"And
Jesus, when He was baptized, went up straightway from the
water: and lo, the heavens were opened unto Him, and He
saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove, and
coming upon Him; and lo, a voice out of the heavens,
saying, 'This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well
pleased'" (Matt. 3:16).
"Then was Jesus led up of
the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the
devil. And when He had fasted forty days and forty
nights, He afterward hungered. And the tempter came and
said unto Him, 'If Thou art the Son of God...'"
(Matt. 4:1-3).
"Again, the devil taketh Him unto
an exceeding high mountain, and showeth Him all the
kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; and he said
unto Him, 'All these things will I give Thee, if Thou
wilt fall down and worship me.' Then saith Jesus unto
him, 'Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou
shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou
serve"' (Matt. 4:8-10; ASV).
"And bring us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one" (Matt. 6:13;
ASV).
"For as many as are led by the
Spirit of God, these are sons of God" (Rom.
8:14; ASV).
"And suddenly there came from
heaven a sound as of the rushing of a mighty wind, and it
filled all the house where they were sitting. And there
appeared unto them tongues parting asunder, like as of
fire; and it sat upon each one of them. And they were all
filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with
other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. Let all
the house of Israel therefore know assuredly, that God
hath made Him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus Whom ye
crucified" (Acts 2:2-4, 36; ASV).
In the first of these passages we see the
link between the Holy Spirit and sonship: the Spirit is
seen lighting upon the Lord Jesus and a voice out of the
heavens is heard saying, "This is My beloved
Son." That truth is taken up again in the passage in
the Letter to the Romans, chapter 8:14, "As many as
are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of
God." In the second passage, Matthew 4, the Son,
under the government of the Spirit, is led into the
wilderness, and the issue of that particular leading of
the Spirit was a mighty victory for the rights of God.
"Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God,
and Him only shalt thou serve. Then the devil leaveth
Him," as Luke adds, "for a season." That
is the end of that battle and it is victory in the hands
of the Son under the government of the Spirit.
What I feel the Lord wants us to recognize
at this time is what a life or church that is led and
governed by the Holy Spirit does; what it means to be led
and governed by the Holy Spirit so far as we personally
and collectively are concerned: in other words, what are
the marks of sonship. You see, beloved, we have to begin
here, that sonship is proved by our being led by the
Spirit. How do we know that we are sons: what is it that
evidences sonship: in what way does sonship manifest
itself and work itself out? The clear, precise statement
of the Word of God is that it is by our being "led
of the Spirit." It was so in the case of the Lord
Jesus. The marks of His Sonship were in His being led of
the Spirit. The statement moreover is quite positive in
Romans 8:14. How tremendously important it is, therefore,
that we both have the Spirit and are governed by the
Spirit. That is fundamental to everything.
I venture to say that if that which I feel
the Lord wants to bring to us now could be truly got over
to us, it would be a matter of tremendous value to every
one of us. Let me repeat: the basis, the foundation of
everything so far as our relationship with God and with
God's purpose is concerned, is the presence and the
government of the Holy Spirit; and that government, of
course, means and presupposes the absolute Lordship of
the Holy Spirit: because the Holy Spirit does not come
save on the ground of death, burial and resurrection. It
was when Jesus was baptized and came up out of the water
that the Holy Spirit came upon Him; and baptism, as we
all well know, sets forth in testimony the fact that, so
far as any other government is concerned, be it the
government of Satan, or that of the world, or be it the
government of the self-life, that government is broken
and we are out of it; and our resurrection, typified in
our coming up out of the baptism, means that we are
alive, and alive unto God only. Thus the ground is
provided for the Spirit to come in as Lord, and so become
the basis of everything in our relationship with God and
God's purpose. The thing that I feel we want to recognize
is what that really means.
A Principle Of Spiritual Guidance
There are a great many questions which
arise, and which we are often asked. They sometimes seem
to be theoretical questions, technical questions about
the Christian life. Now, we may seek to help one another
by giving what we might call a technical answer, an
answer, for example, from the Scriptures on some passage
or some interpretation. But I am always doubtful as to
the real helpfulness of that kind of answer. I think,
beloved, there is an answer which goes deeper and which
is much more satisfactory.
I have recently been asked a question, and
I will answer it publicly so that what help there may be
in the answer will be afforded to others. The question
turned upon the difficulty over the difference between
soul and spirit, and the place which the soul is going to
have in the future life. Is it going to have any place at
all or is it going to cease? Now you know I might answer
a question like that with passages of Scripture, but I do
not think that would be the most helpful way, because it
would probably only raise more questions. But I am going
to answer it in this way, because, although we are not
dealing now with the matter of soul and spirit, I am
seeking to get at a principle of guidance, a principle of
spiritual guidance, the law of sonship.
I would ask you, What is your experience
as a child of God in the matter of soul and spirit?
Perhaps those words are too technical. Let me put it more
simply. What is your experience with regard to that side
of your life which is directly in touch with the Lord (in
the measure in which you have a conscious life in the
Lord: I think every child of God ought to have some
little measure of a conscious life with the Lord), and
that other side of your life which you know to be
yourself - not the Lord, but yourself, your natural life;
your spiritual life on the one side, and your natural
life on the other. Now when, as a child of God, you take
just a little excursion into that region which is your
natural life, what is the result? It may happen through a
slip, a momentary breakdown, an indulgence -
"overtaken in a fault" is how the Apostle
expresses it - anything which means that, just at that
moment, you drop down into the natural life, or the
natural life rises up and gets the advantage for the
moment, asserts itself and becomes the dominating thing.
What is the effect of that upon you? If you are a true
child of God and are really seeking to live with the
Lord, you have a terribly bad time, and it is not just a
matter of your conscience in the same way as any man
might have a twinge of conscience. You know that there
are other factors in this, that of the Lord being
grieved, of something between yourself and the Lord
having been damaged. It is something much more than just
conscience. You have a bad time and you react, you
rebound, you are stung by that, and you make haste to get
back on to the other side. You seek to recover your
spiritual ground as soon as you can, with considerable
regret and remorse and repentance. What has happened?
Well, you have come out of your spirit in its union with
God into your soul. You have learned a lesson. You take
account of this thing and you say, "How was it that
I slipped up there? Why was it, what accounts for that? I
will prayerfully watch that in the future. I know now
what that means."
Now, it does not follow that you never do
slip in the same way again, but as you go on you do
spiritually grow out of that particular thing, and what
is happening is that in spirit you are taking the mastery
of your soul. You are not annihilating your soul, but you
are bringing it under government and making it your
servant; for mark, that frequently the occasion of
stumbling is only the evil form of an expression which in
itself may be necessary. Take anger, for example. You
became angry; but you became angry in your nature, your
natural life, and it was because there was a
self-interest or some self-element in your anger that you
had such a bad time. Anger is not evil. "God is
angry with the wicked every day" (Ps. 7:11).
"Be ye angry, and sin not" (Eph. 4:26). Anger
is not evil. You are not therefore going to annihilate
your soul and make anger non-existent. I instance anger,
but you can take any other feature that you like in the
same way and you will find that the soul itself is not
essentially evil. The evil lies in the evil principle
that has got hold of it.
What are you going to do then? In spirit
you are going to destroy the evil principle and get the
mastery of your soul, so that anger is going to serve
you. Love may have personal elements in it; but you are
not going to annihilate love because you find love trips
you up sometimes on a personal line and leads you astray.
You are going to destroy the evil principle by the power
of the death of Christ and master your soul and bring it
under, so that by your spirit you use love, you govern
the matter of love. Now then, the point that I am after
is not so much the difference between the soul and
spirit, but rather something related to the Holy Spirit
Himself.
The Holy Spirit An Earnest
The Holy Spirit is a basic
necessity, but mark that the Word puts it in this way.
"... ye were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise,
which is an earnest of our inheritance" (Eph.
1:14). What does that mean? Well, if the Holy Spirit
is the energy, the power, the intelligence, by Whom we
are doing this very thing of which I have been speaking,
He is pointing on to something. What is it that He is
pointing on to as an earnest of something that is to be?
Why, He is pointing on to a time when you and I will, in
spirit, have our souls utterly and perfectly under our
government - not annihilated, but perfectly under our
government; and I do not believe that in the resurrection
life, the life hereafter, we are going to be only naked
spirits. We shall be men, we shall have souls, but
without the evil principle and without the soul being in
the place of mastery. Through the organ of the spirit we
shall govern all the rest of our being and enjoy a
perfectly adjusted manhood. Manhood is not a temporary
thing. It is an idea of God which is to go on.
Well now, you see the principle. But the
question is answered when you get the law. All questions
are answered. The question is this in general. What does
the Holy Spirit do in us? How does the Holy Spirit lead
us? What does it mean to us in a practical way day by day
to be led of the Spirit? Oh, do not just narrow that down
to the question of, Lord, shall I go here or there, shall
I do this or that? That is only a mere fragment of being
led of the Spirit. Without any such questions arising,
the Spirit is in us to lead us, and to lead us to moral
issues in the way I have just been indicating; that is,
to show us the way and to say to us, No, that other is
not the way, this is the way; and we know, not by His
pointing it out but by His effective working in us. Our
reactions, as true children of God, are the work of the
Spirit. That jumping back from the ground that we have
touched to our hurt, that is the energy of the Spirit in
us leading us, and it is a terrible thing for any child
of God ever to come to the place where he can indulge
without a reaction.
The enemy would like us, because of our
failures, to say, Oh, well, it is no good, we give it up!
If you and I have a bad time when we touch the natural
realm, that is a glorious evidence of sonship. Do not try
to rule out all your bad times and make light of them,
but beware that the enemy does not turn them to such
effect as to make you introspective and morbid. But
remember the Spirit will keep alive in you a very active
sense of what is, and what is not, in accord with the
mind of God. These are the sons of God who are thus led
by the Spirit of God.
You see how we answer all our questions. I
answer all my technical questions by looking to see what
it means to me that the Holy Spirit is in me. What is the
spirit pointing to? What is the significance of today's
touch of the Spirit upon my spirit? That is an earnest of
something. If that is followed through it will grow and
develop and it will lead me somewhere. That is going to
answer all my questions if I have got that principle.
Have I been too difficult for you? Oh, listen to the
Spirit, come under the government of the Spirit, and
then, when the Spirit checks you, urges you, moves in
you, gives you a bad time, or gives you joy in your
heart, note what that means, what it is leading to. Oh,
there is something bound up with that, there is something
at the end of that. I interpret everything in life by
that touch of the Spirit and that answers all my
questions. If the Spirit touches my mortal body today
with His living finger and quickens it, I do not at once
conclude that I have become immortal, that death for ever
has gone and incorruption has settled down in my mortal
frame. But I can say, "My resurrection body will be
like that in fullness. It will simply be the consummation
of that touch I have known today. I have a wonderful
accession of life today, but the time is coming when that
very thing will have been developed to its fullest extent
and I shall live utterly by Divine life. I have the
Spirit as an earnest." I am trying to illustrate
this thing. The Spirit touching us in any way, dealing
with us in any way as sons of God, is pointing on to what
it will be when sonship is manifested (the day of the
manifestation of the sons) and the creation is delivered
from the bondage of corruption.
Now all that is detail. You can drop the
detail and get back to the foundation. What is it? The
Holy Spirit is basic to everything. We shall never get
anywhere without the Holy Spirit; we shall never know
anything without the Holy Spirit; we shall never reach
anything in the purpose of God without the Holy Spirit;
and the Holy Spirit has to be a conscious life with us:
growingly so, as in the case of a baby. The baby has very
little self-conscious life to begin with. As a baby, most
things are done for it. But it is not long before the
very first and remote signs of conscious life are there.
Whereas up to a point there seems to be no consciousness
of anything in particular, suddenly you will see a baby
get its eyes fixed upon something; suddenly it sees
something. From that time, the baby is taking account of
something. It does not understand, but it is aware of
some object and cannot take its eyes from it. It comes
back to it and, as the days go by, seems to look for it.
Self-conscious life has started, and from that time
onward that grows. In the spiritual life it is just like
that.
At the beginnings, most things are done
for us as from the outside, although there is a remote
sense of a new self-conscious spiritual life. But, as we
grow, the Spirit's presence in us has to become more and
more a conscious life of government; and these who are
led by the Spirit of God are sons. That is the
foundation. It is the foundation of growth, it is the
foundation of understanding, it is the foundation of
God's purpose, it is the foundation of all that is
wrapped up in our relationship with God.
Forgive me for being so elementary, but if
we can only get this, it is the key to everything. We do
not want to have certain questions answered in a
technical way to the satisfaction of our minds, but we
get at the answer spiritually. We are never really
satisfied by having a question answered so that our minds
can grasp it. Presently we shall come up against new
features of the thing and want new explanations. But if
we can have the answer conveyed to our spirit - ah, then
we are satisfied; and I say the answer is found in the
presence of the Spirit and what the Spirit is indicating
by His present dealings with us. What do His dealings
with us indicate? What is the end of it all? If the
Spirit today touches us upon a question of wrong, of
evil, of something doubtful, what is the end of that? The
end is holiness, perfect holiness. It will take some time
because there are many things to be dealt with. But the
end, when reached, is a holy being. So with everything
else. In this the Spirit is therefore the foundation.
Adjustableness A Mark Of A Life Governed
By The Holy Spirit
There are some other things that come up
in that connection. One of them is this, that a mark of
sonship or of a Spirit-governed life is adjustableness.
Now, I want you to grasp this. You see, it means that
nothing is final with us, so far as our attainment is
concerned or our light, and that we can never, if we are
under the Holy Spirit's government, come to a fixed
place. We can never come to the place where we just
accept everything and go on with it rigidly as it is. Oh
no, a Spirit-governed life can never do that, can never
become stagnant, can never become fixed. There can never
be any sense of finality about the position or state in
such a life. I am not talking now about those great
truths which are settled, to which nothing is added or
need be added. We are settled, of course, in the matter
of what Christ has done and what Christ is, those great
objective truths of our faith. I am not talking about
that, but of our understanding, our apprehension, our
knowledge, our growth, our relationship to these things,
our position. These are all things which must remain open
to enlargement, to expansion, and it may be, to drastic
changes. You see, in traditional Christianity we have
come into something that is more or less fixed. It is
fixed in different ways. If you are a Baptist, then your
position is a fixed position. If you are a Presbyterian
or a Methodist, etc., it is the same. These are things
which are rounded off. I am only illustrating, not
judging. What is within these things is something to
which you have conformed, of which you are a member. That
is your bound, your world. I have only cited one or two
examples: I could take any number of things.
Now then, where are we? How did we get in?
Perhaps we were born, brought up, in those things, or
perhaps we came into them later. But they are something,
and they represent a fixed position and we, if in them,
are fixed and governed by that position. That is to say,
within them, certain things are interpreted in this way,
certain things are practised in this way, the method
there is this method; and how often, when you have been
speaking of things, have you had this reaction from
people, "Oh yes, but I was never brought up to that
way of thinking. In the church to which I belong"
(really referring to the denomination) "it is taught
and practiced like this." That is a fixed position.
Let me say it, without judging of these things, that any
fixed position is a contradiction of the Holy Spirit and
of sonship. It does not matter what the position is; and
it may be (I am only going to say it may be, I could put
it more strongly than that) that if you really come under
the government of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of sonship,
you will have to make very drastic changes and cease to
be this and that, and go on with God. Adjustableness is a
mark of sonship, and, as the Holy Spirit has never
brought any of us yet to a final position, there is more
light and understanding yet to be received. The ways of
God are not all known to us yet.
We must remember there is all the
difference between the permissive will of God, for such
instruction in us as can never be gained in any other
way, and the whole will of God, which is another thing.
We all have to look back on our lives and believe that
certain steps which were taken and courses followed were
in the will of God for us. Yet, in later life, we have
had to repudiate the position into which we then came,
entirely change and adjust. But, beloved, I am going to
say this: it does not mean that it was not the will of
God for us that we took that step. The Lord may, at one
time, in His permissive will, lead us in a certain way,
because of its being the only way we can learn certain
things we have to learn. But it does not mean that God
intends us to stay there for ever, that He has settled us
there, and that, because He led us in that way and into
that, we dare not ever contemplate moving out of it. That
is bondage. You and I as sons have to know liberty from
bondage of every kind, and that means that we are
adjustable, free for adjustments, not bound by any kind
of conception that would prevent us from making changes
as we are led by the Spirit; and it is true of every life
that is Spirit-governed that tremendous changes take
place. The things which at one time would never have been
considered nor contemplated, have become actualities now.
The basis of the life of the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit
producing sonship means that you and I have to be
adjustable, and if we are not adjustable there is arrest
at once: we are in bondage, we are in limitation. The
Lord Jesus was adjustable under the government of the
Holy Spirit. He was not playing a trick on His brethren
when one day they came to Him and said, 'We are going up
to the feast. Are you going up with us? If you do not go,
people will wonder; you will prejudice your interests.'
He said, 'No, you go up, I am not going up.' Yet when
they were gone up, then Jesus went up to the feast. Is He
playing a trick on them? Was He simply saying, Well, I
would rather go alone, I would like to get rid of you? He
had not the witness of the Spirit at that moment that He
was to go, and therefore He had to stand His ground and
take the risk of being misunderstood. But when they had
gone up, He evidently got the Spirit's witness that He
should go up; and He did not say, I have told them I was
not going up: they will think I have played a trick on
them, that I did not want them. No, He did not argue like
that, but moved in the Spirit and left it all with the
Father. He was not bound by those considerations of what
people would think and say either way. If they should
talk because He was not there - all right, let them talk.
As for Him, He must be true to the Lord. Adjusting, even
if it is at an hour's notice, that is life in the Spirit,
that is sonship.
This is the basis of victory over the
Devil. There is no defeating Satan save on this ground of
walking by the Spirit, of being governed by Him. May the
Lord give us understanding in these basic things about
our life with Him.
Extract from "Thine is the Kingdom" chapter 3. First published in "A Witness and A Testimony" magazine, May-Jun 1968, Vol 46-3. This version from a publication of the same name from Emmanuel Church, Tulsa, OK.