Except for what may arise as to our past consideration as we proceed, it is quite out of the question now to go back over all that ground. We just have to move on with the last fragments of this great comprehensive matter: God’s Son, appointed by the Father to be the horizon of all His interests and activities.
We have been seeking to see something of what is within the horizon of Christ. In these later times, we have been with Him on those epochal peaks of His movement onward—those high points which represent so very much of the horizon of things for the creation.
This morning, we were with Him in His ascension and glorification, trying to glimpse something of what that means for believers in time and in eternity. There remain but two of these eminences, these high peaks. We take the next, the first of the remaining two, this afternoon, which is Pentecost.
Pentecost is undoubtedly an epoch, undoubtedly a very high height in this great movement of God in Christ. It is the absolute corollary of the resurrection and the exaltation.
All that the resurrection of the Lord Jesus and all that His exaltation involved would be wonderful facts and wonderful truths; but apart from Pentecost, they would be in heaven, objective to us, quite outside of us—matters to contemplate, dwell upon, perhaps with some pleasure and gratification, but still things in themselves and in Him.
At Pentecost, what was true in Him and summed up in Him—in exaltation and glory—was brought down here, into this world, not to be objective but subjective; to be inside believers and the church. Christ risen and glorified, by Pentecost, was made to become the mighty dynamic of Christian life and the church’s mission.
When we were thinking about the resurrection, those of you who were present will remember how we underlined that picture of His resurrection: His emancipation, His release, His liberation from all the limitations under which He had laboured and suffered while He was in His pre-resurrection body. All those restrictions were removed in His resurrection. He Himself was set at liberty for the whole universe: a new position, a new range altogether.
Pentecost, or the coming of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost, became the dynamic of that emancipation in the church—the dynamic of enlargement. The great horizon had expanded in the resurrection.
Before then, He was cramped and confined, mainly to Israel and Israel’s land. In His resurrection, that was no longer true. The Holy Spirit came to bring believers, to bring the church, into that extended horizon of Christ’s universality.
The church, you will notice, was given no option about this matter. We were given no choice in it. The church became, in its personnel individually and in its corporate expression, expanded by sheer inward force and compulsion.
The phrase “a mighty rushing wind” had a marvellous effect. On the one side, it caused the grave clothes of those people to fall away, just as the grave clothes were removed from Lazarus. On the other hand, they found themselves, by compulsion—like Paul—prepared, compelled, constrained, to move into realms that they had never contemplated and to accept dimensions that had never occurred to them, never been characteristic of them.
It was just something at work, like a mighty expanding power within them, working against all their limiting traditions, against their nationalism, against their racialism, against their own geographical limits, and against all their religious barriers.
They never intended it to be so. Before, they were jealous over these things—very jealous over them, and so very personal in their own interests. But you can see very clearly, when the Spirit came on the Day of Pentecost, that the barriers between individuals went down.
There were rivalries, even attempts to outbid and outdo one another, even while they were disciples. There was a competitiveness between them. All that went. There was no trace of it on the Day of Pentecost when the Spirit came.
They had forgotten it. They were now part of a whole, members one of another, dependent upon one another, being supported marvellously by one another. Peter, standing up with the eleven—he had been a very independent man up to that time, always running ahead of the eleven, thinking he could do better than the eleven. Here he is, and here they are, with everything that made them merely and only individual gone. They are larger in themselves, beyond themselves. The personal horizon had expanded.
Then, together, we can see the movement: Jerusalem—yes, Jerusalem. Naturally, in their own natural souls, Jerusalem might have been the beginning and the horizon. But we see the Spirit just pushing beyond, and ever beyond, and out.
The horizon into which they had come by this compulsion from heaven had expanded beyond all national, racial, geographical, and religious limitations and barriers. It was embracing the world—embracing the world. It took the Holy Spirit to do that, but that is what He did.
The Lord Jesus had given them a worldwide commission, to all nations, to the whole world. But even the commission waited upon the Holy Spirit to make it a dynamic reality. The commission was not in their hands; it was in the hands of the Holy Spirit.
Now, there is a very important thing for us to bear in mind. I have said that it affected them individually, but it also affected them in relation to other believers, other disciples of the Lord.
This is a real challenge to us personally. We are too little, friends. We are too small. We are too petty—paltry.
Perhaps we know it. Perhaps we are suffering from it. We know that that is the problem with us: we are far too limited in ourselves and by ourselves, limited by our own natures, constitutions, temperaments, and makeup—just limited and cramped in ourselves.
We are prone to view everything and anything that comes our way in the light of how it affects us, how it affects us personally. The Holy Spirit has come to make us much bigger people than we are naturally: to extend us to the full dimensions of Christ, to enlarge our capacity.
The only hope for our enlargement is the Holy Spirit. But the sure answer to all our smallness and pettiness is a very real experience of the Holy Spirit in our lives. He will do it.
I think this is what the apostle found when he went to Ephesus and met that group of disciples. Indeed, this is what the record of the incident seems clearly to indicate. On arriving and talking to them, seeking fellowship with them in the things of the Spirit—with his so large capacity and so large a knowledge of Christ—he felt that there he was in some kind of straitjacket. He was pent up. These people were locked-up people.
He just could not get away with very much of the Lord. Spiritual limitation oppressed him. “What is the matter here?” he would say. “I cannot speak freely of the things of the Lord Jesus. They do not seem to know what I am talking about. They can give me nothing back. It is all one-sided. I cannot breathe here. I am just pent up. What does it mean?”
In his exercise, he lighted, by spiritual discernment and perception, upon the secret of it. Then, straight as a dart, he put the question:
Did ye receive the Holy Spirit when ye believed?
Meaning: the Holy Spirit does not make for a situation like this. Of course, he found the mark—his dart found its target—and they said, “We did not so much as hear whether the Holy Spirit was given.”
Well, you move from that point—explaining, interpreting, instructing, and praying with them that this lack should be remedied. The Spirit came upon them. Then you move from there to the letter to the Ephesians, and you see that in the letter to the Ephesians there is a great deal about the Holy Spirit and His work in the church.
What you have there is the biggest, the largest, the greatest thing in God’s universe: Christ universally expressed in the complete church, in a marvellous way. This is the issue so far as Ephesus is concerned—that crisis, that day, when they came into a very real knowledge that the Holy Spirit had been sent from heaven and had been sent to dwell in them. What enlargement of them individually and together by the Spirit!
The church is too small. What is true of the individual is true of the church. Wherever it may be found, in local expression or in the world, it is too small in its spiritual capacity, in its spiritual horizon, and in its spiritual dynamic—occupied with itself.
The great enemy of Christ in all His fullness is ever trying to turn inward, narrow down the horizon, bring into limitation, and produce self-occupation. He is always trying to do that.
Every movement from heaven which has, in its first effect, resulted in an expansion to the full dimensions of the world has, sooner or later, been assailed by this thing, to become something else—crystallised and resolved into something in itself, occupied with itself.
The Holy Spirit is against anything like that. Here is His dynamic to counter that and to expand.
Friends, if we have to resort to expedients to make the church missionary, as we call it, or to stimulate missionary interest, we are beginning at the wrong end.
We have had a lot of experience in this matter. We had some perception of the will of God for the world, but in our lack of experience and enlightenment, we set up missionary committees and missionary councils. We invited missionaries to come and try to create and stimulate missionary interest. We did that for years.
Very interesting—the people got very interested and very active. But the fruit of it in actual spiritual enlargement was very little indeed. It did not produce very much either in missionaries or in real spiritual dynamic.
We know that crisis, that deep and drastic crisis, through which the Holy Spirit found His way. From that time, it was never again necessary to have missionary committees or councils, or to invite people to come and try to make a missionary spirit. That thing happened; it just happened.
Vision expanded, and the dynamic of a world-passionate concern was let loose. What had been local and sectarian, and all the rest of its limitations, became spontaneously, without effort or organisation, worldwide and universal in nature—and, may I say, in influence.
No, we are beginning at the wrong end when we try to bring this about. The right end is Pentecost. The right thing is the Holy Spirit. Then He takes over all the rest. You have to do the following, not the leading. He is ahead all the time, as He was in the New Testament days. He was ahead of them all the time. He was calling on, urging on.
There will be a great deal of wasted energy, wasted time, and wasted resources if we begin at the wrong end. There will be no waste if we begin at God’s end: the Holy Spirit as the dynamic of the risen and exalted Lord in the church.
Let Christ crucified, Christ risen, Christ exalted, and Christ glorified come into us and into our churches, our companies, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Give the Holy Spirit His own right ground in Christ crucified and glorified.
We cannot—we cannot remain in smaller dimensions than the horizon of Christ, which is universal. We just cannot. Now, that is a statement of fact, but it is also a test of spiritual life.
You know what your answer to it is. Perhaps your answer is, “We have heard all that before.” Perhaps your answer is critical. Perhaps your answer is disappointment with yourself—the question whether you know anything about this reality. Your answer may be of many kinds.
But the answer to all your answers is that you must be absolutely governed by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the enthroned and all-authoritative Lord Jesus Christ. That is the answer to every kind of limitation.
Dear friends, it is a mark of spiritual smallness when our course changes from expansion to narrowing and contraction, from the full range of the significance of Christ to something smaller and local. That is a mark of arrested spiritual life, or a mark of there being little spiritual life.
We could test that by the New Testament; for the moment, we will refrain. Allow the challenge to come, because what I am saying is proved by the Word. It is true that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever; so is the Holy Spirit. He has not changed in this matter.
As utterly as the Son of God was committed to the Father for His will, the Holy Spirit is utterly committed to the Christ, to make Him the horizon of everything—and no less a horizon than the horizon of all nations and all peoples.
So much, then, for the dynamic of enlargement. The Holy Spirit, in coming on the Day of Pentecost, was and is the dynamic of holiness—the dynamic of a holy life in the individual and in the church.
The symbol of the Spirit, perhaps more than any other symbol—or as great as any other symbol, at least—is that of fire. That ties in the Holy Spirit and fire. He is the Spirit of burning.
We have seen, and we have not time to enlarge upon it, what the cross of the Lord Jesus meant to Him in the matter of the dealing with sin, because of the awfulness of sin, of unholiness, of the invasion of this universe by an unholy thing.
Christ came to rid this universe of that unholy thing—an unholy power, influence, and nature. To do that, all that His cross meant to Him was involved.
Whatever you think or say about the cross, the death of the Lord Jesus, always remember that the deepest and uttermost point of that cross is where it deals with sin.
Having, by His cross, stood against that evil in this universe and conquered it in His own Person, and having been exalted in terms of holiness and spotlessness to God’s right hand, the Holy Spirit came to bring that Christ into believers and into the church.
He came in those terms: on the one side, the judgment of sin—the judgment of sin, the judgment of everything that allows this to be said. Again, open your heart to it. Do not close your heart because you have heard it so often, or for any other reason. We have all got to bare our breasts to this truth.
I am speaking to you as much as to anyone else, and I speak to something that I know of this. Dear friends, if you and I are really indwelt and governed by the Holy Spirit, it is as the Spirit of holiness that He is there to give us a bad, bad time when we are touching this realm.
When we touch a realm in which the evil one has his control, when we touch something that is not Christ—not Christ—we ought very quickly to recoil by the recoil of the Spirit in us.
No, no, we have touched it. We have touched something with which Christ is not in agreement. In that reaction of the Holy Spirit, in our sensitive spiritual consciousness—which we all ought to have—we ought at once to get away to the place of repentance, putting right, confession, acknowledgement, and pleading.
Only by such a life—the Spirit’s government within as the Spirit of holiness—will all the other values of Christ become manifest in us or in the church. He must be present, on the one side, in terms of the judgment of sin.
Remember, we have many instances to which we could refer, but two will suffice. The last book in the Old Testament closes that dispensation and brings the new dispensation into view. Malachi uses words like these:
The Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to His temple.
But who may abide the day of His coming?
For He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver;
and He shall purify the sons of Levi.
It is difficult to see how that was fulfilled by the Lord’s coming in His birth. But there is no doubt about it that, when He came in the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost, that is what happened. He sat as a refiner.
Look at these sons of Levi. There they are in Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost—Peter, James, John, and the rest. My word, these sons of Levi are purified! The Holy Spirit takes up these men and purifies them like purifying fire.
The sons of Levi, of course, are figurative and typical of the priestly nation. The whole holy nation is called to be this, just as the Levites in the Old Testament were chosen in place of the firstborn to represent the whole nation. That is a symbolic thing.
In the New Testament, it means those who are born of Jesus Christ are formed into a priestly nation—the sons of Levi. But this expression, in all its personnel, has to come under this refining work of the Holy Spirit. We shall never get very far without that work, that way, and that refining fire.
I would like to stay with it, because there is so much in the Book of Acts which illustrates this. The other instance, of course, is what we have in the first chapters of the Book of Revelation. We know the state of the churches, for the greater part, in Asia. We know the defilements and corruptions mentioned there in the churches.
We know that this Messenger of the covenant, this Lord, comes to them, as it were, suddenly. His eyes are as a flame of fire; His feet are like burnished brass; and in His hand is the sharp two-edged sword. He has come to refine the sons of Levi, because they cannot fulfil their great vocation in the nations with anything that contradicts the holiness and purity of the One Who is their Lord.
You notice that the least spiritual church in the New Testament, Corinth, being the most carnal, is the most limited in every way. Paul appeals and cries, “We are not straitened in ourselves; ye are straitened in your own affections.” If only they were spiritually enlarged by the Holy Spirit, these divisions would cease—these petty strivings and quarrellings, rivalries among themselves, divisions, lawsuits, and all the other unholy things mentioned.
If the Spirit really gets His place and changes them from what Paul definitely calls them—carnal—into the spiritual, then there is the contrasting condition. But holiness, as we said this morning, is not only purity. Holiness is separation unto God. That is what it means.
Holiness, sanctification, and separation are the same thing: a complete putting apart of things. What belongs to that realm which is outside of God must go where it belongs. Leave it there. Come away from it. What belongs to that which is in God—come over here and abide there.
Separation: the great gap of the cross between parties of the Lord and parties not of the Lord. That is sanctification; that is holiness.
I close for the present by pointing out that the coming of the Holy Spirit was also the dynamic of the fullness of Christ. That has, of course, been implied in all that we have said, but we note it in particular.
The characteristic of the Day of Pentecost is fullness, is it not? They were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and beyond themselves. It says that they filled Jerusalem with their teaching. Fullness.
In Him, exalted and glorified, all fullness dwells—the fullness of the Godhead in bodily form. It was the good pleasure of the Father that it should be so. You have heard much, and are now so familiar with this phrase, “the fullness of Christ.”
But it is a characteristic of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is never going to be content with a partial and limited Christ in anybody or anywhere. If He cannot get on with His work of bringing in the fullness of Christ, He will leave you to it and go somewhere else—go somewhere and do it where He can and with whom He can.
That is a testimony to a fact in the New Testament. Christ is definitely told to fill all things, to fill all things; He is to be all and in all. The Holy Spirit sets to work to make that true in every believer, in every company of believers, and in the true church worldwide.
How does He do it? We referred to the words in Psalm 68:18, quoted in Ephesians 4:
When He ascended on high,
He led captivity captive,
and gave gifts unto men.
The apostle advances upon the psalmist and adds, “He gave some apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers.” The exalted Lord, by the Holy Spirit, provides the church with all the ministries related to the fullness of Christ.
Oh, how we have narrowed down these things—apostles and prophets and whatnot—into church officers! Please, no. The apostle’s function and anointing are to bring the whole range of the significance of Christ into view. So he is on the move, on the move, worldwide. He is no merely local figure.
His business is to keep before the church, the churches, and the individual the fact that Christ is no little Person. Christ is worldwide and universal in His significance. The apostle is everywhere, seeking to bring the believers and the churches into the fullness of Christ.
Apostles and prophets—what are prophets called upon to do? To keep before the Lord’s people His own thought about His Son. That is the function of the prophet: ever to keep God’s thoughts in view. The Old Testament prophets had that as their function, and that is the function of the prophet now.
Do not think about these as classes, cults, professions, or anything like that. It is function. There must be, by the Holy Spirit, something working through some people who are keeping God’s full thought concerning His Son ever in view.
Apostles, prophets, evangelists—it is a large thing, that part of fullness: to bring in from the nations into Christ the unsaved by the evangel. It is a very large thing.
Then pastors and teachers—they go together. That is one title, not two titles: pastor-teachers, one function. What is their business? Not just to be all the time trotting around trying to make Christians feel pleased with themselves or happy with their circumstances. No: shepherding and instructing in relation to that into which they are called in Christ.
All these gifts of the exalted Lord, by the Holy Spirit, are related to bringing the church to the fullness of Christ. You can test all ministry by that end. Is that what the ministry is leading to? Are people getting an ever-enlarging conception of Christ, and are they being helped to come into that enlargement of Christ?
That is the purpose of ministry. If that is not the result, then there is something lacking as to the Holy Spirit in that ministry.
Well, that is enough—perhaps more than enough—for most of us for the time being. But note, then: the Holy Spirit came to bring that exalted and glorified Lord into a people on this earth, in the terms of His risen enlargement and release, in the terms of His holiness of life by His cross, and in the terms of His great universal fullness.
May the Holy Spirit be real in every one of us in all these respects.