Representative Values
Now let us stop with that for a moment, because our mentality always needs helping. It might very well be that many of you, reading these lines, would say, 'Well, I cannot see that I am an elect vessel, in that specific way'. You are thinking of the men to whom we have been referring as the pioneers of this heavenly way - Abraham and Moses and so on. You say, 'I am not a Moses or an Abraham; I do not see how I come into that category at all'.
Well, while it may be that there are individuals among you who are chosen of God for something of this nature beyond the ordinary rank and file, as we say while that may be true, there is this other side - that you may be a part of a collective or corporate vessel, just a part of it; and if you are - and most likely you are; I think I would go so far as to say, 'and you are; - if the Lord has laid His hand upon you and put in you this sense of destiny, of having been called to something more than just 'being a Christian', a strong sense of calling - if that is in you, you may take ti that you are related to a larger purpose. If that is true, you must not just regard yourself, as an individual, and therefore you experiences and God's dealings with you, as though you were the only person, as though you were something very special.
Let me put it the other way around. You may be going through what God is doing with a collective vessel and you may not see, so far as your own individual and personal life is concerned, any meaning for what you are going through. 'Why am I going through this?' Well, because you are a part of a larger whole - that is the answer. So often we find that great pressure upon us individually. When we begin to compare notes, we find that other people spiritually related to us are having the same experience. It is the great law of the Body. 'Whether one member suffereth, all the members suffer with it'" (1 Corinthians 12:26). What is it all about?
Well, you see, it is collective, it is corporate; and although we cannot follow it all, to see how it is working out, God is doing something in a related way, and we are a part of that. we are bearing the brunt of something very much bigger than ourselves. That spiritual relatedness is involving us in this larger purpose of God, which has to do with the heavenlies, much bigger than this earth. It is that that makes us one. It is not that we join something, that we have our name on a membership roll, or that something is done to recognize us publicly as a member of a certain company. It is not that. You may be many miles, hundreds or thousands of miles, apart, and yet, because you are bound up with this heavenly thing that God is doing, you may be feeling the repercussions thousands of miles away. Because when you get into heaven all these earthly things disappear; geography and distances and time all go; they do not obtain up there.
If only we could get the heavenly conception of the Church! Oh, how foolish our earthly conceptions of the Church are! We must get off this earth, and all that is here, as to what is called the Church. You ind it is just one unit in heaven. All this does not obtain there. That is where we were when we were speaking about the passage of Jordan in our last chapter. In that Jordan something was left behind. The people moved off earthly ground on to heavenly. We shall come back to that again presently. But that is to be a spiritual reality, a consciousness into which we enter. While we ourselves cannot explain and understand why we may be having such a bad time, the heavenly explanation is that we are involved in something related to God's fuller purpose, and we are suffering, or we are going through this experience, in a related way; and it is very wonderful, as time to time we meet others with whom we know spiritual fellowship, how we find they have been going through exactly the same thing as we have. The Lord has been saying something to them and doing something with them, which is not the ordinary or the usual thing, but something quite extra.
Intrinsic Values
Now that is all connected with the fact, mentioned earlier, that God chooses individual or collective vessels, and does in them that which is meant for a very much larger company. Those vessels, be they individual or be they collective, are representative of something that God is after on a larger scale, in a larger sphere. It begins in them. I think that is what Paul meant when he said, "in me as chief [first one] ... for an example" (1 Timothy 1:16). I think he meant by that that he was representative of what God was going to do through him. All the Lord was going to do through him in the larger realm, in the churches, the provinces and the nations, was representative, was in token. God was going to operate in the wider scale through this man - not by giving him something to say, but by doing something in him.
That is where we have gone astray. God does something first. He brings into being a living representation of His fuller thought, by means of peculiar, unusual and extraordinary dealings with a vessel. There is very little that is ordinary in the life and experience of such a vessel. It is all extraordinary, unusual. Such representative vessels, individual or collective, are chosen that in them there shall be established the essential, intrinsic values intended for the larger sphere and realm; something which can be expanded, which is capable of going far beyond itself, capable of great enlargement and expansion.
~T. Austin-Sparks~
(continued with # 22)
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