I will bring you back again to the words in the Gospel by Luke, Chapter 3, at Verse 21:
Now it came to pass, when all the people were baptized, Jesus also having been baptized, and praying, the heaven was opened,
And the Holy Spirit descended in a bodily form, as a dove, upon Him,
And a voice came out of heaven, Thou art My beloved Son; in Thee I am well pleased.
Chapter 4, at Verse 17:
And He opened the book, and found the place where it was written,
The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me.
I am going to stop there. What follows will occupy us later.
I just want to add to that a word from 2 Corinthians 1:21-22:
Now He that establisheth us with you in Christ, and anointed us, is God;
Who also sealed us, and gave us the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts.
In pursuing our consideration of this great and important matter of the anointing with the Holy Spirit, this afternoon we are going to focus our attention upon one, perhaps the most important, feature of this matter. That is, the anointing always relates to one thing, and that one thing is vocation.
The anointing came upon the Lord Jesus, we have read, and then He Himself declared why the anointing had come upon Him: “Because the Lord hath anointed Me to preach.”
The anointing of the Holy Spirit concerns vocation. If you like to change the word to ministry, you can; but ministry is too often limited in its conception. Vocation, perhaps, is a more comprehensive term.
May I point out here again that the Scriptures which we have read, to which many others could be added, make it quite clear that what was true of the Lord Jesus in this respect is true of the church.
I take it that this message to the Corinthians is a message to the church. It was the church in Corinth, but it covers the whole church. Because, in between His own personal anointing at the Jordan and this message in 2 Corinthians, we do have the Day of Pentecost—the anointing of the church for its great mission in Christ.
That is quite simple and self-evident, but I do want you to grasp this thing—not as something said, but with realization. There is a lot of difference between knowing a thing in a way and realizing that you have got, or know, that thing. We have a lot of things without realizing exactly what we have and the value of what we have.
It is this realization, beyond the statement and the truth, that I trust will come to you.
You, dear friend, and I, if we are in Christ, as this word to the Corinthians says, are supposed to have the anointing in Christ:
He which establisheth us with you in Christ, and anointed us, is God.
In Christ, we are all supposed to be anointed people. It is not what you feel like at the moment; it is the divine fact. Are you in Christ? If you give an affirmative answer to that, very well then, that is true. You have been brought into the anointing which is on Christ. You inherit that anointing which came on Him after His death. You are an anointed person.
We have said earlier that there is nothing greater of which we can conceive than that we should be people anointed with the Holy Spirit, if only we knew what that means. However, here is the truth.
Then, if that is true, the anointing which is upon us in Christ is with vocation in view. The great governing factor of the anointing is vocation. It brings us into divine purpose. It means that everyone who is in Christ is in Christ for a purpose.
There should be no person in Christ without a purpose in life, by the Holy Spirit. We may need instruction and enlightenment as to what it is, and I am, for the moment, taking pains to underline and emphasize the fact.
If you are not aware of the fact altogether, without the explanation and the interpretation, then you should raise the question of no less, I think, than your place in Christ—the meaning of being in Christ.
And this is not so difficult as it may sound, as I see it. If, when you came to the Lord, or having come to the Lord, there has not been begotten in you a sense that life has taken on a new meaning, that there has come into your consciousness a meaningfulness in life—just a sense, just something that you realize has happened—then there is something wrong about your new birth, about your union with Christ.
It could be put in various ways. Now there is something for which to live. Now you are under constraint to do something. Now there is a goal toward which you have to move. You see, it can be put in many ways, but they all amount to this: you have started on a line which has a meaning.
And that is the very spirit of vocation. You will do something. You will aim at something. You will have an objective in life. You find that you are under some constraint.
So the very presence of the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of the anointing carries with it this very thing, inseparable from vocation.
I have commenced with the individual fact. It is important to begin there, but we make a personal matter of this. We are not passengers in this matter. We are not things to be carried along by some machine, institution, or organization.
We may be very small cogs in the whole works, but the whole thing would be thrown out if we did not fulfil our function. We have got to realize that. I think there are far too many who have not this sense of being under the Holy Spirit’s urge unto something.
But I want to carry that beyond the personal and the individual, because we, as individuals, only receive it in a larger setting, really.
If we come to the New Testament, for instance, there are a whole lot of individuals very much involved. But really, they came into their personal sense of divine initiative, drive, urge, and motive because the church came into a mighty compulsion and propulsion by the Holy Spirit. First of all, the church was taken up in this matter.
And it is very difficult not to see that tremendous sense of commission and vocation came with the Holy Spirit. On that day, and from that day, the church is a thing with a purpose and a motive, a tremendous driving force; and all the individuals derive their own personal sense of meaning from that whole. We have got to come back to that presently.
But now, in between that, here is a word: What is the essential, the indispensable, justification for the existence of churches—local expressions of the one church?
Why should the people of God be gathered in smaller or larger numbers and companies in any given place? What is it that justifies their existence? What is it that really is the basis of their being there at all?
Is it just to mix together, have nice fellowship, help one another along, and be some nice little thing in that place—happily going on, or miserably going on—occupied with themselves, ministering to one another, nursing one another? Is that it?
Well, those things may come into it. But, my dear friends, the local companies are, after all, only parts of the one church universal. And the purpose, nature, and justification of the church universal, which passes to the church local, is vocational. There can be no doubt about this.
Any local company that is not really fulfilling a vocation, that is not there with an anointed vocation, is not justifying its existence.
The Lord brings these into being not to be something in themselves, not to be an end in themselves, and not just to look after themselves, but with a vocation in the world that is around them. They must be there with this sense of responsibility beyond themselves, this sense of a mission beyond themselves, this sense of vocation.
Now, the whole Bible could be taken to show that that is true:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He hath anointed Me to—
What follows is a purpose. “Because the Lord hath anointed Me to” something.
Well, having said that, we have to come to this vocation under the anointing. I am not going to depart from that without making quite sure that you have really got your hand upon this matter.
If your life, dear friend, is really under the government of the Holy Spirit, it will not be a dead end. If any company of the Lord’s people is under the government of the Holy Spirit, it will not be a dead end.
If you are where you are because the Lord has led you there—and that is how it ought to be—you are there with a vocation, a divine vocation, for the fulfilment of which you can count upon the anointing: in your profession, in your business, in your home, and in your assembly as a part of it. This is the law.
So there is something more than the thing itself. You are called into a vocation; you have received the Holy Spirit. That can give meaning to life.
We take ourselves out of the hands of the Holy Spirit, choose our own way, go where we think we should go, and make our own decisions; and very often, in these things, we get into a backwater. We are just out of the way, and nothing comes of it.
But if we are very, very sure that we seek first the kingdom of God, that is only another way of saying that we move by the Spirit in what we do, we shall not find ourselves just out there with no more meaning than what we are doing day by day for time.
This is the meaning of the anointing.
But what about this anointing? What is it? The Bible opens quite naturally into three aspects of the anointing.
These three aspects are, in the divine conception, inherent in the very creation of man. Adam was created to be the vessel, vehicle, and instrument of divine vocation—and vocation in three forms.
Adam let it go. The tragedy of Adam is lost divine vocation.
There are depths of meaning here which might be even dangerous to try and fathom, but there are hints of a tremendous thing in this matter.
The Bible reveals an anointed cherub that covereth—Lucifer, son of the morning, now known as Satan before his fall. And there are strong hints that his vocation had to do with this creation.
And he forfeited it by taking it into his own hands, out of the anointing. Because if anointing means one thing, it does mean absolute dependence upon God. It means that everything comes from God and not from the person concerned.
It means God is most jealous to keep things in His own hands. Things can only be as God maintains the overall government by His Spirit. The anointing was violated in that way, and that high place was forfeited.
Adam was created. Adam would have come into the anointing to fulfil that great purpose if he had not failed and missed the anointing.
God brings in Christ and anoints Him with that very object. And so the Bible opens out along these three lines: first, the creation of man and the object of his creation; then, the development of a nation to be the object lesson of what the anointing means as to vocation, in all three senses; and then Christ and the church, which is His body, brought in as God’s success in this thing which has been inherent in the creation of man from the beginning.
What is the vocation? First of all, it is dominion. If you like, it is rulership, government, or, to take the New Testament title, kingship—royalty in a divine sense.
It has not been sufficiently recognized that the anointing of the Lord Jesus on the Jordan side had this threefold vocation included and involved. The first aspect of it was government: authority, kingship, rulership, dominion. We saw yesterday that it was that which the enemy was trying to undercut.
Government—kingship. Well, you know that that is one of the major lines of the Old Testament. But kingship is not something official. It is not something temporal, as we understand it in the temporal realm.
Kingship is a spirit. Royalty is a nature. Dominion is something of a spiritual kind.
I can explain that. But first of all, you do recognize that the Old Testament naturally opens up along that line as one of its three lines. It begins with man made to have dominion.
Then you find that before the thing assumes the form of official positions, it has already existed in a spiritual and moral way.
It is tremendously impressive. Abraham, as we have seen, is spoken of as one of the Lord’s anointed in Psalm 105—the Lord’s anointed. Very well.
Abraham stands in the presence of kings, and Abraham is superior—absolutely superior. These kings of the earth are cringing before Abraham and bowing to Abraham. Morally and spiritually, he is, so to speak, head and shoulders above them. He really, in the presence of these men, is the king. Spiritual reality.
Take Israel. What is Israel naturally, from the standpoint of this world looking on? Oh, we know quite well what the nation of Israel was naturally.
What about Balaam being hired by Balak, thinking to curse this people, that they might be completely subjugated, brought under, and despised? But Israel, there and then, with all that they were or were not naturally, all their weaknesses and imperfections and faults, rose to tremendous stature at that very point.
He hath not beheld iniquity in Jacob;
Neither hath He seen perverseness in Israel:
The Lord his God is with him,
And the shout of a King is among them.
There rises the spiritual and moral standard in the midst of the nation, embodying the principle of the anointing: dominion, kingship. It is there before there is anything official; it is moral and spiritual.
So we could go on. How true it was of the Lord Jesus. All the rulers were completely baffled and nonplussed in His presence. They could not handle this Man. They could not humiliate this Man spiritually and morally, whatever they did. He was over them all the time.
That is true of the church when moving under the anointing. Oh, that is all objective. What about you? What about any believer?
Is this not true, dear friends, that when a man or a woman comes to Christ, receives Christ into the life—which is but one way of speaking of receiving the Spirit—is it not true that immediately that happens, without any reasoning, calculation, or thinking about it at all, a new spirit of elevation begins to work in that life?
You see it. I have seen it: a poor fellow in utter rags, never having worn a decent collar; a miserable, wretched creature dragging himself about. His home could not be called a home—a hovel. Wife and children in the most deplorable state; poverty and misery, covered in sin. I have seen that man born again.
Born again—ah yes, truly born again. And within a week, coming to the meeting, first step: a nice clean sight, a bit of scarf tied round his neck, and his clothes brushed down a bit. And I have seen that go on until he got a decent collar and suit, and shoes to wear, and his home beginning to change, and his children and his wife.
No one ever said anything to him—not a word. No one would have dared. It happened. It happened from within.
And I want to say that that is the spirit of royalty at work, the spirit of heavenly aristocracy at work in the heart, the spirit of glory. Well, that is what belongs to kings: glory. And the Holy Spirit is called the Spirit of glory. The Holy Spirit is the light.
Now, that may be an extreme illustration, but it is a very true one. It happens again and again. It is what does happen.
A sense of shame comes in, and blushing, because of certain things—ways of speaking, old habits, and so on—which are slow to fall away. But a sense of shame and blushing comes in that was never there before, and they are conscious that the thing was wrong, or doubtful, if it is coming in.
What is true in such extreme cases, you see, is a principle and a law of the Spirit-governed life: that if you are governed by the Spirit, if you are under the anointing, you cannot be slovenly. You cannot be careless in your life, habits, and dress. You cannot have an untidy home, a disorderly state of things, or neglect your responsibilities. It just cannot be.
And you ought not to need anybody to point out that that is wrong and this is not right. The Spirit Himself, says John, dwelling in you, teacheth you, and ye need not that anyone teach you. The anointing teacheth you all things, and this is one of the things that the anointing teaches you.
It makes a disorderly thing an orderly thing, and that is what you expect to find in kings’ households. It makes a disreputable life a reputable thing. It tidies up life all around. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of kings and princes. It is a spiritual and moral thing, you see.
The point is that the anointing means elevation. It means elevation, and it always does work that way: to elevation, to a higher level of life. It lifts. It ennobles. It refines. It makes for godly gentlemen.
This is the spirit of kingship, and this is the law of spiritual government and ascendancy. It is far better to have it like this than to have the office and the title while the conditions are a contradiction. No, princes in Israel are first of all spiritual and moral people before they are official. The anointing means that.
That is amazing. Jesus could fit into any situation. He could fit into any situation, full of angry, ignorant, and lowly people. He fitted right in, but it was the anointing.
Have I said enough on this matter? You see, in this dispensation, the kingship of Jesus is a spiritual and moral thing. It is the mighty power of elevating people, taking them from the dunghill and setting them among princes.
So the anointing should mean for us a growing refinement, an increasing sensitiveness to what is fitting, what is becoming, and what belongs to the palace. We are children of the King, sons of God.
Well, that can be viewed in two ways. It can make you feel uncomfortable and seem to be a legal imposition against trying to make life worth living. Well, if you take it like that, of course you have missed the whole point.
The law of the Word of God is always positive:
Walk by the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.
That is, if you live by the Spirit, it will happen. This is what will happen. What happens, or what does not happen, just shows how much we are being governed by the Spirit.
So, for kingship with all its wonderful meaning: not self-importance, not making an impression by our own effort, but just being different—being different.
You are anticipating the other aspects of the anointing, the vocation. Have you grasped the point of what I have been saying? Here is a vocation. It is a ministry. It is a service. It is something. But it really is ministry.
I believe, you know, that it is far, far more effective in this world to be a person of spiritual dignity and character like this than it is to go around with your Bible preaching and taking meetings.
If you are a person like this, walking in the Spirit, with this character—this personal character, this spiritual strength—that will not descend to a mean thing, will not contemplate anything petty or despicable, you are morally above it. “Like me, I should scorn such a one as I flee.” You see, that is the spirit of the King.
If you are such a person as that, and this dignity is found in your home—your home is a dignified place—wherever you have any influence or power at all, that is shown in the orderliness, refinement, and character. That is a tremendous testimony to the Lord.
Put it the other way round and see how the Lord is let down when it is not like that. The Lord loses. This is vocation: to be, to be.
You recognize that I am speaking very largely to responsible people. You will recognize that the law of the Word of God is always, in all matters, that the person has got to be the thing before they get the name, the title, and the office. You have got to be an elder before you can be made an elder. You have got to be a prince before you can be called a prince. That is a law of the Word of God. You have got to be this.
It is the anointing which makes it all reality.
We can pass quite easily to the second aspect of this vocation, which is that of the priesthood. Just as the kings were anointed and were kings by the anointing, so the priests were priests by the anointing.
Another thing right from the beginning inherent in God’s thought concerning man: priesthood. Before there was a necessity for blood sacrifice, for atonement; before ever the sin question came in, requiring certain aspects of priesthood, the whole matter of standing between God and His creation, mediatorially, intercessorily, was there.
Man was created to be a priest in this sense. Here is God; here is His creation; and there must be one between, to communicate from the one to the other, to stand for the one to the other—both ways. Adam was intended to be that: king and priest in this spiritual sense.
And so the Old Testament again unfolds along the line of priesthood—anointed priesthood. True, there has now come in this whole sin matter, calling in the whole system of blood sacrifices. But the principle remains: that the anointing means that there is that between God and others by which He makes Himself known, communicates Himself, commits Himself, and brings them into knowledge of God.
Priesthood, as you know, first of all means mediation—that is, standing between—and then standing between to minister for God to man, and man to God. And then to teach:
For the priest’s lips should keep knowledge,
And they should seek the law at his mouth.
The suffering aspect has come in now into priesthood too—real priesthood. Suffering is that with which the priest has to do.
But when you have said all these things about it, the church is called into the place of Israel in this whole universe where Adam failed. Christ has come and brought His church into being to be a kingdom and priests unto His God.
He made us to be a kingdom, to be priests unto His God and Father.
It is not our title. It is not our office. Are you, young Christian, old Christian, whoever you are, taking this home to yourself? That as truly as Aaron and his sons, and his long line of sons, and the firstborn in all households of Israel, were priests in Israel, standing in this holy, sacred position, as truly as that, you are that in the thought of God.
Are you there? When you come to a meeting for prayer, you are coming on the ground of your priesthood and may function under the anointing in intercession, standing there in your holy vocation to minister from God to others and bring others from their needs to God. That is mediation. That is priesthood.
And what is true of prayer and intercession in that way, which is the great vocation of the church, is true in many other ways: that we are here in this tremendous vocation. The individual, the local company, stands there not as an end in itself, but there between high heaven and Almighty God and that neighbourhood.
To minister God to meet need out from God—oh, what we can do if only we recognize our anointing, the meaning of our anointing.
I must leave that there and pass quickly to the third and last of these aspects of the great vocation of the anointing: that is, that of the prophet.
Again, the Bible opens up quite naturally along that third line. These are the three great unfoldings of the Bible: the prophets—anointed, anointed.
Jesus was anointed King first. Then He was anointed Priest, and by that anointing He went all the way in a daily sacrifice unto the great consummate sacrifice of the cross, the great Priest offering Himself to God.
What is true of His kingship, His royalty, His dominion; true of His priesthood, as Mediator between God and man; is true in this third aspect, the prophet. He was anointed as the Prophet of the Lord, gathering up into Himself the Old Testament line of prophetic meaning.
A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you, of your brethren, like unto me.
So said Moses. They were all the way through not only seeing and hearing their prophets, but waiting for the Prophet. When Jesus came and He asked, “Who do men say that I am?” some said, “The Prophet.” They were right: that One of whom Moses spoke.
“This is the Prophet.” Ah, but He was more than a prophet. By the anointing, He was that. But what is the function of the prophet? It is to recall and to recover all that has been lost which is of God for His people.
To recall the people to that which necessitates seeing what it is that God wants, and to recover that which was lost and bring it back—tremendous vocation.
But, dear friend, oh that you would realize that you, in your local company, whether it be here in this place or in the other places from which you come, this is what you are supposed to be there for: to recall and to recover.
It means that as a company you must know what it is that God ever meant and that the people of God have lost. And this must, with you, be as it was with the prophets: a travail to get it back and to get them back. That is a vocation.
A vocation to proclaim and to enunciate the whole counsel of God. That is the prophetic function.
And if we are to take Jeremiah as any kind of indication: to pluck up. That is perhaps the more difficult aspect of prophetic work—to have to root up.
Every plant which My heavenly Father planted not, shall be rooted up.
Look at Jesus doing the uprooting. My word, He was uprooting false things that had not been planted of His Father. He was uprooting them. Difficult work to do, but there you are.
There is a destructive aspect of the prophetic ministry that will not tolerate that which man has put in the place of God. Those things which have been put by man in the place of God’s thought have got to be rooted up.
On the other hand, it is not all destructive. There is planting, planting, planting to be done.
We are here for this. We are, or should be, in any place. It is for this that we are anointed. It requires the anointing. But all this is implicit in the anointing.
It is a big thing to be in the anointing of Christ. It is no less a thing than the fulfilment of the whole divine revelation of the Scriptures from Adam to the end. Anointed today.
But this is what will happen. This is what makes it simple, if it sounds complex and difficult. This will simplify: this is exactly what will spontaneously happen if we are moving under the anointing.
These things will happen. They will come about. They will be the very nature of our being where we are, how it will work out.
There will be a battling and a nullifying and a rooting out of things that are not of the Lord. There will be a planting of what is of God. These things will all happen.
I have not got to set myself to try to bring all these things about and do them. What you and I have to do is to live in the power of the anointing, and they will happen.
Oh, then, for more anointed individuals, or more living in the power of the anointing; more local companies like that; these things happening.
Perhaps the Lord is just saying these things to us to remind us, to stir us up over this whole matter, to show us that we are not here just to drag out a painful existence and try to keep going to the end.
The anointing means something more than that. It does. It means spiritual and moral ascendancy. It means being God’s vehicle of supply. It means recall and recovery as to all that God ever meant for His people.