We are still, O Lord our God, with heart reaching out, every faculty poised, to hear and to see what the Lord will say unto us.
Our prayer most earnestly is that it may be the Lord’s speaking, maybe through a human voice; that the Lord may say. For this one thing we pray: that there may be the consciousness of the Lord again in this hour.
And that Thou wilt so govern everything to the end of Thine own pleasure and satisfaction, through the Lord Jesus, Thy beloved Son. Amen.
It has been announced as the keynote to this week’s gathering for ministry that we shall be concerned with the unsearchable riches of Christ.
There has been no collaboration whatever between those who are ministering, but my own heart greatly rejoices in finding that, so far, we are moving in exactly the same direction in what the Lord has said in our brother and through him. I trust it will be through me also.
I told you last night that I had a great question about being here this week because it had been so fraught with conflict and challenge right up to the last moment. After this last hour, I am wondering whether I have dropped upon the answer: whether it has not been the Lord saying, “You were not necessary there, brother; someone else will be there.”
Why, you could not have any fuller vision than that which has been brought to you this morning. Anything that I may have to say will be, very largely, a filling in.
Well, our key words are in Ephesians 3:8. We will just read them again:
Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, was this grace given, to preach unto the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ.
What I have to say this morning is very largely introductory to what, if the Lord wills, I may be saying on a further morning.
These words which we have just read are set in the midst of the letter which contains the consummate essence of the ministry of the Apostle Paul: Christ in His greatness.
This letter, more than any other, is the letter of spiritual enlargement. The range of this letter, as you know, is from eternity to eternity. That is the horizon of the letter, so called, unfortunately, because it was never limited to Ephesus in the beginning. Space was left in the letter for a filling in. It was simply a letter to be filled in.
The apostle says, “Unto the nations was this grace given”—unto the nations. So the letter has the horizon of the nations within the horizon of the two eternities.
This phrase, “the unsearchable riches of Christ,” is just one of a number of superlatives in this letter. If you read it through carefully and watchfully, you come upon phrases such as these:
The exceeding greatness of His power.
The fulness of Him that filleth all in all.
The exceeding riches of His grace.
Exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think.
Far above all rule, and authority, and power, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in that which is to come.
Unto all the fulness of God.
Attain unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.
Unto Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus unto all generations for ever and ever.
A selection of superlatives! The apostle finds language to express what he has seen and what is in his heart. Am I not right in saying that this is the letter of spiritual enlargement?
Well, the crying need, dear friends—the crying need of our time—is the need for increased spiritual capacity.
I say, if you were asked today, “What do you feel to be the greatest need of Christians at this time?” your answers would be various and many. This may not be the greatest of them all, but I suggest to you that it would rank very high and take a foremost place when I say that the need of Christians in our time is for an increase of spiritual capacity.
We are one with the Apostle Paul when we say that. When he found himself launched upon this wonderful unveiling in writing this letter, he did not get very far before he dropped upon his knees. There he was, with his theme before him and his great vision in his heart, and it was as though he said, “Can I get it over? It is a hopeless task. It is impossible unless the Lord does something.”
As he dropped upon his knees, he said:
For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father … that He would grant you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, having the eyes of your heart enlightened.
What a phrase: “the eyes of your heart being enlightened.” You know, the heart has better reason than the head. Ask any mother about that!
Yes, this is a day in many ways of mediocrity. The fact is that there are no people today who are big enough to cope with the situation in any realm—in the political realm, in the social realm, in the industrial realm, in the realm of society, or in the realm of human nature.
No one is big enough to cope with the situation today and bring it under hand. That is very largely true in the spiritual realm.
Christians are being, as we said this morning, forced up into a corner. The Church is being pressed up into a corner where the one consciousness which is overwhelming us is this: “We are not sufficient for these things. We are not adequate to the situation. We are just not going to cope with this unless the Lord increases our capacity.” Is that not true?
If it is not true in the consciousness of any of you, leave yourselves in the hands of the Lord, and that is the way you will take it. An enlarged spiritual measure will be the only solution to your problem.
Yes, it is true. We are not sufficient. We need the Lord to enlarge us, and it may be that this week that is going to happen.
I believe the very first thing will be a new vision of the Lord Jesus. He has started on that, and I believe He is going to carry us right along that line.
Now, you know that it has been spiritual limitation, inadequate capacity, which has been responsible for so many spiritual tragedies in history.
That was the secret, or the cause, of the tragedy of Israel at Kadesh-barnea. When they came to the border of the land, they were turned around and came back into the wilderness, perishing in the wilderness and not entering into the inheritance.
It was on this one thing: insufficient spiritual capacity. They saw the giants in the land, the walled cities, and the things that stood in the way. They said, “We were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.”
You know, it is quite a good thing to view yourself like that sometimes. Indeed, it is quite essential in the divine economy that you and I feel that we in ourselves are nothing more than grasshoppers—indeed, feeling that we are not able to cope at all.
But there can be something wrong in viewing yourself like that. It depends upon against whom you are measuring the situation: yourself or the Lord. If you measure every situation by the Lord, grasshoppers though you may be, you pass over into the land and take possession.
They measured what they themselves were naturally, and not what they were by faith in the Lord.
That paradox, of course, comes out often with Paul. We may light upon it as we go on, because here the apostle is saying:
Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, was this grace given, to preach unto the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ.
“Less than the least of all saints”—does that sound like spiritual capacity? Ah, but to such a one was this grace given: the unsearchable riches of Christ to the nations. That is capacity in one whose conception of himself was so small, so limited, so reduced in himself.
And yet here he wrote his letter with all these superlatives. It depends entirely upon your viewpoint.
There is a simplicity which is quite right. But there is a simplicity which is quite wrong, when people say, “We want just a simple gospel.” They often say they are not interested in all this high language, this great realm of spiritual ideas. “Give us a simple truth.”
People who talk like that do not know their New Testament. Oh dear, the Lord is always well ahead of us, while we want Him to come into step with us. We are always trying to get Him into step with us. We are always trying to reduce Him to our size, to make the Lord One with whom we can cope, whom we can fully understand, and wholly agree with in terms of absolute effectiveness.
The Lord will not have any of it. If you know anything about life with the Lord—going on with the Lord—you will know that He is always well ahead of you. He is always making demands beyond you, beyond your capacity, beyond your ability.
The man who wrote this letter had also written:
We were pressed out of measure, beyond our strength.
Yes, the Lord is always getting us out beyond our measure, for a very good reason. Of course, you do not accept the principle in any other realm but the spiritual, of having things in your measure, do you?
Why do you send your children to school? To be taught the things that they already know? You do not do that in any realm of education. You know quite well that the law of education and growth is that something must always be making demands upon you beyond your present knowledge and ability.
And in the spiritual life it is like that. I do not want to discourage you, but it is going to be like that more and more as you go on.
My brothers here who are ministering to you have gone ahead with the Lord, and it is true that today they are out of their depth. We are out of our depth with the Lord. Our capacity for understanding what the Lord is doing with us is too limited. No, He has got us beyond ourselves.
All right, praise the Lord. It must be so, or we will never grow. Here is the road of increasing capacity. Understand that in all His dealings with us, the Lord’s object is to increase and enlarge our spiritual measure. That is His school.
The enlargement of spiritual capacity is the solution to all our problems. That is the only way in which the problems are going to be resolved.
For illustration, look at the letters to the Corinthians and the situation in Corinth. If ever there was a situation representing spiritual limitation, that was Corinth.
“I could not,” says the apostle, “speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal. I fed you with milk. You were not able to bear it.”
The result of that spiritual limitation was found in all the things mentioned in his letter—tragic and terrible things. Their relationships: they were taking one another to law before the worldly courts. Their attitude toward the apostle. Some saying, “Well, Paul is our man. Be like Paul. You can have Peter; you can have Apollos.”
Others would say, “Our man is Peter. We like his style. We like his way of speaking. We like his material. You can handle it. Paul is too far beyond us; Peter is more within our range.”
Others would say, “Now, you know, Apollos is a learned man. He is an eloquent man. He is mighty in the Scriptures. Apollos is our man.”
Divisions over men—human preferences and prejudices. The apostle says, “That is spiritual smallness. That is carnality.” How can there be a beautiful spiritual life when things are like that?
Then there was their attitude toward the apostle himself. God only knows, from the many hints given by Paul in those letters, what their attitude toward him was. He summed it up, I think, in one phrase:
The more abundantly I love you, the less I be loved.
What about that? Spiritual immaturity.
Then there was their attitude toward the Lord’s work. Paul made an invidious comparison, I think, between them and those at Philippi. The Philippians were ready to give, ready to share. But to the Corinthians he had to say, “You said a year ago that you would do something, and you have never done it. Now let there be a doing of what you promised.”
Parsimony in giving, and failure to cooperate in the Lord’s work. And when those things are true, what was this large section of his first letter about? “Now concerning spiritual gifts.” I do not know whether there was a touch of irony in it, but I could almost suggest that there was.
He went on to correct them concerning healings, tongues, and the manifestation gifts—not saying that these things were wrong. But, when you sum it all up, you have to say, “You people are more concerned with these elementary things of Christianity than you are with Christ.”
Your whole focus is upon things which appeal to the senses, by which a show can be made.
You know the one word that Paul uses in that connection, and it is the word which is the focal point of what we are saying: “unto edifying.” What a pity that is in our translations. Whenever you come upon the word “edifying” or “edified,” bring it back to the original, which is “building up.”
For so many people, when they read or hear the word “edify,” they really interpret it as being pleased. But nothing that merely thrills or pleases is necessarily building up spiritually.
No. Building up is the test of all these things. After all, do they issue in building up—that is, increase and enlargement spiritually—or are they something in themselves which leaves you in a state of spiritual immaturity?
Are you, through these things or without them, growing up and becoming full-grown spiritually? That is the test.
I put this in parentheses: it is a very impressive thing that so often people who are most concerned about the manifestation aspects of Christianity are the least spiritually mature. You cannot talk about anything else with them but those things. You try to talk about the Lord Jesus, and things go flat.
Well, that is the parenthesis. I may be taking that up again. But here it is: all through, Paul is saying, “Well, these things which you think of as marks of spirituality—are they really marks of spiritual growth? How can these conditions which obtain amongst you be accounted for?”
What is the remedy for Corinth? All the problems, all the disorder, all the things about which Paul is dealing—it is in one word, in one clause:
Be ye enlarged.
Our heart is enlarged.
Ye are not straitened in us, but ye are straitened in your own affections.
Now for a recompense in like kind … be ye also enlarged.
That is the answer. If you were bigger people, these things would not mark your lives at all. You would have grown out of these infantile things, pictures, and elements.
Now, this is a word of appeal, friends. Yes, it may be a challenge this week. I do not want to come right down on hard ground over this, but it may be a challenge.
You see, it is just possible that, with the ministries here, you might have your preferences and your partialities, and perhaps your prejudices. Is it possible for you to say, “Well, you know, I like the American way”? Or you might say, “I like the English way of presenting.” You might say, “Well, there is not much room for the European.”
Let me say that if we get into that realm, we are in Corinth. This poor, mean, contemptible attitude!
Spiritual capacity means what has been said this morning: an utter focus upon Jesus Christ. He is the criterion of ministry. Has this man, that man, or the other man something of Christ to minister? If so, we focus upon that, not upon the man or other natural things. It is Christ.
I beg you that if you do not find that you are getting anything of Christ under my ministry, do not come. No, it is to be the Lord Jesus, is it not?
“Be ye enlarged.” All was straitened, restricted, and limited with Corinth. Paul had to put an embargo upon himself as he approached them. He said:
I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.
In other words, “I limited my scope and concentrated on one thing only for you: Christ and Him crucified.” He was limited—not that he wanted to do more than Jesus Christ and Him crucified. My word, the dimensions of Jesus Christ and Him crucified are not Corinthian dimensions—not at all.
When Paul passes from Corinth to Ephesus, to use the phrase, look at the dimensions. It is almost like two different worlds, is it not? From Corinth to Ephesus, speaking spiritually—the dimensions! The man is released; he is emancipated; he is out of all bonds.
He is out of the bonds of language. He cannot master the language; he cannot find language in which to speak what is in his heart. The floodgates are open. He is out of this world in the heavenlies. The man is free.
His only problem is, “How am I going to bring the infinite to this people to whom I am writing?” That is your problem here.
At last, this great apostle is free from personal occupation with local problems on the spot—problems of the churches on the spot, and all the work here, there, and everywhere; the different complexities that he was meeting all the time. He is free, by the sovereign will and way of God, in imprisonment.
You see, it is prison. There was never a man more enlarged than the man with that chain on his wrist and the Roman guard. But in the restrictions that were his, there was never a man more at large. He is out and free.
By that sovereign will of God—that strange, mysterious ordering of God—he is able to sit down quietly and look the thing in the face.
Strange that he should have come to Rome like this, when he had said that he longed to come to Rome. He longed to come to Rome and give them some spiritual blessing. All his ambition was to get to Rome, the centre of the world, and preach there. And then, the way he got there: all the conflict and battle, the shipwreck, the discussions, the frustrations, the devil, and everything else.
There may have been many questions in other minds as to whether he would ever arrive. But at last the old governing phrase came true: “And so we came to Rome.”
All right, we are here anyway, by the sovereign power of God. It has been a strange way—perplexing, difficult, and hard. There seems to be so much contradiction in the methods of God.
But now he sits down quietly. Everything is set back. Now, he says, “I have the opportunity that I have longed for for years. I have never been able to do this before. I have been too busy, too occupied in the work of the Lord, rightly occupied with the problems of believers and churches.”
Now the time has come. “I can unburden my heart of all that has been accumulating there, stored up. I have wanted to get it out, and I had no opportunity, no facility. But now—”
So this letter came out in all its unspeakable fulness, all the unsearchable riches of Christ.
Then in this letter is the great eternal calling, the great capacity which God desires the Church to have, and the great responsibility resting upon those who have the light. That is what is here.
Oh, you know, the New Testament takes account of three categories of people. Firstly, it takes account of the unsaved.
Here I want to say a thing which I think needs to be said, and said without hesitation. Where the unsaved are concerned, it is thought that to them the gospel must be preached in the simplest possible way—that the gospel, as it is called, must be something elementary.
You will not find that in the New Testament. And I, dear friends, do believe that here is one of the great mistakes. I believe that the greater the gospel you preach to the unsaved, the better kind of Christians you are going to get.
Put that around the other way: the tragedy is that so many Christians are so poor in their spiritual beginning because they have not had a big enough crisis with Christ. Little truth!
The New Testament says, “Give the unsaved the greatness of the Lord Jesus, and you will get better converts.” Take that to heart. Take it to heart.
Oh, I do wish that to the unsaved, to the convert, to the beginner, some of the greatest realities—the big things of the gospel—could be presented.
Oh yes, you might find it necessary to have counselors afterward, and advisers and instructors. That is all very good. But, you know, dear friends, the New Testament is based upon this: if, when you truly believe and come to the Lord, you receive the Holy Spirit into your heart, and understand that you have received the Holy Spirit, He will tell you what you ought to do and what you ought not to do.
You will not have to have people coming along and saying, “Now you are a Christian, you know. You must not do this; you must not go there; this is what you must do.”
We always remember our dear brother Watchman Nee in connection with this. He was dealing with a convert in the country when he went out from the city for a rest. He lodged in the house of a heathen peasant and his wife.
He did not say anything to them for some time. Then eventually he spoke about Christ and told them about the Lord Jesus. When he went back to Shanghai, he left them a Bible.
He did not tell them anything about what they ought to do and what they ought not to do, and the man was a great drinker.
After Brother Nee had gone, the man said to his wife at the next meal time, “Bring me my drink.” She put the drink in front of him, and he said, “Now, Brother Nee always asked a blessing before we took our meal. We will ask a blessing.”
He bowed his head and tried to ask a blessing, but nothing would come. He could not pray.
So he said to his wife, “Well, let us try again.” No, he could not. “I cannot ask the blessing on this. What should we do?”
“Well,” she said, “Brother Nee left us a Bible. You can read the Bible; I cannot. Look in it. You may find something about this.”
So he took the big Bible—I suppose it was a large Chinese Bible—and went over and over it, trying to find something. “I cannot find anything about this.”
“Take it away,” he said. “We will try again.” Still, no. “I cannot pray.”
So she said, “Well, you had better go and see Brother Nee and ask him about it.”
The man trotted into the city and looked up Brother Nee. He said, “Suddenly, after you had left, I asked my wife to bring the drink, and I tried to pray as you did, but I could not pray. I tried again and again, but I could not. Suddenly, something inside would not let me have that drink.”
Brother Nee had taught the reality of the indwelling Holy Spirit at new birth. The resident Holy Spirit said, “Take it away.”
It is very simple. You have heard it many times before, but you could not have a better illustration of a convert receiving the gospel and already knowing the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit as a reality within.
And yet, at Corinth, believers of some standing—do you understand that? Do you know that they would not have gone to law against one another if the resident Spirit had been heard and obeyed?
Oh, this challenges us, does it not? It does. But my point is this: the gospel is a bigger thing than that little so-called simple thing that is so often given. Give them the greatness of Christ. Let them know something of that to which they are called, and you will make better Christians.
There is one realm. Then there is the category of believers, recognized by the New Testament. What about them? The whole of the New Testament is focused upon these people with warnings, exhortations, and admonitions to go on.
Much of the New Testament is on this line: believers are not to stand still, not to remain where they are, but to go on and be ever going on, because God is going on. If you do not, you are left behind.
Then there is a further category amongst believers. There are what the New Testament calls overcomers—amongst believers, those for whom there is the crown.
Paul was not concerned about whether his salvation was in jeopardy when he said:
Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect: but one thing I do, forgetting the things which are behind, and stretching forward to the things which are before, I press on toward the goal.
You see? It is a matter of the prize of the high calling—something more than merely getting into heaven.
I cannot dwell upon that now. We may come upon it again if we go on this week, if the Lord wills. But these are the categories of which the New Testament takes account.
I must leave it there this morning with this inclusive statement: everything depends upon our apprehension of Jesus Christ.
What kind of apprehension have we of Him? Well, you will never be able to say that you have been able to measure Him. But have we such an apprehension of Jesus Christ that, on the one hand, it makes us feel that He is beyond us—altogether beyond us—and, on the other hand, that to us, who are less than the least, this grace has been given: the unsearchable riches of Christ?
We will leave it there for the time being. But those unsearchable riches are before us—some of them, if the Lord wills.
Now unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us,
unto Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus unto all generations for ever and ever. Amen.