Our opening verse is Jeremiah 17:12:
A glorious throne, set on high from the beginning, is the place of our sanctuary.
We shall have much to say about those words as we go on. For the time being, I want to bring alongside them two other passages: one in Jeremiah 1, at the end of verse 5:
I have appointed thee a prophet unto the nations.
The other is Acts 1:8:
But ye shall receive power, when the Holy Spirit is come upon you:
and ye shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem,
and in all Judaea and Samaria,
and unto the uttermost part of the earth.
“I have appointed thee a prophet unto the nations”; “unto the uttermost part of the earth.” A very brief contemplation of the context of each of those two passages will reveal that they have many things in common. Amongst them, some things are very great indeed—of the greatest importance.
The one inclusive thing which they have in common lies right on the surface: here is a ministry God-appointed and heaven-governed unto all the nations.
That was Jeremiah’s calling—or, shall we say, the calling of the prophet. That was the church’s calling and ordination: the ministry of the church.
Alongside that inclusive fact, and contained in it, are these other features. Each of these, both in the case of the prophet and in the case of the church, was linked with that past-eternal intention of God. The present, in each case, was seen to be bound up with something that had always been in God’s intention.
The complete statement in Jeremiah 1:5 is a tremendously significant statement. Before Jeremiah ever had a being in this world, the Lord knew him, called him, and appointed him. So that his very being was linked with something before time.
That is perfectly true, as we so well know. The present in the prophetic ministry, and in the church’s vocation, falls back into those eternal thoughts of God—that one eternal intention.
In the second place, in each case God is seen acting again because a called vessel had failed Him.
How true that was in the case of the prophetic ministry. The vessel God had called, with which He had taken such infinite pains, had failed Him in this intention of His.
We know how true that was at the time of the great crisis out of which the church came—was born. One called vessel, a nation, had completely failed. The Lord was reacting, in the case of Jeremiah and in the case of the church, in the way of recovery: constituting a vessel in relation to the failure that had been and was.
In the third place, each of these—Jeremiah representatively, as the prophetic ministry, and the church—was an embodiment of God’s sovereign ways of working in relation to His intention.
It is fascinating; it is tremendously instructive and helpful to study and observe God’s sovereign ways with Jeremiah as His servant, and how those ways with him disclose God’s principles of service at all times.
It is on this wise that God works. If we want to know what true service to God is, we have to look into the life of Jeremiah and others—not only at what they say, but to see God’s handling of them, God’s dealing with them, and God’s relationship to them. There we learn the way, the laws, of the service of God.
I am making these statements which have got to be explained as we go on. This is the foundation: what was true of the ministry of the prophets, represented so largely by Jeremiah—whom I consider the greatest of the prophets—was true, and is true, of the church.
The church is the embodiment of God’s principles of service. Its very history shows how God works and on what lines God works.
A prophet unto the nations, a ministry to the uttermost parts of the earth, is constituted on certain quite clearly defined laws. God is the One Who makes those laws and applies them, and keeps the history of every chosen vessel to those laws.
Here, with Jeremiah, we have the spiritual history of a chosen vessel. If you were to look into it, you would see that this is true to type. The history of every chosen vessel is more or less a repetition of the history of these vessels of old. The vessel embodies something that is spiritual history with God.
It is not just objective; I am trying to say it is not just that God picks up and uses someone to spread His message. A history is wrought in that vessel—into its very constitution. It has spiritual experience, as I expect to come to presently.
That is a very important thing ever to remember. No vessel chosen of God will be allowed for a long while in His hand to get outside the realm of reality. Often it is through terrible reaction that God is doing something before He is saying something, and then the thing comes out.
Now, the focal point of all this is fellowship with God. Fellowship with God—that is a deep, an inexhaustible matter.
A very great deal of weakness, confusion, and failure is traceable to one basic defect: failure to recognize the real nature of God’s call to any life, to any instrument.
The real nature of God’s call to you and me, either individually or collectively, is a call into fellowship with Himself.
We have other ideas about what it is to be a Christian, to come to the Lord, however we may put it. But the fundamental thing about any call of God to any life, to any instrument—His choice—is this: the fundamental factor upon which everything is based, and with which He is concerned, is fellowship with Himself.
The Bible contains a great many things, you no doubt realize. But it could truly be said that the whole Bible is gathered into this one thing. From the creation of man right the way through to the end, the one thing that governs everything in the Bible is God seeking fellowship with man.
Man was created on the basis of fellowship with God. A lot is gathered into that; how many aspects there are of that. But that is the one thing the Bible is all about.
If Christianity is the spiritual sum of the Bible, as undoubtedly it is, then Christianity rests upon this one thing: fellowship with God.
We are called, as the Scripture says, into the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ. And the Son has made it unmistakably clear—indeed, He has taken pains to make it clear—that the relationship between Himself and His Father, which was a relationship of perfect fellowship, is the relationship that He desires to exist between His own and Himself and the Father: “They in Us, and We in them.”
That is the sum and the centre of true Christianity: fellowship with God.
Perhaps it is necessary to step back to what was said immediately before this. A great deal of confusion, weakness, and failure is due to our not recognizing that this is what it is all about.
Why are we Christians? Why do we belong to the Lord? What does it all mean? What is it all about?
The answer, dear friends—you can apply it to every detail and you will find it fits—the answer is fellowship with God. That is what He is working at, and to prove it, He does all His work.
So that the closer and fuller the fellowship, the better and greater the service that God calls true service.
You can see, by only a superficial knowledge of the life of the prophets, who indeed were the great servants of God, that God took infinite pains to see that these men were not just mechanical contrivances to serve some end of His. They were men whose lives were brought into the deepest fellowship with God, and out of that all their service came.
That explains the New Testament. Listen: we should not have ninety percent of the New Testament if that were not true. Ninety percent—and one could press beyond that—of the New Testament bears down upon this one thing: God seeking fellowship on the part of His church with Himself.
And that, of course, includes the individual believer. Well, that is what the Bible is about, and that is what the New Testament in particular is about.
But further, it is a fellowship-call in relation to vocation. It is not only, in a secondary way, a call to salvation. It is a call to salvation, but that is by the way, shall we say?
We make everything of salvation in our interpretation of Christianity. Salvation, of course, is essential; nothing can be apart from it. But God’s call, while through salvation essentially, is not ultimately the call to salvation: it is to vocation. It is a call according to purpose.
And the vocation, to go back again, is only possible by fellowship. It is a fellowship-vocation—a vocation springing out of fellowship with God.
Perhaps I must pause to say this. Perhaps you, from time to time, or even now, could argue back upon what I have said. Many there are who are doing a lot of good work for God. Indeed, there is a tremendous amount of what is called Christian work or service, and it is possible to be carried away with the service, with the work.
But listen. If those concerned are really in the hands of the Lord, if their lives have really been surrendered to the Lord and are under the government of the Holy Spirit, you will find this: God is very, very careful about things in the life of which He does not approve.
You do not get away with it. If there is something there that the Lord does not agree with, you come up against it. It is possible for your whole life to be held up. You have a bad time.
The Lord is working in you to will and to do for His good pleasure. That which is well-pleasing in His sight is what He is working in you. You are not just somebody doing a lot of things; you are a sphere in which God is at work, doing things and being very, very painstaking, careful, and meticulous.
This involves a considerable amount of exercise, and sometimes pain and suffering, in our relationship with the Lord, because of this one thing: vocation—real vocation, real service—springs out of a fellowship of life and character with God.
There is no true fellowship with God except on the basis of character, is there? If our character is all contrary to God persistently and habitually, there is no fellowship with God; it breaks down at once. That is why, when something goes wrong with us, everything is brought to a standstill until we have got right with the Lord.
That is simple Christian life and experience.
Now let us take our steps again. The basis of everything is fellowship with God. Fellowship with God is a vocation-fellowship. It has a purpose in view, a work to be done, a service to be fulfilled.
Thirdly, that vocation relates to the nations. It relates to the nations. Everyone called of God into fellowship with God is called into a vocation, and that vocation is a nation’s vocation.
The horizon of your life, when you are brought into fellowship with God’s Son, can never be small, little, limited, or local. Immediately, you become aware of the greatness, the utter range, of everything into which you have come.
You become a part of this thing which God has had in mind from eternity: a world for Himself, a world for Him. That is what we are born into in our new birth. It is a nation.
You are a part of the church, and you are that if you are born of the Spirit—baptized in one Spirit into one body. Do you see?
But the first thing that the Lord Jesus said about the church, which was about to be born, was, “Unto the uttermost parts of the earth.” That is your vocation; that is your setting; that is your calling; that is your horizon: the uttermost parts of the earth.
Now, do not misunderstand me. I am not saying that every one of you here this afternoon has got to go to the uttermost parts of the earth. I am saying that that is your setting. You are to have no less a range of responsibility than that, no less a sense of committal on that.
It is the nations which are the vocation of the church, and therefore of every member of it.
If this book of Acts, from which we have taken the key verse, sees Christianity precipitated by heaven into this world—for that is undoubtedly what it was. I do not like the term “Christianity,” but it serves our purpose. We use the term “the church,” and people get all sorts of wrong ideas. But in this book of Acts, let me repeat, we see Christianity precipitated by heaven into this world.
It takes its rise from Acts 1:8:
Ye shall receive power, the Holy Spirit coming upon you;
and ye shall be witnesses unto Me in Jerusalem,
all Judaea, and Samaria,
and unto the uttermost parts of the earth.
Now you see what is presented there: three things.
First, a called company—a called company. That word “called” becomes very specific and very inclusive as you go on through the New Testament, but there it is: a company called by heaven into being.
Second, it is an endowed company: a company called, and an endowment given to that company. “Ye shall receive power, the Holy Spirit coming upon you.”
Third, it is a company with a vocation: “Ye shall be witnesses unto Me.” So, called, endowed, commissioned, they are entrusted with this worldwide vocation.
You go on into this book of Acts, and you see heaven—heaven which initiated this, heaven which precipitated this, heaven which constituted this—taking infinite pains all the way along to prevent this thing settling down and becoming merely localized.
This is as big as heaven, and heaven is going to accept nothing smaller than itself. The principle is going to be applied all the way along. Heaven is going to keep the nations in view to the end.
So you see the persons who lead the church—I use that language carefully, persons who lead the church, the church, or who give it its vocation because of heaven-given inspiration and leadership—but notice how heaven takes pains to undercut, in the persons concerned, anything less than its own dimension.
Very much has been said about Stephen. Do you know why Stephen was martyred? Do you know why Stephen was martyred?
There is only one explanation, and it is the explanation: he charged Israel and Israel’s leaders with having failed God in the great vocation unto the nations.
They had drawn in, settled down in an exclusiveness and pride and conceit that they were the people—the only people. They had it all. They called the Gentiles dogs. The nations were not people.
And it was just because he struck at the heart of that localization and exclusiveness that he was martyred. Read it again. What did he say? That was it.
Paul—the only explanation of Paul is this: God had cast him in the mould of the universal, the worldwide, and took those pains which resulted in perhaps the greatest miracle of the apostolic church: a rabbi, of the strictest Pharisees, becoming the apostle of the Gentiles, of the nations.
His whole background, training—everything, like Jeremiah—was ordered and arranged by God, even before his birth and through his childhood, to constitute him the man who would become God’s vessel in relation to that worldwide purpose concerning Jesus Christ.
You see the Holy Spirit working with persons on that line. You see Him working with places—the places.
Jerusalem was tending, to say the least of it, to become the localized centre of everything, to dominate and govern and hold everything to itself. And heaven moved in and said, “This is not My idea. It is not My idea.”
All that had to yield to heaven. They went everywhere to fulfil the great design: unto the uttermost parts of the earth.
Have you noticed how, by the Spirit, by the Holy Spirit, the apostles were so strategic in the matter of the centres that they chose, out from which whole areas could be touched?
Heaven was working on that principle all through the book of Acts. This is a worldwide vocation.
Now, you see how clear these things are in the case of Jeremiah. That statement of Jeremiah which we had quoted has a tremendous amount of history behind it.
Jeremiah was a priest. He was of the line of Abiathar. Do you remember that it was Abiathar who was guilty of complicity with Adonijah in seeking to take the throne from Solomon, God’s chosen successor to David?
The result was that Solomon sent Abiathar, the high priest, away to his own home in Anathoth, banished for life and for good, and put him right out of the high priesthood.
Come down here and arrive at Jeremiah. He is in his home in Anathoth. He is there, serving in this limited way in a prescribed priesthood.
There he is: a little place, some forty-odd miles from Jerusalem, carrying on some kind of priestly work in a little locality—not even in Jerusalem. Then it says, “The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah.”
I like to paraphrase it, or put it into my own words: “Look here, I have got something bigger than this for you. I have appointed thee a prophet unto the nations. Out of this! This is not My thought for any servant of Mine—some little hole-in-the-corner thing that is not accepted or recognized.”
If you wonder whether that is true, we have made a great deal—and I suppose we still may make a great deal of it for our own comfort—of the word that Jeremiah used when he answered the Lord: “I am a child; I cannot speak.”
Many of us have made a lot of that, as I say, for our own consolation. But when Jeremiah used that word, I have discovered that he did not mean what we mean by a child, or the word does not mean that in the Hebrew. It means, “I am one who is not yet recognized by men. I have not yet got standing or status. I have not been accepted.” Perhaps that is more comforting still.
But the Lord said, “Say not, I am one without status or recognition or acceptance. Thou shalt go to all to whom I send thee. I have appointed thee a prophet unto the nations.”
Here is God’s idea coming out again, you see. All the nations are in view with God, and He is moving here sovereignly. We have much to say about His sovereign movement in this connection—moving sovereignly in relation to the nations, maybe firstly through His own people, but it is the nations that are in view with Him.
Now, dear friends, if we get in line with heaven—if we really get in line with heaven—because here in the Old Testament and there in the New Testament, in Acts, it is heaven that is on the move. Heaven has got things in hand. All this is heaven on the go.
If we get in line with heaven, we shall come spontaneously into these three things. First, we shall come into line with a heavenly calling—a heavenly calling; in other words, a heavenly vocation. Get into line with heaven, and we almost automatically come into line with a heavenly calling, a heavenly vocation.
When we get into line with heaven, we spontaneously get into line with a heavenly endowment for the vocation: “Ye shall receive power.”
And when we get into line with heaven, we get into line with God’s ultimate object: a people out of the nations, and then the nations for His possession.
In line with heaven: a call, a call according to purpose. In line with heaven: an endowment—but heaven takes responsibility. Are we not grateful for that? Are we not grateful for that?
Quite a lot of history explains the Lord’s servants, the church, for us. It is that, having come to the place of the most utter abandonment to God, to Christ, to be here on this earth only for Him, heaven is taking responsibility for all that is required.
Jeremiah may have some terrible experiences, some terrible times. It may look sometimes as though it is the end, and the awful end. But you know quite well that God saw him through, took responsibility, and that his ministry was successful though it seemed to be a failure.
You have only to follow through the Chronicles of Israel and Judah: “That the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus” to make a decree. Jeremiah comes into his own. God has taken responsibility for seeing that this heaven-given mandate does not fail.
We come into that when we come into line with heaven. And we can never be in line with heaven and remain within narrow, confined, exclusive lines. Heaven has the nations—or the uttermost parts of the earth—in view, and heaven acts sovereignly to that end, as we have said.
Let it be understood, dear friends, that we do not make Christianity. We initiate or project nothing. Heaven does all this. Heaven does all this.
We shall see, perhaps as we go on, more of this heavenly initiative. But what I am trying to emphasize is this: we get into line with heaven, and the rest follows. Oh, how necessary it is not to get out of line with heaven.
We can fail to come into line with heaven. We can turn aside from heaven’s line. But if we come into line with heaven, everything of calling is spontaneous. It is spontaneous; it happens.
You have not got to organize some plan or scheme and try to make something—elaborate programmes of Christian activity. It happens if you are in line with heaven. Spontaneously, heaven does it.
We are but the channels, the vessels. We are not the source or the originator. Heaven goes on. Heaven is going on. We step aside; heaven is going on. If we rebel, heaven is going on.
Heaven’s attitude is always this: “I am going on. Are you coming, or are you going to be left behind?” Just like that.
Our life, our service, depends entirely upon where we are—not in the first place upon what we are, but where we are; not on what we try to do or make, but where we are.
Are we in the place, in the place where heaven goes on with us and through us?
You know, this is the full revelation that has been given to us in one short book of the Bible—just that. Everything there is so full, so strong, so rich, so spontaneous. And later, to the Ephesians: in the heavenlies, in Christ—the vast range of the divine purpose and calling.
Well, for the present, we must break off here. The primary point is this: Christians, believers, children of God, people of God, are the result of a divine act in relation to a superlative purpose in the heart of God.
“He did not choose Me, but I chose you.” A divine act—a divine act.
We all have to come there, even at the beginning. We may be told that we can decide for Christ, and we can choose the Lord. We may think that we do it. We know quite well that nothing really happens until we come to the place where, if God does not do something, it is all nonsense; it is all empty; it is all in vain.
Sooner or later, that is where we all have to come. It must be, from end to end, all of God. Our existence and our service are the result of a divine act, and that divine act relates to this great vocation in the heart of God, which has to do with nothing less than all the nations—all the nations.
As we shall see, in the first place it is taking out of the nations a people, but it does not stop there. In the last place, it is this: “The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdom of our God, and of His Christ.”
It is not really necessary to go on from that point, but for the afternoon that will be enough. I can only hope that, with all this, you will catch a glimpse of something.
We have so often said: it is no little thing to belong to the Lord, to be in relation to the Lord. It is no less a thing than to be an integral part of this which was conceived in the heart of God before He made the world, in relation to that world concerning His Son.
You and I have, by divine act, been called according to that.
But we shall find the greatness of the Lord, the greatness of His resources, not brought down to the little measure of our personal horizon, but as we are lifted clear of all that into the full range of God’s purpose concerning His Son.
There we shall make discoveries of how great the Lord is in His resources, in His ability to get us through.
If you want proof of that—if you want proof of that—there is one very good source and kind of proof, with which perhaps some of you are not a little familiar: the more you are in fellowship with God’s ultimate, full purpose, the more intense and bitter and relentless will be the activities of hostile forces.
That is perfectly clear. But it is a compliment. Perhaps we do not like those kinds of compliments, but it is a compliment to anything when the evil one hates it and would seek to destroy it.
So what counts most for God, or could count most for God, will be the target of most of the enemy’s activities. But that is a significant thing.
We need our initial verse, do we not?
A glorious throne,
set on high,
from the beginning.
Ah, thank You.