Cuts and quotes

God’s Mysterious DealingsIf God were dealing with us as sinners, that is, if He were dealing with us because of certain personal sins and personal faults, we could quite clearly understand that; but when He is dealing with us in relation to Divine purpose, as His servants, His dealings with us go far beyond our understanding.We are taken out into a realm where we do not understand what the Lord is doing with us, and why the Lord takes certain courses with us. We are out of our depth; we are altogether baffled; and we are compelled - that is, if we are going on with God - to believe that God knows what He is doing: we have just to move with Him according to whatever light we may have, and believe that these dealings with us, so far beyond our understanding are somehow related to that purpose with which we are called, and that the explanation waits some distance ahead, and we will find it when we get there. God does not explain Himself when He takes a step with us. - The Ministry of Elijah

The Holy Spirit’s Objective . . . the Holy Spirit has one object in view, and all His activities are toward that one object, namely, the establishment of the Lordship of Jesus Christ. That is what He is after, and if you want the Holy Spirit to operate, to work in your life and through you, remember it is to that He will work, and it is not always the Holy Spirit’s way to give us lovely sensations and beautiful experiences which would bring us into prominence, and make something of us.The Holy Spirit may take us into deep depths in order to get the Lordship of Jesus Christ established, and He will do it in the way which will reach His end best. He will dethrone, He will break down all our strength, our glory, and our kingdom. His end is the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost prayer is, "Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever." November, 1941

Reaching Divine Fulness Divine fulness is only going to be reached by a progressive and ever-increasing revelation of Christ and His significance. Such a revelation - unless we misunderstand the record of God’s ways from of old - comes firstly to an apprehended instrument which is taken into the deeps with God; then it is given forth as His truth for His people; and then it becomes the inwrought experience and knowledge of such as really mean business with God - not as to their blessing, but as to His purpose and inheritance in them. July, 1942

URGENTLY NEEDED!Men (and women) of stature – (Isaiah 45:14; Ephesians 4:13)In whom the Cross has done a deep work as to self-interest. Who are not so concerned to preach, or to try and influence others to a doctrine or theory, but whose main influence will be one of LIFE. Who have come to know the Lord in a way of proving. Whose reaction to every situation, circumstance, and proposition is: Does it glorify God? and whose touchstone by which all things are tested and determined is: Can it work out to an increase of Christ?For such there is a pressing need, in the Church, in the Lord’s work, and in all the nations. Enquire in The Secret Place.

Christ Only and FullyWhenever and wherever, by a new revealing of Himself, His purpose and method, the Lord has secured those who have moved out on to the ground of Christ only and in fulness, they have always had to meet a great and painful cost. Usually it has been their own brethren in Christ who have exacted it. . . The truth is that - in many cases - they have only taken the ground which everybody knows is the ground of spiritual fullness; where questions of “church connection” and orders, etc., are never raised; where such things as joining something, or conforming to a special teaching or practice are never mentioned, but “Christ is all and in all”; and the one concern has been that He should have what is His ground and way of continuous increase. July, 1945

The Way of Fruitfulness If you are going to be an Overcomer. . . if you are going with the Lord wholly and utterly, to persecute in (a) thoroughgoing way God’s full end, to pursue it . . . and pay the price. . . there is undoubtedly going to be tremendous enrichment of others, and the fact is, and it is a settled law, that the enrichment of others can only come in this way. Those who will not pay the price forfeit the fruitfulness. The real values of Christ have come all the way through the centuries through men after this sort, men of this mind. . . Your greatness and your value and your fruitfulness will be according to the utterness of your abandonment to God’s full thought. He will see to the rest, and many will thank God that you paid the price, that you suffered for an utter way for the Lord, that you counted not the cost too great. January, 1946

Holding the Ground We do not know why we are in the place that we are in. Everything seems so difficult, so contrary, and then we see things begin to break up. It looks like calamity, and in the end there is something secured for God. But it necessitates our being there pronouncedly the Lord’s to secure it. This does not just happen. . .He may hold us in a place and not let us go until that testimony is there established, and then perhaps He will give the situation, or those there, into our hands. September, 1946

Accredited Ministry Truly accredited ministry is through suffering. Accredited ministry represents a tremendous victory, set in a background of great conflict. A determined effort is made through the age to discredit spiritual ministry, and to do so through the one engaged in that ministry. . .One who counts for the Lord, is a joint of supply, who can be of value in any way to the Lord’s people, and stand in His testimony, will know the enemy’s effort to render those spiritual values nil by discrediting. . . All ministry that is to be accredited will be bound up with suffering; a decision we have to make is as to the object of our ministry. A good many things can be taken into consideration, but there comes a point where all other things have to be ranged on one side, and one thing on the other side - the real spiritual value, without alloy: that which is wholly of God and not at all of man. In the measure in which that is true there will be suffering. To stand utterly for what is spiritual is a costly thing. There must be a willingness to be dealt with by the Lord, in such a way as to keep the ministry living and pure. All ministry which issues from such suffering is going to count. It may not be welcomed or desired by the mass, but where there is need and a call for that which we have gained through suffering, there will be response. But the treasure is in vessels of fragile clay; the vessel is being broken day by day.September, 1946

Holding the GroundWe do not know why we are in the place that we are in. Everything seems so difficult, so contrary, and then we see things begin to break up. It looks like calamity, and in the end there is something secured for God. But it necessitates our being there pronouncedly the Lord’s to secure it. This does not just happen. . . He may hold us in a place and not let us go until that testimony is there established, and then perhaps He will give the situation, or those there, into our hands. September, 1946

Enlargement through PerplexityThe facts are that there is often a larger service through a certain curtailment, a fuller life through a deeper death, a richer gain by a keener loss; and we have to look for the impact of the operation of God in us in a realm where the eye of man cannot trace. . .Supposing the deepest purposes of God can only be realized by His hiding from our flesh all that that flesh craves for its life, and – more - supposing His work in us, whereby triumphant faith and obedience reach their highest form, necessitates His concealing Himself and accepting the risk of being considered to have been unfaithful? There is no doubt that most of those who have been called into some of the most vital expressions of “the eternal purpose” have been trained in the school of apparent Divine contradiction, delay, withdrawal, and darkness. November, 1946

The Deeper Meaning of Pentecost 1. Pentecost in its outworking - or the presence of the Holy Spirit here - will mean that those in whom the Spirit operates and has His way will never be able to rest short of God’s full thought for themselves or for others. They will be deeply exercised and burdened and will be drawn into the travail of Christ, to fill up that which is lacking of His sufferings for His Body’s sake which is the Church. This man in Christ is a marked man, he is marked from heaven as one whose whole heart is taken up with this great concern that what is there should be found here: that what is true of Christ, the Man in the glory, should be more fully expressed here in this new man, the Church, the Body.

The Deeper Meaning of Pentecost 2. That is an operation of the Holy Spirit; and if you tell me that the Holy Spirit is having His way, and yet there is complacency with things that are not according to Christ, I say that is a contradiction; it cannot be. If you are perfectly satisfied with things as they are in yourself or in other believers, and have no real concern that there should be a full conformity to the image of Christ and that the whole Body should be brought to the measure of the stature of a man in Christ, the Spirit of God is not doing His work in you. Pentecost in its deeper meaning will produce that. The very fact that so soon after His advent the Church moved out as by Divine urge to seek the members of the Body and then to bring them into full conformity is proof positive that the Spirit of God is seeking to perfect a Body, a manhood, according to that Man Who has been revealed as in the glory. . .

3. The Lord is very greatly concerned about spiritual measure, although His people are not so concerned; and. . . Christ, the Man in fulness, is coming down to be like a measuring rod beside His Church, and to say, This is where you are not true, and you must adjust; this is where you have excesses, and they must go; this is where you have deficiencies, and they must be made good. It is the Spirit of God at work all the time to see to it that in all details we are according to Christ, the Spirit of God working in relation to that perfect measure that is in heaven, the measure for this Body, for this collective man, in all its parts. . .The Man in the glory, being at God’s right hand exalted, established, settled, is the assured realization of God’s end. . . The Spirit of sonship has come, not to try and do something, not with a hope that it may be; He has come in all the sovereignty of that One there, and it is going to be. . . There is a Man in the glory; the Spirit of God has come and has entered into us with just one object-to make all things abound toward the reproducing of that Man in us, in measure individually, and in the collective measure of the individuals in one glorified Body, Christ corporate. September, 1947

The God Who Raises the DeadDeath is the thing which pronounces an end. Whenever you and I say, This is the end, we are finished!-we have succumbed to death. That is the verdict of death, for death always says that.The Church should never believe in ends - that is to capitulate to death. Although a thousand times in ourselves we might feel the end has come, in the very experience which brings us to that place God has invested a new realization that in Him that finality is cancelled out. We should never expect an end until God says That is the end! . . . God is trying to bring us to the place where we stop expecting what the Devil is constantly offering through circumstances - death, an end, limitation. God is all the time thinking of increase, enlargement. . . God allows very deep and hard and painful things - things which bring us in ourselves really to the point of giving up, where we pass the verdict of death upon ourselves. He allows them with this object, that - however much we may have known and proved the truth in our earlier experience - He may bring us yet a stage further into the power and good of it, that God raiseth the dead.If He does that, then there is hope for anybody and for anything.Again and again in the course of our history, we shall be at the place where there is no hope but in “God Who raiseth the dead” (2 Cor. 1:9) if there is to be any future at all. We shall come there in our own soul life - that we are at an end of our resources, mind, heart, and will. We may come ofttimes in our very physical life to the place where, if God does not do something, it is an end.We shall come there in the work of God - where everything seems to declare that this is the finish of the work, there is nothing more possible; but now is the occasion for the God Who raises the dead, the God of promise, the God of Isaac, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.December, 1947

The Cost of Enlightenment We know that the book of Joshua is the book of the inheritance. The people are going in to possess, to occupy, to exploit, to inherit. But what was the very first move, when Israel had come to the borders of the land, forty years previously? The setting up of Intelligence. Spies were sent to spy out the land. Joshua sent over intelligence officers, his Intelligence Corps. Intelligence was a tremendously important thing here. We might say that Joshua and Caleb were themselves the very embodiment of the principle of Intelligence. It was they who brought the report which, in the long run, resulted in a people going in and possessing. But note at this point an interesting and impressive and significant thing. The people thought to stone them! You see, the enemy is not only over there in the land - he is entrenched in the very hearts of the people themselves, he has got a footing there. How true that is to principle and to history! Let any of the people of God begin to get some new light, and, as the Lord’s instrument, they will become the object of Satan’s hatred: He will stir up forces to stone that Instrument. He hates Instruments of spiritual enlightenment.

The Need to Press On There is a vast amount in the Kingdom that we have never suspected - do believe that. There is more for all of us to know than anybody on this earth knows - far more than the very greatest saints, the most advanced Christians, know of the purpose of God. Paul intimates that. In his Philippian letter he makes it clear that even at the end of his life, he has yet to apprehend, he needs still to know. “That I may know. . . ” (Phil. 3:10). There is far more to know. . . . Are you going to allow your life simply to be boxed up within the measure that you know, or within the measure of other people? No - it is the measure of Christ that is God’s end. . . “till we all attain unto the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13). No movement, no society, no evangelical organization, no church on this earth has come to that yet, but that is the objective in view. March, 1949

The Testimony Before the Work . . . The Lord is more concerned for a testimony than for a work. We need to get clear on that. A good deal of confusion comes in when you begin to think of things in the light of a work. When you get a lot of people leaving their employment to go into “the work,” all kinds of complications arise; and really the Lord is not, in the first place, after the work. I am not saying you are not to work for the Lord, but in the first place it is not the work the Lord is after, it is a testimony, it is a light, a living flame. January, 1950

Reaching a Place of Strategic ValueJob’s was a tremendous climb out of a miry condition, up and out into that place of vindication where the Lord could point to him in a new way and say to others, “This man is the key to the answer to your prayers and you will not get any answer to prayer unless he stands in the breach: your spiritual interests and destiny hang Upon him.” That is tremendous: that a man should have reached some specific point where the destiny of many others hangs upon him, and God has determined it and said it in so many words - “Your spiritual good is bound up with this man; I have had to bring him to this position for your sake.” November, 1950

Standing for God’s Full Thought God’ has set His heart upon having His whole counsel represented. . . God must have that whole counsel found in representation or He is defeated, and so He sets to work to bring those who will come, who will pay the price, into this position which, in the first place, satisfies Him, and in the second place, serves Him in that purpose; and a basic essential is a passion in our hearts for God’s fullest thought. If He is going to lead us into it, He must have that response in us for His own satisfaction. January, 1951

God’s Wise Providences The operations of the Holy Spirit, and the providential ways of God - strange, mysterious providences - these are all designed to keep us on the stretch. Any life that is really under the government of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus Christ, will never be allowed to settle down, will always be kept on the move - oh, yes, by strange means. The Lord knows how to deal with you and me. He knows the tendencies of our makeup, our constitution, our natures. He knows us exactly, everyone of us, and (oh, that we could believe it, really believe it always!) the way in which we are going is the way that the infinite, inscrutable wisdom of God knows to be the only way by which we shall come to a greater measure of the Lord. He vetoes much in order to economize, to ensure that we shall not be spreading ourselves too widely but be directed into the essential channels. July, 1951