturally! The Spirit of God alone can give us any idea of it, or of the effect of such a union. The Lord grant that each of us may grow more into the blessedness of it. And may He make you very sensible of His cherishing, and if it be His will may He graciously restore you to that measure of health which will enable you to be here more than ever for His pleasure.
We are being taught that there is no rest here. I think we do not apprehend the full efficacy of the cross. For the Christian all is cleared away in the death of Christ for him, and all that is contrary to God in him. There is a reluctance to accept in faith all that the death of Christ has effected for us -- where it has placed us -- for to faith it has really placed us on the other side of Jordan (where there is no death) to enjoy Him our life for evermore, in His own place.
I am often struck with the way we have limited our blessing to our needs here. We see in Psalm 63, though God is looked for there in a very wonderful way, it is all with reference to man's circumstances down here. How little one knows of the things which eye hath not seen nor ear heard! How little is known of joy in the Holy Ghost! The heavenly family instead of seeking and appropriating their own heavenly blessing, have lost sight of it, while coveting the blessings of the earthly family.
I was speaking on Matthew 8 and 14. Unless we are superior to our own circumstances in the grace of Christ, we are not ready to leave all here, to rise above everything and join Him where He is. I think the manna is not appropriated but as we are freed from ourselves by death with Christ, and then it is we join Him with the consecrated company where He is, and feed on Him as the "old corn of the land".
There is no progress until you reach heavenly ground. The gospel puts you over Jordan. This is full deliverance because you are set in an entirely new place; but after this (as Joshua 5 typifies), there is preparation to enter on possession, and this Colossians 3 sets forth. There we have the progress after you have crossed the Jordan.
The more I think of Christianity the more wonderful it seems to me. We have the natural mind and the mind of Christ; the former thinks only of man; the latter thinks first of God.
How simple all is if we accept the course of the Spirit! It comes more and more before me the entire newness of the man in Christ. I find I have but a very small idea of the great difference between the earthly man and the heavenly. In the festive day Isaac got his right place, and the rival was now an intruder and cast out. I believe the practical difficulty with us all is to say -- not Adam, in any form or quality, but Christ liveth in me! How blessed! I find here, and everywhere, there is not an idea of changing from Adam to Christ; and with regard to Christ there is little or no conception of the spiritual magnitude of His house, where His honour dwelleth.... Every believer likes to advance himself spiritually, but hardly any one likes to exchange himself for another Man. The first man, with his tastes and abilities all must go, and a new man comes in his place. It is in the second Man that we shall know one another by-and-by, and not in the first man.
I have been bringing before them the Christian's charter. It dates from Christ going away rejected by man. All your privileges are derived from Christ at the right hand of God.
The tidings in your letter are very sad. His way indeed is in the sea, and His footsteps are not known, and yet, "Thou leddest thy people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron" (Psalm 77:20). I feel much for the bereaved
parents. They were so attached to that boy, and he seemed so to requite them for all their care. How death rolls in on us here! Surely the more our hearts are in remembrance of the death of Christ the better are we prepared for any wave of death here. It is a land of death. There has been much illness in this house. What appears so afflicting is an occasion and opportunity for the Lord to make Himself known in a deeper and fuller way than when one is not so conscious of one's need of Him. You have learned this, I am sure. The proud natural man tries to bear his sorrows alone. How our hearts are mellowed when we find the Lord bearing us company which He could not do if we were not subject to His word. Martha seems to have gained but little by her sorrow; but Mary, oh, how much! ... With regard to your dear suffering child, I can only lay the matter before the Father of our Saviour, and our Father. There is great rest in this because we are then assured that He who spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, will He not with Him freely give us all things? I feel we are continually brought to face death in one way or another.... But His heart is full of tenderness for you, and if there be sorrow on one side there will be a great compensation for it on some other side, so that you can say, "Goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life" (Psalm 23:6). The sorrow is only the evening before the morning. May your hearts be enriched in this trying moment in the knowledge of His sympathy. What a support and cheer to the poor heart to know that He feels and enters into, and supplies suited succour to us in these times of sorrow.
I have been interested in seeing that the greatest gain from sorrow or suffering is the nearness we are drawn into with the Lord thereby. It is only near Him that we acquire divine sensibility, that is, we learn what suits Him. Mary of Bethany learned from His love that He would appreciate a tribute of her love. How blessedly we should move on and act if we had more divine sensibility.
With love and committing you to Him who cares infinitely for you....
I trust you are learning each day to be more fitted for His pleasure. What a comfort to be here for His pleasure! He was here for us. When we have learned the blessing of His work for us, then we are to enter on a new path -- which is to be here for Him. We may not be able to tell how we are here for Him. The stars shine, they fulfil His pleasure. Enoch walked with God, and he had the testimony that he pleased God. Blessed be His name, walking with Him pleases Him! As my Father hath sent me so send I you. We are all sent by Christ into this world -- each a member of His body to express Him according to our measure. How very interesting it is to be here for Him -- to grow up unto Him in all things who is the Head, even the Christ. To be even a little feather in a beautiful bird is something; but what an honour to be the smallest part of Christ where He is not. We know we are but a poor expression of Him, even though the part allotted to us be a very small one; but the great thing is -- What is our aim? Is it the Head we are thinking of or ourselves? If it be the Head we are ever turning to Him, not forecasting difficulties. He is equal for any emergency that may come. Thus Stephen was prepared. The heart has but the one object -- the member has but the one source of life, joy and strength; the Head is everything to fit, to order, and to delight the member. Service when seen in this light is very interesting.
There is no effort about it, but there is plenty of life and also of power. While I am learning what Christ was for me, I am necessarily occupied with myself and the gain from it. But when I am here for Him He is my object, and the more He is so the more am I in every way conformed to His pleasure, even without seeking it in any particular way.
The Lord cheer your heart with His own company.
The Lord has two reasons for keeping us here: One is to fit us for the place which He has appointed for us in the future spiritual temple. All the hammering is done now. As the flesh is broken down, and set aside by the Spirit, we are according to our growth in grace fit material for His temple.
No one, it is plain, gets rid of the flesh as a whole, but as it is practically set aside, and grace in the power of Christ's life supersedes it, we are accordingly of that measure and size, and thus one stone differs from another stone, but the preparation goes on now. That only will remain which is of Christ. The other reason for our being kept here is that we may serve Him. He has been rejected here, and we are members of His body, and we are never truly happy in divine joy but as we are true to this most intimate relationship to Him. The more I am, through the Spirit, in the sense of this relationship, the better I do everything, and fulfil every duty. The nearer I am to the Lord (see Ephesians) the more truly do I behave myself in every ordinance of God, because it is of God. Once the heart is convinced of the great reality of this relationship, there is a growing readiness to part company with everything which would interfere with it. Though . 'no infant's changing pleasure is like my wandering mind', God's Spirit in my heart keeps it assured of the blessedness of my great relationship to Him to whom I owe everything; and thus the two reasons for my remaining on the earth mutually help one another. One's Christian life here is therefore most instructive, and incomparably beautiful, for it is all of God, in the midst of the greatest incongruities. The Lord keep us more simply subject to Him in everything; and thus we shall find that the ways of wisdom are ways of "pleasantness and peace".
I need hardly say how pleased and cheered I am at the prospect, if the Lord will, of seeing you this coming autumn in your old quarters. May each of us be more
devoted to His interests, and the more we are the more we shall find that He is occupied with ours.
How very little the natural heart can solace itself about absent friends, while we have (may we use it better) the deepest consolation in speaking to the Lord for one another, according as we are bound to, or interested in one another.
I was speaking on Matthew 14, the Lord walking on the water -- above all the power of evil here -- entirely new ground. Peter, from affection to the Lord, desires to join Him there, he says, "Bid me come", and Jesus replies, "Come", and he walks on the water to go to Jesus. He is in figure a pattern for us. Jesus is above everything, as Stephen in reality found. We have the power to go to Him there through the Spirit, but we often lack the affection which would make us eager to use our power. When a young bird is fully fledged and has never used its wings, the parent bird rises a little distance from it, and the young bird, in its desire to reach the parent bird, makes an effort to rise too, and then it finds out for the first time that it has wings. We have the power -- the Spirit of God, but we often lack the longing to join Him, and hence we do not know the power and blessedness of being with Him and united to Him. It is entirely new ground, and where faith alone can keep us.
I find in seeking the Lord's sympathy that it is not the way I feel in the trial but the way He would feel in it, that does me the real good. The care of the Father comforts you and binds you to Him. The sympathy of Christ mellows you; for it imparts to you His own feelings and nature.
As to your questions -- I have always considered that it was the same woman in Matthew, Mark and John, who anointed our Lord. There are some differences in the account of it in each, but this is necessary because the Spirit used the incident to convey a distinct and different
truth in each; as has been said -- there is no repetition in scripture; each gospel is perfect according to its own subject, and in giving the woman's act, the way and connection in which it is given is to enforce and support the subject of each. It is important to see this in reading scripture....
As to those who came out of the graves after Christ's resurrection, I believe they were to testify to the people of the reality of His resurrection, and it may be, as you say, that there will be a public testimony of a like kind -- when the Lord comes for the church....
I understand that the saints will be all gathered to the Lord in the air, and that the world will not know what has become of them, no more than they knew what had become of Elijah in another day.
I feel how little one enters into what the church is to Christ. How one uses words and scarcely seizes the meaning of them. Such as 'members of the body, of his flesh, and of his bones'; and to think that the bond which unites us is the Holy Spirit!
If we were bound together by only a rope we could tolerate many things which the exquisite nature of our bond cannot endure. What is that which has the greatest unity and yet a unity which is most easily disturbed, and in which distances most easily occur?
We little know what is before us each day, and therefore we should go forth stored with manna -- the grace of Christ, which is adequate for every contingency of the day -- the provision before the need, for 'prevention is better than cure', and, this, blessed be His name! is the manner of His grace to us.
Dependence in some form is the great lesson of our wilderness life.
Many and varied have been the mercies of the past year to each of us. When we take our place simply as children before the Father, it is amazing and most affecting the way He unfolds to us His interest and love for us. Many believers lose or waste much time in becoming assured that they are children. It is necessary and right to be assured, and there is great gain in the steps to this assurance; but there cannot be a cheerful, easy consideration and a laying up in one's heart of all His ways with us, until we are with Him in the peaceful consciousness of children. We all accept this relationship in terms, and yet how little do we restfully sit before Him in the blessed calm, unvarying verity of it. "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness neither shadow of turning" (James 1:17).
I enjoyed my time with you much. The Lord was very good to me. Of course, beloved --------'s illness, etc., were reminders that we must be ever dependent on Him who loves our dependence, and rewards us for it. John, when -- or before -- he expressed his desire to the Lord, came nearer to Him than he was before; he then lying on Jesus' breast. The more we know His love the more we like to receive from Him.
There is a time to work and a time to rest.
May the Lord greatly cheer your heart with the fulness of joy of His presence. I believe nothing pleases Him more than that we should be near Himself in perfect happiness of spirit -- happiness which cannot be lost by the losing of any mercy here.
I am glad to hear of the Lord's special favour to you all as a family. When He declares His right to one of our
children, it is one of the greatest favours He can confer on us, and I have for some time felt that if we had been more truthful in our returning them to the Lord and regarding them as His, as entirely as Hannah did with Samuel, there would be less delay to His declaring before all -- in converting them -- that they are His for all eternity.
... I enjoyed Mr. Darby's speaking very much. He said we ought to have revelations of things in heaven now; we are told to set our affections on things above, how could we (he said) unless we know what they are?
I believe the Lord orders and cares for us, so that we may individually learn how necessary He is to us -- even for quietness and rest. He gives us His peace, and this keeps us unruffled in our troubles.
Each day brings its own trials -- lessons for faith. We are placed in some circumstance where God only can make a way for us. We are not only saved by faith, but if we are true, we live each day by faith.
Faith is seeing God and being sustained, though I see no providences. What a rest to the soul to feel I have God, though I have nothing else. Nature does not like this, but it is the deepest blessing. The wilderness is to teach us dependence. What a real and most blessed thing it is to depend on One -- not only all-powerful, which He surely is, but who loves us perfectly. Oh, how much we lose even now! The Lord keep your heart cheerful in the fresh sense of His favour and thought for you.
How interesting about poor --------! What one faithful man or woman can do!
I find I am not yet up to count it all joy when ye fall into divers trials, though I find the daily trials, when I am fully cast on God, occasions of real blessing. It has been said that a saint can trust God for his salvation and yet not trust Him for temporal things. I do not think this
is quite true. I believe if I were in simple and sure enjoyment of my place before Him in the unclouded light and unfailing joy of His presence, I could not but be assured in heart that He who had, to the delight of His own heart, procured for me such perfect and eternal blessing would fully provide for me all the lesser things. I apprehend that where there is any lack of confidence in God as to temporal things, there is but a very feeble sense of the love of His heart. If you welcome me to your sitting-room, I may rest assured that the best fare in the house will be tendered to me. If I am enjoying the greatest of God's favours, surely I can count on all lesser ones.
It is marvellous to contemplate the varied and peculiar interest there is in the heart of the Father of mercies and God of all comfort for each of His numerous children.
The Lord greatly and fully bless you both.
Love is always satisfied if its object is served, even though the service be not rendered by oneself. I judge of a person's love by his attention to my smallest wants. I judge of his character by his mode and manner of executing the smallest acts. A person who would assay to air my gloves and through thoughtlessness would let them be burnt, I should set down as having a thought of affection, but not being ruled by it. You see this constantly in Christians with regard to the Lord; there is good intention, a hopeful commencement, but indifferent accomplishment. The Lord said, "I have not found thy works perfect before God" (Revelation 3:2). Nothing tests every principle of execution like the finishing of it. If you are ruled by the principle, you must finish; you must bring your work to perfection. For discernment watch the little acts. For love attend to the little acts, for love has great discernment. For the truth's sake do not let what you have taken in hunting be unprofitable, because you are too slothful to roast it; that is to finish it. After taking pains to air the gloves do not forget to preserve them from too much of the fire. If
you mind the moral pence the pounds will take care of themselves. You will be wise, you will be loving in truth, and you will be useful.
In consequence of the misapprehension of what I said last Friday week, I trust I may trouble you with a short explanation. My simple intention was to lead souls to see and find the divine sphere which Canaan represents for their rest and occupation, and not the wilderness and its necessities, to which we would too much confine God's love and care for us. Once we are really through the Red Sea -- the death of Christ, we must be in dependence on God here -- and this we are taught in the wilderness. But as a Christian I have much more; I am dead with Christ, this is Jordan; and I am quickened and raised up with Him and made to sit together with Him in heavenly places, and that is Canaan.
Now the question is, and the point of my teaching -- Where do I best learn the goodness and love of God? In the wilderness, from His care, thought and provision for me here, or in Canaan where cities I did not build and vineyards I did not plant are given to me, where the whole heart of God is in its own proper circle and sphere?
I say, if I learn Him even a little in Canaan, I can easily reckon on Him in the wilderness. If I know Him at all in the wide field of His love as it has secured a portion for me in the riches of the glory of His inheritance, I can easily and simply see how comparatively small it is for Him to care for me in my little field in the wilderness. If I am delivered from my enemies and out of myself, I must be in dependence, and nowhere else; but dependence is often lauded because of the gain which accrues from it in the wilderness, and this I said was not the highest thing, nay, that on the contrary it often makes a soul dry, for he is thinking of nothing else but of bringing God into his circumstances, and then rejoicing as he finds Him acting in them, instead
of rising up and seeing God, as I may say, in His own circumstances, making known His love to me, so that in the knowledge of Him the eyes of my heart are enlightened to know the hope of His calling and the riches of the glory of His inheritance in His saints. Of course, there can be nothing but dependence here, but I find dependence is made the greatest good because of the present gain derived from it in the wilderness, and not because it leads me into the wide domain of my Father's house and glory, certifying to me the depth and fulness of His love; so that people talk of their gains from dependence in the wilderness as if that were the utmost of God's love for us. It is plain that in God's own sphere we shall ever be, and that all we learn of it now is for eternity. The wilderness which teaches me dependence must pass away.
... It is very interesting and helpful to remember all the way which the Lord thy God hath led thee. The initiative is with Him. What have we that we have not received? -- as the Lord says, I will show you plainly of the Father. He shows me. Paul was to be a minister and a witness of the things that he had seen. He shews them to me as He shewed the stars in the sky to Abraham. I am given grace to believe what He reveals to me of His favour to me, and as I believe, I act accordingly. The faith comes before the work of faith, as the revelation of His grace comes before faith; as faith comes before works, so works follow faith, or it would be dead, being alone. Faith carries you safe, then you are assured of what grace has made you, and then works are the results; you must have eyes before you can use them; you must have wings before you can fly. You must be over Jordan yourself, over death in the power of life, before you can consign everything here to death, before you can drive out the Canaanite.
As you advance on the up-line, so you do on the down-line. If you understand me, it is as you by faith apprehend, where His grace has set you, the more you ascend, the more power you have to descend. The more you are enriched and captivated with His things, the more will you be loosened from natural attractions, and so be of the heavenly colour, expressive of your heavenly taste -- increasing in the high and spiritual things, while correspondingly relinquishing, or dying to, the natural or earthly things.
You will have completed another year in the wilderness when this reaches you.... You have had a suffering time. I picture you to myself a ship moored in harbour. You are not yet on shore, though near enough to see it, like Moses from Mount Pisgah. You are still exposed to storms and the surging of the waves, but not to the same extent as if you were at sea. At sea the ship is on service. You are moored in harbour, waiting for the summons, 'Come away'. The Lord keeps many a ship in harbour after a life at sea. Every ship, whether its cargo be gold or sand, has to endure the rough sea and the boisterous winds, and it is often years before the ship is hauled on shore or put out of commission. It is moored in harbour -- a witness to many spectators of toils and dangers past. It has its own tale of mercy during its time at sea. You can recount a history of manifold mercies, through many rough seas and contrary winds. Now you are in harbour swinging your cable -- your bond to Christ, the anchor of your soul, both sure and steadfast, and entering within the veil. The winds and the waves are still fierce enough to strain the timbers of the outer man; but this is to deepen in your soul the consciousness of the inner man.
It is a blessed experience when the sufferings of the body can be met with the cheerfulness of the new being, and though it be checked in its expression by the pressure on the outer man, yet it learns, in contrast, how entirely free from suffering and sickness the inner man is. I am
sure it is an immense gain to be conscious of this. It is true there may be a weight on the spirit because of the suffering body, but even then the inner strength may be proved. When there is an unruffled sea, the ship floats along gracefully; but when the storm comes, its strength is proved. I am afraid there is often too much effort to alleviate the sufferings of the body. I do not say that we are not to do so, but promoting the vigour and joy of the inner man would tend in an amazing way to effect this. While we look not on the things that are seen, for they are temporary, but on the things unseen, for they are eternal. You must fix your eyes on the shore, and as the delights there come before your soul, the inner man is renewed day by day. Thus Moses was consoled in spirit, though his heart was sad, as he strained his eyes over the land of Canaan.
The Lord keep you, dear --------, learning how the light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for you a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory -- while you look not at the things that are seen, but at the things that are unseen. This is the one grand recipe. May you abundantly know the virtue of it, and while you are in harbour be a witness of the grace which has brought you safely so near the shore, and has given you mile-marks all along your course, Ebenezers of His unfailing care and mercy through many a dreary day and stormy night.
We are but passing from a very imperfect state into a perfect and entirely beautiful one. We are but going a long voyage, often rough, but we are to land on the shore of endless rest and unfading blessedness, of which we get glimpses as one does of lights on shore, and the better the telescope, the more earnest the eye, the more distinctly and vividly are the distant lights brought near. It is not the rough waters or the dark sky which occupy the mind, but the lights on shore, which attract you, bid you welcome and encourage you. Stephen saw those
lights, and Jesus in the midst of them! preparing and strengthening his heart for the last narrow strait before entering harbour. It is so natural and real, and it is a great help to us to see what the Spirit of God has done in one like ourselves. But the eye must be turned to the shore. "He, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up stedfastly into heaven" (Acts 7:55). The Spirit is the telescope, but the telescope is for the eye (the eyes of our heart), and as the eye is in it, the distant shore with its boundless light and the Person of our Saviour are brought nigh to us.
The Lord give you to be ever in the Spirit using the telescope. We should be able to ask one another day by day -- how do you see, and what do you see? Are the lights on shore becoming more visible? I cannot but rejoice in your blessing. Honour to my Lord in you and your own happiness comprise the desires of my heart for you, and I look to Him to give me the desires of my heart for you, for His name's sake.
All our circumstances are intended to call forth the grace we require, whether pleasing or painful. In Christ we live outside of them all, while the life that we live in the flesh we "live by the faith of the Son of God". We often require more grace in pleasant circumstances than in painful ones, because we look for it less. In every circumstance we have to live by the faith of the Son of God. The real exercise is, how would He live in the very circumstance in which I am? This can only be found out as we are in communion with Him. I suppose in a spiritual sense we all pass through a winter as well as a summer. The winter is the dying away of the natural growth, though then there is also the real strengthening of the new, we pass through a testing time -- "the trying of your faith". As the outer man perisheth, the inner man is renewed day by day. The crossing over Jordan is a real thing. It is the realisation that I have died with Christ, and that in
His life -- the life of Him with whom I have died -- I part company with all that is of man, and that it is a real relief to be apart from the first man. Though I am not to be burdened with its sin, I am never free from the burden of its infirmity; and the more we accept our place with Christ in life, the more the sense of infirmity or death will bear down upon us here.
I was speaking last night on John 14, the place in heaven and the power from heaven. Though we are not yet actually in our place, Christ's death has set us free from the place and state of judgment, and has set us in the place and state of favour -- His own place with God.
The defect of some is trying to kill the old man before they have learned what it is to be outside of oneself in His presence, and the more you are there, the more you will hail the cross where you are dead with Christ. Beholding the Lord's glory you are assimilated to Him. 'In this thy nature grow' is true of you. There is no effort, there is simply a continuance, and thus you become a body of light. You are transformed into a state that you did not ask for or think of. The righteousness of the glory makes us at home in it.
The Lord is one and His name one. He only can fully satisfy my heart. He knows what suits it, and He only has enough, and more than enough to meet it. Do I want strength? Who can surpass His? Love and care? Whose can surpass His? Wisdom? He is the wisdom of God. There is nothing that the human heart (made by Himself) requires, that it cannot find abundantly in Him. The more we visit the poor and suffering in this world, the less we think of our own sorrows, and the more we are touched with the way the Lord supports His own in the greatest sufferings.... I had a taste of what it is to part company with all here, and to find in the Lord enough. What
gracious ways He uses to teach us the complete emptiness of everything here, and not the mere emptiness, but supplanting it by the most blessed reality -- the Lord Himself. He remaineth; and He leads us into experiences of desolation here in order that we may not only see how little we know Him as the source of all joy, but in order that we may turn to Him and find not only relief but full resource in Himself. It is only in solitude that you realise this.
I am much interested in the subject of sanctification. If there is anything that I am naturally proud of, any accomplishment or quality, it will sink into death as a progress in Christ; but I get what is so infinitely better that I feel I have not lost but gained.
The discipline we receive in this world is to separate us from it. By grace we are not of it. We should naturally like to find everything pleasant here. The Father's discipline is that we should be "partakers of his holiness"; that is, to be as completely separate from everything that is not of God as He is. We belong to Christ in heaven, and He has sent us into this world for Himself. We are often thinking of going out of it to Him, instead of apprehending and owning that we do not belong to the world, but we belong to Him who has been rejected by the world, and that we are only in the world because He has sent us into it. He would not say that He sends us into the world if we were not through His grace morally out of it.
It is very interesting and encouraging to see how every one in the long run reaches the top desire of his heart. "He that seeketh findeth". Devotedness is what we most need. May we be more in prayer for it.
In Philippians 3:8 the apostle counts all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge, not of salvation, but of Christ as He is now in glory, the Solomon. The queen of Sheba instructs us in the steps by which we come to this. First seeking the place where He is; second, confiding
all our inmost heart to Him; and third, enraptured with all His things, which ends in her having no spirit in her -- she is entranced, and I believe it is here that worship flows out.... I feel we know very little of the gain from having a Saviour in glory, and it is not easy to distinguish the measure of blessing which comes from Christ dead and risen, and from Christ glorified. For instance, the Holy Ghost comes from Christ glorified, and yet the knowledge of remission of sins ensures the sealing of the Holy Ghost. Again, the hope of glory is assured on justification, and yet there is much more. Another thing has come very strongly before me, and that is that we do not apprehend fully the complete sweeping away of man -- the Adam, in the death of Christ, so that there is nothing left to us but Christ our life, and He is in heaven. May we know this better -- very blessed even to know that it is so.
I was speaking on Hebrews 13:10 and Matthew 27:51. It was all bright for us inside with God, when Jesus died, the veil was rent. There is man crucified on the earth where the judgment is -- where man is; but there is a Man glorified in heaven where God is. You must keep these two together in order to understand the gospel. Each acts and reacts on the other. Inside I am as the glorified Man. On the earth I am as the crucified One, able to say with Paul, "God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ" (Galatians 6:14).
I trust there will be a more decided waiting on the Lord with you, now that the chief support is being removed. It is often the Lord's way, as with children; the nurse is removed when the children are old enough to walk. The testing brings the real measure of the faith into view, and this works endurance. It is a great thing to be assured that I am dependent on God, and that I know the good of the dependence. There must be exercises and difficulties, or the blessedness of dependence would not be known....'There unfold His hidden treasures,
There His love's exhaustless deep.' (Hymn 76)MEDITATION
DIVINE TEACHING
SEPARATION IS LEARNT IN THE PRESENCE OF CHRIST
HIS HOME IS OUR HOME
STEPS IN THE KNOWLEDGE OF CHRIST
SURRENDER MUST GO ON
THE DIVINE PATH IMPOSSIBLE TO MAN
THE IMPERFECT WAY TRUTH IS APPREHENDED, INTIMACY, ETC.
THE DIVINE CIRCLE
THE KNOWLEDGE OF ACCEPTANCE
WOMEN'S WORK AND HEAVENLY BEAUTY
THE FLOOD AND THE ALTAR OF SWEET SAVOUR
THE CLOUD AND THE MANNA
THE MANNA
THE JOY OF FINDING IN THE HOLIEST THE ONE WHO IS NOT HERE
THE WORD MUST BE RECEIVED IN THE CONSCIENCE
THE TRUE SUBJECTIVE
EBENEZER
CONFIDING IN HIS WISDOM
CONFIDING IN HIS LOVE
KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT POWER
'And thus Thy deep perfections
Much better should I know,
And with adoring fervour
In this Thy nature grow.' (Hymn 51)"NO PART DARK"
THE STUDENT AND THE CONTEMPLATER
COMMUNION
WHOLE-HEARTED DEVOTEDNESS
PART WITH HIM
THE "GOOD PART"
And with adoring fervour,
In this Thy nature grow. (Hymn 51)THE WORD MIXED WITH FAITH
HEAVEN THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL
EFFECT OF HIS PRESENCE
PRAYER
THE READING OF SCRIPTURE AND PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE
STAGES OF OUR SPIRITUAL HISTORY
CHRIST -- THE STANDARD FOR THE HEART
SOUL-WORK
GO UP TO BETHEL
THE STANDARD ROSE TREE -- TRANSFORMATION
WHAT AM I LIVING FOR?
HOW WE LEARN OUR MISSION
THE MARKS OF THE LORD BEING WITH HIS PEOPLE
THE WORD HID IN THE HEART. MARKS OF HIS PRESENCE
SERVICE AND COMMUNION NO. 1
SERVICE AND COMMUNION NO. 2
THE WORK OF THE SPIRIT IN US
CHRIST OR ADAM
"I WILL ALLURE HER ... INTO THE WILDERNESS"
''Tis the treasure I've found in His love
That has made me a pilgrim below.' (Hymn 139)SANCTIFICATION, ETC.
SUPPORT AND RESTFULNESS -- HOW ACQUIRED
HERE FOR CHRIST
THE LESSON OF THE DESERT HOW WE REACH HIM AT THE OTHER SIDE OF DEATH
SORROW AND TRIAL - BEREAVEMENT
NO. 1
NO. 2
NO. 3
NO. 4
NO. 5
NO. 6
NO. 7
THE SOLITUDE OF SORROW
THE SOLACE OF CONFIDING OUR SORROW TO THE LORD
NO. 1
NO. 2
ENDURANCE LEARNED IN DEPENDENCE
ILLNESS -- MY SIDE AND HIS SIDE
THE INNER MAN RENEWED DAY BY DAY
MOUNT MORIAH
THE TUNNEL
THE LORD'S SYMPATHY
RELIEF, SUPPORT AND INTIMACY
THE LORD'S INTEREST IN US REALISED IN OUR NEED OF HIM
DISCIPLINE
GROWTH AND DISCIPLINE
THE GAIN OF EXERCISE IN DISCIPLINE
DISCIPLINE TWO-FOLD
THE END OF DISCIPLINE
DISCIPLINE IS TO REMOVE HINDRANCES
GOD'S WORD THE GUIDE FOR FAITH
KNOWLEDGE OF THE LORD BY THE WORD AND BY COMPANIONSHIP
UNQUALIFIED OBEDIENCE NECESSARY TO ACCOMPLISH HIS PLEASURE
IN CHRIST RISEN
THE FRIGATE-BIRD AND THE CARRIER-PIGEON
THE GREATER THE HEIGHT THE GREATER THE POWER
MY COMMONEST DEFECT IS THE ONE WHICH NEEDS MOST TO BE CORRECTED
CONFLICT FOR MAN'S BENEFIT AND FOR CHRIST'S GLORY
WALK IN THE SPIRIT
FAITH IS TESTED
EXERCISE ENSURES PROGRESS
GROWTH IN CHRIST
STEPS IN REACHING THE COMPANY OF CHRIST
TRAITS OF THE HEAVENLY MAN
THE WILDERNESS
GUIDANCE AND COMMUNION
A NEW PLACE, ETC.
UNITED TO CHRIST IN GLORY
IN COMPANY WITH THE LORD'S INTERESTS NO. 1
NO. 2
SYMPATHY AND CORRECTION
THE THREE HUNDRED
NO MATURING WITHOUT DEEP LEARNING
LOVE WORKS FOR ITS OWN SATISFACTION
OUR PLACE IN THE KINGDOM WILL BE DETERMINED BY OUR COURSE HERE
SEEK NOT JOY BUT THE SOURCE OF JOY
CONTINUANCE
THE HEART'S PSALM -- "I WAS BROUGHT LOW, AND HE HELPED ME"
MAKE THE LORD'S COMPANY PARAMOUNT
THE DISCIPLINE OF LOVE IS ONLY UNDERSTOOD IN NEARNESS
MILK OR SOLID FOOD
LOVE AND WISDOM
WHEN NEAR HIM I AM IN HIS PEACE
OUR FATHER'S CARE
WAITING AND WATCHING
CHRIST IN GLORY KNOWN IN SORROW
THE EVENING BEFORE THE MORNING
THE LORD'S CHERISHING, ETC.
IN SEEKING EARTHLY BLESSINGS WE MISS THE HEAVENLY
THE LESSON OF DEATH
HERE FOR CHRIST
WHY ARE WE LEFT HERE?
AFFECTION JOINS CHRIST WHERE HE IS, ETC.
THE BOND AND THE PROVISION
CHILDREN OF GOD
OUR CHILDREN THE LORD'S PROPERTY, FAITH.
TRUST IN HIS LOVE FOR THE ETERNAL AND THE TEMPORAL
THE PRINCIPLE OF LOVE
THE FULNESS OF GOD'S LOVE IS LEARNT IN ITS OWN SPHERE
APPREHENSION OF GRACE ENABLES US TO ACT ACCORDINGLY
IN HARBOUR
LIGHTS ASHORE
OUR LIFE IN CHRIST ABOVE, AND OUR LIFE IN THE FLESH HERE
RESOURCE AND SANCTIFICATION
A GLORIFIED CHRIST IS OUR GAIN
FAITH AND DEPENDENCE