The Work of the Ministry # 6

The Work of the Ministry # 6

The Seed Is The Church, continued -

So you go down into death as an individual, but you come up as part of a whole. There is only one Christ, Christ and His members, and that is the Church. The Church is Christ as the life and the realm of His people. The Church is not a lot of people. It is one new man, and the only way to know the Church is through death and resurrection. You have got to go right out of the picture, or you will never know what the Church is; because it is not on this side - it is on that other side. There may be religion on this side, but it is not the Church. The Church is on that side, and it is just Christ. It is not a thing, an organization; it is a life in union with the living Lord and vital union with one another. We feel for one another, we care for one another. How the whole physical body hurries to the aid of the of the foot that is damaged, or anything else. How insensitive we can be to one another, how terribly self-occupied and self-centered. The Lord wants to deliver us from that and bring us on to a new ground where we "love one another from the heart fervently", where we really care what happens to one another.

Than brings us to what I believe is the key to what was in the Lord's heart as He faced the Cross. I do not know where you think John seventeen took place. It looks as though it took place in the upper room, because chapter eighteen tells us that afterward they went into the garden, but it all seems bound up with Gethsemane. It was the same night, and more than once in John seventeen the Lord uses the actual words "I pray..." When He is facing the greatest issue that has ever been faced, He pours out His heart to His Father. This is, so to speak, the Holy of Holies. You could not have a greater opening of His heart really than John seventeen. He is letting us into His secret. What an extraordinary thing for those men to have been thee in His presence when He so prayed!

What does He pray for - the Saviour of the world, the One Who is going to the Cross as the Lamb of God to take away the sin of the world? "I pray for them; I pray not for the world" - is that not extraordinary? - "I pray... for those whom Thou hast given Me" (John 17:9). And what is the heart of His burden for those who are His children/ His one heart cry to His Father for His seed, His own ("they are mine", He says, "for they are Thine"). The Lord's burden is - not that people may exist spiritually, but they they may be one; not that they may be brought to birth, they shall be brought into oneness. The full fruitage of redemption is not merely their salvation. The Lord is not satisfied with countless saved souls. Saved souls can be a perfect travesty and a contradiction of everything. Some Christians are doing the most grievous harm, but you cannot say they are not saved. We have spoken to a Roman Catholic who was in the employ of a professing Christian. He says - 'Well, I am sorry, I know too much.' And your tongue is tied because sometimes you know things yourself - injustice, wickedness, lying -yes, but the man is saved. God's great issue is not only our standing in Christ, but the state is a very serious matter. There is no testimony by standing; the testimony is by the state. It is not until something happens inwardly in the life that there is any testimony, but being a Christian does not necessarily make you a witness.

Then there is one further thing. The travail of His soul requires something more than individual spirituality. You can as it were beget a lot of semi-spiritual people, because they have had the teaching and they have heard about the Cross; they are, as it were, going on with the Lord all by themselves, but there is very little impact in an unrelated, isolated spiritual individual. A ministry can so produce individuals, and the tragedy is that so often these individuals, if you meet them aside, fall into one of two categories. Either they think they have something a bit better than other people, therefore they cannot help feeling a bit critical of other people, and other Christians can smell their critical spirit miles off, and so are not interested - and so that testimony has gone out. Or, at the other extreme, they are going through such a time, because they are trying to go on with the Lord, that they are nearly always 'under the weather' - in other words, they are always having spiritual problems because they have heard this deeper thing and it has got them tired up. Even if you get quite a measure of spiritual life in a child of God as an isolated unit, and they go on faithfully and seek to be true to the Lord, the weight of things proves too much for them, and the more real they are, the more the weight of it is on them. They are nearly crushed out of existence. The Lord has another way, and the Lord's way is the Body - one life together, oneness. "That they may be one."

The Work of the Cross

The Cross has done a mighty thing. If we could see what the Cross has really done,we would all stand up and say, Hallelujah! It is tremendous, it is a mighty deliverance. It has taken away the whole sin of the world - yes; but that is not all, though that is big enough. When you and I had our sins forgiven, I wonder how many of us, after a little time, ran into a sticky patch? I did; I am sure most of you did. We discover that, although we have a new nature through new birth, unfortunately we also have another nature still there. "The flesh lusteth against the Spirit" (Gal. 5:17). We still have this other nature.

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(continued with # 7)