As quite a few of you have not been with us in the earlier gatherings of this conference, and because it is very necessary that we all keep the main and full setting before us, I will take a minute or two by way of review and retrospect.
We have been led at this time to be occupied with the matter of the servant and service of the Lord. Our basic fragment is from Isaiah. That particular phrase is, first, prophetic and relates to the Lord Jesus.
What we have been seeing is that He is introduced in a very full way into the prophecies of Isaiah for a reason. In other passages concerning the servant, Israel is the object in view—Israel, Jacob.
That nation was chosen, constituted, and dealt with by God with the specific object of being His servant among the nations and to the nations. That is, that in Israel there should be recovered, established, and fulfilled the great law of service for which the universe was created: to minister to God.
Adam perverted that trust, violated that law, and, like the one who tempted and led him to do so, appropriated everything to himself, seeking to make it minister to him. So far as God was concerned, this law of service was turned away and lost in the world and in the race.
God therefore intervened to take out of the nations a people for His name, to recover this lost vocation. For that, He chose Israel. Then Israel failed and drew everything to itself for its own ends and interests.
And so the law of their life, which was laid down in Egypt—“Let My people go, that they may serve Me”—was terribly violated. Again, the vocation was lost.
When that was happening, the prophet Isaiah was raised up, and the very heart of his prophecies is centred upon this coming Servant, in Whom, without any fear of failure again, the divine principle and law of service would be perfected—even in our Lord Jesus, Who is introduced in a very full way in these prophecies.
To Him attention is drawn:
Behold, My servant, whom I uphold;
My chosen, in Whom My soul delighteth.
But that is not the end. There is a third aspect, because this servanthood is not intended to be isolated to an individual, although that individual may be God’s own Son. The eternal thought was a people, a race, to fulfil that vocation.
When He has, in preview and in forecast, accomplished all the meaning of this service in the Person of His Son, then He transfers that to a people. We have the third aspect of the prophecies: “A remnant shall return.”
And in that remnant, the Lord takes up again the values of this servanthood and says something very much akin to what He says about the Servant: “My peculiar treasure.”
Now, that is the Old Testament. But we know that there is the prophetic aspect. Even in the case of the Servant, it was future.
The Lord Jesus, Who took upon Him the form of a servant, came at the time when the nation of Israel was set aside in that capacity. He accomplished this service Himself and brought in a nation to take the place of the nation that had failed—a nation which would bring forth the fruit thereof: the church, the new holy nation, as Peter calls it.
But before we are through the New Testament, we find that, in general, that people is in a state of departure. In the last book, in the first chapters, we find a people of God, but only nominally so—not actually and positively doing the things for which the church was raised up.
The Lord, as we know, came back on the old principle again: a remnant, an appeal to such as would have an ear to hear and make a response, and be for Him the embodiment of this great service and servanthood principle and law—to minister to Him and to His satisfaction.
And the Bible closes with a view of such:
His servants shall serve Him;
and they shall see His face.
That, briefly, then, is the review of what has been occupying us. We have been looking at the great Servant with a view to understanding more perfectly what this service really means: the nature of it, the law of service as universal in the mind of God, and the nature and method of service in Christ and in a people for His name.
Now, I think I will not go back over all the phases and aspects of that with which we have dealt. We will come this morning to one more of these, and I ask you just to look into the prophecies of Isaiah again.
Laying down our basic words in Isaiah 42:
Behold, My servant, whom I uphold;
My chosen, in Whom My soul delighteth;
I have put My Spirit upon Him.
Then will you just look back at Isaiah 41:8:
But thou, Israel, My servant,
Jacob whom I have chosen,
the seed of Abraham My friend.
Now we see in those two passages the model Servant and the people called to be the corporate expression of that servant person.
For our purpose this morning, I turn you back to Isaiah 5.
Let me sing for my well-beloved a song of my beloved touching His vineyard.
My well-beloved had a vineyard in a very fruitful hill:
and He digged it, and gathered out the stones thereof,
and planted it with the choicest vine,
and built a tower in the midst of it,
and also hewed out a winepress therein:
and He looked that it should bring forth grapes,
and it brought forth wild grapes.
And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem, and men of Judah,
judge, I pray you, betwixt Me and My vineyard.
What could have been done more to My vineyard,
that I have not done in it?
Wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes,
brought it forth wild grapes?
And now I will tell you what I will do to My vineyard:
I will take away the hedge thereof, and it shall be eaten up;
and break down the wall thereof, and it shall be trodden down:
and I will lay it waste;
it shall not be pruned nor digged;
but there shall come up briers and thorns:
I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it.
For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel,
and the men of Judah His pleasant plant:
and He looked for justice, but, behold, oppression;
for righteousness, but, behold, a cry.
Among the various symbols of the servants of the Lord in these prophecies is this one of the vine. Israel, as the Lord’s servant, is here conceived as a vine.
This is not an isolated passage in that connection. We take too long to read, or even turn to, all of them. The national symbol of Israel was the vine. It was wrought upon the very gate of the temple at Jerusalem.
The Psalmist, in Psalm 80, said:
Thou broughtest a vine out of Egypt.
Ezekiel 15 speaks about Israel, the vine. We know that the Lord Jesus Himself, on more than one occasion and in more than one way, spoke of Israel as the vine.
And in His own matchless discourse, as probably He led His disciples by way of the temple, they saw the gate with the great vine upon it. Then He said, “I am the true vine.” It is a contrasting statement.
All this shows us that Israel stood to the Lord in that capacity—the capacity of a vine. The Lord Jesus took that up and related it to Himself, to give to God the Father, the Husbandman, all that the vine was intended to mean.
And then it is passed on to the church:
I am the vine, ye are the branches.
I think our subtle mentality very often thinks that there are two things. But what would a bare, mere stem be? You would not call that a vine. The vine is everything: stem, branches, leaves, fruit, everything else—one whole.
So that the very idea, the conception of the vine, is transferred or carried into the church. That is, as I have said, a conception of the servant—of the servants of the Lord as a vine, whether it be Christ, whether it be Israel, whether it be the church.
And that is what we are going to look at more closely this morning.
First of all, we note the place that it holds with God. There is no mistaking the fact that the Lord laid great store by this vine people.
I think of what He said about His Son, His Beloved, in Whom He is so delighted—the committing of Himself to Him. It speaks of the attitude that He wanted to take, the position that He wanted to hold, in relation to His people.
He really wanted to be able to say of Israel, and at one time He did, “My beloved, in whom My soul delights.” There was a time when Israel was a delight to the Lord. At any rate, the Lord had a lot of things like that to say about Israel. His heart, in a word, was bound up with that people.
“I will sing to my well-beloved a song of His vineyard.” It is the language of endearment—something very precious to the Lord.
This vine, as the Word says, was brought up out of Egypt, raised up from the seed of Abraham, God’s friend. It was chosen and constituted to be for God’s pleasure—for God’s pleasure, in which He should find His delight and in which He could take pleasure.
And it was for God’s satisfaction. He should find in it the answer to something that He longed for and desired. Still more, He should find by it His glory. It should be to His glory, just as any exemplary vine would be the real satisfaction, pleasure, and glory of the vinedresser or owner of the vine.
That is the position that the vine holds with God: something very precious to Him and very important to Him, related to nothing less than His own glory—that in it and by it His glory should be displayed.
This is the very first meaning of servanthood, of ministering to the Lord. It is to minister to His pleasure, to His satisfaction, and to His glory—to exist for that and for no other purpose. What God has in it, that is ministry. What God is to get through it, that is service.
This all means that it has no other purpose in its existence. It leads us to the second thing: firstly, what it is to God and the place that it holds to Him; then, the place that it holds as to itself.
This is no casual illustration or symbolism. God is never casual in the choice of His objects of teaching. He knows what He is doing. When He made the vine the symbol of ministry to Himself and real service to Him, He knew exactly why He did so.
Because, you see, the vine is exclusively for fruitfulness. That is the thing that the prophet Ezekiel points out to the men around him in Ezekiel 15.
There is no other use that you can make of vine wood but its fruit. He even said, “Can you take the stem of the vine and make a peg to hang anything on?” You do not even do that. Someone has said, “You do not even make a washing peg or a hook out of a vine.” You cannot make anything of it. It is useless for all other purposes—plain fruit.
I say, God knew what He meant when He took the vine as the symbol of the servant people. If that needs any emphasis or underlining, you have only to look at the Servant Who said, “I am the true vine.”
Did He have any alternatives, any diversions, any secondary interests or uses? No. He had nothing—nothing but this fruit-bearing for the pleasure, satisfaction, and glory of His Father. Exclusively to that one thing. That is the vine.
All its energies and all its interests are concentrated upon one thing: the Lord having what He wants, that upon which His heart is set; the Lord having His inheritance; the Lord having His rights—His rights.
All service that is really service to God is concentrated in that one thing: the Lord having His rights.
Well, we must say a word about the rights of God. Have you grasped this exclusiveness of our purpose in existence? Have you got any alternatives? Have you got a second line of life? Have you got diversions?
Though your life has to be spread over many things—you have your home to look after, your business to attend to, obligations in this world—nevertheless, have you but one motive in living and doing all, whether it is home or business or anything else? Is there one governing motive that gathers up everything and concentrates everything?
The Lord having His rights; the Lord finding His pleasure, satisfaction, and glory. That is consecration. That is ministering to the Lord. That is the service of the Lord.
The service of the Lord has come to mean such a lot that very often it is not the true principle of service. Talk about being servants of the Lord, or going into the Lord’s work or service, and we have specific, particular ideas about that.
Well, it may express itself in various and many ways. But, dear friends, the servant of the Lord is not some peculiar person wearing a certain kind of garb and going by a certain kind of title.
The servant of the Lord is any man, any woman, put in any place, who is there seeing to it that God gets what He can have there. They are concentrated upon that. You can be as much a servant of the Lord in your business, in your hospital, in your school, in your home, as any man who ever stands behind this desk and preaches the Word—just as truly.
It is the principle, motive, and law of service that makes the servant, not the profession or anything else. The law of service is: God has got to have everything, wherever I am.
So let this thought and truth transfigure everything for you. There are some difficult places to be in, places that you would not choose if you had your way, places because of which you have got to go. But take this with you: “I am going to be there. I am going to be there as the servant of the Lord.”
Men may think that I am, or call me, their servant; but I am here as the servant of the Lord, whatever it is. And, as I have said, it is gathered up into this one idea: God has His rights.
The rights of God are found in the fruit. What are the rights of God? What is the fruit that is to come to Him?
Well, first of all, of course, it has to do with God’s nature finding its satisfaction. God has a peculiar constitutional liking for grapes. It is only a way of saying something.
His nature just delights in that fruit. You know what I mean. We all have particular fancies, have we not? Our natures go out for certain things. There is something in our constitution that just responds to them. We find that our very being gets a certain satisfaction, pleasure, and gratification in certain things.
Well, that is how it is with God in this matter. His nature is to be satisfied by this fruit. But what is God’s nature?
Paul gives us the answer in his Galatian letter:
But the fruit of the Spirit is love.
God is love. The grammatical form demands that we put it like this. It does not say, “Now the fruits of the Spirit are,” and then give a whole range of things. It says just one thing: “The fruit of the Spirit is love.”
What is that? Joy, longsuffering, meekness, goodness, self-control. That is love along its various lines. All those are aspects of the one thing, the nature of God.
The love of God shed abroad in our hearts is the secret of joy, the secret of longsuffering, the secret of faithfulness, and the secret of everything else. All these things are expressive of the nature of God.
He does look for that fruit. That fruit is God’s right. His nature demands that. His whole constitution, may I say, must have that for His satisfaction.
It begins there: in character, in nature, in the work of the Spirit in us, in the work of grace in us. That is, firstly, the fruit to which God has a right. It is inward like that.
The servant is essentially such in himself, whether it be the individual, whether it be the church, or whether it be that which represents the church in an inner company. The very service is, in the first place, the service of satisfying God as to His own nature.
It is tragically and grievously true that so many find it possible to be in Christian work who are themselves a contradiction to the nature of God—persistently, habitually so.
If there is one thing that the Bible thunders against in Israel, that is one of the great consummate factors at the end of the Bible. Those messages to the churches bear down upon this thing: there is that which is a contradiction to the nature of God.
How strong, how almost fierce, is the voice of the Spirit where that is true:
I have this against thee.
Thou hast there that woman Jezebel.
Them that hold the doctrine of Balaam,
which thing I hate.
If we were to sum up the challenge to those churches, and to the church and ourselves, in a word, we would say: when it is like that, God is not getting His rights. He is not being ministered to in His very nature, in the demands of His nature.
The beginning, then, of our servanthood and ministry to the Lord is here—in our character, in our answering to the nature of God. The Lord help us.
But then, when that is recognised and we are adjusted to that, these rights of God and this fruit for God concern the satisfaction of God’s position in this universe, in this world, and in the nations.
God’s position—that was the whole charge laid against Israel. We are not going to take that up now, because it comes later. But God had been deposed from His right position.
The Lord was the only true and rightful Lord of this whole creation, and of this people and of the nation.
Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord.
He lost that place, not only in the nation but in His people. They were raised up particularly to bring God into His place in the nations as the only God, the true God.
His rights in creation, His rights in Himself as the Lord, were that He—and He only—should be so.
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart,
and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind,
and with all thy strength;
and Him only shalt thou serve.
The rights of God are to exclusive and utter dominion, lordship, government, and centrality. His rights. That is the nature of servanthood.
Is it not clear in the case of the great Servant, the Lord Jesus? What was He here for? You may say He was here for this and for that. There are many things which define His mission. But put them all together, and they all mean one thing: God has got to have His rights.
Rights in creation, rights in redemption, rights in dominion, rights in worship, and in service. The great Servant was committed and abandoned to death for that. That is service, dear friends.
After having faced this question of satisfying God’s nature, we are here. The church is here—or any company of the church is here on this earth—for this purpose: to see to it that God has His place, which is utter. God is supreme. There is no dividing of allegiance with God.
God must have the fruit out of the nations and in the nations. That is what the church is here for. We are here to be in the nations, that God should have His place in the nation.
Whatever challenge there may come to the presence of any people of God in any place, it is not a question of how far they are successful in their service. It is a matter of their standing with both feet there and saying, “Here I am. I am here for God.”
My being here is a testimony to the fact that God has supreme rights in this place. I believe that that is exactly what the Lord Jesus meant when He said:
This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world
for a testimony unto all the nations.
He did not say that this gospel of the kingdom must be fixed, and all the nations must be saved, and everybody in the nations must be saved before the coming could take place. He said, “For a witness.”
There must be that in the nations which, by its very presence, witnesses to the fact that there is a break in the dominion of Satan. It is not universal. We are here for that, people. Where we are, there should be a testimony of fact: Satan is not absolute lord; the kingdom of Satan is not absolutely universal. Here is the break in it, and I am the break by testimony.
That is why you are there—anywhere. It may not be that you will have a lot of souls saved or see a great deal of result from your being there, but you are there. That is right.
God very often puts people just there. It does not explain along the lines of proofs and evidences and pleasure and satisfaction why they are there, but they are there, and that is all He wants very often—to have us there as a witness.
That is ministry. Very difficult ministry, sometimes. We pointed out yesterday: Isaiah was there, but the reactions to his presence were very painful for him. There were no signs of any success of his ministry while he was giving it. Jeremiah was there, but he was there. The Lord had His men, and that is what matters—not the success of their ministry, but the fact that they represented God’s rights in the earth.
And then, of course, God’s rights ultimately concern His fullness—His fullness, that He shall be filled with all things.
This is no contradiction of what I have just said, nor does it take from it. It may just be that there is little visible result, but nevertheless this ministry, this service, is related to things coming back to the Lord—what we have before called a return movement to God.
In the beginning, everything was in God. Then things were taken out of God, taken away from God, diverted from God, and sent out in other directions for other ends. They were taken away from God.
This mighty movement of God through history has been to turn things back to Himself—a great return movement into God—so that at last, as it is shown, He shall fill all things and all things shall be summed up in Him.
That is just the meaning of worship, as so many of you know. We are here for that purpose: to bring everything back to God, to counter that reverse, to break that course of things away from God.
See how it has all been taken away from God. That is the very principle of this world: take everything for itself; take everything for yourself. The church is here to bring everything back to Him.
When we speak about Christ filling all things, the fullness of Christ, that is what we mean. It is His inheritance in the saints, that He shall be the fullness of all things—turning things back to God.
Well, are you in that ministry? Are we in that servanthood? Are we here in this life and on this earth for this one thing: God is going to have everything; everything is going to be pulled back to Him?
We are going to stand right like a rock in this drift and current which rushes away from God, and turn it around and swing it back to Him. Challenge this thing.
That is what the prophet did. That is what the Lord Jesus did, the great Servant. That is what the church is for.
But is it not sad that the very church itself has become, to some degree—not a small degree—that which has appropriated to itself, for its own end and pleasure, much that belongs to God?
How many there are in the church, and in what is called Christian work, who are in it for their own satisfaction, for their own reputation, to make a name. If you interfere with them and their bit of work, you get into trouble. It is themselves, after all, in the world.
Oh, no, we are here not for ourselves. We are here for God.
Now, this carries us to the conclusion for this morning. The third thing, as to the vine, keeping that well in the background of our mental picture, is the discipline essential to this purpose.
So much is said about this in relation to the vine, is it not? The Lord Himself spoke about it:
Every branch in Me that beareth fruit, He cleanseth it,
that it may bear more fruit.
We read from Isaiah: “What more could have been done to My vineyard than I have done?” A lot of history is gathered into that where Israel is concerned—a tremendous amount of history, the history of discipline in that nation.
What care God has taken, what application, what devotion, what labour, what pains over that vine. The history of that people was not always a comfortable history under the hand of God.
The Lord did not protect and safeguard them so as to prevent difficulties arising and adversities. No, there is a lot crowded into the word discipline—purging, pruning, if you like.
Watch the husbandman. What is he doing? Well, he is cutting away a lot. That is, he is reducing things quite a bit. He is limiting certain liberties. He is taking away some liberties.
There are liberties, you know, which are inimical to value. We rejoice in our liberty in Christ, but I am afraid a lot of people misunderstand that liberty in Christ.
Years ago, I used to have a good deal of association with bodies called modernists, the liberal school of theology. I knew many of them personally.
I found amongst them a real gloating over their position: “Oh, what a great thing it is to be emancipated from that conservative, narrow school of biblical interpretation. We no longer are bound by those old-fashioned ideas of the inspiration of the Scriptures and the deity of Christ and these things. We have escaped from those limitations. We rejoice in our liberty.”
My question is the ultimate one: how much fruit for God has come along that line? How much satisfaction to God has that produced?
The liberty of that kind, which is not fruitful in the way of which we are speaking—God having His rights—nay, rather the contrary, is not the liberty of Christ.
I remember, not so long ago, going to Denmark and finding they were in the vortex of a great difficulty. A whole group of their most promising young men had misinterpreted, or misapprehended, the teaching of Galatians about liberty in Christ.
They had thrown out all restraints. “We in Christ are freed from all laws. We are free from the law. Therefore, there is no law against our smoking; we can smoke. There is no law against our going to the theatre; we can go. We are free in Christ.”
They had thrown off all those restraints on this misinterpretation of liberty. It was disastrous to the spiritual life. I am very glad to say that that battle was fought through and cleared up, and it is all right now. They are all in the right kind of liberty, which, of course, means the restriction of certain things.
The difference, as we so often say, is between liberty and licence.
Another form of liberty, which equally is not a fruitful liberty—you know, the Roman church has a liberty. Oh, it is this liberty: taking away your own conscience and making the church and the priest your conscience.
“I need not have any conscience about things at all. My priest will look after that for me. My church will look after those things.” And so very often you find a terrible contradiction in that system—a terrible contradiction.
Certainly things are not for the satisfaction of God, but how they glory in that kind of liberty. “Oh, how good it is to be free from”—what they mean is conscience. They call it law; they call it narrowness. But what they mean is conscience about this and that. “You are free. That is taken over by our system.”
It does not always work out very fruitfully. You get that sort of thing in the army. When a man goes into the army, the government and the army take over all responsibility. He has no longer any personal responsibility except to do from day to day what he is told.
Everything else is taken over for him, and he need not worry about it. He need not worry whether his family is looked after or anything like that. It is all taken off him. Beautiful liberty—but what about character? What about the building up of personal responsibility?
That does not come into it. The liberty that is inimical to real responsibility leaves men, when they come out of the army, if they have been in long enough, not knowing what to do. They have got to take the whole thing on their own shoulders, and they are not fit for it.
They have become unqualified to face life for themselves, and many of them want to get back into the army again simply because of this matter of responsibility. You see what I mean?
There is a discipline about fruitfulness that is absolutely essential, and that discipline is sometimes the removal of certain liberties—cutting down, if you like, a certain kind of narrowing.
God forbid that we should be narrow. I do not see how anybody can be narrow and have a right apprehension of the eternal, universal, vast realities of Christ and His church. You cannot be narrow when you have real apprehension of these vast things into which we are called—the greatness of Christ, the greatness of the church. That is not narrow.
But there is in this the necessity for shutting us up to the things which matter most, and they are fruit—fruit for God.
So we find in this process of discipline, there is with the Lord an intensification. That is it. He prunes that which is bearing fruit, that it may bear more fruit.
Yes, it is true that there is fruit. But fruit itself is not always what He is most set upon. It is not bulk; it is not measure. It is quality; it is weight, that matters with God. It is intrinsic value.
So when there is fruit, He purges it that it may bear more fruit—that is, less for better. Very often, less for better; not spread over too wide an area, in order to get something more concentrated, more intensive, richer.
That is a principle with God in His dealings with the vine.
There is no figure, I think, that sets forth the corporate principle better and more fully than the vine.
The suggestion of one grape is ludicrous. One grape cannot exist by itself. Go into a vineyard: what would you say if you saw up there one grape, and over there another grape, and over there one more grape? You would say, “Well, there is something gone wrong here. This is either subnormal or abnormal. This is not the normal life.”
What is the normal life? A bunch of grapes—closely touching, in contact, related to each other. It is a corporate life, is it not?
I say again, I think there is no figure that better and more fully sets forth this corporate principle of service. Really, God gets most of His satisfaction through the relatedness of His church in service.
You try to be an individual grape. Well, it may be that you are a grape, and you might even be a very large one, but there is something abnormal about it. It is not natural; it is not right.
The Lord gets far more by fellowship, by relatedness, by oneness, by being together—far more. He has laid down that principle: “Two or three.” See the corporate principle. That is His line. It has always worked on that line.
Get scattered, get divided, and there is something lost—something lost. This very service, dear friends, to God requires that we are closely together, really bound together, that we are, in a sense, one fruit, one bunch.
And finally, the intrinsic element of this symbol, the vine, surely is life. There is life, is there not?
We know how the fruit of the vine is the symbol of the blood of Christ—the very blood of Christ. He takes the cup of wine and says:
This is My blood,
which is shed for you.
Two things go together: the fruit of the vine and the blood in symbolism. What is the blood but the life? There is life.
So that the intrinsic element and factor in the fruit is that it ministers life. Life is being ministered. Life is readiness; there is a virtue, there is an energy—it is that of life.
I think everything has got to be tested by that, do you not? Because that is the ultimate thing. What is ministry? What is fruitfulness? What is service? What is servanthood?
Well, that resolves itself into this: how much life others are coming into and deriving by your being there where you are. Not how much truth, not even how much light, but how much life.
When they come, one thing that they do sense, whether they understand everything or not, is life, life, life. That is the fruit. That is the real meaning of the vine.
But, mark you, the fruit of the vine—the wine—comes out of the winepress. The winepress. Perhaps you know what that means.
Yes, the derived value of this service comes out of suffering, out of pressure, out of grinding and crushing and breaking. That is Christ.
We know what that means, to some extent, in spiritual terms. But remember, that is the way of being able to give—to give. This is for giving, not for keeping, not for holding. It is for giving, to be able to give.
That is service: to have something to give for the life of others.
Well, so much then. May the Lord write these things in our hearts. He brought a vine out of Egypt. “I am the vine; ye are the branches.”