This is your minute, please.
We are prepared to speak, or not to speak; to hear more, or not to hear more—just according to your own desire.
Our Father, we would ask that Thy presence, the Holy Spirit, may be with us by Thy Word. We ask for the renewing of our spirit and of our mind, a fresh quickening, a new life, and a very real experience of the anointing—the anointed lip, the anointed ear, Lord, the anointing in everything, working to Thine own glory and pleasure.
We ask it in the name of the Lord Jesus. Amen.
We continue, with the Lord’s enablement, in our spiritual understanding of that vast realm of the unsearchable riches of Christ. We have pointed out that Calvary is the context of this word, “the riches of His grace.” We have made a very fierce attack upon one word in that phrase: His.
I want now to bring you to the second of these relationships: the unsearchable riches of His glory, which are found in the letter to the Ephesians, Chapter 1, Verse 18:
Having the eyes of your heart enlightened,
that ye may know what is the hope of His calling,
what the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints.
Earlier in the chapter, the apostle has referred to our inheritance in Him. Now he is picking up this other matter: His inheritance in the saints. Through this letter, again and again, the focus is upon the glory of God—“unto the praise of His glory,” “the riches of His glory.”
He Himself loved the Church, that He might present it to Himself a glorious Church. I believe, dear friends, that here we reach the heart and root and core of everything in the whole Bible: God Himself.
“Himself”—that is the governing aspect of the whole Bible. The apostle, as you know, sums it all up in that wonderful finale:
Unto Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus
unto all generations for ever and ever. Amen.
You cannot get beyond that.
Yesterday we were allowing David to be our interpreter, and we shall continue to do so in this other object. We have reminded ourselves of the excellent glory, majesty, wealth, and wisdom that God gave him in his concern for the house of God.
Solomon was not someone in himself. He took up the whole life of his father and, of course, really the full expression of that which was in David’s heart as the great, dominating interest and concern of his life.
Let us look at one or two passages. First, Psalm 132:
Lord, remember for David
all his affliction;
how he sware unto the Lord,
and vowed unto the Mighty One of Jacob:
Surely I will not come into the tabernacle of my house,
nor go up into my bed;
I will not give sleep to mine eyes,
or slumber to mine eyelids;
until I find out a place for the Lord,
a tabernacle for the Mighty One of Jacob.Lo, we heard of it in Ephrathah:
we found it in the field of the wood.
We will go into His tabernacles;
we will worship at His footstool.
Arise, O Lord, into Thy resting-place;
Thou, and the ark of Thy strength.
Let Thy priests be clothed with righteousness;
and let Thy saints shout for joy.
For Thy servant David’s sake
turn not away the face of Thine anointed.
Then let us look at a fragment in 1 Kings 3. The king went up to Gibeon to sacrifice there, for that was the great high place. A thousand burnt offerings did Solomon offer upon that altar.
In Gibeon the Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream by night; and God said, Ask what I shall give thee.
And Solomon said, Thou hast showed unto Thy servant David my father great lovingkindness, according as he walked before Thee in truth, and in righteousness, and in uprightness of heart with Thee; and Thou hast kept for him this great lovingkindness, that Thou hast given him a son to sit on his throne, as it is this day.
And now, O Lord my God, Thou hast made Thy servant king instead of David my father: and I am but a little child; I know not how to go out or come in. And Thy servant is in the midst of Thy people which Thou hast chosen, a great people, that cannot be numbered nor counted for multitude. Give Thy servant therefore an understanding heart to judge Thy people, that I may discern between good and evil; for who is able to judge this Thy great people?
And the speech pleased the Lord, that Solomon had asked this thing. God said unto him:
Because thou hast asked this thing, and hast not asked for thyself long life, neither hast asked riches for thyself, nor hast asked the life of thine enemies, but hast asked for thyself understanding to discern justice; behold, I have done according to thy word: lo, I have given thee a wise and an understanding heart; so that there hath been none like thee before thee, neither after thee shall any arise like unto thee.
And I have also given thee that which thou hast not asked, both riches and honor, so that there shall not be any among the kings like unto thee, all thy days.
We must leave it there. Solomon came into the inheritance of his father’s heart. That is what is said concisely there. Solomon acknowledged that he had inherited his father’s lifelong, all-dominating ambition and concern: for the Lord, for the Lord.
You notice that the Lord gave him all the wisdom that he had asked for, and God gave him all the rest—the riches and the honor. They came after. The governing thing was: for the Lord.
That is a principle throughout the Word of God which we shall know: for the Lord, and in the Lord’s people. This people is the Lord’s people. The Lord’s interest is in them. The Lord’s portion is His people. The Lord’s inheritance is His people.
We can have, as we think, a very great concern for the Lord and His interests and His people without realizing that it is all bound up with His own interests. But if we are really going to serve the interests of the Lord, we shall find that it is in this one and in that one—in His people. That is where His inheritance is.
The greatness of the Lord’s people immediately looms into view. What are they, to the Lord? The answer, after all the searching, is: they are the Lord’s.
Perhaps we have to get a new apprehension of this. What are we to the Lord? And here we are truly held with a word. We have been confronted with this word, “the unsearchable riches of Christ.”
The unsearchable riches are Christ’s riches in you—in the saints. When you face that, you have to fall down before it. Oh, yes, this is beyond us. Christ has invested unsearchable riches in His people.
He has such wealth invested in them that He has His inheritance in them. “Unsearchable,” yes—beyond, beyond. I have used these words: inconceivable, inexpressible, incomprehensible, immeasurable. What other words can you have?
All this is in the saints. That word is too great for the ground upon which we stand. Well, that is beyond me, beyond my comprehension; but it should be true. I can see, even though only the smallest expression of it, nevertheless, a fact of giving help concerning His inheritance in the saints.
Of course, we prepared the way for this a little by considering the riches of His grace. Grace is the way; it has to be. This could not be otherwise. But grace is not an end in itself. It never was intended to be an end in itself. Through grace, it is to glory.
The glory is in the Church by Christ Jesus unto all ages, for ever and ever. God is after glory in His people.
Now Israel, of course, is the great Old Testament example of this—the historic example of this. God’s election is here again beyond our understanding. God said of Israel, “I have chosen you from among all the peoples of the earth.” God’s election—can you ever explain that? No, you never will.
The Lord forgive me if I am wrong even in implication. When we have read our Old Testament and come into our New Testament concerning this people Israel, what they were capable of—we will not dwell upon it or analyze it—and God knew it all.
Their nature, their constitution, their disposition, their proclivities—God knew them. He knew how they would tax His patience to the limit; sometimes, it would seem, to breaking point. Yet God chose them.
You would never have done that if you had had a little bit of knowledge. But would you have chosen yourself if you had had a little bit of knowledge? I wonder.
If ever I get to glory, it will be the greatest miracle that ever God has wrought. God’s election—you cannot explain it, but there it is. I am saying that He has directed His love, His love, toward His people.
“I have loved thee with an everlasting love.” “Thou art graven upon the palms of My hands.” Israel—for what? Inexplicable. Yet He has committed Himself: His honor, His name, His glory, His interests. He has committed Himself to make good His purpose in them.
Read the prophets, and there are the tears of God over His people. It is the great, heartbroken cry of God coming out through the prophets because of this people—God’s love and God’s disappointment.
Take one prophet like Ezekiel. What a tragedy in his life. His young wife is taken overnight from him. His life is left desolate in the midst of the people. For what?
The Lord says to him, in effect, “Anoint thy face as at other times. Go on just as though nothing had happened. Behave just as though no tragedy had entered your life.” And he went forth as at another time, his face anointed; but he could not hide it. He went on with his work, and his friends around him asked what it meant.
This is a great, dark, very real principle. What a man Ezekiel was—despicable man, wicked, rebellious people. The Lord says to him, “I have loved thee like a husband loves a wife, with all My heart, and thou wert everything to Me. And thou hast done something: thou hast deprived Me of My right, disappointed My expectation, frustrated all My hope. Yet thou goest on as though nothing had happened.”
I say, the prophets are full of that—the broken heart of God over His people. They cried; they wept. But you listen: Jesus came, and all day long He stretched out His hands.
At last, with no response, Jesus stood aside on a place above the city and wept: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her brood under her wings, and ye would not!”
It is weeping love over His people. Paul says, “I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren’s sake.” Why? Were they so lovable? God knows—no more than you and I.
Because He has vested interests of His own heart. It was what He designed in this people. Here is His inheritance.
Yes, you say, “Why such love to Israel?” But more: why such love to me? Today, perhaps more than ever, we know the tragedy of it, the heartbreak of God, the distress. We are asking the big question concerning the people: is there any hope for this?
Yes—and yes, it is in the Word of God. The Word of God cannot be broken. It endures for ever. It stands for eternity and will be fulfilled: He will present to Himself a glorious Church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing.
He has vested His eternal interests in this, and He will have His inheritance. He will have it in you and me; He will have it in all His people. That is the rock foundation.
I know that Christianity, as we know it everywhere, has many beloved and delightful things—beautiful Christians, many of them devoted to the Lord. But there are some very dark things in the Church collectively.
I have to confess to you, dear friends, that I have moved around this world from far east to far west, and I do not know of one group of Christians where there is not some kind of strife or division, where it is not at least a battle to keep together—and, of course, much worse. I do not know where that ideal church is.
And yet the word is there: His inheritance. That brings us to motive, and the motive is the solution to the whole matter. Is the motive purified, sanctified, illuminated? That is the core, the heart, the key to everything.
The motive—whether it is for the Lord, or for anyone else, or anything else—that is the criterion, the deciding factor. Let that be pressed home.
You see, that takes us right back to the beginning—in the garden. God created all things for Himself and for His own pleasure, and pronounced upon His work that it was very good.
Then the evil one, who had left a heavenly domain and drawn away a great company through personal ambition and self-interest, entered into that realm where everything was for God and insinuated his own principle: the principle of self.
What it amounts to is this: “Do not have it dependent upon God; have it in yourself. Have it for yourself. You can be as God.” God or self—that is the issue. That is the fall.
From that moment, the poison of the serpent, the poison of that evil one, the enemy of all that is good, entered, so to speak, into the very bloodstream of the human race. It has developed to its present dimensions.
As we get near the end, we see it becoming intensified on both sides—on the one side and on the other side. That is what God is doing in this intensive time.
It started there as a matter of motive: for the Lord, or for self. It goes right back to the beginning.
Kadesh-barnea—what a tragedy, after all the years of God’s patience and long-suffering toward them, after all God had done for them and shown Himself to be in their interests.
At that point they turned aside. The principle came out: “If we go over there, we shall lose everything. If we do, we shall be destroyed.” In other words, “How will this thing affect us? What about our interests?”
There were two men who took the other course: “It is the Lord’s.” That is the other direction. Eventually, that is usually on the side of the minority, do you get it? The minority are usually the people who are wholly for the Lord, and not a mixed multitude.
Joshua and Caleb were preserved while the others perished in the wilderness on the basis of this principle. The letter to the Hebrews tells us quite plainly that it was their whole life that was involved in that disaster.
However, here it is, you see: it is disclosed that the issue was motive.
This was the motive when Christ was crucified: “If we let Him go on thus, the Romans will take away our place and our nation.” That was the issue. It came out clearly.
For two thousand years Israel has paid a terrible price in national suffering. Why? Because self was put in the place of the Lord.
This is the motive of the incarnation of God’s Son, you see, consummated in the Cross. The motive behind His coming down in manhood was to destroy the self-principle in humanity.
The enemy was not finished in heaven. All the time He was here, the temptation was: “Take unto Thyself the kingdoms of this world.” No. He emptied Himself. All the way along, He was emptying Himself right up to the Cross.
He came to destroy this awful thing, selfhood, in man. The incarnation is the incarnation of this motive: not unto Himself; not something to be held on to.
“I am come not in Mine own name.” “My Father”—the Father, the Father, the Father. This is the language of the Son in humiliation.
The Cross, I say, is the consummation, the final emptying, the last bit of man’s self-assertion brought to judgment. He voluntarily entered the desolation of the Cross, the strong surgery upon the spirit of man and of the devil.
But turn this picture round. John 3:16—oh, you know it; you could recite it. But do we look at it?
For God so loved the world,
that He gave His only begotten Son,
that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish,
but have eternal life.
Why? Why? That is the governing question. Move on to Matthew 13, and you begin to have the answer in the parable:
The kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in the field;
which a man found, and hid;
and in his joy he goeth and selleth all that he hath,
and buyeth that field.
And Jesus later said, “The field is the world.” God so loved the world because He has an investment in it—a treasure, a pleasure.
Do you want the explanation of that? Well, the explanation is in this: Christ loves the Church and gave Himself for it. There is treasure in the thing.
I am not patient at this point, but I am reminding you that this is the motive in all God’s dealings with us. He does discipline enough; I have more to say about that in another one of these messages. But His dealings with us are along the line of discipline.
What is all the suffering, the way in which the Lord deals with us and handles us? This, at root, and all the rest, is that we may be completely delivered from self and that He may have His inheritance in us.
You look: what God is doing is undercutting our selfhood, is He not? He is bringing us down, breaking us up, emptying us, weakening us, destroying all our self-sufficiency and self-confidence, bringing us to an end of ourselves.
Why? To really deal with this motive of self. You know, dear friends, as well as I do, that I am afraid to speak of what our hearts are after, are you not? “If only I could get rid of myself!”
You see, the Buddhist comes to this same problem. What does the Buddhist believe? What is the basic principle of Buddhism? Self-annihilation. So they burn themselves, perhaps, and make a demonstration of themselves.
But nevertheless, there is this consciousness: the real truth is, if they are not conscious of it, it is true of us all. God is seeking to undercut this, bring it to naught, to get us to the place where we are finished with self.
“Now, Lord, I have nothing to live for but You. If You want to use me for Yourself and Your own end, all right. If You do not, it is all the same.” You see, right through, like that, it is going to be wholly the Lord in the end, and not anything that we get.
And how we have grown up to try and use the Lord for our own ends, and to believe in Him just for what He can do for us. This is where we begin. Oh, we have a long way to go. None of us have attained, neither are we already complete in this matter.
But God is doing this: bringing us to the place where it is the Lord—just the Lord, just the Lord.
Dear friends, we shall come into the riches when we have truly a motive—not an idea, imagination, or belief about ourselves—but when the Lord knows that we have come to the place where we say, “Now, Lord, everything in my life has got to be arranged for Your satisfaction, for Yourself.”
“You arrange all the things in my life for Your pleasure, for Your service.” And if we will allow Him to do that, and be great when He does, we shall come into the riches. It will be the joy of the Lord.
The Lord, the Lord, the Lord—because Jesus put it like that. And that will be our joy.
Now I must stop there and leave it with you. It is, after all, only saying in another way what has been said to us. The heart of it is this: purified motive.
I say sanctified, because you know it is possible for us to think that our motives are very pure. David made a great mistake in this matter when he sought to bring the ark on the new Philistine cart up to Jerusalem.
And David was thrown into consternation and was angry with the Lord. His motive was all right. He could have said, “Lord, my motive was so pure. I meant it so well, for Your glory.”
Ah, yes, but David, your motive was not illuminated, enlightened by My Word. So back to the Bible. Go back to your Bible and see about this. There is David’s great test, is there not?
You can do the right thing in the wrong way because your motive was not illuminated. It must be a purified, sanctified, illuminated motive.
The blood must be sprinkled; the motive must be purified and made right. It is just the Lord—putting the Lord first, the Lord’s glory, the Lord’s interests.
Well, our New Testament is built upon this, is it not? What for the Lord? What for the Lord?
He is justified, and they slew the servants. He sent another, and another. At last He said, “I will send Mine own, My Son. They will reverence Him.” And they said, “This is the heir. Come, let us kill Him, and the inheritance shall be ours.”
What will the Lord do with those wicked men? It is built upon this principle: whether it is for the Lord or for ourselves.
The fruit is brought forth through the Son. “Herein is My Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit.” It is for the Lord. He is satisfied; He is glorified in the life of His people.
We could go on, but I think you see that it all gathers around this one thing, and everything else comes back here: the riches of His glory in the saints.
Will you hold your life in the light of that? Will you hold your local position in the light of that—not what place you have, not how it affects you, not through the self-life—but always, always, in your relationships, in local companies, and in your individual position, let us discover: are we here for the Lord, or for ourselves?
Does this really please the Lord? Is this situation of division, or strife, or bitterness—does this really please the Lord?
And if the Lord says, “Look here, anything and everything to get this right,” then let us yield. This is not for the pleasure of the Lord.
Oh, if we only took that for the family of God, there would be such a testimony, such glory. And I believe God would give dominion, as with Solomon, over all the enemies round about. The enemy will be spoiled, believe me, when his own ground is taken from him—which is the ground of self.
“Oh Lord, it is for Thee.” Keep alive, God has been saying to us in this meeting this morning. O Lord, we must give it to Thee. It is too much for us, but bring home to us continually what it really means: that there are going to be things found abiding, living, and governing in relation to these matters.