Return to several passages of Scripture.
After these things the word of the Lord came unto Abram in a vision, saying, Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward.
And He brought him forth abroad, and said, Look now toward heaven, and number the stars, if thou be able to number them: and He said unto him, So shall thy seed be.
And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am God Almighty; walk before Me, and be thou perfect.
And I will make My covenant between Me and thee, and will multiply thee exceedingly.
And Abram fell on his face: and God talked with him, saying, As for Me, behold, My covenant is with thee, and thou shalt be the father of a multitude of nations.
Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham; for the father of a multitude of nations have I made thee.
And I will make thee exceeding fruitful, and I will make nations of thee, and kings shall come out of thee.
And I will establish My covenant between Me and thee and thy seed after thee throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee and to thy seed after thee.
And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land of thy sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.
Abraham, who is the father of us all, as it is written, A father of many nations have I made thee, before Him whom he believed, even God, Who giveth life to the dead, and calleth the things that are not, as though they were.
Who in hope believed against hope, to the end that he might become a father of many nations, according to that which had been spoken, So shall thy seed be.
And without being weakened in faith he considered his own body now as good as dead, he being about a hundred years old, and the deadness of Sarah’s womb; yet, looking unto the promise of God, he wavered not through unbelief, but waxed strong through faith, giving glory to God, and being fully assured that what He had promised, He was able also to perform.
Wherefore also it was reckoned unto him for righteousness.
Now it was not written for his sake alone, that it was reckoned to him; but for our sake also, to whom it shall be reckoned, who believe on Him that raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, Who was delivered up for our trespasses, and was raised for our justification.
By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed to go out unto a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.
Let me just simply repeat and say: What is in time at this time? That is, what is the Lord’s message for us just now?
If you look in those passages which we have just read, you will see five things:
The Word of God gives us to understand that, at the end, God will have a state of divine fullness answering to the word enlargement. At the end, God will have things established—fixed. At the end, God will have things characterized by life.
But all of these will be through faith, tried and proved. We recognize that all of this is brought into view in the symbolism of the city—the New Jerusalem—seen as coming down from God out of heaven in the last chapters of the Bible.
Divine fullness: everything brought into a state of finality; established; full; characterized by life. The river, the water of life, symbolize it. Leading up to that, all the way along, is this matter of tried and proved faith.
As we know the Christian world as it is in our time, we realize how these are the great things which are supremely necessary—the great necessities amongst Christians in our time.
We need spiritual and divine enlargement. Things are so small in spirit. We need spiritual establishment. Things are so weak, uncertain, variable, and inconsistent—without assurance, without certainty—amongst Christians.
We need divine life. How great is the need: more life, divine life, heavenly life, a greater fullness of life amongst the Lord’s people.
While we recognize these things to be the crying needs, I think we are all ready to admit that the only way to these things is that a lot of people shall be really tested, really tried. We do not like the idea, but there it is. Everything needs to be put to the test, to be true, in order to be established.
And so we are already very conscious of a new movement of God amongst His people to test things, to really try things, to bring things to maturity.
Now, this would seem to have been God’s way for His people all down the ages: tried, tested, proved, and established; to bring to enlargement, establishment, and life. Those are the ways of God—the principles of His dealings with His people.
This leads us, in the first place, to a comprehensive view of this matter before we get down to practical application.
The Bible has many angles. You take it and look at it from one standpoint, and everything that is in the Bible seems to gather into that one thing. It might be sin, judgment, and condemnation. It might be righteousness and life—another angle.
And so it has many such angles, and every one of them seems to be comprehensive. You just turn the Bible another way, and the same thing seems to be true again. All the Bible is gathered up into that particular view of heaven. The Bible is like that: you can see the whole of it by just turning it a little from one angle to another.
You will see how true that is in this very clear instance that we have before us: this whole matter of enlargement by life through faith. It would be very easy to gather all the Bible into that and say that is what the whole Bible is about. Of course, it is not; but it is one very comprehensive thing.
Enlargement by life through faith. Those of you who know your Bibles will at once see how that runs right through.
Suppose we change the metaphor and say that there is a whole bunch of keys to the Bible—a very large bunch of keys. Every one of them seems to be a master key to open the whole Bible.
On this large bunch of keys, there seem to be three joined together on their own ring, so to speak. Those three keys are faith, life, and enlargement. Faith opens the first door; that door leads to the next, which is life; and through life to the next, which is enlargement.
Those three things always go together through the Word of God. The principle is clearly seen by the opposite: unbelief is always shown in Scripture to result in limitation. You simply do not get any further. You stop—surely and certainly stop.
There is no enlargement, but only limitation, where there is unbelief. Therefore there is no life beyond—no greater, no fuller life—because you cannot separate these things. It is always just like that: these three things hang together.
All the great crises in the history of God’s people, as we have it in the Scriptures, have these three features.
You like to begin right at the beginning, in Genesis 1, with Adam. It is perfectly clear there. The whole question of establishment, enlargement, and life hung upon faith.
And then he refused, or ceased, to believe God. That was a dead stop—a full stop. No more. At that point death entered in, and limitation, so far as Adam was concerned; so far as fellowship with God and all that God meant in life were concerned.
That hung upon his faith, or his refusal to believe. If only he had believed God, there would have been wide-open, continuous, unceasing enlargement, establishment, and life.
You go on in Genesis, from which we have picked out verses this afternoon—chapters 15 and 17—and you come to Abraham.
The Lord comes in with Abraham on this line of enlargement, establishment, and life. Those are the three great things upon which Abraham’s life has gone. Everything hangs upon faith.
All that God says about multiplication, this tremendous increase, this enlargement, and establishing him in the covenant for ever—finality—and the wonderful principle of life so apparent in the case of Abraham, when death would argue that there was no prospect at all in himself, in Sarah, or in the whole situation: all that rested upon faith. He believed God. If he had not, there would have been none.
You pass into Exodus, the great crisis in the national life of Israel—the Exodus itself, the deliverance from Egypt. Exodus 12 presses upon us the whole question of enlargement: release unto enlargement, establishment, finality, fullness, and life.
The central word, perhaps, in Exodus 12 is life, is it not? Slaying on the one side—the death of Egypt’s firstborn—and deliverance of Israel into life through death. These things go together.
That was the crisis, but it all hung upon faith in action: whether they would take the lamb, sprinkle the blood, gird their loins, and take their staff in their hand. You see, it was all an attitude and spirit of believing God. Everything hung upon that.
Pass into the book of Numbers, and through Numbers into Joshua, and again it is the land that is in view—the land of promise, with all that it meant to them historically and all that it means typically and spiritually.
Jordan lies between Numbers and Joshua. The whole matter of enlargement was from the wilderness, with all its limitation, into that largeness, fullness, and liberty; to be established in the land.
The wilderness never had any place in God’s thought and purpose as a permanent condition. It was only a phase of things, to be got through as quickly as the spiritual condition of the people would allow. His thought was into the land, and there for ever.
Jordan, overflowing all its banks, lying there between, speaks of death to be overcome. To get into the land is life triumphant over death. But again, everything hung upon faith. Would they move in faith?
One generation could not do that, and perished in the wilderness; but another generation did it, and into the land they went. These things rested upon faith.
Pass into the books of Samuel, and you move out of that terrible four hundred years covered by the book of Judges—the most terrible book in the Bible, I think. What a painful, shameful story of Israel: a horror story. It is limitation; it is uncertainty.
Out of the book of Judges into Samuel, the Lord brings in a new state of things: enlargement. This reaches its climax with David and Solomon—the enlargement of the kingdom beyond anything that had ever been before; establishment; and life.
Again, it is all on the basis of faith. Faith in Samuel’s mother brought in Samuel. We dare not stay with all the details. Later, of course, faith was lost, unbelief prevailed, and again there was a return to limitation, bondage, the spirit of death, and uncertainty. It all hangs upon faith.
You can look at the whole period before the captivity and after the captivity with the remnant, and you find these things holding together all the time.
You pass into the New Testament. These are the things which cover the Gospels—the core of the Gospel. The whole issue is enlargement, establishment, and fullness of life. That is the issue in the Gospels, all in Christ. Now the question is: Believe it.
The same is true in Acts and in Revelation. These are the things governing those first chapters of Revelation where the churches are in view. It is a matter of spiritual limitation or spiritual enlargement, of being established or having the lampstand removed out of its place.
It is a matter of life through the Living One Who became dead and is alive for evermore. The whole challenge is on this matter of life—whether it is to be life or death—and it is focused upon the one question of faith.
So you come to the last scenes of Revelation, and there you have these things brought to fullness in the great city, as the symbolic representation of the Church. How great it is, how enlarged, how solid, how established, and how living it is. It is the embodiment of tried, tested, and proved faith.
The whole Bible, you see, is gathered into this, and it is such a tremendous lesson to us. The Bible simply says this to us: our Christian lives are based upon the Bible—upon the whole Bible.
What can that mean? It means that our spiritual lives are concerned with spiritual fullness; concerned with our being established unto eternity and not carried away with time; and concerned with this whole matter of divine life brought into complete triumph over the last enemy, death.
The thing that governs the Christian life in these three aspects which comprehend it is this whole matter of faith: tried faith, proved faith, established faith, perfected faith. What a lot that explains!
Now we must look for a few minutes at these words that we have used—the terms we are employing. We will take, perhaps for this afternoon, just this matter of enlargement.
We can use the alternative word fullness. Here I have a special thought in my mind concerning this word enlargement, because I think it is a very living question at this time: whether the Lord is going to enlarge us, whether we are going to be enlarged.
Enlargement is a governing thought of God all the way through the Bible. We have seen that God’s thought is enlargement. God is always thinking in terms of enlargement, of increase, of a final fullness. God never finds any pleasure at all in emptiness and smallness.
God dislikes emptiness, and God always reacts against emptiness. We open our Bible, and practically—though not literally—the first thing that we read, after we have read, “In the beginning God,” is that the earth was without form and void; or, if you like, waste and empty.
The earth was empty, and the Spirit of God was reacting against that state of emptiness. It was as though God said, “This is not My mind. This is altogether contrary to My thought. I am against this, and I am going to do something about it.”
God would have everything in divine fullness—that is, in abundance. That is His thought for the earth and for the people. So the Spirit of God, brooding over this void, this emptiness, begins to work; and every stage and phase of divine activity is to fill.
He fills the earth with the vast range of vegetable things, seeds in abundance, and life within the seeds capable of endless production and reproduction. He fills the earth with the animal kingdom. He fills the sea and says, “Let the living creatures swarm in the sea.” Then, creating man, He says, “Be fruitful, and multiply.”
“I am against this emptiness, this void.” Then He moves on that principle, governed by that thought, reaching Abraham: “I will greatly multiply thy seed as the stars and as the sand which is upon the seashore.”
Well, comprehend that if you can—that divine thought beyond all comprehension. God is always thinking in terms of enlargement.
The Lord Jesus came to express the thoughts of God in every practical way. Among other things that He said, He spoke of a great feast which was made, and the guests were invited, but they did not come. They made excuses.
Then the man who made the feast said to his servants, “Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.” You see, that is God’s thought coming into this world: “That My house may be filled.”
In the New Testament, the day of Pentecost is the greatest example and expression of this divine thought. When the Spirit came, like a rushing mighty wind, He filled the whole house where they were sitting. Then He filled each believer. Filled witnesses.
It is very clear, is it not? This is a governing thought with God: enlargement. Yet the Lord Jesus also said, on the other hand, that it is exceedingly dangerous to be empty.
He spoke of a certain house in which a man had been possessed by a demon, an unclean spirit. He described the casting out of the unclean spirit, and the house being swept and garnished but left empty.
Because no other occupant takes possession, the unclean spirit comes back to his own house and sees it empty. The Lord says that he goes and takes seven others like himself and fills the empty house.
It is a dangerous thing to be empty, to be void. If God does not fill, the devil will. Beware, my friends, of negative conditions, of not being positive, of not being spiritually occupied. Beware of vacuums in your heart, in your mind, and in your life.
David, one day, was on the housetop in a state of vacuum. At the time when kings go out to war, he was a king and a warring king; yet he went onto the housetop instead of being occupied in a positive way. He was in a passive state, and we know the disaster that overtook him, from which he never recovered all his life.
It is a dangerous thing to be empty. The devil will see to the filling up of any space that he can occupy. The Lord wants to fill.
But it is not just size that the Lord is after; it is fullness. It is not just bigness; it is permanence.
The ultimate word in this matter in the Bible is Ephesians 3:19:
That ye may be filled unto all the fullness of God.
Think of that. It is said to believers together in their corporate, related life—the Church.
It is the fullness of Him that filleth all in all.
That ye may be filled unto all the fullness of God. Think of it: the fullness of God. The fullness of God is God coming in in such a way that there is no room for anything else.
There is an illustration of this in the Old Testament temple. When the cloud, the glory, filled the sanctuary, the priests had to go out. The Lord filled, and there was no room for anything or anyone else. That is the fullness of God.
It seems to me that that word “void,” or “empty,” at the beginning of Genesis is the result of a judgment. Of course, that has been much disputed. Some people think this, some think otherwise; but you can look at it from another standpoint, and I think it is complementary.
When the Lord sent His people Israel into Babylonian captivity for seventy years, the land was waste. The land fell into a state very largely corresponding to that state at the beginning: void, waste, and empty.
In the case of Israel going into Babylonian captivity, it was a judgment—a judgment upon their unbelief and their idolatry. So the waste, the void, was a judgment. It would seem that that is how it was at the beginning: definitely as a result of a judgment upon a former creation.
But what is the point? The issue must have been this issue, for it has always been this issue: that God was not allowed to fill all things. God’s place was either shared with other things, or God was driven out.
The end of this present world, as shown to us in the New Testament, is going to be like this. There will come a point when God will be finally rejected by this world and have no place. We are moving fast toward that time.
The result will be the burning up of this world: judgment, destruction, and the end of things. Then, after whatever period we do not know, there will be a new heaven and a new earth, and all things created anew.
Judgment is always upon this one thing: whether God is all and in all, or not. That is all. Enlargement—the fullness which is God’s thought—rests upon this matter of God having His place in all things.
My dear friends, that is the basis of all testing of faith. God presses that point closer and closer as we go on: whether we will believe God sufficiently to let Him have His place in this impossible situation.
What do we mean by the fullness of God? It is not God coming in in person and filling everything, but surely His nature filling all things.
God is light, the Scripture says. God is light. Then where God is, there is no darkness; there is no room for darkness. When God comes in in fullness, there is no darkness at all. It is all light in the Lord.
The Lord is moving on this line, dear friends, with you and with me: to get us completely out of our darkness into His light; that is, to bring us into the light as He is in the light.
He is moving. Oh, how faith is a factor in this matter! Coming to know the Lord, coming into the light of the Lord, coming into understanding—whatever word you may use for light—it is seeing, it is knowing, it is understanding.
You and I never come to one fragment of extra, real life—I am not talking about information; I am talking about spiritual life—only along the line of tested faith, faith really tested.
You want to know the Lord? You want to have more of the Lord?
A dear woman, who felt that she was rather quickly provoked and had a short temper, said to a servant of God, “Oh, do pray for me that I may have more patience. I do need more patience. Do pray for me that I may have more patience.”
And the servant of God said, “All right, let us get down to prayer now.” So they knelt down, and he said, “Oh Lord, do please send more tribulation into this dear sister’s life.”
She started and said, “No, I did not say I wanted that!”
“Ah,” he said, “but the Word says, ‘Tribulation worketh patience.’”
Oh yes, we want more of the Lord, but we are not always ready to go the way He would take us in order that we may have more of Himself. Is it not that way? What is tribulation if it is not testing faith—putting us into situations where it takes some faith in God to live and to go on?
I was in the western United States, in California, and a brother said, “We would go to see some of the children of God,” about sixty miles’ drive away.
These dear people had become, in a wonderful way, a real example of meaning business with God. After a long and very heavy day’s work—hard work—several children of God bundled into a car without having had time to take a meal, took something with them in the car, and came a hundred miles every night for one meeting.
After the meeting, rather late, they went back home again, reaching home after midnight, only to be at work again the next morning. That is business with the Lord, is it not?
They begged us to go and see them, so we started out in the morning. These dear children of God were living in perhaps one of the most worldly, unpropitious, impossible situations spiritually that you could think of—the place where all the Hollywood stars lived. I cannot describe it.
We got there and found our two friends living in what they call trailers over there—we call them caravans—in a trailer, a large trailer, right in the centre of a great trailer park full of worldly people.
There were luxurious trailer homes around them and, as it seemed to me, an atmosphere of sensuality, materialism, and self-indulgence.
We went in and had a blessed afternoon with them in the things of the Lord—a most precious time. We spent the whole afternoon in the touch of heaven.
The brother said, “Perhaps you will not believe it, but there are sixteen out-and-out Christians in this trailer park. I am going to fetch someone.” He went across and brought back two dear children of God, elderly and simple people.
Without any going around matters or talking in generalities, we went right to the things of the Lord. We could have gone on all night. They were so sorry we had to leave. The brother said, “We all meet here in this trailer—sixteen of us—and have very blessed times of fellowship.”
Why am I saying this? The most unlikely place on earth—yes, the most impossible place for anything really of the Lord, of a spiritual character—and yet right in that place, here were people living in living fellowship with the Lord.
You may say, “Oh, the place I have to live in and work in—it is impossible for any spiritual life or spiritual growth. Everything is against me.” Remember that: the Lord can enlarge you anywhere if He calls you to be there.
But the argument is the impossible. Well, think of Abraham. Think of Abraham and the impossible.
Enlargement—not because everything was propitious, not because everything made it easy or was helpful. No. There can be light in the darkest place if the Lord is there: the increase of the Lord.
Having heard of that situation, I had thought those dear friends ought to be got out of it. But when I left them, I changed my view entirely. I do not know that they would really be better for getting out of it.
This is the thing that is enlarging them spiritually. It is throwing them on the Lord. It is making them know the Lord. There is nothing there but the Lord; everything else is against the Lord. It is only the Lord—but there they are.
It is the fullness of God. That is in terms of light, even in darkness; love, for God is love, in a realm of hatred; life, for God is life, in a realm of death; holiness in a realm of unholiness.
That ye may be filled unto all the fullness of God.
Now, I must say much more about this matter of enlargement. Remember, that was the governing thing in the sovereign gifts of the ascended Lord:
When He ascended on high, He led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men.
And He gave some to be apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints.
Till we all attain unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.
Every divine gift in ministry has fullness as its object and its governing principle.
Let me close with this: spiritual measure is always the test as to whether a thing is of God. It is not the measure of doctrinal knowledge, not even the measure of Bible knowledge. It is not the accuracy or correctness about technique, form, and procedure. It is the degree of God.
We can have all those other things, and there may not be a degree of God. It is the degree of God that counts—the measure of God. That is all that matters when we meet and when others meet with us.