And again to the prophecies of Isaiah—the prophecies of Isaiah.
Isaiah 9, at verse 6:
For unto us a child is born,
Unto us a son is given;
And the government shall be upon His shoulder:
And His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of His government and of peace there shall be no end,
Upon the throne of David, and upon His kingdom,
To establish it, and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness
From henceforth even for ever.
The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.
Chapter 61:
The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me;
Because the Lord hath anointed Me to preach good tidings unto the meek;
He hath sent Me to bind up the broken-hearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives,
And the opening of the prison to them that are bound;
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour,
And the day of vengeance of our God;
To comfort all that mourn.
And so on.
We are being engaged in this conference at present with the Servant of the Lord, the basic fragment being chapter 41 of these prophecies: “Behold, My Servant.”
When we put these two passages that we have read together, a question arises.
If He was all that which we have in chapter 9—Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, Father of eternity, Prince of Peace—if He was all that, why was it necessary for Him to be anointed with the Holy Spirit?
Oh, it is the same Person in chapter 61 as in chapter 9.
Is not that description of Him the description of One Who is perfectly self-sufficient? What could be added to that? What necessity had He to be anointed with the Holy Spirit?
Of course, the answer is found in the chapters between those two, and especially in what we have called the seven chapters of the Lord.
The capacity in which He came into this world is that He took upon Him the form of a bondslave.
His life, ministry, and work here were not in virtue of His essential deity, not in the value of His personal, inherent Godhead, but here as a Man, servant-wise.
Everything was done, and His whole life lived, in that divine endowment and anointing.
He Himself very repudiated and undercut any idea that He was able to do or to say anything out from Himself. Even in speaking of Himself as the Son, He was emphatic in saying, and repeatedly saying, “The Son can do nothing out from Himself.”
He described Himself as meek and lowly in heart, and that is the language of dependence, not of self-sufficiency.
And here is something, dear friends, which it is very important for us to recognize, and especially so for ourselves.
Jesus was different from other men, and He was more than other men.
That difference was either definitely recognized and noted, or it was subtly sensed by the people of His day. He was different. He was different. He was different.
In His mental faculties—His wisdom, knowledge, and understanding—He was of a different order. It was not of the schools. “Whence hath this man this knowledge, having never learned?” In other words, having never been in the school.
The most subtle attempts to catch Him and ensnare Him in arguments, to corner Him by the best brains of the nation, found them very quickly in the corner and Him out in the open. They had to go away again and again, completely worsted.
But it was of another order. It was different.
This difference was found in His spiritual faculties: His discernment, His perception. How often it is said, “And Jesus, perceiving their thoughts,” or, “Knowing what was in their heart.” His judgment of situations was different.
The difference was found in His sympathetic faculties, His understanding of people. His disciples owed a lot to His understanding of them—His understanding, His compassion, His forbearance, and patience. He was different.
Ask yourself how you would have acted, even in the case of the twelve. But it is written, over all their difficult make-up, over all the trouble that He had with them: “Having loved His own which were in the world, He loved them unto the end.”
He was different.
And I think we could say that He was different in His physical capacity, His powers of endurance, and what He achieved in so short a time, even physically, is a study in itself. We know His nights of prayer, without any relaxation, the continuous drain upon Him. It made its mark, we know. Nevertheless, there is something different here in every part of His being. That is what I am saying.
And then He had a significance amongst men which was unmistakable. This One signified something. He was not lost in the multitude and in the mass, but He was unmistakably significant.
He made an impression. There was an impressiveness which was unavoidable wherever He went.
Yes, He was different, and He was more.
And yet, let it be clearly understood, that it was all derived. It was all derived.
It was not just a man, but it was a Man with God united. It was a Man Who was not Himself extraordinary, but Who was extraordinary because, in the anointing, God had joined Himself with Him as a Man.
It is not here, I am saying, His essential, inherent deity; it is His manhood with Godhead. It was derived.
And from beginning to end, He was in a state of complete dependence upon that Other than Himself.
If that is not true, then He cannot help us. But that is true, and that is just where He does help us.
Yes, He was not just an extraordinary Man amongst men. He was a Man of a different kind. There was this difference: in Him was recovered the man that God intended every man to be. And God never intended every man to be God, or deity.
God intended from the beginning to have man with Himself in union. Here He is. Here He is: the Man of God’s original intention and thought, recovered.
Hence there are two things that the Bible—shall we say, the Holy Spirit—takes very great care to make clear about Him.
The first thing is the denuding of Him of all things which other men require for significance.
Other men must have certain things if they are to have or take on any significance. Well, they must have education—the education of the school. They must have money or riches. They must have, perhaps, position, important friends, helpers, friends at court, influence at work on their behalf, patronage; or they must be possessed of forcefulness of personality and assertiveness.
All these things, and others with them, are things that other men must have—some or all—to give them significance. Take all these things away, and the very foundations of human accountableness are removed.
But what we have is a very careful, meticulous, and thorough denuding of Him of all those things. He had none of them.
He was a root out of a dry ground—that is, as to where the house of David had come. So that all that had been in the house, the generations, was now dried up. We have nothing like that, only something remote from His present position.
He had no riches. Well, a miracle could pay a tax. He had no riches.
He had no education in the academic sense. They recognized this: “Having never learned.” No doubt, as a boy, there was a measure of schooling, but that is not the thing we are talking about. This higher realm that you must have in this world if you are going to count for something—no.
He had no patronage. He had no influential friends, no friends at court. And these other personal things were lacking: no forcefulness of His own, no assertiveness.
Behold, My Servant, Whom I uphold;
My chosen, in Whom My soul delighteth:
I have put My Spirit upon Him;
He will bring forth justice to the Gentiles.
He will not cry, nor lift up,
Nor cause His voice to be heard in the street.
A bruised reed will He not break,
And a dimly burning wick will He not quench.
That is not personal assertiveness, forcefulness, obtrusiveness, or ostentatiousness. Quietness, reserve, gentleness.
No, all this, from birth to cross, is one story of how utterly lacking in His case were all those things which go to make a man important in this world, to give him any significance.
And yet He was more significant than all the others. But His significance, His accountableness, rested upon nothing in this world. It rested upon another basis altogether.
How meek and lowly He was. How unassuming—unassuming in the truth—and quiet; yet how forceful.
All that I have said, and much more could be added about the impact and registration of this Man in this world, could not be exaggerated. He, in a phrase, could not be hidden. Sometimes He tried to hide Himself; He just could not be hidden, in that right sense.
The second thing that is made so clear about Him is the place that the Holy Spirit had in His life from Bethlehem onward.
Everything is attributed to the Holy Spirit, from infancy to manhood; and then, in His public work from the Jordan onward, it is all attributed to the Spirit.
His whole significance, then, is made perfectly clear as resting upon the Holy Spirit, and not upon what He was Himself as Man. I know the dangerous and delicate ground that I am on, but you will have sufficient understanding, I am sure, to see what I mean.
Yes, and in the last moments, the momentary withdrawing of the Spirit—momentary, but the momentary withdrawing of the Spirit—His forsakenness found Him as capable of despair and broken-heartedness as any other man.
He tasted for despair that which any other man can know outside of Christ—made fully alive to separation from God.
There is all that. But what is the message for us? What is the message for us? And it has a message for us.
Firstly, the same anointing is the new-birth right of every consecrated believer.
No mistaking that, if you read your New Testament. The Holy Spirit is the birthright of every born-again and consecrated child of God—the same Spirit.
And that means that if we have that same Spirit as He had, and He has only recovered to God the kind of man that God ever intended us to be, we have received the Spirit.
That Spirit gives a significance to us which is other and more, which is different and extra. Every child of God and every consecrated believer ought to be different, and more than other people, as He was.
John says, “As He is, so are we in this world.” It should be like that.
Every one should take on a significance that is different and that is more—if you like, that is superhuman or supernatural—that is more and other than we are when we are not born again.
Perhaps that means very little in phrases, but you see where that leads us. This is a fact. I do want you to take hold of it and believe it. Grasp it in faith.
That in union with the Lord, by the Holy Spirit, you and I are supposed, in our very constitution by new birth, to be different from others and more than others, with faculties that are different and that are more.
It is the birthright; it is not an extra gift. It is the faculty that ought to be in us by the second nature, the second nature being the divine which comes by the Holy Spirit.
But note: this significance is unique. It cannot be accounted for on any natural ground whatever.
The child of God, the Holy Spirit-indwelt and governed believer, is inscrutable, as He was. They just could not get to the bottom of Him. They were defeated in every attempt to understand and explain Him.
Again and again, when they tried to reduce Him to their level, bring Him within their compass, they had to just give it up and go away.
Something here is not that with which we are familiar. It is different. It is a significance that is unique. It is not just natural.
What does this amount to? So, dear friends, it amounts to this. It means this so far as we are concerned: that there should not really be one insignificant person in the family of God.
That on one side. Will you believe that? Will you take hold of that?
There should not be one insignificant member of this family.
In so many local families, there are always many who are just occupants of the chairs—just there—with voices you never hear in prayer or worship, whose presence may or may not matter.
I do want to say to you all that, from God’s standpoint, you matter. You matter. You count, and you are intended to count.
Do you really believe that the Holy Spirit of God is resident within you? Do you really believe that makes no difference and gives you no greater value? Do you really believe that?
Are you quite ready to accept that you do not count, that you are an insignificant person, that it does not matter very much—or anything at all?
The very truth of the anointing forbids any such idea.
But note: this significance is not something put on. God forbid that anything that I should say should have the effect of making you assume some position and try to be something.
There is no need to assume. There is no need to presume. There is nothing to pretend. There is no need to pose. There is no need to assert yourself.
We do not take on uniform, or voice, or anything else, to take on an air of significance. These are all artificial ways of making people important and bringing them into prominence, or of trying to gain some notice. It is all false. You need nothing of that at all.
You may be the humblest. You may have nothing by birth, nothing by education, nothing by your status, nothing at all of wealth, or popularity, or even personality; and you may count more than those who have all those things without this—the indwelling Spirit. And you are supposed to count.
It is something unconscious. It is unconscious.
You may not try to be a leader and take on the ways of a leader, and the voice, and so on. Something false, a pose. Get rid of all that.
If the Spirit of Christ is in you, and you are under the Holy Spirit’s government, though all unconsciously, there is a significance about you, and an influence and a meaning in your life, that is more than that of all those who have all the other things without the Spirit.
We need to be redeemed from our inferiorities as well as from our superiorities, and come to this basis of the Servant of the Lord, Who wrought so mightily in His servanthood.
In His servanthood—not as a despot, not as one of the world’s monarchs, not as one of the peers of knowledge and education, worldly wisdom; not in any of those capacities, but as a servant—leaving His mark upon this world. A servant, an unassuming one. Oh, what an honesty!
Leaving an impressive mark, but all unconscious. That is the holy thing about it. Immediately we become self-conscious in any work of the Lord, drawing attention to ourselves, or assuming something, becoming artificial, we just do despite to the Spirit of the Lord.
But all unconsciously led and governed by the Spirit, there is something—something—about us.
If we were asked to define it, the only thing that can be said is, “The Lord is with him. The Lord is with her.” That is all. You meet the Lord.
Ah, what an immense thing that is, to be able to say that about anybody: “You just leave alone that brother and that sister. The Lord is with them.”
That is the essence of significance. That is the very meaning of leadership.
What an immense thing that is, to be able to say that about anybody: “You just leave alone that brother and that sister. The Lord is with them.”
That is the essence of significance. That is the very meaning of leadership. We are not looking for leaders to assume leadership and to take on all those things which men regard as marks of leaders.
We are looking for men and women of whom this one thing can be said: “The Lord is with them.”
You go to the Bible and you find that that is the definition of all leadership, the explanation of all leadership: “The Lord was with him. The Lord was with him.”
It is not just natural. In many cases, the natural was lacking, but they counted. In other cases, there were many natural things there, but their leadership could not be attributed to them. It was the Lord.
They would not have got through. Moses would not have got through with all the learning of the Egyptians unless the Lord had been with him. With it all, again and again, he was at the point of despair and breaking down and giving it up.
The Lord, the Lord.
And so it was with the Lord Jesus. Think not that He worked and lived and got through to the end because of what He was as a Man in Himself.
The verdict of the apostle about Him was, “God was with Him.” For God was with Him.
For Himself, He says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because”—all the power was there: Mighty God, Counsellor, Father of eternity, Wonderful, and all the rest.
Yes, brought to the point, the place of dependence, which gave Him His real significance.
And I say again, dear friends, there should not be an insignificant one in the family of God. But the significance is spiritual and not natural. It is heavenly and other. It is more. It is other.
May the Lord make us all, every one, a significant one in the right sense.