The Normal Christian Life (26 page)
God must bring us to a point—I cannot tell you how it will be, but He will do it—where, through a deep and dark experience, our natural power is touched and fundamentally weakened, so that we no longer dare trust ourselves. He has had to deal with some of us very strangely, and take us through difficult and painful ways, in order to get us there. At length there comes a time when we no longer “like” to do Christian work—indeed we almost dread to do things in the Lord’s name. But it is then, at last, that He can begin to use us.
I can tell you this, that for a year after I was converted, I had a lust to preach. It was impossible for me to stay silent. It was as though there was something moving within me that
drove me forward, and I had to keep going. Preaching had become my very life.
The Lord may graciously allow you to go on for a long while like that, and to do so with a fair measure of blessing, until one day that natural force impelling you is touched. From then on you no longer do it because you want to do it, but because the Lord wants it.
Before that experience you preached for the sake of the satisfaction you got from serving God in that way; and yet sometimes the Lord could not move you to do one thing that He wanted done. You were living by the natural life, and that life varies a great deal. It is the slave of your temperament. When emotionally you are set on His way, you go ahead at full speed; but when your emotions are directed the other way, you are reluctant to move at all, even when duty calls.
You are not pliable in the Lord’s hands. He has therefore to weaken that strength of preference, of like and dislike, in you until you will do a thing because He wants it and not because you like it. You may enjoy it or you may not, but you will do it just the same.
It is not that you can derive a certain satisfaction from preaching or from doing this or that work for God, and therefore you do it. No, you do it now because it is the will of God, and regardless of whether or not it gives you conscious joy. The true joy you know in doing His will lies deeper than your fluctuating emotions.
God is bringing you to the place where He has but to express a wish, and you respond instantly. That is the spirit of the Servant (Ps. 40:7–8). But such a spirit does not come naturally to any of us. It comes only when our soul, the seat of our natural energy and will and affections, has been
brought, by the touch of the cross, under His sway. Yet such a servant spirit is what He seeks, and will have in us all. The way to it may be long-drawn, or it may be just one stroke; but God has His ways, and we must have regard for them.
Every true servant of God must know at some time that disabling from which he can never recover and can never be quite the same again. There must be that established in you which means that from henceforth you will really fear yourself. You will fear to move out on the impulse of your soul, for you know what a bad time you will have in your own heart before the Lord if you do.
You have known something of the chastening hand of a loving God upon you, a God who “dealeth with you as with sons” (Heb. 12:7). The Spirit Himself bears witness in your spirit to that relationship, and to the inheritance and glory that are ours “if so be that we suffer with him” (Rom. 8:16–17); and your response to the Father of our spirits is, “Abba, Father.”
But when this is really established in you, you have come to a new place which we speak of as “resurrection ground.” Death, in principle, may have had to be wrought out to a crisis in your natural life, but when it has, then you find God releases you into resurrection. You discover that what you have lost is being given back, though not quite as before. The principle of life is at work in you now, something that directs and empowers you, animating you with fresh divine life. From henceforth what you have lost will be brought back, but touched now with new values because under heaven’s control.
Let me again make this quite clear. If we want to be spiritual people, there is no need for us to amputate our hands or
feet; we can still have our body. In the same way we can have our soul, with the full use of its faculties; and yet the soul is not now our life-spring. We are no longer living in it, we are no longer drawing from it and living by it; we use it.
When the body becomes our life we live like beasts. When the soul becomes our life we live as rebels and fugitives from God—gifted, cultured, educated, no doubt, but alienated from the life of God. But when we come to live our life in the Spirit and by the Spirit, though we still use our soul faculties just as we do our physical faculties, they are now the servants of the Spirit. And when we have reached that point, God can really use us.
But the difficulty with many of us is that dark night. The Lord graciously laid me aside once in my life for a number of months and put me, spiritually, into utter darkness. It was almost as though He had forsaken me, almost as though nothing was going on and I had really come to the end of everything. And then by degrees He brought things back again. The temptation is always to try to help God by taking things back ourselves. But remember, there must be a full night in the sanctuary—a full night in darkness. It cannot be hurried; He knows what He is doing.
We would like to have death and resurrection put together within one hour of each other. We cannot face the thought that God will keep us aside for so long a time; we cannot bear to wait. And of course I cannot tell you how long He will take. But in principle I think it is quite safe to say this: There will be a definite period when He will keep you there. It will seem as though nothing is happening; as though everything you valued is slipping from your grasp. There confronts you a blank wall with no door in it. Seemingly
everyone else is being blessed and used, while you yourself have been passed by and are losing out. Lie quiet. All is in darkness, but it is only for a night. It must indeed be a full night, but that is all. Afterward, you will find that everything is given back to you in glorious resurrection; and nothing can measure the difference between what was before and what now is!
I was sitting one day at supper with a young brother to whom the Lord had been speaking on this very question of our natural energy. He said to me, “It is a blessed thing when you know the Lord has met you and touched you in that fundamental way, and that disabling touch has been received.” There was a plate of biscuits between us on the table, and I picked one up and broke it in half as though to eat it. Then, fitting the two pieces together again carefully, I said, “It looks all right, but it is never quite the same again, is it? When once your back is broken, you will yield ever after to the slightest touch from God.”
That is it. The Lord knows what He is doing with His own, and He has left no aspect of our need unmet in His cross, that the glory of the Son may be manifested in the sons. Disciples who have gone this way can, I believe, truly echo the words of the apostle Paul, who could claim to serve God “in my spirit in the gospel of his Son” (Rom. 1:9). They have learned, as he had, the secret of such a ministry: “We . . . worship by the Spirit of God, and glory in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh” (Phil. 3:3).
Few can have led a more active life than Paul’s. To the Romans he puts it on record that he has preached the gospel from Jerusalem to Illyricum (Rom. 15:19) and that he is ready now to go on to Rome (1:10) and thence, if possible,
to Spain (15:24, 28). Yet in all this service, embracing as it does the whole Mediterranean world, his heart is set on one object only—the uplifting of the One who has made it all possible. “I have therefore my glorying in Christ Jesus in things pertaining to God. For I will not dare to speak of any things save those which Christ wrought through me, for the obedience of the Gentiles, by word and deed” (Rom. 15:17–18). That is spiritual service.
May God make each one of us, as truly as he was, “a bondservant of Jesus Christ.”
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OR OUR FINAL chapter we will take as our starting point an incident in the Gospels that occurs under the very shadow of the cross—an incident that, in its details, is at once historic and prophetic.
While he was in Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at meat, there came a woman having an alabaster cruse of ointment of pure nard very costly; and she brake the cruse, and poured it over his head. . . . Jesus said . . . Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever the gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, that also which this woman hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her. (Mark 14:3, 6, 9)
Thus, the Lord ordained that the story of Mary anointing Him with that costly ointment should always accompany the story of the gospel; that which Mary has done should always be coupled with what the Lord has done. That is His own statement. What does He intend that we should understand by it?
I think we all know the story of Mary’s action well. From the details given in John chapter 12, where the incident follows not long after her brother’s restoration to life, we may gather that the family was not a specially wealthy one. The sisters had to work in the house themselves, for we are told that at this feast “Martha also served” (John 12:2 and compare Luke 10:40).
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No doubt every penny mattered to them. Yet one of those sisters, Mary, having among her treasures an alabaster cruse containing three hundred pence worth of ointment, expended the whole thing on the Lord. Human reasoning said this was really too much; it was giving the Lord more than His due. That is why Judas took the lead, and the other disciples supported him, in voicing a general complaint that Mary’s action was a wasteful one.
“But there were some that had indignation among themselves, saying, To what purpose hath this waste of the ointment been made? For this ointment might have been sold for above three hundred shillings, and given to the poor. And they murmured against her” (Mark 14:4–5). These words bring us to what I believe the Lord would have us consider finally together, namely, that which is signified by the little word “waste.”
What is waste? Waste means, among other things, giving more than is necessary. If a shilling will do and you give a pound, it is a waste. If two grams will do and you give a kilogram, it is a waste. If three days will suffice to finish a task well enough and you lavish five days or a week on it, it is a waste. Waste means that you give something too much for something too little. If someone is receiving more than he is considered to be worth, then that is waste.
But remember, we are dealing here with something which the Lord said was to go out with the gospel, wherever that gospel should be carried. Why? Because He intends that the preaching of the gospel should issue something along the very lines of the action of Mary here, namely, that people should come to Him and waste themselves on Him. This is the result that He is seeking.
We must look at this question of wasting on the Lord from two angles: that of Judas (John 12:4–6) and that of the other disciples (Matt. 26:8–9). And for our present purpose we will run together the parallel accounts.
All of the twelve thought it a waste. To Judas of course, who had never called Jesus “Lord,” everything that was poured out upon Him was waste. Not only was ointment waste; even water would have been waste. Here Judas stands for the world. In the world’s estimation the service of the Lord, and our giving ourselves to Him for such service, is sheer waste. He has never been loved, never had a place in the hearts of the world, so any giving to Him is a waste. Many say, “Such-and-such a man could make good in the world if only he were not a Christian!” Because a man has some natural talent or other asset in the world’s eyes, they count it a shame for him to be serving the Lord. They think such people are really too good for the Lord. “What waste of a useful life!” they say.
Let me give a personal instance. In 1929 I returned from Shanghai to my home town of Foochow. One day I was walking along the street with a stick, very weak and in broken health, and I met one of my old college professors. He took me into a teashop where we sat down. He looked at me from head to foot and from foot to head, and then he
said: “Now look here; during your college days we thought a good deal of you, and we had hopes that you would achieve something great. Do you mean to tell me that this is what you are?” Looking at me with penetrating eyes, he asked that very pointed question. I must confess that, on hearing it, my first desire was to break down and weep. My career, my health, everything had gone, and here was my old professor who taught me law in the school, asking me: “Are you still in this condition, with no success, no progress, nothing to show?”
But the very next moment—and I have to admit that in all my life it was the first time—I really knew what it meant to have the “Spirit of glory” resting upon me. The thought of being able to pour out my life for my Lord flooded my soul with glory. Nothing short of the Spirit of glory was on me then. I could look up and without a reservation say, “Lord, I praise Thee! This is the best thing possible; it is the right course that I have chosen!” To my professor it seemed a total waste to serve the Lord; but that is what the gospel is for—to bring each one of us to a true estimate of his worth.
Judas felt it a waste. “We could manage better with the money by using it in some other way. There are plenty of poor people. Why not rather give it for charity, do some social service for their uplift, help the poor in some practical way? Why pour it out at the feet of Jesus?” (see John 12:4–6). That is always the way the world reasons. “Can you not find a better employment for your life? Can you not do something better with yourself than this? It is going a bit too far to give yourself altogether to the Lord!”
But if the Lord is worthy, then how can it be a waste? He is worthy to be so served. He is worthy for me to be His prisoner.
He is worthy for me just to live for Him. He is worthy! What the world says about this does not matter. The Lord says, “Do not trouble her.” So let us not be troubled. Men may say what they like, but we can stand on this ground, that the Lord said, “It is a good work. Every true work is not done on the poor; every true work is done to me.” When once our eyes have been opened to the real worth of our Lord Jesus, nothing is too good for Him.