Into the Heart of God # 10

Oneness with God in the Heavenly Nature of Everything (continued)

And what is true of places is also true of experience. Again and again in my own life God has given a new experience. When I had the first one I thought I had come to the end of all blessing. 'Surely,' I thought, 'there can be nothing more than this!' But then, later on, the Lord did something else, and again I thought: 'Surely there is nothing beyond this! I must be ready to go to heaven now!' And yet again there was another movement forward, and every fresh experience of the Lord was something in advance of everything that had gone on before. Be very careful that you do not come to any position which says: 'Now we have come to finality.' They "greeted them from afar" - there was always something more beyond, and this is a true mark of a spiritual progress toward the heart of God.

There are many times in the life of the people of God when they come to disillusionment. They thing that they have now come to the thing which is everything, and then they suffer a great disillusionment. They find that this thing, after all, is not the final thing. Indeed, it is not what God puts into their heart as the thing that is what He is after. Although it may be something very good, and even wonderful, there is an element of disappointment about it. You see, there is a disappointment  about everything and everybody on this earth. If you knew the truth about Abraham, or Moses, or about any of these great men, you would find that there was something to disappoint you in them. There is nothing, and there is no one, perfect here.

I must just make this statement and leave it there for the present. The fact is that the Lord must have us always going on. We are pilgrims and strangers, which means that we shall never come to finality here on this earth. If you are disappointed with what you thought was going to be the perfect thing, just remember that the Lord is calling you on to something better. When we look at some of the mistakes that Abraham made we shall see more clearly what we mean.

We will close by just illustrating from the life of Moses. It says of him: "he supposed that his brethren understood how that God by his hand was giving them deliverance" (Acts 7:25). He had clothed his Hebrew brethren with a great idea that if only he presented himself as their leader they would all come round him and make a great fuss of him. So one day he went out to offer himself as the hero of the deliverance of his brethren. And the first Egyptian that he found badly treating them he knocked on the head and forced all the breath out of him. What did he expect? That all his brethren would rally round and say: 'Now we have got a champion,' and they would all begin to treat the Egyptians as Moses treated that man. It was a very great surprise and disillusionment to Moses when one of his own brethren turned on him the next day and said: 'Who made you a ruler over us?' That was a great disillusionment to Moses. Why? Because God's way is a heavenly way and not an earthly way. We do not do God's work by throwing our own weight about. When it is done, it will be done from heaven and not by that kind of Moses. He only made things much more complicated and lost a lot of time by trying to do heavenly things on an earthly level.

So what we have to learn is that we are called to be a heavenly people whose weapons of warfare are spiritual weapons and not carnal, whose methods are not the methods of this world, but the methods of heaven. And to learn that lesson is a phase in a journey which will end right in the heart of God.

May the Lord interpret this word to our hearts and teach us what it means that we are "born from above" and have heavenly resources at our command!

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(continued with # 11)