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The Way
by
T. Austin-Sparks
“But Saul, yet breathing threatening and
slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto
the high priest, and asked of him letters to Damascus
unto the synagogues, that if he found any that were of
the Way, whether men or women, he might bring them bound
to Jerusalem” (Acts 9:1,2).
“But when some were hardened and disobedient,
speaking evil of the Way before the multitude, he
departed from them” (Acts 19:9).
“And about that time there arose no small stir
concerning the Way” (Acts 19:23).
“I persecuted this Way unto the death, binding
and delivering into prisons both men and women” (Acts
22:4).
“But this I confess unto thee, that after the
Way which they call a sect, so serve I the God of our
fathers, believing all things which are according to the
law, and which are written in the prophets”
(Acts 24:14).
“But Felix, having more exact knowledge
concerning the Way, deferred...” (Acts 24:22).
“The same following after Paul and us cried out,
saying, These men are servants of the Most High God, who
proclaim unto you the Way of salvation” (Acts
16:17).
“This man had been instructed in the Way of the
Lord; and being fervent in spirit, he spake and taught
accurately the things concerning Jesus, knowing only the
baptism of John: and he began to speak boldly in the
synagogue. But when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they
took him unto them, and expounded unto him the Way of God
more accurately” (Acts 18:25,26).
“Enter ye in by the narrow gate: for wide is the
gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction,
and many are they that enter in thereby. For narrow is
the gate, and straitened the Way, that leadeth unto life,
and few are they that find it” (Matt. 7:13,14).
It is very interesting, to say the least of it, to
recognize that in New Testament times the Christian life
and walk became resolved into a term like this, to be
spoken of as “THE WAY.” It would seem strange
in our ears, no doubt, if we heard people talking about
us as “the People of the Way,” but that is
evidently how it was then, and it would be interesting to
know just how that came about; and I think we shall not
be very far wrong if we come to an opinion about it.
Evidently people in those days were very much like people
today. They were given to summing things up in a terse,
brief manner, and affixing labels.
You see, the very word “Christian” was their
way of summing it all up. At times we have that word
mentioned. “The disciples were called Christians
first in Antioch” (Acts 11:26). Then the Apostle
says, “If a man suffer as a Christian...” (1
Pet. 4:16). Clearly, it was outsiders who gave believers
that name, and, as we know, it simply means ‘Christ-ones,’
and it was shortened into Christians; it was the world
who coined that title for believers in the Lord Jesus.
‘They are Christ-ians!’
Evidently it was something like that that resulted in
Christianity becoming known as the Way, but it was
apparently the result of something they were always
saying. They, or at least the chief men among the
Apostles at the beginning —Peter, James, John—had
heard the Lord Jesus say, “I AM THE WAY... no one
cometh unto the Father but by Me” (John 14:6); and
they had gone out preaching to the world and proclaiming
that Jesus was the Way and that there was no other way.
So people had taken it up and said, These are the people
of the Way. What an admission! Whether or not they meant
it as a slight and said it with a sneer, what a lot there
is in it for truth! ‘These Christ-ones are
the people of the Way.” And in both cases,
whether it is Christ-ones or the Way, the result is that
it is all bound up with, and inseparable from, the Lord
Jesus. If we are right in surmising that that is where
the phrase comes from—“I AM THE WAY,” and
these men had preached Jesus as the Way—then it
comes right back to that— Christ-ones,
people of Him WHO IS THE WAY; that is, not people who
just have a way of their own, who take a way different
from others, but people of a Person Who is the Way. It is
the Person Who gives character to the Way. It is the
Person Who makes the Way, it is the Person Who has
pioneered that Way and blazed that trail. They are in the
Way of the Person.
And do you not think that is probably why the Devil hated
it so much? It is strange how many ways people can take
with seeming success and without very much trouble. Think
of all the ways that people take today, even religiously.
You cannot cope with all the fantastic courses that
people adopt. They go all their strange, peculiar ways—ways
that you think no commonsense person would ever look at—but
they go and they get crowds to follow them; and nobody
bothers to oppose them. But here it is different. We come
to that in a minute.
We are not going to say a great deal about the Way—what
it came to mean so far as the Church and believers were
concerned. We just look right on the surface of it, at
one or two things that are very simple.
An
Exclusive Way
First of all, seeing
that it was the Way which was that of a Person, and not
just a system of truth and doctrine, it was a very
exclusive Way. There is a sense in which we can use that
word safely and rightly. I think it was to that that the
Lord referred when He said, “Narrow is the gate, and
straitened the way, that leadeth unto life, and few are
they that find it.” It is a very exclusive way. The
Lord has an illustration for that, the illustration of
the camel and the needle’s eye, the name for the
little gate at the side of the main entrance to the city.
A merchant has arrived with his camel after sundown, and
the gates are closed always at dusk. Somehow he has to
get in with his camel, and so, after a good deal of
argument, the porter says, Well, if you can get your
camel through that lych gate, you may come in, but I must
not open the main gate. So the man strips his camel of
everything—everything comes off and is left outside.
Then he tells his camel to go down, and the man tugs and
squeezes the camel through. The camel is stripped of
everything and he is right down as low as he can get.
Here the illustration about the Way means this. There are
a lot of things that cannot come in, and you will never
get in if you try to bring those things with you. You
will be stripped of everything of your old world and your
old life if you are coming into the Way. Was it not that
that caused the offence to the man known as the rich
young ruler? “Go, sell that which thou hast, and
give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven:
and come, follow Me” (Matt. 19:21). He went away
grieved, for he had great possessions. It was simply the
test of the “needle’s eye,” and he could
not stand up to it. It is an exclusive way, and the Lord
never hid the fact from anybody who was coming after Him.
Except this and that and that, He said, ye cannot be My
disciples. Yes, it is narrow. Well, that is only the
world’s view of it. That is what the world says
about the Christian way, the Christian life—it is
“narrow.” That is how it is viewed from
outside. They call Christians narrow-minded. Have we
found the life narrow? Well, yes, lots of things have
gone, but when you have got inside, what have you found?
It is only narrow from that outside standpoint. It ought
not to be narrow inside. We have missed something if the
Christian life is a narrow, mean, poor, thin thing. We
have missed its meaning. Oh, what a vastness, what a
wealth, what a fulness we have entered into!
An
Inclusive Way
Yes, it is exclusive in
a sense, but it is inclusive in the Divine sense, from
heaven’s standpoint. It is tremendous for those who
really become children of the Way. While it was exclusive
at a certain point, the entering of the gate, it has
become inclusive when you are inside. The Lord really is
not a debtor to any man. “Every one that hath left
houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or
children, or lands, for My Name’s sake, shall
receive a hundredfold” (Matt. 19:29). I ask you,
with all that it means on the side of difficulty and
trial to be in the Way, would you go back to the other
way, would you leave this Way? If you really would, well,
I do not know what has happened to you. You really have
not come to know the meaning of being in the Way, for it
is a large, a full, a wealthy place. Oh yes, we do know
all the testing, we do know what a lot has had to go; but
oh, we would think more than twice before exchanging our
present lot for the lot of those outside of the Way. Have
we not had to sit down sometimes when things were getting
a bit too much for us and the pressure was tempting us to
think back—have we not sat down and said, Can I go
back? Can I exchange this for the old life that I left?
And every time it has been No, oh no! We cannot do it, it
is unthinkable. There is in the Way, after all, a
wonderful fulness. It is not all loss, there is a great
deal of gain. The Thessalonians were people of the Way,
they suffered the loss of all things; but read again the
opening chapters of the two letters, and hear the Apostle
speaking about the overflowing joy and the overflowing
love which was amongst them. They suffered joyfully the
spoiling of their goods. Why? Well, not just for the
pleasure of being very Spartan, and enduring a lot of
suffering for the sake of showing what tremendous grit
they had. No! They found in the Way a greater
compensation for all their loss.
A
Contested Way
But, saying that, there
is no doubt about it, it is a contested way. Strangely,
all the passages in which the phrase occurs are passages
relating to opposition. Paul is saying that he persecuted
the Way, and the first mention of the Way is in
connection with his persecuting. “...that if he
found any that were of the Way, whether men or women, he
might bring them bound to Jerusalem.” He did not
carry it out in Damascus, but he says later that he used
to do that (Acts 22:4)—he threw men and women,
bound, into prisons (note the plural). He had been on
some other expeditions wherever he could track the Way.
Several passages speak of how the Way was contested—as
we said earlier, not simply because it was a new doctrine
but because of WHO THE WAY WAS. You can be a Christian of
sorts, you can bear the name of a Christian, you can have
a kind of profession of Christianity and not know any of
the persecution. It is the temptation of many to try and
be Christians but to avoid the persecution bound up with
it, and there are today a lot of Christians, so-called,
who are not in the fight of the Way. They are evading it
by some means, they are hiding what they are, they are
not coming out into the open with it; but here you notice
it was when the Way was out in the open it was so
challenged, antagonized, contested. They were proclaiming
JESUS AS THE WAY, and so they met the antagonism of the
prince of this world through his subjects; and if we are
really going to be true to the Way, which is only saying
to be true to the Lord—to be loyal to our Master,
not to hide where we stand, let it be out in the open—well,
we are going to meet the conflict. We had better make up
our minds about it. But there is our opportunity, and
there is the Lord’s opportunity, and it works good
all round. It makes for tremendous spiritual increase and
growth. You look for the people who have grown
spiritually and become strong, and you find that they are
the people who have let it be known Whose they are and
Whom they serve, and they have accepted the consequences
of open and positive antagonism. They are the people who
have grown. Look for the people who are small and weak
spiritually, and you will find they are the people who
are not right out in the open with their testimony. It
works for our own spiritual increase and strengthening—the
Lord sees to that. Then it gives the Lord the opportunity
of finding out where there are those who are wanting the
Way. There are a lot wanting the Way, but they will not
find it until there is a lamp that shows the Way; and
“Ye are the light of the world” (Matt. 5:14).
If the Lord has us in a clear, open place, it gives Him
the opportunity of discovering and getting hold of those
who will come into the Way. That is gain. So it is so
necessary for us to be right out in the open, letting it
be known that we are of the Way—taking the
consequences, but to very great gain all round. Yes, it
is a contested way.
The
Entrance To The Way
What is the entrance to
the Way? How do we get into the Way? What is the gateway?
It is the Cross and what the Cross means. It is there
that the laying down of our lives with Christ takes
place; it is there that the stripping of this world from
us takes place; it is there that the all-inclusive
meaning of the Way is faced and accepted. The Cross
stands there and no one gets into the Way except by that
Cross and what it means. If we want not only to get into
the Way but to make good progress in the Way—not all
the time to be coming to a halt, then getting on a little
and another halt, making very jerky and irregular
progress which is most unsatisfactory—if we want not
only to get in but to go on and keep on going on, then
let us recognize the fulness of the meaning of that
Cross, that in that Way all questions are settled as to
who is going to be Master and Lord. This is what the Lord
was suggesting in principle when He said that if the
Master treads the way, the servant must tread it too
(John 15:20). We have it in a hymn— “It is the
way the Master went, should not the servant tread it
still?” But He introduced that suggestion. ‘I
have gone this way, the way of an utterness of letting
go. Satan offered Me all the kingdoms of this world and
the glory thereof as a gift outright, and I said, No!’
Satan will never offer that to you, he will only offer it
to you in bits, fragments; he offered the whole to
Christ. The Lord said, No, not a bit of it on your terms!
He accepted the way of the Cross wholly and utterly.
Well, you see what happened. It was not at all necessary
for Him, for Himself, to go to the Cross. He was
glorified on the Mount of Transfiguration. For Himself He
could have gone right through at once. He only went
through the Cross for us, not for Himself. The Cross
means that this world is ruled out, set aside, and all
its prizes, and its tinsel, its so-called glories, have
nothing for us, we are utterly for the Lord. We are here
on this earth, in this world, for the Lord, cost what it
may in this life. Well, that is both the way in and the
way on. If we are pausing, to count the cost and to
discuss the terms: if we are like those disciples before
they came to the place where the Cross to them was not
the loss of all things but the gaining of all things: if
we are saying, as one did, “Lo, we have left all,
and followed Thee; what then shall we have?” (Matt.
19:27): if there is anything of that we shall not get on
very far. “What shall we have?” Rather must it
be, when we have done all— “We are unprofitable
servants” (Luke 17:10). Really, the Lord has not got
very much out of us when we have done all. Well, the gate
is the Cross, and it is just in the measure in which we
accept what the Cross represents that we shall go on in
the Way—and that is only saying in figurative
language that only in that measure shall we come to the
appreciation of the fulness of Christ, make spiritual
progress and be of real value to Him as pioneers in the
Way for others to come on. “Those of the Way.”
Well, with all the cost and with all the contesting, may
the Lord give us that glorying in our hearts— after
all, we are people of the Way.
First published in "A Witness and A Testimony" magazine, Jan-Feb 1948, Vol. 26-1.
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