Lord, we remind our hearts before Thee that the initiative, in everything, has ever been with Thee. We can initiate nothing.
And we ask Thee that Thou wouldst keep things in Thy hands, and take full charge, to have them all out from Thyself. And Thy Son did say that even the Son can do nothing out from Himself, but whatsoever He seeth the Father doing.
This morning, we know—oh, how we know—that in this work we can do nothing out from ourselves. Let it all be out from the Lord. And, of course, the glory will be Thine; it cannot be otherwise. And we will see that it does come to Thee.
In the name of the Lord Jesus. Amen.
I knew it was going to happen. It is inevitable. When the Lord is in anything, there are always twelve baskets full over, and five thousand have had all that they can take.
There is the embarrassment of the surplus. Those disciples were embarrassed beforehand and had a conference as to how it was going to be done—feeding that many. It is not on record, but I think it must have been that, after it was over, they had another conference: “What are we going to do with this?”
Twelve baskets full, right? And I think that is our embarrassment today. It is mine this morning. I do not know how we are going to get through, but the Lord will help us.
Well, on then with this overwhelming and inexhaustible fullness of the unsearchable riches of Christ. We are taking Ephesians 3:10 as our foundation, which we need not repeat again.
If we go back from Chapter 3 to Chapter 1, at verse 17, I want you to underline the common word in all that we are going to read: wisdom.
The God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him.
I will not stop with that word, but it is a very important thing. It is unfortunate that the translators did not correctly translate here, but we will leave it for the moment: a spirit of wisdom.
Turn to Colossians 1:28:
Whom we proclaim, admonishing every man and teaching every man in all wisdom.
Then Colossians 2:3:
In whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden.
Now back to Romans 11:33:
O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God!
And that leads back to the Old Testament, in 1 Kings 4:29:
And God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding exceeding much, and largeness of heart, even as the sand that is on the sea shore.
Then 1 Kings 5:12:
And the Lord gave Solomon wisdom, as He promised him; and there was peace.
And there was peace. So, the riches of wisdom—the Bible has a great deal to say about wisdom, and the New Testament gives a very large and important place to spiritual wisdom.
I will not trace that through. I will make the statement and leave it with you. Solomon has been our interpreter on these various matters through the second session this week, and he will help us on again this morning.
For Solomon, the very name is synonymous with wisdom. Above everything else that God gave to Solomon was wisdom, and it was out of that gift of wisdom that everything else did come, as we have seen.
The Lord said, “Because you have asked for wisdom, I give you all the other things”—riches, and so on. But the spring of all is wisdom.
We know a little about the wisdom of Solomon. It says that he spake three thousand proverbs. He composed one thousand and five songs. He spake of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall. He spake also of beasts, birds, creeping things, and fishes—mastery in the realm of natural history.
And we could say much more about his wisdom. The Queen of Sheba came from a far country, and I am impressed with the way it is put: she came to see the wisdom of Solomon, not merely to hear it. You will see the point of that in a minute.
But when we have said everything about Solomon’s wisdom—its many-sidedness, its versatility, its range, and its depth—the climax, the peak of Solomon’s wisdom, lies in the building of the house of the Lord.
All the wisdom that God gave him headed up in, and was focused in, the house of the Lord: the building of God’s house, the fulfilment of the life and vision of his father David to find a place for the Lord.
The house was Solomon’s masterpiece. When you look back here and then into the New Testament, you will find that wisdom finds its chief expression in building.
The apostle takes hold of this and says:
As a wise master builder I laid a foundation.
Was there ever a wiser master builder among men than the apostle? He built so well that, for twenty centuries, men have been, on the one hand, trying to pull down his building, and it stands intact today, triumphant over all their efforts.
On the other hand, that building through the apostle is the one thing in which we are finding so much of the divine fulness, divine beauty, divine glory, and divine preciousness. Paul built. My, it has defied all our attempts to fathom it, to exhaust it, to explain it. Here we are again, after all these centuries, still in the freshness of it. He built well: a wise master builder.
Well, as with Solomon, this building wisdom was a gift from God—a real gift from God. The apostle, who had so much understanding of this, prays, as we have read:
The God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you a spirit of wisdom.
A spirit of wisdom in—and now I can come to the word—in the full knowledge of Him. I say it is a pity that the translators made this mistake. Well, we do not blame them; they had a real business on hand.
But here it is: you will notice that the simple word knowledge is used in the New Testament in relation to the beginnings of things.
And this is life eternal, that they should know Thee, the only true God, and Him whom Thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.
That is the beginning of the Christian life: this knowledge. But when you come to the advanced point of the Christian life, as we have it in Ephesians, in the original you have that little prefix, epignosis: full knowledge.
So the apostle is not praying that these believers may come into the first knowledge, the elementary knowledge. He is praying that they may come into the full knowledge. And to come into the full knowledge requires this gift of a spirit of wisdom and revelation.
But let me note another thing common in Solomon and in this prayer of Paul: this wisdom is a wisdom of the heart, for building. Building requires wisdom, and it is wisdom of the heart.
You notice what is said about God giving Solomon a wise and understanding heart: “I have given thee a heart of wisdom.” Ah, wisdom. We said the other day that the heart has far better reasons than the head.
Love—love—is a profound well of wisdom. The apostle prays that He would grant unto you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the full knowledge of Him, the eyes of your heart being enlightened.
There is an illustration in the life of Solomon of this very thing. You remember the incident of the two harlots and their two babes. They lived in one house, slept together, and had their two babes. One of them overlaid and smothered her child, and it died in the night.
Then came the quarrel as to whose should be the living babe. A terrible situation: life from death; life and death contending. And the whole thing came to Solomon.
In his wisdom he looked, not at, but through, these two women. Here was one woman screaming and shouting, “That living baby is mine! That belongs to me!” Oh, she was in a state, but she was giving herself away.
The other poor woman was in tears, wringing her hands—a pathetic picture. Solomon said, “Bring me a sword. Take that living baby and divide it in two, and give half to each.”
The one woman stood back. She was coldly detached. The other woman said, “Oh, no, no, no! Do not take the life of that child. Give it to her rather than kill it. Oh, just give the baby to her.”
The answer to this is heart. Heart. Wisdom is a matter of the heart. You see, the other thing is death—undoing, spoiling. But building! Anybody can destroy. Any fool can destroy. But it is only where the heart is that there will be building.
Now, here is a great illustration of the kind of wisdom: “the eyes of your heart being enlightened.”
But what is wisdom? What is wisdom? Wisdom is more than knowledge. Wisdom is knowing how—knowing how.
Years ago, I knew a man who wanted a large job done—building and reconstruction in his house. He got in touch with a builder and showed him what he wanted done. The builder sent his men and started the work.
When he had finished, he sent in his bill. It was just a total bill, an inclusive bill: for doing such-and-such a job, so much—and a very heavy sum.
The man whose house it was looked at it and said, “How do you make all this up? This is a big sum. Give me the details, will you? How do you make it up?”
So the builder said, “Materials, so much. Men’s time, so much. One or two other details, so much.” And the man said, “But that is only half the bill. What is the other half?”
“The remainder is for knowing how.”
Yes, more than half the bill is knowing how. That is wisdom. Wisdom is knowing how.
And I suggest to you, dear friends, that the real problem in building the house of God is not getting people as material, and not working on them; the real problem lies in how to build. Wisdom to build. Wisdom is more than knowledge; it is knowing how.
And the value of divine wisdom is in its ability to build: to build so as to stand the test of the centuries, of life, of time; to remain intact, not only at the end of time, but throughout eternity. So to build is the essence of spiritual wisdom.
Now, the system of this world, as probably you know—the system of this present world order, including man himself—rests upon a lie. Rests upon a lie.
The foundation of everything in the present world order is a lie. Man himself—well, of course, he has blind spots about himself—man himself is a lie. You and I, by nature, are a lie. We are false. We are not true to the original pattern. There is a lie in us.
Somehow or other, that lie—and you know how and when a lie was accepted:
Yea, hath God said?
The injection into the soul-life of the creation, of the race, of the lie—Jesus said, “He is a liar from the beginning”—that inoculation, that injection of the lie, is right at the very root and core of this present world order.
And that lie is going to find out man and the creation eventually, because that lie is developing and developing and developing towards its full growth. Then it will be discovered. It will be shown to the universe how false this thing is.
John Ruskin, the great critic, went to Italy to look at some of the great buildings and architecture there. He came back and wrote his famous book, The Seven Lamps of Architecture.
One chapter is “The Lamp of Truth.” He tells how he went from building to building, and came upon a building which had been very beautiful in its appearance at one time, but now the beautiful frescoes were spoiled by rain having got in.
The wonderful supposed marble pillars had had their marble washed off, the roof was slanting out into the street, and the building was deserted.
And he said, “When I investigated, I found that there was a lie in the foundation.” The builder had built falsely, insincerely. He had put a lie in the foundation.
In the end came an exposure of that falsehood, in the well-nigh collapse of the whole thing—the desertion of it, a monument to a builder untruthful, a liar.
And it is like that with this creation. Make no mistake about it. You and I, by nature, are, at the very root of our being—oh, there is a lie. We inherited it from the beginning. It is there in our nature.
And in this whole present world system there is a lie: a deception, a falsehood, a misleading, a duplicity, a trick.
And how is it working out? Well, we in our day, dear friends, are living in a remarkable time. What has happened in our lifetime—in the lifetime of some of you younger ones, and within the lifetime of some of us older ones—in the rapid development of this world?
We are seeing all this development, are we not? Man is coming to full growth, and man calls it his wisdom—his wisdom. “This is wise. Oh, so wise!” Sending men to the moon, sending men into orbit, getting out and walking in space, and creating all these atomic things.
Is he not pleased? Is he not congratulating himself? Is he not vaunting his wisdom? Is he not in rivalry, on full stretch, to beat the other one and be still more clever?
And there is such a lie in it that the end is that that wisdom is going to destroy this creation. Now, do not make any mistake about it. With all that they may do to counter or to obviate, they are not going to succeed.
If Peter wrote under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit—and here it is a question whether you believe in the inspiration of the Scriptures—if Peter wrote, as an ignorant and unlearned fisherman, what he could never have written naturally of the atomic age, this is going to happen.
The elements shall be dissolved with fervent heat.
All these things are going to be dissolved. It is going to happen. I do not want you to skedaddle to your shelters, but it is going to happen. It is prophecy. All these things must be dissolved. Whether the Church will have gone before or not is another matter, but it is going to happen.
Because there is a lie in the wisdom of man. And James says that the wisdom which is from beneath is devilish. The wisdom that is from above is peaceable, pure.
This falsehood, this false wisdom, is destructive.
And God is doing now what He did in the case of Israel. I wonder if you have ever noticed why the children of Jacob had to stay in Egypt four hundred and eighty years.
The Lord told Abraham, when He made the covenant, that they would be in Egypt in bondage four hundred-odd years. Why? Well, the answer may have more than one aspect, but the Lord has shown one particular aspect:
The iniquity of the Amorite is not yet full.
While these people were in their country, being built up into a mighty people, a great nation numerically, they were being prepared to occupy the land of the Amorites. The Amorite is an inclusive phrase for the inhabitants of the land.
But God was not going to deal with the Amorites until their sin had reached its limit and could be borne no longer. “The iniquity of the Amorite is not yet full.”
Oh, if this still applies, it is rather a sad, sad verdict upon what is happening today. We listened to Billy Graham in London, night after night, uncovering the awful state of things in America and, of course, in Britain.
We know, within living memory, the awful avalanche of moral decline. Oh, it is terrible how swift this is, amongst the youth and others. It is a shocking situation, and it has been done with impunity—going on with impunity.
The cup of iniquity is swiftly filling up. That is one side of the picture, of course. There is another side, thank God. But that is one side of the picture, and it is a vividly terrible sign.
Yes, the cup of iniquity is being filled up. You know, when Israel went into Babylon at last, it was for that reason in their case.
I was shocked—and you would be shocked—when I was reading again through Israel’s history. Well, this charge was laid to Israel’s account, and that charge, and that—no, I beg your pardon, not Ezra: Josiah, the great revival under Josiah.
This and that are laid to the charge of Israel, and then there came out one thought: in Jerusalem he destroyed the houses of the sodomites. The houses of the sodomites in Jerusalem.
My, we have got down pretty low, have we not? No wonder the judgment of God must come upon Jerusalem, into captivity. Thus we go. It is like this: the cup of iniquity.
This is the lie at the foundation of false wisdom, you see.
Why am I saying all this? Because this building—the building that the Holy Spirit is doing—and this wisdom given by Him for building this house for eternity, which will never be burned up or consumed or overthrown or destroyed, is the embodiment of that which is absolutely and utterly contrary to the lie.
It is the embodiment of the truth—the truth—with no lies, no falsehood.
Our brother has put his finger upon one word with regard to that building, the symbolism of the Church in the book of Revelation: transparency. Transparency.
Nothing opaque, nothing double, nothing unreal, nothing untrue, nothing false. No duplicity, no insincerity.
You know what the word sincere means? It just means that you can see through—right open, open to the light. Nothing to be ashamed of, no question, no fiction.
This house is to stand as the undoing of the lie, the contradiction of everything that maketh a lie. Outside the city is everything that maketh a lie.
Oh, is not this challenging? Challenging to us? This, of course, gives tremendous emphasis to this matter of soul and spirit, dear friends.
It is truth in the inward parts. It is in the spirit, where the Spirit of truth is. But our souls will deceive us up hill and down dale. Make no mistake about it: if you live on the level of your soul, if that is your realm of life, you are going to be deceived.
If it is the emotional side of your soul, and you live on your feelings and in your feelings, your very tender-heartedness can lead you into terrible mistakes. Your very feelings can involve you in something that is a contradiction.
Oh, if only we would profitably investigate this truth. If I am governed just by my feelings—how I feel—what mistakes I am going to make! With all good intentions, with the best motives, like David bringing back the ark.
Yes, in his emotions, getting that new cart and holding up the testimony for years—for many months—all things brought to a standstill by his good motives. Foolishness.
If he had been moving in the spirit, the Spirit would have said, “Look here, you just consult your Bible, and I will show you that it is not new carts that I use; it is living, sanctified people who are to carry the testimony.”
Well, there are many sidelights on this matter. The same is true if you live on that other side of your soul: the intellectual—the intellectual.
Well, of course, it is obvious here. Anybody who is always living in their head, in their intellect, is always in difficulty—always in difficulty.
Be careful that you are not there, and that you do not come back, even after these messages, with lots of merely mental questions—many questions.
Go to the Lord and say, “Lord, I do not understand this. I do not understand this as it has been said. But Lord, if it is the truth, Thou give me light. Thou give me light.”
You have to do that. We who minister have to do that continually. Here is something in the Word: now, what does that mean? There is something there in the Word; you know there is something there. What is the Lord’s meaning in that?
Well then, up to the bookshelf to see what this man says, and that man says, and get another man. And when we have done it all—all the confusion! Not one of them agrees with the other.
This book of Revelation—the bookshops are full of various and disagreeing interpretations of the book of Revelation. And then you have got hold of the lot, and you do not know what to make of it. You are up here, you see; it is heady stuff.
No, we have to go—not repudiating help—but go to the Lord: “Lord, what dost Thou mean by this? Now, Lord, the reality of the spirit of wisdom and revelation—what dost Thou mean?”
And wait, and wait. It may be waiting for days, might be weeks, for months, about that thing. We shall see. In some way, it comes. Oh, I wonder, I wonder.
You know, I had a wonderful experience like that once over Gideon and his fleeces. There was real perplexity as to this: was it the right thing to experiment with the Lord with fleeces?
The Lord allowed Gideon, because he was moving in the time of kindergarten illustrations, and so Gideon was accepted. He said, “Now, Lord, I am going to put this fleece out overnight, and if in the morning this dry fleece is saturated with water—without any rain or dew through the night—let the dry fleece be wet.”
It was. “But Lord, but Lord, let me turn it round the other way. I will put this fleece out, and if in the morning it is dry, all right then, I believe I have to go and do this job.” Oh, the Lord did it.
Now, in my perplexity about whether it is right to experiment with the Lord by putting fleeces out—you may have done it in your kindergarten, in your immaturity; you may even do it today—I think it is a mark of spiritual infancy to do this sort of thing.
However, we will not leave you there to get into trouble. But I was perplexed about this, and praying and thinking much about it, as to whether I dared tell people that they could put out fleeces and put the Lord to the test in that way.
The Lord brought me to that passage:
Death worketh in us, but life in you.
Oh, this is the dry fleece. Gideon is going to lead Israel into life, a ministry of life and salvation for Israel, to the man who himself is feeling himself so insufficient, so dry.
Now, there are some preachers here. Have you not had this experience? Sometimes, when you have felt the most dry—the most dry—weak, limited, oh, so useless, and you have done your ministry, it has often been such a time that most people have come and said, “Oh, part of this was for me.” Is that true?
Ah, but round the other way: sometimes we have had a wonderful time. Oh, the place is just ringing with it. We are having a glorious time, and no one ever comes and says anything about it.
Yes, death worketh in us, but life in you. And sometimes the life is in us—and now, of course, I am contradicting what I just said. Life is in us when death is all around.
I do not know what your funeral services are like. In the funeral services in England, there is a paragraph: “In the midst of life, we are in death.” No—a thousand times no!
If the Spirit of life is in us, though death is all around—the Midianites and the children of the East like the sand of the seashore, death all around, and Gideon in life—we reverse the funeral service: in the midst of death, we are in life.
We have all had those experiences. And I am using that not for its own sake, but as my illustration, you see.
A sudden ray of divine, heavenly light upon something we did not understand—the spirit of revelation illuminating something about which we were full of perplexity, either in the Word or in our experience—and being able to say, “I see. Now I see.”
And you know, when you get that kind of seeing, you cannot undo that. That stands.
We had a young man once, many years ago now. He has been a missionary in Ethiopia for many years—a lovely, beautiful life. But he was with us in our gatherings in London for a long time.
For about three years, I was repeatedly hammering at “Christ in you, the hope of glory”—the meaning of the indwelling Christ. He must have heard it while sitting there for years.
And one day he came to me with a smiling face, a real beaming face, and said, “Mr. Sparks, the Lord has shown me something. He has shown me that Christ is in me.”
He was telling me something as though I did not know anything about it. You see, I just did not know about it. That was something in the Bible that was foreign to me, because it had come to him like that. Why, no one else knew anything about it. So wonderful!
He was emancipated. Something that he had been listening to for years, hearing the words, sitting, as we say, under the ministry—oh yes, something else—became brilliant light. An emancipated man, and out to serve the Lord for years, faithfully, in Ethiopia.
We have often had that: “I see, I see, I see.”
Spirit of wisdom and revelation—that is building. That is really building. That is how the building grows.
What am I to do? My time has gone. Well, this morning—but then I shall take this up again this afternoon, as it happens, so I can go on from here.
The whole mark of the spirit of wisdom in you and in me is our transparency: the truth, the truth. Oh, what a pity we cannot have another hour just at this point—the truth.
Jesus said to the woman of Samaria:
Woman, believe Me, the hour cometh, when neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father.
But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth.
Is then all this at Jerusalem false? All this that is in Samaria false? Yes, it is not the real thing. It is not the true thing.
It has an outward form, an outward shape, makes an outward impression, and people think it is the wonderful thing, but it is not the true thing. It is in spirit and in truth.
But the truth is found in Jesus. Looking at the temple, that magnificent temple of Herod and his successors, with His disciples and with the others—the critics, the enemies—Jesus stood there.
He did not point to the temple, but He was under its shadow, and He said:
Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.
They said, “Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt Thou raise it up in three days?” But John puts in his little parenthesis of comment:
But He spake of the temple of His body.
And after He was risen, they remembered His words. That is the true temple that has been built. It is not a thing, however much it may be the embodiment of man’s ingenuity, cleverness, and artistic ability; however impressive may be its forms, its procedure, its ritual, its vestments, and everything else.
What is the building that God is doing? It is just Jesus Christ: our being built into Him, and He being built into us.
Christ is the temple. Christ is the temple. Christ is the house of God.
And only that which is built into Him—the living stones built into Him—is the temple.
Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.
There is your phraseology. Unless you understand the meaning, “Wheresoever two or three are gathered into My name”—that is the real meaning: into, into all the tremendous meaning of that name.
It is the name of the embodiment of Himself: His incarnation, His humanity, His life, His death, His resurrection, His exaltation. All that is true of Him is embodied in that name. Gathered into that, there I am. There I am.
In a hut, garret, or cellar, wherever it is—that is the house that God is building. How different are our ideas of the house!
Well, I must leave it there and take it up there again, because we have come to some very practical things. This kind of building does require divine wisdom in us. Oh, wisdom, how we need it.
When we go to India, as soon as we get to the threshold of any house, we have to take off our sandals and leave them outside.
How to leave ourselves outside is a way of wisdom. To leave a whole host of things outside, on the other side of the threshold—I speak figuratively—and there is only Christ, only Christ: that is the house of God.
That is the wisdom which is from God. That is incomplete, I know; it is a broken column. But for the time being, let us hold on, and the Lord will carry us.
Again, Lord, we have to say: it is with Thee, and for Thee, by Thy Spirit, to show us the truth, to illuminate our hearts, and to guide us into all truth.
Our part is to be open, to receive, committed by Thy grace. So it shall be for Thy glory, in the name of the Lord Jesus. Amen.