Resurrection

The Christian’s happiness is not to be found in external things, but in learning to enjoy God Himself in the midst of trial

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“What is the significance of suffering? This, that the devastation it brings to the old creation provides an opportunity for the God of resurrection to impart Himself to His creatures, so that they emerge from the death process with a divine element in their constitution. The primary purpose of suffering in this universe, particularly as it relates to the children of God, is that through it the very nature of God may be wrought into the nature of man. “If indeed our outward man is decaying, yet our inward man is being renewed day by day” (2 Cor. 4:16). Through a process of outward decay an inward process is taking place that is adding a new constituent to our lives.

Beloved brothers and sisters, through hardship and pressure a divine element is being wrought into the very fabric of our beings, so that we cease to be colorless Christians, but have a heavenly hue imparted to our lives that was lacking before. Whatever else suffering may effect in this universe is incidental; this is primary — to bring those whom the living God has made possessors of created life into the uncreated life of the God of resurrection. It is in the death experiences which come through suffering that the life of the creature is blended with the life of the Creator. We may know the living God without such drastic experiences, but only through death can we come to an experiential knowledge of the God of resurrection.

Suffering is the God-appointed lot of the Christian. The Christian’s happiness is not to be found in external things, but in learning to enjoy God Himself in the midst of trial. Paul and Silas could rejoice and sing His praises while they were in prison, because their happiness did not come from outer circumstances, but from an inner enjoyment of God. In Paul’s short letter to the Philippians, written during his imprisonment, there are over a score of references to joy. In deep distress he could still be joyful because in his affliction he was learning to know Christ, to appropriate Him and to enjoy Him. His outward circumstances were all conducive to sorrow, but it was in sorrow that Christ was imparted to him as the source of his joy.”

(The God of Resurrection)

Hymns #279: Through the Cross O Lord I pray

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“A stanza of a hymn in our hymnal says:

‘When we see the ripened harvest
Of the golden countryside,
We may know that many seeds have
Fallen to the earth and died.’

Before there can be a harvest, many grains need to fall into the earth and die. But who is willing to die? Instead of dying, nearly everyone wants to receive glory. Thus, no life is imparted into others. It is easy to have a crowd, but difficult to impart life into others. To do this, we need to die. This is my burden in this message. In the Lord’s recovery we do not need a crowd; we need the death that releases life. We need to experience this aspect of Christ’s death.”

(The Experience of Christ, chapter 18)

The house in Bethany was a miniature of the church life

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“Then Jesus, six days before the Passover, came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead.” (John 12:1)

Bethany means house of affliction. At this point the Lord was outside Judaism. Through His resurrection life He had gained a house in Bethany where He could feast and have rest and satisfaction. This house of feasting was a miniature of the church life and depicted the situation of the church:

  1. Produced by the resurrection life — Lazarus (11:43-44);
  2. Composed of cleansed sinners — Simon the leper (Mark 14:3);
  3. Outwardly afflicted — Bethany;
  4. Inwardly feasting in and with the presence of the Lord (v. 2);
  5. Having more sisters than brothers (vv. 2-3);
  6. Having members with different functions:
    • Serving — Martha
    • Testifying — Lazarus
    • Loving — Mary (vv. 2-3);
  7. Spotted by the false one — Judas (v. 4);
  8. Persecuted by religion (v. 10);
  9. Being a test and exposing people (vv. 6, 10); and
  10. Bringing in many believers (v. 11).

(John 12:1, footnote 1)

The Lord has left no aspect of our need unmet in His Cross

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God must bring us to a point—I cannot tell you how it will be, but He will do it—where, through a deep and dark experience, our natural power is touched and fundamentally weakened, so that we no longer dare trust ourselves. He has had to deal with some of us very harshly, and take us through difficult and painful ways, in order to get us there. At length there comes a time when we no longer ‘like’ to do Christian work—indeed we almost dread to do things in the Lord’s Name. But then at last it is that He can begin to use us.

I can tell you this, that for a year after I was converted I had a lust to preach. It was impossible to stay silent. It was as though there was something moving within me that drove me forward, and I had to keep going. Preaching had become my very life. The Lord may graciously allow you to go on a long while like that—and not only so but with a fair measure of blessing—until one day that natural force impelling you is touched, and from then on you no longer do it because you want to do it but because the Lord wants it. Before that experience you preached for the sake of satisfaction you got from serving God in that way; and yet sometimes the Lord could not move you to do one thing that He wanted done. You were living by the natural life, and that life varies a good deal. It is the slave of your temperament. When emotionally you are set on His way you go ahead at full speed, but when your emotions are directed the other way you are reluctant to move at all, even when duty calls. You are not pliable in the Lord’s hands. He has therefore to weaken that strength of preference, of like and dislike, in you, until you will do a thing because He wants it and not because you like it. You may enjoy it or you may not, but you will do it just the same. It is not that you can derive a certain satisfaction from preaching or from doing this or that work for God, and therefore you do it. No, you do it now because it is the will of God, and regardless of whether or not it gives you conscious joy. The true joy you know in doing His will lies deeper than your variable emotions.

God is bringing you to the place where He has but to express a wish and you respond instantly. That is the spirit of the Servant (Psalm 40: 7, 8), but such a spirit does not come naturally to any of us. It comes only when our soul, the seat of our natural energy and will and affections, has known the touch of the Cross. Yet such a servant-spirit is what He seeks and will have in us all. The way to it may be a painful, long-drawn-out process with some of us, or it may be just one stroke; but God has His ways and we must have regard to them.

Every true servant of God must know at some time that disabling from which he can never recover; he can never be quite the same again. There must be that established in you which means that from henceforth you will really fear yourself. You will fear to do anything ‘out from’ yourself, for, like Jacob, you know what kind of sovereign dealing you will incur if you do it; you know what a bad time you will have in your own heart before the Lord if you move out on the impulse of your soul. You have known something of the chastening hand of a loving God upon you, a God who “dealeth with you as with sons” (Heb. 12: 7). The Spirit Himself bears witness in your spirit to that relationship, and to the inheritance and glory that are ours “if so be that we suffer with him” (Rom. 8: 16, 17); and your response to the ‘Father of our spirits’ is: “Abba, Father”.

But when this is really established in you, you have come to a new place which we speak of as ‘resurrection ground’. Death in principle may have had to be wrought out to a crisis in your natural life, but when it has, then you find God releases you into resurrection. You discover that what you have lost is coming back—though not as before. The principle of life is at work in you now—something that empowers and strengthens you, something that animates you, giving you life. From henceforth what you have lost will be brought back -but now under discipline, under control.

Let me make this quite clear again. If we want to be spiritual people, there is no need for us to amputate our hands or feet; we can still have our body. In the same way we can have our soul, with the full use of its faculties; and yet the soul is not now our life-spring. We are no longer living in it, we are no longer drawing from it and living by it; we use it. When the body becomes our life we live like beasts. When the soul becomes our life we live as rebels and fugitives from God —gifted, cultured, educated, no doubt, but alienated from the life of God. But when we come to live our life in the Spirit and by the Spirit, though we still use our soul faculties just as we do our physical faculties, they are now the servants of the Spirit; and when we have reached that point God can really use us.

But the difficulty with many of us is that dark night. The Lord graciously laid me aside once in my life for a number of months and put me, spiritually, into utter darkness. It was almost as though He had forsaken me—almost as though nothing was going on and I had really come to the end of everything. And then by degrees He brought things back again. The temptation is always to try to help God by taking things back ourselves; but remember, there must be a full night in the sanctuary—a full night in darkness. It cannot be hurried; He knows what He is doing.

We would like to have death and resurrection put together within one hour of each other. We cannot face the thought that God will keep us aside for so long a time; we cannot bear to wait. And I cannot tell you how long He will take, but in principle I think it is quite safe to say this, that there will be a definite period when He will keep you there. It will seem as though nothing is happening; everything you valued is slipping from your grasp. There confronts you a blank wall with no door in it. Seemingly everyone else is being blessed and used, while you yourself have been passed by and are losing out. Lie quiet. All is in darkness, but it is only for a night. It must indeed be a full night, but that is all. Afterwards you will find that everything is given back to you in glorious resurrection; and nothing can measure the difference between what was before and what now is!

I was sitting one day at supper with a young brother to whom the Lord had been speaking on this very question of our natural energy. He said to me, ‘It is a blessed thing when you know the Lord has met you and touched you in that fundamental way, and that disabling touch has been received.’ There was a plate of biscuits between us on the table, and I picked one up and broke it in half as though to eat it. Then, fitting the two pieces together again carefully, I said, ‘It looks all right, but it is never quite the same again, is it? When once your back is broken, you will yield ever after to the slightest touch from God.’

That is it. The Lord knows what He is doing with His own, and He has left no aspect of our need unmet in His Cross, that the glory of the Son may be manifested in the sons. Disciples who have gone this way can, I believe, truly echo the words of the apostle Paul, who could claim to serve God “in my spirit in the gospel of his Son” (Rom. 1: 9). They have learned, as he had, the secret of such a ministry: “We… worship by the Spirit of God, and glory in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh” (Phil. 3: 3).

(The Normal Christian Life, chp. 13)

How do we have a genuine revival?

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“The only way to have a revival, a new beginning, is to be open. This is the only way to be fresh. We need to open and be released instead of being locked inside the self. It is very simple to open ourselves. For example, instead of being shut within our oppressed self, we can tell a brother that we feel oppressed and old. If we would open to one another whenever we meet together, there would be a revival among us. There are many serving ones in the churches. On the one hand, we know one another because we see one another nearly every day, but on the other hand, we do not know one another, because we are closed. I do not open my inner spiritual condition to you, and you do not reveal your inner spiritual condition to me. How can there be a revival among us under such circumstances?

…We should not think that the revival will come to us from heaven or from the abyss; it simply needs to flow out of us. The impression that we receive from reading the history of revivals in the church is that believers anticipate that revivals would descend from above. However, those who have experience realize that the power they thought would descend from above actually flows out of their inner being. Hence, the key to revival is being open. The power in us is an explosive force. As long as we are willing to open and let it explode from within us, we will have a prevailing revival.

It is right to say that we need to pray in order to have a revival. However, I must repeat that the key, the secret, of having a revival is not in our asking the Lord to give us something from above but in our opening to Him and letting Him flow out. Being open is the basic principle for allowing the Holy Spirit to work in us. The more we are reserved and closed, the less likely we are to receive grace.

…This is where our problem lies. When we come together for fellowship or in the meetings, we are closed. Most of the saints who come to the prayer meeting on Tuesday night come with a closed attitude. They have made up their mind not to open their mouth to pray. How can we have a strong prayer meeting? Perhaps in the prayer meeting and the bread-breaking meeting we should give messages concerning being open in order to encourage the saints to open. Some saints might feel reluctant to speak because they are not “inspired” by the Holy Spirit. However, as long as we are open, inspiration will come. The less we open, the more difficult it will be to open, and the more we wait for inspiration, the less inspiration we will receive.

We have a treasure in us, but it is locked up. It does not matter whether we are weak, strong, cold, or burning. When we are burning, this rich source is in us, and when we are cold, this rich source is still in us. This source never changes. The question is whether we would let it flow out.

When I was young, I liked to play with firecrackers. I would get about a dozen firecrackers and use a pin to open the paper wrapping around the fuse so that the gunpowder was exposed. Then I would set off a couple of firecrackers and let them explode. The sparks from these firecrackers would touch other firecrackers and kindle the gunpowder. As a result, all the firecrackers would explode. This analogy is fitting for Christians. Each of us is a firecracker, and Christ is our gunpowder. Our problem is that Christ is securely wrapped within us, and we are neither willing to be broken nor to open. We pray for a revival, but we keep ourselves tightly closed. Hence, we cannot “explode,” and even our earnest prayer does not avail. If we want to pray, we should pray that the Lord would cause us to open.

We must submit to the Lord and humbly ask Him to give us a vision. We should not merely have enjoyment, satisfaction, and a sense of sweetness in our pursuit of the Lord. We need to see that the Lord is in resurrection. We need a vision of resurrection so that we would be able to leap upon the mountains and skip upon the hills. In spite of the things pressing on our spirit and the difficulties in our environment, we need to see that the Lord is living and strong in us; He is leaping upon the mountains and skipping upon the hills. If we would know resurrection and be open, we would be like unwrapped firecrackers. Once one firecracker explodes, it can kindle the others. If I am open, I can burn someone else until he is open, and then he can burn me. As a result, we will have a genuine revival.”

(The Law of Revival, chapter 2)