All are in that ministry who are in the Last Adam: "If any man be in Christ, there is a new creation." What the man in Christ is led to discover in Christ has to be appropriated in the first place by himself, as was the case with the former Adam and then ministered. That is our ministry. Such fact destroys the entire conception of a special class called ministers. It means that all who are in the Last Adam are in the ministry, just as the first Adam was an all-embracing man and was called to the ministry of the garden. We are in the ministry of the Garden, which is Christ.
Now you see what the new creation is. The new creation is conformed to Christ - the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ revealed in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. This is the new creation in Christ Jesus. That former garden was lost, but all of its meaning and value has been preserved and presented in Christ.
While it may be true that in the end we shall be in a garden - while it is true that the Bible closes, even as it opens, with a garden - we are not now giving literal meaning to that. We are not thinking that going to heaven - going to glory - is to issue literally in an everlasting walk about a beautiful garden. Paradise at the end - the garden at the end - is the same as at the beginning; in the thought of God it is Christ. Our eternity is going to be enlargement to the full of all that God has stored up in Christ, without the intrusion of sin or death or any evil thing. That is the king of garden to dwell in forevermore. There will be the tree of life. There will be the river of water of life, clear as crystal. There the leaves of the tree will be for the health of the nations. The whole creation will be benefited therefrom; for on each of the four sides of the city - east and west, north and south - are three gates open to the whole creation. It is the universal glory of God in Christ that is to be our ministry through eternity; we are to minister of that fullness.
We are training for that ministry now. We are learning in a practical way how to minister Christ, and it is in the school of affliction that we are learning. We are discovering, through suffering, what is in Christ. The way of the knowledge which issues in ministry is the way of suffering - the discovery of the riches of Christ in afflictions.
We have said that the former garden was lost, but that all its values and meaning have been preserved in Christ - and in Him presented to us. But now all this has to be entered into through travail. We come back, as it were, into the garden through travail - through suffering. I doubt whether there is any other way. Things being as they are, there is no other way.
Let us not be narrow in our apprehension of the word "suffering." What is suffering to one would not be suffering to another. Suffering has its own meaning for everyone. Some can suffer with very little distress what others would find intolerable agony. Suffering covers a wide ground. Paul seems to have had a taste of every kind of suffering. He was a representative man. The Lord knows what to us is suffering and the most suitable means of bringing us to the knowledge of Himself in Christ, and He chooses for us the path which is most likely to bring us there. Whatever form the suffering may take, there will be no doubt as to its reality, but suffering is the way to this ministry of Christ.
~T. Austin-Sparks~
(continued with # 3 (and last post) next)
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