Before we read again from those places which have been before us in the former gatherings this season, may I say to you that I really have a sense that the Lord has something to say to us of a very vital character just now.
We are not here, and I am not here ministering, just to give so many addresses, so much teaching from the Bible; but rather, that there shall be a word from the Lord for this time.
I do not know how you view it, whether you think about it or not, but if you allow me to say this on my own part, I approach these times with a very serious, solemn thought before the Lord: that there shall be a word from Him for the hour.
You will forgive me if I say that, on my own part, in these times I always have in mind the thought that it may be the last time, the last conference in which I minister. Do you hear?
With that thought, I am all the more earnest in my speaking, that there shall not be just words, but a message—and a message from Him. I say this by way of seeking to draw you into the seriousness of such a time, if it should be that the Lord wishes to speak to us for the hour.
My sense is that it is so. Whether those of you who have been here thus far have been able to discern the essential message in all that has been said, I want to focus down upon that this evening and, with the help of the Lord, try to help you to see what that word is that I believe the Lord wishes us to have just now.
Having said that, let us read again from the beginning of the book of Jeremiah’s prophecies.
Jeremiah 1:4-10:
Now the word of the Lord came unto me, saying,
Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee,
And before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee;
I have appointed thee a prophet unto the nations.Then said I, Ah, Lord God! behold, I cannot speak; for I am a child.
But the Lord said unto me, Say not, I am a child:
For to whomsoever I shall send thee thou shalt go,
And whatsoever I shall command thee thou shalt speak.
Be not afraid because of them;
For I am with thee to deliver thee, saith the Lord.Then the Lord put forth His hand, and touched my mouth;
And the Lord said unto me, Behold, I have put My words in thy mouth:
See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms,
To pluck up and to break down and to destroy and to overthrow,
To build and to plant.
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.
Now, as I have said, we are this evening concentrating upon the heart of things, to give some reiteration with a view to so focusing everything: the heart of the Bible, the heart of Christianity, of the Christian life, the heart of our Christian experience, and all God’s dealings and God’s ways with us, with His people.
It is fellowship with Himself unto a vocation.
Fellowship with God vocationally—not fellowship as something in itself, or an end in itself, but fellowship unto a vocation in time and in eternity.
If you would keep that in mind continually, all the time, it would explain everything. That is the explanation of the Bible from beginning to end, and of all that there is there: from man’s creation and the creation of the world to the glorious consummation.
Fellowship. That final glorious and wonderful statement:
And His servants shall serve Him;
And they shall see His face.
That is vocation in fellowship, if it means anything at all. You know that that stands at the end of the Bible, as the ages of the ages take the place of time.
Now, I want to be very careful—not concerned to preach; I want to talk, and make sure that what is said is, from my side, explained carefully. I want you to come into this with me. Make it your business to try to understand and grasp what is being presented.
We have taken these verses from the beginning of Jeremiah’s great ministry—great in every sense, stretching over some forty-five years or thereabouts, so full and so meaningful. We have seen how it began: how the Lord laid His hand on him, how the Lord spoke to him, what the Lord said to him, and what his great commission was.
You follow through this link, people, and you find that all working out from chapter to chapter to the end. That beginning, with all its content, is working out.
Now, Jeremiah is a representative prophet. You may have your preferences amongst the prophets, and when you heard me say that I think Jeremiah is the greatest of the prophets, you might not agree because you like Isaiah better, or someone else. Well, that does not matter.
Jeremiah is a prophet to the nation, through the nation, and is representative of the prophetic function and ministry.
Now, what I want you to grasp is this: it does not matter one little bit who the prophets were. It does not matter that there were prophets who bore these names—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, and all the rest. You can dismiss the names and, if you like, in a sense dismiss the men as men.
But you must keep and lay hold of this: that these men were a function, a divine and heavenly function, amongst the people of God and in this world. You have got to get hold of the function—that is, the thing that God was doing through them.
That is not confined to the Old Testament prophets, the prophets of Israel. There are prophets in the New Testament church. The church of the New Testament takes up the function.
We are not given the names of all the prophets in the New Testament church, but we are told that they are there:
And He gave some to be apostles; and some, prophets.
That is the Lord, in His gifts to the church. Inasmuch as He has not marked them all out by name in the New Testament church—I suppose Paul was one, and some of the others known to us by name fulfilled that particular ministry—that does not matter. It only bears out what I say: it is the function that matters, not the name or the person. It is the function.
The function goes a long way back, before Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Abraham was a prophet, called “the prophet.” Things started a long way back. It comes right on.
The function—what was it related to? This one central, basic thing: the whole matter of our fellowship with God unto vocation. You can take that to your Bible, and the Bible will prove that it is right: fellowship with God, real relationship with God in oneness of heart, unto a vocation.
Now, that prophetic ministry and the prophets were related in their ministry, their work, not to themselves in this matter, but to the people. God meant to have the race in that position—a people in that relationship, fulfilling that vocation. They were the prophets of Israel.
The whole point of their life was that Israel, as a nation, as a people, should be in that relationship with God—a fellowship unto a worldwide vocation. That is why God chose Israel, put them at the centre of the nations, in order that in this particular, peculiar relationship with Himself, in fellowship, they might fulfil a divine vocation amongst the nations and to the nations.
That is, in response to God’s overtures, all men might come into that relationship. The whole world was open to coming into that relationship with God.
Do not make any mistake about it, dear friends. Our way of speaking often betrays our culture and our conception. We so often hear people in prayer and in other ways speaking of “the redeemed in the earth,” praying for the redeemed; and the mentality is that “the redeemed” is synonymous with the faithful. It is not. It is not.
Every child of Adam has been redeemed. Every child of Adam has been redeemed by the cross of the Lord Jesus. There is not a man, woman, or child on this earth that has not been redeemed.
The great tragedy—the twofold tragedy—is that so few know that they are redeemed, and that so many who are redeemed will not accept their redemption. Judgment, you see, will rest upon that: the refusal to have something so costly which is there by right. Well, that is by the way.
The function issuing from this fellowship is to let the nations know what God has done by the cross of His Son for them, and to bring the nations into that relationship with God which will mean that the nations have Him Himself. But come back: this is what is meant by the prophetic ministry.
Do not think of prophets or prophetic ministry as bound up with a certain cult, a certain class of people. We speak in Old Testament terms of priests and prophets and kings. Oh, what a lot has to be done in our mentality over this!
The church of Jesus Christ is called into the great prophetic ministry through fellowship with Him. It is a prophet-nation for the nations. If you are in it, you are in that. You can call yourself a prophet if you like; it is better not. But it is true if you really are in this: your function, your vocation, is far beyond yourself and your surroundings. It is to the uttermost part of the earth in some way.
But I am anticipating. This is the meaning of what is, in the Old Testament, the ministry and work of the prophets. It is a ministry that does not end with them, is not confined to them; it is a ministry brought right on. And while there is a need for this particular function, it will go right on to the end.
Now you see that while this was true, and is so patently true, of those called prophets in the Old Testament, this was the real nature, the essence, the core of discipleship.
The very disciples of the New Testament, of Christ, became disciples on this basis:
And He appointed twelve, that they might be with Him, and that He might send them forth.
Those two always go together. Discipleship rests on that. You might be unprepared to call yourself by any of the other names, but I am quite sure you would be prepared to call yourself a disciple if you belong to the Lord.
At least, that is our relationship with Him: a disciple. Whatever that means—a follower, a taught one, one under instruction—it is just that basic, initial relationship to Him: a disciple.
Again, discipleship—the very first things of the Christian life—rests upon this fellowship and vocation.
Apostleship: again, we put a ring round a certain class and call them the apostles. Well, of course, in a sense that is right, but in another sense it is wrong. Every one of us is a sent one. If you have not got that consciousness that you are a sent one, then there is something defective about your Christian life.
You may only be sent on a very short errand, within a very short geographical limit, but you are there as sent by God. An apostle simply means that: a sent one. The whole content of apostleship is just this: fellowship unto vocation.
When you leave the individual aspect and move to the collective, do remember, dear friends, that while the book of Acts necessarily includes individuals—all the individuals it speaks of—the book of Acts is concerned with the church: first of all, the church universal, the whole church.
The church has its very existence upon this one exclusive and inclusive basis. The church is the apostolic church—the apostolic church in this sense. The whole object of the church, and it has none other, is to have a people in fellowship with the Lord unto a worldwide vocation.
That is obvious in the book of Acts. Fellowship unto vocation: that is the explanation of the church.
When you break up the church, in the right way, into churches—churches here and there, planted by heaven throughout Asia, throughout Europe, anywhere—what is the divine idea of a company, smaller or larger, in any particular location?
It is the same: fellowship with God unto a world vocation. A world vocation. Churches exist for that. Have you got hold of that?
The ministries divinely given from heaven relate to that one thing. Is it a ministry of instruction in the company, unto the person? The ministry of instruction is intended to result in this double thing: fellowship with the Lord, being right and clear and true and full, unto vocation.
Any other functions in the church, or the churches, have the same object in view all the time. The Holy Spirit’s presence and activities are all on this basis, along this line. All discipline, all chastening, all correction, all empowering—everything that the Holy Spirit will do directly or through instrumentalities—has one thing in view: right relationship with the Lord.
Can you challenge that? Can you dispute that? Right relationship with the Lord, with the object of making those so rightly related His vehicles and instruments into a wider circle beyond themselves.
And He gave some to be apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers;
For the perfecting of the saints, unto the work of ministering.
Unfortunately, the punctuation has spoiled that statement. There is a halt: “the perfecting,” or making complete, of the saints; and “for the work of the ministry”—the saints who are to fulfil the ministry.
It is the church that is the anointed vessel of ministry. You come into the church; you come into that which is divinely chosen from all eternity—“Before I formed thee, I knew thee”—chosen from eternity, called in time, endowed from heaven. You come into that church, and you come into a place where these two things are implicit from heaven’s standpoint.
There is the very meaning of your Christian life and of your church relatedness: fellowship with the Lord. Fellowship with the Lord. That is what ought to be in our individual Christian life and in our life together, companies of the Lord’s people: basic fellowship with the Lord, but not stopping there—unto vocation, unto vocation. World vocation at that.
So you see the meaning of this ministry so far as the prophets were concerned. They spoke sometimes like thunder, sometimes with broken hearts. Why? Because they knew. They knew, dear friends, what I am this night trying to make you know.
That is, this relationship with the Lord, this real fellowship with the Lord, resulting in this real worldwide vocation of representing Him to the nations—if that broke down, the very meaning of their existence was gone. There was nothing for it but God to put them aside.
When God did set aside any vessel that He had brought in for that purpose—be it the whole nation, sending it away into captivity and exile—it was for this thing only: “You have failed in the thing for which you were brought into being.”
“You have failed in the thing for which you were brought into being: to represent Me to the nations, to express Me to the nations. You have failed of your vocation because you have lost your fellowship.”
That sums up the prophets, does it not? Their cry, their appeal, their warning, their thunderings, and their broken hearts.
You can see at once, if you know Jeremiah—he is representative of this particular ministry—how true that is. How he cries, speaking for God:
My people have committed two evils:
They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters,
And hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns,
That can hold no water.
Man-made contrivances in the place of the living God. That was Jeremiah’s cry—one of his cries. I am afraid of bringing in too much detail from this long book, but I could take up thing after thing to show that it comes back to this: the people are out of touch with God, and therefore out of touch with the nations so far as a testimony is concerned.
Now, dear friends, let us come right home in our faithfulness to ourselves. When I hear in this place, or in any other place where you may be with the Lord’s people, if ever the Lord raises up or plants an instrument, a vessel, in any place, He does it on this one basis.
On the one side, to bring into the closest and fullest and deepest fellowship with Himself possible; and on the other side, with the world in view—not themselves in view, not themselves in view, but the world in view.
Believe that a world testimony is always God’s thought in any selective choice and appointment of His.
And listen: the essential to the very life of such a people is a dominant sense and consciousness of being in a world ministry. You forget everything else; hold that, and carry it forward for all time to come.
You must, dear friends, individually, and you must, as companies of the Lord’s people, wherever you are, if you are to conform to the divine mind in your existence, have this dominant consciousness: that you stand related to a great world ministry.
Over there, the battle will rage. Anything to weaken that, to dispose of that, to spoil that, break that up, paralyse that, end that. Do you not see?
Every time God has moved in a prophetic way—I mean, on this principle of recovering or securing something according to His mind in fullness—every time He has moved, the movement has had a far horizon. It has had something far beyond itself in view.
In the days of its livingness, its primal freshness, oh, how it spontaneously moved out to the world and became a world force. No organisation, no human systems, were necessary; no plans, no programmes to do things in the world. The thing happened. It happened without effort, without propaganda, without publicity. It happened, and the world was touched.
Can we not go through those movements? Yes, we can mention so many of them. There they are in history—things that God did from heaven. The result was a wonderful fellowship with Himself in life, a wonderful fellowship with Himself in life.
I am afraid to mention any one lest I spoil the picture. Some of you know, if I were to pick out the wonderful movement through the Moravian brethren, well, it is so clear, evident with them. On the one side, it is a beautiful, wonderful fellowship with God. “Wonderful fellowship with God”—their motto, and everything spoke of that.
What a fellowship with God! On the other side, how the world was touched then. Yes, a world testimony, a world impact, quite spontaneous—a repetition of what we have in the book of Acts.
We could put our finger upon one thing after another and see this. And then what? Then, this is the tragedy: they turned in on themselves. Every one of them turned in on itself, became something in itself, drew a circle round itself, constituted a hard and fast system of teaching to which you must conform, or regulations that you must observe.
They turned in on themselves, and then—disintegration, division, confusion, and creeping paralysis. Is not that true to history?
See the reverse. Because that was the state of things, firstly in Israel in the days of the prophets, we have prophetic ministry. Because that was the situation growing in the churches of the New Testament, we have the messages at the beginning of the book of Revelation to the seven churches in Asia.
Just that. They are lampstands. They are lampstands. Jesus Himself said:
No man lighteth a lamp, and putteth it under a bushel.
A lamp is a testimony, for all to see—the illumination of all within its range. It is something not to live unto itself.
This has always been the peril, always been the battleground: to maintain this twofold position—living, unclouded, unshadowed fellowship with the Lord, and a testimony to the world. Yes, beginning, if you like, locally, but ever and always having that far beyond in view.
It can be put to the test. It is true. So it works.
If the Lord has to chasten, discipline, and sift, oh, such activities and ministries, painful as they may be to those concerned, have this still in view: recovery of fellowship with Himself unto essential vocation.
Now then, have you met that challenge this very moment? Ask your own heart. Have you, dear friends, in your very constitution as a Christian, a sense that you do not live unto yourself, and you cannot live unto yourself, but that you are bound up with a great purpose, a great divine purpose, reaching out and on, drawing out your life? Are you?
If that is not true, you come into the category: “She that liveth unto herself is dead while she liveth.” Is not that true? True. Our life, our very life, depends upon this: that we are in union with God with a purpose, with a vocation.
This is no small thing. It draws us out to the uttermost part. The ends of the earth are our concern. The Lord wants us to go when we are ready to go. But whether He calls us to the end of the earth or not, our hearts reach there with Him, for all His interests.
It is not sentimental. It is something that is part of our being, part of our being. Is that true of you? Do you just settle right down nicely, settle down into your nest, whatever that nest is?
Remember those words about the Lord stirring up the nest and casting out. That is not a very pleasant experience. It will have to be if we settle down in our nest, if we put a limit where God does not put a limit upon our calling, our vocation.
Well, perhaps I have said enough. Here were these disciples, in their fellowship with the Lord, being trained, disciplined, instructed. It was not all words. The Master and they were concerned; they had some bad times, painful experiences, heading right up to the inclusive painfulness of the cross.
It was all to prepare the way for a new Holy Spirit fellowship with the Lord unto their world vocation: to be with Him, that He might send them forth.
I think perhaps it is time to stop. Much more could be said, much more is in my heart to say, but I do feel that this is the word of the Lord. It comes just right to this one thing.
You and I, every one of us, must be mastered and governed by a great sense of divine vocation in our existence. That vocation, for its fulfilment, of course demands a fellowship with the Lord that is close, that is pure, because this vocation can never be truly fulfilled unless it is so.
That is why the Lord is disciplining us, putting us through it so continually, having such sharp terms with us over wrong, evil, questionable things; not letting us get away with it, no, holding us to it, and working deeply and thoroughly and perhaps drastically. His object is vocation.
If you do not like the word “vocation,” because it sounds too technical, it is testimony. It is spiritual ministry, which is not going on to a platform here and there and everywhere with a Bible, but a life that knows the Lord, a life that is in fellowship with God.
You can leave the preaching side; you can leave that. Do not worry about the preaching side, or the Bible-teaching side, or some particular and peculiar function. You need not worry about that.
Jeremiah got to the place where he said, “I will not make mention of Him, nor speak any more in His name.” But preaching took charge of him; he did not take charge of the preaching. It came out of the burning in his bones. It has got to be like that.
But that fire only burns when you are in real touch with the Lord. That is where the fire goes.
Well, have I said enough? Will you be patient, ask for grace to receive this? Do remember, do remember, that most of our enemies, if not all of them—and there are many, many of them—most of our enemies have this one object as their target: our fellowship with the Lord, resulting in our testimony to the world.
If he can undermine, undercut that by any means at all, he is going to do it. I do not know how many are his means. The Lord help us to receive the word and to yield to it, and go back with this, maybe, new commission wherever you go.
In fact, I am not here just for here, just to live in this small realm. I am not here for myself, my immediate circumstances, as for my horizon. I am here as a part of something far bigger.
I am a member of a church which was brought into being—a church universal brought into being—for a world testimony to the Lord. I affect that. I affect that, consciously or unconsciously, and mostly unconsciously I affect that. I touch it.
My spiritual life means something to other people of the Lord. You do not know, dear friends, how many of your dark days and bad times are because some brother or sister, or brethren and sisters somewhere, are going through it and you are involved in it.
Now, that is New Testament teaching: if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it. How often there has come to us a sense of some brother or sister, some of the children of God, having a bad time, going through some hard period, and we have had to pray for them—just had to pray for them.
When we have learned the truth, it was just at that time that they needed our prayer, asking the Lord for special help. It was laid on us. You see, in this great spiritual system, time and geography have no place. We are met in our Head, Christ Jesus.
Now, that is another big matter, but it comes in here. We belong, by our very relationship to Christ, to something that is far-reaching. The very vital factor in that far-reaching vocation of the church of which we are a part is our relationship to the Lord, our fellowship with the Lord.
The Lord keep that pure and strong.